Читать книгу The Women’s History of the World - Rosalind Miles - Страница 16

As women, they ‘were’ the Goddess on earth, as her representative or descendant, and little distinction was made between her sacred and secular power – the Greek historian Herodotus describing the real-life reign of the very down-to-earth Queen Sammuramat (Semiramis), who ruled Assyria for forty-two years during which she irrigated the whole of Babylon and led military campaigns as far as India, interchangeably calls her ‘the daughter of the Goddess’ and ‘the Goddess’ herself. As this indicates, the power of the Goddess was inherited, passed from mother to daughter in a direct line. A man only became king when he married the source of power; he did not hold it in his own right. So in the eighteenth dynasty of the Egyptian monarchy the Pharaoh Thutmose I had to yield the throne on the death of his wife to his teenage daughter Hatshepsut, even though he had two sons. The custom of royal blood and the right to rule descending in the female line occurs in many cultures: among the Natchez Indians of the Gulf of Mexico, the high chief of Great Sun only held rank as the son of the tribe’s leading elder, the White Woman. When she died, her daughter became the White Woman and it was her son who next inherited the throne, thus retaining the kingly title and descent always in the female line. This tradition was still evident in Japan at the time of the Wei dynasty (A.D. 220–264) when the death of the priestess-queen Himeko led to a serious outbreak of civil war that ended only with the coronation of her eldest daughter.

The power of the queen was at its most extraordinary in Egypt, where for thousands of years she was ruler, goddess, wife of the god, the high priestess and a totem object of veneration all in one. Hatshepsut who like Sammuramat fought at the head of her troops, also laid claim to masculine power and prerogative, and was honoured accordingly in a form of worship that lasted for 800 years after her death: ‘Queen of the north and south, Son of the Sun, golden Horus, giver of years, Goddess of dawns, mistress of the world, lady of both realms, stimulator of all hearts, the powerful woman’.²³ But the frequent appearance of the queen as ruler, not simply consort, was by no means confined to the Egyptian dynasties. Queenhood was so common among the Celtic Britons that the captured warriors brought in triumph before Claudius in A.D. 50 totally ignored the Roman emperor and offered their obeisance instead to his empress, Agrippina. Perhaps the most interesting of all, however, is Deborah, leader of the Israelites around 1200 B.C.; in Judges 4 and 5, she holds evident and total command over the male leaders of the tribe, whose dependency on her is so total that their general, Barak, will not even take to the field of battle without her. Early Jewish history is rich in such powerful and distinguished women:

A Jewish princess? Judith, who saved the Jewish people; she flirted with the attacking general, drank him under the table; then she and her maid (whose name is not in the story) whacked off his head, stuck it in a picnic basket and escaped back to the Jewish camp. They staked his head high over the gate, so that when his soldiers charged the camp they were met by their general’s bloody head, looming; and ran away as fast as their goyishe little feet could run. Then Judith set her maid free and all the women danced in her honor. That’s a Jewish princess.²⁴

Nor was female power and privilege at this time confined to princesses and queens. From all sides there is abundant evidence that ‘when agriculture replaced hunting . . . and society wore the robes of matriarchy’, all women ‘achieved a social and economic importance’,²⁵ and enjoyed certain basic rights: