From the
Mothers we came, to
the Mothers we go
|
And it came to pass, when she pressed him
daily with her words, and urged him, that his soul was vexed unto death
|
Judges 16:1
|

The folk tale of Samson is the
story of a promiscuous
drifter. Occasionally he pays a visit to his wife from a foreign nation
(Judges
15:1). There are other strange stories in the Good Book. The
story of
Cain and Abel and the story of Abraham. I even suspect that the story
of Noah
needs to be interpreted in this context, as the story not only of a new
beginning but a new society.
In
China,
during the thirties, excavations had unearthed artifacts and buildings
of the
"Shang"-people (1571-1045 BC. according
to traditional chronology). The layout of the villages and
buildings
suggest a way of life similar to the Mosuo people in the Yunnan and
Sichuan
Province and to the present day Minangkabau in Sumatra. All these
people still
live under a matriarchy. Women had always scavenged the land. At one
point then
they learned how to till and sow and how to exploit the seasons. It
meant
organized labor and supervision in ways unthinkable for the free
wheeling
hunter and trapper of previous periods. It also meant a guaranteed meal
ticket.
The Mother Goddess reigned supreme.
Although
Sei Shonagon (965/967-1010 AD.)
was living
in the male dominated Heian society, her book is depicting the
sheltered life
of archaic ceremonial and sexual libertinism, quite like we associate
it with
the matriarchs from the Bronze Age. The women live together in the
communal
longhouse of the clan and a husband shows up only for the occasional
visit. If
the man belongs to a different clan the other side will be recompensed
for the
time of his absence. In the meantime the “wife” enjoys full sexual
liberty and
there is no fear of unwanted births. The children grow up in the
women’s house
with the clan of their mother. The land belongs to the women and it
cannot be
traded or passed on to one person’s ownership. The men can only own and
pass on
their chattels. In this day and age the Minangkabau adapt to modern
life by
pushing their males into the professions of attorneys and business
people in
order to shield the matrilinear tradition of their tribe against the
hysterically patriarchal bias of Indonesia’s Islamic central
government. But the
Minangkabau are modern people with cell-phones and a considerable share
in
Indonesia’s economy, and their emigrants everywhere in the world hold
on to
their matrimonial traditions.
There
is a
strange parallel known from classic Greece. Full of admiration Plutarch (45-125 AD.) is telling us of Lycurg’s
laws,
the written constitution of the Spartans. But even for the urban
Plutarch
Sparta's women had become proverbial for their "cupidity" and "infidelity." In the Confucian scheme of things the
Shang
were thought to be the founders of the realm as China's second dynasty;
and the
moral bias of the Confucians accuses the Shang to have lost the mandate
of
heaven because of their "sexual license, libertinism and
moral
depravity." Like the Confucians
Plutarch,
too, expressed himself as mildly shocked by the liberal conduct and
economic
dominion of the fair sex in Sparta's society.
He
saw only
the front, the communal education of children, the toughness of the
Spartan
soldier, the restrictive taboos on the males. He had no earthly idea
about the
actual function of the Ephors in Lycurg’s constitution.
The
council
of the four Ephors had administrative powers even over the two royal
houses.
They would fine a king for misdemeanor and depose of an unsuitable
monarch. But
who were the Ephors? Apparently they came from humble backgrounds and
operated
on a slim income. It made them a soft target for bribes. They were not
elected
magistrates. Instead the subdivisions of the tribe brought forward
candidates
and the matriarchs appointed who they thought suitable as their
political
executives in a political world where the males seemed to call the
shots. It
was exactly the same situation as with the Minangkabau in Indonesia. In
Plutarch’s description we learn that the Spartan man for most of his
life did
live segregated from the fairer sex in dormitories and barracks. There
was no
such thing as a Spartan family. The women were promiscuous and the male
had no
franchise in the possession of real estate. Not surprising then that
some
disgruntled men chose to opt out.
The
means
to do so was provided by their herds. The earliest patriarchs were
shepherds
who simply moved away from the ancestral seats of the matriarchic long
houses. The
self-styled patriarchs assumed the life of free roaming pastoralists
who
learned to mount the horse instead of hitching it to a chariot. There
was a
snag though. It was all good and well for the males to emigrate and
live by
themselves, but without women their new way of life was bound to
disappear
within the first generation, and probably it did so time and again,
before one
energetic individual decided to change all that and by force not only
abducted a
woman from the matriarchs but held her captive in his tent.
The
institution of marriage was born.
The
evidence
can still be observed in the wedding customs of the Balkans, China, and
the
Amazons, where the groom snatches the bride in a mock abduction. The
founding
myth of Rome tells of an ambush on the women in the Sabinian
neighborhood.
Until recently we have taken for granted the values of female virginity
and
marital chastity because history is written by the patriarchs and their
new
world of male heredity and dynastic alliances by marriage. But this
break with
the matriarchal past came not without a burden of guilt. The Oresteia by Aeschylus (525-456
BC.) is powerful testimony. The struggle between the early
patriarchal
mavericks and the ruling matrilinear dynasties form the main body of
our oldest
epics. Gilgamesh, a historical figure from about 2700 BC., is the taboo
breaking hero and founder of a city. His companion and lover is a man
from the
pre-matriarchal wilderness, Enkido. Not unlike the story in the
biblical creation
myth, it is a woman, a temple prostitute, that harnesses and tames the
wild man
Enkidu who lives to regret this turn of his fortunes. Although
Gilgamesh is the
alpha-male in his town and exercises his jus primae noctis with
impunity, he,
like the kings before him, is required to assert his right of accession
with a
ritual marriage.
It
is known
as the "Hieros Gamos" (holy wedding) to Inanna, the Goddess of
Creation, an earlier incarnation of Venus. The remarkable feature of
the
Gilgamesh epic is the fact that the two protagonists of the story,
Gilgamesh,
the warrior at the threshold to a new patriarchal society, and Enkido,
the
hunter from a bygone era, cooperate under a perspective of common
interest,
which is directed against the Great Inanna herself. This probably lies
at the
root of the prehistoric split between matriarchal agriculturists and
pastoral
nomads as we read it in the story of Abraham (Gen.
12:1ff).
We
can see
now why in Genesis (Gen.4:4) the god with a bias for all
things
patriarchal "had respect unto Abel and to his offering" but not for the matriarchal Cain.
Classic
literature and the Bible (Gen. 2:21 and 3:16!) give evidence for a
"patriarchal revolution" that finally overturned the old
establishment. But if this looks as if war and violence was an
innovation of
the shepherds against their former mistresses, we should look again.
The
Bible
is pretty accurate in laying the blame for the first murder on Cain
instead of
telling the story in reverse.
Since
in a
matriarchy land can not be traded the only remaining option for
aggrandizement
is open warfare with the matriarchal neighbor. We have already noted
the segregation
between the sexes despite the sexual libertinism of the women. The most
able-bodied males were kept confined in barracks and lived a life of
incessant
training in the arts of war. It was an elite band with the inevitable
"l'esprit de corps," encouraged and rewarded with first helpings and
bonus features in the mating game. The picture we develop from
archaeological
findings and the curiously distorted historiography by Confucian
authors of a
much later period seems to suggest that in every summer the Shang
people had
opened the wooden gates to their stockades and had ventured out on
their
chariots to harass the neighborhood and conquer more territory for the
female
proprietors of the land. To the western observer this is a familiar
pattern. Plutarch
is telling us of the Spartans’ never ending campaign against the
Messenians in
their neighborhood until they had the entire nation subdued and
enslaved. Something
similar also seems to have motivated the seasonal warfare of the
Iroquois
nations.
So
when in
the end the patriarchs triumphed over the matriarchal long houses and
began to
take possession of the land they felt a need to rewrite history.
Apparently
neither Plutarch nor the Confucian historians had a clue what they were
looking
at. The biblical story of Joshua's campaign is depicting a conflict
between
groups of patriarchal immigrants and the old matriarchies in Palestine.
The
Amarna tablets from the second millennium BC. were written at least a
millennium before the most ancient bits in the Bible, and they tell us
a
different story. They testify to upheavals among pastoral Canaanites
who are
depicted more like social outcasts than a separate tribe or invading
nation.
The very word "Hebrew" has been interpreted to mean
"outcast."
The
pastoralists
from the mountain ranges finally carried the day against their urban
mistresses
in the arable valleys, and that may explain some of the early
fanaticism and
retentive taboos in the Hebrews’ religion. In Greece and Italy as well
the
Patriarchs took the helm and remodeled the economy and their sex-life.
But
there
was a difference.
In
Palestine the Hebrews had been a minority surrounded by matriarchs. In
Italy
and Greece only two matriarchal enclaves survived the early iron-age,
the
Etruscans and the Spartans.
Both
were
feared by their neighbors, they were formidable in war and very little
understood socially. In Palestine the pressures on a numeric minority
created a
need for fanaticism and monotheistic unity while Italy and Greece
settled
comfortably in a polytheistic quid pro quo. This had a positive side.
Except in
Palestine, wars of total annihilation seemed to become a thing of the
past. The
Roman Empire, like every other empire, expanded by warfare, treaties,
and
trade. But the conquered people often emancipated within the same
generation to
full citizenship and the benefits of the Roman rule of law. Only the
rural
fundamentalists in Palestine and the intellectual opposition in the old
Maccabean strongholds insisted to see things differently.
© - 1/27/2007 - by michael
sympson,
1,800 words, all
rights reserved