Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen

First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Printing, 1973. Translated and adapted from Johann Jakob Bachofen: Mutterrecht und Urreligion, a selection edited by Rudolf Marx. Enlarged edition, copyright 1954, Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart (Kröners Taschenausgabe, Vol. 52). “The search for a universal law of history, for an intuitive leap that might at once enable its discoverer to unravel the hitherto mystery-shrouded, was commonplace among. 19th-century philosophical ambitions. Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887), a Swiss jurist, a contemporary of Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche, is remarkable among turners of magic keys for the energy of his certainties. From his interest in Roman law he passed to an examination of ancient symbol and myth and developed his theory of matriarchy, of ‘mother right,’ as the keystone to the rhythm of progress and retreat. The selections that comprise Myth: Religion, and Mother Right—drawn from Bachofen’s The Myth of Tanaquil, An Essay on Ancient Mortuary a Symbolism and Mother. Right—make the social — philosopher’s work available for the first time in English. And the translation is as sharp and muscular as we have come to expect from Ralph Manheim.” —Geoffrey Wolff, The New Leader “This selection from the works of Bachofen offers chapters. on symbols and myth. The central part is the investigation of the religious and juridical character of Matriarchy. in the Ancient World—a theme that is inseparably linked with the name of Bachofen. His thought. that ‘the progress trom.the maternal to the parental conception of man forms the most important turning point in the history of the relations between the sexes’ is still echoing in anthropology.” —Psychiatric Quarterly