Dea ex Machina

I've been away for a while, but now I'm back.

It all started this morning. I had had some rather disturbing dreams. Let me preface this by saying, I don't have Nightmares, and I don't recall ever having had any. In fact, as a general rule, my dreams have a rather flat affect -- which is to say, they don't have a great deal of emotional content or emotional associations to their imagery. Especially, they don't have fearful or dreadful emotions associated with them. Most of the time, my emotional response to my dreams is, "whatever. . . " It's like my brain says, "OK, watch this," and starts spinning imagery. Now and again, I will have a really intense dream, where I am very "THERE" in the dream and the dream "scene" and content are very potent, very vivid. But these are typically a positive experience and are remarkable, not for their emotional content necessarily, but for their "construct," their imagery. The emphasis is always on the dream itself, never on what I take away from it, --except that the memory of it tends to persist into my daytime world, sometimes for days. My response to these dreams is typically "OK, that was VERY interesting. . ." I would compare it to watching a really good, really well made movie, that caught you up and totally engaged you in what was happening on the screen, and didn't let you go until the movie was over.

Oh, when I'm under stress, I have anxiety dreams -- Mine generally involve something I need to find or do, or someplace I need to be, but for one reason or another it's not happening -- I've forgotten, or I don't know, or I can't figure it out -- but their emotional content is never really intense. There are never any Dire Consequence that will befall me if I don't or can't complete the task. Just niggling, mildly uncomfortable anxiety. That's generally the extent of my "Bad Dreams." But every now and then, my dream machine will cough up something truly thought provoking, as in "Where did that come from?", something definitely negative. Like this morning. One of the characters in it was a guy I didn't know and what he did was without provocation. I was just minding my own business when HE targeted ME. The word "geekazoid" springs to mind. Tall, skinny, glasses, a Jim Carry characture of a geeky, nurdy guy. Turned out he lived nearby. But what he did was, he got into my apartment (i.e., invaded my space) and hung a dead kitten from the ceiling by a wire around its neck. The wire was tied in a bow knot. If you've been following this blog, you will know I have cats, all of whom I have raised from kittens, and the three of them (four, actually, counting Sister,) Loom Large in My Legend. So this image of a dead kitten hanging from the ceiling was very disturbing. I remember my parents were there and saw it, and I remember crying and being very upset about it. Then Geekazoid and an equally geeky, sniggery cohort decided it would be great fun to get into my apartment and paint cooking oil all over the walls. I remember going to the landlord, and him being sympathetic, and we set up cameras, and caught the guy in the act, and confronted him, so I did get resolution in the dream. I woke up, thought "Yuck!" went and took a pee, and went back to bed. Slept and had another disturbing dream, which now I don't remember, got up, took a pee, and went back to bed. (n.b., I sit at a desk a lot, and body fluids tends to collect in my legs. When I lie down to sleep and straighten out my legs, they empty back out again, and all that fluid theyve accumulated has to go somewhere. . . .)

I tend to think of sleeping as an arc like phenomenon, like diving into really deep water, getting to the deepest point, swimming around a while, then coming back to the surface. Sometimes I float lazily up, breathe, and then go down again, whale-like, for another dive, without ever actually waking up; other times, I come up quickly, like a beach ball you've drug down with you to the bottom and then let go of. Boink! I bob to the surface and stay there. I'm not going to go back down again. I'm AWAKE, whether I'm done sleeping or not. (In fact, this "arc-like" imagery for sleep is, physiologically speaking, very apropos. Sleep is a very sine-wave-like phenomenon, not only in terms of EEG activity, but in terms of the whole architecture of sleep itself as a physiological activity. I note in passing that I use the above "watery" metaphor for sleep a lot in my writing.)

Today, the third time I went back to sleep was charmed, nothing but the usual dreams, and I surfaced in a very leizurely fashion and floated lazily on the surface a while in a half-drowse, seeing what thoughts came to my mind. Today, they were thoughts about GOD and about my dissatisfaction with the various concepts of GOD and interpretations of what GOD is that are out there. Since I was raised in the judaeo-christian tradition, my thoughts were mostly about the judaeo-christian concept of GOD, "yahweh" who is GOD from a male point of view, and how very dissatisfying a concept it is from the female point of view.

Now bear with me. I'm not fixing to unload a bunch of "lesbo-feminist-new-agey" rhetoric on you, here. I'm talking about the way humans have interpreted the concept of GOD, and the way the institutionalized form of that interpretation has shaped our common reality. When I say "yaweh" is GOD from the male point of view, I mean it in the same context as "history is what we call the winners' version of what happened." That's the way we're used to looking at things -- history, culture, the whole human experience, in fact -- from the viewpoint of the winners, the people with the most power, the ones who rule. It is they who give us the "official, authorized version" of what happened, and we accept it as the "true, unbiased story of what actually did happen." Intellectually, we know there are at least two sides to every story, and that if we looked at it from another perspective, took a more unbiased view, we might see things in a different light. But the truth is, we're simply not interested in the loser's version, because they're losers. They lost, so how could their version of events be accurate and unbiased? What's more, we are taught not to question the "official version," actively discouraged from questioning at every turn, in fact. It's the classic example of "because I said so." This is especially true when it comes to religion. Extremely true, in fact.

But just for the heck of it, get on board my train of thought, and travel with me for a while, and see where I'm taking you.

The whole judaeo-christian-moslem thing starts when male jews come up with the "one god" concept -- all that "gods all over the place" polytheistic baloney that those other people have, that's all wrong. A total crock. Those city folks don't know what they're talking about. See, there's really only just the one god, ours. Now, our god is like this -- And they proceed to create a god for themselves in their own image. According to them, their god is THE god, and "he's" bigger and more powerful than any of those other gods. How do they know? Because "he" said so, that's how. It's another variation of the same old song, "My dad's better than your dad" that's sung by boys everywhere. They decide to call "him" "yaweh" because "his" real name is a secret --it says so right there in the Bible -- So now you've got a powerful male superbeing with a secret identity. Sound familiar? (I suspect that the concepts of "GOD" and "superhero" come from the same place in the male mind.) And right from the start, the religion of "yaweh" is a boys only secret club with a big sign on the door that says "NO GIRLS ALLOWED."

The thing that gets me every time about this whole "yaweh" business is that it very plainly says in the Bible that "god" created "all animal life" (including people) in "his" image, and the very next thing it says is, "male AND FEMALE, "he" created them. Do you see the flaw in the logic here? If we're all created in "yaweh's" IMAGE, and "yaweh" is male, how come we're not all males? Why are some of us female? But when you point this out, it's like, "yeah, of course "yaweh" made some women. "he" can create anything "he" wants to, right? So what's the problem?" The problem is, if "yaweh" is a "he," then only men can be created in "yaweh's" image. So where does that leave women? We're reduced to an afterthought, an "oh, yeah, them, too, so anyway, then yaweh, you know, "he" did all this other really cool powerful stuff . . .smiting, and destroying, and defeating enemies. . ." When you put the concept of "yaweh" as presented in the Bible up against the real world, and look at it with unbiased eyes, you come away with the distinct impression that the only reason "yaweh" created women was to take care of all those pesky little details, like bearing and raising children, and preparing food and making clothing, and cleaning up after everybody, and waiting on all the men hand and foot -- all that other unimportant, "uncool" stuff. Well, yeah, that sex thing, too, but other than that, women are pretty much part of the scenery, and just like anything else, fair game to be acquired, owned and fought over. MINE!

But, if you go back to the source texts, the ancient writings that are the basis of the Bible as we know it, The word for "god" that's used in that passage of Genesis (chapter 4, verse 25) is "elohim" -- which is plural. So that passage should actually be translated as: "male and female, WE created them." And when Moses asks the burning bush, "who are you" the reply is "yahweh" -- which means "I AM." This "yahweh" goes on to tell Moses that the gods (elohim) of Abraham, and all the other patriarchs were all actually the same being, the "yahweh" who is speaking to him now, only called by different names. Moses (and the other patriarchs) simply makes the assumption that this "yahweh" must be male. In terms of cultural anthropology, the subtext of the Genesis story is that of a culture in the process of integrating a polytheistic religious system in which there are many little gods (elohim) who specialize -- a kind of division of labor -- into a monothestic system with a single all-encompassing GOD being who can do it all, and at a crucial point in that process, the GOD concept was given a "male" spin by the patriarchal society that was developing it and in the process, the concept became invested with their agenda.

So switch scenes from the patriarchal jewish culture where the jews themselves are in control to the judaeo-roman culture where the equally misogynist romans are in control, the male jews of the time cope by inventing their own superhero, "son of god." "son of god" is a god created in the image of a subjugated people, "You just wait until the Messiah gets here. He'll fix you, you lousy romans!" Then the Jesus movement gets stirred into the mix and "son of god" becomes "yahweh's" secret identity, a mild mannered mensch who does good deeds, and helps people, and likes kids, and turns the other cheek, and is a good citizen, but see, "son of god" is really "yaweh" in disguise, and "he's" just acting weak and powerless so as not to give away "his" secret identity. Not everyone is allowed to know "yahweh's" secret identity. Especially not the romans. But little do they know. . . . . Yeah, well, anyway, so "he" lets the romans capture "him," and torture "him," and think they've killed "him," but "he's" not really dead. He just pretending, etc., etc.

Then we come to the same song, third verse, still the god of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph, but they still got the name wrong, and there were other things they got wrong. See, Mohammed had the real skinny revealed to him, and according to Mohammed, god said "his" name is not "yahweh," but "allah," etc., etc. And it turns out that "allah" is "yahweh" on steroids and there's a whole lot more testosterone involved, but there's still a sign on the clubhouse that says "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" and for good measure, another one under it that says "GIRLS KEEP OUT--THIS MEANS YOU!"

The problem is that no matter what major religion you turn to, the "powers that be" are all male. Even in Hindu's great smorgasboard of deities, which include quite a number of female ones, the "goddesses" are actually the "female aspects" (read 'consort') of a god who is overtly male and, tellingly, the head honcho god, Brahma, is male. All the major institutionalized religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judiasm, Christianity, Mohammedism , they were all created in the image of the cultural context in which they arose, and they all arose in male-dominated societies. They are all rehashes of the primordial "sky god" and the people in whose image "he" was created, who swept down out of where-ever it was they came from, and conquered the earlier "goddess-centered" societies. And you don't have to take my word for it. Just take a look around at the way modern Moslem societies -- even the most progressive ones -- treat women. Even in western society, where we're supposed to have come a long way, baby, look at the brouhaha in the various versions of organized christianity over letting women be preachers/priests. (If we've come such a long way already, why are you still calling me "baby?") And then there is that most mysogynist of the christian institutions, the roman church, who still refuse to allow women to have any kind of power at all (that's what the witch hunts were all about, by the way, the roman church wresting the "power" of healing, making medicines, and assisting childbirth away from those evil old witches, the female herbal healers and midwives, and nailing a big "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" sign on the practice of all branches of medicine -- unfortunately, the world is still suffering the aftermath of that coup de main.)

Organized religion, any organized religion, has always been about power. The first thing the diciples did after Jesus's death was to get involved in a power struggle between Peter (he left me the keys to the kingdom, that makes me boss) and James the brother of Jesus (yeah, but I'm his brother), for control of the movement. And number 2 item on the agenda of both camps was to do what they'd all been wanting to do for years, put that uppity Magdelene woman back in her place and marginalize her as quickly as possible. The roman church took it one step further, and demoted her from full-fledged, hand-picked disciple in her own right (and possibly even Jesus's wife) to "a converted prostitute." And what's more, it never occurs to most christians of any stripe that their suposedly "true original" version of christianity is actually the roman version, complete with the seal of approval of the roman emperor Constantine, endorsing it as the official, authorized, state-approved version (accept no others!), and Constantine's version is not only expurgated and manipulated to fit his own personal agenda, but it's already at least twice removed from the original movement that Jesus started. (i.e., James' "jews only" version, and Paul's "we should let romans and greeks and anybody else play, too" version). And like any other religion, it just as easily and just as quickly became mired in the "our god is better than your god, and if you don't agree, we'll kill you" agenda of the never-ending male hierarchical power struggles.

And while I'm in the neighborhood, allow me to vent my spleen at all those christian "fundamentalists" who get up such a head of steam about not celebrating halloween because its pagan and all about "devil worship." If you're not going to celebrate halloween because it's pagan, then you'd better stop celebrating christmas as Jesus's birthday. According to the Bible, he was born at lambing time, which is sometime in March or April. Christmas is the old pagan midwinter celebration of the rebirth of the sun god Mithras that was coopted by the early christians as protective camoflage (Get the little pun? "Yeah, officer, we're celebrating the birth of the sun/son just like everybody else, aren't we." nudge-nudge). And they'd better stop celebrating easter too, since it was coopted, and even gets its name from, the pagan fertility festival of Ostara, that celebrates the return of spring and the rebirth of life -- Duh! where do you think we get the easter egg business -- and the easter bunny? If bunnies aren't a symbol of fertility, I don't know what is. And "saint" valentine's day? -- the expurgated version of the old pagan celebration of winter's end (imbolc) when the goddess is reborn as a virgin to be courted and bedded by the god at Beltane. (think how we celebrate "saint" valentine's day). christianity even coopted the "holy trinity" from the "pagan" goddess religion, taking their "virgin, mother, crone" and converting it into "father, son and holy spirit" because in the judaeo-christian-moslem version, the "all powerful" male principle does it all, creates, destroys, nutures, regenerates. NO GIRLS ALLOWED!

I can't think of the roman church and its rampant "males only" misogyny and not think of their Blessed Virgin Mary--they couldn't completely exclude women no matter how hard they tried -- "son of god" couldn't become a mensch among menschen without being born, and there's no way to get born without a woman being involved. But the BVM wasn't just any woman, you understand. She was special. PURE. In order to be the mother of god, she had to get a special dispensation from "yahweh" so she could be born without original sin. Then she conceived a child without having sex, and after she had given birth, she was miraculously changed back into a virgin. (As far as the roman church is concerned, if you're female, you're either a virgin or you're a whore. Those are the only two choices you get, and if you're such a whore that you can't stay a virgin, then you have to get married and only have sex with the man who marries you, and only for the purpose of procreation. You're not ever allowed to enjoy it.)

Hang on, we're nearly there. The point I have been getting to by this circuitous polemic is that it's time for the human race to outgrow the adolescent male fantasy that it calls religion. What we need is a new image of GOD that includes both male and female, and a religion to go with it that has room for femaleness as well as maleness, that empowers women as well as men, that accepts both for what they are and that allows each to realize his or her GOD-given potential. It would need to be a religion that is not about power, but about empowerment, one that truly embodies the concept of treating others the way you want them to treat you, a religion where the rules are fair and apply to everybody equally, no exceptions, a religion that worships a GOD who doesn't give us "dominion over creation," to treat it like it belongs to us to despoil and exploit however we want, but who entrusts creation to us to be its caretakers, to protect, preserve and nuture it for the benefit of all the living things that share it with us. In that religion the trinity is a triangle with two points representing male and female, both on the same level, with a line to join them as equals, and lines connecting both of them to the third point of the triangle that represents their child. A godhead with something for everybody.

(Oh, and while we're at it, we need to come up with a gender neutral singular personal pronoun. We used to use "one" but then we convinced ourselves that it sounded stilted, quit using it, and allowed the language to "default" to "he.")