I am re-reading Geoffrey Ashe's fascinating study The Virgin (1976), which is focused on Mary, Mother of Jesus Christ (Ashe was a Roman Catholic) - but takes in the broader perspective of goddesses throughout history, in a non-hostile - indeed sympathetic - fashion.
He makes the stimulating suggestion that a Goddess was primal in ancient spirituality, because she was the assumed basis of the procreative hence creative; and that some form of female deity is needed for Men really to believe in a life beyond life.
The idea is that a supreme male deity cannot sustain belief in a full life beyond life. So that when the ruling Goddess goes; the afterlife becomes very partial, ghostly, and all-but irrelevant.
Male deities could never bestow life of their own nature as the Mother had done. Zeus and his colleagues were immortal, but they did not transmit that quality to their human subjects...
Through most civilized and semi-civilized lands... death ceased to be a passage to a future life... the dead were no longer pictured as significantly existing. They were reduced to feeble, bloodless shades in a gloomy underworld. For the Greeks this was Hades...
With the fading of the Eternal-Womanly, with her cutting-down or anathematisation, [for the vast majority, with extremely few exceptions] death had become the end with no prospect of rebirth.
Israel's shift was similar... The Old Testament has no doctrine of survival or return... the dead become shades. They do down to an underworld called Sheol, The Grave.
The sole Israelite immortality is collective... God's chosen community...
I think it likely that Ashe is "on to something" here.
In the book; Ashe is preparing the ground for an attempted explanation of the rise of Mary the mother of Jesus as a more and more important focus of Christian faith - recognizing that this phenomenon cannot be accounted for by Scripture, or by the practices of the earlier generations of Christians.
With Mariolatry (Ashe says) we seem to be dealing with some kind of deep and direct apprehension of spiritual reality, probably coming from grassroots, bottom-up, the "masses". Christian leaders and theologians seem merely to have been trying to explain and validate theoretically something that already was beginning to become important in practice.
From my own experience; I find it striking that Mormonism included a very strong element of the "Eternal-Womanly" with its dyadic deity composed of Father and Mother in Heaven.
And - perhaps in consequence? - the "Mormon culture of salvation" was (at least until fairly recently) probably the most vividly lived and believed-in form of Christian afterlife among the major Christian churches.
The spiritually unsatisfactory and unconvincing nature of one-sidedly masculine, Christianity is something I find very striking. I mean the monochrome hardness, negativity, heartlessness, legalism and this-worldliness of Mary-rejecting forms of Protestantism is something I feel is very evident. It is one reason why England ceased to be "Merrie" with the reformation.
But there is something of this in all of Christianity.
(And this defect has not-at-all been ameliorated, let alone cured, by the dominant trend towards secular materialism in all the Christian churches, which comes-in on the back of leftist ideology. Spiritual problems can only be made worse by "liberalization" - which is actually and always covert apostasy.)
Insisting upon the non-sexual nature of God does not work either - this is just an attempt to escape contradictions absences and by raising abstractions; which has the effect of confusing people - and thereby impairing motivations.
Furthermore, the idea and ideals of ultimate transcendence of sexuality point away from Christianity (rooted in Jesus, the divine incarnate mortal Man) and towards Oneness spirituality, where (eventually) every-thing merges with everything else - in a timeless stasis.
The problem is that it does not really make deep theoretical and theological sense to insert Mary alongside the (masculine) Trinity; and she is therefore always accorded an ultimately secondary and intercessionary" role in creation - no matter how central is her position in everyday worship (eg. devotion to the Rosary, or Marian icons).
But even worthwhile degrees of habitual lifestyle and provision of psychological comfort are insufficient motivations in a world so dominated by evil-affiliated institutions.
In our unavoidably self-conscious era; these inner contradictions about Mary have become nigh-lethal to strong Christian faith - as is evident all around us.
This is why I regard Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Mariolatry as "on the right lines" but ultimately insufficient and unsatisfactory.
And, as Ashe described , this requisite kind of development can only come from directly apprehended knowledge - it is not already existent.
To emphasize: what is required is not something that can honestly be derived from existing Scripture, theology or history.
Furthermore it needs to arise bottom-up; which means from individuals, not institutions.
If modern Men are to grasp and retain the needful structuring-focus on resurrected eternal life; if we are to live-by knowledge of Heaven; then we will need explicitly to discover and embrace what will be new truths of eternal verities concerning women in relation to creation and salvation.
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