The Origins of the Matriarchy

Part II:  It Begins        

In prehistoric times when we were all grouped together in nomadic tribes, men hunted the woolly mammoth. Killing a woolly mammoth is a difficult job, especially when your only weapons are made from rocks and sticks tied together with vines. Yet, despite the difficulties, men were able to hunt and kill enough large game to account for a full forty percent of the tribe's food. The remaining sixty percent came from women, who hunted small game like rabbits and squirrels, fished in streams, ponds and rivers, and gathered nuts, seeds, and eggs.  Anthropological and archaeological evidence suggest because women and men almost equally provided for the tribe's food, they lived in an egalitarian society, equally dividing food and socializing in cooperative ways for the greater good of all.

How the next development happened no one is sure, but somewhere along the line, women realized if they kept the wild turkeys they caught, instead of eating them, they could breed them, and soon have enough captive turkeys that hunting them would no longer be required. Once this notion was well-set, women further discovered the idea of planting and growing crops. Gardens were born, and small though they were, they were enough to cast aside the need for gathering. Fed on the crops women grew and the meat they raised, men no longer had a need to hunt the woolly mammoth.

It is at this point that history changed. Assuming control of the sources of food gave women power over men. We soon gave up the nomadic life and settled into permanent living arrangements with women as the heads of households. 

Civilization was thus born.

Four thousand years ago, the leaders of society in Mesopotamia realized that for the human race to survive, we needed to bring more people into the world every year than we lost through disease, accident or murder.  The Goddess Code was written at roughly the beginning of civilization as a tool to encourage women to  focus the community effort on making and having babies.  The Goddess Code exalts the role of women, as mothers, aunts, grandmothers and nurturing care-givers.  It embraces female affection and warns against the sexual and aggressive appetites of men.  The Goddess Code enacts the word and the spirit of the One True Goddess, above all others before her and certainly above all previous beliefs in male gods.  In the Goddess Code, she is depicted as the loving mother, who nurtures her daughters and penalizes her sons for wayward actions.

Acceptable male behavior is outlined in the code as an express objection of aggression.  Men are to be women's helpers.  They are to guard the home and the family from other male aggressors.  Men fought to protect the home, fought for their families and waged war with other men.  But as historical evidence shows, as with most wars since, women only fought if they so desired.

The Code accepts female aggression, and indeed has led to the rise of many strong female generals in armies all over the world, but as far the Goddess is concerned, male aggression must be controlled and directed for positive benefits.  In story after story, The Goddess Code warns about the dangers of male lust and men's desire for power, wealth and blood.  It outlines the strategies and tactics women were to use to control men.  First, by their innate physical vulnerabilities; second, by their innate physical strength; and third, by their inferior emotional understanding.

In The Goddess Code, men are treated as mere children who are constantly in need of good mothering.  This is the basis of the matriarchy and though it is enacted differently in myriad parts of the world, the oppressions outlined above rarely vary. Men all over the world still wear the strap.  Men all over the world are seen as no more than sperm donors and bodyguards.  And men all over the world live in societies, however different they are from each other, where their ideas, intelligence, and innovations are wasted purely because they do not have a vagina.

By virtue of creating a female Goddess, the early leaders of civilization ensured that men would be held as inferior not only by the women with whom they lived and worked, but by the Divine Power herself.  This  message of oppression, ordained by the Goddess, has been indoctrinated in billions of men over the last four thousand years.  The belief that women and all things considered feminine are to be prized above all masculinity is the core of the matriarchy, which arose from the simple inequities of food procurement.