The End of Patriarchy Doesn't Mean a Return to Matriarchy
It's time for a union of polarities
Hey all,
Happy eclipse-hangover. How y’all feeling?
I was inspired to write this over the past week after watching so may conversations unfold online recently about “Babylon” and biblical prophecy, debates about “the patriarchy” and its discontents, and endless cycles of accusation and defense regarding Judaism, Christianity, and the roots of Western civilization. I’ve been deeply fascinated in how people are perceiving this moment from a spiritual, religious, and ancient-context angle, but much of what circulates on social media reduces these profound historical and spiritual questions to slogans, and to who is victim and who is villain.
This year, my perspective has deepened significantly through an ancestral healing course that opened me to world history in a more intimate and personal way. Working with my own lineage, feeling the patterns of trauma, resilience, and belief that have passed through generations, made the abstract narratives of “patriarchy” and “matriarchy” suddenly embodied and urgent. I’m no longer able discuss these concepts as distant curiosities. The more I look through my own lineage, the more I realize they live in my bones, in the inherited tensions between my own masculine and feminine aspects. The union of these historical dualities deeply informs the spiritual seeking that has driven my work for years.
My work for the past several years through Cycles of Time/Living the Spiral has been about integrating polarity: East and West, feminine and masculine, ancient and modern, immanent and transcendent. I’ve watched as discussions about the “Age of Aquarius” or the “return of the divine feminine” often repeat the very patterns they claim to transcend, creating new dualisms, new exclusions, and new forms of spiritual superiority. And I’ve noticed how rarely anyone asks:
What if both the throne and the sword were partial truths? What if the goddess and the god of our ancestors both have something to teach us, and the task is not to choose between them but to unite them at a higher level of consciousness?
This essay is my attempt to tell a story that honors the full arc of religious evolution without collapsing into either nostalgic matriarchalism or defensive patriarchalism. This essay is about how the Age of Taurus gave us the sacred body and the chalice, how the Age of Aries gave us the critical mind and the sword, and how the Age of Pisces, which is now maturing from innocence to abundance, offers the possibility of sacred marriage within each of us: the integration that transcends both.
I studied anthropology in college but I’m not a historian claiming objective truth. I am a synthesizer of wisdom who has spent years watching fragments circulate in isolation, waiting for someone to weave them into a pattern that could help us move forward. If you’ve ever felt caught between two sides, between blaming the patriarchy and defending your traditions, between Eastern transcendence and Western embodiment, this essay is for you.
Before we get into it: An Invitation to Find Your Shine:
If this exploration of integration (between ages, polarities, and the masculine and feminine within) resonates with your own journey, on of my offerings is my Find Your Shine readings. These are personalized sessions that help you discover your inner radiance by integrating the polarities revealed in your own astrological chart. These readings are about recognizing the patterns that live in you and finding the path to your own sacred marriage of opposites. My books are currently open for those ready to illuminate their next step.
Looking ahead, I am preparing a new offering: Your Heart Is a Compass. This 5-week course will provide a path to walk the wheel of the year with heart coherence and integration. I draw on the myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld as we move through the seasons as active participants in the great work of unifying what has been divided. More details will emerge in the turning of the year. For now, may you find your shine, and may your heart indeed be your compass through the gates of innocence and into the abundance that awaits.
To book a Find Your Shine reading or to receive updates on Your Heart Is a Compass, visit hearthandspiral.com.
Now onto the history of matriarchy, patriarchy, and a call for synarchy…
The night before last I fell down a rabbit hole into the myths of Inanna, Durga, and Cybele- three goddesses from completely different civilizations, thousands of years apart. All three riding lions.
Then the next morning, Israel attacked Iran in a strike called “Operation Roaring Lion.” Last summer’s IDF and U.S attack was called “Operation Rising Lion”.
My imagination was so immersed in images of the Lion Goddess that these operations names stopped me in my tracks.
Of course, both Iran and Israel are symbolized by the lion, too. Israel’s is the Lion of Judah, a symbol of courage, kingship, and sovereignty. Iran’s lion comes from the same ancient symbolic world as Inanna herself, layered over thousands of years through Zoroastrian and Islamic tradition. The Islamic Republic banned the lion flag in 1980, and Iranians still wave it in the streets when they rise up.
These are two lions from the same ancient world, and now the name of a battle of bombs flying at each other. The problem is, they are battling. Killing. Conquering. Nobody is riding the lion.
After several millenia of goddesses partnering with the lion’s wild power, the patriarchy that arose in the Age of Aries around 2000BC instead began to kill them. From that time onward, Hercules slew the Nemean lion, Gilgamesh attacked and killed a pride of lions, and David murdered a lion with his bare hands. The hero myth that still deeply lingers today is always the same: prove yourself by killing the wild beast. Stand over the body. Name the operation.
The goddess traditions understood something completely different. You don’t conquer the lion. You earn its trust, and you ride it.
A dead lion gives you a trophy to boast about.
A living lion gives you real power.
These are two very different relationships with wildness, and with how we deal with the other. Two very different ideas of what strength means.
Let’s get into the history.
The Age of Taurus: The Goddess and the Bull (c. 4300 BCE to 2150 BCE)
The Age of Taurus was characterized by what we coule call embodied divinity. It was a time when the sacred was made manifest in material abundance, sexual fertility, and the cyclical rhythms of nature. Taurus, the bull, represented the generative power of the earth itself, and in this age, human civilization achieved its first great leap. When the Neolithic Revolution transformed nomadic hunters into settled agriculturalists, the city-state emerged as humanity’s defining innovation.
Mesopotamia: Inanna of Uruk and the Sacred Marriage
Nowhere exemplifies the Age of Taurus more vividly than Uruk, the world’s first true city, where the goddess Inanna (later known as Ishtar) reigned supreme. Her temple, the Eanna (”House of Heaven”), dominated the city so completely that it was written that it occupied half the city’s area. Inanna was the Queen of Heaven and Earth, goddess of love, war, fertility, and political power. Her worship centered on the sacred marriage (hieros gamos), which was a ritual union of the goddess with the king. This sexual act conferred his legitimacy, ensured agricultural fertility, and maintained cosmic order.
Inanna’s power was active, sensual, and autonomous. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, she proposes marriage to the hero, offering him “a chariot of lapis lazuli and gold” and “kingship over the world.” When he rejects her, citing her history of destroying her past lovers, she unleashes the Bull of Heaven in vengeance, demonstrating that her favor was life-giving and death-dealing alike. The Descent of Inanna shows her voluntarily descending to the underworld, dying, and being resurrected through the cleverness of her servant and the sacrifice of her husband Dumuzi, which established a recurring pattern of divine death and rebirth millennia before Jesus.
The Taurus religious economy was temple-centered and collective, where land belonged to the gods, administered by priesthoods. The goddess’s body, represented by her priestesses at the temple, served as the conduit between heaven and earth. The bull, represented as Taurus the constellation and in tangible world as the sacrificial animal, embodied this abundant theme: strong, fertile, and grounded in the earth.
Egypt: Isis and the Power of the Word
In Egypt, the Taurus Age manifested through the Osirian mysteries. This was the era of the story of the death and resurrection of Osiris, his sister-wife Isis’s magical restoration of his body and spirit, and the cyclical renewal of Ma’at (cosmic order). Isis was the Great Enchantress who, through her wits and magical knowledge, resurrected Osiris and protected their son Horus from the murderous Set.
Isis’s most famous myth reveals her Taurus-era power: she learned the secret name of Ra by crafting a serpent from his droppings and using its venom to force the supreme god to reveal his hidden name, the source of his power. With this knowledge, she surpassed even the sun god, demonstrating that feminine wisdom and magical speech could overcome masculine solar dominance. The pharaoh, though male, ruled as her son and her throne hieroglyph was the seat of legitimate kingship.
Egyptian theology at that time emphasized stability, repetition, and the feminine power of regeneration. The goddess’s tears for Osiris were said to cause the Nile’s annual flood, the very source of Egypt’s agricultural abundance. Here, like in Mesopotamia, the goddess was present, immanent, embodied, and an essential conduit to maintain the cosmic order.
The fall of the Age of Taurus
By 2500 BCE, however, the fertile Taurus equilibrium faced disruption. Climate change, particularly a severe drought around 2200 BCE, triggered mass migrations from the Syrian desert and Arabian margins. These Amorites (“westerners” or “highlanders”) were pastoral nomads who, according to those in Mesopotamia, “knew no grain” and “ate raw meat”. They brought with them a different religious temperament that tribal, patriarchal, and oriented toward warrior gods who granted victory in battle rather than fertility in fields.
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The Age of Aries: The Warrior God takes center stage (c. 2150 BCE - 1 BCE)
The transition to the Age of Aries marked a civilizational rupture. Taurus had emphasized reception, embodiment, and cyclical return, but Aries came in demanding assertion, conquest, and linear progress. The ram, with its sharp pointed horns and aggressive charge, became the age’s totem.
Mesopotamia: Marduk and the Violent Cosmos
The Amorite conquest of Mesopotamia brought about the first systematic patriarchal revolution in recorded history. The Enuma Elish, which was composed during the Old Babylonian period (c. 1894-1595 BCE), narrates this transformation mythologically. In it, the young god Marduk defeats the ancient Mesopotamian primordial goddess Tiamat. He splits her corpse to create heaven and earth, and receives kingship from the assembled gods.
This was a cosmological inversion, where creation was no longer generative and cooperative but violent and competitive. Marduk’s supremacy was established through single combat, not through any kind of sacred marriage. The king, who had formerly been the goddess’s consort, became the warrior-executive who ruled by divine mandate independent of feminine mediation. (This sounds all too familiar….)
The Amorites restructured Mesopotamian society, where land shifted from temple to palace control, private enterprise replaced collective temple economy, and law codes (like Hammurabi’s) started to regulate individual behavior rather than communal ritual. We know that the goddess did not fully disappear (Ishtar remained very popular and the Amorites also imported their own high goddess named Ashratum), but the goddess ultimately was dethroned from her position as authority, repositioned as a consort, and was eventually demonized.
Egypt: The Hyksos Trauma and Imperial Revenge
Egypt’s transition to the Age of Aries came through violent interruption. Around 1650 BCE, Hyksos invaders (who were most likley related to the Amorites) established the 15th Dynasty, where they introduced bronze weapons, chariots, and religious influences from the Levant. When the existing Theban rulers finally expelled them in around 1550 BCE, they inaugurated the New Kingdom, an era of unprecedented militarism.
The pharaoh transformed from a priest-king serving Isis to a warrior-emperor, personally leading campaigns into Canaan and Syria. The god Amun, who was previously a local Theban deity, was merged with the sun god Ra to become Amun-Ra, a universal conqueror whose empire extended Egypt’s ma’at through force instead of harmony. Seth, the ambiguous desert god, became associated with foreign military power. In the Age of Aries, Egypt’s theology masculinized and imperialized, reflecting the Arian ethos of expansion and domination.
Israel: The Patriarchal Revolution
The biblical patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, also emerged precisely during this Amorite/Arian transition out of the Age of Taurus. Abraham’s journey from Ur of the Chaldees (southern Mesopotamia) to Haran (northern Syria, the Amorite heartland) and finally to Canaan traces the migration patterns of these nomads.
The patriarchal religion of early Judaism that emerged was critical synthesis, where the high god El (likely borrowed from Canaanite theology) was gradually identified with Yahweh, a warrior deity. This new god combined El’s cosmic supremacy with Yahweh’s tribal militancy. The patriarchs established altars to El at ancient Canaanite sacred sites, where they transformed its theology toward exclusive monotheism.
The ‘iniquity of the Amorites’ in Genesis 15:16 - the sin so grave it justified their conquest - pointed specifically at Canaanite religious practice: the fertility cults, the sacred groves, the goddess and her lion. Whatever its historical accuracy, the text encodes the same transition playing out across the ancient world: the systematic overwriting of the older earth-rooted, goddess-centered world by a sky god and his warrior people.
The Canaanites that David conquered when he overtook what is currently Jerusalem through invading the city’s water spring, were Taurean in character. They were settled agriculturalists, worshipping Baal and Asherah, the bull and the goddess. This was an earth-rooted, goddess-centered religious world. Asherah was associated with lions (indicating power), serpents (representing immortality or healing), and sacred trees (signifying fertility). The Biblical God of this era is portrayed as a general leading his army of chosen people in conquest of the promised land.
Even the internal drama of the Israelites encodes this transition. In Exodus, Moses rejects the Golden Calf, which was the people’s instinctive return to Taurus bull worship, and brings in the Ram, symbolized by the blowing of the shofar, the ram’s horn.
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The Age of Pisces (approx. 1 CE- 2150 CE) : Innocence to Abundance
After the Age of Aries, the transition to the Age of Pisces introduced a new religious modality that transcended the matriarchal influences of the Taurean Age and the patriarchial ones of the Arean age. With the rise of early Christianity at this time, a new culture was introduced that focused on transcendence through suffering, sacrifice, and mystical union. Aries spent 2000 years with an ethos of conquering, and then Pisces culture came in to transform through love. Aries asserted the imperial self, and Pisces sought to dissolve the ego in divine communion.
True to the sign of the double fishes, the Age of Pisces interpreted stories of the Goddess from the Age of Taurus in a binary way. Her psychological and cultural roots ran too deep, so instead, early Christianity split her identity. Inanna/Ishtar’s characteristics were divided between two figures:
The demonized feminine: The Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17), retains Ishtar’s imagery, riding a beast, wearing pearls and purple, drunk with blood, holding a golden cup, while embodying everything the new order rejected: sexual autonomy, political power, and material splendor.
The purified feminine: The Virgin Mary, who inherited Ishtar’s titles (”Queen of Heaven”) and maternal imagery but is completely desexualized, made her acceptable to the patriarchial framework.
The Gate of Innocence: The Lamb Enters
The cusp between Aries and Pisces, which was roughly around the time of Jesus, represents what the Human Design tradition calls the Gate of Innocence. At this point in time, the Arian ram becomes the Piscean lamb, a sacrificial figure rather than the the well-known conquering warrior. Early Christianity adopted the fish (ichthys) as its secret symbol (ahem Pisces), but its central figure was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
The Human Design gate that spans from Aries to Pisces is Gate 25, a frequency of innocence, victimhood, and univeral love. Jesus as the Lamb embodies the fullest expression of this transitional energy, the innocent who accepts violence to transform it. The early christian Church, despite its martyrs in the changing of the Ages, often reverted to Arian patterns of imperial dominance, crusading violence, and patriarchal hierarchy.
The Maturation of Pisces: The New Hieros Gamos is the Union of Mind and Heart
In 2026, we are still working through the energetic lessons of the Age of Pisces, and fully able to reflect on the ages that came before it as well. Compared to the Aries/Pisces cusp at the time of Christ, though, we are now living in a different, more mature frequency of Pisces: the Gate of Family, and about to enter the the Gate of Abundance. This final gate of the Age represents the fullness of the fish, focusing on the truth that spiritual poverty and material scarcity are illusions, and that divine union produces abundance in all dimensions.
This mature version of Pisces emphasizes:
Spiritual union as generative, with embodied transcendence that produces fruit, rather than escape from the world.
The return of the sacred marriage: The hieros gamos reappears not as the ritual sexual union between the Godesses priestesses and the nobility, but as the interior union of yin and yang.
Abundance through dissolution, where the ego’s dissolution reveals the plenitude that was always present.
The mystical tradition within Christianity (like Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross) pursued this authentic Piscean goal, calling it divine union (unio mystica). Teresa’s “spiritual marriage,” John’s “dark night of the soul,” and Eckhart’s “ground of the soul” all talk about the dissolution of the separate self into the divine, a return to the Taurus experience of embodied sacredness, now transfigured through consciousness rather than ritual. In this Age, the sensual heart of Taurus and the strategic mind of Aries are destined to unite.
The mature Piscean age has definitely brought the gradual return of the feminine divine worship, too. From the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary (which retained more goddess-like qualities than official theology admitted) to the modern revival of goddess spirituality, the repressed Taurus element has resurfaced. The sacred marriage (hieros gamos), central to Taurus religion, returns in Christian mysticism as the marriage of Christ and the soul, and in alchemy as the coniunctio oppositorum, the union of masculine and feminine, solar and lunar, conscious and unconscious.
This is matriarchy fulfilled through transcendence. The goddess is united with the god in a kingdom that has no throne and needs no sword.
The End of Pisces: Completion and Integration
As we approach the end of the Age of Pisces, we can see that the pattern of the Ages suggests that each era transcends and includes its predecessors:
Taurus gave us embodied sacredness and the recognition that sensual, tangible matter is divine.
Aries gave us individual agency and critical consciousnes, with the capacity to choose, judge, and to conquer the self.
Pisces is giving us role models of universal compassion and mystical depth, the realization that all separation is illusory.
The end of Pisces, right now, means the maturation of these gifts. Body and spirit, east and west, above and below, self and other, human and divine, masculine and feminine were never truly separate. The upcoming Gate of Abundance opens when we recognize that the chalice was never empty and the sword was never needed.
The sacred marriage that Inanna and Isis enacted in their temples, the union that Gilgamesh rejected and Marduk replaced with conquest, returns at a higher octave. The king and priestess in ritual union become the soul and the divine, the mind and the heart, in conscious union, producing spiritual abundance that overflows all boundaries.
This is the promise beyond both patriarchy and matriarchy: the marriage of heaven and earth that both ages, in their different ways, were always seeking.
Scarcity of resources may have initially been the cause the nomadic warriorship in the Age of Aries, and while that scarcity seems like it has not gone away on the land/water/oil front, there is rising awarenss of a new type of resource: consciousness itself.
As the Piscean age wraps up, it is time to rebuild the temple, but it is no longer physical. It lives in each of our hearts. It is time for the goddess and the god to embrace, and for the fish, swimming in both directions, to finally remember that the ocean was always home.
Why the old version of Matriarchy is not the Answer
Today, as the Age of Pisces matures and the failures of patriarchy become undeniable, there is a growing call for matriarchy, for a return to goddess-centered religion, feminine leadership, and the goddess-led values of the Age of Taurus. This impulse is understandable and necessary- the repression of the feminine has been and currently is real and devastating. The end of patriarchy, however, does not lie in a return to matriarchy, and I think that those who advocate for such a return risk repeating the very errors they critique.
What Matriarchy Actually Meant
The Age of Taurus was not the feminist utopia sometimes imagined. Inanna’s temples practiced sacred prostitution that may have involved the exploitation of women; the sacred marriage gave the king divine legitimacy for autocratic rule; and the collective religious economy, while stable, was also static and hierarchical. The goddess was immanent and powerful in the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that she could pass along to others, but she was limited by her very embodiment, without the transcendence of consciousness within the populace.
The Taurus religious system was closed, cyclical, and bound to place. It could not accommodate the critical consciousness, individual agency, and universal ethics that the Arian age would develop. When Gilgamesh rejected Inanna, he was seeking something beyond the cyclical return: immortality, individual meaning, transcendence. Now that’s gone too far. And it’s time not for a return to what was, but something completely new.
Beyond Matriarchy to a Relational Cosmology
What is emerging today is a redefinition of matriarchy itself. The new call for the feminine is about integrating the gifts that have been suppressed, rather than replacing masculine dominance with feminine dominance. Riane Eisler, author of the classic “The Chalice and the Blade”, says that patriarchy and matriarchy are "two sides of the same coin", both involving the ranking of one half of humanity over the other, and she proposes the term gylany for partnership-based societies.
The current age requires:
Embodiment without imprisonment, where we honor the body, sexuality, and earth without being limited to them.
Reception without passivity, with the capacity to receive, nurture, and contain, combined with the power to choose and transform.
Cyclical wisdom without eternal return: Understanding patterns and seasons while remaining open to quantum leaps and novelty.
This is matriarchy redefined as the full integration of feminine values into a consciousness that has already developed critical awareness and individual agency. It is the marriage of throne and sword, the chalice that can hold the blade’s sharpness, the sword that serves the chalice’s abundance.
The Internal Union
The crucial insight of mature Pisces is that this integration must happen within each of us, and in our social structures together. The “sacred marriage” is the interior union of masculine and feminine principles in the individual soul, as much as it is any external arrangement.
Carl Jung’s work on the anima and animus, the feminine within the man and the masculine within the woman, points toward this integration. The deeper work, though, is spiritual union: the recognition that the “other” is a manifestation of the divine to be united with, and that this union within addresses the limitations of both previous ages.
The call for matriarchy today is valid, but it must be a call for the feminine principle to be integrated into the whole of human life and consciousness. The “end of patriarchy” means the end of any system of domination, and the beginning of complementary partnership at both social and psychological levels.
At this time in the cycles of history, it’s not about having a fertility goddess to sleep with or a warrior-god to submit to — it’s the union of the two that can bring a true connection to source. But this isn’t easy- it takes radical responsibility, and trust that your mind/heart sovereignty creates the basis for a new collective reality. It’s time for each one of us, regardless of gender, to sharpen our swords, but only to draw them from a place of sensual connection to the earth. We got this.
What do you think?
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Sources for this article:
Ancient Texts
Epic of Gilgamesh (Standard Babylonian Version, c. 1300-1000 BCE). Trans. Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin, 1999).
Enuma Elish (Babylonian Creation Epic, c. 18th-17th century BCE). Trans. Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses (CDL Press, 2005).
The Descent of Inanna (Sumerian myth, c. 1900-1600 BCE). Trans. Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (Harper & Row, 1983).
Hebrew Bible & New Testament, Book of Revelation.
Key Secondary Works
Baring, Anne & Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (Arkana, 1991).
Campion, Nicholas. The Book of World Horoscopes (Wessex Astrologer, 2004).
Charpin, Dominique. “The Amorites: A Political History” in The Amorites (Eisenbrauns, 2021).
Dever, William G. Who Were the Early Israelites? (Eerdmans, 2003).
George, Andrew. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin, 1999).
Jung, Carl G. Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton, 1963).
Redford, Donald B. Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, 1992).
Schussler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment (Fortress, 1985).