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Every once in a while even the passionate and habitual reviewer finds a book which is as difficult to report on as a sonata or a surrealist picture. The case of this book is furthermore complicated by the author's superb but very difficult German style. Like psychoanalytic interpretations, the weight of the author's intended impression is based upon the formulation as well as on the content of his material. The wide range of the author's use of comparisons may be demonstrated by the fact that at one place, not in pseudoscientific exactness but only for illustrative purposes, he tries to put Bachofen's entire theories into a mathematical formula (p. 113) and in another place (p. 178) he effects a very surrealistic sounding composition when he starts to summarize his conclusions with the words: 'once the sea emerged from the land and was called the tree'.
Johann Jakob Bachofen was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1815; there he died in 1887, little known even in the German speaking countries. He founded the theory that the patriarchy is based upon and emerged from the matriarchy. To prove this hypothesis he was the first one who discovered 'prehistoric history' by investigating culture from which we do not possess written documents. Archæology, mythology, paleontology and even poetry are used for the purpose of historic interpretation and reconstruction enlarging