Why The Matriarchy is a Trap

(untangling ourselves from patriarchy one word at a time)

[all art in this piece is by the imcomparable Dee Mulrooney]

Ten thousand years of patriarchal civilization has not only colonized the lands of the world but the habits of thought, the minds, and most of all the languages of its peoples. Liberating ourselves from these insidious belief-spheres is no easy task. Words so often trap us in the very systems we are tyring to escape.

The word matriarchy, for instance, seems to allude to a pre-patriarchal time when female goddesses were worshiped and clans organized around mother and grandmother. Certainly, a strain of such tendencies endures within civilization—with the great mother goddesses of legend and lore, with remnants of devotion to the earth as mother, and with the blessed mother herself. Matria means mother, but, and here’s the rub, archy means rule, government, and authority. If we take one system of domination and replace it with another, we are stuck in the civilized mindset, where one group will always exert power over another.

What was it really like to live among our kith and kin before agriculture lured us into endless experiences of oppression—again other animals, the land, women, of course, and all of the others, enslaved to enslave the land and produce the storehouses of wheat and barley, corn and rice for the one percent? Initially, most hunter-gatherers fled the brutalities of the agricultural way of life which is why the overlords needed enforcement—both the police and the priests, the stick and the carrot of heaven as it were. What was it really like to live among peoples who did not see themselves as seperate from the other creatures, from the earth, or the cycles of sun and moon?

The lost way of our ancestral mothers honored all of those generous and merciful circles and not lines plowed into the land or asserted over each other. What was it really like to live inside those circles where there were no castes, no pyramid schemes, and definitely no archies?

Trying to imagine that pre-literate, pre-dominate world from inside end-stage capitalism is not easy but thankfully the earth itself is always standing ready to guide us home. Imagine living in a small clan where a child that was born might be nursed by any number of women, and not just women with children but those who had never conceived or were even post-menopausal (both are possible.) Imagine what it was like to be a man in such a community, any number of whom might have experienced themslves as having offered to that soul in utero “father milk” which was often how they described semen. Imagine being born into a clan where everyone experienced themslves, defined themselvses as, in one way or another, your “mother.”

Patriarchy wants to establish property rights, lineages of production and ownership. our pre-civilized ancestors simply belonged—to the earth and to each other. The earth was mother, the reindeer or the salmon that fed you was your mother from another life, every soul was your mother in one lifetime or another. You were the mother of all that was. It was mothers all the way down. Mother is not then a gendered term, not a biological definition, but a way of recognizing the love of souls for each other. We are all each other’s mothers in one moment or another. This is what I have taken to calling the matri-sphere, a soft place to land for sleep and dreams, love and fertility, warmth and care. The matri-sphere is always there beneath our feet, the ground that bears us up, that births the world, and will take our bodies back when we are done with them.

So let us be done with the matriarchy. Please my dear devotees of the divine feminine stop evidencing Stockholm syndrome and calling yourself priestesses. Priestesses are enforcing psychotropic mechanisms of obedience and homogeneity whether they know it or not. Matriarchies are like the feminist putting on her pant-suit to take over the corporation. No please no. Instead let us join hands with all of our kin—our blood kin, our fur kin, our rooted kin, our star kin, our soul kin—and remember that we are, literally, each other’s mothers.

And we need circles and sanctuaries of mothers in the world right now.

Because mothers do not put guns in the hands of any of their children. Mothers do not starve any of their children. Mothers do not drop bombs on their children. Mothers do not clearcut their children or condemn their children to factory farms or cages in laboratories. Mothers do not recognize nations, parties, ideologies, or even species or any of these artificial ways of dividing ourselves from each other so someone can be on top and someone can be on the bottom.

It’s just a word, right? Why make a big deal about it?

But words are insidiously re-programming us all the time, luring us back into the great civilization experiement.

I long for the matri-sphere…when every one knows that we are each other’s mothers and that there are so many ways to express that reality. In the matrisphere we are held by each other, circled by each other. In the matrisphere we belong to each other and we belong.

I know that many wonderful people are asserting the importance of the goddess and yet I would say let’s let all of that go…and embrace instead what my daughter calls “the animate everything” and just be each other’s mothers. I know that many people of great heart want to recreate a matriarchy and all I say is, let’s get creative and wild with our language and make it bigger than patriarchy. I know that many many people have been conditioned to be terrified of the word mother, that civilization is a 10,000 year war against the earth and the mother and taking on the mother without a little “archy” at our sides can feel scary.

But imagine if our leaders and generals and CEOS thought of themselves as mothers. We might not have governments or armies or corporations. Imagine if our sons thought of themslves as mothers and our partnes too. Imagine if everyone stepped into the world knowing that every soul they met—every tree, every city pigeon, every homeless person, every harried businessman—had been their child in one lifetime or another. What if we were all loving and praying for each other life without end? This is the matrisphere.

All of our mothers from all of our lives are beneath us, before us, behind us, above us and within us. We are not alone and we never have been.

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The art in this piece is all by the extraordinary Dee Mulrooney. The main image is one we discussed and which guided me through the writing of my next book on the mothers of magic. Show Dee some love if you would…she does with image what I aspire to do with words. She brings the mothers back into the world.

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors (May 2026, Running Press.) With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of The Way of the Rose, a fellowship of friends devoted to the earth, the rosary, and the “lady by any name you want to call her.” They are co-authors of the book of the same name.

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