Johann Jakob Bachofen

Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 to 1887) was a Swiss antiquarian, jurist, philologist and anthropologist who taught Roman law at the University of Basel from 1841 to 1844. He is most often connected with his theories of prehistoric matriarchy, set out in his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht, translated as Mother Right. In it he assembled documentation to argue that motherhood is the source of human society, religion, morality and decorum, and he postulated an archaic mother right within a primeval matriarchal religion that he called the Urreligion. Bachofen became an important precursor of twentieth century theories of matriarchy, among them the Old European culture proposed by Marija Gimbutas from the 1950s, and of feminist theology and matriarchal studies in the feminism of the 1970s.