things hidden since the foundation of patriarchy

If you don’t have a patriarchal culture, do you really need Christ to rid yourself of sacrificial violence?

I got thinking about this question in two different ways.

First, after reading Martha Reineke’s Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence, which analyzes the importance of sexual difference within a sacrificial economy and draws on the ideas of Rene Girard and Julia Kristeva, I was struck by the point “sacrifice is the unhappy result of a converging set of circumstances.” In explaining Kristeva’s idea of the social contract we live under, Martha Reineke writes, “Fusion of the patriarchal code of sacrifice with a Symbolic Law of absence places women at absolute risk of violence when they are made to bear abject marks of the maternal body. So pervasive is the patriarchal influence on the social contract that Kristeva believes we truly do not know what men’s and women’s roles might be if the logic of separation legislated by the Law of the Symbolic order were to be inscribed in society nonsacrificially.”

Kristeva comes at the subject’s development from a psychoanalytic point-of-view. Identity is formed in separation, learning you are something because you are not something else. You must lose the Mother, reject the “maternal matrix,” and really, be forever rejecting it, to become a functioning member of the Symbolic order. The Father is the gatekeeper to the Symbolic order, the one with the Phallus, and so the one with the authority all children want to emulate. Exactly how patriarchy develops from these different representations when these representations clearly rely on a patriarchal value system to encode them isn’t clear to me. But I wonder how this psychodynamic process of separation could ever lead to a matriarchal society. Perhaps only if Mother somehow acquired the Phallus. How does psychoanalytic theory explain a matriarchal society?

Second, I was reading some background material at Societies of Peace, Second World Congress on Matriarchal Studies, and Heide Gottner-Abendroth wants to be sure you understand that “matriarchy” is not just a reversal of patriarchy with women running the show in hierarchichal, accumulative, dominating fashion but a “system with its own rules.” She has based her outline of structures on a cross-culture analysis of matriarchal cultures with some vestiges still in existence today, including “the Mosuo, Yao, Miao and Tan peoples in China, the Chiang people of Tibet, the Minangkabau of Sumatra, the Ainu of Japan, the Trobrianders of Melanesia in the Pacific, the Khasi, Garo and Nayar of India, the Bantu, Akan and Ashanti peoples in Africa, the Berbers and Tuareg of North Africa, the Arawak peoples of South America, the Cuna and Juchitanians of Central America, the Hopi and Pueblo peoples as well as the Iroquois peoples of North America.” 

Among many interesting things, she has this to say:

On the cultural level, matriarchal societies do not have the concept of religious transcendence in terms of an unseen, untouchable, and incomprehensible all-powerful God, in contrast to whom the world is devalued as dead matter. In matriarchy, divinity is immanent, for the whole world is regarded as divine. This is evident in the concept of the universe as a goddess who created everything, and of Mother Earth, who brings forth everything living. And everything is endowed with divinity — the smallest pebble and the biggest star, each woman and man, each blade of grass and each mountain.

In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, following the rhythms of the seasons, everything is celebrated: nature in its manifold expressions, the different clans with their different abilities and tasks, the different genders and the different generations, following the principle of ‘wealth in diversity.’ There is no separation between sacred and secular; so everyday tasks such as planting and harvesting, cooking and weaving are, at the same time, meaningful rituals.

On the spiritual level, I define matriarchies as sacred societies and cultures of the Goddess. (Heide Gottner-Abendroth from Modern Matriarchal Studies)

It occurs to me you can’t have a “sacred” without also having a “profane” or “secular.” The Girardian mechanism of scapegoating can’t work with a society that is all one or the other. One of the reasons Girard discovered his theory when he did is that the culture-preserving work of scapegoating has been failing to work ever since the advent of Christ, even more as Christian culture pervades the world. Scapegoating doesn’t work as a release valve if you see it for what it is, which is actually a bad thing, in a way, because that means the substitutionary violence of all-against-one becomes all-against-all, and societies can’t continue with such disruptive violence.

As J. Bottum pointed out in an article I mentioned a few weeks back,

Hitler sacrificed millions of Jews to found what turned out to be a twelve-year reich, Stalin made scapegoats of millions of ‘counterrevolutionaries’ to preserve a regime with only fifty more years of life, and every little dictator since has slaughtered his own victims to create or maintain an ephemeral authority. Thousand-year cultures are not founded by sacrifice anymore, for the process of scapegoating no longer seems to work very well. Everyone in the world has learned the Christian demythologizing of sacred violence too well, and no one trusts sacrifice to do what it once did. (J. Bottum from Girard Among the Girardians, First Things)

What is the most outstanding feature of modern Western society? Secularism. It seems to be what absolutists of all kinds fear, from conservative American ideologues to Middle East theocrats. Not that either one of those categories of people want entirely sacred societies. In fact, neither believes that the world is sacred, but only those men and places they name, set apart, and control. Those who would use the system of scapegoating need a carefully preserved mix of sacred/profane to make the system work. This isn’t to say you can’t have a civil religion masked as secularism. We have one in America. It’s called Consumerism, where malls are our sacred places. I recommend Jon Pahl’s The Desire to Acquire: Or, Why Shopping Malls Are Sites of Religious Violence at the Chicago Divinty School website. 

So now I’m wondering about this sacred/secular bit. I know Girard looked at myths from all over the world and through history to develop his ideas, but did he find the scapegoat mechanism in any matriarchal societies? Did he even look there? Were all his examples based on societies with hierarchical, transcendent religions (thus patriarchy), or do immanent religions (such as those in matriarchies) feature the same mechanism? 

The scapegoat must start out profane, an enemy of God, and becomes sacred only after the fact of its murder. If everyone and everything is sacred, can you make scapegoats of any of them? Alternatively, as the modern West seems to be doing, if you deny anything can be made sacred, will you also avoid the scapegoat mechanism? This we don’t seem able to do, which supports Jon Pahl above, as well as Roger Scruton, mentioned awhile back in this blog, in that religion is NOT “primarily about God but about the sacred” and “the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated…but never destroyed.” Roger Scruton from The Sacred and the Human.

We’re familiar with our own personal use of (nonlethal) scapegoats in our lives, and we form our identities and concepts of life having seen them in our culture and religion, from blame to murder. Scapegoating is so familiar, we take for granted that it is an intrinsic process of being human, like mimesis. But does one necessarily lead to the other, or is it like Kristeva says, that sacrifice is so pervasive in our patriarchal system that we can’t imagine it any other way, so we say it’s just human nature or, maybe, original sin? 

One of the most creative maneuvers of patriarchy was to make God entirely masculine (of course he’s not gendered literally, but all our language and images define him so). The unconditionally-loving, all-forgiving Christian God is “Father”. That’s not to say fathers can’t be that way, but patriarchal cultures go out of their way to strip men of their emotional “weakness.” Fathers, as an idea, enforce the Law, they love on merit, and likewise, they disinherit for failure of all kinds. Mothers, as an idea, are the ones who love and forgive unconditionally. So why make God a “father”? Then God has a son, another masculine entity, but not just masculine, a man. Yet Jesus doesn’t act much like a man, at least, not a patriarchal man. In fact, throughout history, theologians conceived of Jesus’s body as feminine. He is descended of God and woman, after all. He got his human body from Mary. As for the Holy Spirit, even today people froth at the mouth anytime someone suggests the third Person may be thought of as feminine. Their unexamined argument is that God isn’t gendered, so we must call God “him.” Yet the Holy Spirit has a tradition of being feminine, both as a representation of Wisdom (always seen as feminine) and as a feminine noun in the Hebrew (lost through translation to Greek and then Latin).

Does Christianity work as Girard says it does because underneath all the camouflage it’s un-patriarchal, egalitarian, maybe even womanish? Maybe the only way to inject a little matriarchy into patriarchy was to disguise its feminine principles in Christianity through inversion, while taking pains to add invectives against women’s equality — you know, like the bigger the lie the more they’ll believe it. Is this an indication that a matriarchal culture can avoid the scapegoat mechanism by avoiding the life of estrangement explained in psychoanalysis and the resulting lethal escalation of rivalry, which suggests Girard’s theory began with the advent of patriarchy, not the evolution of humans? Maybe this is Girard’s true mystery, the real “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” At least, the patriarchal world.