Throughout our everyday life, we live in a patrifocal society. That is a world where our corporate jobs, our politics, and our mainstream religions are mainly based on masculine values: domination, hierarchy, and control.
It is a world where people are alienated from the earth and from each other, where spirituality is often linked with suffering and with an escape from this world, where warfare and ecological destruction is constant, and where violence, aggression, and the oppression of women and minorities is a norm.
Our patrifocal society is between 4-6,000 years old, but there is evidence that, before this, it was actually a matrifocal society. That is, instead of the deity being male as in patrifocal mythology, the deity was female known either as the Goddess or Great Mother- who is always depicted as the maiden, matron, or crone.
According to Archaeologists, there is evidence that 25,000 years before the rise of male-dominated religions in the world “Old Europe” was a matrifocal society. Many believe that in the matrifocal societies woman and men were considered equals, though the women were the magicians, shamans, and priestesses.
