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Week 14 Reading: Seven Secrets of the Goddess Part B


  • Rural cultures v. urban cultures
    • rural valued fertility - associated with women
    • urban valued obedience - associated with men, making women subservient 
      • indicated control and discipline
    • urbanization led to more rules and the idea of evil - one who does not submit to the rules
  • Chinese myth
    • Yin & Yang
      • work in harmony to create life
      • Yin - male dragon in the sky
      • yang- the earth like a phoenix that recreates itself from ashes 
    • Confucian traditions favor culture over nature
      • favoring hierarchy, making the man more important 
      • patriarchal societies link women with nature and men with culture
        • culture domesticates nature --> men are asked to domesticate women
  • Mesopotamian myth
    • Marduk (male god-king) defeats Tiamat the primal female monster and brings order to the world
  • stories like this abound across cultures
    • Adam & Eve
      • Eve tempts Adam to eat the forbidden fruit
      • before Eve, God created Lilith who refused to be subservient to Adam and therefore was cast out and became the mother of monsters
    • Pandora's Box
      • Pandora opened the box after being told not to and thus released all the troubles of the world
    • Snow White
      • isolation of women "for their own good"
    • Trojan War
      • Helen "brought shame to all of Greece"
      • Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter so that the winds would return so they could sail to Troy
      • after their victory, the Greeks brought Trojan women home as spoils of war 
  • Honor in Indian Epics
    • masculine honor
    • women go from a person --> venerated object
    • Ramayana 
      • Rama rescues Sita not because she is his wife but to protect the honor of his family because she married into it 
      • Mahabharata 
        • the Kauravas publicly denigrate Draupadi by seeking to disrobe her in order to humiliate her husbands the Pandavas
  • Devi in Hindu tradition
    • the value placed on the feminine can be traced to the reverence given the grama-devis, or female village goddesses
    • existed long before the Vedas or the cities of the Indus Valley
    • Shiva attacks Brahma for trying to control Devi
    • Devi is divinity on her own - independent as the earth
  • Storytelling notes: I want to take the idea of the independent women in these videos and write a story with them in it, or a story where I combine the attributes from several. I want to make the idea (that women should be subservient) used to demonize these women and turn it around to make them the revered deities. 
  • Bibliography: Seven Secrets of the Goddess by Devdutt Pattanaik (2016). Video. 
(Lilith by John Collier from Wikipedia)

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