In this second part of his new series, Patrick continues his cultural and philosophical journey through religious texts and traditions, examining how creation myths, theological doctrine and popular devotion have shaped, and often sidelined, the role of women, while revealing how feminine presence has persisted through symbolism, folklore and lived faith rather than official scripture...
In the beginning
The story of the carnal love between men and women originates in our cultivated minds, our ancestral unconscious, or our universal subconscious, through the writings of the Bible. It is the story of Adam and Eve.
While Adam was alone, God having not yet created a woman, his betrothed, Eve, Adam wandered alone, with his physiological attributes being his penis and a hole, a hole in which he stored his penis. Thus, as the physiological growth of his penis hindered him in his long solitary walks in the desert, his hole was welcome.
Observing Adam’s comfortable situation in the short term, but nevertheless ridiculously absurd in the long term, God took one of Adam’s ribs to create a woman, Eve.
(Michel Tournier, “Le coq de Bruyère”).
This was still, and until then, a macho view of things, with men still at the source of creation, in the absence of a distribution of roles to come.
However, paradoxically, Joseph had no say in the matter; Mary was impregnated by God without having seen the wolf. Poor Joseph, his masculinity was taken away from him from the outset, his virility was undermined and, worse still, he no longer even had a hole to accommodate his sex; Eve had been born long ago.
His child is Jesus, a boy, and when you think about it, that’s just as well, because even in classical Greece and ancient Rome, abortion was a condemned practice because it deprived the father of his right to dispose of his offspring as he saw fit; and given what happened next, that’s normal, otherwise Mary Magdalene would never have existed.
Furthermore, in the 13th century, Christian theologians opted for a differentiated animation between boys and girls: they set the appearance of a soul in foetuses at 40 days for boys and 80 days for girls.
Women apparently take twice as long to exist as men – what a strange way to view the origin of the world. Meanwhile, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian canon and astrophysicist, contemporary of Albert Einstein and father of the Big Bang theory, cannot help but make a connection between the Big Bang theory and the biblical creation story in the Old Testament, where God creates the world in one day and takes six days to bring it to life.
Forty more days to create a woman, to give her existence and life. Man has effectively killed God, or at least he thinks he has, forgetting that Marguerite Yourcenar warned, “Nothing is slower than the birth of a man.”
Later, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, enacted by Charles V in 1532, set the moment of animation of the foetus in the middle of pregnancy, that is, as soon as the mother perceives its movements.
Why not? The ways of the Lord are inscrutable, but the fact remains that it is Mary who gives birth, apparently at the sole command of the Lord, the origin of life, or rather, of the world, according to Gustave Courbet.
And if a schism arises between Catholics and Protestants on the subject, in reality, whether in Protestant or Catholic churches, in their respective Houses of God, neither of these Christian divergences has met with the owner of their houses.
Such are the baptismal fonts of creation, of the origin of the world, the woman gives birth, by the grace of God above all, and by Adam, who, having had a rib removed, forgets his hole, to find that of Eve, a hole offered to him from h removed rib.
God has a sense of humour, from his first human creation, Adam, who had a rib removed to be offered another hole, if not his own. Joseph, for his part, has no say in the birth of his son Jesus; and Eve, no more than Mary, realises any of this, except that they create life respectively in sin or against their will.
Original sin is feminine.
Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals of the field that Yahweh Elohim had made. He said to the woman, “Did Elohim really say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?“
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden, but Elohim said, ‘You shall not eat the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.
The serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die, but Elohim knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.“
The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
(Genesis III,7-15)
Indeed, following this logic with its misogynistic undertones, the Biblical scriptures give women secondary roles and liturgies, auxiliaries; they are excluded from the drafting of official texts and canonical memory.
But women still have their voices and their wombs to transmit the faith and provide followers for religions led by men.
It is popular religion that rehabilitates women.
Thus, if we want to magnify women, we cannot rely on canonical texts or official theology. The exaltation of the role of women is only possible in a popular religion, largely oral or visual. This is true in Christian history itself, where we see women of the people periodically rising up to prophesy, that is, to speak and command in the name of God: in France, Saint Geneviève (against the “barbarians”), Joan of Arc (against the English), and, much later, Bernadette Soubirou (against the free thinkers) represent this popular tradition of inspired women, more “virile” than the cowardly men, always in their “comfort zone” of impostors.
This is also true of Eastern Orthodoxy, which, through icons, gives prominence to the cult of Mary.
This is also the case in Hinduism, where the spirit of celebration and the taste for pilgrimages give rise to a host of devotions in which women play an essential role: the celebration of the mystical wedding of Shiva and Minakshi, the cult of Sita, wife of Rama and model wife, the festival of Kumari, the “living goddess”, incarnated in Kathmandu by a young girl periodically elected as to “personify” the “feminine principle of Knowledge and Power”. In a religion as visual as Hinduism, women’s divine asset is the charm of their faces.
On the contrary, “iconoclastic” religions, for which faith is based on “scripture alone” (sola scriptura), grant women only a minor role in divine revelation. This is true of Judaism, since the Bible is the first known sacred book in the world to have no female deity: either God has no grammatical gender (Yahweh) or is masculine (Elohim). This is even more true of Islam, since the Koran knows only a masculine God (Allah), deprived of his old Semitic companion (Allât). And this is no less true of Protestantism, which, by removing from Christianity everything that is not in the Bible, abolishes the cult of saints and the “supercult” (hyperdulia) of Mary.
Femininity in revelation would find a middle ground in Buddhism: although the historical Buddha is indeed a man, his statues, those of his emanations (Buddha of medicine, forgiveness, sins, etc.), and those of his disciples (bodhisattvas) often have androgynous features.
These effeminate Buddhas merely suggest the principles of nirvana, the extinction of desire, which goes hand in hand with a blurring of sexual differences.
(Selected excerpts – Odon Vallet – Women and Religions – Goddesses or Servants of God?)
Patrick LAURE
Secrétaire Particulier
+33 6 35 45 27 02
laurepatrick@wanadoo.fr
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