I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars, and heap your dead bodies on the dead bodies of your idols; and my soul will abhor you. –Leviticus 26.30
Although we like to pretend otherwise, Western civilisation has been built on the ruins of the Goddess culture, by the descendants and psychological heirs of those who, over centuries and millennia, worked to destroy the Great Goddess, Her people, and all memory of their gifts to humankind.
It is a not uncommon psychological phenomenon that those who have victimized others end up hating their victims. For evidence of this we need look no further than to the US, where among the after-effects of a grossly abusive slavery system is a racism that refuses to die. Or the Biblical story of Tamar, a woman whose half brother Amnon raped her, after which his desperate love turned to even more desperate hatred. He ordered Tamar thrown out of his house and the door bolted against her.
Today’s Christianity seems more rooted in the Old Testament’s hatred of the Love Goddess—“the Law and the Prophets” as the New Testament calls it—than in the loving message of its nominal founder. As with the racists and rapist above, the modern Christian world goes on hating and hurting women, as if the memory of our religion’s horrific abuses against free women forces us to endlessly repeat them. As if the historical restricting and demeaning of women can only be justified if we continue the same treatment. The fierce determination to control women with regard to abortion that still exists in many parts of the Christian world is only one sign of this.
There is another repeating pattern from those who can or will not process historical wrongs against women: the regular determination to tear down any woman who, however briefly, has inhabited the “Goddess” role in the world. It seems our unconscious race memory forces us to repeat the evil of the past, as a way of avoiding the knowledge that it was evil. As if large sections of our society today are still governed by a primitive fear of the Goddess and the rival religion that was wiped out long ago.
This is arguably what motivates the British media’s continued abuse of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, even after they’ve been called on it. In fact, the abuse is now at an almost unbelievable pitch. Till now, they’ve been satisfied with a metaphorical stoning, using words and psychological abuse to bring her down.
But no longer. Now we have Jeremy Clarkson’s recently-published column in one British tabloid, The Sun. (For those who don’t know the name, Clarkson is well-known in various guises on TV and other media in the UK.) His column suggests that the metaphorical stoning of the Duchess is no longer enough: he’s calling for a real public shit-stoning. He wants her paraded through the streets in real time. He is proud of hating Meghan Markle, a blameless young woman with no stain on her character, more than Rose West, a notorious serial killer of young women in Britain 50 years ago.
This call to action produced predictable shock and outrage and the kind of negative attention Mr. Clarkson prides himself he thrives on. But can we really pretend to be outraged? His sentiments are, after all, straight out of the Old Testament: Rose West, it could be argued, was doing the Lord’s work—just like those men in Leviticus, she murdered young women, many of whom were free and sexually self-determining, and so anathema to the threatened-prophet mindset of men like Mr. Clarkson.
Whereas Meghan Markle, for one brief shining moment, inhabited that space in our psyches that belongs to the Goddess. Like the statues of the Great Goddess that so afflicted the prophets three millennia ago, Meghan Markle has to be brought down. The jealous male god, whose ire still infects many more psyches than just Jeremy Clarkson’s, demands it.
This is “the Law and the Prophets”.
Image of Human Sacrifice, Private Collection, Used by permission.
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