Monday, September 18, 2006

Douglas Rushkoff gives good interview

I really dug his books Nothing Sacred and Coercion. This interview covers a bunch of stuff, including his new comic book series Testament.

Suicide Girls Interview w/ Douglas Rushkoff:
The idea of this comic is that the god God of Torah doesn’t really exist, but Adonai Eloheinu, that God, Yahweh, was a creation of three demigods. If you read Torah in order, you see God starts out as this fire-breathing god. Then he calms down and then becomes more of a human god. Then he becomes more of the Indian God as more influences came through and the various Prophets talked to different holy men of different regions. I have three gods come up with the great, big, unknowable God as a way of thinking they could make peace in the God world. That way we won’t have to fight. It’s in the way of having a corporation, having a nameless entity through which we’ll pledge allegiance to this thing and how humanity will create this Bible that has that God in charge of everything. It’s this great idea, but what ends up happening is that they repress the feminine because it’s abstract and it’s not based on Earth. It’s a theological system based in scarcity, abstractness and ideas, rather than abundance, the ground and fertility. What has to happen in my story is that in order for our characters to really liberate themselves from Torah, without just being Satanists or anti-Torah, punk reactionaries, is they’ve got to somehow create a marriage between this whole male culture and the female culture that got repressed. If you look in Torah, you can see all the matriarchs in Torah are actually sacred priestesses. All of them along with Sarah and Rebecca are temple prostitutes. There are little hints by the things that they do, who they’re having sex with other than the husband and when husbands are offering their wives up to strangers who come to the door. This isn’t just you offering up your wife because since these are temple priestesses it’s a blessing. But that whole aspect of history ended up getting repressed. I look around the world now and I actually see things like SuicideGirls as efforts to reclaim some of the power. The survival of the species is about that, whether or not we’re going to reintegrate what we call the feminine archetype back into our understanding of the world.

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