This open veneration of women’s natural rhythms and monthly flow contrasts strangely with the secret shame and ‘curse’ they later became. But when God was a woman, all women and all things feminine enjoyed a higher status than has ever been since in most countries of the world. Where the Goddess held sway, women did so too. Does this mean then that there was ever a time when women ruled men – when the natural and unquestioned form of government was matriarchy?
‘The age of queens’ – what is the historical truth behind the persistent myths of women holding power over men? Approaches to this question have been dogged by historians’ search for societies where women had total control, and where the men were downgraded and oppressed as an inevitable consequence – for a mirror-image of every patriarchy, in fact. Not surprisingly, this process of going backwards through the looking glass has failed to produce any concrete results. Another will o’ the wisp was the conviction of nineteenth-century scholars that matriarchy had once been a universal stage in world culture, when, the argument ran, as human society emerged from animal promiscuity, women succeeded in bringing about matriarchy through the defeat of their lustful males. In the social order thus created, woman held primacy at every level from human to divine, and the excluded males, uncivilized and violent, lurked about on the fringes of each individual ‘gynocracy’ plotting furious revenge. For matriarchy was only a stage of human ascent towards civilization. Ultimately (and quite logically to the mind of the male historian) the males contrived to overthrow matriarchy and institute patriarchy, the ultimate stage of civilization and its finest flower.20
Feminist historians could hardly be expected to take all this in the missionary position. Simone de Beauvoir explosively put the boot in as early as 1949:
The Golden Age of woman is only a myth . . . Earth Mother, Goddess – she was no fellow creature in his eyes; it was beyond the human realm that her power was confirmed, and she was therefore outside that realm. Society has always been male; political power has always been in the hands of men.21
Recent orthodoxy dismisses any idea of a primeval rule of women, stressing that the myth of women in power is nothing but a useful tool for justifying the domination of men.
But in the nature of things, matriarchy could not be a system of political rule like that developed later by men, since patriarchy evolved subsequently and from previously unknown ideological roots. Nor can we reasonably look for any one universal system in a world whose societies were developing at such a wildly divergent rate that one might have stone, iron, pottery or village organization some 30,000 years ahead of one another. To return to our indisputable mass of evidence both on the Goddess and on the social systems of which she was the prop and pivot, ‘matriarchy’ is better understood as a form of social organization which is woman-centred, substantially egalitarian, and where it is not considered unnatural or anomalous for women to hold power and to engage in all the activities of the society alongside the men. On that definition, in the 4000 years or so between the emergence of the first civilizations and the coming of the One God (as Buddha, Christ or Allah), matriarchies abounded; and even societies clearly under the rule of men displayed strong matriarchal features in the form of freedoms since lost and never regained by the vast number of women in the state of world ‘advancement’ that we know today.
What were these freedoms? The commandment carved on the base of the giant statue of the Egyptian king Rameses II in the fourteenth century B.C. is quite uncompromising on the first: ‘See what the Goddess-Wife says, the Royal Mother, the Mistress of the World.’22
Women held power to which man habitually deferred.
As women, they ‘were’ the Goddess on earth, as her representative or descendant, and little distinction was made between her sacred and secular power – the Greek historian Herodotus describing the real-life reign of the very down-to-earth Queen Sammuramat (Semiramis), who ruled Assyria for forty-two years during which she irrigated the whole of Babylon and led military campaigns as far as India, interchangeably calls her ‘the daughter of the Goddess’ and ‘the Goddess’ herself. As this indicates, the power of the Goddess was inherited, passed from mother to daughter in a direct line. A man only became king when he married the source of power; he did not hold it in his own right. So in the eighteenth dynasty of the Egyptian monarchy the Pharaoh Thutmose I had to yield the throne on the death of his wife to his teenage daughter Hatshepsut, even though he had two sons. The custom of royal blood and the right to rule descending in the female line occurs in many cultures: among the Natchez Indians of the Gulf of Mexico, the high chief of Great Sun only held rank as the son of the tribe’s leading elder, the White Woman. When she died, her daughter became the White Woman and it was her son who next inherited the throne, thus retaining the kingly title and descent always in the female line. This tradition was still evident in Japan at the time of the Wei dynasty (A.D. 220–264) when the death of the priestess-queen Himeko led to a serious outbreak of civil war that ended only with the coronation of her eldest daughter.
The power of the queen was at its most extraordinary in Egypt, where for thousands of years she was ruler, goddess, wife of the god, the high priestess and a totem object of veneration all in one. Hatshepsut who like Sammuramat fought at the head of her troops, also laid claim to masculine power and prerogative, and was honoured accordingly in a form of worship that lasted for 800 years after her death: ‘Queen of the north and south, Son of the Sun, golden Horus, giver of years, Goddess of dawns, mistress of the world, lady of both realms, stimulator of all hearts, the powerful woman’.23 But the frequent appearance of the queen as ruler, not simply consort, was by no means confined to the Egyptian dynasties. Queenhood was so common among the Celtic Britons that the captured warriors brought in triumph before Claudius in A.D. 50 totally ignored the Roman emperor and offered their obeisance instead to his empress, Agrippina. Perhaps the most interesting of all, however, is Deborah, leader of the Israelites around 1200 B.C.; in Judges 4 and 5, she holds evident and total command over the male leaders of the tribe, whose dependency on her is so total that their general, Barak, will not even take to the field of battle without her. Early Jewish history is rich in such powerful and distinguished women:
A Jewish princess? Judith, who saved the Jewish people; she flirted with the attacking general, drank him under the table; then she and her maid (whose name is not in the story) whacked off his head, stuck it in a picnic basket and escaped back to the Jewish camp. They staked his head high over the gate, so that when his soldiers charged the camp they were met by their general’s bloody head, looming; and ran away as fast as their goyishe little feet could run. Then Judith set her maid free and all the women danced in her honor. That’s a Jewish princess.24
Nor was female power and privilege at this time confined to princesses and queens. From all sides there is abundant evidence that ‘when agriculture replaced hunting . . . and society wore the robes of matriarchy’, all women ‘achieved a social and economic importance’,25 and enjoyed certain basic rights:
Women owned and controlled money and properly.
In Sparta, the women owned two-thirds of all the land. Arab women owned flocks which their husbands merely pastured for them, and among the Monomini Indians, individual women are recorded as owning 1200 or 1500 birch bark vessels in their own right. Under the astonishingly egalitarian Code of Hammurabi which became law in Babylon about 1700 B.C., a woman’s dowry was given not to her husband but to her, and together with any land or property she had it remained her own and passed on her death to her children. In Egypt, a woman’s financial independence of her husband was such that if he borrowed money from her, she could even charge him