Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDENCE 45
Civilization, quoting a wide sampling of the best archeological evidence,
argues persuasively that slavery was created after the subjugation of women
and was probably inspired by it.
In China, curiously, a very similar pattern has been discerned by contemporary
scholarship. As Joseph Needham demonstrates in a remarkable sixvolume
study, Science and Civilization in China, the matrist and matriarchal values
vvere preserved in that remarkable text, the Tao Te Ching, which praises a
figure quite cognate with the great goddess of the Mediterranean area:
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 nonslave 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.)
Early Egyptian religion, it might be noted, was largely sexual in basis and