The Human Placental Mammal 1

The Human Placental Mammal 1

Chapter Twelve

The Human Placental Mammal

On Page 81, there was listed the full Classification of Man. To be scientifically precise it should really be the Classification of Woman. In the quirkiness of the English Language, when we saymankind or just man we more often than not mean women too.

Taxonomy is concerned with Classification. It is a relatively new aspect of dealing systematically with the observations we make of Nature. Modern arrangements of the orderly ascent of growth in complexity of living self-functioning systems generally put the human placental mammal at the pinnacle of biological evolution. This represents a complete, though often grudging,change of face from the traditional outlook of patriarchal culture.

During the second half of last century, the male intellectual tyranny that for so long governed decisions in matters of human knowledge, behaviour, politics and religion has been challenged and its deceit exposed. With ourunderstanding of Existential Relativity and our factual knowledge of sexuality in Biology, past claims of any sort of male functional bodily or intellectual superiority are no longer tenable. Sheer brute muscular strength and its accompanying bully- ing and destructive ability are not criteria for eminence in an evolving future togetherness of peaceful lovemaking Earth dwellers.

Historians and archeologists are becoming more and more aware that past events have not always been as oral and written traditions generally pretended. Much extant literature of bygone days is biased and one-sided when it comes to controversial issues. In the past, the development of religious ideas proceeded hand in hand with cultural evolution. The latter was generally structured on shifting sands.

Fictional deities, gods and goddesses, have a mythological exis- tence. Tales about them were handed down by professional story- tellers from one generation to the next to satisfy childlike minds with knowledge of heroes and heroines and villains as well. Their good and bad deeds were subjects for endless recounting. The ordinary people thus had something to think and talk about and role models to imitate.

Legendary characters though necessary for cultural purposes, have little relevance today in the human search for a more profound and personal experience of the reality of selflife. Transcendent celestial entities have been described in all sorts of contrived fictions. Their role as protagonists in creation stories has been of vital importance in the evolution of both religion and literature, but it is time to pass on to new and higher levels of awareness and understanding of the meaning and purpose of selflife.

We are coming to the end of a period in History of almost exclusive male cultural domination andpatriarchal despotism in the Rule of Law, both secular and religious.Belligerent male political leaders, encouraged by their ecclesiastical and military associates with their own ambitions of supreme authority have their plans all ready on the table for a global war which, if pursued, might well put an end to all wars by destroying mankind itself.

All this is part of the evolutionary blueprint in which the male role is not only as a fertilizing factor, for better or worse, in a moment of spaced time. Mother Nature’s introduction of a male sex gamete ensured that privatized human propagation would proceed through the distinction and union of mortalindividual human beings.

Male dominance is not meant to last. Eventually the male of any species succumbs to entropic uselessness. His ordained place always remains at the service of the female placental mammal and her offspring.

In the History of Religion, the three great male expressions of monotheistic thought, Judaism, Christianity and Islamism are relatively modern. They all link themselves with an accepted first patriarch, Abraham, who is generally dated now by current biblical scholarship as living probably sometime around 1000 BCE.

In contrast, for thousands and thousands of years prior to this in the Near, Middle and Far East, there flourished matriarchal societies in which was worshipped The One Great Mother-Goddess, The Divine Ancestress, The Queen of Heaven, Mistress of the Universe. The Great Goddess was known under a variety of names, but they all were conceptualfacets of the one Divine Maternity.

In the matriarchal cultures of the distant past, the mystery of new life, birth and growth focused attention on maternal aspects of this many titled Great Mother-Goddess whose very first representations were artistically exaggerated female figurines. In seeming rhythm with the lunar cycle, woman's body bled. This would stop mysteri- ously for long periods pending the miracle of birth when from her body issued both men and women and also nourishing milk.

Throughout many millennia, gender distinction and sexual inter- course in fertility rites were associated with procreation in spite of the very long period of gestation. Only later did servant man superficially reason a male role in animal propagation. He reversed woman's superior position and made himself the lord and master of she who formerly was his queen and mistress.

In human history, the most primitive and the most meaningful and enduring unity ofhuman beingtogetherness is the pregnant mother, not the husband and wife, nor the father and son. The most comprehensive revelation of the infinite fecundity and being of the Self of the Cosmos is Woman, the self-other-functioning placental mammal. Begetting offspring was the most meaningful expression of her spaced time human otherself's filial becoming.

In prepatriarchal myths, a goddess was understood to reproduce parthenogenetically, i.e., by the act-art of self-fertilization. This perception of the source of life remained long after paternity was divined by men. It persisted on in folk culture well into the Christian Era where overtones of it were adopted or adapted by writers and teachers to complete the gaps in popular religious traditions. Both daughters and sons were the fruit of her womb. Divine sons were meaningful but subordinate and dispensable consorts in cycles of death and rebirth.

Patrilinearity was an essential feature of patriarchal culture. In tribal societies, the chief’s firstborn son was the logical successor inheriting both power and possessions. Brother often conspired against brother and murder or banishment were frequently real outcomes.

The development of religious ideas has followed an evolutionary course.Revelations can only be made into cultures which are adaptable to receive them. Jewish scriptural traditions and its Mosaic Law were the products of prevailing dominant patriarchal mindsets.

The writer accepts the cultural role of Jewish Mythology as an intelligently designed, but nevertheless, only transitory part of an evolutionary process which is inexorably progressive. It contains many genuine tribal insights and much useful, indeed beautiful human wisdom. Mythology, for the most part, is a kind of primitive science. Considered as plausible explanations of cosmic events, it is only relatively true and valid. It is transitional, destined to be eventually relegated to the archives of contrived human fiction.

In Hebrew speech, the relation between person and name is something quite special. It is foreign to our Anglo-Saxon idiom. Name is used in contexts where modern language uses person or self. For the Hebrew mind, to have no name is to have no real or actual existence. If one’s name is blotted out, one ceases to exist. As mythologized in the Book of Genesis, when its god created, he gave the man the task of naming each object of his creation. The giving of a name to someone or to something is to give it its very own proper identity and not merely to distinguish it from other individuals or species. A human being became a person when, as a spoken-to “Thou Art”, it was given a name.

This conferring of a name is an act of power and an assertion of a species of ownership or some other form of control. It is only in recent times that Western women are not compelled to take their husband’s name as though now belonging to them. Healing events took place in the name of or by the power of special people. A change of name likewise, would indicate a change of state or condition, the beginning of a new existence.

It is important, indeed essential, for any understanding of the evolution and history of modern societies and their religions, to be mindful that in the Hebrew language, there was, and still is, no word for divine mother or goddess. Theologically speaking, in the patriarchal mindset, Judaism and its offspring were, and still are, motherless children. They are all born and live outside any sort of wedlock. Female divinities were officially anathema to it and to its later derivatives, Christianity and Islamism. Their common folk were continually reprimanded for whoring after the “unspeakable” abominations of their godless neighbours.

The Mother Self of the Cosmos had already initiated her Self’s revelation through matriarchal cultures. Though she could not reveal her real and true SELF in a motherless culture, she could at least stage dramatic interpretationsin her Theatre of the Cosmos of her NOTSELF, acomplementary fictional otherself. Eventually her Self-Other Existential Relativity would become common knowledge.

Human beings are her otherselves. They are the matter-masked space time Dramatis Personaein one of her never-ending series of Divine Comedies. We human persons are Aseity’s otherselves, actors of her selflife’s dialogue.

Selflife as “I” is woman, man as “Thee”

and she’s enough of everything, save he.

At the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1/27 insinuates that the human is fashioned in the image of the Divine. If so, then the pinnacle of human being, the pregnant placental mammal, must be considered the most meaningful representation of the archetypal Pregnant Divine Woman. Whether we are already aware of it or not, whether we choose to deny it or ignore it, this world of ours is forever gestating in the womb of its pregnant Motherself, Aseity.

Compared to the biune existential self-other-life relationship of pregnancy, the male father-son relationship is primitive and trivial. In traditions of motherless religions, dominant sire-sonrelationships might have been accepted without question. In their obstinate asser- tion of continued relevance, such human minds’ same sex divine brain-children arefast approaching their evolutionary use-by date.

The yearning for increased conscious self-awareness and inner perceptual experience of the numinous, are laying the foundations of new cultural movements to replace the outknown myths and outgrown cults of a conservative male-dominated Christianity. It has become impotent to fertilize the human psyche any further for good, but only for evil. Armed with stockpiled nuclear weapons of war, some motherless belligerent patriarchal religions seem hell-bent on their own eventual self-destruction and at the same time effecting the demise of all life on Mother Earth.

Women had considerable economic value. Nevertheless, they were inferior servant beings, useful like animals for breeding and mere labour activity. They served also as desirable objects for lusty male pleasure in sexual gratification and in glorifications of masculine dominance.

This activity however was not without its dangers. Women could be deceivers and artful seducers. Of course men were not exempt from such vices but as the Genesis story of Adam and Eve pointed out, it was all Eve’s fault in the first place. This attitude towards women’s role in society still prevails in many cultures.For three thousand or more years, the mindsets of very many male religious and civil authorities would seem to have been infected with a cerebral virus which encouraged an air of arrogant patriarchal superiority. At the same time, with their suppressedintuition and inborn sense of inferiority and dependence, they disparaged the more complex and more highly evolved, gentler and more elegant other sex as weaker and intellectually inferior.

There were many exceptions. Past literature and historical records, including the Bible, bear witness to love affairs of couples which brought them a unique and ineffable erotic bliss. There were men who worshipped women as their otherself, their soulmates. There were men who were inspired by woman’s beauty to create great works of art. There were men who performed heroic deeds to honour their ladyloves, their mistresses. The medieval system or institution of knighthood flourished in an Age of Chivalry.

Just how much the belligerent male mindset of the hordes who invaded the Middle Eastfrom the North prior to the Patriarchal Epoch was due to some genetic mutation, we shall probably never know. Did some of their mutated male genes spread far and wide? The ensuing patriarchal culture was certainly in sharp contrast with the matriarchal cultures which preceded it.

The cultural and scientific revolutions which have characterized the last four Centuries have left Philosophy and Theology in a state of having to rethink and remodel their basic postulates and rational procedures if they are to have any relevance and credibility for the generations to come.

The physical world has an existence and reality of its own. Aseity’s self-revelation blooms physically and biologically in the primatial pregnant placental mammal and continues psychically and analo- gously in the human self. By the latter’s complex physiological and cerebral activity, the physical is drawn, in sensible information, inside the self and given a new style of existential reality with a superficial name-stamp of the self’s own conceiving and designation. As this psychical or cultural evolution proceeds, matter is made increasingly aware of the inner life of its maternal other, Aseity, both all around in Nature and in the pregnant womb of her own ovoidal selflife. The intelligent logical self is not only confronted with the existence of this necessary Other, but can choose to be infused consciously with the essence and spirit of her being’s becomingness.

From out of hindsight’s apparent yet deceptive anarchy, there has been made to evolve the most astonishing complex unities and ordered selflife processes. In the living growing world around us, we observe progressive change towards increased freed relational inter- dependence in a more and more orderly togetherness until with the phenomenon of male man, a new species was introduced with the evil greed seed of disordered retrogressiveself-centredness.

True scientific knowledge only advances with the experience of the unity of positive becomingness in regard to Mother Nature’s works of Art. Aesthetic experience arises for the scientist when he or she begins to contemplate the Cosmos as an evolving whole, as Aseity’s slow and teasing unveiling of herself to her otherself, nude and unashamed. The true real beauty of Science is the joyful revelation to a human self contained in matter, of and by its complementary divine otherself not contained by matter but containing and indwelling it.

For most of human history, aesthetic appreciation has sought the experience of the contemplated unity existing between a self and the true positive transitive becomingness of works of human artistry. The subject-object, self-other nature of art was taken for granted. Art was the conscious expressioning of an inner creation, an inner other whose fullest revelation required its added growth into an external and independent existence.

The art-full self conceived and rejoiced in its brain-child and after mute gestation gave it birth in the fullness of spaced time. The trials and frustrations of confinement and the subsequent labour pains of its materialization were forgotten in the joy that a new reality had emerged to be shared by all.

Aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation result from contemplation’s psychic unity effected by the self’s becoming one with its known other good. To know is to become, and to appreciate true Art neces- sitates a species of psychic identification with the artifact. A self’s ordered identification with positive becomingness ensures its continual growth through the expansion of consciousness as aseistic evolution intends.

Art is a basic psychological need of human nature. We are living reflecting images of the artist, Aseity, and as such we must reflect and perfect the latter’s art. Goodness is diffusive and communicative of itself. Reflexive being only knows its self comprehensively and perfectly in its transitive otherself becomingness. Self’s most natural and perfect work is to generate its own real image and likeness, as one focus does to the other in the reflecting inner surface of the ovoid. Whatever a self possesses of reality, it is urged by the innate reflexive nature of knowledge to communicate transitively as its known otherself and make the latter as real and as existent as possible. Aseity begets her artistry’s beauty, truth and goodness by reflection out of the superabundance of her infinite being. Instead, the human artist must be content to do so within the limitations of her or his own begotten self-insufficiency.