by WILLIAM BOND
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Dionysus on Cross
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The Sacrificial/Saviour Gods
If we accept the matriarchal theory, which goes: In the past there was once a peaceful and caring matriarchal age that worshiped the Great Mother. In this age women ruled society and men never questioned this rule. Then women began to allow men more freedom but this went too far and men abused this this and ended up taking over and ruling society through violence.
Clearly if we look at the history of the last four or five thousand years we can see clearly that men have made a terrible job at ruling the world. Men’s answer to all problems has been aggression and violence, which has created a world of wars, genocide, poverty, fear, hatred and suffering. This was clearly seen two to three thousand years ago at the time of the saviour gods when there was still knowledge of the ancient matriarchal past.
At that time there must have been a large number of people who wanted the world to return to matriarchy and the worship of the Great Mother. But what was preventing this, was violent and aggressive men.
What is clear is that the ancient religion were totally female dominated religions, but then these women allowed men power and some of these men took advantage and brought into being the patriarchal age.
The sacrificial/saviour god religions where probably an attempt to create female domination religions in ancient times. It is of interest that all these sacrificial/saviour god religions were also called Mystery religions.
Now in all Mystery religions there is an outer and inner mystery, where all knowledge of the inner mysteries is unknown except of an initiated few. In the earlier Mystery plays the saviour god sacrificed themselves to The Great Mother. For instance, in the Nordic mythology, Loki, one of their oldest Gods, was sacrificed to the Goddess Skadi. While even in the Jesus story, his crucifixion is witnessed by the three Marys. Who probably represented in earlier times the Triple Goddesses.
Jesus is also called a king and this may be about a very ancient tradition where the king is sacrifice. It seems in the matriarchal past only queens could rule but she had consort kings. These were mostly young men, and if the queen grew tired of him then he was sacrificed for the fertility of the land. Why this happened might be because a deposed king may be angry at his lost of power and status and stir up trouble for the Queen. Or he might be executed because he began to abuse his power, and tried to undermine or disobey the Queen. So the sacrifice of kings had a long tradition until with the rise of patriarchy and kings became too powerful to allow themselves to be sacrificed.
For this reason, the tradition of the sacrificing the king may have happened as matriarchy was declining. In a true matriarchal society men would not expect to have any power, and so a Queen could have many lovers with no fear that these men will want to take away her powers. As it would have been unthinkable in those days, that a male could, depose a queen and rule in her place. But with the rise of patriarchy, then queens may find themselves with lovers with strong political ambitions. So the only way to deal with them, was to have them executed, or threaten them with execution and claim it was a sacrifice.
This type of sacrifice probably wasn’t voluntary, but in the savior god tradition it was. It was made very clear in the Bible that Jesus made no attempt to resist himself being crucified. So from this we have to ask the question how can the voluntary sacrifice of the god-man to the Great Mother, save us all?
The problem for people living near any patriarchal society who attempted to set up a matriarchal society of love and harmony, would be quickly conquered by violent men, who were only interested in loot and enslaving the population. So it would be clear that the cause of all the wars, violence, poverty and suffering was these selfish and violent men.
We know from history that the Amazons did for a while attempt to fight fire with fire and fight back. But this clearly wasn’t the answer because by becoming violent yourself you become exactly like the people you are fighting against. In other words the only way Amazons could be free was to become as aggressive, ruthless and violence as the men they fought. The Amazons failed to stop the rising tide of patriarchy, probably because women were unable to become as brutal and ruthless as men.
Now Femdom could be the solution for this problem. In military history there has been many cases where a small army of soldier have defeated far larger armies. The most famous was the Battle of Thermopylae when 300 Spartans stopped a very large Persian army.
It is mostly claim that this can only happen because the small army was better trained, but that is not the only the only reason for this. A group of psychopaths who have no qualms about killing people is going to have a big advantage in a battle again ordinary men who don’t like the thought of killing others.
We know a big problem for any military is forcing troops to kill others and they normally do this by brutalizing them. This is of course going to be a big problem for any loving and caring Matriarchal society because men will not be brutalized enough to want to kill other men in a war and so will be easy defeated in any military conflict.
The answer to this problem might be Femdom, where men have masochistic desires for sadistic women. Most women don’t like whipping or torturing men but as we see in the Femdom scene there are some women who are happy to do this. So women like this can become officers in any matriarchal army and brutalize their male troops in the way any patriarchal army does. So they will be able fight and kill the men of any patriarchal army trying to invade them.
Unfortunately, as far as we know we didn’t have femdom in ancient times, or if we did no-one thought of using it, to brutalize troops. Instead women decided on a different strategy and attempted to reform these violent men. To do this they gave them a vision of what a caring and loving world would be like and explaining to them this is only possible if men are willing to sacrifice yourself to the Great Mother. So a story was created about a drama of heroic sacrifice, of a God-man sacrificing himself for the good of the world.
To some degree this seems to of been successful because all over Europe and the Middle East there were saviour god religions. So it seems many men were willing to sacrifice themselves to the Goddess in these Mystery religions. Unfortunately, these religions became victims of their own success, because patriarchal leaders who had no interested in sacrificing themselves, saw these religions as a threat to their power and set about either destroying them or taking them over.
It is of interest that early Christianity was very popular among the slaves of the Roman empire. This would make sense as many matriarchal societies where victims of the conquering Romans, so there would be a tradition of the worship of the Mother Goddess among the slaves. For this reason they would be very sympathetic to a saviour god religion like early Christianity.
In the 3th century AD, Rome found itself with three large Saviour God religions. The largest was the Egyptian religion of the Goddess Isis and her saviour god Osiris. Then there were two other the Christians and another based on the saviour God Mithras.
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Isis raising Osiris from the dead
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Attempts by the Roman ruling elite to stamp out these saviour god religions, was at first unsuccessful. They were unsuccessful in destroying Christianity, while the Isis religion was popular in the Roman military so this could cause a civil war if they attempted this.
So the ruling elite instead attempted to promote a religion based on another saviour god Mithras, as it was the religion they preferred but this didn’t receive enough support from the people. So in the end they decided that if you can’t beat them join them. They clearly didn’t want a Goddess religion like the the Isis religion and so Christianity became the final choice.
The Roman rulers simply hijacked the Christian religion and changed it to make it acceptable to them. They then set about destroying the religion of Isis were able to convert people in this religion to Christianity because both religions were similar.
But they also destroyed Christian sects like the Egyptian Gnostics that refused follow the type of Christianity put forward by the Roman elite. The actual teachings of Jesus like, “loving your neighbour”, “turning the other cheek” was quickly ignored as the Roman rulers and became more interested in the religion of Judaism and promoted this, rather than what was taught by the early Christian Church.
The promotion of Judaism was the opposite to what many early Gnostic Christians taught, as they referred to the Jewish Jehovah god as the Demiurge and claimed he was a evil god from whom Jesus came to save humankind. The original New Testament was suppose to be an attack on the Old Testament and the patriarchal religion of Judaism, but this was soon changed to endorsing it.
Another big change was that many of the saviour god religions promoted sexual freedom. We can see this is the religions of Dionysus and Bacchus where many of the famous Roman orgies were Bacchus festivals.
Sexual freedom at the time benefited wealthy women. This was because if women had a sexual licence to have sex with whoever they liked, then no one could say for sure whom were the fathers of their children and so, rich and powerful men had little idea who were their sons. This meant that inheritance of wealth and power could only come down the female line. Meaning that, a large amount of wealth and power stayed in the hands of women.
It seems that early Christianity was also an orgiastic religion of free love, before it became a state religion. To promote the power of men, Christianity was changed to have strict marriage laws where it became a sin to have sex outside of marriage. (Though this only applied to women and not men). The idea being that rich and powerful men now knew whom their sons were and could pass their wealth and power down the male line, preventing it getting into the hands of women.
Then Christianity as a state religion and later the Moslems set about destroying all knowledge of the ancient religion of the Great Mother. With this knowledge finally forgotten by the common people, they were then able to put forward the idea that Jesus sacrificed himself to an angry god to appease him. Rather then the idea, that all men need to sacrifice themselves to the Great Mother, and to women, before we can have a peaceful matriarchal world once again.
Perhaps the mystery religions of the past were a few thousand years before their time. They were trying to promote a vision of a peaceful and loving world in a very violent age. Today in the 21st century we see in the West at least a different attitude to violent men. It is far less acceptable for Western rulers to go out and conquer other countries, (though it still goes on, as we saw in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars). And it is far less acceptable for them to rule through fear and intimation. Western rulers today are forced to listen to the needs and desires of the common people and even respect the views and opinions of minorities.
So perhaps the sacrificial/saviour god image within Christianity acted as a Trojan Horse for the patriarchal age. On the collective unconscious level it created a archetype that has influenced all men in Christian countries for the last two thousand years. So that the idea of voluntary sacrifice has become acceptable to men which is starting to bear fruit in the last hundred years. It is interesting that feminism has progressed in Christian countries where men allow women to demand equal rights. This is in stark contrast in Islam countries where feminist women are beaten up, put into jail, and murdered by being stoned and beheaded.
In contrast, we have seen in Christian countries Jesus like men, in Hippies of the 1960s where men have tried to practice peace and love. Or ideas of the “new man” where men stay at home to look after the house and family while his wife goes out to work. In its more extreme form, we have the concept of Femdom where women totally dominate men. So are these men very much in tune with the archetypal sacrificial/saviour god? Clearly if all men are strongly influenced by this powerful archetypal it will save the world from violence, wars and suffering.
Although Christianity has mostly ignored the teachings of Jesus and have concentrated more on the Old Testament god of judgement and fear, the symbols of a sacrificial Jesus are seen in all Churches. Also, the Great Mother is represented in Roman Catholic Churches in the disguise of the Virgin Mary. So even though many Christian priests have only paid lip-service to the teachings of Jesus and the drama of his betrayal and crucifixion, this is still taught. These symbols, dramas and teachings have been unconsciously influencing men in Christian Counties ever since Christianity became a state religion.
So although in the short term the attempt by matriarchal women to create a submissive saviour god in the past seems like a failure. The popularity of the sacrificial drama of Jesus Christ has brought about an archetypal change in men, which will allow men to surrender themselves to women and bring about a new matriarchal age. After all, it is in Christian countries where we see the rise in feminism during the 20th century and more recently the beginnings of Female Domination. The concept of the sacrificial god, does seem to be working on minds of men to allow themselves to tune into this powerful archetype.
Although for us to have peaceful Matriarchal societies we also need an army with female officers using femdom methods to train their troops again any invading patriarchal army.
