Before the sky-god religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) rose to dominance, a movement that began around five thousand years ago, spirituality was Nature-based. The Earth was seen as a Great Mother, and all living things were her children. When death came to a member of the tribe, it was the crone priestess who presided over last rites. It is said that she cradled the dying in her arms like a newborn child, crooning the funerary version of a lullaby. The pronouncement of anathema was the priestess’ official statement that the dying person was about to cross the mortal threshold, and should prepare for the great surrender.
These were not mere theological distortions. They were the strategic decisions of a new institution trying to consolidate its power. Through the canny misconstrual of ancient practices, the church conducted the world’s first mass negative propaganda campaign ever attempted on this kind of scale. As we know, it was an astounding success.
Under the new priesthood, it was untenable that female elders be allowed to announce the Mysteries. All evidence of feminine religious authority had to be expurgated. Here, as with so many other tenets of ancient cosmology, the church found a way to cast blame for death onto the Feminine principle. During the centuries that followed, the old priestess’ rite mutated into a rationale for the persecution of “witches”.
But the spin churchmen put on the pronouncement of anathema has a further significance, even more profound: it points up the way our thinking about death has changed over the ages. No longer a sacred phase in the Wheel of Life, death came to be seen as a non-inevitable calamity of which humanity was the cause as well as the victim.
Any historian who aspires to a rigorously honest analysis of the early church must confront the question: What inspired church fathers to come up with the perverse new explanations of mortality, sex and childbirth that they came up with? How much of it was pure political co-option; how much projected collective neurosis?
However we explain their motivation, their edicts heralded the way death would be seen by an increasingly dis-ensouled world. Eventually their explanations came to be accepted as normative, and evolved into a cosmology whereby modern people imagine themselves to exist outside of and at odds with Nature, and alone in the Universe.
But under the Christian system, independent explorations into the Mysteries were condemned as heresy. Looking death in the eye was outlawed; and by prohibiting it, the church suppressed the likelihood of a person reaching spiritual maturity. Christians were denied the license to cultivate their own unique spiritual intelligence. Passivity was encouraged. It became a crime even to ask questions that didn’t fit the program.
Thus the church made death taboo in the modern sense1: too dangerous to talk about, think about or confront.
But with the advent of the patriarchal religions, humanity was presented with a whole new set of death stories: stories of a bellicose and rejecting deity, of inborn human evil and hideous afterlife punishment. The new myths wrenched humans out of their sense of planetary belonging.
Death became linked with fear.
The changeover from the original view of death to the Christian view was a revolutionary philosophical crisis. It was the most critical ontological threshold humanity has ever crossed, marking the chasm between the primitive mind and the cosmically estranged modern mind.
The new death stories represented a definitive parting of company with Plutonian law.
If we take a broad enough historical view, we begin to see that notwithstanding the current clashes between Darwinists and creationists, the truth is that modern science itself evolved out of the victory of the patriarchal church over the ancient ways.
Back when the great Goddess-to-God shift was taking place, the contest for the right to explain the Mysteries was between folk (”pagan”) tradition and Christianity, whose crusaders were armed to the teeth and dispatched to “convert” heathens across the globe. It took several thousands of years of persecution, pogroms and inquisitions for the new system to prevail.
It is no wonder that it took so long. One can only imagine how freakish the idea of original sin must have sounded to the goddess-worshiping cultures that came under the conquering sword. To ancient peoples, the idea of demonizing sexuality was not merely bizarre; it was a sacrilege. And for the church to condemn across-the-board the entire race of women — givers of life, like the Goddess Herself — must have seemed an incomprehensible blasphemy.
To declare death an aberration was a consummate power play. Cajoling the populace away from seeing their own death as part of a larger cycle, as organic as leaves falling from the trees at the approach of winter, the church presented death as a weird human error that could be rectified only through institutional intervention. By enforcing the belief that we die because of an aboriginal act of human wickedness (Eve and the apple, etc.), death became a problem. The ultimate problem. And one that no amount of self-knowledge or independent spiritual search could solve. There was no choice but to submit to the priests and popes, follow their rules and pay their tithes. Otherwise the horrors of hell awaited.
It was the biggest scam in human history.
The church made it its first order of business to denounce reincarnation as a pagan travesty. This campaign proved largely successful in the Western world, where great cosmic truths are now under the auspices of a scientific establishment that dismisses and ridicules the idea of past lives. And by declaring it taboo to sacralize Nature, church founders laid the groundwork for the kind of modern thinking that leads us to treat the environment as a commodity to exploit and consume.
The impact of the new teachings extended far beyond the theological arena. The early church accomplished nothing less than an all-but-total repudiation of the ancient, circular view of existence. Instead they substituted a linear model. The new model said: We are born and then we die, and whatever happens after that — whether heaven or hell — is forever. Simple as one, two, three.
This worldview has become so ingrained that atheists and fundamentalists alike hold it as an unquestioned assumption. One cannot help but see it as darkly humorous that both battling camps unthinkingly subscribe to the same postulate. The anti-spiritual crowd considers what happens after death to be a moot point, while the religionists consider it to be the whole point. But both presume after-death experience to be final and static.
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this change in the collective worldview. The modern mind considers it axiomatic that human life — and Time itself — operate in a line, not a circle. Death is seen as the phase farthest away from birth. Indeed, just phrasing it this way sounds absurdly self-evident, which tells us how deeply entrenched the notion has become.
By contrast, the ancient mind saw death as the phase that took a person’s life full circle. Thus it was the point closest of all to the point of birth.
Greene has associated Pluto-in-Scorpio through history with the reawakening of interest in various doctrines which reclaim humanity’s place in the natural order of ever-repeating cycles — all of them heresies in the eyes of the world’s dominant religious establishments. These include reincarnation, astrology, alchemy and other occult traditions.
The New Physics, which entered the collective vocabulary in earnest during the late 80s and early 90s when Pluto was most recently in Scorpio, is of course not new at all. Its basic tenets are merely the latest restatement of the eternal truths: that everything in the universe is interconnected, and that energy can never be created or destroyed, but just changes form — the key premises of the Old Religion.2
To the extent that we in the industrialized world are all educated in this myopic perspective, we overestimate the proportion of human history that the father-god theologies have been in power. And we underestimate the significance of the countless millennia before then, during which the human race viewed the world very, very differently. But as Carl Jung and others have made clear, this knowledge is in fact retained by the human mind; or, to be more precise, by a part of our beings that might be termed the body-mind intelligence. Each of us is born with a collective memory that contains within it ineradicable imagery of profound emotional and spiritual power, deeply hidden but very much alive despite the all-encompassing influence of conventional thinking.
It also seems likely that each of us carries within our cells the memory of ceremonies conducted by our ancestors to honor Plutonian law, such as the Eleusinian Rites: rituals practiced for thousands upon thousands of years before the relatively recent sky-god religions came along. Deep species-knowing cannot be stamped out, even by centuries of oppression and brainwashing.
I believe we also retain collective memory of the gallows, the stake and the rack. Nine million women are estimated to have been killed in the name of the father-god during the European Renaissance, an epoch glorified for being a high point for (male) education and the arts; but which, for believers in the Old Ways — or those mistaken for same — was a holocaust that makes subsequent historical abominations pale by contrast.
For a discussion of the parallels between the New Physics and ancient worldviews, see Physics vs. Metaphysics: A False Divide on the Articles page of this website.
