Mary Daly and the Male Saviour

JM Wood

In Daly’s discussion on the doctrine of Jesus, she claims that it confirms the existence of the sexist hierarchy because the Christian faith does not accept that Jesus was a limited human being. She states that if women want liberation they will have to reject Christological formulas as idolatry. As God becomes limited in women’s consciousness the more they will be able to stop thinking about Jesus as the “Second Person of the Trinity” who has historically being assumed to have had a human nature in a “unique hypostatic union” (Daly 1985:69).

The uniqueness and supereminence of Jesus will become meaningless when liberated women reject the God who became incarnated as a unique male. Daly states: I am proposing that Christian idolatry concerning the person of Jesus is not likely to be overcome except through the revolution that is going on in women’s consciousness. It will, I think, become increasingly evident that exclusively masculine symbols for the ideal of “incarnation” or for the ideal of the human search for the fulfilment will not do. As a uniquely masculine image and language for divinity loses credibility, so also the idea of a single divine incarnation in a human being of the male sex may give way in the religious consciousness to an increased awareness of the power of Being in all persons (Daly 1985:71).

Women cannot accept the idea of a redemptive incarnation in the unique form of a male saviour. Women also cannot accept that “a patriarchal divinity or his son” is in a position to save them from the horrors they experience in a patriarchal world. Daly identifies four methods that society and the Church used to avoid insight into the conflict between feminism and Christianity and applies them specifically to the problem of Christolatry. These categories are universalisation, particularisation, spiritualisation and trivialisation (Daly 1985:78-81).

Firstly, the problem of Christology was avoided through universalisation. Daly states that it is universally accepted that Jesus is not “a women, a black, or Chinese, etcetera” which implies that women are not the only “outsiders”. For Daly, the problem of universalisation does not lie in the fact that Jesus was male, young and a Semite, but in the exclusive identification of Jesus with God. This implies that Jesus’ divinity and his being the “image of God” makes Jesus the “God-man”, something which Jesus is not (Daly 1985:79). Daly sees having faith in Jesus as “God-man” as inauthentic and as an idolatry (Daly 1985:79).

For Daly, the problem lies in the process where the “particularity of Jesus’ maleness” does not function in the same way as the “particularity of his Semitic identity”. This means that priests did not exclude men from the priesthood regardless of race or age whilst they excluded all women. The universalisation of Jesus legitimates sexual hierarchy, something women must refuse (Daly 1985:70).

Secondly, Christological issues are avoided by particularisation, which limits oppression to a particular time, place, institution and area of activity. Particularisation is used to escape Christological issues “by shifting the emphasis to a specific set of conditions” and the refusal to see the “universality of the conditioning process” (Daly 145 1985:79).

Particularisation fails to come to terms with the sexist bias against women (Daly 1985:80).

Thirdly, spiritualisation is used to steer away from the patriarchal implications of Christolatry. Daly rejects the Pauline texts “In Christ there is no male or female” as a spiritualised example and contends that these are not true because Jesus remains a male. For Daly, Christ is synonymous with the name “Male”. Spiritualisation also offers the fallacy of a future, a future wherein women will finally have equality, but spiritualisation detracts from the fact that women are currently still oppressed (Daly 1985:80).

The fourth method is trivialisation, which is accompanied by the aforementioned methods. Daly states: It is possible to universalize, particularize, and spiritualize away the conflict between women’s becoming and Christolatry precisely because female aspirations to humanity are not being taken seriously. Women who raise the problem are frequently told to turn their minds to “more serious questions” (Daly 1985:80-81).

Daly states that cosmic energy is symbolised in the Tree of Life, the Sacred Tree, which is the Goddess, in order to transform her idea into the cross of Jesus Christ. The tree of life belongs to the cult of all Great Mothers and is sacred. The tree, as a symbol, represents not only fertility but also cosmic energy. In Ancient Egypt, art was depicted as the bringing forth of the Sun itself.

To Daly, The Cosmic Tree is a symbol of the Christian cross as a dead wooden rack to which a dying body is fastened with nails; this becomes the torture cross of the entire world of Christianity (Daly 1978:79). Odin, known too as Hanging God, The Dangling One, and Lord of the Gallows was worshipped by the Germans. According to Neumann, Odin facilitated the conversion of Germans to Christianity because of the similarity of their hanged god to the crucified Christ (Neumann 1972:251).

The tree of life, the cross and the gallows tree were all forms of the maternal tree. Neumann analysed the Tree of Live as: Christ, hanging from the tree of death, is the fruit of suffering and hence the pledge of the promised land, the beatitude to come; and at the same time He is the tree of life as the god of the grape. Like 146 Dionysus, he is endendros, the life at work in the tree, and fulfils the mysterious twofold and contradictory nature of the three (Neumann 1972:252).

Daly rejected Neumann’s bland objective scholarly style and questions why he equates the fruit of the tree of death to a pledge of the Promised Land and how Christ can be the life of work in the tree. According to her, the tree is dead and He (Jesus) is on his way to this same state (Daly 1978:80). Daly sees the tree as mysterious but not contradictory. Daly does see a contradiction in the “Reversal Religions reduction/reversal of the Tree of Life” to a torture cross. T

he cross is many things: a bed, Christ’s marriage bed, a crib, a cradle, a nest, a bed of birth and the deathbed (Neumann 1972:256). The femininity of Christ is incorporated in that of Dionysus. This is the role to which patriarchy expects women to conform, therefore the equation of a marriage bed and deathbed makes sense to Daly which she claims to be unintended gallows humour (Daly 1978:81). Daly contends that the Christian myth of Christ devours the Goddess, and that the Goddess, as the Tree of Live, becomes Christ, and as the life at work in the tree, Christ becomes the sap.

Taking into consideration that the tree was the body of the Goddess, Daly claims that the violence of these assimilations can be understood as the gentle Jesus who, when he offers his body to eat and his blood to drink, becomes and plays Mother Goddess. Daly both calls and identifies Jesus as a “fetal-identified male behind the Goddess mask that is saying let me eat and drink you alive – a crude cannibalism and veiled vampirism” (Daly 1978:81).

Daly offers her interpretation of the blood-drinking syndrome of the Christian ritual and explains her views on the origin of the chalice and the belief that the wine it contains transforms into Christ’s blood. Daly states that according to Rich (1976:99) women invented pottery making, and that the cauldron was associated with the Mother Goddess, the Priestess-Potter, the Wisewoman and Maker. When the Church stole the cauldron of women-identified transformating power, it reversed it into the chalice as a symbol of the transforming power of all-male priesthood.

This resulted in patriarchal powers over others in the name of a male “god”. A priest plays at being a 147 priestess, and hides behind her symbol as he attempts to change wine into sacred blood. Daly sees this as the Christian version of “male menstruation”. The chalice becomes a “cannibalistic/necrophagous” ritual and its contents, the blood of Jesus Christ, are consumed by the pseudopriestess (Daly 1978:83). Daly states that in order for the male god to become the Goddess, he has to be reborn. Unlike Dionysus, who was born from the thigh of Zeus, Christ did not require a paternal thigh to be born of, nor did his mother Mary need to drink a portion of his heart as Semele, Dionysus’ mother had to do.

She states that Christ, in the Christian myth, existed in his own incarnation as Christ and that the consubstantial Holy Ghost impregnated Mary spiritually (Daly 1978:83). This, according to Daly, was such a spiritual affair, that Mary remained a virgin, before, during and after his death (Daly 1978:83). In the “Androcratic invasion of the gynocentric realm”, the female presence is replaced by male femininity. This to Daly, is evident in the multiple rebirths of the divine son, such as in his baptism and his resurrection.

These rebirths are also present in the myths of the Goddess. Persephone had to spend three months of each year in the underworld realm of her husband Hades, who raped and abducted her. Daly sees these myths as having been male-manipulated and that they functioned to “legitimate” the transition to patriarchal control (Daly 1978:87). In the Christian myth, the feminine male god replaced the “Daughter/Self” of the Goddess. When he descended to hell, he emerged on his own without any female presence in what Daly calls the “Monogender Male Auto-motherhood” (Daly 1978:87).

Daly calls Jesus’ ascension into heaven “a second growing up”, the rejoining with his father – himself. Like Dionysus’ ascension into heaven where he sat on the right hand of Zeus, Christ, as the Christian Dionysus, has done the same thing. On the basic intentionality of the “Word made Flesh” Daly states: The “Word” is doublespeak that drives women M-A-D, violating cognitive boundaries, preparing the way for a phallotechnic Second 148 Coming. It is the announcement of the ultimate Armageddon, where armies of cloned Jesus Freaks (Christian and/or nonchristian) will range themselves against Hags/Crones, attempting the Final Solution to the “problem” of Female Force (Daly 1978:89).