It’s important to list the Unbeaten and Unconquered European nations and peoples when it comes to “Patriarchal vs Matriarchal” relationships.
The Vikings are, obviously, the #1 most Unconquered European people.
Second is likely the Anglo-Saxon British Isle.
Third, are the Eastern Romans, Græco-Roman Orthodox.
The Byzantine Greeks are particularly interesting, as Satyr here demonstrates. The culture is “multi-cultural” in the sense that Competition is welcomed. Is this a Patriarchal or Matriarchal tendency? Which gender is more Competitive? Which is more or less confrontational? Which gender is conflict-avoidant?
How can a people be “Matriarchal” in the middle of the most conflicts in world history?
The Norse only settled in the north and east of England. Their linguistic legacy is evident to this day in the dialects of those areas. The south and west of England were unaffected. The account of that individual sounds like complete rubbish, to be honest.
To reiterate, the Druids were not English. They were Welsh (and Irish).
The fact that there were no Viking or Danish settlements in the west and south of England is evident from place-names (no Norse endings to village names, such as -by or -thorp), dialect, and historical accounts of the English reconquest of the east and north under Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder and Athelstan, who between them created the modern English kingdom.
Iceland, indeed, was never fully converted, and has experianced a Pagan revival. And yes, Pagan lore survived all over the place. One good example is the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in England.
Absolutely not. The Angles and Saxons only came to Britain after the Romans left (with perhaps some overlap). They definitely weren’t here when the Romans arrived.
Why, for example, does English have almost no Latin loan words in it till after the Norman Conquest, whereas Welsh is literally packed full of them?
The Druids were part of Celtic culture. The Anglo-Saxons were not Celtic, and came here as a result of the Roman withdrawal. This is all very, very well known. Even a cursory investigation will confirm this, and I urge you to do so.
And plase bear in mind that I studied A-level archaeology at school, and have never ceased reading up on these and related subjects.
Sounds like indoctrination to me. From what I’ve read, and studying Anthropology, the Angles were the first ones to step foot on the British Isles from Antiquity. The ‘Celts’ are essentially one and the same with Germans and Saxons. The Celts came after the Angles, not before.
Again, this is from studying Genealogy and bloodlines, NOT linguistics. I bet Linguistics would back me up though.
All I would need to do, is study ancient Gaelic trends. They’re easily connected to Germanic and Norse vernacular.
Celtic is related to Germanic, since they’re both Indo-European. But Celtic is actually closer to Italic, than to Germanic.
I’d be genuinely interested in any evidence you have for the Angles being here before the Celts, so if you can provide some links to sources, that would be great.
The Norse usurped Anglo-Saxon culture and through them dominated all the neighbourhood.
This Anglo-Saxon bitterness was transferred to the new world where it went through tis vengeance with the American civil War that destroyed the south’s aristocratic ethos.
The liberation of the African slaves was not the primary motive, but it was a symbolic way of displaying how Yankees , decedents of Anglo-Saxonry - was finally liberated from Norse aristocracy…or Old World hierarchies.
They didn’t care about the Negroes…at that point it was more expensive or house and feed slaves than to have them as free-labour working for wages, importing a new batch from any place in the world.
Read Heisman’s Suicide Note…it’s over one thousand pages.
Archaeology is the science of rubbish and graves.
What people chuck away including their dead is what forms the basis of archaological interpretation. This means that nothing is reliable, all is up for grabs.
The biggest evidence for a matriarchal society was in Bronze Age Crete and seems to be based on some figurines of woman hold snakes.
Other examples of female statuary and figurines from the Palaeolithic through to the Bronze Age have also been offered as possible indicators of female led societies.
In all this evidence there is not one piece of unambiguous evidence to suggest what Elizabeth Gould Davis suggests.
She is simpy wrong.
For most of this period in history power relations were horizontal rather than vertical. This is understood with reference to existing hunter gatherer societies, which range from war like male oriented societies such as the Yanomami of the Amazon to Negrito communities in which make and female are more or less equal.
With the exception of horizontal relations there is no example in extant hunter gatherer societies that could reasonably be called matriarchal, though there are example, despite horizonal relations of male domination.
What do I mean by horizontal? Where roles in society are delinated by gender each gendered role has a dominant role is a specific field. For example women may have leadership and control over the hearth, matters pertaining to religion and healing; whist men would have control over issues such as tribe defence and hunting.
Such societies may not be called matriarchal or patriarchal, as they are acephalic in nature.
Almost nothing general can be said of hunter gatherer societies since amongth the thousands which existed before the advent of agriculture, (and some survived until the 20th century), there were different strategies, cultures and customs.
From studies of anthropology from its early beginnings around 300 years ago, one thing is clear, there were no fully matriarchal societies, and whilst many demonstrated gender specific monopoloies of particular areas within society there never was more examples of matrilocality, matriliniarity, or matriarchy than the male opposites.
If what E G Davis is true you have to ask upon what basis she is making that claim, and upon what evidence. Yo umaight also like to ask yourself if matriarchy was “universal” where the fuck did those societies all go?
LIke so many other regions of interpretation. This reveals more about the prejudice of the writer than the actual facts.