How trade routes created the Patriarchy
Back in 7000 BCE until 1700 BCE, Old Europe, or Neolithic Europe as it was known, was a culture that held women and womb health as sacred. That's a history of 5300 years of humans who led their lives in worship to women and nature! Can you imagine?
Not only that, but every human, no matter age or gender, was respected equally.
So when and why did this change? How did we go from celebrating to burning women at the stake?
Our entire world changed when the trade routes opened from Europe all the way to Russia with the crossing of the Russian steppe. With the invention of trade along these route came the opportunity for kingdoms to grow by conquering new territory.
These once egalitarian spaces were exposed to wars and patriarchal domination over material goods and power. With this passage of people from one side of the world to another, came Christianity. If you watch the show Vikings, in the 6th Season you can follow along with the characters as they explore this exact time period.
The Last Kingdom also demonstrates this shift from the old gods to Christianity. Over time, the power dynamic from priesthoods who honed power and authority over the people replaced the divinity of women. Instead of goddess and the cycles of nature, life’s celebrations were replaced with an imaginary man who lived high in the sky. Sky daddy.
As a result, the power of women and the matriarchy became a threat to this way of life and so men in positions of politics and religion suppressed anything feminine. This included things like worshipping goddesses, respecting the female body, honouring Mother Earth, etc. Any woman working with herbs, or midwifery, or dancing with the faeries under the moonlight was in danger.
I really love how Dr. Page, author of The Healing Power of the Sacred Woman unpacks this all at the beginning of her book which totally inspired me to contextualize the work I do with her writing.
In reference to this shift, she says
"It is my hypothesis that they knew women possessed powers far more potent than physical strength, financial wealth, and man-made laws. These forces included fearlessness in the face of death, the ability to purify and transform, the power to create life, the gift of inspiration, and most importantly the power of love. In essence, these qualities mirrored those of the Great Mother, who had been worshipped for tens of thousands of years before the appearance of the patriarchy."
She also notes, "Such {feminine} concepts did not completely disappear with the appearance of the patriarchy but were repackaged and delivered by teachers, such as Jesus Christ, who also spoke about love and resurrection into an eternal life. However, by the early part of the first millenium CE, religious dogma had created so many hoops a person had to jump through before reaching such an enlightened state that the sense of a loving deity who truly offered unconditional love had become a far distant memory". So even the feminine energy of the love of Jesus and God became pretty unattainable
By 500 CE, most people had succumbed to the patriarchal dogma, women and men reprogrammed, a collective amnesia of what it was to be a sacred woman. Women and men lost connection to themselves, the power of women and the sacredness of nature. Replaced with a drive for power and greed and male advancement, built upon the backs of women and marginalized groups of people with the more recent development of capitalism.
This historical retelling of how the fuck we got to this place in society is important. It reveals to us that our desires to return to nature and celebrate our feminine ways our the female body are legit. We did this for thousands of years, 5300 of them, if not longer. There is a deep and reverent history of sacred women and it’s up to us to ignite the flame and return to the old ways, as much as we can, with a foot in both worlds.
