Woman, Church & State

It is impossible to write of the church without noticing its connection with the great systems of the world, during its course of life. The history of christendom is the history of the myriad institutions which have arisen through its teachings, or that have been sustained by its approval. The world has not grown wise under it, except with a wisdom that is leading the purest humanitarian thought in a direction contrary to its footsteps. Slavery and prostitution, persecutions for heresy, the inquisition with its six hundred modes of torture, the destruction of learning, the oppression of science, the systematized betrayal of confiding innocence, the recognized and unrecognized polygamy of man, the denial to woman of a right to herself, her thought, her wages, her children, to a share in the government which rules her; to an equal part in religious institutions, all these and a myriad more, are parts of what is known as christian civilization. Nor has the church ever been the leader in great reforms. During the anti-slavery conflict, the American Church was known as “the bulwark of American slavery.” Its course continues the same in every great contest with wrong. A memorial history of the American Episcopal church, an extensive work in two volumes of seven hundred pages each, published within the past few years, devotes but seven pages to “the Attitude of the Church during the Civil War,” and the general refusal of the church to take part in the great struggle for national life, is referred to with complacent satisfaction. Penitentiaries and prisons, asylums and reformatories, all institutions of a repressive character which the church prides herself as having built up, are no less evil than the convents, monasteries and religious orders belonging to it. They have all risen through perversion of nature. Crimes and criminals are built up and born because of the great wrong first done to mothers; they are the offspring of church and state. Science now declares crime to be a disease, but it has not yet discovered the primal cause of this disease. It is an inheritance from centuries of legalized crime against woman, of which the church in its teachings is prime factor.

Woman will gain nothing by a compromising attitude toward the church, by attempt to excuse its great wrong toward her sex, or by palliation of its motives. On the contrary, a stern reference to facts, keeping the face of the world turned toward its past teachings, its present attitude, is her duty. Wrongs of omission equal in magnitude those of commission.

Advance for woman is too well established, woman has had too much experience, has borne too much ridicule, misrepresentation and abuse to now hesitate in an attack upon the stronghold of her oppression – the church. She possesses too full knowledge of its subtle touch upon civil law to dare leave it alone; it has become one of woman’s first duties, one of her greatest responsibilities, to call public attention to its false doctrines and false teachings in regard to the origin, condition and subjection of woman. She has engaged in too many battles, weathered too many storms to longer hesitate in exposure of its stupendous crimes toward one-half of humanity. Let those who fear, hide themselves, if they will, until the storm is past. Let those who dare, defiantly rejoice that they are called upon to bear still more, in order that woman may be free. A brighter day is to come for the world, a day when the intuitions of woman’s soul shall be accepted as part of humanity’s spiritual wealth; when force shall step backward, and love, in reality, rule the teachings of religion; and may woman be strong in the ability and courage necessary to bring about this millennial time. The world is full of signs of the near approach of this period; as never before is there an arousing sense of something deeper, holier in religion than the christian church has given. The world has seemingly awaited the advent of heroic souls who once again should dare all things for the truth. The woman who possesses love for her sex, for the world, for truth, justice and right, will not hesitate to place herself upon record as opposed to falsehood, no matter under what guise of age or holiness it appears. A generation has passed since the great struggle began, but not until within ten years has woman dared attack upon the veriest stronghold of her oppression, the Church. The state, agent and slave of the church, has so long united with it in suppression of woman’s intelligence, has so long preached of power to man alone, that it has created an inherited tendency, an inborn line of thought toward repression. Bent in this line before his birth, man still unwittingly thinks of woman as not quite his equal, and it requires a new creation of mind to change his thought. A second generation has arisen, in whom some slight inherited tendencies toward recognition of a woman’s right to herself are seen. In the next generation this line of inherited thought will have become stronger, both Church and State more fully recognizing woman’s inherent right to share in all the opportunities of life; but at what cost to all who have taken part in the great struggle.

Has woman no wrongs to avenge upon the church? As I look backward through history I see the church everywhere stepping upon advancing civilization, hurling woman from the plane of “natural rights” where the fact of her humanity had placed her, and through itself, and its control over the state, in the doctrine of “revealed rights” everywhere teaching an inferiority of sex; a created subordination of woman to man; making her very existence a sin; holding her accountable to a diverse code of morals from man; declaring her possessed of fewer rights in church and in state; her very entrance into heaven made dependent upon some man to come as mediator between her and the Saviour it has preached, thus crushing her personal, intellectual and spiritual freedom. Looking forward, I see evidence of a conflict more severe than any yet fought by reformation or science; a conflict that will shake the foundations of religious belief, tear into fragments and scatter to the winds the old dogmas upon which all forms of christianity are based. It will not be the conflict of man with man upon rites and systems; it will not be the conflict of science upon church theories regarding creation and eternity; it will not be the light of biology illuminating the hypothesis of the resurrection of the body; but it will be the rebellion of one half of the church against those theological dogmas upon which the very existence of the church is based. In no other country has the conflict between natural and revealed rights been as pronounced as in the United States; and in this country where the conflict first began, we shall see its full and final development. During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects. We note its beginning; its progress will overthrow every existing form of these institutions; its end will be a regenerated world.

1

The first state of primitive man must have been the mere aggregation. The right of the mother was therefore most natural; upon the relationship of mother and child the remotest conception of the family was based. —Wilkin, p. 869.

2

Where a god and goddess are worshiped together they are not husband and wife, but mother and son. Neither does the god take pre-eminence, but the mother or goddess. This condition dates from the earliest days of society, when marriage in our sense of the word was unknown, and when kinship and inheritance were in the female line. The Babylonian Ishtur of the Izdobar legend is a deity of this type. —W. Robertson Smith: Kinship in Ancient Arabia.

3

Dr. Th. Achelis. —Article on Ethnology: (The Open Court).

4

In a country where she is the head of the family, where she decides the descent and inheritance of her children, both in regard to property and place in society in such a community, she certainly cannot be the servant of her husband, but at least must be his equal if not in many respects his superior. —Wilkin.

5

Motherright.

6

Lubbuck. —Pre-Historic Times and Origin of Civilization. Wilkin.

7

Among many people the father at birth of a child, especially a son, loses his name and takes the one his child gets. Taylor —Primitive Culture. Also see Wilkin.

8

“Thus we see that woman’s liberty did not begin at the upper, but at the lower end of civilization. Woman in those remote times, was endowed with and enjoyed rights that are denied to her but too completely in the higher phase of civilization. This subject has a very important aspect, i.e. the position of woman to man, the place she holds in society, her condition in regard to her private and public (political) rights.”

9

“Among the monogamous classic nations of antiquity, the maternal deity was worshiped with religious ceremonies.”

10

We find the mother’s right exclusively together with a well-established monogamy. —Bachofen.

11

Documentary History of New York.

12

Alexander: History of Women.

13

History of the United States, Vol. I.

14

Cushing.

15

“What is most to be considered in this respect are the political rights which women in time of the Matriarchate shared with the men. They had indeed the right to vote in public assemblies still exercised not very long ago among the Basques in the Spanish provinces.”

16

That the Veddas are the aborigines of Ceylon may be assumed from the fact that the highly civilized Singalese admit them to be of noble rank. Pre-Historic Times. – Lubbuck.

17

“We find in some instances this independence of the maiden in regard to disposing of her hand, or selecting a husband as a memento of the time of the Matriarchate… The most remarkable instance of the self-disposition of woman we find among the ancient Arabs and the Hindoos; among the latter the virgin was permitted to select her own husband if her father did not give her in marriage within three years after her maturity.”

18

Account of the Religion, Manners, etc., of the People of Malabar, etc., translated by Mr. Phillips, 1718.

19

Among the illustrative types of interior realities and the elementary geometric forms, point, direct line and deflected line, the last of which is a true arc produces the circle when carried to its ultimate, this circle representing the triune order of movement; the point in the line, the line in the curve, and the curve in the circle —The Path.

20

The phallus and lingum (or lingum and yoni), the point within the circle or diameter within the circle. —Volney’s Ruins.

21

Chips from a German Work-Shop. – Max Muller.

22

All mythology has pertinently been characterized as ill-remembered history.

23

In the Rig-Veda, a work not committed to writing until after that movement of the Aryans, which resulted in the establishment of Persia and India … there is nothing more striking than the status of woman at that early age. Then the departed mothers were served as faithfully by the younger members of the family as departed fathers. The mother quite as often, if not more frequently than the father conducted the services of the dead ancestry, which took place three times a day, often consisting of improvised poetry. —Elizabeth Peabody on the Aryans.

24

There are but few of the United States in which the authority of the father to bind out a living child or to will away an unborn one, is not recognized as valid without the mother’s consent.

25

Ward, the American who rendered such service to the Chinese Emperor, has been deified. The Emperor, in a recent edict, has placed him among the major gods of China, commanding shrines to be built and worship to be paid to the memory of this American. The people are worshiping him along with the most ancient and powerful deities of their religion as a great deliverer from war and famine – as a powerful god in the form of man. In every household, school and temple, his name will be thus commemorated. —Newspaper Report.

26

Diodorus Siculus.

27

“I am nature, the parent of all things, the sovereign of the elements, the primary progeny of time, the most exalted of the deities, the first of the heavenly gods and goddesses, the queen of the shades, the uniform countenances who dispose with my rod the innumerable lights of heaven.”

28

The salubrious breezes of the sea, and the mournful silence of the dead whose single deity the whole world venerates in many forms with various rites and many names. The Egyptians, skilled in ancient lore, worship me with proper ceremonies and call me by my true name – Queen Isis.

29

Leeks, garlic, onions and beans.

30

All the ancient nations appear to have had an ark or archa, in which to conceal something sacred. – Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis I, 347.

31

The Sacred Song of Moses and Miriam was an early part of Jewish literature; the idea was borrowed like the ark from the religion of Isis.

32

The throne of this brilliant queen who reigned 1600 years B.C. has recently been deposited in the British Museum. Her portrait, also brought to light, shows Caucasian features with a dimpled chin.

33

Bryant was an English writer of the last century, a graduate of Cambridge who looked into many abstruse questions relating to ancient history. In 1796, eight years before his death, he published “A Dissertation Concerning the War of Troy.”

34

That Homer came into Egypt, amongst other arguments they endeavor to prove it especially by the potion Helen gave Telemachus – in the story of Menelaus – to cause him to forget all his sorrows past, for the poet seems to have made an exact experiment of the potion Nepenthes, which he says Helen received from Polymnestes, the wife of Thonus, and brought it from Thebes in Egypt, and indeed in that city, even at this day, the women use this medicine with good success, and they say that in ancient times the medicine for the cure of anger and sorrow was only to be found among the Diospolitans, Thebes and Diospolis being affirmed by them to be one and the same city. —Diodorus Siculus, Vol. I, Chap. VII.

35

The remaining three were Cyrus, Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander. Cyrus met defeat and death at the hands of Tomyris, queen of the Scythians, who caused him to be crucified, a punishment deemed so ignominious by the Romans that it was not inflicted upon the most criminal of their citizens. Because of his barbarity, Tomyris caused the head of Cyrus to be plunged into a sack of blood “that he might drink his fill.”

36

Very few mummies of children have been found. – Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians.

37

In relation to women the laws were very severe; for one that committed a rape upon a free woman was condemned to have his privy member cut off; for they judged that the three most heinous offenses were included in that one vile act, that is wrong, defilement and bastardy. —Diodorus, Vol. I, Chap. VII.

38

Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries. Chapter on the Vestals. – Lanciani.

39

The Anacalypsis II, 241.

40

According to Commissioner of Education, Chang Lai Sin, Chinese women can read and write, and when a husband wishes to do anything he consults with his wife, and when the son comes home, although he may be prime minister, he shows his respect to his mother by bending his knee. “I claim that the Chinese institutions and system of education, both with regard to men and women, are far superior to those of any of the neighboring nations for a great many centuries, and that it is only within this century that China, after having been defeated by so many reverses in her arms, has turned to a foreign country – to the United States – for example and instruction.”

41

The Shakers hold that the revelation of God is progressive. That in the first or antediluvian period of human nature God was known only as a Great Spirit; that in the second or Jewish period he was revealed as the Jehovah. He, she or a dual being, male or female, the “I am that I am;” that Jesus in the third cycle made God known as a father; and that in the last cycle commencing with 1770, A.D., “God is revealed in the character of Mother, an eternal Mother, the bearing spirit of all the creation of God.” —W. A. Parcelle.

42

In China the family acting through its natural representative is the political unit. This representative may be a woman. The only body in China that may be said to correspond with our law-making assemblies is the Academy of Science and Letters of Pekin, and women are not excluded from that learned conclave. La Cité Chinoise.– G. Eugene Simon.

43

Art Letters, p. 322. – Bachofen.

44

Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. XVI, Edinburgh, 1872.

45

The divine element, according to the idea of the ancient world, was composed of two sexes. There were dei femma, and hence temples sacred to goddesses; holy sanctuaries where were celebrated mysteries in which men could not be permitted to participate. The worship of goddesses necessitated priestesses, so that women exercised the sacerdotal office in the ancient world. The wives of the Roman Consuls even offered public sacrifices at certain festivals. The more property the wife had, the more rights she had. —M. Derraimes.

46

The superiority of woman’s condition in Europe and America is generally attributed to Christianity. We are anxious to give some credit to that influence, but it must not be forgotten that the nations of Northern Europe treated women with delicacy and devotion long before they were converted to the Christian faith. Long before the Christian era women were held in high estimation, and enjoyed as many privileges as they generally have since the spread of Christianity. Nichols. —Women of all Nations.

47

When I go back to the most remote periods of antiquity into which it is possible to penetrate, I find clear and positive evidence of several important facts: First, no animal food was eaten; no animals were sacrificed. Higgins.—Anacalypsis II, p. 147.

48

Observe that I.H.U. is Jod, male, father; “He” is female, Binah, and U is male, Vau, Son. —Sepher Yetzirah.

49

The Perfect Way.– Kingsford.

50

I.A.H. according to the Kabbalists, is I. (Father) and A.H. (Mother); composed of I. the male, and H. the mother. Nork. —Bibl. Mythol., I, 164-65 (note to Sod 166, 2, 354).

51

Nork says the “Woman clothed with the sign of the Sun and the Moon is the bi-sexed or male-female deity; hence her name is Iah, composed of the masculine I and the feminine Ah. Sod.– Appendix 123.

52

The Perfect Way, p. 78.

53

That name of Deity, which occurring in the Old Testament is translated the Almighty, namely El Shaddai, signified the Breasted God, and is used when the mode of the divine nature implied is of a feminine character. Kingsford. —The Perfect Way, p. 68.

54

A chief signification of the word Babel among Orientals was “God the Father.” The Tower of Babel therefore signifies the Tower of God the Father – a remarkable indication of the confusion, not alone of tongues, but of religious ideas arising from man’s attempt to worship the father alone. —E. L. Mason. Injustice to the sex reached its culmination in the enthronement of a personal God with a Son to share his glory, but wifeless, motherless, daughterless. —Dr. William Henry Channing.

55

Those who have studied the ancient lore of Cabalistic books, know that in the ineffable name Yod-he-vau (or Jehovah), the first letter yod signifies the masculine, the second letter hu or ha the feminine, while the last letter van or vaud is said by Cabalists to indicate the vital life which fills all the throbbing universe from the union of eternal love with eternal wisdom. It is this ineffable holy (or whole) Mother and Father, which must be exalted and imaged forth in family and government with the woman-force more strongly emphasized, before even human society can be filled with that new creation with which the iridescent subtle mother-essence infuses and enwreathes all other realms of the pulsing universe. No man seems shaken at hearing of the fatherhood of Jehovah. Is motherhood less divine? Nothing but a male-born theology evolved from the overheated fires of feeling would have burned away all recognition of the fact that the presence of the “Eternal Womanly” in Yod-he-vau’s being is necessary to full-sphered perfection; none but those whose degraded estimate of woman has caused them to desecrate her holy office of high priestess of life, will see anything more sacrilegious in a recognition of “Our Mother in Heaven,” and in offering her the prayer “hallowed be thy name, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” than in saying the same things to the Father there. Those who chose to search will discover that the “Eternal Fatherhood of God,” in regard to which Protestant theologians talk so much, has been balanced in all ancient religions as well as in the nature of things by the eternal Motherhood in Jehovah’s being, without which Fatherhood would be impossible. This Motherhood has always and everywhere been the preserver and creator of the omnipresent life of all kinds which fills the throbbing universe. Yod-he-vau’s Lost Name can never be hallowed (made whole) without the Mother is there. E.L. Mason. – The Lost Name.

56

It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian fathers that concupiscence or the sensual passion was the original sin of human nature. Lecky —Hist. European Morals. The tendency of the church towards the enforcement of celibacy was early seen. At the four Synods which assembled to establish the true faith in respect to the Holy nature of Christ’s Humanity, the first one at Nice, 318, the second at Constantinople with forty bishops present; the third at Ephesus with two hundred bishops present; the fourth at Chaledonia with many bishops together, they forever forbade all marriage to the minister at the altar. Monumenta Ecclesiastica, p. 347. To no minister at the altar is it allowed to marry, but it is forbidden to every one. Ibid.

57

According to Christianity woman is the unclean one, the seducer who brought sin into the world and caused the fall of man. Consequently all apostles and fathers of the church have regarded marriage as an inevitable evil just as prostitution is regarded today. August Bebel. —Woman in the Past, Present and Future.

58

Spirit in the Hebrew, as shown in the first chapter, answers to all genders; in the Greek to the feminine alone. With Kabbalists the “Divine Spirit” was conceded to be the feminine Jehovah, that is, the feminine principle of the Godhead.

59

From Marcellina, in the second century, a body of the church took its name. Her life was pure, and her memory has descended to us free from calumny and reproach.