Rise of the Matriarchy

Kamala Harris depicted above as the Hindi Goddess Durga

In a surprise/not surprised move, President Joe Biden announced his departure from the 2024 campaign for the presidency of these United States of America. He made the announcement on his personal twit-X account. In a tactically-timed move... President Biden made the announcement on Sunday, July 21... just days after the Republican National Convention wrapped up. Clever boy... he waited till after 45 (the Great Pretender) had made his VP pick of JD Vance... to drop the Kamala bomb on the Trump campaign.

In a moment of tactical brilliance, Biden made the announcement... letting the news sit with the stunned media, political, and political junky followers of his twit-X account... for a full 20 minutes... before coming back with a second news release, throwing his full support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris. So after 20 minutes of total freak-out, Biden's second announcement not only answered the burning question on everyone's mind... it also brilliantly calmed the freak-out, while outlining a path forward for the Dems.

Making his announcement a two-parter... gave everyone who was tuned in to the (expected) news, time to assimilate Biden's decision to drop out of the race, and let the freak-out work through their over-stimulated nervous systems. Then... after a dramatic pause... he announced his full support of Harris, thereby herding the gaggle of cats that is the Democratic constituency, into seeing that Kamala Harris was the obvious and most qualified individual to pick up the Democratic battle standard.

Waiting to make the announcement a little over a 100 days before the November election was also a very strategic move on Biden's part. One hundred days is plenty of time to unite around Kamala and run a successful campaign... but is not enough time for political hand-ringing and/or pearl-clutching. The result being a united Democratic Party, in support of the one candidate who can take full advantage of the Biden war chest... and by the way... the one candidate who the Democratic Delegates will rally around and select to be the duly elected Democratic candidate. Representative government in action.   

It's hard to imagine that team Trump didn't see this coming... but the Trump organization seemed truly stymied by the announcement. I guess the Great Pretender, now being the old codger in the race, just can't pivot the way he used to. By 45's response, it appears as though he will resort to racist xenophobia. After all... this worked splendidly for the GP back in 2008, when he claimed President Obama was not born in the United States... it was this conspiracy theory that put Trump on the Alt-right political map.

However... these political musings... as entertaining as they are... only point to what will prove to be the significant paradigm shift, triggered by Kamala's ascent to the Democratic nominee. It is clear that Kamala rekindled a fire in the Democratic Party... but more importantly, it sparked enthusiasm in women... across all ethnicities and societal strata. Here in the US and abroad. Driven in part by the demise of Roe v Wade, to be sure. But the essential shift in consciousness we are witnessing, quite possibly could be the pivot to the Partnership Paradigm, espoused by the great Riane Tennenhaus Eisler. 

In American politics, the rise of powerful, intelligent, compassionate leadership increasingly has been the purview of women. 

We haven't seen this level of inspired mobilization since 45 was first elected, back in 2016.

Kamala's candidacy seems to have sparked more than political action. She appears to be the face of societal change. She has tapped into a deep reservoir of feminine power, whose time has come. Beyond women's rights, beyond reproductive justice,  beyond the political, beyond the societal, Kamala has become emblematic of the rise of the matriarchy... just as the GP became the face of fascist white nationalism.

This movement, as personified by Kamala, absolutely caught fire in the algorithmic, artificially intelligent, globally intact nerve-net mind we call the internet. Social media has been lit with 'la memes... turning Republican talking points upside down, sparkling with creative energy in their support of Kamala. As we know, TikTok and Insta are powerful indicators of things to come...

 

Returning to the Partnership Paradigm, this movement, as visualized by Raine Eisler, as championed by Terence McKenna, demonstrates a viable alternative, intended to replace the violent, patrilineal predator/dominator system of control. A brief outline of this dynamic may be found in part four of my "Blows Against the Empire" series.

The essential idea is to replace our current, Archonic, predator/dominator system of oppressive thought control, poetically named... The Empire by Science Fiction author Philip K Dick... with a more egalitarian form of cooperative governance where all segments of our diverse population have a seat at the table. The following is from my new book: Brave Noö World - A Guerilla Ethnography of High Strangeness...

A competing vision for the patrilineal, predator/dominator model, is the one proposed by cultural historian, systems scientist, educator, attorney, speaker, and author Riane Eisler. In her 1987 book: The Chalice and the Blade, she describes her vision of the Partnership Paradigm. So impactful upon its publication, The Chalice and the Blade was the inspiration of Dan Brown’s 2003 thriller novel: The Da Vinci Code. 

In her book, Eisler sheds light on the tension between the dominator or domination model and the more naturally feminine partnership model. Eisler documents that tension between these two competing models underlies the span of human cultural evolution. She traces this tension in Western culture from prehistory to the present.

Neolithic art and funerary practices repeatedly demonstrate that women were the equals of men. Archaic religions celebrated life and nature, with the Goddess (symbolized by the chalice) being the primary figure of reverence. Minoan Crete marks the last instance of this social and religious organizational pattern.

Conquering peripheral tribes, such as the Hebrews, introduced a patriarchal, death-centered system (symbolized by the blade) that valued aggression and dominance and denigrated earlier faith in the Goddess. Such views, expressed in the Old Testament as well as in the Gospels, continue to influence the direction of Western culture to the present day. These archaic, warring, desert-raider tribes have survived to modern times, within the violent, war mongering desert religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

Eisler’s partnership model opposes the traditional patriarchy, with a more egalitarian structure of society founded on mutual respect among its inhabitants. In this model, all segments of a population… including the afore mentioned ethnic minorities, refugees & the displaced, the poor & impoverished, LGBTQ, women, children, and of course, the weird… become innovative, working partners in a noö paradigm, rather than being preyed upon, as in the old one.

The time of patriotism… of pathologic, patrilineal, misogynistic and homophobic weirdness is rapidly drawing to a close. A noö patriotism, or more accurately, a  noö Matriotism… is on the rise. Mother Earth… Mother Nature… is on the ascent. Let us all draw inspiration and sustenance from the great mother, in our transition. Let us proceed from a place of centered, informed naïveté, viewing the world with the eyes of enlightened innocence.

So it is with a sense of hope... a sense of inevitability... and a sense of urgency... that your humble weblogger reports to you... dear intrepid reader... on this moment in time... on what could (and should) be the beginning of a noö partnership paradigm. As a secular, neo-Gnostic, I hold a place in my heart for the great mother Sophia to dwell. A place where dreams and aspirations of a world that treats all with compassion and kindness, incubates. A place where intuitive knowledge supplants fear and hatred.

And here's the thing... I'm talking to you now guys... we've given it a couple of thousand years to try out the patrilineal thing... and it just didn't work out. No shame in relinquishing a power paradigm that's just not up to the task at hand. We had our shot... but now the stakes are too high to be messing around with the obviously failed patrilineal predator/dominator tomfoolery.

Besides... what we are talking about is partnership paradigm anyway. This means we all get to participate... as equals. In a world facing climate change... artificially intelligent sentience... as well as a break-down and splintering of consensual reality... it's "all hands on deck" here aboard spaceship Earth. If we aspire to move forward conductively into our Brave Noö World... it's gonna take all of us pulling together.       

It just so happens that these are the very topics I delve into, along with a history of High Strangeness, in my new book: Brave Noö World - A Guerilla Ethnography of High Strangeness. Check it out, if you please...

 

Part Two