As all religious systems are believed to represent growths, and to indicate a result of the degree of progress attained, it is evident that had a religion appeared at this early age which was capable of elevating women from a condition of degradation, as indicated by the early state described by Bachofen it could not have been the result of natural development, but, on the contrary, must have proceeded directly from a divine source; in which event it would doubtless have remained upon the earth still further to aid development and bless the race. Such, however, was not the outcome of this remarkable but premature religion; for it is asserted by this writer that what women gained by religion they afterward lost through the same source—that in Greece, the loss first came through the oracle of Apollo, which declared the father to be the real parent of the child.
Bachofen assures us, also, that through the Bacchanalian excesses which followed the dominion of males in Greece, hetairism was again restored, and through this means gynecocracy reappeared. From this it would seem that although under the earliest stage of hetairism women were without power and wholly under the control of men, with the return, at a later age, of a like state of society, the basis was at once laid for female supremacy.
It is evident that Herr Bachofen’s confusion arises from a misconception of the early importance of women. Although perhaps more than any other writer upon this subject he has been able to recognize the true bias of the female constitution, yet, as he has mistaken the relative positions of women and men at the outset of the human career, and as he has been unable to perceive the previously developed influences which governed these relations, he has failed to furnish a satisfactory solution of the problem of the early supremacy of women, which from the evidence adduced, not only by the traditions and mythologies of past ages, but by later developments in ethnology, may not be doubted.
Prior to the appearance of mankind on the earth, had there been developed within the female no higher element than that which characterized the male, and had she appeared on the scene of human action as the willing and natural tool of her less-developed male mate, it is plain that she would have been unable to elevate herself to the position of dignity which Bachofen assigns her, and which, until a comparatively recent period in the human career, she had occupied.