The power of the earth and the power of the keys: Tracing Bachofen in S. I. Smirnov’s historical thought

Abstract

The article examines a historiographical case in Russian scholarship on church history of the early 20th century, in which the cultural opposition of the masculine and the feminine — characteristic of the late modern period — is projected onto the research material. The case in point involves the texts Abominable Women and Confession to the Earth by Doctor of Church History Sergey Ivanovich Smirnov. In these works, the masculine and feminine are portrayed as antagonistic principles within religion, primarily manifesting in the opposition between Christianity and paganism. Suppression of the feminine principle in religion is identified by Smirnov as a cause of the active development of marginal religiosity, examples of which he sees in the folk belief in Mother Earth who forgives people’s sins, and in the female priesthood in early Rus’. The article traces the influence on Smirnov’s thinking not only of the early 20th-century debate on the revival of female church ministries, but also broader cultural and scholarly programs addressing “the woman question.” Mediated above all through Russian jurisprudence and ethnography, as well as German classical studies (presented in the article as sources for Smirnov’s conceptual framework), his ideas are ultimately linked to the intellectual debates surrounding J. J. Bachofen’s book Mother Right (1861). Smirnov’s intellectual legacy reveals three key motifs that reflect the core of these debates: the conflict between the masculine and feminine principles is interpreted as part of a historical process; the emergence of spiritual paternal authority is associated with the advent of Christianity; within this context, a new form of spiritual community emerges, articulated through the concept of the “penitential family.”