Garden of Eden
April 4th
It is rather curious that all the world-creation and creation-of-life myths and religious stories and texts have a male god as a creator/founder/life-giver. Ok, occasionally there is a female figure there as well — either as a helper, one of the first creations, or a personification of ancient chaos that the male god puts in an order to things. But it is always the male god portrayed as a life-giver. Which is obviously wrong. Women are creators of life and order, and that was the fact for original matriarchal societies in Neolithic Europe and before that time as well. It seems to me that the change in creation myths from a female goddess to a male god came only with the migrations of Indo-Europeans from the Asiatic steppes about 2500–1500BC. Those migrations not only created the current patriarchate, and ethnic and linguistic divisions across Europe but also brought an organized war and violence and mythos of a warrior-hero. Neolithic women leaders and priestesses ran proto-European societies until kings and priests took over the executive and spiritual realm.
Some traces of matriarchal leadership still remain, though. Even in places like the Old Testament. I don’t know how else to interpret the story of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Gardens, growing and reaping fruits of plants and labors, were always a domain of women. The forced, back-breaking work in agriculture and husbandry was a domain of men. We lost the luxurious garden of the previous religious myths, and we are condemned to an exile of sweat and blood and tears of current patriarchal societies. Of course, the story had to be made to portray the woman as a guilty party in the fall of men and expulsion from paradise. But it is quite clear that it was the men and their brutality and savagery that put us all on the road to all the problems of today. And it seems that it became widely accepted that this is the only way societies are and can be.
Maybe we should try to go back to matriarchate and see where it will lead us. It won’t be any worse than the current bullshit everywhere.
