Manu’s Law 2400BCE: The Copy Cat Law of the Romans 200BCE

Photo from: www.livius.org

Manu’s Law, subjugating one gender to the other gender harmed both in “equal but different” ways. The harm is deep, invisible and complex.

First, a few men bloated with the belief they possessed divinity and special power made it appear to the people to be true by claiming Godhood. They were to be addressed as Lords, Manu being one of these. His greed for power was so great he made slavery legal. Absolute obedience was demanded. Rule by a few men is the foundation of Patriarchy.

Note that I said a few men. The rest of the men were ‘lesser’ men, not divine, and so could be and were also enslaved. Slavery became a global phenomenon. Lords claimed it to be natural, and in fact, God’s plan. This is the circular argument: it (slavery) is so because we say it is so.

Slavery soon grew into a more organized system called feudalism. Now when one looks into the past with the 20/20 vision of hindsight you see that in almost every large group held together by geography, language, colour, etc., there arose a few men who claimed divinity. Gods, Kings, Emperors, Lords … exploded on the scene, to whom all ‘lesser’ beings owed absolute obedience, fealty and fidelity.

So the Roman patriarchs wanted their own God too. In 200BCE the Romans put the ‘Manus’ into law. (Note the similarity between Manu and the Manus as names) The ‘Manus’ was “the authoritative control of the husband over his wife.” It too was claimed to be God’s plan. And it appears three times in the Bible. In between Manu of the Hindi and the Roman ‘Manus’ a divinity was claimed among Jews, Emanuel, a name incorporating the name of Manu. And in 600ACE the Arab nations claimed a divinity and set up another God. Serving the Lord became the definition for being moral.

Feudalism blossomed all over the globe right up to the 17^th Century. It took the species until the 1760’s to see that they were being controlled, that society had been ‘fixed’. Rich and poor, clean and unclean, men and not men, higher men and lesser men, educated and not educated … all intersecting divisions making it easy to control “the masses.”

The species suffered 4000 years of slavery, feudalism and patriarchy. These so deeply harmed both genders that it is naïve to think that we are out of the poisoned and infested woods.