from The Meaning of Life: Ascending Jacob’s Ladder by Hazy Notion
The primary task of religion is to define the purpose of life. Secular institutions may organise and direct people in ways to fulfil a purpose but the original identification of the purpose is the business of religion. Cultural evolution is essentially an evolution of religion. Religion evolves by identifying aspects of the Spectrum and turning the various Themes and Sub-Themes it finds into gods and goddesses. These deities are models of ideal human types at various stages of the evolutionary experience. As prophets and visionaries encounter ever higher points on the Spectrum new gods are invented to represent higher values.
The religion of the matriarchal age involved worship of female deities that governed the reproduction of life. These Fertility goddesses instructed the human race in the belief that the purpose of life was to procreate and to succeed in agriculture.
At first the goddesses were Earth mothers. Later, as Fertility culture evolved to higher Sub-Themes, Fertility goddesses took on cosmic proportions. Women began to associate the menstrual cycle with the rhythms of the moon. The moon came to be seen as a deity whose regular comings and goings every twenty nine and a half days confirmed women's reproductive powers at the centre of cosmic purpose. In late matriarchal societies colleges of lunar worshipping priestesses were sometimes taught to synchronise their menstrual cycles with the lunar cycle.
Measuring time and keeping track of the turning seasons were important to matriarchal society because successful agriculture requires anticipation of planting and harvesting seasons. The moon’s religious significance led to the development of lunar calendars. Under lunar time-keeping the passage of time became deeply associated with Fertility religion and, therefore, with the power of women. However, lunar time-keeping is a very imperfect way to keep track of time for agricultural purposes. This is because the cycles of the moon and the annual cycle of the seasons are not synchronised.
A solar year is a complete cycle of the seasons and is 365.242 days in length. A lunation, or one cycle of the moon, is 29.53 days long. Unfortunately, the number of days in a lunation don’t divide evenly into the number of days in a solar year. This problem of synchronisation can be partly overcome by using a lunar/solar calendar. Lunar/solar time-keeping usually involves a year of 12 lunar months, which is some 11 days short of a true solar year. The surplus days of the seasonal (solar) year are then accumulated and at regular intervals, sometimes every 3 years, an extra month is intercalated into the lunar year to soak them up.
A straight solar calendar, which disregards the lunar cycle and simply counts out 365 days for each year, is far more accurate and easy to use than either lunar or lunar/solar calendars. But solar calendars did not come into widespread use until after the arrival of patriarchal (Status) forms of social organisation.
The solar calendar first appeared in ancient Egypt where life centred around the annual flooding of the Nile. This event required fairly precise prediction. The Egyptian calendar divided a 360 day year into 12 months of 30 days each. Being 5.242 days shorter than a true solar year, the start of each new year in the Egyptian calendar had the inconvenience of slipping slowly back through the seasons. But this inconvenience was apparently less troublesome than intercalating a thirteenth month every three years.
Life is time. Whatever measure is used for time inevitably gets bound up in the definition of life. As long as time continued to be measured in lunations human life remained centred around Fertility. But when the sun and the solar calendar successfully challenged the ascendancy of the feminised moon these symbols in turn became deeply associated with the transcendence of Fertility and the establishment of new masculine values centred on Status.
The obsession of the new masculine Status gods with moral concepts of good and evil was largely derived from juxtaposing Status consciousness with Fertility consciousness. To the patriarchal gods of the modern age Status is good while any dominant expression of Fertility consciousness is evil. Fertility culture required an emphasis on sexuality — most specifically non-monogamous sexuality. It featured orgiastic festivals of sexuality and other mating arrangements that were meant to confuse and disguise fatherhood. Female sexual freedom is an absolute threat to the male Status objectives of child identification through spouse domination and monogamy.
The Judaic-Christian term ‘sin’ shares a phoneme with the name of a Babylonian Fertility Goddess, Nana-Sin. It is perhaps no coincidence that nana turns up in contemporary language as a colloquial title for a grandmother — a matriarch. Satan also has similar Fertility religion roots and is derived from Saturn, an old Fertility deity of Mediterranean origin.
The conflict between good and evil has also been characterised as a war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The forces of light being the Status deity of the solar (sunlight) calendar with the forces of darkness representing the Fertility deity of the lunar (night-time) calendar.