“Champions, where is freedom? what has gone awry? A man can guess but no man can solve. We must turn to woman for the answer.
It was many thousand years ago, before histories were written, that the change came. We must turn our memories even farther. why can we not, who sprang from those loins, though it be long ago, the age of Isis that is mistakenly called the matriarchy. It is not a matriarchy as we imagine it, a rule of clubwomen, or frustrated chickens. It is an equality. The woman is the priestess, in her reposes the mystery. She is the mother; brooding yet tender; the lover; at once passionate and aloof, the wife, revered and cherished. She is the witch woman. It is coequal. Undifferentiated, the man, chieftain, hunter; husband, lover; thinker; doer. The woman, priestess, guardian of the mystery, sibyl of the unconscious, prophetess of dreams. Thus balance; stability.
Then, catastrophe untellable, the patriarchy, archtypified by the demonic monosexual monster; Jehova. And now, in the rule of priests, woman is an inferior animal, man a superior god, isolated, and at the mercy of his merciless intelligence. It is war, total war without quarter; between the emotions that must and the intellect that will not. Every religion in the patriarchy is a self contradictory monstrosity - Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Mohammedism, facism, communism, democracy, science and every other faith of the historical world. It is dogma, creed based on axioms that shift like straws in the wind of the intellect, and upon this shifting structure man has failed, and must fail, for he knows their futility and fights for them with all the sick fury of frustration. He knows that he is a little boy playing with erector toys and chemical sets, playing cops and robbers in a game that goes too far.
It is to you, woman, beautiful lost redeemer of the race, that I dare address this chapter. That which stirs in you now is not madness, is not sin, is not folly, but is life, new life, and joy and fire that will beget a new race, and create a new heaven and a new earth.
When you were a child, did not the wind speak to you and the sun? Did you not hear the mountain’s voice, the voices of the river and the storm? Have you not heard the tidings of the stars, and the voices in the silence, ineffable?
Have you not gone naked in the forest, with the wind over your body, and felt the caress of Pan? And your heart has swelled with spring, blossomed with summer, and saddened with the wolf of winter. These things are the covenant, and in them is the truth that is forever.”
- John Whiteside Parsons; Woman Girt with a Sword
