Ishtar Rising by Robert Anton Wilson

Author:Robert Anton Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Arts & Entertainment
Publisher: Hilaritas Press
Published: 2020-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Valley Spirit never dies

She is called the Eternal Woman

and urges all the usual matrist qualities already listed in the table from G. Rattray Taylor. Needham concludes that Chinese culture, before the Chou dynasty, was probably matrilineal and vaguely along the lines of Bachofen's classic matriarchies.

Even after the rise of the patriarchal governing class, women retained most of their traditional rights in Sparta until well within historical times. (Plato, whose Republic is considered pro-Spartan propaganda by some historians, included equality for women in his ideal nation, along with such other Spartan institutions as state socialism and lamentable Stalinist censorship of the arts.) Even in Athens, where the wives were reduced to a condition only slightly above that of the slaves, the courtesan class had most of the freedom enjoyed by non-slave males. The Athenians seem to have made the great divorce between sexual love and sexual reproduction that characterizes so many later societies. Their lyric poems are almost always written to courtesans or to young boys; they never seem to have felt romantic about the women who mothered their children.

Throughout these first pagan patriarchies, however, love and sex were still enjoyed and praised as great ornaments of life and inextricably connected with the religious life. The Old Testament, like the popular marriage manuals circa 1920-1960, glorifies sex in marriage as the highest of human joys — and does not neglect the breasts. ("Rejoice with the wife of thy youth . . . Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times," Proverbs 5:18-19.) The Song of Solomon even seems, to the literal-minded reader, to be praising fornication — but subtle rabbis and Christian theologians have repeatedly argued that it means quite the opposite of what it appears to say. (Actually, as Robert Graves has noted, the Song looks very much like the chants which accompanied rites of fertility-magic in the old matriarchal religion or in the still-surviving witch cult.)

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