Patriarchy mythologized its triumph as a violent cosmic conquest over feminine chaos.

Evidence

Men represented this triumph as the outcome of a violent struggle. One of the most ancient cosmologies, belonging to the Assyro-Babylonians, tells of their victory in a text that dates from the seventh century but that recounts an even older legend. The Sun and the Sea, Aton and Tiamat, gave birth to the celestial world, the terrestrial world, and the great gods; but finding them too turbulent, they decided to destroy them; and Tiamat, the woman-mother, led the struggle against the strongest and most fine-looking of her descendants, Bel-Marduk; he, having challenged her in combat, killed her and slashed her body in two after a frightful battle; with one half he made the vault of heaven, and with the other the foundation for the terrestrial world; then he gave order to the universe and created humanity. In the Eumenides drama, which illustrated the triumph of patriarchy over maternal right, Orestes also assassinates Clytemnestra. Through these bloody victories, the virile force and the solar forces of order and light win over feminine chaos. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 169

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave and to the cosmogonic myths that structure Manichaean readings of feminine alterity. — connects to: Women channeled the ecstatic religious madness that patriarchy had displaced onto a male god — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 340; Patriarchal mythology projects its own values onto woman and calls imposed immanence her nature — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 655; Patriarchal marriage domesticated feminine cosmic power into lawful order — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 367
• BMF: The story of Tiamat the woman-mother slashed in two to form heaven and earth, and Orestes absolved as his father’s son before his mother’s, evokes the Oedipal and cosmic-feminine motifs in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower sequence and the gendered abjection of latent worlds.

Broader Connections

• Patriarchal mythology projects its own values onto woman and calls imposed immanence her nature #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 655
• Women channeled the ecstatic religious madness that patriarchy had displaced onto a male god #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 340
• Patriarchal marriage domesticated feminine cosmic power into lawful order #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 367