2450 30 Oct 90 "SADDAM, PHONE YOUR MOM!" OR ELLIOTT THINKSHEETS THE ANTIBIBLICAL MYTH OF PRIMORDIAL GYNECOCENTRIC PEACE 309 L.Eliz.Dr., Craigville, MA 02636 Phone 508.775.8008 Noncommercial reproduction permitted An irreverent (to Saddam Hussein), uproarious current popsong spoofs (1) SH & (2) the ever more widely held dysfunctional no- tion that the world, if taken away from the boys & given to the girls, would be more peaceful (a no less romantic, though slightly more intelligent, variant of the latter being that it'd be more peaceful if the world were taken away from the boys & given to the girls & boys [usually, in that order] together). If we could just get Saddam to phone his Mom, she'd yell "You getthehellouta Kuwait RIGHT NOW!" & (so goes the myth) he'd do it! A more nuanced, sophisticated version is that though she wouldn't do it, that would only be because her natural anti-war psyche had been corrupted by the androcentrism prevailing in her culture &, indeed, in all cultures for the past 5,000 - year "detour" of natural human evolution.... This Thinksheet is a bibliocritical review of Riane [Tennenhaus] Eisler's THE CHALICE & THE BLADE: OUR HISTORY, OUR FUTURE (H&R187188), a radical feminist antibiblical rewrite of history. Most radical feminist literature I only glance at / read reviews of, but I try to give a thorough read to any piece that is overtly antibiblical: that's why I call this review "bibliocritical." 1 A refugee from Hitler's spectacularly-disastrously androcentric Europe, perhaps she can be forgiven her spectacularly-disastrously gynecocentricity, which she labors to defend against the charge of gynarchy (usu. called ""), the dominator model at the opposite end of the pendulum's swing from andrarchy (usu. called ""). Her prejudicial theory is that--though when the boys are in the center, power is vertical, hierarchical--when the girls were in the center, power was horizontal, partner- ship. The second phrase of her subtitle tells you what she makes of this reconstruction of prehistory from paleoarcheology. 2 Biblical scholars are familiar with the proleptic error, the prochronism of attributing to the ancients a later emergent (eg, reading a differentiation back into an undifferentiated stage). Instance Gn.3: In disobeying God, Eve & Adam violated their conscience. But they didn't have a conscience when they disobeyed! The responsibility of conscience came as the result of moral consciousness ("know what is good and what is bad"), which they acquired when they ate the apricot. What we have here is a highly sophisticated etiological divine/human-encounter story, superior to all its world-rivals for conveying (1) divine/human communication as constitutive of humanity, (2) obedience as the fundamental note in that relationship from the human side, & (3) the complexities & ambiguities of human existence ("Life is not a feast, it's a predicament."--Geo. Santayana). The simple reason we give this story the name of "the Fall" is that its essence is the naked disobedience of the original human pair. The naked shock is that the disobedience was not punished within the compass of the story (ie, they didn't die) but rather was rewarded (by their acquiring conscience-- or perhaps more broadly, knowledge--if "know good and bad" is taken to mean the knowledge range, ie to "know everything")! The storyteller's enemies may be seen peeping around the story's edges: was the Fall out of the blessed ignorance in communion with God into the cursed knowledge of alienation from God (expulsion from Eden)? What, now, is our author's innocent prolepsis? Innocent in the sense that nowhere does she seem aware of it. It is that she reads peace back into prehistory, before war came into being. The error is not hers alone but is common to most post- WWI I paleoarcheologists-prehistorians, whom she quotes endlessly (giving a scientific patina to her fiction, her "social construction of [prehistoric] reality" [to appropriate a Berger/Luckmann title]) . If we pseudohistoricize the Fall, are Adam & Eve really human beings, or zombie slaves? And are her pseudohistoricized prehistoric beings really human, or are they only doe-like placid, ignorant of war & so not having chosen peace instead? Scientifically, the most she can manage is a myth of primordial gyneco- centric placidity, doe-likeness. Her logical error appears if one thinks of the fundamentalists' myth of Adam-&-Eve original righteousness (instead of original goodness). 3 Her diatribe uses lightweight Jos. Campbell, not heavyweight Mircea Eliade. The 2450.2 former is, as she is, antibiblical; the later is evenhanded, scientific. And she loves Bible-hating Ashley Montagu, who on her paperback cover says her book's "the most important book since Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES." (On a walk in 1952, AM said to me "My life work may be thought of as an effort to stand Darwin on his head" [ie, give natural dominance to cooperation rather than competition].)

4 Like most grandmothers, she hasn't one good thing to say for war. Her simplistic moralization of history can be stated in this double formula: girls + "peace" = good: boys + war = evil. Natural enough: girls' powers do not include the heavy musculature of building/destroying/defending/attacking. Girls psyche themselves up into thinking themselves & their powers superior, & this illusion of superiority distorts how everything is seen & felt. (Of course ditto for the boys, pari passu; but I'm reviewing a girl's book. I believe in what she says she believes in but doesn't, viz partnership, which I often state as "the mutual superiority of the sexes.")....Male heavy musculature correlates with the male's higher testosterone, the drive-adventure hormone, & adventure is one energy of war--the others being greed (for power & land, as in the case of Saddam Hussein) & defense....which leads me to say that our author's placid prehistory has a few parallels in contemporary "stone-age" tribes who live off by themselves, not encountering other tribes & cultures & thus having no need to defend themselves. But with the immense population increases of historic times came Kulturkampf, the pressing-clashing of peoples against each other, & therefore war, which (& her argument has this advantage) is becoming too destructive to have as bright a future as it's had a past. (Yes, I believe that in the past, on balance war's done more good than harm. The last war [Rev.19.11-20.10] will do more good than any previous war--but of course Eisler rejects the Bible, its wars, & its battle imagery, & apocalyptic: all that belongs in history's "detour" into male dominance. For her, war is nothing but the antonym of "peace" (though for her this is irreversible: "peace" can exist, & did in prehistory, without the presence, threat, or memory of war. Nor does she have any kind words for militarily achieved & maintained peace, the arts of peace flourishing under a military umbrella--as pax romana, pax britannica, pax americana [eg, Japan flourishing under the American military umbrella].) 5 Our author admits that prehistory is, for us, a jigsaw puzzle more than half of whose pieces are missing; yet she does not practice a theory-modesty commensurate with this fragmentariness of our knowledge. Eg, she has no doubt that female figurines prove "worship of the Goddess"; & that the association of female artifacts with life's untowardnesses proves that the feminine was thought to control evil (rather than, I suggest as another possibility, contain it--as in Kali--in which case ritual would include propitiation of the negative feminine, to defend the community against evil from the feminine).— This cocksureness leads her to assume what she cannot prove (viz, her cultural-transformation theory of prehistoric cultural superiority under the Goddess), & proceed to erect an elaborate sociohistorical structure thereupon. This reminds me of 's view of false philosophical systems as like stageplays in which the playwrights have invented imaginary worlds-- ("idols of the theater," one of the four types of "idols of the mind" [the other three being "idols of the tribe," common to human nature; "idols of the cave," of individual origin; & "idols of the market," arising from the need to communicate & the pitfalls of languagel). This classic exposition of the kinds of inducement to thinking-errors appeared in the Year of the Mayflower, 1620, as , a bold attempt to replace Aristotelian syllogistic deduction with induction as the base for the development of axioms of successively greater generality, the whole structural process to be under continuous inductive criticism--the process we came to call "science." The Mayflower pilgrims intended to extend freedom to honor & worship God: Bacon's intention was to extend to the utmost humanity's over nature-- a dominir-q-, now imperiling nature & therefore humanity (as Eisler & I agree: we now need a NOVUM NOVUM ORGANUM, a less penile & more uterine way of thinking about the biosphere & our human part in it, & in this sense a less "masculine" & more "feminine" way: I say yes to her intentionality & no to her conceptuality). 6 Antibiblical worldviews may attack the Bible (1) for having the view that something went wrong or (2) for being wrong about what went wrong. Darwinism is 2450.3

an example of the first type of attack, & Marxism & Eislerism are examples of the second type: where the Bible says the Fall, Marxism says classism & Eislerism says sexism. What gives power to her book is the antisexist story she so well tells about the prehistoric good guys & the outside-agitator/invader bad guys. It has a Mahabharata-like, Iliad-like epic appeal, except that its propagandistic moralism dooms it to the bin of ephemera (though it will long be a cult book of radical )....Here's the storyline: Once upon a time, in the near-Golden Age ante, the first "gylanic" (woman-+-man partnership), the first age innocent of "androcracy" (male domination of female & everything else in sight), things like "cultural evolution" were moving along nicely until some outside agitators swept down upon earth's theacentric (Goddess-centered) civilizations ( = all cultures worthy of being called civilized, = all gylanic cultures) & injected every civilization with the virus of violence- hierarchy-, "detouring" our species for these five millenia from the cultural evolution that had already, before male-dominance, laid the foundations for all truly human achievements. We cannot survive if we remain on the detour: nuclear destruction will end the detour. The alternative is to choose to return to the main road, the status quo ante androcracy (a.k.a. "patriarchy," a term the author rejects on the ground that there are some nice fathers, but no nice "men" in the context of her term "androcracy"). 7 Thank God for mythic freedom! Make your own myth, or choose among the ready- mades t or develop further a myth already in process of exfoliation. This last is what RE does, admirably (from the scholarly standpoint) striving to credit (1) all who've influenced her & (2) all others who've worked or are working on parallel tracks. I thank her for her thoroughness, for nowhere else (to my knowledge) is all this brought so well together. She's good at mythopoeia, cosmic-prehistoric storytelling, including tke intellectual promotion & defense of her world-story. And she's quite good at mythoclasm, smashing other folks' world-stories. (She's ideologically anti-physical-war, but loves story-battling, for which the Greeks had the word mythomachy.) 8 Trouble is, anybody buying into her myth would stop praying the Lord's Prayer, the Shema, the Allah Akbar: the three religions history-of-religion scholars call Western all die itt, the myth-war with her: God is dead, executed after unconditional surrender. Christians, Jews, & Muslims who realize she's in the myth replacement business become automatic enemies of her. She looks kindly upon ancient divine couples but is no matchmaker between her Goddess & my God. Like Lenin with his , she with her radical feminism considers atheism essential to her cause: there's no place for God in her Golden Age II (pp.198-203), "where the actualization of our higher evolutionary potentials--our greater freedom through wisdom and knowledge--will guide social policy" & children will be taught not the Ten Commandments & the Lord's Prayer but "more advanced forms of yoga and meditation" (How Californian! From my experience of Esalen & other California human-potential centers in the 1960s I can see-hear-feel her Center for Partnership Studies, Box 51936, Pacific Grove, CA 93950). In much of radical feminism, man-hate (misandry, antonym of "misogyny") & God- hate (atheism) reinforce each other. I've experienced it face to face with Mary Daly (whom RE loves to quote ), for whom if the divine were personal, She would be a lesbian radicat feminist. (RE's sexual preference? I haven't a clue, unless these are clues: (1) she thanks offspring, but no spouse (xii); (2) she skips over her male sexual partner (xiv: "I pursued my professional studies, had children, and..."); & (3) she consistently prefers women to men, in the expression "women and men." And (4) "masculine" means naughty & "feminine" means nice: no nuancing of her virtues/vices lists. No more nuanced than her atheism 1 (ie, the first definition in the dictionaries). She's some nice things to say about Jesus as (her coinage) "gylanic"; but not one nice thing to say about the Father, in whom his mind-life-hope centered (God's androcentrism not infecting Jesus' gylany, though the latter was infatuated with the former!). In RELATIVISM, NIHILISM, AND GOD, Philip E. Devine defends the biblical God against pragmatism (which tilts toward worldly goods & awasi from truth), relativism (which admits of a multiplicity of truths, each correlative to a particular way of life), & nihilism (for which truth, when not a deception, is only an innocent illusion. 2450.4 If it goes into another edition, I suggest he add radical feminism, for which truth- wisdom-knowledge are gender-specific (yep, not my gender: the divine snubbed half the human race, my half); the fact that sexism snubs the other half is no excuse in THE CHALICE & THE BLADE, which makes a great show of scholarship in form while being a propagandistic diatribe in substance). 9 The author's eschatological scenarios are only two: (1) Nuclear finis, if not (2) Global swamping of androcracy (man-power, male-supremacist ) by gylany (the "I" standing both for "linking" [v. "ranking"] & "loosing" [from the chains of male dominance]). As to the latter, she extrapolates from the natural sciences (eg, chaos theory) & the social sciences (eg, cultural-transformation theory): the shift from the boys to the girls (in "partnership" with the boys) can be radical, sudden, & total (ie, global). How it can be total she no more explains than she explains how the "detour" from gylany to androcracy was total (Crete being the last holdout). The two nonexplanations are one manifestation of her black/white thinking. Why was gylany so vulnerable as to suffer defeat everywhere? And if gylany was that weak then, isn't it a mighty leap of faith to believe it'll some day be strong enough to defeat androcracy? Every religion demands leaps of faith, but some more than others. And be not deceived: RE's version of radical feminism is her religion by any standard definition of religion. And in this book she's offering it as her alternative to the other religions. For her it's more than a philosophy to be thought, for whatever profit; it's a way of life, to be lived--& that's what distinguishes a religion from a philosphy. Why am I taking her & her ilk so seriously? Because she's fashioned the latest idol to deceive away from the living God, the biblical God. Because she will win some converts from church & synagogue. Because many she'll not win away she'll weaken in their faith in the biblical God & their participation in church & synagogue: many already are crosseyed worshipers of both God & the Goddess. Because semi-converts to radical feminism, remaining in church & synagogue, are pressuring, with some success, for radical changes in how God is conceived & the Bible is read & life is to be led. I take seriously her & her ilk because, while they've some good things to say about the need for consciousness change (what I call a Second Copernican Revolution, & preach), they are, in their antiGod gospel, enemies attacking both outside & within church & synagogue. The fight will get fiercer. Almost certainly a "womanchurch" or church of gylany will take congregational form all across the country, & then church & synagogue will have a clearer enemy to preach against. But the whole thing is a sad scene, sad because the diametricity is, as I see it, unnecessary & pernicious. (I am, & long have been, both pro-feminist & anti-radical-feminist.) 10 Imperialism is, according to our author, a characteristic of androcracy; but it is clearly a characteristic of her "gylany": all opposition is to be overwhelmed, though of course the weapons for overwhelming will be gynecocentric (she perfers the less- well-formed "gynocentric") rather than androcentric. (Of course the boys are to be defeated for their own good--but doesn't every imperialism make the claim that the to- be-subjugated will be better off after being taken over? Besides, no intelligent man believes women are less powerful in the battles of the sexes! And when a man experiences a woman as more powerful, any gynophobia (woman-fear) in him turns to gynomisia (woman-hate, an essential in sexism--as androphobia turned to andromisia [man-hate] is a fundamental energy in radical feminism). (Cf. for parallel illumination, Jew-hate & Goy-hate; or Gay-hate [not the same as "homophobia"] & Straight-hate.) 11 RE is guilty, in her text, of Eurocentrism. Her thesis demands globalizing her evidence & prediction, but she's satisfied with projecting globally from what she s€e_s happening in the EurAmerican civilization, her civilization. She mentions the Sinic yin/yang as a gylanic model (without mentioning the irony that in actual Taoist- influenced societies, the stabs of women is lower than in the West), but she describes neither how the Sinic world became androcentric nor how it will recover the Goddess-- & so for the rest of the earth outside EurAmerica. 12 Another provincialism of RE is that she's white radical feminist (a species) rather than radical feminist (the genus). Of late, some black women have sharpened our 2450.5 awareness of the difference. E.g.: (1) Katie G. Cannon's Union Theological Seminary 1983 PhD; & (2) Jacquelyn Grant's WHITE WOMEN'S CHRIST AND BLACK WOMEN'S JESUS: FEMINIST THEOLOGY AND WOMANIST RESPONSES (Scholars Press/89). JG195: "Feminist theology is inadequate for two reasons: it is White and it is racist." JG198: The elitist target of feminism is sexism, but Black women face racism-sexism-classism & so need (p.261) "tridimensional analysis." JG200, on the imperialism overclaim: "Feminism' means 'white feminism', and thus oppresses [by dragooning] Black women's experience," so Black women have rejected feminism. JG205: "Womanist theology begins with the experiences of Black women as its point of departure." JG261: "The Christ is more likely to be found in the community of Black women."

13 Reading the book with (among other questions in mind) "What's being left out, & why?", I found only an unrelieved damnation of androcracy: the author has nothing good to say, even by way of concession, for these 5,000 years of male dominance. Her simplicistic historicism demands three periods: good guys (a generic noun), bad guys, good guys. Reminds me of Bush's booboo a few days ago, comparing (at one point) Saddam & Hitler in the latter's favor. Howls of protest: Hitler's been so demonized that one dassn't say any good of him! This demonization of history (ie, these 5,000 years since prehistory), in distorting data & prior philosophies of history, is as good propaganda as it is bad historiography. One distortion her eristic theory inflicts is the romanticization of illud tempus, pre- history, as the mother of all truly human arts & crafts. The theory requires her to answer, if the data seem to indicate truly new emergents in history, that those emergents only seem to be truly new, & that because (1) you can't argue from silence that those values did not exist in prehistory, or (2) they seem new only to those who've not made the connection with their prehistoric-archaic shapes (eg, while conceding that literature is a historical phenomenon, she sees it only as a natural evolu- tionary development from known prehistoric signs), or (3) history has tried to destroy evidence of prehistoric gylany, as also of women's historic contribution (eg, changing the spelling of the Greek poet's name Sappha to Sappho). How, then, does she explain the astonishing exfoliation of the arts & sciences once male dominance became established? Easy: androcracy, which is destructive, was unsuccessful in crushing gylany, which is creative & was in late prehistory at the take- off point of a giant leap in cultural evolution. Any clever person can keep neat any philosophy of history, & RE is nothing if not clever. Now, I'm not about to claim that androcracy was/is necessary to high cultural development, as some argue in the case of music. But let's look at literature, which she concedes is an historical emergent. What shall we say of women's literature? Outside of Western literature there's little to be said. Too, much of ancient literature is anonymous, so there's the outside possibility of female authorship (or even probabi lity, since now it's a known fact that men are not inherently superior as authors). Allow, too, a small percentage of dirtywork: (1) suppression of women's writings & (2) false attribution, to men, of works authored by women. Let's look, now, at a publication tradition I was "present at the creation" of, in a 1941 U. of Chicago seminar with Hutchins & Adler, GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD (1952, 54 vols, 74 authors, none of them women). The 1990 edition is 60 vols., 130 authors, including four women (though at least one additional woman is "cited as recommended reading...in the 'Syntopican," the two-vol. exposition of the 102 great ideas Adler had chosen for the original edition [NYT 250ct90 C26]). A "males only" policy? Hardly. The 1952 editors, much more the 1990 editors, would have been eager to include more women authors, even if only to ward off feminist attacks that would cut down on sales (which are tough enough: $1,400 is the cheapest edition). (Tough criteria for inclusion: contemporary relevance, worth re-reading, & "deal with the great ideas that confront...in every age." The women who made it? Jane Austen, Willa Cather, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.) If she were fair-minded rather than radical-feminist-fundamentalist, RE would admit that history's dominance of androgens over estrogens has advanced not just the arts of war (which she endlessly, & rightly, avers) but also the arts of peace. I'm stating a—fact, not arguing for the contination of androcracy. From now on, the art 2450 I, 6

of liVing should (as I've been preaching for decades) make more space for, give more place to, the "feminine" without losing the male-initiative dynamism of "history," ie the past five millenia. 14 Where can we find the best support for this today-&-tomorrow art of living? My answer: in biblical religion, which combines power & love. (Sunday in church we sang a hymn combining, as many hymns do, power & love: "When I, 0 Lord, behold thy vast creation, /....Then all my heart cries out, my God, to thee,/ Great is thy love,/ Great is thy love.") Of this religion, RE has only a horribly distorted impression, so distorted that I can hardly recognize my religion in her descriptions. Eg, she contrasts a prehistoric pregnant figurine (a life symbol) with a crucifix (for her, a death symbol ; for me, a supernatural pregnancy, the cost of Easter, New Life). My experience of Christianity is joy overcoming, not evading, sorrow; democratic partnership, not authoritarianism; equality of the sexes (I am clergy, but so is my wife & our daughterinlaw: our church has been ordaining women since 1835, honoring the gylany of the earliest churches). Sure, RE can find, in past & present, instances of the worst features of androcracy corrupting religious as well as secular institutions. But she exceeds her data, & shows her antibiblical hand, when she puristically uses these instances as her excuse for rejecting biblical religion out of hand, thus unnecessarily making me an enemy, when in much she longs for I am her friend & could be an ally. But of course she's selling a package, a paradigm + process + promotional Center. Given her human-potential & New Age primary audience, she's not apt to worry about alienating people like me. What do I worry about? Women, & even some men, who buy her package, send for her scripture's Study Guide (yes, her book has become scripture for some of her followers), get into an RE support group, & (some of them) get themselves to her Center for further indoctrination--&, in consequence of it all, find themselves further alienated from the Biblical Story, the West's primary spiritual heritige, & from church & synagogue, America's primary social resources for spiritual support in all the ventures of life. And I'm saddened at her boxing herself in on Scripture (cap. "s," the Bible), which is (to use her language) a product of the androcratic "detour" & is therefore primarily a document of death, all androcratic products being thanatos-affirming. The fact that 1 & a few billion other human beings have found the Bible eros-affirming, bio- philous, saying a cosmic-public-private "YES!" to life, does not impress her, as it contradicts her history-story (though she finds some gylanic spots in Scripture, especially in the late prophets & Jesus). (One should not be surprised to find her very weak on Bible. The chief authority she refers to is an old [1950] college edition for courses in the Bible to be read as literature: THE ,DARTMOUTH BIBLE. 15 Why did the dinosaur & primordial gylany die out? Many theories, all fascinating. In saying --- _they btottv became dysfunctional, unviable, we've merely used fancy words to repeat: they died out. Nobody thinks the former resurrectable, RE thinks the latter is: Golden Age II will be gylanic, with the Goddess resurrecta (though her final description of the new age is psychosocial, without explicit Goddess-worship). In the gauzy thinking that supports this hope, I get the feeling that I'm in an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. A revolution stands things on their head; but who now can believe in a fe/male partnership under the re-dominion of the "feminine," the Goddess in any manner of speaking of the priority of the estrogens? 16 Our author airily, romantically, combines angelism (she preaches that people are basically good, the old Enlightenment doctrine that's taken such a pounding in the 20th c.) & demonism (with hardly a breath of qualification, she yells "Androcracy!" when asked to explain human evil). Such superficial moral-spiritual analysis comdemns her thing to being at most a cult, not a movement--though it's part of the radical-feminist movement. A sexist reading of Genesis 3 taints women as the initiators of sin: RE's reading of history taints men as the initiators of evil. Neither reading is fit to support the partnership model-ideal for society. I believe in the model-ideal, but find better support for it in the nature of God (Gn.1.26f) & of the church (Ga1.3.27f). While she 2450.7 alludes to both these passages, time & again she flatly rejects the biblical God, whom she hates for being "above" humanity (she adores the horizontal & despises the vertical) & for being "male" (& therefore penile-"blade," instead of--as her Goddess-- womb-"chalice"). For her, there is no God who is to be obeyed, no sin that is to be repented of & forgiven, & so no redemptive cost to effect atonement-reconciliation- salvation (a gylanic defeated dead Jesus, but no Christ & no cross & no resurrection).

She carries on her program not only without benefit of clergy (which wouldn't bother me), but without what the Bible calls "grace," the "amazing grace...that saves a wretch like me," & could save a wretch like her. And she likes to rummage in ancient gnostic writings to find support for her thesis that all we need, to get off the androcratic "detour," is yvEic Lc "gnosis" (knowledge, wisdom, enlightenment, all of which she claims to be gifts of the Goddess, without input from any God--in spite of her gylany, which would logically presuppose the transcendentalized politics of a divine couple--oh, how her antimale bias shows!)....By contrast, her chief authority for gnosticism, Elaine PageIs, says "the principle of human equality could be incorporated even into orthodox Christian teaching" (p.44, "The Scholar and the Feminist III: 'The Search for Origins," Barnard College, 10 Apr 76). 17 Instead or her simple opposition of horizontal/vertical, the Bible combines the two dimensions. The fundamental partnership of the sexes is not an ontological function but a relational triangle: eg, Christian marriage is not primarily a horizontal covenant but a vertical covenant, each partner covenanting with God "in the presence of God and of each other," their mutual covenant with each other thus being in the sphere of their mutual covenant with God, who wills-sanctions-blesses their horizontal relationship. But RE considers the vertical dimension in such a marriage not only a violation of truth & of parsimony but also an insult to humanity. Consider: "God invites us to partnership [my underlining] in the creation of a more just and humane world." For this, "it is Jesus who is the paradigm,...attacking hypocrisy and injustice in the religious and social system of his time" (p.194, Duncan S. Ferguson, BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS: AN INTRODUCTION [Jn.Knox/861; the Bible's overarching theme being [p.193] "the inauguration of God's eschatological rule," providing "the marching orders for the church's mission in the world"). Wo/man are in double partnership, not just or even primarily with each other, but with God &, in God, with each other. This leaves no room for either simplism, sexism or gylany, neither being equatable with salvation, neither being the way of hope. 18 The Christian doctrine of God's incarnation in Jesus proclaims the feminine as the inaugural point of tangency of the divine with the human. To feel this (with the artists of sound & sight) is as important as to think it. When RE touches on Mother Mary, it is only to present her as continuator & anticipator of the Goddess. By con- trast, one may profit from Rainer Maria Rilke's superb series of poems on "The Life of the Virgin Mary" (pp.193-231, TRANSLATIONS FROM THE POETRY OF R.M.R., by M.D.Herter Norton [W.W.Norton/38/62]). Here's a bit of it: "the God who rumbled over nations / makes himself mild [macht sich mild] and in thee [Mary] comes into the world" (p.211). The solidarity of fe/male (feminine & masculine) appears in the association of Mary's later tears with the water as yet unturned into wine (John 2), & also with Jesus' later bloody death, which the red wine anticipates: "the water of her tear-glands / had turned to blood with this wine [geworden war mitdiesem Weinr (p.217)....A trinitarian Christian , I believe God once assumed, took on, a human body not hermaphroditic nor female but male--appropriate to, in "objective correlation" with (to borrow a T.S.Eliot phrase), the incarnate mission. The Christian doctrine of God is an exposition of the Christian experience of God at the point of tangency with history, a doctrine dramatically stated in the B.C./A.D. time-designation. Not God in general, "the God of the philosophers" (Pascal), "the God beyond God" (Tillich), useful as such phrases may be, but the God of the Jews, the God of this Jew ("the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ"), around whom gathered these disciples, whom he sent ("apo-stle") on the mission of the divine love equally for women & men & all people. Mystery, & therefore faith, remain in this "scandal of particularity"; but they are at the heart of all religion, & this religion is mine. But we Christians should 2450.8

beware of overreading Jesus' maleness, overimplicating on its basis, as does the present Pope when (outrageously!) he argues from it that women should not be ordained. 19 An important aspect of RE's faith is that psychosexual formation is more nurture than nature. From paleoarcheology & social psychology she reads her stance here not as faith (fact + mystery) but as science (fact). (Another woman, Mary Eddy, made a similar overclaim & on its basis started a religion melding Christianity & gnosticism, viz "Christian Science.") Not a peep out of her about hormones, though it is a matter of sdence that the androgens are harder-driving than the estrogens, so the boys tend to take over even what the girls start: the male initiative is normal (in the technical sense of the "norm") in nature. RE's claim that the greater aggressiveness in males is only from nurture's malforming of them is pseudoscience. Of course there's no neat correlation putting all women in one hormonal bag & all men in the other: Meg Thatcher's drive-hormones, eg, far exceed her husband's! So who should take the initiative is not a matter of checking genitals but of holistic assessment of the individual. Yet the "norm" remains, & in the Christian doctrine of God it's expressed as the divine initiative of the "Father" & of the "Son." So let the girls be girls & develop their animus, boys be boys & develop their anima, & from each according to inclination & ability, in partnership with all. 20 While I like RE's goal of "maximizing flexibility and creativity at all stages of life" (p.203), she offers, nothing for the human spirit beyond ancient Greek philosophy's telic goal that (things &) people ought to strive to fulfil their potential as individuals & in community. Pretty pale up against the Bible's vision combining the glory of God with human dignity as twin goals, the latter defined & informed by the former. 21 Probably something in her background inclines her to be as anticlerical as she is. She describes the ancient Hebrews as "a warring people ruled by...warrior- priests,....imposing their ideology and way of life on the peoples of the land they conquered" (p.44; a view very different from the peasant-revolt view of Norman Gottwald & some other prominent Hebraists). Then she blames the priests ("P") for turning the "egalitarian" creation story into a baneful "male-supremacist" version-- the reverse of the truth (p.86): Genesis 1.26f is in "P" (the Priestly Code). Her dogma demands that the earlier story be the egalitarian one, but it isn't. And she's unaware that (1) the later story comes first in the text & (2) only one of the stories, not both, is in Genesis 1. (But we learned earlier not to trust her on the Bible.) 22 I've a coin minted during the two-year (361-3) reign of Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, with his head & inscription--whose aim was to repaganize the . He used both his intellectual & his political powers to try to destroy Christianity, which he forbade to be taught in public schools. Not the least reason he fascinates me is that so many of his methods have been used by the neopagans of our own century. One of these was to gain divine authority for his cause by archaizing, dredging up the remote past. This is how "the Goddess" functions for RE. Garth Fowden recently studied this phenomenon (THE EGYPTIAN HERMES: A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO THE LATE PAGAN MIND [Camb.U.P./861) & concluded that the winning formula in the Roman world was the combination of "divina auctoritas" (which Lactantius & Augustine tweaked the philosophers for not having) with "the systematic reasoning of the philosopher" (p.215), the whole wrapped up in a gnostic package (eg, Hermeticism's mystic glue joined & Pythagoras, treating them as mystagogue4. RE laughs at biblical people, Jews & Christians, for believing in divine revelation; but in history- of-religions light, so does she, listening to her imaginative reconstruction of the prehistoric Goddess. Her book is a religious tract, a scripture, parading itself as science. I object not to her preaching but to the parade. 23 RE does not allude to the parallel between a boy's experience of moving from mother-dependence to father-model, & the movement from the prehistoric Goddess to the historical God. The analogy has the force of the sanction of maturity, Though I've a load of notes left from working on the book, I've delivered myself of most of my burden so will not burden you further. Though I may report on any response to this Thinksheet I get from RE.