female monotheism vs. male monotheism

Here's an idea: how can we have an ATL where the dominant religious/philosophical divisions is between a monotheistic religion where the deity is portrayed as a male and in a male-like way (like in OTL) vs. one where the monotheistic deity is portrayed as a female or a female like manner? I'm not talking about polytheism with a Goddess at the top, but a real monotheism where it's not "God" but "Goddess".
 
Have an amazon-like culture invade Europe about the same time as the huns etc. Let them stay in Europe and have influence over a certain area (the british isles, the iberian penninsula maybe), enough to have their culture adn religion last a few hundred years so that it can copete againt the traditional patriarch societies of the rest of Europe. I know that it can sound rather far fetched, but i'm just brainstorming my guts out ;D
 
Have the Indo-European invasion of Europe not be so decisive, so parts of the Mother cult that is said to have existed there previously survives and spreads.

Or, for more fun and less plausibility, have the cult of Mary in the 1000s A.D. get much stronger, and a breakaway Christian cult venerating only her converts various heathen peoples (Poles, Lithuanians, Magyars, Muscovites?).
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
God_of_Belac said:
Have the Indo-European invasion of Europe not be so decisive, so parts of the Mother cult that is said to have existed there previously survives and spreads.

Or, for more fun and less plausibility, have the cult of Mary in the 1000s A.D. get much stronger, and a breakaway Christian cult venerating only her converts various heathen peoples (Poles, Lithuanians, Magyars, Muscovites?).

As I remember there was a movement in the 1990s. (Not a typo, just ten years ago) to have the Pope use ex-cathedra for only the second time to declare Mary a sort of "co-savior" but I don't know how much real support it had.

Nevertheless, the second scenario is a LOT more plausible than the first. The cult of Mary is historical fact. If Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade is any indication of the present status of the Mother cult theories then they have little evidence to back them up, besides the obvious fact that nowadays, sisterhood is powerful
 

Redbeard

Banned
If this has to involve some kind of matriarc society you'll need lots of ASB's. Such a society has never existed outside imagination, and if it ever emerges it will loose its first conflict.

If we're just talking about teological strides then the Catholic Church seen from outside already appears like a Holy Mary cult (sorry if that insults Catholics, but that's how it looks to me - but I'll admit not having any deep insight).

BTW we need some more women on this board, I especially love to discuss the hopelessness of matriarc societies with eco-feminist lesbians :D

Regards

Steffen Redbeard
 
A solution would be to evolve the cult of Isis (another pagan goddess would do as well but Isis was the most popular) into a monotheistic religion.
If you eliminate the christian emperors (Constantine looses) or keep their rule short-lived (Julien does not go to war against Persia) and is followed by a string of similarly-minded (and competent) successors, you might end up with a world with two competing religions :
- a monothistic religion based upon Isis, with the other pagan gods reduced to mere "aspects" or "avatars" of the One True Goddess.
- Christianity , probably notably different from our version.

Another possibility is an exclusive and messianic cult of Kali in India, but I suspect such a religion would not promote "feminie values".

By the way, there is one matriarchal society on Earth : the Mosuo in southern china. They are a small agrarian culture, but their society gives us a good idea of what a matriarchal societ would look like (to begin with, no marriage)
 
Redbeard said:
If this has to involve some kind of matriarc society you'll need lots of ASB's. Such a society has never existed outside imagination, and if it ever emerges it will loose its first conflict.

If we're just talking about teological strides then the Catholic Church seen from outside already appears like a Holy Mary cult (sorry if that insults Catholics, but that's how it looks to me - but I'll admit not having any deep insight).

BTW we need some more women on this board, I especially love to discuss the hopelessness of matriarc societies with eco-feminist lesbians :D

Regards

Steffen Redbeard

A male-dominated society could still have a supreme Goddess. The Chief deity of Japan was female, and for that matter the Japanese Emperor is hled to be both male and female.

A POD would be the defeat somehow of the orthodox and the triumph of Gnosticism, wherin Pistis Sophia was the highest aspect of divinity.

In Gnosticism, the Demiurge, which was the male element of divinity, is immaturely worshipped by mainstream Christians, when he's just a reproductive tool of the real Divinity, which is "female". Hagia Sophia is named that for a reason.

When the Demiurge looked into the waters and saw the reflection of Pistis Sophia, he became jealous because he knew there was a higher power, and hence the 1st commandment.

I know that's a simplification, but, hey, I have a job.
 
I agree. There is no inherent reason a patriarchial and/or patrilineal society could not worship a supreme female diety. I also tend to agree with both AHP and Nappy's posts that an evolution somehow from either the cult of Mary or the Sophia aspect of the Christian God is more likely to lead to a worldwide religion than anything else. I suppose another way would have the "goddess" of a localized eastern european Mesolithic tribe become a universal god in the same way the Hebrews' male tribal diety did. This requires a lot of ifs, however.
 
@Steffen: I don't advocate a matriarch society, but as far as we know in the dawn of time many societies were matriarchal - and they lasted for thousands of years. So much about impracticability.
 
Max Sinister said:
@Steffen: I don't advocate a matriarch society, but as far as we know in the dawn of time many societies were matriarchal - and they lasted for thousands of years. So much about impracticability.

That's not exactly true. While many early societies were MATRILINEAL, or had supreme female deities, there is no evidence that there has ever been a MATRIARCHAL society.
 
An actual matriarchal society is one where political and economic power is vested in women - both in family structures and in culture/society at large. Under this definitiion, there have been very few, if any, real matriarchies. Matrilineal societies are those in which descent and property inheritance is traced through the female line. Most matrilineal societies are in actual practice patriarchical in that the mothers' brothers tended to possess the real power. To imagine a true matriarchy, it is helpful to imagine it's exact opposite: In this definitin a matriarchy would be a society in which men have no decision making authority whatsoever, that they cannot own property and divorce their wives but the wives can divorce them on a whim and are the legal owners of any property they possess, where there are numerous cultural, religious, and legal prohibitions on what men can do apart from their wives, where it is socially accepted for women to have multiple husbands or male lovers but men are harshly punished for any sexual impropriety, where a single man is considered imperfect and somehow sinful, and where men are considered a weaker sex in need of special protection, including restricted access to normal rights excercised by women. There has been no such thing in human history.
 
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