The Chalice and the Blade

The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler is an international bestseller first published in 1987 and now in 26 foreign editions, including most European languages as well as Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish. The book introduces a new conceptual framework for studying social systems that pays particular attention to how a society constructs the roles and relations between the female and male halves of humanity. It proposes that underlying the long span of human cultural evolution is the tension between what Eisler calls the dominator or domination model and the partnership model. The book traces this tension in Western culture from prehistory to the present, and closes with two contrasting scenarios for the future. It challenges conventional views about cultural evolution.

A New Multidisciplinary Method of Social Analysis

The method of social analysis that led to The Chalice and the Blade is the study of relational dynamics. In contrast to earlier studies of society, this method addresses the question of what kinds of social systems support our human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity, or alternately for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness.^[1] The study of relational dynamics is an application of systems analysis: the study of how different components of living systems interact to maintain one another and the larger whole of which they are a part.^[2] Drawing from a transdisciplinary database, it applies this approach to a wide-ranging exploration of how humans think, feel, and behave individually and in groups. Its sources include cross-cultural anthropological and sociological surveys,^[3] and studies of individual societies^[4] as well as writings by historians, analyses of laws, moral codes, art, literature, scholarship from psychology, economics, education, political science, philosophy, religious studies, archeology, the study of myths and legends; and data from more recent fields such as primatology, neuroscience, chaos theory, systems self-organizing theory, non-linear dynamics, gender studies, women’s studies, and men’s studies.^[5]

A distinguishing feature of the study of relational dynamics is that it pays particular attention to matters that are marginalized or ignored in conventional studies. It highlights the importance of how a society constructs the relations between the male and female halves of humanity, as well as between them and their daughters and sons, taking into account findings from both the biological and social sciences showing the critical importance of the “private” sphere of family and other intimate relations in shaping beliefs and behaviors.

A New Perspective on Cultural Evolution

The Chalice and the Blade compares two underlying types of social organization in which the cultural construction of gender roles and relations plays a key role. Eisler places human societies on what she calls the partnership-domination continuum. On one end of the continuum are societies orienting to the partnership model. On the other end are societies orienting to the dominator or domination model. These categories transcend conventional categories such as ancient vs. modern, Eastern vs. Western, religious vs. secular, rightist vs. leftist, and so on.

The domination model ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and religion vs. religion, with difference equated with superiority or inferiority. This model consists of an authoritarian structure in both family and state or tribe, rigid male dominance, and a high degree of abuse and violence. The partnership model consists of a democratic and egalitarian structure in both the family and state or tribe, with hierarchies of actualization where power is empowering rather than disempowering (as in hierarchies of domination). There is also gender partnership and a low degree of abuse and violence, as it is not needed to maintain rigid top down rankings.

The Chalice and the Blade traces the tension between these two models, starting in prehistory. It draws from many sources, including the study of myth and linguistics as well as archeological findings by the Indo-Europeanists J. P. Mallory^[6] and Marija Gimbutas^[7] and archeologists such as James Mellaart,^[8] Alexander Marshack,^[9] Andre Leroi-Gourhan,^[10] and Nikolas Platon.^[11]

Based on these findings, The Chalice and the Blade presents evidence that for the longest span of our prehistory, cultures in the more fertile regions of our globe oriented primarily to the partnership model, which Eisler also calls a "gylany", a neologism for a society in which relationships between the sexes are an egalitarian partnership. This gender partnership was a core component of a more egalitarian, peaceful, and matrifocal culture with a focus on life-giving, centering on nurture. These societies once were widespread in Europe around the Mediterranean, and lasted well into the early Bronze Age in the Minoan civilization of Crete.

But then there was a cultural transformation during a chaotic time of disequilibrium related to climate change and incursions of warlike, nomadic tribes. These peoples brought with them a domination system and imposed rigid rankings of domination, including the rigid domination by men of women and the equation of “real masculinity” with domination and violence. This led to a radical cultural transformation.

Eisler’s book is not the only work describing this massive cultural shift from a perspective that pays special attention to a radical change in gender relations. Other scholars have also written about it; for example, historian Gerda Lerner details it in her Oxford University book "The Creation of Patriarchy"^[12]

However, Eisler does not use the term “patriarchy.” Nor does she use “matriarchy” to describe a more gender-balanced society, noting that rule by fathers (partriarchy) and rule by mothers (matriarchy) are two sides of a dominator coin, and proposing that the real alternative is a partnership system or gylany.

Nonetheless, some critics have accused Eisler of writing about a “matriarchy” in prehistoric times, and, according to them, of claiming that earlier societies where women were not subordinate were ideal. Eisler does point out that the more partnership-oriented societies described in The Chalice and the Blade were more peaceful and generally equitable, but she emphasizes that were not ideal. She further makes it clear that the point is not returning to any “utopia” but rather using what we learn from our past to move forward to a more equitable and sustainable future.There are also archaeologists who question that these earlier societies were more peaceful, especially critiques of Marija Gimbutas, one or Eisler’s sources.^[13] This critique fits the conventional narrative of cultural evolution as a linear progression from “barbarism” to “civilization” - a narrative Eisler challenges in light of the brutality of “civilizations” ranging from Chinese, Indian, Arab, and European empires to Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

In addition, some archaeologists question whether the great profusion in these earlier cultures of female figurines, going back 30,000 years and perhaps even longer, indicates that they venerated a Goddess or Great Mother. Indeed, when these figurines were first excavated in the 19th century, the men who found them in millennia-old caves seemed to think they were an ancient kind of pornography, and called them Venus figures (a term still used today). But these sculptures are highly stylized, often pregnant, and sometimes with no facial features—hardly the stuff of pornography. So today this notion has largely been discarded. Instead, some archaeologists contend that these stone sculptures are dolls. But the idea that prehistoric artists created these figurines for little girls flies in the face of the fact that these are nude figures with highly accentuated vulvas and breasts—hardly what one would associate with children’s play. Moreover, some of these female sculptures could not be dolls since they are not portable. For instance, the famous Venus of LaSalle is carved on the rock facade of the entrance to a cave, which, as Eisler suggests in The Chalice and the Blade, was most probably the site of ancient religious rites celebrating the life-giving and sustaining powers inherent in woman’s body and in our Mother Earth.

Subsequent Findings Supporting The Chalice and the Blade

Since The Chalice and the Blade was published in 1987, new findings support its thesis of earlier gender equality as part of a more peaceful and equitable social system. For example, writing of the Minoan civilization that flourished on the Mediterranean island of Crete until c. 3500 years ago, the Greek archeologist Nanno Marinatos confirmed that his was a culture in which women played major roles in a religion where a Goddess was venerated. Marinatos also notes that this was a more peaceful culture that, unlike other “high-civilizations” of that time was not a slave society, on the contrary, exhibiting a generally high standard of living for all.^[14]

Also confirming the description of earlier Neolithic cultures in The Chalice and the Blade is Ian Hodder, the archeologist excavating Çatalhöyük, one of the largest Neolithic sites found to date. In his 2004 Scientific American article Hodder wrote: “Even analyses of isotopes in bones give no indication of divergence in lifestyle translating into differences in status and power between women and men.” He further noted that this points to “a society in which sex is relatively unimportant in assigning social roles, with neither burials nor space in houses suggesting gender inequality.” In short, Hodder explicitly confirms that gender equity was a key part of a more partnership-oriented social configuration in this more generally equitable early farming site where there are no signs of destruction through warfare for over 1,000 years.^[15]

Going back further, to the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, another body of research that supports Eisler’s proposal that this period also oriented more to the partnership side of the domination-partnership continuum is on contemporary foraging societies, especially the anthologies edited by anthropologist Douglas P. Fry. This work is directly relevant to prehistoric times because for most of the millennia of our earliest cultural evolution our species lived in foraging groups. Fry’s 2013 anthology of articles by scholars studying these types of societies documents that the vast majority of them are characterized by the more peaceful, gender balanced, and generally egalitarian configuration of the partnership model.^[16]

Data from other world regions also supports the thesis of an earlier partnership direction. For example, after The Chalice and the Blade was published in China by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a group of scholars at the Academy wrote a book showing that there was also in Chinese prehistory a massive cultural shift from more partnership-oriented cultures to a system of rigid domination in both the family and the state.^[17]

In short, despite old narratives about an inherently flawed humanity, more and more evidence shows that we are not doomed to perpetuate patterns of violence and oppression. We have a partnership alternative with deep roots in the earlier direction of our cultural evolution—not a utopia, but a way of structuring society in more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable ways.

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