Review: The Gospel of the Goddess
Contents Updated: Wednesday, March 24, 1999
- Visionary but Infuriating
- Gods want to Punish
- Great Mother
- Mother and Son
- Intuition
- Foibles
- Willaim Bond Replies
Visionary but Infuriating
William Bond and Pamela Suffield have written a visionary but infuriating book. It is like those William Morris style illustrations of the New Jerusalem on Trades Unionists banners early in the 20th Century. The revolutionary woman, her followers behind her, stands at the entrance to the valley gesturing extravagantly to the distant vision of the spires and minarets of the coming utopia just beyond the distant hills. It looks inspiring but when did it ever happen?
This book is visionary, offering a “matercentric” utopia of the future inspired by the prehistoric matriarchal societies. Unlike hierarchical patriarchies this society is egalitarian, so the word matriarchy is rejected. Nevertheless, it is a return to the ancient social form that is intended because the authors consider we are in a historical cycle from matriarchy through patriarchy back to matriarchy. We are already in the final phase of this cycle.
The book is a sincere argument for us all to turn back to the Goddess but it is infuriating because the authors come from New Age beliefs and it shows, in its pseudo-Christian religiosity and especially in its continuous polemic against science. Their Goddess is a female Yehouah but with the loving characteristics of the Son. She is a real, living, sentient, transcendental Goddess of unconditional love. They speak several times of the will of the Great Mother. Metaphoric? Utopian? Even in ancient times, the Goddess was never so yawningly boring. Today we know she isn’t, and we know it from science.
Since a simple change from a patriarchy to its female equivalent, a matriarchy, is not what is anticipated, why should Jesus disguise himself as a female Yehouah to give us this Goddess? The authors argue that Jesus is part of the transitional phase from vengeful patriarch to loving mother, but the old Goddess never did just love. She had her darker side too. It makes you think that disillusioned Christians are trying to re-invent Jesus as a woman.
Gods want to Punish
The premise of the authors is that the concept of a loving god is absurd, because gods want to punish not to love. Only the Goddess truly loves and unconditionally to boot. She loves irrespective of crimes or disregard by the objects of our love—ourselves. She is the martyred, put upon mother of the fireside, peeling the potatoes and putting up with the cheek of her children. She does not care. We don’t have to earn her love because we are the products of her loins and she loves us all—equally. So, all we have to do is find a way of getting rid of patriarchy and everything will be harmonious and joyful. The future world of the Goddess will be free of scarcity, aggression and guilt. Proof is that the previous age of matriarchy was the Golden Age which sages and poets have celebrated ever since.
What is there to choose between the patriarchal fantasy of a sentient loving god and the matriarchal fantasy of a sentient loving goddess besides the sex change? What differs in the way either by faith can condition a future heaven on earth? If the prehistoric social system was matriarchal and, by modern standards, utopian, how is it to function as well in grossly overcrowded and under-resourced world, compared with the relative abundance at the earlier time?
Everyone should have ideals but, if cynical people are not to laugh out loud in an increasingly cynical world, they have to be realistic. There is not the least shred of evidence that any supernatural being exists, let alone is constantly watching each of us to check whether we are doing right or wrong, or need love and attention. The Goddess is blind to our knee-bending and deaf to our payers and entreaties. She tends her cosmic garden, planting here and pruning there, and if she thinks that we are a pernicious weed, she will have no compunction in pruning us! It is not a question of her loving all humans equally, she only loves the overall creation. In making it, she is quite happy, like an oil painter, to paint out something she finds distasteful or ugly. We can only avoid being pruned by looking beautiful and healthy to her. We are failing!
Great Mother
The authors speak of us living outside the Great Mother, as if she is a transcendental god like Yehouah. She has allowed us to live outside her to give us room to develop but when we move too far from her, we go astray and take too many wrong paths. They seem not to realise that the whole point is that we are not outside her but within her, developing as she develops. The concept of the Goddess is not the one we have made for ourselves living on the skin of a planet looking out at the universe beyond. Her attention is entirely turned inwards, because there is nothing transcendental—nothing outside her. The cosmic garden is the cosmic womb.
A review is necessarily critical, but I want to break this one here to say that for all my criticisms, there is much in this book of value. People need a vision. The danger is that it will become a prescription. The vision here is a useful one. We must all believe a Goddess oriented society is better than a god oriented one or we would not advocate a change. The authors know the path will be difficult (though that too is a Christian sentiment). Women might have to become more patriarchal in their attitudes to get into positions where they can change them.
Children and simple people might need to have an image of a living, caring Goddess. What I am saying is that it must not be taught as if it were true. We can teach our children by telling them fairy tales which they later realise were not the truth because we tell them so. Tales of a sentient, loving Goddess must fall into that category.
Another aspect of the book which is fascinating and doubtless controversial is the use of sexual perversions as indications of the growing tendency towards Goddess worship. A variety of instances are given but the obvious one would be the man who liked to fantasise about a leather clad, whip-toting, masked dominatrix. Such a man is not far from the realm of the Goddess, the authors suggest. Mmm.
Mother and Son
They do correctly focus on the fundamental sexual relationship in humanity as mother and son. The female sex, if it is defined as the one that gives birth to the next generation, is the fundamental sex. In asexual reproduction there is only one sex and it is female. In animals and plants that normally reproduce sexually, sometimes the female alone can naturally generate or can be artificially induced to. The male cannot, if for no other reason than that it has not the apparatus to do so.
When species formed sexes the male must have been an altered female. Males are all descended from females—they are naturally sons. They became fathers having no father themselves, having been born of a virgin. The Great Mother must have herself been a virgin because until she had her son there were no males to mate with. The Judaeo-Christian patriarchal religion could not have this, and had Eve made synthetically from Adam’s rib, a desperate attempt to make males primal contrary to ancient knowledge and the plain facts of biology.
On their anti-science bent, Bond and Suffield tell us that though science is patriarchal and on a par with Yehouah, it can no longer be abandoned. Instead it should be judged on how harmonious it is, and the yardstick should be feminine intuition, as if scientific truth was somehow arbitrary. It is certainly permissible to say to the scientists that certain experiments are forbidden, but it is Lysenkoism to pretend that scientific results can be altered arbitrarily.
Though the authors like to have their New Age digs at science, they have to admit that science’s discovery of the law of evolution—the survival of the fittest—is really the Goddess’s harmony. And indeed it is. If a human female unwisely swims in a tropical river and is eaten by a crocodile, is it because the Goddess did not love her, or prefers to love crocodiles? When animals, wild or domesticated, harm humans, they are sought out and destroyed, as if the animal should have known human laws. The crocodile hasn’t read the statute books or God’s bible and doesn’t know “Thou shalt not kill”. The woman was foolish or ignorant. It was no fault of the crocodile, which simply followed its natural instinct to feed itself. This is the harmony of the Goddess. Animals do what is natural with no blame attached. Only mankind can consciously do what is unnatural and the authors make a heartfelt plea that they should restrain their inclination to do so.
They point out that Chaos Theory is a warning to us. The tiniest changes can lead to monstrous consequences in chaotic systems and the cosmos is a chaotic system. Chaotic in this sense properly means complicated by multiple feedbacks, causing a response to any stimulus to be unpredictable. Humans are happy to carry out grotesque experiments on the fundamental blueprint of life, the genetic code, without the slightest idea what might happen. “It is quite safe,” the experts tell us. The unsinkable Titanic sank!
Intuition
Scientists do not accept angels, pixies and fairies because evidence about them is “outside the realm of empirical proof” and for scientists what “cannot be verified, cannot exist”. Though scientists like Einstein use intuition, Bond and Suffield tell us they refuse to accept it. Is there any book on science history that does not tell about the discovery of the benzene ring by Kekulé, a prime example of intuition—the unconscious mind working on a problem the conscious mind has failed to solve? Bond and Suffield think that intuition introduces a completely new thought—out of the blue—whereas logic is stuck with rearranging accepted wisdom. But intuition demands a problem first.
Intuition is not as the authors seem to think—an alternative truth. It is an alternative mental process to rational thought. Just as computers can be digital or analogue, if rational thought is digital then intuition is analogue. Rational thinking needs the figures in place to work properly. If the figures are not all available then assumptions have to be consciously made to supply them. Intuition only needs partial information to yield an outcome—and working unconsciously. Scientists often work on hunches, even if not often enough. But their hunches still have to be tested in the real world because there is no guarantee that a hunch will be correct. It is this very testing of ideas against reality that New Age critics of science do not like, and Bond and Suffield go to the ultimate of insults and call it patriarchal. Though they speak frequently of harmony, they cannot see that intuition and logic are not competing systems of thought but complementary ones.
The sort of “science” that Bond and Suffield want is science that allows them to believe in souls. They require no evidence that souls exist and are reincarnated. Furthermore, there are “Old souls” and “Baby souls”. The “Old souls” have incarnated frequently on earth and know all there is to know about it and soon will take off to pastures new on distant planets where they will incarnate as some form of silicon life. They might as well stay here on earth and incarnate as a microchip. Seriously, the “Old souls” help the “Baby souls” in their faltering first steps as incarnated souls on earth. The “Baby souls” are the common herd, too unwashed and ignorant to rise to positions of power and influence. The “Old souls” have the experience and wisdom to fit them for the roles of princes and priests. The original “Old souls” were women and the “Baby souls” were men whom the “Old souls” left when they departed to b-Regulus. The males began to make mistakes without their “Old souls” to guide them and developed patriarchal society. Right?
Since angels, fairies and aliens manifest themselves in similar ways in all cultures, they must be real, according to Bond and Suffield. To a scientist, wanting objective evidence, they are false and relegated to religious experiences or madness. My own impression is that mystical experiences are indeed culture bound and not usually similar. In Catholic countries people used to see visions of the BVM but increasingly they see visions of the UFO.
Scientists do not think the mystical phenomena are false. They think they are real illusions. The fairy or ghost is false but the experience of having seen one is real (discounting hoaxes). Illusions like the ones experienced can be explained, at least partially, and can often be induced, showing that there are contributing circumstances, but those who have seen the illusion delude themselves that it was real and will not be convinced otherwise by any scientist. None of this is helped by the increasing neurosis of people, which a change of attitude to life could help alleviate. Patriarchal religion has a long history of using people’s delusions to allow them to keep control. I cannot see how acceptance of patriarchal quackery and fraudulence can possibly help the Goddess.
Foibles
Science naturally works in the real world itself, and scientists are not free from the faults and foibles of any normal human being. Some are crooks. Some try to find evidence for anti-social views through science. The authors criticise scientists who find racial differences between people. Yet elsewhere they quote approvingly scientific findings that men and women think differently. Both fields of research have been politically incorrect in the last 30 years and only bigots would not question with extreme suspicion any finding of mental differences whether between races or sexes. But once the results have been found to stand up under questioning and testing, they have to be acknowledged. All scientists have to be aware that devising genuinely culture fair tests is not easy and that inability to perform skilfully on one test does not preclude skill in another. We have to accept Nature as it is, not how we would like it to be, and that is diverse.
The criticism Bond and Suffield have of scientists is that they are not really objective but seek information to help “controlling”. Their cure seems to be to abandon all pretence at objectivity in favour of subjectivity and emotion. Well under the subjective emotional system, the patriarchal religions controlled us absolutely for millennia. They argue that we are in an evolutionary cycle out of patriarchy. If they cannot recognise that the development of science in the last 200 years has helped to untie the bonds of patriarchy, then they are blind to their own thesis.
The authors are correct to say that matrilineal inheritance makes more sense than institutionalising female slavery via marriage to ensure that a man’s son is his own. There can be no doubt about who a child’s mother is, but every doubt about the father unless women are restricted by law to one man. The authors’ whole attitude to marriage focuses on the male as exploiter and the female as victim. This is essentially true but the male is also a loser in this system—males too are victims. Prehistoric matriarchy seemed to exist when human groups were small enough for everyone to help each other. Burdens of child- rearing were taken by elderly people, in our society left to waste their time in endless pointless holidays if they have the money or left to slowly die unwanted and unloved if they have not. Meanwhile married couples are often almost isolated in the duties of bringing up the children and most of this burden falls on women. When the prssures of such marriages end in divorce, it is assumed that the men get the best deal. But enquiries show that more men than women regret the divorce. Quite so, they had the easy role, but men also die sooner whether married or divorced. Nuclear marriage has no clear advantages for either party.
Bond and Suffield use the old Chines symbol of Yin-yang to discuss the separateness of men and women. The proper interpretation of this symbol is not that the sexes are separate, though they plainly are, but that Nature is dual. Humans are a part of Nature so we two are dual. We have a multiplicity of aspects which consist of opposites. Though patriarchal teachers might have identified the shapes as pertaining to one sex with its qualities and another sex with is different qualities, the symbol itself cannot be so construed. It is more abstract because Nature, human or otherwise, is not so easily characterised.
Bond and Suffield seem to want the qualities of men and women to equalise in their matercentric world. Yin-yang will become a uniformly coloured disc because the opposites will have disappeared. Well whatever we humans might want, we have not yet discovered a secure way of making the Goddess conform. The point is not to make men and women the same but to generate the mutual respect that will allow us to use their different qualities fully. Sincere acceptance of nature’s diversity in all respects will give us the healthy and wholesome world Bond and Suffield envision.
The book also has a long section explaining the authors’ thoughts in terms of the Quaballah and the Tarot. I cannot see the need for it except that these are some of their New Age interests. It would have been better left out or put into a separate book.
There is nothing wrong in having visions of an ideal. For such visions, this book is worth reading. If you are a New Ager looking for a synthesis of New Age ideas and an analysis of patriarchal society and how it needs to change, you will enjoy this book. There is a lot of interesting and provocative discussion in it from which there is much to learn.
Its downside is a sort of New Age dreaminess and attachment to New Age fancies which will only help to discredit those who support the move to honouring the Goddess instead of Yehouah and introducing matriarchal ways instead of the coarse vulgar insensitivity of our patriarchal society. I’ve given you my view, now buy it and read it for yourself.
The Gospel of the Goddess, William Bond and Pamela Suffield, (1994), Artemis Creations Publishing, 3395 Nostrand Avenue, 2J Brooklyn NY 11229-4053. $19.95. Telephone Orders: Call Toll Free on 1-800-247-6553 with your Optima, Discover, Visa or Mastercard ready.
William Bond Replies
Although I was happy to see you review our book; “Gospel of the Goddess”. I have to say in your review portraying us as “Dreamy new-agers” is not exactly a image either Pamela or I have of ourselves. I admit that both Pamela and I have been in the new-age movement. But we both got out of it because we got into too many arguments as we both reserved the right to think for ourselves. In fact I would like to say our book hasn’t gone down well in the new-age community because we clearly are not “politically correct”.
We were also portrayed as being anti-science: I can’t say we are against science, as we both read scientific books and magazines. It is just that we get pissed-off with scientists claims of being “wise-men” who know everything. I’m afraid that the attitudes of many scientists are not much different to the gurus you get in the new-age movement. They are as just as arrogant as each other.
To the general public science is portrayed as being ultimate truth. Yet anyone who has a interest in the history of science soon finds that science can be altered arbitrarily to suit the fashionable ideas of the time. Science is not only about gathering data, it is also about how you interpreted this data. Most so-called scientific “facts” are just interpretations of facts that could be interpreted in many different ways. And probably will in time be interpreted new ways when new data is gathered. Many so-called scientific laws are just the story we know so far.
For instance scientists in the early half of the 20th century believed that mankind originated in Asia. Because the evidence at the time pointed to this fact. Then fossils of early man began to be discovered in Africa. So scientists had to change and say mankind originated in Africa. Yet this is not the end of the story. Because of what has been discovered in the genetics of humans, some scientists are claiming that man originated in Asia after all. I can give many more examples of the changing beliefs in science. This is how science evolves, if scientists themselves believed in a ultimate true then progress in science would cease overnight. The fact is that in science the gaps in knowledge is papered over by theories and speculation but I’m afraid these theories and speculations sold to the general public as being the ultimate truth.
Also the myth that scientists are objective in what they do is dangerous. It is what all scientists are taught to do. But the fact is that scientists are human beings and no more objective than the rest of us. So we all have a right to question what scientists tell us because it comes from imperfect human beings. So when they tell us something like “genetic engineered food is safe” we have a right to question this. We also have the right to question there objectivity and ask; if they are being employed by food and drug companies. And does the commercial interests of their employers or the organizations who pays their grant funds influence there “scientific objectivity”.
It is clear that the reviewer had real problems with us talking about a utopias in the past and future. Which is understandable; as I agree that utopia has got itself a bad name because of the many failures of those who try to put it into practice. But because of these failures is that a reason to give up on it all? After all we are not trying to recycle ideas of the past that have clearly failed. We are trying to understand what was the cause of these failures. And present something that hasn’t been tried in all of recorded history namely a matercentric society.
The reviewer also says a loving Mother Goddess is very boring. I suppose it is true for a society that is addicted to conflict and violence. But don’t you think that conflict like we see on our TV screens is a very crude form of entertainment? Don’t you get piss-off with the idiotic behavior of wars, genocide and intolerance and want to move on from this?
The paradox of this is that we have no problem in believing and understanding a society of deep hatred like in Northern Ireland or the Balkans. Yet we say that a society based on deep love is sentimental garbage. Why do we believe so strongly in hatred and not love? When we know that human beings are capable of loving others very deeply? I would say that this is because we believe in either a avenging and judgmental father god. Or no god at all. Which means we live in a universe ruled by a insane old man or live in a pointless and meaningless universe. I don’t think we appreciate just how negative these beliefs are and what effect it has on us all. If we did believe is a caring Mother Goddess then we can get away from these negative beliefs and set about creating a truly loving and caring society.
It is a very strange fact that in our so-called under-resource world we grow more than enough food to feed everyone on it. Yet millions of people die every year from starvation. I don’t think anyone seems to stop to think just how badly our world is being run. The poorer countries are poor because they have corrupt and incompetent leaders. And the effort by the richer western countries to help them have been just as incompetent. Like lending billions of dollars to corrupt third world leaders who squandered the money. So then the whole country has to suffer to pay back the debt by cutting back on health care and education. Or grow cash crops when the people in the country are starving. So the attempt to help poorer countries only made things worse for them. I could go on and on with examples like this. Don’t you think that if men have done such a terrible job of ruling the world for the last few thousand years it is time Women have a go to see if they can do any better? Over the last 4 or 5 thousand years it has been men with masculine ideas that has ruled the world. Perhaps if we started to give more respect to the feminine side of human kind. We might be able to live in loving and caring societies.
I don’t know if we didn’t explain things properly. But we have been accused of being anti-men. What we were trying to say is that both Women and men develop together to learn how to love. Women first of all learn how to love others and men learn how to love themselves. One form of love is not greater then another. When the Matriarchal age comes into being the role of the sexes change places. Spiritually one sex is not greater than the other and both sexes develop and evolve together.
In learning to love themselves men dominated society. When it is Women’s turn to learn to love herself society she will in turn dominate society. But it won’t be a straight swap. As she has already learn how to love others and won’t have to make the mistakes that men made. Although we can point out the stupidity of the patriarchal age we have to take the attitude of Jesus in saying: “forgive them for they no not what they do”. It is a learning process and the only sin we have is the sin of not understanding as we learn by our mistakes.
We might be critical of the way men have ruled society. But this is only because men had in spiritual terms and first shot at doing this. Women will have the advantage in a Matriarchal age because she will learn from men’s mistakes and will also have will be more spiritual advanced when it is her What we try to put across that society in the patriarchal age has been out of balance by being far too masculine. It is true that feminine love is about sacrificing yourself for others. I think what we tried to put across that love that is balanced is not just about sacrificing yourself to others. Love is about both loving yourself and loving others at the same time. So the loving Mother Goddess is not a patriarchal sacrificial Mother. She has more wisdom than that. The problems we all have in learning how to love both ourselves and others. Women have learnt in the patriarchal age how to just love others while men learnt just how to love himself. We need now a matercentric age where women can learn to love themselves and men learn to love other. And so restore the balance.
It is also claimed in the review that we are trying to reinvent Jesus as a woman. I have to say there is some truth in this. But I also have to say their is a lot of difference from the Yehouah god of the old Testament and the loving father god advocated by Jesus in the New Testament. The Yehouah god was a god of judgment, fear and hatred. To worship such a god creates a society also of fear and hatred as we see clearly in Europe of the Middle-ages. I am sure Jesus saw clearly what the worship of this type of god does to a society that worship it. And tried to change people beliefs and worship a loving father god. The reason he failed in this was that the Jewish and later Christian priests found that they had more power over society and it people. If they promoted the avenging and frightening Yehouah god. Rather than his loving father god who seemed to be like Jesus a bit of a wimp. Because all patriarchal rulers rule through fear and the priests turned god into a patriarchal ruler.
Also I don’t think people could get their head around the idea of a truly loving father. After all how many men abandon their children to be left for the mother to be look after by herself on her own.
Anyway I don’t wish to be critical of the reviewer. Because if we have given the impression of being unrealistic dreamers. Then perhaps we hadn’t explained ourselves clearly enough. But then I suppose once you mention utopia and the pre-historic Golden age. Then people assume we are dreamers. So perhaps we needed to be more direct and argued case more assertively.
Blog Back
Here you can give short responses and suggestions. Considered contributions, criticisms and discussion can be made privately via email[†]
