Pluto Unmasked

In December 1972, an historic photograph was taken from space, of our Planet Earth. For the very first time we humans saw our home planet as a beautiful blue ball against a backdrop of the dark space of starry infinity.
The spacecraft Apollo 17 on its way to the Moon shot that first photograph of Earth in its round, blue beauty.

 Since then this photo has become the most frequently published, the most famous photo of all time. Its use as an icon by everyone on the globe forever altered human consciousness – of ourselves, of earth and of our place in the cosmos. That photo unleashed a new idea into our world as powerful as any idea history has previously let loose.
The photograph offered to humanity a vision of a beautiful yet vulnerable home planet and celebrated the birth of global consciousness.

Of course the global village had been conceptualised earlier than 1972. John Lennon’s popular song Imagine released in 1971 encapsulated the entrancement with and yearning for this idea of unity.
Imagine there’s no countries –
It isn’t hard to do…
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world  yu-huh,
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one –
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.


And long before John Lennon, Karl Marx unleashed his cry that has rung round the world for nearly 2 centuries “Workers of the World Unite”.

 







Yet a picture communicates in a different language. The power of the idea that the world-is one, burst into flower deep within the human family’s consciousness, when that famous photo of our blue Earth was published over and over again. The incomparable sight of our home viewed from space elicits a profound emotional response. It made real – as only a visual image can – that a new connection was established between humans and their home planet.

Pavel Popovich on the USSR Vostok on the 4th August 1962 said
“It seems to me that even the wisest of philosophers of the Renaissance or the most daring minds from the past could not estimate the real size of our planet. Earlier, it seemed unmeasurably great, almost infinite. Only after the middle of this century did man ( read human (ed.) – having gone up above the Earth into space, see with surprise and disbelief just how small the Earth really is. Some saw it as an island in the limitless ocean of creation. Some compared it to a spaceship with a crew numbering more than 6 billion.”

Loren Acton on the USA Challenger on the 8th July 1985 said.
“Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty – but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That’s where life is: that’s where all the good stuff is.”

43 years has passed since that first photo, and the creation of the World Wide Web has revolutionised our lives with its instant communication that unites the planet in ways we could never have dreamed.
Since 1972, space travel and its technology have undergone huge change. Humanity has become used to pictures from space – we have seen the sparks of light in our sky turn into astonishingly real physical worlds before our eyes. The different planets and their Moons in our solar system have revealed themselves. Even the faraway reaches beyond have bewitched our curiosity thanks to the Hubble telescope.

And now in mid- July 2015 (just a few days off the 46th anniversary of men landing on our Moon) there was a brief buzz in the world’s media when humanity was presented with another historic picture.
On the far, far outreaches of our solar system, Pluto was photographed. 12,000 kilometres away, we Earth-dwellers saw the extraordinary sight of Pluto in its glory.


 If ever we need reminders that humanity is capable of reason and ability to work collectively, co-operatively in a peaceful endeavour – well here we have yet another transcendent example.

The commentators reminded us the vehicle (New Horizons) that snapped the Pluto shots was launched on January 19th 2006. The computers on board are 10 years old (gasp - Old as!!!!).
It takes as much power to run as that of a domestic frig (the modem has the power supply of 24 K).

The jubilant team of scientists who worked on this project have devoted two decades of their lives to this project. When New Horizons left Earth, they couldn’t pinpoint exactly where Pluto would be - but the flyby arrived within 72 seconds of when they expected it would.

New Horizons is the size of a grand piano and is still now hurtling beyond Pluto and its fellow Charon - out into the vastness of the dark matter we call space. It will take 16 months to transmit the data load of 50 gigabytes of Pluto photos etc, back to Earth as the little robot travels onwards deeper into the Kuiper Belt.

Those clever happy people at NASA will study and share this brand new knowledge with us. The euphoria those scientists felt on July 15th – is also shared by all of us humans who were moved by this momentous accomplishment.

It makes me proud to be a human here and now. Like listening to a Mozart opera or reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables for the first time, this is a sublime moment that makes the human heart swell with grace.

As an astrologer I was intrigued to see what the heavens would speak about this event. Yet the skymap we call the horoscope, didn’t transmit the symbolism of this moment as strongly to me, as did the events that were occurring simultaneously in the world itself, during that momentous week.
It was a Big News week, and I began to explore the nature of these momentous events in conjunction with the planet revealing its face for the first time.
 

All our planets are named after the ancient Greek god/desses. I think of the god/desses as symbolic archetypal stories that describe the huge impersonal life forces that we are all subject to on Earth. There are god/desses that describe the powers of Love and Beauty, War, Religious experience, Communication and Travel etc etc. Astrology is the art/science tradition of describing the combination of these different forces in our lives.

If humanity unmasks a god named Pluto, what might we expect?

Pluto by Agostino Carracci 1592

Pluto is the Greek god of the underworld and in psychological parlance the unconscious. He rules the land of the dead. Charon (the planets’ travelling companion Moon) is the ferryman who transports us to Pluto’s realm. In mythology Pluto wears an invisible cloak when he comes to the land of the living so we mortals don’t see him until he has violated and taken us down.

Now we mortals have violated the god’s invisibility and gazed upon his face.




Pluto was discovered in 1930 as fascism was on the rise; atomic energy was being harnessed to soon create the atomic bomb and nuclear power. Pluto’s name is Death and power is this god’s game.
Under Pluto’s influence we have to face power, whether it be our own or power of others over us. When impersonal force/fate knocks us down, or we are visited by such events as rape, violent crime, compulsive or obsessive behaviour - Pluto is laying his cold hand upon us. We must then face the dark journey to his realm and learn how to (hopefully) empower ourselves. The alternative is to stay forever in his Underworld.

His name originates from Plutos meaning wealth. He is the god who turned everything the compulsively greedy Midas touched into gold – and as Midas discovered to his horror - death.
Pluto’s wealth is underground – whether its oil, gold, diamonds-  we have to dig for his wealth in the darkness of his realm.

In astrology the passage of Pluto marks a decay, death, and rebirth cycle when we must plumb the depths, eliminate and clear out any toxic waste, break taboos.
Pluto moves us into the unconscious areas of shadow and transgression before we can breakthrough into the light once more.
Get the picture?

During the week when Pluto ceased to be a symbol, a myth and a faraway planet in the cold outreaches of our solar system and we saw the god for the first time,this happened;-

1.Iran agreed to a long-term nuclear deal with the US, UK, France, China and Russia plus Germany. Iran agreed to limit its sensitive nuclear activities in return for the lifting of crippling sanctions.

This is widely seen as an historic peace deal reached between the East and the West that was twelve years in the making and took the last 23 months of negotiating.
Iran is on the verge of economic bankruptcy, its oil and gas industries have been crippled and its employment high. Its assets overseas have been frozen and its people been subject to travelling sanctions. The sanctions had destroyed Iran’s private sector and its public sector was struggling.

The deal signals a new birth for Iran. Its young population is in the majority. The under 40 years old are highly educated, and if the Treaty is ratified many professional people who had left can come home. Iran is a home to many religions and different ethnicities, and has not only a high rate of education, but highest in the Middle East for women. Modernity has a strong hold on Iran.
This deal is good for the democratisation of Iran for it will encourage civil society.

Iran is a country that has been demonised in the West. Remember Ronald Reagan naming it as one of the ‘Axis of Evil’…Pluto always describes our demons.

Now this deal brings the country back into the world community. It opens the potential for diplomatic resolutions for issues such as Syria.
A rebirth of relationships between East and West has been seeded.




2. Greece was humiliated and punished by the troika (representing the European nations) the big three money thugs who are part of the world’s 1% elite. Greece was forced - on its knees - to a deal that sacrifices its sovereignty, despite its people’s democratically expressed wishes.

http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/07/europes-vindictive-privatization-plan-for-greece/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
For some time, the world has watched an ongoing shaming of this country. We have been bystanders viewing the classic scenario of the strong bullying the weak.

Athens Soup Kitchen

This is Pluto’s well-worn terrain. Historically the world has been witness to this scenario many times; notably after World War 1 when the winners financially punished Germany and pushed it into impoverishment and ultimately Nazism.

Under Pluto’s eye, in 2015 the rulers of the European Union behaved like a dysfunctional family, scolding the Greek scapegoat who has been disobedient and unable to follow the authorities’ irrational ‘rules.

Stricken Greece was asking for some debt-relief and aid to better grow its shrunken economy. Despite, and probably because of its show of democratic power in the referendum, the Greeks were bought to their knees, as the Euro Troika forced upon them an impossible deal of austerity and privatisation. An austerity that has already been proven to create misery, is self-perpetuating and self-defeating.
And Doesn’t Work.

 Greece is a sinking shipwreck that the world watches as the inevitable occurs – a catastrophic collapse of a nation.

The future of the Euro Union, with the moneymen at its helm is at stake too. The Titanic springs to mind – a mighty accomplishment that its creators heralded as invulnerable, until it met an iceberg rearing out of the mist. I would suggest that Greece is that iceberg.


I think it deeply ironic that Greece is the home of the idea of democracy.

‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace –
Where Delos rose, and Phoebe sprung!
Eternal Summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.’
Lord Byron. 1819.

3.China’s sharemarket experienced a near-death experience – the Plutonic symbolism is startling.
China experienced a financial earthquake that lost 3 trillion dollars (10 times more than the Greek debt). Tens of millions of its small shareholders investments (working class families’ savings) were wiped out. China’s government massive intervention calmed the market somewhat but the markets – epicentre of China’s economic reforms - continue to be highly volatile, with more slippages continuing.

China’s future remains unclear. It has a capitalist stock market, being played like a casino by tens of millions of freebooting speculators, right in the middle of a society purporting to be socialist and run by a communist party with a deep affinity for rigid interventionist controls. Its uneasy fusion of communism and free-market economics is a system with no precedent and no operating manual.
This contradiction running like a fault line throughout the world’s second biggest economy, makes outcomes impossible to predict.

4. Major tech glitches in computer software took down three large corporations in USA.
United Airways, the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street Journal’s websites - all ground to a halt.
Planes were at a standstill amidst scenes of chaos, trading stopped in the Stock Exchange (centre of the world’s financial business) and the Journal’s website flatlined. Immediately the public was told it wasn’t a co-ordinated cyber attack, but the mystery still remains as to what really did happen. 

"I'm in Hell" at United Airways

Just a “very bad day”?
A rather dark mystery (mystery is Pluto’s fodder) that serves to tell that the technology we take for granted is not bullet-proof.

These three companies are all business operations that rely on massive computer systems. Automated software is complex (involving millions of lines of computer code) and a single error – even a misplaced text - can grind the whole system to a halt.

Whether human error or deliberate hacking creates a breakdown, Pluto’s little joke has highlighted how easy chaos can happen. Our increased dependency on undependable things has been displayed, putting us on warning how incredibly quickly a cascading failure can lead to pandemonium.

5. In Aotearoa, milk prices crashed disastrously due to a slump in the world markets and the next day Fonterra cut 523 jobs in lower and middle management.
Pluto rules elimination and ruthlessness.
Fonterra is a good example of the way neo-liberalism works in our small country.
More than 4000 of its 18000 world-wide staff earn at least $100,000 per year, while 17 staff earn more than $1 million annually.
The Chief Exectutive Theo Spierings earns $4.18 million p.a, following a $660,000 pay rise last year.
The redundancies the elite management are making are justified in the name of “efficiency” (exactly why they had all those people working before is a mystery to me – presumably before they were let go, they were all involved in inefficient work). The savings the diary giant (monopoly) is presumed to be making is said to be up to $60 million (don’t hold your breath) but meanwhile $15 to $17 million will be paid out in redundancy packages.

Farmer Murry Beach

Farmer Murry Beach suggesting to Fonterra that wages could be cut, starting with 10% for those on $65,000 and rising to 75% for those on $1 million.








Pluto rules anything we might call ” mega”
Fonterra's highest earners
•    $100,000 - $200,000: 3482 staff
•    $200,001 - $300,000: 402 staff
•    $300,001 - $400,000: 138 staff
•    $400,001 - $500,000: 66 staff
•    $500,001 - $600,000: 29 staff
•    $600,001 - $700,000: 13 staff
•    $700,001 - $800,000: 15 staff
•    $800,001 - $900,000: 6 staff
•    $900,001 - $1 million: 8 staff
•    $1 million - $2 million: 13 staff
•    $2 million - $3 million: 2 staff
•    $3 million - $4 million: 1 staff
•    $4 million - $5 million: 1 staff

None of these high-earners have of course been made redundant. Redundancy is for the losers at the bottom of the ladder.

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/278949/fonterra-defends-top-salaries-after-cuts
 

“Fairly Ugly”

The scale of the drop in diary prices overnight –  10.7 percent - came “as a shock” to the federated Farmers and pushed down the NZ dollar by about 2% against the American dollar.
This drop is the ninth consecutive fall and the whole milk price affects Fonterra’s forecast payout to its farmer shareholders.
The backbone of the economy of Aotearoa is dependent upon our farming primary industry.

The government prides itself that the dairy industry is ‘unsubsidised’.
However dairy farming’s unsustainable practices directly causes massive environmental degradation of our waterways and soils with immunity. It pays no carbon-tax. Is this not a form of subsidisation?

If you doubt what is actually going on in the dairy industry's continued pollution of the waterways of Aotearoa, please read this:-
Dr Mike Joy: Paradise Squandered;New Zealand’s Environmental Asset Stripping.
http://www.nzfishingclubs.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-Bruce-Jesson-Mike-Joy-Lecture.pdf

Citizens and animals alike are all actually heavily subsidising the dairy farmers –Everyone is paying – and will go on paying for a long, long time for this pollution.
Pluto rules the toxic, the hidden costs, the muck at the bottom that was buried in secret.

What the follow-on effects will be on the slumped world milk prices will be on our small country’s so-called “rock-star economy” is hard to say. But we are already in a precarious situation due to the neo-liberal policies that both Labour and National parties have adopted since 1984.

Over the last few decades an experiment has been conducted by its leaders upon us Kiwis. An extreme version of deregulation and privatisation has dismantled our welfare system. Aotearoa has become “vastly more unequal, lost the majority of its industries, opened itself to capital flows that were supposed to create competitive businesses and new jobs, but never did. Foreigners with money speculate on our non-productive assets or push up our dollar to take advantage of high-interest term deposits. “
http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.co.nz/2015/07/how-new-zealand-works.html

Aotearoa is not alone in this trend – it is part of a world-wide movement that has sold us de-regulation, consumerism and increasing inequality. Commercial interests consistently shape all politics and policies at the expense of human and environmental concerns.

Since that 1972 photo of planet Earth, humanity’s leaders and shapers of policy have constantly denied or ignored any understanding of the fragility of our home planet.

Despite the intellectuals, creatives, scientists and humanitarians battling constantly to be heard, nothing has prevented the ongoing barbarity of war, genocide, disparity of wealth distribution, slavery, misogyny, racism and religious intolerance.

The human species seems hell bent on despoiling our planetary nest with horrendous environmental destruction, unleashing mindless climate change and an historic extinction of other species which runs parallel with over-population of desperately impoverished humans.

We seem to believe that we are gods who can act with impunity upon our habitat. Despite our clever monkey minds, it is as if we cannot recognise our human dependence on the environment, or comprehend that we need the planet more than it needs us.



As a species we have been peculiarly blind in our inability to change our national or global social, political, economic and legal structures that could make a reality of this imperative.

Muhammad Ahmad Faris from Syria Soyuz TM3 in July 1987 said
“From space I saw Earth – indescribably beautiful with the scars of national boundaries gone.”
Now in 2015, despite the change of consciousness accompanied by the extraordinary technological realities of global communications and travel, the scars of national boundaries seem ever deeper.

The five big events of mid-July I’ve listed will all have unknown consequences. But if I link them all into the Pluto archetype then we can be sure they are depositing us earth inhabitants somewhere along the spectrum of the decay, death, rebirth cycle. Metamorphosis is always the driving necessity of this Plutonic cycle.

I believe that Earth - particularly in relationship to the human species - has entered a hospice stage of development, as we steer our Ship of Fools to the precipice of no-return catastrophes. This would place us on the decay/death part of Pluto’s cycle.



I am hoping that Pluto’s unveiling might begin to give us hope in believing we can transform ourselves through the huge changes that are coming up for us all. We might then begin to move into the rebirthing and regenerating stage.

One of the biggest global unifiers that has occurred throughout our world since the 1970s is the creation and rise of a new global empire

George Orwell’s strangely prescient novel 1984 has come to pass. In an Orwellian coup a global empire has been born in the name of freedom that has granted us its opposite.

We have named it globalisation without paying much attention to whom and what is behind this name. Its ideology we call neo liberalism which has enjoyed a rapid rise to power over every aspect of our macro and micro lives.
The ‘Market’ rules supreme over its’ level playing field’.
The gradual removal of barriers to international trade has intensified competition which is worshipped like a god itself.
International cities have become more and more similar. MacDonald’s here, MacDonald’s there. Pay with your Mastercard or Visa everywhere and anywhere you go….the world for sale.

This is a new Empire, but unlike the Roman or American Empire, it is one of global capital and corporations. These giants have taken over - by stealth - national governments, media outlets, once publicly-owned assets. The huge conglomerates that are banks and corporations have acquired enormous and seemingly unlimited power over both individuals as well as our nation states. They go on consolidating their power every day.


Under neo-liberalism 1% of people now rule the world. In January 2015, the share of the world's wealth owned by the richest 1% increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% last year.

According to a study by anti-poverty charity Oxfam, the wealthiest 1% will soon own more than the rest of the world's population,.
On current trends, Oxfam says it expects the wealthiest 1% to own more than 50% of the world's wealth by 2016.
In NZ the top 1% own 17% of the wealth of NZ.

This elite have all kinds of cunning ways not to pay taxes to the common wealth. Instead they take our taxes and tithe us in hidden ways (environmental degradation being only one of these).

Ordinary folks’ wages and living conditions are constantly driven downwards to fund the impossibly rich’s bank accounts. When the banks fail due to their greed, as in 2008, ordinary folks’ taxes pay for their bailout.
Dirty politics have ensured that spying by governments on the populace is taken for granted. Foreign investors buy our houses and land.

Bill English ( Minister of Finance) spouts that Climate change can’t be incorporated into any economic policy because there would be’ too much red tape’…Auckland’s Supercity councillors discuss selling our city’s assets – privatisation marches inexorably onwards…

Free trade costs the earth.
Soon our NZ government will have signed over our sovereignty under a new trade agreement –TPPA ; a deal that is being negotiated and will be signed in secrecy. This deal will lock Aotearoa into even more minimal regulation. Commercial considerations rule supreme over any of our cultural, social or educational realities.

All of what I have written here about the global takeover fits the Pluto constellation like of glove. Devouring, greedy, all consuming, power-hungry; enormous wealth and unequal distribution; demonising of the ‘Other’, stealthy power machinations, dirty politics.

The unified world is suffering energy depletion, climate change and migration on a previously unimagined scale – all due to this global empire of the wealthy elite and their minions such as John Key, Tony Abbott and others of their political ilk.

Capitalism is being inevitably altered and will become unworkable soon enough.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

It may be a combo of external factors such as extreme weather events, a world plague, oil prices falling, another bank crisis, and desperate refugees/migrants flooding into already overloaded countries – that will trigger the domino effect of the world’s house of cards.

Or the social order and functional infrastructures might implode from within (such as we are witnessing in Greece) due to impoverishment and despoliation of the natural and social environment, helped along by punitive monetarist financial policies visited upon the suffering populace.

It may be all of the above – but whatever and however, we have gazed upon the face of the god of Death and must accept Pluto’s challenge to begin the work of killing off the untenable so we can regenerate a different kind of world. We must begin to visualise a future for our human family that reflects the beauty and harmony of our Blue Planet, our Home Planet.

God of Nations, at thy Feet....

In my adolescence I began to develop a problematic relationship with authority.
God and his Presbyterian/Methodist medium were my first undoing.

How to reconcile the propaganda about a god of love with the hate-full reality?

“Onward Christian soldiers marching unto war with the cross of Jesus….”
Et cetera

At 13, with a lot of rote Sunday school lessons behind me, not to mention really bad music, I began to question what kind of godfather, son and company this was who preached love and made war. Indeed, I wondered in my innocence, was there a god at all up there in the blue? Supernatural blessings bestowed seemed far and few between.

I continued taking on the outer shell of his teachings every Sunday with the family at church and even taught Sunday School afterwards (I liked the stories and especially the angels). I won a national Bible quiz with prize money of 50 pounds and scored my picture on the front page of the Otago Daily Times. (photo withheld, haha)

However while I swallowed and digested the outer coating of the pill of puritanical Protestantism, I found the inner hollow more and more unpalatable.

I never did learn how religion could become an opiate, although as Karl Marx so famously remarked, so many others have.

In Calvinist Dunedin, the pale Jesus stories were always overshadowed and over-ruled by his thundering father Jehovah whose jealous, disciplinarian despotism was medicine never open to questioning, but offered no solace or healing for me.

The gothic stone of the First Church, Knox Church and other civic buildings presented an unchanging cold and claustrophobic façade that represented perfectly the culture this Christianity bred.

First Church. Dunedin

I remember playing Jezebel once at the age of nine in a church play in the bowels of the First Church.
Maybe because I had red hair I was chosen for the part, but certainly an unconsciously perfect symbolic fit with me and religion I guess.

Jezebel eaten by dogs

I still mourn that poor woman’s fate at the hands of religious fathers of the time. Through all the high drama generated in the church play, I still remember feeling how unfair it all was and what a great woman this queen had been.

Somehow the religious propaganda being shovelled down just didn’t stick.

Otago Girls’ High School provided me with an education that taught me heaps about authoritarianism and totalitarianism. The content of the education was mostly how to make “ladies” and good “colonials” of us. The methods employed to convey patriarchy and imperialism were appalling and often downright silly.

Our Latin teacher used to stand at the front of a classroom of 30 odd girls and beat out with her rod on the desk, the declensions we must learn by rote.

My embroidery teacher ridiculed my choices of colour for my tea tray cloth (“pink and purple do not go together you foolish girl!”)  The principal used sarcasm as her principle weapon to keep us in line.

(Meanwhile outside the school walls, the world seethed with the Cuban Missile crisis and Martin Luther King crying that he had a dream.)

I loathed school, its uniforms and hierarchies, but like the army, I bonded in friendship with fellow foot soldiers for life.

At home the authorities of mother and father provided me with a loving, family life, but that was blasted out of the water when I transgressed and became pregnant.
The puritanical underpinnings of parental and societal attitudes were laid bare as I discovered the lot of an unmarried mother who must carry the traditional ignominy and guilt of sexuality like a badge for all to see and shame.

Emotional cruelty to a young 17-year-old girl-woman was commonplace from most including my own mother, the doctor, (“slut” is what he called me during an examination) - and really any kind of authority I bumped into during that time. I learned the hard way about the people who ruled my life, but also found the kindness of strangers and the camaraderie of friends.

Then I discovered Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, the New York Redstockings and the great, great joys of so many hundreds of female and male writers, activists, politicos, friends, who taught me how to think about power, observe and understand its myriad forms in the personal and political. I grew into who I am today; someone who still has a deeply problematical relationship with authority and authorities.

I always feel as if I am the child crying (mostly in the wilderness) “look, the Emperor has no clothes!”
I would like to think I have learned as well, how to become more like Diogenes who when asked by Alexander the Great who had come to visit him, told the great conqueror of the known world, to “step out of my sunlight”.

I take particular umbrage with religion. Religion is an institutionalized authority system that has conquered and warped the world.
The practice of monotheism (worship of one god) has set itself up as a moral, theological and economic authority for too long.
Its central idea has a supreme being as an entity distinct from the world (Nature) but controlling it according to plan, while keeping humans in a state of infantile subjection.
This idea has given rise to many horrible forms of social control that have been – and are practiced - with great effectiveness.


“Religion legitimates so effectively because it relates the precarious reality constructions of empirical societies with ultimate reality.” Peter Berger.

Enforcement of sexual hierarchy is one of its many deep injustices that under its auspices have been enforced and perpetuated around the globe and throughout history.

“Wives submit yourselves unto your husbands…. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church”.
Ephesians 5:23-24

This power has always serviced a few sections of the community well, but has left the majority in suffering that they are expected to transcend, but definitely not change, under their own steam.

The great, late Christopher Hitchens once epitomised the only reasonable attitude possible in today's world when he said:
"Mockery of Religion is one of the most essential things ... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority."

Mockery and rock-bottom distrust of god and his religions have only deepened within me, the older I have become, and the more I know, read and experience.
I am the first to admit that my ideas have a profound emotional investment underlying them.

I suspect the buried reason for such strong feelings behind my rational antipathy of Christianity in particular, is the horror-filled family history I bear in my genes. The family branch with which I most identify, has come from Huguenot stock who were driven out of France into Scotland and England, during one of the many Catholic Holocausts.

St Bartholomew's massacre

Religious persecution by Christian authorities has a bottomless tap root in Europe.








And I’m a Kiwi who is lucky enough to live in a so-called secular country, downunder far from the ongoing war-torn religious tyrannies that are alive and well.

However so many early Pakeha settlers – like my family – immigrated to Aotearoa because of economic oppression and ill-treatment they suffered from different authorities, including religious. Driven off their common lands by the rise and rise of capitalism, they were so often forced out of their home by hunger and hardship or by the lure of gold.
If they were of the ruling and middle classes, they were often impelled by their greed for land-sharking and/or saving souls.

When they arrived in Dunedin, Aotearoa, my family were working class Methodists, narrow-minded and straight-laced with emotional and intellectual constraints as tight as the collars and corsets worn. Oblivious to childrens’ needs and adult passions, punishment for any transgressions was dished out with dour efficiency.

“Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft”
1 Samuel 15:23

Knox Church

John Knox composed a “First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.”


The history of my family as well as of other ordinary folk, makes me mad with grief and outrage.
So if my ideas are fuelled by these feelings does this make the ideas bad ones? In my experience, objectivity is often another name for arrogant gatekeeping of mainstream claptrap.
Unless we learn to temper with subjectivity what passes for objectivity, and begin to reason with honest feeling, we can never get to the heart of things.

Everyone has a subjective bias especially round issues to do with authority and religion. I’ve told you mine; what is yours? Before we argue the ideas, lay your bias down on the table of consciousness, or else your ideas are poisoned by unconscious prejudice and not worth the argument.
Consider your own imprinting by the powers of religion, especially through what you learned early from your own family.

There is a high percentage of transmission of religious momentum across generations. Research in America has found that religious similarity between parents and their children was not that much different in 1970 than in 2005.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Families-and-Faith-How-Religion-Is-Passed-Down--Across-Generations

So consider your own “god gene” – what have you soaked up from your family’s influence? It makes a big difference as to what you think you think about gods and wo/men. Don’t let that thinking be ruled by unconscious bigotry.

The prevailing ethos among the liberals in this historical time and culture is that we must be tolerant of religious belief. Everyone apparently has the right to worship and practice their religion of choice. If anyone mocks or desecrates another’s god or gods there’s hell to pay.

However in Aotearoa, we are very selective about our practice of this tolerance. It is only very recently that Maori cultural and spiritual practices have been recognised - at least in lip service - as needing (grudging) space in our public arenas. This has been enormously helped by the fact that mainstream Māori have been thoroughly converted to a broadly Christian viewpoint.
Any “New Age” practices will be righteously mocked as a matter of course, as part of the “loonie left”. And what on earth are we meant to make of the burkha of new immigrants?

We look askance at Europe where the Charlie Hebdo massacre left many Kiwis wondering just how far those victims of reactionary violence should have gone in the name of “free speech”.

As for those who practice jihad – goodness gracious me they’re obviously raving lunatics.



And what about those extremist Femen women who protest topless, in true punk fashion, inside the Notre Dame cathedral against the authority of the Christian church?

Femen in Notre Dame, Paris

Criticize the Pope (head of an enormous Big Business where paedophilia rules) and you will be howled down by folks who idolise him and who respect his right to tell women they are murderers if they have an abortion or practice birth control. (Apparently the new guy is such a lovely man, thanks to his extraordinarily efficient Public Relations people from the American Fox Corporation)

I am no liberal. I believe we should all be protesting loudly against the Unholy Trinity of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish Churches. These are enormously powerful institutions that are effectively ensuring their pernicious ideas are propagated successfully and thoroughly, throughout any society they are part of.

The doctrine of a supreme and only masculine god breeds and infects its followers with extreme forms of intolerance to any other belief systems, with a default button of compulsion for conversion.

Their ideologies and their patriarchal practitioners, have been responsible for untold human suffering, environmental degradation and political upheavals.

War, famine, murder, torture, rape and pillage have been carried out over and over again, in the name of “the one true and only god”.





I see no reason at all to uphold this ridiculous notion of the “god-given” right to worship a belief system that is so obviously pro- a tiny elite - and violently anti woman, anti-human and anti-life.

I can uphold the right for an individual to worship any old ideology in the privacy of one’s own home. But with the caveat that there is no public funding to go into that worship and certainly no societal support – financial or otherwise – for propagating it to children or vulnerable citizens such as those who are desperately poor and uneducated. Why can’t we treat religion a wee bit like we treat sex at the moment – it’s ok for consenting adults to do it in private, but not in public spaces.

I have my guns on the Jewish and Muslim beliefs as much as Christianity because they all maintain there is one male god, and are totally hierarchical and totalitarian in their practices. However here I shall focus now on Christianity, for I know its political history, its belief systems and can cite scripture as well as the Devil.

Christianity is embedded into all the structures and institutions of our modern so-called secular society.
For example, our government with the public’s purse, funds private schools run by Christians, depriving our secular public education system. Churches are granted massive tax breaks by being categorised as “charities”. Churches are allowed to spread their ideologies to children, force- feeding propaganda into vulnerable minds, as a time-honoured way of sustaining their idiotic beliefs and practices.

Idiotic beliefs? Here are a few of my pet hates about Christianity’s ideas.

Christianity posits that there is one god who manifests in 3 masculine guises, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost (which is a kind of breath, shaped in the form of a dove, but a definitely masculine dove.)

Artist: Jasmine Worth

The only woman who gets a look into the pantheon is a Virgin Mother who in the Catholic texts gets to be an intermediary between the god and the human because she experienced so much sorrow in losing her son (who was sacrificed by his father who wasn’t her husband, but there you go)











So this father god evolved from the Jewish Jehovah who was a scarey, angry god. This supreme being - a sky god -  obviously appreciated and condoned rape, pillage, genocide, fathers sleeping with their daughters, murdering their sons and any kind of despoliation of the planet, you can imagine if you care to read even a little of the Christian’s Old Testament.

Try for starters, the story about the Walls of Jericho tumbling down… I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t got onto that one yet.

Joshua 6: 1- 27 “ And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, the ox and the sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword….. So the Lord was with Joshua; and his fame was noised throughout all the country.” Genocide is the only word for this kind of hate-fuelled religious massacre, but the Lord approved of good old Joshua.








The ongoing Middle Eastern “god-forsaken” wars are so clearly motivated by both sides believing their god is on their side. In the West, even when state and church are not fused in the same way that happens in many Muslim nations today, this was/is the common practice.

The First World War was fought “For God, King and Country”

The present crisis in Iraq can be laid directly at the door of the policies of American Presidents Bush senior and junior, who both believed that their god was on their side. This, of course justified their right to lie to their public and bomb the daylights out of that old civilisation, because they wanted their oil.

War is an inevitable outcome out of the monotheistic viewpoint that my god is the only god, and if you don’t worship my god you are my enemy.




One of the interesting – and foul - things about Christianity’s ideology is that it believes only humans have souls. (Only recently were women decreed that they too had souls like men). So in Christian belief, the rest of “god’s creation” – all of the sentient animal world, not to mention the insects, the plants, the beautiful blue world of Planet Earth - is not ensouled.

If the world is inanimate (anima means the soul or spirit of life) – if the world is dead - it doesn’t matter what we do to it, because only man is made in the image of god. And if we – or at least Christian humans - are gods, then we can do as we damn well please with the rest of nature, of which we are thankfully not part of, and in fact higher than.

This idea that nature is “inanimate’ with (Christian) humans at the top of the non-souled tree, gives men license to rape and ransack our Mother Earth – anything really can be justified that furthers men’s self- interest. Capitalism is an especially convenient economic system that works hand-in-glove with Christianity in this respect.

The Hunter and her dead prey

As examples, I cite such things as whale hunting, or in fact the casual slaughter and mistreatment of any beast we care to name. Working sustainably and co-operatively with the rest of nature, does not fit with this ideology. In fact, the ideology justifies the plunder of forests, the burning of bush for farmlands and the pollution of waterways for financial profit.


Historically Christians, without endangering their spiritual mana, have murdered indigenous peoples who are little better than beasts after all, with impunity. Conversion to Christianity has always been a tool by which Empire has expanded, but the theft of land and resources from non-Christian natives has always taken precedence over potential lost souls.

Soldiers and missionaries consistently paved the way for the Christian, capitalist settlers.
Their breath-taking arrogance has been fuelled by the convenient idea that they sit above the land and its indigenous inhabitants as they ascend the great ladder to white man’s heaven.

Christianity further posits that nature is bad - in relationship to spirit which is good. Christians separate out matter from spirit - earth from heaven. Heaven is where we all must strive to go, to leaving behind this vale of tears and carnality. Flesh and any enjoyment we partake in our bodies, especially our sexuality, is a carnal sin.

Women specially carry this burden of dirty bodies. Only women bleed - its monthly and its filthy!
The male body can be worshipped in certain ways (the tortured man on the cross is made into art over and over again).

Mother Hubbard dresses replaced trad bare-breasts in Vanuatu

Women’s bodies, unless they are thoroughly clothed and hidden - are temptation incarnate. We are shameless hussies, whores – who seduce men by flaunting our sexuality (“it was her fault I raped her she was wearing a mini-skirt”).







Male control of the female body seems essential under this prevailing view. Male authorities must and should control the means to the birthing process by medicalisation of birth, abortion by criminal law, domestic violence by intimidation, rape in war and peace.

The terrible consequences of separating out the material world of flesh and nature from the spiritual world of mind and soul, have been devastating in the suffering and the tortured sexual mores of the Western world.
We have been encouraged to separate out from our bodies as if the mind, emotions and soul were quite distinct entities from the material body they inhabit.

The double whammy of the equation of the material ‘body” being gendered and designated ‘feminine” and the spirit being essentially “male’, means women are both lower to the spiritual male as well as subject to men’s ”objective” gaze.
Objectification of the physical female body has resulted in the ultimate degradation of pornography. Other distortions proliferated such as eating disorders, unrealistic standards and expectations of the ideal female body shape, narcissism and body hatred. All are consequences of the body/mind split.

As religion’s grip has loosened over the last 50 years, and the profit culture grown, men’s bodies have become objects of the fe/male gaze as if they too are (play)things to be demeaned and dishonoured.
Male strippers are commonplace as women vie to become “more like men”. As if being a man means having power at any cost.

The cost of this kind of estrangement of body/spirit has a high price too in alienation from our physical environment with the terrible consequences of environmental distress.

Our waterways, our land, our air have become unbearably polluted because of our belief that human consciousness is separate from its habitat.

 Modern scientism is driven by the Christian belief that the object can act upon the subject independently and manipulate it without the object being affected. As if objective/subjective isn’t a kind of continuum or force field.

Christian belief drives men to believe unquestionably they are made in the image of god and can behave with impunity just like that god does.
The practice of Christianity’s psychosis has turned us humans into a plague of locusts tearing our habitat apart with our own teeth, leaf by leaf.

The pagan paradigm in which the world is alive with spirit and matter entwined and dancing, seems so sensible and balanced when compared to the idea of a split universe.
The old Hermetic maxim as above so below still rings true and science itself is at last pointing the way to this old truth now.

Indeed, the world is oft-times a vale of misery and we are all pinioned upon the cross of gravity. Our bodies feel pain and die as our spirit cries out at the anguish of it all. Life is cruel and yet isn’t it also equally glorious?
Who of us hasn’t worshipped in the church of mountains or bush. Whose heart hasn’t been lifted as nature laughs in flowers?

 “Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“To see a world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wildflower.”
William Blake





I suggest we humans are part of nature not above it. Our bodies are ourselves, the earth is our mother, the planet is our home.

And then there’s the myth of Jesus, the Lords’ only begotten son, dying on the cross.

Once humans worshipped the Earth, the mother of all things. They appeased the many gods of wind, earth, fire and water and nature itself, recognising and honouring the powers of life that were greater than themselves.
Eros, Demeter, Persephone, Pluto, the Furies, Nemesis, Justice, Invention, Creativity – all these life forces were called gods and goddesses and celebrated as part of the human story.



Often pagans humanised these gods or forces in their artistic depictions. Nymphs, fairies, sylphs, elves, mermaids and gnomes were the spirits of the Goddess of Nature.

The tree itself was a symbol of the life force – the great Tree of Life. When Europe was covered in great forests and trees were like living gods. Groves of trees were sacred places.










For the last 2000 years though, Christianity has held the West in the thrall of its words. Its stories are based not on Nature, but on the Word. As delivered by the chaps....

We have been told of a god made in human form who is sacrificed by his heavenly father to save us mortals from ourselves. So this man was tortured, crucified and worshipped on a dead piece of wood in the shape of a cross, so he could transcend his suffering and be resurrected into Heaven with his divine father.

What kind of a deformed father does this to his son?!!! Beloved son no less. As an example of parenting it beggars belief, and yet it has spawned belief, drenched in blood.

Once the cross was a symbol that represented the four great elements. The point of power where the four came together was the ether or fifth element that breathed them all together into consciousness.

But Christianity changed the cross from a living tree into a dead cross upon which we must suffer and die. It is one sick metaphor that has spread a virulent infection into human’s lives.

“We are all crucified in the earth,
The earth our cross, exotic to our hands,
We are all nailed by time’s jest,
Who belong to the clayless climate of the mind.”
 fromThe Settler by Keith Sinclair

We have been told to think of humanity as suffering in this mortal coil, crucified in our craven, fleshly bodies by gravity and pain. This idea has been immortalised in so many great works of art, in so many beautiful churches with divine architecture over and over again.

And yes it has worked its black magic – humans are bound to feel miserable and beholden to the cruel god who punishes us in this way. We have been led to viewing the world as a place of suffering and injustice, where the only way to be saved is by the self-same father, whose doing it to us for our own good.

Why can’t we celebrate life in all its beauty, all its glory, all its life?!

Surely the central image could be one of a woman giving birth, or fecund in her pregnancy, or a live tree with children playing, dancing around the maypole? The gods play with us, they sport with us and yes life is painful and often dark. But it is also sublime and full of wonder. Why can’t we worship life in all its mystery?

Love inevitably holds pain but doesn’t justify pain.
I don’t want to worship a father who kills his only son - or men who do that over and over again as they take us off to war, kill us in our own homes, rape us on our own turf, so I can be a sacrifice to a murderous god.
Why aren’t our churches the mountains the bush, our own gardens that provide food for us if they are lovingly tended?
What kind of species are we if we think a dead man on a dead piece of wood is a thing to bow down to? A religion whose ritual includes the (symbolic) drinking of his blood and eating of his body?
The ideas of resurrection of the body after death on some Judgement Day, or after the Apocalypse are the fantasy of wish-fulfillment.

They are toxic ideas, not worthy of respect. They don’t lead humanity to viable lifestyles on our beautiful but wasted planet anymore.







 I would rather believe in the Land of Oz and the Emerald City, for at least they lead me home to my place on this world at this time.

I have left the worst till last. Arguably, the most detestable aspect of Christianity is their treatment of womanhood, and by extension our children.

There are two parts to Christian woman-hating.
The first is the extraordinary story of a Virgin Mother. Amongst the teeming multitudes of men in the bible stories, only one woman manages a look-in part - the mother of the son of god.

A virgin mother is a vicious idea that is designed to make women feel ashamed of their sexuality and birth-giving bodies. It substitutes an unrealistically desirable role model to support them in becoming subservient vessels of the Lord (and by extension their fathers and husbands.)

Madonna by Sassoferrato

She is pure, demure and chaste. She miraculously indeed manages to bear her only child without having recourse to any sexual relations. The Madonna’s immaculate conception is venerated as the ultimate (and unattainable) template for all women.


The earlier biblical myths are where this woman-hating begins.
Eve was the original woman who rather than being celebrated and loved as the fertile creatrix of the human species, is said to be forged by the masculine god Jehovah out of her partner Adam’s rib! 

So not only are we told that the mother of man had her origins in the man! she then goes on to become the cause of his downfall and all her own miseries. She was punished for her curiosity and disobedience. (ie her humanity) and was cast as the primordial scapegoat of original sin.

This malignant image of the ‘nature’ of women is still deeply embedded in the modern psyche and has been poisoning male /female relationships for 2000 years.

In even earlier Jewish scriptures, Eve’s mother Lilith was banished from civilised discourse because she wanted to lie on top of her partner when having sex. O la la.
Christians and Jews alike have regaled us for centuries with horror stories of her ongoing wickedness – she became a witch who ate babies! 



In the later myths, the Christian Mary however, is a wonderfully compliant woman who didn’t have sex yet conceived a baby quite independent of her nasty body. Mary was long-suffering, obedient, sweet and silent.

However, to ensure the message is driven home about women’s bodies being the Devil’s playground, we are given a counterpoint to this loony idea of femininity.
Another Mary is named in the New Testament stories – Mary Magdalene.
We real women get to choose between the two Marys – one is a Virgin and one a Whore.

Mary Magdalene by Ambosius Benson

Mary Magdalene is named in the four Gospels at least 12 times, more than most of the other apostles. However, the bible’s words actually don’t mention she is a prostitute.
What they tell us is that she did travel with Jesus and witnessed the crucifixion and resurrection.
But the ever-popular version has associated her with the “woman in the city who was a sinner” (Luke 7:37) who washed the feet of Jesus, wiped them with her own hair and anointed his body with costly perfume. There is no scriptural basis for this old popular belief. But since when does propaganda bear any relation to actual events…
The rich sensual imagery surrounding her hair and perfume have formed a wonderful platform for woman-hating myth-makers to spread the word about the way women should be perceived. Mary Magdalene has long been used as a culprit for sexual sinning.

As a whore, she performs a useful counterpoint function to the purity of Mary the Virgin Mother. The impure female body can only be a vessel for the son of god’s birth, as long as she remains in the realms of male fantasy. In the real world, a female body has menstruation, leaks bodily fluids, pulses with passion. In the real world, her female body is a gateway to hell.

Tertullian, an early Church father informed women “You are the devil’s gateway.”

Mary Magdalene by Georges de la Tour

These two prototypes of the good chaste woman and the evil sensual woman have straitjacketed all western women for 2000 years.
Female sexuality threatens the Christian fathers so much that the Catholics made celibacy a necessary rule for their priesthood. Since the early ‘Mother’ Church, women have never been allowed near a priest’s skirts themselves.

Christian women should comport themselves as if they have no body or sexuality. Female’s bodies are just too tempting for men otherwise. Shame and guilt have been the paramount weapons of oppression in this long struggle by Christianity against women. (although an Inquisition or three, torture, rape and murder work a treat too)


As a young woman I discovered how an illegitimate pregnancy became my personal, shameful stain. Breaking the taboo of sexual curiosity was a sin of the highest magnitude, and of course any resulting child must be also covered in shameful secrecy. “Illegitimate” means “criminal’ or ‘illegal;  bastard a form of abuse.

Women have made a good fist of being dutiful Mary’s – when they’re not being the Magdalenes.
Damned Whores and God’s Police is a wonderful title of a 1975 feminist book written by an Australian author Anne Summers.
http://www.annesummers.com.au/books/damned-whores-and-gods-police/

In Kiwiland we are particularly afflicted by female authorities who believe they are god’s police. Ann Tolley, Judith Collins, Paula Bennet -  in fact any female in the National party cabinet - do a pretty damn fine job in carrying through this role modelling.
But all of us women can easily fall into the trap of this deeply embedded role. It gives us a voice normally not otherwise heard in the social discourse.

It’s tempting and easy to become a moral guardian.
We can hear ourselves playing this role when we become the “mother” of our partner, or when we complacently parrot punitive, conventional mores at our own or others’ children, or when we smugly mouth off at other’s ‘bad’ behaviour  – it’s women who most successfully and shrilly fall into being good old god’s police.
Paula Bennett standing on her high horse, in charge of the nations’ solo mother’s finances, is a good example.







And if we’re not being a ‘good’ mother, then we’re certainly a whore and damned.

Sexual knowhow is not celebrated in a woman but is an insult. We’re called sluts, twats, bitches, witches, bimbos, hussies, tramps, slappers, hoes, floozies, the village bike, and then there’s chick, bird, dog, hen, bitch, vixen, cougar, kitty, pussy, nag, porker, goose, bunny, beaver….
There are precious few male equivalents of words such as these.

In fact the worst word anyone can call anyone in this whoremongering world is cunt. The place from which we are all born has become a taboo word of the worst possible kind.

Mother Mary obviously didn’t have a cunt.










I lay the blame on this topsy-turvy state directly at the door of crazed Christian ideology that tells us that a woman’s body is disgusting and shameful, that birthing and fucking can only be sanctioned by Christian rules and regulations.

In considering if and how we can ever break free of the monotheistic and misogynistic  religions’  tenacious grip on our hearts and minds, I was heartened by a recent study published by the NZ Herald on May 13th 2015 about the state of religion in Aotearoa today.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11430295

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11447270

The research states that 55% fewer Kiwis identify with a faith since 2006 although Auckland figures are up, due to the new immigrant populations of Muslims and migrant groups.
New Zealand-born have high levels of non-religion and disaffiliation from religion.
In Wellington – the “goddless” capital of New Zealand, half the population says they have no religion.
The earthquakes in Christchurch failed to bring people back to god – Christianity lost 16.5% of the flock between 2006 and 2013 and 50.5% more said they did not affiliate with any religion.
 In the main the wealthier are the ones rejecting religion and the poor are still supporting its shared community benefits. The poor have the most to gain from religious belief, with community comfort and sustenance in difficult times and significant financial benefits.
Self-interest obviously plays its part in the belief systems. Religion offers comfort and community to the impoverished and oppressed.

Our own family traditions - as well as our Kiwi reluctance to question authority of any kind  - all feed into this complex question of why we believe what we do about god.

I would suggest after the attention to a new flag dies down, we focus on changing our National Anthem. Kiwis are no longer comfortable at the feet of this “God of Nations”.

In fact this god has failed spectacularly to bring bonds of love and harmony to the nations of the world, let alone our little islands in the mighty Pacific Ocean.
That Judeo-Christian god has made war and brought little peace for millennia.

Let’s have recognition of this collective crisis of faith. Let’s question this authoritarian figment of our imagination.

If we must worship something, let’s celebrate the power of the Pacific Ocean that surrounds us. Its name (somewhat of a misnomer) means “peaceful”.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/pacific.html

Its deep waters birthed Aotearoa – Land of the Long White Clouds -  and are the source of food, refreshment and communication.
And while we’re at it, we could pay respectful obeisance to the gods of the air, the birds and all flying creatures; homage to the fire of warmth, light and inspiration; and offer gratitude to our Mother Earth, this beautiful blue planet we call our home.

We can no longer afford the high cost of believing in ideas that are killing our species and the very planet itself.