CHAPTER EIGHT

Misogyny:
The Origin of Negative Attitudes towards Woman

                      Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (Sirach 25:24)

                                          
The Christian attitude to woman draws on earlier attitudes which are carried in Jewish commentaries on the Myth of the Fall, for these were partly responsible for laying the foundation on which later Christian writers built. In the Old Testament we find this key sentence: “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die.” From the Jews, the Christians took the original Myth of the Fall. They also inherited the various passages in the Old Testament, including the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, which presented woman as a threat to man.
           This view of woman was carried forward into Christian culture — not through the words or teaching of Jesus but through the influence of St. Paul. In his letters to the different churches, St. Paul instructed women to keep their heads covered, not to teach or speak in church and to be subject to their husbands in all things, “for man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” (1 Tim. 2:8-14, Eph. 5:22-4, 1 Cor. 14:34-5, 1 Cor. 11:7-9)
           This was one root of the negative view of woman that was developed in Christianity. The other root was the ideas that prevailed about women in the Greek world as reflected in Plato’s Theory of Forms. In this Theory, as Jack Holland writes,

the very act of conception is viewed as a falling away from the perfection of God into the abysmal world of appearance, of suffering and death...This dualistic vision of reality denigrated the world of the senses, placing it in an eternal struggle with the achievement of the highest form of knowledge: the knowledge of God. This vision profoundly influenced Christian thinkers in their view of women, who literally as well as figuratively embodied what is scorned as transient, mutable and contemptible.”(1)

           However, apart from philosophical theories, there were also social customs. In her book When Women were Priests, Karen Jo Torjesen brilliantly illuminates how the Christian Fathers absorbed their view of the different roles of men and women from the social customs of the Roman Empire and how these, in turn, were inherited from those that existed in Greek culture. It seems incredible to discover that views about women which still prevail today can be traced back to these ancient cultures. As she writes, “When women are dismissed as irrational and men are presumed to be innately logical, we can be sure these conclusions are prompted by the persistent whisperings of long-dead Greek philosophers in society’s ear.”(2)
           Pythagoras was the first philosopher to define the radical difference between men and women: “There is a good principle which created order, light and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness and woman.” Torjesen develops this theme, explaining that the Greek theory held that the human self has two aspects:

A superior, masculine self—rational, virile, masterful, and noble—and an inferior, feminine self that is irrational, sexual, animal, and potentially dangerous. Enshrined within this theory of the self are the gendered values of male honor and female shame. Masculinity, equated with sexual and political dominance, is designated “rational.” By identifying the sexual, appetitive, and “dangerous” aspects of the self as irrational, the philosophers split off the “uncontrollable” parts of human nature and projected them onto a “lower female self.” Through this gendering of the self, femaleness became the primary symbol for the irrational and uncontrollable. Women could then be labelled irrational, sensual, and dangerous because of the supposed dominance of their “lower” female nature and the weakness of their “higher” masculine self. (3)

           And, she observes,

Instead of celebrating femaleness as providing a unique avenue of access to God, or seeing in femaleness a profound expression of the divine, Christianity left the traditional cultural meanings of femaleness and female sexuality unchanged. Rationality and self-control retained their masculine cast, while passion, sexuality, and body are particularly female…Woman’s body, since it was a stark proclamation of sexuality, was not in the image of God; it represented rather the pull of those forces that drew humanity away from God. (4)

           Putting the Greek (and Roman) inheritance together with Jewish beliefs about original sin and the shame of sexuality, it is clear that this dual legacy was to have a disastrous impact on women’s psyche and women’s lives in Christian culture.
          It is therefore all the more astonishing to discover that in the first two centuries after the death of Jesus, women played a valuable and valued public role in the early Church. To begin with, Christianity was disseminated through meetings in the houses of individuals—many of them distinguished and wealthy women, well respected in their community. When they were baptized as Christians, their whole household, including slaves, was baptized with them. Women preached, taught, baptized and performed healings and exorcisms in the earliest Christian community. Women were attracted to Christianity because it gave them a freedom and a respect that they were not accorded in the surrounding culture, whether Jewish, Greek or Roman. For the first time, they had choice in the disposal of their bodies: they could abstain from marriage by remaining virgins or could choose to be celibate within marriage and even refrain from having children or more children through sexual abstinence. Marriage was for life. A wife could not be put aside. Infidelity in a man was regarded as sinful as it was in a woman.
           Jesus’ attitude towards women was truly revolutionary and, in the way he treated them, he broke with Jewish as well as Roman custom. Even his disciples were surprised and even shocked by his unusual behavior towards women, as when he spoke with a Samaritan woman (John 4:27). Women surrounded Jesus during his ministry; invited him into their houses; anointed him, as Mary Magdalene did, with precious ointment; and generally, were welcomed by him as disciples and friends. It is possible that, as a rabbi, he was married, since this was the Jewish custom at that time, and there is no reason—other than the conviction of the Christian Fathers that the Son of God had to be celibate—to exclude the possibility that he had a close relationship with Mary Magdalene, who was the first to greet him after his resurrection (Mark 16:9) and the first to bring the good news to the other disciples. Certain of the Gnostic gospels allude to the intimate relationship between them.
            In the Dialogue of the Saviour, for example, Mary is praised as a visionary, as the apostle who excels all the rest and as the woman “who knew the All.” (5) It seems that there were several women called “Mary.” In the Gospel of Philip, there is this passage: “There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His [Jesus’] sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.” (6) There is also this passage: “And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” (7)
            In the Gospel of Mary, Peter says to her, “We know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the Saviour which you remember—which you know.” Andrew and Peter reject her words, saying that they do not believe them. Mary cries and Levi rebukes them saying, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.” (8)
           But to the theologians, any suggestion that the Son of God could have sexual relations or be married was inconceivable. The Saviour had to be ‘chaste’ and ‘undefiled’. He could not be allowed to transmit original sin through the sexual act.
           As Church doctrine developed, particularly after the Council of Ephesus in AD 431 when Mary was declared Theotokos, or God-Bearer, it was decided that she also could not be contaminated by original sin. The fact that Jesus had sisters and brothers born before him was expunged from the record in order that Mary should be a sexually pure recipient of the Holy Spirit. For, if his mother had been defiled by sexual intercourse and Jesus born in the normal way, like his brothers and sisters, he would have been contaminated by original sin and could not have been the Son of God. The sexually explicit distinction between Mary and other women had to be clearly drawn. She was to remain a virgin before, during and after the birth of her son. The Church tangled itself in knots with endless doctrinal debates which detracted from rather than added to the teaching it believed itself appointed to transmit.
           There was a marked change in the attitude towards women in the third and fourth centuries when Christian theologians — many of them originally lawyers — began to inveigh against women holding any priestly office or even speaking out in debates in church, for by now, churches had been built to hold large congregations. Once again, as in Greek and Jewish culture, women were to be confined to the home and could hold no public office. Their primary role was to accept the rule of chastity, silence and obedience, to copy Mary’s example of humility. As Irenaeus (ca. AD 125-200) stated it: “Eve by her disobedience brought death on herself and on all the human race: Mary, by her obedience, brought salvation.” (9) The power of men to control the lives of women seems not to have been questioned.
            Tertullian, (AD160-220), a theologian and prolific writer living in North Africa, became one of the most vociferous critics of women holding priestly office: “It is not permitted for a woman to speak in the church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer the [eucharist], nor to claim for herself a share in any masculine function—least of all, in priestly office.” (10) Tertullian addressed women directly in one of the most virulently misogynistic passages that have come down to us:

By every garb of penitence woman might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve – the ignominy, I mean, of the first sin, and the odium of human perdition…Do you not know that you are each an Eve?…You are the Devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law…You destroyed God’s image, man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the son of God had to die. (11)

           Despite the fact that in the Gospels Jesus does not equate sexuality with sinfulness but, on the contrary, protects an adulterous woman from death by stoning, the idea of enmity between the higher (soul) and lower (body) aspects of human nature and the sinfulness of sexuality became, through the influence of St. Augustine and later theologians, one of the major themes of Christian teaching. Generations of Christian ascetics believed that the path to God could only be opened through the renunciation of anything to do with the contamination of woman. After his conversion, St. Augustine wouldn’t allow any woman in his house, not even his elder sister or his nieces, all of whom were nuns. (12)
           What I found endlessly repeated in the writings of the Christian theologians is that woman, because of her descent from Eve, was described in this imagery: as an inferior substance because Eve emerged from Adam; as a secondary creation because Eve was created second, out of Adam; as the ally of the serpent and the devil because she succumbed to temptation first; as the Devil’s gateway through whom the Devil or Satan is enabled to pursue his aims in the world through causing her to tempt men into sexual relations. These ideas laid the ground for the witch trials over 1000 years later when women were specifically accused of ‘consorting’ with the Devil and even having intercourse with him. The fact that Eve in Genesis is described as a secondary creation drawn from the body of Adam rather than a primary creation, led to this contorted statement from Gratian, a twelfth century theologian:

The image of God is in man and it is one. Women were drawn from man, who has God’s jurisdiction as if he were God’s vicar, because he has the image of the one God. Therefore Woman is not made in God’s image…Adam was beguiled by Eve, not she by him…It is right that he whom woman led into wrongdoing should have her under his direction, so that he may not fail a second time through female levity. (13)

           The end result of these projections was that Eve and all women were equated with body, matter and carnality and with the irrational nature of man. Adam, who got off relatively lightly as a primary creation and as a secondary rather than a primary sinner, was equated with the rational soul, following the Greek view of man. “Woman,” wrote Albertus Magnus, teacher of Thomas Aquinas, in the twelfth century, “is an imperfect man and possesses, compared to him, a defective and deficient nature. She is therefore insecure in herself. That which she herself cannot receive, she endeavours to obtain by means of mendacity and devilish tricks.” (14) No wonder it has been so difficult for women priests and women bishops to gain acceptance!
           Here are two statements from the pen of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who was greatly influenced by Aristotle’s derogatory view of woman:

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even some external influence, like the south wind, for example, which is damp.

The image of God, in its principal signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and in woman…But in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature. (15)

           The misogynistic attitude towards women that prevailed in Greek and Roman culture had distant roots in the ethos of the solar age where light and darkness, good and evil are so strongly opposed to each other. The subservient position of women in those cultures where the solar ethos prevailed was the same as it was to become in later Christian culture. It is found not only in the Semitic cultures of the Near and Middle East, and in Greek and Roman culture, but also further to the East, in cultures such as those of India and China, wherever a powerful controlling male priesthood allied to social custom enforced a subservient spiritual position and social role on women. (16)
           These ideas, which reflected and confirmed those imbibed from Greek and Roman as well as Jewish culture, entered into mainstream Christian teaching and were responsible for an enormous amount of suffering for woman whose inferior and sexual nature came to be seen as the main impediment standing between man and God. It is as if a spell were cast on the Christian psyche by the Myth of the Fall. As Torjesen writes:

The equation of woman with sexuality and body…and the exclusion of sexuality and passion from the divine opened up a chasm between woman and God. Only by repudiating her sexual identity and renouncing femaleness could this chasm be bridged. The equation of woman with sexuality meant she was both subordinated to man and alienated from God. (17)

Misogyny: an Ongoing Legacy
           So deeply embedded in patriarchal (not only Christian) culture are these beliefs about the dangerous sexuality of women that we can still find them reflected wherever women are restricted to the home, denied access to education and forbidden to take up a profession. In certain Muslim societies, women are persecuted, punished and even murdered for daring to wear ‘unsuitable’ clothing or for being seen outside their home with a man who is not their husband or close relative. They are even murdered by their own families for wanting to marry someone outside the family's choice of a husband. The stoning of women for adultery existed at the time of Jesus as the story about him preventing it illustrates. This custom, derived from the practices recorded in the Old Testament, still persists in Sharia law, notably in Iran and Somalia. The persecution of women under the Taliban in Afghanistan is well-known but there are many other Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Saudi-Arabia where these abhorrent views prevail and where women still have no rights or very limited ones. Domestic violence and absolute male control of woman is accepted as integral to social and religious custom. The recent conflicts in Iraq (post invasion) and Afghanistan have accomplished one positive thing: they have revealed to the eyes of the world the appalling suffering and oppression of women.
           From a Jungian perspective, the phobic fear of woman in patriarchal culture reflects the fear of the evolving organ of consciousness — the ego — being swallowed up by the primordial undifferentiated unity, the maw or womb of nature. For men who are deeply insecure in their masculinity, whose internalised image of woman is undeveloped because woman has never been valued for herself, but only for what service she can render to man, an independent and educated woman will present a threat—unconsciously, the threat of castration and death.
           We can see this phobic fear reflected in the misogynistic remarks directed at Hillary Clinton on Internet web-sites during the electoral campaign of 2008. As one journalist commented: “Go into these and you are knee-deep in some of the most sexually toxic words in the English language.” One young man’s comment read: “There’s something about her that feels castrating, overbearing and scary.” The fact that this statement might be a projection of his own unconscious fear of woman rather than anything intrinsically true about Hillary Clinton, passes unnoticed.

The Effects of the Myth of the Fall 
           Generations of Christian men and women have sat in church listening to the story of the Fall, absorbing it as the word of God and as divinely revealed truth. How were they affected by it? How has it programmed man’s unconscious attitude towards woman and woman’s view of herself and all the violent patterns of behavior we still encounter, from rape, domestic violence against women, child-beating, paedophilia, pornography, and the sexual abuse of children by parents, siblings and close relatives.
           According to recent statistics (2008) posted on the Internet, in the US, four women die every day, murdered by their partners. The most conservative estimates indicate that two to four million women of all races and classes are battered each year. At least 170,000 of those violent incidents are serious enough to require hospitalization, emergency room care or a doctor's attention. In the UK five hundred women a year are killed by their partners. Domestic violence accounts for twenty-three per cent of all violent crime. (18) While these figures cannot be attributed exclusively to the influence of religious indoctrination, nevertheless I believe that this has, over the centuries, laid the ground for the infliction of intolerable violence and degradation on woman. What unconscious negative beliefs about herself might woman still be carrying as a result of the silent suffering she has endured for centuries?
           Generations of children have sat in church and Sunday School and been imprinted with the idea that long ago, a woman disobeyed God and succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, bringing sin, death and suffering into the world and that her suffering and even her death in childbirth were a punishment for that original sin. They also learned that Eve tempted Adam to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and so was to blame for his fall and his being forced to toil for his living. How, I wondered, would this myth have influenced children’s view of their mothers and fathers? And themselves? Supposing their mother died in childbirth. How would this myth have affected their memory of her? How did it influence the attitude of boys towards girls and girls’ view of themselves? It has surely contributed to women’s deep unconscious feeling of inferiority. In both men and women it would surely have set up a great conflict in their nature, making them mistrust their instincts and feel guilty about sex, believing that this vindictive, punishing, angry God demanded the repression or even the sacrifice of their sexuality as an expiation for the contamination of their inherited sin.
           Again, how has the Myth of the Fall affected the Christian attitude towards children? Generations of children had sin and evil beaten out of them lest they should fall into the clutches of the devil. Many thousands have suffered terribly at the hands of priests and nuns. Their horrific stories of the sadistic punishments meted out by these celibate servants of God are only just coming to light in recent reports in Ireland (the Ryan and Murphy Reports 2009) and in the accounts of the terrible abuse inflicted by the Catholic Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy on orphaned children sent to Australia at the beginning of the last war. Even in the Jamie Bulger case (1993) where two ten-year old boys tortured and murdered a toddler, people wrote to the Times (in England) saying that all children were born sinful and were, therefore, likely to be programmed to do evil.
           All this seems outrageous but also tragic because it was so completely unnecessary. As a therapist and as a woman, I have been made deeply aware of the misogyny in the culture as a whole and the guilt women carry, as well as men’s unconscious fear of and contempt for women and women’s fear and distrust of men as well as their inability to value and respect their bodies. I can see clearly that these stem at least in part from the calamitous legacy of the later as well as the early Christian Fathers, for Luther and Calvin perpetuated many of these ideas at the time of the Reformation.
           What comes through these Christian writings is a deep sado-masochism: sadism towards woman in general (which is reflected at the extreme end of the spectrum in sexual pornography and rape where woman is abused and violated); masochism because this preoccupation with sexual sin and guilt led men and women to cultivate a quite unnecessary, almost hysterical sense of sin and self-blame. It may be an unconscious sense of guilt and self-blame that still prevents women from protecting themselves against abusive and violent partners.
           The belief system engendered by the Christian interpretation given to the Myth of the Fall justified every kind of persecution of woman, from denying her the right to any property and making her subject to her husband, to the witch trials of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in which hundreds of thousands of women were tortured in order to prove their sexual relations with the Devil and died horrifically at the stake.
           “Never” writes Gregory Zilboorg in his History of Medical Psychology, “in the history of humanity was woman more systematically degraded. She paid for the fall of Eve sevenfold, and the Law bore a countenance of pride and self-satisfaction, and the delusional certainty that the will of the Lord had been done.” (19)
           The meta-narrative of the Myth of the Fall which has such deep roots in the solar age has cast a negative pall over the Christian attitude towards life in this world. Instead of helping to alleviate human suffering, it has immeasurably increased it, not least by the Catholic Church's repudiation of contraception, therefore placing the heavy burden of many children in places where many women live lives of desperate poverty yet are afraid of defying their Church and falling into sin. Culturally, it contributed to man’s contempt for woman’s “hysteria and emotionality”, and strengthened the prejudice which for centuries barred her access to education and an effective place in the world in any of the professions exercised by men, including the priesthood and the medical profession. Until very recently, it underlay the judicial opinion in rape trials that women had “asked for it”. Unsurprisingly, it has wounded man’s internalized image of woman and given him a good reason for mistrusting and dissociating himself from his own feelings as well as creating within him an obsessive need to control his own emotions.
           In the political sphere, we are confronted by the violent history of Christianity which has contrasted so strangely with the teaching of Christ, who spoke of love and compassion and our son-ship with God — even of the innate divinity of all humanity (“Ye are gods” John 10: 34), as well as the need to love our enemies. We didn’t really need any other direction than to follow his suggestion that we should do unto others as we would be done by, and that compassion should be our guide. What happened to that luminous value in the brutal treatment of women and children, the persecution of heretics, the bloody conquests in the name of Christianity, the inquisitions, tortures, burnings and the repression of any group or individual who threatened the established Church? Where is it in the current Christian Fundamentalist belief in “The Rapture”? Christianity today has become riven by schisms and bitter arguments over the issue of women priests and the acceptance of homosexuality. Words from the Old Testament that were written well over two thousand years ago in a culture utterly different from our own are invoked to support entrenched beliefs. The actual teaching of Christ appears to have been forgotten.
            Nor can we ignore the quite unwarranted sense of the moral and spiritual superiority of Christians towards other religions, their attempt to convert indigenous peoples to the “true” religion and the omnipotent control exercised by the Church over its flock. Indigenous peoples in the New World were regarded as inferior, primitive and "close to nature" — therefore rightly subject to the superior power of the white European conquerors. We have also to recognize the long-term effects of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the Crusades against the Muslim infidel which are carried right through to our own time in the catastrophe of Bosnia and Kosovo and the unresolved tension between Christianity and Islam that lurks beneath the War on Terror.
           We need to take into account attitudes about the body and sexuality and the belief that a life dedicated to God demanded the sacrifice of sexuality and that this sacrifice was pleasing to Him. The idea of atonement and reparation for evil had long existed in the work of the Greek tragedians but no-one, until the advent of Christianity, had suggested that sexuality itself was a sin for which one had to atone. It may be this repression of an essential human instinct that has led, over the centuries and into our own time, not only to male violence against women but to the evil of pornography which violates woman’s body and to the rape and sexual abuse of young boys by Catholic priests who were entrusted with their care. One may wonder what terrible trauma inflicted on children has been concealed for centuries. (20)
           No one is allowed to challenge the Catholic Church’s rigid rules on contraception which it considers to be a sin. It is strange that, in a world where over-population is one of the major challenges confronting humanity, the Church still maintains its position on this issue, even in Africa where, in the face of an AIDS epidemic that is destroying countless millions of lives, it counsels abstinence rather than the use of condoms. Again, we find the control of woman’s sexuality by celibate men at the root of this shocking adherence to a literal reading of the Old Testament. Dr. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, who holds the chair for religious history at Essen University, has written a book entitled Eunuchs for Heaven. In the Introduction to this devastating critique of the Church’s hostility towards sexuality and women, she deplores how a long historical process has

transformed Christianity from what it was or should have been—a religion founded on personal experience of the universally accessible love of God, in which the body has its natural and God-given place—into a regime imposed by an unmarried oligarchy on a subordinate and largely married majority. This has perverted the work of him from whom the Christians take their name. (21)

           In contrast to the shadow aspect of Christianity described in these two chapters is the behaviour of countless millions of Christians who, over two millennia, have tried to live the essential message of Christ in innumerable acts of kindness and self-sacrifice, and in the noble and courageous defense of others in the face of the threat of their own death, in attempts to establish justice for the downtrodden and oppressed, and in setting up charities to help those less fortunate than themselves. Also in contrast is the legacy of sublime art, architecture and music which arose in response to the influence of Christianity and which I came to value deeply in the course of my own quest.

Conclusion
           In conclusion, we can see how the two great religious meta-narratives of the solar age — the Myth of the Fall and the Doctrine of Original Sin — split nature from spirit and body from soul. In their attempt to explain the existence of evil, they taught generations of men and women that this world was a place of suffering, punishment, sin and death and that all effort should be directed to ensuring life after death by turning away from this world. These two chapters have explored a pathology which is deeply embedded in a belief system that has existed for some 1800 years. It constitutes an unconscious collective thought form which is extremely difficult to transform and heal precisely because it is so deeply unconscious. Moreover, these meta-narratives are still being disseminated wherever Christianity is carried today. The whole edifice of Christian belief rests on the twin pillars of belief in the Fall of Man and the consequent need for our redemption by Christ’s sacrificial death.
           It seems to me that Christianity has taken a disastrous detour under the spell of a myth and the formulation of a doctrine that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual teaching of Christ. It has killed the poetic soul of man, numbing his spontaneous sense of delight in life, extinguishing the flickering flame of joy. No-where in it do we find the celebration of the sacred nature of sexual love, as in the Indian tradition. Nor, in the Myth of the Fall do we find a recognition of the sacredness of nature. We might well wonder what would be the effect if the Doctrine of Original Sin were expunged from Christian doctrine, so freeing soul and body from the heavy burden they have carried for some seventeen hundred years. But if this were to be removed, would it undermine the doctrinal belief in Christ’s divinity and the need for the sacrifice of God’s only Son to redeem the sins of humanity?

MEDITATION

I would like to offer a meditation on the body, to restore its value and its preciousness as a temple and the physical manifestation of the soul—the vital connecting intermediary between nature and spirit:

Imagine your body as a vessel, a receiver and transmitter of light.
Thank it for everything it has done for you in your life, past and present.
Thank it for the miracle of its being.
Say to it that you deeply regret that it was made to suffer in the past and that you will take great care of it in the future.
Imagine love flowing from your heart into every part of it, flooding it with light.
Recognize your body as the connecting link between invisible spirit and the physical environment all round you: the earth, the trees, the plants and flowers, the food you eat, all the things you make and creatively transform with the raw materials of life.
See it as the finest transparent substance, like crystal or a beautiful jewel, such as a diamond.
See that crystal or jewel-like form irradiated by the healing light of the cosmos that flows through and sustains the whole of the manifest world.

Notes

1. Jack Holland, Misogyny, The World’s Oldest Prejudice, Constable and Robinson Ltd. London, 2006, p. 31
2. Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were Priests, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. p. 180
3. ibid, p. 181
4. ibid, p. 211
5. Dialogue of the Savior 139.12-13, Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1977, p. 235
6. NHL, The Gospel of Philip, p. 135-6
7. ibid, p. 138
8. ibid, The Gospel of Mary, p. 472 and 473
9. Tertullian, Adversus Haereses,111. xxii. 4
10 . ibid, de Virginibus Velandis 9
11. ibid, On the Apparel of Women
12 Ranke-Heinemann, p. 104
13. Gratian, Decretum,
14. Ranke-Heinemann, p. 157 quoting from Quaestiones super de animalibus, XV, q.11
15. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
16. Marilyn French, From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, McArthur & Co., Toronto, 2002
17. Torjesen, p. 222
18 . report in the Times, July 18th, 2002 based on statistics given on www.womensaid.org.uk
19. Zilboorg, Gregory, A History of Medical Psychology, p. 162
20. Evidence of the rape of children by Catholic priests is now coming to light (2010) in America, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Brazil.
21. Ranke-Heinemann, introduction p. x

This myth has been explored in more detail in The Myth of the Goddess and in a book called Eve: The History of an Idea, by J.A. Phillips, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1984. I would recommend Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s book and the books by Charles Freeman mentioned in the previous chapter to the reader.

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