Emmet Scott is already well-known to many Gates of Vienna readers as the author of Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy
This piece appeared earlier at the New English Review in a slightly different form.
The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy
by Emmet Scott
Origin myths are of tremendous psychological importance; in many respects they inform our attitude to the world, to life and to the future. That is why Darwinism, which may be regarded as the first materialist creation-myth, was of such fundamental importance. It would be no exaggeration to say that in many respects the twentieth century was a creation of Charles Darwin. Certainly the decline and even death of Christianity in Europe owes very much to his epoch-making Origin of Species.
But the crude battle for survival envisaged by Darwin could hardly be considered emotionally appealing, with the result that other alternatives to Christianity were sought out. One of the most important of these and, I would argue, one of the most damaging, was that of the Primeval Matriarchy: the notion that at some early stage in human development the world, or at least most societies, were dominated by women, and that these early societies were characterized by pacifist co-operation and peaceful co-existence. The myth has several variants and several sources of inspiration, but it is an idea which is utterly without foundation and has caused no end of mischief in contemporary Western society.
The concept of a primeval matriarchy may be regarded, on one level, as a modern incarnation of the Golden Age myth, a belief found in primitive societies throughout the world that during the infancy of the human race mankind lived in perfect peace and harmony in a world of abundance. The Garden of Eden is the biblical take on the legend. In the Bible story however, as in all traditional accounts, there was a “Fall” from grace, after which strife and hardship entered the world. The Fall, or Original Sin, represented an implicit acceptance of human imperfection and in a way accounted for the violence and discord of life by pointing the finger of blame at humanity as a whole and the individual in particular. The essential imperfection of human nature was recognized by all ancient societies, and is a theme which we encounter in the works of the Chinese philosophers as well as those of India and Greece. With Rousseau and the Enlightenment, however, there came a change. Reacting against the rationalism and industrialization of the eighteenth century, Rousseau and his fellow proto-romantics adopted a sentimentalized view of ancient and primitive man, arguing that human nature, in its pristine form, was not “fallen” at all, and that human beings had in modern times been corrupted by an exploitative and degenerate economic system.
Rousseau’s Noble Savage has caused untold harm over the past two centuries as totalitarians of various hues sought to foster and free the inherent nobility of humanity by destroying the corrupt and exploitative economic systems which had supposedly turned people into butchers and criminals. Both fascism and communism trace a direct line of descent to Rousseau, as do anarchism and the various extremist ecology movements of our time.
Feminism, too, is a branch of Rousseau’s tree, though it has other wellsprings. Marx and Freud, of course, with their negative attitudes to Christianity and Christian civilization in general, contributed much to feminism. Marx in particular emphasized how “bourgeois” Christian society had oppressed women, and called for the abolition of the family and complete sexual liberation. Freud contributed by his claim that neuroses and mental illness in general were the result of sexual repression. But the myth of a primeval matriarchy also owed much to students of mythology such as James Frazer and (more especially) Robert Graves. Archaeology too played its part, as scholars began to uncover ancient images of goddesses and female deities from various parts of the globe. The Palaeolithic epoch, the earliest age of homo sapiens, revealed small statuettes of clay, ivory and bone, depicting some form of Mother Goddess. Perhaps the most influential archaeological discoveries, however, came from Crete, where between 1900 and 1905 Sir Arthur Evans uncovered a splendid pre-Greek civilization where women and female deities apparently enjoyed a privileged position.
In many ways, “Minoan” Crete seemed like a Freudian paradise. Here the archaeologists unearthed colourful frescoes of naked-breasted women participating in the dangerous “bull-vaulting” game, whilst statuettes of bare-breasted goddesses, holding writhing snakes in each hand, emerged from various parts of the island. Evans spoke glowingly of a pacifist matriarchy that flourished before the coming of the warlike and patriarchal Greeks, and his vision was hugely influential in academic circles for at least half a century. It is a vision which has been humorously outlined by Rebecca Bradley on the dust-cover of her book, Goodbye, Mother: The Warriors of Crete: “Once upon a time, on an olive-strewn island in a wine-dark sea, beautiful people lived in peace under the rule of the Great Goddess and her matriarchal avatars. The like of their palaces was not seen again until the advent of shopping-mall architecture in the twentieth century; their artistry flowered like the saffron blossoms collected by their luscious bare-breasted maidens. This was Minoan Crete, stronghold of the Matriarchy and the Great Goddess, flower child of the ancient world — until those nasty patriarchal Mycenaeans and even nastier Dorians came along and crashed the party. Oh yes, and there’s something about a volcano on Santorini, and a few earthquakes as well, but the rot really set in when the men from the mainland took over.”
Perhaps the most prominent high priestess of the Great Goddess was Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). During the 1950s and 60s Gimbutas developed her so-called “Kurgan Thesis;” basically the idea that the archaeological marker of the arrival in Europe of Indo-European-speakers was to be found in the Bronze Age Kurgan mound burials of the Pontic Steppe, a vast region incorporating most of present-day Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan. Controversially, Gimbutas further claimed that these nomadic Indo-Europeans brought with them a warrior-culture dominated by male sky-gods, which supplanted earlier matriarchal and goddess-worshipping cultures. In this, she echoed ideas already expressed at great length by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The White Goddess. Over the next three decades Gimbutas developed her ideas further in a series of books, articles and lectures delivered at campuses throughout America and Europe, where she was immensely influential amongst the burgeoning women’s movement. Three major works, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), presented an overview of her conclusions regarding what she saw as Europe’s primeval matriarchy.
The importance of Gimbutas in the development of the matriarchal myth, and also by extension in the development of modern radical feminism, cannot be overstated. Her archaeological experience and expertise, together with her wide knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, seemed to give academic credibility to the romantic and poetic ramblings of Arthur Evans and Robert Graves. Yet in retrospect it is hard to imagine why anyone with even a modicum of common sense could have been taken in.
There were warning signals everywhere. Right from the beginning, for example, many historians were critical of Evans’ interpretation of Minoan Crete, and a devastating blow was delivered in 1974 when German author Hans Georg Wunderlich published his Wohin der Stier Europa trug? (Where did the Bull carry Europa? published in English in 1975 as The Secret of Crete). Here Wunderlich, a trained geologist, examined the structure of the “palace” of Knossos in Crete in detail and came to the conclusion that the building could never have been a palace for the living. It was, instead, a charnel house, a massive necropolis which doubled as an arena for human sacrifice. For the happy-go-lucky “bull vaulting game”, said Wunderlich, was nothing of the sort: it was a ferocious form of human sacrifice which involved young men and women being gored and trampled to death by a sacred bull. This, said Wunderlich, was the origin of the legend of the Minotaur. Since Wunderlich’s time human sacrifice has been confirmed as an integral part of Cretan religious practice, whilst the supposed “pacifism” which Evans and others had imagined, was exposed as nonsensical.
And so it has proved in region after region. Neolithic Europe, for example, which Gimbutas tried to portray as some form of matriarchal utopia, has been shown to have been just as warlike as later epochs of European history. The most prized possessions found in Neolithic burials are invariably weapons of war, such as bows, spears, axes and maces.
Indeed, throughout the planet, it has emerged that in the earliest epochs of culture and civilization war was universal and human sacrifice widespread (if not also universal). Modern “Druids” and Neo-Pagans, strongly influenced by the Matriarchy myth, have rejected Christianity in its entirety, and every solstice sees historic sites such as Stonehenge besieged by thousands of Wicca and Druid practitioners colourfully garbed in flowing vestments and jewels. But the tree-hugging, touchy-feely, feminist religion of the Neo-Pagans bears no relationships whatsoever to the actual religion of Europe’s Celtic and Germanic ancestors. In fact, notwithstanding the occurrence of the odd unusual character such as Boudicca, both the latter peoples were warlike in the extreme and practiced human sacrifice on a grand scale. Nor were women considered even remotely equal to men, and all the evidence suggests that a husband or father had the power of life and death over all the female members of his household. Homosexuality too, as Tacitus informs us, was a criminal offence punishable by a horrific death.
Contemporary tribal societies display the same essential characteristics, and nowhere has any evidence emerged of a genuine matriarchy as imagined by Gimbutas and the feminists. In the early twentieth century, for example, the cannibal tribes of central Africa threw their old people, both men and women, to the crocodiles, as soon as they became infirm and a burden to the community, whilst the tribal peoples of South America (like those of Africa) grant the power of life and death to a husband over his wives and daughters. Belief in sorcery was universal, and an outbreak of illness or any other kind of misfortune invariably attributed to the malignant influence of a witch — very often a young woman — who would be identified thanks to the skills of a witch-doctor (now called a ‘shaman’) and put to death. I vividly recall the content of a lecture delivered by Dr Andrew Saunders of Cardiff, who had during the 1970s spent a year living with the Yanomamo people of the Orinoco basin in South America. Shortly after his arrival in the village, Dr Saunders was seated round the camp fire with the other men of the tribe, sniffing an extract of the narcotic cocaine plant. One of the tribesmen began to shout at a woman who walked past the camp fire several times. Dr Saunders was informed that the woman was the man’s wife and he was telling her to get the dinner ready. A few minutes later, after another bout of shouting, the man got up, reached for a machete, and hacked the woman to death in front of the camp fire. Understandably, the Doctor was shocked and horrified by this unprovoked and utterly unexpected violence. But even more shocking was the reaction of the other men at the camp fire: They took no notice whatsoever, and continued chatting and joking as before. It was as if the murderer had squashed a bug!
How long will it take to convince the feminist goddess-worshippers and neo-pagans that modern Western society is the most female-friendly civilization that has ever existed? And when will they cease their attempts to subvert that civilization in the name of a feminist-shamanist utopia that never existed?
Ah sheesh. Yet another skewed take, criticizing an older skewed take.
Some tribal societies were the first women-friendly human groupings. Modern Western society certainly has some pluses for women (and other humans) and also many minuses. One of them being the fact that it’s killing off everything living for profit and stupidity.
And there are plenty of folks who wish to discredit pictures of later societies where women were obviously valued, like ancient Crete. I was there. I saw the frescoes. The difference between the dare I say feminine, playful, joyful Cretan art and the Greek art is palpable.
I read the theories. Many questions remain. Those who think they knew for sure what Crete was like fall prey to dogma.
We do not know enough about Minoan Crete to get a coherent idea of what it was like. Even the Minoan language remains completely incomprehensible and thus Minoan documents remain silent.
Though, the fact of widespread human sacrifice (including that of children) seems pretty well established by modern archaeologists.
As for the abundance of goddesses and playful pictures, it does not prove anything. Take a look at Hinduism. Hindus worship a zillion goddesses, whose statues and pictures are all over India, they even sacrifice animals (and in rare cases human beings – though this is prohibited by Indian law) to goddess Kali (a very violent and forbidding lady, by the way). And male gods of Hinduism are often depicted as rather effeminate. However, traditional Hindu society is every bit as patriarchal as any Muslim one. Just think of what Hindus do to widows! Or remember that Hindus so much prefer sons over daughters that they traditionally kill female babies if the parents are too poor to feed them. For this reason, in some Indian states there is a shortage of brides and there are cases of brothers sharing a wife.
Even Hare Krishna – which is an export version of Hinduism produced specially for the West – is extremely patriarchal and a woman’s position in it is very modest and humble.
Hinduism, by the way, has often been portrayed as gentle and pacific, as opposed to Islam and Christianity. But look at India’s history – it has been as full of wars and other bloody events, as European or Muslim history. And if you look at communal violence in India, you will see that Hindus are as violent and murderous as Indian Muslims (and much more than Indian Christians). Violence against Dalits (untouchables) who dare to have ideas above their station is also widespread.
Hindus are kinder to cows than to women and girls.
So no amount of pretty goddesses, lotuses, sweet woman-like gods, incense sticks and other nice little things that ladies fancy do not prevent a religion from being absolutely patriarchal or its followers from being warlike and violent.
This should be borne in mind when we are looking at the art of some ancient civilisation. We should not jump to conclusions because our stereotypes may be misleading – other civilisations may have very different stereotypes of their own.
Or take South America. There are so many beautiful statues of the Virgin Mary, the religious processions featuring her more than her Son, etc. etc. more common 50 years ago than today. And the culture was so “macho” that it defines the term.
about the term “macho” and “machista” you should compare the level of sexual assaults and rapes on women (and men) on some northern European and american countries (and families) with that of some countries of South America. You´d be surprised. Be the perpetrators of whatever the origins, you should see that Swedden and the United States are between the first places, and rape is not only a problem of criminals, but also of possibilators, be them society as a whole or parts of it. The USA is not a very safe place for women. Much safer, by the way, Chile or Argentina. Oh, they are “macho” countries, I´m sorry.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Rape-rate
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Rape-rate
Rape more common in the United States and in Swedden than in many “macho” countries. The rapist may be from whatever the origins, but the powers who, in a certain way, excuse the perpetrators are usually white (leftish) people. Before insulting other countries you should first check the facts.
Please remember that you are dealing with reported rapes, in any case. In some situations it isn’t safe to complain. However, I have to confess that I wasn’t thinking about rapes, but rather who rules the roost, and who can get away with not taking responsibility. I’m sorry if you think “macho” is an insult, I considered it more a description of certain social mores without trying to pass judgement.
“Hindus are as violent and murderous as Indian Muslims”
Not true. Lived there.
I’ve often seen men from various primitive tribal backgrounds chatting in a friendly way with women here in NYC! Frequently they even gather together with women in “women-friendly human groupings!” This proves that primitive tribal societies were matriarchal and worshiped the Goddess. (smiley-face emoji)
How about crediting another society for valuing the varied roles of women — the Middle Ages. Instead, the Leftist and Politically Correct narrative has developed (distant roots in the Renaissance with its modernist bias against its immediate forbears; really picking up steam with the Enlightenment) that denigrates the Middle Ages for its supposed fanaticism and misogyny.
A good corrective for this narrative, and a restoration of sensible history as an antidote to the revisionism which has dominated the modern West so long, might begin with Régine Pernoud’s study of the Middle Ages — “Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths” (French title, Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age — a title addressing the problem of the term “Middle Ages” itself, for it was the Renaissance which demeaned the centuries before them as constituting some kind of historical slump between the great Classical period and their own present rediscovering the Classics).
I am a bit pessimistic about the possibility of “restoration of sensible history”. A historian is a human being with inevitable (sometimes subconscious) stereotypes, biases and ideological preferences. So, even in those cases when a historian is trying to give an objective picture of his subject, he sees it through the lens of his own convictions and prejudices.
And a great number of historians do not even try to be objective. They are either sincere fervent supporters of an ideology (be it Marxist, Feminist, Gay Liberation, Nazi, Islamist, Zionist, Neo-Pagan, Human Rightist – or whatever is the latest fashionable craze) and refuse to see in history anything that does not corroborate that ideology or they are in the pay of a State or some other entity that wants to promote a certain ideology (and, if possible, to do away with competing ones).
A good knowledge of history is very useful for those who want to make sense of modern times and understand what can happen in the near future. However, it is hard to achieve it – you must not draw your knowledge from popular books or magazines, which are more often than not extremely superficial, inaccurate and ideologically biased – but from serious fundamental research and historical documents. And even so, you should always bear in mind that practically no researcher or author of any document is impartial or completely truthful.
In the end, you may end up with a catch of dry facts and vague understanding of historical trends, which might, after all, provide useful guidance.
I like the research, but I’d like to correct one thing. (In my understanding from my education… & it’s been wrong before… so, no attitude here from me) Marx in my understanding is futurist utopian and works in a linear timeline… much like the bible. The end of times is man’s greatest achievment for Marx. Socialist thought generally looks back to a glorified prehistory and that’s one of the characteristics that I’ve been told severs it from the revolution of Communist thinking. Certainly Hitler like Rousseau looks back to an ideal past.
also there might not be a golden age for the matriarchy, but Joseph Campbell and other writers have identified ancient cultures run by mostly women that were tyrannical. The one mentioned in Anatolia was involved in male sacrifice and bull worship and a middle eastern cult involved in serpants reflected the goddess Medusa. again… all conjecture… but interesting
The importance of Gimbutas in the development of the matriarchal myth, and also by extension in the development of modern radical feminism, cannot be overstated. Her archaeological experience and expertise, together with her wide knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, seemed to give academic credibility to the romantic and poetic ramblings of Arthur Evans and Robert Graves. Yet in retrospect it is hard to imagine why anyone with even a modicum of common sense could have been taken in.
Maybe one had to be there to grasp the willingness to be “taken in” by the heady new theories of the cultural anthropologists building their houses of cards on the shifting sands of that era of ‘cultural relativism’…Thus Margaret Mead’s hoaxes about Samoa end up with later generations wondering who hoaxed whom. It was all in aid of a ‘new’ feminist freedom in which the whore replaced the virgin as an object of worship.
But somehow, in feminism, what never changes is the feminine as object…of worship instead of condemnation. IOW, they never managed to make a case for the paradigmatic shift they claimed as their ‘revolutionary’ change. Odd, that: they railed against ‘woman as object’ even as they further objectified women with their fake ‘raised status – all in service to a faux freedom that has left women ever more vulnerable.
The ghetto of Fem Studies grows more strange and cut off from any real vitality with each passing decade. If what they do is ‘celebrating’ feminisim, I’ll take the old verities. They are less bizarre and twisted. Those girls could do with a good grounding in, say, modern physics as a start.
As academic fashions go, it has endured for a long time, probably because it is grounded in neo-Marxism. It would be nice to live to see the end of it.
Perhaps those girls could indeed do with a good grounding in modern physics. But they are in the Fem Studies ghetto, as you so colorfully call it, because they can’t count to ten without taking off their shoes and socks. Math is presumably about male dominance; I think that Andrea Dworkin once described Newton’s Principia as “a rape manual”, a concept that I find rather difficult to wrap my mind around.
Do not try to wrap any part of your anatomy ’round Andrea Dworkin. Besides, she’s well turned back to sod by now.
For your (kind of) rhetorical questions re today’s academic feminists, the answer must be: when the money funding the ‘research’ for their borderline fantasies dries up, they’ll find honest work. Until then, it’s a lucrative scam and a loud echo chamber. What a tempting career choice, to write papers reinforcing their own closed system which are in turn read by those within the chamber, who respond with papers of their own.
The world is falling apart. These people are on its fringes, supported by an unimaginable prosperity in a hideously corrupt academia-governmental bureaucracy. As the West becomes poorer and declines, so will these academic ghettoes. Like the Mandarin culture with its long curved fingernails and bound feet, this dreamworld will be swept away by the exigencies of survival.
A good and interesting article. And certainly in human, as well as in animal societies, might usually makes right–as the old saying goes.
But sometimes the author paints with too wide a brush in his assertions. Maybe it’s a case of the exceptions proving the rule, but we should admit that we can’t know what all societies in the human past were like.
http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/15/photographing-in-the-kingdom-of-girls/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbzG0n3shTM
I have a theory about those topless Cretan snake-ladies. I think they’d do a sexy snake-dance for you after you presented your offering to the priests, and then, if your offering was generous enough ….
Doesn’t the human matriarchal theory get undermined by the existence of human sexual dimorphism? Men are larger, stronger, and more violent than women. Those, it seems to me, are characteristics that would ensure men rule and dominate. And aren’t hyenas sexually dimorphic in the opposite way? Aren’t the females larger and more aggressive than the males and aren’t their groups matriarchal.
The very word matriarchal misleads. We stand between the bonobos, where the females run the band, while older males are solitary and respectful of the order the females maintain. Then we have the chimps who abuse the females and sometimes kill their babies.
There were no matriarchies. But there were, and still are, traditional societies where women played a large and respected role. The Iroquois were such, to a great extent. From the frescoes at Crete, it surely appears that women were very prominent. Some have speculated that the women ran things while the menfolk were at sea. And the flouncy skirts they wore were culottes… much more practical when getting about.
There still is a Chinese tribe living next to Tibet where the social organization is around the large house of the grandmother, young people visit but do not marry in our sense, the young woman and her children belong to the grandmother’s house, and the father (of those children) puts most of his energies into raising the children of his sisters and cousins. It works really well. I’ll have to fish out the name.
More back in time, Catal Huyuk was a place were women had high standing, or at least equal to the men, so far as the digs have unearthed.
Discussion of what’s happened with women’s studies, and actual social arrangements that favor women, or archaeological evidence, should be discussed separately.
The Chinese tribe mentioned above are the Mosuo.
The wiki on the Mosuo has some interesting stuff:
However it came to be, it is what it is. An avowed Brazilian misogynist author went there, lived with them, and declared that men have it better when women rule. 🙂
Back in 2001 to 2002 my graduate thesis at Eastern Washington University was supposed to be the myth of matriarchal societies in history. For PC reasons I had to change thesis and at the time I was in great pain from a ruptured disc. I am very familiar with Gimbutus the only genuine archaeologist who was fooled by this false paradigm. All the other authors on this topic like The Blade and the Chalice were not historians or even archaeologist. They were often literature teachers or some other unrelated field. Based on my own previous research I agree with Emmet Scott that a peaceful female dominated Society never existed period. War has always been a part of human history sad to say.
I think if you dig deeper you discover this is not true. The earliest civilizations (such as Catal Huyuk or Caral/Norte Chico) show no evidence of warfare. And they lasted many many centuries.
Tribes always had skirmishes and ceremonial wars with few casualties. Institutional warfare is a relatively recent development.
Civilization develops where there is a population concentration. Increased population outstrips the natural food sources available to the hunter-gatherer. Organisation of labour enables increased food production in place of hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The necessity for increased food production implies survival pressure which implies conflict. This likely chain of causation makes it unlikely that civilization will develop without war.
The first civilizations were developed by foragers. And there was no food pressure then. Later, the logic holds…
I’ll first comment on the myth of matriarchy as validated by actual findings.
Feminism, as a branch of Marxism, is not bound by facts, and will not respond to any findings of history, anthropology, or archaeology. As Dymphna pointed out, the academic field will wither only when funding for it ceases.
Second, I prefer a Darwinian perspective on tribal and societal development. It is possible to have a peaceful society for a generation or two; at that point, the warrior phenotype will disappear, and the society will be susceptible to outside aggression. I can’t think of a more perfect example of this than Sweden. I defy anyone to offer a better explanation of the systematic surrender of Swedish land to Muslim invaders than the disappearance of the aggressive phenotype due to genetic mutation and drift.
As far as the pristine and bucolic view of primitive society, I think it could well have been true. Our natural ideals of beauty involves the appearance of exotic plants and animals and open spaces. Our early ancestors, particularly the hunters-gatherers, lived in a sparsely populated land with plenty of native plants and roaming animals. They could indeed have been surrounded by beauty. Also, with a sparse population density, a lot of the communicable diseases we know today would not have had a chance of getting started. If you got a wound that got infected, you were out of luck; also, lots of babies died, and old people weren’t coddled: but what you lost in your life expectancy, you gained in the beauty of life.
Of course, wide-open spaces are just what we are losing with mass immigration. The Mexicans, Asians, everyone, are building houses as fast as they can, and any wildlife that used to be around is rapidly disappearing. So, the bucolic quality of life we look back on, we’re losing by our softheadedness as far as protecting our turf.
We have a serious problem, in that the more successful our society in maintaining the quality of life, including advanced medicine and ability to live a peaceful life, the more susceptible we are to outside aggression.
The extreme feminism in, say, Sweden, is, in my view, a result and not a cause of the deterioration of the character and genetic edge of the Swedish people.
Could be. Yet the Vikings are not really that far back…
For a fun romp through matriarchal myths to feminism, try The Flounder (Der Butt) by Günter Grass, described by one reviewer as the Grimms’ ‘The Fisherman’s Wife inflated to bursting.” Yes, I am aware of Grass’s anti-Semitic bent, but I borrow from a colleague’s judgment of Wagner as both a man and a composer: As a genius, we salute him; as a mensch we give him the finger.”
Re Wagner, Leonard Bernstein described it neatly: I hate him, but I hate him on my knees”.
“Origin myths are of tremendous psychological importance; in many respects they inform our attitude to the world, to life and to the future.”
Another origin myth — one that warms & assuages the White Guilt of Leftists and PC MCs (which together probably makes up the majority of Westerners) — is the “Lucy Myth”: that all Mankind came from a black woman in Africa. I’ve seen Leftists defend Lucy as fiercely as if she were their own Mother.
Excellent essay.
Rousseau’s “noble savage” lie has wrought unimaginable death and misery in the world. It is also terrifically racist because it implies that the savages lack agency and the ability to choose their own course of action.
I know Rousseau is a lie because I have lived in a Third World country for over 3 years. The natives are most certainly not having deep political discussions and acting as caring stewards of the environment. In some ways, even though they are Muslim, they are even worse about materialism than the average Westerner.
On the other hand, I hesitate to blame Freud quite so much for our present predicament. Sexual repression has led to some awful practices among the Ummah.
Early cultures were not and could not have been pacifist. Fertility had been so high that certain portion of a population would have to voluntarily starve to death if they wanted to avoid a fight for resources. Only recently with widespread use of a contraception there have emerged something like pacifism.
Leftists would have you believe otherwise, but Native Americans were raping and murdering each other long before Caucasian Europeans arrived in the Americas.
And torturing each other in some horrific, protracted ways. We had nothing to teach them about degradation of other human beings.
I’ve been the studying the Minoan civilization for about 10 years (give or take 9 years and 8 moths). I first came across the Minoan at college and was amazed that I’d never heard of this pre-Greek civilization. It was a major civilization and most have never even heard of it!The problem with the Minoan is that aside from the astounding architecture (which contain the frescoes, etc. their architecture and the time period in which they built their palace(s) is worth learning about in and of itself.) there isn’t an abundance of actual knowledge about the Minoan themselves written by the Minoan THEMSELVES. There is only massive amount of speculation. Until their language is deciphered we can only theorize for it we could decipher their language that would open up the door for us to learn about the Minoan FROM the Minoan themselves.
What we do know is that the idea of a “peaceful Crete” is not based on evidence and nor is a “violent Crete”. There’s speculation that the Egyptians called upon the Minoan for naval support to help repel a Hykos invasion implying that the Minoan had a form of military). The Minoan were also a great naval power sort of like the Phoenicians before-the-Phoenician if you will. In order to be any sort of “power” you have to have enforcement aka a military. I suspect that as more and more attention is shined on the Minoan civilization the more we’ll discover!
Personally I thought it was kind of sad that one of the feminist authors cited in the essay actually tried to make the point that Minoan architecture was unequalled until the appearance of modern shopping malls.
Anyone who knows anything about architecture knows that shopping malls are some of the most painfully banal, uninteresting structures in the entire architectural canon.