Bachofen's 1861
Das Mutterrecht proposed four phases of cultural evolution which absorbed each other: • Hetaerism: a wild nomadic 'tellurian' [=
chthonic or earth-centered] phase, characterised by him as communistic and
polyamorous, whose dominant deity he believed to have been an earthy proto
Aphrodite. • Das Mutterecht: a matriarchal 'lunar' phase based on agriculture, characterised by him by the emergence of
chthonic mystery cults and law. Its dominant deity was an early
Demeter. • The Dionysian: a transitional phase when earlier traditions were masculinised as patriarchy began to emerge. Its dominant deity was the original
Dionysos. • The Apollonian: the patriarchal 'solar' phase, in which all trace of the Matriarchal and Dionysian past was eradicated and modern civilisation emerged.
Reception There was little initial reaction to Bachofen's theory of cultural evolution, largely because of his impenetrable literary style, but eventually, along with furious criticism, the book inspired several generations of ethnologists, social philosophers, and even writers:
Lewis Henry Morgan;
Friedrich Engels, who drew on Bachofen for
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State;
Thomas Mann;
Jane Ellen Harrison, who was inspired by Bachofen to devote her career to
mythology;
Walter Benjamin;
Carl Jung;
Erich Fromm;
Robert Graves;
Rainer Maria Rilke;
Joseph Campbell;
Otto Gross;
Erich Neumann and opponents such as
Julius Evola. In the 1930s his work was acclaimed by several prominent academics in the German speaking world. Because of his theoretical commitment to
Marxist historiography, Friedrich Engels faulted Bachofen for regarding "religion as the main lever of the world's history" and therefore considered it a "troublesome and not always profitable task to work your way through [his] big volume [i.e.
Das Mutterrecht]". Nevertheless, he credited Bachofen with inaugurating research into the
history of the family. He summarized Bachofen's views as follows: :"(1) That
originally man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term "
hetaerism"; :(2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity; :(3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen's conception, of a regular rule of women (
gynaecocracy); :(4) that the transition to
monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period." (Friedrich Engels, 1891: see link below)
Emile Durkheim credited Bachofen with upsetting the "old conception" that the father must be "the essential element of the family". Before Bachofen, Durkheim claims that "no one had dreamed that there could be a family organization of which the paternal authority was not the keystone". In contrast to Engels and Durkheim, the American sociologist
Carle Zimmerman criticized Bachofen's work for initiating a
research paradigm in
sociology that "completely divorced" the study of the family from history, replacing the "constant struggle between
familism and
individualism" with "imagination". He characterized Bachofen and the other members of this research paradigm, such as
J.F. McLennan,
L.H. Morgan,
E.A. Westermark, and others, as "evolutionary cultists" and considered them to have "destroyed history as a fundamental study in social science" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As has been noted by
Joseph Campbell in
Occidental Mythology and others, Bachofen's theories stand in radical opposition to the Aryan origin theories of religion, culture and society, and both Campbell and writers such as Evola have suggested that Bachofen's theories only adequately explain the development of religion among the pre-Aryan cultures of the Mediterranean and the Levant, and possibly Southern Asia, but that a separate, patriarchal development existed among the Aryan tribes which conquered Europe and parts of Asia. == Works ==