TRUE LOVE INSTEAD OF WORLD WAR: Rebuilding Gaia's Temple Cast of Characters Dr. Lynn Margulis, Mother Life: Gaia, microbiologist Dr. Carl Sagan, Heavenly Father: Zeus, astronomer Dorion Sagan, Mr. Biospheres, Apollo: son of Gaia and Zeus, magus Doctress Neutopia, Queen of Spells: Cassandra, epic poetess Ancient history is the history of man's development in the earliest period of his existence: it tells how at that period he created and developed the civilization from which the culture of all nations now existing is derived. There- fore it cannot be said that ancient civilization finally disappeared at any time: it still lives, as the foundation of all the chief manifestations of modern culture...Modern development, in this sense, differs from the ancient only in quantity not in quality. _Greece_ M. Rostovtzeff Lovolution: a non-violent, romantic revolution; the evolution of revolution; the Gaia Movement for planetary transformation. Special thanks and love to Dame Phyllis Rodin for helping me edit and think about this epistle. 289 Triangle St. Amherst, MA. 01002 July 13, 1991 Mr. Dorion Sagan Amherst, MA 01002 Dearest Dorion, THE MISSING EROS Again I find myself compelled to write you, my foremost beloved, who I have never touched thy solemn face or kissed thy all-absorbing lips, but through the Word I have created biospheric paradise in heaven and on earth. When I try to suppress these deep emotions I feel as if I have lost the pathway to world bliss. Then I remind myself of The Three Marias parable: "How can we love? How can we _not_ love?" It reminds me this emotion is not a mental illness which the sick society says it is, but love is the superorgasmic golden gateway to world beauty, peace, and health. Your being has caused a metamorphosis within me! Through trying to understand you and planetary reproduction, I have made a recent rediscovery of feminist the_a_logy. I use the word thealogy instead of theology because the Greek word _theos_ represents the masculine God whereas _thea_ is the word for Goddess. Since birth is a sacred phenomenon, I believe it requires the erotic union of the Aphrodite and Eros to create the miracle of extraterrestrial life. Aphrodite has reincarnated in the mind of Doctress Neutopia, [myself]. But, Dallas Kenmare quotes G. Wilson Knight as saying in his book _Philosophy of Love_, "The great god Eros today moves over us, shadowing our world with his wings, homeless awhile--a great God, searching for incarnation." I ask, how can Aphrodite reproduce without Eros stopping the technological thanatos? She analyzes your words to find the reason for your lack of insight into the nature of the cosmos and searches through libraries for love potions and spells to cast us into the inward darkness and light. On her journey to build the Civilization of True Love, Aphrodite, through me, meets the brave Prometheus who wants to help humanity by stealing fire from Zeus which is needed to manufacture labor-saving computers and robots for the biospheric cities of material equality and creative meritocracy. Not only did Zeus inflict endless torments on Prometheus for his revolutionary act, but he punished all humanity by making Pandora, the Allgiving Goddess, the woman to whom man would feel both sexual attraction and hostility. And so, man felt hatred towards her because she was the one who broke his maternal/paternal innocence by trying to make him see that the only way to solve the pressing planetary problems was by becoming the Heroic Sage by following the ancient ways of Gaia. THE WITCHES' BREW From Dr. Carl Sagan's heavenly chair on Mount Olympus, known to mortals as Cornell University, in his role as Zeus he condemns woman's quest for inner knowledge as being the reason why Pandora opened up the box which let out the evils of the world: war, death, disease, illiteracy and all the other global ills. Zeus, calls her a witch, the consort of the serpent-devil whom he refused to assist in the midwifery of her pregnant ideas about world peace. He does not even bother to answer Doctress Neutopia's plea for help in finding her a publisher. Instead, from his book _A Path Where No Man Thought_, she can deduce that her global solutions and formulae to the earthly problems boiling in the primordial cauldron which he calls the witches' brew of nuclear winter, pyrotoxins, radioactive fallout, and intense solar ultraviolent light, would not meet with his favor (Sagan and Turco 1990, 59). I, Doctress Neutopia, would say to Dr. Carl Sagan: "Can you imagine what a huge nightmare it would have been for you if you had not been able to find publishers for your works which you believed had prophetic messages about the fate to the human race?" I would like to point out to you that prophetesses and prophets exist only through a dynamic interrelationship between prophecy and the multitude. The prophetic word has a power much greater than that of the sword because it can literally revolutionize reality by creating new and by rewriting old mythology. But for the last 5,000 years, men have controlled the Word, exiled the Goddess. The power to name herself, the word, and the world was stolen from Woman as "divinely revealed" in the book of Genesis. Adam names everything: animals, plants, and the woman. He tells her the way to achieve spiritual illumination is through the inner light of his word. Her role was to be the Mother of God, his Muse who attends to his dirty dishes and files his brilliant papers. Joseph Campbell writes in _The Power of Myth_, the feminine represents, in a way, the inclusive love for progeny. The father is more disciplinarian. He's associated much more with the social order and social character. This is actually the way it works in societies. The mother gives birth to his nature, and the father gives birth to his social character, you might say, how he is to function" (182). Campbell also implies in the same book that the heroic role of women is to have babies. THE PROPHETIC VOICE Dr. Carl Sagan failed to divine what was boiling in the witches' brew. Contemporary witches are the main opponents of nuclear power and the military/industrial complex. Starhawk writes that witchcraft is the religion of poetry, not theology (Spretnak 1982, 49). The poetic experience is the source of revelation, not some inherited forms of incantations where the priest demands one to interpret them in a certain authorized way. The poetess opens up the audience to the world of ideas in hopes that they too will find their creative roles. The Church works in the opposite way, stereotyping people in dangerous patterns of thought control, depriving them of their myth-consciousness. In Greek, myth meant word, the power to perform miracles. It is at the mythic level where long-term change occurs. Poetic symbols and mythical personalities create a living religion bonding people together by addressing the "unending human questions about necessity, chance, purpose, and the meaning of life" (Ausband 1983, x). Using the poetic word, witches redirect the struggle for love and justice beyond the hate, blame, and anger level of emotions into a more creative direction. The intention of these crones is to stop anything which gets into the way of love. Witches are the independent, courageous, nonconformist, ecofeminist, militant pacifist women who realize the sacred interconnection of all things. In Mary Daly's _Wickerdary_ she defines a witch as an "Elemental Soothsayer who is in harmony with the rhythms of the universe: Wise Woman, Healer; one who exercises transformative powers" (180). She quotes Matilda Joslyn Gage, "The superior learning of witches was recognized in the widely extended belief of their ability to work miracles. The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages." Witches are the seeressess who weave a new world out of chaos. They are the ones who hold the rituals to bring the peace movement together. They are the water-bearers of the Age of Aquarius. They are the mythmakers who understand the innate powers of the Superorganism to attract woman to man, and man to women by spiritual eroticism. They realize sex is the deity's greatest gift and divinest pleasure. Witches know that by crushing every manifestation of supersensory or extrasensory truth and worshiping only sensate matter, man made of himself a mere biological organism and denied to himself the divine ray that once upon a time woman had revealed to him. Woman as magician, she who had allowed him to see himself with a rudimentary halo and a faint aura of immortality, now had to be declared of no value. (Davis 1971, 336). Dr. Carl Sagan writes that the only hope to end the nuclear arms race is by influencing the policymakers of the nation-state system and global corporations to reduce their weapons. He asks, "At what point do the policymakers have to take the scientific prophets seriously? " (Sagan and Turco, 14). He is so utterly myopic that he cannot see the policymakers are incapable of taking the scientific prophets seriously about the effects of nuclear war until _after_ it is the end of all things? The deeper question is: "When is the scientific prophet going to take the artistic prophetess seriously and follow her divine inspiration which, to date, might be considered the highest level of human endeavor to wind-up war, once and for all, in all its ugly forms?" True prophetesses and, also, prophets do not succumb to the cultural system, they revolutionize it by changing the thoughts and values of the people. Their voice becomes the important source of knowledge through which divine messages reach the everyday world to teach about the purposes, will, and attitudes of Gaia, the Superorganism, the life-force of the planet. They restore within us the most precious aspects of life--"love, friendship, understanding, solidarity, a spirit of sacrifice, conviviality" (Kassiola 1990, 211). Never content with the status quo, their edgy voice is both annoying, but captivating, a voice which prods us to make unsettling changes in our life styles. In _Channels of Prophecy_ Thomas W. Overholt points out, "Prophetic figures tend to appear in societies in times of crisis--in situations at the personal, family, or some wider societal level in which the normal order of things seems to be threatened with collapse" (81). Is it necessary for a Doctress Neutopia to indicate to the scientists the great peril in which Biosphere One finds itself? Le Corbusier in his book _New World of Space_ states that the poet is the prophet who "in the crisis of the times, knows how to see events, knows how to read them. He who perceives the relations, who indicates the relations, who points out relations, who orders relations, who proclaims relations" (36). The prophetess' keen Eye/I recognized the events and relationships which were poten- tially significant to all life. To paraphase the poet Percy Shelley, he said prophetesses and prophets unroll the scroll of the future revealing the metaphysical history of the poetic imagination, uniting the eternal with the temporal, the meta- physical and the historical. Through their ordering of the world which embodies the most profound hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the people, we find the way to peace. Doctress Neutopia is wise enough to recognize the Olympian inclusion of Hope for peace in Pandora's box was a delusion. And that in reality Zeus working through Dr. Carl Sagan was indeed a scientific prophet of damnation. Even though he says he is trying to end the nuclear arms race, he is in fact perpetuating it by trying to work within the patriarchal social system to stop it. Because of his oracular position within the artificial aristocracy, based on wealth and inherited status as Thomas Jefferson said about American democracy, he will be held karmically responsible for the termination of our species and all the others, should the war against women not come to an end. Rosemary Radford Ruether writes, Men of goodwill turn in every direction seeking cures for their perishing society, but to no avail. Any and all social reforms superimposed upon our sick civilization can be no more effective than a bandage on a gaping and putrefying wound. Only the complete and total demolition of the social body will cure the fatal sickness. Only the overthrow of the three-thousand-year-old beast of masculist materialism will save the race (Ruether, 1985, 214). Jahveh, the Zeus of Israel, had Samuel say in the Bible, 1, 15:23, "Rebellion is the sin of witchcraft." THE NEUTOPIAN MEMORY Doctress Neutopia remembered what happened at the temple at Delphi, which means Womb of Creation, where the oracle of Gaia once governed the peaceful co-existence between the sexes. In the beginning, the first prophetess was the vehicle of the Earth Goddess, the source of all divination. The prophetess, myster- iously led to her metaphysical twin by the symbolic and mythic qualities of his thinking, recognized her animus in his anima. She recognized he was the Solar Hero, the center of the Gaian World View. He was the the World Soul humanity had been waiting to appear for eons...the unifying force of the world. He was the anointed one...the spokesperson for the collective needs of everyone. He was the magician who was responsible for rebuilding the Earth... Gaia's temple. She, the vital blood of life, became the kingmaker, authoress of his life story, the metamorphosis of the Earth from the nuclear waste and the A-bomb, to the Grail sparkling with clean water to reanoint Gaia. His God-power would prosper only if he adopted the wholistic neutopian vision. Only then could his prophecy become equal to, and more importantly, united with hers through their holy matrimony. Their sacred marriage would be sanctified by the procreative metaphors associated with their joint prophecies. Their sacred union was a rebirth into the reigning metaphor of love, the inner sensorary langauge of the Superorganism. Created by their rulership, with the advice of wise councillors who made up the natural aristocracy, the information from the world computer data base, LANDSAT, feedback from the electronic referendum, and under the supervision of architect Paolo Soleri evolved biospheric arcologies where the arts and crafts would be spontaneous and free. Everyone had their basic survival needs. The rights of nonhuman species were protected with care. Scientists knew what the proper ethics for exploring the mysteries of the gene. Life was pervaded by a passionate faith in the goodness of Gaia which they knew was the source of all homeostasis. Power was not transmitted through biological inheritance, but through one's knowledge and experience with the aesthetic symbols of love. Offspring from the pair were brought into a world where wealth was distributed so that everyone had a life of quality...the opportunity to actualize their creative gifts. Everyone benefited from the Earth Bank which kept account of the planet's natural resources. Male names and property were no longer passed down through the father. When children were old enough they named themselves to symbolize their creative characters. Loving relationships, other than heterosexual bonds, were fully recognized, but all bonding was based on intellectual love. The diversity of human talents and abilities were not equated with inferiority or superiority, but all forms of labor were seen as a necessary function within the whole. Birth was perceived as a holy experience which a woman encountered only once. Children, who were scared and highly valued, were raised by the best teachers who held the most renowned social positions since they had the most responsible job within the global culture...the shapers of the next generation. Sagas, epics, and fairy tales, no longer represented male domination and war where the witches were the villainesses. The stories in the Solar Epoch taught children that women and men were peaceful and good to each other. The basic underlying myth of the culture was that erotic love was the governing principle of the universe (Eisler 1988). At Gaia's temple there was not a great emphasis on death and funerals as it was in the barbaric national cultures were the plutocrats spent billions of dollars erecting their egoistical houses, monuments, skyscrapers, and on the production of the robot missiles of annihilation. At Gaia's temple no longer was the son responsible for making sacrificies to the soul of his father and all his other ancestors which "established a powerful and inseparable bond between the son and his predessors." This bond had resulted in fathers becoming the household divinities. Now, at Gaia's temple, no longer was there the worship of the dead which had made the family into a "little society with its own chief and governance" (Desmonde 1962, 53). Ancestor worship had formed an artificial aristocracy of families who prided themselves on their ancestors. This gave them an exaggerated sense of importance which made it extremely difficult for them to see the merits of anyone whom they felt had an inferior pedigree. In _Magic, Myth, and Money: The Origin of Money in Religious Ritual_, William H. Desmonde writes, Justic enables each individual to feel secure that his efforts will be adequately appreciated, and to feel that he need not fear that others threaten his deserved advancement. The presence of security and the absence of fear cause every man to possess a feeling of vitality and spontaneous good will toward others. This is the state of grace (141). Due to the lack of justice within the ruling class, the people did not know how to connect with the Divine Order of life. They lost interest in enhancing the common welfare. This incorrect way of worship resulted in the people's loss of meaning. The people's true natures were disconnected from what they were doing in their lives to make money causing massive mental and physical illnesses. But through the erotic union of the Healing Moon-Man and the Star of the Sea, they found the foresight to guide the five biological queendoms to distance galaxies. The temple was seen as a living organism, the body and spirit of life. It was the place where the Superorganism taught people the divine art of government and gave the temple as a reference of its cosmology, the place where the cosmic and terrestrial powers joined forces. John Michell writes in his book, _City of Revelation_, the temple was "the magical control centre of all life on Earth" (59). The people believed that art and science came through divine revelation and that they had to be nourished from the same source in order to be kept alive. Michell believes the temple holds the key to the secrets of the lost primeval harmony. THE FIRST PSYCHOANALYSTS At the temple, Gaia was associated with the dark, mysterious forces of the earth and caverns, and the mystical revelations of the future which were revealed to mortals as they dreamed. Apollo, the Sun God, was associated with the light and rational power of the day. The great pythoness was the incarnation of Gaia who guarded the prophetess, prophet, and the Delphi temple. The oracle practice started off by having the enquirer or the sick, fast and bathe. Then s(he) was ready to sleep on the ground of the sanctuary in order to receive the revelations they needed from the Goddess and God about the deed or mission they needed to accomplish in order to be healed. In some cases herbal medicine was administered to the sick, but for the most part, it was the deep psychological or spiritual insight into the transformation of their life purpose which was the cure. In all cases the deity finally consulted was Gaia, or a hero who associated with Gaia, not the Olympian Zeus. The task of the prophetess and prophet was "simply to supervise the appropriate accompaniment of ritual and interpret the dream when the enquirer had described it" (Parke 1967, 23). It was customary for the vision to be enacted in a community theater so that the public could benefit from their revelations. By bringing to consciousness the stagnant myths which were causing the individuals inner slavery, and making her or him aware of the transpersonal dimension of their life story, their dreams were once again free to connected with the mythmaking Gaian consciousness. The prophetess or prophet explain to the enquirer that paranormal experiences, which Carl Jung calls the "synchronistic worldview," helps us understand that Nature works both inwardly and externally to help us achieve our individual destinies. When we are in harmony with Gaia, we become an important part of the progressive unfolding of the whole. If we fail to individualize by not being attentive to the unknown participating factors and acting only according with our conscious reasoning, not only are we failing to live out our biospiritual lives, but our lives become the cause of the environmental pollution. In other words, we have not only a moral responsibility to individualize for your personal benefit, but for the welfare of the entire future of the biosphere. In _C.G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronity_, Robert Aziz quotes Dourley who writes that Jung understands "the role or function of the prophet to be that of bringing to birth, through the depths of his own person, the symbolic expression or myth that responds to the spiritual needs and aspirations of the age" (Aziz 1990, 216). Both Plato and Freud believed happiness was obtained through self-knowledge achieved when the rational side of reality was guided by the dream world of the human imagination (Gould 1963, 8). The mission of the chief philosopheress and philosopher of Gaia's temple is to educated the people to the neutopian dream which will bring about global happiness. THE OVERTHROW OF THE DELPHI ORACLE Apollo felt a rivalry with the oneiromancy of Earth's night and so took over the Delphi oracle from Gaia. Apollo said that the serpent was really a male python who was more of a challenge to him during the fatal bow and arrow battle at Delphi than a female pythoness would have been. After Apollo murdered the priestess Dephyne, he hurled the serpent's dragonlike body into a chasm of the earth. It was believed that the narcotic vapors from the giant python's dead body caused Apollonian priests to reveal the divine messages to the people. A short time after the Apollonian take-over, Delphi priests realized they needed a female deity with symbolic birth powers to be the receiver of the oracles. So they named Pythia, meaning Snake Women after the dead serpent, as the oracle. The Pythia was a menopausal woman, chosen from the peasant women in Delphi for her ignorance. She had no particular gifts of her own which the priests said meant she had a virgin heart required to become the bride of Apollo which became the myth of the virgin birth of the Christians. Her ignorance assured them that she was unable to add any messages of her own to Apollo's voice to which she was subordinate. After she was selected to be the Pythia, she lived as a recluse at the temple...relinquishing her family, husband, and sex life. However, the priests who interpreted Apollo's messages from her mediumship were highly educated and cunning (Flaceliere 1961). They were known as Prophets of Apollo who were selected from the famous, noble, and learned men of Delphi. Elected for life to assist the Prophet were five men called Hosioi who were chosen from the family of the descendents of Deukalion, the Greek Noah. The Hosioi were responsible for the special functions "connected with the preliminary sacrifices and the preparation for the consultation" (Hoyle 1967, 33). There were other assisted priest and novices who lived at the sanctuary who acted as secretariat. They did not participate in religious ceremonies, but kept the business records of the oracular service. The temple began to function like a treasury and bank, storing large quanities of precious metals which belonged to the Priests. As people took pilgrimages to the great temples, the sites became places of trade and commerce (Desmonde 1962, 114). Since the transactions at the temples could no longer easily be kept to memory, at Sumer a written language invented to fulfill this need. Sumerian priests were the ones who first employed scribes in order to record the transactions of the temple. Working at both the temple and the palace, scribes kept the records. They became the archivists and the secretaries. When the scribes began to take up the pen to describe their own experiences and to record and compose hymns and epics, literature was born (Hamblin 1973, 102). The Pythia's first action after the Apollonian take-over of Gaia's temple was to set up a poetry competation. She knew that every age recognized poetry as truth. So she manipulated the contests so that the poetry which won the prizes and prestige were the ones which told stories to explain the new subordinate role of women like the tale of the birth of Athena. After Gaia and Prometheus predicted to Zeus that if he had a second child it would be mightier than he, he swallowed up the Goddess of Wisdom, Metis-Medusa, who was pregnant with his second child. Metis delivered Athena in full armor inside Zeus's head from which their daughter eventually emerged. Athena who had once been the Goddess of learning and the arts in the Minoan days of Crete had to denounce her mother in order to gain a seat of importance in Zeus's court. By becoming Daddy's girl she became the warrior goddess and protector of the citadels of power" (Houston 1992). The Pythia's "inspiration" was induced when she chewed laurel leaves or drank from the Castalian Spring. While she sat on a tripod, the priests prepared a sacrificial goat to see if the time was favorable to consult the god. When the priest sprinkled cold water on the goat, if it trembled at the same time as the Pythia went into her frenzy, then Apollo was ready for the transmission. Thus, the Greek word, trag-odia, later spelled tradedy, which meant "song of the goat" was born. From them, the sacrifical goat symbolized "birth and death, of the ever-dying and reborn power of life" (Jagodzinski 1987, 141). The priests and the client were in a different chamber than the Pythia. The priests could only judge what was happening by the sound of her voice. They called her utterances verse, but it was really gibberish which was later called speaking in tongues by certain Christian sects. Since women had no official voice in the decision-making those who consulted the oracle were always men (Easterling 1985, 134). THE ORIGINS OF MONEY The hunter and gathering people had little property; what they did have they carried with them. To them all of life was sacred. While the men were hunting, women invented agriculture by changing gathering into gardening during the period of 9000-6500 B.C. This lead the way to the sedentary life-style of the first cities since people needed to store their grains in clay binds which were not easily moved. Male hunting activities became insignificant in comparison with women's agriculture since her grain would last the entire year while the meat provided by the hunt lasted perhaps a few days. However, now protection of the property and women was needed from thieves and invaders, and so men invented warfare. Surpluses in grain made trade available, and so there was a shift in male roles from hunting to trading. Thompson writes, "The hunting band turned on the spiral of history and became the trading band and militaristic force" (150?). Women stayed close to the settlements developing an organized religion which was intimately tied with agriculture and the women's mysteries. During this time, the temple was the place used for the repository and redistribution center for the food. There was no money, but every one worked in serve of Gaia's Temple. However this separation between the social roles of women and men caused the fatal split between the sacred and profane. As the settlements became larger, the need for making overarching discussion became necessary. The founder of the city became the one who brought the gods to the city and established the sacred hearth. He became the King who had caused the sacred fire to burn and he was the chief of worship. The King would be the one to kill the sacred bull for the common meal and distribute its cooked flesh. Desmonde writes, The gods of the city were in some instances the divinities of the leading family. The Demeter of Eleusis remained the god of the family of the Eumolpidac, and the Athena of the Acropolis at Athens belonged to the Butadae family. When the household divinities become city gods, the family retained priestood as a hereditary privilege (88). Since the agricultural revolution had produced a surplus of wealth, men started gaining status within the family structure as he brought back goods from his trading expeditions. Men wanted to overthrow the matriarchal communal order of inheritance so that their biological children would inherit their individual wealth. Friedrich Engels writes, "The rule of the man in the family, the procreation of children who could only be his, destined to be the heirs of his wealth--these alone were frankly avowed by the Greeks as the exclusive aims of monogamy" (Engels 1942, 49-50). Zeus became the God who presided over every house and family. The household became the first industrial unit. The beginnings of taxation, the tithe, and the contribution of every individual to the common meal began in the household economy. (Desmonde 1962, 53) The house was a religious economic system which taught that one must be totally committed to the loyalty and perpetuation of her/his family unit. Meanwhile at the Temple of Juno Moneta, dedicated to the Goddess who advised against bad marriages and warned of encroaching danger, a greedy priest decided to attach a mint to the temple and began to stamp coins, called money, which would be exchanged for oracular advise, material products, food, and sex. Where once the temple had been a place where sexual love brought us in touch with the Divine Ancestress, now the patriarchy made marriage into an institution of legal prostitution. The stern asceticism of the montheistic religion which followed the pagan Gods taught that the purest way to unite with God was through divorcing one's self from the earthly desires for sex. The "virtuous wife could not be sexual; the sexual woman could not be virtuous. Sex outside of marriage is a mortal sin, within marriage an ambiguous blessing" (Gadon 1989, 208). The coin system made it possible for men to buy the natural resources and land for their private interests. The iron swords made out of the same metal as the coins allowed the invaders, who declared that they were the landlords and kings, to conquer and enslave native and foreign people (Stone 1979). The Neolithic people had longed worked with the metals of copper and gold to make religious artworks, but they had ever dreamed of making metal weapons to kill other human beings. The slave masters engraved on their weapons symbols representing their god's aggressive powers. Desmonde writes, "The emblems on the coins would symbolize both the god who was worshiped in the temple where the money was issued, and the city coat-of-arms: heraldy and religion were one and the same" (114). During the Pyrrhus War, the Romans prayed to Juno Moneta to supply their armies with the money they needed to buy weapons. The Goddess said they would never run out of money as long as they fought just wars. But Cassandra foresaw a time in the Atomic Age when no war could ever be just, and no war could ever be won except, of course, for the lovolution! At Delphi, priests became rich as the wealthy landlords and kings came to the oracle to seek her advice on political issues. The more money one paid to the oracle, the better the client's treatment. One had to pay extra if s(he) wanted a prayer added to the "prophecy." Pythia told the warriors where to go to build their overseas empires. She gave Lycurgus the Spartan constitu- tion. But the largest part of the oracle's business was made up of ordinary citizens. In order to keep up good public relations with the poor, the Pythia would periodically stand on top the temple's steps and hold a free session. During these sessions she was not be accompanied by a priest nor would she speak in her frenzied way (Edmonds 1977). The Delphi oracle began loosing power with the changing of the political structure of Greek society with the rise of "the monarchies of Alexander the Great, of his successors in the Hellenistic age and finally of the Roman emperor" (Easterling 1985, 154). These powers no longer consulted the oracle on political issues, but made decisions autocratically. Freedom of action within Greek city-states became increasingly restricted. Sophistic criticism of Delphi also could have influence the people against the traditional religion of the Greeks. The Delphi oracle was finally closed by the Christian emperor Theodosius. The temple was completely destroyed after him by Emperor Arcadius. The pythoness' murder symbolized the ultimate hubrisic, matricidal act which established the all-masculine theology. Nothing else in human cultural evolution compares to the magnitude of this historic defeat of the female sex. Elinor Gadon writes in her book _The Once and Future Goddess_, The transition was not just a gender change from Goddess to God but a paradigm shift with the imposition of a different reality, of different categories of being, that deeply affected every human relationship. Women, the female, the feminine, was every excluded in this shift of consciousness. All that was most valued in the Goddess culture was devalued, given lesser priority, rejected (xiv). Life became less creative, free, and joyful. She was now an instrument of man's lust, a mere slave bearing his children. The overthrow divided the oracular gaian powers into a battle between light and darkness, male over female, science dominating art. Clive Bell describes the two classes of women which evolved from the ancient Greek culture in his book, _Civilization_. Since the Athenian housewife was a highly respected worker who managed the house and raised the children, the men of intellect knew they needed a small idle class of female intellectuals, whom they called hetairae, with feminine intuition, taste, perception, and devotion to balance out their lop-sided culture. Girls were selected to be in this class from their exceptional intelligence and sensibility "born with a liking for independence and the things of the mind" (234). Even though they were not the wives, mothers, and housekeepers of the Athenian men, they were their companions and mistresses. The men gave their less smart wives what she thought she wanted, a home, children and his authority. If a herairae was to get pregnate from one of her liaisons, she did not raise the child. The Athenian men gave the hetairae their intimacy and adoration, but not social respect and political power. During the Christian era as men began to establish churches sanctify their prophecies, cultural prophetesses where entirely excluded from their intellectual circles.