Matriarchy???

Of course, the real problem is not to be found in any gendered prefix, a mere qualifier of an otherwise stable entity or process, but in the root itself which in this case is the unqualified arch. Back when arch and vault were synonyms of the heavens and not the cover for a tit-for-tat proposition, when folks said "The sky is falling!" they were speaking of snow and the impending onset of winter. Little did they know the protracted global severity which was to follow, even into warmer climes, and that is when the word came to refer to the dick who captained the boat.

So much myth and legend from the West, which means as well "almost by definition" – it is that colloquialised – suggests that the patriarchs emerged in an effort to end matriarchal society. That is, it was a reactionary defense mechanism by the repressed or gelded menfolk who only wanted to raise their own children uncorrupted by guilish female influence: the girls. Even if womb envy is considered a motive force, in fact one anthropologist thinks the mess started with the sex strike by the lady-folk to exert control over the bigger boys, then we should expect the iron age machismiocracy would occur as chthonic, in situ or autonomous uprising (an erection of sorts) from region to region in the form of spontaneous revolution wherever matriarchy prevailed in a very Morgan-Marxesque predictable or tit-for-tat linear progression.

But our own well-coloured histories don't even suggest this. For the most part, the so-called matrifocal neolithic cultures were annihilated not from within but from without, in every case by already formed patriarchal states. No military empire spreads for altruistic motives of liberation – no matter the rationalisations (discrediting excuses representing the immorality of barbarians) given to the folks back home like "they hate us for our freedom, those godless heathen, necrophilic baby-eaters". In fact, it was St. Francis Scott Free, D.O.O.M. (Druidic Order of Marianettes), inventor of colostoscopy who first replied "look in the mirror, asshole!"

I wouldn't say matriarchy has never occured. That would be sexist or misogynist itself suggesting women are incapable of being thugs, in the same way that the blame is placed on alien intervention whenever there is an unexpected archaeological find demonstrating "advanced know-how" among stone age cultures, is ethnocentric at least and misanthropic at most.

Two things the female can do the male cannot is have and then feed children. Once patriarchs like Zeus and Apollo discovered milk-goats, they proposed the theory that the mother is merely a vessel, like a flower pot in which he plants his seed. Of course, the analogies here and throughout western mythology more specifically refer to the taking of boy children from their mother's influence to be initiated into the doctrines of patriarchy, and then sending the girl-brides away from home, essentially to live with the husbands father. It is the same tactic the catholics used when they sent Indian children to missionary boarding schools limiting communication with the folks back home, inclusive of beatings for native linguistic usage. In a sense, we still do this when we send our kids to school (or so-called "care center"), at an ever-earlier age, whereupon they must learn a new language or be cast out with the garbage. Educators today call it "slipping through the cracks in the floor of opportunity".

Even so, matriarchal centralisation would be difficult to acheive in the neolithic cultures we refer to as civilised (Minoan Crete, for example). There is no evidence of police or military. No fortifications. No sign that the priestess held any power like we would ascribe to a hollywood "Indian chief" or historical king. What hollywood labels Queen, going back to Shakespeare and Edmond Spencer, was very often the imposed metaphor on what in the oral traditions (myths and legends or ballads) were called "hostess". In the Ozarks, they would be called "grannies". In the Ewe language of Ghana, they are appropriately called "Dada" – 'mother, nurse, or elder woman' – while grandma would be "mama". The Greeks called them "Herophiles" when referring to the ancients or foreigners still living in the hinterlands – we call them priestess or queen because, after all, who could live without politics and religion and the institutions or sacraments on which they lie?

But this "myth-time" predated marriage and herophilia pertained not to entrapment (aka, the marriage bond or shackle) but free love expressed toward strapping young adventurers. When a hero comes to a permanent stand-still, he is a retiree. There is a reason the snake or vine slithering up a magic wand still gives rise to sexual inuendo more than any pharmaceutical intervention into ones health or lack thereof. The Ozark "Granny" is no reference to age but disposition, particularly in healing wisdom – some girls are just born to it. Likewise, "Crone" may derive from the matrix of Chronus, the dyonesian-like Titan who castrated the regal-grown patriarch with a scythe (a gift from his mother) in ambush (and not the greek god, "Father Time-Piece" who enjoyed a similar fate, and is about to again).

While grandmothers may become tyrranical old bitches, few pay it any mind, but it is always thought unbecoming in a nurse (in any sense). Just like being a dick-head generally grants no man a position of authority; on the contrary they are perceived as assholes and counterfucked as soon as conditions permit. It is power which grants authority, and that is why the powerful are almost always dicks. We've merely got the formula backwards, thinking the reinforcement is the cause of behaviour rather than its nurturing. As Dora Marsden said, civilisation rests on gunpowder (spears, in an earlier day):

Justice and civilisation – abstractions both at best – are not two things but one. Civilisation is rather related to Justice as a special case. It is Justice in limited and secondary application. Basic Justice is coincident with gunpowder.

The maenaides of Greek/Trojan fame could be literally taken as man aids (just as men have been portrayed as props or pillars in more than just the phallic sense – the omphalos or nexus is gender-neutral as everyone has a navel): they were described as "nurses" in early transliterations (which is what Homer did, put oral tradition(al) ballads into writtten verse). If we look to German, we see a historical tie between doctors and daughters, and the medieval term, leech, for healer derives not from the sucking aquatic creature later applied to infections but to the suck itself. A look to Spanish gives another different association or sequence, and that points to milk (leche). The wormy, sucking thing gets its name only after the fact, that being the nurturing process common to all mammals. The fe in female is itself a referent to succor and carry. It is the same fe in fecund and fertility and fare and ferry, meaning to carry like the mutual relation or symbiosis of a snake or vine and a staff (the symbol Mercury stole from the maenaides and Persian pairi and then lost to the american medical association of mainly manly doctors). And now we're back to nurturing, from which we get our common sense of nursing outside the limits of a performance duty as slave to master. But there is also a little fe in fury, which is said to be what happens when you fuck with the ladyfolk. The Greek Furries were three feminine "witches", possibly manifestations of the Wyrd Sisters, who took revenge or festerings upon overzealous patriarchs guilty of felicide, the killing of a cat.

The whole other idea behind feminine guile as the art of seduction, certainly resting behind an anti-archist moral sensibility reacting against subliminal cooptation or even educational programming, making seduction itself a "bad" thing (so even Baudrillard said), an expression or desire for power and authority, may itself rest on the patriarchal institution of marriage, a gift from Egyptian PR men to the goat herders of Greece who, without it, were just too unruly to be proper subjects. Without the association with power, who could complain of seduction? I should think I'd be flattered to be seduced! Amoral seduction is just a personal invitation to party, announced or expressed with as much cosmetic flourish as is necessary to draw the attention, where a wink may run further than any mascara, with nary a thought toward massacre. (Body art is itself no necessary signal or demonstration of anything beyond the expression of a personal or social aesthetic: to imply a transmission, it must stand out lest one is reduced to invisibility.)

Without the bind of oath and ownership, where is there room to charge "infidelity"? Like feudal fealty or military obligation, marriage is the end of free association, and this is so well understood that even the state, devoid of wit as it is, has had to acknowledge it as "common law" to still get revenue from those who choose to stay together, where the aesthetic cosmetic – giving us the slogan "love is bling", er, "blind" – does not wear off quite so readily as one would expect. Without intrusion by the cash register and state, polyamory has been the standard fete.

Crete is known also as the place of the palaces. Pallas itself was said a goddess but means more literally "little maiden" related to pallake "concubine," a consortium outside institutional bounds. It was Persian patriarchs who changed the connection to "beautiful women seducing pious men", detourning their own namesake (peri < Paraika) after the discovery of marriage as institutional subduction and foundation for morality. If we are at all to retain the word "power" in an anarchist or even biological context, it can only refer to mobility and its metabolic maintenance. There is a reason there were no fortifications or armouries or mass graves (necropoli) found on Minoan Crete: they were mobile navigators who got out before the volcano blew. They were not any stage or age (bronze, gold or what-have-you) of civilisation precisely because there were no cities. The Island itself was not a city of palaces, it housed them and they were only stopping points for a seafairing culture. The palace was an entertainment center, where all sorts of intertwinement were possible, lasting only as long as it takes. Another descriptor for this sort of culture is "potlach", and sex is not the issue at all, even when children are.

– see Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion – by Jane Ellen Harrison, 1912

– see also Raw Materials for a Theory of the YoungBoy: Is or is it not a parody? Isn't everything?