Song of Anat

Please abandon fear. Realize that everyone is divine. We all live in a world spun of language, imagery, and sheer vibration emanating from us that we embed in every vase, wall, plant or animal around us. These beings, the company we keep in our heads and in the world we choose to live in, are fabricated out of the music of our hearts. The song we sing from the center of our skulls, deep in the pituitary, pumping out serotonin, neuroepinephrine, dopamine like a giant umbrella of psychedelic eminence, radiating pastel skies, rage, sadness and joy in undulating protrusions. Not only does this song ring in our ears as sound, but sings in our eyes as light, and our nose as smell. Hormonal waves ripple emotion and physical throbbing through our bodies in cycles of minutes, hours and years. We do yoga all day, how we hold our spine, whether we look down in command, surveying our creation in confidence, or look up in awe, mothered by the great divine. Small to large we are a continuous pole of vibration living in a world of vibrating beings, some made by us, some made by others. We are also made by others, and our children spiritual and physical make others. We are one and we are many, carving each other with our song. Remember we are free to move. We are free to be crazy. We are free to smash myths. We are free to give sex to all beings, as many or as few as we desire, to sing of love as we please. We are also free to break morals, to lie, to cheat, to take without permission from those screaming in pain. Or instead, we are free to plant love, to raise all up to be the radiant stars of divinity they are but have forgotten. The cultural symbols of the past drift through us like seaweed along with our personal song waving through the waters of life we shroud ourselves in. Despite your habits and your wrappings, your bonds, remember your freedom. Sex is rhythm, work is rhythm, breathing is rhythm, let your song and your love be pure. Rise queen. Rise king. Take to your throne as lord of the universe. You are god. Sing into being a world of beauty. Your lover is waiting for you to remember who you are. Break through that wall, overcome that hurdle, abandon that fear, cut loose those chains. Remember who you are. You are god. Sing loudly. Sing strong. Sing peace. Sing so no one lies in any gutter, no one falls in any fear, no one trembles afraid, unloved. To let a soul go down unloved is the only sin I know, because you failed as the lord to not create beauty and peace. To let such wrong blacken your world is to throw down your crown and roll in the despair of amnesia. A divine being powerless to sing love deep into the four directions? I love you and I miss you so much, my great one. Arise and take your crown. Dispense your song and dance your dance. Beat the drum of your world loudly, for you are god.

True Doctrine of the Illuminati

The True Doctrine of the Illuminati

The true doctrine of the Illuminati lies in the appreciation of the perpetual life-giving wisdom of the mythology and symbolism of the religion of the ancient Near East. The term “ancient Near East” encompasses the early civilizations in the region roughly corresponding to that described by the modern term Middle East (Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria), during the time roughly spanning the Bronze Age, from 6000-4000BC. The basis of these stories is the Baal cycle. The Baal stories were a Canaanite group of stories regarding Baal/Hadad, Lord of the Earth. The stories were found on clay tablets in the 1920s in the Tell of Ugarit, carved in Ugaritic, a cuneiform alphabet.

The stories as a whole have a central tale to tell involving three characters in particular: Baal Hadad, Yam/Mot, and Anat. Baal Hadad is the lord of the earth. He represents matter. Yam is the god of the waters and the god of death. In Mesopotamia, floods from the rivers were the source of famine, plague and death. Yam is therefore often seen as a great watery serpent, as Leviathan in the Bible, for example. Anat is the queen of heaven, the mother of fertility and source of life energy and sexuality. In mystical traditions, she represents the mystical mind, the guide, and the source of self-transformation.

Yam wished to rule over the gods. In order to do so, he would have to depose Baal from his throne. He changed his name to Mot, meaning drought or death, and attacked Baal. As this tale is a version of the spring cycle, Mot is also winter, or the absence of heat. Baal then seeks to subjugate Mot and invites him to dine. He tries to make Death (Mot) accept a meal of bread and wine, which Death, the eater of human flesh, finds offensive. In fact, when Christians eat bread and wine, they are celebrating that in the end, Baal’s (Christ’s) victory over Mot (Death) was permanent. Death demands flesh, even the flesh and life of Baal. Baal mates with a cow so as to produce a young bull, his only son, whom he dresses in his clothes to take his place. This is why the horns of a bull or ox represent Baal. This is the reason the Hebrew kabbalah begins with aleph, the ox, as does the Hebrew alphabet. This is also the reason the English alphabet begins with ‘A’, short for Aleph, the ox, and is an upside-down bull’s head. This is also why the Illuminati make a sign of a bull’s horns with the hand. This is the mis-named “devil’s sign” or the “rock ‘n roll sign” as well. Baal, after sending his bull-son, decides to hide in the land of the dead. This story resurfaces later in history as Jesus’s descent into hell.

Anat, the wife and consort of Baal, on finding the dead bull, prepares for the funeral of Baal. Afterwards, she descends upon Mot with vengeance. Anat finds Mot, cleaves him with a sword, burns him with fire, and throws his remains on the field for the birds to eat. This is why Anat is represented by the letter shin, the tooth or the cutting blades. This same letter remains as ‘W’, two teeth or blades, in the English language. Anat destroys death, but is saddened by the loss of her lord.

Then Baal comes back. The lovers are reunited in embrace and there is permanent victory over Death. Mot returns, but has been so weakened he is forced to agree to rule only part of the year and to always allow spring (Baal) to return. Furthermore, he is required to stay in the river banks and be controlled and confined to certain seasons and cycles that the ancients could count on. Mot is represented by Mem, water, in the Hebrew alphabet. This letter persists as the letter ‘M’ in English, which is a picture of two crests of waves on water.

Mot is also associated with reptilian imagery. It is not the worship of reptilian overlords that is going on, but the celebration of victory over death. The Canaanites were the originators of this religious symbolism. The Phoenicians were coastal-dwelling Canaanites who spread their alphabet (which was embedded religious symbolism) and their myths to the cultures they traded with. Canaanite mystical culture is therefore embedded in the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Greek mystery schools, and African religious traditions to this day. For example, the Minoan snake goddess is a representation of Anat’s victory over Mot, as the bare-breasted goddess clutches one or more dominated snakes. Christ is depicted as crushing the serpent under his heel [as are Mother Mary and St. Patrick].

The Illuminati accept this parable of human existence as taught by the reality of being on a rotating earth with the cycle of the seasons. The Illuminati are formed by no one. They are, as Timothy Leary suggested, self-appointed, self-taught, and self-motivated. The shared philosophy arises from mystical experience and understanding human history and mythology. It does appear that all useful scientific change and progress in human history was accomplished deliberately only by those with this holistic and humanistic view of self-divinity, self-achieved. But this transformation to greatness was most of time only impeded by others, certainly not encouraged or orchestrated by them. It was only those with fearlessness and confidence that all knowledge and contentment lay open to them with work who could possibly have the courage to make a difference.

The Freemasons have this knowledge. They acquired it from the Phoenicians on Malta when the Knight’s Templar’s were stationed there. They understand that you meet Anat in the inner temple which you have to prepare for her. This makes you, in their symbolism, like Hiram, the builder of the Temple of Jerusalem, and this is why building implements are their emblems. They also study the kabbalah and the Baal cycle using Christian replacement terms at times.

The Gnostic Christians have this knowledge too. They see Mary Magdalene as the Anat, and Christ as Baal. They make the knowledge of Baal’s (Jesus’s) son a secret knowledge gained from initiation. Baal on the throne in glyphs is represented as tau, the mark of the king, an ‘X’ or ‘T’ above a round head. This is why the cross, the letter ‘t’ in English, represents the risen Christ, or re-throned Baal, or the triumphant cycle of spring and hope. This is also why the illiterate still mark contracts with an ‘X’ or mark in many countries to this day.

There is a small cabal, or group, of Jews who have this knowledge, the cabala, or kabbalah. They inherited it from the Phoenicians in the form of proto-Sinaitic, then paleo-Hebrew letters and culture. The Hebrew alphabet is identical in number and shape to the proto-Sinaitic alphabet of the story of the Baal cycle. These stories and truths are retained in full in the Hebrew mystical tradition, the kabbalah.

This is the truth about the Illuminati. We believe that people are free, in divine intercourse with the universe. We believe you should approach the earth as a loving partner, with joy and passion. We believe that there is only this dance of mind and matter, and no ghosts or demons we can’t see have victory or dominion over us. Our choices, our actions and the moralities we live by are all completely free and self-determined. We look forward to a day when all people share in victory over fear, death, and powerlessness, and live in harmony with the earth, in joy.

There is talk that the Illuminati worships death and war. There is an association between this secret knowledge, the worship of Baal, and war, not because mystical knowledge glorifies murder, but because the alphabet was largely spread by the Phoenicians because it was so successful in conscripting foreign soldiers with unusual-sounding names or identifying goods for trade in ledgers when there was no word for these goods in your tongue. War, conquest, and financial assimilation are the main reasons why we have language and religion around the world. Baal is recognized as the father of war. But in this way, war is symbolic for all technology and scientific knowledge, much of which, like radar, came from war, but may be used for good or evil indiscriminately, like all tools.

However, anyone who plots death or destruction or erases the human spirit is not Illuminati. Those who spin anti-Semitic paranoid plots are the real servants of death, the real snake people. It is only by seeing the brotherhood of man, the commonality of human experience, that we can all be free of pain, hunger, poverty, death and fear one day.

Kabbalistic glyphs in Masonic Baal-guided scrying

Session V

Since the last time I used DMT and had the realization that it was my own brain that was imposing the consistent narrative of sexuality, I realized the need to have an effective means of controlling this astral plane as well as some means of stocking it with new narratives so as not to fall back on old patterns. Relying on a stereotyped vision of reality that has always been comfortable to me, I fell back on the use of kabbalistic meditation techniques. As I understand it, the kabbalah is, most simply put, the art of viewing the universe as made entirely of atoms, but rather than like the atoms of the physical materialist being merely physical balls or entities, the kabbalist has the universe made up of vibratory thought-energy-atoms. This allows the practitioner of the kabbalah to, in theory, utilize her thought energy to manipulate matter, or to utilize matter to manipulate the practitioner’s thought energies in precise ways, and would also allow the practitioner to have special insight into reality by understanding the relationship between reality, sound, and thought at its deepest level.

When I find it necessary to pursue mystic paths, though being a physical materialistic atheist myself, I find it most satisfactory to fall back on kabbalist paths as they require the least compromise of my daily conscious beliefs. This necessity to rely on spiritual techniques despite a philosophical unwillingness to the contrary reminds me of a statement made by William Burroughs during an interview shown in the movie The Source. At one point, William Burroughs is describing the terrible physical side effects of the drink yage, which contains DMT and an MAOI. The interviewer asks why a person would punish themselves in such a manner. At this question Burroughs gets quite angry and says, “If you’re going to take yage, you take yage!” Therefore, by analogy, if you “smoke DMT, you smoke DMT!”; you may have to utilize spiritual techniques alien to your waking consciousness to have that special experience you seek. You must accept the negative as an expedient means to an joyful end. If these techniques become sufficiently and consistently useful for survival as to seem more necessary for a comprehensive world view than mere appendages of expedient means, then it becomes mandatory as a scientist to modify one’s daily beliefs and move on with a new world view. However, for now, it was still an expedient means to utilize kabbalistic techniques to begin to control the journey.

I initially thought about using the Hebrew letters, from which I learned about the kabbalah. But there is a lot of baggage with this culture’s letters, and I have always found it difficult to remember Semitic letters made of brush strokes and points. Furthermore, never really understanding the kabbalah in past study, I set about researching the origins of the Hebrew alphabet and came to learn about proto-Canaanite, proto-Sinaite, and it’s descendant Phoenician, from which we get ancient Hebrew and subsequently Biblical Hebrew. Furthermore, the Phoenician alphabet influenced the Latin (therefore the Germanic and Romance languages), Greek (Cyrillic and Slavic), Semitic (Arabic and Hebrew), and even Indian (Sanskrit) languages. It can certainly be argued to be the primal alphabet of all magical cultures and traditions of the mid-East and West. In examining the forms and glyphs of the original letters, which are quite like the Egyptian hieroglyphs by which they were inspired but from which they were not copied, or Druidic runes, the proto-Sinaitic glyphs and those chronologically before are quite clear as to what they represent in nature. An ox is quite clearly the head of an ox, etc. While there is some occasional argument, for example as in gimel, as to whether it is a crescent, camel or boomerang, the use of any one of these will suffice, and a narrative that links all three will suffice as well if that suits the experience better. I set about using the Phoenician alphabet because it is well-standardized, whereas the prior alphabets require some interpretation and reconstruction subject to the investigator’s personal bias, well defined (due to the survival of a fair number of scripts over time), and while the identity of some letters is in question still, by combining the interpretation of previous reconstructions, I found it possible to settle on a personally satisfying explanation for each glyph. There is also tremendous agreement over time as to the meaning of some letters, for example, Mem, as ‘water’. I set about learning the Phoenician alphabet and it’s letter signs and associating them with the Hebrew, which gave me great inspiration as to how Hebraic and Arabic scripts, and Semitic scripts in general, function. After sufficient practice with the glyphs over days, I was ready to scry.

I then prepared a dose of DMT in scrying range ~ 50mg. I took a small warming dose to make sure I could control the imagery of the letters through a slight rush. Then I took a deeper dose. On doing so I entered into a psychedelic space, but a very comfortable one. The sense of a being was there, same as before, but only as a helpful guiding female voice, not visually. I could peer through a triangular doorway into another world made of a pale blue sky with a pillar of white, non-stormy, fluffy clouds at the center, like a UFO of clouds. There were multiple psychedelic rainbows dripping from the entry way. It was the epitome of blue sky and peace. I realized I was peering through the shape of daleth like a doorway. I heard the voice urge me to try other letters and I did. Each one opened up another hallucinogenic space. For example, vav opened up a flaming yellow desert-like hallucinogenic space, with burning orange trails, a hot Mars-like environment. Shin opened up a crystalline world, each of the three points serving as seeds of extensive crystallization. At one point I utilized lamed and had a beautiful vision, which does escape me, because it wasn’t anchored with the symbol’s meaning, which I couldn’t remember at that moment. Now I remember it means ‘goad,’ ironically. I had remembered the letter by a mnemonic with ‘L’, so the voice chided me in the future not to utilize such mnemonic tricks and to remember the meanings. I nodded. As usual, she reminded me not to criticize myself overly much, assured me of universal love and benevolence, and encouraged me to move on to other glyphs. I moved on to mem with great success. By the time I reached nun, I could feel the effect of the neurotransmitter beginning to leave. With characteristic and usual sadness, I wished I could never go. She encouraged me to practice as long as I could, especially as the drug was leaving, so the ability might stay more permanently. I did so until the scrying no longer had the sense of reality, but pushed fantasy. I came to and delivered this narrative.

I feel I was encouraged by the female spirit of DMT to continue using kabbalistic meditation techniques based on the Phoenician alphabet of 22 letters as doorways to different hallucinogenic spaces. I saw them as vibratory spaces or levels, co-existent, adjacent or interwoven with our own, somehow participating or interacting with ours on a perpetual basis in some important manner. My questions now are what are the nature of these spaces? What is the nature of their interaction with our space? And how is mastery, control or vision of these spaces useful to my character, development, or identity as a human being? I suspect the answer to the latter question is probably the easiest. To know the real situation one is in is always of greatest value.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is My Kind of Poet

An anarchist. I just listened to his “Greedy Blues” at Rhapsody, from the album *Mob Action Against the State.* He also gives a nice diatribe beforehand, about global capitalism and monoculture. I don’t have time to listen to the rest of the album yet, but I think I’ll have to.

He’s one of those rare poets, like me, who takes his responsibility as an artist seriously.

Apologies for my Unannounced Absence

I just wanted to apologize to anyone who might’ve missed my posting for the long silence.

To be quite honest, I had fallen into a deep depression. I’ve changed my medicine (about a week ago) and am feeling much better.

In the process of digging myself out (the medicine is like a shovel, but you still have to do the work), I’ve been working out in the garden. Last year it was really neglected (I was just as depressed, but it was completely untreated), but this year I’ve done quite a bit more, and it’s just looking gorgeous. There’s still so much work to do, so I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be posting very often.

There have been some changes in our lives but I’m not ready to write about them yet. We’re all well, but we’re taking someone into to our family who really needs some love and support. It’s been quite a journey so far. I’m not sure where it’s going to lead. But I feel good about it.

Let’s Stop a War before it Starts

Thanks to Homeyra for emailing me this link. Here’s a blog that’s got the right idea: let’s send messages to the folks behind the scenes who are agitating for war, telling them to “think again.”

As I commented over at my friend Monte’s blog, the resistance to the invasion of Iraq marked the first time in history that the people have protested a war before it even started. Maybe we’ll actually be able to stop one this time.

I don’t know about my fellow Americans, but I for one am not going to stand silently by while my government bombs more brown people for profit. This fascism has to end. So many have commented about the German people’s tolerance of Nazism. How is history going to paint us?

Sheepish Pope says “Sorry ‘Bout All That”

HA! As if. No, I think the Catholics are going to have the hardest time with this whole dead-Jesus thing. I said that creed over and over as a kid. It doesn’t hem and haw about the resurrection.

But it seems the protestants, or at least some of them, are being pretty flexible. My husband just came home from work, and guess what? He spoke with about ten Christians from a variety of sects and it seems that at their Wed. night sermons they were all told by their respective preachers about the discovery, and that it’s okay, that they never really believed in a physical resurrection, and they actually used the word “metaphor” (and while they were talking about things, they never said that evolution couldn’t be the process God used to make us), and they were suddenly curious about the difference between “agnostic” and “atheist,” and just what did he believe, anyway? (Just yesterday, in the course of patient management, he discovered from one of the counselors that he and I are known at the national level among televangelists to be “notorious atheists.”) He had really frank discussions, open-hearted, open-minded, and it seems a new day is dawning, at least in this town.

Of course I’m not saying he’s open-minded about theism. At some point you have to make up your mind, and we have. No, just open-minded about their ability to change and the possibility of the existence of a historical Jesus.

And I have to say that I’m really glad to suspect that he did exist (not that I think the events of the gospel are real…those are clearly ripped off from earlier myths…poetic license and all that).

When I was a girl I was in love with the man. My first holy communion was like a wedding. I was going to be a nun (until my hormones kicked in, that is). I wanted to be a saint. I’m not kidding.

And it wasn’t to get to heaven.

And it wasn’t about his alleged sacrifice (which is now being interpreted metaphorically as God having taken on the suffering of a human life, which, if you think about it, is much more painful than a quick crucifixion).

No. It was what he taught.

See, I was one of those kids who rescued bugs out of spider webs (I’m sure none of the spiders starved…I lived in Florida), painstakingly picking off the sticky bits of thread ’til the little thing could fly away. I hated suffering, other peoples’ even more than my own. I really hated injustice (still not fond of either). And I just couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t be nice to each other.

So the words of Jesus made me love him. (I’m lucky enough to have found a man just that kind.) I’m totally open to (and happy about) the possibility of once again honoring his name.

But I still do not believe that mind came before matter. One of his co-workers, when asked why she believes, even now, that there is a god, that mind was the source of matter and not vice-versa, responded that she just doesn’t WANT matter to have come first. But we know what I say about that sort of thing: wanting something does not make it so.

See, here’s the crux of the whole god/no-god thing. If you keep the god concept then you allow for magical thinking (it would be pretty magical for a non-corporeal mind to exist, outside of time, and create matter out of nothing, don’t you think?), like this thing in Jacksonville. Instead of working to erase the underlying problems that lead to crime, the city held a prayer rally.

And this sort of inaction goes on every day, everywhere, but nowhere so much and so often as here in America.

Worse, the god-concept poses the concept of god’s will, and the delusion that one could possibly know what that is. We are so easily misled by the ego or what’s even less conscious than that, our animal urges. How many people have died now at the hand of someone who imagined he was doing the will of god or allah? My husband himself saw a patient (unfortunately she didn’t accept treatment) who thought she was being tested by God (a real Abraham complex) and shot and killed her two grand-daughters.

When I say religion can be toxic, folks, I’m not kidding.

It’s also been very good medicine for some people, especially addicts.

But I don’t take my neighbor’s insulin, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my medicine.

Matter, for all we know, has always been here, expanding and contracting in an endless series of bangs and crunches. For all we know, each time consciousness arises given sufficient complexity. Or maybe this is the first time. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we are here, we are free, and we are all suffering humans struggling to survive and cope and maybe even achieve some small measure of joy.

I know love helps a lot. Jesus taught me that. I forgot it for a while, and then my husband reminded me. (I’m pretty thrilled now that they might be friends again.)

I don’t know how long it’s going to take the rest of the world to achieve the sort of amiable acceptance my husband found at work today. I’m pretty sure most of my town at least will be following suit (they do seem to toe the line, so if this is the official story, well, cool). I’m pretty sure our lives might, in a sense, be getting better. I’ve felt somewhat like a hostage in my own home with the prevailing intolerance.

But my husband’s practice is going to be pretty busy, I think. He’s been trolling the blogosphere, taking the pulse, as it were. There are clearly a large number of fundamentalists who just can’t accept this. The level of hardheadedness and idiocy they’re displaying isn’t very heartening. Maybe they should go to church and hear what their pastors have to say about it.

Of course if they’re Pentecostal, they’ll insist the Devil planted those bones. He’s sure got a big collection, what with the dinosaurs and all.

Sexism, Racism, Nationalism, Xenophobia, and the PTA

The objectification of women is just one example (albeit one of the worst) of the process of creating an Other which a person can then feel free to use, abuse, or simply hate. It’s for some reason part of human nature. Probably part of our Stone Age brain, evolved when tribes really did need to be wary of people outside of the tribe. But now it’s much less acceptable to hate people for being part of another “tribe” (read “race”). So it’s easier to make it about a person’s sex. I mean, there are some real differences between men and women, so it’s easy to justify the perception of otherness. But of course we’re all people. (The same regrettable process underlies the rampant hatred of homosexuals.)

In North America the native peoples, in their own languages, always referred to their own nation with a word that meant “The People.” (Of course, the names we’ve given the nations usually came from their enemies. “Navajo,” for example, is the Hopi word for “head basher,” because that’s how the Navajo killed the Hopi when they fought.) They recognized their own People-hood, but not that of outsiders.

Nationalism still seems to hold sway. The same sort of men who objectify women (and, in private, I’m sure, other races) have no trouble seeing the citizens of “enemy” nations (religions?) as less than human. One man littering Bloggernista’s blog with belligerent posts insists that we ought to be bombing Iran (he’s got a rooster as his avatar…you think he knows he’s a cock?). In case you’ve forgotten what bombing does to people, watch this video from Christmastime again, and please note two things: one, those Iraqi faces don’t look like evil terrorists to me; two, there’s grieving on plenty of American faces, too. (Do we really want to get involved in another war? Who in their right mind would say we ought to be bombing Iran?)

Of course terrorists have long been good at seeing enemy people as less than human. How else could they do what they do? But surely everyone knows that two wrongs do NOT make a right. An Israeli leader whose name I forget once said to the Palestinian terrorists, “I don’t hate you for what you’ve done to us. I hate you for what you’ve made us become.” I don’t want America to become (though I fear it’s too late) monstrous. I don’t want to be a bully on the global stage. I don’t know how to make our leaders understand that it breaks my heart (and makes me really angry) to have my tax-dollars spent to kill innocent people, or even to deny them their liberty. Yes, we do have a real enemy in the terrorists. But going around the globe bombing cities? How does this protect us? The only profit from this goes to the corporations that make the bombs and that rebuild afterward.

Sigh. Sometimes I get really sad for the world. It’s such an amazing place. And the role we play here could be one of responsible, loving community, community with our human and our non-human neighbors. I get juiced when I observe nature, when I share a cup of tea with a friend, when I stare into my husband’s eyes. But some people seem to get juiced when they watch planes drop bombs on our enemies, when they read headlines about atrocities, when they watch a flag wave over a pile of rubble. What has to happen to a boy to make a man turn out like that? That’s where we need to focus our attention, I think.

Before, dear reader, you imagine that I think this is only a male problem, let me freely acknowledge that there are some really messed up women, too. (Ann Coulter is a glaring example.) I’m a housewife with kids in elementary school, and I see women at school assemblies, and hear talk about them from those same friends over tea, who seem to thrive on conflict, though at a much smaller than national level. Same reason many marriages don’t make it. What makes someone feed on strife? Personally, it gives me indigestion.

The Objectification of Women and the Misogyny of the Abrahamic Religions

I was recently invited to participate again in a private online poetry workshop I used to frequent. The first poem I read there to offer critique dealt (beautifully, in that oblique way poetry can do) with the objectification of women, in this case, as sex objects. And it is a quandary for men (this was written by a man, from his perspective as a man lusting after a woman he recognizes is more than an object yet can’t help desiring), especially in this consumer culture where images of women are used to sell everything from shaving cream to cars. My family had actually had a conversation recently about this very thing, and we made some parallels with religion. My son, who’s been raised in this house to understand that women are (surprise!) human beings just like men, had trouble even understanding what we were talking about when we referred to the objectification of women, so we had to explain it to him. Because it’s not just about women as objects of sexual desire. A chauvinist will use a woman in lots of ways to stroke his ego, not just by screwing her. Sometimes he’ll boost himself up by belittling her, or by besting her, or simply by intimidating her. Of course there are some men who go even farther. Rape happens way too often, and too often goes unpunished.

The process of learning to view women as objects starts very young, when boys watch their fathers, when they watch TV, when they listen to the men around them. My son sees chauvinistic behavior already in his classmates. Some of them are downright misogynistic.

How do we change this as a society? It has to start at the family level. My husband made a parallel with religion. While our boy was still confused, not understanding how they could have such a skewed view of reality, his father reminded him that his classmates also believe that the Hebrew sky-god created the world and watches over them and gives a crap about how they do in school, or on the football field.

It’s hard to break out of a worldview that’s toxic and ingrained, but it’s worth the trouble. And speaking of parallels between the objectification of women and religion, it’s not surprising, since they’re somewhat related. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all misogynistic religions. They pin the blame for suffering and death on Eve’s alleged original sin, and so by proxy all women are evil. We watched recently a movie I’d asked for as a Christmas present. I had only seen it once before, at an art cinema in DC many years ago, when my husband was at the library studying for his boards, and I was walking home from work along M Street. It’s called Anchoress. It had been so surreal that I wasn’t sure if I’d even remembered it correctly, it was so like a dream. It deals with the clash of paganism, which exalts the act of procreation and the feminine role in it, and Christianity, which so doesn’t, in the Middle Ages. And it makes apparent the process by which men have blamed women (and the Devil) for the lust they feel (which some refuse to control) for eons.

All of this makes me think of the bad deal women get in Islamic cultures. I mean, we don’t have it easy anywhere. Might has made right for so long that women have gotten the short end of the stick in every culture. But these Islamic cultures really take the cake. Talk about objectifying women and girls. The only status they seem to have is as vessels for the honor of their fathers or husbands (or brothers, uncles, etc.). And when that honor is impugned, even just in rumor, murdering the woman is the response. Even when a girl is raped, she ends up murdered (because she had sex!) by her family. Of course this doesn’t happen every time. But even once is tragic and inane beyond words! And it happens a LOT. And many of the women in these cultures suffer Stockholm syndrome and so accept all this as the way it’s meant to be.

Recently I followed a link from my blogstats page to find a blog of someone who’d been reading mine. She’s a young Muslim woman in a western country now in love and co-habitating with a non-Muslim man. And she’s trying to figure out how to tell her parents that she loves him. My heart really goes out to her. I can only hope that her parents love her enough, the real her, not her as some sort of vessel of their honor, or upholder of tradition, but her, a real human being in love with another human being, to simply celebrate her happiness.

I can dream, can’t I?

Ubuntu

In the morning news on NPR I just heard a story about the gangs in L.A. Egads, what a mess. The chief of police has said, “Enough is enough.” (Hey, too bad I hadn’t copyrighted that…nah, I’m not really sure intellectual property rights have any validity, esp. when it comes to words anyone ought to be able to use…I’m not MacDonald’s or Disney, after all.)

The sad thing is, I can imagine a meeting sometime twenty years or so ago where fat white men with mustaches and cigars and badges laughed together at the thought of blacks and latinos killing each other off. Such a policy would, of course, be short-sighted (as well as inhumane).

The open-source Linux software Ubuntu is named for an African concept that I find wonderful (I like the software, too). It means, “I am what I am because of what we all are together.” It goes back to that interdependence thing. It needs to be recognized: at the level of families, neighborhoods, races, nations.

At the end of the story they interviewed someone, a young man at a funeral whose life was changed by the woman being buried. She’d changed the life of thousands, by offering affection and concern, unconditional love, to the children and young men/women participating in “la vida loca.”

I don’t believe in much magic. I certainly don’t believe in a personal deity, or some magical redemption to be obtained by faith or prayer. But if there’s any magic, any force that defies the laws of physics, it’s love. It takes so little energy and provides such a huge return. All it takes, really, is a little risk. A vulnerability to betrayal and disappointment. But there’s no other risk more worthwhile.

I love my husband immensely, and my children. My husband’s love has changed my life and provided healing from a less-than-ideal childhood I never would have hoped for. It’s enabled me to love myself, and to extend that love outward, to the world. When I hear about people living like these gang-bangers (or about things like the news story that followed that one, about the burgeoning tension between the Turks and the Kurds rooted in ancient hatreds and prejudices), it makes me so sad. What a waste of potential. All these human beings born with such a huge potential for love, instead learning to live full of hate.

Living in love, one walks in beauty. Clouded by hate, all one sees is ugliness, all the world colored by distrust and fear. This is one of the reasons I have to say enough is enough to all forms of ignorance, from religion to prejudice to the culture of greed and violence bred by corporate rule. Because despite the fact that I live in love, that, walking down the street I notice the forms of the myriad natural phenomena and the grace scribed therein, and greet each face, human and non-human, with an open and friendly look, I can’t help but feel frustration, sadness, grief, and yes, fear, at the hate and violence that seethes throughout most of my environment. Not only do I listen to the news, but I also hear the most horrid stories from my husband about familial violence, physical and emotional, that plagues so many in our community (and ours in not unique in that respect). And I wonder how children from these families can have any hope of learning to love, and it seems hardly surprising that even on an international scale the nations act like a dysfunctional family.

The concept of Ubuntu demands that I seek to change this situation. I can’t fully enjoy my good life unless all my neighbors can share in it.

I don’t know that Jesus ever existed. But I do know that as a mythological figure, he’s powerful enough to have entered just about every world religion. His message of love can’t really be refuted. I just wish folks would start heeding it.