When Peter Gabriel played at the ACC in Toronto back in 2002, he remarked that it had been a long time since he had performed in T.O.—but that, when you got to be his age, it wasn’t the quantity of performances that mattered, it was the quality.
I’d been thinking about virgin births and fertility rituals this morning, and then also started pondering the decrease in sex drive as one ages.
Of course, we know today that that decrease in desire and the ability of women to conceive is a consequence of a lowered level of production of sex hormones and other changes in the body. But our primitive ancestors had no such knowledge. Rather, to them, the lessening of sex drive as one ages will have profoundly reinforced the idea that fertility is a finite resource—not merely in one’s own human body, but also in the animal world on which they depended for their food and survival. That is, your sex drive decreases as you age because you’ve used all your fertility up. (Ironically, but purely coincidentally, women are actually born with only a finite number of eggs; but our ancestors again had no way of knowing that.)
This is the half-remembered agrarian fertility-ritual thing (from when I tried reading Frazer’s The Golden Bough as a teenager, and gave it up because it was just too thick and dry) which got me into that frame of mind:
[Frazer] speaks to the roles of the Egypt temple priestess of Ammon who was also the consort of the god, and, “… usually she was no less than the Queen of Egypt herself …” but otherwise a virgin:
“For according to the Egyptians, their monarchs were actually begotten by the god Ammon, who assumed for the time being the form of the reigning king, and in that disguise had intercourse with the queen” [Frazer 1959:130]….
In fact the king is said to assume the form of the god Ammon and, after the temple virgin mistakenly accepts the apparition as the real god, sleeps with him and conceives a new heir to the throne….
Frazer’s book goes on to describe the ancient Neolithic mysteries of the Greek Kabeori. Again he gives good solid reasons for the mystery cults, stating that they were “Magical dramas designed to stimulate the growth of plants by the real or mock marriage of men and women who masquerade as spirits of vegetation….” [Frazer 1959:137]. Here, too, the mysteries of the Kabeori may have involved the ritualistic marriage and annual union between the temple priest and the temple priestess to insure the fertility of the land. Certainly any of the virgin birth stories resulting from the sacred marriage are fragments when the temple priestess would annually celebrate the fertility ritual with the temple priest.
Our agrarian ancestors had their hands full with merely securing enough food to survive: the importance of “virgin birth” to them relates directly to their pre-scientific conceptions of fertility, not to fanciful metaphysics. They were hard-scrabble, brutally superstitious farmers—with a priesthood whose responsibility was to ensure that rituals were performed properly—not early philosophers/theologians or dope-smoking college students on their way to Nepal to “find themselves.”
P.S. If you think you can do better on getting through that book, knock yourself out.
Also, Jesus Christ in comparative mythology and Was the story of Jesus stolen from Ancient Egypt?