Johann Jakob Bachofen

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J. J. Bachofen
J. J. Bachofen
Born22 December 1815
Basel, Switzerland
Died25 November 1887 (aged 71)
Basel, Switzerland
SpouseLouise Bachofen-Burckhardt
Scientific career
FieldsRoman law, anthropology

Johann Jakob Bachofen (22 December 1815 – 25 November 1887) was a Swiss

philologist, anthropologist, and professor of Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1844.[1]

Bachofen is most often connected with his theories surrounding prehistoric

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

matriarchal studies" in 1970s feminism
.

Biography

Born into a wealthy Basel family active in the silk industry[2] and attended the service of the French Reformed Church in Basel.[3] After having attended the Gymnasium,[3] Bachofen studied in Basel and in Berlin[2] under August Boeckh, Karl Ferdinand Ranke and Friedrich Carl von Savigny[4] 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.[2] Having returned to Basel, he was called to the appellate court and his next book on roman law received the acclaim of the academics.[2] He would also become elected into the Grand Council of Basel.[2] 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.[5] In 1845 he also quit from the Grand Council.[5] As a judge he would stay for twenty-five years and resign after his marriage to Louise Bachofen-Burckhardt.[5] 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.[6] In 1851–1852 he travelled to Greece, Magna Graecia, and Etruria.[6] He published most of his works as a private scholar.

Personal life

Tomb of the Bachofen family in the Wolfgottesacker. The statue was sculptured by Richard Kissling

His mother Valeria Merian Bachofen died in 1856 but he kept living in the same house as his father.[7] 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.[8] In 1865, he married the at the time twenty five-years old Louise Bachofen-Burckhardt from a noble family of Basel.[7] He would buy a house at the square before the Minster of Basel and a son was born.[7] Louise Bachofen Burckhardt would live in the house at the Minster Square after her husband would die in 1877.[9] Johann Jakob Bachofen is buried at the Wolfgottesacker cemetery in Basel.[10] The tomb was sculptured by Richard Kissling.[10]

Das Mutterrecht

Bachofen's 1861 Das Mutterrecht proposed four phases of cultural evolution which absorbed each other:

  1. Hetaerism: a wild nomadic 'tellurian' [=
    polyamorous, whose dominant deity he believed to have been an earthy proto Aphrodite
    .
  2. Das Mutterecht: a matriarchal 'lunar' phase based on agriculture, characterised by him by the emergence of
    mystery cults and law. Its dominant deity was an early Demeter
    .
  3. The Dionysian: a transitional phase when earlier traditions were masculinised as patriarchy began to emerge. Its dominant deity was the original
    Dionysos
    .
  4. The Apollonian: the patriarchal 'solar' phase, in which all trace of the Matriarchal and Dionysian past was eradicated and modern civilisation emerged.

Reception

Main article: Matriarchy

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:

mythology; Walter Benjamin; Carl Jung; Erich Fromm; Robert Graves; Rainer Maria Rilke; Joseph Campbell; Otto Gross; Erich Neumann and opponents such as Julius Evola.[citation needed] In 1930s his work was acclaimed by several prominent academics in the German speaking world.[11]

Because of his theoretical commitment to Marxist historiography, Friedrich Engels faulted Bachofen for regarding "religion as the main lever of the world's history" and therefore considered it a "troublesome and not always profitable task to work your way through [his] big volume [i.e. Das Mutterrecht]". Nevertheless, he credited Bachofen with inaugurating research into the history of the family.[12] He summarized Bachofen's views as follows:[13]

"(1) That
hetaerism
";
(2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity;
(3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen's conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);
(4) that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period." (Friedrich Engels, 1891: see link below)

Emile Durkheim credited Bachofen with upsetting the "old conception" that the father must be "the essential element of the family". Before Bachofen, Durkheim claims that "no one had dreamed that there could be a family organization of which the paternal authority was not the keystone".[14]

In contrast to Engels and Durkheim, the American sociologist

familism and individualism" with "imagination". He characterized Bachofen and the other members of this research paradigm, such as J.F. McLennan, L.H. Morgan, E.A. Westermark, and others, as "evolutionary cultists" and considered them to have "destroyed history as a fundamental study in social science" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[15]

Bachofen's actual writings are that matriarchy originated as a rebellion against promiscuity, because of the sexual strains it caused them, to institute matriarchy and monogamy.

As has been noted by Joseph Campbell in Occidental Mythology and others, Bachofen's theories stand in radical opposition to the Aryan origin theories of religion, culture and society, and both Campbell and writers such as Evola have suggested that Bachofen's theories only adequately explain the development of religion among the pre-Aryan cultures of the Mediterranean and the Levant, and possibly Southern Asia, but that a separate, patriarchal development existed among the Aryan tribes which conquered Europe and parts of Asia.[citation needed]

Engels said that Bachofen had proved his theory that Matriarchy was promiscuous, but Bachofen argued the opposite, that Matriarchy introduced monogamy.

Works

See also

References

  1. ISBN 9780520266766
    .
  2. ^
    JSTOR 40462111
    .
  3. ^ a b Stagl, Justin (1990).p.21
  4. ^ Stagl, Justin (1990).p.15
  5. ^ a b c Stagl, Justin (1990).p.12
  6. ^ a b Stagl, Justin (1990).p.13
  7. ^ a b c Stagl, Justin (1990).p.14
  8. ISBN 978-3-905057-07-2
    .
  9. ^ Balzer, Mathias. "Kunstmuseum Basel – Die visionäre Sammlerin Louise Bachofen-Burckhardt". bz Basel (in German). Retrieved 21 September 2022.
  10. ^
    E-Periodica
    . p. 395.
  11. JSTOR 23357881
    .
  12. Charles H. Kerr & Company
    . pp. 14, 16.
  13. ^ Engels, Friedrich (2010). The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Penguin UK. p. 49.
  14. OCLC 1028943316
    .
  15. Harper & Brothers
    . pp. 571–573.

Further reading

External links
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