The Triumph Of The Patriarchy
The following is another extract from the book ‘The Great Cosmic Mother – Rediscovering the Religions of the Earth’ by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor: ‘The triumph of patriarchy in the Bronze Age corresponded with the development of heavy metals, and their connection with professional warfare. Metallurgy, when it first appeared, was a highly ritualised and sacred art under guardianship of the Goddess, with strong taboos attached to it. Metals were light – gold, silver, tin, copper – and were mostly shaped into jewellery, ornaments, ceremonial vessels. Undoubtedly, the mystery transformation of running hot metals into ornaments and tools, using fire, moulds and ovens, was first developed by women incidental to their experimentation with pottery.
‘Once developed into a distinct art, mining and smelting seem to have been the special tasks of men who lived apart from women, under religious restriction or taboo. The only male figures found on Cretan seals were tiny bodies of smiths, scratched beside the larger figure of the Goddess. Sacred metallurgy served the Neolithic Goddess and the people wisely, but in the Bronze Age the ritual controls were broken; metallurgy passed into the male sphere entirely, becoming a secular industry (or a religious industry in service to the God of War). This opened the Earth up for the first time to violent exploitation, including struggles between male groups for control over the earth’s ores.
‘Some evidence suggests, as John G. Jackson wrote, that iron-smelting began in central Africa.’ According to Merlin Stone, the process of mining and smelting iron ore was discovered by the Aryan Hittites, circa 2500 B.C. We don’t know. The significant fact is that, compared with the copper, gold, and bronze of the Goddess cultures, iron was a much stronger and more abundant metal; in particular it provided more efficient, heavier weapons. The Aryan people kept their iron-smelting process secret for many centuries, as on it depended their technological supremacy and sole power over the more culturally and practically developed matriarchal peoples. The Indo-Europeans, for example, had no written language of their own, but adopted the script of the peoples they conquered. In this adapted script, the sign for ‘man,’ ‘iron,’ and ‘Mars’ – the War God – are the same. Further, the Goddess people used the wheeled wagon (their invention), pulled by a donkey, for daily use and trade; the Anatolian Hittites and later Near Eastern warrior-people were the first to harness up horses, turning wagons into war chariots.
‘T. C. Lethbridge in ‘Witches’ speculates that it was the development of metallurgy as a male art that brought the end of the Mother Goddess cultures. Larger and heavier metal weapons radically changed men’s experience and techniques of war, giving advantage to the emerging ‘professional warrior’ – and changing warfare from a defensive tribal skill to a whole new game stressing aggressive offence, and the spoils of victory. The new weapons mounted on wheeled wagons also allowed war to be carried on much further from home. With this war became a speciality of roaming mercenaries, while the women remained at the home village maintaining the culture.’
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This article is a chapter from ‘War And Peace Between Nations.
If it has whetted your appetite to read more, please follow the link below:
‘War And Peace Between Nations’
