J. J. Bachofen - Das Mutterrecht - Reception

Reception

There was little initial reaction to Bachofen’s theory of cultural evolution, largely because of his impenetrable literary style, but eventually, as well as furious criticism, the book inspired several generations of ethnologists, social philosophers, and even writers: Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels, who drew on Bachofen for Origins 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, Erich Fromm, Robert Graves, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Campbell, Otto Gross and opponents such as Julius Evola.

Friedrich Engels analysed 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)

A selection of Bachofen's writings was translated as Myth, Religion and Mother Right (1967). A fuller edited English edition in several volumes is being published.

As has been noted by Joseph Campbell in 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 Asia.