Читать книгу The Women’s History of the World - Rosalind Miles - Страница 23

Holy Shiva, Divine Linganaut,

Heavenly Root, Celestial Penis,

Phallus Lord, thy radiant lingam is so large that neither Brahma nor Vishnu can reckon its extent.

HINDU PRAYER

He let fly an arrow, it pierced her belly,

Her inner parts he clove, he split her heart,

He destroyed her life,

He felled her body and stood triumphant upon it.

King Marduk overthrows the Great Mother in the Babylonian Epic of Creation, c. 2000 B.C.

Men look to destroy every quality in a woman that will give her the powers of a male, for she is in their eyes already armed with the power that brought them forth.

NORMAN MAILER

‘In the beginning,’ writes Marilyn French, ‘was the Mother.’ That mother, as her ‘children’ saw her, is still with us today – her outsize breasts, bulging belly and buttocks, flaring vulva and tree-trunk thighs survive in the familiar figurines found in their tens of thousands in Europe alone. Against this massive, elemental force the human male cut a poor figure indeed. Every myth, every song in praise of the Great Goddess stressed by contrast the littleness of man, often in caustically satiric terms – the illustrated Papyrus of Tameniu of the twenty-first Egyptian dynasty (1102–952 B.C.) shows her naked, over-arching the whole world, flaunting her star-spangled breasts, belly and pubic zone, while the boy-god Geb, flat on the ground, reaches up to her in vain with a phallus that although exaggerated, plainly is not man enough for the occasion. Nor was this the limit of the sexual humiliations the Great Mother would exact. Among the Winnepagos of Canada, a brave who dreamed of the Goddess, even once, knew himself singled out for a terrible fate, that of becoming cinaedi, a homosexual compelled to wear women’s garb and to submit in every way to the sexual demands of other males. There are countless similar examples from widely different cultures of the Goddess’s dreaded and inexorable power: as Robert Graves explains, ‘under the Great Mother, woman was the dominant sex and man her frightened victim.’¹

For when all meaning, all magic, all life lay with woman, man had no function, no significance at all. ‘The baby, the blood, the yelling, the dancing, all that concerns the women,’ declared an Australian Aboriginal: ‘men have nothing to do but copulate.’ Into this vacuum, as consciousness deepened, came envy, the ‘uterus-envy of female-protest within men awed by the apparently exclusive female power of creation of new life’. Resentful of the women’s monopoly of all nature’s rhythms, men were driven to invent their own. In origin, however, these male-centred rituals consisted of no more than attempts to mimic the biological action of women’s bodies, a debt openly acknowledged by many still-surviving Stone Age cultures: ‘in the beginning we had nothing . . . we took these things from the women.’²

Typical of numerous such imitations worldwide was the hideous Aztec rite of dressing a sacrificing priest in the skin of his human sacrifice. He would then ‘burst from the bleeding human skin as the germinating shoot from the husk of the grain’, becoming both the new life and the one who gives birth by the power of his magic.³ More horrific still was the fate that befell every boy initiate in the Aranda tribe of Australia:

. . . the ritual surgeon seizes the boy’s penis, inserts a long thin bone deep into the urethra, and slashes at the penis again and again with a small piece of flint used as a scalpel. He cuts through the layers of flesh until he reaches the bone, and the penis splits open like a boiled frankfurter.⁴

This hideous ceremony, christened ‘sub-incision’ by the white settlers, tormented their civilized minds – what possible purpose could it serve? Had they understood Aranda, all would have been clear. The Aboriginal word for ‘split penis’ derives from the term for the vagina, and the title ‘possessor of a vulva’ is the honorific bestowed on all boys who undergo the ordeal. Later rituals also included the regular re-opening of the wound to demonstrate that the initiate could now ‘menstruate’.⁵

It was, in Margaret Mead’s words, ‘as if men can only become men by taking over the functions that women perform naturally.’⁶ For Jung, the secret of all male initiation rituals lay in ‘going through the mother again’, embracing the fear, the pain and the blood in order to be born anew not as a child but as a man and a hero. ‘Through the mother’, though, does not imply any sympathetic identification with the female. On the contrary, the key element is the takeover of birth as a male mystery, the first ‘weapon in the men’s struggle to shake off the feminine domination created by the matriarchy’.⁷ This struggle of men not merely to imitate and outdo, but to usurp women’s power of creating new life took place on every level; Zeus giving birth to Athene from his head is a classic reversal of the primal creation myth that finds a parallel in many other mythologies. It was nothing less than a revolution: of the weak against the strong, of the oppressed against their oppression, of value structures and habits of thought.

And human thought was itself progressing along lines that eased the way towards the domination of males. As human beings crossed the mental threshold between interpreting events in symbolic and magical terms, and the dawning realization of cause and effect, man’s part in the making of babies became clear. Now women’s rhythms were seen to be human, not divine, and the knowledge that man determined pregnancy completed the revolution that his resentment and resistance had already set in train. Historian Jean Markdale sums it up:

When man began to assert that he was essential to fertilization, the old mental attitudes suddenly collapsed. This was a very important revolution in man’s history, and it is astonishing that it is not rated equally with the wheel, agriculture, and the use of metals . . . As the male had been cheated for centuries . . . equality was not enough. He now understood the full implications of his power, and was going to dominate . . .⁸

And what better weapon of dominance was there to hand but the phallus? As man began to carve out some meaning for himself to set against woman’s eternal, innate potency, what would serve his turn better than man’s best friend, his penis. In its fragile human form, prey to unbidden arousal, stubborn refusal and unpredictable deflation, it could not challenge women’s unfailing power of birth. But elevated above reality into symbol, transformed into ‘phallus’ and enshrined in materials known to be proof against detumescence like metal and stone, it would do very well.

At a stroke, then, the power was there at man’s bidding. Now he was transformed from an unregarded afterthought of creation whose manhood held no magic for any except himself, to the whole secret and origin of the Great Mother’s life force. The power was not hers, but his. His was the sacred organ of generation; and the phallus, not the uterus, was the source of all that lived. Power to the phallus became the imperative (to, from, by, in and of the phallus); and so a new religion was born.

This is not to suggest that the penis and its symbolic equivalent the phallus were unknown to these early societies before the discovery of biological paternity began to sweep the world around the beginnings of the Iron Age, some 3500 years ago. Phallic emblems made their appearance in the earliest recorded living sites, and from the time of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (around 9000–8000 B.C. in the Near East), they occur in impressive size and profusion. At Grimes Grave in Norfolk, England, for example, an altar discovered in the bowels of the abandoned Neolithic flint mine workings bore a cup, seven deer anders, and a mighty phallus carved in chalk, all set out as offerings to the figure of the Great Goddess reared up before it. For whatever their proportions (and some of the lovingly wrought models in clay or stone display a truly impressive capacity for wishful thinking), these emblems were only fashioned as part of the worship of the Goddess, and were not sacred in themselves.

Paradoxically then, it was the Great Goddess herself who first established the cult of the phallus. In the myth of Isis, whose worship spread from the Near East throughout Asia and into Europe, the Goddess ordered a wooden lingam of Osiris to be set up in her temple at Thebes. Subsequently the worship of the Goddess involved making offerings to her of phallic emblems or tokens; the women of Egypt carried images of Osiris in their sacred processions, each one equipped with a movable phallus ‘of disproportionate magnitude’, according to one disgruntled observer, while a similar model in the Goddess-worship of Greek women had a phallus whose movements the celebrants could control with strings. In this state of ecstatic animation, the god was conveyed to the temple, where the most respected matrons of the town waited to crown the phallus with garlands and kisses in honour of the Great Goddess, as a sign that she accepted the tribute of phallic service.⁹

But once promoted from jobbing extra to leading man in the primal drama, the penis proved to be hungry for the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd. In Greece, phalluses sprang up everywhere, like dragon’s teeth; guardian Herms (phallus-pillars) flourished their potency on every street corner, while by the third century B.C., Delos boasted an avenue of mammoth penises, supported on bulging testicles, shooting skyward like heavy cannon. Across the Adriatic in Italy, the god Phalles was familiar to every family as one of its regular household deities, and many cities like Pompeii were entirely given over to the worship of the phallus-god, Priapus – a fact that disapproving later sages were quick to connect with its destruction by Vesuvius in A.D. 79. In Dorset, England, the ancient Britons poured the pride of their creation into the huge hill-figure of the Cerne Abbas Giant – forty feet tall, he glares out to history brandishing a chest-high erection and a massive phallic club to ram home the message of his mightiest member.

No country in the world, however, embraced phallus worship with more enthusiasm than India. There, as its mythologizers insisted, was to be found ‘the biggest penis in the world’, the ‘celestial rod’ of the god Shiva, which grew until it shafted through all the lower worlds and towered up to dwarf the heavens. This so overawed two other principal gods of the Hindu pantheon, Brahma and Vishnu, that they fell down and worshipped it, and ordered all men and women to do likewise. How well this commandment was obeyed for many thousands of years may be gauged from bewildered Western accounts of a long-standing custom. Traders, missionaries and colonial invaders recorded that every day a priest of Shiva would emerge naked from the temple and proceed through the streets, ringing a little bell which was the signal for all the women to come out and kiss the holy genitals of the representative of the god.¹⁰ To the average Victorian Englishman, it must have seemed like phallus in wonderland.

With its rise to sacred status, the phallus increased in significance, as well as in size and sanctity. From this epoch onwards, male superiority becomes vested in and expressed through this one organ, as an ever-present reminder of masculine power. By extension, and the extension was limitless, the phallus then becomes the source not only of power, but of all cultural order and meaning. For men, clasping and invoking the penis validated all greetings and promises; among the Romans the testes underwrote every testament, while an Arab would declare ‘O Father of Virile Organs, bear witness to my oath,’ and as a mark of respect suffer any sheikh or patriarch to examine his genitals on meeting.¹¹

Over women the power of the sacred phallus began to make itself felt in a number of ways. In the temples of Shiva, a slave girl specially chosen for her ‘lotus-beauty’ was consecrated to ‘the divine penis’ and tattooed on her breasts and shaven groin with the emblem of the god. Worldwide, both historical records and archaeological evidence confirm women’s practices of imprecating, touching, kissing or even mounting sacred phalluses of wood or stone as a cure for infertility from the ‘phallus lord’, who may well have been also the original recipient of their virginity. In the remote villages of southern France, to the deep embarrassment of the Catholic church, the Provençal ‘Saint’ Foutin was worshipped in all the pride of his priapic magnificence as late as the seventeenth century. This was under constant threat from the women’s habit of scraping shavings from the wooden end to boil into a potion to promote conception; but it was always renewed by the priests, who sustained the saint’s reputation as ‘the inexhaustible penis’ by surreptitious mallet-taps to the other end behind the altar.¹² Perhaps most sinister of all was the Celtic ritual still in use in Wales as late as the reign of Hywel Dda (Howel the Good), 909–950 A.D.. There, if a woman wanted to prosecute a man for rape, she had to swear to the offence with one hand on a relic of the saints, while with the other she grasped ‘the peccant member’ of her offender¹³ – to prick his conscience, perhaps? This reminder that the male organ can be a weapon of war as well as an instrument of love is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the monumental phallus at Karnak erected by King Meneptha of Egypt in 1300 B.C.; its inscription records that the king cut off all the penises of his defeated enemies after a battle and brought home a total of 13,240.

As the date of this episode shows, the rise of the phallus did not mean the immediate overthrow of the Great Goddess. On the contrary it is fascinating to observe how the myths, stories and rituals of her worship were adapted over a considerable period of time to accommodate the accelerating rhythms of the male principal in its thrust towards full centrality. The devolution of power from Goddess to God, from Queen to King, from Mother to Father, took place in stages, which may be as plainly detected in world mythology as strata in rock. In the first phase, the Great Mother alone is or creates the world; she has casual lovers and many children, but she is primal and supreme. In the second, she is described or illustrated as having a consort, who may be her son, little brother or primeval toy-boy; originally very much her junior, he grows in power to become her spouse. At the third stage, the God-King-Spouse rules equally with the Goddess, and the stage is set for her dethronement; finally the Man-God kings it alone, with Goddess, mother and woman, defeated and dispossessed, trapped in a downward spiral which humankind has only recently begun to arrest, let alone reverse.¹⁴

Mythologies are never static, and even to divide this development into phases is to suggest an organizational logic that historical processes rarely possess. Different developments occurred over different times in different places, and even when men had made themselves into kings and held gods and goddesses under their sway, they found it still advisable to honour the old customs and pay the Great Mother her due. ‘The Goddess Ishtar loved me – thus I became king,’ declared Sargon of Assyria in the eighth century B.C.¹⁵

Other records of religious and political rituals in these early kingdoms abundantly testify to the fact that the king’s power, however great, was not absolute; a king of Celtic Ireland had to perform the banfheis rígí, or ‘marriage-mating’, with ‘the Great Queen’, the spirit of Ireland, before he could be accepted as king by the people. For the kings of Babylon, this duty was literal, not symbolic. Their power had to be renewed every year, and was only confirmed when the royal embodiment of the sacred phallus was seen to consummate his ‘divine marriage’ with the high priestess of the Great Mother in a public ceremony on a stage before all the populace.¹⁶

The Great Goddess still had some power, then, and the evidence suggests that the ruling men neglected the due observances at their peril. On the wider horizon, however, an interlocking series of profound social changes combined to shake these early civilizations to their foundations, and the force of events conspired with the new aggressive phallic impetus to drive out the last remaining elements of the power of the Goddess and the accompanying ‘mother-right’. Broadly, these changes arose from the population growth that resulted from the first successful social organization. They derived from the most basic of imperatives, the need for food. Nigel Calder explains the nature of the development that helped to push women from the centre of life to its margins:

From Southern Egypt 18,000 years ago comes the earliest evidence for cultivation of barley and wheat in riverside gardens . . . feminine laughter no doubt disturbed the water-birds when the women came with a bag of seed to invent crops. Perhaps it was a waste of good food and nothing to tell the men about – yet it took only moments to poke the seeds into the ready-made cracks in the mud . . . The women knew little of plant genetics, but the grain grew and ripened before the sun parched the ground entirely, and when they came back with stone sickles they must have felt a certain goddess-like pride.¹⁷

This ‘goddess-like’ control of nature by women continued, Calder judges, for 10,000 to 15,000 years. But from about 8000 years ago, an upsurge in population enforced changes in the way that food was produced. By degrees agriculture, heavier and more intensive, replaced women’s horticulture. Where previously women had worked with nature in a kind of sympathetic magic as her natural ally, now men had to tame and dominate nature to make it deliver what they determined. The new methods involved in agriculture found an equally damaging symbolic echo in the male/female roles and relationships, as a Hindu text, The Institutes of Mana from around A.D. 100, makes plain: ‘The woman is considered in law as the field and the man as the grain.’ Where the Goddess had been the only source of life, now woman had neither seed nor egg; she was the passive field, only fertile if ploughed, while man, drunk with the power of his new-found phallocentricity, was plough, seed, grain-chute and ovipositor all in one.

As planned husbandry and domestication of land replaced casual cultivation, the more the role of the male strengthened and centralized. Paradoxically, this was also true of those groups who failed to produce enough from the land to live on. For those tribes, any shortage or failure of crops brought enforced migration, which also necessarily involved warfare, as groups already established on fertile territory banded together to resist the invaders.¹⁸ Both in the group’s nomadic wanderings and in any fighting which resulted, men had the advantage, as they had superior muscle power and mobility, over women encumbered with children. All women’s earlier hard-won skills of cultivation became useless when the tribe was on the move. Meanwhile, men driven by the darker side of phallicism seized the upper hand through aggression and military organization. As these clashes of force inevitably produced dominant and submissive groups, winners and losers, determining rank, slavery and subjection, it was not possible for women to escape from this framework. Caught between the violence of ploughshare and sword, women had to lose.

There could be only one outcome. However, wherever, and whenever it came in the millennia immediately before the birth of Christ, all the mythologies speak of the overthrow of the Great Mother Goddess. In the simplest version of the story, like that of the Semitic Babylonians, the god-king Marduk wages war on Ti’amat, the Mother of All Things, and hacks her to pieces. Only after her death can he form the world, from the pieces of her body, as it rightfully should be. This motif is astonishingly consistent through a number of widely separated cultures, as witness this Tiwi creation myth from central Africa:

Puvi made the country the first time. The sea was all fresh water. She made the land, sea and islands . . . Puriti said, ‘Don’t kill our mother.’ But Iriti went ahead and killed her. He struck her on the head. Her urine made the sea salty and her spirit went into the sky . . .¹⁹

In other versions of the story, the Great Goddess is defeated, but lives. Celtic folk myth relates how the Three Wise Ones (the Goddess in her triad form), Emu, Banbha and Fódla, meet the sons of Mil the war god in battle, but after many violent clashes are subdued and humbled to the power of the invader. Whatever form it takes, the fundamental power-shift from female to male is reflected in all mythologies. Among the Greeks, Apollo took over the Goddess’s most sacred oracle at Delphi; the Kikuyu of Africa still relate how their ancestors overthrew their women by ganging up in a scheme to rape all their women on the same day, so that nine months later they could overmaster the pregnant women with impunity; while for the Aztecs, Xochiquetzel the Earth Mother gave birth to a son Huitzilopochtli, who killed her daughter the Moon Goddess and took her place as the ruler of heaven, killing and scattering all her other children in his rage for domination.

This pattern of defeat and partial survival finds a frequent expression in the motif employed here, the victory of the sun god over the moon, who is always female. In the Japanese version, the goddess Ama-terasu, the supreme deity of the Shinto pantheon, is attacked by the god Susa-nu-wo, who destroys her rice fields and pollutes her sacred places with faeces and dead flesh. Although she fights him, he ‘steals her light’, and she only regains half her previous power, and so may only shine by night.²⁰ Just as in the historical shift from horticulture to agriculture, this apparently natural development masked some profound and irreversible changes in the relations between men and women, even in the ways of thought:

The divinity of the sun, lord of time and space, was essentially masculine – the phallic sunbeams striking down on Mother Earth – a maleness whose rays impregnate the earth and cause the seeds to germinate. From Spain to China, the prehistoric sun stood for maleness, individual self-consciousness, intellect and the glaring light of knowledge, as against the moon ruler of the tide, the womb, the waters of the ocean, darkness and the dream-like unconscious . . . solarization, the victory of the male sun god over the female moon goddess . . . implied the collapse of the female-oriented cyclical fertility cults and the rise to supremacy of the male concept of linear history, consisting of unrepeatable events . . .²¹

Nor was the overthrow of the female simply a mythological theme. Women of power in real life came under attack, as men sought to wrest from them their authority in a number of different ways. Where royalty passed through the female line, a bold adventurer could commandeer it by enforcing marriage on the queen, or seizing possession by rape – Tamyris the Scythian ruler fought off a ‘proposal’ of this sort from Cyrus the Great of Persia in the sixth century B.C. Others were not so lucky. When Berenice II of Egypt refused to marry her young nephew Ptolemy Alexander in 80 B.C., he had her murdered. The violence of this outrage is demonstrated by the fact that the loyal Alexandrians then rose up and killed him.²² But in general kings were more successful in retaining the powers they usurped. From this period of aggressive male encroachment on female prerogative comes the introduction of royal incest, when the king who was unwilling to vacate the throne on the death of his wife, would marry the rightful heir, her daughter. Alternatively, he would marry one of his sons to the new queen; this had the double benefit of keeping the monarchy under male control, and by degrees weaving sons into the fabric of inheritance until their right superseded that of any daughter.

Under these circumstances, ruling women rapidly became pawns in male power-games, their importance only acknowledged by the lengths men went to to possess or control them. Galla Placida, daughter of the Roman Emperor Theodosius the Great, was captured by the Visigoth Alaric at the sack of Rome, and after his death taken over by his brother. On the murder of the brother, she was handed back to the Romans, and forcibly married to their victorious general Constantius, who designated her Augusta, and as ‘Augustus’ ruled as her co-emperor. When Constantius died, her brother exiled her to Constantinople and took the throne, and only when her son became emperor in 425 A.D. did she achieve any peace or stability.

There are countless historical examples from all countries of royal women, through whom inheritance or claim to the throne would pass, being exploited as pawns in the power game, and then disposed of. A classic story is that of Almasuntha, queen of the Ostrogoths: made regent on behalf of her son when her father King Theodoric died in A.D. 526, Almasuntha was forcibly married by the late king’s nephew when her son died, and then, as soon as the usurper had secured his power, put to death.

Women of royal blood were not alone in experiencing men’s rage to dominate, to downgrade and destroy. With written records come the first in a series of orchestrated attacks on women’s nature, their rights in their children, even their right to full human existence. The sun-moon dualism now becomes extended into a cosmic system of polar opposition; whatever man is, woman is not, and with this imposition of the principle of sexual contrast comes the gradual definition of man as commanding all the human skills and abilities, woman as the half-formed, half-baked opposite. By the fourth century B.C., Aristotle’s summary of the sexual differences in human nature said no more than any man or woman of his age would have accepted as fact:

Man is active, full of movement, creative in politics, business and culture. The male shapes and moulds society and the world. Woman, on the other hand, is passive. She stays at home, as is her nature. She is matter waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active elements are always higher on any scale, and more divine. Man consequently plays a major part in reproduction; the woman is merely the passive incubator of his seed . . . the male semen cooks and shapes the menstrual blood into a new human being . . .²³

Once articulated, the denigrations of women flood forth unchecked as war-leaders, politicians and historians like Xenophon, Cato and Plutarch worry away at the ‘woman problem’:

The gods created woman for the indoors functions, the man for all others. The gods put woman inside because she has less tolerance for cold, heat and war. For woman it is honest to remain indoors and dishonest to gad about. For the man, it is shameful to remain shut up at home and not occupy himself with affairs outside.²⁴

You must keep her on a tight rein . . . Women want total freedom, or rather total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be any easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters . . .²⁵

I certainly do not give the name ‘love’ to the feeling one has for women and girls, any more than we would say flies are in love with milk, bees with honey, or breeders with the calves and fowl they fatten in the dark . . .²⁶

As Plutarch here reminds us, for the Greeks there was ‘only one genuine love, that which boys inspire’. The homosexuality of ancient Greece in fact institutionalized the supremacy of the phallus, denying women any social or emotional role other than childbearing. But to the emerging male, newly born into consciousness and thinking with his phallus, it seemed inescapable that such a creature should have as little part as possible in his children: and in the famous ‘Judgement of Apollo’ at the climax of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the sun god obligingly pronounced:

The mother is not the parent of that which is called her child: but only nurse of the newly planted seed that grows. The parent is he who mounts.

In this simple, brutal diktat phallic thought reversed the primeval creation beliefs of thousands of years. Woman was no longer the vessel of nature, creating man. Now man created woman as a vessel for himself. As the sun overthrew the moon, the king beat down the queen, so the phallus usurped the uterus as the source and symbol of life and power.

Under the new dispensation women’s rights went the way of their rites, and in cities and states from Peking to Peru women dwindled into little more than serfdom. They became property; and found that truly property was theft. The new social and mental systems robbed them of freedom, autonomy, control, even the most basic right of control over their own bodies. For now they belonged to men – or rather, to one man. At some unidentified but pivotal point of history, women became subjected to the tyranny of sexual monopoly – for once it was realized that one man only was necessary for impregnation, it was a short step to the idea of only one man.

Yet the exclusive possession of a woman and the monopoly of her sexual service could always be waived when a greater need arose. In Eskimo tribes, for instance, wife-lending is endemic. For the Eskimo husband, this is ‘a wise investment for the future, because the lender knows he will eventually be a borrower’, when he needs a woman who ‘makes the igloo habitable, lays out dry stockings for him . . . and is ready to cook the game he brings back’. Nor was this all – the extent of the obligations of the borrowed wife can be judged from the special term by which Eskimo children refer to any man who does business with their father: ‘he-who-fucks-my-mother’.²⁷

As their property, women of these early societies were at the disposal of men; and when women were no longer the struggling tribe’s prime resource, nor the sacred source of life and hope for the future, nothing inhibited men’s use of force against them in the struggle for control. Among the ancient Chinese, the Greek writer Posidippus noted in the second century A.D., ‘even a poor man will bring up a son, but even a rich man will expose a daughter.’²⁸ On the other side of the world, a chieftain of Tierra del Fuego told Darwin during the voyage of The Beagle that to survive in a famine they would kill and eat their old women, but never their dogs.²⁹ From written records, epics and chronicles, and from anthropological and archaeological evidence, come countless examples of sexual hostility in action, frequently carried to extremes: women are traded, enslaved, ravished, sold in whoredom, slaughtered on the death of their lord or husband, and in every way abused at will.

One poignant story from an Anglo-Saxon settlement of pagan England puts some flesh on the bones of this stark generalization. Two female skeletons of the pre-Christian period were discovered lying together in one pit grave. The older woman, in her late twenties, had been buried naked and alive; the position of the skeleton after death showed that she had tried to raise herself as the earth was thrown on to her. The younger of the two, a girl about sixteen years old, had previously sustained injuries ‘typically the result of brutal rape, which was strongly resisted by the victim’, including a cavity in the bone behind her left knee where she had been prodded with a dagger to make her draw her legs up for the rapist. She had survived for about six months after the attack, and the fact that she was buried naked, bound hand and foot and possibly alive like her sister-inhabitant of the same grave suggests that her death was the result of her unchastity coming to light, most probably through pregnancy, as the archaeologists conclude:

We can only guess what crime and punishment enmeshed the older woman . . . But for the young girl, naked, bound, lacerated and perhaps still alive, with the howl of human jackals in her ears, her passport to a merciful oblivion is likely to have been the slime and mire of this chalky trench.³⁰

No longer sacred, women became expendable. One Aztec ceremony of death was indeed a direct mockery of women’s former power; every December a woman dressed up as Ilamtecuhtli, the Old Goddess of the earth and corn, was decapitated and her head presented to a priest wearing her costume and mask, who then led a ritual dance of celebration followed by other priests similarly attired. This was only one of a number of Aztec rituals of this kind. Every June a woman representing Xiulonen, Goddess of the young maize, was similarly sacrificed, while in August a woman representing Tetoinnan, Mother of the Gods, was decapitated and flayed, her skin being worn by the priest who played the role of the Goddess in the ensuing ceremony. The ‘strike-the-mother-dead’ motif is even clearer in one detail of this grisly procedure – one thigh of the woman victim was flayed separately, and the skin made into a mask worn by the priest who impersonated the son of the dead ‘mother’.³¹ But similar customs obtained worldwide – in pre-feudal China a young woman was annually selected to be ‘the Bride of the Yellow Count’, and after a year of fattening and beautifying, was cast adrift to drown in the Yangtse Kiang (Yellow River).³² From ritual sacrifice to the enforced suttee of unwanted child-brides, the destruction of women spread like a plague virus through India, China, Europe and the Middle East to the remotest human settlements – anywhere in fact where the phallus held sway.

As societies evolved, male control through brutal force was gradually supplemented by the rule of law. In Rome, the paterfamilias held undisputed power of life and death over all members of his family, of which he was the only full person in the eyes of the law. In Greece, when Solon of Athens became law-giver in 594 B.C., one of his first measures was to prohibit women leaving their houses at night, and the effect of this was to confine them more and more to their homes by day. In ancient Egypt, women became not simply the property but legally part of their fathers or husbands, condemned to suffer whatever their male kindred brought down on their heads. As the horrified Greek historian Diodorus recorded in his World History (60–30 B.C.), innocent women even swelled the ranks of the pitiful slaves whose forced labour built the pyramids:

. . . bound in fetters, they work continually without being allowed any rest by night or day. They have not a rag to cover their nakedness, and neither the weakness of age nor women’s infirmities are any plea to excuse them, but they are driven by blows until they drop dead.³³

Not all women, however, lived as victims and died as slaves: it would be historically unjust as well as inaccurate to present the whole of the female sex as passive and defeated in the face of their oppressions. Even as Aristotle was earnestly discoursing to his students on the innate inferiority of women, a woman called Agnodice in the fourth century B.C. succeeded in penetrating the all-male world of learning. After attending medical classes she practised gynaecology disguised as a man, with such success that other doctors, jealous of her fame, accused her of seducing her patients. In court she was forced to reveal her sex in order to save her life, at which new charges were brought against her of practising a profession restricted by law to men alone. Eventually acquitted of this, too, Agnodice lived to become the world’s first known woman gynaecologist.³⁴

As this suggests, even under the most adverse circumstances, women have never been wholly subordinate. As a sex, the female of the species has taken a lot of treading down, and the greater the efforts of the emerging phallocrat, the more resourceful and sustained was the resistance he produced. It did not take much female ingenuity, for example, to subvert the systems that men had themselves set up: the worldwide system of menstrual taboo, for instance, by which menstruating women were excluded from society so that they should not infect men, pollute food, or, as Aristotle believed, tarnish mirrors with their breath, in fact provided ample and perfect opportunity for women to develop alternative networks of power, all the more effective for being invisible, unseen. What went on in the menstrual huts or women’s quarters when the women foregathered to bring food, news or messages to a menstruating sister would be beneath the ken of the males; but it would make itself felt in their lives nevertheless.

Not infrequently women’s resistance to masculine control was expressed directly, even violently, as the Roman senators found to their cost in 215 B.C., when to curb inflation they passed a law forbidding women to own more than half an ounce of gold, wear multi-coloured dresses or ride in a two-horse carriage. As the word spread, crowds of rioting women filled the Capitol and raged through every street of the city, and neither the rebukes of the magistrates nor the threats of their husbands could make them return quietly to their homes. Despite the fierce opposition of the notorious anti-feminist Cato, the law was repealed in what must have been one of the earliest victories for sisterhood and solidarity.

For in the game of domination and subordination, women have not always been the losers: the annals of nineteenth-century explorers were rich in accounts of primitive African tribes where the women had fought off the challenge of the phallus and continued to rule the men. Most of these have now vanished, like the Balonda tribe of whom Livingstone noted that the husband was so subjected to his wife that he dared do nothing without her approval. Yet even today records continue to document tribes like that of the cannibal Munduguma of the Yuat River of the South Seas, whose women are as ferocious as their head-hunting men, and who particularly detest having children. This age-old resistance to the traditional wifely role is echoed in a Manus proverb of the same region: ‘Copulation is so revolting that the only husband you can bear is the one whose advances you can hardly feel.’³⁵

As this suggests, women did not fall easily into the subservient supporting role for which the lords of every known phallocracy have insisted they are ‘naturally’ fitted. Many and varied in fact have been the ways that women have found to subvert and convert the power of men, asserting their own autonomy and control as they did so. For the new political systems of male domination were not monolithic nor uniform; there were plenty of cracks through which an enterprising female might slip. In addition, the phallus supreme might count himself king of infinite space, but in real life, willy-nilly, men had to marry and father females. Taken together these factors provided a number of bases from which women could operate in much the same way as men: