Myth, Religion, and Mother Right by Johann Jakob Bachofen

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Myth, Religion, and Mother Right
Johann Jakob Bachofen
Preface by George Boas
Introduction by Joseph Campbell
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Princeton University Books 1992 edition
(copyright 1967)

      "Inspired, then, by what today would be called an "organic," "holistic," or "functional" theory of culture -- believing, that is to say, that whether great or small, sacred or profane, every element of a cultural aggregate must be expressive, ultimately, of the "informing idea" (Grundanschauung) of the culture from which it took its rise -- the young Bachofen realized that the anomalous features recognized in the Roman legacy would have to be explained either as imports from some alien province or as vestiges of a no less alien period of native Italic culture, antecedent to the classical; and, as he tells in his work on mother right, it was in Herodotus' account of the customs of the Lycians that he found his clue. "The Lycians," he read, "take their names from their mother, not from their father"; from which he reasoned that, since a child's derivation from its mother is immediately apparent, but from its father remote, primitive mankind may not have understood the relation of sexual intercourse to birth. Descent from the mother would then have been the only recognized foundation of biological kinship, the men of the tribe representing, on the other hand, a social, moral, and spiritual order into which the child would later be adopted, as in primitive puberty rites.
      There is an interesting confirmation of this bold hypothesis in the writings of one of the leading anthropologists of our own century, namely Bronislaw Malinowski, whose volume The Sexual Life of Savages (based on notes from a four-year expedition to New Guinea, 1914-18) has the following to say of the natives of the Trobriand Islands:

      We find in the Trobriands a matrilineal society, in which descent, kinship, and every social relationship are legally reckoned through the mother only, and in which women have a considerable share in tribal life, even to the taking of a leading part in economic, ceremonial, and magical activities -- a fact which very deeply influences all the customs of erotic life as well as the institutions of marriage . . .
      The idea that it is solely and exclusively the mother who builds up the child's body, the man in no way contributing to this formation, is the most important factor in the legal system of the Trobrianders. Their views on the process of procreation, coupled with the certain mythological and animistic beliefs, affirm, without doubt or reserve, that the child is of the same substance as its mother, and that between the father and the child there is no bond of physical union whatsoever. . .
      These natives have a well-established institution of marriage and yet are quite ignorant of the man's share in the begetting of children. At the same time, the term "father" has, for the Trobiander, a clear, though exclusively social definition: it signifies the man married to the mother, who lives in the same house with her and forms part of the household. The father, in all discussions about relationships, was pointedly described to me as tomakava, a "stranger," or even more correctly, an "outsider." . . . What does the work tama (father) express to the native? "Husband of my mother" would be the answer first given by an intelligent informant. He would go on to say that his tama is the man in whose loving and protecting company he has grown up . . . the child learns that he is not of the same clan as his tama, that his totemic appellation is different, and that it is identical with that of his mother. At the same time he learns that all sorts of duties, restrictions, and concerns for personal pride unite him to his mother and separate him from his father.
" pp. xxviii - xxix
      "In fact, when it comes to considering the larger, world-historical as opposed to the merely classical, application of Bachofen's theories of the stages of mother right, it is relevant to note that the first field anthropologist to recognize an order of matrilineal descent among primitive peoples -- and even to have associated this order with herodotus' account of the Lycians -- was an eighteenth-century missionary among the Indians of Canada, the Reverend Joseph François Lafitau, S. J. (1671-1746); in his Moeurs des savages Amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724), at times he launches into eulogies of the spiritual, social, and practical supériorité des femmes that even rival those of Bachofen himself.
C'est dans les femmes que consiste proprement la Nation, la noblesse du sang, l'arbre généalogique, l'ordre des générations et de la conservation des familles. C'est en elles que rétoute l'authorité réelle. . . . Les hommes au contrare son entierement isolés et bornés a eux-memes, leurs enfants leurs sont étrangers, avec eux tout périt. . .
      Moreover, one of the very first to acknowledge the importance for science of Bachofen's researches and to write to him in appreciation was an American anthropologist, the jurist and ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose pioneering study of the Iroquois had prepared him to recognize the value and universal reach of Bachofen's revelation." p. xxxiii
      From Mother Right
"The progress from the maternal to the paternal conception of man forms the most important turning point in the history of the relations between the sexes. The Demetrian and the Aphroditean-hetaeric stages both h old to the primacy of generative motherhood, and it is only the greater or lesser purity of its interpretation that distinguishes the two forms of existence. . . . Maternity pertains to the physical side of man, the only thing he shares with the animals: the paternal-spiritual principle belongs to him alone. Here he breaks through the bonds of tellurism and lifts his eyes to the higher regions of the cosmos." p. xlvii
"Ironically, Lewis H. Morgan's widely read treatise on the prehistoric stage-by-stage evolution of culture, Ancient Society, published in 1877, in which Bachofen's achievement is accorded both recognition and due praise, caught the eyes and imagination of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, into whose vision of an early communal order of civilization its hypotheses seemed to fit; and so the works of the two learned jurists, respectively of Ropchester, N. Y., and of Basel, were admitted to the canon of permitted Marxist readings. In fact, in Engels' own treatise on The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Bachofen's view of the evolution of culture is accorded respectful approbation -- though with correction, of course, of the romantic bourgeois thought of a basically spiritual instead of economic-political-exploitation motivation of the process." pp. lii-liii
      "The matriarchal traditions did not escape this fate. We shall encounter some very surprising phenomena produced by the impact of late conceptions on the vestiges of older views and by the weakness which led some writers to replace the incomprehensible by what was comprehensible form the standpoint of their own culture. Old features are overlaid by new ones, the venerable figures of the matriarchal past are introduced to contemporaries in forms consonant with the spirit of the new period, harsh features are presented in a softened light; institutions, attitudes motives, passions are reappraised from a contemporary point of view. Now infrequently new and old occur together; or the same fact, the same person, may appear in two versions, one prescribed by the earlier, one by the later world; one innocent, one criminal; one full of nobility and dignity, one an object of horrors and the subject of a palinode. In other cases the mother gives way to the father, the sister to the brother, who now takes her place in the legend or alternates with her, while the feminine name is replaced by a masculine one. In a word, maternal conceptions cede to the requirements of patriarchal theory.
      Thus, far from writing in the spirit of a surpassed, vanished culture, the later age will endeavor to extend the rule of its own ideas to ideas and facts that are alien to it. And this circumstance frequently guarantees the authenticity of the mythical vestiges of the matriarchal age, lending them the force of reliable proof. But where it has succumbed to later influence, myth becomes still more instructive. Since the changes usually result from the unconscious action of the new ideas, and only in exceptional cases from conscious hostility to the old, the legend becomes in its transformations a living expression of the stages in a people's development, for the skillful observer, a faithful reflection of all the periods in the life of that people.
      These considerations, I hope, will serve to justify the use that is made of the mythical tradition in the following. But the richness of the results it brings can only be appreciated in the course of detailed study. Preoccupied as they are with the facts, personalities, and institutions of particular epochs, our modern historians have drawn a sharp distinction between historical and mythical times and prolonged the so-called mythical era out of all proportion. along these lines any penetrating and coherent understanding of antiquity is impossible. All historical institutions presuppose earlier stages of formation: nowhere in history do we find a beginning, but always a continuation, never a cause which is not at the same time an effect. True scientific knowledge cannot consist merely in an answer to the question, What? It must also discover the whence and tie it up with the whither. Knowledge becomes understanding only if it can encompass origin, progression, and end.
      Since the beginning of all development lies in myth, myth must form the starting point for any serious investigation of ancient history. Myth contains the origins, and myth alone can reveal them. It is the origins which determine the subsequent development, which define its character and direction. Without knowledge of the origins, the science of history can come to no conclusion. A distinction between myth and history may be justified where it refers merely to a difference in mode of expression, but it has neither meaning nor justification when it creates a hiatus in the continuity of human development. The success of our undertaking depends essentially on the abandonment of any such distinction. The success of our undertaking depends essentially on the abandonment of any such distinction. the forms of family organization prevailing in the times known to us are not original forms, but the consequences of earlier stages. Considered alone, they disclose only themselves, not their causality; they are isolated date, elements of knowledge at most, but not of understanding. The strictness of the roman patriarchal system points to an earlier system that had to be combated and suppressed. And the same applies to the paternal system of Athens, the city of Athene, motherless daughter of Zeus." pp. 74-75
"Pythagoras builds his address to the women of Croton round woman's special aptitude for piety, her vocation for religion; and Strabo, following Plato, pointed out that from time immemorial women had disseminated all fear of the gods, all faith and all superstition as well." p. 85
"I shall pursue the religious basis of matriarchy no further: it is most deeply rooted in woman's vocation for the religious life. Who will continue to ask why devotion, justice, and all the qualities that embellish man's life are known by feminine names, why initiation is personified by a woman? This choice is no free invention or accident, but it is an expression of historical truth. We find the matriarchal peoples distinguished by rectitude, piety, and culture; we see women serving as conscientious guardians of the mystery, of justice and peace, and the accord between the historical facts and the linguistic phenomenon is evident. Seen in this light, matriarchy becomes a sign of cultural progress, a source and guarantee of its benefits, a necessary period in the education of mankind, and hence the fulfillment of a natural law which governs peoples as well as individuals." p. 91
On page 197, Bachofen refers to Suidas.
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