Re-Intentioning Our World: Biblical Rape Culture and The Onus of Being a Conscious “Top Predator”

Abstract

Though current storylines portray torture, pillage, and rapine as the especial tactics of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militias, such violent dominance and control strategies have in fact been staples of organized warfare for as long as the institution has existed. It seems important to point out what fundamentally needs to be understood about the West’s historic, institutionalized forms of Rape Culture, before we go into shock over the behavior of a “foreign” system most of the world agrees to uphold in its less aggressive forms.

Keywords: Patriarchy; Patriarchal Religion; Judeo-Christianity; Gender Politics; Gendered Violence; Sexual Assault: Violence Against Women; The Cognitive Culture of the Bible; Ideologies of Gender; Cattle Cult Societies; Primate Social Models; Human Social Models; Social Anthropology; Social Evolution; Consciousness Evolution.

In 2015, the New Yorker published an article on the death of a young woman held captive by ISIL leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In it, author Lawrence Wright wrote: “The revelation that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, was repeatedly raping an American hostage, Kayla Mueller, comes just after the Times released a devastating story about the use of rape as a form of religious devotion by Baghdadi’s followers” (Wright, 2015).

Mueller had been moved from the ISIL leader’s private enclave just before Western forces raided it. Transferred to a warehouse near Raqqa, she died when the building was destroyed in a bomb attack. It seems likely she was being kept there by ISIL as insurance against their weapons depot being bombed for a second time by Jordanians in retaliation for crimes against their soldiers and civilians. The Jordanians, on the other hand, didn’t care that there was an enslaved, tortured and abused Western woman imprisoned on the property; they were reacting to the recent execution (by burning alive) of one of their own soldiers, captured, savagely tortured, and murdered by ISIL in their inexhaustible “Holy War.”

Two days after Wright’s article came out, The London Guardian published an essay by Nussaibah Younis which started out by saying: “One year on from the summit to end sexual violence in conflict, convened by Angelina Jolie and William Hague in London, the self-proclaimed Islamic State has developed a complex bureaucracy of sex slavery that makes a mockery of the summit’s goal to bring about an end to the use of rape and sexual violence in war.” Younis goes on to say, “And ISIL is not the only party in the Syrian civil war to use rape as a weapon—rape is endemic in detention centres run by the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad. But what makes ISIL’s use of rape so horrifying is its attempt to justify, codify, and institutionalise the practice using ostensibly religious justifications for this war crime” (Younis, 2015).

Though these storylines portray torture, pillage, and rapine as the especial tactics of ISIL militias, such violent dominance and control strategies have in fact been staples of organized warfare for as long as the institution has existed. Lest anyone suppose, for a moment, that Mohammed, the angel Gabriel (“Gibreel”), the Quran, the lore of the Prophet collected in the Hadith, ISIL or Sharia Law originated this particular kind of War Crime, in the Judeo-Christian Bible we find: “And Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. ‘Why have you let all the women live?’ he demanded. ‘Behold, these caused the sons of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, so the plague was among the congregation of the LORD. So kill all the boys among the little ones, and all the women who have had intercourse with a man. But all the young girls and women children, who have not known a man by lying with him, these you keep alive for yourselves’” (Numbers 31:14–31:18). It seems important to point out what fundamentally needs to be understood about the West’s historic, institutionalized forms of Rape Culture, before we go into shock over the behavior of a ‘foreign” system most of the world agrees to uphold in it’s less aggressive forms.

Yahweh was originally a storm, mountain, and war god. Sometimes portrayed with a cock’s head, coiling serpent legs, and a lightning bolt, at other times, he was shown in his aspects of a ram or bull. Also called Yod-He-Vau-He (YHWH) or Ja-Ho-Vah, he is the original “Jehovah.” Balaam was an early Semitic god-form that pre-dated Yahweh. Also known as “Bal,” “Bel,” or “Beli,” Balaam was an indigenous god, the male aspect of the Tree of Life, revered in the settled agricultural lands invaded by Early Hebrew nomadic pastoralist tribesmen. He and his divine consort, the feminine aspect of the Tree of Life, Asherah (also known as Astarte, Ashtoreth, and Ishtar as well as by many other names), were labeled “abomination” by the invaders, and their assignment of spiritual “pollution” justified the “cleansing” of the area by genocide, sack, seizure and rapine. The notion that it is acceptable for ranking, raiding and invading males to stockpile—to “kill more than you can eat”—resulted in the institutionalization of war as a means to raid, loot, rape, abduct “virgins,” pillage, seize property and dominate others’ territory in the name of the local tribal god. This kind of belief system is called a “cattle cult” in cultural-anthropological terms (McCorriston, Harrower, Martin and Oches, 2012). In it, theft and rapine are not “sins” and don’t confer blood guilt or “pollution” if waged against the “Alien Other” or “Stranger”: “This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you” (Deuteronomy 20: 15–17).

These tenets are reflected in the Quranic principle that it is justified to wreak all manner of atrocity against non-Muslims but not against followers, as preached and practiced by ISIL. The scriptural logic of justified rapine lies in the idea that such acts of aggression represent simply reclaiming what is really yours in the first place, granted to you by your local, tribal god (in the case of Abrahamic traditions, by Yahweh or Jehovah) as the entitled, ranking males of the dominant tribe, group, or militarized society.

Employing “terror and awe,” such practices have deep theological and religious roots in so-called “cattle cult mentality.” Mosaic Law, citing male entitlement to captive women and girl children as lawful chattel or “booty,” or as the “spoils” of war, is cited at length throughout the Old Testament. God, Moses, Joshua and a host of other Old Testament patriarchs stridently order ethnic “cleansing,” outright genocide of conquered males and male offspring, and the rape and impregnation of virgin girls, always citing divine, religious or ideological grounds. In this ethical system, the Earth and all of its assets (chattels and appurtenances) were given into the stewardship, ownership and control of the ranking men of the cattle cult in question.

Cattle Cults and Why They Matter

A “cattle cult” is defined as a social model which claims the Divine Right to Rule of its elite male members as having been handed down to the men of their tribe by their local, tribal war god at the Creation. “In the Beginning,” according to these privileged, meta-narratives, “God” (Yahweh, Ja-Ho-Va-He, Jahovah, El, the Elohim by any other names—the monolithic sky gods of countless other cattle cult societies across the world in the wake of patriarchal revolutions) gave possession, control and rule over all the people, animals, fruits of the Earth, and territories to the alpha-ranking men of the tribe. Cattle cults might reasonably be seen as the result of male-dominant-ranking dynamics having been elevated to the status and psycho/spiritual prestige of a religion within patriarchal models.

Awarded by the Creator (often the parochial, tribal war god of the soldiery, such as Yahweh, or Mithras in the case of the Roman legions) at the moment of the Creation, all of the earth is designated subordinate to a ruling, masculine elite in the constructed cosmology of the raiders. We see this pattern transcribed in Genesis. “Chattels” are “property,” which is to say, portable aspects of “territory.” This is why slavery, rapine, haremizing, and concubinage have consistently been elevated and enshrined within the institutions of war as “sacred” mandates, as evidenced in mosaic purity laws and other patriarchal codes of the ancient Near and Middle East. And it is why such practices—as the instruments of a thriving, global, illegal underground trade in women and children as sexual slaves—still proliferate worldwide.

Enslaved non-persons and captives are garnered from war and dominance practices, and provide fodder for human sacrifice, which in turn yields the added perk of instilling passivity, terror and awe in dominated under-classes. Slavery is the by-product and the perk/booty of war for the victors. In keeping with the rapacious conventions of war and invasion of other aggressive male-dominant societies of the ancient Levant, Mosaic rules of war and invasion are very specific. In the Old Testament we find: “When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands the town over to you, use your swords to kill every man in the town. But the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you” (Deuteronomy 20:10–20:14). Sometimes the demands of “purity” are more rigorous, as in Joshua 11:14: “The Israelites carried off for themselves all the plunder and livestock of these cities, but all the people they put to the sword until they completely destroyed them, not sparing anyone that breathed.” In ISIL’s “New Caliphate,” just as in the Old Testament, captive women are awarded to the conquering heroes as rewards, as part of the “hero’s portion,” and as incentives to greater “valor” and sacrifice upon the field of battle:

In its online magazine, Dabiq, ISIL says that, prior to its conquest of the Yazidi-dominated town of Sinjar, it tasked its “sharia students” to determine which “Islamic rulings” should apply to the Yazidi community. It concludes that Yazidi women could be enslaved under Islamic law and establishes that one-fifth of the women should be transferred to the ISIL leadership and the remainder divided among the fighters who participated in the conquest of Sinjar. […] Based on its widely refuted interpretations of Islamic texts, ISIL has gone about systematising rape, sexual assault and slavery by embedding the buying, selling and gifting of slaves into a system of rewards for its fighters. Of the estimated 3,500 Yazidi women held by ISIL, survivors report being interrogated and in some cases stripped naked for sorting and categorising. They have been rated according to desirability, labeled and transported across ISIL-held territory. They have been traded between fighters, and awarded by leadership as prizes (Younis, 2015).

The contemporary “Islamic” practice, whereby elite ISIL militia members and/or religious leaders are tithed with human, female “booty” in accordance with Sharia Law, is actually derived from much earlier, pre-Islamic patriarchal traditions. Biblical prophets issued the percentages of loot, booty, and feminine “spoil,” to be awarded fighters and military priests, in accordance with Mosaic Law. The major recipients would be the Hebrew tribal and military leaders, meaning elite warriors and the ruling priesthood—the Levite priestly caste: “Now the plunder remaining of the spoil that the army took was 675,000 sheep, and 72,000 cattle, and 61,000 donkeys, and of human beings, of the women who had not known man intimately, all the persons were 32,000. The half, the portion of those who went out to war, was as follows: the number of sheep was 337,500, and the LORD’S levy of the sheep was 675; and the cattle were 36,000, from which the LORD’S levy was 72; and the donkeys were 30,500, from which the LORD’S levy was 61; and the human beings were 16,000 virgin girls, of whom 32 were the LORD’s share. Moses gave all the LORD’s share to Eleazar the priest, just as the LORD had directed him” (Numbers 31:32–31:41). Members of the priestly Levites, Moses’ own caste and tribe, were guaranteed a lion’s share of any spoils of war: “from the people of Israel’s half, Moses took one of every 50, both of persons and of beasts, and gave them to the Levites who kept guard over the tabernacle of the LORD, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Numbers 31:47). Sometimes the rewards granted to the Levite priesthood were in return for sheer misogynistic, religious, ethnic violence, whereby the shrines and sacred precincts of indigenous feminine deities would be subjected to “holy” vandalism and “purification” by fire:

Now when all this was finished, all of Israel who were present went out to the cities of Judah, broke the pillars [Goddess poles] in pieces, cut down the Asherim [the sacred groves of the Goddess and/or Goddess figurines in the forms of Goddess poles or the Tree of Life] and pulled down the high places [mountain-top celestial shrines] and the altars throughout all Judah and Benjamin, as well as in Ephraim and Manasseh, until they had destroyed them all. Then all the sons of Israel returned to their cities, each to his possession. And Hezekiah appointed the divisions of the priests and the Levites by their divisions, each according to his service, both the priests and the Levites, for burnt offerings and for peace offerings, to minister and to give thanks and to praise in the gates of the camp of the LORD (2 Chronicles 31:2).

Out of roughly 50,000 years of recorded human culture, only the past 5,000 have been typified by organized violence and ideological warfare on this kind of scale. Prior to the technological/ideological revolution that spawned warfare (the so-called “Secondary Products Revolution,” a byproduct of the Agricultural Revolution and the amassing of stored wealth), there was simply no concept for it—no model or mental construct by which to institute, maintain, or support it. According to the hierarchical caste systems of dominance-ranking societies, the shift required the complete reversal of formerly held beliefs in life as sacrosanct, mothers as central, and women’s bodies as sovereign and holy. In earlier, woman-centred, matricist societies, it no doubt seemed a fundamentally insane concept—like planning to contrive to murder children by actually institutionalizing their wholesale murders and violence. Mounted by the increasingly striated, hierarchical caste systems of dominance-ranking societies, the new patriarchal religion comprised a true “pecking order,” instituted and maintained by attrition and punitive disciplinary tactics. In enforcing unquestioning obedience to ranking males, the values of earlier societal matrices had to be inverted, turned upside down and demonized in order to inculcate the wholesale slaughter of mothers’ sons on the fields of war, or of vulnerable infants at the breast. Whether grown or juvenile, the attrition to males in the new society was prodigious and must have required intensive rationalization and enforcement.

The method for murdering the offspring of foreign males and its justifications are lauded, lionized, and detailed in the Bible. The practice is actually held up as a form of holy vengeance and divine punishment: “O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:8–137:9)1This method of ridding the arms of conquered women of the unwanted children sired by alien males was typically followed to the letter by Conquistadors, and other colonizing, imperialist invaders, across the Americas, the Caribbean, and other parts of the colonized, Europeanized world. Ironically, the best documents of this practice, consistently deployed against Indigenous peoples in the “New World,” are to be found in the accounts of priests carrying forth the Inquisition and the Witch Hunt, entailed to the cohorts of Spanish, Portuguese or other Catholic invaders. These clerical accounts often express horror at the genocidal behaviors of the soldiers and sailors carrying the sign of the Holy Cross, as the Dominican mandate at the time was to capture, convert and (often) to enslave subject peoples, preserving them alive so as to bring them into the Church (Cushner, 2002). Wholesale “ethnic cleansing,” whereby the children of a conquered people, darker race, or inferior caste are immolated, is actually a biblical precept.

Males raised within the conventions and protocols deemed appropriate for their gender, within any of the Three Main Orthodoxies, are conditioned to assume hate practices as expressions of religious observance or piety. These can include religiously-motivated genocide, stoning non-virgin brides to death, burning witches or prostitutes alive, treating women as property, and other acts considered atrocities if not protected under the rubric of “freedom of religious expression.” Many Jews and Christians regard the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) to be the inerrant Word of God, written by authors that God has directly inspired, and containing injunctions that people should use to govern their behavior today. Because the worst human rights abuses in a cattle cult society are perpetrated against those designated as spiritually “polluted” objects in a violently polarized, dualistic purity and pollution discourse, a category which includes voluntary or involuntary sex workers or sex-slaves (like the millions of women and children categorized as property and forced into the sex trade annually worldwide), Amnesty International has recently championed the case of Human Rights accords to cover sex workers. Salil Shetty (2015), Secretary General of Amnesty International, described their plight in the press release publicizing Ireland’s adoption of the new resolution: “Sex workers are one of the most marginalized groups in the world who in most instances face constant risk of discrimination, violence and abuse. Our global movement paved the way for adopting a policy for the protection of the human rights of sex workers which will help shape Amnesty International’s future work on this important issue.”

Judeo-Christianity includes Islam as an Abrahamic religion, and Muslims count themselves among the “People of the Book.” They are but the most recent members of the “Three Main Orthodoxies” comprising the Abrahamic tradition. While no equivalents for the savage biblical verses cited above exist in the Quran, resorting to the traditions of thought associated with, or deriving from, ancient Levantine patricist scriptures can only result in the kind of collective madness and xenophobia we see presently expressed in the increasingly violent and fascist United States, the State of Israel, the dramatic rise of the Neo-Nazi faction in Ukraine,2 Kev Golinkin, “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda,” The Hill, November 9, 2017 and oppressive autocratic rule in much of the Arab world. These nation states’ collective behaviors represent a well-established enculturation, manifesting as the inevitable result of following the violent, dysfunctional edicts and values of the cattle cult ethos, and amount to an implicit, biblical rape culture. Institutionalized human rights abuses such as sexual slavery, human trafficking and the illicit trade in women have a venerable lineage in Scripture. Embedded within the Western world’s most vaunted moral codebook, upheld as the “Word of God,” predatory rape culture is propped up and supported by these tacit, underlying, “religious” principles of elite male entitlement.

War and raiding are the acquisitive means by which male-dominant-ranking “cattle-cult” societies procure possessions, assets, property, chattels, and territory. Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, and the West for the most part (the Mafia, the U.S. government, the extremist fundamentalist cults of every patriarchal religion) still have flagrant cattle cult societies. In these systems, it’s all about control, possession and dominance of assets, property, resources and territory, with females and infants defined as “property,” or chattels. In the main, they are acquisitive tribal systems that rule and prosper through raiding and theft.

The notion that it was acceptable for ranking, raiding and invading males to stockpile—to “kill more than you can eat”—resulted in the institutionalization of war as a means to raid, loot, rape, abduct “virgins,” and pillage, seizing property and dominating territory in the name of the local god. In the film, “The Constant Gardener,” the award-winning 2005 political thriller directed by Fernando Meirelles (with the screenplay by Jeffrey Caine based on John le Carré’s 2001 novel of the same name), there was a harrowing scene. Charity volunteers delivering food and medical supplies to a war torn area of the African bush had to pull out, saving no one, when a vicious group of male warriors swept down on their camp on horseback. The warriors killed all the men and grabbed all the women and children, summarily killing those they didn’t want. That was a depiction of a modern day cattle cult in action, and the sad fact of the matter is that they have proliferated across certain parts of Africa in the wake of corrupt wars and attrition by other, more establishment and ensconced cattle cult-styled tyrannies and coups.

The Going Forth

If people cite or quote passages from the Bible that promote discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality, etc., and if they advocate that this oppression should be upheld in contemporary society, then some courts may define their effort as promoting hate and hate literature. If they do this in the workplace, their actions may justify termination, and if such influences motivate genocidal acts against civilians, they are considered war crimes and prosecuted as such. Yet, by far, the greater proportion of such acts are perpetrated by members of one Abrahamic faith-based group against another, often citing scriptural premises. An example is the recent genocide by Serbian Orthodox Christians, which victimized Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Another example is the case of the convicted soldier, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who shot dead seventeen Afghan women and children in 2012, and is currently serving a life sentence for war crimes. He had previously been reported for several gratuitous acts of violence against Iraqis. In a letter requesting that his life sentence be reduced, Bales stated that by the time he committed the crime against the unarmed civilians he had lost compassion for Iraqis and Afghans and that his mind had been “consumed by war.” Although Bales cited no specifically religious motivation for his behavior while in Muslim lands, he claimed that his enculturation within the ubiquitous, dominant ideology of war made these behaviors seem normal to him in that context. “I planted war and hate for the better part of 10 years and harvested violence. After being in prison two years, I understand that what I thought was normal was the farthest thing from being normal” (TeleSUR / mh-CM-mk, 2015).

As moral handbooks or codes of conduct, texts such as the conventional Bible and its derivatives can only bear poisonous fruit. The lineages of such documents are clearly compromised by racial and gender paranoia, xenophobic self-interest, and other, similarly egoistic or fear-based sets of rationales. Such toxic cognitive patterns and thought forms are by no means inextinguishable, however. Their roots may appear deep from one perspective, but are actually quite shallow, temporally speaking. The era of war and rapine, elevated as supreme and lauded as divine mandate, is but a “flash in the pan” compared to the many millennia during which we, as a species, co-created egalitarian, life-revering, shamanistic-pantheistic societies in which to live and thrive. As shown by the archeology and folkloric studies of Marija Gimbutas in excavating the pre-patriarchal civilizations of Old Europe, there are long-established precedents for a re-emergent, human collectivity. These pre-patriarchal cultures represent the social values most deeply rooted in the human psyche and can be traced in the surviving “hospitality laws” of all sanely functional, forward-looking societies. The war era’s societal predecessors, worldwide, represented pantheistic, egalitarian, collective reverence patterns of the kind we are spiritually and magically re-conceiving today, that see and acknowledge divinity in everything (Gimbutas, 1974).

Social relating on a horizontal egalitarian respect-based model, very different from vertical dominant ranking hierarchical social models, is just as “natural”—just as “biological” to humans—as it is to certain other higher primates also. If you think otherwise, you’re accepting your conditioning and indoctrination as fact, and not simply a construct. (Every social model is constructed. Indeed, every model of science, biology and/or psychology is constructed. Of course.) It’s probably best to not be too attached to such constructs, or to the epistemological frameworks for their modeling. Better still to think on: Every member of the group in the matrifocal clan-bonding model has a role—a vital and uniquely valued one, precisely FOR being unique, different and individual, where there is no penalty for difference and no value placed on uniformity. Female Clan Bonding privileges collectivism and communalism, but not conformity. Everyone has a distinct and valued role in the clan or organic network. There are people next to you, but not above or below you, in a horizontal, Earth-oriented social cosmology and worldview. (In this discussion “worldview” = “reality construct and/or concept.”) What is interesting is letting people know, and see the evidence, that as far as the “Vertical Dominant ranking model,” it was very far from always so. More than interesting—mind-blowing, liberating, hugely relieving. New studies of prehistoric societies suggest that male-dominant-ranking models are a tiny, recent blip in the human social record.

There exists an actual, current codification of the alternative values of historical female clan bonding systems, as increasingly, popularly and professionally applied. The Ten Key Values of the Green Movement began to be formulated in the early 1980s, inspired by the Neo-Paganism movement in the Bay Area/San Francisco, and informed by the works of activists, artists, writers, scholars, scientists, and philosophers like Starhawk, Mary Beth Edelson, Marija Gimbutas, and Charlene Spretnak, among other prominent theorists of sustainable social models. Fundamentally, with these guiding principles in place, the Green Movement synthesizes a new, philosophical, Pantheist Movement. It is these links and connections which spawned the Gaia Movement within both science and spirituality, and which may well hold the vital keys to survival and ethical living on Earth. Core values for the actual crafting of the manifesto were collective process, non-hierarchical consensus, and connectivity.3A transcript of the full original document can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/35856087/The_Original_Values_Statement_Ten_Key_Principles_of_the_Green_Movement_Introduction

Journalist Mark Satin was invited to cover the Green Party founding meeting where the Values Statement was created. His Green-oriented monthly newsletter New Options would become a must read in the late 1980s. He later wrote about the meeting: “The Ten Key Values were birthed at the St. Paul founding meeting, during a late Saturday night marathon session facilitated by then Los Angeles-based and later Eugene, OR activist Jeff Land (who would later co-host Green Gathering ’89), with primary contributions by Spretnak and by many close to Murray Bookchin of the New England Institute for Social Ecology […] A “collective brain” seemed to take hold, and we began working together as one… No single individual came up with the idea of a values statement; it just welled up from out of our intense discussion … Seamlessly, we began discussing what our own values or pillars might be. Someone began recording our suggestions on a large flip chart. Ten, 15, 20 suggestions went up on the chart with seemingly no end in sight” (The Green Party U.S. Retrieved February 2018,  http://www.gp.org/history_unabridged).

Conclusion

We didn’t make it through the recurring Ice Ages by acting competitively, but by living cooperatively. Even with other species, notably wild canines. This carried through the Gravettian Epoch right through the hunter/gatherer societies of the newly formed grasslands and into the Early Neolithic of Chatal Huyuk and Old Europe, and only ultimately ceded to the male-dominant-ranking armed, horsed warfare of the Late Iron Age—and even then there were (are) vestiges and survivals of female-clan-bonding models (matriliny in human terms) that remain in healthy equilibrium. A notable “New World” example exists among surviving authentic Northwest Coast First Peoples. Hospitality laws are theorized to have been hardwired into matrifocal humans around the close of the last Ice Age (Gibson, & Philip J. Carr, 2004), along with the cannibalism taboo and incest prohibitions (Oliver, 2013).4See also: Giles, F. (2002). Fountains of love and loveliness: in praise of the dripping wet breast. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 4(1); Fierke, K. (2015). Diplomatic Interventions: Conflict and Change in a Globalizing World (New York: Plagrave MacMillan, 2015), p. 1.

Hospitality laws are the human equivalent of Bonobo monkeys’ female-clan-bonding way of feeding stranger Bonobos who wander into their camp, instead of killing them and eating them, like the male-dominant-ranking baboons will do with “Other” or stranger baboons they come in contact with or gain power over (University Michigan Primate Center, Retrieved in January 2018 from http://www.oit.itd.umich.edu/projects/ADW/). While male-dominant-ranking “pecking orders” are maintained what we may call “bullying” in the human context, female-clan-bonding social networks (or matrifocal societies in human terms) are maintained by pleasure-sharing and nurture. In all Higher Primate female-clan-bonding societies, this effectively means mutual grooming, sharing of affection, food gifts or “food-offerings,” and petting-soothing. For the Bonobos, it means tons and tons of soothing, consensual sex (de Waal, B. M., 1995).

A top-down “pecking order” is inaugurated and maintained by top-down “pecking,” which is to say “kissing up and punching down,” in human terms, or—in animal anthropological terms—“attrition.” “Attrition” can be otherwise known (in all-too human, schoolyard social politics terms) as bullying. Dominant male baboons are among the higher primates who will use assault and intimidation to extort sex from females (Smuts, 1995). The baboon pack haremises females, sequestering them and infants in the centre of the running, raiding alpha-led pack. The adolescent males are relegated to form the outside flank of the pack, and function as a sort of running guard. Their “attrition” rate is as many as 50%, a full half of every male generation being killed off or dying from their wounds before reaching sexual maturity and adulthood. Only the most vicious and violent youngsters survive to climb up through the ranks and become dominant alphas or the ranking sub-dominant lieutenants of alphas (Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, 1996).

For female-clan-bonded, matrifocal human societies, social network maintenance meant, and in some cases still means, lots of consensual sex and mutual grooming. (Hence the slightly inaccurate descriptions of such societies as “fertility cults” by modern scholars, and their prohibition by the ascetic patriarchs of the Old Testament as “abomination” in castigating the “Whore of Babylon.”) In the surviving matrifocal societies of North Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, it meant (and still means, in ceremonial circumstances or in the culture of the women’s baths) mutual hennaing of hands, feet, face and body, ceremonial tattooing, elaborate braiding and dressing of hair, dressing and adorning of the body, sharing of food offerings, and other pleasure and nurture sharing rituals. Interestingly, human sacrifice is not recorded in true matrifocal, organically occurring social networks (which occur in a horizontal web-work of connectedness), but only in attrition imposed, male-dominant-ranking social models, where it is all about possession, dominance and the aggressive control of assets, property and territory (Levittan, 2012).5The human sacrifices of children in the tophets of North Africa and the ancient Levant were required by the aggressive Carthaginian male gods of war and acquisitions, Moloch and Baal. The “tophet” was originally a shrine to Tanit, goddess of the necropolis and guardian of the dead, but were transformed into sites of immolation in the patriarchy. Cross, Frank Moore (1997). Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: 147-148. Why? Because in the epistemological framework of female-clan-bonding, everybody is someone’s son, daughter, sister, brother, uncle, auntie, cousin, etc., equally precious within a horizontal network—never diminished and dehumanized in a violently hierarchical, vertical-ranking value system, whereby some are the elite and others, less fortunate, are the “expendable” or “otherised” none-caste, “untouchable,” polluted non-persons (slaves, captives, designated corpse and waste handlers, chattel, booty, property, etc.).

We can be seen as an aggressive, violent and destructive species. We are, after all, the top predators on the planet. We learned hunting acumen, survival elegance, and social sophistication from wolf societies during the last Ice Age and thereby prospered, prevailing over (and/or interbreeding with) other human species, like the Neanderthals (Shipman, 2015). But the kind of organized, rapacious, institutionalized aggression we see in patriarchal ideologies was born in the elevation of war and the avowed destruction of the polluted “Other” as a conditioned way of life. It is an ideologically constructed, fear-based syndrome comprised of raw male-dominance-ranking. More recognizable expressions can be witnessed in most major institutions, both licit and illicit, like contemporary piracy, “raider” capitalism, the Mafia, the Church,6From the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the violent torture and murder of Hypatia, to the opportunism of the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the Church-sponsored pogroms against Jews across Europe and the expulsions of Phillip the Fair, to the conquests in the name of the Church in the New World, to the Jesuits’ establishment of slavery in South America in aid of the Church’s monopoly of the sugar trade in the Renaissance, to the current situation uncovering historical sexual violence against children by Catholic clergy, the record is too lengthy and detailed to account for here, but can be easily accessed in historic accounts, in both primary documents and contemporary research. and the modern corporation. Though masquerading as a religion and manifesting as a theology like any cattle cult, this is a pattern resulting from nurture, not Nature; while functioning as a model and meta-narrative, it is by no means inevitable, inescapable, or unavoidable.

Although the vicious syndrome of religiously codified male violence has pillaged the planet in the name of its parochial, militant god, it can be viewed (and perhaps forgiven) as a sort of intellectual disease or ideological malaise. As a relatively new and disastrously unworkable moral construct, it can be readily, wittingly, magically deconstructed. It is in fact a comparatively recent, ultimately non-viable social experiment. It is conceivable that, in a relatively short span of time, our near descendants may look back upon it as a briefly-held, failed model for human relationships—one that didn’t take. Patricist rape culture might one day be seen as a social graft that failed to thrive. As such, it may be compared to an outworn cautionary tale and found to be no longer relevant—an old story that has lost coherence, abandoned the narrative thread, and so subsided.

Footnotes

1 This method of ridding the arms of conquered women of the unwanted children sired by alien males was typically followed to the letter by Conquistadors, and other colonizing, imperialist invaders, across the Americas, the Caribbean, and other parts of the colonized, Europeanized world. Ironically, the best documents of this practice, consistently deployed against Indigenous peoples in the “New World,” are to be found in the accounts of priests carrying forth the Inquisition and the Witch Hunt, entailed to the cohorts of Spanish, Portuguese or other Catholic invaders. These clerical accounts often express horror at the genocidal behaviors of the soldiers and sailors carrying the sign of the Holy Cross, as the Dominican mandate at the time was to capture, convert and (often) to enslave subject peoples, preserving them alive so as to bring them into the Church (Cushner, 2002).

2 Kev Golinkin, “The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda,” The Hill, November 9, 2017.

3 A transcript of the full original document can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/35856087/The_Original_Values_Statement_Ten_Key_Principles_of_the_Green_Movement_Introduction

4 See also: Giles, F. (2002). Fountains of love and loveliness: in praise of the dripping wet breast. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 4(1); Fierke, K. (2015). Diplomatic Interventions: Conflict and Change in a Globalizing World (New York: Plagrave MacMillan, 2015), p. 1.

5 The human sacrifices of children in the tophets of North Africa and the ancient Levant were required by the aggressive Carthaginian male gods of war and acquisitions, Moloch and Baal. The “tophet” was originally a shrine to Tanit, goddess of the necropolis and guardian of the dead, but were transformed into sites of immolation in the patriarchy. Cross, Frank Moore (1997). Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: 147-148.

6 From the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the violent torture and murder of Hypatia, to the opportunism of the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the Church-sponsored pogroms against Jews across Europe and the expulsions of Phillip the Fair, to the conquests in the name of the Church in the New World, to the Jesuits’ establishment of slavery in South America in aid of the Church’s monopoly of the sugar trade in the Renaissance, to the current situation uncovering historical sexual violence against children by Catholic clergy, the record is too lengthy and detailed to account for here, but can be easily accessed in historic accounts, in both primary documents and contemporary research.

References

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Cushner, Nicholas P. (2002). Soldiers of God: the Jesuits in colonial America, 1565-1767, 1st English edition, Buffalo, NY: Language Communications.

Fierke, K. (2015). Diplomatic Interventions: Conflict and Change in a Globalizing World. New York: Plagrave MacMillan.

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Yvonne Owens is a past Research Fellow at the University College of London, and Professor of Art History and Critical Studies at the Victoria College of Art, Victoria, BC. She was awarded a Marie Curie Ph.D. Fellowship in 2005 for her interdisciplinary dissertation on Renaissance portrayals of women in art and sixteenth-century Witch Hunt discourses. She holds an Honors B.A. with Distinctions in History of Art from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, a Master of Art with Distinction in Medieval Studies (with an art history thesis) from The Centre For Medieval Studies at the University of York, U.K., a Master of Philosophy in History of Art from University College London and also a Ph.D. from UCL, also in art history. Her publications to date have mainly focused on representations of women and the gendering of evil “defect” in classical humanist discourses, cross-referencing these figures to historical art, natural philosophy, medicine and literature. She also writes art and cultural criticism, exploring contemporary post-humanist discourses in art, literature and new media.