apparently not been lulled into full submission, waits for a moment of
carelessness, and pushes the kind old woman into the oven. The kids run
away, and rejoin their father, who has thoroughly repented of his evil actions.
In a household like that, the choicest cut of child is the spirit, and it’s
always consumed first. Too much protection devastates the developing soul.
The witch in the Hansel and Gretel tale is the Terrible Mother, the dark
half of the symbolically feminine. Deeply social as we are in our essence, we
tend to view the world as a story, the characters of which are mother, father
and child. The feminine, as a whole, is unknown nature outside the bounds of
culture, creation and destruction: she is the protective arms of mother and the
destructive element of time, the beautiful virgin-mother and the swamp-
dwelling hag. This archetypal entity was confused with an objective,
historical reality, back in the late 1800s, by a Swiss anthropologist named
Johann Jakob Bachofen. Bachofen proposed that humanity had passed
through a series of developmental stages in its history.
The first, roughly speaking (after a somewhat anarchic and chaotic
beginning), was Das Mutterrecht^199 —a society where women held the
dominant positions of power, respect and honour, where polyamory and
promiscuity ruled, and where any certainty of paternity was absent. The
second, the Dionysian, was a phase of transition, during which these original
matriarchal foundations were overturned and power was taken by men. The
third phase, the Apollonian, still reigns today. The patriarchy rules, and each
woman belongs exclusively to one man. Bachofen’s ideas became profoundly
influential, in certain circles, despite the absence of any historical evidence to
support them. One Marija Gimbutas, for example—an archaeologist—
famously claimed in the 1980s and 1990s that a peaceful goddess-and-
woman-centred culture once characterized Neolithic Europe.^200 She claimed
that it was supplanted and suppressed by an invasive hierarchical warrior
culture, which laid the basis for modern society. Art historian Merlin Stone
made the same argument in his book When God Was a Woman.^201 This
whole series of essentially archetypal/mythological ideas became touchstones
for the theology of the women’s movement and the matriarchal studies of
1970s feminism (Cynthia Eller, who wrote a book criticizing such ideas
—The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory—called this theology “an ennobling
lie”).^202