BACHOFEN, JOHANN JAKOB. — Jurist, born in Basel on 22 December 1815, died there on 25 November 1887. A disciple of Savigny, he directed his research toward the history of the development of juridical forms within primitive human groups, to such an extent that he is regarded as 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 have proceeded from an initial stage characterized: economically, by communism; socially, by the predominance of women, to whom, given the promiscuity of the sexes, the rule of generation belonged; and religiously, by the worship of a great Mother Goddess, symbol of the earth that produces everything and absorbs everything back into itself, whence chthonic divinities 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 worship of solar divinities; this, 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 during the period between the First and Second World Wars.