Lapsarian myths

Jim Slagle has an interesting quote from historian Diane Purkiss on the history of witchcraft; or rather on the public's perception of historical witches. A snippet:

"There is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also in some parts of the Continent, midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters. Most women used herbal medicines as part of their household skills, some of which were quasi-magical, without arousing any anxiety. There is little evidence that convicted witches were invariably unmarried or sexually 'liberated' or lesbian; many (though not most) of those accused were married women with young families. Men were not responsible for all accusations: many, perhaps even most, witches were accused by women, and most cases depend at least partly on the evidence given by women witnesses. Persecution was as severe in Protestant as in Catholic areas. The Inquisition, except in a few areas where the local inquisitor was especially zealous, was more lenient about witchcraft cases than the secular courts; in Spain, for example, where the Inquisition was very strong, there were few deaths. Many inquisitors and secular courts disdained the Malleus Malificarum, still the main source for the view that witch-hunting was women-hunting; still others thought it ridiculously paranoid about male sexuality. In some countries, torture was not used at all, and in England, witches were hanged rather than burned.

"All this has been known for some time. Yet in the teeth of the evidence, some women continue to find this story believable, continue to circulate it. Some women are still so attached to the story that they resist efforts to disprove it. The myth has become important, not because of its historical truth, but because of its mythic significance."

She also writes:

"It is often linked with another lapsarian myth, the myth of an originary matriarchy, through the themes of mother-daughter learning and of matriarchal religions as sources of witchcraft. This witch-story explains the origins and nature of good and evil. It is a religious myth..."

Every now and then someone tells me the story of the ancient matriarchal religions. They were peaceful, kind, sexually liberated, and ecologically sensitive, and they were smashed and driven underground by the evil patriarchal religions, which have been persecuting women ever since. Ecrasez l'infame, destroy the patriarchy!

I'm not a huge fan of The Patriarchy myself (or at least I try to heed what feminism has to say). And surely there were matriarchial religions somewhere in European prehistory. But I'm doubtful about the strictly historical value of the overarching original-matriarchy story. It's always seemed to me that it was indeed a kind of lapsarian myth, an account of the Fall. It's not about history or science, it's a mythic answer to an existential question, located (of course) in the misty land before history. We all tend to situate our Paradises somewhere in the past or in the future: Ah, things were good once, in the pagan classical era/the Catholic Middle Ages/pre-Columbian Turtle Island/the Enlightenment/the decent, law-abiding 1950s/the Clinton era... Or, just you wait until the Dictatorship of the Proletariat/Jehovah's Earthly Kingdom/the Enlightened Reign of Science/the Rapture/the Singularity. Things were/will be much better then, darn tootin.'

I'm not saying that such myths do not contain existential truth. Just that we should recognize when we've left history and entered mythology. Then, perhaps, we can compare our mythologies.