Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (4 page)

Another kind of justice was represented by the goddess Nemesis. She’s often thought of as a goddess of retribution, but her name means, roughly, “dispenser of dues,” so she was really a goddess of evening out the shares or balancing the distribution of good and bad fortune. Among her accessories were the wheel of fortune, a sword, and a scourge made of branches — like Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid’s birch rod. A third goddess of justice was Astraea, yet another daughter of Themis. Her kind of justice was more Ma’at-like — a justice of truth, right behaviour, and things running the way they should; but because men got too wicked, she could no longer stay on Earth and thus became the constellation Virgo — the girl already mentioned, she who holds those heavenly scales.

The rule with religions seems to be: take what you need from the religion preceding yours, incorporate those bits into your own religion, and dump or demonize the rest. The Roman goddess of justice was called Iustitia; she was given the weighing scales of Astraea and the sword of Nemesis — which may have once belonged to the Mesopotamian sun god Shamesh, who had both the scales for weighing out justice and the sword for enforcing it. Iustitia was also given a blindfold, so she wouldn’t be influenced by the defendants’ social class, and sometimes she was given a torch, symbolizing the light of truth, and sometimes she was given the Roman bundle of rods — the Fasces — that denoted civil authority. Having only two hands, she can’t hold all of those things at once, so when you see her depicted outside European and North American courts of law, she will have made a choice among these objects. Usually it’s the balance and the sword.

So Iustitia inherited a lot of accessories from the gods and goddesses who came before her, but she was not thought of as judging the souls of the dead. Instead, she presided over the law courts and weighed, not hearts, but the evidence before her. However, by Roman times she’s an allegorical figure rather than a numinous, awe-inspiring goddess. The Ancient Egyptians really believed that there was a Ma’at, and especially that there was a Sekhmet, and that these deities could intervene with drastic results, both in this life and the next. But Iustitia is a statue representing a principle: the justice she represented was administered in human courts of law, by human beings, according to law codes that they themselves had devised.

So much for justice in this life, but what about the next one? The Greek and Roman afterlives were neither very pleasant nor very consistently described, but some sort of soul-judging and rewarding and punishing seems to have gone on down in their murky Underworlds. Being dead, however, was far from fun: as the dead hero Achilles tells the visiting, still-alive Odysseus in
The Odyssey
, better to spend one day on Earth as the meanest slave than to be king of the dead. Some folks got punished in the afterlife, it’s true, but for the virtuous there was nothing like a truly delightful heaven: no gardens, harps, or virgins for them. The boring fields of asphodel were about the height of it. As for what caused men to have the fortunes and misfortunes that were meted out to them on Earth, that was the business of the Fates, against whom even the gods could not stand. The Greek-speaking ancients were heavy on the tat side of tit-for-tat — evil begot evil — but not very keen on the good-for-good part: about the best you might expect as a reward for right action was being turned into a tree.

For something closer to the Egyptian weighing of the heart, and also closer to the concept of Ma’at, we need to leap forward in time to Christianity. The ideas contained in the word
ma’at
are similar to those suggested by the Greek word
logos
, or at least by some uses of it. Logos is neither a wheel nor a balance nor a way, but a word, or
the
Word. It enters Christianity via the famous opening to the Gospel of Saint John —“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word dwelt with God, and the Word was God.” But the Logos isn’t any old word — it’s a Ma’at-like word. It is both a god and a word at the same time: one that comprises the true, just, and moral foundations of all that exists.

Christianity has no goddesses as such. It has some female saints, many of whom are pictured holding their cut-off body parts, but though they may help you get a husband, play the piano, or find lost objects, they don’t have major powers. The Virgin Mary is the strongest one, but all she can do is intercede on your behalf: she performs no devastating lionesslike acts of retribution.

However, instead of lesser gods, Christianity has angels. None are explicitly female, though they generally have long hair and no beards. At the Last Judgement, Osiris-like Christ presides over the big picture but it’s the Archangel Michael who takes over the task of soul-weighing. Like Ma’at, he has wings, and he’s often shown with a scales. He’s inherited that Roman and sword of justice, in addition. As in the Egyptian heart-weighing scenes, there’s a record keeper — the Angel Gabriel is the “recording angel,” the one credited with keeping God’s ledger book up to date — and it’s these records that will be produced at the Last Judgement.

And maybe even before that: if Heaven is in session right now, Lazarus, poor and miserable during his earthly life, is looking over the heavenly railing at the rich man, Dives, who is frizzling and frying down below; thus the account books of happiness and suffering are being evened out. The Muslim religion also has a Last Judgement scales of justice, the
mizan
— your good deeds are weighed against your bad ones — and not one but two record books kept by angels: Raqeeb keeps the right-side one of good deeds, and Ateed the left-side one of bad deeds. With them and their documents on hand, there will be no room for that usual excuse of politicians: “I can’t recall.”

From the Egyptian goddesses Ma’at and Sekhmet to the Roman goddess Iustitia to the Archangel Michael to Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid is a long journey, but if it’s true that human beings don’t create anything unless it’s a variation of the human-behaviour modules present on their
Homo sapiens sapiens
smorgasbord, then each of these supernatural beings is a manifestation of that inner module we were talking about earlier: the one we could call “fairness,” “balancing out,” or “reciprocal altruism.” As we sow, so shall we reap, or that’s what we’d like to believe; and not only that, but someone or something is in charge of evening up the scores.

WITH THE EXCEPTION
of the Christian and the Muslim ones, the supernatural justice figures I’ve been talking about are all female. Why is that? With the earlier goddesses, such as Ma’at and Themis, you might say they belong to or are at least descended from the Great Mother period in the Near East and the Middle East, during which the top deity was female and was also identified with Nature. But the Great Goddesses period was followed by several thousand years of rigorous misogyny, during which gods replaced goddesses and women were subordinated and downgraded. Yet the female Justice figures persisted. What accounts for their staying power?

If we were primatologists, we could point to the fact that among the chimpanzees it’s often the older matriarchs who are the king-makers: the alpha male can stay in power only with their support. This tendency is even more marked among the gelada monkeys of the Ethiopian highlands, where families consist of groups of tightly bonded females, their children, and the mate they’ve selected, who remains the in-house family male only as long as the females say so. If we were anthropologists, we might point to the female elders in hunter-gatherer bands such as the Iroquois, who had a lot of say when an animal was being divided up and shared out among families, as they were well versed not only in relative social status but in relative need. If we were Freudians, we might talk about psychic child development: the first food comes from the mother, as do the first lessons in justice and punishment and in the fair sharing-out of goods.

Whatever the reason, Justice continues to wear a dress, at least in the Western tradition, which is a possible explanation for the attachment of our Canadian Supreme Court justices to their lovely red gowns and their wigs.

I’D LIKE TO MAKE
yet one more
Star Trek
leap in time and space, and go back to a play that commemorates the moment when the meting-out of justice was transferred from powerful supernatural female beings to what was — and would long remain — a male-dominated court-of-law system. The play is
The Eumenides
, third in the trilogy known as
The Oresteia
; the author was Aeschylus; the place was Athens; and the date of presentation was 458
B.C.E
., during the period of Greek history we call “classical.”

The subject matter of the play comes from the earlier legendary period — the Mycenaean / Minoan era — and concerns the aftermath of the Trojan War. In the first play of this trilogy, King Agamemnon, returning from the Trojan War, is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in revenge for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia — an act he performed in order to gain a favourable wind for his Troy-bound ships. In the second play,
The Libation Bearers
, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returns from exile in disguise and, cheered on by his sister Electra, murders his mother. We are in the middle of a tit-for-tat blood feud, the rules of which are stated very clearly by Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth: “Blood will have blood.” Orestes owes a blood debt of vengeance to his father, and killing his mother discharges that debt.

However, under the archaic pre-classical customs, the murder of a mother was a very sinful thing — much more sinful than Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, who was not her blood relation and certainly not her mother. So Orestes has incurred another debt: his own blood is claimed in payment by the Erinyes, or “Raging Ones,” known to the Romans as the Furies. They are older than the Olympian gods, being daughters of Earth and Night; they are horrible-looking, savage, and vindictive; and their task is to pursue kin-murderers and kinship-bond violators such as Orestes, and to drive them mad and force them to kill themselves.

In
The Eumenides
, Orestes has been pursued by them to the shrine of Apollo, who has purified him of blood guilt; but the Erinyes don’t accept this verdict. Orestes then goes to Athens, where the goddess Athene — considering herself an insufficient judge in this complex case of father’s blood weighed against mother’s blood — puts together a jury of twelve Athenians to try the case, reserving the deciding vote for herself. The jury splits, and Athene casts her vote in favour of fathers and men, presenting as evidence the concept that men alone generate children, whereas women only incubate them. She cites herself as being a prime example, since she sprang fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, her only begetter. (She forgets to mention the preliminary part of her own myth, in which she got into Zeus’s head in the first place because he ate her pregnant mother.)

The Raging Ones feel shamed by the Athenian verdict — three ancient matrilineal goddesses of great power have been deposed by a younger male-oriented female upstart who has never been a mother, and claims not even to have been the child of one. They threaten to curse Athens with various witchy blights, but Athene, by a mixture of flattery and bribery, cajoles them into staying on as Athens’ guests. They’ll still have power and worship, she says, and they’ll love their new accommodations in a dark cave.

The Furies are given a new name, “the Eumenides,” or “Kindly Ones.” In the play, they switch from being “utterly repulsive” and disgusting smelly animal-women with tusks and bat wings and ooze-dripping blood-red eyes into gracious and stately beings, “grave goddesses”— a quick change that to the modern mind suggests those women’s magazine Before and After makeover features. Thus disguised, and presumably with their tusks extracted and their bat wings concealed by a little artful drapery, the Raging Ones go off to their cosy underground shrine in a happy, singing processional. The goddesses of the primitive past have been driven down out of sight, although — as Athene points out — the possibility of blood-for-blood retribution cannot be erased altogether, because Justice must always be reinforced by Fear. Trial by jury and the rule of law have been installed, and are presented as more enlightened and more civilized, recognizing as they do the payment for injuries in currencies other than blood; and the long chain of blood feuds — by which one death leads to another, ad infinitum — will be broken.

“I will pick the finest of my citizens,” says Athene, speaking of the court of justice she is about to establish “for all time to come.” “They shall swear to make no judgment that is not just, and make clear where the truth of this action lies.” The tribute paid to the above-board and the even-handed in
The Eumenides
is laudable. But although the ancient sense of fairness is a necessary inner foundation stone for any legal system, it doesn’t follow that every legal system is necessarily fair. Classical Athens applied fair judgement and allowed full liberties only to Athenian citizens, and only to male ones. Slaves and women were excluded from citizenship, and the laws governing them were harsh.

Despite this, and despite the millennia during which women were excluded from courts, whether as judges or lawyers or jurors — and in many cases, even as credible adult witnesses — the allegorical figure of Justice remained female. She’s still standing outside our courtrooms today, holding up her scales, the survivor of a long line of scale-wielding ancestresses.

SO FAR I’VE
been discussing not only the principle of fairness without which no system of borrowing and lending could exist and the female justice figures such as Ma’at and Themis and Astraea and Iustitia and Charles Kingsley’s punishing and rewarding Mrs. Bedoneby twins, but also the history of balances, those two-sided devices for determining fairness by weighing one thing against another. In the afterlife of Ancient Egypt, the heart was weighed against the concepts of justice and truth, which included the right order of the cosmos and the natural world; in the Christian system, Michael the Archangel weighs the soul against its deeds; and, going back to the bank book I had as a child, the red debits were weighed against the black credits, and the resulting figure was called “the balance.” The Ancient Egyptian balance weighed moral pluses and minuses, as did the archangel’s; however, the bank balance was concerned only with numbers, although it was considered a bad thing to go too far into the red: bad for you, and bad of you, as well.