But before this took place, Bachofen relates yet another movement, which for a time restored the early matriarchate. The women, at first opposing, presently became converts to the Dionysusian gospel, and were afterwards its warmest supporters. Motherhood became degraded. Bacchanalian excesses followed, which led to a return to the ancient _hetaïrism_. Bachofen believes that this formed a fresh basis for a second gynæcocracy. He compares the Amazonian period of these later days with that in which marriage was first introduced, and finds that “the deep religious impulse being absent, it was destined to fail, and give place to the spiritual Apollonic conception of fatherhood.”[22] [22] _Ibid._, p. 85. In Bachofen’s opinion this triumph of fatherhood was the final salvation. This is what he says-- “It was the assertion of fatherhood which delivered the mind from natural appearances, and when this was successfully achieved, human existence was raised above the laws of natural life. The principal of motherhood is common to all the spheres of animal life, but man goes beyond this tie in gaining pre-eminence in the process of procreation, and thus becomes conscious of his higher vocation. In the paternal and spiritual principle he breaks through the bonds of tellurism, and looks upwards to the higher regions of the cosmos. Victorious fatherhood thus becomes as distinctly connected with the heavenly light as prolific motherhood is with the teeming earth.”[23] [23] _Das Mutterrecht_, Intro., p. xxvii. Here, Bachofen, as is his custom, turns to point an analogy with the process of nature. “All the stages of sexual life from Aphrodistic _hetaïrism_ to the Apollonistic purity of fatherhood, have their corresponding type in the stages of natural life, from the wild vegetation of the morass, the prototype of conjugal motherhood, to the harmonic law of the Uranian world, to the heavenly light which, as the _flamma non urens_, corresponds to the eternal youth of fatherhood. The connection is so completely in accordance with law, that the form taken by the sexual relation in any period may be inferred from the predominance of one or other of these universal ideas in the worship of a people.”[24] [24] _Ibid._, Intro., p. xxix.