Theos-Talk Archives (September 1995 Message tl00990)

>Women have regulated their reproductive biology for millenia, in
>Koori (Aboriginal) culture:strictly WOMEN'S BUSINESS. Every month is a
>death, a loss, a potential misscarriage.
>
>The discussion going around re natural/unnatural is also starting to
>grate. Is it "natural" that we all sit in front of a device exuding low
>doses of radiation, powered by a substance that is rapidly depleting the
>ozone layer? The abortion issue is one of control: who does control
>women's bodies. I don't anyone can argue who should!
>
>To change the subject, I would like to talk about Blavatskys writing on
>Speech and the Mind**TSD**Stanza iv (4). Is anyone interested in helping
>me with this reading
>
>Tracey

Tracey,

I'm sorry this discussion got out of hand. I've looked over Stanza IV, Sloka
4 and don't know how to begin the discussion. I don't know if I could help
you with any of it, but I am willing to try.

Also, I ran across a passage from a book by Robert Ellwood, THEOSOPHY, which
brings up a point that would contradict Blavatsky regarding "natural law" in
man. I mean, who was more natural than the neolithic? This passage also ties
in with the Jewish Holiday I wrote about earlier, and it appears that it is
because of religious law that man HAS progressed, because remember religious
law arrives with those great teachers who bring it. Here it is:

"In the Neolithic era, the New Stone Age of archaic agriculture, the
spiritual focus shifts to Mother Earth. Farming brought much that was good:
stability in one place, a relatively more dependable food supply, villages
and towns and eventually cities, a rapidly expanding human population
leading to division of labor. Yet in the mythological accounts of the
discovery of agriculture, we sometimes find it portrayed as a sort of a
fall, marked by a crime: the killing of a beautiful maiden out of whose body
came the variuos crops, or a heartless cutting into the flesh of Mother Earth.
 Religiously, too, the Neolithic era shows an upsurge in the dark magical
side of belief in spirit, referred to in theosophical accounts of a debased
Atlantis. It is here, not in the Old Stone Age, that headhunting, and animal
and human sacrifice, proliferate. For with agriculture comes fresh awareness
that life and death are intertwined and that fertility requires victims. The
seed must die and be buried before it sprouts; the shrunken head of an enemy
danced through the fields will give them its still-potent life force. For
life to continue generation after generation, the first-fruits, including
one's first-born, should be sacrificed to the gods who hold all weather and
the fruit of all wombs in their hands. In this stage too we find much
increased sexual antagonism, an undercurrent of tension between men and
women, marked by separate secret societies for each sex, often with
horrendous initiatory ordeals. Perhaps the antagonism paralleled the new
sacred power given women by agriculture with its fresh emphasis on fecundity
and the mother goddess."

This is why theosophy is so great, because when we look at our origins and
our past, we know why life has developed the way it has and can be thankful.