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| Rasa Von Werder, photographer, is building a Mega-Website to house her work; an education / spiritual vehicle that will put God back into Sex & Sex back into Religion. It is a fall-back to our Original Source: Mother God - When She was worshiped, women were venerated & Sex was Sacred. We will revive Goddess Religion, Shaktiism, & Tantra Sex. We will teach men how to worship God through the woman's body & how to make love to Her in a pleasing manner. |
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"The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets", by Barbara G. Walker.
Eve
The biblical title of Eve, "Mother of All living,"
was translation of Kali Ma's Jaganmata. She was also known in India as Jiva or Ieva, the
Creatress of all manifested forms. In
Assyrian scriptures she was entitled Mother-Womb, Creatress of Destiny, who
made male and female human beings out of clay, "in pairs she competed
them". The first of the Bible's two
creation myths give this Assyrian version, significantly changing
"she" to "he" (Genesis 1:27).
The original Eve had no spouse except the serpent, a living phallus she created
for her own sexual pleasure. Some
ancient peoples regard the Goddess and her serpent as their first parents. Sacred icons showed the Goddess giving life to
a man, while her serpent coiled around the apple tree behind her. Deliberate misinterpretation of such icons
produced ideas for revised creation myths like the one in Genesis. Some Jewish traditions of the first century
B.C., however, identified Jehovah with the serpent deity who accompanied the
Mother in her garden. Sometimes she was
Eve, sometimes her name was given as Nahemah, Naama, or Namrael, who gave birth
to Eve and Adam without the help of any male, even the serpent.
Because Jehovah arrogantly pretended to be the sole Creator,
Eve was obliged to punish him, according to Gnostic scriptures. Though the Mother of All Living existed
before everything, the God forgot she had made him and had given him some of
her creative power. "He was even
ignorant of his own Mother…It was because he was foolish and ignorant of his
own Mother that he said, 'I am God; there is none besides me.'" Gnostic texts often show the creator
reprimanded and punished for his arrogance by a feminine power greater and
older than himself.
The secret of God's "Name of power," the Tetragrammaton, was that three quarters
of it invoked not God, but Eve. YHWH, yod-he-vau-he, came from the Hebrew root
HWH, meaning both "life" and "women" – in Latin letters,
E-V-E. With the addition of an I (yod),
it amounted to the Goddess's invocation of her own name as the Word of
creation, a common idea in Egypt
and other ancient lands.
Gnostic scriptures said Adam was created by the power of
Eve's word, not God's. She said,
"Adam, live! Rise up upon the earth!"
As soon as she spoke the word, her word became reality. Adam rose up and opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said, 'You will be called
"the mother of the living," because you are the one who gave me
life."
Adam's name meant he was formed of clay moistened with
blood, the female magic of adamah or
"bloody clay". He didn't
produce the Mother of All Living from his rib; in earlier Mesopotamian stories,
he was produced from hers. His
Babylonian predecessor Adapa (or Adamu) was deprived of eternal life not by the
Goddess, but by a hostile God.
The biblical idea was a reversal of older myths in which the
Goddess brought forth a primal male ancestor, then made him her mate – the
ubiquitous, archetypal divine-incest relationship traceable in every
mythology. The reversal was not even
original with biblical authors. It was
evolved by Aryan patriarchs who called Brahma
the primal male ancestor. They claimed
their god brought forth the Mother of All Living from his own body, then mated
with her, so she gave birth to the rest of the universe. The Hebraic version, a wombless God made his
offspring with his own hands, and the actual birth-giving was left to
Adam. The Bible as revised by
patriarchal scribes said nothing about divine birth-giving, since the scribes
were determined to separate the concept of "deity" and
"mother" insofar as possible.
Gnostic scriptures however reverted to the older tradition
and said Eve not only created Adam and obtained his admission to heaven; she
was the very soul within him, as Shakti was the soul of every Hindu god and
yogi. Adam couldn't live without
"power from the Mother," so she descended to earth as "the Good
Spirit, the Thought of Light called by him 'life' (Hawwa)." She entered into Adam as his guiding spirit
of conscience: "It is she who works
at the creature, exerts herself on him, set him in his own perfect temple,
enlightens him on the origin of his deficiency, and shows him his (way of)
ascent." Through her, Adam was able
to rise above the ignorance imposed on him by the male God.
By this Gnostic route came the Midrashic assertion that Adam
and Eve were originally androgynous, like Shiva and his Shakti. She dwelt in him, and he in her; they were
two souls united in one body, which God later tore apart, depriving them of
their bliss of union. Cabalists took up
the idea and said the paradise of Eden
can be regained only when two sexes are once more united; even God must be
united with his female counterpart, the heavenly Eve called Shekina.
Another Gnostic version of the story made God the true
villain, who cursed Adam and Eve and expelled them from paradise out of
jealousy of their happiness. He also
lusted after the Virgin Eve, raped her, and begot her sons Jahveh and Elohim,
whose other names were Cain and Abel.
Here was one of several myths that made Eve the mother not only of Adam,
but also of Jehovah, and of all the elements as well. The myths went on to say the first Eve's
offspring ruled the male elements of fire and air; the second ruled the female
elements of earth and water.
Like her prototype Kali Jaganmata, Eve brought forth death
as well as life – that is, she brought forth all living forms, all of which
were subjected to death for the very reason that they were alive. Under patriarchal system of belief, the fact
that every living thing is doomed to die was blamed on the Mother who gave it a
finite life. Instead of blaming God for
casting Adam out of the paradise where he might have lived forever, the
patriarchs blamed Eve for bringing this about.
"Because of her we all die."
Fathers of the Christian Church said Eve conceived by the serpent and
brought forth Death. The seeds of all
women already existed in Eve, St. John Chrysostom maintained, so that in her
sin "the whole female race transgressed."
The book of Enoch said God created death to punish all
humanity for Eve's sin, but many patriarchal thinkers hesitated to blame God
even indirectly. The prevalent opinion
was that when Eve disobeyed the deity, death somehow just happened. St.
Paul blamed only Eve, absolving Adam from guilt for
the apple-eating incident: "Adam
was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression"
(1 Timothy 2:14). A church council
announced in 418 A.D. that it was heresy to say death was a necessity rather
than the result of Eve's disobedience.
This was the real origin of the church father's fear and
hatred of women, which expanded into a sexist attitude that permeated all of
western society: Women was identified
with Death. Her countervailing
responsibility for birth was taken away, and the creation of life was laid to
the credit of the Father-god, whose priests claimed he could remove the curse
of death. As every women was understood
to be an emanation of Eve. Tertullian
said to Everywoman:
And do you know that
you are an Eve? The sentence of God on
this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway…the first deserter
of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant
enough to attack. You destroyed so
easily God's image, man. On account of
your desert – that is, death, even the Son of God had to die.
Medieval theologians said Adam was forgiven. Christ
descended into hell and recued Adam along with other biblical patriarchs. He escorted Adam into heaven, saying,
"Peace be to thee and to all the just among thy sons." But for Eve there was no forgiveness. No peace was offered to her or her
daughters. Presumably, they were left behind
in hell. Christian theologians espoused
the same theory as Persian patriarchs, that heaven was closed to all women
except those who were submissive and worshipped their husbands as gods. Even modern theologians naively blame human
death on the Edenic sin. Rahner said,
"Man's death is the demonstration of the fact that he has fallen away from
God…Death is guilt make visible."
Theologians have not yet dealt with the question of what
"guilt" causes death among non-human creatures.
Actually, churches depend for their very existence on the
orthodox myth of Eve. "Take the
snake, the fruit tree, and the woman from the tableau, and we have no fall, no
frowning Judge, no Inferno, no everlasting punishment – hence no need of a
Savior. Thus the bottom falls out of the
whole Christian theology."
Equally destructive to the Christian theology would be
restoration of books arbitrarily excluded from the canon, such as the Apocalypse of Adam, in which Adam stated that he and Eve were created together
but she was his superior. She brought
with her "a glory which she had seen in the aeon from which we had come
forth. She taught me a word of
knowledge… And we resembled the great eternal angels, for we were higher than
the God who created us"
Some of these once-sacred books made Eve superior to both
Adam and the creator. It was she, not
God, who gave Adam his soul and brought him to life. It was she, not God, who cast down the evil
deities from heaven and made them demons.
And she, as the eternal female Power, would eventually judge the God she
created, find him guilty of injustice, and destroy him.
As an allegory, this might reflect a social truth. Fragile constructs of the collective mind,
gods are easily destroyed by those who ignore them. Early Gnostic documents show that most women
of the ancient world were disposed to ignore the God who was said to have
cursed their sex and their descendants forever.
Had one of the other versions of the Eve myth prevailed over the
canonical version, sexual behaviour patterns in western civilization almost
certainly would have evolved along very different lines. Christianity managed to project man's fear of
death onto woman, not to respect her as Kali the Destroyer was respected, but
to hate her.
The uncanonical scriptures were no more and no less creditable
than the canonical ones. Their picture
of Eve as God's stern mother, the defender of mankind against a tyrannical
demon-deity, had more adherents in the early Christian centuries than the
picture that is now familiar. One of
Christianity's best-kept secrets was that the Mother of All Living was the
Creatress who chastised God.
Postscript
One of her Tantric names was Adita Eva, "the Very
Beginning." In northern Babylonia
Eve was known s "the divine lady of Eden," or "Goddess of the
Tree of Life." Assyrians called her Nin-Eveh, "Holy Lady Eve,"
after whom their capital city was named.
Eve was of the common Middle-Eastern names of the superior
feminine power. To the Hittites, she was
Hawwah, "life." To the Persians,
she was Hvov, "the Earth."
Aramaeans called her Hawah, "Mother of All Living." In Anatolia she was Hebat or Hebat, with a Greek derivative
Hebe, "Virgin Mother of Earth," with the same relationship to the
Great Goddess Hera as Kore – Persephone to Demeter, and Hebe may have been an
eponymous ancestress of "Hebrews." A semitic root of her names was havy, a matrilineal kinship group, once
considered the "life" of every tribe by direct descent from the
Creatress. The names of Eve, the
Serpent, and "Life" are derived from the same root in Arabic.
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| Rasa Von Werder, photographer, is building a Mega-Website to house her work; an education / spiritual vehicle that will put God back into Sex & Sex back into Religion. It is a fall-back to our Original Source: Mother God - When She was worshiped, women were venerated & Sex was Sacred. We will revive Goddess Religion, Shaktiism, & Tantra Sex. We will teach men how to worship God through the woman's body & how to make love to Her in a pleasing manner. |
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Bitch
This became a naughty word in Christian Europe because it
was one of the most sacred titles of the Goddess, Artemis-Diana, leader of the
Scythian alani or "hunting
dogs." The Bitch-goddess of
antiquity was known in all Indo-European cultures, beginning with the Great
Bitch Sarama who led the Vedic dogs of death.
The Old English word for a hunting dog, bawd, also became a naughty word because it applied to the divine
Huntress's promiscuous priestesses as well as her dogs.
Harlots and "Bitches" were identified in the
ancient Roman cult of Goddess Lupa, the Wolf Bitch, whose priestesses the lupae gave their name to prostitutes in
general. Earthly representatives of the
Wolf Bitch ruled the Roman town of Ira Flavia in
Spain ,
as a queen or series of queens named Lupa.
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