Matriarchy and Patriarchy at The Heart of History (Dedicated to John Weir Perry)

The history of the evolution of human consciousness can be considered as a process that began in different times and places, through often very distant visions and beliefs, and gradually manifested itself as a collective planetary phenomenon tending more. and more toward homogenization: this is De Chardin’s [1] concept of the noosphere, a kind of sapiential layer that envelops our planet in a now totalizing manner tending toward. uniformity. In Jung’s view, collective consciousness is counterposed to the collective unconscious, which is entrenched in the earliest experiences and in the most deeply rooted instincts of our species. The noosphere would therefore be the sum of collective psychic experiences, both conscious and unconscious. Religious cults of all times have made a fundamental contribution to the formation of the noosphere: starting with the Great Goddess, passing through the polytheistic intermediate phase, and ending with the establishment of the great Patriarchal Religions, human history has expressed profoundly changing, but at the same time cyclical ways of thinking. It is only in contemporary times that man has created a self-image and a vision of the world almost entirely detached from the religious experience. In the next few pages, we will dwell on a historical-religious phase that lasted several millennia, fundamental to the roots of Western culture: the transition from the worship of the Great Goddess to the birth of the Father God. We will reflect on that time period while maintaining a continuous comparison with human psychic functioning. Finally, we will try to make sense of contemporary man in the light of his archetypal relationship with the images of the mother and the father, in an attempt to better understand the direction of our next evolutionary steps.

Keywords: Marija gimbutas; Erich neumann; Joseph campbell; John weir perry; Carl gustav jung; Great goddess; Kurgan; psychic evolution; Russian-ukrainian conflict