a tumblr of Soma

via clothedinsky:

In “Passionate Enlightenment” by Miranda Shaw one can read about a social and religious movement in which women were at the forefront. They were considered leaders, very powerful and their sexuality and the whole of the feminine human expression was worshiped. In one of his works Daniel Odier quotes an old myth explaining that the Gods and Goddess gave women divine sexual power, one aspect of which naturalizes aggressive male tendencies, returning them to the earth. (From the little research I’ve done it seems the ancient rights of Summer where of a similar type in that sense, different in others.) This same feminine & sexual power when embraced/worshiped by males gives rise to altered/higher level states of mind/being. The social and religious culture that developed around these practices did away with the rules of the caste system, obviously lifted the social status of women and embraced both female and male sexuality. Lives based in peace, freedom and happiness appear the oder of the day, sadly this was short lived before being largely reabsorbed into more authoritarian, male dominated societies.

It gets really interesting when you tie in a wonderful story from Radiolab titled New Baboon: This amazing piece focuses on a group of Baboons who (through a pretty disgusting tragedy) lose half of their male population.

The typical adult males in Baboon society are incredibly violent, especially when a new male tries to enter a group (they leave their original families at sexual maturity). For the first 3 months of his tribal membership he will be beaten and tormented by the other males. None of the females will show him any attention, because they will be savagely beaten for doing so.

However, in this particular group after the alpha males died all at once the levels of stress and violence in the group declined greatly. The researcher was completely heart broken by the death of so many of his troupe, a group he spent 10 years with and he moved on to study another.

When he returned 20 years later his mind was blown to see this Baboon group still living peacefully, something completely alien to baboon culture.

This happened because the females were the majority. They no longer lived in fear of being attacked by super-aggressive males and the males learnt a more peaceful way to live, they didn’t need to kill each other to get ahead. The levels of grooming, even male to male grooming (something that never happens) went way up. They were able to keep this going for so many years because every time a new male would enter the troupe expecting to have to fight their way in, they were received openly and instead of it taking 3 months before things settled down and he was able to receive some attention from the females, the females approaching him within 3 days, they learnt there was another way to live and the ball just kept rolling.

In one generation one of the most violent, male dominated primate cultures became a peaceful, female orchestrated culture.