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The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future Paperback – September 21, 1988
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Now with an updated epilogue celebrating the 30th anniversary of this groundbreaking and increasingly relevant book.
"May be the most significant work published in all our lifetimes." – LA Weekly
The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateSeptember 21, 1988
- Dimensions6.12 x 0.76 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-109780062502896
- ISBN-13978-0062502896
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“Everyone…should have the opportunity to read it.” — Chicago Tribune
“Validates a belief in humanity’s capacity for benevolence and cooperation in the face of so much destruction.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“The Chalice and the Blade may be the most significant work published in all our lifetimes.” — LA Weekly
“Some books are like revelations, they open the spirit to unimaginable possibilities. The Chalice and the Blade is one of those magnificent key books that can transform us and… initiate fundamental changes in the world.” — Isabel Allende
“The most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species .” — Ashley Montagu
From the Back Cover
The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.
About the Author
Riane Eisler is an internationally acclaimed scholar, futurist, and activist, and is codirector of the Center for Partnership Studies in Pacific Grove, California. She is the author of Sacred Pleasure and The Partnership Way.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Journey into a Lost World:
The Beginnings of
Civilization
Preserved in a cave sanctuary for over twenty thousand years, a female figure speaks to us about the minds of our early Western ancestors. She is small and carved out of stone: one of the so-called Venus figurines found all over prehistoric Europe.
Unearthed in excavations over a wide geographical area--from the Balkans in eastern Europe to Lake Baikal in Siberia, all the way west to Willendorf near Vienna and the Grotte du Pappe in France--these figurines have been described by some scholars as expressions of male eroticism: that is, an ancient analogue for today's Playboy magazine. To other scholars they are only something used in primitive, and presumably obscene, fertility rites.
But what is the actual significance of these ancient sculptures? Can they really be dismissed as the "products of unregenerated male imagination"?1 Is the term Venus even appropriate to describe these broad-hipped, sometimes pregnant, highly stylized, and often faceless figures? Or do these prehistoric sculptures tell us something important about ourselves, about how both women and men once venerated the life-giving powers of the universe?
The Paleolithic
Along with their wall paintings, cave sanctuaries, and burial sites, the female figurines of the peoples of the Paleolithic are important psychic records. They attest to our forebears' awe at both the mystery of life and the mystery of. death. They indicate that very early in human history the human will to live found expression and reassurance through a variety of rituals and myths that seem to have been associated with the still widely held belief that the dead can return to life through rebirth.
"In a great cavern sanctuary like Les Trois Frères, Niaux, Font de Gaume or Lascaux," writes the religious historian E. O. James, "the ceremonies must have involved an organized attempt on the part of the community . . . to control natural forces and processes by supernatural means directed to the common good. The sacred tradition, be it in relation to the food supply, the mystery of birth and propagation, or of death, arose and functioned, it would appear, in response to the will to live here and hereafter."2
This sacred tradition found expression in the remarkable art of the Paleolithic. And an integral component of this sacred tradition was the association of the powers that govern life and death with woman.
We can see this association of the feminine with the power to give life in Paleolithic burials. For example, in the rock shelter known as Cro-Magnon in Les Eyzies, France (where in 1868 the first skeletal remains of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors were found), around and on the corpses were carefully arranged cowrie shells. These shells, shaped in the form of what James discreetly calls "the portal through which a child enters the world," seem to have been associated with some kind of early worship of a female deity. As he writes, the cowrie was a lifegiving agent. So also was red ocher, still in later traditions the surrogate of the life-giving or menstrual blood of woman.3
The main emphasis seems to have been on the association of woman with the giving and sustaining of life. But at the same time, death--or, more specifically, resurrection--also appears to have been a central religious theme. Both the ritualized placement of the vagina-shaped cowrie shells around and on the dead and the practice of coating these shells and/or the dead with red ocher pigment (symbolizing the vitalizing power of blood) appear to have been part of funerary rites intended to bring the deceased back through rebirth. Even more specifically, as James notes, they "point to mortuary rituals in the nature of a life-giving ritual closely connected with the female figurines and other symbols of the Goddess cult."4
In addition to this archaeological evidence of Paleolithic funerary rites, there is also evidence of rites seemingly designed to encourage the fecundity of the wild animals and plants that provided our forebears with life support. For example, in the gallery of the inaccessible cavern of Tuc d'Audoubert in Ariège, on the soft clay floor underneath the wall painting of two bisons (a female followed by a male), we find impressions of human feet believed by scholars to have been made in ritual dances. Similarly, in the Cogul rock shelter in Catalonia, we find a scene of women, possibly priestesses, dancing around a smaller naked male figure in what seems to be a religious ceremony.
These cave sanctuaries, figurines, burials, and rites all seem to have been related to a belief that the same source from which human life springs is also the source of all vegetable and animal life--the great Mother Goddess or Giver of All we still find in later periods of Western civilization. They also suggest that our early ancestors recognized that we and our natural environment are integrally linked parts of the great mystery of life and death and that all nature must therefore be treated with respect. This consciousness--later emphasized in Goddess figurines either surrounded by natural symbols such as animals, water, and trees or themselves partly animal--evidently was central to our lost psychic heritage. Also central to that lost heritage is the apparent awe and wonder at the great miracle of our human condition: the miracle of birth incarnated in woman's body. Judging from these early psychic records, this was a central theme of prehistoric Western systems of belief.
Now what we have been developing to this point is still not the view of many scholars. Nor is it the view still taught in most survey classes about the origins of civilization. For here, as in most popularized writings on the subject, there still prevail the preconceptions of earlier scholars who saw Paleolithic art in terms of the conventional stereotype of "primitive man": bloodthirsty, warlike hunters, in fact very unlike some of the most primitive gathering-hunting societies discovered in modern times.5
Product details
- ASIN : 0062502891
- Publisher : HarperOne; First Edition (September 21, 1988)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780062502896
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062502896
- Item Weight : 12.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.12 x 0.76 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #113,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #94 in General Anthropology
- #217 in General Gender Studies
- #327 in Women in History
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About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Riane Eisler is a systems scientist, attorney, and author internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade, now in 26 foreign editions and 57 US printing, as well as for other award-winning books. She keynotes conferences worldwide, with venues including the United Nations General Assembly and the US Department of State. She is President of the Center for Partnership Studies and has received many honors, including honorary Ph.D. degrees, the Alice Paul ERA Education Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, and is featured in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.
She can be contacted at center@partnershipway.org.
Her websites are http://www.centerforpartnership.org,
and http://www.rianeeisler.com
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As we are presented with mounting archeological evidence from a great many Neolithic cultural sites that proves humanity was capable of peaceful social organization and technological advances, Eisler presents an excellent social analysis of what this new knowledge implies for our present and future.
The crux of her message, that human potential is stunted in dominator societies that use force to maintain their rigid social hierarchies, is supported by ample evidence from numerous sources. The new alternative, a continuation of the interrupted ancient partnership model that emphasizes the linking of humanity in peaceful equality, starting with the most fundamental step of linking women with men, as opposed to the ranking of one half of humanity over the other, is presented as essential to our very survival as a species.
The book is superbly researched, and though it presents a broad, sweeping view that often leaves unanswered questions (one of my persistent questions is how to defend against force without simply presenting a counter-force), it offers a great array of resources for further reading. While I thought this book would answer my questions, it actually made me ask new questions and awoke within me a voracity to learn more, which I suspect is its intent. Above all, it gives us useful tools and terminology for reading between the lines and lies of our dominate cultural worldview, and these help dispel confusion and hopelessness for all who work for a peaceful world.
Now to address the inaccurate nature of some prior reviewers of this book (you know who you are):
Eisler clearly defines, numerous times, the difference between dominator hierarchies, in which a pyramidal social system uses force to maintain its power structure, and systems hierarchies, in which functions increase in complexity and function, as in biological systems such as cells to organs. The social parallels to the latter are virtually nonexistent, but Eisler is very careful with this definition nonetheless, to avoid confusion. Also, as it would be very clear to anyone who actually read the book, the characterization of life-affirming values such as caring, nurturing, creativity, and intuition as "feminine" in this book is always done in the context of how these values are perceived in a social system based on ranking and enforced by violence. The characterization of these qualities as feminine in this context is meant to discourage the male half of humanity from espousing them. The characterization masculine the qualities of domination and violence is how these rank-based systems maintain the status-quo. This idea of assigning a gender to specific life-affirming or destructive attributes is horribly damaging to men and women. To anyone who actually read the book, it would have been obvious that the alternative to social structures in which men dominate women is NOT those in which women dominate men. It is a society in which women and men are linked as equals. And if women happen to get mentioned ahead of men in this book, it is a literary courtesy whose time has come.
On closer inspection, however, the picture is less clear than we have long believed. I was surprised to learn that archaeology, as a science, only became serious after World War II. Before this time, Egyptology and the like were mostly a front for imperialistic grave robbers, vying for the shiniest addition to their national museums. Dating of artifacts was done through assumption until the advent of carbon 14 technology and dendrochronography. All of this combined created a vision of the past that was heavily tainted by the expectations and experience of those who unearthed ancient sites.
Proper dating technology has painted a new picture of the ancient past. It seems that in many parts of Old Europe, there were Goddess worshiping cultures that harnessed their intelligence towards creating healthy communities. In these cities, sometimes occupied for millenia, there is no evidence of weapons, ruler-kings, or the glorification of war. In fact, some sites were occupied for thousands of years without any evidence of war. These cultures showed a surprising equality between the sexes, as well as a lack of hierarchy. The concentration of wealth by the powerful that we take for granted is something that came much later.
As the nomadic herding tribes migrated into the regions occupied by these Neolithic culture, they found great wealth and little defensive technology. The cities were rather ripe for the plucking. Once this occurred, people reorganized their focus, working hard to develop weapons technology for offensive and defensive purposes. This arms race continues in the present day.
The unfortunate side effect of this race is that early technological advances in city planning, in art, and other technologies of peace were put aside in the face of this new human created danger. Earlier assumptions about the dates of some primitive looking artifacts turned out to be wrong; after war came to these cultures, their technological development came to a halt, and much technology was lost and forgotten.
These peaceful Neolithic cultures predate Sumer by millennia. Sumer is often recognized as the cradle of civilization; it would be better to describe it as the cradle of modern culture of warfare. Eisler calls these cultures "dominator cultures", whereas the earlier Goddess worshiping groups engaged in a partnership model. By the time that Sumer was in full swing, the partnership model had been overcome by the warrior culture of the nomadic steppes.
As we hurtle into the 21st century, we spend unthinkable amounts of resources coming with better ways to kill each other. The amount of resources spent on military budgets worldwide could transform our world if we put them to better use. We have the technology to feed, clothe, and house people, but as long as we surrender to the dominator model, resources will continue to be concentrated in the hands of the few while the many suffer from need and lack. Eisler urges us to give up the old ways of aggressive ranking and warfare, and create a new world in which we find solutions that work to build communities, create prosperity, and improve the quality of life for our entire human family.
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Both books are KEY reading for everyone, especially women!
Want to know the true herstory?, then you must read this. How did our society begin? How did we live? How did this change? What is the pattern shown by cultural shifts and important events?... feminism or moves to embrace the feminine principle, have been occurring for centuries.
Powerful, fascinating and thoroughly researched.