Note: This is the second essay in a series of five on the abyss of civilization. To read the first part, click on this link: The Invention of Gender Roles: Division by Design.
The whole idea of (female) pollution is a reaction to protect the clarity of the system.”
—Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger
“Women’s history is the history of the dehumanization of half the human race.”
—Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
Mythology is Relevant
It was just a myth—an account of warring deities from ancient Babylon, written around 1800 BCE. At first glance, it seems no more remarkable than any other. After all, aren’t these stories just tales of flawed gods and their dramas? We rarely pay them much attention today. Even historians write about myth more from obligation than conviction.
But to dismiss any of this as irrelevant would be a profound mistake. Every myth matters. Each one reveals how people once understood their place in the cosmos. Most have been lost, their meanings erased. The story of Marduk and Tiamat survives—and that alone makes it worth examining.
This isn’t just a distant or “boring” clash between gods. It’s the erasure of Tiamat, the embodiment of wild feminine creativity, by Marduk, the sky-god of order. And that act—cosmic, violent, final—tells us almost everything about what we’ve come to believe, even now.
This is not just a story about civilization. It’s the blueprint—its operating instructions—and the source of its six-thousand-year grip on the world. The myth itself may be forgotten, but its consequences are not. Its logic—its architecture of power and division—echoes through the tales it spawned: sagas, legends, even fairy tales. Together, they shaped the world we live in. To ignore them is to misunderstand not just history, but ourselves.
In the first essay, we saw how men in the cities of Sumer laid the foundations of patriarchy between 4000 and 3500 BCE, and how by the end of that period, a male-only priesthood had seized political power. But the priests knew that wasn’t enough. To secure control and lock in the foundations of civilization, they set out to do what Marduk would later do in myth—annihilate the feminine.
Fortunately, that has proven impossible. Tragically, however, the early effort to erase the ontological feminine (O/F)—and its vital connection to nature—has never stopped. The damage runs deep. If we are to undo it, we must first learn how it happened.
The truth is found in the ruins of the ancient Near East.
The Long Undoing: Six Phases in the Erosion of the Ontological Feminine (O/F)
The assault on the feminine wasn’t a single act—it was a long, six-phase process that began even before civilization itself and continues to this day. The aim was nothing less than the destruction of the psyche—the full being—of all people. But this was carried out primarily through the systematic undermining of women and the O/F.
The Six Phases of Annihilation of the Feminine
| No. |
Date |
Title |
| 1 |
12,500 – 4000 BCE |
Chthonic Integration |
| 2 |
4000 – 3500 BCE |
The First Attack |
| 3 |
3600 – 3400 BCE |
The Assault on the Feminine |
| 4 |
3500 – c. 1100 BCE |
Co-option – Goddesses |
| 5 |
2350 – 600 BCE |
Subjugation – Empire |
| 6A |
600 BCE – present |
Crass Dehumanization |
| 6B |
600 BCE – present |
Outsourcing the Ontological Feminine |
Chthonic Integration
This story begins in the long transition from hunter-gatherer life to civilization, spanning roughly 12,500 to 4000 BCE. During this time, women weren’t just equal to men—they were revered for their role in birthing and renewing the group. Even after the first breaks from nature in the ancient Near East (ANE), women still held a central place. They embodied the living link between these early communities and the natural world.
From 12,500 to 9000 BCE, animism—the belief that all beings and natural forces carry spirit or agency—was the dominant worldview. It was the natural religion of hunter-gatherers. In animistic societies, gender roles were not central. While sex differences were recognized and reflected in early myth, strict divisions of labor or power weren’t necessary. Anthropologists have consistently found that where animism is present, the sexes are roughly equal—and there’s a broad balance between men and women in matriarchies too.
Around 9000 BCE, however, something begins to shift. The rituals and beliefs that give meaning to life start to change. A chthonic form of spirituality begins to take root—one centered on “presences”: local, earth-bound powers tied to the land, its features, and its cycles of fertility and regeneration. And these presences usually take feminine form. While we can’t know exactly why, early agricultural societies likely saw a clear link between female spirits and the fertility of their crops.
But whatever the cause, the next 5,000 years of small village life are dominated by the feminine and its connections to nature. The archaeological record reveals that these five millennia are relatively peaceful. The Ontological Feminine (O/F), which had clearly been integrated up until 9000 BCE, remains so throughout this era—until the onset of civilization. The O/F was therefore not only still ascendant, but women were completely empowered.
But despite the favorable spiritual environment for women, many of the customs that emerged during this era laid the groundwork for the first phase of civilization. These included surplus accumulation and storage, animal domestication, rising debt, and inegalitarian class systems. While not enough to fracture the psyche outright, they did make it more vulnerable.
The First Attack
This period, from 4000 to 3500 BCE is when civilization first emerges—startlingly different, complex, and deeply disorienting. New customs begin to erode the communal and relational structures of earlier life, introducing values that begin to corrode the psyche.
Within this matrix, the male gender role comes into being and patriarchy takes root. The priesthood gradually becomes exclusively male, and it assumes powerful new authority. As this shift accelerates, women lose status and security, their trust giving way to wariness and persistent angst.
The Assault on the Feminine
By 3600 BCE, the priesthood had become the de facto political leadership of the Sumerian cities, tasked with upholding the fragile stability of a new civilizational order. This order depended on the precarious success of a few staple crops in a region increasingly vulnerable to drought and environmental stress.
Additional pressures included the management of complex irrigation networks, recurrent warfare and inter-city rivalry, rapid urban growth and crowding, and mounting debt burdens.
Yet the greatest challenge to priestly authority—indeed, to any elite—was securing the compliance of the laboring masses: the serfs and slaves whose work upheld the entire system. As long as chthonic, feminine-rooted spirituality endured among the people, trust and obedience could not be guaranteed. These older beliefs carried the memory of a different world—one shaped by reciprocity, collective well-being, and intimacy with nature—values fundamentally at odds with the emerging order. A single year of crop failure could trigger a reckoning. While full-scale revolt was rare, the mere threat was enough to terrify the elite.
This core tension made the continued existence of feminine-based chthonic spirituality intolerable to the new priesthood. They moved heaven and earth—figuratively—to erase it.
Co-option – Goddesses
A key strategy for eliminating the O/F was the invention of so-called “named gods.” This move is less benign than it is usually presented. First, former chthonic presences—most of them female—are “elevated” into formal deities.
Around 3500 BCE the male priesthood in Sumer began reshaping feminine deities to serve their own interests—and, by extension, those of patriarchy and civilization itself. The first one was Inanna, discussed below. Given the lingering memory and emotional pull of chthonic spirituality, the populace would have been drawn to these new, “upgraded” goddesses. This only made it easier to subtly undermine without raising alarm. Over the next 2,400 years, goddesses and women were gradually subordinated within the expanding patriarchal order.
Subjugation – Empire
With the rise of empire—beginning with Akkad around 2350 BCE—conquest became a permanent motif, and the need for standing armies reshaped society. Gender divisions hardened. Men grew more violent and uncompromising, trained from childhood to suppress fear, sensitivity, and revulsion to killing—or worse. In parallel, they asserted increasing dominance within the household, becoming “little kings”, backed by tightening law codes that stripped women of rights and prerogatives. Symbols of female power and agency were openly denigrated. The feminine, now institutionally subordinate, was often reduced to property—objects of male lineage, reproduction, and control.
Religion in civilization was 1,200 years old during this phase—and its once-hidden agenda was now unmistakable. Militant male sky gods rose to dominance, demanding obedience and sacrifice. Goddesses were no longer merely co-opted; they were actively subdued or destroyed in myth. This was widely accepted. After centuries of patriarchal conditioning, the populations of each city had forgotten the old ways. They now accepted powerful men—and their sky gods—as the natural order.
This development is devastating to both the psyche and the O/F. As divinity is elevated skyward—far above the earth and severed from nature—new chains of abstraction take hold. Men are deemed competent in these abstract operations while women are confined to the realms of emotion and instinct. Thus begins the dualistic split of psychological capacities by gender—a division that still shapes the modern psyche.
Crass Dehumanization
No matter how diligently the priesthood works to annihilate the feminine, they can never quite succeed. The word annihilate, which means “to reduce to nothing,” is therefore not fully accurate. It’s more a process—a drive, not a conclusion. Even now, when civilization has done its best to eradicate the last gated-off remnants, and stands on the brink of destroying all life, Nature herself cannot be eliminated. She is both the substance and the essence of the universe.
I’ve also come to believe that the ontological dimension of Nature—and of the Feminine—regenerates. Not automatically, but through the persistent efforts of indigenous peoples, feminist scholars and activists, ecologically grounded individuals, and even some conservatives who simply love the land. Despite millennia of assault, something buried continues to stir.
This offers a measure of hope. But the stakes remain immense. We’ll return to this below, in the context of how all of this was ontologically constructed.
The Three Great Feminine Spirits: From Chthonic Power to Civilizational Erasure
Prelude: The Architects of Rupture
Civilization, in my theory, is a stage of humanity’s existence—the shortest of the three that have existed so far, accounting for only 2% of our total span. It is not a conscious agent; rather, it arises as the cumulative effect of what people think, feel, believe, and enact. In this sense, it functions as a dynamic process—like an organism, it sustains and extends itself by generating and enforcing values that are ultimately destructive or decadent.
The male priesthood entered into a symbiotic relationship with this evolving structure—a form of mutualism in which both forces reinforced and benefited one another. While they may not have fully grasped the scope of their historical role, I argue they were, to a significant degree, deliberate architects of the four foundational transformations of the Great Ruptures Period. These were: (1) the creation of named gods; (2) the invention of “civilized religion” as distinct from chthonic and animistic spirituality; (3) the construction of the female gender role; and (4) the institutionalization of transcendence.
The evidence for intentionality is strong:
- their clear need to secure and legitimize power,
- their evident success in doing so,
- the scale and simultaneity of these changes, and.
- the pattern of repetition across time.
This last point becomes especially clear as we turn to the histories of the three great feminine spirits.
A Tale of Three Goddesses — Erasure of the Feminine
Inanna: From Chthonic Power to Civilizational Instrument
Inanna’s origins trace back at least to 4500 BCE, when she existed as a chthonic presence—an embedded, generative force within the transition from the Ubaid to the early Uruk cultures. Fertility and earth-mother figurines from this era are likely precursors to what would later be named Inanna. But in these earliest layers, she is not yet personified or deified. She is unnamed, relational, and inseparable from the cycles of nature, sexuality, and communal life. In her chthonic form, Inanna is neither transcendent nor anthropomorphic; she is embodied fecundity—the living force of nature’s creative power.
In Goddesses in Context (2013), Assyriologists Julia M. Asher-Greve and Joan Westenholz document how this presence was gradually seized, personified, and recoded for civilizational ends. Through this process, Inanna became both more visible and, ultimately, completely undermined.
Around 3500 BCE, the male priesthood of the city of Uruk transformed her into the patron deity of that rising Sumerian city. By 3300 BCE, cuneiform texts begin to record this new identity—now marked by attributes of power, war, sovereignty, and cosmic authority—each one a distortion of her original nature. To be made a goddess was no great honor. Remember that the next time you hear the word.
To grasp the full weight of this transformation, we must look beyond surface symbolism and examine how her being—her ontological essence was irreparably harmed in the process.
Scholars often interpret this shift as a kind of “promotion,” revealing a persistent bias toward transcendental developments and the narratives of progress that accompany them. But what is framed as elevation is in fact severance: a detachment from the chthonic, retooling Inanna into an instrument of patriarchal and elite power.
Around 3400 BCE, the Eanna temple complex—with its massive stone foundations—was built in her name. Yet despite this apparent grandeur, Inanna was assigned the contradictory attributes of love and war—a fracture so profound it destabilized her identity from the start. Her once-fluid gender expression was recoded through patriarchal lenses. Ambiguity became spectacle; the chthonic feminine, subordinated. The temple served not to honor her essence, but to mask her co-option.
As male gods—Anu, Enlil, and Marduk—rose to dominance between 2900 and 2300 BCE, Inanna’s subjugation deepened. She was increasingly portrayed as capricious, dangerous, or morally suspect. Her sexuality—once sacred—was reframed as threat, her mythic scripts reduced to seductress, manipulator, or victim. Sovereignty disappeared.
This trajectory culminated in her descent to the underworld, composed between 2100 and 1800 BCE. Stripped of regalia at each gate, humiliated, and killed by Ereshkigal, Inanna is eventually resurrected—but not by her own will. Her return is orchestrated by Enki, a male god, underscoring the containment and conditionality of her rebirth.
Myth always serves power. Here, Enki—god of boundaries—restores cosmic order, but only by rendering Inanna subdued, compliant, and safe for the new world.
She remains in this diminished state until she is finally outlawed or forgotten with the rise of monotheism. Though still depicted in art, as Carolyn Merchant notes in The Death of Nature (1980), “nature” and feminine forces survive only as symbolic or nostalgic figures—long after their ontological force has been crushed.
In other words, the aestheticization of Inanna continues the work begun by Enki: making the feminine safe for society, palatable to power, and completing her ontological erasure. It is a stark reminder that ancient myth persists—not just in story, but in structure—and continues to shape the modern world.
Ninhursag: The Fate of the Primordial Mother
Ninhursag—also known as “Mother of the Mountain”—is one of the earliest Sumerian earth goddesses, embodying the generative, nourishing, and stabilizing forces of the land. In her original chthonic form, she is not a deity over nature but is nature—inseparable from birth, creation, and the living matrix of existence itself.
Ninhursag was most closely associated with the city of Kesh, where a temple was built in her name. Though the priests claimed to honor her, they also appropriated her essence to legitimize their own authority and the emerging religious order. She was soon relegated to a subsidiary role, subordinated to the rising male gods. In myth, she is made to create humanity—but only in response to divine command, likely reflecting priestly ideology. Her generative power is reframed as obedient service.
Her ontological essence is fragmented, parceled out into a series of supportive and secondary functions. The priestly caste codifies her creativity into ritual, law, and genealogies—all tools for securing male succession and institutional control. In the end, her image and cult are not preserved as a living presence but as a relic—stripped of vitality and conscripted into service of the new order.
In the end, the great Mother of the Mountain vanishes from the central narratives. Her generative, chthonic dimensions are recast as primitive, obsolete, or even dangerous. Once her symbolic function is fulfilled, she is discarded—cast aside by a pantheon now ruled by sky gods. She becomes little more than a name, stripped of agency, until she fades from view entirely. Her erasure is not incidental but deliberate—a fate wholly consistent with the systematic annihilation of the O/F.
Tiamat
Tiamat was mentioned earlier, but we haven’t yet examined her case. In truth, it’s a cold case—a foundational act of violence buried under layers of myth and retroactive legitimacy. Her murder was once not only well known, but proudly celebrated. The supposed killer is Marduk, but we know better. Or at least, we should.
You see, the entire crime has been swept into the shadows of time—even though the identity of her killers is obvious to anyone willing to look. Few have spoken of it since; fewer still have followed its trail to the present. And so, the crime stands: the earliest known unpunished assaults on the primordial feminine, setting a chilling precedent for everything that followed.
Again, the priestly caste is responsible, this time in Babylon, around 1800 BCE. And we can see just how much cleverer—and more devious—they’d become since the first assaults on the feminine 1,800 years earlier in Sumer.
This time, they don’t bother to co-opt her or build a temple in her name. They simply write Tiamat out—folding her destruction into the Enuma Elish, the theological epic composed in Babylon. Its sole purpose was to establish and legitimize the supremacy of their patron god, Marduk—and in doing so, to sanctify Babylon’s religious and political order.
As always, the massive machinery of civilization is not just embedded in the text—it is sanctified by it.
Tiamat begins as a chthonic presence—saltwater ocean, the generative force of the deep, primordial and vast. But in the Enuma Elish, that very essence becomes the reason for her condemnation. Power, once sacred, is recoded as threat. It’s the oldest trick in the book: frame a woman’s strength as danger. It’s like blaming her for her own rape—because she dared to exist, to act, to generate.
Tiamat is called the “mother of gods,” but her generative power is immediately reframed by Babylonian priests as chaos, threat, and evil. That violence doesn’t stop with symbolic inversion. To fully justify her destruction, the priests go further: they portray her—this elemental embodiment of nature—as so dangerous that she musters an army of monsters to attack her own divine offspring.
You can almost picture them: hunched in their temple complexes under the Mesopotamian sun, sweat dripping, styluses scratching, nodding in agreement with each new stroke of demonization. A calculated campaign—mythic assassination by text.
This is what they come up with. Marduk—now fully masculinized and placed at the center of the Babylonian cosmos—offers to defeat Tiamat, and of course, he succeeds in a violent cosmic battle. The primeval order is overthrown by the imperial, transcendent order of the sky gods. And still, it isn’t enough.
What follows is as vicious as anything devised by a serial killer—so often male, so often targeting women. Tiamat’s body is cut in two, “like a shellfish,” her massive form split down the middle. One half becomes the heavens—the upper vault of the sky, now wholly transcendent. The other becomes the earth—bounded, contained, and subdued.
The brutality doesn’t stop there. Marduk dismembers her body entirely. From her eyes, he forms the Tigris and Euphrates. From her breasts, he raises the mountains. Her tail becomes the bar that locks the sky in place. Her spittle, her thighs, her very flesh—all repurposed into boundaries, structures, the architecture of a world built on domination. A sacred vivisection in service of control.
And still they are not done. The priests—now operating in a mode of decadent cleverness—surpass even the serial killer. Not in sadism alone, but in reach, in metaphysical ambition. Where the killer destroys a body, they rewrote the cosmos. What follows is a totalizing act of extinction: a negation of the feminine so absolute, so thorough, that we struggle even to find the language for it—let alone the imaginative capacity to truly grasp what was lost. We turn to that next. But in case you’re keeping track of the numbers involved in the assault on the goddesses, here’s the summary:
- There were 19 Mesopotamian goddesses—11 of Sumerian origin and 9 Babylonian. Of these, eight are cold cases—murdered so civilization could live. The rest? They wished they were. Their fates were arguably worse: house-bound, broken, and forced to linger in obscure, degraded forms.
- The average end date for prominent worship or cultural relevance among these 19 goddesses is approximately 963 BCE. That decline aligns precisely with the rise of imperial theologies, the intensification of male cosmologies, the consolidation of male high gods into state pantheons, and the increasing abstraction and hierarchy of theology itself.
The Ontological Miasma
The Babylonian version
Without question, the concept of being is essential to grasping the full extent of what was done to the O/F. I was unprepared for the sheer ingenuity—and depravity—of what the Babylonian, and later Hebrew, priests designed for her. Only through an ontological lens could I begin to comprehend it, and my response has been one of benumbed mourning. Writers—especially men—have been rigorously trained to remain objective in the face of horror. I’ve let that go, gladly, as I tell this final part of the story.
The Babylonian priests were highly educated, intellectually sophisticated—and they possessed a profound sense of the ontological. It seems they grasped something that has confounded scholars for centuries: the underlying being of nature. They saw its continuity, wholeness, and sheer presence as an existential threat to civilization. The values she carried—once central to human life and radically opposed to the emerging order—still lingered, despite earlier efforts in Sumer to extinguish them.
This is why they were so incredibly thorough: they didn’t just introduce, demean, kill, and dismember Tiamat—they went further. They had Marduk perform metaphysical surgery, using Tiamat’s very body to reconstruct the cosmos itself. It was meant to be the final stage of annihilation: ontological nothingness—a void where myth, memory, and embodied presence once lived.
Thorkild Jacobsen, a leading Assyriologist and historian of the Ancient Near East, described the Babylonian creation as “a transition from a vitalistic, organismic worldview to a mechanistic one” (The Treasures of Darkness, 1976)—implying that Descartes, the Industrial Revolution, and modern science were merely late arrivals to an ancient project. But “transition” hardly captures it. Marduk didn’t shift paradigms; he restructured the cosmos through force. Jacobsen does recognize that violence—the indispensable instrument of civilization—was required to “sanitize” nature through acts of splitting, apportioning, and boundary-making.
The Enuma Elish is inexhaustibly rich in meaning, though Jacobsen, unfortunately, did not make its ontological dimensions explicit. Still, his insights guide us. Splitting refers not only to the literal severing of Tiamat’s body, but to the symbolic imposition of dualisms: good/evil, male/female, spirit/body. It anticipates the psychic fragmentation that civilization induces as its decadent values take root.
Apportioning signifies more than division; it denotes the carving up of reality into discrete, manageable units—transforming living wholes into categorized parts, stripping them of intrinsic significance, and reducing them to mere utility. This is not just separation, but ontological reduction: the conversion of beings into use-objects.
Hebrew Miasma
The exile of the Israelites in Babylon (586–538 BCE), though not obscure, is a far more consequential event in world history than is generally acknowledged. A few religious studies scholars—David Carr, Bernard Batto, and Thomas Römer—have explored the influence of Babylonian mythology and theology on early Judaism. But even they have not grasped the full extent of this transformation—especially how it deepened and intensified the attack on the Ontological Feminine.
In fact, the impact of exile was so extreme that it compelled the Hebrew people to radically reshape their religious framework and redefine their cultural identity. The evidence for this transformation is compelling:
- Priestly Redaction. The priestly caste heavily redacted and restructured the Pentateuch and Torah (which, for simplicity, I refer to as the Old Testament) during this period—an intentional effort to rewrite historical memory and codify religious law in their image.
- Mythic Reframing. The narrative of Egyptian captivity in Exodus was likely constructed or significantly expanded during this era—serving as a displaced retelling of the trauma of Babylonian exile.
- Purity and Separation. The exile catalyzed an obsession with bloodlines, genealogies, and exclusionary identity. The concept of a “chosen people” emerged—not just as belonging, but as purification against the Other.
- Priestly Ascendancy. Priestly authority surged, eclipsing prophets and kings. They claimed control over divine revelation, covenant, and law—rewriting the sacred on their own terms.
- Erasure of the Feminine. All favorable references to Asherah were systematically removed, and women’s biological functions—menstruation, childbirth, and sexuality—were vilified. This reflects intensifying hostility toward the embodied feminine and a broader effort to sever the sacred from the female body.
- Monotheistic Absolutism. This period marks the first emergence of a fully uncompromising, thoroughly masculinized monotheism. The feminine is erased from the divine entirely, and a singular, transcendent male god is elevated as absolute—disembodied, remote, and totalizing.
Although our focus remains on the Ontological Feminine, we must first grasp the Hebrew zeitgeist during this period to understand how thoroughly their priesthood worked to annihilate it—arguably even more completely than the Babylonians had. Having laid out the evidence for these profound shifts, we must now ask: What compelled the priestly caste to enact them? What drove such a sweeping reconfiguration of the sacred, the social, and the feminine?
- Babylonian culture stood at the height of intellectual and cultural achievement in the ancient Near East. The Hebrews—having existed as a distinct people for barely 700 years, and mostly as rural pastoralists—struggled to match that sophistication.
- Yet they had to, or risk being absorbed into a dominant, cosmopolitan world.
- Their response was to radicalize the Babylonian assault on the O/F—turning cultural annihilation into their primary mode of competition.
- The exile provoked a powerful mix of psychological responses: fear, anger, and disorientation, but also awe, envy, and ressentiment. These are the emotions any displaced people might feel when thrust into a world far more advanced than their own.
Given these nearly insurmountable pressures, it is nothing short of “miraculous,” as Nietzsche put it, that the Hebrews not only survived but forged the very means of survival for the next 2,500 years. It was an extraordinary accomplishment—matched perhaps only by the endurance of the Armenian and Romani peoples. And yet, as Nietzsche also warned, this triumph came at a devastating cost: the sacrifice of their own psychic well-being. No person, and no people, should ever be forced to make such a Faustian bargain.
But none of this would have been possible without a further, systematic dismantling of the feminine. By now, it should be clear just how deliberate, far-reaching, and horrific this process truly was. It didn’t unfold on the margins—it stood at the very center of the civilizational project.
This is why the term patriarchy is ultimately insufficient to describe what happened. Feminist scholars laid the essential groundwork for uncovering this long-buried truth. But its roots go deeper—reaching into the ontological and psychological, not merely the sociological or historical.
The redaction of the Book of Leviticus is a particularly instructive example of priestly control. It was enforced through a purity code so intricate and symbolically encoded that it remained largely misunderstood for centuries—until the anthropologist Mary Douglas decoded it in 1966 in her groundbreaking work, Purity and Danger. She saw what no one else had—not only because of her brilliance, but because, for 25 centuries, it seems, no one had even been looking.
Douglas’s genius was to reveal that the purity laws constructed by the priestly caste around 500 BCE had nothing to do with hygiene or morality, as long assumed. They were about preserving symbolic order—a theological architecture that reached all the way into the heavens.
She showed that what a culture deems unclean or impure isn’t grounded in objective harm or moral failure, but in how that culture structures reality itself. When something violates the boundaries of that structure—when it doesn’t fit—it triggers a sense of danger. It becomes too disruptive, too chaotic.
Of course it was women. In the priestly imagination, managing the feminine wasn’t just one task among many—it was the first, the central task. Without suppressing the female body, the entire system risked collapse.
To maintain symbolic control, the priesthood had to make the world legible—ordered, bounded, predictable. This required dividing reality into opposites. Dualities like inside/outside, life/death, sacred/profane had to be rigidly enforced. But this was not the order of health or harmony—it was the imposed calm of a population subdued by economic and theocratic control.
While Douglas’s framework is broader than this, its relevance here is how the purity system was weaponized against both the feminine and the psyche. Civilization created the very conditions that made this not only possible, but inevitable. Once the natural order was broken, uncertainty took root—and a constant nervous tension became the new norm.
The Hebrew priests understood this—they had studied Babylonian methods all too closely. But constructing a cosmos purged of the feminine wasn’t enough. Shaped by centuries of vulnerability to stronger powers, they knew that nothing is ever truly secure. Danger always lurks. Boundaries had to be patrolled—not just on land, but in meaning itself—in the theo-ontological domain.
They concluded that although the goddesses were dead or fading, women themselves still posed a threat. The solution the Hebrew priests devised was brutal: they declared women’s reproductive capacities—menstruation, even childbirth—impure and corrupt. In Leviticus, women are discussed alongside animals, a comparison that strips them of dignity and humanity. This is crass dehumanization. We read it. We try to understand it. But it remains deeply disturbing—how cruelly, how unspeakably, we have treated our mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives.
The final act in this tragic six-part play—this performance of the absurd—was still to come. Its consequences are so profound, they will receive detailed treatment in a later essay.
With the trauma of exile still fresh, the Hebrew priests intensified their assault on the O/F. But this time, in a brilliant double move, they did so by debasing their former captors at the same time. How was that even possible? Through another wave of redactions—this time condemning nearly every aspect of Babylonian life. Out of this, a new idea began to take shape: that the entire ANE was impure, decadent, and corrupt.
Over time, this view congealed into a broader narrative in which “the East” was cast as lazy, despotic, indulgent—and above all, effeminate. That last word is the linchpin. The East wasn’t just slandered; it was feminized. In contrast, Hebrew culture was reimagined as disciplined, pure, and masculine. The move was so deft, so deeply encoded, that it remains difficult to detect even now.
Edward Said would later ingeniously describe this binary as Orientalism—the ideological construction of the East as the West’s inferior Other. But what he did not see is that it all began with a deeper move: the outsourcing of the feminine—what was left of it—from Jerusalem to Babylon.
Abetted by Homer’s mythic framing of the Greeks, this newly constructed opposition became the seedbed of the Western mythos: hyper-masculinized, heroic, triumphant—and the ontological architecture that still afflicts us today.
|
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin R. Nelson is a self-taught writer and theorist whose work spans philosophy, anthropology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and critical theory. Prior to retiring from healthcare and government regulatory oversight, he published two articles in Nutrition Science News—one on international public health and another proposing an alternative heart-healthy diet. He also self-published Take Charge of Your Medical Care, a guide to navigating modern health systems.
Since 2016, he has devoted himself full-time to exploring the human condition and the roots of disconnection and injustice. His recent book, Reality Unedited: The Naturalistic Perspective, was published by Gatekeeper Press. Far From the Source, his most ambitious work to date, is currently under consideration for publication. He has also completed a trilogy of theoretical essays—The Psyche and the Tear—which are under review with several magazines. He lives in Peru with his wife and their animal companion, a cat who adopted them while they were living in Armenia.
|
