The Chalice and the Blade: A Discussion of the Ideas of Riane Eisler

This article was originally written in 2010 and remains very relevant to today. There is much that is unfolding in our times and many lessons surfacing which have long asked to be recognized, embraced, learned from, healed, and transformed. I believe that if we limit ourselves to the white male perspective, especially to that of those men who are disconnected from the feminine within the world and themselves, then, yes, it can appear that we are doomed. This perspective, to me, is sorely lacking - especially given that much of history neglects and excludes herstory. It is my belief that there is a great struggle occurring to attempt to learn the lessons which much of humankind has not embraced and which are threaded with the great need to heal and transform the toxic imbalance between the feminine and the masculine that has been in existence for many millennia. The violence, disregard, disrespect, oppression, and suppression of the feminine has cost us all and our Earth Mother horrific harm and suffering. It is my belief that we humans are trying to awaken and reconnect with the Sacred Feminine and the feminine within ourselves, men and women alike. I absolutely believe that another world is possible, but only as more and more of us step up courageously and heal and open our hearts. We are capable of evolving to a place of greater maturity, wisdom, compassion, and consciousness of our deep interconnection with all of life. 
My husband and I attended a Native American event yesterday and one of the indigenous speakers, a tribal elder and a man, spoke of the Sacred energy that flows through all of life. It isn't just women who hold the wisdom so urgently needed on Earth. It is also men who are connected with and respectful of the feminine within themselves and all of life. Also, given the ticking clock of global warming, coupled with having a profoundly mentally ill president, we don't have much time left to strongly counter cultural stories and belief systems which perpetuate our slumber rather than our awakening. My experience is also that it is profoundly important to choose our teachers wisely, of whom Riane Eisler has long been among many who I treasure. May we all be drawn to those who in some way nourish our wholeness, our awakening, and our capacity and motivation to act consciously on behalf of a higher good for us all. - Molly

By Dr. Jan Garrett

Since March is Women's History Month, it is fitting to devote a program to the ideas of Riane Eisler, one of the most important writers on women's oppression and human liberation. Eisler's best-known book is The Chalice and the Blade. She has written other important books I may mention as needed. Several of them have "partnership" in the title, such as The Power of Partnership. ¹

All her books since 1987 have been anchored in the distinction between Dominator relationships and Partnership relationships, which provides a lens for viewing and understanding societies, intimate relationships within families, religions (relations between humans and the divine), and the relationship between humanity and the earth.

Before turning to that idea, let me explain the title of Eisler's 1987 book, The Chalice and the Blade, which I borrowed as the title of this talk. Every Unitarian Universalist knows what a chalice is, and if you go to the Unitarian Universalist Association website you'll find an explanation of how this symbol became associated with our denomination.

However, in choosing the chalice as a key word in the title of her book, Eisler probably did not have UUism in mind. For Eisler the chalice is associated with the goddess religions that existed in many places in the millennia leading up to about 1500 BCE. Yet this is a nice coincidence from our perspective, because Unitarianism and Unitarian Universalism has nurtured feminists since the 19th century and has for several decades welcomed pagans, including those working to revive goddess-religion, into our broad tent.

1500 BCE is the approximate time when the last of the major goddess-worshipping culture, Minoan civilization centered on the Mediterranean island of Crete, ceased to exist. For Eisler, the chalice represents the peaceful gender-egalitarian societies, mostly horticultural, for whom the Goddess was the major object of religious devotion, although there were normally male and other female deities alongside her. Eisler's book relies on the research of archeologists who have distinguished this type of culture from the warlike, male-dominated cultures that seem to have supplanted them. Because these later societies were warlike, as proven by the prominence of weapons of war and fortifications in their archeological remains as compared with the absence of them in earlier, goddess-worshipping cultures, the appropriate symbol for them is the Blade. ^2, 3

Some of you have read Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code, or seen the movie of the same name starring Tom Hanks. In the novel some of Eisler's themes appear rearranged. The hero of the novel explains that V shape, which corresponds to the Cup part of the Chalice or Grail is an ancient symbol for the feminine. As you can see when you imagine a line drawing of a frontal view of a naked woman, and focus on the uniquely female part of human anatomy, this place is where new life would be carried in a pregnant woman (about where the flame is in the flaming chalice). In Brown's novel the thesis is that the Holy Grail really refers to Mary Magdalene, who was actually married to Jesus Christ and who escaped, pregnant, after the crucifixion of Christ and somehow got to France, where her child was born and went on to have descendants, the latest of whom turns out to be a main character in the novel (and the movie).

One difference between Eisler's book and Brown's novel is that for Eisler the chalice represents Goddess-worshipping egalitarian cultures that were overrun at least 1500 years earlier. On Eisler's account, it is not institutional Christianity that initiated the suppression of women. ⁴ That started much earlier, in Western Asia and India, probably with the invasion of Indo-European warrior-nomads. Goddess-worshipping cultures were defeated and their new rulers began subordinating goddesses to gods within the mythically portrayed society of deities. Homer's gods provide clear examples. So although Goddess worship did not at first disappear completely, it tended to take back seat to the worship of male war-gods. Pre-Christian Greek and Roman civilization is already patriarchal or male-dominated, although religiously it is still pagan. Even the earlier Mycenaean society, the society that produced the early Greeks who conquered Troy, was patriarchal. In other words, the end of gender-egalitarian, Goddess-worshipping civilization occurred more than 1500 years before Christianity appeared on the scene, although pockets of goddess-worship continued to exist here and there. By the time Christianity fused with the Roman Empire under Constantine, it had accepted the Dominator culture of classical pagan antiquity, and once fused with state power it helped to consolidate it.

The point of Eisler's study of prehistory and ancient history is to show that the domination of the male gender over the female gender is not an eternal and inevitable feature of human social organization, that another type of society, a Partnership society rooted in gender equality, is possible. This is something that almost completely escapes Dan Brown's novel.

It is useful to compare Eisler's perspective with two more familiar feminist perspectives. One is associated with Nel Noddings, whose care theory of ethics, has been called a feminine theory, to distinguish it from other feminist theories. According to Noddings, the key to moral thinking is the mother-child relationship. Caring is rooted in the feeling of compassion that comes natural to most mothers. Caring is about paying close attention to the needs of another person that one knows intimately. Noddings thinks this relationship can be extended to mutual care between siblings and between spouses, and perhaps between teachers and their pupils. Most feminists find her view lacking precisely because of [her] lack of concern for questions of social justice regarding broader social patterns.

Another feminist perspective, which has been around since the end of the 18th century, is liberal feminism. Liberal feminists work for equal opportunity for women alongside men in the economy, government, and public life. The problem with liberal feminists, from the perspective of care theory, is that they tend to adopt the abstract language of justice and rights that prevails in already existing legal discourse, which misses the importance of caring and compassion in human relations.

Eisler's approach has the best of these worlds and then some. She has a place for Noddings' appreciation of the importance of caring without being indifferent to the patterns of human interaction that prevail in the larger society. Both caring and equality play a role in Eisler's conception of partnership relations. Social justice relates to partnership organization at the level of communities larger than the family. Her analysis of economics, carried out in her most recent book, The Real Wealth of Nations, makes the case that women's work is crucial for early education, language learning, survival, healing, Hospice care, and thriving of the human species in general. Yet in the United States and elsewhere it is often unpaid or poorly paid and therefore not socially valued by economists focused on money as a measuring device. We have only to think of how the work of homemakers and caregivers for sick and dying family members, childcare providers, primary school teachers and nurses, is barely recognized.

Let us now touch on the basic differences between the Dominator and Partnership Patterns of Organization. In The Power of Partnership, Eisler has described the basic patterns in terms of four dimensions: social structure; gender relations; the emotional dimension; and value beliefs.

(1) In the domination model, social relations are typically characterized by hierarchies of domination, i.e., rankings that sharply distinguish between those who are controlled and those who control. In the partnership model, relationships tend to be egalitarian; hierarchies exist there but they are what Eisler calls hierarchies of actualization. A synonym for actualization here is empowerment. More experienced, wiser, and skilled persons try to enable the less experienced and skilled persons to acquire capacities they initially lack.

(2) In the domination model, the male half of humanity is typically ranked over the female half. Traits and activities such as control and conquest are highly valued and associated with masculinity. Gender inequality is taught at an early age and becomes the model for other inequalities, expressed in terms of, say, religious or racial rankings. In the partnership model, males and females are ranked equally. Traits such as empathy, nonviolent interaction, and care giving are valued in women and men and expressed in social policy.

(3) In the domination model the emotion of fear is prominent; violence is expected and to some extent encouraged, at least towards persons and groups considered to be inferior. In extreme forms, we see it in physical and emotional forms of spouse abuse and child abuse, and in abuse at work by superiors and even supposed peers. In the partnership model, trust is fostered. There is little emphasis on fear and little acceptance of violence against individuals or groups.

(4) In the domination model, relations of control/domination are presented as good. In the partnership model, relations of partnership, mutual respect, and processes of negotiation are presented as good.

As Eisler indicates, these four features of the partnership model—social structure; gender relations; the emotional dimension; and value beliefs—tend to reinforce each other. That makes the Partnership model a systematic reality. But there is also a contrary dynamic in which the corresponding four main features of the Domination model tend to reinforce each other. The real world of human relations over the last four millennia is one in which the Dominator model usually prevails, but it can rarely totally extinguish elements of the Partnership model. At certain times, the Partnership model makes significant inroads in society and the Dominator model must retreat, but then its devotees may regroup and beat back the progress made by the Partnership model. In certain places at certain times, whole societies may incline mostly toward Partnership relations, at least in contrast with other societies where Dominator relationships are more prominent. That is the case today with Scandinavian countries, characterized by advanced partnership patterns of social organization and gender relations, unlike, say, the U.S., not to mention Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.

Please continue this article here: http://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/chalice_and_blade.htm