Matriarchy and the Volk

Abstract

Johann Jakob Bachofen, author of Das Mutterrecht (Das Mutterrecht: Eine Untersuchung der die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer relgiösen und rechtlichen Natur. Basel, Switzerland: Benno Schwabe, 1861) and modern inventor of the idea that prehistoric societies were matriarchal and goddess-worshipping, had little impact on the Anglo-American world, but he was tremendously influential in the German-speaking world. In the first decades of the twentieth century, his works were revived and provided much of the groundwork for fascist understandings of myth and symbol in Germany. Impressively, Bachofen's ideas about matriarchy found champions even among the Nazi leadership, in spite of the Third Reich's overall celebration of Aryan manliness. The ability of matriarchal myth to function on both the political left (as among communists and feminists from the 1880s to the present) and the political right (from Bachofen through National Socialist Germany) raises interesting questions about the political uses of matriarchal myth in particular, and also about myth in general.

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