Although writing in patriarchal Greece from a patriarchal perspective, Hesiod said in hisTheogony or Birth of the Gods that Gaia or Earth alone was the mother of the Mountains, Sky, and Sea. With the male Sky she gave birth to the next generation of deities known as the “Titans,” who were overthrown by Zeus. Hesiod’s was a “tale with a point of view” in which “it was necessary” for the “forces of civilization”–for him represented by warrior God and rapist Zeus–to violently overthrow and replace earlier conceptions of the origin life on earth and presumably also to overthrow and replace the people and societies that created them.
With the triumph of Christianity in the age of Constantine in the 4th century AD, Christus Victor replaced Zeus in the cities, while the religion of Mother Earth continued to be practiced in the countryside. Over time, many of the attributes of Mother Earth were assimilated into the image of Mary, and priests began to perform rituals earlier dedicated to Mother Earth, such as blessing the fields and the seeds before planting. In the Middle Ages “the Goddess” re-emerged within Western Christianity in devotion to the Virgin Mary, the female saints, and figures such as Lady Wisdom, at the same time that the history of the Goddess was being erased.
In the middle of the 19th century, in Das Mutterrecht (The Mother Right), J. J. Bachofen stunned the scholarly world with his theory that matrilineal kinship, matrilineal inheritance, and reverence for the Great Mother were to be found at the origins of civilization. Bachofen challenged the view that patriarchy and the worship of male Gods had existed “from the beginning .”
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a large number of scholars and writers agreed with Bachofen that Mother Earth was worshipped in early “matriarchal” socieities. Almost all of these scholars also agreed with Bachofen that the religion of the Goddess in matriarchal societies represented a “primitive,“ “inferior,” and “lower” state of culture. Thus they also concurred that “it was necessary” for matriarchy to be overthrown by patriarchy in order for civilization to “advance.”
19th and 20th century theorists invoked Darwin’s evolutionary theory and spoke of an “evolution of cultures” in which the “stongest” and the “fittest” survived. For them, it was “obvious” that the triumph of patriarchy over matriarchy was a triumph of reason over unreason, the individual over the group, and civilization over its opposite.
The classicist Jane Harrison whose work uncovered a history of the Goddess underneath the art and literature of the Greek “classic age” can be read as having had a preference for the earlier religion of the Goddess and an antipathy for the Olympian religion of Zeus. However, she deemed the shift from “matriarchy to patriarchy” a “necessary stage in a real advance. Matriarchy gave to woman a false because magical prestige.” (Prolegomena, 285) On the same page she noted that (true) “understanding was not granted to the Greek.” Presumably she looked forward to a time when the “mystical truth” that the “stronger had a need, real and imperative, of the weaker” would lead to a new cultural synthesis in which the stronger would no longer feel it necessary to “despise and enslave” the weaker. However, her language is so cryptic that it is easy to miss her point—whatever it is.
Carl Jung and his disciple Erich Neumann who wrote the widely read Jungian book, The Great Mother, accepted Bachofen’s theory that matriarchy preceded patriarchy and his conclusion that patriarchy marked an advance in culture. Neumann argued that patriarchy allowed the individual to emerge from the group and for rationality to emerge from the mists of magical and irrational thinking. For all his love for and interest in “the Great Mother,” Neumann concluded that it was necessary for her “reign” to end.
Jung and Neumann agreed that rationality and individualism which they viewed as “brought to us by patriarchy” were a “good thing.” However, in the face of modern technology, growing alienation of city dwellers from nature, and the destruction wrought by modern warfare, both Jung and Neumann concluded that it was time for patriarchy to reincorporate at least some of the values of matriarchy. For them “the masculine” had need of “the feminine” in order to reunite the masculine with the body, nature, and the unconscious. While they spoke of the reintegration of the masculine and the feminine, neither Jung nor Neumann mounted a full-on critique of patriarchy for the violence it brought with it, nor for despising and enslaving women in real life.
The view that a matriarchal age preceded patriarchy was challenged in the mid-twentieth century by mainstream scholars who argued that no matriarchal societies ever existed. These scholars called attention to the power of uncles, the brothers of the mothers through whom matrilineal kinship was traced, and concluded that societies with matrilineal kinship were patriarchal after all.
After the Second World War, interest in matriarchal societies and the Goddess waned in the face of a new view of “man” as the “naked ape.” The idea that mother-honoring societies of peace preceded patriarchy was deemed a romantic longing for a golden age and viewed as a fantasy belied by the inheritance of aggression from “the apes.” (The idea that dominance and aggression is the main human inheritance from apes has been challenged by studies of the bonobo apes.)
In early 1970s when second wave feminists began to critique “patriarchal” religions and to seek alternatives to them, they rediscovered the literature on matriarchy and the Goddess. This literature seemed to confirm feminist longings for an alternative to patriarchy and its Gods. While some feminists criticized earlier scholarship, others simply ignored its assumption that early civilizations were primitive and its conclusion that it was necessary for matriarchy and the era of the Goddess to be superseded by patriarchy and the era of the Gods—in order for civilization to advance.
In her great works The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess, Marija Gimbutas did not directly address the assumptions and conclusions of earlier scholarship on the Goddess. However, her conception of the “civilization of the Goddess” boldly challenged the assumption of earlier scholarship that Goddess cultures were “primitive” and “uncivilized”; it thus undermined the conclusions of earlier scholars that “it was necessary” for such cultures to be overthrown. Gimbutas argued that in many respects the civilization of the Goddess was “higher” than the patriarchal ones that replaced it. As she said, the civilization of Old Europe was peaceful, egalitarian, sedentary, and highly artistic—and survived for millennia without war.
Gimbutas did not use the term “matriarchy” in her works, because she rejected the popular and scholarly assumption that matriarchy is the opposite of patriarchy—a society where mothers rule and females dominate males. She spoke carefully of egalitarian cultures that were “matristic” or mother-honoring, and probably matrilineal and matrilocal. In recent years, a new group of scholars have redefined matriarchy to refer to mother-honoring egalitarian societies where grandmothers and great uncles share power in community. I suspect that Gimbutas would have adopted this new definition of matriarchy. However, the fact remains that she did not use the term.
Despite the attempts of new generations of scholars to redefine terms, and to challenge the assumptions and conclusions of earlier scholars, those who dismiss Goddess scholarship generally assume that new generations of scholars are saying “the same old thing.” What is the cause of this failure of scholarly objectivity? The whole discussion of the power of women and Goddesses in prehistory raises questions that cannot help but stir up emotion. Was patriarchy and advance in civilization? Was it necessary for men to dominate women in order for civilization to advance? Is war inevitable? Or was patriarchy a wrong turn in human history fraught with violence and injustice?
I suggest that the emotions involved in the above questions have made it difficult for sustained rational discussion to occur. It was one thing to discuss matriarchy and the Goddess as a sideline to the necessary triumph of patriarchy. It is quite another to suggest that patriarchy might not have been “necessary” at all. This thought threatens the foundations on which our entire understanding of civilization–and our educational system–is based.
Originally published on Feminism and Religion.
Carol P. Christ is looking forward to the spring Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. Early bird special for fall tour until June 15. Carol can be heard in a recent interview on Voices of Women. Carol is a founding voice the Goddess movement and the study of women and religion. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.