Mirrors

  HINDUS

  Mitra, mother of the sun and the water and of all sources of life, was a goddess from birth. When she arrived in India from Babylonia or Persia, the goddess had to become a god.

  A number of years have passed since Mitra’s arrival, and women are still not very welcome in India. There are fewer women than men, in some regions eight for every ten. Many are those who never arrive because they die in their mothers’ wombs, and countless more are smothered at birth.

  Prevention is the best medicine, since women can be very dangerous. As a sacred text of the Hindu tradition warns: “A lascivious woman is poison, serpent, and death, all in one.”

  Others are virtuous, though proper habits are being lost. Tradition orders widows to throw themselves into the fire where the dead husband’s body burns, but today few if any are willing to obey that command.

  For centuries or millennia they were willing, and they were many. In contrast, there is no instance ever in the whole history of India of a husband leaping into the pyre of his deceased wife.

  CHINESE

  About a thousand years ago, Chinese goddesses stopped being goddesses.

  Male power, which by then had taken over the earth, was also aligning the heavens. The goddess Xi He was split in two and the goddess Nu Gua was relegated to the status of mere woman.

  Xi He had been mother of the suns and the moons. She gave comfort and succor to her sons and daughters at the end of their exhausting voyages through day and night. When she was divided into Xi and He, each of them a he-god, she was no longer a she and she disappeared.

  Nu Gua did not disappear but she was reduced to a mortal.

  In other times she had been the founder of all that lives:

  she had cut off the legs of the great cosmic tortoise to give the world and the sky columns to rest on,

  she had saved the world from disasters of fire and water,

  she had invented love, lying with her brother behind a tall screen of grasses,

  and she had created nobles and plebeians by modeling the higher ones of yellow clay and the lower ones of mud from the river.

  ROMANS

  Cicero explained that women ought to be ruled by male guardians “due to the weakness of their intellect.”

  Roman women went from one pair of male hands to another. The father who married off his daughter could cede her to her husband as property or tender her to him as a loan. In either case, what counted was the dowry, the patrimony, the inheritance. For pleasure there were slave women.

  Like Aristotle, Roman physicians believed that women, all of them, patricians, plebeians, or slaves, had fewer teeth and smaller brains than men, and that on the days they menstruated, their mirrors darkened with a reddish tinge.

  Pliny the Elder, the empire’s greatest scientific authority, demonstrated that a menstruating woman soured new wine, sterilized crops, caused seeds and fruits to wither, killed grafted plants and swarms of bees, tarnished bronze, and made dogs go crazy.

  GREEKS

  A headache may give birth to a goddess. Athena sprouted from the throbbing head of her father, Zeus, whose temples split open to deliver her. She was born without a mother.

  Some time later she cast the deciding vote when a tribunal of the gods on Olympus had to judge a difficult case: to avenge their father, Electra and her brother Orestes had chopped off their mother’s head with an ax.

  The Furies prosecuted. They demanded the murderers be stoned to death because the life of a queen is sacred, and killing one’s mother cannot be forgiven.

  Apollo took up the defense. He maintained that the accused were children of an unworthy mother and that maternity did not matter in the least. A mother, argued Apollo, is nothing more than an inert furrow where the man throws his seed.

  Of the thirteen gods of the jury, six voted to condemn and six to absolve.

  Athena would break the tie. She voted against the mother she never had and gave eternal life to the power of men in Athens.

  AMAZONS

  The Amazons, fearsome women, fought against Hercules when he was Heracles, and against Achilles in the Trojan War. They hated men and cut off their right breasts so their arrows would fly true.

  The great river that cuts across the body of America from one side to the other is called Amazon, thanks to Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana.

  He was the first European to navigate its length, from the inner depths of the land to the outer reaches of the sea. He returned to Spain minus an eye and said women warriors, who fought in the nude and roared like wild beasts, had riddled his brigantines with arrows. When they hungered for love, they kidnapped men, kissed them all night long, and strangled them at dawn.

  And to burnish his story with the luster of the Greeks, Orellana said they were the very Amazons who worshipped the goddess Diana, and with their name he baptized the river where they reigned.

  Centuries have passed. The Amazons were never heard from again. But the river still bears their name, and though poisoned daily by pesticides, chemical fertilizers, mercury from mines, and oil from ships, its waters are still the richest in the world in fish, birds, and stories.

  WHEN THE LIVER WAS THE HOME OF THE SOUL

  In earlier times, long before cardiologists and balladeers, matters of the heart could well have been called matters of the liver.

  The liver lay at the heart of everything.

  The Chinese believed the liver was where the soul slept and dreamt.

  In Egypt, its custody was in the hands of Amset, son of the god Horus, and in Rome none less than Jupiter, father of the gods, cared for it.

  The Etruscans read the future in the livers of the animals they sacrificed.

  In Greek tradition, Prometheus stole fire from the gods for us mortals. Then Zeus, top dog on Mount Olympus, punished him by chaining him to a rock where every day a vulture devoured his liver. Not his heart, his liver. Every day Prometheus’s liver grew back and that was proof of his immortality.

  ORIGIN OF MISOGYNY

  As if such torment were not enough, Zeus also punished Prometheus’s betrayal by creating the first woman. And he sent us the present.

  According to the poets of Olympus, her name was Pandora. She was lovely and curious and rather harebrained.

  Pandora arrived on earth holding in her arms a large box. Inside the box, captive, were the sorrows. Zeus forbade her to open it, but barely had she arrived among us than she succumbed to temptation and took off the lid.

  Out flew the woes and stung us. Thus came death to the world, as did old age, illness, war, work . . .

  According to the priests of the Bible, a woman named Eve, created by another god on another cloud, also brought us nothing but calamities.

  HERACLES

  Zeus was quite the punisher. For behaving badly, he sold his son Heracles into slavery.

  Heracles, who in Rome would be called Hercules, was bought by Omphale, queen of Lydia, and in her service he destroyed a giant serpent, not a tall order for one who had been chopping up snakes since he was a baby. And he captured the twins who turned into flies at night and robbed people of their sleep.

  Queen Omphale was unimpressed by such feats. She wanted a lover, not a bodyguard.

  They almost always stayed indoors. The few times they emerged, he wore a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, and brightly colored underwear that did not last because his muscles burst the seams. And she wore the skin of the lion he had strangled with his bare hands in Nemea.

  Word went around the kingdom that when he misbehaved she slapped him on the ass with her sandal. And that in his free time Heracles lay at his owner’s feet and busied himself sewing and weaving, while the women of the court fanned him, groomed him, perfumed him, spoon-fed him, and served him wine by the sip.

  The vacation lasted three years, until Zeus the father ordered Heracles back to work to finish the twelve labors of the strongest man in the world.

  ORIGIN OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION

  T
hey needed a god of trade. From his throne on Olympus, Zeus surveyed his family. He did not have to ponder long. Hermes was the god for the job.

  Zeus gave him sandals with little gold wings and put him in charge of promoting the exchange of goods, the signing of treaties, and the safeguarding of free trade.

  Hermes, who would become Mercury in Rome, was chosen because he was the best liar.

  ORIGIN OF THE POSTAL SERVICE

  Two thousand five hundred years ago, horses and cries carried messages to far-off lands.

  Cyrus the Great, son of the house of Achaemenes, prince of Anzan, king of Persia, organized a postal system in which the Persian cavalry’s best horsemen rode relay night and day.

  The express service, the most expensive, worked by shouts. From voice to voice, words crossed the mountains.

  ECHO

  In earlier times, the nymph Echo knew how to speak. And she spoke with such grace that her words seemed always new, never before spoken by any mouth.

  But the goddess Hera, Zeus’s legal spouse, cursed her during one of her frequent fits of jealousy. And Echo suffered the worst of all punishments: she was deprived of her own voice.

  Ever since, unable to speak, she can only repeat.

  Nowadays, that curse is looked on as a virtue.

  THALES

  Two thousand six hundred years ago in the city of Miletus, an absentminded genius named Thales liked to go for a stroll at night to gaze at the stars, and as a result he frequently fell into the ditch.

  Perhaps by asking the stars, Thales discovered that death is not an end but a transformation, and that water is the origin and meaning of all life. Not gods, water. Earthquakes happen because the sea moves and disturbs the land, not because of Poseidon’s tantrums. The eye sees not by divine grace, but by reflecting reality the way the river reflects the bushes on its banks. And eclipses occur, not because the sun hides from the wrath of Olympus, but because the moon covers the sun.

  Thales, who had learned to think in Egypt, accurately predicted eclipses, measured with precision the distance to approaching ships on the high seas, and calculated the exact height of the Keops Pyramid by the shadow that it cast. One of the most famous theorems is attributed to him, as well as four more, and it is even said that he discovered electricity.

  But perhaps his greatest feat was of a different kind: to live godless, naked of any religious comfort, never giving an inch.

  ORIGIN OF MUSIC

  When Orpheus caressed the strings of the lyre, the oak trees in the woods of Thrace danced by virtue of his melodies.

  When Orpheus embarked with the Argonauts, the rocks heard his music, a language where all languages meet, and their vessel was saved from shipwreck.

  When the sun rose, Orpheus’s lyre greeted it from the peak of Mount Pangaeum and the two chatted as equals, light to light, because his music also set the air on fire.

  Zeus sent a bolt of lightning to punish the author of such audacities.

  DIVINE MONOPOLY

  The gods will not abide competition from vulgar and common earthlings.

  We owe them humility and obedience. We were made by them, they claim; heavenly censors quashed the rumor that they were made by us.

  When the Mayan gods realized we could see beyond the horizon, they threw dust in our eyes. And the Greek gods blinded Phineus, king of Salmydessus, when they learned he could see beyond time.

  Lucifer was the favorite archangel of the god of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims. When he tried to raise his throne higher than the stars, that god turned him to ash, consuming him in the fire of his own beauty.

  The same god banished Adam and Eve, the first people, the ones with no belly buttons, because they wanted to know divine glory. And he punished the builders of the Tower of Babel for committing the insolence of trying to reach up to heaven.

  THANKS FOR THE PUNISHMENT

  The tower that symbolized the sin of human arrogance rose in Babylon, the cursed city known in the Bible as “harlot and mother of harlots.”

  Heaven’s wrath did not delay: God condemned Babylonians to speak in many tongues so no one would ever understand them, and the tower was left half-finished for all time.

  According to the ancient Hebrews, the flowering of human languages was divine punishment.

  Perhaps, but in his desire for rebuke, God saved us from the boredom of a single tongue.

  ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES

  According to the ancient Mexicans, the story was different. They told of the mountain Chicomóztoc, which stood where the sea split in two, and had seven caves in its bowels.

  In each of the seven caves reigned a god.

  Each of the first peoples of Mexico were modeled from the dirt of one of the seven caves, kneaded with blood from that cave’s god.

  Little by little, these peoples sprouted from the mountainside.

  Each still speaks the language of the god of its cave.

  That is why languages are sacred, and diverse are the melodies of speech.

  ALL THE RAINS

  The god of the Hebrews was displeased by the behavior of his children. As retribution, a flood engulfed all human flesh and the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky.

  Noah, the only just man, had the privilege of building an ark of wood three stories high to save his family and a male-female couple from each of the species that populated the world.

  The great flood drowned the rest.

  Those expelled from the ark also merited death: abnormal couples like the horse and the mule, or the bitch in love with the wolf, and the males who ignored nature’s hierarchy and were dominated by females.

  RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF RACISM

  Noah got drunk celebrating the ark’s arrival at Mount Ararat.

  When he came to, he was incomplete. According to one of the many versions of the Bible, his son Ham had castrated him as he slept. In that version God then cursed Ham and his sons, and the sons of his sons, condemning them to slavery for centuries upon centuries.

  But none of the many versions of the Bible say Ham was black. Africa did not sell slaves when the Bible was written, and Ham’s skin did not begin to darken until much later on, perhaps in the eleventh or twelfth century, after the Arabs launched the slave trade in the southern part of the desert. By the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, once slavery had become the biggest business of Europe, Ham was utterly black.

  The slave trade enjoyed divine sanction and eternal life from that point forward. Reason in the service of religion, religion in the service of oppression: since the slaves were black, Ham must have been black. And his children, also black, were born to be slaves because God is never wrong.

  And Ham and his sons, and the sons of his sons, would have kinky hair, bloodshot eyes, and swollen lips. They would go about nude, exposing their scandalous penises. They would have a taste for theft, would hate their owners, would never tell the truth. And they would dedicate the time they should be sleeping to nasty things.

  SCIENTIFIC ORIGIN OF RACISM

  “Caucasian race” is the name of the white minority that sits at the summit of humanity’s hierarchy.

  The christening occurred in 1775 at the hands of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.

  The zoologist believed the Caucasus was the cradle of human civilization and that all intelligence and beauty originated there. Against all evidence, the term remains in use to this day.

  Blumenbach collected two hundred and forty-five skulls, which provided the justification for the European right to humiliate all others.

  He saw humanity as a five-story pyramid.

  On top, the whites.

  Over the next three floors, the races of dirty skin marred original purity: Australian Aborigines, American Indians, yellow Asians. Underneath them all, deformed without and within, were the blacks of Africa.

  Big-S Science has always put black people in the basement.

  In 1863, the Anthropological Society of London concluded that blacks were intellect
ually inferior to whites, and only Europeans had the ability to “humanize and civilize” them. Europe dedicated its best energies to this noble mission but did not succeed. Nearly a century and a half later, in 2007, an American, James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, confirmed that blacks were still less intelligent.

  THE LOVE OF LOVES

  King Solomon sang to the most womanly of his women. He sang to her body and to the door to her body and to the lushness of the shared bed.

  The Song of Songs is not the least like the other books of the Bible of Jerusalem. Why is it there?

  According to the rabbis, it is an allegory of God’s love for Israel. According to the priests, a jubilant homage to Christ’s marriage to the Church. But not a single verse mentions God, much less Christ or the Church, which emerged long after the Song was sung.

  It seems more likely that this encounter between a Jewish king and a black woman was a celebration of human passion and of the diversity of our colors.