Weddings: a Rite of the Patriarchy?

I came across the following post warning about the “sexist” history of many aspects of contemporary wedding ceremonies: https://www.mic.com/articles/139845/7-surprisingly-sexist-wedding-traditions-we-should-change-immediately

I found the authors alarm to be amusing. Who knew history was so politically incorrect?

If only the white dress was the lone part of the bride’s wardrobe steeped in the patriarchy. Unfortunately, the veil is just as guilty.

Horny Housewives of the Patristic Age

brambles

Given

The patristic era of the church is considered to have run from AD 150 – 500.

All surviving evidence shows that the early church unanimously believed that only men are in the image of God. Tertullian, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, and others all wrote of men alone being the image of God. The women of the early church knew they were not in the great and glorious image of God like their husbands, and consequently they would have no reasonable basis to claim equality with men. Furthermore women were not only looked upon as lesser and weaker vessels, but they were in fact viewed as a source of uncleanness and defilement, the original source of transgression against God, and prone to giving in to their passions and their ever emerging lustful desires.

Quotes

Women are worse than animals because they are continuously full of lust. ~ Origen AD 184 – 253

Woman is the root of all evil. ~ Saint Jerome AD 347 – 420

…it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman. ~ Saint Augustine AD 354 – 430

Introduction to the topic

Some of the early church fathers were swayed by the great influence in their culture of the stoics and ascetics to adopt a very anti-sex position, that has carried over into today’s Catholic churches demand for celibacy amongst their clergy. Instead of viewing married sex as sanctified, always due at your spouses request, and a protection against temptation, as the apostle Paul taught in 1 Corinthians 7:2-5, some instead viewed all sex as a weak failing of resolve to restrain the flesh, and thought that only God’s command of procreation could render it permissible. Thus they erroneously rationalized all forms of sexual contact to be evil, if conception wasn’t the primary goal. The goals of not defrauding your spouse of their due, and keeping temptation at bay, were apparently overlooked. Along with verses like:

Off topic already. LOL

Proverbs 5:18 Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. 19 Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.

Based upon the rest of proverbs 5 the “fountain” is fairly clearly being used as a euphemism for the man’s sexual organ.

I think the churches historical anti-sex drift has led to many teachings in the Bible concerning sex to remain obscured. Bowdlerized! For example just prior to the husband being told to let his fountain be blessed, and all that, we are told:

Proverbs 5:15 Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.

What if Solomon, who was given wisdom from God, wasn’t instructing us to refuse to drink any literal water when away from our own well? Nobody I know even practices that literally. Lapping waters from thine own well makes far more sense and is on topic as another pretty graphic euphemism. I’ll let you figure out what he just described. Hint: men have a fountain, women have a well. LOL I believe Solomon is instructing us to fully enjoy our exclusive marital sexuality, (leave every other man’s well alone) and that is in keeping with the apostle Paul’s teaching that frequent marital sex helps to prevent temptation including thirst for adulterous liaisons.

And now, back to our topic…

The “Problem That Has No Name” was described by Betty Friedan in the beginning of ‘ The Feminine Mystique’. The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban [house]wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — “Is this all?”

Why the dissatisfaction? Because Betty doesn’t think her husband is a god. That’s why. As a Feminist, Betty’s husband is at best seen as an “equal”, not someone she can look up to, but most likely seen as an undeserving and inferior person that she is enslaved to. She doesn’t reverence her man, and so she doesn’t reverence her mission, which is to serve her husband. Having lost respect for her man, she also naturally loses interest in keeping him, keeping his home, and keeping his children that she had together with him. She is dissatisfied with her lot, serving her “equal”. Needless to say this explains why she is also going to ‘dead-bedroom’ him, and only begrudgingly condescend to allow him some lackluster sex when, if ever, she feels like it. Her natural sexual instinct is craving a man that she can reverence, but she has deluded herself into believing that her own husband is not such a man. Perhaps she thinks, somewhere out there is a man who is more. And so she is attracted to confident men who project that they are something more than other men. She keeps hoping to find a “god” to serve.

Conclusion

So why was the Patristic prevailing wisdom that women were insatiable sexually?

My theory is that when women see themselves as beneath men, because they are taught from childhood that all men exclusively are gods, images of God most high. Then every married woman has a man whom she always has great reason to look up to and reverence. And serving him and bearing him children, becomes a divine privilege and a very worthy purpose. No other purpose is needed if women are taught the truth correctly, from God’s word. Marrying a god is likely a great source of “insatiable” female sexual desire. Men alone being images of God is the satisfaction to most of a woman’s hypergamy. Every woman can marry a man who is hopelessly above her by nature of his very creation as a god. During the Patristic age Christian women were taught that, and those who recorded church history found the wives then to be sexual aggressors, desiring their husbands “insatiably”. We would all reap benefit from ending this God emasculating heresy of imagining women into the image of God our Father.

The Sun & Moon and the Image of God

MM

The Sun & Moon are used as similitudes

God figuratively uses the sun and moon as images of man and wife, or male and female.

In the passage below Joseph relates a prophetic vision to his father, Jacob. The patriarchal order in which Joseph mentions the symbols, and the exact same order in Jacob’s reply, shows that Joseph’s father (AKA Israel) immediately knows that he is the sun, his wife is the moon, and the eleven other brothers are the eleven stars.

Genesis 37:9 Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, “Behold, I have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” 10 But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?” 11 And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind.

Most cultures treat the sun as male and the moon as female and have sun gods and moon goddesses. The moon is the lesser or weaker light that “rules the darkness” and has a 28 day cycle exactly like a woman. In fact our words “menses” and “month” both come from the the latin mensis (month), which derives from the Greek Aeolic form mens (μηνς) of mene (μήνη; moon).

The Bible speaks of the moon as being feminine:

Isaiah 13:10 For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine.

Ezekiel 32:7 And when I shall put thee out, I will cover the heaven, and make the stars thereof dark; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light.

God says he is a Sun: (He never claims to be a moon)

Psalm 84:11 For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.

In the following passage our earthly bodies are directly likened to celestial bodies:

1 Corinthians 15: 39 All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.

40 There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.

41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.

42a So also is the resurrection of the dead. …

45 And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.

46 Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.

47 The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.

In 1 Corinthians 11 the apostle Paul teaches us that men are “ the image and glory of God“, but that women are “ the glory of the man“:

1 Corinthians 11:4 Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. 5 But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven. 6 For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered. 7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. 8 For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man. 9 Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.

So just as the sun, in all its glory, shines out its light, and the moon only gives a dim reflection off of the moon’s grey dust. I believe we are clearly told that men exhibit the image and glory of God, but their wives just reflect the glory of the man.

Fun Fact:

Some of the ancient moon goddesses were given names like the “Queen of Heaven” or the “Mother of gods”. Do those names sound strangely familiar?

luna

an idol of the ancient polytheists’ goddess Luna