When Mothers Ran the World

David Graeber and Charles Eisenstein on how things were and could be

For the last dozen episodes, I’ve been looking to add to my Where Are the Women? playlist, but I couldn’t find any! I couldn’t find examples of what I meant by that concept. And then in a recent essay on The Rings of Power, Charles Eisenstein differentiates between feminine power and allowing women to be 'honorary men', as Ursula K. Le Guin calls them or ‘patriarchs without penises’ as I refer to Hilary Clinton. What we’re looking at is the role of women in the full adulthood of taking responsibility for someone else.

The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow tells of ancient cities run by colleges of priestesses, and the creation epic of The League of Five Nations and the Jigonsaseh, or Mother of All Nations. As we enter our dark winter of the soul, these examples show that we haven’t always been unmothered as a society and deprived of feminine power protecting all of us.

My video tells about a recent night of feeling vulnerable and precarious, and how easy it would be to slip off the tightrope and into the abyss. Maybe it was the sudden cold and dark days. Maybe waking up at 3 am after listening to Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn’s WTF Conference, ending with “See you next week … if there is a next week.

At 6:30, I had the thought that it might never get light, and I let that feeling sink in. Like the initial days of the pandemic, I realized I had nothing I needed to do—plenty I could and should, but nothing urgent to distract me. Time stretched long ahead of me. I watched the film Safe and Effective, about the vaccine injured. And I sobbed.

I think this feeling of precariousness touches all of us. A year ago, my ex-husband digitized the family videos so our daughters could access them, but they found them hard to watch. Not because they were sad but the opposite—in the videos they were carefree and sure of being loved. As my oldest said, I know I’ll never be that secure again.

What it made me realize is that we are profoundly motherless, set adrift without a context, where we can slip through the cracks and no one will catch us. Without the womb as the center of our care and attentiveness, there is no point to the penis. As Charles Eisenstein states:

Feminine power does not move the world through force. It tethers the masculine powers to life, directs them toward love, and keeps them grounded in beauty. In the marriage of matriarchy and patriarchy, the masculine asks the feminine, “Where shall I direct my powers?” The untethered masculine runs awry, building towers of abstraction and technology that grow ever more distant from matter and life.

The province of matriarchy is what. The province of patriarchy is how. What shall we do, that is in service to life, love, and beauty? How shall we do it? These questions merge and flow into each other. What becomes how, how becomes what. Such is the conjugation of matriarchy and patriarchy.

The weaker the connection to life, the more it appears necessary to apply forceful intervention, and the more it seems that human progress consists in amplifying the techniques of force. The result has been endless struggle and alienation, as the world turns into an opponent and an object. Little does the alienated masculine suspect that far greater power, security, and ease is available through union with life rather than domination of it.

Charles sees the demotion of the feminine happening in two steps:

Let me put it another way. First a distorted patriarchy demotes women to second-class status, holds feminine powers in irrelevancy and contempt, and ultimately denies them altogether. Then women internalize that attitude, demean their own femininity, doubt the worth of their feminine powers, take on the cultural blindness to feminine power generally, and replace it with masculine power in an attempt to become what Ursula K. Le Guin called an “honorary man.” Those who succeed earn the privileges and status once reserved exclusively for men. They become CEOs, commanders, engineers, judges, career women. Thus they earn status and financial reward, in contrast to their sisters who never achieved escape velocity and remain full time mothers or homemakers or low-paid, low-status members of the caring professions. …

Is this to be the model of the new woman? Is this progress for women’s equality? Again, taking our current system for granted, then yes. If traditional feminine roles and ways of being are devalued, then it is indeed progress for women to escape them.

It would be a much deeper feminism to revalue what patriarchy has devalued, and to center society around the feminine powers that have been restored. Restored, first to visibility, and then to reverence.

I think that reverence is the right word, and not just relevance. We live in a culture that fetishizes youth, that celebrates immaturity, that sacralizes a pubescent egocentrism. On my browser, a Pocket recommendation was “What we can learn about America from teenagers.” Why? What should we be learning from those who’ve never taken responsibility for themselves?

I’ll end with the creation epic called the Gayanashagowa of the League of Five Nations from The Dawn of Everything:

… what comes through most strongly in the text is its representation of a social problem with a social solution: a breakdown of relationships in which the country is plunged into chaos and revenge, spiralling to a point where social order has dissolved away and where the powerful have become literal cannibals. Most powerful of all is Adodarhoh, who is represented as a witch, deformed, monstrous and capable of commanding others to do his bidding.

The narrative centres on a hero, Deganawideh the Peacemaker, who appears from what is later to be the Neutral territory … determined to put an end to this chaotic state of affairs. He wins to his cause first the Jigonsaseh, a woman famous for standing outside all quarrels (he finds her hosting and feeding war parties from all sides of the conflict); and then Hiawatha, one of Adodarhoh’s cannibal henchmen. Together they set about winning over the people of each nation to agree on creating a formal structure for heading off disputes and creating peace. Hence the system of titles, nested councils, consensus-finding, condolence rituals and the prominent role of female elders in formulating policy. In the story, the very last to be won over is Adodarhoh himself, who is gradually healed of his deformities and turned into a human being. [483-484]

Because these are hereditary titles, however, there was a Jigonsaseh in 1687 when Louis XIV decided to end the League of Five Nations. His governor and military commander, the Marquis de Denonville, invited all the councils to a ‘peace conference.’ Once they got inside the fortress, he arrested them and shipped them off as galley slaves. Graeber and Wengrow continue:

The Jigonsaseh, however, had chosen not to attend Denonville’s meeting. The arrest of the entire Grand Council left her the highest-ranking League official. Since in such an emergency there was no time to raise new chiefs, she and the remaining clan mothers themselves raised an army. Many of those recruited, it is reported, were themselves Seneca women. As it turned out, the Jigonsaseh was a far superior military tactician to Denonville. After routing the invading French troops near Victor, New York, her forces were at the point of entering Montreal when the French government sued for peace, agreeing to dismantle Fort Niagara and return the surviving galley slaves … the dozen or so, out of the original 200, who made it back alive. [491]

We’re in another time of the dawn of everything, and it’s certainly undeniable that life is being cannibalized. We can’t be part of that in any way. We need to look at everyone as if they’re our own child and say, “Why are they doing that?” It’s not because they’re a bad person. It’s because they’ve been lost, deformed in some way from their humanity. This goes for even the worst of the witches and cannibal henchmen.

We are the Mother of All Nations. We are the right person in the right place at the right time. All of time has been waiting for us to be in this moment, because we know what to do. We can heal the monsters and release them from their deformity. We can solve the problem and restore relationships. We are the Jigonsaseh.

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If you would like more inspiration from The Dawn of Everything, here’s Muskrat Love & Anarchy:

In The Dawn of Everything, Davids Graeber & Wengrow tell the story of Kandiaronk, or the muskrat, the Wendat stateman who ran circles around European politicians. They also show why Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari are unduly pessimistic about the ability of humans to invent and reinvent their own social structures. I add Chris Hedges to this doom and gloom trio and explain why blind obedience has it backwards. The three essential freedoms are listed, that every person NOT trained in obedience took for granted. My theory, that money has been 3500 years of obedience training, is expounded. I end with Kandiaronk’s view of money and the question from the Daves of 'when did we stop imagining that we could reinvent our social relations?’

and for a different view of witches and cannibals, this is Legal Shamans vs Economic Witches on Yuval Noah Harari:

In Russell Brand's interview, Yuval looks at nations as spells cast by legal shaman. I answer that we need economic witches to take back the commons. I look at how nations prevent people from feeding themselves in India and profit from climate change at the COPs. Yuval states that nations make us care about the stranger but I find Israel negates that point. I imagine California breaking into 4 Swedens or 100 Icelands to be a manageable size for matrix government. Nuclear disaster, climate change, and runaway technology can all have small solutions more effective than the patriarchal pyramid of power.

and this is Waking the Dragon Mom on Jordan Peterson:

Responding to Russell Brand's interview, I agree with Jordan that men and women are fundamentally different and I describe a feminine ideology, morality and shape of government. Jordan suggests a fourth branch of government as symbolic with a king. The symbol I'd choose for a feminine structure is the interlocking honeycomb with the child in the center and the queen bee serving the hive. Jordan proposes that lust isn't a sin when directed to the marriage, but I look at sin as seeing inferiority, including objectified wives. I end by applying problem-solving criteria to the pandemic and wonder what it will take to wake the dragon mom.