Patriarchal Nightmare Part 2

John Giannini on the Sacred Feminine (aka Patriarchal Nightmare, Part 2)

Culturally, some religious denominations still struggle with women’s issues more than others. The theologian of the former Pope Benedict XVI wrote that women cannot be priests because ”men are likely to think of God in terms of philosophical definitions and logical syllogisms…a quality valuable for fulfilling a priest’s duty to transmit church teaching.” And, besides, he adds,” men are more practical.” I can hear a multitude of women-- who are philosophers, theologians and CEOs of companies or who as wives and mothers attend to endless pragmatic duties—angrily responding to this man who obviously is living in an ecclesial male vacuum and its fear and hatred of the feminine.
  
We see this male outlook in typical television ads. The analyst James Hollis points to an ad in which, for example, “a macho group of merry fellows hoist girders, saw logs or drive fork-lifts, but little is said on how men relate to women, unless helped with alcohol.” Hollis concludes: “How can men expect to have good relationships with women when men do not have a relationship with their own feminine soul?” (Hollis, 1993, p. 54)

Underlying this male behavior is a fear and hatred of feminine qualities within themselves. This lethal attitude called misogyny is the oldest prejudice in history. (Holland, 2006) The analyst Erich Neumann gives this attitude a cosmic meaning:

Devaluation of the Earth, hostility toward the Earth, fear of the Earth: these are …..the expression of a weak, patriarchal consciousness that knows no other way to help itself than to withdraw violently from… the Earth as the unconscious making, instinct-entangling and therefore dangerous feminine.(Newman, 1994, pp. l70-l7l)  

We will see many other evidences of this universal patriarchal misogyny in this book as well as spiritual awakenings to the maternal archetype’s presence in Nature, culture and persons. This fear and hatred of the feminine in women, in sensitive men, and in the cosmos constitutes what I call “The Patriarchal Nightmare.” On the other hand, speaking of nightfall, all of us, male or female, experience the maternal archetype’s attribute as darkness in which we are enveloped by her and even more crucially, we eventually must surrender to her darker reality of sleep. Whether we know it or not, we are then in the arms of the maternal principle, in which in some dreams, patriarchal men will experience her as a holy terror.

I will give countless examples of male violence not just toward women but to humankind. Each day evidences of this male pathology mount up. For example, on the first page of one New York Times, I found the following: (1) an article condemning HBO’s “Game of Throne’s” because it is “riddled with sexual abuse.” Further, it has a seventeen million person following, the most since HBO’s “The Sopranos.” (Itzkoff, 2014, p. 1). (2) An article, describes how Myanmar’s Buddhist-led military government has cut off medical aid to Muslims, after its “expulsion of Doctors without Borders, one of the world’s premier humanitarian aid groups.” (Perlez, 2014, p.) (3) Another article states that Obama has ordered a “policy review of executions” after a “botched execution in Oklahoma.” (Baker, 2014, p. 1) We are one of the few nations still fostering this inhuman practice.

Carl Jung, who is often the hidden source of much current thought on personality and spirituality, will provide a psychological approach to a depth view of the maternal principle who is patriarchy’s greatest nightmare.

Intuition Materials

I've written documents (a whole book in fact) on intuition. Anyone interested?  - John Giannini

Some Thoughts

Dear Folks,

We are easily diverted by all the negative news from particular issues, locally or internationally, such as the beheadings. Don't forget basic issues that effect you and your family and friends.

- John Giannini

A Manifesto for Peace

Context

"We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage.

We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them.

We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites.

We produce high-budget films such as American Sniper to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.

The barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit. The line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is technological, not moral. We are those we fight."

- Chris Hedges 

Christ Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author, with Laila Al-Arian, of Collateral Damage and an earlier book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press).

A Manifesto for Peace

What is needed, is to go beyond a worldview and approach to conflicts rooted in terror, war and violence. What is needed, is to transcend a paradigm and approach to politics, governance and conflict that is itself the true and greatest threat: not any 'them' or 'the other', but the logic and practice of war that is itself a mirror and reflection, an escalating pathology that we collectively need to have the intelligence, integrity and courage to overcome.

Our task today is not to mobilise, legitimise and sanction the violence of governments and military alliances of 'this' or 'that' side nor to mobilise, legitimise and sanction the violence of non-state actors and groups. Our task today is to mobilise the vast and overwhelming majority of humanity who are tired and exhausted of the violence, destruction, war and killing, and the bankrupt policies, 'intelligence' and 'leadership' which fuel it. Our task today is to dive with all the integrity of passionate doctors searching for cures to ebola and aids to find cures to a sickness far more destructive and devastating - the sickness of war and the global intellectual, academic, economic and political systems that underpin it. Our task today is to recognise the evidence-based empirical fact that there are ways to address conflicts effectively, that prevention of war and violence is a concrete and practical reality, and that to achieve this we need to overcome stale ideological maxims and certainties as valid as the belief that the earth is flat, and instead engage with all our tremendous and extraordinary diversity, intelligence, innovation and creativity to build peace - real peace, just peace, the peace that transcends and overcomes the illogic and futility of war.

Our task today is to create the new anti-apartheid movement, the new suffragettes movement, the new civil rights movement. Like all these movements before it will take organising, it will take dedication, it will take hard work, effort, commitment and passion. Like all these movements before, it will take a dream, and our realising that that dream becomes real the moment we dedicate ourselves to making it happen.

Our task today is to create this movement, and to reach out to soldiers in armed forces and to members of ISIS as our brothers and sisters, and have them put down their weapons. Our task today is not to mobilise youth in Benghazi or anywhere else in Libya, Iraq, the United States, Jordan, France, Nigeria, Mexico, Japan, China, or elsewhere to kill. Our task is to mobilise them to have the courage to live, and to join in the effort to rebuild their countries, and to build together the world we wish to live in.

Our task...  is to be the change we wish to see. A global movement is rising. Join us. 

- Kai Brand-Jacobsen, Patrir

The Sacred Feminine Series, introduction to The Patriarchal Nightmare

John Giannini has written two more books, following his Compass of the Soul, and can be considered two parts of a Sacred Feminine series.  The first is entitled 'The Patriarchal Nightmare' and the second, 'Intuition'.

I wish to start sharing his work virtually in order to spark conversation about the material and win some interest among the public for John's thoughts, his words, that I think deserve public hearing and that I think should be shared freely.  - Martin Giannini, John's son

Here begins the introduction to The Patriarchal Nightmare:

“There is no creation that does not have a radiance.” - Hildegard of Bingen

I have been moved to write on this subject of patriarchy and its nightmare, the maternal principle, because of the enormous outrage I have long felt about male dominance and attitudes. My outrage has not diminished; it has only increased exponentially as I have met men who are equally concerned. I have encountered the pathology of this five thousand year masculine culture in my personal life, my work, my readings and in the lives of everyone I have met and studied.   I do not condemn paternal men as such since they have given us intelligent systems, structures and laws. “Paternity” is a positive archetype. I condemn only what Webster’s describes implicitly as its pathology,“patriarchy,” with an overt “dominance by males.” Its general characteristics are its misogyny as a hatred and fear of women and the maternal principle in all of us, a rigid exclusion of other types of people and ideas that do not agree with their ideology, and their resultant violence in every aspect of life from rape to war.  Over all, I condemn its pathological one-sidedness, which Carl Jung writes is always “barbaric,” So this pathology is the standard bearer of all such barbarisms.

Simultaneously I learned that the antithesis to this male dominance had once been the goddess-based cultures in the Neolithic period of history that preceded the written word and male control.  I began to see the larger meaning of the goddess as the unitary earth and holistic psychic forces, which I call the maternal principle.

This book is the story of a five-thousand year old titanic battle between a patriarchal pathology and its exclusivity and the mother principle’s inclusiveness. Because I write as a Jungian depth psychologist and as a theologian, we will also explore the spiritual aspects of this cosmic narrative. The main-line churches, influenced by the paleontologist  Teilhard de Chardin, now accept the facts of evolution, with the added proviso of a divine causality. Such a sacred energy assumes that intelligence and purpose are crucial factors in evolution. Then, the great quantum physicists of the last century, having discovered the mathematics of matter, called this intelligence “mind.” Since they acknowledged that their discoveries do not explain the essence of matter, most of them have written metaphysically about the miraculous fact of existence itself. (Wilbur, l984)

I am also privileged to be an old man, still working, writing and loving. I am increasingly aware of the mighty flow of history in which we as a human species share in the second mystery of existence, the first being life itself. The second is that we know that we know. We have reflective awareness. Daily, I see hundreds of people from the youngest to the oldest on the streets, at public events and on television. I realize that each of us has an inner life and history so individual that its patterns are as unique as one’s finger prints.  Whoever we are, we all participate in the cultural drama of patriarchy and the maternal principle in public as well as in our deepest reflections.