...and they saw that they were naked

Stephen Gough has been rearrested again after having spent most of the last six years in solitary confinement in prison.  This is far longer than many muggers, burglars or even rapists will serve and yet he has harmed nobody.  His only crime is to be naked.

In this, he is not alone.  We are all naked beneath our clothes.  Nobody came into the world complete with underpants.  I am naked as I write this. It is, unusually for this summer, warm in my flat and I like the lack of constriction and the feeling of air against my skin.  It is not in itself sexual, although it could be in certain situations.  But, then again, so could a meal or a trip to the cinema.  Context is important in this as in most human activity.

If I were, however, to walk outside into the small garden, in order to feel the warmth of the sun and the cool of the breeze, then I could find myself in court for the garden is overlooked by others.  Although my intention would be to enjoy the sensations felt by my body, I would be accused of an offence against public decency, or behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace, or some other circumlocution. Those who saw me could, if they were offended, simply look the other way.  That is their freedom.  I am no Adonis and would not expect anyone to be so overcome with desire that they find it hard to unglue their gaze.  I would not be thrusting my genitals in their face.  They would simply remain where they always have been - and in a condition of flaccidity.

It is easy to look away if we don't like what we see.  No-one can force us to look, short of taping our eyelids open and holding our heads in a fixed position.  Daily, I am assaulted by noise I find unpleasant, traffic, police sirens, car alarms, piped music in shops, the ranting of street preachers - the list can go on forever.  I cannot close my ears nor does turning away from the sound have much effect.  But there is little regulation of any of this.  The owner of the burglar alarm that goes off, for no apparent reason,  in the middle of the night, keeping me from sleep is not prosecuted for causing a public nuisance.  Nor is the shopkeeper whose music spills out into the public space or the chain store that bellows its advertising by loudspeakers.  They breach my peace and I have had to learn to live with them.

Appearing naked where it is possible for others to see you is, however, deemed serious enough for someone's liberty to be denied.  Gough is not a flasher; he shows no desire to cause alarm; he does not use his nakedness as a weapon.  He is simply asserting his right not to be coerced into wearing clothes.

The question is simply this: why is the human body unfit to be seen by others?  Why does the wrath of the state descend on someone who is doing no tangible harm?  It is as if civilisation would collapse were it to allow people to reveal themselves as human beings, genitalia and all.  And this leads to a further question:  if this is true, does such a civilisation deserve to survive?

Why Inanna?

I have been pondering the title of this blog.  When I first started it there was no doubt in my mind that it should be called "The House of Inanna" .  However, there are many posts in which I do not mention Her name and some few in which I make no explicit mention of Goddess.  At one point I pondered setting up another blog for personal and political posts that were, on the surface, unconnected with thealogical matters.  That way, I considered, visitors would be more likely to find what might interest them and not be put off by matters irrelevant.  Thus, someone looking for information on Inanna specifically would find it here.

However, I decided to keep the blog as it is.   I live in the House of Inanna in that She is always present somewhere within my consciousness - sometimes clear and dominant and at other times in ways more subtle and hidden.  Sometimes, indeed, I forget Her presence and become too enwrapped in daily cares and worries to give  thought to anything beyond them. Then, when I have posted, the posts reflect this self-absorption and Inanna seems to be invisible.

Why Inanna and not any other goddess?  Why that name and not any of the other 9,999?  The reason for this is simple.  Inanna is the only goddess who has come to me in a dream and spoken directly to me.  I am not given to remembering dreams and have little truck with channelling.  I do not presume to speak for any other than myself.  However, in the dream Inanna spoke seven simple words. "I want you to tell my story" is all She said.  Then the dream ended.

At first, I thought that this simply meant that I had to use my story-telling skills and recount the stories written in Sumer.  So I went to Amazon and bought the book and that is what I did for some time.  Then I found that the more I told the stories, the more discontented with my life I became.  I became restless and unsatisfied,  There had to be something more that was needed.  I had, somehow, to enact them in my life.  Which I proceeded to do, often unconsciously and more often very hesitantly and half-heartedly.  But, willy-nilly, things happened and my life took an unexpected and often unwelcome and uncomfortable course.  I discovered things about myself that I did not like and would, if I could, rather have left unexcavated.  I then had to incorporate those unwelcome insights into my life - a process that is still unfolding.

I am a man born into a particular set of circumstances - with unearned privilege I did not seek but accepted nevertheless.  I am a product of my class, my gender, and a particular place and time.  As a result of other accidents I came to see the fundamental unfairness of life as it is today - where I could thrive while others struggled and died.  There is simply no justice to it all- an arbitrary set of circumstances dictated for me opportunity unheard of by the majority of humanity.  I was and am, however, no saint.  Far from it.  I welcomed the relatively ease I had inherited and did little to concretely improve the lot of others.  I still do little.

Except research, study and think.  Of which I have done a lot all my life.  Because I cannot truly see into others' hearts and minds I have used my own as my laboratory - pushing ideas to extremes and seeing what emerges.  I have analysed and re-analysed my thoughts and actions often to the point of absurdity.  I have seen, to a degree, my own motivations; my own hopes and fears.  And because I do not imagine that I am unique in the world assume that these also operate in others; that they are part of the condition of being human.

And the conclusion I have reached is that, for whatever reasons, humanity in general made a collective decision several thousand years ago that has profound consequences today.  Probably as a result of the invention of agriculture, divinity, which previously had been envisioned as female, came to be seen as male.This did not happen overnight.  There was really no conspiracy behind the development of patriarchy.  That is too simplistic a model.  Slow and imperceptible were the changes but, incrementally, they became the World Order that we see today.  Much has been written about the New World Order of American Right Wing fundamentalism but there is nothing really new about it.  It is simply the latest manifestation of an old dream of Dominion - of an elite ruling with the blessing of Divine Right.  James 1 of England and VI of Scotland and his son Charles both tried to live by it but failed.  Louis XVII of France and, later, Tsar Nicholas II met similar fates to Charles. Stalin, Hitler and Mao all claimed similar dominion assuming the right to decide for millions.  Now in country clubs and government buildings, corporation headquarters, embassies and churches, similar dreams are dreamed by men whose faces do not necessarily appear on any television screen.  This is not, however, a conspiracy.  It is more subtle than that.  It is, rather, the meetings of people with like minds and like assumptions who believe that their wealth and power is a sign of the favour of their god.  They are not evil as any could define the term.  They may truly believe they are right.  They are, however, tragically wrong.

 Inanna, as the earliest goddess of whom we have written record, is a living echo of the time before.  She, and Her stories are a bridge to the earlier, now supplanted, times of our species.  Overlaid by a later gloss, older wisdom can be discerned.  And this is the wisdom of finding out who and what we are at root.  We are human.  We are, if such a condition exists, also divine in that humanity. As far as we know, the notion of divinity exists in our species alone.  We have externalised the internal and created gods of our own imaginings; giving them the characteristics of humanity for humanity is all we can know for we are human.  As such our gods are fallible.  Inanna's descent is a recognition of this fallibility.  She has to forsake all Her regal and divine trappings and embrace the shadow of Her mortality in order to discover who she really is.  She is mourned in the ruins of dead cities - for all human constructs die.  She is reborn fully aware and partially in command of her own demons who accompany her back to the upper worlds.

I do not know what happens after death.  I mostly feel it is oblivion but sometimes have an inkling -a feeble hope?  or fear? - that something lies beyond.  St Peter's pearly gates, however,  are to me a metaphor for those other, more fleshy,  pearly gates that lead us into life.  All religion, all stories of goddesses and gods, including Inanna, are simply metaphors.  We daily face the Unknown and seek comfort from the Dark.  The god of the present Order, however, prescribes nightmare for all but his elect.  Those who seek a healthier dream must look elsewhere.  I look to Inanna. 

The Golden Age

The Golden Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

According to Hesiod, the Golden Age was a time when:

[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace.

 Throughout European history there has been a feeling of nostalgia for this Age and it has manifested itself in many different ways.  Abrahamic religion has of course its own version - the Garden of Eden and other cultures throughout the world have similar references to a simpler, more natural way of being.   Ovid wrote of this time, echoing Hesiod that:

The Golden Age was first; when Man, yet new, No rule but uncorrupted Reason knew: And, with a native bent, did good pursue. Unforc'd by punishment, un-aw'd by fear.
His words were simple, and his soul sincere; Needless was written law, where none opprest: The law of Man was written in his breast.

 When Columbus first encountered native people in the Americas he wrote back to his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella:

So tractable, so peaceable, are these people that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.

It would seem, from this description, that Columbus had discovered a place which still lived in the Golden Age.  But the gold he and his successors sought was far from metaphorical.  I do not intend here to describe what happened to these "decorous and praiseworthy" people - but it is enough to say that in North America today, power has a white European face.

The discovery of the Americas sparked the imagination of Europe.  While some saw it as an opportunity for wealth others saw  a land of souls awaiting salvation through knowledge of Jesus.  There was a third current which idealised the inhabitants, following such accounts as Columbus'.  Perhaps, they said, the natives of the new World were living as humanity lived before the Fall - perhaps America was the new Eden.  This strand of thought can be seen in Shakespeare's The Tempest where Gonzalo proclaims that were he king on the island.
 

I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;--

...All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.

...

I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.

In 1622, some 11 years after the first performance of the Tempest, however, John Donne preached to the Virginia company on their bounden duty to spread Christianity and European values:

 ...bless it so in this calm that when the tempest comes it may ride it
out.  Safely bless it so with friends now that it may stand against
enemies hereafter. Prepare thy self a glorious harvest there and
give us leave to be thy labourers that, so the number of thy saints
being fulfilled, we may with better assurance join in that prayer
"come lord Jesus come quickly" and so meet all in that kingdom
which the son of GOD hath purchased for us with the inestimable
price of his incorruptible blood    

(spelling and punctuation modernised)

Donne himself, however, also saw in the Americas a source of wealth other than souls:

Licence my roving hands, and let them go,   

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,

My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!          

(From Elegy XIX, To His Mistress Going to Bed)

The Americas, therefore, had  a triple appeal to the imaginations of the Early Modern Europeans.  They were, simultaneously, a source of great wealth, a land to be claimed for God and, lastly, an Edenic paradise.  Donne seemed to have had no difficulty in reconciling the first two and in so doing seems to have gone some way towards the establishment of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

The third, however, retains an appeal to this day.  Everyday on Facebook it seems to me that someone posts a picture of a Native American above a quote extolling the value of closeness to the earth.  Laurens Van Der Posts writings of the Kalahari had a great impact on many, not least the heir to the British crown.  The Golden Age cherished by royalty and the aristocracy however has been that of a pastoral Arcadia. The Tudor and Stuart courts  encouraged pastoral drama and poetry, including As You Like It, works by poets like Marvell and Herrick, and some delightfully scabrous satires by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, such as Fair Chloris in a Pigsty Lay. (Warning maybe NSFW!)

A century or so later,  Marie Antoinette dressed as a shepherdess and milked thoroughly washed cows into fine porcelain churns in the gardens of Versailles 

And our present monarchy delights in appearing to be close to nature, reserving vast tracts of countryside in order to do so.  Although I must say that Elizabeth's costume is more appropriate than Marie Antoinette's:

and Charles does not pretend to be doing any real work:

The Golden Age that seems to appeal to many, including Royalty, is an age of rustic charm.  A Merrie England where Herrick's maidens dance around the Maypole or where old ladies cycle back from Evensong.  It is the land of squires and swains living in charming villages with duckponds and roses. It is the land that Danny Boyle seems to wish to evoke in his design for the Olympic ceremony.  It is a land where, as MacNeice put it, "all the milk is cream and all the girls are willing".   It is also, in another context, the land evoked by Nazi propaganda:

It is, in reality, Tess Darbyfield dancing with her friends before she aspires to become a D'Urberville.  For this is, and here is the serpent in this particular garden,  above all a land where hierarchy is honoured and unchallenged.  Even Gonzalo, in his evocation of an ideal state puts himself - as his companions point out - in the position of king.  It is in the acceptance of the hierarchical paradigm that the pastoral version of the Golden Age differs from that described by Hesiod and Ovid.

In his famous sermon at Blackheath during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the Lollard priest John Ball said:

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?  From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

Ball speaks of the rise of hierarchy as having occurred sometime, but not immediately, after the fall from Eden.  He invokes the equality of all human beings as ordained by his god.  Hierarchy, he says, is the work of "naughty men" who have enslaved the free people of god.  What is notable about his image is that it all clearly takes place after the discovery of agriculture.  In Eden food was freely available and, as Adam and Eve were both naked, there was no need of spinning.

Eden and the Classical Golden Age clearly preceded agriculture. The ideas are clearly  memories of the time when our species survived as hunter-gatherers, as we did for most of out history on the planet.  Bands of hunter-gatherers that survive today tend towards social equality with leadership, when necessary, dependent on skill, experience and the respect of peers.  The optimum number that such bands can contain appears to be around 150 - when numbers exceed that, there tends to be a split into two bands.  Such small numbers mean that each member knows each other member very intimately - they are fully aware of the strengths, weaknesses and personal foibles of each.  They are dependent on each other and tend to rely on co-operation rather than coercion.  They eat what is available, and when food sources dry up they move on.

According to Hobbes, their lives were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".  Hobbes was writing in defence of absolute monarchy at the time of the English Civil War and he saw strong centralised rule as the only alternative to the chaos of "the war of all against all".  For all its apparent ills, he maintained, strong government was a prerequisite for any functioning human society. The opinions he articulates still inform much of today's discourse.  They can be seen as one of the strongest motivations behind the missionary endeavours of the Christian churches and can be seen as already present in Donne's sermon.

It was with such views that the earliest Europeans landed in Australia.  What they saw there appalled them.  The native people were clearly starving and impoverished since they ate grubs and rats and were nearly naked.  Furthermore, they were lazy and spent most of their time sitting or lying around.  Clearly, it was the duty of good Christian men to do something about this and bring them up to the standards of civilisation.  It was, after all, for their own material and spiritual good that this should happen.  If any should resist such a mission it was then necessary, regrettably, to punish them.  This mission continued well into the 20th Century.

However, what the early settlers also noticed, but conveniently ignored,  was that many of the "starving" people were fat and healthy.   Far fatter and healthier, in fact, than those who arrived from British cities and villages.  For the world they lived in was, to them, a world of abundant food ready to be plucked or hunted with relatively little real effort.  Modern foraging inhabitants of the Kalahari, which to outsiders seems bleak and desolate, can consume over 2000 calories and over 90 grams of protein daily.  It is, moreover, a varied diet and far more balanced than that of most inhabitants of modern cities.  Hobbes was, in short, wrong.

The Golden Age was, then, the long period of time when human beings lived as hunter-gatherers, moving around as the season dictated.  It was the time before the invention of agriculture, before the Fall when all around was Eden.  It was also, according to archaeology, a time when divinity was seen as female.  We cannot know how she was honoured then nor how people viewed her interactions with humanity.  We cannot replicate such things in a world of cities, rapid transport and the internet.  We cannot become hunter-gatherers roving a sparsely-inhabited, mostly abundant, world.  We may, to use Joni Mitchell's words, be starlight and golden but we cannot return to the Garden.

Not as it was, that is.  There is, however, another Garden that we can strive for.  We can choose which of two different sets of human characteristics we value. For most of our time on the planet, we survived through co-operation and human society reflected this.  Since the advent of agriculture the dominant value has been competition and rivalry.  Both sets characteristics are "natural" - they are maybe part of our evolutionary development. The  "naughty men", however, have had things too  long their own way..  It is time to reinforce the peacemaker.  It is time to bring back the Goddess into public consciousness.  And She is returning. 

It will not, however, be a Golden Age.  It will be, and is now being, actively opposed. For those deluded enough to think that the purpose of life is to accrue wealth and power, co-operation between free individuals presents the ultimate threat.  The world today, with 7bn inhabitants, is vast and complex.  For those who serve Goddess there are many challenges, both from without and from within the patriarchally conditioned minds we inhabit.  It needs far more than healing ceremonies, valuable though they may be,  and wishful thinking.  It needs both vision and work.  It needs reaching out to others of similar vision, however they define themselves.  We are attempting something entirely new, grounded though it may be in our imaginations of the distant past. However accurate those imaginings may be and however supported  by empirical evidence, we can never claim them as undisputed fact - at best they can only be probable.

Just as John Lennon said "There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky", Goddess will not descend trailing clouds of glory and, while wiping away each tear, create the world anew.  That is down to us, fallible though we be.