In my last few articles, I have tried to draw up a wide-angle historical understanding of these events by summarizing different but converging angles of research. This has included David Graeber and David Wenslows groundbreaking work presented in their book The Dawn of Everything from 2021, in which they showed that our traditional big-picture historical narrative has almost nothing to do with the facts, and that the accumulating evidence from archaeology, anthropology and other disciplines is pointing us towards a completely new account of human development and world history. Towards the end of their book they suggested that the patriarchal household is the cause for the recent human turn towards oppression, war and environmental destruction, a claim I have tried to explore through the research into our matriarchal prehistory, and the Indo-Europeans and their development of horseback riding, wheeled transportation, and warfare.

If you haven’t read my other articles about this, here’s a brief summary:

It seems that for hundreds of thousands of years of human development, all the way from the small bands of Neanderthal hunter-gatherers to the advanced civilizations of the Neolithic, women were the primary economic leaders of the family and the clan. This sprang out of and was closely related to the initial idea of family belonging and ancestral heritage as coming through the mother. The matriarch “owned” the shelter or the house, where men lived as their mother's son or sister’s brother. The idea of fathers did not yet exist, which means that there were also no “wives,” “husbands,” or maybe even monogamous relationships. This social reality was mirrored in a general spiritual understanding of the world itself as feminine and “mother-like,” a womb-like ground of being from which everything is born, dies back into, and is reborn from again, over and over.

Over millions of years, as humans slowly spread across the earth, we sought out areas offering diverse and easy access to food, which most often meant wetlands, coastlines, and river valleys. The Neolithic cultures that populated the Steppe initially followed this pattern as well, settling along the lush banks of creeks and rivers and sustaining themselves by a mix of foraging, hunting and simple agriculture. A period of climate cooling and drying that began about 6000 years ago put an end to that way of life, however, causing the rivers and creeks to dry up, the grain to stop growing, and the edible plants and wild animals to disappear. The only way to survive was for these tribes to become fully dependent on large flocks of grazing animals. Since the herding belonged to the men and the agriculture and foraging to the women, this transition also made women less economically relevant, and men the sole “breadwinners”. In the pursuit of grass for their herds, the men were forced to move the animals ever further away from the river valley villages and out on the open expanse of the grasslands, which created the conditions for a male culture that existed apart from the women, children and old folks back in the village. In this lopsided and traumatic situation, men took over from women as heads of the household, the family line began running from father to son rather than mother to daughter, and patrilineality became the new norm.

As the climate situation kept deteriorating and the flocks of animals grew larger, conflict between tribes over grazing grounds became commonplace. While humans have always occasionally fought each other over resources, at this time on the Steppe, it became a permanent situation, which continuously confronted the people in this area with the impossible and extremely traumatic choice of either killing their neighbors or seeing their own family starve or be killed. It must have been a world quite similar to the one mirrored today in the Mad Max movies, but with a flock of skinny cows rather than oil tankers. To keep their herds of animals alive and protected from theft, the men had to develop and cultivate a new kind of ruthlessness that would allow them to habitually commit violence, and if their clan and family were to survive in the long term, they needed loyal and strong sons who could pick up the fight after them.

This new separation between the sexes and the emergence of patrilineality and endemic conflict are closely interwoven with four profound technological advancements:

• The domestication and riding of horses, around 6-4000 years ago

• The invention of the wheeled carriage for transport, which made Indo-European tribes semi-nomadic around 5000-4000 years ago

• The development of the war chariot and a fully nomadic, aristocratic warrior class around 4000-3000 years ago.

• The development of the compound bow, cavalry, and standing armies around 3000 years ago

Aided by those new technologies, this herder-warrior “Patriarchal package” spread out from the Steppe in successive waves in all directions — to northern Europe, West Asia and the Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, and the northern border of China — profoundly influencing and changing the cultures they came into contact with. Before this time, there is little to no evidence for inequality and systemic conflict in human culture, but immediately afterward, between 2000-1000 BCE, war, centralized authority, hierarchical social structures and men’s ownership of animals, women and subjugated cultures emerge across the whole Eurasian continent, with Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria in Mesopotamia; the Vedic period in India; the Shang dynasty in China; the Mycenaean Greeks, Hittites, and Phoenicians in the Mediterranean; and the transition from the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom in Egypt.

I’d now like to turn to the mythical, spiritual and religious aspects of those early patriarchal cultures, and how the “sacrifical spiritual motor” they invented continues to drive our culture today.

The New Sky Gods

The Indo-Europeans' turn towards full-time herding came out of desperation: The rivers and creeks dried up, the grain wouldn't grow, the edible plants and wild animals disappeared, and cattle and horses were the only lifeline. In this situation, the all-encompassing Earth Mother must have begun to seem fickle, cold-hearted and indifferent to the suffering of her children. In contrast, the sun and the stars above remained steadfast and unflinching in their movements, reliably guiding the men across the near-eternal expanse of the plains. During that time they gave the trustworthy and eternal open sky the new name Dyeus Pater, Father Sky, later becoming Dyaus Pitar in Sanskrit, Zeus Pater in Greek, and Ju-piter in Latin.

And as the most important family unit on earth became that of father and son, the most important divine relationship became that of Dyeus Pater and his son Perkuno, the thunder god, who, just like his human warlord counterpart, rode around in a war chariot while wielding the mace club of power. Perkuno later became Thor in Scandinavia, the thunder god Svarožić/Radegast in Slavic areas, the Vedic, Greek, and later Roman war gods Indra, Ares, and Mars, as well as the Chinese thunder god Leigong.

Up until this time, the Great Mother Goddess had reigned supreme in her various forms as the ultimate reality, but afterwards she splintered into the many different wives, mistresses and rape victims of the primary father and son couple that we know from the Greek, Norse, and other pantheons. Heaven and earth became fundamentally separated in a way they had not been before, with the divine, good and masculine up above, and the bad, untrustworthy and feminine down below, here on earth.

“The Sacrificial Religious Motor”

It was not given that the early Indo-Europeans would become accustomed to systematic and constant violence. People must have faced the same situation of starvation and extinction many times over the course of human history without deciding to destroy their neighbors so that their own immediate family could survive. Despite our current impression of ourselves as a species, it is actually quite difficult for us to hurt each other with deliberate intent, even when faced with the threat of our children starving to death. As David Graeber concluded:

“It's almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in systematic yet indiscriminate ways … For most of human history, no one saw much reason to do such things; or if they did, it was rare.”

The early Indo-Europeans convinced themselves that killing their neighbors and raping their women was a necessary and good thing by a set of interrelated new ideas and practices, with the animal sacrifice ritual as its center. It was both the way in which they managed to legitimize, encourage, and desensitize themselves to violence, and the foundation for religion, as it has continued up until today. As this “motor” continues to operate at the center of our consumerist, capitalistic culture, it’s essential that we understand its different components and how they work together.

Animal Sacrifice

Just as there is little evidence of systematic violence and social hierarchy before the Indo-Europeans, there are also few signs of animal sacrifice before that time. In their turn towards violence, however, they began to imagine that the world itself was made by a primordial sacrifice, something they had to continuously reenact and repeat in order to maintain social and cosmic order.

Their creation myth that supported this began with two men, Manu (Man) and Yemo (Twin), traveling through the cosmos alongside a Great Cow. Through the lens of matriarchal studies, we can understand the Cow as an ancient symbol for the Great Mother Goddess, and through the work of Robert Graves, we could also look at this initial image of the traveling Man and his Twin as ancient, matriarchal symbols of the different stages of a man’s life. In the new Indo-European cosmological plot, however, just as the chief created a future for his clan by killing his neighbors, Man structured reality and created the world by killing his Twin (and in some later versions also the cow). With the help of the Sky Gods, Manu then used Yemo’s dead body to make the basic elements of the world and all the various kinds of animals and people in it. The Norse myth of Ymir, the Vedic Purusha, and Roman Remus are all descendants of this story.

The myth served as the theological scaffolding for the two new societal authorities that emerged at that time — the Priest and the King. Manu was the archetypal First Priest, the one who brought our ordered world into existence by sacrificing his brother. Twin, on the other hand, was the archetypal first King. His body is the earth itself and all that it contains. This is the original meaning of sovereign, having supreme power or authority: the King owns and controls the land because he is it. As his power wanes and he loses control, he is sacrificed, and his power is transferred to the next king. This twofold, Priest-and-King basic structure of hierarchical authority appears to have come about at the same time as systematic violence, around 5000 years ago, and it is easy to see how it has continued up to our own times of popes and monarchs, church and nation state.

The third character in that foundational drama was Trito (literally “third man”), the original human hero warrior. Shortly after the world was created, Trito received domesticated cattle as a gift from the Sky Gods, but it was treacherously stolen from him by a three-headed, six-eyed serpent called Ngwhi (the Proto-Indo-European word root for negation). The symbolism of the serpent is often explained as disorder or chaos, but to my mind, it could also be considered as another symbol for the feminine aspects of reality, or the matriarchal cultures that the Indo-Europeans conquered. To retrieve the cattle, Trito asked Perkuno, the war god for help, and together they went to the cave or the mountain of the serpent, killed her, and brought the cattle back home. Crucially, as Tito returned home, he handed a cow over to the priest Manu, who killed it and burned it in a fire so that the rising smoke could reach the Sky Gods to please them and thank them for their divine intervention.

While the details of the story have morphed and changed through the millennia, the sequence of theft, recovery, and restoration has remained a core narrative structure in Western culture. A few of the countless examples are: Odysseus and Achilles’ reclaiming of Helen in the Trojan War; Perseus slaying Cetus to save Andromeda; Beowulf’s destruction of Grendel and his mother; Sigurd slaying the dragon Fafnir; Bilbo reclaiming the treasure from Smaug; or Neo of the Matrix films, working to free the humans themselves as the stolen cattle.

Several essays would be needed to unpack this in all its detail, but most important for this article is the new relationship the story establishes between humans and gods, with the sacrifice as the bridge between the two. It also shows the mutual dependency between the warrior and the priest, where the warrior’s raid was authorized and blessed by the priest on behalf of the gods, and the warrior, in turn, confirmed the authority and position of the priest by asking him to perform the concluding sacrifice.

The sacrificial ritual and its associated practices of poetry recitation, soma-drinking, and so on were for the nobility only, the priests, chiefs and warriors. It was prohibited for women, slaves and subjugated peoples, serving to formalize these initial divisions into the later caste systems.

Kóryos groups

The reconstructed word kóryos, meaning “war band” or “men under arms” (männerbund in modern German), was the Indo-European way of initiating boys into adulthood. After undergoing a painful trial, adolescent males from the societal warrior elite were placed together in a war-band of up to twelve members and sent away to live in the wild for up to two years with only their weapons as possessions. They’d try to become like wolves or wild dogs, raiding and stealing from neighboring tribes and raping their women. If they survived to the end of the period, they were accepted back into their tribe as fully formed warriors and allowed to own women and animals of their own. This systematized raiding, pillaging and sexual violence was an essential part of how the Indo-European culture spread across the world, as all this transgressive behavior had to take place outside of the heartland of their own tribe. Genetic studies have shown that it was primarily these kóryos groups of young men who migrated into new areas and fathered children with native women, while men in the defending areas died off, and women and children migrated away from the border regions where these war bands operated.

Soma

From archaeological finds and from the two text sources closest to the Indo-Europeans — the Avesta of zoroastrianism, and the Rigveda of Hinduism — we know that the narcotic drink Soma was an essential part of the sacrificial ritual. Out of the Rigveda’s 1028 hymns, 114 are dedicated to it exclusively, and it features prominently in many more. The glory of Indra, for instance, is often illustrated by him consuming vast amounts of soma. The exact composition of the drink has been lost over time, but researchers largely agree that the central ingredient was from the Ephedra plant, producing a narcotic effect similar to amphetamine, which would have heightened feelings of power, aggression, and even violent intent. It was considered both a drink and a deity in its own right, and the ability to execute violence in a successful way was often attributed to soma’s influence:

Like violent gusts of wind, the draughts that I have drunk have lifted me... In one short moment will I smite the earth in fury here or there: Have I not drunk of Soma juice?

-Indra, Rigveda 10.119

Agni

Ever since fire was tamed and corralled into the campfire and hearth, it has held a central place in human daily life and myth. It was kept alive in the fireplace of the hut, where it was central to preparing food and keeping young children warm, and so it became connected with domestic, nurturing, and feminine qualities. Female hearth-goddesses such as Hestia in Greece, Frigg in Scandinavia, and Bastet in Egypt have carried these ancient associations close to our times. For the Proto-Indo-Europeans, however, what they called Agni became something different, changing from female to male along with the general shift towards male authority, and becoming a sort of messenger god bridging the material and celestial realms. Out of the Rigvedas' 1028 hymns, Agni has more than 200 dedicated to him, ranking only second to Indra, the Trito-style warrior hero himself.

The basic idea was that as milk, butter, and meat was placed in the fire and turned into smoke, it would rise up to the Sky Gods, establishing vertical communication with them. Agni therefore was connected with transformation, purification, and the human journey towards the divine. Later on, as these ideas evolved into dogmatic brahmanism, Agni also became seen as an internal fire that connected us to the supposed universal consciousness of Brahman.

During this time, metallurgical knowledge derived from matriarchal jewelry-making was adapted for bronze weapon production, adding to the veneration of fire as a purifying and refining force. If fire could transform a lump of ore into a gleaming bronze sword, what else might it be able to do? The blacksmith’s control and knowledge of Agni’s mysterious power would have been akin to magic.

Palynological studies show that the arrival of Indo-European populations in Europe and India brought significant deforestation. While Neolithic people also cleared land by fire to open it up for farming and hunting, the practice increased markedly as the Indo-Europeans arrived with large herds of grazing animals. The same sacred fire that transmitted their dead animal offerings to the gods also helped them transform impenetrable forests into grazing lands, adding to the impression of purification, and setting up what might be considered the first incident of large-scale anthropogenic landscape modification driven by religious ideology.

Glory

Initially, cattle-raiding and skirmishing with neighboring tribes provided food for the clan during difficult periods, allowed young men to raise cattle for bride-price payments, and served as a way for the group to maintain internal cohesion. Over time, however, as the kóryos system became institutionalized and the spearhead for Indo-European expansion, the raiding became increasingly symbolic and status-oriented. Central to this was the term ḱléwos, or kleos in Greek, literally meaning "what others hear about you", and most often translated to "renown" or "glory".

While the concept of "history" had existed before this — in the retelling of a clan's origin story or their ancestral line back to the primordial clan mother, for instance — for these warrior-herders, it took on a different dimension. Having aligned themselves with the image of the new, male Sky Gods and rejected the previously all-encompassing Earth Mother, they also lost the ancient belief that she would swallow them up as they died and rebirth them again later. For them, the underworld changed from being a fertile place of new beginnings to a bleak, shadowy and impure place they wanted to avoid. Perhaps as the first people in human history, these people began to imagine themselves as individuals existing separately from the earth, and their personhood as something that ended at death. Kleos, reputation or glory, was the only thing that lived on, so to amass it was the only way to achieve permanence and avoid the anonymity, and perhaps more importantly, commonality, of death. If the pursuit of kleos was successful, it became kleos aphthiton, "imperishable fame" — śravas akṣitam in Vedic Sanskrit and ḱléwos ndhgwhitóm in reconstructed Indo-European. This "fame that does not decay" was the only thing that could lift the warrior (it was not available for slaves or women) out of the churn and strife of human existence and into the realm of the divine.

Just as the kóryos system was an important component for the Indo-European expansion as a whole, it also increased the focus on kleos, since when the boys were not fighting or stealing from other clans, they spent their time reciting songs and poems about the glorious raiders of the past. In fact, it would appear that it was within these groups that heroic poetry, individual fame, and glory-seeking behavior all emerged for the first time, or at least where it first occupied a central part of a culture. By the end of the early Indo-European period, warrior activities were no longer evaluated only by their practical outcomes, such as the clan's welfare and survival, but more and more by their potential to generate kleos aphthiton for an individual.

As with the sacrificial ritual, the priests also held a crucial, mediating role in the assigning of kleos. In those early days, before the position split up into different roles, "priest" would also have meant the prophet, legislator, orator, soothsayer, and so on. In the aspect of bard or poet, he would have had the say in who was to be included in the songs, and how much kleos they deserved.

Kurgans

As the Indo-European relationship to death changed, so did their burial customs. Up until this time in history, people would usually be laid to rest in some sort of anonymous common grave along with a few shells and a sprinkle of ochre to encourage their swift return. As the Indo-European warrior class emerged, however, they began constructing monumental, individual graves for their attempt at "imperishable fame". When Marija Gimbutas systematized her theory of patriarchal steppe cultures in the 1950s, it was called the "kurgan theory" or "kurgan hypothesis" in reference to these so-called kurgan mounds.

Out on the flat steppe, these mounds were constructed by digging up the grass turf and layering it in piles over a grave or a grave chamber. At first, the mounds were constructed out of pristine grazing grounds, but as environmental damage from over-grazing became more common, they were increasingly made from depleted soil. At the beginning of the period, they were small mounds less than a meter tall, but grew to the point where a large one would be more than 50 meters in diameter (about the width of a soccer field). As an indication of the effort they put into their kleos through these mounds, the 50-meter Chertomlyk kurgan is estimated to have required more than five hundred worker-days to build (meaning that 100 men could have built it in about a week). 75 hectares of grazing land was cut out and stacked to build it, the equivalent of about 100 soccer fields, or a quarter of NYC's Central Park, or twice the area of the Vatican.

Conclusion

I probably haven’t gotten everything right in this article, but since this matriarchal/patriarchal perspective on history provides such a powerful lens for contemplating the deeper swells and currents in our culture today, I hope you will forgive any minor errors you might find, in favor of the benefit of the wider scope of the narrative.

This narrative is still unfolding, some of it has not been discussed before, and many of the connections I have made here will seem preposterous to many academics. However, most male historians are also still blissfully unaware that women have generated new perspectives on the past, even after more than 100 years. Meanwhile many female historians have been so oriented towards unearthing and reclaiming women’s previously elevated position that they’ve had to present patriarchal developments as an exclusively negative or destructive force. Between these two, to my eyes, we have had a blind spot in our historical curiosity.

There are many ways to continue to ponder the shift from a matriarchal to patriarchal world order and family system: Our general political divide between right and left can be understood as an expression of these two worldviews — the matriarchal, egalitarian, and consensus-oriented original system on one hand, and the patriarchal, hierarchical, and territorial on the other. Communism, socialism, the welfare state, women’s rights, and other egalitarian systems could be understood as deep-seated matriarchal impulses resurfacing after a period of patriarchal hegemony. Perhaps other distributed power structures, like the internet and cryptocurrencies, can also be seen in this light.

The Indo-European mindset can easily be identified at the core of today’s extractive, ruthless capitalism. Deforestation in favor of grazing animals has increased across all continents since those days, working the same way in Indonesia and Brazil today as it did between the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their neighbors 5000 years ago. For a trader or an industrialist, whatever means of extraction they are using — cattle, mining equipent, or financial derivatives — is considered a rightful, even divinely bestowed gift for to them to use as hard as they can to get as much wealth as they can, and success in the marketplace continues to be interpreted as divine grace and favor, a “blessing”, or “luck” as it’s sometimes called today.

Our version of the kóryos groups is easily found in adolescent boys being sent to the army, to the Hitlerjugend, to boarding schools, and these days, most notably to online multiplayer first-person shooters. 97% of U.S. teenage boys play video games, and more than 60% identify as “gamers”. This isolation from the immediate family group and fraternal cultivation of a violent mindset is, in essence, the same as it when it first came about 5000 years ago.

However, when the kóryos system brought together groups of young men and isolated them for extended periods of time, it ended up not just cultivating ruthlessness and a capacity for violence, but also self-reflection and contemplation. Monastic orders are really only evolved forms of kóryos groups — what happened when the newly formed armies didn’t have anyone to fight for a while. So just as the development of Patriarchy produced the first war, systemic oppression, and environmental degradation, it also produced modern philosophy, spirituality, and the notion of a human as an individual with free will who interacts with the world.

Christian priests, Jewish rabbis, Islamic mullahs, and Hindu brahmins continue to present themselves as mediators between the earthly and divine, just as Indo-European priests did — the goal is still to curry favor with the gods, find a way to escape from earth and gain entry into a heaven ruled over by a Father and his various sons.

On the other hand, one of Christianity’s central symbols is the strikingly matriarchal Virgin Mother and Baby Jesus, which was kept alive and worshipped primarily by the non-priestly and non-warrior segments of the population even throughout peak Patriarchy and its attempted extermination of all feminine values. Similarly, as Brahmanism spread throughout the Indian subcontinent it adopted, coopted and transformed much of the earlier matriarchal symbolism, leading to ideas such as shakti, which positions feminine power as a fundamental creative force of existence.

Kleos, celebrity and fame as a bulwark against death, is our culture’s primary ethos, just as it was 5000 years ago for the Indo-Europeans. It’s in our rows of named gravestones, in politicians naming roads and dams after themselves, in philanthropists donating their money in exchange for their name on a wall, and, of course, in the everyman’s frazzled and headless social media pursuit of name recognition. Hero worship continues much as before, with businessmen, sports stars, music idols, and so on taking the place of the warrior, the main difference being that the fast horse has been exchanged for a car, a boat, or a private jet. The central Indo-European power symbol of the mounted warrior is found outside practically every palace and castle, the mace war hammer continues to be in symbolic use as the royal sceptre of power, and the most popular team sport in the world, football, is an obvious reenactment of grassland skirmishing and raiding.

To end: the so-called Axial Age — the simultaneous appearance of wise sages and prophets across the whole Eurasian continent — is most often considered a mysterious and somewhat unexplainable occurrence. In my next article, however, I will begin to look at it as a result of what patriarchy set in motion, an inevitable response to the implausible and unsustainable division of reality into good and bad, heaven and earth, pure and impure, which the Indo-Europeans came up with and propagated across the earth.

After all, if there was one thing Zoroaster, Jesus, Buddha, Chuang-tzu, Lao-tzu, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Empedocles, Socrates and so on would agree on, is that there was no use in continuing on with the core Indo-European practice of sacrificing animals to the Sky Gods.

Some of the books and works I’ve used to compile this article:

• The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wenslow, 2021

• The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony, 2007

• Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy: West Asia and Europe, by Heide Goettner-Abendroth, 2022

• The White Goddess, by Robert Graves, 1948

• The Creation of Patriarchy, by Gerda Lerner, 1986

• Comparative Mythology, by Jaan Puhvel, 1987

• Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln, 1999

• Death, War, And Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice, Bruce Lincoln, 1991

• In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth, J.P. Mallory, 1989

• Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Martin West, 2007

• The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, Gregory Nagy, 2013

• Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, Christopher I. Beckwith, 2009

Websites & PDF’s:

• Proto-Indo-European Deities, Ceisiwr Serith

• The dogs of war: A Bronze Age initiation ritual in the Russian steppes, by David W. Anthony, et al., 2017

• The Origins of Fatherhood, by Sebastian Kramer, 1991

• Burial mounds of Scythian elites in the Eurasian steppe: New discoveries, by Hermann Parzinger, 2016

• How To Kill a Dragon, by Calvert Watkins, 1995

• An Introduction to George Dumézil website

• Soma (Wikipedia entry)

• The Rigveda, translated by Ralph T.H Griffith, 1896

• Indo-Europeans in the Ancient Yellow River Valley, by Shaun C. R. Ramsden, 2021

• Sacrificing Sacrifice to Self-Sacrifice: Sublimation of Sacrificial Violence in Western Indo European Cultures during Karl Jaspers' Axial Period, Eric D. Meyer, 2016

“In this moment, thinking neither of good nor evil, who are you?”

- Huineng (638-713 CE)

In my last article, I explored the so-called matriarchal side of the early Stone Age (paleolithic) cultures: the reciprocal gift economy and consensus-based political system, the matrilinear (descended from the mother) kinship, and the cultural orientation around what we might call the Mother Heaven-and-Earth — the sacred feminine life force that was immanent in everything, and in which the cycles of death and rebirth played out. In this article, I want to explore how Patriarchy came around to change all that. To get there, however, I have to make two little detours, first to the Chinese Zen teacher Huineng, and then to the Neolithic.

Huineng

Huineng was originally an illiterate country boy from the south of China who, in the 6th century, traveled north to study with the Zen teacher Hongren. Due to his extraordinary abilities and perception, Hongren eventually decided to make him his successor and the sixth patriarch of the Chinese Zen tradition. But because he was a dark-skinned, uncultured man from the wrong part of the country — the equivalent of today’s immigrant Guatemalan day laborer in the U.S. or Syrian street food vendor in Europe — his monk colleagues became outraged when they found out he’d received the acknowledgment from Hongren, thinking that the honor should instead have gone to their preferred man of their own kind. Hongren had anticipated this reaction from them and, therefore, told Huineng to leave town and stay hidden for a few years until the ill tempers died down. The monks, however, were so enraged that they decided to set out in hot pursuit after Huineng, determined to get back the symbolic robe and bowl that Hongren had given him, and perhaps even to kill him in the process if need be. When one of them finally caught up to Huineng and made his demands, Huineng simply offered him the robe and bowl without resistance. The monk who had come into the situation so angrily hell-bent on justice being served was completely surprised by this. Suddenly, he was seized by confusion and couldn’t bring himself to pick up the items that had been so important to him just a moment before. That was when Huineng asked him his famous question: “In this moment, thinking neither of good nor evil, who are you?”

This attitude or state of being that Huineng embodied in that encounter is what Zen practice seeks to cultivate. It is also how I’d like to try to approach this look at history. Since it was first named more than a hundred years ago, and certainly in the last few postmodern decades, Patriarchy has been the undisputed bad boss. It is portrayed as the root cause of all the war and strife that has plagued Earth for the last few thousand years and the source of most of the rest of our problems. In a nutshell, if everyone would just realize how bad Patriarchy is, we would be able to return to a just and fair world where everyone lives in harmony with each other.

Perhaps that is true, and perhaps something else is also going on? The truth usually grows more layered and paradoxical the closer we look at it and the more curious we are. Borrowing Huinengs approach: In this moment, thinking neither that the matriarchy was good nor the Patriarchy bad, who were we? Who are we?

The Neolithic package

To understand how patriarchy came about, we first have to look at the cultural environment it came out of, which is the time-period we now call the Neolithic. To summarize thousands of years of highly advanced and complex civilizations in just a few sentences is, of course, both foolish and impossible, so although I don't think the following is completely wrong, please consider that it will be overly simplistic.

The neolithic began where my previous article left off, as the climate stabilized after the biblical floods and upheavals of the Younger Dryas period. This is when humans, for unknown reasons, began building the first religious structures, such as the famous Göbekli Tepe. These initial large-scale constructions were likely not planned and executed by societal elites but rather self-organized community efforts that served as the center point of the social and religious life of both local and regional communities. In the beginning, they took place as seasonal gatherings of feasting and building, but as the years went by, people remained in the same place longer and longer until they finally became permanently settled near the structures.

As I discussed previously, in the earlier Paleolithic age-class societies, every one of the same age thought of each other as sister or brother, and every old man or woman was a "grandparent" to every child in the group. While mothers have always known the identity of their child, the father-child connection and the idea of paternal kinship as we conceive of it today had still not been developed in the Paleolithic. In the Neolithic, as people remained in one house over multiple generations, the mother of the mother became identified, and the idea of genealogy along the mother's line (matrilineality) came forth, bringing with it the first conceptualization of history. The primeval mother ancestresses of the clans became the sacred mythical originators, a lesser or more local form of the sacred feminine principle that is the whole world.

In the earlier Paleolithic hunter-gatherer groups, the social structure seemed to have been flat and open in that people could freely move between groups, of which the membership simply being determined by whoever was present. By the change to genealogy, the clan replaced one’s age as the primary identity, and by people staying in one place, matrilocality also arose, the practice of continuing to live near one's mother.

As they remained in place, these first Neolithic cultures developed simple agriculture and domesticated the first animals, initially to supplement the traditional hunting and gathering, but over time, replacing it more and more. This new way of life, consisting of agriculture, domestic animal husbandry, weaving, pottery, and art, became the "Neolithic package." With the use of boats, it rapidly spread out through Europe and West Asia along seas and waterways. While there were occasional feuds between population groups at times of ecological pressure, the archaeology shows no signs of war at this time. Few or no wounds from weapons can be seen, and no defensive installations around towns and settlements beyond what was needed to keep wild animals or evil spirits out.

Despite the increasing cultural density and complexity, which saw some cities grow to tens of thousands of inhabitants, the layout of the settlements remained fundamentally egalitarian in nature over several millennia of cultural development. The villages, towns and cities were ordered according to kinship groups, what we call clans, living in longhouses centered around communal buildings or open spaces, which were used for political council meetings and religious gatherings.

The diverse, self-sufficient subsistence economy was in the hands of the women, who oversaw an equal distribution of goods within the clan structure. The men took care of construction and politics, perhaps herded the animals, and developed the metallurgy. Despite the increasing division of labor between men and women, the complimentary equality between the sexes seemed to have remained up until the patriarchal shift.

The Triple Goddess

According to Heide Goettner-Abendroth and her matriarchal studies perspective, the Paleolithic view of the sacred and feminine continued through this time period. The world both was and was ruled by the immanent and all-encompassing Mother Goddess in her three aspects (as originally identified by Robert Graves back in the 1940s), which were not separated from each other but interwoven through the cycle of the year and the life cycle of each being:

• the White Goddess of the beginning as the creatrix of life (first aspect);

• the Red Goddess as the maternal, nourishing bearer of life (second aspect);

• the Black Goddess who brings the end of life and the transformation from death to rebirth (third aspect).

From this Neolithic triple goddess all the later Bronze Age goddesses of Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld are derived.

The Sacred King

The social identity of Neolithic women got obscured and partially replaced by later patriarchal ideas. Is it possible that something similar has been the case for men? If so, ccan a new understanding of male identity also draw upon the Neolithic for inspiration?

As I explored in this article, the feminism that arose in the mid-1800s was partially a result of the rediscovery of ancient Egyptian and Sumerian goddesses. An important catalyst for this was Johann Jakob Bachofen's book Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right, 1861), the first work to discuss the Neolithic position of women. Could a similar process have begun for men thirty years later, with James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890)?

In that book we find the first discussion of the Sacred Kings in the Neolithic, a flash of insight which has since been picked up by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, by David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything, by religious historian Mircea Eliade, and recently by a new crop of researchers and thinkers such as Eliseo Ferrer. As with women holding the central economic role in the clan household and the highest spiritual or religious positions, the men's role as the cyclical Sacred King appears to have been a cornerstone of Neolithic societies. These kings were understood to be the sons of the queen or the goddess and were deposed of in a dramatic ritual after a prescribed period of cyclical time — a year, eight years, twelve years, etc. Some of these kings may have actually been killed, their blood scattered over the fields, or more likely perhaps is that their body might have been symbolically eaten in a cannibalistic Eucharist that later became the familiar Christian custom.

Robert Graves wrote: "The tribal queen annually chose a lover among her entourage of young men, a king who had to be sacrificed at the end of the year, making of him a fertility symbol rather than an erotic pleasure object. His blood, once dead, was spread over the field so the trees, crops and flocks would bear fruit."

As agriculture, animal husbandry, human culture and cosmology were not separate domains but one continuous field, the purpose of sacrificing the king was to inject his energy and power into the cosmos and the land, thereby rejuvenating both the natural cycles and human cultural institutions. This ritual evolved over time and took on different expressions in different cultures. Substitutes were made for the actual regicide. Another man might be sacrificed in the king's place while the king hid out for a few days, he might abdicate the throne while an effigy was sacrificed in his place, and so on, but whatever form it took, the cyclical view of male power remained.

I'd like to return to these ideas in later posts and wrap up this brief overview of the Neolithic with a comment on its cultures' extraordinary consistency and longevity. Seen through the lens of our own times of rapid and extreme upheaval, the millennia of stability, continuity and homogeneity that these societies lived out are difficult to comprehend. Above all else, the Neolithic world seems to have been dedicated to nurturing and maintaining the health of cosmic polarity, the balance between masculine and feminine forces. This was most likely reflected throughout all aspects of their culture but is most visible to us today in the form of the extraordinary monuments they left behind. Hundreds of thousands of massive earthworks and megalithic monuments exist all over the world. In recent years, many studies have shown how their layouts often encode astronomical positions and alignments, and even make use of particular geological conditions to manipulate natural electromagnetic forces.

As these cultures lived according to a different set of values than our own today, I wonder if we are just now again becoming able to grasp the sophistication, or perhaps more importantly, the intention, of their efforts.

Perhaps, as the patriarchal imprints continue to fade in our collective imagination and we learn to appreciate less extractive ways of relating to the world, we will come to find inspiration for our own world in theirs.

Patriarchy and climate disaster

In the late 1700s, while stationed in India, the British polymath William Jones (who by the end of his life reportedly knew 28 languages) noticed some striking similarities between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, which led to the discovery of the indo-european language family. Over the years, many people contributed to exploring this shared ancestry, before it was synthesized in the 1950s by Marija Gimbutas into her Kurgan hypothesis or Steppe theory. While it was received with a lot of criticism at the time, it has since been supported by a mountain of evidence from historical linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, genetics, etc, and has now become a mainstream scientific theory. Briefly, the idea is that around 4000-6000 years ago, warrior-minded, patriarchal tribes pushed out of their homelands in the Eurasian steppe and entered into present-day Europe, India and China, gradually conquering, displacing or assimilating the more culturally advanced, egalitarian, and peaceful cultures they encountered there. To explore this I’ll use the book The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David Anthony and the matriarchal studies of Heide Goettner-Abendroth.

The Eurasian Steppe is a broad belt of open grasslands stretching thousands of kilometers from Ukraine and South Russia in the west to Mongolia and North China in the east. To the north, it is bordered by the forests of Siberia and North Europe, and in the south, by the deserts and mountain ranges of West and Central Asia. It's been known as the Steppe Highway for its role in transporting goods, technologies and ideas between the East and the West, and by that same quality, it's had a long and inglorious history of setting up various invasions of China, Europe and India. However, the flat openness of the terrain that facilitates movement also creates an extreme climate of icy cold winters and blazing hot summers, and because these grasslands don't retain water as well as the forests to the north, they are more sensitive to larger shifts in temperature and humidity. As the climate has cycled between warm, humid phases and cold, dry ones over the millennia, it has had drastic effects on the life of plants, animals, and humans in this area.

During a prolonged warm period that lasted until the 6th millennium BC, the Eurasian Steppe became populated by neolithic people from the south and west who set up permanent settlements along lush creeks and riverbanks, with the aforementioned neolithic package lifestyle of simple agriculture, foraging, and small flocks of semi-domesticated animals, pottery, weaving and art. Around the 6th millennium, however, the climate began to cool and dry, and from about 4500 BC onwards, the ground turned barren, rivers dried up, and lakes shrunk or disappeared entirely. Many of the communities relocated or died out, and the few who survived the continuing catastrophe had to adopt a radical new way of life.

As the food from agriculture and foraging dwindled, the small flocks of sheep, goats and cattle that were previously kept close to the settlements got expanded into large herds that had to be moved around in search of pasture. People also increasingly turned to hunting wild horses for food, which over time led to them being tamed, and then one of the greatest discoveries of all time, that it was possible to ride them.

David Anthony writes: "Horses were first domesticated by people who thought of them as food. They were a cheap source of winter meat; they could feed themselves through the steppe winter when cattle and sheep needed to be supplied with water and fodder. After people were familiar with horses as domesticated animals, perhaps after a relatively docile male bloodline was established, someone found a particularly submissive horse and rode on it, perhaps as a joke. But riding soon found its first serious use in the management of herds of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses. In this capacity alone, it was an important improvement that enabled fewer people to manage larger herds and move them more efficiently, something that really mattered in a world where domesticated animals were the principal source of food and clothing. […](#) A person on foot can herd about two hundred sheep with a good herding dog. On horseback, with the same dog, that single person can herd about five hundred. Riding greatly increased the efficiency and therefore the scale and productivity of herding in the Eurasian grasslands."

As these practices spread, a livestock breeding boom ensued around what is now the area of Kazakhstan. The already arid land came under pressure from the massively bigger herds, desertification increased, and the animals had to be driven longer and longer in search of pasture. These developments occurred in a relatively narrow historical window, between 5000 BCE and 4000 BCE, and produced several psychologically and spiritually drastic changes "all at once".

The First Warriors

Before this point in history, the role of the warrior did not yet exist. While men have always fought and feuded occasionally, this always used to be an exception rather than the rule. In the old system, while strong-bodied and capable men might lead others on a difficult hunt or take charge to protect the group through some dangerous situation, their authority would only last until the group returned from the seasonal hunt or the danger passed. As I mentioned above, in Neolithic societies, the day-to-day economic or political affairs of the communities were managed by elders and councils of elders through the clan system. However, as the climate situation on the Steppe kept deteriorating and the societal crisis it brought became the new norm, the authority of the strong man became institutionalized.

Abendroth writes: "The growing herds demanded ever larger pastures, and the new mobility on horseback enabled men to cover considerably longer distances for good grassland. This, however, led to a first phase of conflicts: as more and more tribes began to change to mounted grazing and thus were expanding, they clashed with each other over the areas they wished to claim, leading to disputes over grazing land. There were fights that, at this stage, consisted of feuds between clans and tribes. Also, cattle and horse theft began, perhaps for revenge or other motives. Such attacks could be carried out very quickly on horseback, retreating just as rapidly, but they resulted in like-for-like counter-attacks. … The increasing loss of good pasture land remained and became a permanent problem, resulting in constant feuding. Now the leaders were continuously needed, and their status began to consolidate: the figure of the "charismatic leader" evolved. … The leaders and their retinue of fighting men began forming their own groups and alliances beyond the cohesion of the clans and also beyond tribal boundaries. In this way, herders became herder warriors, and the areas within their reach sank into constant strife."

As soon as these cultures began managing large herds of cattle and sheep from horseback (around 5200–4800 BCE), their leaders were carrying maces – a stick with a heavy stone attached to one end — the purpose of which was to crack the skulls of rivals and cattle thieves.

David Anthony writes: “A mace, unlike an axe, cannot really be used for anything except cracking heads. It was a new weapon type and symbol of power.”

The threat of violence was what made it a symbol of authority, and in a more abstracted form it has been carried forward all the way up to our day, as the royal scepter.

Private property and Inequality

The need for constant, violent defense of the grazing herds would naturally have given rise to possessive and protective feelings, which over time coagulated and consolidated into the first ideas of private property. Unlike land or arable crops, cattle can be easily counted and, given the necessary skill, be multiplied at will, making for an ideal first form of mobile, personal property.

In the initial step, the competing clans would have had to differentiate between their own cattle and that of their neighbors, even if it meant the destruction and death of people who were just like them. In the second step, there was differentiation within each clan.

At first, the migration with the herds was a seasonal affair, as is still the case all over the world. The animals were kept close to the villages in winter, but in summer, they were moved to far-off pastures or high-lying mountain meadows. In these increasingly long months away from the village, the new warrior-herders formed a new social group identity, and the previous sense of collective ownership of the cattle was replaced by an individual one. The chiefs increasingly compensated themselves for their merits by owning livestock, for example, what they had taken from a rival tribe, and soon came to possess a large part of the herd. The previously redistributive communal feasts now became "feasts of merit," hosted by the chiefs and dependent on their offering and sacrifice of their personal animals.

Goettner-Abendroth writes: "Since the economy was based one-sidedly on livestock breeding, private ownership of cattle resulted in a significant shift of power in favor of the chief, enabling him to enlarge his retinue and strengthen the alliance between him as leader and his brothers in arms by giving away cattle. This relationship was sealed by oaths, thus legalizing inequality also between men for the first time, because not all men were included in the brotherhood of arms."

Over time, this societal split became the basic caste system that still persists in some parts of the world today, of Priests, Warriors/Rulers, Farmers (and later Merchants), and Slaves/Untouchables. In the archaeological record, this shift is clearly visible in the burial customs with the advent of the Kurgan grave for lone chief or king. Unlike the previous mostly unadorned community grave sites, Kurgans are huge mounds constructed over a grave with either a single male body or one surrounded by sacrificed slaves or family members, along with treasures, weapons, and horses. The kurgans themselves were built by cutting out the grass sod of the steppe and building a mound from it, as if the ruler was also taking his pasture land with him as his own property. For the largest of these kurgan structures, built by the Scythians in Chortomlyk in modern-day Ukraine, as much as 75 hectares of sod had to be dug up, the equivalent of 100 football pitches, or the exact size of Greenwich Park in London.

The Subordination of Cows and Women

Traditionally, hunting, herding, and building have been the domains of men, while foraging and agriculture have belonged to women. As climate change made rivers dry up and foraging and agriculture disappeared on the Steppe, women became increasingly dependent on men for food, and the social contract and balance between the sexes went through an unprecedented change.

Because the selective breeding of animals is so dependent on the applied knowledge of the male role in procreation, a great shift in the view of the function and importance of male sexuality must have taken place in the transition to a herding economy. In taming wild cattle and horses, the first step is to separate the more docile cows and mares from the more aggressive bulls and stallions, and by this practice, it would have been clear that no parthenogenesis was happening among the cows. A bull had to be let into the enclosure in order for the calves to come forth. Furthermore, where a good cow or mare can only have one pregnancy at a time and will rarely produce more than ten offspring, a good breeding bull or stallion can pass on their desirable traits to countless females. As they lived alongside herds of cattle for months on end, it’s easy to imagine the warrior chief beginning to identify with the bulls of his herd in this way.

As the environmental crisis continued to deepen, the men were forced to drive their flocks longer and longer away from the village, and so spent less and less time alongside women. The more the men stayed away from the village, the more they lived by rules and norms that women had no part in creating and that increasingly set the priests and warriors apart from the women, the cattle and the rest. Perhaps the transition was so slow or so marked by crisis and violence that no one noticed, but whether it was a sudden or gradual shift, at some point, a chief who was rich in cattle but poor in looks and personality must have made a previously unimaginable leap and offered some of his personal cattle in exchange for sexual intercourse with a woman.

It's easy to overlook how profound this shift was. For hundreds of thousands of years, whether wild or tamed, the cow with her moon-horns and life-giving udders had always symbolized The Great Mother of Heaven and Earth, or what we now call the cosmos or the universe. While in earlier times, cows were both hunted and milked, for a cattle bride price to become a possibility, both the cow and the woman would have to have been commodified and thereby also desanctified. Whereas before there had been some sort of sacred exchange, the value of women and animals was now determined by their worth to their owners, the men.

This way of quantifying and purchasing a woman's beauty and reproductive ability continued to gain popularity and soon became the new norm for relationships. Although men and women might have chosen to remain faithful to each other in previous times, it seems clear that monogamy as a cultural norm arose there on the Steppe in connection with the cattle-herder mindset of the bride price. They wanted exclusive usage of their own property, a guarantee that it was their own good warrior-traits that were being carried forward, and the loyalty of their own sons next to them as they went to war.

The final phase in the decline of women's status and importance came with the introduction of the wheel and the wagon.

Abendroth writes: "A third cold period afflicted the steppes of the Caucasus, the Caspian and the Black Sea in the 3rd millennium and destroyed any remaining agriculture. The forest steppe decreased extensively, the grass steppe dried out continuously, and deserts grew, jeopardizing the steppe peoples and leading to the Late Yamnaya in the Middle Bronze Age (2,800–2,600). References to houses and settlements now disappear completely. Apart from tents, covered wagons became the dwellings for the now fully nomadic herder warriors. Kurgan graves in the open Steppe show repeated occupations with long distances in between, indicating the people no longer remained at the site of their cemeteries. The herds had become too large to spend the winter at rivers and in swampland, and the herders now moved with them, also in winter, through the open country. Attacks and robberies by armed groups became commonplace and rampant. It is a way of life in which the women taken along lose all relevance. Apart from occasionally gathering wild grains, their main role was to milk the herds and produce dairy products, which means that they became dispossessed servants to care for the property of men. All that still belonged to the women was the tent or yurt, with the household the daughter inherited from her mother. Such deteriorating conditions led to a third wave of expansion from the Black Sea region to Europe."

Trade

Economic textbooks have traditionally speculated that money came about as a way to facilitate barter, the exchanging of one type of goods for another. In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber argued that this idea is largely a myth and that there is no anthropological evidence that pre-patriarchal societies operated on barter systems. Instead, these economies were based on systems of credit and mutual obligations, where transactions occurred within social relationships rather than through quid pro quo exchanges.

In the suspicion and manipulation that surrounds us in our current cultural field, it is hard to even imagine that people in the past would travel long distances with heavy loads just to give it away as gifts to distant relatives. Yet, the evidence as Graeber presents it suggest that is more or less what happened.

Barter and money is to Graeber intimately connected with war and authoritative force, which is what came about for the first time in this cultural transition on the Steppe. So the same change that birthed endemic war, social inequality, the subordination of women and animals and men, also seems to be the source of “trade” as we understand it today,

Abendroth writes: "A "charismatic leader" was important not only for the feuds that flared up at any given time but also for the constantly changing alliances, which promised safety. Each new alliance was celebrated with feasts, with the newly allied chieftains competing to display their wealth—which probably filled their respective communities with pride. Finally, they reaffirmed their status by giving valuable gifts to each other. (At first) the gifts consisted of prestigious goods such as flint daggers, bracelets made of precious stones, shell jewelry, chains made of animal teeth, and also of copper and gold. … Copper was particularly regarded as "exotic" and highly valued, because (at first) they didn't produce the metal themselves but obtained it from the centers of copper processing of Southeast Europe. Such luxury goods as symbols of prestige spurred individual ambition, and so interest in owning them grew. A new greed for possession stirred, and the chiefs began to control the west-east transport routes by force of arms in order to monopolize the coveted copper. In this way, what we call "trade" was created, which is closely related to strife. Right from the start, trade appeared here as long-distance trade for individual interests."

A New Cosmos

All these changes to the way of life on the Steppe — ownership of animals and women, acceptance and legalization of inequality, permanent conflict with other groups - was reflected in and made sense of by a whole new cosmology and a new vision of what happened after death.

To my mind, at least, it seems obvious that Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures must have been organized around an idea of rebirth, which is that, at death, everyone went down to the underworld, from where they were later reborn as fresh, new beings. Just as plants die into the ground and come back up again, and as the sun and moon disappear below the horizon and come back again each day, so the same must be true for people and animals. This underworld was not necessarily a scary or gloomy place but perhaps something more like the pregnant belly of the Goddess-nature of the world — a sacred realm of returns and new beginnings.

Over the many centuries of separating themselves ever more from their women, the Indo-European warrior-herder left behind this female-directed rebirth religion. There can be neither birth nor rebirth without some kind of feminine being involved, and the feminine is almost completely absent from early Indo-European cosmology.

The Rigveda is the oldest collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns, an Indo-European oral tradition that was written down sometime between 1500 and 1200 BCE in the present-day area of Pakistan. Out of its 1028 hymns, only 40 are dedicated to its most prominent female character, the goddess of the dawn Ushas, and only 3 to the next most important, the goddess of the Saraswati river. The previously supreme Cosmic Mother Goddess Aditi has no hymns dedicated to her. On the other hand, the hero Indra has 250 hymns dedicated to him and his sidekick Varuna 46. The fire-god Agni gets 200 hymns, and the intoxicating Soma drink 123 hymns.

This then brings us back to the title of this post, When Men Divorced The Earth. As they left behind women and the rebirth-goddess, these priests and warriors adopted a new cosmology to reflect their new reality, the Father god standing over the Mother. The term "God the Father" exists in all Indo-European languages (Sanskrit: "dyaus pitar," Greek: "zeus pater," Latin: "deus pater," and also "Ju-piter") and is derived from the early Indo-European root "dyeus pater", or "Father Sky".

In my next article, I will continue to explore that new Patriarchal cosmology, which has continued as the backbone of our Western culture to this day. Fundamentally it is the separation between Heaven and Earth, between right and wrong and good and evil — the way of thinking and being that the later wisdom traditions sought to move past, and that Huineng gives voice to by asking, “In this moment, thinking neither that some things are good and some are evil, who are you?”

Thank you for your attention!

__________________________

In the interest of making this more accessible for more readers, and easier for myself to actually publish, I decided against detailed footnotes, but that being said, here are my main sources:

• Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy: West Asia and Europe, Heide Goettner-Abendroth, 2022

• The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David W. Anthony, 2007

• Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber, 2011

• The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021

• The White Goddess, Robert Graves, 1948

• The Origins of Fatherhood, Sebastian Kraemer, 1991

In my previous post, I discussed the interweaving of feminism and the female symbolism of pre-patriarchal religion (and also whether matriarchal is the right word to use for it). In the introduction to her book, HGA acknowledges that there is a political element in her interpretation of the archeological and anthropological evidence: She would like this new story of the past to help women of today free their hearts and minds from the yoke of patriarchy. While that is understandable, considering all the gross misrepresentations of the past made over the years in the interest of building up men’s position and status, I think that certain parts of Western culture is now maturing enough into a general appreciation and understanding of women’s value and worth to let go of some of that assertiveness. I’ll pass over some of her conclusions that to me seem overly motivated by a desire to assign women agency and worth and try to focus on the core of her argument.

She identifies four main characteristics of these societies which I’ll expand on below, (spending most of the time on the last two):

• Gift economy

• Consensus-based political system

• Matrilinear kinship

• Culture oriented around the sacred

Gift economy

At first glance, it’s perhaps the economic organization of matriarchal societies that appear as their most radical aspect when compared to our contemporary, capitalistic system: It is based on generosity, reciprocity and gift exchange rather than accumulation and profit, and on usage rights to land and resources rather than exclusive ownership.

In such societies, the traditional domains of men has been hunting (which later became herding and construction) and politics. For women, it has been gathering (which later became agriculture) and economic distribution. The flow of resources is managed by older women and directed by rules and customs, such as the obligation of a wealthy clan to host a festival to distribute surplus food to the greater community. Status and wealth are strongly connected to gift-giving, meaning that potential economic inequality gets transformed into social prestige through gifting resources and treasures rather than hoarding them individually.

HGA writes: “It goes very much against our (current) way of thinking to imagine that (women’s) power of economic distribution could lead to a balanced economy where there are no rich and poor, and where general prosperity is the rule. But this reciprocity derives from the value system of matriarchal societies, where maternal behavior is seen as the prototypical activity: it therefore includes the maternal value of caring for and nurturing all members of the society, different as they may be, which means respect for diversity, and the value of equilibrium and balance among all segments of society.”

As David Graeber clearly showed in his book Debt: The First 5000 years (2011), these societies operated neither with barter (the exchange of one type of goods for another) nor with money or other forms of currency. The so-called shell money that often gets presented by historians as an early form of money was not used to buy food or other resources but rather to balance and enhance social relations, in connection with funerals, birthday celebrations, feasts, group initiations, and, particularly, weddings and resolutions of disputes.

Consensus-oriented political system

In matriarchal political systems, decision-making begins at the household level, where all clan members gather in councils to discuss domestic matters. This same consensus-based approach then extends to village-level governance, where male delegates from different clans come together to address community-wide issues. While men act as political delegates and representatives, there are significant limitations on their authority. They act as messengers and implementers rather than autonomous decision-makers. Because the origins of their authority lie in the consensus reached in their clan house, they must rely on mediation and diplomacy rather than commands and decrees.

The perhaps most clear indication of both the gift economy and the consensus-based politics is the egalitarian nature of burials. Before patriarchy, people were generally buried in community graves, not singled out in glorious individual burials along with treasures and weapons, which became common for the ruling elites after patriarchy. The examples of valuable items in graves that do exist in older times are just as likely, or even more, to be given to an invalid, an older woman, or a young child rather than a man at the height of his physical powers.

Matrilinear kinship

While the fact of motherhood is immediately obvious to anyone who witnesses the birth of a child, the concept of biological fatherhood is dependent on firm boundaries around women’s sexuality. For fatherhood to be clear, everyone involved has to be certain the woman has only slept with one man. As I’ll discuss in my next post, this development first occurred about 6000 years ago when humans turned to domesticated animals as the primary source of food.

Before this development occurred, HGA writes that “Given the open, often changing sexual relationships between women and men, it is not even clear that people knew the connection between conception and birth. They probably believed that women brought forth life from themselves—just like Mother Earth … who was seen as the guarantor of rebirth, gifted with a miraculous capability to turn death to life and return the dead to the world. These beliefs were held for hundreds of millennia, as the myths of primordial goddesses show, who brought forth children from themselves through parthenogenesis.

The view was that children came from ancestors and not from men; that is, the perspective was completely different. One of the first ethnologists among Trobriand Islanders still observed the belief that children did not originate from men, but from ancestor spirits returning to life through a young woman from the same clan. The facts of procreation were unknown to them. The same idea has been reported by the first explorer of the Mosuo, in which the children, when asked about their father, named their mother’s brother, as they were unfamiliar with the term of “father” and the concept of biological paternity. The worldwide rituals of retrieving ancestral souls from ponds, stones, and tombs practiced by women demonstrate the same view: children come from ancestors, not from biological “fathers,” and are reborn into life by women.”

With the generally open and often changing social and sexual relationships of early human cultures there were no blood relatives in the sense of how we think of it now. Africa’s oldest aboriginal peoples, the San and the Pygmies, even today do not organize their social life by genealogy but rather by age class. HGA writes: “Within each age class, members call each other “sister” and “brother,” referring not to blood kinship, but to the fact that they are of a similar age. Similarly, all women with children are collectively mothers, and the group of elderly women helping the mothers is collectively called grandmothers—or so-called by researchers, because we are so much accustomed to this concept. … To understand the Palaeolithic social order, a comparison with these aboriginal peoples of Africa is highly relevant. It supports the assumption that, at those (Paleolithic) times, too, life was organized around smaller or larger egalitarian groups within an age-class society.”

In all human societies at all times, the primary social group has been the mother and the child, which originates at birth and continues during a nurturing period that lasts for years. The mother line, on the other hand — matrilineality, the idea of the grandmother as the indirect origin of her grandchild — only emerged much later, in what is known as the Neolithic Era.

The Neolithic began as the climate stabilized after the massive upheavals of the Younger Dryas period. In a short window about 13,000 to 12,000 years ago, the climate see-sawed dramatically, global temperature at one point rose ten degrees celsius in 10 years, global sea levels rose more than 100 metres, and almost 75% of the megafauna on earth was wiped out along with much of mankind. The end of this period is marked by the establishment of the mysterious ritual site of Göbekli Tepe in the 10th millennium BCE — the first known sacred structures built by humans.

From the time excavations began in 1994 it has been an archaeological sensation that continues to upend the traditional understanding of the origins of civilization. Before its discovery, no one thought that semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer types were capable of building much of anything, let alone something of that magnitude, with more than 200 pillars weighing between 4 and 20 metric tons, some at over 5 meters in height. Now it appears that the extensive, coordinated effort to build these structures was actually what laid the groundwork for the development of complex, permanently settled societies, rather than the other way around.

The archaeological finds show that it began as a hunter-gatherer’s seasonal religious festival of feasting and monumental construction. Over the course of almost two millennia of use and constant building work, people began to remain in place next to the building site for longer periods and, gradually, forming communities to organize themselves for the construction effort, which set off a vast transformation of their economic system in the process. What had been occasional, experimental cultivation of stocks of native wild grains now became deliberate practice, with hoe-agriculture implemented on a large scale. The enclosing and domestication of animals from the surrounding area soon followed, with the wild sheep and goats that were drawn to the grain fields being the first and cattle added later.

From the time of the first woven grass mats that protected against wind, sun and rain on the African savannah, up until the birth of patriarchy 250,000 years later, shelters, and later huts and houses were the domains of women. HGA writes: “We know of Mongolian peoples today where the yurts belong to the women. They transport them with pack animals from one place and erect them in another. The same is true of the nomadic Tuareg tents in the Sahara, which are the property of the women who weave them from goat hair. The construction and decoration of permanent clay dwellings among indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas is solely women’s work. Women developed these skills, and the houses are theirs. The house itself is considered female and is decorated with attributes such as breasts and a vulva symbol at the entrance. Even linguistically, woman and house are identical, as examples from Africa show: the word axxam in the language of the Berbers means both woman and house, and the name of the Egyptian goddess Hathor means house of Horus. Such examples are so numerous that we can assume it was no different in the earliest epochs”.

(Here I have to pause for a moment just to express my own incredulity at men not being involved with building houses, since it seems like such a natural thing for a man to do. Men certainly became the principal builders in later times, but perhaps it really was a women’s activity at first, strange as it seems. )

In the new settlements with permanent houses around Göbekli Tepe and in nearby areas, children, and especially the daughters, remained with their mothers longer, continuing to stay in the home to help with agricultural tasks and domestic arts. As these groups expanded to include three or four generations living and working together under the same roof, a line from one daughter-generation to the next was identified, creating a female genealogy. This vertically intersected the earlier age classes, which now lost their importance. The men continued to live in their mother’s house, which was their birthplace, and thus, the eldest mother and her daughters, sons, and grandchildren occupied the same house or group of houses. Matrilineality became matrilocality, as residence in or near the mother’s house. Unrelated men could come to a different house for a limited time as friends or lovers of young women, but were only guests there with no rights or duties, and had their home in their own mother houses, where they bore the maternal clan name and had their obligations. This, then, is the basic idea of matrilinearity, which continued up until patriarchal times.

Culture oriented towards the sacred

We inherited the foundations of our culture and spirituality from our gentle, older cousins, the Neanderthals. Faint memories of these tall, hairy people might still be with us in the form of myths, such as the Basque basajaun, Norse trolls and the Himalayan yeti. Neanderthals came into existence about 300,000 years ago (100,000 years before we did) and went extinct about 40,000 years ago, around the same time that we went through our great evolutionary shift during the Upper Paleolithic transition. Their vocal organs were well-developed (which means that the development of language must have occurred much earlier, among the first people of the Lower Paleolithic Era, 2-4 million years ago), and they were well capable of symbolic and abstract thought:

Ochre is a natural clay earth pigment that contains iron oxide and has a reddish color that is reminiscent of living flesh and blood. It was the first pigment used by humans and has always symbolized life, as still seen today in the form of lipstick and sports cars. The Neanderthals developed the custom of sprinkling it on their dead, which Homo Sapiens adapted and continued to expand upon throughout the Palaeolithic. We dusted our dead ever more richly with it, painted it on graves and large surfaces in caves, and finally used it in everyday life for painting our skin and endowing ourselves and our treasured objects with life energy.

The Neanderthals also created the first abstract symbols that we know of, one of them being the cross. The first line of the cross is the horizontal east-west direction that the sun, the moon and all other celestial bodies takes across the sky every night and day, and the Neanderthals would bury their dead in a fetal position along this orientation.

HGA writes: “By adding a vertical north-south line, they achieved the first ordering of space — a great intellectual advance still reflected in our compass today. This four-sided spatial order was also expressed by an ideogram with four corners scratched in stone and bone: the quadrangle, in its simple or multiple forms. Crossed lines combined with a ring, or ring-cross, are even conceived as three-dimensional. The upper arch refers to celestial bodies, which move by day and night from east to west across the heavens. Yet the question remained: why do they always rise again in the east—how do they get there? In response, they imagined that the sun, moon and stars also traversed an invisible lower arch in the Underworld, which brought them back from west to east. The lower arch of the ring-cross represents this. The world’s three-dimensionality was expressed not only with the ring-cross but also with the sphere divided into an upper and lower hemisphere. This form they found in nature or reproduced themselves, which shows how meaningful it was for them. It represented space, divided into the vault of heaven and the vault below, with the Earth in-between.”

“From observing the heavens, in a further intellectual accomplishment, Neanderthals also created the first order of time. This is based on the three visible phases of the moon, which recur regularly at all the Earth’s latitudes, dividing the flow of time into equal parts. They also represented this temporal triad with ideograms scratched into bones and stone: three parallel marks or the abstract sign of a triangle. … From the triad, the number nine was developed, because each visible phase of the moon comprises three times three, or nine nights. Therefore, it could be seen for 27 nights. Add the one night of the invisible phase, and the result is a lunar month of 28 days. … Regular groups of three signs in bones could, therefore, be records of this counting method and thus of the first lunar calendar.”

Up until historical times, all art was religious, and there were two kinds: One was permanent art on the walls of caves and abris, consisting of scratch drawings, paintings, and bas-reliefs. The other was portable art, consisting of carved figurines and sculptures, as well as scratch drawings and paintings on bone, horn, and thousands of stones. Both types of art date from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic period, but portable art continued for longer and spread much further, including to areas where there were no caves. In addition, abstract symbols such as lines, dots, and line combinations such as net and crosshatch patterns appeared both in cave paintings and on portable objects. In a huge geographical area, for tens of millennia, these art forms used a homogenous system of symbols that perpetuated basic ideas from the Middle Palaeolithic.

There are two dominant themes in this art: on the one hand, animals, and on the other, women or vulvas. These appear in the monumental cave paintings just as they do in small portable sculptures. In caves, the drawings and paintings are generally in a hidden section, far to the back, which shows their separation from everyday life and makes them more sacred. These caves were thus symbolically ornamented "nature temples" and were used as central, fixed sanctuaries. Overall, the cave remained a sacred space even in later cultural epochs and was then artificially recreated in pyramids, temples, and even Gothic cathedrals. Movable sculptures, on the other hand, were portable relics that could be carried anywhere and set up for ceremonial celebrations or rituals.

The abstract vulva sign is one of the oldest and most common of all signs. The Neanderthals already scratched it into rock walls as a triangle with a short line ("slit") or cup ("hole") at the center. As humans began making female figurines during the Upper Palaeolithic, they always displayed a pronounced pubic triangle (whereas breasts may be ample, small or even lacking completely, depending on the given style), which continued on through all later epochs, even up to the present among some indigenous peoples. This triangle was both an ideogram for the moon and for the order of time.

Early on, the number three led to the concept of the lunar trinity, a threefold entity that is really only one, as reflected in the course of a pregnancy, which lasts for three times three or nine lunar months. This sacred connection between women and the moon is perhaps best expressed in the famous relief of the Venus of Laussel:

Her raised right hand is holding a bison horn with exactly 13 incisions. Due to its increasing and decreasing shape, the moon is generally depicted as a horn or as a pair of horns, and the 13 incisions correspond to the year's 13 lunar months. With her left hand, the woman is pointing to her womb as if to show that she also carries the temporal sequence of the moon in the sky in her body's menstrual cycle. With her left hand, the woman points to her womb as if to show that she also carries the temporal sequence of the moon in the sky in her body's menstrual cycle, and as an indication of her threefold nature, she is not alone but accompanied by two smaller figures in similar poses on nearby stones.

This symbolism of pregnancy, women and vulvas does not relate to a "fertility cult" but is the central symbolism of a religion of rebirth. The term that probably comes closest to their understanding of this might then be "Primordial Mother," since in this earliest religion, the concepts of earth, woman, moon, and the temporal sequence of life, death, and rebirth formed a symbolic continuum.

HGA writes: There are many examples among indigenous hunting peoples that support the interpretation that the animal world was also included in this rebirth religion. By placating the ancestral mothers or killed animals with song, dance, and other cultural gifts, they will send new animals, born again. … Among these indigenous peoples it is women who initiate men into rituals of the hunt and who watch over their hunting practice. Among the North American Iroquois there were two women’s hunting societies responsible for maintaining spiritual contact with the animals and teaching the hunters and fishermen correct and respectful behavior toward them, since otherwise the animal’s ancestral mothers would no longer send young animals back into this world from the world beyond. As keepers of death and rebirth, women were seen as mediators between the animals and hunters. According to the mythology of the indigenous Ainu in North Japan and on the Kurile Islands, it is Mother Earth whose daughters and sons are the land animals, and Mother Water who gives them the water animals. These goddesses once introduced the men to the hunting and fishing rituals so that they would carry out these activities respectfully—meaning that it was once the women who taught the men these rituals. Only when an animal soul comes home to its female animal ancestors with human gifts like songs and woodcarvings do they send further descendants for the hunt. All the hunting peoples of northern Asia share this belief, and it extends back into Palaeolithic times.

Especially significant in this context is a Palaeolithic rock drawing from the Tiout Oasis in the Sahara Atlas Mountains (Algeria) with a motif that occurs multiple times in Africa. It shows an elevated female figure with raised arms, perhaps in a ritual robe or with wings, looking toward a hunter with a bow and arrow. He is about to shoot an arrow at an ostrich. A line goes from the woman’s womb to the man’s genitals or navel; this has nothing to do with sexuality, but designates him as her son. The man with the bow and arrow symbol stands unambiguously for the theme of “death.” The motherly woman, on the other hand, whose vulva brought him forth, stands for the themes of “life” and “rebirth,” and not only human rebirth, but also that of all the animals surrounding her. At the same time, her raised arms show that, only with her permission and blessing, is he allowed to hunt and kill, and must do so “respectfully,” as the indigenous hunting peoples say.With her left hand, the woman points to her womb as if to show that she also carries the temporal sequence of the moon in the sky in her body's menstrual cycle, and as an indication of her threefold nature, she is not alone but accompanied by two smaller figures in similar poses on nearby stones.

But what about the men?

For the sake of keeping things relatively simple, I’m leaving this article off here at the beginning of the Neolithic period, 12,000 years ago, when the spiritual complexity increases with the advent of genealogy and agriculture.

There are many big questions to get into, one of which being the paleolithic masculine identity, which for so many years have been tossed around as the stereotypical dumb or brute club-wielding male. I’ll be exploring this in much more detail later, but for now let’s just say that the Paleolithic male identity in a greater cosmological sense probably was most closely related to our idea of the son.

What we see in this Paleolithic rock drawing, according to Heide Goettner-Abendroth, is “an elevated female figure with raised arms, perhaps in a ritual robe or with wings, looking toward a hunter with a bow and arrow. He is about to shoot an arrow at an ostrich. A line goes from the woman’s womb to the man’s genitals or navel; this has nothing to do with sexuality, but designates him as her son. The man with the bow and arrow symbol stands unambiguously for the theme of “death.” The motherly woman, on the other hand, whose vulva brought him forth, stands for the themes of “life” and “rebirth,” and not only human rebirth, but also that of all the animals surrounding her. At the same time, her raised arms show that, only with her permission and blessing, is he allowed to hunt and kill, and must do so “respectfully,” as the indigenous hunting peoples say.”

Another illustration of the matriarchal male identity is shown on the cover of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948), the book that I gratefully acknowledge got me into this mess of an obsession to begin with! In this image we see man as a poet and philosopher, granted his birth, death, rebirth, and poetic vision by the Primordial Mother, of which he is also a part:

In my coming posts I will be exploring the changing relationship between men and women in the Neolithic and Mesolithic periods, the birth of patriarchy, and the general evolution of spirituality over time.

Thank you for your attention!

What has been found by this method, according to Goettner-Abendroth, is that pre-patriarchal societies generally shared the characteristics of:

• Matrilinear kinship (kinship traced through the mother line);

• Balanced economic reciprocity (aka gift economy, in which goods are not accumulated individually but continually distributed by the women); a

• Society of consensus (an egalitarian society, based on local clan politics with male delegates as clan spokesmen at larger regional gatherings); a

• Sacred culture (a worldview centered on rebirth and a divine feminine principle understood as immanent rather than transcendent, that is, the whole world itself is the divine feminine, with the masculine as part of it)

When I discovered that my friends knew very little or nothing of this research, not even the "goddess-aware" women or the most progressively intellectual men, I originally set out to write this article as a sort of public service quick summary of the most important discoveries and conclusions from this field. However, I soon got caught up in the questions of why my friends didn't know about this information and why it is generally not included in those blockbuster, grand historical narratives, like Yuval Harari's Sapiens, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, John Vervaeke's Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, etc.

What I realized is probably indicative of my own ignorance more than anything, but so be it — it was simply how little time has really passed, in the greater scheme of things, since women (re)gained access to the public domain. As a Scandinavian male millennial, born in the early 1980s towards the end of the so-called second wave of feminism, I've tended to just take for granted that women have the same rights as men, mostly forgetting that this only came about during my grandmother's and mother's generations, and is a cultural shift that is very much still in development.

Through converging evidence from archeology, sociology, linguistics, genetics, and more over the last century, it has become clear that patriarchy — the concept of biological fatherhood, ancestry traced through the father line, and men acting as heads of the household — came about through two different cultural paths, one in the Eurasian steppes and the other in Mesopotamia. Beginning about 6000 years ago, it gradually spread from those regions to the rest of the world, reaching places like Japan and Northern Europe about 2000 years ago. The beginning of the end of this period of total male dominance, surely one of the strangest, darkest, and most remarkable periods in our entire human history, then came about in the mid-19th century when women began to be allowed to vote, to educate themselves, and to own some property again.

This means that if we compress the 50,000 years since our Upper Paleolithic transition (the time we've spent on earth as cognitively modern human beings) into one year, it was between a month-and-a-half to two weeks ago that women first became subordinated to men, and only yesterday that they began revolting against their subservience. Most of that power-reclamation process has occurred much more recently, however — sometime in the late night and early morning hours! Perhaps we can even consider the Western postmodernist movement as a waking up disoriented and with a thundering headache the morning after the all-night rager that ensued when the women who had been locked in the basement came storming out into the living room again.

The other surprising discovery for me was how closely this change in the status of women and the balance between the genders is connected to the re-emergence of The Goddess. Before I go deeper into the ancient past, I think it’s worth dwelling for a moment there.

The suffragist movement that formed in the mid-to-late 1800s, when women began forcing their way into higher education and politics, corresponds with the European transition from bourgeois romanticism to early modernism. This was the time of the Brontë sisters' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, (1847), Ibsen's A Doll House (1879), and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878), and the painters J.M.W. Turner and Eugene Delacroix.

Interestingly, it was also when hieroglyphs and the cuneiform script were first deciphered, and the first translations of ancient Egyptian and Sumerian texts came out. Europe at that time still largely thought of the bible as the oldest book in the world, and the apostle Paul's words to the Ephesians were a standard ingredient in wedding ceremonies: "Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. Therefore, as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things."

The new Egyptian and Sumerian texts not only brought the realization that much of the bible was a rehashing of earlier pagan culture, but also news of the powerful goddesses Isis and Hathor in Egypt and Inanna in Sumer, who had seemingly ruled the roost in ancient times. In 1849, German Classicist Eduard Gerhard proposed a revolutionary theory suggesting that these various ancient goddesses were actually representations of a single, monotheistic female deity. This theory gained momentum among French and German classicists, who began connecting Greek religious practices with those of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. In 1890, James George Frazer published the enormously influential The Golden Bough, which redefined anthropology and challenged Christian religious authority by suggesting that Christianity was merely one manifestation of universal patterns of myth and ritual centered on dying and resurrecting god-kings. It presented a stark and unflattering portrayal of male authority through its central image of the priest-king who gained and held power solely through violence and constant vigilance, suggesting that male power was inherently precarious and based on strength rather than divine right or moral superiority. Then, in 1901, archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered numerous female figurines at Knossos, Crete, further nurturing the idea of an ancient Goddess with a subordinate male god who was both her son and lover.

This chart shows the number of countries that accepted women's right to vote each year:

New Zealand was the first in 1893, before the Scandinavian countries became the next early adopters, with Finland in 1906, Denmark in 1908, and Norway in 1913 (which could be explained by the roots of patriarchy being relatively shallow in Scandinavia, having also arrived there rather late). In 2015, Saudi Arabia became the most recent country to allow women voting rights, albeit for municipal council elections only since it is based on Sharia law and tribal customs and has no national elections, leaving the misogynistic first place now shared between the two peas in a pod, Taliban Afghanistan and the Vatican. At the beginning of this chart, women were making less than 50% of men's wages on average; now, the average pay gap has shrunk to around 12% in the Western world, and in Luxembourg, women have even begun earning more than men on average.

It was as recently as 1988 that American women were allowed to take out a business bank loan without a man's signature, a consequence of the dramatic rise in women-led businesses, from 402,000 in 1972 (4% of all U.S. firms) to 14 million in 2025 (40% of all firms). This same exponential curve can be seen in academia. Universities admitted the first few women in the late 1800s; 100 years later, in 1980, there were as many female as male university graduates, and now, women are earning more than two-thirds of all master's degrees in the U.S.

At the end of WWII, at the base of the sharp upward rise in the chart above, the first generation of financially empowered and educated women had matured and begun publishing works that expanded the focus from economic and political rights to also include new perspectives on history, culture, sexuality and spirituality:

Mary Ritter Beard (1876 – 1958) published Woman as Force in History in 1946, the first work to attribute general historical value to all women, and not only to those few exceptions who had performed well in the traditional domains of men (such as Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de Medici of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, etc.).

Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) published The Second Sex in 1949, laying the theoretical groundwork for second-wave feminism.

Robert Graves (1895 - 1985), heavily influenced by his then-wife Laura Riding, published The White Goddess in 1948, describing a universal triple goddess (maiden, mother, and crone) who had ruled the world during a matriarchal period that was then suppressed by patriarchy, which profoundly inspired and influenced the next decades of wiccan, new age, and goddess-centered spirituality.

In the second generation of women with higher education we find women like Gerda Lerner (1920 – 2013), one of the founders of the academic field of women's history, Merlin Stone (1931-2011), who wrote When God Was A Woman, and Marija Gimbutas (1921 - 1994), who in 1956 published her groundbreaking study of the societal roles of women from the Palaeolithic through the Neolithic periods, and her theory about the origins of patriarchy. From Lerner and Gimbutas, we finally arrive at the present day and the third generation of female scholars, such as Rebecca Solnit (1961 —) (who coined "mansplaining"), Naomi Klein (1970 —), bell hooks (1952 — 2021), Ruth-Bader Ginsburg (1933 — 2020), and the one who I'd like to focus on with this blog, Heide Goettner-Abendroth (1941 —) and her matriarchal studies.

The evolutionary way of thinking that dominated anthropology and archaeology in the 19th and first half of the 20th century framed Western civilization as something like the growing end of a tree that had progressed from more primitive to more civilized, from a deep pagan past, through Christianity, and finally into rationality and pure science. James George Frazer in The Golden Bough, for instance, seems to have considered the fertility rites of the past as essentially naive and misguided attempts at making synthetic fertilizer, which had been invented just a few years prior to the publishing of his book.

As this perspective began to wane with the postmodernism of the 1970s and 80s, the new approach that came along said that prehistoric cultures should be examined as complex, sustainable social systems with their own internal logic and values. Without the impairing belief that all earlier societies were more primitive versions of our own, there was more freedom to interpret what was actually being found in the ground, and new discoveries and great leaps in understanding were quickly made. One strand of this was the environmentally conscious, new-age goddess movement, exemplified by the author Starhawk, whose 1980s books combined feminist spirituality, environmental activism, social justice, practical magical techniques, and permaculture principles.

The overlapping of these ideas and objectives has notably been critiqued by Cynthia Eller, who, in her book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000), refuted the idea that there had been such a thing as a matriarchy. This feminist view of the past that Eller takes issue with I recently saw succinctly presented in a social media post by a semi-famous internet personality, who, in a statement about female sexuality, wrote: "Anyone who looks at ancient history knows that women were the ruling class."

While Eller’s point about the harmful effect of inventing a past that never existed is valid for the feminist movement as a whole, she’s had to oversimplify and misinterpret her fellow female academics to get it to work with them, since they don’t actually claim that women ever dominated men. Marija Gimbutas, who might be called the academic grandmother of this research, rejected the word matriarchal to describe these earlier cultures, writing that the Neolithic societies of Europe and Anatolia had "a balanced, nonpatriarchal and nonmatriarchal social system.”

Heide Goettner-Abendroth agrees with Gimbutas that these cultures did not have a gender hierarchy, yet still prefers the word matriarchal to describe them, writing that the words matrilineal, matrifocal, matricentric, and also matristic (which Gimbutas preferred), are reductive and “neglects the variety of relationships within these complex social structures between women and men, elders and youth, sisters and brothers, and so on.” She also rejects gylanic, proposed by Riane Eisler in her book The Chalice & the Blade (1987) by combining gy from Greek gyne (woman) and an from Greek andros (man), as an artificially constructed and meaningless word. Goettner-Abendroth then finds an etymological way to keep matriarchy by separating its definition from that of patriarchy, explaining that the Greek word archē can mean either "domination" or "start, beginning, origin," and that while patriarchy leans on the first definition to mean "dominance or rule of the fathers," matriarchy should lean on the second definition to mean "in the beginning, the mothers."

Although this workaround didn't quite land for me, I initially disregarded the whole word problem as trivial splitting of hairs and secondary to the research itself. However, considering it further, I came to wonder if it could have something to do with the still-missing wider acceptance and assimilation within mainstream culture.

Goettner-Abendroth wants to stick with matriarchy for two reasons; because it is a well-known word that’s been thrown around since the 1850s (albeit with a number of different meanings), and more importantly because it has a political dimension, in that the study of a non-patriarchal past helps remedy “women's internal colonization within society by various forms of a global patriarchy that assigns to women only object status”.

From the beginning, but particularly from the early 1900s onwards, the women's suffrage movement leveraged symbolism in the form of parades, protests, and images to advance its cause. In Britain, the militant suffrage organization the Women's Social and Political Union employed artists to design posters, banners, and postcards that depicted their struggle as a righteous battle for justice, and staged protests that often turned violent and landed many of its members in prison, where some were force-fed — events that were then rendered in suffrage art to further stoke the passion. Spectacle played such a central role in this campaign that The Common Cause, a British suffrage magazine, proclaimed the whole thing to be "agitation by symbol."

Perhaps we can also see our contemporary goddess worship movements and the narrative of a previous harmonious matriarchal social model as a more sophisticated or sublimated form of this symbolic agitation? The divine goddess held a different role and position for the people in ancient times than it does for us today, where at least a good chunk of her role has been to subvert patriarchal paradigms and reimagine female agency. Our narrative of the mother goddess and the harmonious matriarchal social model she presided over provides a counter-mythology and a reorientation of our cultural memory. This divine feminine is become an alternative to the hierarchy and exploitation of the patriarchal Hero’s Journey, and serves both as an idealized lost heritage and a blueprint for a new egalitarian future. I wonder if this politicization and commodification of The Goddess have become a hindrance to us at this point, if it’s standing in the way of a deeper understanding and integration of pre-patriarchal reality and a further integration and harmony between the genders.

Whatever people's relationship to the divine used to be before patriarchy, men and women must have had a shared understanding of it. Perhaps now in 2025, in some parts of the world, for some people, at least, women’s inherent value is becoming so obvious that it also becomes possible not to have to assert it so strongly. I wonder such a less partisan gaze can allow us to see more of our matriarchal past, and perhaps even something new about the patriarchy that came after.

In my next posts I will be exploring the characteristics of those older gylanic societies that Gimbutas and Goettner-Abendroth studied, and take a look at the circumstances that brought about patriarchy.

Thank you for your attention!

I named this blog _thoughtfree_, which carries three different meanings for me, two that I’d like to explain and one that I’d like to apologize for. I’ll begin with the apology, which is to my Zen teachers and the Zen lineage as a whole: I have studied and practiced Zen for 25 years, my whole adult life, and yet this blog has almost nothing to do with that. The first step of Zen practice is to see through and become free of our self-obsessed, repetitive, and mostly negative thoughts — but the way to do that, in Zen or any other deep spiritual tradition, is through meditation and various other practices. It happens by doing, not by thinking. Piling words on top of words and thoughts on top of thoughts, as I’m doing here, is definitely the wrong way to go about it! The old Chinese masters would have called my whole effort here “playing with a ball of mud.”

With that being said, the second meaning of the title is that while it’s quite possible to let go of thoughts, that doesn’t mean that they go away; it means that we develop freedom in how we interact with them. In that sense, to be _thought-free_ is to let the thoughts stretch out and luxuriate, take the weird and unusual shapes they sometimes want to take, and let them come and go as they will.

The third meaning returns us to the historical investigation. In all the years grappling with my spinning, ruminating mind through zen practice, I’ve wondered how it came about to begin with. A dog or a monkey doesn’t sit and think about themselves all day, so there must have been a point in human evolution when humans started doing that. In a sense, going back to my initial apology, this is a very unimportant question. The Buddha likened it to getting shot by an arrow and laying on the ground bleeding, wondering what kind of wood the arrow is made of, how fast it was traveling on impact, or what the motives of the shooter may have been, rather than trying to get the arrow out and bandaging the wound. Nonetheless, now that I have gotten the arrow out, I’m curious to find out more about it!

It is a strange, painful, and also wonderful time to be alive. Ideas and institutions that just recently seemed like they would last forever are rapidly crumbling, previously unimaginable possibilities keep sprouting up, and both our future and our past are rapidly transforming.

History is not a fixed and static truth that we already know the basic outline of and that only needs to be fully excavated from the soil. It is a living, breathing, always changing thing, a mirror image of ourselves in the present projected out to make up what we call the past. We understand our past differently when we change and begin living in a new way, and we feel different in the present when we discover a new side of our history. A limiting history limits our present possibilities, and an opening one reveals new options. To create a new and better future, we must also reimagine the past.

In their groundbreaking, bestseller book, The Dawn of Everything, published in 2021 after ten years of research, David Graeber and David Wenslow discussed how the last few decades of scientific discoveries have upended our traditional views on human evolution:

"The evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications.

The pieces now exist to create an entirely different world history - but so far, they remain hidden to all but a few privileged experts (and even the experts tend to hesitate before abandoning their own tiny part of the puzzle, to compare notes with others outside their specific subfield). Our aim is to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together, in full awareness that nobody yet has anything like a complete set. The task is immense, and the issues so important, that it will take years of research and debate even to begin to understand the real implications of the picture we're starting to see. But it's crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent big picture of history … has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that's before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required."

This conceptual shift that they call for is to our traditional, linear, and technology-oriented Western understanding of history. As they describe it, this story comes in two basic forms, inherited from philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778), that portray earlier people as either savages or noble savages. Hobbes' version of the story is the one favored by industrialists and technology-enthusiasts, where we used to live "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives in a "war of every man against every man," pursuing self-preservation by any means necessary. By giving over some of our autonomy to the King, the Government, Big Tech, etc, we receive protection and security in return, and this contract is what forms the basis of civil society and prevents us from descending into violence and chaos again. The tradition derived from Rousseau, on the other hand, is a sort of denatured version of the Christian origin story, where we once lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers in a primitive, childlike innocence that somehow got tainted by the original sin that is the source of all our problems, causing us to live in a fallen, discontented state, where we are torn between fear of further condemnation and a vague hopes of future redemption.

Graeber and Wenslow's research showed that we've always faced fundamental societal and cultural problems, that we've dealt with them in a wide variety of ingenious ways down through the millennia, and that the out-of-whackness of the present moment is a quite recent phenomenon that is not caused by some inherently sinful part of ourselves, but rather by a lack of imagination. Where people of the past were able to change and adjust their social orders according to need, we have forgotten or relinquished the core, foundational freedoms that make this possible and are keeping ourselves powerfully trapped in a limited, untruthful, and dull view of ourselves and our history.

Let's take the example of war. Many of us assume it has always existed, and although that is not true, the belief itself limits us to a world in which war has to continue to exist. The fear of competition and violence continues to create a competitive and violence-oriented frame of mind. In reality, while we humans have always occasionally attacked each other physically, it was only a few years ago when we began doing so systematically. War depends on the logical principle that there are two teams opposed to each other and that any member of one team can treat all members of the other as equal targets. If someone from one team kills someone from the other team, the second team can retaliate against any of the members of the first team, not only against the actual murderer. "If there is a war between France and Germany, any French soldier can kill any German soldier, and vice versa. The murder of entire populations is simply taking this same logic one step further. There is nothing particularly primordial about such arrangements; certainly, there is no reason to believe they are in any sense hardwired into the human psyche. On the contrary, it's almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in such systematic yet indiscriminate ways. It would seem that for most of human history, no one saw much reason to do such things; or if they did, it was rare."

Archaeology shows that organized warfare first appeared in Eurasia in the late Bronze Age. In Central Europe serious sword wounds only become clearly recognizable from the Iron Age Celtic Hallstatt epoch onward, and wounds from incessant warfare are only common from the time of the Roman Empire and the Christian Middle Ages. To appreciate how remarkable this is, we have to consider it in the greater context of human evolution, but our perception of that has been skewed by our technology-focused contemporary mindset that classifies time periods by the material used to make tools. Our so-called stone age Paleolithic period lasted more than 3 million years, while the Mesolithic that followed it lasted around 10,000 years, the Neolithic after that around 8,000 years, the Bronze Age around 2,000 years, and the Iron Age less than 1,000 years. For most of human history, technological innovation has not been considered important, as evidenced by ancient cultures inventing agriculture before choosing to abandon it again, by the Greeks using steam machines just to open temple doors, by the Incas using the wheel just for children's toys, and so on.

Here's a timeline from when we were already well separated from apes and walking around on two feet (bipedaling), until the present. The tiny, orange blip to the right is the last 8000 years of historical time, sized bigger than it really is to make it visible on this scale.

Let's zoom in closer on the last 300,000 or so years. Here, we see the so-called Upper Paleolithic Transition, where we developed the activities that are still most dear to us to this day: music, representational art, projectile weapons, and complex social organization in large groups. From this point onwards, humans are considered behaviorally identical to how we are now. Here the period of “historical time” also becomes clearly distinguishable.

Finally, let's expand the time since the Upper Paleolithic Transition, and call it “Modern humans”. In this timeline, the yellow bar represents the era of advanced, egalitarian cultures that focused their collective energy on building stone circles, massive religious earthworks and pyramids. The Bronze Age is the great, mythical era of empires which birthed systematic violence. The brown bar represents the current era since the time of the Buddha, Socrates, Chuang-Tzu, and the rest of those sages that gave us philosophy and religion.

The orange Bronze Age bar not only gave us war but also individual accumulation of wealth, slavery, permanent social hierarchies, the commodification of women and animals, and human-driven environmental destruction. How did all this come about? Graeber and Wenslow trace it back to the emergence of the state, which they, toward the very end of their book, connect to the patriarchal household:

"The state, as we know it today, results from a distinct combination of elements - sovereignty (supreme authority), bureaucracy and a competitive political field - which have entirely separate origins (but) map directly onto basic forms of social power which can operate at any scale of human interaction, from the family or household all the way up to the Roman Empire or the super-kingdom of Tawantinsuyu. Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma. All early states deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system (whether that violence was conceived as a direct extension of royal sovereignty or carried out at the behest of divinities); and all to some degree modelled their centres of power - the court or palace - on the organization of patriarchal households. Is this merely a coincidence? On reflection, the same combination of features can be found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case, there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might. But why exactly should this be the case?"

This is part of the question I'll be digging into over the next few posts, by combining Graeber's and Wenslow's economic and indigenous line of inquiry, with the emerging female perspective on history in the form of so-called matriarchal studies, and the development and practice of self-transcendent spirituality.

In astrophysics, an event horizon is a boundary we cannot see past, and beyond which events cannot affect us. I’ve come to see the Bronze Age as the event horizon for Western civilization, as a sort of collective cognitive prison that prevents us from effectively addressing our cultural problems. The Bronze Age was when what one might call the Homo Masculus human narrative first appeared — the view of history as something being driven forward by technology and ambitious, innovative men. This new way of thinking was itself what gave birth to our historical time and our idea of civilization, so the reason our idea of history haven’t been able to describe what existed before itself, is because it wasn't present to observe it.

Just within the last 150 years, the Homo Masculus narrative that was tied up with authoritarian and dogmatic Christianity have dramatically collapsed, cyclical and holistic perspectives are returning to us, and women have moved from being the property of men to a new kind of sovereign individual. Some of these developments can be seen as ancient ways coming back to us after a brief intermission, others are unhealthy and unsustainable patterns that are being let go of, while some are entirely new turns in the course of human evolution. Adopting the old invocation, I hope that this investigation can help us accept what cannot be changed, give the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know one from the other.

In my next articles, I will explore the connection between feminism and divine feminine symbolism, what one of the leading feminist historians has to say about our ancient past, and what it was that brought about patriarchy.

Thank you for your attention!