I told you so. There is a massive return to and celebration of pre-Christian paganism in so-called 'Christian' cultures. An important element of pagan culture is the fertility ritual.

This is a good time to talk about fertility cults, a time when, among other things, Easter bunnies, buns and eggs are out and about and the bacchanal of carnival is about to reach its climax.

The semi-scholarly Jamaica Journal has published a learned article, 'Lady Saw cuts loose: Female fertility rituals in the dancehall'. An important subtext of the article is that the music is more than just music but has deep significance as religio-cultural expression and exposé'. The Lady Saw article begins with the poem, "Iyalode Oshun, Goddess of the River/Daughter of Promise, Mother of the Sweet Waters/It is from your throbbing Womb/That the rhythm of music springs/It is from your bouncing Breasts/That Dance is born." Iyadole Oshun could be any fertility goddess in the long and wide history of the cult of fertility.

The article proclaims that "the flamboyant exhibitionist DJ Lady Saw epitomises the sexual liberation of many African-Jamaican working-class women from airy-fairy Judaeo Christian definitions of appropriate female behaviour". The Bible, for instance, exhorts Christian women to "adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation" and "let your beauty be the hidden person of the heart with the incorruptible ornament of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God".

This injunction, of course, in some fields of contemporary discourse, means abject surrender to patriarchy, with God being the chief masculine tyrant.

"So in a decisive act of feminist emancipation, Lady Saw cuts loose from the burdens of moral guardianship. She embodies the erotic." What the article fails to demonstrate is how stabbing up, or stabbing out, the meat, from Lady Saw's signature song, with meat being metaphor for the female genitalia, is emancipatory for the owner of the meat.

Sexist norms

Having stabbed the critics who argue that Lady Saw is too slack, this 'scholarly' article rushes on to proclaim, "Unfortunately, women who have internalised sexist norms add to these negative images. (But) Lady Saw is one such songstress who plays herself, and by association, all other women."

It would be most interesting to ask the thousands of African-Jamaican working-class women crowding into Christian churches this Easter Sunday, as they did on Emancipation Day in 1834 and 1838, and sisters of Rastafarianism whether this scholar and her 'slack' subject speak for them. But, then, the poor things have internalised destructive Judaeo-Christian and Rastafarian sexist norms and the patriarchy which goes with these norms. What these poor enslaved women desperately need is liberation, like Lady Saw, by a return to a fertility cult now finding contemporary expression in dancehall! And this is scholarship?! Help!

Fertility cults

The 'liberation' of human sexuality from the kinds of constraints present in Judaeo-Christian Scripture is as old as human history. And so are the fertility cults. It is the sexual restrictions of the monotheistic faiths which are non-normative. In many of these fertility cults women had the great privilege of being sacred temple prostitutes. The queens of dancehall dress the role and, for the time being, only imitate with their partners the act of public copulation. A favourite food of the fertility gods was the blood of young children. Paganism, including the fertility cults, have from time to time penetrated both Judaism and Christianity drawing stern denunciations from prophets and reformers.

The juxtaposition of life and death as two sides of one coin in pagan religions seems to have a parallel in dancehall interpreted as religion with its extreme emphases of stabbing the meat and shooting 'informa' and b-man. And the wider culture is highly tolerant of this mirroring of what the Greek pagans called eros (sexual love) and thanatos (death). Christianity is fundamentally about the apocalyptic triumph of life over death exemplified in the glorious resurrection of Jesus, the Christ.

Turning to the cultural and historical notes in my NIV Archaeological Study Bible, we read that the cults of the ancient mystery religions "frequently focused upon fertility, (included) erotic symbolism and included secret rituals that were sometimes either gory or orgiastic. Further, the Greek Cult of Dionysus, also called Bacchus (from which bacchanal comes), was "notorious for its unrestrained, orgiastic character involving wine, music dance and sex." The excesses were so destructive that many pagan civic authorities sought to suppress the cult and its practices.

The temple of Aphrodite at Corinth reputedly held 1,000 temple prostitutes. Sacred temple prostitutes and fertility orgies were not unusual in the pagan world. Herodutus recorded that every Babylonian woman was required to perform temple duties as a sacred prostitute in a temple of Ishtar at sometime in her life. Although this assertion is disputed, the fact of sacred prostitution in temples is not.

The Judaic prophet Ezekiel, from Babylonian captivity, denounced the syncretistic mix of the worship of Jehovah and Tammuz-Ishtar. The fertility goddess Ishtar, like her Canaanite counterpart Astarte (Ashtoreth in the Bible), was called 'Queen of Heaven'. Christianity, like Judaism before it and alongside it, has never managed for long to avoid the penetration of elements of the pagan religions.

It is perhaps worth noting, though not many people want to put two and two together to arrive at this reasonable four, that Africa, from whence, presumably, Lady Saw's liberating female fertility rituals have been derived, leads the world in incidence of AIDS and this predominantly by heterosexual transmission. And the second-highest prevalence occurs in the Caribbean, the only place in the world outside of Africa itself where people of African ancestry are in majority.

Fertility cults

This fact of history is evident to honest people who look at the matter: The greatest liberation of women, children, persons previously in bondage or conditions of oppression - and even animals - has occurred in a reformed Judaeo-Christian cultural context, despite all the sins of the faith. Far from being liberating, any mass return to fertility cults and rituals being celebrated by the Jamaica Journal 'scholar' with Lady Saw set up as priestess, perhaps without her consent or understanding, is a return to bondage, particularly for women and other categories of the historically oppressed.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.