People have been receptive to notions I've begun to develop on the nature of Lilith, the "goddess" of many women musicians. A new piece began to fall into that puzzle when I decided to find out what the fuss about 'The Da Vinci Code' is. For ages I've been looking at people reading the book by Dan Brown in the Métro without a clue of the subject matter. But I woke up when Mary Magdalene was on the cover of 'Newsweek'.
Well, well, what do you know? About 20 years ago, I read 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln about a small French village in the Pyrenees and a priest with a secret. It would seem this cocktail of scholarship and whimsy is now due for revision and republication.
Now I see what all the fuss is about ... though my ignorance of the news world outside music and Africa is such that only today did kindly colleague Marlowe inform me that Brown's book "drew" so much on the one I read long ago that caused a bit of a stink.
Speculative, detective non-fiction like this may go out of fashion for a while, but the bad way organised religion has with women obviously never did. They scarcely need my help coming into their own, but I imagine Lilith has something to say about these legends too.
Over my lunch, I googled on Mary Magdalene to find that New York theologian Ramon K. Jusino has built a web site built around his 1997 thesis that the "beloved Disciple" was the real author of the Fourth Gospel, traditionally attributed to John of Zebedee.
Jusino's intriguing claim was indeed a "good read", as he hoped, and further reading soon told me his supporters include some eminent Biblical scholars, but I don't want to be sidetracked by the revived debate on ways in which a particular church minimises the role of women as its founders and evangelists.
It's a hot debate, to be sure, in which points of agreement beneath the controversy over the plausible beloved Disciple are that she wasn't a prostitute, but needed demons cast out of her, according to Luke's Gospel.
 A man now embarking on a further leave of absence from work to find tools to deal with his own emotional legacy, the way I last night said I am, might not so very long ago have been considered possessed before the mind sciences came along!
In the Lilith some traditions consider not only possessed but a demon herself, as if there was a constant bid to equate women with evil, I find several echoes of this controversy over the role of Mary Magdalene, whom best-selling books are today seeking to rehabilitate all over again.
It can only be subjective, but I know that in myself there is a strong "feminine principle" at work, hence the powerful feelings evoked in me throughout the winter about pregnancy and giving birth, maternity and the mysteries of motherhood.
I shouldn't be surprised to learn that for some psychiatrists and other mind students and therapists, we men are held to be deeply afraid of what we can't know about women in our own direct experience, so we can react in the way people often do with something they fear, by violence against it or by suppressing it.
I told Kate, another workmate who is also interested in the case of the woman from Magdala, of these things that have risen up out of my unconscious about giving birth to new life in motherhood and she said: "Men play an important part."
Yes, we do indeed ... at the beginning. But we can't know what it is to "be with child", living for nine months in such a close symbiotic relationship. If we are healthy, we want to touch, to feel the kicks of the baby inside while this is happening.
Watching my own daughter's head and body emerge from her mother's womb must be the single strongest emotional experience I can remember, a time to marvel and be awed, then to take the child in my arms and to love the woman who had just given birth to her with all my heart.
I see no evil in this!
Yet women are downtrodden everywhere, not always in the subtlest of ways. Mary of Magdala is widely made out to be a harlot when she wasn't one and there is no reference to that in the Gospels, while in most societies and certainly religions they get the back seat. There are nasty notions about menstrual blood in many cultures too and all kinds of rituals surround women's monthly periods; that much I know from my anthropological and ethnomusicological days and subsequent reading, but according to one religion, it took the blood shed by a man to bring about the process of resurrection.
The ultimate put-down for women is blaming one for the Original Sin, as I've written before. Since just before Christmas, though the coincidence with the celebration of the birth of the man some consider the "Redeemer" wasn't intentional, these ideas have been buzzing around in my head, almost literally like mad.
It started when Eleanor told me why she had stopped drinking any alcohol. And there was real art in a nude photo I took of Catherine, my own Kid's mother, when she had a fat round belly at an advanced phase of pregnancy. I've often had that picture in my mind's eye of late, obviously so deep I have latched on to the Lilith legends and what they might mean. Some memories I'm taking this coming week off to meditate, learning to be at ease with my emotions about them, are still only half-concious and concern intimate times from marriage.
Now Lilith is very much in the public domain,as some kind of symbol and power adopted by women who assert their right to engage in the art of music, using it to even the scales in society and undoubtedly as part of their own quest for inner peace and harmony.
While thinking of people who write books about esoteric things that are part fiction and part scholarship, I learned from Marlowe, how his father, who recently died, was an ethnomusicologist, Mantle Hood (Wikipedia).
I'd have liked Mantle Hood. He too thought of music as a river, with other water analogies, and Marlowe explained that his three-part book on 'The Evolution of the Javanese Gamelan' -- those glistening percussive, mainly metal orchestras of Bali and other parts of Indonesia -- was frowned on by Hood senior's peers for being part fiction, also called 'Music of the Roaring Sea'.
"He couldn't see any other way to do it," Marlowe said, which made plenty of sense. Simply telling stories is often the best way to tell a story, after all.
What the eminent scholar would have made of me and my quest for Lilith I don't know, but he may have approved of the method. Mantle Hood had views of the "typical student" which have been kept by a woman called Kendra of Berlin, who commendably says she is "just as important or unimportant as anybody else".
On her site, Kendra quotes Hood, who clearly had a sharp-edged sense of humour and taste for aphorisms, from 'The Ethnomusicologist' on the likes of some of us. Here's a bit of it:
"He is inclined to be highly sensitive to other human beings, to respect their scales of values and their behavior, even if these are not compatible with his own. He is likely to have a latent or realized suspicion that everything in print about music is not necessarily true, even in some instances is necessarily not true. He has a healthy curiosity about the new and the unknown and a talent for stepping outside himself or the self he thinks he is, long enough to take a sympathetic look at the unknown. [...] He has for the senior scholar an unabashed admiration, founded on the security of frequent differences of opinion with him. He has a deep love of the sheer sound and musicality of music, and he likes to make it. He is both a doer and something of a dreamer. He has strong tendencies toward romanticising and a clear pragmatic streak that keeps him from losing his balance -- most of the time. He has an analytical turn of mind but secretly half-believes in myths. He is very much an individual. Above all, his liking for music is closely tied to his liking for people; his interest in the one is inseperable from the other."
That's not entirely me, but I've spent half a century aspiring to most of it.
It's rather reassuring to be reminded a little of who you are at the very time you need to do a little more finding out! When it comes to Lilith, however, I see no reason to be a secretive somebody who "half-believes in myths".
The real question is, which one?
To be, of course, pursued...
_________
The detail from the 'Last Supper' mural, 1498, is reproduced by Ramon Jusino on his page, "Did Leonardo da Vinci Believe that Mary Magdalene was the Beloved Disciple?"
I'd say "The eyes have it"!
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