Women in the Religious Imaginary. From “the Crown of Creation” to “the Gate of Hell” – Echinox Journal (2024)

Mihaela Ursa

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Women in the Religious Imaginary

From “the Crown of Creation” to “the Gate of Hell”

Abstract: This paper investigates the way in which, in order to be contained, unsettling projections about women inside the religious imaginary are confined to specific areas, which I call “reservation fields”, since these allow their survival, at the same time keeping them under control by means of cultural policies. My case studies focus upon the projection of Eve (in the Judeo-Christian cosmogony) and Pandora (in Hesiod’s Greek cosmogony), as problematic women, to say the least. Both are traditionally understood as “bad” women, who allow evil into man’s world. Several patterns of cultural selection and manipulation are analyzed and – hopefully to a certain degree –dismantled throughout the paper.

Keywords: Sexual / gender identity; reservation fields; cosmogonical models; ”evil / good” woman; logic of doubt; ”mystory”; Pygmalion; Galatea.

Manly Women and Womanly Men

Ethic disorder is quasi-unanimously claimed in the post-modern times (cf. Jacques Le Rider, Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, Gilles Lipovetsky, Georg Gadamer, Denis de Rougemont, only in the bibliography of this text). It forces us to admit that both the term and the concept of sexual identity have lost their traditional content: whether we like it or not, masculine identity has parted with its virile description just as much as feminine identity has done so with her maternal, naturalistic one. For some (Walter Benjamin or Georg Groddeck), the interrogation on “the very being of the feminine” is just one more pretext for jubilation and revelation of hidden, disregarded treasures. For others, the same question raises doubts on the solidity of the borders in between genders and threats that we shall be “lost in uncertainty” (Gilles Lipovetsky). Just as woman frees herself from her traditional role and statute, virility itself gets re-written in connection to manhood. The One becomes the Other, women become men as men become women, but this mutual identification has nothing to do with the Androgynous union: we could not be further from the axiological absolute unity of the anthropogeneses that follow an Androgynous matrix.

Though, there is nothing really new here, since la querelle des femmes has seized Europe’s attention for four centuries, along the Middle Ages to the dawn of the Renaissance, and at the beginning of the 20-th century the same “question of women” brings an oversaturated imaginary to explosion. The tensions accumulated in the gender imaginary lead either to virulent attacks on women (not only on feminism) such as Otto Weininger’s (“A man who holds his lowest position is infinitely higher than a woman on her highest rank.”[1]) or, on the contrary, to utopian feminist projects such as that of Georg Groddeck’s:

“The future belongs to the woman. Man’s brains are covered in dust. Only the woman is barbarian enough to alter this rotten culture […]. Let’s allow her to become aware of herself. Humankind is depending on her. Man disappears, but woman is eternal. […] A sacred depth lies asleep inside the woman. But who will know how to wake her up? For as long as the world existed, woman has been taught how to serve, when will she learn how to rule? […] Woman must be left to grow, freed from any manly model and from any manly thought! Powerful trends of thought will burst, new religions will emerge, new gods, new worlds […]. A culture of the powerful sex, of the woman, arises.” (Ein Frauenproblem[2]).

Generally, when confronted with the problem of de-polarizing the man-woman couple, culture produces extreme reactions: either feminist eutopias, or patriarchal distopias.

The religious imaginary is not by far any different: according to the accumulation or the clash of different tensions (social ones, economical, religious or political ones), it elaborates certain phantasms that will contain unsettling principles in what I call reservation fields, holding strict and precise rules and interdictions, in order to make the unpredictable manageable. For instance, Lucifer, who is different from Satan and is usually considered masculine, is originally a feminine figure and an extremely sexual one. “Lucifer” comes from the Latin “Lucem ferre” (“the light bearer, the one who brings light”), translated in Greek (in the Septuaginta) as heosphoros or phosphoros. The last name can be found in three cultic references: in the first one, as a title of Artemis (the Roman Diana is also Lucifera, the goddess of the moon and the night, but Lucifera is also the title of Bona Dea, another name for Magna Mater), the protector of childbirth, then, as another name for Eos, the goddess of dawn and finally as an attribute for Hecate, the torch bearer. The Gnostic Lucifer is Sophia, wisdom, the feminine partner of Christ. The phantasm of the masculine Lucifer, as fallen angel, starts only from Tertulian and Origenes, who promote it on account of mythical references. I take interest in this trend, because it shows a dual model of understanding the sexual differences. In gnoses, the demonic nature of Lucifer-Sophia is explicit:

“I have become like a devil, who dwells in matter, in whom there is no light. And I have become like a spirit who lives in a material body, in whom there is no power of the light.” (Pistis Sophia, Book I, Chapter 39).

Sophia bears a certain resemblance to Lilith who, just as well, desires to create the world without her masculine partner. In the Apocrypha of John, Sophia of Enoia,

„as an Eon, conceived a thought in herself, bringing to life the Unseen Spirit and Knowledge. She wanted to create something resembling herself, without the approval of the Spirit – who did not allow her to – and without her husband and without his approval.”

The Luciferal image is not the only one that proves that femininity is associated, in the religious imaginary, with the maleficent and sexuality. Accomplice to evil, flesh and its sexual exposure, femininity is one of the most notable candidates for the containment inside reservation phantasms.

Case study

I intend to discuss two cosmogonical models of great authority: the Biblical one and the Hesiodic one, since both of them associate woman and evil entering the world. To make my demonstration as clear as possible, I choose to work within an analogy in which elements of the book of Genesis are compared to those of Works and Days and The Theogony, Hesiod’s didactic poems. The analogy is supported by the similarities between the imaginary of the Biblical source P (Priestercodex, 6-th century b. C.) or of the Yahwist source J (10-th century b. C.) and those of Hesiod’s poems (9-th century b. C.). As far as the cosmological matrix is concerned, the Biblical model projects a three-fold anthropogenesis: creation – fall – redemption as well as a logocentric world that emerges with the divine word, more specific with naming. Its sacred, positive character, “good” (tob, that is, pleasant to the Creator, “meeting His expectations, according to His plan”), is re-stated after each day of the creation and it is stressed out by the chronological order, by time measurement and the classification of disordered temporality in seven days. The seventh day crowns creation with a “supplementary” sanctification, because God chooses that day as his resting time and as the day for contemplating his own making, thus the day of Divinity itself. The primordial mark of this world is tob, instituted as conformity with the Logos, the commandment of the only God. The only instance when God does not see tob, but, on the contrary, lo tob (the rupture of the conformity to the celestial project) is, in Genesis 2:18, right after man is created. Unlike the other creatures, which exist in multiplicity, the man alone presents itself in isolation, as a singularity, requiring the Creator’s re-intervention upon the anthropogenetic formula.

This is how an ezer kenegdo, “an help meet”[3], comes into being. Let us notice that, besides the projection of a God who is more than willing to adjust His own Creation, out of love for it, the agreement tob cannot be uttered until woman is created.

Hebrew-Christian thinking takes its strength out of logocentrism, out of naming, which is opposed to the non-assertive word, setting aside, through expansion, the metaphysically “heavy” word for man, as the human nominalistic Demiurge. On the other hand, silence or, on the contrary, dangerously excessive small talk, or simply meaningless talking, is reserved for woman, now an intimate of the Devil itself. How did we get to associate sexuality and original sin? Sexuality as such is only mentioned in the Bible as a sin when it is used outside wedlock (for the Kabala Rabbis, man is missing when the snake presents itself to the woman, because he is resting after he “knew his woman”). On the contrary, the prospect of procreation, of “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth”, is the very first blessing of the Adamic being, the one which will lead to the appearance of the Messiah and, thus, even to Redemption.

One possible interpretation warns us that the serpent in the Genesis, although not yet associated with Satan, still has phallic qualities within the sapiential narrative of the Yahwist, which it accumulated mythologically, and that ̀arom, „naked”, is followed a few verses away by ̀arum, „perverse”. This would be an indication that the human being is opened, through nakedness, towards both the divine tob (until the Fall) and the evil rà. The sensual nakedness of the snake contaminates human nakedness itself with low instincts and the Fall would be definitively associated with sexuality. Instead the free of guilt exposure of the human being, as it was under the protection of the Creator, nudity means here the recognition of one’s own vulnerability in front of a human history without the divine agreement.

My interpretation, which could probably be less doctrinal, is philological. I intend to draw the attention upon the displacement of the sin of speech over the sin of the body. Adamic sin comes through woman (I use the term “woman” and not “Eve”, since the latter is used by the Yahwist only in relation with the after-Fall woman, when man alone becomes Adam). Woman is the first one to engage the first human dialogue with another being, respectively with the messenger of evil. Even more, the woman herself is in here generically human, an adam which is turned towards the animality of the serpent, but also towards a different kind of wisdom than that i-mediately transmitted through the divine logos. Man and woman both take a bite out of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, tempted by the promise of absolute wisdom. Later, they gain the knowledge of both their own sin and their shame, even before God confronts them, and this way they remain redeemable, they are ready to be forgiven. Interestingly enough, out of the two trees in the middle of the garden, the primordial couple seems to completely ignore the tree of life, the source of immortality, which is not protected, in fact, by any divine interdiction. Just like Ghilgamesh, who misses the opportunity for eternal life, after finally being given it (Utanapishtim – the pre-figuration of the Biblical Noah – gives him the plant of eternal life, but Ghilgamesh loses it, also due to a snake), man and woman miss the same chance the moment God decides to remove them from Eden. Once they tasted wisdom or accessed immortality, they would become, from God’s analogous on earth, God Himself. The kind of knowledge brought by the snake, yadà, modifies the relationship between creation and the Creator according to an intimate relationship, like the knowing of the woman by the man.

Adamic sin and the sin of speech

In a treatise on speech and language, De vulgari eloquentia, Dante seems to believe that the need for „the signs of speech” would differentiate people not only from animals, but also from angels, since the latter have „a very quick and mysterious power of mind, through which they entirely disclose their thought at once”[4]. „That reckless Eve” is pointed out to have started, by her answering the snake, sinful speaking. She utters the word which, unlike the Adamic one (concerned with being godly), moves away from naming, establishing the dialogue. The first sample of human dialogical, relational speech thus belongs to Eve: talking to the serpent, woman draws misfortune upon the entire humanity. This is only the first of a series of disasters in the order of speech, the last one being the mixing of the tongues at the “Tower of Trouble” (“Alas, how embarrassed I am to refresh, by speaking about it, the shame of the human kind!”[5]). Speaking without reason becomes from now on the doomed feud of the woman kind and, in order to make them repent for their original imprudence, they shall be silenced.

Dante’s view on the relational character of woman’s weakness is the same as the traditional reading of the episode. Woman’s fatal intervention in the Fall scenario is seen quite often in relation to the misuse of human liberty and creativity (as it appears to de Rougemont). The feminine phantasm is indexed under evil, casting a shade over her providential creation as “an help meet” (as we shall see further on), just as well as over her original design as a “crown of creation”, that is an apotheotic end to a genesis that grows in both meaning and ontological value. Traditionally speaking, “woman is no more diabolic than man is, only easier to double-cross, since she has no objectivity, no concision to her evaluations, no distance from reality or, in a word, no rhetoric”, while Adam’s sin is more a question of victimization through seduction or of… romanticism:

“and here he is, this romantic Adam who gets caught. He imagines that his beautiful Eve, thanks to her famous feminine intuition, has found the way to heaven.”[6]

Traditional interpretation, nevertheless, does not take into account a quite recent objection raised by modern theology to the viewing of the woman’s gesture as a sign of weakness: the serpent presents itself as a food merchant, it has a fruit to sell, so it goes to the woman guided by reflex, since she alone – not the man – is the one designed by social custom to bargain for the family’s food. However, it is certain that this is the first episode in the Genesis where the woman is alone, by herself, with the man inexplicably missing. This is how the dialogue appears in a context where both the logocratic Creator and the Adam partner are missing. So far, the two human beings have been impossible to conceive in singularity, since they were created in interdependence, but at the very moment of the ophidian offer, the being they compose together is already open for dismemberment. This is also the point in which one’s identity is assumed as a negative differentiation: before he can say who he is, the human being says who he is not, avoiding responsibility. Pointing to the Other, he uses a negative logic in order to describe himself: the man as non-woman, and the woman as non-animal, carrying on, through this negative rationale, the logic of doubt, imposed by the incitation of the snake.

One theological point of view claims that dialogism is inherent to humanity: humans would be inclined towards dialogue through their very structure, as one who became a “living soul” through direct exposure to the face of God. The godly breathing of “the breath of life” is, in this view, a dialogical model to be followed throughout human history.

A story that associates woman with the threat of dialogue appears in Ovid’s 6-th book of Metamorphoses. Philomela, a virgin raped by her brother-in-law, threatens her aggressor:

“If I am able to, I shall walk and tell the whole world. If I am kept imprisoned in the woods, I shall fill the woods and tell the rocks, who know my misfortune.”[7]

The rapist then cuts her tongue, so that she cannot speak about the incest (“The tongue falls down and, trembling, seems to murmur on the black soil, just like a snake tail.”). Consequently, Philomela makes up a new language, of gestures but also of scriptures, writing her story out of “purple threads and white threads”[8], out of images sown on a piece of cloth. Let us notice that, in spite of the empathic tone of the writing towards Philomela’s hardship, a reference to the snake reemerges here, although it cannot be interpreted ideologically, except imagologically, since the organ of speech and the snake share a series of attributes: mobility, humectation, wiggling movement and, most of all, potential danger. Besides, it is not accidentally that the telling of the story makes her sister not only to want revenge, but also to hide her vengeance behind silence. The sexuality of the snake, that alludes, in the theological interpretation, to the penis, is a substitute, here, for the evil nature of the tongue. The most important connection realized by means of this superposition is the one between the tongue and the feminine, unpredictable sexuality. The same value is given to the woman’s encrypted speech in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Shame, where Ranni weaves several shawls about her own personal history, a “mystory” on cloth.

The Biblical tradition of the Fall is often related to the loss of the androgynous state, as “a dichotomy of the Primordial Man”[9]. Actually, this connection to the Hebrew-Christian tradition is not the only one being currently made: the chapter 27 of Genesis, in the Vulgata, describes sexual difference as a way “to deprive humans from a part of their possibilities” and projects an androgynous Adam. The theory of an androgynous Adam is widely circulated among the Kabala Rabbis, who believe in the existence of androgynous pre-Adamites, later replaced by the supremacy of the Adam-Eve couple. The belief has been perpetuated until the 12-th century, at the heretic Cathars, to whom Denis de Rougemont dedicates an entire book on the Western meanings of love. For an entire line of antic cultures, the primordial being and the Creator of the World are androgynous (e. g. Astarteea, the mother of the living worlds for the Phoenicians, the origin of one of the most powerful feminine cults of Oriental inspiration: that of the Great Goddess, of the Great Mother, of Magna Mater or Bona Dea, where we can find the attributes of Cybele, Demeter, Diana, but also, on different coordinates and in a different complex, that of the Virgin Mary[10]). Historically speaking, the first representations of the androgyn can be identified in sacred texts, as they justify, according to Eliade, the perfect coherence between the perfection of the Creator and his creation, between the absolute potency of the Demiurge and the potential of the created being. For Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), the metaphysical search for totality is expressed in interpreting Christ as androgynous, “half man and half woman”. Although the androgyny of the first human being is not named in the Bible, as it is in the Talmud, it is not less true that it represents one possible implication of the Genesis text.

Regarding the deficit of wise speech and implicitly, that of wise reason, that is imputed and imposed upon women, we have to take into account another important line of significations. We should consider the Aristotelian conception, perpetuated in the Middle Age patristic texts, according to which the man, sole bearer of procreative principle, is the only one who gives birth to the offspring, who only dwell inside woman’s womb. Or, the Aristotelians make the masculine the only norm, law and, nevertheless, reason (since the procreative principle is in here more of a “breath”, a “movement”, than a form or another of “matter”). Following the same considerations, the feminine means mother, chaos, illegitimacy and sexuality (that is, matter). As the only one who gives life, man associates woman to a natural weakness of the mind (that appears formulated as such in the Roman law). So not only the container of the physical progeny must be governed by man, but also the “vessel” of mind has to be carefully looked after by him, too. Both the rational pot and the pot of the womb must contain carefully selected seeds, in order to produce the expected crop. Our first mythological reference is that of Pygmalion and Galatea, the accomplished artist, too demanding to find a natural woman who is good for him as she is, and his perfect creation, ready to adore him and fulfill all his needs. A memorable sentence of André LaCocque couples, in the Biblical scenario, the good crop of the womb and knowledge:

“Perverted human choice has an immediate effect precisely upon the tool of knowledge itself. God strikes woman in her womb.”[11]

This is how an entire tradition begins, for which woman must be “directed” by her masculine mentor, where the educational role of the father does nothing else but announce and specifies the further role of the husband. Unlike the phantasm of the gossipy woman (responsible for letting evil in the world), this new phantasm is designed to point to the need to “correct” and “improve” natural feminine speech. A continuous practice is imagined to evaluate and adjust woman’s mind, because she naturally speaks without knowing, just like noisy Echo:

“At that time, Echo was a nymph, not just am echo, but still she was noisy; her mouth, just as it is now, was not use but to repeat, out of many words, the last ones. Junona had punished her in this way, for very often, when trying to catch the nymphs in the mountains with her Jupiter, she would stall her talking, until the nymphs ran away.”[12]

First human, first man, first woman

The Biblical outline of Genesis is, unlike the ancient Greek ones (that are, according to Jean Pierre Vernant, completely uninterested in the anthropogenetic meditation), greatly preoccupied with how human came into being. There are two stories in the Bible concerned with the making of the human being (Genesis 1: 26 – 27 and Genesis 2:7), the first one newer than the second (cf. the Priestercodex, 6-th century b. C., responsible for the tradition of “the King God” compared to the Yahwist source, 10-th century b. C., governing over the tradition of “the Anthropomorphic God”). For the next part of my paper I shall use the theological conclusions of André LaCocque[13], Eugen Pentiuc[14] and Robert Alter[15], in order to keep the doctrinal accuracy of my implications. In the first chapter of Genesis, the human being is designed as „man and woman”, zakar, „man, phalus” and nekeba, „woman, to pierce” (lat. perforata), which are terms that denote mostly the simmetry of the reproductive organs[16]. The idea is used by those who claim that Adam is androgynous. The primordial being is, in the same chapter of Genesis, either man-and-woman at the same time, or differentiated, from the very beginning, into man and woman, in equal amounts. Besides, he is imago Dei, a theomorphic creature, living close to his Creator, as „guardian” and „exploiter” of His garden (see also Timothy). Exactly in his capacity of God’s image, the primordial being is a unity in totality, nothing more than an anthropological reflex of an androgynous Divinity which is in itself One in the Multiple. Adam receives three roles: he takes care of the garden, („to dress it”), guards it („to keep it”) and, besides, gains a logocratic position, naming the living creatures and thus establishing their status.

The Biblical cosmogony casts a veil over the Hebrew creation of a former couple to Adam – Eve. In the midrash texts, Lilith, Adam’s first wife, appears as his competitor to his divine status. Both Lilith and Adam are made out of the same essence, that is out of clay, of earth, and this is why Lilith claims for herself the same ontological dignity as her husband, with whom she rather shares resentment than partnership. When she does not get what she wants, she utters the Unutterable Name and this way she flies away, leaving Adam for good. He receives, as a consequence, a new wife, the real “help meet”, made from his own body, so that their union is no longer threatened by structural irreconcilable differences. According to Ginzberg, the separation of the primordial being into two is possible because this one had two faces

(“When God was about to make Eve, He said: ‘I will not create her from his head, lest she be light-headed; nor from the eye, lest she be a coquette; nor from the ear, lest she be an eavesdropper, nor from the neck, lest she be proud, nor from the mouth, lest she be a gossip; nor from the heart, lest she be prone to jealousy, nor from the hand, lest she be light-fingered, nor from the foot, lest she be a gadabout. I will create her from a holy part of his body’ and even so, after God took all these precautions, woman came out with so many faults.”[17]),

but according to Pentiuc the same text makes us notice rather God’s concern for the creation of woman and also the inside, interior, hidden placement of that manly part from which woman is designed. The idea that Adam’s “help” must come from inside, and not from outside him lays at the basis of the creation of woman as his consubstantial counterpart.

In the second part of the Genesis, the man created out of dust is “living soul”, out of the divine soul himself (unlike the animals, who only have breath, psyche, in The Septuaginta), and bears the name of adam (from adamah, “piece of dirt, lump of clay”, but also “collectivity, undifferentiated being, which shall be differentiated later” or, in the Septuaginta, anthropos, “human being”, and not aner, “man, male”). There is nothing dualistic about this anthropogenetic projection, since the separation between body and soul does not exist. God is the one who establishes that a new creation is necessary, “an help meet”, ezer kenegdo. Let us first note that kenegdo does not imply subordination or submission of any kind, nor an ancillary relation, meaning only “to stay face to face, one next to the other, in spatial opposition to” (the idea that the first man suffered from solitude and asked himself for a partner comes from the tradition of the legends of the Jews, where he realizes the numeric difference, respectively his uniqueness and the animals coming in pairs to be named). Even more, ezer, very often translated as “help”, is used in the Old Testament as a determinative for God Himself, in situations when man desperately needs divine intervention[18], another proof to look at the creation of woman more like one could witness an apotheosis, a “crown to God’s doings”[19] or a “crown of creation”[20] for Robert Alter, who makes us pay attention to the scaling of the genetic imaginary from images of the whole, of the background, to images more and more focused in their visual print and their significance. Pentiuc also mentions that there is an anti-feministic matrix that the Hellenistic Septuaginta imposes in its selection of semantic equivalents: even in here, ezer kenegdo becomes kat auton (“according to man”)[21], transforming the relationship between two terms of the same rank in a subordinate relationship. The moment when this help is created is preceded by Adam’s fall in a deep sleep, induced by the divinity himself as an abolishment of consciousness whose role can be either “anesthetic”, to alleviate the separation trauma, or esoteric, to hide the mystery of separation and to give man a passive statute, so that man cannot pretend having participated in the creation of woman – both interpretations are equally presented in Biblical exegesis. Out of a tsela, “part, spatially detached” of Adam, God creates an ishsha, “woman”, whom he than gives back to Adam, who recognizes her as ishsha, since it was taken out of ish. Pentiuc takes the interpretation even further, specifying that man’s own self-awareness cannot manifest itself until he realizes, after seeing the woman, that he has been individualized through her creation.

The generic name of man, of the primordial man-and-woman being, adam, remains the exclusive property of the man and becomes a proper name, Adam, just as soon as man manifests its supremacy over the other beings, naming them, just as he will later name the woman Eve, that is “the Living One, mother of all beings”. By keeping the generic quality for himself, the man Adam takes Eve in his subordination, in the same way that he had taken hold of all the other beings, by logocracy. This is, in the genetic plot, the moment that starts an entire history of viewing woman as evil and temptation, up to the violence in Tertulian’s reference to woman as “the gate of Hell”. Some tend to easily forget the sharing of guilt in this template: it is true that woman is the first one to taste the forbidden fruit, but man is, at the same time, absent. Order is broken and in the new world woman is no longer non-mediately subordinated to God, as she was so far, but subordinated first to a new master, that is man. Woman’s subordination to Adam is a matter of punishment and not one of structure:

“the change […] from one ‘master’ to the other describes, we should get this right, some denaturized and abnormal relationship”[22].

The ascendance of man over woman is sexual. The woman’s suffering comes from the fact that, although she is warned upon the pain of birth giving (because pain, and not giving birth is the punishment), she still cannot refrain from surrendering her sexual desire, in ancillary dependence from man, due to her own limitation (incessant longing for her man).

The generic function of man is preserved in many languages at the very level of linguistic utterance: to name what concerns “the human being”, “the humanity”, the same terms are used as those for “man” (not only in English or German, which are the classic examples, but also in the regional usage of Romanian language, too: “a human being [om] with his woman” would mean “a man and his woman”). The prospect of androgyny is not lost forever, because the New Testament offers it again with the promise of the Heavenly Kingdom, where the distinction between man and woman is abolished (cf. Paul’s epistles or the apocrypha Gospel of Thomas:

“When you shall make one out of two, and when you shall make what is on the inside the same with what is on the outside and what is on the outside the same with what is on the inside, what is up the same with what is down and when you shall make man and woman the same thing, so that man will no longer be a man and woman no longer a woman”[23].

Saint Paul and The Gospel of John number androgyny among the virtues of spiritual perfection. The metaphor of bisexuality would offer, according to Eliade, an example that is similar to the paradoxical warnings of Christ who asks for a new birth or for the return to a childlike stage. In other words, the metaphor is just another expression of the professed metánoia, it is the attempt to find a „corporeal”, intelligible definition of the turning of values and of the conversion to a new regime of existence, one of absolute attributes.

Dialogical speech in opposition to assertive speech

The dialogue on what-you-should-not-speak-about starts the exile of the Biblical man and marks, inside this anthropogenesis, man’s entering history with the consciousness of one’s own sin, with the shame of one’s own naked body. The first censorship is also Adamic: covering in leaves the shameful nakedness mimics yet another concealment, just as important, that of the sinful speaking impulse. Following this associative line, a sin in the order of speech becom what is on the inside es a sin in the order of the body. There is a displacement between the attributes of the body and those of speech, which sometimes leads to utter superposition of the two. There are many accusations coming from the paternalist traditions which actually translate the fear that woman could speak again, establishing a direct relationship with the devil. Man’s fear of the sin that comes from inside the woman’s body could be born of another, deeper one, that, also using her body, woman could establish a charismatic, prophetic relationship between herself and the divinity, just as her voice, speaking without naming, can accept to re-embody the divinity on earth. This is the level where the birth of the Savoir can be seen as a replica, on entirely different coordinates, to the parthenogenesis of the original Mother, which suspends the masculine contribution to procreation.

The women-saints, the exceptions, are saved from women’s vicious relationship to speech, that transforms the feminine majority into a gossipy or silent community. Exceptional women are both pure in their bodies, refusing sexuality, and pure in their speech, „talking like men do”, not negotiating Satanic offers, but re-affirming the Logos, the Word of God. The first women who were given the right to write – that is to speak and to be listened to in the world of men are Christian saints, like Hildegard of Bingen or Herrard of Lansberg. Of course, this fact should be considered in the light of Western patriarchalism, which reserves for women certain fields that are invisible to the creation of ideas, the so-called “history of objects”. When confronted with the task of showing a history of women, museums around the world display collections of personal items or artifacts (jewels, shawls, umbrellas, dresses, hats), instead of written proofs. This, in itself, has to be connected to the fact that traditional culture favors theoretical thinking before practical one, the rational consciousness before the emotional one. In reference to the vexata quaestio of woman’s inferiority in front of man, Evola warns us that “logic and practical intelligence” is overrated, when it should have been a

“simple accessory to life and spirit which both are, together, differentiated, while intelligence in itself is amorphous and neutral and can be equally developed by man and by woman”[24].

Making a typology of words in the Western culture, Gadamer isolates three classes: the question-word, the legend-word and, finally, the promise-word (or the reconciliation-word[25]). By asking, woman sets her own finitude free, both inside the order of knowledge, and inside that of understanding and anticipating. Modern human knowledge is just a form “of the self-surpassing question” which gives away the fragility of human condition. The Fall starts with a question, but so does redemption, in which the question-word has to be followed by the reconciliation-word, which makes a promise. This is the most interesting of the three classes, because it is based on an absence, on a word not entirely uttered when its effect is already there, in action. By the promise made in the reconciliation-word, otherness is exceeded and the Other is back in the equation of the Identical.

There we have one of the criteria that make sexual differentiation possible in culture: the masculine and masculinity are the norm (“the one who speaks right”) against which the feminine and femininity are a deviation (“the one who fails to speak right”). According to this criterion, the woman is obviously an unfinished man, a non-man and her inferior configuration is obvious. It seems evident that the function given to the bad-woman-because-she-speaks phantasm is the containment of the turbulent principle of eroticism and carnality, who can invite, according to context, to establish a transcendental non-mediate communication with either the devil, or God.

From androgynous unity to sexual hierarchy

Both Eve and Hesiod’s Pandora – the woman given as a punishment to the titan Prometheus – are configured, so the feminist say, with a large dose of ontological indignity, much larger than that of their masculine partners. As far as Eve is concerned, the woman really takes part in giving content to “the scapegoat” institution, precisely used by Iudaism, which will reach a climax in the birth of God Christ from the woman without a man. The punishment given to the Biblical woman is considerably easier than the serpent’s, but heavier than the man’s. She becomes, from “an help meet”, from his “consubstantial counterpart”, her partner to the sinful plot, subordinated (both structurally, metaphysically – “and thy desire shall be to thy husband”, and morally – “and he shall rule over thee”) to the one who gives her a name. The term the Septuaginta uses to describe man’s rule over woman is derived from vlahon, “barbarian, primitive”, reiterated to describe the rule of the sinful wish over man. There is no doubt from now on in the Biblical story that the woman Eve is subordinated, in the history yet to come, to her man. The primordial, genetic unity has been fractured the very moment when man and woman stopped acting as a unity and started acting sexually, that is differentiated. And this is just another interpretive line of the superposition of the original sin over the sexual one, the sin of the fracture.

Eve acts in the name of a utilitarian philosophy, she can see that the tree is ”to be desired to make one wise” and “good for food” and “pleasant to the eyes”, that is, in a Aristotelian reading (cf. The Politics) of good as “useful”, can be convinced that she does the right thing. When initiating verbal communication in the history of mankind, she acts out the affirmation of consensus, different from the Adamic agreement. Later, in order to have Christ embodied in the form of man, Mary’s consensual answer is necessary, her verbal, explicit “yes”. Genesis also shows the extent to which Eve’s sin is connected to language and speech. The idea of the practical argument is also supported by Gadamer who, from the Aristotelian definition of the hand as the supreme organ, captures Eve’s hand reaching for the fruit. Her gesture becomes a manifestation of the voice of her body, which supports even more what the real, verbal voice, says. The human being communicates herself entirely in her hand, like in a figural synecdoche, just as it communicates in her tongue “the whole universe of the human experience of mankind”.

It should also be said that, in gnoses, woman is somehow a more favorable phantasm. Sophia, Jesus’ partner, is imagined as God’s primordial emanation. In Trimorphic Protennoia, Sophia Protennoia says: „I am Protennoia, the Thought who dwells in the Light.” Besides, she is granted salvation by the archangels Michael and Gabriel. Just as well, the Holy Ghost is thought to be feminine in nature. In Jews it is stated: „This is how my Mother, the Holy Ghost, took me by a hair and carried me to the mountain of Tabor.” Most of the modern Gnostics identify Sophia with the Holy Ghost as the feminine member of a trinity that would follow the Father – Mother – Son template. The Primordial masculine man and the feminine Thought of God are, still, examples of the same fall of divinity into matter[26]. The matrix of a Trinitarian family seems to be extremely appealing to the common religious imaginary of our days: the depreciation of the Christian symbols in a whole range of cultural products (mostly movies and books) has to be discussed in the context of, on one hand, the reading of the apostolic figure of Mary Magdalene as the wife of Christ and, on the other, the reading of Mary Magdalene as the most important feminine figure of the Christian world, instead the Virgin Mary.

A good deal of the interpretations given to the masculine-feminine relationship in history dwell on the cliché that woman is „natural” while man is „constructed through culture”, “built up in education”, that is removed from nature. We can see here the seeds of a very interesting configuration of woman as vital force, capable of either destruction of the man or of reconnecting the man with his lost and regretted origin. This is the reading that Hesiod[27] gives to his phantasm of the woman. Unlike eve, Pandora does not explicitly enters the conflict of man and divinity, rather she participates objectually in the punishment of the latter, with no personal contribution. Let us notice that both the Hesiodian poems in which Pandora appears, The Theogony and Works and Days presuppose the existence of more „breeds of women”, and Pandora is the first one only as far as „the temptresses” are concerned. “The temptress” is “the most dangerous woman” of all. Unlike Prometheus, of divine origin, a Titan himself (preceding the Olympian gods), Pandora is a clay figure made by Hephaestus, a cacophonic appearance, an eidola, a contradictory image, kalon kakon. She is a beautiful evil, an ugly thing that pleases the eye, the one “gifted with all the gifts” in order to punish the man, the artificial outcome of an artificial creation, as is the creation depicted on her golden crown (given to her by Hephaestus to represent all the living creatures, which makes her the artificial Mother of all beings). In some variants of the myth, Pandora is associated with Anesidora, “the one who takes out the riches of the earth, who brings the gifts to the surface”, having agrarian fertility functions. Still, for Hesiod, she remains “a marvelous misfortune”, a “shrewd enticement” who will unleash the entire potential of evil and pain that the world successfully contained until her arrival inside the pythos in Epimetheus house (for most authors, Epimetheus, thought to be Prometheus’ brother, is no other than Prometheus himself, in his weak and unreasoning hypostasis). The temptress has only one initiative: she is, according to Hesiod, the drone, who eats up the entire wealth of the bee-man (a common phantasm in the masculine imaginary of the ancient Greece). Pandora the temptress and all the women who resemble her are projections of a hungry stomach, not only drone-women, but also stomach-women, always hungry for man’s destruction (another elaboration of a vagin* dentata in the end, because they lead the man to impotence and death). Man stays close to an imaginary of the living creatures: he is the bee or the tree, while woman is a sort of intense heat, whose powers grow during summer, when “men’s virtue is weak”. She is a “devouring flame” that scorches man to death before his time. In this perspective, woman is demonic because of her sexuality and her opposition to man’s identity. She is the Other, her attributes always come against those of man and, as a consequence, valuing the latter, one must depreciate the first.

The sexual imaginary and its pressures

There are certain elements of ontological rehabilitation: sometimes connected to Anesidora, Pandora is associated to Hestia and governs over the home. The fireplace does not only epitomize all the attributes of the home, but also configures the omphalos mundi, where one needs no mediator to communicate with the gods. In this description, woman gathers some occult value since she would officiate the communication around the fireplace. The cosmogonical outline in The Theogony and Works and Days puts us in front of a privileged model of the Identity, where One means Power and masculinity (Zeus brings order in the world in the end of The Theogony with his last triumph over the beast Typhoon, “the last son” of Gaia and Tartars, “the defeated king of chaos”), while the Dual, the Multiple and the woman are conceived as dangers, perturbation agents of a physical, psychic and occult nature. In Pandora’s case, the connection between sexuality and the unrestling of the masculine, rational, socially efficient identity is clear and explicit. Unlike the first model we took into account, we can witness here the effect of the flame-woman phantasm, a devouring woman due to her sexual hyper-activism.

To the feminists, such a great deal of ontological subordination, present in most of the religious systems of the world is the outcome of their elaboration through masculine meditation. It exerts, as a consequence, such a pressure over both women (feeling guilty for their obvious lack) and men (feeling compelled to understand their masculine identity in terms of ascendant over women). It is quite relevant that women emancipation movements are very interested in the re-presentation of their voice, both collective and individual, personal, since this would open their access to formerly closed fields of theoretical thinking. On the other hand, from that very reason, feminine imaginary becomes obsessed with the phantasm of sexual inversion, of the metamorphosis into man (sometimes by finally revealing a sex that was, so far, ignored.

Montaigne, in his essay “The Power of Imagination”, narrates a series of sexual inversions that took place, he says, due to the persistence of a certain psychic template over the body[28]. His examples are interesting in themselves, but the most important thing seems to me the comment that he makes after giving them. It is his contention that the miraculous sex-changes are not a “great wonder”, since

“imagination has the power and it is always and very insistently enticed to such deeds, so that it can escape the obsesive thought and the ardent wish; it is easier for it to give those girls the manly part they want for good”[29].

“Imagination”, the life of the mind, prefigures, says the author of the Essays, certain physiological structures, and being stubborn over a single concetto, a single interior figure, we can alter our old physiology, “formatted” by the old psychic template:

“Plinius says to have witnessed the transformation of Lucius Cossitius from woman to man, on the day of his wedding. Pontanus and others say such changes took place a long time ago in Italy, because of the inflamed wish of either one’s own, or of his mother’s.”[30]

Also Montaigne tells us that he himself saw “a young man, called Germain, whom his entire village new as Maria until the age of 22”. Sexual inversion would be, so the author of the Essays believes, the result of some mind movements or, in psycho-analytic jargon, the by-product of the release of the subconscious from under the pressure of the id. Nevertheless, the problem raised by his examples of sexual inversion is not their credibility, but their inner motivation, which is precisely an imaginal solution to real identity crises.

A minority of women, before taking any physical or social action, go to a different solution: to transform themselves into men only at an imaginary level. The phantasm of a man-woman is for many of them the most accessible solution to get out of the crisis of identity depreciation, in a system that they do not really want to attack or deny. In time, this phantasm is internalized by men themselves as a solution to accept the accomplishments of some women without giving up their misogynistic creed. A reflex that has been preserved to our days is to say to an intelligent woman that she thinks like a man and mean it as a compliment. This contains a direct sexist implication, where the blame usually cast upon non-rational women is exceptionally suspended.

Around the 9-th century A. D., Western Europe has been victim to a religious fraud. A young woman of clerical vocation becomes so competitive in her religious zeal, that she conceals her woman identity, assuming that of a man and, finally, is said to have been elected Pope. The authors do not entirely agree upon this being a historical reality, or only a legend. However, what is interesting to us, in this analysis of phantasms, is the fact that the medieval imaginary is confronted with such a violent contradiction, that it preserves the name of Pope Joan as the name of one who refused to be silenced and aspired to the masculine logos. The hidden identity is significantly revealed by a “betrayal of nature”. Pope Joan falls in love and gets pregnant, so the truth is revealed. The phantasmatic solution to this masculine crisis of power is relevant, too: we are reminded once again that “nature speaks through women” and this is how Pope Joan acquires a double guilt, that of speech and that of discovering one’s sexuality.

Anyway, the case of Pope Joan can be a simple hoax, but things are historically supported in the case of Christine de Pisan, a noble woman of the 15-th century who, once widowed, provides for her entire household by means of her writing. She enters the dispute around the famous Le Roman de la Rose, of Jean de Meung, raising for the first time the question of a discursive representation of women. Interestingly enough, by doing this, she feels she becomes a man and is described as one by a chancellor of the University in Paris: insignis femina, virilis femina. In 1404, she writes a Book on the City of Women, an incredibly modern text, born out of her frustration of not being a man: “Why did you not allow me to come to this world as a man? I could have been as fulfilled as man says he is.” Her solution is activist: she imagines a utopian city, where all the apriorically imperfect women can gather together, to use “the axe of reason” and “not to torment themselves with such mad questions”[31]. We can see here how the phantasm of a man-woman, as first solution to become ontologically visible is left aside for a new definition of woman, where the woman identity becomes a well deserved acquirement.

Where does the woman soul disappear?

We cannot forget the most important example, which is the well-known “dispute around women”, “la querelle des femmes” or “la querelle de sexes”. The dispute belongs more to the Middle Ages than to the Rennaisance, although much of the debate was consumed during the 16-th century. However, its start is medieval, more explicitly the moment when the dualist, polarized understanding of the sexes, that has reigned so far, gives room to a new one: namely to the theory that describes woman as an unfinished man, mas occasionatus for Thomas of Aquinas. The dispute concerns the establishing of each gender’s “dignity” and contains different dissertations, reactions, mutual criticisms that men and women organize around this theme. The debut of the dispute is to be found around the 13-th century, in Le Roman de la Rose, especially in his second part, elaborated by Jean de Meung, who is considered the promoter of an “erotic communism” when he says: “You are, will be or were whor*s, by action or only by desire.” But the real extent of the dispute is reached around the 16-th century, when an anonymous German paper is issued under the title Disputatio nova, undertitled: Are women humans or not. The answer given by the paper is negative: women are not humans. They are suspected of not having any soul and are ontologically equal to animals. They are considered an error of nature and, even if this is not their fault, they have less ontological value than men and naturally wish to be “just like men are”. Two aspects should be pointed out now: women’s desire to resemble men is condemned as a dangerous intention to be free from men and their families, plus, on the other hand, marriage is blamed to impose upon man the unnatural burden of woman’s indignity. Marriage is imagined as the main obstacle on the path to wisdom and learning, a heavy chain that man assumes only to lose money, time and, most of all, spirit. From this point, we only have one step to make to the Illuminist projection of the conjugal couple as educational unit. In Emil or On education, Rousseau tries to confront the unfortunate outcome of society over human nature, taking his pupil back to the school of nature.

Imagining how the educator should anticipate and pre-direct the choosing of a wife for his pupil, Rousseau designs the ideal woman, intentionally called Sophie, for it is “a good name”, meaning “wisdom”. His act is similar to that of Pygmalion, who is not content with any actual woman and creates Galatea himself, who, once brought to life by gods, becomes the ideal wife. After enumerating her necessary attributes, Rousseau brings her to life – the living image of the “natural” woman, but also of the wise partner, full of desire to please her man. In the 4-th book of his treatise on education, Rousseau conceives the differences between men and women in terms of unilateral complementarities. Book 5 encourages educators to accept the differences between boys and girls as entirely natural and as the starting point for raising a woman who is “good” for “the man of nature”.

Woman is defined by Rousseau according to two factors: the needs of “the man of nature”, that is the needs of the ideal, natural man and, on the other side, the limitations and coerces of society. Referring to the principles to be respected in education, the philosopher mostly looks at the father-son relationship, but the father is also taken into account as the educator of the daughters:

“Try to show the reason why you ask them to do certain things, but make them do something at all times. Laziness and disobedience are the most dangerous flaws for them and the less adjustable, once they have been acquired. Girls must be diligent and hard-working. And this is not all: they have to learn how to obey, early in their lives. This misfortune (if this really is a misfortune) is connected to their sex; once they get rid of it, they will suffer horrible mischief. [..] You have to teach them how to suffer constraint, so that it will not upset them; teach them to supervise all of their phantasies and submit them to the will of another. If they want to work incessantly, you should, at times, make them do nothing.”

Women are obviously invested here with an auxiliary nature, just like in the normative books of the Bible: they are encouraged to “mortify” themselves not to suffer the frustration of not having access to socially forbidden values. Rousseau however blames the contradictory existence of women on “our wicked institutions”, which force them to continuously “fight with themselves”, but still he blames the social disorder of the natural world on the woman:

“it is true that her sex suffers now part of the evil things she brought upon us”[32].

A saved woman

As a conclusion, in Rousseau’s treatise, Emil, three theories of gender differentiation are combined: the ancillar woman, “formatted” to answer and to meet man’s needs and desires, but also the woman as completely foreign to the man, moved by a completely opposite principle than the rational, masculine one, namely a principle of eroticism, of “the eternal feminine”. The third line of the argument is given by the description of woman as the eternal pupil of man, eager to be taught, first by her father, than by her husband, the alphabet of practical life. At some point, the author understands love in terms of a competitional relationship:

“to be loved, you try to make yourself available for love, to be favored by love, you have to make yourself more loveable than anyone else, at least in front of the object of your love. This is why you start looking at your peers, start comparing yourself to them and thus rivalry, jealousy and competition appear.”[33]

In a similar way, Freud will also place rivalry, envy and hatred, that is masochism, at the basis of the wish and the ability to differentiate between I and other, but also between I and the outside world. To the psychoanalyst, all of these make intellectual knowledge possible thanks to the differentiating powers of the human psychic, which acts like “the knight of hatred” (objectivity would be then a particular case of aggressiveness). Lacking scientific spirit, over-narcissistic and envious, women act in the name of the erotic principle. For Rousseau, what distinguishes good from evil, moral from social perversion is not love in itself (formerly established as the only educational precept), but the way love is handled by the educator. Love has to be pre-directed, met with certain expectations, with a set of definite values, with a phantasm of love that will govern the processing of both qualities and flaws of the object of love:

“you love more the imagination you make of the object it represents. If you saw what you love as she is, there would be no love on earth. When you are no longer in love, the person you love stays the same, but you do not see her like you used to, the veil of her prestige falls off and infatuation disappears. This is why, by giving him an imaginary object [to love], I master the possible comparisons and easily prevent the illusion that real objects could give.”[34]

De Rougemont also analyzes love in terms of appropriation to the subject: as long as he lets himself suffocated by woman, through love, man harms himself and the woman, because, “shapeless as she is”, she awaits for the Pygmalionian effort, for her pouring into shape by the self-aware man and by his formative responsibility.

I have isolated in the analysis above some particular areas of the sexual imaginary which I called reservation fields because they allow the surviving of some threatening, unsettling cultural projections of a menacing woman, in formulas that indexes them to a systemic order, often by culpability mechanisms. Since the projections I talked about are identity related, they create specific pressures inside the entire imaginary, generating a-typical phantasms, such as the woman-man or even the man-woman. The feminist argument is, still, completely unproductive as long as it uses the same definitions as the masculine theories. An imaginary adjustment is necessary, in order to project new definitions, which positively value the fragmentary, the disorder and the turbulence. What is, in the traditional imaginary, a handicap (the limitation of the feminine self’s access to the world of the masculine logos) becomes the opportunity to admit to an alternative existence. Thus, one does not reject the ego-logic of the social I, but favors de-centering as the mode of placement in the world. The defining phantasm of this alternative type of imaginary is the Dionysian woman, which I shall discuss in a different study. Her imagological advantage is her openness to the epiphanies of the whole, to the mystic of life. The Dionysian woman in the paternalist imaginary is viewed like a threat to the Apollonian masculine identity, as an evil entity and as a candidate to silence. In a different formula, even silence would gain a new dimension, an active, creative, Wittgensteinian one, since only through silence one can regain the impossible to express and can expect for the epiphany to happen.

Notes