Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist, anthropologist, and professor for Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1845.
Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric matriarchy, or Das Mutterrecht, the title of his seminal 1861 book Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the Ancient World. Bachofen assembled documentation demonstrating that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality, and decorum. He postulated an archaic "mother-right" within the context of a primeval Matriarchal religion or Urreligion.
Bachofen became an important precursor of 20th-century theories of matriarchy, such as the Old European culture postulated by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and the field of feminist theology and "matriarchal studies" in 1970s feminism.
Biography
Born into a wealthy Basel family active in the silk industry and attended the service of the French Reformed Church in Basel. After having attended the Gymnasium, Bachofen studied in Basel and in Berlin under August Boeckh, Karl Ferdinand Ranke and Friedrich Carl von Savigny as well as in Göttingen. After completing his doctorate in Basel, he studied for another two years in Paris, London and Cambridge. He was called to the Basel chair for Roman law in 1841. In 1842 he travelled to Rome accompanied by his father to according to him, see his spiritual homeland with his own eyes. Having returned to Basel, he was called to the appellate court and his next book on roman law received the acclaim of the academics. He would also become elected into the Grand Council of Basel. He retired from his professorship in 1844, after in the local press it was suggested the wealth of his family would have helped him assume the job at the university. In 1845 he also quit from the Grand Council. As a judge he would stay for twenty-five years and resign after his marriage to Louise Bachofen-Burckhardt. In 1848 he undertook a second journey to Rome in which he witnessed the Roman revolution, changed his research focus from the classical antiquity but the early antiquity. In 1851–1852 he travelled to Greece, Magna Graecia, and Etruria. He published most of his works as a private scholar.
Personal life
His mother Valeria Merian Bachofen died in 1856 but he kept living in the same house as his father. It was the same house which would become the seat of the Civil Register of Basel between 1962 and 1983 and part of the Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig in the 1980s. In 1865, he married the at the time twenty five-years old Louise Bachofen-Burckhardt from a noble family of Basel. He would buy a house at the square before the Minster of Basel and a son was born. Louise Bachofen Burckhardt would live in the house at the Minster Square after her husband would die in 1877. Johann Jakob Bachofen is buried at the Wolfgottesacker cemetery in Basel. The tomb was sculptured by Richard Kissling.
Das Mutterrecht
Bachofen's 1861 Das Mutterrecht proposed four phases of cultural evolution which absorbed each other: Hetaerism: a wild nomadic 'tellurian' [= chthonic or earth-centered] phase, characterised by him as communistic and polyamorous, whose dominant deity he believed to have been an earthy proto Aphrodite. Das Mutterecht: a matriarchal 'lunar' phase based on agriculture, characterised by him by the emergence of chthonic mystery cults and law. Its dominant deity was an early Demeter. The Dionysian: a transitional phase when earlier traditions were masculinised as patriarchy began to emerge. Its dominant deity was the original Dionysos. The Apollonian: the patriarchal 'solar' phase, in which all trace of the Matriarchal and Dionysian past was eradicated and modern civilisation emerged.
Reception
There was little initial reaction to Bachofen's theory of cultural evolution, largely because of his impenetrable literary style, but eventually, along with furious criticism, the book inspired several generations of ethnologists, social philosophers, and even writers: Lewis Henry Morgan; Friedrich Engels, who drew on Bachofen for The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; Thomas Mann; Jane Ellen Harrison, who was inspired by Bachofen to devote her career to mythology; Walter Benjamin; Carl Jung; Erich Fromm; Robert Graves; Rainer Maria Rilke; Joseph Campbell; Otto Gross; Erich Neumann and opponents such as Julius Evola. In 1930s his work was acclaimed by several prominent academics in the German speaking world.