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In the families founded upon individual marriage, which grew up after the Amazonian revolt, the women, and not the men, held the first place. Bachofen does not tell us whether they assigned this place to themselves, or had it conceded to them.
A whole science devoted to the embryology of human institutions has thus developed in the hands of Bachofen, MacLennan, Morgan, Edwin Tylor, Maine, Post, Kovalevsky, Lubbock, and many others. And that science has established beyond any doubt that mankind did not begin its life in the shape of small isolated families.
It is, therefore, the more surprising that so many traces of this anterior condition should have remained in the Grecian and other tribes which Professor Bachofen has pointed out, since gyneocracy and mother-right, as discussed by him, must have originated among these tribes when under the gentile organization, and with descent in the female line.
It was through reading his work, "The Ethic of Free Thought," that the Matriarchate made such a deep impression on my mind and moved me to write a tract on the subject. People who have neither read nor thought on this point, question the facts as stated by Bachofen, Morgan, and Wilkeson; but their truth, I think, cannot be questioned.
Bachofen, M'Lennan, and Morgan, all started from a hypothetical state of more or less modified sexual promiscuity. He discovered Hetarismus, as he called it, or promiscuity, among Lydians, Etruscans, Persians, Thracians, Cyrenian nomads, Egyptians, Scythians, Troglodytes, Nasamones, and so forth. Mr. M'Lennan's view is, perhaps, less absolutely stated than Sir Henry Maine supposes.
This little book of fascinating reading is the best and easiest way of studying Bachofen’s theory. Bachofen strongly insists on the religious element in all early human thought. He believes that the development of the primitive community only advanced by means of religious ideas. “Religion,” he says, “is the only efficient lever of all civilisation.
I believe they have been greatly misinterpreted in the thought of writers bound by patriarchal ideas. This is done by Bachofen, and also, to some extent, by McLennan. The limitation of my space does not allow me to enter into the great amount of evidence provided by these mythical stories of the privileged position of women. One instance, however, may be referred to as an illustration.
Again we find the maternal system intimately connected with religious ideas, and it is interesting to recall what was said by Bachofen: “Wherever gynæcocracy meets us the mystery of religion is bound up with it, and lends to motherhood an incorporation in some divinity.” Among these Islanders every family traces its descent from a woman the common mother of the clan.
He could scarcely have rejected good counsels from the trustee Utinger, and the canons Erasmus Schmied, Walder, Bachofen and some others perhaps, who at the very first extended to him the hand of friendship.
It can no longer be said that this opinion, in the form held by Bachofen, meets with any considerable support. As to the widespread prevalence of descent through the mother, there is no doubt whatever that it has prevailed very widely.
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