Gods, Myths, and the Machinery of Society 2
Part 2
While reading Scriptures or other religious texts it surprises us that how people used to ask to have sex straightaway from any random woman and more surprisingly she used to get agree. They used to produce children between close relations also. Women could get pragnant by eating sacred kheer or deities used to give them children as blessings or a children could born from a drop of semen falling anyehere. If you are a theist, you will accept any illogical thing and If you are not an atheist, you will make fun of such things. But if you go deeply into the history, you will see all these things in a different form. Actually the moral values of that time were totally different from that of today's. The things which were in common practice at that time are considered grave sins today and because of this while writing about that period, such illogical imaginations have to be resorted to whenever it becomes difficult to reconciling with the morality of the different periods. However for any rational person they seem laughable.
And truly speaking according to today's moral beliefs, these will be regared as immoral and sinful. One will not accept that such respectable people were indulged into these sort of immoral activities. The real problem lies with judging past as per today's criteria where people were not aware about the reason behind child birth. Whatever they knew was that children come from the vagina of a woman. So a woman was considered the most important and she had all the rights.
She used to be the leader of any group, the chief priestess and an independent unit with whom sexual intercourse was meant to give pleasure to the goddess. In that period, most of the societies were matriarchal and female vagina was worshipable for them. After further understanding of the secret that fertility is related to male semen, the penis was considered the center of creation and many societies started worshiping linga. In India, it was probably started by the people of Pisacha group.
The primitive form of yoni puja is still seen in places like Kamakhya, while linga puja is in practise all over the country even today. Two things are worth noting here that all these practises were prevalent from India to the Mediterranean and linga did not mean Shivling. Shiva was associated with the linga much later and that too only in India. Arabs also worshiped similar symbols, which they called the Kaaba...
Now it is not known whether their belief was the same or they worshiped it for any other reason, but at once there were many Kaabas, which were destroyed after centralising one Kaaba and in that center the totem deities of all the Arab tribes were kept. Idols were brought and installed, due to which the annual pilgrimage (Hajj/Umrah) started being performed there. Based on this history, historian P. N. Oak had given the theory of Shivling being present inside Kaaba, which a large population in India still believes.
In India, these totem deities were worshiped as deities in the Brahmin religion (the total of which comes to 33 crores). So all of this can be summarised as though the utility of linga got recognised in reproduction however, it was a woman who used to gave birth, so she had all the rights in the sexual intercourse. Today we associate sex with morality and immorality, but then it was just a mean of pleasure and reproduction.
There were no taboos to reproduction either. That is one could have a child with anyone and paternity was not a question of honor as it is has become today. Women's rights were restricted from the day it was linked to morality. One of the oldest cities on the banks of the river Euphrates, the Sumer city 'Ur', was like other port cities as the entire economy depended on foreign traders (this was the practice for thousands of years afterwards), where the temple of Addishur was the center of that economy.
There the naked deity-dancers used to entertain the foreigners with dance and intercourse and the temple used to receive huge offerings. Every year a fair used to be held there, where every family used to present their young girl (13-14 years old) for bidding and only after losing her virginity a girl could be eligible for marriage. The one that used to remain unsold was considered unlucky and could not get the opportunity of intercourse.
For a woman, marriage also did not mean anything like monogamy. A woman could have sex with any man before and even after marriage. It was in vogue from India to the Mediterranean. Real brothers and sisters could also marry, could have intercourse without marriage and could also give birth to a child. In many places the father could also have intercourse with the daughter and get a child.
In Semitic religion, prophet Loot could have sex with his two daughters, Brahma with Saraswati and Manu with Ila in Hinduism. Although they were not biological daughters, it is mentioned here just to show that there was such a practice. Where, except for pleasure or having a child, for any other kind of desire, this act used to become prostitution, but at that time neither this act was bad nor this word... Despite being a prostitute, a woman could be a wife as well as a priestess. The priestesses of Adhishur were prostitutes only.
Similarly, Rakshasa, Pishacha, Asura, Danava were also just names given to castes and were not symbols of bad or evil but in stories written later they were presented as villains fighting Aryans and the word itself became a symbol of evil. Although they were fighting for their rights but they could not get the chane to write their history. So overall in the cultures across the world, and the relationship between men and women remained the same until it was associated with prestige and morality.
A woman used to follow her will for intercoure. She could accept / reject anyone's offer to have sex with her, could conceive from any body before or after marriage. However, later it was also believed that after giving birth to a child a woman cannot give much sexual pleasure so the children born out of wedlock were also disinherited. Karna of Mahabharata was probably an example of this.
While there was nothing wrong in having children after marriage, as were the rest of the Pandavas. Now there was a huge problem for the writers to write things with a differece of day and night. Had they written the blatant truth of that era, people would not have been able to digest it so when they tried to cover those things with imagination, it became a laughing stock.
I do not consider it the fault of the writers as they had a terrible dilemma in front of them...
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