The focus for today’s reading is on the distance between men and the Gods and addresses questions about mankind’s relationship with nature and the divine. As we see in the reading for today and as will be made clearer for Monday, human are connected to the natural world more closely than the divine. In western traditions often the reason for this is some act of trickery or malfeasance on the part of man. Eve eats the apple in the Christian tradition taking on the knowledge of good and evil. Thus she and Adam can no longer exist in the garden where all things exists and all things meet their opposites. They must move into the world of nature and have children and suffer and die. This is also reflected in the Pandora story where mankind is cursed by the gods to suffer, sweat an d toil all his life.
One unfortunate element of these stories is their scapegoating of women. In the western cultures such as the Greek, women were literally the property of their husbands and might not ever see their families again after they were married off . Remember that men wrote these stories and keep in mind that not all cultures viewed women as the “downfall of man.” One of the main reasons why this may be the case is that women are more closely tied to their reproductive function than men. When a woman becomes pregnant it is clearly visible and when the child is born, that child is still tied to the mother for at least a year or so and depends on her for sustenance. There fore women are tied to nature and it’s cycles of fertility and productivity. This is a common observation among agrarian societies. Once men have played their part in the sexual act they are basically irrelevant. If some early societies used this against women, many others did not.
Please remember to submit your journal entries today to my e-mail at the college with the attached Word file containing all your entries. Next week we will continue with these stories and then look closely at the importance and function of the goddess. Enjoy you weekend and stay cool if you can.
