From the Dawn of the Patriarchs

 

Since times immemorial women have scavenged the land. They learned to observe the seasons and to return to the same place for another harvest. At some point women discovered that it pays to return a fraction of the yield to Mother Earth. They improved the technique of planting and learned to till the land. In the longhouses the women were in charge of distribution and storage. A new social model emerged. It meant organized labor and supervision in ways unthinkable for the free wheeling trapper of our hunter and gatherer past. It also meant a guaranteed meal ticket. The Mother Goddess reigned supreme. The Mosuo people in the Yunnan and Sichuan Province of China and the Minangkabau in Sumatra still live under her spell. The women house together in the communal compounds of the clan and their husbands show up only for the occasional visit. If the man belongs to a different clan his people will be recompensed for the time of his absence. In between the visits the “wife” enjoys full sexual liberty and there is no fear of unwanted pregnancies. Children are welcome and grow up in the house that belongs to the clan of their mother.

The rule of the mothers follows unwritten codes of etiquette and tradition, although coming to agree what exactly is the right way of doing things can be a taxing dispute between elderly ladies racking their brains for fading memories. I’ve witnessed it on my Chinese wedding: when and where during the procession was the umbrella to come out? Or was this supposed to be a lotus leaf? At what point was the bride permitted to put her feet down from the sedan chair – in the 20th century substituted by a limousine? It was an exchange between tempers, egos and seniority. The wedding dress was European, but the red of the heels made good for the colors of a more traditional outfit.

The arable land in a matriarchal community is collectively owned by the mothers and cannot be traded or passed on to any individual, least of all a man. Yet a man may own and pass on his chattels. To protect the matrilineal tradition of their tribe, the Minangkabau of the 21st century push their males into the professions of attorneys and business people. It serves them as a front towards the hysterically patriarchal bias of Indonesia’s Islamic government. The Minangkabau are modern people with mobile phones and a considerable share in Indonesia’s economy, but their emigrants everywhere in the world continue to hold on to their matrimonial traditions. The men seem not to begrudge their mistresses' economic dominance; there is a social tradeoff in what could be called the men’s executive privilege.

Yet this has not always been the case. The Good Book is telling us some rather strange stories: the tale of Cain and Abel, the story of Abraham, the account of Joshua's campaign into the promised land, alleging that a confederacy of Hebrew tribes had invaded Canaan and conquered the indigenous matriarchies. I suspect that even the story of Noah’s Ark is more the story of a new patriarchal identity emerging from the matrilineal past – a past, which is defamed as an era of depravity and sin – than a story of rescuing the species from the rising waters at the end of the last Ice-Age. In the Book of Judges, a promiscuous drifter with no family to return to and with not a single square foot of real estate to his name pays the occasional visit to his wife from a foreign nation (Judges 15: 1). In between he has many affairs and is making a nuisance of himself with the Philistine authorities. In other words Samson was one of the disgruntled have-nots looking for opportunities to opt out from the matriarchal economy.

The means to do so was provided by keeping livestock in the freedom of the open spaces. The earliest patriarchs were shepherds roaming the land far away from the fields and irrigation systems surrounding the ancestral settlements. We can see now why in Genesis (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.

These free roaming pastoralists learned to mount the horse instead of hitching it to a chariot – the chariot maker belonged to the guilds of artisans in the matriarchal compounds. For the nomads it was a life of freedom, but there was a snag. It was all good and well for males to live by themselves, but without women this way of life had no future. One day, some daring individual decided to resist the tyranny of custom and either kidnapped a woman by force, virtually holding her captive in his tent, or persuaded her with gentler means to leave the tribe and follow him to the liberty of the open pastures. The founding myth of Rome tells of an ambush on women from the Sabinian neighborhood. In the Book of Judges the council of the tribes gives permission to the men of Benjamin to snatch women from the other tribes: “There is a feast in Shiloh. Go and lie in wait in the vineyards and see if the daughters of Shiloh come out. Then catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin” (Judges 21: 17-21).

A living testimony for these ancient practices is the wedding customs of the Balkans, in China, and in the Amazons. The groom snatches the bride in a mock abduction and even pretends to manhandle her. Sometimes the whole community is coming out to pursue the couple, trying to “rescue” the bride. In remote villages of the Szechwan province, the groom carries the bride on his back and the villagers try to smear soot onto the bride’s face, these days an affair of laughter and fun, but originally a symbol that the bride has become an outcast among the matriarchs.

The institution of marriage was born in the tent of a nomad. A new way of life, but to abduct and confine the girl, whether on her own free will or by force, was only the beginning of the trouble. Virginity and marital fidelity – mostly of her to him – became countable commodities and were traded for dowries and political influence. The objective was to produce a male heir "of pure blood" to pass on the family’s possessions.

Sarah’s ordeal to produce an heir has been attributed to her barrenness. But was it really she who fell short of expectations? Perhaps the only man supposed to visit her bed had gone limp? Or was there a more valid reason for Abraham not to get it on with Sarah, maybe the prohibitions of a taboo? The narrator is making a big production of “closed wombs” and visitations in King Abimelech’s dream; the bare bone of the fact is that Abraham introduced his wife to the King as his sister (Gen. 20: 2) – which technically she seems to have been – and apparently with money changing hands. Back home, in Chaldea, Sarah could have received many visitors without incurring the stigma of infidelity. According to Herodotus (Book I, Clio), she would have offered her virginity to the passing stranger for an advance on her dowry. This trade with King Abimelech was well within the Chaldean tradition. Later a mysterious stranger paid the couple a visit promising Abraham that his wife should conceive a son (Gen. 18: 6-11). Another old custom! As recent as 1958, a visitor to the equatorial regions in Africa could plant his spear before the hovel of his host and expect a tryst with the host’s own wife. It was not her age that made Sarah laugh so hard on that day (Gen. 8: 12; 21: 6). Abraham could never be sure whose drop of spunk had sired Isaac (Gen. 12: 1ff).

Classical literature and the Bible (Gen. 2:21 and 3:16!) testify for violent upheavals, some say a "patriarchal revolution," at the end of the Bronze Age. When the first murder was committed, the Bible is laying the blame on Cain. As we know, land in a matriarchy cannot be traded. The only option for aggrandizement was open warfare. Plutarch is telling us of the Spartans’ epic war against the Messenians in their neighborhood. Unlike the wars between the other Greek polities, the Spartans not only subdued the Messenians, but also made them subservient helots, soil-bound serfs, working the land they once had owned. The Spartan man was confined to the barracks, a life of incessant training in the arts of war. It was an elite with the inevitable "esprit de corps," encouraged and rewarded with first helpings from the spoils of war and bonus features in the mating game. Frequently the comradeship in the barracks included acts of sexual bonding. Something similar is known from China. During the thirties, short before the Japanese invasion, archaeologists had unearthed the artifacts of the "Shang"-people from between the 15th and 10th century BC. Archaeology and the curiously distorted historiography of Confucian authors from a much later era suggest a people, who every summer opened the wooden gates to their stockades and ventured out on their chariots to harass the neighborhood and conquer more territory for their mistresses. In the Confucian scheme of things, the Shang were thought to be China's second dynasty; but the moral bigotry of the Confucians also accuses the Shang to have lost the mandate of heaven because of their "sexual license, libertinism and moral depravity." Similar stories are told about the last Etruscan viceroys before ancient Rome became a republic and about Sparta.

In his Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch (45 – 125 AD.) is full of admiration for the Spartans. Like everybody else in Greece, Plutarch saw only the front, the communal education of children, the toughness of the Spartan soldier, the retentive taboos. Yet even the urban and unprejudiced Plutarch was mildly shocked by the liberal conduct and economic dominion of Sparta's women; he says their "cupidity" and "infidelity" had become proverbial. The philosopher Aristotle didn’t mean it as a compliment when he called the Spartan state a “gynecocracy” – a country run by women – and he noted that this “license” of the Lacedaemonian women had existed from the earliest times: “When Lycurgus, as tradition says, wanted to bring the women under his laws, they resisted, and he gave up the attempt.” Apparently neither Plutarch, nor Aristotle, nor the Confucian historians in China had any idea what they were looking at. Or maybe they didn’t want to know.

Especially the function of the “ephors” in Lycurgus’ constitution remains an enigma. The five ephors had administrative powers even over the two royal houses. They could impose fines, even depose and imprison 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 elected magistrates, appointed for just one year and without the right of reelection. The ephors presided over the council of elders; they were in charge of the judiciary, taxation, the calendar, foreign policy, and military training. The ephors were responsible to keep the helots in their place, sending out assassins to kill suspicious individuals without trial and without violating a religious taboo. In other words, surrounded by a male dominated world, the Spartan ephors, not unlike the attorneys and businessmen of the Minangkabau, served as the political executives of their mistresses. The women were promiscuous and a man had no franchise in the possession of real estate and barely a family. Most of his life was passed in the barracks, and custom required that married people saw each other only at night. The first night of the couple was little less than institutionalized rape and the bride resisted with every means at her disposal. Everywhere else, in the ancient world, the Patriarchs began taking the helm, remodeling the economy and their sex-life. Only Spartans, Etruscans and Philistines maintained their ancient ways. Rome shook off the matriarchal yoke, when the senate expelled the last of the Etruscan viceroys. In Palestine, however, the Hebrews faced a more formidable opponent. They reacted with fanaticism and the retentive and unusually harsh enforcement of taboos against nakedness and premarital sex (Exodus 20: 26, 28: 42; Levi 18: 6-19).

But the transformation was incomplete. To this very day, it is your mother’s bloodline that marks you as a Jew, not your father’s. Apparently the conflict in the book of Joshua, depicting an invasion, was more of a social uprising. The diplomatic correspondence found in the ancient capital of Pharaoh Akhenaton (1380 – 1362 BC) is telling us of pastoral Canaanites up in arms against their matriarchal rulers in the fortified cities. The word "Hebrew" originally may have meant "outcast." It seems the Egyptians exploited these conflicts to control the region and struck alliances with some of the rebels. It was the beginning of the two Hebrew kingdoms.

© - 1/27/2009 - by michael sympson, 2,200 words, all rights reserved