Ramblings from an Old Woman

 

Cathryn Platine

Wars of Perception

I am sometimes dismissed because of my own lack of academic "credentials" although I did have something rather akin to a classical education which I then continued the rest of my life.  I find this interesting because what I see passing as academic these days I consider pathetic.  Time after time I have, during the course of my own research, run into the most sloppy of works that incestuously draw "legitimacy" based on quoting sources that did exactly the same thing and often can be traced back to someone, who to put it unkindly, literally pulled it out of their own arse as near as I can tell but did so long enough ago that is overlooked.  This is NOT scholarship.  Many times I have run across those I call chat room scholars who demand citations for every word you utter and will take as gospel anything published in a book, but nothing published on the internet that wasn't done by someone with letters after their name.  At the root of this is the very essence of the religious system I embrace and work to restore vs. the patriarchal ways of thinking almost universally used today after thousands of years of Judeo-Christian-Islamic teachings.  The very first book of the Bible illustrates this clearly if one is able to step outside patriarchal thinking and actually look at what the creation story of Adam and Eve is really about. 

We find Eve "created" from the side of Adam in what Joesph Campbell called one of the most blatant rewriting of mythology ever done.  This is for one reason and one reason alone and that is to change the focus of the natural creative nature of birth itself to male rather than female to further the ends the rest of the story is devoted towards, the justification of domination of men over women.  As is true of all real research, one needs to have a broad knowledge base to catch the mental slight of hand going on here.  Almost every single element of the story uses the symbology of Goddess traditions in a somewhat to downright total negative light towards it's end.  The serpent, an ancient Goddess symbol from all over the known world, it the villain of the story.  He "tempts" Eve with the apple, a fruit which when cut open reveals the pentacle star......also the path of Venus through the heavens as seen from Earth and also a powerful and ancient Goddess symbol..  The fruit of the tree is knowledge itself, the gnostic tradition embodied by the phrase "know thyself" which was the basic of every single Goddess mystery tradition!  We are to take from the story that knowledge or enlightenment is something that god disapproves of. and that indeed is the effect it has had ever since.  If enlightenment is attainable without authority, authority has no power.  This is actually the fundamental difference between the Goddess traditions and the later patriarchal desert religions that ruthlessly tried to erase them.  If we are totally honest with ourselves we can see it as the basic difference between how women organize themselves, left free to do so, and the way men organize themselves and then try to impose on others.  One is a system that relies on respect for the gnostic abilities of the others to reach decisions and one that relies on "authority" and position to impose decisions on others.  In the story Adam is the victim of Eve's "original sin" of seeking knowledge and Eve is further punished beyond expulsion with Adam with the "curse" of her own womanhood!  The entire rest of the Bible reinforces the right of Adam, being closer to god than Eve was, to dominate and control Eve in the form of all women and men after them.  So how was this accomplished?

One of the places I disagree most with modern Dianics is the idealized vision of an ancient Matriarchal Eden they see us cast out from by patriarchal invaders.  My own years of research would indicate something entirely different, equalitarian societies, which admittedly can look downright matriarchal given patriarchal ways of thinking everyone is basically been forced into accepting as "legitimate", scientific  and thus superior.  In an equalitarian society descent and inheritance would naturally have to be matrilinearly based or in other words through the mother's family linage.  It is the confusion of matriarchal, or woman controlled, and matrilinear, or woman descendant, that causes this confusion.  When we look at the works of the Greek historians one thing that should leap out is that many of their contemporary societies were still matrilinearly based which they ridiculed repeatedly.  Most notably the Phrygians, Lydians and Scythians.  They themselves were among the first of the patrilinear societies outside those stemming from the thousand years or so conflicts between the Israelites and the Canaanites and the Hittites who were caught somewhere in the middle.  Why would a system of descent and inheritance be important?  It's importance lies in the fundamental relationships between the sexes, the very core of those relationships.  Consider, in a matrilinear system the father of a child is of minor importance while the mother is the focus.  It's hard not to know who one's mother is but given the realities of human sexuality, it's equality hard to know for absolute certain who was one's father absence modern genetic testing.  Matrilinear societies have no vested interest in the control of anyone's sex life, particularly women's sex life.  On the other hand, patrilinear societies have an extreme interest in the control of womens sex lives to ensure the identity of the father just to function.  Father can sleep around all he wishes, but his spouse's access to other men must be controlled at all costs so he knows who his heirs are.  One is a natural system based on a common sense approach to human sexuality, the other rather artificial and requiring the imposition of control specifically on women.  As you would expect once you know this, almost all human societies were first matrilinear and remained so until the imposition of a patrilinear model from the outside throughout most of human history.  Women could not be considered property until their sex lives needed to be controlled, it's really that simple and until we change this very basic element of societal organization back to the common sense one, we will never be rid of the patriarchy completely.  While matrilinear does not imply Matriarchy, patrilinear requires Patriarchy to exist.  Interestingly enough, even the relative sizes of the sexes to each other was influenced by this shift.  It would appear that women and men were roughly the same size in matrilinear societies and this was true all the way up to the classical period in places like the British Isles.  This is one of the dirty little secrets of archaeology rarely discussed outside of professional circles.

We are taught today that the greatest gift of the Greeks to the modern world is democracy, a system we are taught to hold in the highest possible esteem as the pinnacle of human organization models.  Once again let us try to step outside and look at some of the implications in this highest of all political systems at the risk of someone calling me a communist.  Americans are taught as a matter of faith that our country is a democracy.  It isn't.  We have a modified system that is called a republic based on "representative democracy" or an isolation from a true democracy by way of the election of representatives who then vote in  theoretical democratic assemblies with a system very cleverly designed to make decision making as difficult as possible with checks and balances.  We are taught that the purest form of modern democracy is the classic New England town meeting which came from our Puritan ancestors.  At the heart of this system is the idea that the majority rules..........which automatically implies a disenfranchised minority.  For all we are taught, it is actually a very authoritarian model, as much so as a feudal one which simply trades a King and lords for a "fair and balanced" mob rule even if the mob only outnumbers the minority by a single member.  As to be expected in a system that sprang from a patriarchial model, women were excluded from the vote in both ancient Greece and in America at it's beginnings.  In fact this fairest of all systems excluded non landholders, women, blacks and any other group not deemed worthy until they fought like dogs to get a piece of the pie.......and each and every group has been required to do so on it's own up to this very day.  It's still mostly a men's club in a man's world, surprise surprise.  And yet for all the drawbacks, even it's victims fight for the right to vote even as that vote is rendered less and less valuable and we all carry this importance of voting on everything as all important.  It's a zero sum game but we buy into it because of the belief that if only we can become part of it, our personal lot in life will improve.

In the past couple of years I starting including a large segment to the the lectures and workshops I do on our ancient history to rational and critical evaluation of historical sources. It's very easy to fall into mental traps and take the historical accounts as "accurate" when in fact the writers fell into the same sociological, ethnocentric traps that modern archaeologists and historians do.......interpretations based on their own cultural blindnesses. We find really bad histories today written on events that fell within the lifetimes of some of us still around and it is foolish to believe this wasn't just as possible then especially when the distance in time from some of the ancient accounts ranged from more than a hundred years all the way to a thousand or more to the events they discuss. Further, events and practices witnessed may not have been placed in proper context by outsiders who would have been unaware of the possible seasonal natures of some of these practices and lastly, many of these ancient accounts came to us from Greek historians and were very very coloured by viewing through a Greek cultural bias.   My point is all this is simply to attempt to breakthrough some of the thinking traps just growing up in a patriarchal society  prevent us from placing value on our own ability to "know ourselves"......and stop relying on outside authorities for our personal answers to our most basic questions.  Every once in awhile I succeed which is all I can ask.  The Goddess is within, not outside.  Knowing Her is knowing yourself.  Knowledge of good and evil is indeed a divine trait but what Yahweh feared most was Eve learning that she contains the divine as did Adam and the villain in the story of Adam and Eve was not the serpent, who told the truth, but Yahweh himself who lied.

Life Lessons from Cybeline Studies

Of all the peoples of the ancient western world, the Greeks had the highest "horror" of intersexed people and greatest prejudice towards transwomen and transmen. Gallae priestesses were least welcome in Greece than anywhere else in the ancient world and are rarely mentioned directly as taking part in their culture while the Cybeline religion itself was widely practiced throughout Greece. Thanks to the prejudice of Greek historians we have all those ancient references to castrated male priests and the impression that the Cybeline faith outside of Greece centred on them. Just as today there is widespread attention paid by these historians to the most prurient (deviant) elements of religions outside their own experiences so this must be taken into consideration when reading their accounts just as decent information about transsexuality today is hard to come by if you only look at trans-porn sources. The events of the past year at the Phrygianum as well as much of the modern sources (many are incestuous poor scholarship stemming from a couple of late 19'th century historians) place an inappropriate, in my own view, emphasis on transsexuals within the Cybeline faith. My own criticism of the modern Dianic revival in casting out transsexual women is also aimed at those who would make the Cybeline faith as well as related Goddess traditions (which I see as part of a monolithic faith) into trans-centric ones when this is equally wrong. Then as now, the "sex change" of transsexual women both is fascinating and terrifying to those who do not understand it and therefore the most "spectacular" element which leads to the more important parts being overlooked completely. Gender variance was always welcomed in the faith and the transsexual priestesses held a significant part of it's organization but was NEVER the whole focus by any means.



The Cybeline religious movement worships the Divine nature of the feminine. My own failures that brought about the recent schism stemmed from my own inability to attract more non-trans women into the movement hampered by the majority attracted to the faith of transsexual and transgendered women. This prevented my own successful introduction of more of the women's mysteries elements such as moon blood rituals since transsexual women are least likely to "get" this part naturally. Some of the earliest elements of our web presence addressed this but apparently it is the least understood part of my writings and research. The schism group is busy rewriting the entire theology of the faith to make it a transie religion and eliminate the absolute requirement of being a woman to being a priestess. How they can then call this Cybeline is beyond me. To illustrate the problem, the person who led the revolt against me first was critical of my taking part in NOW as a feminist woman rather than a "transsexual", but I was born intersexed, not transsexual and my own identity is and always has been female, not trans, not intersexed, not male. I view the world as a woman first. I dedicated a lot of research to the transsexual and intersexual priestesses of the ancient world because almost no work was ever done in this area and what little did exist was highly prejudiced by anti-trans viewpoints. But please do not think this was the primary nature of my research because it wasn't. It was to re-integrate an essential PART of the picture, not the whole picture. It was to instill a sense of historical pride and acknowledge the place of transsexual women in the ancient world to a group that has been systematically denied that place. Unfortunately those same individuals who promote third gender identity to the exclusion of all women of intersex and transsexed backgrounds who fully identify as women are also those to are attempting to hijack the modern Cybeline revival towards that exact same end.......exclusion. Those identifying as third gendered will always be welcome but they cannot, by the very nature of our faith, be it's priestesses and for reasons the schism group illustrated beyond anything I can say further.