Cecil,
In your article Did a peaceful matriarchy once rule the earth? , you excluded native american societies, pre- western contact. Many had matriarchal and matrilineal societies.
But not many of them were peaceful. A lot of the time what happened was that the women ruled the roost at home and managed the day to day logistics while the men focused on being the warriors.
To my knowledge matriarchies have been very rare. And as mswas points out, women having power doesn’t make a society peaceful; the idea that women are anti-war is a modern Western conceit. “Come back with your shield or on it”, to quote the mothers of Sparta.
Courtesy link. Cecil skips citing some specific examples of instances of matriarchy or matrilineality,but that may just be because their existence itself still proves nothing about the “primeval ***peaceful ***matriarchy”.
That sort of an idea, after all, sounds like something I’d presume to be a subset of the overarching myth of the Golden Age / Arcadia. For some reason a lot of societies and individuals are heavily invested (in their religion, or in their philosophy of life) in the notion that life on this Earth used to be naturally sweet and harmonious until some meanies came and ruined it, as opposed to life having been tough and rough and conflictive all along.
I think it’s because, if that’s true, then human beings are naturally good and decent, and it gives people hope that in the future we can create a society that’s sweet and harmonious.
Odd. I have more hope of the latter because it’s not been done before. If we were once in that state, then we lost it, and the chances of getting back – and staying there – are smaller.
Powers &8^]
Settlers of the “Wild West” feared being captured, because they would be turned over to the women. And what ensued was not death by snoo-snoo.
I had not heard that. Do you have a cite?
I’ve seen that claim before in a couple of places, with regard to certain tribes. See, for example, Adiar’s History of the American Indians, page 390, lines 6-7.
I’m hijacking this thread to remark that many scientists believe that in the very, very early days of judaism, God (Jahweh) was supposed to be married to the Queen of Heaven, Ashera. They even shared temples. But there was a power struggle and now all mentionings of her in the Bible are pejoric. Still, even through the pejoric mentionings of “tree godesses” in Deutereronomium, (Ashera was sympbolized by a living tree or, an upright wooden pole) or wrong translations of Ashera as “Baal”, an image of a very peaceful religion seeps through.
[ul]
[li]Precisely what authority has a “scientist” to comment on history?[/li][li]Is this anything like the “wrong translation” of “Charlotte” as “Edgar”?[/li][/ul]
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
-Rudyard Kipling[quote=“John_W.Kennedy, post:11, topic:503490”]
[LIST][li]Precisely what authority has a “scientist” to comment on history?[/li][/QUOTE]
Um…Historians are scientists, no? Did you even read the wiki link?
A lot of that is pure speculation. Ashera worship (which includes Isis) was quite common in the entire area. Various cultures traded worship in many gods as they traded with each other, conquered each other, or simply lived together. Baal simply means “master” in Hebrew and was a common name for many communities for their (usually male) local deity which protected the tribe. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with Ashera who was the goddess of heaven.
The thing that bothers me most about these Peaceful Matriarchic Society myths is that they have their roots based in anti-semitism.
The idea goes like this: The world was filled with these peaceful societies headed by a priestess. Then came The Rabbis who destroyed these societies with their oppression of women, and the whole guilt trip they created.
Nazism had some of its roots in this pagan idealism. That strand of anti-semitism (which had an intellectual basis) combined with the less intellectual “Jews control everything” strand into a deadly force. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (who both expressed an admiration of early Italian Fascism) also expressed anti-Semitic sentiments based upon similar ideas of the Jews/Early Christianity bringing in guilt.
I remember Utne Reader magazine had an article about this romantic priestess speculation. It turned out the author had also written for various blatantly anti-Semitic journals.
Archaeological evidence suggests that most early societies were pretty violent, and got less violent as time went on. Much of this is probably due to the enlargement of society due to better security (you’re not likely to get killed by highway bandits as you travel from city “A” to city “B”), more trade (dead people aren’t going to buy your goods), easier communication (you have to be alive to use Twitter although I’m not sure if you need actual brain activity). and the expansion of nationalism (the people over there are no longer enemies, but fellow countrymen. Maybe I won’t kill them all and let God sort them out).
If there were matriarchal societies of yore, they probably were just as violent as those other societies. In a certain sense, we now live in the best, most prosperous, and peaceful it has ever been. Which must mean the world use to really suck.
Although history usually pitches its tent in the realm of social science, there’s a huge and continuing epistemelogical debate as to whether social science should be able to call itself a science. So JWK’s comment is perfectly valid from a certain point of view. That all aside, the authorities cited in the linked Wiki article are not historians. The chief commentator cited is 16th-century clergyman Matthew Henry. The others cited are a biblical scholar and an archeologist.
Furthermore, there’s nothing in the linked article that substantiates the contentions that Ashera was mistranslated as Baal, that her symbol was a tree, or that her religion was “very peaceful.” The article you linked doesn’t support your post.
That’s the first time I’ve heard it put that way. Generally it’s “patriarchal sky gods” if a religious angle is being pushed. Or, it’s blamed on men in general, or the discovery of animal husbandry ( and therefore knowledge of how babies are made ), or the development of agriculture. Pretty much whatever happens to be the bugaboo of the person in question; most of the ones I’ve come across have been feminists or Luddites, not anti-Semites. If you are running into people using it to slam Jews, I suspect that they are doing the same thing; using a more peaceful society that never was as an excuse to blame their particular object of hatred for its imaginary destruction.
Depressing but true.
Historians are scientists, no.
This observation comes from a historian whose academic training was in the social “sciences.”
Exapno Mapcase said:
I can’t parse that.
Philologists are scientists neither.
(Linguists, OTOH, have at least a modicum of mathematics and the ability to disprove theses by discovering new (aspects of) languages. Unless they’re Chomskyists.)
There likely were matriarchies, or at least emphasis placed on the farm and child-rearing, and some similarity lasts into legendary and historical Celtic and Pictish ruling queens. Peaceful - that’s a different matter! All the paleological evidence is that the Neolithic had too few people too dispersed for proper warfare but a lot more violence between them hitting each other with sticks and stones that mostly did not do as much deadly damage as bronze (and ‘damage’ of course includes infection).
So once they settle and start producing metals, their wars are bigger nastier and for those reasons rarer - a sort of deterrent effect. Irish legend is full of warriors knocking the crap out of each other at the behest of some queen or other. After all, it was easy enough for her to start a war because she wasn’t going to be out there in it, although Celtic women were sometimes known to fight.
Think of Sparta, where all men do is military and hunting and the women run the farmstead with the native population as generic slaves. I wonder if that was a matrriarchal setup that the later Greeks just chiaged to put political power with the war-band?