Age of Mothers: Matriarchy
For the well-wishers of human society who want to improve the human condition, we need to confront our social conditioning and bring our subconscious social programming into consciousness.
Deep within our collective psychology are beliefs formed millennia ago that affect our vision of life and our progress as a species. These beliefs go back to the pre-historic period, to a time before patriarchy when the mothers and their brothers formed the clan's values, politics, economics, and later the Clan confederation, tribes, and nations.
The story that follows is intended to present a flow of history from approximately thirty-five thousand years ago covering the rise and fall of matriarchy and the onset of patriarchy.
In the study of our past, we looked at three fundamental characteristics of human consciousness which, in their unfolding, have largely defined us as human beings. These are:
(1) Our ingrained thirst for limitlessness,
(2) the psychologies we employ to gain power over social and environmental conditions,
(3) the evolution of the mentalities of Men and Women.
1. Thirst for Limitlessness:
Human beings are mind-preponderant beings. Our history is more ideological than biological. While other species are mostly governed by their biology, we are governed by our mental propensities—our instincts, sentiments, rationality, and intuition. As such, human history is primarily about how we interpret reality, and how we respond to it. In the simplest terms, human history reflects our desire to move from imperfection to perfection. This evolutionary process is driven by our thirst for limitlessness.
2. Social Psychology:
Reality is physical, mental, and spiritual. Yet, for all practical purposes, we only consider reality to be psycho-physical. As such, we focus on how to control this psycho-physical reality. This is understandable. We cannot survive without having some control over our environment. Thus, the evolution of social psychologies.
When we examine the dynamics of power within a historical context, we discover that there are only three ways to have power in this world—control by physical force as the warriors do, control by psychic force as the intellectuals do, or control by money as the merchants, who buy both physical and psychic assets, do.
In ancient history, armies ruled the earth. In the Middle Ages, the Church ruled. And in modern history, the corporations rule.
The warrior psychology evolved during the periods of prehistory and ancient history because of the struggle to survive physically.
Our involvement in empire-building gave rise to our current programming regarding slavery, race, class, and our national and religious identities.
In the Middle Ages, the intellectual psychology dominated. This is the time when religion took control of human beings, commanding not only our bodies but also our minds as well.
In modern and contemporary history, merchant psychology dominates and everyone is under the control of the rich oligarchies. It is virtually impossible to survive without money. When an intellectual devotes all of his time and energy to the acquisition of material wealth, he becomes conditioned by it.
3. Men and Women:
The third theme in our history is how men and women think and act, and how this gives rise to different mentalities and different skills. We will look at what this means when each gender is in a position of decision-making. Gender relations are the most nuclear relations among human beings.
Today men do not perceive women as equals because we do not understand human history; Women are our property, the weaker sex. This faulty thinking has led us to the brink of disaster that we now face as a species.
We are tragically imbalanced in the way we think and feel as a species. This imbalance is a result of our programming during the age of patriarchy.
An exploration of our past reveals that it was the women who brought us out of animality, defined our humanity, and led us to create the great agricultural civilizations of the world, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley.
Because most male historians off-handedly dismiss anything before the advent of language and archaeological artefacts as “prehistory,” not worthy of investigation, they have not been able to understand what went on for the first million years of human existence, before the arrival of patriarchy, a mere Ten thousand years ago.
The Yogic View of Gender: Shri P R Sarkar
"In the practice of spiritual cult there is no distinction – nor can there ever be – between men and women. As jiivatma (the soul) is not composed of the five fundamental factors there cannot be any sex distinction in it.
For the proper expression of one's latent samskaras, one gets reborn into the body of a woman or a man or sometimes a hermaphrodite. There is no question of high or low, superior or inferior, noble or ignoble because whatever might be the sex of the body, the jiivatma is just the witness of the mind it is attached to. It is unassailed by the sexual differences of the quinquelemental bodies.
The unexpressed psychic reactions (samskaras) of the disembodied soul are guided by the Cosmic Mind and adjusted with a proper structure, at a proper time and a proper place, providing a congenial environment for the expression of the unrequited samskaras.
Depending upon the nature of the Samskaras there is either the predominance of the tendency to attract (samyojanii shakti) or the predominance of the tendency to be attracted (vibhajanii shakti) The nature of the force of attraction is drawing the object of enjoyment towards itself, and the nature of the force which is attracted is to move towards the object of enjoyment.
When there is dominance of ‘samyojanii shakti’ in one's latent samskaras, the disembodied soul attains a female body for its outward expression, and conversely where there is a dominance of ‘vibhajanii shakti’, it attains a male body. Where there is an approximate balance between the two the disembodied soul attains the body of a hermaphrodite.
Of course, even in the hermaphrodite, the balance between samyojanii and vibhajanii shaktis is not perfect; there is a slight tilt in favour of one or the other. That's why some hermaphrodites are more inclined towards masculinity, and some are more inclined towards femininity."
Shape of Our Future:
Our human civilization is now global in scope and our impact on the eco-systems and life support systems is planetary.
As such, we are quickly approaching a civilizational dead end that will destroy countless lives unless we are willing and able to leap forward as human beings.
Only by understanding our past will we understand our present and be able to shape our future.
To summarize, the purpose of our story is to understand the roots of our subconscious programming regarding gender.
We cannot fathom how to think or act for the benefit of the whole of humanity even though our crisis is now global in scope.
Thus, the purpose of our story is also to understand the roots of mystical thought and how incorporating a sense of spirituality into our revolution will provide important solutions to our common dilemma.
Introduction:
We will begin our journey with a look at the age of the matriarchy during which time, the clan mothers led us out of animality and, in so doing, came to play the primary role in defining early human society.
During this long time, our idea of god evolved from nature spirits and eventually manifested as the Great Goddess, the supreme source of life’s fertility.
We will look at the social structure under matriarchy and how the roles of women and men differed from today.
We will look at the worldview created by women and how that gave rise to the ancient agricultural civilisations of the world.
We will look at the internal contradiction in the matriarchal system and how it led to the emergence of patriarchy Ten thousand years ago, with the dawn of the father-family, private property and the state.
Break Down the Myth:
Long before human beings learned to express their thoughts in writing, women governed society.
The matriarchy period stretched from the dawn of our species in Africa, around 25 lakh years ago, to the time the first Aryan patriarchal tribes came crashing out of the Caucasus Mountains and descended onto the fertile plains of the Indus Valley, as recently as Seven thousand years ago.
For hundreds of years, the books and papers of historians and other academics, and the scriptures and dogmas written by the priests of patriarchal religions have long ignored or denied the existence of the matriarchy, which obfuscates the contribution of women to human evolution.
The simple truth is that as long as we remain blinded by the myth of male superiority and female inferiority, we will not be able to create a better world for our children and grandchildren. It will not be an easy task to change the world because the myth of uninterrupted male superiority is now so deeply encoded in the subconscious programming of modern society.
The myth of eternal male superiority and eternal female inferiority stands against the very laws of motion. In a world where everything is constantly changing, it is impossible to have a contradiction composed of two poles that remain infinitely distinct and separate.
Men in power remain sentimentally attached to their mythology and will do everything in their power, including the use of brute force, to keep women subservient.
This distorted perception, backed by brute force, prevents our society from progressing and stunts our growth as human beings. To progress as individuals and as a human society, we must now begin to break down this myth.
Time Line:
The origin of our genus (homo): about 25 Lakh years ago.
The origin of our species (sapiens): about two Lakh years ago.
Around fifty thousand years ago, we were already modern human beings having language, tools, trade, science and pursuing other cultural developments.
Around Ten thousand years ago, on the banks of rivers in the Middle East, Western Northern Europe and Eastern Indus Valley matriarchal Agricultural civilizations flourished.
Around seven thousand years ago nomadic Aryan tribes swept down from cold Caucasian mountains into these three Matriarchal societies of which Indus Valley civilization was one of the most sophisticated matriarchal civilizations to ever exist on the Planet.
Written history, by contrast, only began about five thousand years ago.
The Birth of Matriarchy:
During the transition of the human clan out of the hominid primal horde, the women, in their Mother's role as caregivers, established the rules regarding human relationships.
The skills of survival in the groups for the protection of the young drove them to cooperate and communicate (eye signals, vocal sounds, body postures) as a group.
Except for the alpha male, who had access to females, the males were peripheral to the group structure.
This behaviour on the part of Mothers existed around 25 Lakh years ago and continued to exist up until the beginning of patriarchy some ten thousand years ago.
What masculine authority there was resided in the Mother's brother. He was the man of the family, and to him, the children yielded respect and obedience.
The father, at best, was simply a pleasant friend who fed them and played with them; at worst, he was an indecent member who sponged on the mother.
The children belonged to their mother's family and joined their uncle's group of hunters.
This matriarchal organization of the primitive tribe finds evidentiary support in the habits of higher animals.
----------------------------------
Ref: ' The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions'. By Briffault.
Briffault Law: "The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place."
-----------------------------------
Ref: 'Women's Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family' By Evelyn Reed
Comment: “The book has provided humanity with an understanding of gender relations comparable to Marx's contribution to our understanding of class relations”.
-----------------------------------
Ref: “The Untold Story of Western Civilization” Volume I: Prehistory By Chuck & Tom Paprocki
Quote: “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” -Winston S. Churchill
-----------------------------------
The Matriarchal Clan:
A clan is usually a group of around 25 individuals. To evolve out of the primal hominids into the human-clan structure, the mothers had to establish certain rules.
The earliest of these consisted of two taboos.
a) it was forbidden for males to eat anyone in their group.
b) it was forbidden for males to have sex with any female in the group.
These taboos were essential to maintaining the stability of day-to-day clan existence.
Through these rules, the females taught the males (their brothers) that the clan was a special group to protect each other and that they were human beings.
To deal with the turbulence of males raiding other clans for sex, women created Clan Confederations to secure peace between the males of local clans. Eventually, an alliance of more than one clan confederation led to the innovation of Tribes, then, to Villages and Agriculture.
Thus Mothers had established agricultural civilizations as early as twelve thousand years ago.
Matriarchy's Features:
a) mathematics, astrology,/astronomy, medicine
b) technology to produce a wide variety of foods, tools, pottery, jewellery, weapons, textiles
c) of greater significance, the idea of spirits (divinity), community celebration of religious practises fostering unity.
d) the mother goddess; the valorization of the female principle, the earth symbol and the attribution of mystical lunar-solar cycles, life-death to Her.
Moon & Mystery of Motherhood:
The fact that a woman can produce another life out of her own body has always been central to women's worldview. Solving the mystery of how this happens and how all life happens was the central preoccupation of the matriarchy.
Initially, women all over the world came to believe that pregnancy resulted from a particular union of a woman’s blood with a spirit. Spirits could take any form they chose.
No one at the time had any idea men’s sperm had a role in the creation of a child.
Even the voices that women and men heard in their minds were not yet attributed to themselves but to outside spirits. The voice of spirit in one’s mind could be from an animal or plant, a dead ancestor, or eventually a goddess or god.
The women discovered that the moon was responsible for this. They observed that every night the moon arose out of the earth and every morning it descended back into it. They also noticed that it cyclically changed its form. It grew from nothing into a full moon and then gradually waned again into nothing. Women noticed that the flow of their menstrual blood corresponded to a particular phase of the moon.
One complete cycle of the moon, the women called a month; is the earliest biological marker of a period.
Every month they bled. When they did not bleed they were with child and their blood was being converted into life.
Therefore, women believed that the moon produced and controlled their life’s blood. They called the moon a goddess. She was the controller of life. In this way, women concluded that all life came about as the result of a union between the goddess and a spirit.
Women came to correlate their wombs with the caves of Mother Earth; it was the women who created cave art in their attempt to understand and control the activities of life.
With such thoughts, the women developed rituals, which they called magic.
The oldest form of the Dravidian goddess was Kurukulla?, the “Mother of Caverns.” Kurukulla was coloured red like the moon. Later she became an expression of Kali, the Great Goddess, who was worshipped in cave temple complexes like Ellora, Ajanta, and Elephanta.
The discovery of the life cycle constituted the deepest of magical knowledge. What followed due to this discovery, were the rituals of blood; the creation of sacred kings; orgiastic rituals and human sacrifices; and the making of gods, saviours, and scapegoats.
Blood was the gift of the Goddess to all women and through women to all life. The women had already been using ochre as a symbolic substance. Perhaps by now, they understood Ocher to be the blood of the soil itself. If blood was a gift, it was also a sacrifice. Mothers gave their blood to their children in the womb or returned it to the Goddess each month. This was the demand of the Goddess. She gave blood and took blood. She gave life and she took life.
At first, the mothers offered their menstrual blood to the Goddess. Under certain circumstances, however, the mothers came to believe that their menstrual blood was not enough to appease Her or to induce Her to create a bountiful harvest, or a larger herd or more young in the tribe. They had to give more to receive more. In this way, the mothers came to offer the blood of others to the Goddess.
The sacrificial victims, whether human or animal, were almost invariably male. Males were expendable because they had no role in giving life.
As clans grew into tribes and tribes into tribal alliances or nations, politics became more complex. It became necessary to centralize power into the hands of an individual. The person the mother chose for this role was called the Queen. In the earliest times, women viewed her as the most resourceful, powerful, and beautiful. The Queen became the embodiment of the Great Goddess herself.
With the creation of the role of queen, the ancient ritual of blood sacrifice produced a new kind of offering to the Goddess—the sacred king.
Sacred King: Savior or Messiah
Up to AD 1810, kings of Zimbabwe were ceremoniously strangled to death by their wives at the moon temple every four years. A remnant practice of the period of matriarchy. A sacred king would be slain each fall and another recreated each spring to represent life and death. Probably the idea of resurrection into godhood induced men to accept death willingly.
The women had discovered the cycle of the day, the week, and the month; observing the moon's cycle. The priestesses created the lunar calendar. Every thirteen months, each comprised of twenty-eight days, a new cycle could be discerned. This was the year. The discovery was of immense importance, in creating the first human agricultural civilization, led by the matriarchy.
Around 15 thousand years ago the priestesses evolved the basic knowledge of astronomy/ astrology and mathematics. An archaic term for astrology was mathesis, literally, mother-wisdom. The Sanskrit word for Matra was the same word for mother and measurement.
Social cohesion under mother-rule was the kinship bond that brought groups together in cooperation. The bond was maternal because early groups did not grasp paternal relationships due to the earliest taboos that placed sex outside the realm of one’s community. Simply put, the connection between sexuality and childbearing was unknown to primitive people, as was the role of the father.
You could not eat or kill anyone in the group, nor could you have sex with anyone in the group. While this created peace within the group, it created a different social stress—one that was keenly felt by the men.
However, the creation of the tribe solved the problem of sexual partners. The tribe consisted of two clan confederations in which members of one confederation had sex with the members of the other confederation. This was a big breakthrough for everyone.
Rise of Brother-Rule:
Yet, despite the fullness of the matriarchal worldview and its vast accomplishments, it was based after all, on false information.
The mystery of life was not created out of blood; it was created from the egg of the female and the sperm of the male.
When the men discovered that it was their sperm that created life—and not their blood—it greatly reinforced their sense of superiority and was an essential factor in bringing the value system of matriarchy to an end. It was now not women who gave birth, but men. The women were the vessels to nurture the new life.
By this time in history, the surplus wealth generated by agriculture required that men take a greater role in its protection and distribution. The men had the responsibility for educating the male teenagers in their clan and initiating them into manhood as conditions for assuming their role in society.
They had also established strong bonds through the rituals of making men blood brothers. This period in which men gained greater social power was called the fratriarchy, or period of brother-rule.
Fratriarchy, the transition period between matriarchy and patriarchy, was a period of staggering social upheaval that paved the way for patriarchal rule and the systematic repression of women. The scars suffered by men and women during this period still stir in our cultural angst and rise from our subconscious, causing many of our nightmares even today.
Fratriarchy began with the expansion and authority of the mothers’ brothers in tribal decision-making, particularly over the issue of property management. The Property had begun to increase as stockbreeding and gardening replaced hunting and gathering. The advances in trading and specialized production also increased wealth. The authority of the men had also increased due to blood brotherhoods. The males had to mobilize for war in completely new ways. These circumstances created the activity of war, as we understand it today.
Those with benign climates and good soil developed agricultural civilizations. Those who lived in cold climates or lacked good soil remained nomadic. In time, the nomadic tribes started to invade the agricultural civilizations and the ability of the people to protect themselves.
Blood Revenge:
Blood revenge gave rise to the system of regulated punishment and counter-punishment between the two communities. It was an organized bloodletting. This system is still practised by many primitive tribes today.
They did not believe that death could occur naturally. Consequently, whoever died had to be killed by the enemy. This made it imperative that the men band together to punish those who had brought harm to their kin. Just as blood kinship was established on a communal basis, so also blood revenge was communal.
The whole community was held responsible for the actions of each member. No specific culprit needed to be found and killed in reprisal for the death of a kinsman – any member of his community would suffice to satisfy the claims of blood.
Women were never held accountable for a death and thus never sought out and killed. It was the general belief that death-giving was the natural responsibility of men, just as life-giving was the natural responsibility of women.
Blood revenge inevitably led to hereditary feuds and destabilized tribal relations. To alleviate this condition mothers and their brothers instituted the prearranged combat followed by the gift exchange. Usually, the two opposing sides met periodically for the purpose of settling grievances between them, which had accumulated in the preceding period.
The fights were conducted according to specific rules. As soon as the grievances were settled, they called a halt to the bloodshed and the warriors of both sides joined together to exchange gifts and restore peace. The combat and gift exchange led to the Olympic contest of ancient Greece.
How then did the Universal practice of ritual combat break down and, in so doing, give rise to the warfare and imperialism that we experience today? The answer lies in the breakdown of matriarchy and the rules that govern the behaviour of men.
The Contradictions, Turbulence and Decline of Matriarchy:
The decline of the matriarchy did not begin with an act of war on the part of the men against women. It began with the concept of '"private ownership."
The first inroads that men made against Women's power were in becoming male-mothers (mother’s brother), husbands, and husband-mothers (Father-Family). Later they would become male priestesses. And out of the tradition of sacred kings, men would become kings or warlords.
Male-Mother or Mother's Brother:
The first role of power the men held in the clan structure was as Mother's brother, as protector of the sister and her children. In time, as property developed and the role of the brother's authority, increased, it also came to signify power over the wealth of the mother-family, including the children. This power did not constitute ownership over that wealth, which under matriarchy was always communal, but rather it consisted of decision-making authority over its utility.
Conflicted Husband Era:
This role in contra-distinction to the mother's brother was filled by a stranger, whom the sister chose as her lover or mate. So profoundly troublesome was this relationship that it ultimately caused the downfall of matriarchy.
In the downfall that occurred during fratriarchy, men were pitted against each other in a schizophrenic blood-bath the likes of which the society had never, nor will ever, see again.
Human bloodletting reached a feverish pitch that it overthrew all social and gender relations. It paved the way for male-dominated traditions to keep women in a socially inferior position.
The cultural inversion also caused the establishment of Father-family, Private property and the State upon which all secular forms of male rule are now derived.
How did such an Upheaval Occur?
The Institution of inter-clan or inter-confederation mating of male and female threw up a situation that one marries into a village of enemies.
The transfer of the go-between role of mother-in-law to the brother did little to ease social tensions. The husband was a visitor to his wife's community.
The crux of the problem was that when a man left his community for his wife's community, he became subject to divided loyalties. His basic rights and responsibilities were with his sisters and other kin. This inhibited the fuller development of his relationship with his wife and children.
Contrary to this the wife was not subject to these pressures directly.
The men having both the roles of brother and husband were put in a no-win situation which ultimately dragged everyone down.
The blood relation of sister made him, as brother, the pillar of the family in the matrilineal community, alongside a brittle and unsure relationship with a wife. The house belonged to his mother and other women in the family. He had no property to which he could bring his wife and raise a family.
As the value of a clan's wealth increased, the antagonism between the wife's brother and husband increased, and so did the antagonism between sister and brother and between husband and wife.
Individualism and Property:
Because a man could not belong to two clans at the same time, for him to enter a primary relationship with his wife meant giving up his blood bond to his mother, brothers and sisters.
It meant that for the first time in history, matrilineal kin would be in opposition to one another. It meant the breakdown of social consciousness as a primary force and set the conditions for the development of individual consciousness as a primary force in history. To achieve this transition it meant abandoning the idea of kinship and replacing it with the people as property.
Father-Family:
It began with the Husband’s usurpation of the brother's role of assisting in the care and protection of a woman's children, and more to the point, with the husband's usurpation of ownership of the wife, her children and property.
The transition phase of the transfer of power from brother to husband decimated the matriarchy and gave rise to the patriarchy and the subjugation of women in all spheres - physical, psychic and ideological.
Bride Price:
“The purchasable wife was impossible in the most primitive cultural stages, not only because the men have no notion of any commercial exchange, but because they possess no fundable property, ….” - ( Robert Biffault).
“The importance of cattle in the development of private property has long been recognised…..these were the reasons cattle became the earliest form of movable property to be bartered for wives.” - (Evelyn Reed)
The occasion of the gift-exchange relationship turned into an exchange-relationship.
Golden Age of Matriarchy:
MEHRGARH .. matriarchal in its origin flourished in the basins of the Indus River and the now dried-up Sarasvati River from the Kacchi plain of Balochistan onwards. Dwelling- sites have been established from 9000 years ago to 2000 years ago. Lived in brick houses, stored grain granaries, fashioned tools with copper ore, and lined large baskets with bitumen to carry liquids. Urban living spaces had an amazing level of civic facilities.
But no evidence of an administrative hierarchy, caste structure or ruins of a grandiose power centre were found.
The society lived by matriarchal Community values as against the latter and current Hierarchy, caste and Individual Property values of patriarchy for ten thousand Years.
Merhrgarh is the earliest known centre of agriculture and the precursor to the Indus Valley Civilization.
Over 32 thousand artifacts were collected covering 500 acres. Glazed beads, Terra cottage figurines females decorated with paint and diverse hairstyles and ornaments. All the figurines from 45 thousand years ago up to 4000 years ago mostly of Mother-goddess were female. Male figurines appear to grow in number from less than 4000 years ago.
Around 7500 years ago, Aryans encountered Mehrgarh during its period of Fratriarch, and moved on the society into patriarchy.
0 Comments