"... Then I went to this other party and saw this whore woman, and she climbed up a pine tree and started humping one of the stumps. It was just hideous, gruesome. And i just thought... this is California." ----------------------------------------- john doe, c. 1976 ------------------- "If you happen to meet a prostitute, the day is lucky and filled with an abundance of business." ----------------------------------------- st john chrysostom, c. 388 ----------- "In this dirty-minded world, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore--or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you." ----------------------------------------- john irving -------------------------- Except in an entirely secondary manner, Queen Jezebel never worshiped Baal. 'Baal' was the ancient Semite word for "lord" or "husband." The god referred to by the Bible as Baal had divine status primarily because he was husband to Astarte. It was Astarte whom Jezebel worshipped. Who was Astarte? She was a goddess; rather, she was -the- Goddess, the Great Mother, the Light of the World, the most ancient and widely revered divinity in human history. Shrines to her date back to the Neolithic Period, and there was not one Indo-European culture that failed to remove with its kiss the mud from her sidereal slippers. In comparison, "God," as we moderns call Yaweh [often misspelled "Jehovah"], was a Yahny-come-lately who would never approach her enormous popularity. She was the mother of God, as indeed, she was mother of all. As beloved as she was for her life-giving and nurturing qualities, the only activities of hers acceptable to the patriarchs, she was mistress over destruction, as well as creation, representing, according to one scholar, "the abyss that is the source and the end, the ground of all being." In Jezebel's native Phoenicia, the Goddess's name was Astarte. In Babylon, she was Ishtar; in India, Kali; in Greece, Demeter [immature aspect: Aphrodite]. If Saxon was your indigenous tongue, you would address her as Ostara; if Nordic, you'd say Freya; if Egyptian, Isis--or Nut or Hathor or Neith. Oh, the Goddess had many names, and many roles. She was virgin, bride, mother, prostitute, witch and hanging judge, all swirled into one. She had more phases than the moon. She knew the dark side of the moon like the palm of her hand. She shopped there. Because the Goddess was changeable and playful, because she looked upon natural chaos as lovingly as she did natural order, because her warm feminine intuition was often at odd with cool masculine reason, because the uterine magic of her daughters had since the dawn of consciousness overshadowed the penis power of her sons, resentful priests of a nomadic tribe of Hebrews led a coup against her some four thousand years ago--and most of what we know as Western civilization is the result. Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman's superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, insititutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it. In Jezebel's time, a full millenium after the patriarchal revolt, Yaweh had managed to establish no more than a precarious foothold. Today, each and every ejaculation, each and every earthquake or harvest moon may remind the deep male unconscious of the Goddess's continued presence, but in the ninth century B.C., she was openly worshipped in the lands surrounding Israel, and covertly in Israel itself. Small wonder, then, that when King Ahab's Phoenician bride started building shrines to Astarte, and when the Israelites started flocking to those shrines--the populace apparently favored Astarte's voluptuous indulgence over Yaweh's rigid asceticism--the patriarchs reacted violently against her. Interestingly enough, one of the crimes charged to Jezebel, according to the historian Josephus, was the planting of trees. Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation. Incidentally, Astarte's Hebrew appellation--Ashtoreth-- is mentioned in the Bible only thrice. In carefully patriarchalized incarnations, the Goddess does appear in Scripture as Eve and the Virgin Mary [the one a wily temptress, the other an asexual, passive vehicle]; John refers to her as the whore of Babylon, identified with the fornicating "Beast" whom the innocent, non- orgasmic "Lamb" will defeat in the battle that climaxes history. But the mouthpieces of patriarchy were far too freaked out by her, by her openess, her variability, her magic and carnality, to so much as write down her name. Thus, they substituted her husband, her 'baal', realizing, too, that only to a male divinity could the alleged sacrifice of babies be convincingly attributed. Lest it be misconstrued here that those that stretched and yawned in the underground niche had some historic axe to grind, it should be established that they were... well, agents of reality, not scholars or proselytizers, and hardly would have bothered, even were they able, to reel off names of goddesses as if announcing the lineup of a soccer team. Yet, while they undoubtably would have been less loquacious about it, they would willingly have revealed to Ellen Cherry the true character of Jezebel's transgressions. To wit: her misdeed was her devotion to Astarte. Because that devotion was contagious [being an instinctive human reflex], because it weakened the grip of the Yaweh cult, she was slandered, framed, and finally murdered. When the moment arrived, Jezebel was thoroughly aware that she was to be assasinated. She put up her ergot-black hair, donned her tiara, roughed her cheeks and lips, applied kohl to the lids of her huge Phoenician eyes, and went to face her killer with the style, dignity, and grace befitting a reigning queen. So much for painted hussies. ----------------------------- tom robbins, _skinny legs and all_-------------- that will be $100 dollars, please.