“It seems to me that the sacred pre-exists the religious.” [Clement and Kristeva 1998]
A few authors have attributed the origin of the misogynistic message that the Axial Age diffuses to a nomadic people coming from the north of India, the Aryans. We have noted, however, that the decline of woman's status finds its roots long before the philosophy of the Axial Age invades the Eurasian continent. In fact, more than a few centuries will have been necessary to shake so profoundly the pluri-millennial certainties of our prehistory.
The Aryans’ oldest sacred texts that serve as basis to the Vedic religion, the Samhitas, were composed between 1,500 and 800, and are posterior to the code of laws of Lipit-Ishtar or of Hammurabi (around 1,800) that both establish man as the focal point of the society.
A similar trend is observed in all regions where the winds of the Axial Age blow. In the Indian subcontinent, the Laws of Manu develops identical themes: “She who, controlling her thoughts, speech, and acts, violates not her duty towards her lord, dwells with him (after death) in heaven, and in this world is called by the virtuous a faithful (wife, sadhvi). But for disloyalty to her husband a wife is censured among men, and (in her next life) she is born in the womb of a jackal and tormented by diseases, the punishment of her sin.” [Laws of Manu] In China, signs of women's subordination appear when Confucianism becomes the doctrine of the State. It introduces an extremely hierarchized, patriarchal organization resting on a strictly patrilineal ancestor cult, boys being the only ones authorized to carry their father's name. Some aspects of this patriarchal society will exceed the most extreme cannons, woman being simply considered as a biological necessity and merely useful for procreative purposes. She will have to devote all her energy on procuring a male heir for her husband, and girls will often be sacrificed at birth. As for men, they will develop an elaborate science of sexual practices, in their search to control the gender of the fetus that has to be, evidently, male [30].
However, still in China, Taoism will escape this trend by developing a vision of the world that finds its balance between the forces of the Yin and those of the Yang. The space that the feminine occupies belongs to the Yin and is in every aspect comparable to the space in which the masculine is located, the Yang. Whereas Confucianism establishes the woman as man's maid, Taoism keeps a more ancestral standpoint by assigning to her a natural and mysterious role, and by maintaining a holistic vision of the universe in which every element possesses its place and where complementarity is the rule.
Stretching from China to Greece over millennia, it seems impossible to endow such a trend to a unique Aryan source. All the more since norms and values imposed by a foreign people are mostly rejected by autochthonous populations.
On the other hand, the discovery of men’s procreative function could have had such an impact, infiltrating and impregnating the different societies in all their layers, deeply influencing their mentalities as well as their social structures. Ultimately, it will result in putting man at the center of the universe, in an ideological and psychological expression that will culminate during the Axial Age, a phenomenon so unique in its geographical scope that only the most remote places will escape its impact and ascendancy.
In their comparative analysis of different creation myths in pre-industrial societies, Nienke Moor and her team showed that the technologies of subsistence and the belief in a creative god were closely linked:
The notion of a creative god is mainly present in pastoral communities and in societies possessing an advanced agriculture, in which a differentiated economic structure rests on man. It replaces a more ancestral vision of the world in which humans were part of an all-encompassing nature, vision that did not allow the existence of a creative god that would exist outside the natural world.
Let us summarize the main steps that have marked the passage from the holistic to the hierarchized representation of the universe.
1) Spiritualizing nature, and adding thus meaning to its manifestations that can now be interpreted represents a primordial expression of the way humans take control of nature
2) The domestication of plants and animals is another decisive development that has firmly established the dominance of humans, since, for the first time, a species breaks away from the prevailing economy of predation. For men, the domestication of symbolic animals, such as the bull and the horse, represents an economic and strategic turning point as well as a psychological victory in their endeavor to control nature
3) Inside the human couple, the discovery of man’s procreative function reverses the ancestral balance that favored, until then, female fertility. A new conception of procreation arises in which man becomes creator while woman is relegated to a nursing role
4) To secure their new position in the universe, men conceive a new entity, Yahweh, who, as Father and Creator, replaces fertility embodied by Mother-Nature at the summit of the creation
While the economic and social transition leading to the Urban Revolution will be swift, driven by necessity due to the implosion of the Neolithic society, the transformation of the deeply ingrained traditions and the replacement of the ancient beliefs will take more time. This will create a discrepancy in the societies of Antiquity. On the one hand, the balance of power is definitely tilted towards the masculine, as the codes of law ascertain. On the other hand, the norms and beliefs of the past still play an influential role: goddesses dominate the first pantheons, and all creation myths before Genesis refer to a primordial nature on which divinities are dependent. Ultimately, the ideological tidal wave of the Axial Age will completely erase these residues of ancestral beliefs, as exemplified by the advent of the Abrahamic religions that consecrate the ideology of the masculine civilization from which nature and the feminine have been evicted.
“In brief, the sacred is an element in the structure of human conscience, and not a stage in the history of this conscience.” [Eliade 1976]
In the primeval holistic vision of the world, nothing could exist outside nature: everything was included and possessed a place in it. Defining the natural world as sacred, the concept of profane could not exist, since nothing existed outside nature.
When a divinity exterior to nature was introduced, when the original creative principle that once belonged to nature was attributed to a divine entity, sacredness was transferred to the divinity sitting now on top of the creation, encompassing all that existed without exception.
In the case of Levantine monotheism, the relationship between Yahweh and its people was defined by monopolistic and contractual characteristics meant to identify and circumscribe the “chosen people.” Yahweh conceptualizing the principle of sacredness, a new concept that would describe and encompass the “out-group” became necessary: the notion of “profane” will be introduced and applied to all that does not belong to the divine world, defining all that has been excluded from the sacred.
By limiting the use of the term “sacred” exclusively to their divinity, the rise of monotheist religions based on the Old Testament does not celebrate the advent of the sacred, but divides the human race by introducing the concept of profane [31].
Another consequence ensues directly from the reductive definition of the sacred and the resulting apparition of the profane. Contrary to the holistic vision in which the creation as a whole forms an indivisible unit, the religions of “the Book” consider as profane everything that does not belong to their definition of the divine. As we have seen, the texts forming the Old Testament clearly seek to identify what characterizes the in-group as opposed to the out-group. They establish the basis for a division between the faithful and the infidel that will give rise to religious intolerance, an unfortunate characteristic defining these religions. This new attitude greatly contrasts not only with the primitive holistic vision, but also with the openness and flexibility attached to the polytheistic cults that excluded no one.
However, just like the notion of profane, religious intolerance does not form an intrinsic condition of monotheism, the teachings of Christ and of Buddha being proofs of the opposite. Intolerance, nevertheless, is inherent to the way the prophets attach Yahweh to its people: i.e. defining them as “chosen” automatically leads to the rest of humanity becoming the “excluded” people. None of the big religious institutions developed on these premises will be able to escape the principle of exclusivity: they will all apply intolerance on a systematic and global scale. Excluding and condemning all other credos, they will go as far in their blindness as to reject sister-religions that are issued from the same sources, that share the same prophets, that refer to the same texts [32].
In their quest to extend their power and authority and to monopolize the religious landscape, these religious institutions will send their missionaries all around the world to convert the out-group. This will lead to all sorts of abuses: oppressions, persecutions, massacres, wars, and not to forget the systematic acculturation of millions of people, erasing in the name of their credo ancestral traditions all over the world. A unique phenomenon that still defines the history of these religions today.
Creation of Adam (detail). Fresco (1510). Sistine Chapel (Italy)