Woman Hating (15 page)

The origins of the belief in lycanthropy can be traced to group rituals in which celebrants, costumed as animals, recreated animal movements, sounds, even hunting patterns. As group ritual, those celebrations would be prehistorical. The witches themselves, through the use of belladonna, aconite, and other drugs, felt that they did become animals.
^*
 The effect of the belief in lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a stray dog, a wild cat, a rat, a toad —all were witches, agents of Satan, bringing with them drought, disease, death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous, demonic. The legend of the werewolf (popularized in the Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout, two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the next morning that a respectable town matron had been wounded in precisely the same way.

*
For a contemporary account of lycanthropy, I would suggest The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), pp. 170-84.

Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks, and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they annointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but genuine fact:

As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius Loyola, or St. Teresa.... In the Middle Ages it was regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one.

... It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches were believed to fly... [though] the Church expressly forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief that witches flew.
³¹

With typical consistency then, the Church said that saints could fly but witches could not. As far as the witches were concerned, they trusted their experience, they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselves with Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions, in the realization of a phenomenon so ancient that it would seem to extend almost to the origins of the religious impulse in people.

We now know most of what can be known about the witches: who they were, what they believed, what they did, the Church's vision of them. We have seen the historical dimensions of a myth of feminine evil which resulted in the slaughter of 9 million persons, nearly all women, over 300 years. The actual evidence of that slaughter, the remembrance of it, has been suppressed for centuries so that the myth of woman as the Original Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure. Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture, woman-centered, nature-centered —all of their knowledge is gone, all of their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes of their own pasts) found the massacre of the witches too unimportant to include in the chronicles of those centuries except as a footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance of those centuries —they did not recognize the centuries of gynocide, they did not register the anguish of those deaths.

Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that the myth of feminine evil lived out so resolutely by the Christians of the Dark Ages, is alive and well, here and now. Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth, to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

Part Four

ANDROGYNY

When the sexual energy of the people is liberated they will break the chains.

The struggle to break the form is paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility of realizing a form (a technique) to escape the fire in which we are being consumed.

The journey to love is not romantic.

Julian Beck,
The Life of the Theatre

We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions of male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to destroy the structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws: all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets which define women as hot wet fuck tubes, hot slits.

Androgynous mythology provides us with a model which does not use polar role definitions, where the definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good, female = bad, man = human, woman = other. Androgyny myths are multisexual mythological models. They go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios they suggest for building community, for realizing the fullest expression of human sexual possibility and creativity.

Androgyny as a concept has no notion of sexual repression built into it. Where woman is carnality, and carnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) that woman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged; that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guiltridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity and community life provides no such imperatives. Sexual freedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons “female, ” are not separable. That they are different, and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worst of sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both. It may be the one road to freedom open to women, men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.

CHAPTER 8

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

It is a question of finding the right model. We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed: Cinderella, Snow-white, Sleeping Beauty; O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage; Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are the substantive message of this culture —they define psychological sets and patterns of social interaction which, in our adult personae, we live out. We function inside the socioreligious scenario of right and wrong, good and bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturated with shame and guilt. We are
programmed
by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action. For example, we have seen how the romantic ethos is related to the way women dress and cosmeticize their bodies and how that behavior regulates the literal physical mobility of women. Take any aspect of behavior and one can find the source of the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man’s obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable in this context.

Depth psychologists consider man the center of his world —his psyche is the primary universe which governs, very directly, the secondary universe, distinct from him, of nature; philosophers consider man, in the fragmented, highly overrated part called intellect, the center of the natural world, indeed its only significant member; artists consider man, isolated in his creative function, the center of the creative process, of the canvas, of the poem, an engineer of the culture; politicians consider man, represented by his sociopolitical organization and its armies, the center of whatever planetary power might be relevant and meaningful; religionists consider God a surrogate man, created precisely in man’s image, only more so, to be father to the human family. The notion of man as a part of the natural world, integrated into it, in form as distinct (no more so) as the tarantula, in function as important (no more so) as the honey bee or tree, is in eclipse, and that eclipse extends not over a decade, or over a century, but over the whole of written history. The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply, he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation: woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is directly responsible for the current ecological situation which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life, including human life. Man has treated nature much as he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence. The phenomenological world is characterized by its diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interactions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world consists of finding the proper relationship to it.

In terms of interhuman relationship, the problem is similar. As individuals, we experience ourselves as the center of whatever social world we inhabit. We think that we are free and refuse to see that
we are functions of our particular culture.
That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology of our creative possibilities —it possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow of sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change ourselves from culturally defined agents into naturally defined beings. We must find ways of destroying the cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must discover forms of relationship, behavior, sexual being and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent natural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source of social oppression, and move toward creative, full, multidimensional modes of sexual expression.

Essentially the argument is this: we look at the world we inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states; prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienation of workers from their work, women and men from each other, children from the adult community, governments contemptuous of their people, people filled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault, rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition gone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger, want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Those phenomena mark the distance between civilized man and natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and social patterns functioned in a more integrated, balanced way. We know how it is now, and we want to know how it was then. While we cannot reconstruct the moment when humans emerged in evolution into recognizable humanness, or analyze that person to see what existence was like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals and social forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and then imitate the dynamic relationship primitive people had with the rest of the natural world, while we cannot even know much of what happened before people made pottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhaps would not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have (of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima), we can still find extant in the culture echoes of a distant time when people were more together, figuratively and literally. These echoes reflect a period in human development when people functioned as a part of the natural world, not set over against it; when men and women, male and female, were whatever they were, not polar opposites, separated by dress and role into castes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imagined whole.

In recent years, depth psychologists in particular have turned to primitive people and tribal situations in an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics of male and female. The most notable effort was made by Jung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirable as his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers have carried the baggage of patriarchy and sexual dualism with them into the search. Jung describes male and female in the absolute terms native to the culture, as archetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is defined as authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian and embodies the consonant values of patriarchy; female is defined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian. Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchal values (particularly the need for complex organization) inform advanced societies, whereas female values inform more primitive tribal societies. As far as individual men and women are concerned, the male psyche has a feminine component (the subconscious) which is anarchic, emotional, sensitive,
lunar, and the female personality has a male component (the conscious, or mind) which can be defined as a capacity for logical thought. Of course, biological women are ruled, it turns out, by the subconscious; men are ruled, not surprisingly, by the conscious, mind, intellect. One might imagine a time and place where intellect is not valued over anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: but that would be the most gratuitous kind of fantasy. Jung never questioned the cultural arbitrariness of these categories, never looked at them to see their political implications, never knew that they were sexist, that he functioned as an instrument of cultural oppression.

In the book
Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern
, M. Esther Harding, a lifelong student of Jung and a Patron of the C. G. Jung Institute, applies Jungian ontology to a study of mythology. Taking the moon, Luna, as the patron saint of women (ignoring any masculine imagery associated with the moon, and this imagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imagery connected with the sun, and this imagery is substantial), Harding ultimately identifies the female with the demonic, as did the Catholic Church: