21st Century Progressivism

Tag: The Picts

  • Rome: Archetype of the Imperial Machine (Part 2)

    Reading Time: 10 minutes

    Every empire is founded on human pathology. Ambition and hubris are at the core of it. But there is another ingredient that remains invisible at first: addiction. The addiction of constant expansion cements the machine’s control over conquered and conqueror alike. But like any addiction, it only makes itself known after the machine has established itself. Rome was the archetype of the imperial machine, and many grand histories have attempted to capture her essence. Unfortunately, Rome is not merely a lesson from history. As we have detailed inside our Master Directory, The Corporate Enclosure of Reality: The Thousand-Year Pipeline of the State Spreadsheet, the Empire is still with us.

    In this article we will consider the kinship networks that were its victims. Thanks to this focus, another context for analysis has been revealed: morality. The key idea is expressed in a quote from the Bible. “By their fruits you shall know them.”

    By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

    Rome was a global leviathan in 63 BCE. It was at the apex of its ambition, and the addiction was firmly in control. As a result, private warlords, like Pompey, found it necessary to keep conquering new borders just to feed the massive overhead. Perhaps the empire had started by amassing wealth, but debt had become the primal need gnawing at General Pompey. This Rome was not a peaceful civilization by any definition. It was a global, predatory, militant, bureaucratic machine. Rome was thoroughly amoral; that was her essential nature.

    The Grand Warning: the Hasmoneans

    In 63 BCE, the Hasmonean brothers had achieved Israel’s dream of religious freedom and national independence. It is always distressing to contemplate what happened to them; instead of celebrating, they invited the wolf into their house.

    In the bloody battles of the Maccabean Revolt, the Hasmoneans had successfully thrown off the yoke of foreign tyrants and established the last sovereign Jewish kingdom in the Levant for over two thousand years. Yet, the moment they secured the throne room, they became embroiled in internal corruption, hubris, and a bitter civil war for supreme dynastic monopoly.

    The Invitation

    The brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II were trapped in their own short-sighted family panic. Neither brother looked to their native, horizontal covenant baseline to find resolution. Instead, they each sent elite delegations with massive bribes of gold and silver to Pompey’s military camp in Syria. They literally begged a Roman general to step in and legally arbitrate their private family dispute.

    The brothers may have managed to hold on to the dream of their people, but they completely internalized the ungodly systems of the world. Their kinship baseline was coopted.

    Pompey was not just happy to oblige them. The combination of the arrogance of Roman Dominium and his own constant anxiety decided Israel’s fate in a heartbeat. He laid siege to the Temple and then walked right into the Holy of Holies. Once he was in complete control, he wired Israel’s former sovereignty directly into the imperial tax ledger.

    The Human Pattern

    This unforced error establishes the tragic human pattern that runs all through our history. When a kinship network panics, it enters a psychological blindness where it chooses to legitimize the very state ledger that is waiting to devour it. Of course, the case of the Hasmonean brothers was something new in this progression. When the elders of Israel begged Samuel for a king, they thought they were establishing a defense against outsiders. Whereas the Hasmoneans invited Rome to intervene in a family dispute.

    Sadly, this is the exact same ancestral blindness that would later cause division in the premier clans of Clan Chattan. This drama will be explained in detail in another article. Here it will be briefly introduced.

    In 1672, Duncan Macpherson of Cluny marched into a cold Lowland courtroom and used a foreign Anglo-Norman legal dagger to sue his own kin. His hubris had been manipulated by the machine for centuries of loyal service to the clan. Finally, in this one episode, he unwittingly validated the machine to claim a piece-of-paper monopoly over his clan. To be clear, this is not meant as a condemnation. It’s meant as a warning. Ultimately, the Macpherson’s remained loyal to the kinship baseline.

    The Invisible Reach: The Corruption of Scandinavia

    Very few places in the world were fortunate enough to remain untouched by the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Scandinavia was well outside the machine’s physical borders, but its tribal baseline was corrupted just the same. Rome was almost methodical in the way it brought the Scandinavian people into the Empire’s orbit.

    🪙 1. The Weaponization of Luxury Trade

    Rome did not need to conquer a people to destabilize them; they used their merchant ledger. Roman traders traveled deep into Scandinavia to extract raw northern wealth—specifically amber, furs, and blond hair (highly prized by the elite in Italy).

    • The Currency Trap: In exchange, the Romans pumped massive amounts of silver coins (denarii), glass beads, and Roman wine into the north.
    • The Structural Split: This injection of luxury goods completely corrupted the traditional, horizontal tribal baseline. Suddenly, a few local chieftains became hyper-wealthy by monopolizing Roman trade. They used Roman silver to hire permanent private warrior retinues, breaking away from the traditional kinship assemblies and establishing the first top-down, hereditary aristocratic hierarchies in Scandinavia.

    ⚔️ 2. The Mercenary Software Export

    The Roman army was constantly starving for manpower, so they routinely recruited elite Scandinavian and Germanic warriors into their auxiliary legions.

    • These young men spent decades serving inside the Roman military machine. They learned its vertical chain of command, its engineering tactics, and its cold, mechanical approach to warfare.
    • When these veterans finally returned home to Scandinavia, they brought that imperial software with them. They stopped acting like traditional tribal elders and began acting like mini-Emperors. They built fortified hill forts, centralized local weapons manufacturing, and used Roman-style martial discipline to dominate neighboring clans.

    🪓 3. The Runes: Copying the Ledger

    • The Contagion: The very script of the Vikings—the Elder Futhark Runes—developed in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE as a direct result of contact with the Roman Empire. Scandinavian elites saw how the Romans used written Latin characters to issue laws, count taxes, and project power across vast distances. The northern tribes customized these alphabetic concepts to carve their own runes into stone and wood. It was an indigenous adaptation, but the initial spark was inspired by watching the power of the empire’s written ledger.
    • The Altered Baseline: Rome’s silver and military software corrupted Scandinavia’s horizontal tribal baseline long before the empire fell. It structurally primed the northern tribes to become the hyper-militarized pressure cooker that would eventually explode across the sea.

    The Global Crouch: The 536 CE Detonation

    When the Empire fell, the Scandinavian chiefs still had not turned into raiders. It was the 536 CE volcanic winter that finished off any kin-centered reserve that remained. In that year, a series of massive volcanic eruptions blanketed the Northern Hemisphere in a thick, atmospheric ash cloud. This triggered what scientists call the Late Antique Little Ice Age. The sun’s rays grew weak and blue, summer temperatures plummeted up to 4°C, and parts of the world experienced a decade of continuous, jumbled winters without heat.

    The Combined Effects of Planetary and Political Disaster

    The Empire’s fall and the effects of the volcanic winter together shattered the highly centralized trade grid and forced the entire world into a feudal crouch. The effects were apocalyptic for the world, but they were especially harsh for Scandinavia.

    • The sudden drop in temperature caused massive, systemic crop failures and famine. Archaeological records reveal that up to 50% of the population in Sweden and Norway perished or abandoned their settlements in the 6th century. This real-world climate horror directly birthed the Norse mythological memory of Fimbulwinter—the three continuous years of winter that precedes Ragnarök (the end of civilization).
    • The shattered Scandinavian tribes spent the next two centuries reorganizing. They divided their fields into tiny production units, turned away from fragile crops toward frost-resistant rye, and began hyper-militarizing their society. In this way, they hoped to compete for the drastically diminished local resources.
    • By the time the weather normalized and the population began to rebound in the late 700s, Scandinavia was an overcrowded, hyper-militarized pressure cooker. Primogeniture rules meant younger sons had zero inheritance, and there was a brutal domestic scarcity of farmable land.
    • They built the perfect maritime escape weapon—the shallow-draft longship—and burst out into the North Sea, desperate for wealth and space.

    The Pictish Golden Age

    The Picts did not feel the post-Roman vacuum as a loss because they had never been enclosed by Rome in the first place. For them, the 5th and 6th centuries were not a “Dark Age” of collapse, but a glorious, un-enclosed Golden Age of independent crystallization.1

    When the Roman legions evacuated southern Britain in 410 CE, the Lowlands and the south fell into an absolute structural panic. Those societies had become addicted to the vertical infrastructure, the coin-based markets, and the military protection of the Roman ledger. When that grid vanished, their society fractured. However, Pictish society did not fracture; the Picts felt an absolute release of pressure because their greatest external threats had collapsed. In this period, the Pictish horizontal kinship baseline operated at its peak.

    Recent cutting-edge archaeology (like the discoveries at Tap o’ Noth and Fortriu) show that in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Picts built massive, highly organized hillfort settlements containing hundreds of homes. These settlements were supported by advanced agrarian farming and sophisticated, decentralized regional alliances. It was during these years that the Picts carved their magnificent, iconic Class I and Class II Symbol Stones into the landscape.

    Whenever outside forces tried to bring a new vertical ledger into the north, the unified Pictish kinship vanguard utterly crushed them. When the Anglo-Saxon Kings of Northumbria marched north with their heavy armies—the Picts crushed them at the Battle of Dun Nechtain (685 CE) and permanently secured their borders against enclosure.

    Innocent Bystanders in the Apocalypse

    But in 839 AD, a massive Viking fleet sailed into the Northern Heartland of Fortriu and annihilated the Pictish royal family. This disaster opened the way for a warlord from Dál Riata, Kenneth MacAlpin, to invade Pictish lands and seize control.

    Dál Riata had a long, adversarial history with the Picts. This Irish colony had been trying to subvert the northern indigenous baseline for over two centuries. In response, Onuist, the Pictish king, had marched his elite northern armies west a hundred years earlier, and laid siege to the Gaelic capital of Dunadd. He burned their strongholds, and put the royal princes in chains. It was a counter-offensive to protect his people from a predatory, foreign nuisance, but it demonstrates how the Picts maintained their independence for so many centuries.

    It’s true that the Vikings had also pressured Dál Riata leading up to MacAlpin’s invasion, but the motive of breaking free from the Viking threat was in addition to the foundational nature and purpose of the colony of Dál Riata.

    St. Andrews: From Pictish Sanctuary to State

    Mainstream history books claim St. Andrews was founded by a miraculous arrival of the relics of St. Andrew from Greece. This was a myth invented centuries later to overwrite the local, indigenous reality. King Onuist had established this great monastery. Its original name was Cennrígmonaid (Kilrymont).

    The entire organic organization of Pictish culture was centered around such monasteries. They were horizontal sanctuaries of hospitality, kinship registries, and regional security. And they operated independently; they were not part of the top-down corporate hierarchy of Rome. However, MacAlpin soon overwrote this old, decentralized Pictish world by replacing it with the rigid Céli Dé registries. Changes in the succession of kings were more gradual.

    MacAlpin’s direct male line of succession eventually fractured, but his eventual impact on the future kings of Scotland resulted in the transition to a rigid dynastic monopoly. For nearly two centuries, the dynasty managed succession through the horizontal Gaelic law of Tanistry. This was a system in which the royal kindred selected the strongest adult cousin to prevent immediate structural collapse. However, the pull toward centralization was irresistible.

    By 1034 CE, Malcolm II systematically assassinated his own male-line cousins. This forced the crown into a singular, narrow dynastic loop. It also paved the track for his anglicized grandsons to permanently replace horizontal Celtic assemblies. Future kings would adhere to top-down, document-obsessed Anglo-Norman law.

    The Ghost of Rome and the Return of Dominium

    Centuries after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, its cold, legal definitions of Dominium were dragged out of the Church archives by ambitious medieval kings like David I. In this way, they were able to declare the unwritten, oral kinship baseline of the Celtic world (dùthchas) legally invisible.

    While an empire is birthed by the arrogant ambition of individual warlords, it very quickly crosses a threshold where it becomes a self-perpetuating, automated resource-extraction machine. At that point, it doesn’t expand because it wants to; it expands because it has to. It’s the only way it can keep from collapsing under the weight of its own internal debt, population pressures, and resource depletion.

    Primary Motivations for the Imperial Pattern

    If we look closely at Rome in 63 BCE and the Viking explosion after 536 CE, we see two entirely different primary motivations, but they both resulted in the exact same imperial pattern:

    🏛️ 1. The Roman Machine

    Driven by Debt and Bureaucratic Overhead: For Rome, expansion was driven by a vicious, structural feedback loop.

    • The Problem: To maintain their massive standing armies, pay off the urban populations, and fund the escalating political battles of private warlords like Pompey, the state required an astronomical influx of wealth.
    • The Dynamic: If the empire stopped expanding, it ran out of new wealth to pump into its system. It would face immediate economic stagnation, military mutinies, and domestic collapse. Therefore, extinction or expansion became the machine’s primary directive. It was an insatiable beast that had to keep devouring new borders—like Judea—just to generate the tax revenue needed to pay for the conquests of the previous generation.

    🌊 2. The Viking Crisis: Driven by Ecological Compression and Survival

    On the flip side, when you look at Scandinavia after the 536 CE volcanic winter, the primary motivation wasn’t luxury-loving hubris or imperial debt. It was pure, raw survival against nature.

    • The Problem: The sudden, catastrophic drop in planetary temperatures wiped out half their population and left them with a severe domestic scarcity of farmable land.
    • The Dynamic: As the population rebounded centuries later, the younger generations found themselves locked in a hyper-militarized pressure cooker with zero inheritance or dirt to stand on. They built the longships and launched their maritime land-grabs out of a desperate, primal need for security, food, and space.

    📐 The Universal Attribute: Total Centralization

    So, the spark can be different—Rome was driven by financial overhead and debt, while the Norsemen were driven by ecological compression and survival. But they both share the exact same foremost attribute: they solve their internal crises by centralizing power and violently exporting their trauma outward to enclose someone else’s home.

    Whether it is an ambitious Roman general walking his boots into the Holy of Holies, or a desperate Norse longboat crew decapitating the native Pictish elite in 839 AD, the result for the indigenous kinship baseline is identical. Their unwritten, horizontal sanctuary is crushed and forced into a top-down extraction ledger.

    Today, we are not even capable of mourning this loss. This article is an attempt to remind us of what has been lost.

    Alternatives to the Machine

    If we are going to call the mistakes of ancient people who were dealing with the machine ‘unforced errors’, alternatives must be available. Alternatives do exist, but a full accounting will require a separate article. This is what we know so far:

    Israel’s covenant enforced order through personal, local accountability to a shared spiritual baseline. If your neighbor was oppressed, the community stepped in. A state police force did not order this. They stepped in because the unwritten covenant demanded it. The society was based on relational intimacy, not corporate compliance. 

      • Under this radical alternative law, all land boundaries were wiped clean every fifty years.
      • Even if a family fell into poverty and was forced to lease or mortgage their ancestral plot to a wealthy neighbor, the debt was automatically canceled and the dirt must return to the original family network.
      • It made permanent corporate real-estate monopolies completely impossible. The machine couldn’t own the valleys permanently.
      • The ancient Hebrew baseline had a built-in, systemic software weapon designed specifically to stop the land-hungry intruders. The “Gordons” and “Davids (King David I)” of the ancient world could not enclose the landscape. (We will also discuss these examples later.)  This ‘software’ was the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25).
      • The alternative to a king was a network of local, independent sanctuaries and tribal assemblies where authority was temporary. Kings were merit-based, and defensive—exactly like the Gaelic Tosach, or the Judges of Israel. When a threat arose, leaders stepped up out of allegiance to the family network. When the threat disappeared, they went right back to the dirt and the plow. There was no permanent political palace to hide behind.

     

     

    1. Sally M. Foster, Picts, Gaels and Scots. B T Batsford, Historic Scotland. 2004. p. 107 [↩]

  • Patriarchy in Modern Society: Historical Roots and Future Implications

    Reading Time: 11 minutes

    Historical Origins of Patriarchy

    We know the approximate origin of patriarchy in modern society. It appeared in the West approximately 1200 BCE. But the credit goes to Homer (750-700 B.C.) who sang of the struggles of distant heroes. He was the first to describe a patriarchal system. Homer’s poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, told of men who gave law to their children and wives. Next, we have the influence of Solon (630-550 B.C.). Solon’s actions may have advanced patriarchy in a more concrete way than Homer’s poems. He was considered ‘one of the Seven Wise men of Greece’. So, when he built a brothel in Athens and dedicated its profits to the erection of a temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, he gave patriarchy cultural and religious standing. However, it was Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.) who immortalized disdain toward women1 Distain toward women is inseparable from patriarchy.

    I will argue that the first patriarchs were foreign invaders. They married women from the indigenous conquered populations and imposed their own demands on them. This required them to police their new system in order to perserve it.

    These invaders clearly demonstrated that they were rapists and looters and foreign adventurers. They never intended to assimilate into the conquered population. Instead, they remade the known world in their own image. But eventually the outrageousness of their behavior combined with their new positions of authority, motivated them to justify themselves. The Greeks used mythology and philosophy; the Romans used law. They both used misogyny.

    Early Patriarchs Were Synonymous With Warfare

    There were no early patriarchal societies. Patriarchy did not form societies. It destroyed them. The examples of Greece and Rome illustrate this characteristic. 

    Greece

    The context of early patriarchy in Greece was destruction and upheaval caused by the Achaean invasion. It was basically a bloody coup in which the invaders slew entire colleges of priestesses. But interspersed with the carnage were furtive and piecemeal tactics, such as sly manipulation of ancient marriage practices and occassional murder.

    Socrates and his students are our most familiar patriarchal authorities, but they didn’t invent the system. They were following a script written by earlier Greek conquerors. In Socrates’ time, all that was needed was continuing reinforcement and justification. Homer wrote his stories in the fourth century B.C. but he set them around 1200 B.C.  That is how the process worked. His poems were constantly adapted to please aristocratic patriarchal males. They also helped cover up crimes committed in the takeover.

    Rome

    Romulus founded the city of Rome as an asylum for runaway slaves, outlaws, exiles, and criminals from across Italy. There were almost no women there; the outlaws and outsiders were all male. So, the Romans invited a neighboring tribe to a festival and forcably kidnapped their daughters. This is known today as the Rape of the Sabine Women. The Roman home was treated like a conquered territory because that’s what it was. 

    The Modern Evolution of Patriarchy

    Today, the politically correct version of these stories are all that most people know. They are what comes up first in a Google search. This illustrates the modern evolution of patriarchy. We swim in a patriarchal ocean…

    Greece

    If you were to do a Google search for the question, Did Theseus conquere Crete?, you would get the official story. Theseus was sent to Crete as captive youth in tribute to the Minotaur. He successfully slew the beast, stopped the tribute, and escaped Crete with King Minos’s daughter, Ariadne.

    However, if you supply additional information, the full story can still be found. But you have to know what you are looking for when you begin. 

    If you reply for example, In reality, Theseus won property through bigamy and even kidnapped Helen when she was a child. You will get the following answer: Yes, in the context of Greek mythology, you are completely correct. While Theseus is often celebrated as a noble hero, his mythological history includes many deeply problematic and villainous acts, including the kidnapping of a young Helen.

    This answer includes a general outline of the story–Helen’s age, where they kept her, and the consequences of Theseus’s villainy. However, sources may hedge a little. For example, according to the source linked above, Theseus was motivated by his desire to marry a daughter of Zeus. That may be technically true, but it meant that he wanted access to what Helen would bring to a marriage: the throne and control of the related territory.

    Other sources fill in the blanks. Theseus used the same technique in Crete. When he married Phaedra, the sister of Ariadne and daughter of King Minos of Crete, it solidified Athenian ties to Cretan wealth and power. However, it ultimately ended in a family tragedy.

    Rome

    If you ask Google where Roman Patriarchy comes from, again the first answer is the politically correct one. Roman Patriarchy was the result of brutal practical realities. These ‘practical realities’ include early agrarian survival, warlike tribal foundations, and strict property law. The Sources listed are Reddit and Brewminate.com. 

    The explanation continues: While the Greeks used philosophy to keep women away, the Romans used codified law. Their law turned the male head of the household into a micro-emperor.

    Supposedly the economy of cattle and the danger that they might be stolen made this necessary. Men monopolized the warfare necessary to protect the herds. Therefore, the male line controlled the property. 

    There are many ways to say the same thing. For example, the early Roman agrarian state was surrounded by hostile neighbors and had to organize itself like a military fortress. The family was not an emotional unit. It was an economic corporation headed by the oldest male in the family. The sources listed are: Worldhistory.org; Wikipedia; bbc.co.uk; and medium.com.

    Nevertheless, we get the impression that the position of women in Rome was not as pitiful as Athenian women. 

    Objection: Why Didn’t the Indigenous People Become Patriarchal?

    There is one important objection to these justifications for Roman patriarchy. Indigenous peoples faced the same threats but they didn’t subjugate their women. This objection is quickly validated by Google’s AI.

    Your point about indigenous cultures (like many Native American tribes) developing matrilineal systems despite facing hostile neighbors is completely accurate. This proves that external threats do not inherently force a society to adopt an extreme patriarchy. 

    This thread provided the story of Romulus, which I related at the beginning of this discussion. It concludes with the following statement :

    “While indigenous matrilineal societies relied on deep, stable kinship networks where women held the continuity of the community, Rome was an aggressive, synthetic military state built by rootless men.”

    The Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome are Actually Defense and Coverup

    In Greece, Plato and Aristotle provided an intellectual defense for the Hellenes’ brutal conquest during the Bronze age, centuries earlier. When they arrived, the Aegean was dominated by the Minoan Civilization on the island of Crete. This culture was centered around female power. (The reason for Greek hatred of women couldn’t be more clear.) 

    These were Mycenaeans, the first true Greeks. They arrived from the mainland around 1450 B.C.E.,  overthrew the Minoan centers, smashed the matriarchal structures, and replaced the Mother Goddess with their own sky-father warrior god, Zeus. (Quora.com and Internationalschoolhistory.com.)

    “By the time Socrates and Plato came along, the physical violence was over, but the guilt and anxiety of that violence remained. Classical philosophy was the ultimate coping mechanism: it allowed Athenian men to look at the subjugated women around them and say, ‘We didn’t violently steal your power; nature and logic dictate that you never should have had it in the first place’.” (LiteratureandHistory.com)

    The Weaponization of Name Calling and Outrage

    The Greeks in Herodotus’ times knew of four generations who were responsible for a period of social upheaval. One example is the renowned Heroes who slew many mythological beasts: Bellerophon killed the Chimera; Hercules or Herakles ended the lives of many monsters in his Twelve Labors; Theseus killed the Minotaur and founded Athens. We know now that these are pleasant ways of describing a more brutal reality. 

    The Chimera was one of the symbols of the Mother Goddess cult; we are really being told that Bellerophon ended the cult by killing its priestesses. He may have even used one Mother Goddess cult to wipe out another. The Pegasus, which he used to kill the Chimera, was one of Her favorite animals. However, he may also have experienced a revolt. In the end, he fell from Pegasus and died2, p. 129-130.

    The killing of the Minotaur by Theseus probably represents the Achaean invasion of Crete, and Herakles’ Second Labor was the killing of the Hydra of Lerna. The killing of the Hydra probably represents the elimination of a college of priestesses at Lerna. And when Herakles shot the Stymphalian birds with his arrows, his Sixth Labor, he was really suppressing a Goddess cult at Stymphaly. That’s how the myths are interpreted today.

    Herakles was Fighting a Religious War

    Herakles was fighting a religious war. His myth had vestiges of ancient Goddess worship, but it was distorted. Before he arrived, the Goddess cult had deified many Heroes, but in the end he was the only Hero who remained. (This is the same as Palemon, whose story is described below.)

    The myth states that Herakles worked for Hera. However, this isn’t exactly right. By this time, marriage was an Achaean weapon. Generations of Heroes before him had achieved political and religious status by marrying a sacred queen. In the case of this Herakles (his real name was Palemon) he was following orders to marry the Queen and become the Hero-King of that Euzkan region. He was accompanied on his mission by Theseus, Iolcus, Peleus and many others. When he took the Golden Girdle from Hippolyte the Queen of the Amazons on his ninth labor, he actually deflowered her. That led to a battle in which the Amazons were killed.

    The voyages of the Achaeans were not particularly focused. They included the exploration of trade routes and general mischief, so it took some time to understand what they were doing. Sometimes a king would simply leave the kingdom. It was a violation of religious tradition and a shocking lack of piety with no explanation, but it was considered a one-time thing. In addition, the period of kingship was gradually increased by the invaders, sometimes up to twenty years and only then would a king fight to avoid being deposed. The pattern wouldn’t become clear until later. After all, the indigenous population lived within the established system. It had been part of a sacred reality in that region for as long as anyone could remember. But finally the priestesses recognized the danger.

    Jason and Medea

    Jason married Medea, a Sacred Queen, and when the time came to escape he took her with him. When she discovered what his real intentions were, it was not possible for her to return. She was disgraced and she would have been punished. Instead she chose to advise King Aegeus of Athens of the threat posed by Theseus. She tried to poison Theseus, but he escaped to Crete where he seduced Ariadne. Then he returned to Athens, killed Aegeus, took the throne, and banished Medea.

    Palemon

    It is thought that Palemon married sacred queens at least three times, probably many more. As stated previously, the Achaeans were able to do this by taking a leave during their kingship. In this way they could unify or control a wide region. The social psychic instability continued for centuries, and most Greek tragedies are based in this period.

    Deianeira

    When Deianeira, the current wife of Palemon, realized what was happening, she took advice from the Centaurs, Pelasgian horsemen. They knew Palemon very well because he had had killed their king, Cheiron, and many others. This had been particularly outrageous because Centaur Cheiron had trained him in archery and the art of hallucinogens.

    Deianeria annointed one of Palemon’s shirts with a poison supplied by Centaur Nessus. He died while wearing this shirt. Palemon was deified after his death even though he was not the last Hero or even the last Herekles. For the indo-Europeans he was the only one.

    The old religion continued for some time, but the information war continued too. And eventually, Homer wrote his version of the drama in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

    What We Know About the First Patriarchal Systems

    Among Indo-Europeans women were very low on the social scale. For Latins and Greeks, they were just a little above other reproductive animals. They had no social rights at all. Rather than enjoying an independent lifestyle, they were transferred from their father’s authority to that of their husbands. If they survived their spouses, their male children assumed authority over them.

    Greek writers such as Theopompus and Hesiod, and their Roman compatriots like Cato, agreed that the only purpose of a woman was to provide legitimate children. The education of women was limited to weaving and cooking, and they never appeared in public.

    In ‘settled, lawful Rome’ until the rise of the Empire, women could not own property, or anything else for that matter. They were owned. They were so unimportant they had no names. Emilia and Claudia were family names indicating that they belonged to an Emilii or Claudii man.

    Women prepared the meals for their men and their guests but they did not eat with them. The same was true in Rome. Roman and Greek conservatives were disgusted by the conduct of Etruscan and Ionian women. Yes, disgusted. Not surprised, not curious, not disapproving. Disgusted!

    What was the Character of the Indigenous Society?

    A different sort of society existed in the same region during this period. The indigenous societies they took over had been in Europe thousands of years before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. They were the remnant of the Paleolithic population in that region.

    Ionian women for example joined their husbands at their businesses. They had their own businesses too, and could inherit and pass on property. Love in the couple was common. The women were competitive, and their husbands didn’t mind. 

    We know from my original patriarchy article that women in Egypt had similar rights before Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great. Alexander was a student of Aristotle; Aristotle was a student of Plato; Plato was in the vanguard of the regime-change campaign.

    Alexander the Great consciously strove to spread Greek thought, language and culture to all of the peoples he conquered. Thanks to him, the writings of his mentors, Plato and Aristotle, have been perpetuated in Western philosophy. And as Alfred North Whitehead famously said, Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.

    Women’s Rights v Disgusted Indo-Europeans

    One of the accounts I am using focuses on the Basques. This is The Oldest Europeans by J. F. del Giorgio. I’ve discovered a few minor errors in this work, but I’ve found it useful for the most part. He argues the traits of these societies were shared by populations in other areas of the West, for example, Britons, Scandinavians, Irish, Welsh, Celts, Etruscans and Pelasgians–the Oldest Europeans. It is interesting that hatred for these cultures resurfaced before World War II. 

    The trait that had most bothered those early invaders was the independence and self-assertiveness of European women. Before World War II Asiatic anti-European propaganda claimed independent women were a modern symptom of European decadence. 

    del Giorgio argues that modernity had nothing to do with it.

    The independence and other remarkable traits of European women are not modern, It all comes from ancient, very ancient times.

    Actually, it is not now that they are more independent. They have not gained independence during the last millennia, but have almost completely lost it. European women were not merely independent in the past. They seem to have enjoyed a remarkable high status. They were practically in command (del Giorgio, p. 86)

    Patriarchy in Contemporary Society

    The impact of patriarchy on modern social structures is so total it is almost invisible. Many modern women assume they are liberated, or they did until the recent American backlash, but this perception was always delusional. The overriding structure of the world is patriarchal and it will remain that way until our institutions and economic agreements change drastically.

    Challenges to Patriarchal Structures

    An effective challenge to patriarchal structures does not exist in today’s world. The feminism allowed by our culture is part of the power structure. Take Hilary Clinton for example. She and Bill together have been good soldiers for the Anglo-Saxon-leaning power-base for their entire careers. And I would venture to say that Hilary has always been in awe of Bill’s political ability, regardless of her independent feminist stance. She is talented in her own way and hard-working, but her only claim to fame in the 2016 election was being female. She didn’t win, but she fulfilled her assignment–to do whatever was necessary to defeat Bernie.

    The Same-Sex Marriage Movement as Women’s Rights Strategy

    The same-sex marriage movement has its own dedicated lobbyists who are working toward some invisible goal. Feminist theory may be the source of this movement, but as a strategy for women’s rights, it’s wrong-headed. 

    Greece and Rome fostered same-sex relationships, but this did not help Greek or Roman women. Same-sex relations were not a threat to the Achaeans. Women as women were the threat, and the Achaeans destroyed the cultures that honored them. 

    The Romans loved Greek art, architecture, and literature, and they assimilated some of it into their arts and mythology. They were also heavily patriarchal but their patriarchy had a different character than Greek patriarchy. The Romans rejected certain Greek institutions. They especially despised the classical Greek social structures which they believed made Athenian men weak, effeminate, and psychologically soft. For that reason, they criticized gymnariums and nakedness. These institutions were a recipe for laziness and corruption in their view. The Romans exercised for military training, but they kept their clothes on. (thehistorianshut.com; onlinelibrary.wiley.com)

    Rome also rejected Greek pederasty. They thought it violated a citizen’s dignity. They did form same-sex relationships, but they protected Roman youth. A Roman citizen could only have same-sex relations with slaves or non-citizens, and he must always take the dominant penetrative role. They viewed the Greek system of courted free citizens as a complete breakdown of patriarchal authority.(rlesser.sites.gettysburg.edu; thoughts.com)

     

     

     

    1. John Temple Bristow, What Paul Really said About Women. HarperCollins Publishers, NY, 1988. [↩]
    2. J.F. del Georgio, The Oldest Europeans. A.J. Place, 2005. [↩]