We in the Pagan community have made it a article of (near-) universal faith that the supplanting of the Goddess-worshipping, putatively egalitarian ancient pagan societies (in Europe and Asia, at least) by patriarchal, urbanized, militarized societies has led to many of our modern ills. Much has been written on the subject, ranging from the credentialed, if controversial, theories of Carol Christ and Marija Gimbutas to the loose-and-fast, too-convenient conclusions of Riane Eisler.

In these works, contemporary feminist politics perform a sort of parthenogenetic interbreeding with anthropology and classical studies to reframe history at the dim edges of its beginnings. Certainly the evidence that the sacred feminine was central to the culture and spirituality of many of these early societies is irrefutable. Certainly the evidence is compelling that, indeed, patriarchal militarism, with its sky-gods and warrior-kings, supplanted other cultures with very different values and no evidence of military preparedness.

All this, I agree with. Like many Pagans, I'm an amateur anthropologist, enthusing particularly in the Stone Age, with its cave paintings, portable art, Goddess figures, mastadon tusk huts and beautiful and mysterious hints about what we were at our very beginnings as homo sapiens sapiens.

But I am concerned that, like so many political and social theorists (e.g., Marx, Bachofen, etc.), Pagan/feminist theorists have made the mistake of confusing an analysis of the process by which an undesirable state (in this case, patriarchy) has arrived with a prescription for how to solve the problems created by that undesirable state.

In short: the Official Story in our community goes like this: patriarchy was an unfortunate Wrong Turn in western history, and we and the world have been paying for it ever since. And if you just got rid of patriarchy, we would all live in Peace, Love and Perfect Ecological Harmony.

To the latter, I say: maybe. But the former is unquestionably bullshit.

Certainly we have a very serious problem in this world with Big Bad Penis Men. But the human species has collectively participated in creating its problems, and the rising of the BBPM was actually a result of attempts to solve those problems. All our problems are tied up in issues of power, but there isn't much of anything on earth that ISN'T associated with issues of power. It's just too facile to dump it all on the Male Oppressor.

Going into the 21st century, with the biosphere teetering on being unable to support human life, it's clear that patriarchy is not serving us, and we can agree on all the various Bad Things that it brings into people's lives. But patriarchy was not an accident. It was an logical survival strategy for dealing with burgeoning population pressures.

Patriarchy was inevitable.

Militarism (and patriarchy) arose at the point in history when human populations had grown to the point that people started competing for rangeland and cropland and began raiding one another for food. This happened a lot earlier, of course, in cold climates where food supplies were smaller, where hunting of herd animals was the primary food activity and, as human populations grew and herd sizes shrank, competition for hunting grounds became fierce. As horticulture was an inevitable replacement, forced by population, of hunter/gathering, and as agriculture grew out of that, so came urbanization, etc. Driven by hungry mouths.

Militarism became central to a culture's survival, both defensively (if you're trying not to get steamrollered by an invading hungry culture) and offensively (if your children are hungry and somebody else has food you want). When there's fighting to be done as an essential and routine part of a society's survival business, guess what? The sex with the upper body strength, foot speed and endurance—and which coincidentally doesn't have to stay behind to nurse the baby—gets put in charge of military activities. Run that routine for a couple of generations and men tend to start to rule the roost.

Most wars in the world have been so that ordinary people and their families could have food. I'm not just talking about the past, either. World War II took this country out of the Depression by generating enormous economic activity in the name of the war effort. That kickstart has fuelled the entire U.S. economic domination of the latter 20th century. The military buildup of the 1930s in Germany did exactly the same thing, following privation so awful that people burned money because firewood was too expensive.

Industrialized nations have wars so that we can have things like cheap leaf vegetables in winter and computers and cars and jet fuel for our travels. It is a basic part of our human nature that we will choose ourselves over the faceless Other. The only exception seems to be that we will sacrifice ourselves sometimes for our families and others whom we don't see as faceless. Hell, most indigenous people refer to themselves as "the People" and to everybody else as "non-People", "animals" or "enemies". Demonization of the out-group is a basic primate pack-predator thing. It's a fundamental flaw in how we are built. We may not believe in Original Sin, but I refer to this element of human nature as the Original Curse. It is the quality that is most likely to lead to our extinction.

It's ugly, and it's had all kinds of really rotten impacts, but patriarchy wasn't just a random left-turn that early matriarchies made by mistake. Societies adapt to changing conditions, and they choose changes that work, or they die out. For all the other effects of the advent of patriarchy, it was a successful survival strategy. There is no other way to interpret the fact that the world, which used to have lots of thriving matrifocal or egalitarian societies, now has only a handful.

Of course, now the habits of patriarchy threaten us with extinction, by dint of the very fact that it is too damned successful and not enough of us are dying. Our population is going through the sky. Unless we learn some other way, we will die off, like a virus that is so successful that it annihilates its host species.

—Dragon Singing (Copyright)