wotan6

As the quote from Matthew 12 that introduces this essay implies, before the opposites can merge, their clash will produce a quality of consciousness, reflected in physicality, in which desolation will manifest. This is the Wasteland, and you are now in and of it. The nation, and the Earth, suffers and wastes away as a direct result of continuing Genderwar. That is, Genderwar breeds the Wasteland. That sickness shows in all the nation�s policies and products, even in our soil and skies.

Desolation is a condition that goads honest reappraisal and demands transformation. In America, this desolation appears as polluted waters and atmosphere, as spiritual malaise, as schoolyard shootings, as bought government, as homelessness, as prison industries, as corporate greed. With each day women and men polarize into increasingly autonomous, and antagonistic, cultural entities. What is evil becomes occluded behind protestations of correctness and �protection� (most despicably, �protecting the children�) while what is good is hounded to death. Truth is Spun. Love is taken hostage. The forces of fundamentalism rule the universities, the media, political entities, and �justice� systems. Touch, sexuality, and emotion are commercialized.

The fundamentalism that marks American culture over the past thirty years heralds the final polarization of the opposites, of the dualities to which we cling as infants to teat. Here, in opposition to the screechings of the Empowered Witch, is authentic femininity speaking: "Neither the undifferentiated world of early matriarchy, nor the overly differentiated world of patriarchy allows for a conscious world that can contain the opposites. The right answer for the Baba Yaga [as to whether humans incarnate by free will] would go something like this: "I am here seventy-five percent of my own free will, sixty-five percent by compulsion." (Woodman, Marion, and Dickson, Elinor, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, p. 49.)

Note how the figures don't "add up" logically, suggesting a coming world of ambiguity and paradox, in which the illusory security of mathematical perfection and mega-control of the State must be relinquished. Note also that incarnation is a combination of 1) chthonic/compulsive elements, as if humans are partly extrusions of the Earth itself, which projects us into life for reasons of its own health, e.g., conuinctio, and 2) autonomous/free elements, which might be termed divine or cosmic.

For now, however, we exist in the very Pit of dualistic certainties, however illusory. The Statue of Liberty now presides over Prison America. Each day Lady Liberty sinks further into the ocean of unconsciousness, or as Paul Simon puts it, goes �sailing away to sea.� But America still has a chance to redeem itself and make itself a great land, the last great empire, and the mother of freedom for all coming generations. The stars in her crown are not yet lit, but the Fat Lady hasn�t started singing yet. Pretty soon she�s gonna get plenty hot and high.

The prison that so dominates America�s response to everything it cannot face in itself is a regression to eye-for-an-eye matriarchal vengeance. It returns males to bestial status, which is the hierarchical position of men during the matriarchal periods. Caging that which we can�t integrate is a way of concretizing our superiority, and expiating our own guilt for the cowardly lives we live: "Patriarchy has tried -- and continues to try -- to seduce the new masculine, to lure it into a sphere that promises power and all its illusory trappings [i.e., chiefly women�s� favor and material wealth]. But ... this sphere is really a prison ... a phallic prison ... men today are no less seduced by power or imprisoned by fears of impotence than they were in the witch hunts of the fourteenth century." (Woodman and Dickson, pp. 97-99.)

Gender-scholar emeritus J.J. Bachofen elucidates the relationship between dualism and justice: "[I]n its application to justice the dyas [couple, duality] proves once again to be an 'indefinite number,' as it was often called by the ancients. Its attribute is indeterminacy and endlessness, for it never leads to a conclusion, its innermost law is eternal fission � the justice based on duality must be the law of talion ... retaliation and retribution are the entire content of such dualist justice." (Bachofen, pp. 186-188, emphasis added)

While this description also is applicable to current �patriarchal� justice, Bachofen carefully explicates how patriarchal jurisprudence grew from talion/matriarchal roots. Talion is a form of retribution extant everywhere in post-War America, and indeed in America�s Puritanical beginnings. Today�s talion is matriarchal in character and content -- set in its intolerant and sure motion by any offense given to a female, even to the point of words or looks (�hate crimes,� campus �interpersonal codes," ad infinitum).

Under the matriarchies, talion applied only to males -- females were sacrosanct. Modern, "patriarchal" jurisprudence grew directly from the attempt by males to include females in collective acts of retribution. The Babylonian king Hammurabi (ca. 1780 B.C.E.) established the first known codifications of law, which were segmented by class, and still relied on talion, but pointedly included the female gender. These codes in turn were probably based largely on Sumerian cuneiform tablets (pictographs) -- the so-called "Sumerian Family Laws" (ca. 3000 B.C.E.). Codifications of the first patriarchs -- the "Mosaic Law" or Books of Moses of the Thirteenth Century B.C.E. derived in large measure from Sumerian and Babylonian jurisprudence. Again, crucially, process and punishment under patriarchal jurisprudence did not exclude females from liability as did the matriarchies. American jurisprudence now returns us to the matriarchal condition.

In the 1950�s, sensing the approaching gynocracy, American men sought refuge and power in an archetype of the preceding century � the cowboy. He seemed to stand for justice, individuality, self-reliance, and courage � and he backed it up with the power of the gun. I recall how as a child I loved The Rifleman series. Ol� Chuck Connors was an easy-goin�, gentle family man, teaching Little Luke the ropes of masculinity. But somehow, in each episode, he found need to blast off a fusillade of bullets from his lever-action .30-.30, and take down the �evildoers� of whom Junior Bush rails so self-servingly -- again, Bachofen�s law of dyas. Comforting. Emotionally satisfying. Endlessly self-destructive.