Have Women Ruled Before?

Matricentric, essentially, means “centered on the mother.” Frequently, the word “matriarchal” is given as a synonym to matricentric. Also “gynocratic.”

Matricentric culture is one that is organized around the needs, values and activities of women and their children. A universal aspect of matricentric culture is matrilineal descent, “A kinship system in which descent is traced through mothers and their blood relatives.”

• Matricentric Family: A two-generational family in which the mother is the key figure, the father’s position being casual, temporary, or otherwise peripheral.
• Matriarchal Family:

1. A family organized with the mother or senior mother as the formal and functional head, especially when this is according to custom.
2. A family that is ruled by a senior woman and organized according to matrilineal descent, especially when this is according to custom. Matrilocal residence is sometimes also an expected feature of a matriarchal family.

• Matriarchalism:

1. Belief that in a social unit — such as a state, business, or family — a female should lead, except, perhaps, where no willing or qualified female is available or where that social unit is made up of men only.
2. Implementation of such a belief in practice.

Four different types of matriarchies.

• matricentric: a culture that highlights the maternal through symbolism and elevates the maternal above male. It is assymetrical but does not involve dominance. It is a variation of
• gender complementarity: Here core values are placed on gender reciprocity, where genders are seen as drastically different but complementary. Cooperation is emphasized. Examples are the Ashanti, the Dahomey and the pre colonial Ibos in Nigeria.
• gender triviality: here gender is made insignificant through gender blindness. These cultures value both autonomy and sharing/nurturing. Examples are Vanatinai Islanders of New Guinea, Aka of West Congo and Akanabe of Japan.
• gender unity: (this is the one Vaughan studied most) These cultures minimize symbolic sex differences by incorporating both. Equality is fostered in the unity of the two sexes. Her main example is the Lahu people of the Tibetan highlands near China. They have twin gods depicted as joined entities Both men and women share identity. They are defined as adults only when they marry and become 2 entities in one. Singles are shamed. The husband is the midwife at the birth. Both man and woman are called the ‘master of the household’. There are 3 pairs of village leader couples. Parental spirits are also seen in pairs. They also have a paired male and female Buddha.”

Traditional tribal lifestyles as “more often gynocratic than not, and…never patriarchal,” and refers to American Indian social systems as based on “ritual, spirit-centered, woman-focused worldviews”: Some distinguishing features of a woman-centered social system include free and easy sexuality and wide latitude in personal styles. This latitude means that a diversity of people, including gay males and lesbians, are not denied and are in fact likely to be accorded honor. Also likely to be prominent in such systems are nurturing, pacifist, and passive males (as defined by western minds) and self-defining, assertive, decisive women. In many tribes, the nurturing male constitutes the ideal adult model for boys while the decisive, self-directing female is the ideal model to which girls aspire. The organization of individuals into a wide-ranging field of allowable styles creates the greatest possible social stability because it includes and encourages a variety of personal expression for the good of the group.

In tribal gynocratic systems a multitude of personality and character types can function positively within the social order because the systems are focused on social responsibility rather than on privilege, and on the realities of the human constitution rather than on denial-based social fictions to which human beings are compelled to conform by powerful individuals with the society.

Tribal gynocracies prominently feature even distribution of goods among all members of the society on the grounds that First Mother enjoined cooperation and sharing on all her children.

One of the major distinguishing characteristics of gynocratic cultures is the absence of punitiveness as a means of social control. Another is the inevitable presence of meaningful concourse with supernatural beings.

Among gynocractic or gynocentric tribal peoples the welfare of the young is paramount, the complementary nature of all life forms is stressed, and the centrality of powerful women to social well-being is unquestioned. (Introduction, pp. 2-3)

“For it is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron-Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new, heroic master of gods, leaving to the native nature powers the character only of darkness–to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic orders of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such, without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with an ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword.”

“As a supreme Creator who creates from her own substance [Inanna] is the primary goddess of the Old European pantheon. In this she contrasts with the Indo-European Earth-Mother, who is the impalpable sacred earth-spirit and is not in herself a creative principle; only through the interaction of the male sky-god does she become pregnant.”

• “The Proto- or Early Indo-Europeans, whom I have labelled “Kurgan” people, arrived from the east, from southern Russia, on horseback. Their first contact with the borderland territories of Old Europe in the Lower Dnieper region and west of the Black Sea began around the middle of the 5th millennium B. C. A continuous flow of influences and people into east-central Europe was initiated which lasted for two millennia. …”

“The materials of the Volga-Ural [region] and beyond the Caspian Sea prior to the 7th millennium B.C. are, so far, not sufficient for ethnographic interpretation. More substantive evidence emerges only around 5000 B C. We can begin to speak of “Kurgan people” when they conquered the steppe…north of the Black Sea around 4500 B.C. …”

“No weapons except implements for hunting are found among grave goods in Europe until c. 4500-4300 B.C., nor is there evidence of hilltop fortification of Old European settlements. The gentle agriculturalists, therefore, were easy prey to the warlike Kurgan horsemen who swarmed down upon them. These invaders were armed with thrusting and cutting weapons; long dagger-knives, spears, halberds, and bows and arrows. …”

“The Kurgan tradition became manifest in Old European territories during three waves of infiltration: I at c. 4400-4300 B.C., II at c. 3500 B. C., and III soon after 3000 B.C. …”

“The livelihood and mobility of the Kurgan people depended on the domesticated horse, in sharp contrast to the Old European agriculturalists to whom the horse was unknown. Pastoral economy, growing herds of large animals, horse riding, and the need for male strength to control the animals must have contributed to the transition from matrism to armored patrism in southern Russia and beyond at the latest around 5000 B.C.” (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 352)

• “The discontinuity of Varna, Karanovo, Vinca, and Lengyel cultures in their main territories, and the large scale population shifts to the north and northwest, are indirect evidence of a catastrophe of such proportions that cannot be explained by possible climatic change, land exhaustion, or epidemics…. Direct evidence of the incursion of horse-riding warriors is found, not only in single burials of males under barrows, but in the emergence of a whole complex of Kurgan cultural traits: hilltop settlements, the presence of horses, the predominance of a pastoral economy, signs of violence, and patriarchy, and religious symbols that emphasize a sun cult. These elements are tightly knit within the social, economic, and religious structure of the Kurgan culture.” (Gimbutas, Marija (1991) The Civilization of the Goddess. Harper: S. F. p. 364)

“Before, all the processes of culture were connected with the cycles of nature; in death, tribal man simply returned to the Great Mother. But when civilized man sets up walls between himself and the forest, and when he sets up his personal name against the stars, he ensures that the now-isolated ego will cry out in painful recognition of its complete alienation in the fear of death.”

p. 208.

“From Neolithic villages to organized state, from gardening to irrigation farming, from inconography to writing, from disorganized raids to institutionalized warfare, from custom to law, from matriarchal religious authority to patriarchal political power, from mystery to history; the transformation was so complete that the past itself was reinvented to create a new foundation for a radically altered present. Now that we ourselves are moving into a radically altered present, it is small wonder that the patriarchal image of prehistory is disintegrating. The movement into the future always involves the revisioning of the past.”

“The matriarchal principle is that of blood relationships as the fundamental and indestructible tie, of the equality of all men, of the respect for human life and of love. The patriarchal principle is that the ties between man and wife, between ruler and ruled, take precedence over ties of blood. It is the principle of order and authority, of obedience and hierarchy.”