All week we have been warming our spirits at the sacred fire of Candlemas / Imbolc, the Celtic holiday in honour of Brighde, Irish saint and Goddess of poetry, smithcraft and healing. Imbolc falls approximately 6 weeks between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, one of the 8 festivals of the Celtic year.
In the Greek Orthodox Church, February 2 is celebrated as Ypopantis, the presentation of Jesus at the Temple, 40 days after his birth, in accordance with Mosaic law. This day also marks Mary’s ritual return to the world after forty days of postpartum seclusion. This practice was known in the Western Church as ‘churching’ or blessing a new mother after 40 days; Hindu tradition also recommends women spend up to 40 days in rest and isolation after childbirth.
This post was originally posted on February 5, 2018
The symbol of the Goddess is as old as human history. The most ancient images of the Goddesses from the Paleolithic era are neither pregnant nor holding a child. In Neolithic Old Europe the Goddess was most commonly linked with birds or snakes and only rarely portrayed as mother. Yet we tend to equate the Goddess with the Mother Goddess. I suspect that images of the Virgin Mary with Jesus on her lap and prayers to God as Father have fused in our minds, leading us to think that the Goddess must be a Mother Goddess and primarily a Mother.
In a recent blog, Christy Croft reminded us that in our culture, women’s experiences of mothering and motherhood are not always positive:
[The mother] doesn’t always appear in our stories in simple or easy ways. Some of us mother children we did not or could not grow in our bodies; some of us birth babies who are now mothered by others. Some of us are not mothers at all. Some of us had mothers who could not love us unconditionally, or did not have mothers in our lives, or had mothers who brought us more pain and humiliation than comfort, from whose effects we are still recovering, are still healing.
Moderator’s Note: We here at FAR have been so fortunate to work along side Carol Christ for many years. She died from cancer in July, 2021. Her work continues through her non-profit foundation, the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual and the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. To honor her legacy, as well as allow as many people as possible to read her thought-provoking and important blogs, we are pleased to offer this new column to highlight her work. We will be picking out special blogs for reposting. This blog was originally posted February 25, 2013. You can read it long with its original comments here. It was the second in an important 3 part series. We will be posting part 3 next week (or you can read it earlier by going to the original post). Part 1 can be readhere:
Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.*
In last week’s blog, I explained patriarchy as a system in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality with the intent of passing property to male heirs. How did a system that identifies a man’s essence with his property and the ability to pass it on to sons come about? I suggest that the answer to this question is war and the confiscation of “property” by warriors in war. Patriarchy is rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.
Moderator’s Note: We here at FAR have been so fortunate to work along side Carol Christ for many years. She died from cancer in July, 2021. Her work continues through her non-profit foundation, the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual and the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. To honor her legacy, as well as allow as many people as possible to read her thought-provoking and important blogs, we are pleased to offer this new column to highlight her work. We will be picking out special blogs for reposting.This blog was originally posted February 18, 2013. You can read it long with its original commentshere. It was the first in an important 3 part series. We will be posting the next 2 parts in subsequent weeks (or you can read it earlier by going to the original post).
Recently feminist scholar Vicki Noble commented that this is the best definition of patriarchy she has read–but she hadn’t read it earlier. I am reposting it now in the hopes that all of you will share it with your social media so that it will be more widely known.
Patriarchy is often defined as a system of male dominance. This definition does not illuminate, but rather obscures, the complex set of factors that function together in the patriarchal system. We need more complex definition if we are to understand and challenge the the patriarchal system in all of its aspects.
Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality, with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.*
To solve global problems, these steps from below must nevertheless be supplemented with more comprehensive structures. These are not „above,“ as there is no „above“ in this sense in matriarchal societies; they are simple more comprehensive.
National states no longer fit the bill: they are too big for humane, transparent political processes. At the same time, they are too small to solve global problems that the current patriarchy creates and leaves behind for posterity; this is especially true regarding problems related to advanced destruction of the biosphere on earth. It is no longer possible for national governments, or even regional ones, to solve these problems. They affect all of humanity, so global strategies are needed to solve them.
No more national states
Existing national governments must be dissolved in two directions: on one hand, in the direction of the autonomous regions, which are the basis for life; on the other hand, in the direction of a global structure with a purely executive status which has no state power. Such a structure could be a Global Council, which will be formed by the two halves of a Women’s Global Council and a Men’s Global Council. Today, the U.N.O. tries to form such a global council, but because of its patriarchal structure which excludes the issues of women and of many peoples, and because of the power plays of the super-powers on this level, fails to fulfill its ideals. They just continue the patriarchal status quo.
New distribution of national wealth
An initial and fundamental challenge is therefore to dissolve the financial wealth of each national state, first to the regions, and in the regions to the communities. Of course, it does not mean that the money goes to individuals or patriarchal institutions, rather it is only distributed for matriarchal communities. Exactly half of this wealth, that is 50 %, must go to women and the other half, that is 50 %, must go to the men of the communities, and not more to the men, as it is common in patriarchy. In that way, each sex can develop their respective area of the society and region. As there is already a double-occupancy of every agency in a new matriarchal society, this can be independently accomplished by each sex.
However, this money is not a paying for motherhood and women’s work – which in fact cannot be paid –, but it belongs to them as half of humanity. It is their modest share for all what women had done for free through long periods of time. This equitable division of wealth would enable women to stop begging for state aid, which for them is notoriously scanty anyway. And it should start just now for women’s communal and cultural projects!
The constant social and economic unbalance in which all of today’s national states find themselves would come to an end. The current horrendous flow of money into male projects – the military, multinational corporations, monumental prestige-buildings and ego-architecture, huge sports stadiums and events costing hundreds of millions of dollars – means that there is nothing left but pitifully small amounts for social services, as women are expected to provide these for free. It is the usual situation of exploiting women. With the equal division of financial national wealth, women would probably establish infrastructures to fulfil social needs, with the likely result that communities, healthcare, culture and education would flourish. And women would establish their own schools and universities, because their knowledge is never respected in patriarchal societies. But even men are not free to do what they want with their share of money, for the projects of women and men in the communities and regions would be agreed upon by the local and regional consensus councils, according to maternal values.
Global structures for global problems
The other direction in which the public wealth of national states should be dissolved would be the structures of the Women’s Global Council and the Men’s Global Council. An agreed-upon percentage of women’s and men’s wealth from all the regions would go to these two halves of the Global Council, conducted by delegates of both sexes. The Global Council’s assets would be used exclusively to solve the global problems of the polluted air and water and soil and the damaged life on earth, that means, to clean up the technology-caused legacy of pollution by military powers and industrial corporations.
Members of the Women’s Global Council and the Men’s Global Council are always elected delegates from each region, and are responsible to their region; they have no power to make decisions independently of their region’s determinations. They moderate and coordinate the decisions of all regions of the world in precisely the same sense that a regional or local council coordinates the decisions of the matri-clans.
With these structures, what we call a “state” dissolves, regardless of whether it is a monarchy, an autocracy, a so-called democratic national state, an empire or a super-power. The concept and image of the hierarchical “state,” no matter how constituted, have become redundant. Patriarchal history of established domination began with the formation of “states” every time. With the development of new matriarchal societies, which are free of domination, a new, humane history of cultures could begin.
Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth is a mother and a grandmother. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy of science at the University of Munich where she taught for ten years (1973-1983). She has published extensively on philosophy of science, in addition to various books on matriarchal society and culture, and is a founder of Modern Matriarchal Studies. Her magnum opus: Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe,(Lang 2012, New York) defines the topic and provides a world tour of examples of contemporary matriarchal cultures. She has been visiting professor at the University of Montreal in Canada, and the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In 1986, she founded the International ACADEMY HAGIA for Matriarchal Studies and Matriarchal Spirituality in Germany is its director. In 2003, 2005 and 2011 she organized three World Congresses on Matriarchal Studies in Europe and the U.S.A. In 2005, she was elected by the international initiative “1000 Peace Women Across the Globe” as a nominee for the Nobel Peace.
In a new matriarchal society, “bigger” is not necessarily “better.” The smaller units of society, responsible for engendering person-to-person and transparent politics, are given preference. They must not become so big that people cannot see through them, and cannot participate in their decisions, as is the case in so many of today’s national states and super-powers. But they must be big enough to safeguard their self-sufficiency by a subsistence economy, and the diversity of their handiwork, technologies and arts. The ideal dimension is that of the region.
The borders of a region are not random, like national borders are; rather they have developed out of the conditions of the landscape and out of cultural traditions. Regional borders are formed by the decisions of the people themselves who want to live together on the basis of common cultural and spiritual traditions; this avoids any war of culture or of religion. Often the landscape corresponds to these cultural borders, because natural borders can be formed by mountain ranges, rivers, big lakes, or the sea which bind and bound people into their regional places. Continue reading “Matriarchal Politics The Vision of an Egalitarian Society (Part 2): Macrostructures by Heide Goettner-Abendroth”
On the basis of modern Matriarchal Studies, we can develop the vision of a new matriarchal, egalitarian form of society. This is called “Matriarchal Politics.”
The path to such a society has to combine matriarchal spirituality with politics, to create another kind of economy and another society. How this can be achieved is clearly portrayed by traditional matriarchal societies. Their economy, politics, social life and spirituality are inseparably connected: their goal is to provide a good life for all and this is assured through their structure and conventions.
Of course, we cannot go back and simply transfer historical patterns to the present. It is unlikely that we will return to societies based on the blood-relatedness of clans or sole dependence on agriculture. History and its social development cannot be turned backwards. But for our own path into new matriarchal, egalitarian societies, we can gain much stimulation and great insights from patterns which have been tried and tested for millennia. Continue reading “Matriarchal Politics by Heide Goettner-Abendroth”
Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchies, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies are mother-centered societies. They are based on maternal values: care-taking, nurturing, mothering. This holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike.
Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. They aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a cultural model. This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the patriarchal conception of motherhood which is used to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves.
Within matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations each have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. This creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking. Continue reading “Matriarchies Are Not Just a Reversal of Patriarchies: A Structural Analysis by Heide Goettner-Abendroth”
Currently I am reading Peggy Reeves Sanday’s a-mazing book Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy for the third time. In it Sanday describes the living egalitarian matriarchal culture of four million people of the Minangkabau culture of West Sumatra, Indonesia. Sanday spent parts of two decades living among the Minangkabau before publishing her book. I can understand why it took her so long to come to terms with a culture so different from our own.
The Minangkabau are matrilineal, defining family relationships through the mother line. They are also matrilocal: extended families live in big houses traditionally crowned by symbolic buffalo horns reaching to the sky; husbands, affectionately called “roosters” come to live in the “chicken coop” of their wives. The big houses and surrounding farmlands are held in common by the maternal clan. This much is relatively easy to understand, once we are willing to accept that not all societies are patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal. Continue reading “How “Egalitarian Matriarchy” Works among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra by Carol P. Christ”
In their purest form, “egalitarian matriarchies” place the mother principle at the center of culture and society. Their highest values are the love, care, and generosity they associate with motherhood. These values are not limited to women and girls. Boys and men are also encouraged to honor mothers above all, to practice the traits of love, care, and generosity, and to value them in others.
“Egalitarian matriarchal” societies are matrilineal which means that family membership and descent are passed through the female line. They are also usually matrilocal, which means that women live in their maternal home all of their lives. Family groups are usually extended rather than nuclear. Often there is a “big house” in which groups of sisters, brothers, and cousins live together with mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and great-aunts. In what I imagine to have been the original form of the system (still practiced by the Mosuo of the Himalayas), men also live in their maternal house, visiting their lovers at night, and returning home in the morning.
Mosuo women at festival
These societies practice small-scale agriculture. The women are owners and guardians of the land, which is held in common by maternal clans. They are also the guardians of the secrets of agriculture, food storage, and food preparation, which are passed down from mothers to daughters through songs, dances, rituals, and stories that celebrate the Earth as a great and giving Mother. The powers of women as birth-givers and as the guardians of the mysteries of the agricultural cycles are symbolically related to the powers of birth, death, and regeneration in nature and in all creative processes.
Women seated under trees in place of honor at Minoan festival
These social and cultural systems must have first developed at the beginning of the Neolithic era, when “woman the gatherer” first discovered the secrets of agriculture that allowed people to settle down and farm the land. If women discovered agriculture, then it makes sense that they would have been leaders in the first settled communities and guardians or owners of the land they farmed. They would have been the ones to build the first homes on or near the farmland. Sons as well as daughters would have been born in these early settlements.
The males of the families or clans continued to hunt. Over time they became responsible for building and heavy farm labor and for grazing flocks and seeking raw materials away from the settlement. It makes sense that they would be the ones to venture away from the community to gather information and to trade. In a recent documentary, Mosuo men stated that they don’t work as hard as women. This may not have been the case in the past. Today products and raw materials are brought in through the capitalist economy: traditional roles of traders are obsolete. Information gathering was an important part of trade expeditions: this is how new technologies spread rapidly in the Neolithic era; religious and cultural symbols were also shared by traders. Today there are books, newspapers, television, and the internet. Nor are Mosuo men involved in inter-clan negotiations in the People’s Republic of China.
From the division of labor in these societies, an egalitarian system of governance developed in which the elder women or grandmothers supervised the “internal” life of the house or clan. The “internal” domain included family and farm and all of the rituals surrounding birth, puberty, and death, as well as planting and harvesting. Women played central roles in creating and enacting all of these rituals. Through their expeditions and trade activities, elder men, the brothers of the grandmothers and uncles of the next generations, became responsible for the “external” relations of the clan, meeting people from other cultures when they were away from home, and welcoming visitors who arrived on their home territory.
Because of this division of labor, the elder men would have been the ones to meet and greet colonists and invaders and also to speak with storytellers, historians, and anthropologists, most often also men, who were interested in learning about their culture. If foreign men came from patriarchal cultures, they would have assumed that the men who met them were the leaders of their groups. The party line in the field of anthropology, which is followed by academics in other disciplines, is that “men wield the power” in matrilineal societies. I was disappointed to read this when I first started learning about matrilineal societies as a graduate student and to find it repeated in a recent article arguing that Minoan culture might have been matrilineal and matrilocal.
Those of us who have been socialized in patriarchal societies in which “men wield the power” cannot easily imagine alternative systems. When we begin to think about female power, we immediately conjure up pictures where “women wield the power” by going to war, keeping men as slaves, sexually abusing and raping them, and forcing them into subordinate positions. Such images are so abhorrent that we may conclude that patriarchy is not so bad after all. And this stops us from looking for or wanting to envision alternatives.
In 1981 anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday challenged these conventional views in her ground-breaking Female Power and Male Dominance. Examining all of the pre-urban societies documented in anthropological records, she discovered that societies that celebrated and valued female power were not female dominant but egalitarian. She also found that societies that celebrated and valued male power were almost always male dominant. They tended to develop in times of external threat (when men became warriors) or environmental crisis (when the female power of the earth was viewed as having failed the community). Though Sanday’s arguments are convincing, they failed to change that anthropological consensus that “men wield the power” in all human societies, including those that celebrate female power and are matrilineal and matrilocal.
What the consensus that “men wield the power” in matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal societies does not recognize is the power women hold in the internal relations of the group. For example, in the Iroquois culture, the councils of female elders that managed the day to day life of the clan were just as important as the councils of male elders that through their “chief” met with European settlers and invaders. In fact, the councils of female elders were slightly more powerful than those of the male elders. Iroquois women could remove male leaders they did not approve of and reject decisions of the male council to go to war. This power of the female council did not mean that Iroquois women dominated Iroquois men. Rather it was an important check-and-balance ensuring that men’s councils could not unilaterally take actions that would negatively affect the internal relations of the clan.
What should we call societies such as these? Obviously we should continue using the terms “matrilineal” and “matrilocal” where they apply. But what term should we use to describe these cultures as a whole? Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas called the egalitarian societies of Old Europe “matrifocal” because she recognized that the term “matriarchal” is usually (mis)understood to mean female dominant; this decision did not protect her work from being criticized for its challenges to the patriarchal consensus.
I dared to use the “m” word after reading Peggy Reeves Sanday and Heide Goettner-Abendroth. I define egalitarian matriarchy as a society and culture organized around the mother principle of love, care, and generosity, in which mothers are honored and women play central roles, and in which men also have important roles and every voice is heard. My new suggestion is that the “m”word always be preceded by the “e” word, in other words that we not use “matriarchy” unmodified, but always write and speak of “egalitarian matriarchies” in order to make it clear that we are not talking about female-dominated societies. This will be my practice in the future.
The symbol of the Goddess is as old as human history. The most ancient images of the Goddesses from the Paleolithic era are neither pregnant nor holding a child. In Neolithic Old Europe the Goddess was most commonly linked with birds or snakes and only rarely portrayed as mother. Yet we tend to equate the Goddess with the Mother Goddess. I suspect that images of the Virgin Mary with Jesus on her lap and prayers to God as Father have fused in our minds, leading us to think that the Goddess must be a Mother Goddess and primarily a Mother.
In a recent blog, Christy Croft reminded us that in our culture, women’s experiences of mothering and motherhood are not always positive:
[The mother] doesn’t always appear in our stories in simple or easy ways. Some of us mother children we did not or could not grow in our bodies; some of us birth babies who are now mothered by others. Some of us are not mothers at all. Some of us had mothers who could not love us unconditionally, or did not have mothers in our lives, or had mothers who brought us more pain and humiliation than comfort, from whose effects we are still recovering, are still healing.
I attended the 2016 Matriarchal Studies Day that preceded the biannual Association for the Study of Women and Mythology conference only two weeks before my family and I arrived at our new home in an established cohousing community. It was a bit of a crazy time, traveling cross-country this way and that. Packing, flying, presenting, learning, growing, flying back, unpacking & packing again, driving, moving in, more unpacking, more learning, more growing. The dust is really just beginning to settle. And so I’ve finally had a chance to think; to integrate the experiences and opportunities of the first half of this year.
Reviewing my notes from the conference brought me back around to my experience of Dr. Heide Göttner-Abendroth’s video lecture on Modern Matriarchal Studies. The first challenge one seems to face when opening any discussion of Matriarchal Studies is clearly defining what Dr. Göttner-Abendroth means by matriarchy. The first assumption to deconstruct is the erroneous belief that matriarchy is merely the opposite of patriarchy, and therefore a culture that simply oppresses the men instead of the women.
At one of our new cohousing community’s weekly common meals, I showed up in my “Smash the Patriarchy” t-shirt and was jokingly ribbed by a neighbor who instinctively made this assumption. Ironically, I believe this knee-jerk assumption is actually a direct result of the binary thinking inherent in the patriarchal paradigm- left/right, right/wrong, etc. We’ve got to oppress somebody, the patriarchy tells us. So if it’s not the one group, it must be the other, right? What was even more amusing to me than the trigger of the brief conversation was the fact that it was taking place between neighbors at a cohousing community meal. That’s because I believe cohousing, itself, shares numerous structures with matriarchy.
Thus through an enormous network of mythological narrative, every aspect of culture is cloaked in the relationship of ruler and ruled, creator and created. . . . [Sumerian] legend endows the Sumerian ruler-gods with creative power; their subjects are recreated as servants. . . . [This new narrative was] deployed with the purpose of conditioning the mind anew.(20, italics added)
To solve global problems, these steps from below must nevertheless be supplemented with more comprehensive structures. These are not „above,“ as there is no „above“ in this sense in matriarchal societies; they are simple more comprehensive.
Regionalism
Currently I am reading Peggy Reeves Sanday’s a-mazing book 
The symbol of the Goddess is as old as human history. The most ancient images of the Goddesses from the Paleolithic era are neither pregnant nor holding a child. In Neolithic Old Europe the Goddess was most commonly linked with birds or snakes and only rarely portrayed as mother. Yet we tend to equate the Goddess with the Mother Goddess. I suspect that images of the Virgin Mary with Jesus on her lap and prayers to God as Father have fused in our minds, leading us to think that the Goddess must be a Mother Goddess and primarily a Mother.
I attended the 2016 Matriarchal Studies Day that preceded the biannual Association for the Study of Women and Mythology conference only two weeks before my family and I arrived at our new home in an established cohousing community. It was a bit of a crazy time, traveling cross-country this way and that. Packing, flying, presenting, learning, growing, flying back, unpacking & packing again, driving, moving in, more unpacking, more learning, more growing. The dust is really just beginning to settle. And so I’ve finally had a chance to think; to integrate the experiences and opportunities of the first half of this year.
At one of our new cohousing community’s weekly common meals, I showed up in my “Smash the Patriarchy” t-shirt and was jokingly ribbed by a neighbor who instinctively made this assumption. Ironically, I believe this knee-jerk assumption is actually a direct result of the binary thinking inherent in the patriarchal paradigm- left/right, right/wrong, etc. We’ve got to oppress somebody, the patriarchy tells us. So if it’s not the one group, it must be the other, right? What was even more amusing to me than the trigger of the brief conversation was the fact that it was taking place between neighbors at a cohousing community meal. That’s because I believe cohousing, itself, shares numerous structures with matriarchy.
Thus through an enormous network of mythological narrative, every aspect of culture is cloaked in the relationship of ruler and ruled, creator and created. . . . [Sumerian] legend endows the Sumerian ruler-gods with creative power; their subjects are recreated as servants. . . . [This new narrative was] deployed with the purpose of conditioning the mind anew.(20, italics added)
feminismandreligion.com 