Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s early 19th century horror classic is a brilliant commentary on a male complex that very well may have been the origin of patriarchal monotheism. Let’s recap the likely evolution of religion for a moment.
First stage is obviously matriarchal monotheism. As a young child there’s not many things you can do by yourself. You can’t help but feel quite powerless. The adult caring for you on the other hand, your connection to the rest of the world, can do apparently anything. To the child’s mind the mother must indeed appear all-powerful. Once the child grows up and learns to do these things for itself it quickly realizes that the seeming omnipotence of adults, most prominently its mother, was a mere exaggeration of the facts. But the idea of omnipotence still lingers and never quite dies.
Next step: polytheism. Personifaction of natural forces. It’s a simple concept really: Man can create a fire and burn down things and so can lightning. Man can fell a tree and so can a storm. Only the latter two can do it with a lot more oomph. Other natural forces can do things man can only dream about, like make the ground shake. Large animals might be able to create a similar effect though. Again, not quite as powerful as an earthquake.
Experience tells man that things don’t happen without reason. The reason being someone decided for something to happen. As long as it’s not beyond his power man can make things happen if he decides to do so. The obvious first attempt to explain the forces of nature will naturaly consist of imagining them to be more powerful versions of man. The idea of omnipotence adopted during early childhood is an ideal base for this way of thinking. And you cannot seriously expect cavemen to take an empiric approach at this stage.
With polytheism also comes choice. Which god to worship, which ideology to follow? You can easily find one that suits your needs. Awfully complicated though. Especially if you’re the one trying to justify your authority with one god and someone tries to use another one to challenge this authority. Of course, whoever is in power will try to make their god the most important one. The ultimate solution to the relativism of polytheism? Declare all gods false ones and create your own.
While women surely used the idea of the goddess to shape the decisions made in their respective communities, for which shamanism is a good example, they’re not likely to develop an ambition for absolute power. They never asked to be viewed as goddesses, it just comes naturally. And if you’re at the top of the authority chain you don’t even have to try to move up in the system. For the male child there’s a lot of room for gaining authority though and it’s not a surprise that they end up demanding more power than their former goddesses, trying to position themselves above them. Born from the male inferiority complex the male gods gain prominence even in polytheism.
But the ultimate miracle observed in nature, creation of life, remains beyond their power forever. Men can break things, kill things, sure. In terms of violence and destruction they might challenge the might of the gods. If used sparingly, violence can even be a tool for creating things, like clothes from animal skin or tools and weapons from wood and stone. They can even mimic reality by drawing images of it on stone walls. But none of their creations or art can hope to rival the elaborate mechanisms found in nature already. And none of their creations is animate. Only the goddess, only woman can create life.
If you are to create the ultimate god, one that makes all other gods obsolete, it must be the creator of the world. Creation myths might have come before and the idea of omnipotence definitely came before, as I pointed out above. But looking at the creation myth portrayed in the bible, the inventors of the patriarchal god apparently turned the natural order on its head. God created man in his image. Then he created woman as a side product of the male reflection of divinity, a mere companion for man. Nevermind that the only force in nature that can create life is female.
To do away with their inferiority complex it wasn’t enough for men to become equal with women. They had to steal the truth, deny the original idea of divinity and bannish the female right to power forever. Thou shall have no other gods before me. Now you know why.
Artists are the ones closest to god and it was obviously artists that created god. Only they claimed that it was the other way around. To the mind of beings that define themselves by the act of creation, art without creator is unthinkable. And nature is the most impressive piece of art. Only that it really isn’t.
Empiric thought was a long way off and its development not encouraged by the religious authorities either. Even when science gained prominence it only lead back to pluralism and an absolute regime is always easier to manage than a multitude of ideas. The danger of enlightened societies to detoriate back into superstition is always there.
It may be delusional to believe that religion will ever die out but it sure would be a most fortunate turn of events. More people should read Frankenstein. Or at least watch the Kenneth Brannagh movie adaption. You know, the only adaption of the book so far that even tried to tell the story of the book. Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but of its creator.
Loading ...