Feminism, Witchcraft and Monogamy

Several evenings ago, I recommended the sixth chapter of James Wesley Stivers’ Eros Made Sacred while commenting on another blog. That chapter, originally written by Stivers as a stand alone essay to explore the conceptual affinity between the three doctrines, is an amazing wealth of thought and philosophy. I found it online yesterday and have copied and pasted it from another website and strongly recommend that if this material piques your interest, you order this short and powerful book and read it. There is a link on our Resources page. We gain nothing from the links on that page.

Chapter 6. Feminism, Witchcraft and Monogamy

113 Qualifier: It is not the view of 113Restoration that monogamy itself is the source of feminism and witchcraft, which is the impression which may erroneously be conveyed by this chapter, but state- and culture-enforced monogamy-ONLY laws. It is therefore the anti-polygyny laws that are feminism’s and witchcraft’s catalysts. The universal practice of polygyny by all men and women everywhere would be undesirable and impractical in this age.

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Feminism, monogamy, and witchcraft form an unholy trinity working the destruction of Christian civilization. This is an astonishing assertion and one which will not sit well with most people. Most people will view witchcraft as a plausible rival of the Christian faith. Some will view militant feminism with distrust. But to associate monogamy with the two seems preposterous. To prove the linkage, let us begin with some basic definitions of these terms.

“Feminism: originated by the French playwright Alexander Dumas in his essay on the rights of women, L’Homme-Femme (1872), has often been used in reference to movements to secure equality for women; the term in current usage for such movements is ‘women’s liberation’.”

Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, Vol. 25, p.209

Witchcraft: “The practices of witches; sorcery; power more than natural; enchantment”.

New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary

Monogamy: “The practice or principle of marrying only once”.

Ibid.

Romantic feminism, which lies at the foundation of the women’s liberation movement, believes in the ethical and spiritual superiority of women over men. An example of this attitude was Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement (see Peter Gardella’s Innocent Ecstasy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985). The notion of feminine superiority was necessary to justify women’s suffrage and the notion of “liberation” from the tyranny of men.

The average feminist believes in the functional equality of the sexes. She believes the average woman can do whatever the average man can do, and sometimes better. Perhaps the woman must rely more upon the aid of technology (such as contraceptives) or her intuitive instincts – but in the end, men and women are the same.

Therefore, “liberation” means a release from traditional rôles of wife, mother, and mistress. Not only do these women want to do what men do in politics, business, and education; they also want to be soldiers, priests, and judges. They want traditional families obliterated and the rearing of children given to the state (see literature published by the National Organization for Women). They want marriage to be equally divided like a business partnership. In the words of one spokesman:

For the sake of those who wish to live in equal partnership, we have to abolish and reform the institution of legal marriage.

Gloria Steinem

Feminists believe they are more developed emotionally than men, and thus are better equipped to reduce conflict. The male’s territorial ambitions, pride and sexual aggressions lead to war: the ultimate evil. The woman is said to be kinder, gentler, and consequently, better motivated to compromise, reform society, and mete-out equitable justice. Enlightened womanhood is viewed as the redemptive force in the world. She must be liberated from the home and be allowed to tame the public sphere.

Feminists also believe they are more sensitive spiritually and less intellectually wooden than men. They are more prone to mystic experiences and contact with the supernatural. Since traditional Christianity lacks this feminine touch, feminists yearn for the return of a mythical matriarchal age antedating Christianity. They reject the patriarchal core of the Bible and its masculine deity. The drift is strong toward a neutered Scripture.

Over the last several years, we see this theme receiving serious attention. Books like When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone are on the cutting-edge of feminism’s war with Christianity. As a book review described it:

Here, archaeologically documented, is the fascinating story of the religion of the “Goddess.” Known by many names – Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, among others – she and matriarchy reigned supreme in the Near and Middle East.

In addition to being worshipped for fertility, the Goddess was revered as the wise creator and the one source of universal order. Under her, women’s roles differed markedly from those in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures. Women bought and sold property, traded in the market-place and the inheritance of title and property was passed from mother to daughter.

How and when did the change in our perception of God (and woman) occur? By documenting the wholesale rewriting of myth and religious dogmas, the author reveals a very ancient conspiracy: the patriarchal re-imaging of the Goddess into a wanton, depraved figure. The author demonstrates that this is the portrait that laid the foundation for one of culture’s greatest shams – the legend of Adam and fallen Eve.

Barnes & Noble bookstore catalogue

The Humanist Magazine has propagandized along similar lines, and boasts that “Feminism is humanism on its most advanced level.”

Feminist ideology has largely triumphed in American society. What was lost in the failed “Equal Rights Amendment” has been gained using the Fabian process: piecemeal victories in the courts by using the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Turning now to witchcraft, it is not difficult to show the ideological affinity between it and feminism. Witchcraft is not Satanism and the worship of the Christian devil. Witchcraft (or Wicca) is the old paganism of goddess worship – a natural religion centered around the mystery, sexuality, and psychic abilities of the female. Modern witchcraft, blended with science, is much more sophisticated than ancient or medieval witchcraft. It talks of astral planes, holistic healing, and lesbian sex instead of necromancy, magic potions, and orgiastic sabbats. The New Age Movement, with its channeling, herbal medicine, and tantric sex is the vanguard of this synthesis between feminism and witchcraft.

The practice of abortion and belief in reincarnation are two examples demonstrating the pervasiveness of witchcraft in our society. Witches were the original abortionists, ending pregnancies for distraught women through drugs and magic spells. Reincarnation is at the core of Wicca’s system of justice: undischarged Karma, the burden of spiritual debit and credit carried over from incarnation to incarnation until it is finally resolved (see What Witches Do by Stewart Farrar, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York, 1971). Reincarnation is prominent in the New Age Movement (witness Shirley McClain) and legal abortions are in the millions. Abortion, as a form of birth control, is one of the pillars of feminism. Reincarnation witnesses to the genderlessness of mankind’s soulish essence, which is his real essence (one may alternate between male and female in successive incarnations according to Wiccan dogma).

The doctrine of reincarnation, as it is taught by such pagan religions, is an affront to the Christian doctrine of Atonement. Christianity teaches the all-sufficiency of Christ’s sacrificial death.

Abortion, of course, is a violation of Christian morality. Not only is abortion condemned in the Scriptures, but also in the earliest writings of the Church (Didache, Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius, etc.)

Temple prostitution was an integral aspect of ancient goddess worship. It was also central to the matriarchal order. The temples held the monopoly on sex, and men paid handsomely to get it. Revenues generated from this commerce bank-rolled matriarchal supremacy.

Additionally, temple prostitution served as a form of public welfare. Girls from poor families and orphans given or sold to the temple got an equal shake. (Primitive, pagan societies which were poor and lacked this kind of institutional structure, killed their girls at birth). Boys could become sodomites, or could be sacrificed to Moloch (lit. “king”). They fought in gladiator games (and died) or were killed in war.

This is the old Baal religion denounced in the Bible. Ashtoreth, with Baal (her male consort), were the generic names for each local pantheon of deities. Baalism occurred in the advanced pagan cultures – Egypt, Canaan, Babylon, Greece, Rome, etc.

The monogamy of ancient times was created in order to insure a static and equalitarian society. The established political order had a vested interest in preventing the emergence of power blocks. And the control of population growth was integral to the stability of their civilizations (witness the near panic of the Egyptians at the explosion of Hebrew fertility in Exodus 1. In Egypt and Israel we have a classic confrontation of monogamous and polygamous cultures.)

Monogamy could only be sustained by public prostitution. Men who could not afford private courtesans, availed themselves of the temple prostitutes.

There, they could expend their vital energies, which monogamy did not accommodate. These “priestesses” would frequently conceive and bear children, which were used in human sacrifice, if they were male. Females were sometimes saved for future prostitution. Human sacrifice was added as a means to relieve the burdens of procreation for the temple. And in hard times, they were eaten in a cannibalistic (Cahna-baal) eucharist.

Wherever there has been prostitution, witchcraft has flourished – if for no other reason than for the fact that prostitutes have turned to witchcraft to prevent or terminate pregnancies. We find the same phenomenon in monogamous cultures. Pregnancies are dreaded. Monogamous wives fear of losing their husbands if they do not maintain their youthful beauty and vigor, which pregnancies rarely exempt as a price. Children also take a toll on the affluence of a family, the time a woman can spend with her husband, and the general success with housework. Hence, contraception, aberrant sex, and abortion go hand-in-hand with monogamy. Polygamy greatly lessens these stresses and consequences.

Some social observers may vainly imagine that for some men to be polygamous (polygynous), some women (prostitutes) must be polyandrous (George Gilder, Men and Marriage, Pelican Publishing, 1987). Polygamy is seen as the disease instead of the cure. It is blamed for homosexuality and prostitution.

Who is to say which came first – the chicken or the egg? Whether men abandoned social responsibility and became sodomites and philanderers and thus created a surplus of marriageable women? Or whether polygamy created a shortage of women and forced the surplus of men into the arms of the harlot and sodomite? Which do you see more of these days? More men who want marriage or more women? More polygamists or more prostitutes (professional and amateur)?

I doubt whether that question is statistically answerable. But it can be answered Biblically. The Bible gives the reason for homosexuality in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 1:

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use [of their sexual orifice – WS] into that which is against nature [procreation]:  And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

The Greek word for “nature” is “budding forth” and refers to fertility. The Word of God here teaches the rise of homosexuality as God’s judgment for atheism. The women, monogamous women, lose faith in God’s sovereignty over their conception and seek to control it or restrain it themselves. Contraception neuters the woman. A male having sex with an androgynous female finds it a small step, psychologically, to having sex with an effeminate male. Feminism produces homosexuality.

Monogamy decouples sex from propagation of the human species and reduces it to the feminine motive for intimacy. I am not saying that intimacy is bad, but that intimacy is the way women experience sex. Men experience it differently: as a tool of dominion. God made man to procreate, and all things being equal, he will be polygamous. He cannot experience sex as intimacy. His relational arrow points upward to God, and God’s calling upon his sexuality – not to the woman. No woman in herself can fulfill her husband. She is only a part, although an indispensable part, of her husband’s life. If she does not allow him to procreate, to build a household and an estate, sex with her loses its sanctity. Reduced to a mere exercise in sensual gratification, her idolatrous demand for intimacy turns him into a hedonistic monster or a tortured drone.

Monogamy inevitably cultivates the hedonistic motive in men – the motive which sustains prostitution. For if men were interested in women primarily as the mothers of their children, then there would be no demand for prostitutes. Men go to prostitutes for fun sex, not fruitful sex.

We cannot blame polygamy for creating a shortage of women available for marriage. Rather, a shortage of men interested in marriage requires the monogamous woman to compete with the prostitute for the affections of the male. Monogamy creates a demand and a supply for a kind of sex which avoids the messy consequences of procreation. Sex without procreation inevitably leads to sex without relationship, the kind offered by the prostitute and homosexual. For the man who now seeks the prostitute for sex without the burden of children, may next seek the sodomite for sex without the burden of women. The inconvenience of the woman’s menstrual cycle, her fickle emotions, and her dependency on the male are all avoided by the homosexual. It should not surprise us that ancient philosophers were often bisexual, and considered homosexuality to be the more rational and “purer” form of sex.

Polygamy reduces the supply of women available for prostitution, whether professional or amateur. A married woman, if she does compete with other women, competes as mother, not as prostitute.

The notion that the civilizing of the male occurs by submitting his sexuality to the maternal sexual patterns of the female is skewed. For there is always a class of men whose virility demand large families. Most women are not prepared emotionally or physically to bear enough children to span the years of their husband’s fertility – about forty good years. To require monogamy of such men only weakens them. The Creation Mandate tells him to “be fruitful and multiply”. It is written in his very being. Restraining a man’s virility is perverse. He is a man, not an angel. If he cannot lawfully have polygamy, then he will seek the whore.

Therefore, we are back to the assertion that monogamy and prostitution go hand-in-hand. There has never been a monogamous society in the history of mankind which has not been forced to wink at unchastity. In a polygamous society, there is no excuse for it, and can be rightly punished severely. Monogamous societies must be lenient toward the harlot. In so doing, it creates a cultural force in favor of witchcraft.

This is not all; for there are other polluted streams which flow from the fount of monogamy.

Feminism demands equality, and where does it learn the notion of equality, but from monogamy? In monogamy there is an equalitarian demand for a numerical equality of the sexes. One woman equals one man in marriage. Social morés may separate the notions of economical (or functional) equality from equality in being (ontological or essence) for a while. That is, men and women may be considered the same in the sense of being human, but with different roles. The Bellum tradition has succeeded at this separation to a fault. However heroically defended, these secondary defenses are challenged and broken. Society adopts a companionate view of marriage. Women begin to view their husbands as chums and not as lords. And then, the distinction of roles becomes blurred. The confusion of roles never occurs in a polygamous household; for the numerical inequality of the sexes makes the man special and the natural source for leadership and arbitration. Thus, his priestly and governmental headship is enhanced.

This aspect of the man’s headship in the home and society is a key element in maintaining a Christian civilization. For a man to exercise dominion at any given place, he must first be present. A woman without a man as her head – either father or husband – is in a state of anarchy. It is as evil for a woman to lack that headship as it is for a man to lack the headship of Christ, or for Christ to lack the headship of God (1 Corinthians 11:3).

The Scriptures do not teach in vain that “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (1 Samuel 15:23). The revolt against male authority (or its evasion) is the central pillar of feminism and witchcraft. Monogamy wars against that authority by creating a growing class of women who are unattached to families. They are women who lack either a father or husband in charge of their domestic lives. They become independent and begin to work, like the steady force of gravity, into the spheres once controlled by men.

Historically, such women have been the harlots. Prostitutes have opportunities unique to their profession which bring power. Not only in terms of wealth, but more importantly in terms of intrigue, blackmail, and privileged information, prostitution gives them leverage which the confession box is only a poor competitor. Men are often compromised by their philandering, especially in a monogamous culture. They will pay well or provide special favors to protect their vices.

We can see why Biblical law did not allow widows to remain unmarried. The temptation to harlotry was a grave danger.

We find an example of this degrading process (of monogamy to feminism to witchcraft) in the decline of ancient Israel’s southern kingdom: Judah. By the time of King Hezekiah, the geographical expansion had long since passed. Monogamy was nearly universal among the Jews. The concentration of power into the royal dynasty had become nearly complete – culturally, economically, and politically. The royal princes had practiced polygamy, following the pattern of Solomon’s pompous display in violation of Deuteronomy 17:17. This denied polygamy to the common man who was forced into monogamy because he was priced out of the market. Coupled with zero population growth, Israelite society lacked a growing pool of marriageable women available for polygamy. Historians have noted that static civilizations are always decadent ones. And we know Judah had become decadent because aberrant sexual practices were becoming a problem: adultery, sex with menstruating women, prostitution, and various sins of uncleanness. These are forms of cheap and easy sex.

On the other end of the scale, it was becoming increasingly difficult to marry-off the royal daughters as fewer men had the capital to pay the dowries. Thus, there emerged the phenomenon of what Isaiah called “the daughters of Zion” – something similar to what college-educated women careerists are experiencing today. Most women want to marry someone higher on the social scale. Who do you marry when you are on top looking down?

Following Hezekiah’s benevolent reign, Judah became a militantly feminist society (Isaiah 3:12, 16-17). And his successor, Manasseh, led the nation in an orgy of idolatry and witchcraft (2 Kings 21:1-18; 2 Chronicles 33:1-20). We can mark Judah’s decline by the social conditions which made polygamy impossible.

An example from secular history would be that of ancient Greece. I quote at length from W.E.Lecky’s The History of European Morals, from Augustine to Charlemagne, (1869):

“It is one of the most remarkable, and, to some writers, one of the most perplexing facts in the moral history of Greece, that, in the former and ruder period, women had undoubtedly the highest place, and their type exhibited the highest perfection [the polygamous period: J.S.]. Moral ideas, in a thousand forms, have been sublimated, enlarged, and changed by advancing civilisation; but it may be fearlessly asserted, that the types of female excellence which are contained in the Greek poems, while they are among the earliest, are also among the most perfect, in the literature of mankind.

“In the historical [or monogamous] age of Greece, the legal position of women had, in some measure, slightly improved; but their moral condition had undergone a marked deterioration. The foremost and most dazzling type of Ionic womanhood was the courtesan; and among the males, at least, the empire of passion was almost unrestricted.

“The peculiarity of Greek sensuality is that it grew up, for the most part, uncensored, and, indeed, even encouraged, under the eyes of some of the most illustrious of moralists [for example: Socrates, a homosexual and Plato his successor].

“In the Greek civilization, legislators and moralists recognised two distinct orders of womanhood, – the wife, whose first duty was fidelity to her husband, and the hetaera, the mistress, who subsisted by her fugitive attachments. The wives lived in almost absolute seclusion. They were usually married when very young. The more wealthy seldom went abroad, and never, except when accompanied by a female slave; never attended the public spectacles; received no male visitors, except in the presence of their husbands; and had not even a seat at their own tables when male guests were there.

“The voluptuous worship of Aphrodite gave a kind of religious sanction to their profession [of the hetaera or courtesan]. Courtesans were the priestesses in their temples. The courtesan was the queen of beauty. She was the model of the statues of Aphrodite, that commanded the admiration of Greece. . . The courtesan was the one free woman of Athens; and she often availed herself of her freedom to acquire a degree of knowledge which enabled her to add to her other charms an intense intellectual fascination.

This candid account we have from a vigorous defender of monogamy! Polygamy degraded into monogamy, and monogamy degraded into promiscuity.

Our own nation’s experience has been similar. Prior to the Civil War, excessive numbers of women were not a problem. The rigors of the frontier meant they died young and their widowers remarried. Following the Civil War, however, the wilderness became less a reality in the lives of most Americans. The country was settled as far west as Kansas. All that remained was the Great Plains, and that has never factored much in population anyway.

Over 600,000 men died in the fighting of the Civil War. This represented a loss of the the most marriageable men in a nation of 26 million whites. Immediately, the nation faced a severe man shortage. Had this been a polygamous society, it would not have been a problem. But American evangelicals insisted upon monogamy and a class of women was created which had no male headship. During the later part of the 19th century, we find feminism taking wings. But in our stoic tradition, the vanguard was not the prostitute. It was the school teacher. Public education mushroomed during the period as young spinsters struggled to make a respectable living. Their higher education plus independent livelihood made them excellent spokesmen for feminism, socialism, and other radical ideologies which enveloped the nation just prior to the 20th Century.

The majority of women, however, worked low-paying jobs in the factories. They became the oppressed for whom the feminists would speak, and would later become a voting block for women’s liberation. In the mean time, their cheap labor created the corporate empires which in the 20th Century have nearly wiped-out the family farmer and small-town businessman.

Enforced monogamy is not a Biblical teaching, but a doctrine at the heart of Wiccan religion. Witchcraft teaches the doctrine of equal polarities. The universe consists in, and operates through, inseparable opposites. Indeed, this is the governing principle of all pagan religions. From the Baal and Ashtoreth religions of the ancient Middle East, to the Greek and Roman pantheons of gods and goddesses – the universe is comprised of an ultimate dualism working its way down to a multitude of particular dualisms. The Chinese have known it as Yin and Yang. Among the Zoroastrians, it was light and darkness. The ancient philosophers talked of universals and particulars or cosmos and chaos.

Modern man thinks of form and energy. And Hegel saw it as thesis versus antithesis resulting in a synthesis, which then becomes a new thesis. Medieval Christianity had its God and Satan. The list goes on and on, but the theme is the same.

Witchcraft views women’s liberation as merely a restoration of the feminine principle and a balancing-out of the cosmos. It does not believe in male or female dominance, but total equality. In the rites of Wicca, it is important that the coven be led by a priestess and her male consort as the goddess and god. Every act must be counter-weighed by members of the opposite sex. By this process is the cosmic order maintained in the rituals.

Biblical Christianity is the only religion which breaks away from this sexual and dualistic view of paganism. With its doctrine of the Trinity, or three-ism, the possibility of dualism as a faith and social philosophy is shattered. Likewise, we can see why monogamy is so important to pagan man and why polygamy is inimical to it. Monogamy maintains the cosmic dualism in the pagan home and its family shrine. Monogamy, with one man and one woman (and one boy and one girl for static perpetuation of godhood) represents the image of the dualistic godhead.

The polygamous household, on the other hand, reflects a different godhead: the Holy Trinity of Father (ruler), Son (heir/successor) and Holy Spirit (mother/helper). For this reason, pagan man has always been hostile to polygamy, as he has population growth. His view of the universe is dualistic and fluid, and of course, friendly to promiscuity. It needs the god-state to bring order.

Modern Christianity betrays its pagan infection with its enforced monogamy and its bondage to goddess worship (i.e. the Virgin Mary, a transvestite Christ, and the Church as a Bride). Mankind inevitably and irresistibly mirrors its view of God and the cosmos. Who is really the Christian’s God?

The Christian’s God will produce a family-based society of diversity, liberty, and respect for private property. It will be patriarchal with an emphasis on traditional roles for men and women. Ethics are not situational, but based on an authoritative source.

The Holy Spirit is the Father’s helper. It is feminine in the ancient Hebrew language and is divisible into the Seven Spirits of Revelation, which divide in order to multiply the Son. Thus, polygamy is at the core of an authentic, Trinitarian Christianity (see The Mother Heart of God)

This is not what we are seeing from modern Christianity. We see “experience” exalted over the Bible in ethical decisions. Traditional roles are often switched. And as a society based upon private contracts, we see an increasing presence of the state to reduce the litigious anarchy in the courts.

Monogamy, feminism, and witchcraft are ideologically homogenous. For that reason, they must be recognized for what they really are: allies in a war against Biblical Christianity. Polygamy is the weapon which strikes at the Achilles heel of Satan’s kingdom. May Christians have the grace to see their Opportunity.

Copyright ©1991 J.W.Stivers, Library of Congress #TX-3-189-734
Stivers Publications, P.O. Box 8701, Moscow, Idaho 83843, USA

Again, I HIGHLY recommend the whole book!! We will refer to this article in some future posts on this blog. There is much to process and expound on in this short essay.