Matriarchal Power, Rage, and Stagnation and the Shifting Role of the Youthful Divine Masculine
Feminist thought has become a dominating ideology in the modern world because there was an imbalance of power that men and women fought to change. As such, people have more and more access to the history of the feminine, and many people have come to idealize an early matriarchal culture, one that we know very little about but can imagine. People imagine matriarchal culture as peaceful, loving, and empowering. This vision is a lens like any other. The early mythic record that has come down to us prioritizes the masculine but still illustrates the divine feminine’s power. If anything, the myths offer clues to the power shift that changed the world from matriarchal to patriarchal. The feminine archetype, as any archetype, has negative and positive elements as well as variations in between. What the mythic record suggests, at least among Mediterranean cultures, is an imbalance of power. With any imbalance of power, an equilibrizing force comes in to restore a more balanced order. It also is a common trope for the old order to be challenged and usurped by a new power, the younger generation that wants to come into itself and discover its turn at life. Before and beyond the reach of the written word, matriarchal culture was the cradle of humanity, but when the prioritization of the divine feminine changed and shifted, it is the mythic record that can help us better understand the transformed dynamics of the larger culture. Despite the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal culture, the early written mythology retained a mixture of matriarchal and patriarchal principles. Many people emphasize a violent change in power dynamics, but the myths paint a picture that if sometimes violent suggests more complexity was involved rather than blind and ignorant disdain and power thirst, albeit the power dynamics favor the divine masculine as a general rule. Mesopotamian myths, such as The Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh, often depict patriarchal principles overtaking traditional, and wildly destructive, matriarchal principles. Early Greek myths, such as The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, also depicts the rise, or perhaps balancing force, of the patriarchal over the matriarchal. Conversely, equality between the matriarchal and patriarchal can be seen in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, Isis, and Horus even though at the end of the myth, the new age can only be achieved through the agency of the youthful manifestation of the divine masculine. These varied Mediterranean myths[1] offer a more complex symbolic understanding of the shifting gendered cultural and spiritual dynamics at the time than what is currently accepted in mainstream, modern culture.
The Enuma Elish is a story of patriarchal principles overcoming matriarchal principles. The tale begins with Tiamat, the great mother goddess of salt water, and Apsu, the father god and the god of fresh water. Together Tiamat and Apsu create the gods. Tiamat eventually grows angry with her children, the other gods, because they are loud and disturb her sleep, so Apsu, the older divine masculine manifestation, suggests that they destroy their children. Tiamat refuses because destroying them would be wrong. In this refusal, Tiamat represents the positive aspects of the feminine. However, as time passes, Tiamat decides that destroying her children would be good since they continue to rob her of her sleep. Creation begets and so takes away. The portal of birth leads back to death, for all life necessitates an end. It is Tiamat who creates monsters to kill her children rather than Apsu. By doing this, Tiamat’s positive matriarchal role is replaced by a negative matriarchal role. The Creatrix has turned against her creation. Tiamat changes from a loving mother of divine forms to a hateful Generatrix of monsters. The inversus of her natural function prevails, which inevitably shows the cultural shift from matriarchal veneration to patriarchal prioritization and the justification for it. Although the Matriarch has the power to turn upon her creation, her creation also is able to defy her. When Tiamat goes to battle, she is slain by the young solar god Marduk. This symbolizes the slaying of matriarchal culture by a new, rising patriarchal culture. Apsu, the old masculine order, lacks the agency to affect change whereas Marduk discovers his emerging power over creation. While this can be seen as a violent dismantling of the matriarchal, it suggests that the matriarchal was becoming destructive and that new life with a youthful, masculine oriented vision is what is requisite to tame both stagnation and the rage directed toward those who represent lively change.
The tale of Gilgamesh also shows the downfall of the matriarchal to youthful emanations of the patriarchal. Gilgamesh is the son of Lugalbanda, a hero and king of Uruk, and Ninsun, a goddess and priestess of Shamash. Gilgamesh, a semi-divine figure in his own right, is arrogant and wild in his youth, so Enkidu a man wilder still, a foil for the demi-god, is created to teach Gilgamesh about friendship and heroism, traits that are necessary for a king. Gilgamesh and Enkidu go on many great and perilous adventures with each other, highlighting the importance of active exploration even in the face of danger. Gilgamesh’s bravery appeals to the fertility goddess Ishtar, so she wants to marry him. However, Gilgamesh refuses, and Ishtar becomes angry and vengeful. Thus, Ishtar as a fertility goddess is symbolic of an imbalanced matriarchy and its corrupted power. The raging manifestations of her ire represent the chaos of potentiality. Fertility has its ugly side- the pain, the blood, the tears, and eventual death. Ishtar’s unbridled, passionate rage does not create new life but rather attempts to destroy what has already been created. Her life-giving function is imbalanced, and so she becomes the inverse of creation. Her fertility is weaponized, and thus, when Gilgamesh and Enkidu (the patriarchal) kill the bull of heaven sent by Ishtar, with the help of her father Anu — an old order sky god, they overpower the chaotic element of power drunk feminine potentiality. At the same time, it is a masculine entity that they slay. For true domination of the masculine order over the matriarchal, one would imagine that Ishtar would send a feminine entity or that they would kill Ishtar herself. However, no such symbol of the matriarchal emanates from her rage. Instead, the tempestuous and raging bull, a male bovine, is the manifestation that the new masculine order triumphs over, signifying that the patriarchal must overcome its own raging tendencies in order to quell feminine chaos or the ire of the matriarchal.
Moving on to Mediterranean Europe, The Homeric Hymn to Apollo also shows the clash between the matriarchal and the patriarchal although it is an entity of balanced emanation that brings order to the situation. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo depicts Apollo’s quest to establish his prophetic temple (founded later in Delphi), a place where feminine oracles can voice the prophecies gifted from Apollo’s vision, yet this quest is overshadowed by Hera’s anger toward Zeus’ infidelity. In a vengeful rage, Hera performs a ritual to manifest a child stronger than Zeus. The child born from Hera ends up being a she-dragon that terrorizes other creatures and interrupts Apollo’s quest. The dragon form of this creature speaks to the fertility symbolism of early matriarchal cultures while also highlighting the dangerous, and perhaps greedy, side of potentiality. Not all that is born forth can be harmonized to that which already inhabits the earth. Hera’s anger embodied in the she-dragon represents the negative aspects of the matriarchal: the wrathful and stubbornness wrapped into feminine survival. The dragon represents the feminine’s motherly instinct to protect her children and habitation, which must establish not only a stable dwelling but also a dependable supply[2]. This is not a simple matter of over powering snake worship (a.k.a. fertility cults), for the snake has grown into the massively serpentine dragon figure, dweller of caves, hoarder of treasure, and imparter of burning fire. The matriarchy’s force can be understood to have grown into an entity of incredibly fixed destructive power. To understand this socially, the symbol signifies not only an imbalance of matriarchal power but also of matriarchal priority. Progress, the expansion of effort, is stifled. Expansion of size or quantity does not benefit a people when too much control is exercised. It is Apollo who slays the she-dragon, for he is the archer god, and his clear vision and aim make him the ideal hunter for a chaotic beast that represent the wrath of the fixed matriarchal, Hera. The death of the serpent is marked by a spring close to Apollo’s new temple, illustrating the replacement of chaotic feminine emanation with the more directed feminine archetype of the oracle. It is often theorized that the cult of Apollo in Delphi replaced another older, matriarchal oracular school[3], an interpretation that is supported with Apollo’s slaying of the serpent so close to his new temple. Apollo is frequently associated with the shining force of civilized power[4], expansion of effort and skill, clear and direct of aim. The scenario presented represents the strength of the patriarchal order besting the dangers presented by matriarchal stagnation and excessive control. At the same time, Apollo’s role hints that the institution of order by linear masculine force is not destroying so much as restoring balance. On the one hand, feminine power is still exercised by the Pythia (a word associated with python/ the serpentine as matriarchal marker but semiotically transformed). The Pythia is the high priestesses of Delphi; the matriarchal still exercises powers though in different form with the younger masculine god orchestrating the visions. On the other hand, Apollo is twin brother to Artemis (not mentioned in this myth), a gender bending moon goddess who can harness the masculine force of the phallic arrow to hunt and protect her own domain. She is a less fixed feminine entity, not needing to hoard and inhabit one fixed domicile as she is a moving, hunting goddess of the forest, a place less wild for her presence but less stiflingly civilized as an old order matriarchy. His role as her twin is notable, for he has a feminine counter-part. His birth as twin represents two lives simultaneously sprouting from one source. Although this myth was written down after the larger culture had already shifted from a matriarchal culture to a patriarchal one, there is still veneration and agency afforded to goddess figures, which is something that almost vanishes with later monotheistic traditions. This veneration and agency of the divine feminine speaks to a balancing of masculine and feminine prioritization rather than a of the patriarchal ruthlessly dominating feminine manifestation.
To differing degrees, these myths depict the triumph or balancing force of patriarchal order, but in Egyptian myth, the theme is somewhat different with the matriarchal and patriarchal in a more balanced conjunction; nevertheless, by the end of the myth, progress can ultimately be delivered by a new patriarchal culture shift. The myth of Osiris, Isis, and Horus offers a more balanced depiction of agency and power between the matriarchal and the patriarchal, yet inevitably the myth ends by highlighting weakness in the divine feminine’s ability to affect lasting change. Osiris is a ruler of Egypt and the fecund god of his civilization. Isis, his wife, in harmony with his role and powers, is a fertility goddess, a goddess adorned with a headdress of the sun cradling the moon. The moon in crescent form is a semiotic echo of the scales used to weigh and balance, except it is a celestial, divine weighing that crowns her head as she is also a goddess of fate. Inside her embrace resides the solar masculine. When the great nemesis Set, reptilian vestige of the old counter-solar culture, kills Osiris out of envy and spite, Isis resurrects Osiris for a short time by virtue of her feminine generating power as she gathers the pieces of him scattered over the earth. With the breath of her generating principle, she is able to revive him from death. The matriarchal can sustain. If Death is a dark country, her moon lights his way back to the realm of the living where feminine and masculine merge, resulting in the birth of a new god, herald of the next age, Horus. Although the feminine exercises significant power, in this myth, it is Toth, the god of wisdom, who intervenes to prevent further mischaunce. He instructs Isis to hide Horus from Set. It is the masculine’s more illuminated vision that sees the danger obscured in the shadowy lunation of the divine feminine; within potentiality resides an element of blindness. Despite her motherly intervention, which is catalyzed by Toth’s visionary advice, Horus dies from a scorpion bite. The new age has been poisoned with the venom of the old order. In this myth, at this time, the feminine creative force still is an agent of power, which Isis exercises when she draws Horus back into creation. Her moon light though dim gives life to the darkness. It is a something in the void of chaos. It is then Horus, that new Aeon, who gives Osiris a new life, one that lasts; Horus’ efforts exercise a generating power beyond that which the old matriarchal order can offer. It is the confined reality of earthly manifestation that fails in reviving Osiris whereas the new (and more balanced) masculine principle, Horus, has come back from the realm of the dead the more powerful for his all-seeing vision, as symbolized by his most famous eye. He has vision and thus power over life and death, the earth and the other world. The earthliness of the matriarchal is limited to the realm of living; in juxtaposition, Horus has broken through the boundary of the living, vegetative earth, albeit his transcendence relied on the feminine generating principle, and gives Osiris new life where Isis could not. Because Osiris has new life, he can communicate with others, so he teaches his son that it is important to avenge wrongs on one’s parents. Therefore, Horus fights with Set and wins, but then Isis feels pity, a critical weakness, for Set, the enemy of civilization, and insists that Horus lets Set free. The feminine sympathy for an unworthy element of (her) creation, according to the narrative of this specific work, is emblematic of a flaw in the feminine psyche as a power. Although it is true that there are instances of misplaced masculine sympathy, the story played out in this myth emphasizes that feminine flaw rather than the masculine version. In this myth, Isis’ powers are critical and important in a way almost equal to Osiris and Horus, which suggests that within Egyptian culture the matriarchal and patriarchal had equal roles to an extent; nevertheless, Isis’ reliance on Horus and later her sympathy to the enemy in the end of the myth reveal that although a more balanced culture, the feminine vision and operational mode rely on the less nurturing tendencies of the patriarchal. Otherwise, emotional intemperance might invite in the enemy, another face of creation, but one that poses a danger to order. The myth of Osiris, Isis, and Horus shows the reasoning behind patriarchal prioritization.
Many early myths depict the symbolic shift of the new dawning patriarchy over the older matriarchal order. In the Mediterranean myths of the Mesopotamian The Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh, the Greek The Homeric Hymns to Apollo, and the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus, readers discover the symbolic dynamics of this shift. These myths all include elements of patriarchal dominance over the matriarchal, yet a closer look illustrates a balancing tendency, one that favors movement and progress in opposition to a power fixated old order. The political, including migratory, and natural turmoil surrounding the Mesopotamian and Greek states may have led to a revolution in patriarchal/matriarchal thinking. With new cultural influences, perceptions about what norms and power dynamics were useful changed, which led people away from glorifying the matriarchal whereas Egypt, a further removed reach of the Mediterranean, with its more equalized depiction of matriarchal/patriarchal elements, was relatively stable politically/naturally in comparison. With less agitation and flux within its domain, the Egyptian myth still illustrates shifting power dynamics, but the feminine is afforded a more positive role even as the old matriarchal order represented by Set in vanquished by the new order of Horus.
[1] Morford, Mark, P.O. & Robert J. Lenardon. Classical Mythology. 7th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
[2] Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. New York: Vintage, 1991.
[3] Chappell, M. “Delphi and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 331–48, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4493421.
[4] Paglia, Camille. Ibid.
