Bachofen’s myths launched sexuality’s deep history
Sexuality’s taboos and rules have shaped cultures since prehistory. Swiss jurist Johann Bachofen’s myth-based stages—from aphroditic to demeteric matriarchy to patriarchal monogamy—influenced Morgan and Engels even as they criticized him. Today evolutionary behavioural ecology reframes origins.
Bachofen read ancient myth almost alone, imagining mother-right before male-enforced monogamy made paternity certain. That speculative ladder shaped nineteenth-century social theory more than fieldwork did.
Modern accounts stress reproductive success shaping genotypes like other species. Meanwhile sexual speech stayed euphemistic because few people wrote, so archives skew toward the literate elite’s decorum.
Because explicit writing is scarce, historians piece the subject together from laws that encouraged or banned behaviour, religious and philosophical debate, private diaries and letters, medical textbooks that treated some practices as disease, and shifts in slang. In pre-colonial North America a cross-gender role later labelled berdache existed among the Yukon's Kaska, the Klamath people of Oregon's south, and the Colorado River's Mohave, Cocopa and Maricopa; it faded in the late nineteenth century under settler pressure. Marriage customs varied too: the Navajo practised polygyny with wives from the same clan until the Navajo Tribal Council, pushed by Washington, banned it in July 1945.
The earliest Indian evidence lies in the Vedas, which include fertility prayers and rituals such as the Asvamedha sacrifice that involved sex magic, while the Kama Sutra was written for literate nobles, warriors and philosophers and their households. In China the I Ching uses intercourse as one of two basic models of the cosmos, describing Heaven coupling with Earth without embarrassment, yet women's virginity was policed by family and community and tied to bride price, under a plain double standard that protected men. Japan's Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel, treats Prince Genji's affairs in detail as part of courtly aesthetics, and later Japanese sexual norms were enforced less by guilt than by the threat of social ostracism.
Source: History of human sexuality
