During the Age of Pisces, the Supreme
Being was portrayed as male: omniscient, omnipotent, dominating, controlling, vengeful and
judgemental. As we move into the Age of Aquarius, the gentler feminine aspects of
spirituality are re-emerging from twenty centuries ofrepression.
Problems with macho theology There is a contradiction in the idea of a supreme being who is omniscient,
compassionate and yet creates souls in the knowledge that they are damned to eternal agony
in hell. This contradiction has never been resolved by the theologians. If
God is omniscient then He knows all events past and future, including how people
will behave, and their ultimate fate before they are even born.
If God is not omniscient in the
sense of knowing the future, then neither can He be omnipotent. If He exists within time,
and is subject to the uncertainties of time just like the rest of us, then
time is ultimately more powerful than God.
If He is omniscient and exists
outside time, then he can never make a decision or choose a course of action, because he
knows in advance exactly what his future actions will be for all eternity. He cannot
decide to change his mind because he will know in advance when and how he will decide to
change his mind, so his mind will already be made up. Such a God would be totally
paralysed by his own pre-ordained future - the ultimate in feed-back loops or logical
contradictions, which ever way you care to look at it.
The theologians have overspecified God with
power attributes to such an extent that He has become a logically impossible being. This
has led many Spiritual practitioners to rediscover the feminine nature of the deity. In
the Anglo-Celtic Traditions She is portrayed as having three aspects - maiden, mother and
wise woman. In Tibet a more detailed enumeration is given, and She has three times seven
aspects - the twenty-one manifestations of the Lady Tara .
Tara is a wise and helpful enlightened being, not a projection into the
spiritual realm of a long authoritarian tradition of Continental
Tyrants.
Too much of a good thing The Patriarchal God has many other internal logical contradictions, apart from
suffering the paralysis of omniscience. The fact that theologians have heaped power and
superlatives on him gives rise to problems of logical consistency. He is claimed to
be omnipotent, good, the source of truth, perfect and changeless. Yet many of these
attributes are either self-contradictory or contradict one another. For example:
Omnipotence
If He is omnipotent, can he produce a truly indestructible object? If He can't then He's
not omnipotent. If He can then He's not omnipotent either because now there's one action
He cannot do (destroy the truly indestructible).
Goodness
If He is good then why is there so much human and animal suffering in His creation? If
suffering and other evils result from Satan rather than God, then why doesn't God get rid
of Satan - after all, God is omnipotent and Satan is limited. In any case, if God is
omniscient he knows what Satan is going to do in advance, so God could always outwit Satan
and spoil his devious plots if He wanted to.
Truth
If as the believers claim, God created the universe during six days, less than ten
thousand years ago, why did he create the fossil record? The account in Genesis
would seem to be contradicted by every mineshaft sunk and every drill-hole bored. Are
fossils indeed forgeries planted by Satan to support the theory of evolution, or did God
plant them to test our faith in the Bible?
And what about those light rays from distant stars
which appear to have started on their journey millions of years ago? Are these fakes as
well? Maybe God has constructed a vast planetarium surrounding the solar system,
from which he projects the appearance of an old universe towards us in order to tempt us
into disbelieving Genesis.
Free will and changelessness. Can God create autonomous beings, whose wishes and intentions he can't control?
Most Buddhists and neo-pagans claim that humans have free will. Most materialists and many Christians (especially Calvinists) claim
that free will does not exist. Materialists reject free will on the basis of physicalist
determinism. Calvinistic Christians reject free will because in creating autonomous
beings God would lose his omnipotence (he couldn't control their actions) and also his
omniscience (he wouldn't know what they were going to do). Which implies that by creating
such beings he would have changed in his ultimate nature from a perfect being to a limited
being. Thus God would be seen as an inconstant, changing and indeed diminishing
over time. This is regarded by the Calvinists as a theological non-starter.
Perfection
If God is perfect then he is sufficient in himself. So why
bother to create a world at all?
If God is imperfect, so that he requires our
existence for some reason (eternal loneliness?) then perhaps we should regard him with
compassion rather than with fear and trepidation. He would then be what the
Buddhists term a 'samsaric god' - a powerful but ultimately tragic figure.
But maybe a less-than-macho God wouldn't go down too
well with the theologians, and certainly not with the memoids who, as the Age of
Pisces draws to its close, are becoming the predominant force in most of the patriarchal
belief systems (resulting in an increase in fundamentalism,
intolerance, acts of
terrorism, anti-rationalism, homophobia,
censorship of school syllabuses and libraries, persecution of harmless pagans such as wiccans, and a general escalation of
invective and paranoia).
Deconstructing the God or Reconstructing
the Goddess? So how come that the idea of the ultra-macho, ultra-powerful God has been taken to
such extremes that it is riddled with contradictions? The answer is that the
macho-god's origins do not lie in either logical analysis or spiritual experience. God is
a meme, the product of a male-dominated political system.
God's origins go back to the decline of the Roman
empire. The later Roman emperors, both Western and Byzantine, were tyrants who owned
their subjects body and soul. Anyone who defied them was generally sentenced to a slow and
agonising death. This earthly kingdom was extrapolated into the eternal spiritual
realm by continental theologians, who imposed the memetic blackmail of the doctrine of
ever-lasting hell and its torments for defiance of ecclesiastical authority.
Any teachings which claimed that the individual was capable of salvation outside each
particular sect were denounced as heresy. Unfortunately the Anglo-Celtic
opposition to this tyrannical theocracy was smashed at the Synod of Whitby.
The continental God-meme is a sociopolitical power
construct, in fact a parody of a power construct, in that the power attributes have been
exaggerated to such an extent that they have become logically contradictory.
Spirituality and the sense of the
numinous
Yet the sense of the transcendent, the numinous and the spiritual
aspects of life are as prevalent now as in earlier centuries. If
Caesar-in-the-Sky can no longer provide a focus for these longings, who can?
Some theologians may attempt a partial
deconstruction of the macho-God to alleviate some of the difficulties. A more radical
approach is to recognise that religion has become the enemy of spirituality. The
only way out of the mess is to go back to the pre-Roman roots of our culture, put Caesar
into the museum where he belongs, then examine the female attributes of divinity, which
have been suppressed for so many centuries.
Attributes of the divine in pre-Roman and
eastern cultures. In neolithic times the Godhead was portrayed as what has been called an 'Earth
Goddess'. The Earth Goddess appears as a plump, pregnant woman with large vulva and
breasts. One interpretation is that she is a fertility goddess representing the
crops of the earth and the fecundity of the tribe. However a more
metaphysical interpretation is possible, as we shall see.
In Celtic times the Goddess was strongly
associated with wells and springs (eg the rituals surrounding Coventina's well and
the numerous Brideswells, Marywells, St.Anne's wells and Ladywells throughout Celtic
Britain and Ireland). The usual explanation is that our fertility-obsessed ancestors
regarded these watery orifices as the
vagina or nipple of the Earth Goddess.
The presence of the Sheela-na-gig in the
vicinity of some holy wells in Ireland does suggest a connection with the vagina. But
again, a more spiritual interpretation is possible, for we must not forget that one of the
most enduring aspects of the Celtic goddess is that of the wise woman (only finally
eradicated from Anglo-Celtic spirituality by the last witch-burnings of 16th and 17th
centuries).
In classical Greece the principal female
divinity was Athene (patron Goddess of the city of Athens, of philosophy, and
of all the arts and sciences of civilisation). She was first and foremost a wisdom
goddess.
But what does wisdom and philosophy have to
do with the pregnant earth-mother and the fluid symbolism of springs and wells?
To get a coherant picture we need to look to
the Tibetan tradition, where ancient wisdom has survived into modern times with no
intervening attempts to masculinise everything (at least not until the appearance of Mao
Tse Tung).
In Tibetan Buddhism, wisdom is very
definitely feminine. Tara is a wisdom Goddess. Wisdom is primarily the understanding of
the ultimate nature of reality - Sunyata
- which is sometimes translated as emptiness, but in fact comes from a Sanskrit root
meaning 'pregnant' or 'swollen with possibility'. This may account for the
philosophical significance of the pregnancy symbolism.
Sunyata is the ground of all being (hence
the earth symbolism). Sunyata is also sometimes known as 'the plenitude of the
void' and is seen as a constant upwelling of possibility, freedom and potential.
Sunyata is the primary fountainhead of the flow of free-will (non-determined
action, intuition and creativity). Only by having the ultimate nature of sunyata can
anything change or develop or be created.
'Water symbolizes the whole of
potentiality; it is fons et origo, the source of all possible existence' - Mircea
Eliade. Hence the well and spring symbolism may have a
meaning which transcends the cruder interpretation of physical fluids.
Caesar-in-the-Sky has been so overspecified
with superlatives, especially with the fatal feedback loop of omniscience, that he
has been constructed into what philosophers would call a 'logically necessary being' (ie a
changeless, inherently existent being ). But according to Buddhist philosophy nothing can
be inherently existent, there is no such thing as a
logically necessary being, and anything than cannot itself undergo a change of state
cannot interact with anything else.
In contrast, the Goddess is not a
static, stagnant, inherently existent monolith.
She is the clear wellspring of
liberation, and the source of all the potentials and possibilities which flow out of the
ground of being.
Each of the twenty one Taras is a
manifestation of the principal Tara, Green Tara. (See 'Liberation from Sorrow
'and 'Great Compassionate Mother' published byTharpa). Her aspects
encompass the maiden, mother, guardian, healer, consuming fire, light and wisdom.
They are traditionally stated to be:
I
Lotus-born swift heroine II Lighting the darkness
like a hundred full moons in autumn III Wisdom IV Honored by the Conquerors V Subduer of unfavourable
conditions VI Worshipped
by the (male samsaric) Gods VII Destroyer of opponents - fiery
appearance VIII Exorcism of demons IX Mudra symbolising the three
precious jewels X Mirthful laughter
XI Summoning the directional
guardians XII Adorned by the crescent moon. XIII Wrathful fire which destroys obstructions
to spiritual progress. XIV Radiating power. XV Dwelling within a sphere of peace XVI Powerful Mantra - the ten letter rosary XVII Shaker of worlds XVIII Dispeller of poisons IXX Dispeller of conflicts and bad dreams XX Healer XXI Subduer of evil spirits
She is
not however the creator of the universe, nor is she omnipotent. She is a being who
became enlightened in another world-system, aeons ago.
Goddess in the aspect of the maiden at full moon
Islam and the damnation of infidels They will be jammed into "a sealed
vault of Fire" (Qur'an, 90: 20) and live in the murk of
thick black smoke. They will hear the fire gasping harshly as it seethes and find people
moaning in it. Their endless pain will never be relieved, despite their entreaties,
causing them indescribable anxiety. A scorching wind will burn their skin, which
will be continually replaced to burn yet again, as God describes in verse 4: 56,
"Every time their skins are burned off, We will replace them with new skins." So
according to Muslim belief, those NYC firefighters, paramedics and other rescuers who were
trapped by the collapsed towers and slowly roasted to death as the fires spread through
the rubble, will, being infidels, have an eternity of the same agony to look forward to.
