Contents

Preface..................................................................................................... 13

Acknowledgements ................................................................................. 15

I. Childbirth as Symbolic Patterns, Experience and Performance ....................................................................... 19

II. A Conception of Childbirth ...................................................251. The Paradigm: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality ..... 25

1.1 Primary, Political, Theoretical and Spiritual Natality: Four Ways of Accessing a Beginning ...... 26

1.2 Natalities and Immortalities ................................... 302. Childbirth, Sex and Gender ................................................. 343. Conceiving of the Birthgiving Woman ................................ 37

3.1 From an Existential Definition of Death to an Existential Definition of Giving Birth ............... 37

3.2 Thrownness and Anxiety .......................................413.3 Pain as Disclosing Mystery, Standstill

and Non-Relationality............................................. 43

III. Symbolic Patterns of Childbirth ............................................ 47

III.1 The Supremacy of the Male ..................................................... 491.1 Creation as Procreation in Egyptian Cosmogony ................ 501.2 The Twelfth Tablet of the Gilgamesh-Epic .......................... 531.3 Hesiod: On Anadyomène ..................................................... 561.4 Genesis: Woman of Man Born ............................................ 571.5 The Genealogies of the Old Testament

and of Prophet Muhammad ................................................. 581.6 Mimesis: The Births of Athena and Dionysos ..................... 60

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1.7 The Semen and the Stars: Aristotle’s De Generatione Animalium and the Gender of Pneuma ..... 64

1.8 Foundations for a “Dubious” Supremacy of the Male: Tertullian and Augustine on the Transmission of Original Sin ......................................................................... 73

1.9 On the Heels of Aristotle: The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas ....................... 791.9.1 From “Semen and the Stars” to “Semen and Sin” ..... 791.9.2 The Agency of the Holy Ghost .................................. 831.9.3 Reflections on Male Divinities Intervening into

Women’s Wombs ....................................................... 851.10 The Divine in the Prophet: The Procreation

of Muhammad in the Sirat of Ibn Hisham........................... 871.11 Twentieth Century Examples for the Supremacy

of the Male ........................................................................90

III.2 Theoretical, Spiritual and Political Natality versus Childbirth .................................................................... 1011. The Babylonian Myth of Creation and the

Creation Myth of the Bible ................................................ 1032. Plato’s Symposium and the Deathless

Children of Philosophers ................................................... 1052.1 Discussion: Reflections on Theorein,

Doing and Childbirth ............................................ 1133. Creation Abandoned for the Idea of Good:

The Justinian Myth of Edem and Elohim .......................... 1144. Abraham and the Binding of Isaac

(in the Reading of Kierkegaard) ........................................ 1165. From Abraham to Agamemnon:

Iphigeneia at Aulis of Euripides ........................................ 1206. Christian Devotion versus Childbirth ................................ 126

6.1 Luke 11: 27–28: The Word’s Supremacy over the Womb ................................... 127

6.2 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas ............ 128

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6.3 Birth as Deriving “from the Skins of Brutes”: Gregory of Nyssa’s Understanding of Marriage and Virginity as Different Conditions of the Soul .......................................... 135

7. On Desks and Cradles: a Letter from Héloise to Abélard ............................................................. 138

8. A World Where Saps Will Have Their Way: The Opposition of Life and Art in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Requiem for a Friend .................................. 141

9. The Ejaculation is a Promise of Death: Simone de Beauvoir’s Conception of Individuality as Being Opposed to the Human Species ......................... 147

10. Against the Tyranny of the Fates: Joseph Fletcher’s Plea for Rational Procreation as Opposed to Childbirth by Raw Nature ................................................................... 155

11. From the Supremacy of Theorein over Childbirth to Childbirth in Theory? .................................................... 16011.1 Günter Grass: Headbirths ..................................... 16011.2 Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ....164

III.3 The Supremacy of the Female ................................................ 1691. The First Birthgiving: Goddesses as Mothers

of the Gods and as the Origin of the World ....................... 1702. The Creation of the World by Sophia the

“Fallen Wisdom”: A Gnostic Myth ................................... 1723. Isis and Mary: The Supremacy of the Female and

Harmony between Spiritual Birth and Childbirth ............. 1844. Mikhail Epstein: The “Russian-Doll-Principle” ................ 184

III.4 Harmony between Spiritual/ Theoretical Natality and Childbirth ........................................................ 1891. Childbirth, Wisdom and Mystery Religion:

The Reign of Queen Isis .................................................... 1901.1 Plutarch’s Isis as Idea: The Goddess of

Philosophers and the Goddess of Childbirth ........ 199

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1.2 Lucius Apuleius: Isis as “Blessed Queen of Heaven,” “Reliever of the Birth Pangs of Women,” and “Sovereign of All Things Spiritual” ....204

2. From Isis to Mary .............................................................. 2073. The Incarnation of the Sacred Through a Woman:

Mary as “Spiritual Vessel” ................................................ 2103.1 Mary-Theotokos ................................................... 2143.2 Mary’s Disembodiment and the

Painless Virgin Birth ............................................. 2183.3 Immaculate Conception ........................................ 2233.4 Mediatrix – Corredemptrix – Regina Caeli .......... 2273.5 Mary-Sophia ......................................................... 2403.6 Two Examples for Different Conceptions of

Mary: Augustine and Friedrich Schleiermacher ... 2414. Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Pregnant Mystic ............... 246

4.1 Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Anniversary... 2474.2 Self-Portrait, Two Flowers in the Raised Hand ..... 2504.3 Self- Portrait with Camellia Branch ..................... 250

5. Mikhail Epstein: Towards an Ethics of Childbirth ............ 253

IV. Final Remarks: A Baby Has Been Bor n – So What? ............ 261

Bibliography ....................................................................................... 267