Some women don’t just live through history, they rewrite it. Barbara G. Walker is one of them.

At 95, she remains a scholar, truth-teller, and author of 24 groundbreaking books on mythology, symbolism, and the sacred feminine.

Her life’s work unearths what history tried to bury, the stories of the Great Mother, menstrual calendars, and the blood wisdom that once guided the world.

Through fearless research and writing, Barbara revealed how patriarchy hijacked spirituality, replacing the Great Mother with a lone male god and silencing women’s wisdom. Her voice has reawakened generations to their lineage of power, pleasure, and creation. And it’s an honour to share space with the extraordinary Barbara G. Walker.

Show Note:

It is important for women today to realize that for many centuries they have been the victims of the world’s most perfect scam, a belief system that has been repeatably drilled into them from childhood,  even after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are long abandoned, by sneaky organizations controlling the world’s richest source of tax-free money.  Religion promises that after death you will continue to see without eyes, hear without ears, feel without nerves, think without a brain.  Unlike every other living thing, a human being is supposed to continue living after it dies. 

No real proof of this impossibility is ever offered, but proof is not needed.  Those rich organizations base their super-successful business on mere words, which make promises of eternal happiness for the obedient, and terrifying threats of eternal agony for the skeptics, even when the nerves required to feel pleasure or pain are not there.  A number of ancient societies maintained that the bliss of heaven was a perpetual orgasm, but Christian asceticism furiously contradicted any such belief. The religion business profits by inventing numerous occasions for entering a house of worship, and every occasion involves giving money.  The alleged God watches to make sure you don’t skimp, just as “He” listens and watches hundreds of trillions of other human activities every minute. 

Patriarchy, the system whereby the deity became a solitary male, came late in human history.  Previously almost all human societies believed in a supreme Mother Goddess who was able to give birth to the world, because they saw only females having the power to create life.  The usual assumption was that women made their children out of their own blood, because during a pregnancy it stopped flowing with the phases of the moon, and stayed within the body to build a child. The mother created the family; we still speak of “blood” relatives for this reason.  Early religions claimed that all life was created from the legendary “ocean of blood” (or Red Sea) that was the universal womb of Mother Earth.

Early calendars  were menstrual, which means “of the moon”.  A year consisted of 13 lunar months of 28 days, each neatly formed of four 7-day weeks, totaling 364, with one day added to make 365.  That’s why folk tales often speak of “a year and a day” as a sacred period. Patriarchy sought to promote the sun god over the moon goddess, and broke up the thirteenth month into 2-  or 3-day periods scattered through the 12 remaining solar months, which didn’t really work out until leap years were added.  The 13th montth was thereafter declared taboo, which is how number 13 became “unlucky”.

It seems that women continued to cling to the old ways, honoring  goddesses and their own blood magic.  A girl’s first menstruation was celebrated with religious ceremony.  Men continued to envy female blood magic and tried to make it happen for adolescnt boys by the usual process of ceremonial imitation, causing a boy’s genital bleeding by way of circumcision.  No matter how many times repeated, this magic still failed to work.  Because it is important to the riches of religious institutions, ceremonial magic is seldom completely abandoned. Therefore circumsion  was transferred to infancy and still considered essential  to the future proper functions of a male.  Yet the adolescent ritual  remained and evolved into the bar mitzvah. More recently, the Jewish religion’s envious imitation has gone in the other direction and created  a new ceremony for girls: the bat mitzvah.   

Among the numerous gods and goddesses of mythology, “father” gods began to be recognized as more powerful when it was claimed that males could con\tribute the spirit of the developing embryo.  As the Bible puts it, “He went in unto her, and she conceived, and bare a child.”  Spermatozoa were still unknown, but the Catholic Church maintained for many centuries that the child’s soul was in the semen, and female blood was no longer magical.  Of course, the  complex human ovum was not discovered until the 20th century.

The medieval Catholic Church was particularly vicious toward women.  It claimed that all women were born evil, because Mother Eve was the source of original sin.  (She ate an apple.)  Menstrual blood became the “curse”, never to be touched  by a male.  Sexual intercourse was dangerous, and men of the church were commanded to be celibate.  Married men were told not to have intercourse for pleasure, but only to beget children; and women were not to enjoy sex at all.  In Islam, women were surgically deprived of sexual pleasure by amputation of the clitoris, described as “female circumcision”, but it was actually comparable to penile amputation.  It is still practiced today. During the miserable six centuries of the Inquisition’s grip of Europe, when more than nine million (recorded) women were tortured and murdered by the Church, the clitoris was described as a “devil’s teat.”  Even women seemed anxious to deny its existence.  Those who learned to enjoy its function were beyond secretive

Christianity took nine centuries to become fully established in Europe, and during these so-called Dark Ages, it still co-existed with paganism.  The rival religions, with their featured Mother Goddesses, continued to be followed especially by the elder women, the “crones”, a term similar to “crowns” and formerly referring to priestesses of the elder faith.  They were the wise-women whom common people usually consulted for their religious instruction.  A female  was often perceived as a trinity of her three ages, pre-menstrual Virgin, fertile Mother, and post-menopausal Crone, or daughter, mother, and grandmother.   The Christian trinity copied the idea by supplying a Holy Ghost third party, originally female, to make father, mother, and child, but the female third was later masculinized.

Of course the Church perceived the older priestesses as a threat, and worked hard to develop enough political power to declare them witches and all kinds of matriarchal magic the crime of witchcraft.   Once that was achieved, all older women were placed at risk of summary arrest, tortured to create a “confession”, and execution, often with a deliberately slow fire to increase the agony.  In some areas, multiple public executions were regularlly scheduled.  There was a strong element of sadism in this anti-pleasure system of belief; the highly honored Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that one of the greatest pleasures of the faithful souls in heaven will be a perfect view of all the tortures of the damned.  Martin Luther recommended wife-beating, provided it didn’t prevent the woman from working.  Most encouraging was the rule that the Church seized all the property of a victim of the Inquisition, just as the Nazis later seized the property of all arrested Jews.  The centuries of the Inquisition helped to make tthe Catholic Church the richest organization in Europe.

Women today need to be made aware of this history, despite the churches’ continual efforts to suppress it.  My developing anger about these facts helped me to probe deeper and challenge more when I realized to what extent the religion industry still maintains a lot of these insupportable claims and coverups.  Nowadays, it seems that “female spirituality” is often regarded as some kind of nonsensical hoo-ha because its real origins are largely obliterated.

We need to probe through the lies of modern religion and rediscover an earth-centered system of truths that don’t so pretend to inflate the human “soul” into a false reality, and so overemphasize maleness above femaleness in a species where both need to exist in mutual cooperation.

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