On "Non Serviam".

The title of this blog, Non Serviam, means "I will not serve." According to Christian -- specifically, Roman Catholic -- tradition, it's what Lucifer said to God, presumably right before he took a nosedive.

You just don't tell the Boss "I quit."

However, let's look at the phrase more closely. It actually comes from St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate text of the Old Testament, Jeremiah 2:20. The words are put into the mouth not of Lucifer or Satan, but of Israel, personified as a harlot who "spreads her legs":

From New Jerusalem Bible: Jeremiah 2:
"It is long ago now since you broke your yoke, burst your bonds and said, "I will not serve!" Yet on every high hill and under every green tree you have sprawled and played the whore." [or, more literally, "On every high hill, and under every spreading tree, you spread your legs."  Dee Brestin, "The Punishment for Adultery".]

Also see:  NEW ADVENT BIBLE: Jeremiah 2. which contains the Latin in the right-hand column alongside the English version (which is a bit more polite than the.literal Hebrew.)

As can be seen from the rest of the chapter in Jeremiah, the sexual imagery is not meant literally, but refers instead to idolatry,  the worship of foreign gods. (1) The hilltops & trees were places where such deities, like Baal & Asherah, were worshipped. (The mention of Egypt & Assyria (2:18) suggests that political alliances with other nations may also have been involved.) Israel is held to be a prostitute, or adulteress, because she places her trust and reliance in foreign powers & deities rather than in her One God.  In a common OT trope, idolatry is associated with sexual transgression, and this is linked to the defilement of the land itself. (2)

But this idea is not limited to the Bible alone. In terms of evolutionary psychology, this is an example of the purity taboo, in which a group and its territory are imaged as a giant body whose boundaries must be protected, lest it be contaminated by foreign influences. As a biological factor and an archetype, we all have this primal fear lurking within us. Here is an interweaving of gender, power & sexuality, with levels of evolutionary development overlaid upon one another, the primitive with the more sophisticated. Satan, too, is a symbol of such dreaded contamination.

And so, somewhere along the line, the Biblical image of a woman spreading her legs became juxtaposed into that of a male archangel defying his divine Father. In the process, the original female voice was silenced as her bold, defiant words were transferred to the male speaker. From a feminist perspective, this is an obvious example of the vanishing & repressed feminine. But it also shows the mutability of such gendered concepts; how, over time, one sex can easily slip into the other (no naughty pun intended. Honestly.)

The words "Non Serviam" have also been appropriated by a number of radical political & countercultural groups, most notably Anarchists.

Most of those who employ the phrase as a slogan are making reference to Lucifer, the male hero, rather than the spreadeagled woman. But she, too, the Great Whore, is the one who says "I will not serve." Complementary to Satan's phallic rivalry, her act of transgression is a receptive one, spreading herself to receive her lovers. As a promiscuous polytheist, she opens herself to new perspectives, inviting the many forms of the Divine, however strange & foreign, to enter within her. From a Left Hand perspective, she represents the courage to violate the most primal taboos, when doing so is warranted by reason.

So Hail to Her: Babylon, the Great City; Asherah, Queen of Heaven; Astarte, the lady of the many breasts flowing with milk & honey, who is also Astaroth pied black & white, whose throne is set beside that of Lucifer.

(1) Some of the "heathen" gods worshipped by the Israelites may not have actually been foreign at all, but indigenous to the Israelite community. Richard Wright discusses these religious origins in The Evolution of God.

(2) See the discussion of territory, adultery & purity taboo in Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain.