The purpose of this research is to examine the concept of patriarchal subjugation of women in the light of the evolution of the idea of religion, and to evaluate, with reference to evidence of such concept, the manifestation of the concept in the modern period. The plan of the research will be to set forth nascent or primitive religious concepts that illustrate a prepatriarchal and presubjugation religious ethos, and then to discuss the content and impact of myths that appear to have evolved in a way that either prefigured or declared a patriarchal religious idea that was a significant and decisive departure from primitive religious forms, as well as the manifestation of the post mythical residue of the shift in religious consciousness in the ontemporary world. Finally, as appropriate, reference will be made to the possibility of the emergence and development of a postpatriarchal, postsubjugation religious ethos that may either derive or depart from the patriarchal religious tradition on one hand, or return to the religious or spiritual ethos of prepatriarchy on the other.
The fact of a patriarchal religious ethos may be described as a fundamental of the contemporary culture around the world. Various liberation movements by or on behalf of women may have appeared and may have achieved success in certain segments of that culture, but in this period of the so called global village, where so called primitive and industrial cultures frequently intersect, the vast weight of evidence is on the side of a moral judgment, frequently supported by a religious or spiritual appeal, that holds that as a group, women are or ought to be
subservient, inferior, or otherwise secondary to the dominant
male group. Women in industrialized nations may have achieved some social, political, or legal standing even a bit of authentic power here and there but it is profoundly the case that the mainstream of virtually any culture on the pla...