(I’d like to dedicate this post about warrior culture, patriarchy and militarism to Donald Trump’s Pretend-Hero’s Birthday Military Parade.)
This post is also dedicated to men, however you define yourselves. Because right now there’s so much talk circulating about masculinity, touting warrior culture and the need for men to be more manly men, that it’s important to understand what patriarchy actually is.
We think of patriarchy as a system that allocates power to men over women and anyone who doesn’t fit either gender, and indeed it does, to men’s benefit. But in its origins and at its core, patriarchy has a different purpose. Patriarchy is a set of beliefs designed to shape men’s psyche’s so that they allow themselves to be controlled by other men, and to fight, die and kill for other men’s aims and objectives.
Let’s look at how patriarchy began:
Throughout time, through history and prehistory, human beings have invented thousands of different forms of culture, and distributed power in various ways, sometimes according to gender and sometimes not. But the particular ideology we call patriarchy, this warrior culture that the right wing is so fond of cosplaying, is inseparable with the rise of organized warfare.
Again human beings have always fought, some societies more than others. At times, in some lands, tribes battle each other and conduct raids on other tribes. But organized warfare, warfare for conquest of territory and enslavement of the losers, only arose in the Bronze Age when metallurgy allow the development of more efficient weapons, and with the rise of larger, hierarchically organized societies where enslaved captives could be fed and put to work, building pyramids or digging irrigation canals.
So let’s take a trip back to ancient Mesopotamia, the origin place of some of the earliest civilizations. Here I always think of what Gandhi said when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization.
He said, “I think it would be a good idea.”
Be that as it may, what we call civilization, generally identified with the rise of agriculture, cities, and technological innovations such as pottery, weaving and writing, is also a sad tale of war, of conquest and destruction.
It didn’t start out that way. The very first cities and villages in the Middle East and what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas termed Old Europe, anywhere from 9000 to around 3500 BCE, were clusters of relatively egalitarian homes, small shrines, without evidence of massive defensive structures, huge palaces or armories of weapons. Art from that era depicts life: plants, animals, birds, and sacred symbols.(1)
Enter the Bronze Age, and the change begins. Now we start to see centralized temples, giant palaces, evidence of extreme social stratification, walled cities, caches of weapons and evidence of warfare and mass destruction. A simplified history of Mesopotamia might go like this:
A people build a beautiful city. They develop all kinds of great advances in building and architecture, in pottery and weaving, in culture and mathematics, in sciences. Then they get into a war with another city. It all gets destroyed, and all the inhabitants get slaughtered or enslaved.
So then they build up another city and they have great advances in art and architecture and sculpture and painting and gardening and sciences. And then they get into a war with another city. Again, it all gets destroyed and all the inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved. And this happens over and over and over again, as if a bunch of kids were making towers out of blocks and knocking them down again and again and again.
It’s probably always been relatively easy to motivate hotheaded young men to jump on a horse and go raid another tribe’s cattle. But what organized warfare required was something very different. Ancient battles were won or lost by how well armies were disciplined to form a line and hold it. While there were always a few leaders or heroes who inspired the troops with their individual prowess and daring, success or failure ultimately depended on how well the bulk of the soldiers suppressed their individuality, stood together, and held the line as a whole.
If you were a soldier, you had to stand still, shields locked in line with other men, as the chariots came thundering down and the pikes came at you, What do you need psychologically to do that? You need something that is strong enough to override your innate human instinct to shit your pants and run away.
Such battles demanded an ideology stronger than fear. You had to be more afraid of being seen as weak or cowardly, as soft or womanlike, than you were of being skewered. You had to believe that to be a man, to be strong, is to be hard, cold and unfeeling. You can’t feel empathy, because if you do, how are you going to stick your sword into somebody else’s guts?
Patriarchy is that ideology. (2)
Above all, patriarchy demands that you prove your manhood over and over again, that you not be like a woman. Women then get assigned all the feelings, all the fears, and anxieties, but also all the caring, empathy and compassionate feelings that no society can truly exist without. They are left to rear new generations of warriors, and to function as prizes of war.
For soldiers also needed a carrot as well as a stick. Their reward for facing death and dismemberment was plunder and rape. Rape was always a component of organized warfare. When a losing people were enslaved, for women that meant sexual slavery. Consider The Iliad, that classic epic of Bronze Age warfare, that begins with Achilles having a major fit of the sulks because Agamemnon has taken away his prize of war, Briseis, an enslaved woman.
If women are to function as prizes they cannot have sexual agency. You can actually trace this change by looking at the sacred liturgies of Mesopotamia. Writing was not invented until the early Bronze Age, so even the earliest texts come from the time of conquests, but some reflect an earlier sensibility. In the Sacred Marriage liturgies of ancient Sumer and Akkad, sexuality was seen as a great, fructifying force that regenerated and enlivened the land. Inanna, originally Goddess of the communal storehouse and abundance, later the Goddess of love and war, is clearly in command of her sexuality. She sings a song of praise to her vulva:
“My crescent-shaped barge of heaven,
So well belayed,
Full of loveliness, like the new moon,
My untilled plot left so fallow in the desert,
My duck field so studded with ducks,
My hillock land so well watered,
my parts piled up with levees, well watered..”(3)
And she goes on to sing of her consort, Dumuzi, God of the date palm in some regions, in others, the Divine Shepherd:
“He has sprouted, has burgeoned,
He is lettuce planted by the water.
He is the one my womb loves best.”
And my personal favorite for murmuring in the throes of passion:
“Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom.
My shepherd, I will drink your fresh milk.
Let the milk of the goat flow in my sheepfold.
Fill my holy churn with honey cheese.” (4)
This is what has been taken from us all: the experience of our sexuality, our great capacity for pleasure, as a sacred force, a powerful life energy that pleasures even the Gods and brings vitality and abundance to the land itself.
Instead, men are taught to identify their sexuality with power-over, their penises with weapons that thrust and pierce, but do not feel.
For the vast majority of men, that sacrifice of feeling conceals the sacrifice of their own lives, goals, and desires in order to serve other men’s aims. But what about those other men? Those leaders, generals, kings and conquerors? How did warrior-culture work for them?
In some ways, well. They got to be the top of the hierarchy, to command, and in many cases to store up great wealth. But those benefits came with a cost. Warrior culture demands one great virtue: courage. Command was earned by exhibiting bravery, the raw, physical courage required to lead from the front, not from behind, courage that must be proved over and over again. It meant being first over the top, not directing a bunch of drones from far behind, or sending a flock of belligerent tweets.
Consider Alexander the Great, for example, probably the quintessential warrior conqueror. By all accounts a brutal and ruthless man, he was nonetheless extremely brave. He earned his men’s respect by leading the charge, putting himself in the place of greatest risk and danger. And he paid for it, suffering multiple wounds, disfigurements, and ultimately dying young. (5)
Alexander wasn’t fighting for some noble idea, or even to defend his own people. He set out to conquer the world because he was so driven by his own internalized patriarchy then he couldn’t stop. Had he settled for conquering Greece, or Anatolia, or Persia, he could have retired and lived a long, happy, and honored life. But he was himself enslaved by the same ideology that ruled his men, and that perhaps drives billionaires today to continue amassing wealth they don’t need and power that they don’t deserve. Patriarchy is relentless, and manhood is never secure, but always needs to be demonstrated over and over again.
The Zuckerbergs and JD Vances who call for a return to warrior culture are no Alexanders. It’s ludicrous to even think of them leading a charge to break a shield wall or scaling a battlement. They’re pretend warriors, who want the plunder and rape, modified slightly these days to mean profits and control over women, without taking the risks or exhibiting the courage that is the price.
Courage is a virtue. There are times, and now is one of them, when we need the courage to stand up and defend our lands and people, to fight on many fronts to stave off the conquerors. But courage is not limited to men, nor does it require us to stop feeling, to turn our bodies into either weapons or booty, or to brutalize others. Real courage is to feel fear and act anyway. And sometimes the truly courageous act is to refuse to harm others.
So men, don’t let a bunch of cowardly guys who mistake bullying for strength goad you into thinking that warrior culture is something that’s to your benefit. It’s not. It’s a way to deny you your right to feel, to truly love your own body and pleasure yourself and others, to act in service of your truest desires and to realize your unique gifts, to feel empathy, compassion, and love, and to be loved in return.
You have a right to be Dumuzi, not Alexander, and not some hapless foot soldier. You have a right to experience your body not as a weapon but as a vehicle for the fructifying life force of the world, to sing of yourself as was sung of Dumuzi:
“At its mighty rising,
Did the shoots and the buds rise up.
Did the vines rise up,
Did the grains rise up,
Did the desert fill with verdure like a pleasurable garden.”(6)
You have a right to experience your body, your sensuality as something that’s aligned with the great fructifying forces of life, that makes the flowers bloom and the trees set fruit. If you reject warrior culture and search for something else, together we can create a culture in which men and women both, along with those who don’t fall easily into either gender, can love our bodies however they are, and thrill to our amazing capacity to give pleasure. We can put our courage and our compassion toward the service not of death but of life, physical life, but also spiritual, sensual, creative life, toward the greening of the world in all its beauty.
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1) Marija Gimbutas was a renowned archaeologist of the ‘70s through the early ‘90s, head of the Department of Indo-European studies at UCLA and director of five major excavations. Her work came under attack when she championed the idea of a matrifocal, Goddess-centered culture at the root of European civilization that was altered and in places destroyed by the invasions of the early Indo-Europeans that she called Kurgans and other archaeologist term the Yamnaya. But recent research in ancient DNA has confirmed her theories. Her many works include The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, The Language of the Goddess, London, Thames and Hudson, 2001, The Civilization of the Goddess. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1992, and more.
Donna Read-Cooper and I made a documentary about her: Signs Out of Time: The Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Here’s a link to it from Kanopy, the public library app: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/114523. It’s also on YouTube but I don’t know who put it up, it wasn’t done with our permission and we don’t get any financial compensation for it. Still, we’d rather have you watch it than not!
2) I develop this thesis in greater detail in Chapter Two, “The Dismembering of the World,” of my book Truth or Dare: Encounters With Power, Authority and Mystery. New York, Harper & Row, 1987
One of the sources that influenced me was John Keegan. The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. Penguin, 1983
Riane Eisler develops a similar thesis looking at ancient Greece in her book, The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future. New York, HarperOne, 1988
3) Thorkild Jacobsen. The Treasures of Darkness. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1976, p.45,46
4) Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Myths from Sumer. New York, Harper and Row, 1983 p.38-39
5) For more on Alexander, see John Keegan. “Chapter One: Alexander and Heroic Leadership”, in The Mask of Command. New York, Viking, 1987
6) Jakobsen. p.46
This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.