From The Creation of Eve, to Pygmalion, to Ex Machina: The Abject Male Fantasy of Artificial Women as Sex Slaves, ‘Help-Mates’ and ‘Companions’
Marble relief on the left pier of the façade of the cathedral in Orvieto, Italy
The patriarchal meta-narrative of a local creator god creating Woman as a ‘helpmate’ or sexual companion for his crown creation, ‘Man,’ is ubiquitous in male-dominant ranking ‘Cattle Cult’ religion. Genesis’ tale of Yahweh creating the First Woman (Eve) from one of First Man’s (Adam’s) ribs is only one of many, dating from around 1,500 BCE. (‘Adam’ is from ‘Adama,’ which means ‘made of clay.’)
Around a thousand years later, around 500 BCE, the story of the creator god, Hephaestus, creating the First Woman, Pandora, emerged within the archaic Greek religion. Like Eve bringing about ‘The Fall of Man,’ Pandora was held culpable for the catastrophic release of all ‘evil’ into the world — old age, infirmity, illness, death, suffering, etc. Pandora’s ‘box’ was actually a vase or vessel in the original renderings, and stood as a cipher for her womb. ’The ‘evils’ released by Pandora — or by her husband in ‘opening’ her ‘vase,’ in some versions of the tale — were understood to represent the ‘pollution’ or ‘curses’ of her menstruation. In medieval religious literature, the Latin term ‘vase,’ for ‘jar’ or ‘vessel,’ was used as a synonym for both ‘woman’ and ‘womb.’
Early Greek religious lore also included the morality tale of the godlike creator, or ‘superman’ sculptor, Pygmalion, who fell in love with his own creation, a statue of ‘the perfect Woman’ made in Aphrodite’s likeness from ivory. He prayed to Aphrodite to bring his creation to life so that he could marry her. The story is the founding myth for the ancient Greek city of Pathos, showing how the citizens were descended, not from a natural, mortal woman, but from something ‘better’ — a mute, acquiescent, man-made woman with no taint of menstruation and no independent will, therefore representing the abject patriarchal ideal for the ‘perfect’ female sexual companion for Man.
In Zoroastrianism — the source religion for all Indo-Iranian/Indo-European/Indo-Aryan Cattle Cult religions (including the Three Main Orthodoxies of the Abrahamic stem)— the Arch Demon, Ahriman, ‘lifts up’ and ‘charges’ the female demon, the ‘Poison Maiden’ Jahi (whose name means ‘menstruation’), with the task of ‘empoisoning’ the Works of Man, the animals, the elements and the Earth itself, thus ‘creating’ her as the worst ‘pollution’ in his arsenal against Ahura Mazda (the “Good God’) and his crown creation, Man:
The figure of Jeh appears in Zoroastrian texts as the personification of the pollution of menstruation. Jehis the Middle Persian rendition of an older Avestan word, jahi or jahika, which, due to its context, is usually translated in a pejorative sense to mean “whore,” although its etymology remains uncertain.
Jahika appears frequently in the early Zoroastrian texts. The word can mean “woman” or a woman who cannot reproduce. It is also used of the woman who behaves improperly — practices sorcery, or is promiscuous. As the epitome of an evildoer, Jahi threatens the good creation physically in that her glance dries up one-third of the rivers and one-third of vegetation, and her touch withers one-third of the good thoughts, good words, good deeds, holiness, and ability to combat evil of the faithful person (Vendidad 18.63–64). Because of her destructive potential, Jahi is worse than the other miscreations of Ahriman, the Destructive Spirit (Vd. 18.65). The threat she poses is echoed in proscriptions for menstruating women: Women in menses are to remain separate from the elements of creation, especially fire, in case they cause harm with their gaze (Vd. 16.1–4).
In the Middle Persian texts, Jahi, as Jeh, becomes the archetypal Whore. The Bundahishnplaces Jeh in filial relationship with Angra Mainyu (also called Ahriman). Jeh’s words revive Ahriman from a three-thousand-year stupor, and he kisses her on the head, at which moment she becomes the first to be polluted by the blood of menstruation (Bd. 4.4f.). This is one of the few myths concerning the origin of menstruation.
In the material battle between good and evil, Jeh is pitted against all virtuous women (Bd. 5.3), since they are all subject to menstruation and its inherent pollution. Jeh is also referred to collectively as an adversarial “species” (Bd. 14 a.1). In Wizidagiha-i Zadspramshe appears as Jeh-dev — the “whore demonness” — the queen of Ahriman, who leads her band of demonesses to corrupt all women, and, thus all men (WZ 34.30–31). The Jehdev’s sexuality is unlimited, and her promiscuity presents a challenge to the virtue of the faithful. (https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/jeh, Updated Dec 17 2019)
Though irresistibly sexually alluring, Jahi ‘The Whore’ is the original Poison Maiden — toxic in the extreme, who kills by seduction. In the Vendidad Jahi is characterized as causing Ahura Mazda “the most grief”.(Vendidad 18.62) “Her gaze takes the colors away from a third of [world]”. (Vendidad 18.64) Jahi is also given the cosmological role of killer of Gav-aevo.data (MP: Gawi ewdad), the primordial creature from whose seed all animal creation originates. (Vendidad 21.1)
In the Sudgar Nask, the holy element of fire is polluted by the stench and filth of Jahi’s abundant hair — the long, lustrous, seductive hair of women being constructed as having been formed from menstrual matter in ancient texts. The ‘pure’ fire element is threatened by Jahi (“Menstruation”), “owing to the hussy who, dropping her knee on to the fire-stand, arranged her curls; the falling of damp and moisture from her head, with the hair and filth therefrom.” (Denkard 9.1.10.6) The Sudgar Nask is an Avestan text that has not survived. However, its contents are summarized in The Dēnkard or Dēnkart (Middle Persian: “Acts of Religion”), a 10th-century compendium of Zoroastrian beliefs and customs. These figures’ primordial conspiracy to ‘empoison’ the world formed one pole of the first rigidly polarized dualistic religion and also the first ruthlessly binary political ideology.
Zoroastrianism was a state religion, the ideology of which was designed to justify and shore-up the absolute power of the king. Its logics are at the root of the dialectical model of thought — polarized values constantly at war with one another, and the foundation of the religio-socio-cultural pattern of constant warfare.
The figures of Ahriman and Jahi the Whore, or “Menstruation,” in their conjoined subversion of ‘God’s Order,’ are the models for the later malign partnerships of Eve and the Serpent in the primordial and ‘pure’ Garden of Eden, Pandora and her box of blights (symbol of her menstruation) after she is forged by the Greek creator god Hephaestus, and the Whore of Babylon with Satan in the form of the dragon of the Apocalypse, when the ‘Great Whore’ “pours out the cup filled with the pollutions of her fornications” (a transparent cipher for her menstruation) at the end of the world in Revelations.
The Whore of Babylon or ‘Scarlet Woman’ of Revelations inherited many of the infamous attributes of the ancient Persian daemon of the Apocalypse, ‘Jahi’ or “Geh,’ whose name simply means ‘Menstruation.’ Re-cast as the legendary ‘Abomination’ of the Old Testament (Ashtoreth/Ishtar/Astarte, etc.), the Whore of Babylon’s worship was notoriously reinstated among the Israelites by Solomon and Jezebel, and other monarchs who ‘sinned in the eyes of the Lord.’ (Brenner, 53–57) Here too, “…we find menstruation flooding the world with evil,” in an eschatological, cosmological drama. (Lederer, Fear of Women, 27) “For it is told that Angra Mainyu [the Devil], Lord of Evil and antagonist of the good Lord Ahura Mazda [God], having slept three thousand years was awakened by a female friend, Jahi (Menstruation), who shouted at him,” saying, ‘Arise, O father of us all! For I shall now cause in the world that contention from which the misery and injury of Ahura Mazda and his Archangels are to proceed. I shall empoison the righteous man, the labouring ox, the water, plants, fire, and all creation.’ Whereupon Angra Mainyu, starting up, kissed her on the forehead, and the pollution called menstruation appeared on the demoness….’” (Lederer, 27–28. For the full text see Müller 1880, 15–16)
Rise up, thou father of us! For in that righteous conflict I will shed thus much vexation on the righteous man and the labouring ox that, through my deeds, life will not be wanted, and I will destroy their living souls (nismo); I will empoison the water, I will empoison the plants, I will empoison the fire of Ahura Mazda, I will make the whole of creation empoisoned. And so she recounted those Evil deeds a second time, that the evil spirit was delighted and started up from that confusion; and he kissed Jahi on the head; and the pollution which they call menstruation became apparent in Jahi. He shouted to Jahi thus: ‘What is thy wish? So that I may give it thee.’ And Jahi shouted to the evil spirit thus: ‘A man is the wish, so give it to me.’ The form of the evil spirit was a log-like lizard’s (vazak) body, and he appeared a young man of fifteen years to Jahi, and that brought the thoughts of Jahi to him.(Müller 1880, 16)
For his millennial work, ‘The Apocalypse,’ the deified German artist, Albrecht Dürer, based his Whore of Babylon figure on an actual prostitute — a famous courtesan from Venice — whose acquaintance he had made when travelling solo in Italy soon after his marriage.
In the millennia since, tales have been spun in all media describing how masculine, godlike creators (‘scientists,’ inventors, physicians, master sculptors or artists) have created artificial women as ‘companions,’ help-mates or sex slaves for male consumption. These stories range away from the earliest narratives of Pygmalion to more recent tales showing the dark side of such patriarchal narratives in all media — from horror novels to filmic treatments. Some of these thematic treatments include Fritz Lang’s iconic early film, Metropolis, The Stepford Wives novel and two subsequent movies, and Alex Garland’s beautifully dark filmic morality play on the ethics of placing artificial intelligence into cyborg sex dolls, ‘Ex Machina.’
In the final moments of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, the machine known as Ava has passed the ultimate Turing Test. Having seduced Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), her would-be protector, and manipulated him into falling in love with her enough to try and “save” her, she escapes her caged existence. ‘Ava’ is really an ‘it,’ being a machine, a super-intelligent sex doll. But we relate to ‘her’ as a seductive female with agency— a New Woman icon who possesses no conscience, no soul, and a fierce but utterly alien artificial intelligence.
