Mother-right, Myth And Renewal: The Thought Of Johann Jakob Bachofen And Its Relationship To The Perception Of Cultural Decadence In The Nineteenth Century. (volumes I - Iii).

Abstract

Born into a patrician Basel family, Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) was raised in an atmosphere of Christian piety and conservative politics. His religious view of reality was traceable to his upbringing in Basel and to the neo-Humanist movement which conditioned his education. In the mid-1830's, Bachofen left home to study in Germany. There he was deeply influenced by the historian of Roman law Karl Friedrich von Savigny. During the 1840's, Bachofen moved away from Savigny intellectually. He became absorbed with the methodological value of ancient myth, tradition, and grave symbolism for understanding the ancient mind. The elaboration of his methodology was predicated upon the belief that modern historical criticism was destroying historical knowledge by imposing its analytical categories upon the mysteries of experience. Bachofen's research into antiquity was therefore linked to his critique of modernity. Throughout his writings, he was impressed by the religious nature of the ancient mind. The religio-cultural transformations of antiquity, the periods of health and illness, served as cultural mirrors for his own age which he believed was in need of rejuvenation. The dialectical relationship between decadence and renewal forms the clue to understanding Bachofen's thought. Bachofen rebelled against a Mommsenist logic of facts. He perceived positivist methodology as the sorry fruit of materialism in thought and democratic ideas in politics. He exhorted his age to accept the holistic and religious nature of consciousness and its engendering experiences. These ideas persisted to the end of his life. They conditioned his ethnological studies of the 1870's and 1880's which continued from his seminal Das Mutterrecht (1861). In these investigations, he approached primative cultures according to his faith in the unity of the species. Bachofen's ideas became part of the cultural ambience of the fin de siecle. They influenced ethnologists, social theorists and the poets of the Kosmische Runde, who discovered the religious power of his language. From this period on, the interpretation of his work is filled with ideological half-truths until a critical preparation of a Gesammelte Werke by the Meuli group in the 1940's began to set the record straight.