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15 2 Amazons Everywhere Matriarchal Myth before Bachofen The gynococracy or government of women was quite universally spread for it existed not only among the Scythians, Sarmatians and Amazons in particular but it occurred in both Asias where the warlike women who had been their mistresses had set the style for all the women living under their empire of making themselves rulers over their husbands although they were not all so warlike or so far separated from men as those who gloried in living far from them and seeing them only at set times. —Joseph Lafitau Prior to the publication of Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht, most of the Western world was convinced that the patriarchal family was the original human society, since it was laid out as such in the book of Genesis. Bachofen was the first to offer something very different, a coherent narrative that gave women and goddesses primacy in an early phase of human history only to stipulate their complete overthrow by a later social system that favored men and male gods. However, Bachofen did not create this version of prehistory ex nihilo. He had a lot of preexisting matriarchal material to work with. Amazon stories had been very popular from ancient times forward, indicating a continuous interest in exploring gender reversals . And especially in the eighteenth century, philosophers were beginning to experiment with time lines of human social development that they believed had universal applicability. All that remained was for someone to alchemize gender reversals into an evolutionary historical account. By 1861, the stage was beautifully set: all that was left was to bring up the lights and let the show begin. THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE AMAZON Variants of matriarchal myth have been found all around the world. For example , a Kikuyu myth from Africa traces the origin of the people to a family of nine 16 Amazons Everywhere sisters whose husbands all agreed to live under a matriarchal system. This system continued for generations. The men’s lot was a harsh one. They had to tolerate humiliation and injustice at the hands of the ruling women and were expected to remain sexually faithful to their spouses, although their wives were at liberty to take multiple husbands. The men wished to rebel but were not as physically strong as their wives. Finally, the men plotted to impregnate all their wives simultaneously . While the women were indisposed, the men took over. They have been in power ever since. Similar myths have been identified in South America, Africa, Oceania, and Australia. One type of such myths associates social power with the possession of sacred flutes, trumpets, or other ritual paraphernalia. These objects are held exclusively by men, but legends say they were originally the possession or even the creation of women, who held the social power associated with them until the ritual objects were stolen by the men. Several ancient Greek myths also tell of women’s loss of power in what amounts to a patriarchal revolution. The most famous of these is a rather late and fragmentary account of the naming of the city of Athens. It is attributed to Varro in Augustine ’s City of God. According to this narrative, an olive tree and a spring of water issued forth in the city that became known as Athens. The residents were told by Apollo that the olive tree was from Athena and the spring from Poseidon, and that the citizens should name their city after one of these deities. All the women voted for Athena and all the men for Poseidon, and because the women of Athens outnumbered the men (by one), Athena won the vote. This enraged Poseidon, who flooded the land. Apollo recommended that in order to assuage Poseidon’s anger, the Athenian men should take away women’s right to vote, refuse to call them Athenians, and stop the practice of naming their children after their mothers. The nineteenth-century men who invented modern matriarchal myth did not have access to many non-Western myths of the loss of women’s power, most of which came to the attention of outsiders only after the turn of the twentieth century . But they were exceedingly well versed in classical texts and so were familiar with stories like that of the naming of Athens. Interestingly, however, the classical resources most favored for Western experiments with gender reversals prior to Bachofen’s work were not matriarchal myths, but stories of the Amazons. The Amazons did not...

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