Mediterranean = medio – terra = middle earth

The Mediterranean = medio – terra = middle earth, as it names indicates, is at the crossroads between
various peoples with different traditions and spiritual orientations. Italy lying at the centre of the
Mediterranean has been and continues to be a land that receives and absorbs the many different
branches and strands of traditions from the four directions.
Hesperia refers to the North Western tradition associated with a mythical Hyperborrean and Atlantean
tradition that in many ways is in contrast to Southern and Eastern traditions of Austral-centric and
Asiatic provenance.
The clash of these contrasting and opposing civilizations came to a head in the three Punic wars* pitting
Carthage against Rome. It was during the height of these conflicts where the invading armies of
Hannibal (218 – 202 B.C.) were ravaging Italy that communal groups were forced to choose sides
between an autonomous Hesperiam vs. African. Overwhelmingly, most of the Some communities sided
with Rome, however, I few sided with Carthage.
Bachofen's 1861 Das Mutterrecht proposed four phases of cultural evolution which absorbed each
other:
1. Hetaerism: a wild nomadic 'tellurian' [= chthonic or earth-centered] phase, characterised by him
as communistic and polyamorous, whose dominant deity he believed to have been an earthy
proto Aphrodite.
2. Das Mutterecht: a matriarchal 'lunar' phase based on agriculture, characterised by him by the
emergence of chthonic mystery cults and law. Its dominant deity was an early Demeter.
3. The Dionysian: a transitional phase when earlier traditions were masculinised as patriarchy
began to emerge. Its dominant deity was the original Dionysos.
4. The Apollonian: the patriarchal 'solar' phase, in which all trace of the Matriarchal and Dionysian
past was eradicated and modern civilisation emerged.

Evola asserted that ancient Rome had been a virile, solar force which had eningmatically emerged from
the opposite trend, which he called “promiscuous and feminie, mystical and earthy, lunar a d
democratic”. This medley of supposed evils had previously defeated “heroic, Olympian” Greece.

As has been noted by Joseph Campbell in Occidental Mythology and others, Bachofen's theories stand in
radical opposition to the Aryan origin theories of religion, culture and society, and both Campbell and
writers such as Evola have suggested that Bachofen's theories only adequately explain the development
of religion among the pre-Aryan cultures of the Mediterranean and the Levant, and possibly Southern
Asia, but that a separate, patriarchal development existed among the Aryan tribes which conquered
Europe and parts of Asia

In it he developed his grand conception of the struggle in the ancient world, a stage he called "the
antiquity of antiquity," between the spiritual "Father-Right" and the earth-bound, material and
corporeal "Mother-Right," as universal stages in human history.
For Bachofen, religion had been the force that empowered Rome to assume a dominant world-historical role, ever
anticipating the augurium for solemn undertakings.
the old oracle given to Aeneas, Antiquam exquirite matrem, 'search for the ancient mother.' "9 At bottom,
Bachofen's idea of the femi- nine was that 442it alone united the sensuous and the other-worldly: woman's religiosity
was, for him, inseparable from the senses and the corporea l.
Nothing brought forth more clearly and elaborately Bacho- fen's own intense preoccupation with the
universality and inescapability of this confrontation between the feminine-material and the masculine-spiri-
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The Greek, devel- oped in the key Lycian chapter of Das Mutterrecht, revolved around a tragic-heroic conception
of the Greek struggle with the matriarchal world. Bellerophon in that chapter epitomizes the Greek efforts to ascend
to the upper "uranian" spiritual world.
The introduction or Vorrede to Die Sage von Tanaquil begins by asking whether the culture of Italy is
autochthonous or not. "Of the alien influences," he continues, "are we to recognize only that of Hellenism or is there
an older oriental period?" 35 A Hellenic dominance would render the history of Rome, and therefore also that of
the West, inexplicable. Greece lacked the "ethical strength" and national consciousness that allowed Rome to
absorb and overcome the Ori- ent militarily and culturally.

The dual relation of the city on the Tiber to the Orient, Bachofen wrote in 1870, "on the one side its
dependence on it and on the other the external and internal overcoming of the Asiatic idea of the world
and humanity," can be seen in the Tanaquil myth, to which he now dedicated a book-length study.40 In Die
Sage van Tanaquil, a rich and authoritative allegorical ac- count of the relation between Roman and
ancient oriental Kingship pub- lished in 1870, Bachofen develops an evolutionary frame for the distinct
femininities within the narrative of the world-historical role of Rome. Rome carried out the task which
Greece had begun but was too weak to complete, of overcoming the matriarchal East and asserting
patriarchal civilization against it.4 1 Roman civilization purifies itself by defeating the Orient within Italy,
hence the subtitle of the work: An Investigation of Ori- enta/ism in Rome and Italy. In the course of the
struggle, political authority was torn away from a "theocratic" feminine power and came to rest on the
Roman state. The ancient oriental kings had derived their authority from feminine figures, whose
religious significance was inseparable from their sexual exuberance: the East represented a corporeal
religiosity and a femi- ninity tied to it; the patriarchal West the spiritual and incorporeal one.
Tanaquil was the Etruscan wife of the later king Tarquinius. While on the way to Rome, before he was
king, an eagle flew off with Tarquin's hat and then returned it to his head. Tanaquil took this as a sign of future
kingship and her prophetic abilities were credited with Tarquin's rise to the
Bachofen repeatedly uses the term Knecht- schaft or "serfdom" to describe the condition of the male participant

in this kingship of the Orient. At the heart of that realm was a priestly or "theo- cratic" kingship where power
had a feminine legitimation. Tanaquil is the figure associated with this ancient tradition. Beginning the
concrete part of his narrative, Bachofen writes:

The elder Tarquin has the help of a woman to thank for his rise to the throne.... Is this a Roman
idea? No one would assert that. Rather, we recognize an antithesis to the principles of the Roman
state, that only later, in the late imperial period with the [renewed] influx of oriental ideas, allow an
analogy to be made. The Hellenic world too, offers us no firm connection. By contrast we are con-
fronted with such a quantity of parallels in the Asiatic mythical stories, that the common context of
the Roman and oriental no- tions is immediately apparent. The kingly legends of the Asiatic dynasties
show more than one Tanaquil. As far as the Assyrian cultural realm stretches, the granting of the
crown will be under- stood as the deed of a woman.43

The relationship of Rome to the Orient, and to the feminine, is thus seen to be not only immediate,
one of assimilation and internal struggle from which the Roman state emerges victorious, but also
cyclical. Late imperial Rome falls prey to the revival of Oriental cults showing the fundamentally
unre- solved nature of the dialectic that Bachofen discerned in history.44 It is in this context that he
expressed a preference for Republican
442 Rome as the purest expression of the Roman spirit, the one
called upon and able to bring about such turning points as the destruction of Carthage

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Carthage was founded in 814 BC by Phoenician colonists from Tyre, and by the 6th century BC the sailors
and merchants of Carthage were known throughout the western Mediterranean. In the 4th century BC,
following a series of military conquests, Carthage controlled many territories west of the gulf of Sirte in
present-day Libya, and much of the coasts of Numidia and Iberia. The coasts of Sardinia and Corsica
were already under Carthaginian control when the city-state attempted, in three wars between 480 and
307 BC, to conquer Sicily. These attempts were stopped by the Greeks, who had, by then, heavily
colonized the island. Primarily interested in commerce, Carthage had no standing army, and mostly used
mercenary forces composed of Numidian cavalry, Libyans, and Iberians.

Rome

Main article: History of Rome

Rome was founded only seventy years after Carthage (in 753 BC, following Varronian chronology). For
the first several centuries of its history, Rome was involved in a lengthy series of wars with its
neighbours, which resulted in the Roman army's specialization in land warfare. The Roman economy and
social structure began to incorporate the results of these wars: taking loot or tribute, redistributing
conquered land, and in all cases, requiring the subjugated peoples to supply troops in support of Rome
(becoming socii, or allies) [1]. With respect to maritime commerce, the Romans simply entrusted
themselves to the Etruscan and Greek fleets.

After 150 years of campaigning, Rome had conquered a good portion of Etruria, destroyed Veii, and
repelled the Gallic invasion of 390 BC, although it felt threatened by the second Gallic invasion of 360
BC.[citation needed] Rome had been and still was shaken by internal strife, especially between the patricians
and the plebeians for access to public office and therefore to political activity and the management of
land and spoils of the incessant wars. Rome was also fighting the Ernici, the Volsci, the Tiburtini, and the
Etruscans, and was preparing for battle with the Samnites, who were coming down from the mountains
to raid rich Campania, which Rome also desired.
The Samnite Wars officially ended in 290 BC, and the subsequent actions of Rome within its territory
had reduced the pressure of the Italian populace on the Greek cities in southern Italy, and in particular
Taranto; the Italians themselves were being attacked by the Roman army. Taranto was experiencing a
period of wealth and expansion, to the point of securing a treaty that limited Roman navigation.

and able to bring about such turning points as the destruction of Carthage. 45 But before Republican Rome
could emerge as the nemesis of the feminine East, a criti-cal process would play itself out in the rites of
kingship, which signified the transition from the priestly, theocratic, and feminine traditions of the Ori- ent to
the legal patriarchal abstraction of the Roman state, to the emergence of a separate civil power. Several aspects
of this process are critical to an understanding of Bachofen's feminine. Despite a narrative in which it is
condemned by history, its theocratic heritage meant that it was left in pos- session of powerful and compelling
religious qualities that were of great importance to some of his later interpreters. Rome asserted the civil power
of the patriarchal state at the expense of the old feminine theocracy but in so doing it left the religious aura of
the feminine intact as a memory.
Having investigated this reality of an Oriental prehistory of Italy, Bachofen titled the last section of
the work "the Roman transformation 442 of the Asiatic heritage." "If we have seen that the Italic
57

people took up oriental ideas and customs to the fullest extent, so we will now see," he wrote in his
introductory outline, "that the power of transformation of all those alien elements, and their
subjection under its own form of thought, fully corresponds to its receptive power."
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 It had been the "receptive power" of the Italic peoples which had assimilated the old traditions, and
the transformative power of Rome, which Bachofen juxtaposed to it, had left the feminine in possession
of a tradition that mitigated patriarchal power from the perspective of an unassailable matronal dignity.
In this case, of course, the Roman transformation was the process of turn- ing the highly sexualized power
of Omphale into the matronal virtue of Fortuna, to which Bachofen refers throughout Tanaquil. In
particular, the idea of Omphale occupied the place of the Sacaean goddess in eastern reli- gion, reveling in
promiscuity, the equality of all and the common bond to the Great Mother. 61 Later Roman feasts, Bachofen
explained, still retained characteristics of the original Sacaean feast, though the meaning of particu- lar
ceremonies had been lost in the course of Roman "purification," once
The issue of suppression or "repression," the eyes with which Bachofen regarded the passing
civilization of the matriarchal East so vehemently per- secuted and purged by Rome, became the
focus both of the idea of Bacho- fen's work and of his opposition to that of Mommsen
Aeneid
The dispute with Mommsen can best be seen, as has already been men- tioned, in the rejection of
the latter's idea of a later "Hellenic" derivation of Roman legend. This dispute, and indeed, the
culmination of Bachofen's entire narrative in Tanaquil, can be seen in the discussion of the Aeneid,
which constitutes the impassioned peak of his programmatic Vorrede

is here that his entire conception of Rome's assimilation and transformation of eastern tradition, its
move away from the "theocratic" eastern kingship, its "national" self-conception and world-
historical role, and its separate- ness from and superiority to Greece, was articulated most
convincingly. It is clear that Bachofen regards this episode as the most illustrative of the
relationship between the feminine East and the Roman-led West. Its status in his mind as the
Roman national epic serves to cement his claim that the East-West dialectic and the eastern roots
of Rome constitute an incontest- able "cultural whole." "Rome," wrote Bachofen, explaining the
meaning of Virgil's epic and in his most lapidary statement of the book, "founded in Asia, becomes
its final vanquisher [ Besieger

Aeneas, Bachofen wrote, is, in his dual character as son of Mylitia and Priest-King, the true expression
of theocratic Asia. But, though he was "rooted in the East," his "gaze is directed towards the West." The
throne of the oriental hetaerae, which Cleopatra-Isis wished to erect anew, sinks in ruins before the Roman
national hero. 78 Aeneas personified, in Bacho- fen's view, Rome's progress from East to West, from theocratic
kingship to
the Roman national state. The legend and the allusion, in this context, to Cleopatra's later intervention conform
to Bachofen's chief illustrative theme which, as we have seen, is the pairing of Heracles and Omphale. "We
have seen how the whole tradition of Dido's relationship to the Trojan hero," Bachofen explained , "rests on
the religious ideas of the Assyrian Orient." 79 In his scheme, the Assyrian Orient, with its feminine dominance
over royal power and subjection of the man, makes repeated attempts to assert itself, even as later pairings in
Bachofen's story, Aeneas and Dido and the Flamen and Flaminica in Rome, move further and further away
from the original condition at their root. In Bachofen's reading of the epic, Ae- neas is confronted with the
claims of the old theocratic femininity. What Dido claims in asking Aeneas to marry her is the rule which
Omphale claimed over Heracles, Semiramis over Ninus, and Delila over Samson. It is the old law, Bachofen
adds, which Asia gives to the hetearic woman over the life and throne of the man. 80 Aeneas's refusal and
journey to Latium was the journey 442 of the West. Virgil's epic therefore constitutes, from Bachofen's perspective,
the national Roman depiction of their own evolution in an intimate struggle with the Orient and establishes the
link between the Ital- ian Peninsula and the East as the primary relationship in antiquity. It is for this reason
that the only discernible references to Mommsen in this text take issue with his attitude towards that epic.
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 This mentality and this development concerned the progression from Asiatic passivity to western
movement. The energy and severity of Rome, derived from its struggle with the Orient, had made possible
the "histori- cal" as opposed to "natural" existence of the West. We have seen that Bach- ofen regarded Rome
as possessed of "ethical strength." Mommsen's idea of a "Hellenizing" legend concerning what Bachofen
regarded as the Roman national epic was therefore all the more galling. Greek sensualism and aes-
theticism, he wrote, were "the mark of ethically weakened races." The struggle and combat which has
become the hallmark of European races "becomes dominant in Rome." 82 In insisting on the "ethical
strength" of Rome and its primacy as the most energetic political force in the ancient world compared to
the sensualism and abortive heroism of Greece, Bacho-

The Polis, Burckhardt argued in his lectures on Greek cultural history a year later, is a unique creation in
history. "It was the expression of a com- mon will of the most extraordinary vigor and capability." 85 No doubt
the shared conception of the latter two figures, of an agonal ancient Greek society of individual contest, served
to cement the vitalist idea.86
On November 16, 1930, Otto delivered a speech on Virgil. He began with Virgil's poetry and as- serted
its Roman nature against those who regarded it as a mere copy of Theocritus. But the truest and deepest sense
of the Roman spiritual world of Virgil, he explained, is the Aeneid.88
The modern reader does not have it easy, Otto elaborated, in appreciat- ing the Aeneid. The comparison
with Homer is above all to blame. But whoever sees it only as the attempt to imitate Homer would be bitterly
disappointed. Only when we accept that the difference to Homer is no dis- advantage but rather the Roman
form, will we be able to understand it. Yet
precisely this task is difficult for the German, since, Otto adds, "to us, in our nature, the Roman world is

distant."89 He goes on to develop a dichot- omy of the Greek and Roman modes of thought, as reflected in the
differ- ences between Homer and Virgil, the premises of which are not too distant from those of Bachofen.
Rome, as for Bachofen, was the outbreak of his- tory. Homer's world, Otto continued, consisted of what was
essentially internal progress: the danger and the task became ever greater and the hero ever more powerful.
But with Virgil it was a matter of decisive progress in time, the rhythmical succession of sharply differentiated
periods.90 Otto's dichotomy of Roman and Greek legend therefore echoed Bachofen's own comments on the
ephemeral nature of Greek achievements centered on fu- tile heroism compared to Rome's certain march in
history.
For Bachofen, the movement from passivity into history is at the same time one away from the theocratic
foundation of the East. What Bachofen had regarded as Rome's original strength in his history of 1850, the
ubiq- uity of "superstition," the fear and seeking of the augurium, was now, in 1870, a quality transferred by
him to the feminine East: "If according to the same principle of passivity the Asiatic interpretation of any,
even the most meaningless phenomenon, is a demoralized one and all strength of the spirit is abjectly wasted
in anxious trepidation before the least of natural events, the Roman preserves the su periority of human
understanding by means of the right to dismiss any auguriu m." 91
Bachofen's account had come full circle. His dialectic leaves the femi- nine Orient in possession of
the last vestiges of an original religiosity, of the reverence of the augurium he had once associated
with the power of early Rome; an all-encompassing, particularly superstitious piety. The rise of civil
law and the Roman state had been an emancipation from the theocratic kingship of the East
premised on the subjection of the man. The dialectic had also ended on the mitigation of a militant
and Amazonian female Orient and its transformation into a figure representing the dignity of
moth- erhood in the face of the severity 442 of the state and civil law. In his under- standing of the
Roman state, Bachofen advanced a similar view to Hegel, who in the Philosophy of Right had
construed the role of woman's familial piety, exemplified by Sophocles's Antigone, as an opposition
to the harsh- ness of public law. Hegel himself sees it as the expression of the "law of woman" which
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Yet for Bachofen, a return to the Orient and to its passive religiosity was dangerous because it was
stifling. 95 Bachofen has often been seen as the successor to Friedrich Creuzer. 96 His Symbolik (1810-
12) antici- pated several of his positions, such as the fallacy of an autochthonous an- cient Greece,
the religious influence of the East and the contrast between a passive Oriental culture and the
deed-oriented, heroic nature of the Hom- eric epic, which Creuzer saw as a dominant religion in
ancient Greece.97 Yet for Creuzer, Greece and not Rome was the pivot of the relationship between
Orient and Occident. Moreover, though Creuzer's Greece evinced some of the same oppositions
between East and West which preoccupied Bachofen, its relationship with the Orient was
ultimately more nuanced
for a "new mythology" that animated many seekers of Eastern religion. His Protestantism drew him
instead to the secret of history, where myth recorded a struggle indiscernible to critical philol- ogy.
It is this that accounted for his eclectic methodology and choice of sources. The secrets of the
struggle had first become apparent in an investi- gation of an ancient Roman law, the Lex Voconia,
which Bachofen had understood as early as 1843 as protecting the military vitality of the state from
feminine excesses of luxury. 102 The funerary paintings of ancient Roman graves, of Greek vases and
the findings of archaeologists had all contributed pieces of the puzzle.

The construction of Bachofen's Rome, his understanding of Greece and the relationship of both to the
Orient allow his place in the broader history

of ideas to be seen in a new light. In contrast to Dieterich and Kern whose work can be termed the
"Greek School" of maternal research, Bachofen may be seen as the founder of the "Roman School."

. The sec- ond resumed the search for matriarchal political formations in history, for the struggle of
the sexes as Bachofen had conceived it. Bachofen's contribu- tion was to have endowed the feminine
with an independent religious and political authority separated from a western civil law

442

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