From the Mothers we came, to the Mothers we go

 

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