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Women in poor communities often face barriers that prevent them from participating in their countries’ economies and from earning income to support themselves and their families.Thanks to microfinance, women at the bottom of the world’s economic ladder are finally gaining access to financial services that allow them to save and start income-generating businesses. CARE knows from experience that investing in the earning power of women yields large benefits in terms of family income and well-being. When women earn, everyone benefits. …because Mother is the only example of unconditional love in this world that is in existence.

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Some 550 million people in sub-Saharan Africa – more than the entire population of the United States, Canada and Mexico combined live on less than $2 a day. For them, each day is a struggle. They simply do not earn enough to meet their needs.

Though the problem may be stated simply, the solution isn’t a quick fix. In countries with little or no industry, private sector jobs are extraordinarily rare. Women have to create their own opportunities and, as we all know, it takes money to make money.

In 1991 in a village in southern Niger, CARE developed a way to harness an ancient African practice of group savings, in which community members pooled together their resources to create a kind of village bank. *

HISTORY

The AMAZONS – Did this MYTH or HISTORY create the modern day karma for Women, or not ?

The Amazons: World History Timeline – the Coming of the Mascûli

In the beginning, we are told, the people of Telluria were not unlike ourselves. In their Golden Age, before the coming of the mascûli, there were maidens only among them, even as among us.

And as with us there were two sexes: chelani, the golden-headed, that bore daughters, and melini, the raven-tressed that protected and provided for them.

Whence came the mascûli we do not know. They were not, it is thought, an alien incursor that might be repulsed with force of arms, as was the case with our people.

It is thought that the Telluri maidens committed grave sins, and thus a curse fell on them; and they bore creatures of their own loins that were unlike themselves, and not maidens. Creatures that filled some of their daughters with unnatural desire. Creatures that were – in the course of long millennia – to enslave them.

Many things happened in this time that could not in later times have happened; for in the Golden Time of Telluria, as in the Golden Time of any world, maidens were still subtle creatures whose feet had but lately touched the earth, and the mascûli that they bore were grosser than they. And though it is the fate of every race of maid to descend ever deeper into the veil of matter as the Ages wear onward, yet in the case of these Telluri maids, this strange consort of theirs hastened their descent.

And as their bodies hardened into flesh and bone, it came about that many maids were barren among maid and could be given child only by the mascûli, and these were called the mazei, meaning the lost, or bewildered. And among them the chelani and melini became almost as one kind and that kind was called femíni; for while all maidens are feminine, the mascûli were not.

Yet while most of the newly-consolidated were mazei some remained as we are, and these were called a-mazei, or the Amazons: those who are not lost, but adhere to the true way.

“The Amazon Woman”

We now examine the phenomenon of the Amazon woman as she was long before the feminine warrior nations known to the Greeks and Hindus.

As we have seen in our previous Knowledge Lecture the Term “amazon woman” is really a contradiction in terms. The a-mazei, or Amazons, were in fact those maidens who had not become the feminine counterpart of the mascûli. So by definition they were not women.

They were maidens of the two feminine sexes, chelan and melin, not one half of the duality man/woman.

This, of course answers the question (to which various fanciful answers were advanced by the Athenians and others) of how the Amazons reproduced without recourse to mascûli.

We shall move on to the much later period of Amazon history chronicled inadequately by Greek writers in our next lecture.

For the moment we shall continue our brief world history timeline as it relates to the misnamed “Amazon woman” – actually the decreasing minority of the human race that remained in its original intemorphic form as opposed to the schizomorphic (male/female) nature taken on by the increasing majority.

The mascûli were, as their name implies, an embodiment of the masculine principle that is to say, of a combination between the tamasic force of increasing consolidation and materialization that continues throughout the Cycle of Ages in any world and a very extreme form of the influence of Sai Vihkë, the Angel of combat and discord, whose influence, in a masculinized (and therefore deeply unbalanced) form was known as the “god” Mars or Ares.

This combination of material “weight” and unbalanced vikhelism led increasingly toward two things: on the one hand war, torture and cruelty and on the other an increasing descent into “materialism”. However neither of these effects were immediate because for a long time the femini (the real women) remained in control of this new creature.

Even in relatively recent periods (as little as 9,000 years ago) we see that throughout the world all statuary is either wholly feminine or indicates the strong predominance of the feminine, both by its far greater frequency and by the clearly subordinate position of male images when they do appear.

Only slowly did the mascûli rise first to equality and finally to total dominance, bringing with them a new kind of world history – one in which blood and conflict would henceforward decide all the great issues.

In the long period before this (far longer than the whole of patriarchal history) the Amazons lived in peace with the femini, even though their ways differed greatly. The schizomorphic peoples increased and the intemorphs, or Amazons decreased, for the psychic tide of Tellurian history was now running strongly in favor of the schizomorphic (and eventually mascûlic) principle.

The Amazons were not at first a warrior people. Indeed, there were no warrior peoples at this time. As archeology clearly shows, such things as fortifications and weapons of war were introduced only after the mascûli became dominant in the schizomorphic world.

Even after this they were not primarily a warrior people, although combat had become necessary to ensure their survival. Their wars were a very small part of their history. But, of course, they were the only part known to their patriarchal enemies, who were sworn to destroy the “Amazon Woman”.

The true purpose of MATRIARCHY in a modern society is often mis-understood. The mission of this goal is to achieve spiritual BALANCE in our world, one society at a time. It seems that our patriarchal patterns have swung so far to one side, that all balance is now out of reach and does truly warrant investigation. IN my research, I have found this paper that, in my opinion, offers a great amount of information presented in a fashion of open mindedness.

” Since 2001 many connect with the phrases as “Sacred Feminine“, “Divine Feminine“, “Return of the Feminine“, “Matriarchal Societies” as metaphors of the return to higher consciousness. We seek balance and with it comes power. Women want, and envision themselves as priestesses, as the goddess energy within them spirals them into higher light and they remember why they are here. “

 “The return of the feminine, is not about women ruling society as that would created imbalance. It is about the return to nature, balanced restored, ying/yang united – both hemispheres of the brain working in balance, consciousness. ”  Please enjoy Matriarchal Societies – Return to Balance.

DEFINITION: Matriarchy

The word matriarchy is coined as the opposite of patriarchy. from Greek matēr ‘mother‘ and archein ‘to rule’. Margot Adler wrote, ” literally, … [“matriarchy“] means government by mothers, or more broadly, government and power in the hands of women.” “‘Matriarchy‘ can be thought of … as a shorthand description for any society in which women’s power is equal or superior to men’s and in which the culture centers around values and life events described as ‘feminine.'”

In the Marxist tradition, it usually refers to a preclass society “where women and men share equally in production and power.” Some consider the term as not being parallel to patriarchy, because it is not always defined in the same fashion differing only for gender.

Matriarchy is also the public formation in which the woman occupies the ruling position in a family (a primary cell of society). Matriarchy has even been found where a quarter of Black families in the U.S. were headed by single women; thus, families composing a substantial minority of a substantial minority could be enough for the latter to constitute a matriarchy within a larger nonmatriarchal society.

In addition, some authors depart from the premise of a mother-child dyad as the core of a human group where the grandmother was the central ancestress with her children and grandchildren clustered around her in an extended family. According to journalist Margot Adler, “ number of feminists note that few definitions of the word [“matriarchy”], despite its literal meaning, include any concept of power, and they suggest that centuries of oppression have made it impossible for women to conceive of themselves with such power.”

Etymologically, according to the OED, the word matriarchy is first attested in 1885, building on an earlier matriarch, formed in analogy to patriarch, already in use in the early 17th century. By contrast, gynæcocracy, meaning ‘rule of women’, has been in use since the 17th century, building on the Greek word γυναικοκρατία found in Aristotle and Plutarch.

The Matriarchal Studies school led by Heide Göttner-Abendroth calls for a more inclusive redefinition of the term: Göttner-Abendroth defines Modern Matriarchal Studies as the “investigation and presentation of non-patriarchal societies“, effectively defining matriarchy as “non-patriarchy”. She has also defined matriarchy as characterized by the sharing of power equally between the two genders. Similarly, Peggy Reeves Sanday (2004) favors redefining and reintroducing the word matriarchy, especially in reference to contemporary matrilineal societies such as the Minangkabau.

Developing a new social science

After I had completed my Ph.D. in philosphy at the University of Munich on the subject of the “Logic of Interpretation“, I taught philosophy and theory of science there from 1973-1983. Then I left university system, because I had found a much more important and socially relevant task. Ever since 1976, I had been doing pioneer work, along with my female colleagues, in founding Women`s Studies in West Germany, and in this context I presented an outline of my “theory of matriarchal societies” for the first time.

I had started to develop this theory as a young student of 25 years, using all the libraries of the different disciplines for my interdisciplinary research and traveling widely to visit many archaeological sites. These were my unofficial studies, in addition to the official ones in Analytical Philosophy, Theory of Science, and Formal Logic.

It was in 1976 that I first presented it in public, and in 1980 my first book in this field was published (See: The Goddess and her Heros , in German 1980 / in English 1995). From 1983 on, I devoted myself completely to this task, one that was not acknowledged by any university in Germany. But another audience was very interested: my book marked the beginning of the discussion about women-centered societies and matriarchy in the New Feminist Movement in West Germany.

I was well aware that this discussion had a long tradition in German-speaking Europe (Switzerland, Austria, Germany), going back as far as the famous work of J.J. Bachofen: Myth, Religion and Mother Right, which came out in 1861. For more than a century, the discussion on “mother right” and “matriarchy” continued: this subject now was used and abused by all the intellectual schools of thought, and all political parties, each with their distinctly different point of view.

What worried me most about this reception of Bachofen`s ideas was the complete lack of a clear definition of the matter at hand, and furthermore, the huge amount of emotion and ideology that was involved in the discussion. This combination of unclear definitions and excessive emotionality already occurs in Bachofen`s work itself. Bachofen`s work is in the field of history of cultures, and it represents a perfect parallel to the work of H. L. Morgan (in the field of anthropology/ethnology), who did research in the matriarchal society of the Iroquois of his time (1851 and 1871/77).

But the works of these scholars have been evaluated very differently: the differences cast light on just how political the subject of “matriarchy” is in the midst of our patriarchal society. Scholars of the humanities and social sciences, who should be extremely interested in Bachofen`s findings, ignored or ridiculed the majority of them. Morgan was praised and called “the father of ethnology“, because he founded the new science of anthropology/ethnology; meanwhile Bachofen, who also founded a new science: the “science of non-patriarchal societies”, or “matriarchy-logy“, was not honoured in the same way. The reason is simple: if his work had been taken seriously, it would have caused the beginning of the breakdown of patriarchal ideology and world view.

It marks the beginning of the development of a new paradigm of human history.

That is why it is too dangerous to be aknowledged adequately!

After these insights, I decided – building on the foundation of my philosophical tools – to give the matriarchal studies, i.e., the research into all forms of non-patriarchal societies in both past and present, a modern scientific foundation. I value this field of research as too important to be neglected in this respect; furthermore I am involved as a researcher myself. “To give it a modern scientific foundation” means to formulate a definition, that integrates its vast material, and to develop a supporting theoretical framework.

In the light of a theoretical framework, the many excellent special studies, that have already been done in this field, would more clearly exhibit their mutual interconnections, and future research could be inspired and guided by it. Developing such a universal theory does not at all mean to lock it into a closed system (a traditional philosophical attitude that has become obsolete), but rather it means to give it an open structure that is clarifying and helpful for each specific piece of research, including my own.

When I started to work on this task, I first spent ten years developing a research methodology for matriarchy, one that is basically interdisciplinary and relies on criticism of ideology. One part of the task was to relate the different disciplines used in this research to each other, and to do this systematically (and not only arbitrarily, as is often done).

Another part was to develop a special method of ideological criticism to investigate all the different aspects of patriarchal ideology, and not just reproduce them unconsciously anew. Step by step, I developed the framework of a “theory of matriarchy“; I would like to present it now in a short outline. Then I want to give a sketch of the structural definition of “matriarchal society“, which is the core of the “theory of matriarchy”. Both sketches are the result of 30 years of research in the field of matriarchal societies, developed through a long process of trial and error. They are in no way presupposed deductive axioms, although I am presenting them here in a concentrated, abstract way.

~ Hiedi Goettner