From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Newsgroups: alt.feminism
Subject: Re: Your views on Catholic Church or Sinead O'Connor
Date: 16 Oct 92 00:54:36 GMT
Organization: LLNL

In article <1992Oct14.171216.11915@netcom.com> sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer) writes:
>In article <1992Oct13.214750.16665@ncsu.edu> blchapma@eos.ncsu.edu (BEKKI LYN) writes:
$ 
$ Writer Mary Daly has a feminist perspective of the Catholic Church's
$ impact on women.  Her book _When God Was a Woman_ goes into her
$ reasons for why she no longer follows the Catholic faith and why
$ she chose the Goddess religion she now follows.  Her views may shed

>Sorry, _When God Was a Woman_ was written by Merlin Stone, not Mary
>Daly. The book contains a lot of hilarious stuff, as the author tries
>to prove the reality of a 'Goddess Garden of Eden' before the horrid
>patriarchs took over.

	I think that that is an overly simplistic summary of her work.
While I certainly some feminist prehistorians are perhaps excessively
romantic, I think that there is a good deal of truth to what they have
to say, even if I would not want to go back to the technical level of
the societies they talk about, and even if the full form of their
hypotheses is partially erroneous, something I suspect in some cases.
I doubt if female domination was the rule, more like gender
egalitarianism. 

To do so, she ends up trying to prove that the
>Jews are actually Indo-European (Aryan), instead of Semitic, since
>the Goddess theology holds Indo-Europeans responsible for everything
>bad, and the patriarchal Jews were obviously very, very bad.

	Wrongo. She suspects that some Indo-Aryans _influenced_ the
Israelites at some date before any of the Bible was written, and she
presents evidence of resident Aryans. For example, in the Amarna
Letters (1200 BCE (?)), she notes that many of the names of Canaanite
princes were Aryan, like "Indaruta" (Vedic "Indrota" or "Indrauta").
This, I may add, is before the "historical horizon" of the Bible,
which is at about 1000 BCE, so any Aryan contributions might have been
forgotten or left uncredited. She also mentions the Levirate
(surrogate fatherhood) as an important custom common to the Israelites
and the Aryans. She also mentions Aryan influence on Mesopotamia, in
the form of the Mitanni kingdom. Cultures don't exist in isolation,
and Stone is probably correct here, even if some of her more
farfetched theorizing does not hold up.

She
>also tries to prove that "Hitler" is somehow related to the ancient
>"Hittites", who as Indo-Europeans were also very bad.

	This is just a speculation, and she freely admits that some of
what she proposes is rather speculative.

	One disappointing thing about Stone's book is that she does
not explain what "Indo-European" means. She could have explained how
one does linguistic comparisons, and how one can perform cultural
deductions from reconstructed vocabulary, like the original IE
speakers having cows, sheep, pigs, horses, wheeled vehicles, and
simple metalworking, as well as patrilineal inheritance and patrilocal
marriage (wife goes to husband's household; this is evident from the
words for a husband's relatives being preserved much better than those
of a wife's relatives).

	What would have been a big zinger for Stone is one thing she
sadly neglects -- the name of an important IE god. Here goes:

Germanic:
Old English: Tiw
Old Norse: Tyr

Latin: Jovis Pater (> Juppiter, "Father Jove")
Greek: Zeus Pater ("Father Zeus")
Sanskrit (Vedic): Dyaus Pitar ("Father Sky")

From regular sound correspondence, we reconstruct

*dye:us p@te:r
[*tye:us ph@the:r in one revision of the IE phonology]

which literally means "Father Sky", the two words being in reverse
order as per the Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit examples.

	Dan Quayle does not seem to be a student of prehistory, but
I'm sure he would appreciate the IE speakers for worshipping a deity
with this name, in contradistinction to the abundant Murphy-Brownish
imagery of the pre-IE folk, some of which survived to later times in
varying forms. Stone quotes one female worshipper of Cybele as having
proudly been an unwed mother, and also notes that an unwed mother was
sometimes considered to be especially close to Cybele.

Yes, hilariously
>dumb, but good enough for Womens' Studies.

	Does this include your favorite virago, Camille Paglia?
Newsgroups: alt.feminism