The Goddess Who Would Be Isis: Summary so far.

In the previous parts of this essay, it has been argued that there is a patriarchal myth of unity. That myth is that for their to be political unity, there must be a violent military manhood, who deserve, by right of necessity, all political power. Women must either be subservient house goddesses, or they become unlovable bitches. In support of this idea the language of the myth of the Goddess Hathor/Sekhmet from Old Kingdom Egypt was compared with the language of anti-suffrage writers Elihu Root and Helen Kendrick Johnson from late 19th century America.

The Hathor myth focuses on the period of transition from scattered settlements to unified Kingdom. It is related to the use of castration and destruction in the establishing of kingship, as can be seen in the Narmer Palette from Egypt. Which matches well with the reunification of the United States after the Civil War, and the crushing of native nations by the United States. Unity, in the Hathor myth, comes from men accepting a domestic sphere for women, but asserting that women are, by nature, unsuited to the political realm.

The contrasting myth is that of Eeset, or the Egyptian goddess who would become Isis later, and her absorbing of the Hathor cult. Eeset's myth is a pre-feminist assertion of the role of women in political power.

Unification in these myths is not just of men and women, nor even just of land, but of time. Time is essential for unification, because time organizes. In the agrarian era, time determined when to perform essential functions. The Hathor myth unifies agricultural time, with sexual time. Sekhmet is drunk for three days, after menstruation, and becomes turned back into the domestic goddess Hathor afterwards. This is, as far as I can tell, the earliest myth of PMS.

The Eeset myth is a more sophisticated union of solar and lunar time, or of the calendar of the stars, which is solar, and the calendar of fertility, which is lunar. There is another lunar calendar, and that is the calendar of trade. Or more precisely, the tides. Boats and women both are controlled, by the moon.

That trade is important in the unification of Egypt can be seen from the archeology, where previously cultures were centered around particular settlements, and had limited foreign goods, to the proto-Dynastic, and Old Kingdom, when goods from a wider region were available. The evidence indicates towards the conclusion that Upper Egypt was part of the Saharan physical and agrarian culture, and that Lower Egypt influenced by the physical culture of the fertile crescent.

The Narmer Palatte provides a further evidence for the impact of the fertile crescent culture on Egypt, in that the palette itself, is housed between two long necked lion creatures, which are clearly from the Fertile Crescent's artistic culture. It also has foreigners being beheaded and castrated who are portrayed as being different in their beards and physics from the Egyptian monarch. These figures are of a pattern that would be seen for three thousand years, including into the Early greek age. It is impossible to tell what or who they reference from the context. They could be defeated lower Egyptians, but they could, as well, be foreigners. The assertion that any of these figures may have had accidental meaning, on a religious palette, s not credible given the importance of symbol in the object.

This level of unification, however, is not enough for Middle Kingdom and later Egypt. While Egypt is protected from invasion from some areas, it is still open to attack from North and South. It is also open to internal dissent. Monarchies also have the problem of fertility. Family lines die out, and there are squabbles over who is to take power.

In this context: of a trading society that needs more people, more surplus, and more legitimacy, Eeset becomes a more important goddess.

So what of the role of an ancient female ruler, or monarch? A good place to start with recent scholarship is Ancient Queens edited by Sarah Milledge Nelson. In her introduction, after the usual noting of the obvious fact that male dominated eras did a pitifully poor job of looking at women who ruled in earlier periods, digs deeper into the roles of women in ancient rulership. Specifically she notes:

• Woman as ruler. That is, as the monarch.

• Woman as consert. That is, as consort to the ruler.

• Women as legitimizers of the Line or property.

• Women as mythic pillars.

In the Hathor period, women could rule. In the Second Dynasty, Merineith ruled as regent, and in the sixth dynasty, it was decided that women could directly. Later dynasties would have women rulers. There are also some interesting cases of male kings who were transformed in the historical record to women, or who took on women's epitaphs after death. Neithiqerti was probably Siptah, and a later king was made divine, as Sekhmet, the goddess associated with Hathor.

These realities show that even in the period of myth of male dominance, women could rule. This reality is clear by the reality that when it comes to keeping power in the family, or keeping it in the gender, those in power will keep it to the family. While women rulers might not be the preferred state, it was better than having an infant king, or a king of a new dynasty.

However, the ability of the Ra/Hathor myth to work as myth is, eventually reached. A different kind of state needs a different kind of queen. With that, a different story.

That is why I am writing this: where we find a Ra/Hathor myth, or it's outline, it is a sign of a society where the feminine is being harnessed for political important, and, literally, subdued out of the myth of power growing out of the barrel of a gun. The challenge is to change, as Eeset's cult did, the Hathor myth, to something else, a myth of magic and union.

In the above volume is an essay by the most prolific scholar of Egyptian dynastic ideology, Lana Troy, and it is through the lens of her work that it is best to take up the creation of the Eeset myth.

The Goddess Who Would Be Isis - Pre-Wave Feminism and the archetypes of myth Part II(b)

So there we have in the last decade of the 19th century an assertion that the domestic woman as supporter of he military life of the state is an essential part of legitimacy. How does this parallel Hathor versus Eeset?

Let's go back to the anthropology of Hathor's story.

The major researchers of this period are Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild, whose work is seminal, even when later researchers have called into question their conclusion, much of the first important organization of the artifacts and remains of the time are their work. It's worth noting that they produced several classic papers on food, burial, and technology, from which a great deal of what I am about to summarize comes.

Around 10,000 BP, Before Present, the arid period began ending around the Western Sahara, and the first permanent settlements are found. Climate was becoming more stable from year to year, and the monsoons were shifting north, creating oasis areas in the arid Savannah, which then began to gradually dry out again. Pottery began being deposited, as part of what could be called "intensified gathering." Saharan physical culture seems to have been part of a northern African culture, which spread as far as present day Nigeria, and the domestication of cattle separately may well have been part of this.

The physical culture spread first to smaller water sites, and not to the Nile itself. This is not the result of an accident of objects, since the clays from the pottery come from the outer regions. The nile was not where the agrarians lived at first. Around 8000 BCE, we find cattle burials, in large and organized way. Clearly, there is a cattle cult, where cattle are particularly important. By this point, cattle have been at least somewhat domesticated or herded. Some writers theorize that girls did the herding, but the evidence is that teenage boys probably did, from some of the rock art of that time period.

For roughly 4000 years there was a succession of cultures, based in different areas, and then rapidly weaving, new pottery forms, and most importantly a general pattern of settlement crop up very quickly. This is "proto-dynastic" or "pre-dynastic" Egypt. Metal replaces stone, trade begins. Artistic conventions, such as the oval eye, which would remain in place for thousands of years, were developed. Trade grew between the Nile, now the center of settlement as the desert oasis areas.

When an Egyptian polity emerges, it is created around the legitimacy of the cattle cult, as we can see from the first two objects we have from it: the Narmer Palette, and the Scorpion Mace-head. Each attests to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under a single ruler, who is variously called Menes, Narmer, and perhaps Hor-Aha. All of these names could be for one person, three people, or a title that several people had. However, what is clear from these two objects, is that Egypt was unified, and the unified polity immediately began creating symbols and myths that justified it's power.

The Narmer Palette is particularly of interest. It has one of the first hieroglyphic inscriptions, and until recent discoveries, the oldest one we had. On it is the king, Narmer, about to ritually behead a defeated enemy, on the reverse side of the palate are beheaded enemies. It has the Horus symbol standing over victories, perhaps in the Nile Delta according to the most common interpretation pulling the brains out of the nose of an enemy head, and it has the bull symbol smashing the walls to a city, at the top, are ox heads, or perhaps cow heads, decorating the top. They are not bulls, as can be seen by the bull face below, which is square, not round. The palette celebrates the unification of upper and lower Egypt, or a battle that takes place after or as part of that unification.

The cattle goddess might already be here, in the form of the cow heads, but even if not, Hathor is named by some time in Narmer's dynasty, the "First Dynasty" of Egypt. Since the title Hathor means "house of Horus,' she is the mother of Horus, that is, the mother of the Pharaoh's icon. Hor-Aha, means Horus Fought, and is the name or title of a Pharaoh. Horus as well, though often a falcon headed god, was also depicted as a bull, perhaps the Palette references this, but even if not then it is part of the context.

Importantly the patron deities of both upper and lower Egypt were female. The titles of Narmer's queen consort included "beloved of the Two Ladies."

So the history goes like this: in pre-Nile culture, settlements grow up around wild grain, and gradually agriculture once the climate stabilizes. They begin herding cattle, and domesticating it. Then as the region becomes more arid, the Nile is settled and rapidly a trading, weaving, boating culture blooms. Key to the control of the Nile, is irrigation and plowing. The control of cows, oxen, and bulls, becomes the fundamental activity of controlling the proto-dynastic Nile. The Pharonic system establishes itself around a cult that controls these resources, including the use of bulls, and castration. How do we know castration? Because one of the sacrificial figures on the palette, is castrated.

So what is the role of the feminine in this anthropology? Much of what follows is summarized from Michael Brass' "Tracing the Origins of the Ancient Egyptian Cattle Cult", published in 2003.

The importance of unification is clear: it is the result of the bull god Pharaoh destroying resistance. The most logical analysis of the Palatte is that Narmer destroyed the capital of the Delta, lower Egypt, filled with a different kind of people, and beheaded the prisoners in a ritual fashion, and from this leveling of what is a revolt against his power, comes a unified Egypt. There are other interpretations, but each one must ask for special pleading as to why the palette would then be in the temple in the first place.

Unification comes from a legitimacy granted by the cattle cult, and by marriage to a Lower Egypt Princess, and to the protection of the female goddesses of the two parts of Egypt. The cattle cult was already well established, and the major goddesses were woven into it. We are talking, remember, about the Hathor cult, the domestic cult. Women keep the home, and as the Ra myth shows, brew the beer that allows people to drink and not die of infection.

So to control Egypt, to move back to my own argument, meant controlling a key technology, that of cattle as part of an agricultural, as well as herding, system. The pharonic system needed a myth that combined the three aspects of this system: the male bull, the female cow, and the castrated ox. The castrated ox was associated with dead and defeated enemies, and by extension the dead, the cow with the mother goddess, and the bull with male gods. It is not an accident that the same thing that makes fields fertile, that is excrement, is the source of the death that afflicts a culture going from sporadic agriculture to a unified society.

Now let's look at the anthropology of the anti-suffrage movement, in the form of Elihu Root, and Helen Kendrick Johnson. They argue for the woman's place in political disenfranchisement and maintaining the home as part of political unity. Anyone reading in 1890 would know that war meant "The Civil War" and the wars to subjugate the native nations of the American West. That is, political unity. It is also important to remember that the Victorian, without real cures, relied upon "cleanliness is next to godliness." Women kept the home clean, and for this, Root worships them.

The worship of the female is in the same pedestal way as 5000 years before in ancient Egypt, the men slay, parade, and rule, and the women are beloved bearers of children and keepers of the house. It is interesting to note that the palette that Narmer's victory and ritual human sacrifice or execution is celebrated on, is for grinding cosmetics.

The parallels in political situation, of a civil war, the importance of unification, and the relationship of the male war principle to the female domestic principle are almost exact, even though the Narmer Palette was not discovered until 1898, which meant that the story of Narmer was completely unknown to the anti-suffrage writers. We are speaking then of an archetypical pattern that recurs through history, and, in fact, as far back as there is history, all the way back to First Dynasty Egypt.

So the Hathor pattern repeats itself at great distance. So why Eeset? And how is the Eeset pattern repeated by First Wave Feminism?

The Goddess Who Would Be Isis - Part II (first part of it really)

First Wave Feminism is rooted in the struggle for the vote, equal access to education, and reform of laws, particularly associated with marriage. Its theory was that god granted natural rights, and that women being the equal of men in these natural rights, deserved political rights as well. While FWF is often presented as a construction of industrialization, it is more complex than this, as can be seen from the pattern of adoption of FWF into law. While the writing leadership and permanent organization was based in large urban and industrial centers, the adoption of FWF occurred in peripheral areas of industrial systems: Australia and New Zealand were the first countries to establish women's suffrage, and the adoption in the United States was led by states to the West of the Mississippi.

What is startling, as I mentioned in the last post, is the way the struggle is presented in the texts of the time. In the time period the anti-suffrage forces, unknowingly, cast the debate in the same terms as the Hathor myth: that is, that a woman without agency is a loving domestic goddess, revered for her love of the arts and bliss; but when granted agency through the vote, she becomes an unlovable creature who is not capable of using the tools of equality. Or the Hathor/Sekhmet duality. Let me take this section from a speech against suffrage from Elihu Root:

Elihu Root in 1894:

I am opposed to the granting of suffrage to women, because I believe it would be a lose to women, to all women and to every woman and because I believe it would be an injury to the State, and to every man and every woman in the State. It would be useless to argue this if the right of suffrage were a natural right. If it were a natural right, then women should have it though the heavens fall...

Into my judgement, sir,there enters no element of the inferiority of woman. There could not, sir, for I rejoice in the tradition and in the memory and the possession of a home where woman reigns with the acknowledged superiority in all the nobler, and the higher attributes that by common, by universal, consent, determine rank among the highest of the children of God.

Woman rules to-day by the sweet and noble influences of her character. Put women into the arena of conflict and she abandons these great weapons which control the world, and she takes into her hands, feeble and nerveless for strife, weapons with which she is unfamiliar and which she is unable to wield. Woman in strife becomes hard, harsh, unlovable, repulsive; as far removed from that gentle creature to whom we all owe allegiance and to whom we confess submission, as the heaven is removed from the earth. Government, Mr. President, is protection.

So Elihu Root's argument touches directly on the archetype of Hathor/Sekhment, and attempts to address the Eeset myth: the legitimacy of the state rests on the power of war, and women are not, by their nature, capable in war.

This assertion, that democratic legitimacy is rooted in war, is also in the hand of a woman anti-suffrage writer, Heln Kendrick Johnson, in her short book polemic, Women and the Republic:

As I read political history, the facts go to show that the fundamental principles of our Government are more opposed to the exercise of suffrage by women than are those of monarchies. To me it seems that both despotism and anarchy are more friendly to woman's political aspirations than is any form of constitutional government, and that manhood suffrage, and not womanhood, suffrage, is the final result of the evolution of democracy.

She sets political equality against the protection of sphere explicitly in her last chapter:

Mrs. Seabury avers that where woman is, homes will naturally exist. Homes have not existed "naturally." There was a long, long time in human history when not a dream of a home existed. From lawless individualism to tribal life, from tribe to clan, from the clan, at last through might struggles, the family was evolved-the final grouping of the race-the social unit. That point was not reached until man the savage, man the rover, had consented to be bound, and bound for life, to one woman. It has been one object of Christian civilization to hold man to this saving compact. First to hold his spirit by affection for wife and child, and next to hold his material interests for the sake of society. The work has so well progressed that to-day the man's family is dearer to him than his own life. He will live for them, and fight for them; and the women who proclaim that man is woman's enemy, are the assassins of their own peace and of the growing peace of home...

This section is the Hathor myth in reverse: the domestic loveliness of woman binds savagery which befalls everything if women are not the upholders of the home. That is the deal offered by the Hathor myth.

To transform this archetype into an Eeset myth, it is necessary to assert that the legitimacy of the state itself, and this has to be rooted in a power of unification and resurrection. How does the FWF movement do this? By asserting two essential facts, which touch on the crucial elements of the Hathor and Eeset myth: the protection of the home and society from the chaos of alcohol, and the protection of the society from the dissolution of war. Women are presented as the defenders, not attackers, of the life of the family, by protecting middle class life from drink, and the protectors, and indeed healers of the nation, by being a vote against war.

The first can be shown by the relationship between Prohibitionist or Temperance societies and women's suffrage. The two are never far from each other, and the relationship was explicit. Susan B. Anthony set reform of divorce laws, allowing for divorce on account of drunkenness, as one of the first changes that enfranchised women would make.

The other centers on the topic of war. One of the organizing forces of the Women's Suffrage movement in the United States, was abolitionism, and many women thought that after the war, the same sweep that would enfranchise "the African race" would be used to give women the right to vote. But it would be another war that would finally be the motivation to a Federal Amendment, or more specifically, the ending of that war. After the War in Europe was truly won, Woodrow Wilson used the work that women had done in factories to argue that they deserved partnership. In short, the bringing together of "the Union," the first reason for the cause, was completed only when women helped win a second war.

These facts deserve a closer interpretation, because while it might seem that FWF is an industrial phenomenon, the reality is more complex. Instead it was peripheral areas which became the seat of FWF. This parallels the Eeset cult, which was the only major deity not to have a center in a city. The reality is that the creation of a feminine principle as an instrument of state legitimacy is not the prerogative of urban centers, or of distant agrarian regions, but of agrarian regions connected closely to cities. It is in this place, isolated from pure agrarianism and it's particular relationship between the genders, and the metropolitan centers, that there is an need and inducement to FWF.

The transformation of myth, through the story of a Goddess who will be Isis - Part 1

Part of the process of creating action, is the creation of myth. Societies do not create myths of whole cloth, but take material that they find and absorb, and recreate it in accordance with their own needs and their own ideas. Any idea or movement must create mythology around it, because the facts are often too uncertain to really draw judgment from. Myths are stories which encapsulate archetypes, as the work on mythology since the 19th century shows. Peoples incorporate knowledge in myth that they cannot structure in a rigorous way, such as food taboos.

Patriarchal societies structure myths which place the male principle, and the male ways of being, doing, and thinking, at the center of success and society. Despite the spate of powerful women around him, Odysseus and his journey, are The Odyessy. Circe, Athena, Penelope, are all figures which structure his journey, and despite their powers, it is only through the lens of the male that there is a story at all. The process of patriarchalization of myth is seen in many societies around the world, and has been studied in detail in many of them. Every time a Greek sky god rapes, ravishes, or seduces a female goddess, that is a story of the cult of that goddess being folded into the main sky-god cult.

But the reverse process also occurs: we unfold myths from being patriarchal myths into being myths of pluralism. Christianity was used to argue for women's rights in Wollstonecraft's seminal pamphlet defending the rights of women to vote and be educated in the same way as men. And there is another recent example that this essay will turn to later.

In the present there has been a renewed focus on the role of women in development, particularly in the development of the poorest nations and regions. This has been the focus of micro-lending, the subject of many columns by writer Nicholas Kristof. In activism Jodi L. Jacobson wrote a report Gender Bias: Roadblock to Sustainable Development which detailed the myriad ways which bias against women holds back sustainable development, particularly in access to education, the very topic which motivated Wollstonecraft in 1794.

The roots of women as development go back very far in the historic, and prehistoric, past, and the mythology of the early literate societies points to a complex of archetypes of women in development. The early archetype portrays women as either the protectors of a narrow domestic sphere, or as, quite literally, bitch goddesses from hell. An illuminating example comes from Old Kingdom Egyptian mythology, prior to the merger of the two main cosmologies. In this myth Ra descends to earth and rules as a human Pharoh, and oversees a golden age. However, as he ages, the people begin to disobey him, and after taking council of the gods, makes a goddess into "The Eye of Ra" with the name Sekhmet. Sekhmet begins to slay the people of Egypt, but Ra can no longer command her to stop. Instead he brews beer, and spikes it with red dye. Sekhmet is tricked into believing she has already done slaying, drinks the red river water laced with the beer, and falls asleep for three days. When she wakes up, she is stripped of her name, and becomes loaded with titles, among which is Hathor, which is the most common name used to refer to her. In this form she becomes the loving domestic goddess of fertility.

The anthropology of this myth can be read as follows: human beings, as the climate stabilized, around 10,000 BCE, began to engage in agriculture. Over time their settlements would grow large enough, and fertile enough, that diseases would begin to afflict humans specifically, the first plagues. One major source of contagion, even up to the present, is, of course, drinking and bathing water. The Egyptians, particularly women, brewed two kinds of beer: a weak strained beer, and a stronger festival one. What the myth says, in part, is the use of strained beer to purify drinking water is an essential woman's duty. The other part of the myth is bound up in menstruation: women are not to bath in the Nile during the three days around their periods. Bathing in the main river is a custom that is present in a number of societies, but is hazardous in one that has exactly one main river.

The social context of the myth is that while women are the protectors of the home, and against disease, they are only marriageable as domestic loving sweet fertility goddesses, patrons of the gentle arts, and subservient, by intoxication if necessary, to the male.

Later, in the Middle Kingdom, Hathor's cult and story are assimilated into another goddess, who is known by several names, and is conventionally called by "Ee-set" or "Eset," her Hellenized name, is more familiar: Isis. Her name literally means "she of the throne" and it is through matrilineal descent that Pharoh's claimed their power.

The important moment here is the absorbtion of Hathor by Eeset. Hathor's power came explicitly from Ra, and while he could not directly defang her slayer aspect, it was a creation of his power. Only men could let women run loose, but once they did, it required trickery to get control again. Eeset, however, was not a limited part of the life giving nature, but became the great magician of the gods, taking this power on her own from Amun-Ra. She resurrected her husband brother Usir, called Osiris by later peoples. This story was set down in a Latinized form by Plutarch, but was based on a complex of stories from Egyptian times.

The sociology of this myth is far reaching, in it Sutah, or Set, kills Usir, and hacks his body to pieces so that it cannot be resurrected. Eeset either sews the body back together, where it is then embalmed, or in other versions, resurrects him so they can have a child, who is Haru, or Horus as he was known to the Greeks. In several versions she creates a penis for Usir. This conflict is an old myth, but it was grafted on Eeset and Usir, precisely at the time when foreigners had occupied Egypt repeatedly. The prior Sutah, god of the desert and Upper Egypt, was the god of monarchy. The sociology of this myth is that Eeset reunified the kingdom, and that the Pharoh, as her religious son and archon of Haru, is the legitimate ruler because of her.

Since these myths are many faceted, and Egypt's long history changed the aspects of almost every deity several times, there is no one form of the myth. It is also important, at least as important, to realize that this is all in a very pre-feminist context, without reference to the ideas of rights, equality, politics, humanism, and so on, that we take for granted. But as an archetype, the meaning of Eeset being not merely the home goddess, but the goddess who reunified the country draws a series of contrasts with Hathor.

This represents a mythological transition associated with development. Eeset, the figure of later Egypt, is not the domestic goddess of mere fertility and lust, but a major figure across virtually every aspect of society, worker of magic, and seat of the legitimacy of every dynasty. The transition from home protecting Hathor, to dynasty making Eeset, represents a shift of archetypes.

The important differences:

• Hathor has her power and knowledge entirely through the agency of Ra.

• Hathor is disruptive and dangerous force, where as Eeset contends against Sukah.

• Hathor's power is limited once she is tamed.

• Hathor's sphere is limited, where as Eeset is the bearer of state legitimacy, the throne itself.

• Eeset has agency, Hathor is first an embodiment of rage, and then drunk, and then a servant of her husband.

• In Hathor's myth Ra owes nothing to Hathor, in the Eeset myth Usir and Haru owe everthing to Eeset.

I could be accused of merely wallowing in some old scrolls and forgotten knowledge with particular interpretations, there are other versions of this story which are just about Haru and Sukah, and several complex later versions which involve other deities in the process. However, this archetype is the oldest version of the story, and the one which later inspired the Hellenic and Latin cults of Isis, Set, Osiris, and Horus.

But this story is important because it is not just a myth from long ago, but a pattern, which is used by people far removed from it, who were not even consciously patterning their actions after it. I would like to leap forward 3000 years, and change to the new world, specifically the First Wave Feminist fight over women's suffrage in the United States. The connection is closer than you might think to just the myth, since the late 19th century America is in the grip of an old testament driven version of Christianity, and many of the Egyptian myths are woven into that story. Women who are creators of raving destruction and evil, contrasted against domestic and loving subservient wives are strewn across their mythopoetic landscape. But there is a startling parallel in the writings of the anti-suffrage camp.

(I need to thank Widget, Chidy, Kevin, and SA for their invaluable help in setting this particular text on the right road after it had been terribly lost.)