“It is interesting… to recall Dr. Reich’s distinction between matriarchy and patriarchy, as given in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. According to Dr. Reich, work-democracy and self-regulation of primary drives were characteristics of primitive matriarchy, and both were destroyed by the rise of authoritarian patriarchy. Recent anthropology has cast doubt on the existence of the ‘primitive matriarchy,’ but, as G. Rattray Taylor shows in his Sex in History, there can be little doubt that cultures do shore more Matrist tendencies in some periods of their development, and more Patrist tendencies at other periods. Patrist periods are characterized by sexual repression, limitation of freedom for women, political authoritarianism, fear of spontaneity, worship of a Father God, etc. Matrist periods, on the other hand, are characterized by sexual freedom, high status for women, political democracy, spontaneity, worship of a Mother Goddess, etc. This agrees with Dr. Reich’s picture of the distinction between Patriarchy and Matriarchy.
“Chapter 6 of the Tao Te Ching says:
The valley spirit never dies
She is called the Eternal Female
“According to Needham, Blakney and other Sinologists, this Eternal Female is the goddess of pre-Chou China forgotten by the conventions of the Patrist Chou State and official Confucian philosophy. Blakney considers the early Taoists to have been recruited from peasants who remembered the Shang State and its Matrist orientation” — Robert Anton Wilson, “Lao-Tse and Wilhelm Reich, Prophets of Inner Freedom” Way Out, September 1963, School of Living
“Liberation is not the release of the soul from the body; it is recovery from the tactical split between soul and body which seems to be necessary for the social discipline of the young. It therefore sets reason and culture not against Eros but at the disposal of Eros, of the ‘polymorphous perverse’ body which always retains the potentiality of a full erotic relationship with the world — not just through the genital system but through the whole sensory capacity. Liberation restores the ‘primary narcissism’ not just of the organism by itself, but of the organism/environment field…. Ethics are then subordinate to spontaneity as in Lao-tzu’s description of the ascending levels of natural order: The model (or law) of man is the earth / The model of the earth is heaven; / The model of heaven is the Tao; / The model of the Tao is spontaneity…. For the joyous task which confronts an ethic of spontaneity, however difficult it may be, is quite literally to woo people out of their armed shells.” — Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (Pantheon Books, 1961) pp. 181 & 1__
