WOMAN AS WITCH 



a civilisation in which man, unhandicapped by child- 

 bearing, is the lord of creation, and woman occupies, 

 socially and tribally, a secondary position. Behind this 

 heroic age, long anterior to the beginnings of traditional 

 history, looms from the dimmest past another and 

 wholly different type of civilisation a type which 

 appears in most respects to have owed its institutions 

 and its victories over nature to the genius of woman 

 rather than to that of man. It is a type, accordingly, in 

 which the influence of woman is far more prominent 

 than it was in the patriarchal age. This period of 

 civilisation has been termed the matriarchate, but to 

 avoid the dogma that it was necessarily and universally 

 a period of woman's rule, I prefer to term it the mother- 

 age, and refer to its customs of ownership and family as 

 Mother-Eight. 



So long as our only history was the history of 

 chronicles and monuments, themselves products of a 

 late stage of human growth, traces of the mother-age 

 must remain few and far between ; such even as crossed 

 the path of the historian were either misinterpreted or 

 attributed to the vagaries of individual tribes or groups. 

 But now, in our own time, when history is becoming 

 scientific, when, to again speak paradoxically, there is 

 such a thing as prehistoric history, to-day, when we 

 study history comparatively, and see in it a growth of 

 folk-customs and social institutions stretching far back 

 before written language and written laws, to-day we 

 begin to appreciate better these traces of the mother- 

 age. We put together the fossils provided by pre- 

 historic history, what philology, folklore, and archaeology 



