or, how i learned to stop worrying and hate fake history written by fascists
or, you can’t fool me, it’s enemy feminisms all the way down
i’ve been thinking about this for a while, and picking up pieces of the story here and there, but i haven’t had the time (or, to be real about it, the languages) to do the deep dive it needs. so here’s what i know, in hopes that others will run further with it.
one of the most lastingly popular narratives to come out of the cultural feminist sphere1 is the idea of an ancient matriarchal culture, suppressed by later patriarchal oppressors. this currently appears in all kinds of forms: contemporary “noble savage” depictions of indigenous cultures of turtle island; historically dubious accounts of the medieval and early modern european/euro-colonial anti-“witchcraft” moral panics2; and, above all, grand presentations of the prehistory of europe and west asia, or/and of “indo-european cultures”.
that last one is not only central to a widely popularized cultural feminist “common sense”, but central to most contemporary paganisms. at its core, it holds that prehistoric goddess-worshiping societies were supplanted by patriarchal invaders (either physical or ideological) who brought with them monotheism as well as misogyny.
leaving aside the straightforward critiques of the basically laughable idea that there was a common culture across the vast geography involved in these claims – and that it would be reconstructable if there were3 – this simply doesn’t hold up to any detailed scrutiny. but that’s not what i’m interested in here; and neither is the narrative’s transparent recapitulation of the christian myth of the Fall from Eden. where i’m headed is towards the history of that narrative, the history of the fantasy itself. this is all still preamble.
frequently, but not invariably, this narrative of indo-european prehistory turns explicitly anti-jewish. take, for example, the version presented by z budapest, founder of Dianic Wicca and one of the most influential figures in the history of feminist paganism. at a 1976 Women’s Spirituality Conference in boston, she declared “the Jewish religion began as a backlash to the goddess religion”.4 another presenter at the same conference, mary daly, a post-Catholic theologian who played a similarly central role in women’s spiritual movements outside the pagan sphere, held a similar position.
if that sounds like a feminist version of the openly anti-jewish strains of “reconstruction”-oriented paganism – from slavic “native faith” groups to U.S. Odinism; often though not always aligned with neo-Nazi politics – it ought to, because that’s exactly what it is. and that’s what this piece is about.
when you look to see what sources get cited in the more academically-oriented versions of this tall tale, there are a few names that show up constantly. two are what you could call metahistorians of religion – mircea eliade and georges dumézil – both inclined to massive generalizations based on minimal evidence, and both actively connected to the early/mid-20th-century fascist far right (and its Traditionalist/Perennialist esoteric wing, inhabited by the likes of julius evola and rené guénon). they still turn up as central authorities on “indo-european cultures”, despite decades of debunking.
the third is more important by far, since she was a very well-regarded archeologist of eastern europe: marija gimbutas.
gimbutas, specifically, is the person most responsible for the feminist versions of this narrative. her “goddess” trilogy (The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989); The Civilization of the Goddess (1991)) forms the defining canon of the myth of a peaceable, egalitarian, matristic “Old European” culture destroyed by warlike, hierarchical, patriarchal “Indo-European” invaders. that’s widely known and clearly acknowledged, by those who embrace gimbutas’ ideas as well as those who critique them
what’s almost never mentioned, however, is that gimbutas’ turn to the reconstruction of matristic prehistory happened alongside a second major project of hers. in 1973, as she was writing her first goddess book, gimbutas co-founded The Journal of Indo-European Studies (JIES). her co-founder, and the journal’s publisher, was roger pearson, one of the most prominent Nazi intellectuals (not neo-Nazi – he supported the original version) of the 20th century u.s. JIES was published through pearson’s Institute for the Study of Man, which also published more explicitly eugenicist and white supremacist publications like Mankind Quarterly (now put out by the white nationalist Human Diversity Foundation).
but alignment with Nazis wasn’t new to gimbutas.
this is where the deep dive i haven’t done would come in. i hope someone has, or will, hit the archives to trace how gimbutas’ far-right politics weaves through her entire academic career, from her well-regarded archeological work on bronze age eastern europe to her dubious “matristic” pseudohistories. what i can offer you is some very basic stuff, taken from her wikipedia entry.
gimbutas was from a prominent lithuanian nationalist family, raised in the 1920s-30s at the heart of the folklore-oriented nationalist cultural movement backed by the newly-founded lithuanian state. lithuanian nationalists generally sided with the Nazis in WWII (see, for example, the much-evaded history of filmmaker jonas mekas, and the revisionist whitewashing attempts by the contemporary lithuanian state) – and gimbutas was no exception. she and her family made no move to emigrate when the Nazis occupied lithuania, but when the soviet army threatened to dislodge the Nazis, they left for the heartland of the Reich – vienna, and then bavaria. having received her master’s degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Vilnius, she proceeded to do her doctoral studies at the University of Tübingen, the crown jewel of Nazi academia. she is quoted as saying of this period: “life just twisted me like a little plant, but my work was continuous in one direction.” in the 1950s, like many other Nazi intellectuals, she emigrated to the u.s. and found a comfortable place first at Harvard, and then at UCLA.
so what we have here, at the source of the fantasy of primordial “matristic” culture, is a lifelong Nazi-aligned scholar. it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the narrative she spent decades of scholarly credibility to promote reflects the cultural and political priorities of her fascism. or that it is so often interwoven with the bioessentialism that unites anti-trans organizing and eugenics alike.
that’s all.
there’s no conclusion here besides this:
stay the fuck away from these fantasies. primeval matriarchy narratives have the TERF shit and the anti-jewish stuff baked into their premises – even when people are trying to do it within jewishness or within trans contexts. the real history’s a lot more interesting, a lot more complicated, and a lot more fun to work with.
- i’m using the useful taxonomy that was consolidated in the 1980s-90s, in which “liberal feminism” aims at women’s equality within a structurally unchanged society, in contrast to “radical feminism”, which declares women’s oppression the single source of all forms of oppression, and “socialist feminism”, which places opposition to both capitalism and patriarchy at the center of its project. “cultural feminism” is the strain of radical feminism which, in ellen willis’ words, sees “the primary goal of feminism as freeing women from the imposition of so-called ‘male values,’ and creating an alternative culture based on ‘female values.'” [“Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism” in Social Text 9/10, 1984] it’s the feminist lineage at the heart of TERFism, with a deep commitment to a bioessentialist understanding of gender and a profoundly christian framing of womanhood as Original Sinlessness. ↩︎
- for fucks sake, read norman cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons, so you can tell when someone like sylvia federici (if you insist on reading a racist TERF) is making a solid point, and when she’s just riffing on the thoroughly debunked fantasies of margaret murray, étienne-léon de lamothe, and other equally unreliable writers. ↩︎
- manvir singh has a recent article in The New Yorker that gives (without quite naming it directly) the solid argument against all such pretenses. ↩︎
- as reported – though not criticized in any way – in the boston area feminist paper Sojourner (1:9, may 1976). and i guess i need to specifically say: historically speaking, this is garbage. there’s plenty of misogynist fuckery in judaism, and plenty of fascinating traces of female divinities and ritual practitioners, but none of it’s got to do with this fantasy narrative. ↩︎