BACHOFEN, JOHANN JAKOB. - Jurist, born in Basel on 22 Dec. 1815, died there on 25 Nov. 1887. A disciple of Savigny, he directed his research to the history of the development of legal forms within primitive human groups, thereby being considered the founder of legal ethnology.
His fundamental work is Mutterrecht (Stuttgart 1865), in which he asserts that the social and religious development of humanity would proceed from an initial stage characterized: economically by communism; socially by the predominance of woman, to whom, given the sexual promiscuity, the norm of generation was attributed; religiously by the cult of a great Mother Goddess, symbol of the earth that produces all and in itself absorbs all, whence the chthonic deities and the cult of the dead.
From this telluric religion, in which lunar mythology predominates, one would pass to a second form of religion and civilization, economically characterized by private property, socially by the predominance of man even within the family, and religiously by the cult of solar deities; which, according to B., signifies that the progress of history is accomplished through the victory of spirit as a force over the inertia of matter. This explains the revival of studies on B. in Germany between the First and Second World Wars.