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WARNING: In this article I will mention from time to time the common names of plants used as abortificants. These medicines can be very dangerous and I cite them as historical information only. Modern chemical and barrier contraceptives are far more effective and much safer. If you suspect you are pregnant and do not wish the embryo to develop, or if you wish to enjoy a sexual relationship andavoid pregnancy consult a qualified doctor or birth control clinic. If for any reason you cannot use modern contraceptives and wish to find out more about natural birth control, please consult a trained herbalist, preferrably one who has a recognised qualification in conventional medicine. Any attempt to treat yourself is likely to have very serious consequences.
Due to some rather irrational comments made to Part 1 of this 4 part article it is necessary to clarify what we mean by abortion and contraception. Most of the herbal contraceptives discussed below work by preventing the fertilised egg from implanting itself on the womb wall, thus if we accept the pro-life campaigns definition that life begins the at the moment of fertilisation, these preparations are an early stage abortificant. The case has been presented in this way to counter the hysterical claims of the pro-life campaign that abortionists are "baby butchers." The fact that many of these herbal contraceptives occur in our diet as normal foods puts the hysteria into perspective.
Part 1 described the creation of the mother deity and the very earliest use of contraceptive herbs in the neolithic age. Mother worship and moon worship persisted for many thousands of years. Although both men and women were involved in the advances that improved life for the neolithic tribes and clans, childbirth and other femal biological functions that are associated with the reproductive process remained strictly womens' business. Men studied the stars and plotted a calendar, women studied the moon cycle ans learned to control the bithrate to the benefit of the community.
When we think of the attitude of most modern scientists to astrology, it is ironic to recall that astrology, studying the movement of heavenly bodies, was the first science.
It would probably have been a man who learned how to predict the changing of the seasons and understood that when the leaves fell off the trees it was part of a natural cycle and not something that happend because the gods were pissed off with someone. A woman however would have discovered that a tea made by infusing leaves of the Raspberry bush or other member of the Rose (Rubus) genre in hot water would relive the pain of childbirth and ease delivery. The earliest written instructions for preparation of this medicine date back to the 7th century B.C. and were found in an archaeological site in the middle east.
It is sad to think that the woman who wrote that on a clay tablet may have been passing on her wisdom before being stoned to death as a witch.
The most widely known contraceptive of the ancient world, from the mediterranean to the Persian Gulf was a herb named Silphion. This plant grew in a small area in North Africa and was exported to Persia, Assyria, Egypt and Greece.
The Roman physician Soranus wrote, "women should drink the juice from a small amount of silphium about the size of a chick pea with water once a month. He added that it "not only prevents conception but also destroys anything existing".
Another ancient herbalist/physician, the Greek Dioscorides, too, gave it for contraceptive and abortive purposes."
So effective was Silphion that when attempts to cultivate the herb failed it was overharvested and had become extinct within a century. Not to worry, Silphion was a member of a large and abundant plant family, species of which are found all around the world. Another member of the genus was used as a contraceptive in Britain, France and Germany and yet another in North America. All of these, with varying degrees of efficacy, have the same effect, they make the wall of the womb slippery so at the very earliest stage the embryo has difficulty implanting itself. Birth control by early stage abortion then.
I am not going to give more details of the modern name of this plant. The decision to be a complete bastard was prompted by some ridiculous arguments on recent discussion threads in which "pro-lifers" were screaming that life begins the moment the egg is fertilised. The plant of which I am wrting is a very common food plant, is present in many prepared foods and finds its way onto the dinner plates of the western world on a regular basis. So those rabid pro-lifers who regularly rant about the evils of abortion may themselves unwittingly be abortionists.
That is truly an irony to savour.
Use of Silphion as a contraceptive is recorded from the seventh century B.C. and it became popular around a hundred years later. (When I use B.C. and A.D. in date references, sometimes a Christian will pop up and try to claim this proves I really, really want to accept Jesus as my saviour but am too arrogant to admit it to myself. Where do these people get such nonsense from? I use B.C. and A.D. simply because it is familiar and everybody knows what I am talking about. And anyway, B.C. stands for Backwards Counting and A.D. for Advancing Dates.)
Silphion then was the contraceptive of choice at the time Cyrus the Great created the Persian Empire and built his great capital city Persepolis.
The formation of the Persian Empire which, through Cyrus' conquests, extended fromThe Indus to Egypt and the Mediterranean coast of Palestine, coincided with the formation of a new monotheistic religion Zoroastrianism that had as its God the sun, Ahuru Mazda or Ormazd (the great light - ever used a Mazda light bulb?) The light was not just the sun in the sky but the light of knowledge, represented by a flame. The religion is named Zoroastrianism and Zoroaster means great star.
A number of interesting things were happening in the world at that time, not all of them good for civilised living.
Around 1500 B.C. somebody woke up one morning and thought, "I'm bored of struggling with wood, bone and stone tools, I'll invent Bronze and kick off the first technological age."
I'm sure it happened exactly like that.
In line with this inspired person's expectations the invention of metal tools led to a wave of advances in art, crafts, agriculture and science. One of the scientific discoveries that came about early in the Bronze Age was that men's willies had something to do with making babies.
Being male, the boys from the Bronze Age soon learned how to turn making babies into a competitive sport. To make matters worse, around the same period in several civilisations simultaneously, a priestly caste rose to prominence who knew beyond doubt that God was a man and he hated women. Once men understood their part in the conception process it did not take long before they tried to control female sexuality.
Women were demonised. The first deity on earth in early myths had been female, a mother goddess, the mother of all things. Now the mythical perspective shifted, new creation myths told that the first human was male, created by the male God in his own image. The female was reclassified as Lilith in middle eastern legend, the she demon who had challenged the omnipotence of the male god. It does not take much nous to read this myth, since the earliest appearance of anything that could be called civilised life, as well as the importance of motherhood in securing the future of the tribe, people had understood the importance of the sun in maintaining life. Thus the calendar myths and the supreme deities, the sun father and the earth mother were created and worshipped side by side.
Once the half teaspoonfull contribution of men to the gestation and bith process was understood men wanted to take over the world.
A priestly trick revamped the nature myths, suggesting that early men were immortal, gods in fact, and it was only the sexual temptations offered by women that inflicted the miseries of mortality on them. The creation story of Genesis was greatly sanitized in the Bible writing boom after the Protestant Reformation, for an example of how it should read try this passage from a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls made by poet (and author of I Claudius) Robert Graves:Now, God had set Adam to name every beast, bird and other living thing. When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam-being already like a twenty-year-old man-felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried coupling with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: 'Every creature but I has a proper matel', and prayed God would remedy this injustice........
God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam's union with this demoness, and with another like her named Naamah, Tubal Cain's sister, sprang Asmodeus and innumerable demons that still plague mankind.
(A longer extract is printed at the end of the article)
A pretty damning indictment of womankind then, they had been declared the cause of all human ills, and all because the girls had periods and wanted to retain the right to control their own bodies to restrict the birthrate for the sake of improving the quality of the tribe's humanstock, for their own health and that of their children, and to restrict numbers to what the hunters, gatherers and farmers could feed.
Those women who knew the secrets of herbalism and how to prepare the medicines and infustions kept their knowledge, this was still an age of oral tradition. Books could be destroyed but thoughts and ideas could not. The priests tried to eradicate the knowledge of herbal medicine, not just for contraception but for all healing, by declaring that women who possessed or sought such knowledge were servants of the she-demon and as such an abomination to God. And so the first witches were created and stoned to death, not for calling up devils, causing forces of nature to sway the outcome of battles or turning righteous men into newts but for brewing up infusuions; of raspberry leaves to ease birthing pains; asafetida, wormwood or tansy to prevent pregnancy, or wilow bark to relieve a headache.
This then was how the followers of the patriarchal God of Abraham, the god of the monotheistic religions of the Middle East subjugated their women.
Fortunately the civilisations of Europe managed to hold on to their collective sanity, at least until they had managed to stash away enough of their knowledge in written form to give us a picture of how things really were.
Footnotes, links & Bibliography
from the Book of Bacarach:
And the Serpent, the Woman of Harlotry, incited and seduced Eve through the husks of Light which in itself is holiness. And the Serpent seduced Holy Eve, and enough said for him who understands. An all this ruination came about because Adam the first man coupled with Eve while she was in her menstrual impurity -- this is the filth and the impure seed of the Serpent who mounted Eve before Adam mounted her. Behold, here it is before you: because of the sins of Adam the first man all the things mentioned came into being. For Evil Lilith, when she saw the greatness of his corruption, became strong in her husks, and came to Adam against his will, and became hot from him and bore him many demons and spirits and Lilin.from the Book of Zohar
When Cain was born, she could not attach herself to him. But later she approached him and bore spirits and winged demons. For 130 years Adam had intercourse with female spirits, until Naamah came. Because of her beauty the sons of God went astray after her, 'Ussa and 'Azael, and she bore from them, and from her spread evil. spirits and demons in the world.... (Patai81:454f) And she goes and roams the world at night, and makes sport with men and causes them to emit seed. And wherever men are found sleeping alone in a house, they [these spirits] descend upon them and get hold of them and adhere to them and take desire from them and bear from them. And they also afflict them with disease, and the men do not know it. And all this is because of the diminishing of the moon.
Lilith: (from a translation of sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Robert Graves)
S ome say that God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world; 2 but that Eve did not yet exist. Now, God had set Adam to name every beast, bird and other living thing. When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam-being already like a twenty-year-old man-felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried coupling with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: 'Every creature but I has a proper matel', and prayed God would remedy this injustice.God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam's union with this demoness, and with another like her named Naamah, Tubal Cain's sister, sprang Asmodeus and innumerable demons that still plague mankind. Many generations later, Lilith and Naamah came to Solomon's judgement seat, disguised as harlots of Jerusalem'.
Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. 'Why must I lie beneath you?' she asked. 'I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.' Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.
AND LASTLY A DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME MOMENT.
This is an ancient recipe to prepare a one month course of the contraceptive herb asafetida, which would prevent conception for a year. Found on the Sister Zeus website.
To Prevent Conception for one year
An Ancient Recipe - not for home use
4 drams active principle of Embelia ribes
4 drams Piper longum
2 drams Ferula assa-foetida
4 drams of borax
The above was taken to prevent conception for one year in equally divided doses daily for 22 days while abstaining from intercourse.
What the "active principle" of Embilia Ribes is or how it can be obtained is information that no longer exists. The recipe also does not show how the asafetida should be prepared or used, or indeed wat parts of the plant were effective. We must assume the person who wrote the recipe considered this information so basic it was not worth repeating.
As the Sister Zeus website says, we should only consider this as historical information, even if effective contraceptives were not readily available we could no recreate this concoction from the information we have.
USEFUL LINKS for birth control
Further reading and websites for ancient history:
Tufts University Classics Dept. online archive of ancient texts.
Home of the Internet Classics Archive, the largest online archive of classical literature
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cv/index.htm
Internet Sacred Terxts Archive, sacred texts from all over the ancient world
The Hinduism Website
http://www.hinduwebsite.com/vedicsection/vedaindex.asp
The Ayurveda, Bhagavad Gita, Ayur Veda, Rig Veda, Maharabharata and more
Oregon Biphysical Research Lab
http://www.orgonelab.org/contracep.htm
Sister Zeus
http://www.sisterzeus.com/Silphio.htm
History Books and Research Papers:
The Myth of Eternal Return: Mircea Eliade (trans Willard Trask) Princeton 1994
Illustrated World Religions: Huston Smith
1) The Way Of Aminal Powers
2) Myths of the Primitive Hunter Gatherers
The intellectual Adventure of Early Man: H & H.A. Frankfort, Chicago 1947
The Epic of Gilgamesh (traditional - search for Gilgamesh)
The Zend Avesta (traditionl - search for Avesta)
The Golden Bough: Sir James Frazer
The White Goddess : Robert Grave
The Mythology and Rites of British Druids: Edward Davies
The Republic: Plato
The Virtues of Women: Plutarch
The Heritage of Persia: R.N. Frye.
other books too numerous to list have been referred to in preparing this article.
READ Amanda Macotte of Pandangon on the topic of irrational attitudes to abortion.
Medical procedures don't have to be enjoyable in order to be a social good.
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Comments: 25
Have you ever read "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond? It is an eye-opener as to the importance of the female in the overall progression of humanity. While men were busy with their silly wars seeking domination over each other and killing each other off, women were busy developing agriculture and progressing us to where we are today in almost every skill imaginable. And when they weren't killing each other off, women were still doing the work which gave men the time to ponder philosophical questions and the heavens and write down their silly interpretations of such via male gods.
Have you heard of Lysistrata? The answer is in your hands (or will be at some time)
As we said in Part 1 of this, in the early civilisations men were expendible. But early woman was too busy developing agriculture to do the sums. If the girls had though it through.... Hmmm - OK, his willie has a part to play but he can ejaculate three, four times a day, I can only have one baby a year, so we only need one man for the the whole tribe...... ah but I'd miss my mammoth steaks and who would draw maps and reverse park the Oxen?
The Sacred feminine stuff in The Da Vinci code is plaigiarised, and to make matters worse, badly plaigiarised from The White Goddess by Robert Graves.
When patriarchy became more important, however, now ensuring identification of a father to a child became key. Now, I, as someone important, had to ensure my women cleaved only to me. Potential adultery became an excuse to get rid of any woman I was tired of or disown any child I chose. I had to "own" the woman in order to have the control I needed to ensure my seed carried forward. What's more, it was a way of sanctioning such horrors as raping the conquered women or the ladies of women as a way of imposing one's seeds on one's enemy.
Is that not a backwards step in civilization or is it?
I also found the description of Lilith very telling. What is it about male myths of this sort that they impose distinctly male behaviors on women? Women raping men, imposing parenthood on them against their will? Please! Delusional.
Of course, I felt the same way about the story with Solomon and two women claiming the same child. Like I said, maternity is pretty easy to establish.
Interesting read.
And this comment is hilarious: "his willie has a part to play but he can ejaculate three, four times a day, I can only have one baby a year, so we only need one man for the the whole tribe...... ah but I'd miss my mammoth steaks and who would draw maps and reverse park the Oxen?"
I'm not a scholar, I,m a controversialist :-)
Interesting you should mention men needing to ensure exclusivity as I was planning an article on what adultery is really all about and why it was customary for conquerors to rape all the women of their defeated enemy (its still happening today in Darfur to name one location) No spoilers now, I'll mail.
I have never actually had to park oxen but I know my Crogwyn, a purebred welsh cob horse was traine for dressage. She could do leg yielding (going sideways) turns off the inside hand and I could drop the reins and guide her through a figure of eight with just leg pressure. But it was a bugger to get her to go straight in reverse.
I was drawing on that experience :-)
I'm getting to that in part 4
Obviously such stuff will be dumped when I put this into the manuscript for the book.
But I don't get paid for posting at gather (I can't spend the vouchers in Britain) so let me have my fun and wind up the people who try to bully all liberal thinking off the site.
In a different thread, nothing to do with birth control, we had the "pro-lifers" kicking off about abortionists knives hacking to pieces viable foetuses, then they cried censorship when I deleted their comments for being off topic. (the thread was about the Democratic party's selection process)
So I now put a reminder in each article that such idiocy will not be tolerated. Its just a case of getting my retaliation in first.
Your criticism is welcome though.
I agree with Stephanie - on the whole, we are quickly devolving.
Don't devolve from us all, some of us think women are wonderful.
But I wonder do the boy scientists working on fertilising an egg by taking the nucleus from a stem cell understand what danger they are putting our gender in.
They haven't thought that one through have they?
But from what I hear boy scientists are pretty attached to their blow up dolls.
Must share this. A few years ago I read a novel by Tom Sharp that had a scene where a guy was having a passionate affair with a blow up doll so hid wife put superglue in its vagina. The ensuing action was the funniest writing I've ever read.
You are a feminist! I love it! You also have a very sure feel for anthropology and evolutionary biology. I appreciate the references as well.
Lysistrata contains a lovely scheme, but it's impractical, as testosterone controls both sex drive and aggression.
However, a global withholding of sex by us women would work really well if we wanted you guys to exterminate each other in warfare. We could just lock up a few of you for safekeeping, to ensure the creation of a new generation. Or better yet, just freeze some sperm.
Your point about establishing paternity says it all, I think. Most of the persecution and supression of women throughout history springs from this simple fact.
We women know which kids are ours, but from an evolutionary perspective, wasting time and resources raising another man's child is about the worst thing a guy could do. Unfortunately, even though we now have the tools to establish paternity, the persecution continues. In many societies, men still feel the need curtail or prevent the sexual freedom of women.
I believe the invention of the horse-drawn plow was a crucial factor in the switch from matriarchal to patriarchal religions. Prior to the plow, we humans used sticks to loosen soil for planting. Women can do this well enough. But the average woman doesn't have enough upper-body strenth to control a horse-drawn plow. So, men gained power over food production and the fertility of Mother Nature. God became a male.
A couple of closing notes:
Concerning dates-- isn't BCE (Before Common Era) replacing BC (Before Christ) so that the religious connotations can be dropped?
You found a reference to beastiality in the Dead Sea scrolls? Now THIS is interesting!
Peace,
libramoon
Thank you for doing that. I have two more parts to come bringing the story up to the twentieth century.
Beastiality was common at the time, the mindset did not think in terms of vile perversions - that only came with the rise of the theocracies. People were just sexual and it was quite OK for women and men to have same gender fun. Paternity and property righs were the issue as you have said.
So if a lad saw a pretty young goatette parading about showing her Victoria's Secret mohair underfleece he'd just think "why not?"
And contemporary accounts tell us the girl goat-sluts didn't mind at all :-)
Not a bad idea, Ann...although I think we would agree that Ian should be one of those men kept for safekeeping. : - ) And, we would need to ensure that while the men were destroying each other they did not take women and children along with them.
I definitely agree, save the best genetic stock for breeding!