net is completely available to men and available to women only in limited, if expanding, ways.
It was not, as evidence from comparative religion shows, ever thus. Indeed, there is archaeological and anthropological evidence, in addition to internal documentary evidence, that some mainstream societies in primitive, prehistoric times were matriarchal in religious and cultural ethos. Even after the decisive worldwide shift to male dominated cultures, certain residues of matriarchal, even matrilinear, social organization persisted, through history and into the modern period. The Babylonian theogony, the Eleusinian mysteries in Greece, and the Cult of Mary are two examples (Ochs, 1977, p. xii, 5, et passim).
Descriptions of primitive religious motifs repeatedly refer either to divine matriarchy or to divinities of either sex who interact so as to affect the course of events in the natural world. Frazer, for example, develops his theory of the golden bough and the cyclical killing of the king of the wood with reference to Indo European agricultural practices. The praxis surrounding the murder of the priest of Nemi, who himself had murdered the previous priest of Nemi (also called king of the wood) smacks of a strong bent of authoritarian society and religion and is said to derive its form from the killing by Orestes of the king of the Taureans, and Orestes's fleeing to the sacred wood protected by the image of Diana. As Frazer explains, the wood itself belonged chiefly to Diana; worship of Diana, the goddess of forests and groves was an aspect of a wider earthly abundance, for everything from childbirth to a good crop. The residue of annual festivals in Diana's honor shows that they were cycles of purification for young people, as well as of the earth (Frazer, 1890; 1981).
Ochs describes ancient matriarchal religious observances that persisted beyond the classical period. In particular, the Eleusinian Mysteries in Gree...