Peace, Love, and Matriarchy

The Greeks didn't have our penchant for associating femininity with compassionate rejection of patriarchal violence. Hera, the Queen of the Gods, was the ultimate psychobitch from hell, and the most important human women in their mythology were the Bacchanites, who got roaring drunk and ripped people limb from limb in their celebrations.

Today, Gaia is the hippie symbol of all that's good and peaceful. After all, she's the earth goddess, the all-mother.

In particular, she's the mother of her own husband. And of another boy who she raised so she could give him a sickle to castrate her husband/son. And a bunch of weird-looking monsters, too. Not the kind of stuff hippies are usually into, unless you lace their pot with a mixture of speed, PCP, and blue nine.

Say what you will about Margaret Thatchter, I think she'd fit right in on Olympus.

This whole longing for an ancient pagan matriarchy that was destroyed by the Christian patriarchy is just silly. Anyone who's read the slightest history realizes that the Athenians, the Persians, the Chinese, and the other important pagan nations were ever bit as patriarchal as Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire.

It wasn't Julia Caesar, after all.

There were a few women like Boedicaea, who ran things for a while when some tribe ran out of men after one too many bloody battles. But you can say the same thing for the Christian era--look at Queen Elizabeth, or the 20 or so Queen Christinas that plagued northern Europe for most of the middle ages.

Then there were the behind-the-scenes women, from just about every king's mother or wife in Byzantium having her nephew's nose cut off up to Princess Sophie of Hanover, who arranged enough royal marriages to guarantee the survival of hemophilia into the modern era.

P.S., to those neo-hippies who think matriarchy is as bad as patriarchy and poly is the real way to go, remember that before the Jews started putting limits on things, "poly" meant that the King had a harem of hundreds of wives guarded by eunuchs. Polygyny is common all over world history, but polyandry only exists (outside of San Francisco) in tribes on the edge of survival, and then only in special circumstances. (For example, some Inuit tribes make the groom's younger brother into a "junior husband" in years when there's not enough whale fat to feed the usual number of nursing women and babies. Not exactly the free-wheeling love fest the Ren Faire/Burning Man crossover crowd imagines.) If you can make it work, good for you--but don't try to tell me it's "natural" or "pagan."