from The Meaning of Life: Ascending Jacob’s Ladder by Hazy Notion
The highest and, therefore, the dominant level of collective consciousness in matriarchal society was Fertility of Self identity. With the evolution out of hunter/gatherer society women's bodies and women's skills and women's identities became vastly more powerful than the male equivalents. Their bodies were infinitely more useful in exploiting the new knowledge that the finality of death could be circumvented by procreating. To keep men off balance new mating arrangements were inaugurated.
Now, instead of wandering in a seasonal hunting and gathering cycle, communities settled down on fertile land to practice agriculture. Permanent dwellings were built with women holding ownership of the land. Sons and daughters would live with their mother and the mother would rule the family. The daughters would inherit the property, and the male siblings would continue to live in their sisters' houses taking on a submissive role as farm labourers and guardians.
Instead of being tied to husbands women were free to take as many lovers as they chose. The brothers of each new generation of matriarchs would live out their lives in their sisters’ houses, servicing other women in the community as lovers. As uncles to their sisters’ children the men would provide a domestic male role model. Our deeply entrenched sibling incest taboo has its origins in these cultural arrangements.
In this type of social system, however, men were never sure of fatherhood. As a consequence the Terror of death remained a constant gnawing concern which could not be ameliorated either by the now-discredited totemic beliefs of spirit recycling or the new Fertility understanding of self-replication. Matriarchal women stood shoulder to shoulder, like a great wall of self-replicating flesh, between men and their male peace of mind.
Women controlled the economy of the early agricultural age. Women's agricultural skills produced food more reliably and in greater quantities than the earlier male dominated hunter/gatherer economy. Women, as the leading exponents of Fertility identity, had an advantage that men seemed forever unable to match. Paradoxically, however, it was largely the result of this female success that eventually allowed men to leap-frog over women into the modern age.
Matriarchal society triumphed in the two main areas the culture focussed on: human reproduction and agricultural food production. Unfortunately for the matriarchs it eventually became too successful in both these areas to be sustainable. Over-population and food surpluses in late-matriarchal society created just the right conditions for collective human consciousness to spill out of Fertility and into Status identity.
The continually expanding populations were very demanding on agricultural land. A kind of tribal bucolic sprawl was continually in progress. In some areas, like fertile river flats, this kind of expansion had very definite limits and when these were reached steps had to be taken to control population growth. Advanced matriarchal societies were sometimes forced to adopt the drastic device of female infanticide to keep the reproduction rate down. But this type of practice tended to undermine the whole cultural rationale.
In fertile regions agricultural success eventually led to surpluses of durable produce like grain. This in turn led to the need for storage facilities and eventually trading centres. Trading centres became towns. The gradual growth of an economy of tradeable goods led to a shift in power from the agricultural producers (women) to the guardians, traders and thieves (men).
The modern age was born when matriarchal societies became too complex to be organised with the limited consciousness of Fertility. Urban centralisation and the division of labour require a type of consciousness that is more specialised in the task of social organisation. The new consciousness in turn required expression of the more refined emotions of Will to power (Status) and Anxiety over social insignificance. By getting control over the agricultural surpluses men invented a new cultural principle which allowed them to arrange themselves in hierarchies of social merit, and take possession of the women.