Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 – 1887) was a
SwissSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
anthropologist and sociologist, who is most often connected with his research into the matriarchal clans around which primates evolved into hominids, or
Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book
Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. This presented a radically new view of the role of women in a broad range of ancient societies.
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 – 1887) was a
SwissSwitzerland , officially the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 states named cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities...
anthropologist and sociologist, who is most often connected with his research into the matriarchal clans around which primates evolved into hominids, or
Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book
Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. This presented a radically new view of the role of women in a broad range of ancient societies. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum and he drew upon Lycia, Crete, Greece, Egypt, India, Central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. He concluded the work by connecting archaic mother right with the Christian veneration of the Virgin Mary. Bachofen's conclusions about archaic
matriarchyMatriarchy refers to a gynecocentric form of society, in which the leading role is taken by the women and especially by the mothers of a community....
still echo today.
There was little initial reaction to Bachofen’s theory of cultural evolution, largely because of his impenetrable literary style, but eventually, as well as furious criticism, the book inspired several generations of ethnologists, social philosophers, and even writers: Lewis Henry Morgan,
Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of communist theory, alongside Karl Marx. Together they produced The Communist Manifesto in 1848...
, who drew on Bachofen for
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Thomas MannThomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
,
Jane Ellen HarrisonJane Ellen Harrison was a British classical scholar, linguist and feminist. Harrison is one of the founders, with Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, of modern studies in Greek mythology. She applied 19th century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of Greek religion in ways that have...
, who was inspired by Bachofen to devote her career to mythology,
Walter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher-sociologist, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
,
Erich FrommErich Seligmann Fromm was an internationally renowned social psychologist, psychoanalyst, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.-Punanni:Erich Fromm was born on 23 March 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the...
,
Robert GravesGraves considered himself a poet first and foremost. His poems, together with his translations and innovative interpretations of the Greek Myths, his memoir of the First World war, Good-bye to All That, and his historical study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of...
,
Rainer Maria RilkeRainer Maria Rilke is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th-century poets...
,
Joseph CampbellJoseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...
,
Otto GrossOtto Gross was an Austrian psychoanalyst. A maverick early disciple of Sigmund Freud, he later became an anarchist and joined the utopian Ascona community.His father Hans Gross was a judge turned pioneering criminologist...
and opponents such as
Julius EvolaBarone Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola also known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher, esotericist, author, artist, poet, political activist, soldier and Perennial Traditionalist...
.
Friedrich Engels analysed Bachofen's views as follows:
- "(1) That originally man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term "hetaerism
Hetaerism or hetairism can mean:*A term employed by 19th-century anthropologists to indicate a theoretical early state of human society characterized by the absence of the institution of marriage in any form. Women were the common property of their tribe, and the children never knew their fathers...
";
that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity;
that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen's conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);
that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period." (Friedrich Engels, 1891: see link below)
Though Bachofen applied
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
ary theories to the development of culture in a manner that is no longer considered valid, and though modern archaeology and literary analysis have invalidated many details of his historical conclusions, the origins of all modern studies of the role of women in classical antiquity begin with Bachofen, extending him, correcting him, denying his conclusions.
Bachofen proposed four phases of cultural evolution which absorbed each other:
1) Hetairism. A wild nomadic 'tellurian' phase, characterised by him as communistic and polyamourous. Whose dominant deity he believed to have been an earthy proto
AphroditeAphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty and raw sexuality. According to Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Cronus cut off Ouranos's genitals and threw them into the sea, and from the aphros arose Aphrodite.Because of her beauty other gods feared that jealousy would interrupt the peace...
.
2) Das Mutterecht. A matriarchal 'lunar' phase based on agriculture, characterised by him by the emergence of
chthonicChthonic designates, or pertains to, deities or spirits of the underworld, especially in relation to Greek religion.Greek khthon is one of several words for "earth"; it typically refers to the interior of the soil, rather...
mystery cults and
lawLaw is a system of rules, usually enforced through a set of institutions. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a primary social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus ticket to trading on derivatives markets...
. Whose dominant deity was an early
DemeterDemeter , in Greek mythology, is the Goddess of grain and fertility, the pure...
according to Bachofen.
3) The Dionysian. A transitional phase when earlier traditions were masculinised as patriarchy began to emerge. Whose dominant deity was the original Dionysos.
4) The Apollonian. The patriarchal 'solar' phase, in which all trace of the Matriarchal and Dionysian past was eradicated and modern civilisation emerged.
While based on an imaginative interpretation of the existing archeological evidence of his time, this model tells us as much about Bachofen's own time as it does the past.
A selection of Bachofen's writings was translated as
Myth, Religion and Mother Right (1967). A fuller edited English edition in several volumes is being published.
As has been noted by
Joseph CampbellJoseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...
[Occidental Mythology] and others, Bachofen's theories stand in radical opposition to the Aryan origin theories of religion, culture and society, and both Campbell and writers such as Evola have suggested that Bachofen's theories only adequately explain the development of religion among the pre-Aryan cultures of the Mediterranean and the Levant, and possibly Southern Asia, but that a separate, patriarchal development existed among the Aryan tribes which conquered Europe and Asia.
External links