For my novels I unearth facts, allegations and theories from a huge variety of digging grounds. Sometimes what I learn doesn't altogether fit into a story line, yet is too fascinating for me to let go. So occasionally I'll write an essay on such an item, especially if it has significance to our own days. Below please find an essay on contraception in the ancient world, and another on monotheism and its implications.

     Enjoy, and send me your comments and questions. 

The 2,700 year old once-a-month

morning-after pill

     Wouldn't you be surprised to learn that in the ancient world, women had more control over their reproductive rights than they did until the late twentieth century?

     As early as 700 B.C., a woman could take a pill that would prevent conception for a whole month.

     That's a fact I uncovered doing research for my historical romance The Rescuers, set in the second-century A.D. My female protagonist has strong reasons to believe she would not survive childbirth, so she makes use of a birth control method that was widely known at the time, yet not much written about.

     The all-natural pill she uses was made from the resin of a species of giant fennel called silphium, a plant grown in Cyrene, a Greek colony in what is Libya today. The plant was a cash crop that made Cyrene wealthy. A Greek coin from the period shows a woman holding a fennel plant and pointing to her reproductive area.

     Ancient writers said that silphium would "clean the menses," their term for contraception. These ancient writers, being male, gave few further details on silphium's use or effects. The silphium plant was allowed to become extinct around the first century A.D. It's wide open to speculation why. In western civilization, the dark ages for women's rights had begun.

     However, certain relatives of the silphium plant continued to be used, and are still employed for contraception today. Women kept this information alive by word of mouth.

     In late antiquity, men gradually began taking over medicine, a movement that culminated in the witch-burning of medieval and early modern times. During this anti-female movement, much herbal lore was lost. Crucial to women was the loss of their reproductive rights.

     We are glad that the light has started to shine again, and that even though we still have a long way to go, twentieth-century women's movements have restored equality enough to allow the development of pharmaceutical birth control. However, the natural way was easier and apparently just as effective. It is interesting to note that there was no population explosion in ancient Rome.

     As I research and write my historical novels, I constantly find information that mainstream history overlooks, distorts or even suppresses. It is a joy to claim back history in the light of what we have learned in recent years about the progress of humanity towards equality. ###

Monotheism: the greatest concept of them all

     Monotheism is the acceptance of the conviction that one God and only one God exists. In the Western world, most people take monotheism for granted as being what religion is all about. However, the one-God concept evolved only gradually through history. People seem to have started out believing in multiple deities, each attached to some natural phenomenon or human concern (god of rain, goddess of wealth, god of marriage, etc.). It is striking that of the three major cultures which continue today from the most ancient times, India, China and Israel, only one developed monotheism (unless you call Buddhism monotheistic). Interestingly enough, monotheism turned out to be a protection against aggression.

      The Indian and Chinese people have been largely immune from outside attack because of dwelling in lands that are fiercely difficult to invade and occupy. The Israelites, on the other hand, have been hounded and persecuted every which way since Abraham founded the nation. They developed one grand defense: the idea that the one God, the most powerful being in the universe, would protect them if they behaved.      Not all at once, yet eventually, the one-God idea became entrenched amongst the Hebrews (and not at all with the other peoples of the ancient world, unless, again, you count the Buddhists). It worked well enough to bolster the survival of this persecuted people even during the two millennia when they had no homeland. By the time of Christ, monotheism was a Jewish absolute.

     When Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean world, the millions who worshipped droves of gods (the Romans and the barbarians who overwhelmed the Empire) became monotheists, as well as believers in gentleness and love, at least nominally. In the eighth century, the ferocious multiple-god-worshipping Arabs were subdued into monotheism by Prophet Muhammad, and thus we got our modern Judeo-Christian-Muslim western world. Polytheism today exists in the West only in vestiges such as the worship of saints. (Some say the Christian idea of the Trinity is polytheistic, yet that's a stretch. The Trinity means three aspects of one God, not three separate deities like the Hindu trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.)

     Through monotheism, billions of people have had the personal experience of a supreme being that loves them individually. The Greeks never had it so good. A few recent writers have romanticized the way the Greeks in their golden age worshipped a pantheon of gods and goddesses, saying it may have made them more tolerant than later Christians. Yet their deities never loved them, nor did their gods and goddesses teach them tolerance.

     Periclean Athens did not tolerate Socrates' right to teach against the gods, nor did they accept his belief in Logos, meaning "word." Logos to him was the divine force that righted wrongs and bound the universe together. The Greeks were educated and sophisticated, yet they put their greatest philosopher on trial, convicting and executing him for corrupting the youth.

     The Logos loved by Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and other great Greek philosophers was a monotheistic issue. It harmonized so perfectly with the Judaeo-Christian ethic that John in his Gospel used Logos to introduce God to the Greek-speaking world: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

      Monotheists have been struggling for thousands of years towards the gradual end of slavery and inequality based on gender or race, injustices all accepted by the Greeks and Romans, by the Egyptians, by the pre-Islamic Arabs and by many other polytheists. Monotheism teaches that God is a real being that loves each individual unconditionally. A world that respects love as the supreme value could never result from polytheism.

     Thus, monotheism promotes much more than tolerance. It insists that we love every human being as equals in God's creation. This force leads to human unity, not mere tolerance.

     Monotheism has also led to the slow demise of the old pagan idea that God is a dominant male. Few today can seriously picture God the Father as an old white man with a beard and blue eyes. By the last century Mary Baker Eddy, apostle of Christian Science, was referring to God as "Father-Mother." Isn't this a plausible image, even if hard to visualize? If God is a spirit, one probably doesn't have to bother to picture the Ultimate Divine as having gender.

     Critics of monotheism are critics of organized religion. Yet must a person belong to a church to believe in one God? By their nature, churches and religions have a tendency to be political. By the middle ages, Christians came to display an almost pagan level of intolerance. However, to criticize monotheism for what the religions have done in its name is like deciding that since politicians use "freedom" to justify their deeds, freedom itself is no good. For that matter, history shows that on the whole, churches have done more good than harm.

     Fighting against the idea of God is ultimately a personal issue. Perhaps those today who reject the concept of a single deity would admit they have never been personally touched by what they could identify as God's love. When you've been touched by that love, you don't have to believe -- you know.

     The single God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, along with the unified Buddha-nature, insists on sexual ethics, truthfulness, non-violence, non-theft and compassion. The single Deity has always proclaimed absolute moral realities, and as we strive to live up to them, we make civilization possible, long after the glories that were Greece, Rome and Egypt fell into the ruins we see today. In fact, just as love is the greatest emotion of them all, monotheism has to be the greatest concept.         ###