Johann Jakob Bachofen
For Bachofen, myths and tomb symbols were memories of forgotten stages of culture: behind the father-centred law of Greece and Rome lay an older “mother right”, with descent through the mother and cults of earth and night. Modern anthropology rejects a universal matriarchal stage.
Placement
Swiss jurist and historian of antiquity in Basel: reading myths, tomb symbols and legal customs, “Das Mutterrecht” (1861) proposed that an age of “mother right”, with descent and religion centred on women, preceded the father-centred order of Greek and Roman law.
Key ideas
- Mother right
- Myth as historical source
- Symbolism of tombs
- Stages of cultural history
Influence
Influenced 4
Friedrich Engels
influenced
Engels drew on Bachofen’s Mother Right (1861) in The Origin of the Family (1884), calling the overthrow of mother right the ‘world-historical defeat of the female sex’. F. Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884), preface to the 4th ed. (1891); J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861)
Evidence: AI draft
Friedrich Engels › 1820–1895
Alfred Baeumler
influenced
Baeumler, later a Nazi philosopher, presented Bachofen as mythologist of Romanticism and of a chthonic world before reason (1926); Thomas Mann criticised it as reactionary (Pariser Rechenschaft, 1926). A. Baeumler, “Bachofen der Mythologe der Romantik”, introduction to M. Schröter (ed.), Der Mythus von Orient und Occident (1926); T. Mann, Pariser Rechenschaft (1926)
Evidence: AI draft
Alfred Baeumler › 1887–1968
Walter Benjamin
influenced
In ‘Johann Jakob Bachofen’ (written 1935, printed 1954) Benjamin set out Bachofen’s matriarchal prehistory and its rival readings, from Engels to Klages. W. Benjamin, “Johann Jakob Bachofen” (written 1935 in French for the Nouvelle Revue Française, printed 1954)
Evidence: AI draft
Walter Benjamin › 1892–1940
Erich Fromm
influenced ✓
Fromm read Bachofen’s mother right as the image of a society built on unconditional maternal love, a counterweight to patriarchal bourgeois order (‘Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der Mutterrechtstheorie’, 1934). E. Fromm, “Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der Mutterrechtstheorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3 (1934); J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Erich Fromm › 1900–1980
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Marianne Weber
criticised by
Marianne Weber rejected Bachofen’s mother-right as a universal original stage: matrilineal and patrilineal descent could exist side by side (Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung, 1907). Marianne Weber, Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (1907), ch. 1; E. Höbenreich, “In the Red Light of Emotion”, Rivista di Diritto Romano 5 (2005)
Evidence: AI draft
Marianne Weber › 1870–1954
Works
- 1861Mother Right
Drawing on myths, legends and legal customs from Lycia and Crete to Egypt and India, the book proposes a sequence of cultural stages from unregulated sexual life through a religious “gynaecocracy” (rule of women) to the paternal law of Rome.
Position
Bachofen is on the map because of the long and contradictory reception of “Das Mutterrecht” (1861). Reading myths, legends, tomb symbols and legal customs as historical sources that preserve the memory of forgotten stages of culture, he proposed a sequence: an original “hetaerism” of unregulated sexual life, then a religiously grounded “gynaecocracy” in which descent was traced through the mother and the cults of earth and night prevailed, and finally the paternal principle of light and law that triumphed in Rome and in Apollonian religion. For Bachofen the last stage was the higher one; the earlier stages were not a lost paradise. In ethnology, Lewis Henry Morgan (on the Iroquois, 1851) and John F. McLennan (Primitive Marriage, 1865) had described descent through women independently; Morgan drew on Bachofen’s “work of vast research” in “Ancient Society” (1877), and Engels combined both in “The Origin of the Family” (1884), where he called the overthrow of mother right the “world-historical defeat of the female sex”. Erich Fromm and Walter Benjamin wrote on him in the 1930s, the circle around Ludwig Klages and the Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler made him a herald of a mythical, anti-rational world view, and parts of the women’s movement later saw in him evidence of a matriarchal prehistory. Anthropology and archaeology today reject the idea of a universal matriarchal stage; Bachofen is read as a pioneer of the study of myth and symbol and as a document of nineteenth-century ideas about gender (see “Context & critique”).
Life & context
Johann Jakob Bachofen was born on 22 December 1815 in Basel into a wealthy family of silk-ribbon manufacturers. He studied law and philology in Basel, in Berlin, where he heard Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and in Göttingen, and continued his studies in Paris and England. In 1841 he became professor of Roman law in Basel, but resigned in 1844 after political attacks; he remained a judge at the Basel court of appeal until 1866. Free of the need to earn a living, he devoted himself to private research and travelled in Italy and Greece, studying tombs, monuments and myths. He married late, in 1865, and lived a retired life in Basel’s patrician society. The young Nietzsche was a guest in his house in the early 1870s. He died in Basel on 25 November 1887.
Further main works
- Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten (1859)
- Das Mutterrecht. Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (1861)
- Die Sage von Tanaquil (1870)
- Antiquarische Briefe (1880–86)
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