Remembering real male-female partnership
Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty
Week 25: in which we remember what real masculine-feminine partnership looks and sounds like
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Beautiful Magicians,
We have lived in a patriarchal world obsessed with hierarchy, domination, control, and violence for five or six thousand years. The anthropological record clearly shows, however, that we lived in peaceful, matrifocal, matrilineal communities for thirty-five thousand years prior to the arrival of violent tribes that worshiped violent male gods.
Merlin Stone labeled that long stretch of matrilineal time perfectly in the title of her book, When God Was a Woman.
But when I, or anyone, talks about how life might have been in a matriarchal society, it can sound like ancient, long forgotten history. Impossible to remember. Never mind try to bring to life.
The sins of patriarchy—misogyny, domination, abuse, greed, rape, war—are now so pervasive, that we can’t see how we could ever change them. Unfettered patriarchy is everywhere. It’s in the dirty air we breathe, the toxic water we drink, the poison we eat in our food. It’s in the endless lies spewing out of the mouths of politicians and religious leaders.
As Cathy Stevens Pratt and Tony Goncalves and I began to answer the nudge (more like a shove) from the ancestors to create Praying in the Dark, a radical new prayer practice that awakens the memory of how we lived in the time before patriarchy, we found ourselves focusing in on the central sin of patriarchy.
The one lie that anchors all others. It’s right there in the label: patriarchy. Patriarch.
The father. The male head of the household. The man who had complete dominion over all the women in his life: his wife (it was plural wives for most of the history of the Abrahamic religions), his children, especially his daughters. He could trade them, have them raped, have them stoned, marry them off to an old creepy guy. There were no restraints on what he, or any man in the family, could do—and did do—to the females under his dominion.
Here’s just one appalling quote from Genesis that will set your hair on fire. Lot doesn’t want the angry crowd to attack his male guests. Lot says:
“I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” Genesis 19: 6-8
And there, laid out in gut-wrenching language, is the total lack of respect for women, even your own daughters. Women have no autonomy. They do not control their bodies, their thoughts, their lives.
So, of course in patriarchy all male-female relationships are poisoned.
There is not even a hint of equality. The male is dominant. As ordered by god when he got angry at Eve for wanting the knowledge of good and evil. How dare she want knowledge. Why that might make her equal, not just to a man but to a god.
He condemns her and all women saying: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” Genesis 3:16
So, to even begin to envision a post-patriarchal world, the heart of our new prayer practice has to address this core wound of the unequal, historically abusive, male-female relationship.
Notice the subtitle of Praying in the Dark:
Think about that. Our purpose is to pray as visionaries. That means we have to have an idea, a vision, an inkling of what’s possible. Not by reverting to living in small Paleolithic or Neolithic communities, no one thinks that’s plausible or desirable. But we can look back, back, back to capture whiffs of how men and women lived for millennia. And weave those memories into our prayers.
Cathy and Tony stumbled upon how to do that as we created a bonus video on the Minotaur in ART 7 on Dragon. (This bonus is so important that it’s a gift in Praying in the Dark.)
We wanted to know more about the Minotaur who first grabbed our attention during ART 6 on Reverence and Devotion. In that intensive, Cathy took us into the Paleolithic caves where we discovered the Minotaur dancing across cave walls. He wasn’t the monster Greek patriarchy made him out to be.
He was demonstrating the original masculine. Joyful. Powerful. Robust. Dancing. Feral and fertile. This masculine was totally enamored of and delighted by the feminine. Not to dominate or rape, but to be with, to partner with.
And there is the key word. Partnership.
With the Minotaur singing his original song of partnership, Cathy and Tony created the first ever partnership prayer. It’s seven paired lines spoken first by the feminine which elicits a beautiful response from the masculine. Then, when they had spoken all seven, Cathy and Tony reversed roles and the masculine spoke first and the feminine responded. With exactly the same words!
When we heard this partnership prayer for the first time, everyone on the call was stunned into silence. The words, the sweetness, the real sense of partnership, broke something open in all of us. Something we knew was true. Something we have been hungry for, in this life, and in five thousand years of lives under the thumb of patriarchy.
We felt healed.
And at last, we had a vision of how to pray in a time of collapse. How to pray to awaken the memory of delightful beautiful relationships. Not just male and female, but female and female, male and male. All relationships.
Is this naïve? Impossible? Imaginary?
I got my answer to that question last night as I opened The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler for the third time. I hadn’t gotten far into the introduction, when I read her succinct definition of patriarchy and matriarchy:
“The first, which I call the dominator model…is the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relationships are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking, may best be described as the partnership model.”
Thank you Merlin. Thank you Riane. Thank you Minotaur. Thank you Cathy and Tony for listening into the morphic memory of true partnership.
And thank YOU for joining us in the very first prayer that awakens the memory of partnership.
Click to read all about this prayer intensive, get the schedule, peruse the bonuses, and register.
We meet on 4 Tuesdays July 14,21, 28 and August 4 at 6pm eastern, a time that works well for the Americas and the Pacific Rim.
Then, to serve everyone who can't make the Tuesday gatherings, I'm hosting Watch Parties on Thursdays at 1pm eastern.
Plus, because we need to just sit and talk about this radical new prayer practice, we'll also have three Sunday cafes.
I've kept the fee very low and even made it possible to invite a friend.
Life is fragile, handle with reverence
and radical, beautiful, partnership prayer
Janet
PS: if you have questions, write to me at janet@janetconner.com
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