RETURN OF THE GODDESS

What, then, is to be the future of religion in the West? Sir James Frazer attributed the defects of European civilization to ‘the selfish and immoral doctrine of Oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God, and its eternal salvation, as the only objects worth living for’. This, he argued, undermined the unselfish ideal of Greek and Roman society which subordinated the individual to the welfare of the State. Adolf Hitler said later, more succinctly: ‘The Jews are to blame for all our troubles.’ Both statements, however, were historically untrue.

Frazer, an authority on Greek religion, must have known that the Salvationist obsession of the Greek Orphics was Thraco-Libyan, not Oriental, and that long before the Jews of the Dispersal had introduced to the Greek world their Pharisaic doctrine of oneness with God, city-state idealism had been destroyed from within. Once speculative philosophy had made sceptics of all educated Greeks who were not Orphics or members of some other mystical fraternity, public as well as private faith was undermined and, despite the prodigious conquests of Alexander, Greece was easily defeated by the semi-barbarous Romans, who combined religious conservatism with national esprit de corps. The Roman nobles then put themselves to school under the Greeks, and caught the philosophical infection; their own idealism crumbled and only the regimental esprit de corps of the untutored legions, combined with Emperor-worship on the Oriental model, staved off political collapse. Finally, in the fourth century AD, they found the pressure of the barbarians against their frontiers so strong that it was only by recourse to the still vigorous faith of Christianity that they could save what remained of the Empire.

Hitler’s remark, which was not original, referred to the alleged economic oppression of Europe by the Jews. He was being unfair: under Christianity the Jews had for centuries been forbidden to hold land or become members of ordinary craft-guilds, and obliged to live on their wits. They became jewellers, physicians, money-lenders and bankers, and started such new, highly skilled industries as the manufacture of optical glass and drugs; England’s sudden commercial expansion in the seventeenth century was caused by Cromwell’s welcome to the Dutch Jews, who brought their modern banking-system to London. If Europeans dislike the results of unlimited capitalism and industrial progress, they have only themselves to blame: the Jews originally invoked the power of money as a bulwark against Gentile oppression. They were forbidden by the Mosaic Law either to lend money at interest among themselves or to let loans run on indefinitely – every seventh year the debtor had to be released from his bond – and it is not their fault that money, ceasing to be a practical means of exchanging goods and services, has achieved irresponsible divinity in the Gentile world.

Yet neither Fraser nor Hitler were far from the truth, which was that the early Gentile Christian borrowed from the Hebrew prophets the two religious concepts, hitherto unknown in the West, which have become the prime causes of our unrest: that of a patriarchal God, who refuses to have any truck with Goddesses and claims to be self-sufficient and all-wise; and that of a theocratic society, disdainful of the pomps and glories of the world, in which everyone who rightly performs his civic duties is a ‘son of God’ and entitled to salvation, whatever his rank or fortune, by virtue of direct communion with the Father.

Both these concepts have since been vigorously contested within the Church itself. However deeply Westerners may admire Jesus’s single-minded devotion to the remote, all-holy, Universal God of the Hebrew prophets, few of them have ever accepted whole-heartedly the antagonism between flesh and spirit implied in his cult. And though the new God-head seemed philosophically incontrovertible, once the warlike and petulant Zeus-Jupiter, with his indiscreet amours and quarrelsome Olympian family, had ceased to command the respect of intelligent people, the early Church Fathers soon found that man was not yet ready for ideal anarchy: the All-Father, a purely meditative patriarch who did not intervene personally in mundane affairs, had to resume his thunderbolt in order to command respect. Even the communistic principle, for a breach of which Ananias and Sapphira had been struck dead, was abandoned as unpractical. As soon as the Papal power was acknowledged superior to that of kings, the Popes assumed magnificent temporal pomp, took part in power-politics, waged wars, rewarded the rich and well-born with indulgences for sin in this world and promises of preferential treatment in the next, and anathematized the equalitarian principles of their simple predecessors. And not only has Hebrew monotheism been modified at Rome by the gradual introduction of Virgin-worship, but the ordinary Catholic layman has long been cut off from direct communication with God: he must confess his sins and acquaint himself with the meaning of God’s word, only through the mediation of a priest.

Protestantism was a vigorous reassertion of the two rejected concepts, which the Jews themselves had never abandoned, and to which the Mohammedans had been almost equally faithful. The Civil Wars in England were won by the fighting qualities of the Virgin-hating Puritan Independents, who envisaged an ideal theocratic society in which all priestly and episcopal pomp should be abolished, and every man should be entitled to read and interpret the Scriptures as he pleased, with direct access to God the Father. Puritanism took root and flourished in America, and the doctrine of religious equalitarianism, which carried with it the right to independent thinking, turned into social equalitarianism, or democracy, a theory which has since dominated Western civilization. We are now at the stage where the common people of Christendom, spurred on by their demagogues, have grown so proud that they are no longer content to be the hands and feet and trunk of the body politic, but demand to be the intellect as well – or, as much intellect as is needed to satisfy their simple appetites. As a result, all but a very few have discarded their religious idealism, Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, and come to the private conclusion that money, though the root of all evil, is the sole practical means of expressing value or of determining social precedence; that science is the only accurate means of describing phenomena; and that a morality of common honesty is not relevant either to love, war, business or politics. Yet they feel guilty about their backsliding, send their children to Sunday School, maintain the Churches, and look with alarm towards the East, where a younger and more fanatic faith threatens.

What ails Christianity today is that it is not a religion squarely based on a single myth; it is a complex of juridical decisions made under political pressure in an ancient law-suit about religious rights between adherents of the Mother-goddess who was once supreme in the West, and those of the usurping Father-god. Different ecclesiastical courts have given different decisions, and there is no longer a supreme judicature. Now that even the Jews have been seduced into evading the Mosaic Law and whoring after false gods, the Christians have drifted farther away than ever from the ascetic holiness to which Ezekiel, his Essene successors, and Jesus, the last of the Hebrew prophets, hoped to draw the world. Though the West is still nominally Christian, we have come to be governed, in practice, by the unholy triumdivate of Pluto god of wealth, Apollo god of science, and Mercury god of thieves. To make matters worse, dissension and jealousy rage openly between these three, with Mercury and Pluto blackguarding each other, while Apollo wields the atomic bomb as if it were a thunderbolt; for since the Age of Reason was heralded by his eighteenth-century philosophers, he has seated himself on the vacant throne of Zeus (temporarily indisposed) as Triumdival Regent.

The propaganda services of the West perpetually announce that the only way out of our present troubles is a return to religion, but assume that religion ought not to be defined in any precise sense: that no good can come from publicizing either the contradictions between the main revealed religions and their mutually hostile sects, or the factual mis-statements contained in their doctrines, or the shameful actions which they have all, at one time or another, been used to cloak. What is really being urged is an improvement in national and international ethics, not everyone’s sudden return to the beliefs of his childhood – which, if undertaken with true religious enthusiasm, would obviously lead to a renewal of religious wars: only since belief weakened all round have the priests of rival religions consented to adopt a good-neighbourly policy. Then why not say ethics, since it is apparent that the writers and speakers, with few exceptions, have no strong religious convictions themselves? Because ethics are held to derive from revealed religion, notably the Ten Commandments, and therefore the seemingly unethical behaviour of communists is attributed to their total repudiation of religion; and because the co-existence of contradictory confessions within a State is held by non-communists to be a proof of political health; and because a crusade against Communism can be launched only in the name of religion.

Communism is a faith, not a religion. It is simple, social equalitarianism, generous and unnationalistic in original intention, the exponents of which, however, have been forced, as the early Christians were, to postpone their hopes of an immediate millennium and adopt a pragmatic policy that will at least guarantee their own survival in a hostile world.

Since, then, the Communistic faith, however fanatically held, is not a religion, and since all contemporary religions contradict one another, however politely, in their articles of faith, can any definition of the word religion be made that is practically relevant to a solution of the present political problems?

The dictionaries give its etymology as ‘doubtful’. Cicero connected it with relegere, ‘to read duly’ – hence ‘to pore upon, or study’ divine lore. Some four-and-a-half centuries later, Saint Augustine derived it from religare, ‘to bind back’ and supposed that it implied a pious obligation to obey divine law; and this is the sense in which religion has been understood ever since. Augustine’s guess, like Cicero’s (though Cicero came nearer the truth), did not take into account the length of the first syllable of religio in Lucretius’s early De Rerum Natura, or the alternative spelling relligio. Relligio can be formed only from the phrase rem legere, ‘to choose, or pick, the right thing’, and religion for the primitive Greeks and Romans was not obedience to laws but a means of protecting the tribe against evil by active counter-measures of good. It was in the hands of a magically-minded priesthood, whose duty was to suggest what action would please the gods on peculiarly auspicious or inauspicious occasions. When, for example, a bottomless chasm suddenly opened in the Roman Forum, they read it as a sign that the gods demanded a sacrifice of Rome’s best; one Mettus Curtius felt called upon to save the situation by choosing the right thing, and leaped into the chasm on horseback, fully armed. On another occasion a woodpecker appeared in the Forum where the City Praetor, Aelius Tubero, was dispensing justice, perched on his head and allowed him to take it in his hand. Since the woodpecker was sacred to Mars, its unnatural tameness alarmed the augurs, who pronounced that, if it were released, disaster would overcome Rome; if killed, the Praetor would die for his act of sacrilege. Aelius Tubero patriotically wrung its neck, and afterwards came to a violent end. These unhistorical anecdotes seem to have been invented by the College of Augurs as examples of how signs should be read and how Romans should act in response to them.

The case of Aelius Tubero is a useful illustration not only of relligio but of the difference between taboo and law. The theory of taboo is that certain things are prophetically announced by a priest or priestess to be harmful to certain people at certain times – though not necessarily to other people at the same time, or to the same people at other times; and the primitive punishment for the breach of a taboo is ordained not by the judges of the tribe but by the transgressor himself, who realizes his error and either dies of shame and grief or flees to another tribe and changes his identity. It was understood at Rome that a woodpecker, as the bird of Mars, might not be killed by anybody except the King, or his ritual successor under the Republic, and only on a single occasion in the year, as an expiatory sacrifice to the Goddess. In a less primitive society Tubero would have been publicly tried, under such-and-such a law, for killing a protected sacred bird, and either executed, fined or imprisoned; as it was, his breach of taboo was left to his own sense of divine vengeance.

Primitive religion at Rome was bound up with the sacred monarchy: the King was restrained by a great number of taboos designed to please the various-titled Goddess of Wisdom whom he served, and the members of her divine family. It seems that the duty of his twelve priestly companions, one for every month of the year, called the lictores, or ‘choosers’, was to protect him against ill-luck or profanation and pay careful attention to his needs. Among their tasks must have been the relictio, or ‘careful reading’, of signs, omens, prodigies and auguries; and the selectio of his weapons, his clothes, his food and the grasses and leaves of his lectum or bed.1 On the extinction of the monarchy, the purely religious functions of the King were invested in the Priest of Jove, and the executive functions passed to the Consuls; the lictors became their guard of honour. The word lictor then became popularly connected with the word religare, ‘to bind’, because it was a lictorial function to bind those who rebelled against the power of the Consuls. Originally there had been no Twelve Tables, nor any other Roman code of laws; there had only been oral tradition, based on instinctive good principles and particular magical announcements. Mettus Curtius and Aelius Tubero are not represented as having been under any legal obligation to do what they did; they made an individual choice for moral reasons.

It must be explained that the word lex, ‘law’, began with the sense of a ‘chosen word’, or magical pronouncement, and that, like lictor, it was later given a false derivation from ligare. Law in Rome grew out of religion: occasional pronouncements developed proverbial force and became legal principles. But as soon as religion in its primitive sense is interpreted as social obligation and defined by tabulated laws – as soon as Apollo the Organizer, God of Science, usurps the power of his Mother the Goddess of inspired truth, wisdom and poetry, and tries to bind her devotees by laws – inspired magic goes, and what remains is theology, ecclesiastical ritual, and negatively ethical behaviour.

If, therefore, it is wished to avoid disharmony, dullness and oppression in all social (and all literary) contexts, each problem must be regarded as unique, to be settled by right choice based on instinctive good principle, not by reference to a code or summary of precedents; and, granted that the only way out of our political troubles is a return to religion, this must somehow be freed of its theological accretions. Positive right choosing based on moral principle must supersede negative respect for the Law which, though backed by force, has grown so hopelessly inflated and complex that not even a trained lawyer can hope to be conversant with more than a single branch of it. Willingness to do right can be inculcated in most people if they are caught early enough, but so few have the capacity to make a proper moral choice between circumstances or actions which at first sight are equally valid, that the main religious problem of the Western world, is briefly, how to exchange demagogracy, disguised as democracy, for a non-hereditary aristocracy whose leaders will be inspired to choose rightly on every occasion, instead of blindly following authoritarian procedure. The Russian Communist Party has confused the issue by presenting itself as such an aristocracy and claiming to be inspired in its choice of policy.

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There are two distinct and complementary languages: the ancient, intuitive language of poetry, and the more modern, rational language or prose, universally current. Myth and religion are clothed in poetic language; science, ethics, philosophy and statistics in prose. A stage in history has now been reached when it is generally conceded that the two languages should not be combined into a single formula, though Dr. Barnes, the liberal Bishop of Birmingham, complains1 that a majority of reactionary bishops would like to insist on a literal belief even in the stories of Noah’s Ark and Jonah’s Whale. The Bishop is right to deplore the way in which these venerable religious symbols have been misinterpreted for didactic reasons; and to deplore still more the Church’s perpetuation of fables as literal truth. The story of the Ark is probably derived from an Asianic icon in which the Spirit of the Solar Year is shown in a moon-ship, going through his habitual New Year changes – bull, lion, snake and so on; and the story of the Whale from a similar icon showing the same Spirit being swallowed at the end of the year by the Moon-and-Sea-goddess, represented as a sea-monster, to be presently re-born as a New Year fish, or finned goat. The she-monster Tiamat who, in early Babylonian mythology, swallowed the Sun-god Marduk (but whom he later claimed to have killed with his sword) was used by the author of the Book of Jonah to symbolize the power of the wicked city, mother of harlots, that swallowed and then spewed up the Jews. The icon, a familiar one on the Eastern Mediterranean, survived in Orphic art, where it represented a ritual ceremony of initiation: the initiate was swallowed by the Universal Mother, the sea-monster, and re-born as an incarnation of the Sun-god. (On one Greek vase the Jonah-like figure is named Jason, because the history of his voyage in the Argo had by that time been attached to the signs of the Zodiac around which the Sun makes its annual voyage.) The Hebrew prophets knew Tiamat as the Moon-and-Sea-goddess Rahab, but rejected her as the mistress of all fleshly corruptions; which is why in the ascetic Apocalypse the faithful are promised ‘No more sea’.

Dr. Barnes was quoting the stories of the Whale and Ark as obvious absurdities, but at the same time warning his fellow-bishops that few educated persons believe literally even in Jesus’s miracles. The merely agnostic attitude, ‘He may have risen to Heaven; we have no evidence for or against this claim’, has now given place in the back-rooms to the positively hostile: ‘Scientifically, it does not add up.’ A New Zealand atomic scientist assured me the other day that Christianity had received its heaviest blow in 1945: a fundamental tenet of the Church, namely that Jesus’s material body was immaterialized at the Ascension had, he said, been spectacularly disproved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – anyone with the least scientific perception must realize that any such break-down of matter would have caused an explosion large enough to wreck the entire Middle East.

Now that scientists are talking in this strain, Christianity has little chance of maintaining its hold on the governing classes unless the historical part of ecclesiastical doctrine can be separated from the mythical: that is to say, unless a distinction can be drawn between the historical concept ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, and the equally valid mythical concepts ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of Man’ in terms of which alone the Virgin Birth, the Ascension and the miracles make unchallengeable sense. If this were to happen, Christianity would develop into a pure mystery-cult, with a Christ, divorced from his temporal history, paying the Virgin-Queen of Heaven a filial obedience that Jesus of Nazareth reserved for his Incomprehensible Father. Scientists would perhaps welcome the change as meeting the psychological needs of the masses, involving no anti-scientific absurdities, and having a settling effect on civilization; one of the reasons for the restlessness of Christendom has always been that the Gospel postulates an immediate end of time and therefore denies mankind a sense of spiritual security. Confusing the languages of prose and myth, its authors claimed that a final revelation had at last been delivered: everyone must repent, despise the world, and humble himself before God in expectation of the imminent Universal Judgement. A mystical Virgin-born Christ, detached from Jewish eschatology and unlocalized in first-century Palestine, might restore religion to contemporary self-respect.

However, such a religious change is impossible under present conditions: any neo-Arian attempt to degrade Jesus from God to man would be opposed as lessening the authority of his ethical message of love and peace. Also, the Mother-and-Son myth is so closely linked with the natural year and its cycle of ever-recurring observed events in the vegetable and animal queendoms that it makes little emotional appeal to the confirmed townsman, who is informed of the passage of the seasons only by the fluctuations of his gas and electricity bills or by the weight of his underclothes. He is chivalrous to women but thinks only in prose; the one variety of religion acceptable to him is a logical, ethical, highly abstract sort which appeals to his intellectual pride and sense of detachment from wild nature. The Goddess is no towns woman: she is the Lady of the Wild Things, haunting the wooded hill-tops – Venus Cluacina, ‘she who purifies with myrtle’, not Venus Cloacina, ‘Patroness of the Sewage System’, as she first became at Rome; and though the townsman has now begun to insist that built-up areas should have a limit, and to discuss decentralization (the decanting of the big towns into small, independent communities, well spaced out), his intention is only to urbanize the country, not to ruralize the town. Agricultural life is rapidly becoming industrialized and in England, the world’s soberest social laboratory, the last vestiges of the ancient pagan celebrations of the Mother and Son are being obliterated, despite a loving insistence on Green Belts and parks and private gardens. It is only in backward parts of Southern and Western Europe that a lively sense still survives in the countryside of their continued worship.

No: there seems no escape from our difficulties until the industrial system breaks down for some reason or other, as it nearly did in Europe during the Second World War, and nature reasserts herself with grass and trees among the ruins.

The Protestant Churches are divided between liberal theology and fundamentalism, but the Vatican authorities have made up their minds how to face the problems of the day. They encourage two antinomous trends of thought to co-exist within the Church: the authoritarian, or paternal, or logical, as a means of securing the priest’s hold on his congregation and keeping them from free-thinking; the mythical, or maternal, or supralogical, as a concession to the Goddess, without whom the Protestant religion has lost its romantic glow. They recognize her as a lively, various, immemorial obsession, deeply fixed in the racial memory of the European countryman and impossible to exorcize; but are equally aware that this is an essentially urban civilization, therefore authoritarian, and therefore patriarchal. It is true that woman has of late become virtual head of the household in most parts of the Western world, and holds the purse-strings, and can take up almost any career or position she pleases; but she is unlikely to repudiate the present system, despite its patriarchal framework. With all its disadvantages, she enjoys greater liberty of action under it than man has retained for himself; and though she may know, intuitively, that the system is due for a revolutionary change, she does not care to hasten or anticipate this. It is easier for her to play man’s game a little while longer, until the situation grows too absurd and uncomfortable for complaisance. The Vatican waits watchfully.

Meanwhile, Science itself is in difficulties. Scientific research has become so complicated and demands such enormous apparatus that only the State or immensely rich patrons can pay for it, which in practice means that a disinterested search for knowledge is cramped by the demand for results that will justify the expense: the scientist must turn showman. Also, a huge body of technical administrators is needed to implement his ideas, and these too rank as scientists; yet, as Professor Lancelot Hogben points out,1 (and he is exceptional in being an F.R.S. with sufficient knowledge of history and the humanities to be able to view science objectively) they are no more than ‘fellow-travellers’ – careerists, opportunists, and civil-service-minded authoritarians. A non-commercial benevolent institution like the Nuffield Foundation, he says, is as high-handed in its treatment of scientists as a Treasury-controlled Government department. In consequence, pure mathematics is almost the only free field of science left. Moreover, the corpus of scientific knowledge, like that of law, has grown so unwieldy that not only are most scientists ignorant of even the rudiments of more than one specialized study, but they cannot keep up with the publications in their own field, and are forced to take on trust findings which they should properly test by personal experiment. Apollo the Organizer, in fact, seated on Zeus’s throne, is beginning to find his ministers obstructive, his courtiers boring, his regalia tawdry, his quasi-royal responsibilities irksome, and the system of government breaking down from over-organization: he regrets having enlarged the realm to such absurd proportions and given his uncle Pluto and his half-brother Mercury a share in the Regency, yet dares not quarrel with these unreliable wretches for fear of worse to come, or even attempt to re-write the constitution with their help. The Goddess smiles grimly at his predicament.

This is the ‘brave new world’ satirized by Aldous Huxley, an ex-poet turned philosopher. What has he to offer in its place? In his Perennial Philosophy he recommends a saintly mysticism of not-being in which woman figures only as an emblem of the soul’s surrender to the creative lust of God. The West, he says in effect, has failed because its religious feelings have been too long linked with political idealism or the pursuit of pleasure; it must now look to India for guidance in the rigorous discipline of asceticism. Little or nothing is, of course, known to the Indian mystics that was unknown to Honi the Circle-drawer and the other Essene therapeutics with whom Jesus had so close an affinity, or to the Mohammedan mystics; but talk of political reconciliation between Far East and Far West is in fashion and Mr. Huxley therefore prefers to style himself a devotee of Ramakrishna, the most famous Indian mystic of modern times.

Ramakrishna’s case is an interesting one. He lived all his life in the grounds of the White Goddess Kali’s temple at Dakshineswar on the Ganges, and in 1842, at the age of six, had fallen in a faint at the beauty of a flock of cranes, her birds, flying across a background of storm clouds. At first he devoted himself to Kali-worship with true poetic ecstacy like his predecessor Ramprasad Sen (1718–1775); but, when he grew to manhood, allowed himself to be seduced: he was unexpectedly acclaimed by Hindu pundits as a re-incarnation of Krishna and Buddha, and persuaded by them into orthodox techniques of devotion. He became an ascetic saint of the familiar type with devoted disciples and a Gospel of ethics posthumously published, and was fortunate enough to marry a woman of the same mystic capacities as himself who, by agreeing to forgo physical consummation, helped him to illustrate the possibility of a purely spiritual union of the sexes. Though he did not need to declare war on the Female, as Jesus had done, he set himself painfully to ‘dissolve his vision of the Goddess’ in order to achieve the ultimate bliss of samadhi, or communion with the Absolute; holding that the Goddess, who was both the entangler and the liberator of physical man, has no place in that remote esoteric Heaven. In later life he claimed to have proved by experiment that Christians and Mohammedans could also achieve the same bliss as himself; first, by turning Christian and devoting himself to the Catholic liturgy until he achieved a vision of Jesus Christ, and then Moslem until he achieved a vision of Mohammed – after each experience resuming samadhi.

What, then, is samadhi? It is a psychopathic condition, a spiritual orgasm, indistinguishable from the ineffably beautiful moment, described by Dostoievsky, which precedes an epileptic fit. Indian mystics induce it at will by fasting and meditation, as the Essenes and early Christian and Mohammedan saints also did. Ramakrishna had, in fact, ceased to be a poet and become a morbid-psychologist and religious politician addicted to the most refined form of solitary vice imaginable. Ramprasad had never allowed himself to be thus tempted from his devotion to the Goddess by spiritual ambition. He had even rejected the orthodox hope of ‘not-being’, through mystic absorption in the Absolute, as irreconcilable with his sense of individual uniqueness as the Goddess’s child and lover:

and faced the prospect of death with poetic pride:

One Kalipuja Day he followed Kali’s image into the Ganges until the waters closed over his head.

The story of Ramprasad’s devotion to Kali reads familiarly to the Western romantic; samadhi, the unchivalrous rejection of the Goddess, will not appeal even to the Western townsman. Nor are any other revivals of Father-god worship, whether ascetic or epicurean, autocratic or communist, liberal or fundamentalist, likely to solve our troubles; I foresee no change for the better until everything gets far worse. Only after a period of complete political and religious disorganization can the suppressed desire of the Western races, which is for some practical form of Goddess-worship, with her love not limited to maternal benevolence and her after-world not deprived of a sea, find satisfaction at last.

How should she then be worshipped? Donne anticipated the problem in his early poem The Primrose. He knew that the primrose is sacred to the Muse and that the ‘mysterious number’ of its petals stands for women. Should he adore a six-petalled or a four-petalled freak, a Goddess that is either more, or less, than true woman? He chose five petals and proved by the science of numbers that woman, if she pleases, has complete domination of man. But it was said of the lotus-crowned Goddess in the Corinthian Mysteries, long before the phrase was applied to the ideally benign Father-god, ‘Her service is perfect freedom’;1 and, indeed, her habit has never been to coerce, but always to grant or withhold her favours according as her sons and lovers came to her with exactly the right gifts in their hands – gifts of their own choosing, not her dictation. She must be worshipped in her ancient quintuple person, whether by counting the petals of lotus or primrose: as Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose and Death.

It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice-versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult. Man is a demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess – she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate.

Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man’s dependence on her for life. She is passionately interested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irreconcilable demands on her.

There are frequent denials of her power, for example Allan Ramsay’s Goddess of the Slothful (from The Gentle Shepherd, 1725):

But the longer her hour is postponed, and therefore the more exhausted by man’s irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will her five-fold mask be, and the narrower the scope of action that she grants to whichever demi-god she chooses to take as her temporary consort in godhead. Let us placate her in advance by assuming the cannibalistic worst:

And we owe her a satire on the memory of the man who first tilted European civilization off balance, by enthroning the restless and arbitrary male will under the name of Zeus and dethroning the female sense of orderliness, Themis. The Greeks knew him as Pterseus the Destroyer, the Gorgon-slaying warrior-prince from Asia, remote ancestor of the destroyers Alexander, Pompey and Napoleon.