Can Troubled Minds Create Beauty?

Catrin Welz-Stein

The priests who now spread what they said was the divine Word — the Word of God that had magically been communicated to them — were backed up by armies, courts of law, and executioners. But their ultimate backup was not temporal, but spiritual. Their most powerful weapons were the ‘sacred’ stories, rituals, and priestly edicts through which they systematically inculcated in peoples’ minds the fear of terrible, remote, and ‘inscrutable’ deities. For people had to be taught to obey the deities…who now arbitrarily exercised powers of life and death in the most cruel, unjust, and capricious ways, to this day still often explained as ‘the will of God.’

-Riane Eisler

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It is not female biology that has betrayed the female, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed more than one hundred years ago, it is the myths and stories that have been told about her, what has come to be believed about her — even by the female herself. In the Christian West, it is common for a woman to be described or to describe herself as “just a mother”. It is common for “barefoot and pregnant” to connote powerlessness. Simone de Beauvoir suggested that it was as mother that woman was most fearsome, so it was as mother that she was enslaved. Yet there are cultures in the human community where a birthing mother is described as a “great warrior” — going to the gates of life and death, to heave and…