Sky - Earth
Father - Mother
Culture - Nature
Apollo - Cybele
Mono - Poly
Light - Dark
Tragedy’s inhospitality to woman springs from nature’s inhospitality to man. The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory. In hunting or agrarian societies dependent upon nature, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility.
As culture progressed, crafts and commerce supplied a concentration of resources freeing men from the caprices of weather or the handicap of geography. With nature at one remove, femaleness receded in importance.
Both the Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental. That is, they seek to surmount or transcend nature. Despite Greek culture’s contrary Dionysian element, which I will discuss, high classicism was an Apollonian achievement. Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness.
Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.
The evolution from earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.8-9
Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature.
Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.9
The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man.
Man’s metaphors of concentration and projection are echoes of both body and mind. Without them, he would be helpless before woman’s power. Without them, woman would long ago have absorbed all of creation into herself. There would be no culture, no system, no pyramiding of one hierarchy upon another.
Earth-cult must lose to sky-cult, if mind is ever to break free from matter.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.16, 19-21
Women have borne the symbolic burden of man’s imperfections, his grounding in nature. Menstrual blood is the stain, the birthmark of original sin, the filth that transcendental religion must wash from man.
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man’s cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God’s enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough.
The Bible defensively swerves from God’s true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent. Anthony Storr says of witches, “At a very primitive level, all mothers are phallic.” The Devil is a woman. Modern emancipation movements, discarding stereotypes impeding woman’s social advance, refuse to acknowledge procreation’s daemonism.
Nature is serpentine, a bed of tangled vines, creepers and crawlers, probing dumb fingers of fetid organic life which Wordsworth taught us to call pretty.
I contend that the premenstrual woman incited to snappishness or rage is hearing signals from the reptilian brain. In her, man’s latent perversity is manifest. All hell breaks loose, the hell of chthonian nature that modern humanism denies and represses. In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.11-12
Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken into the open.
Paganism recognized, honored, and feared nature’s daemonism, and it limited sexual expression by ritual formulae. Christianity was a development of Dionysian mystery religion which paradoxically tried to suppress nature in favor of a transcendental other world. The sole contact with nature that Christianity permitted its followers was sex sanctified by marriage. Chthonian nature, embodied in great goddess figures, was Christianity’s most formidable opponent.
Christianity works best when revered institutions like monasticism or universal marriage channel sexual energy in positive directions. Western civilization has profited enormously from the sublimation Christianity forced on sex. Christianity works least when sex is constantly stimulated from other directions, as it is now.
No transcendental religion can compete with the spectacular pagan nearness and concreteness of the carnal-red media. Our eyes and ears are drowned in a sensual torrent.
Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.25-26
In psychology, philosophy, and art, classical Greek imagination sought, in Eduard Fraenkel’s words, “λóγος, ratio… the intelligible, determinate, mensurable, as opposed to the fantastic, vague, and shapeless.”
The Apollonian, I said, is the line drawn against nature. For Harrison, the Olympian gods are patriarchal betrayers of earth-cult and mother nature. The chthonian is her test of authenticity and spiritual value. But I say there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian. It was, ironically, the west’s Apollonian line that produced the matchless Jane Harrison.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.73
Related posts:
Tragedy’s inhospitality to woman springs from nature’s inhospitality to man. The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory. In hunting or agrarian societies dependent upon nature, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility.
As culture progressed, crafts and commerce supplied a concentration of resources freeing men from the caprices of weather or the handicap of geography. With nature at one remove, femaleness receded in importance.
Both the Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental. That is, they seek to surmount or transcend nature. Despite Greek culture’s contrary Dionysian element, which I will discuss, high classicism was an Apollonian achievement. Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness.
Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.
The evolution from earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.8-9
Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature.
Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.9
The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man.
Man’s metaphors of concentration and projection are echoes of both body and mind. Without them, he would be helpless before woman’s power. Without them, woman would long ago have absorbed all of creation into herself. There would be no culture, no system, no pyramiding of one hierarchy upon another.
Earth-cult must lose to sky-cult, if mind is ever to break free from matter.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.16, 19-21
Women have borne the symbolic burden of man’s imperfections, his grounding in nature. Menstrual blood is the stain, the birthmark of original sin, the filth that transcendental religion must wash from man.
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man’s cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God’s enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough.
The Bible defensively swerves from God’s true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent. Anthony Storr says of witches, “At a very primitive level, all mothers are phallic.” The Devil is a woman. Modern emancipation movements, discarding stereotypes impeding woman’s social advance, refuse to acknowledge procreation’s daemonism.
Nature is serpentine, a bed of tangled vines, creepers and crawlers, probing dumb fingers of fetid organic life which Wordsworth taught us to call pretty.
I contend that the premenstrual woman incited to snappishness or rage is hearing signals from the reptilian brain. In her, man’s latent perversity is manifest. All hell breaks loose, the hell of chthonian nature that modern humanism denies and represses. In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.11-12
Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken into the open.
Paganism recognized, honored, and feared nature’s daemonism, and it limited sexual expression by ritual formulae. Christianity was a development of Dionysian mystery religion which paradoxically tried to suppress nature in favor of a transcendental other world. The sole contact with nature that Christianity permitted its followers was sex sanctified by marriage. Chthonian nature, embodied in great goddess figures, was Christianity’s most formidable opponent.
Christianity works best when revered institutions like monasticism or universal marriage channel sexual energy in positive directions. Western civilization has profited enormously from the sublimation Christianity forced on sex. Christianity works least when sex is constantly stimulated from other directions, as it is now.
No transcendental religion can compete with the spectacular pagan nearness and concreteness of the carnal-red media. Our eyes and ears are drowned in a sensual torrent.
Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.25-26
In psychology, philosophy, and art, classical Greek imagination sought, in Eduard Fraenkel’s words, “λóγος, ratio… the intelligible, determinate, mensurable, as opposed to the fantastic, vague, and shapeless.”
The Apollonian, I said, is the line drawn against nature. For Harrison, the Olympian gods are patriarchal betrayers of earth-cult and mother nature. The chthonian is her test of authenticity and spiritual value. But I say there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian. It was, ironically, the west’s Apollonian line that produced the matchless Jane Harrison.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.73
Related posts:
