ndeed, and more examples
were continually collected. But nobody knew how to make use of them.
Even in E. B. Taylor's "Researches into the Early History of Mankind,"
etc. (1865), they are only mentioned as "queer customs" together with
the usage of some savage tribes to prohibit the touching of burning
wood with iron, tools, and similar religious absurdities.

This history of the family dates from 1861, the year of the publication
of Bachofen's "Mutterrecht" (maternal law). Here the author makes the
following propositions:

1. That in the beginning people lived in unrestricted sexual
intercourse, which he dubs, not very felicitously, hetaerism.

2. That such an intercourse excludes any absolutely certain means of
determining parentage; that consequently descent could only be traced by
the female line in compliance with maternal law--and that this was
universally practiced by all the nations of antiquity.

3. That consequently women as mothers, being the only well known parents
of younger generations, received a high tribute of respect and
deference, amounting to a complete women's rule (gynaicocracy),
according to Bachofen's idea.

4. That the transition to monogamy, reserving a certain woman
exclusively to one man, implied the violation of a primeval religious
law (i. e., practically a violation of the customary right of all other
men to the same woman), which violation had to be atoned for or its
permission purchased by the surrender of the women to the public for a
limited time.

Bachofen finds the proofs of these propositions in numerous quotations
from ancient classics, collected with unusual diligence. The transition
from "hetaerism" to monogamy and from maternal to paternal law is
accomplished according to him--especially by the Greeks--through the
evolution of religious ideas. New gods, the representatives of the new
ideas, are added to the traditional group of gods, the representatives
of old ideas; the latter are forced to the background more and more by
the former. According to Bachofen, therefore, it is not the development
of the actual conditions of life that has effected the historical
changes in the relative social positions of man and wife, but the
religious reflection of these conditions in the minds of men. Hence
Bachofen represents the Oresteia of Aeschylos as the dramatic
description of the fight between the vanishing maternal and the paternal
law, rising and victorious during the time of the h