"(...)Bachofen noted that, against the substratum of a more ancient
world, suffused with a 'civilisation of the Mother', the opposite
civilisation, virile and paternal, developed to supplant and defeat
it, even though, at a later point, at the closing of a cycle, at
least in some countries, it was swept away again. All this was
regarded by Bachofen as a sort of automatic development in a single
family of peoples. The opposition of the two civilisations as he
describes it refers therefore essentially to that existing between
two evolutionary and progressive stages of a single process, without
his inquiring into how the one was derived from the other.
But this problem needs to be posed, ethnologically. What has been
learned from the sum total of researches in various other domains
gives a certain margin of credibility to the idea that the most
ancient, pre-Hellenic Mediterranean civilisation, characterised by
the cult of the Woman, of matriarchy, and of social or spiritual
gynaecocracy, was linked to pre-Aryan or non-Aryan influences, while
the opposite vision of the world, solar and Olympian, had
specifically Aryan origins. This was intimated by Bachofen himself in
his relating of the first civilisation to the Pelagic populations and
in his noticing that the most characteristic cult in the Heroic-solar
world, that of Delphic Apollo, had Thracian-Hyperborean origins,
which amounts to saying Nordico-Aryan. His evolutionist prejudice,
however, prevented him from getting to the bottom of these positive
data. While carrying out a work of genius by referring the residual
fragments which have reached us of the gynaecocratic civilisation to
the archaic unit to which they belong, he failed to proceed in a
similar manner with regard to the solar and Olympian elements which
emerged and asserted themselves in the ancient Mediterranean world,
which would have led him to notice the existence of an Olympian and
paternal civilisation, just as archaic, of different ethnic origin.
In the Mediterranean, the purest forms of this second civilisation
are, compared to the other, more recent. They are more recent,
however, only in a relative sense, in that in the Mediterranean world
they only appear at a given moment, not in the absolute sense, which
would entail that they had not existed previously and could only ever
come to birth by way of successive 'evolutionary stages' within one
and the same group of peoples. Rather, the opposite could be true,
that is to say that many forms derived by Bachofen from the cycle of
the Mother (in its higher, 'lunar' and 'Demetrian' aspects), could be
considered not so much as really intrinsic to the civilisations in
which they are found, but more as forms of involution of some
branches of the solar tradition, or as products of interferences
between this tradition and the opposite one. This corresponds, among
other things, to the teachings about the 'four ages' passed on by
Hesiod."
Since the documentation assembled by Bachofen was meant to
demonstrate that motherhood is the source of human society, religion,
and morality, and that the maternal principle is first, ontologically
and chronologically, 'Feminism' couldn't but make his work a standard
bearer of its 'cause. Even though feminists do not understand what
words like 'ontological' mean, these words still sound fine to their
ears.
And the irony lies, among other things, in the fact that Bachofen
concludes his main work by connecting archaic mother right with the
Christian veneration of the Virgin Mary. Bachofen, as recalled in the
preface to the French edition of 'Das Mutterrecht', was known to be
a 'reactionary patrician', to start with.
--- In
evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "Savitar Devi"
<savitar_devi@...> wrote:
>
> Has anyone related this to the rise of the Wiccan movement as yet?
It
> seems to be an even purer manifestation of this phenomenon than the
> original cults.
>
> I had read that previously, but however on revisiting your site
another
> question has been raised in regards to the sentence "Bachofen's
work,
> however, because its evolutionist prejudices - which, quite
ironically,
> led it to be adopted by various feminist currents..." How so?
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:
evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:
evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of evola_as_he_is
> Sent: Sunday, 2 April 2006 5:31 a.m.
> To:
evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [evola_as_he_is] Amazons & Cynocephalism - Myths of the
Dog-Man
>
>
> "In the streets of Berlin, Paris or London," as for instance
> A.Baeumler, a famous National-Socialist scholar, wrote, "all you
have
> to do is to observe for a moment a man or a woman to realise that
the
> cult of Aphrodite is the one before which Zeus and Apollo had to
beat
> a retreat... The present age bears, in fact, all the features of a
> gynaecocratic age. In a late and decadent civilisation, new temples
> of Isis and Astarte, of these Asian mother goddesses that were
> celebrated in orgies and licentiousness, in desperate sinking into
> sensual pleasure, arise. The fascinating female is the idol of our
> times, and, with painted lips, she walks through the European
cities
> as she once did through Babylon. And as if she wanted to confirm
> Bachofen's profound intuition, the lightly dressed modern ruler of
> man keeps in leash a dog, the ancient symbol of unlimited sexual
> promiscuity and infernal forces".
>
>
http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id8.html
>