| "Witches are not thought of as possessing a power which is exclusively and necessarily evil in itself; but all magical power is dreaded, because it is susceptible of being used for harm. When such power is wielded by one sex alone, this must inevitably arouse alarm in the other. Little wonder, then, that men have sought to restrain women from using magic, and have sought to acquire the secrets of the art in self-protection...[T]he Christian tradition that women brought death and sin into the world is not peculiar to Christianity, but is universal. Father Lafitau compares the First Woman of the North American Indians... to Eve, while Father Sahagun was struck by the same comparison in Mexico. Many African tribes regard the first woman as having brought death into the world, as do the Eskimo and the Melanesians. The Igorots of Luzon say that the first woman instigated men to fight." [The Mothers, Robert Briffault, p. 287] Ah yes, whether chimp or stag or human, males fight over territory. And �territory� is always and ever Woman. Freud and the early Jung mistook the Dragon for fear of the Father who barred the way to the Mother. In fact, as Erich Neumann points out, the Dragon symbolizes both the First Parents, who the hero must kill in order to live fully. The Dragon represents the negative halves of the collective masculine and feminine. In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung equates the Dragon with the Devil, and suggests that in order to slay him, he must be approached from below, through the very belly of the beast � meaning undertaking a descent to the realms of the �underworld� sufficient to integrate the dangerous, taboo, chthonic, and often sexual elements of the ��negative� masculine. Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness equates the Dragon with the negative feminine, and traces her back to the Great Mother Goddess. By combining the two works, readers can form an accurate snapshot of the Dragon � an alchemical fusion of our current rulers, the Toxic King and Empowered Witch. For the most part, the feminine in the West still resorts to the tried-and-true -- or black-and-blue, depending upon perspective -- method of bringing men to heel and servitude: the ole terror-and-cage. A couple hours in the pen with Bubba will do wonders for ya, boy. Few in modern times recall that boys in Sparta � in the midst of that supposed Ur-patriarchy of Hellenism � were routinely and publically whipped. Not for offenses, mind you � simply as part of their conditioning process as servants of Mater State. As their reward for being born male. The �Patriarchal State,� you say? Pt-ooey. It was the women of Sparta � particularly the wealthy matronage � who not only ordered, but insisted upon, these very public floggings. So much for egalitarian, gentle womanhood,eh? To support -- violently if necessary -- Mom and Apple Pie is the quintessence of American values. Apple pies are baked in Mom's blistering oven, ostensibly in nurturance of the larger culture. The door of the Candy House is solidly shut, and Hansel is powerless to stop the Witch. Only the female heroine, Gretel � his true, righteous sister, the little girl in my dream -- has the ability to "blow the whistle" on the destructive, selfish, cannibalistic Witch. The King is Toxic, and therefore he toxifies the Land that he titularly rules, from its streams and skies to its violence, injustice, hypocrisy -- and the staunch denial of its own madness. He is precisely described by Camille Paglia: �Like Milton�s �fawning� Satan, the smooth flatterer crawls on his belly, twisting and turning with changing circumstance. He is purely reactive, a parody of femininity, each word and deed a cloying reminder of the ruler�s desire.� (Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia, p. 143) J.J. Bachofen, beginning on p. 141 of the abridged Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, discusses the tyrannis who, though male, is the servant, stooge, and boy-bloodletter of the matriarchate. "[E]ach tribe has its tyrant. Since... there is... no such thing as individual paternity [under matriarchy], the whole tribe has only one father, the tyrant... the tyrant derives all his rights from woman. The tyrannis is transmitted by way of the womb. The Ethiopian leaves his kingdom not to his children, but to his sister's children." The tyrant is our familiar Set or Typhon, the maternal uncle so feared by males throughout matriarchal development � and well into the emerging �patriarchies,� as well-documented in Hellenic and Roman history, literature, and art � not that our modern universities would ever allow such �misogyny� to be read, much less course-listed. The tyrannis has �evolved� into our modern, Western Toxic Kings. The latter stages of matriarchy occurred in conjunction with the aid of the Toxic King who, despite his loyalty to the ladies, was often sacrificed as the �year-king.� Late matriarchies retained an elite male or group of males, selected according to allegiance to the feminine � medieval knighthood is a remnant. The men who ruled � then as now � are the men who serve women. If they do not serve women, they do not rule. Period. Robert Briffault, in The Mothers, discusses Set in this context at p. 352, as the drone of the matriarchy appearing late in the Egyptian dynasties, as king-hood replaced queen-hood and �patriarchy� incurred upon matriarchy (at least superficially): "It was not until the relatively late times of the XXIInd, or XXVthe Dynasty that Set was definitely recognized as the spirit of evil and his temples abolished." Set represents the consort stage of male relation to the matriarchate, and later, under various guise (e.g., Moloch or Cronus) he is the tyrant father, the Toxic King who the heroic masculine must vanquish: "It is [the Great Mother's] murderous satellites ... who carry out the sacrifice of the adolescent son. In mythology this side manifests itself as a dark homicidal male force, a savage animal, in particular the boar, which is akin to the sow, symbol of the Great Mother, but later manifests itself as her masculine warrior consort or as the priest who performs the castration... just as sociologically and mythologically Set, the maternal uncle of Horus, is the instrument of the hostile executive power of the matriarchate" [Neumann, p. 179] The wound of the Grail King in Arthurian literature, likewise, is to the genitals, traceable to attack by a boar, the animal-weapon of the Goddess. The boar symbolizes not only the castrating/circumcising principle, but the Great Mother/Empowered Witch�s ownership of the male, and taboo around the boar or pig arises in cultures that are moving away from the blood-rites of the matriarchate -- such as tribal Judaism. The maternal uncle Set later takes on the boar's role as emasculator: "The suppression of Set, the boar, and the pig is consistent with the suppression of the Great Mother and all her rites and symbols. Whereas in the matriarchate the pig was a favored animal sacred to the great mother goddess Isis, Demeter, Persephone, Bona Dea, and Freya, in the patriarchate it became the epitome of evil." [Neumann, footnote, p. 224] |