I hope you were able to laugh at the absurdity of that title. It sounds like a comment we might project upon the stereotypical caveman, but it more accurately describes our modern society’s systemic bias against women. It is something of an insult to attribute it to our ancient indigenous ancestors who actually worshipped the “Great Mother,” motherhood was honored as the source of life in those humane cultures. So, what happened? As Daniel Quinn described it was “the Great Forgetting.”
There must have been some trauma that caused a man to claim such ruthless and violent power over the Great Mother Goddess. What arrogance pushed the Goddess aside to claim that power resides in a powerful male God. Plants had been the realm of women’s knowledge, growing and collecting them to feed their family, their band. When men got involved, they cultivated more land, more than enough to feed them so with more food their numbers grew. Food and seed could be stored for later use. As the land was depleted more land was needed which meant either clearing the, much more prevalent at the time, forests for more land or conquering neighboring lands. The conquerors would demand total fealty toward their all-powerful and fearful male god represented by the conquering King himself. Thus, over thousands of years of brutal torture and murder of those who clung to the ancient ways, mostly women, patriarchy was established. Damaged people damage people.
Evolution, not withstanding, we still have not passed the Women’s Equal Rights Amendment, which was an order that came down from on high in the patriarchal economic hierarchy. Why? And why do we even have an economic hierarchy? The answer to both questions is POWER which is obtained through the accumulation of wealth.
The ancient economic mechanism facilitating trade was money which when accumulated became an instrument of power. While most trade was accomplished using credit, a debt deferred until settled with money or goods, the powerful soon figured out that by issuing money as credit, lending money at interest, their wealth and power grew faster. Money, which had been the realm of the Great Mother Goddess, the Great Nurturer/Provider, was instead turned toward power and personal gain.
Money is a subject curiously left out of our history books; it is an omission that serves the current…
