The Pendulum of Religion

Ok, I was reading the book called "The Mists of Avalon" by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The book is laced with references to pagan religions and what I assume to be Wiccan lore. This book also is set at such a time in Britain when Christianity is trying to make its presence more solid and its authority more totalitarian. That’s when the starkness of this contrast struck me in the face. Here is paganism, which gives more importance to the feminine. And as an opposite is Christianity which proclaims that the feminine is the root cause of all evil in this world. This started me thinking.

Maybe, there was this religion where the woman played an all important role and is given the symbolism like she is the embodiment of the divine goddess and what not, and the man is only needed for the act of procreation. Through time, maybe this idea became more and more extreme and the people ended up with the idea that men are useless except for procreation. And men were looked down upon as lesser beings. We must remember that before Christ, paganism was widespread throughout much of the western world. And this extremist idea must have cheesed off certain very shrewd people who got this idea into their head that women were the root cause of all evil and so on.

Then a further idea struck me, we all know that the masculine gender is more given to physical strength and aggression. It may be that since the dawn of time, men started ruling the roost and subjugating their feminine counterparts on the basis of physical strength. then, to reinstate their importance, some people put forth the theory that the feminine was closer to god than the masculine because after all, women are the one who give birth to the next generation, and that is the creation of new life, and it is almost difficult to overlook the similarities between the lunar cycle of waxing and waning, and women's menstrual cycles.

Hindu scriptures indirectly speak of a civilization that existed before ours and that it was destroyed in a sort of "end of the world" scenario that is called the "pralayam" in Sanskrit. Maybe, that was a male-centered civilization, which ended up being so full of aggression, unrest, war and strife, that the thinkers of the time decided that its time that the focus shifted from the sacred masculine to the sacred feminine. And maybe this "end of the world" is actually a symbolism for something like a change in ideology. And this change lasted till the dawn of Christ and Christianity which turned the tables again. Now, 2000 years after Christ, with talks of women’s rights and "equality of the sexes", are we again heading towards another "change in ideology"?

I would like to think so.