An Excerpt from The chalice and the Blade by R Eisler 8 comments

17 Nov 2002 @ 03:37, by Jenese James From: Riane Eisler 1987 The Chalice and the Blade: Riane Eisler THE GAIA TRADITION AND THE PARTNERSHIP FUTURE: AN ECOFEMINIST MANIFESTO THE LEADING-EDGE social movements of our time-the peace, feminist, and ecology movements, and ecofeminism, which integrates all three-are in some respects very new. But they also draw from very ancient traditions only now being reclaimed due to what British archaeologist James Mellaart calls a veritable revolution in archaeology. These traditions go back thousands of years. Scientific archaeological methods are now making it possible to document the way people lived and thought in prehistoric times. One fascinating discovery about our past is that for millennia a span of time many times longer than the 5,000 years conventionally counted as history -prehistoric societies worshipped the Goddess of nature and spirituality, our great Mother, the giver of life and creator of all. But even more fascinating is that these ancient societies were structured very much like the more peaceful and just society we are now trying to construct. This is not to say that these were ideal societies or utopias. But, unlike our societies, they were not warlike. They were not societies where women were subordinate to men. And they did not see our Earth as an object for exploitation and domination. In short, they were societies that had what we today call an ecological consciousness: the awareness that the Earth must be treated with reverence and respect. And this reverence for the life-giving and life-sustained powers of the Earth was rooted in a social structure where women and "feminine" values such as caring, compassion, and nonviolence were not subordinate to men and the so-called masculine values of conquest and domination. ------------------------------------------------------------- Rather, the life-giving powers incarnated in women's bodies were given the highest social value. In the words of Greek archaeologist Nicolas Platon, who for 50 years excavated the civilization of Minoan Crete where this type of social organization survived until approximately 3,300 years ago, it was a social organization where "the whole of life was pervaded by an ardent faith in the goddess Nature, the source of all creation and harmony. Most accounts of Western civilization start with Sumer or with the Indo-European Greeks. These accounts generally describe anything prior to Judeo-Christian religion as "pagan." And they usually leave us with the impression that prior societies were both technologically and morally primitive." But the new knowledge now accumulating from archaeology shows that this is a highly misleading view. The Paleolithic period, about 25,000 years ago, is generally considered to mark the beginning of Western culture. It is thus the logical place to begin the re-examination of our past. And it is also a good place to begin to reassess our present-and potential future-from a new perspective. Under the conventional view of Paleolithic art as the story of "man the hunter and warrior," the hundreds of highly stylized carvings of large-hipped, often pregnant women found in Paleolithic caves were dubbed "Venus figurines"-objects in some ancient, and presumably obscene, "fertility cult." They were often viewed as obese, distorted erotic symbols; in other words, as prehistoric counterparts of Playboy centerfolds. But if we really look at these strangely stylized oval figures, it becomes evident that they are representations of the life-giving powers of the world. As UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and other archaeologists now point out, they are precursors of the Great Goddess still revered in historic times as Isis in Egypt, Ishtar in Canaan, Demeter in Greece, and later, as the Magna Mater of Rome and the Catholic Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Similarly, earlier scholars kept finding in Paleolithic drawings and stone and bone engravings what they interpreted as barbed weapons. But then they could not figure out why in these pictures the arrowheadsor barbs were always going the wrong way. Or why these "wrongway weapons" regularly seemed to miss their mark. Only when these pictures were re-examined by an outsider to the archaeological establishment (someone not conditioned to see them as "failed hunting magic") did it become clear that these were not pictures of weapons. They were images of vegetation: trees and plants with their branches going exactly the right way. This same view of human nature-or "man's nature"-as a self-centered, greedy, brutal, "born killer" has long shaped what we have been taught about the next phase of human culture: the Neolithic or agrarian age (approximately 8000-1500 B.C.). The conventional view, still perpetuated by most college survey courses, is that the most important human invention -the development of the technology to domesticate plants -was also the beginning of male dominance, warfare, and slavery. That is, with "man's" invention of agriculture -and thus the possibility of sustaining civilization through a regular and even surplus food supply-came not only male dominance but also warfare and a generally hierarchic social structure. But once again, the evidence does not bear out the conventional view of civilization as the story of "man's" ever more efficient domination over both nature and other human beings. To begin with, anthropologists today generally believe that the domestication of plants was probably invented by women. Indeed., one of the most fascinating aspects of the current reclamation of our lost heritage is the enormous contribution women have made to civilization. If we look closely at the new data we now have about the first agrarian or Neolithic societies, we actually see that all the basic technologies on which civilization is based were developed in societies that were not male dominated and warlike. As James Mellaart writes, we now know that there was not one cradle of civilization in Sumer about 3,500 years ago.2 Rather, there were many cradles of civilization, all of them thousands of years older. And thanks to far more scientific and extensive archaeological excavations, we also know that in these highly creative societies women held important social positions as priestesses, craftspeople, and elders of matrilineal clans. Contrary to what we have been taught of the Neolithic or first agrarian civilizations as male dominated and highly violent, these were generally peaceful societies in which both women and men lived in harmony with one another and nature. Moreover, in all these peaceful cradles of civilization, to borrow Merlin Stone's arresting phrase from the book of the same title, "God was a woman" (New York: Dial Press, 1976). There is today much talk about the Gaia hypothesis (so called because Gaia is the Greek name for the Earth). This is a new scientific theory proposed by biologists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock that our planet is a living system designed to maintain and to nurture life. But what is most striking about the Gaia hypothesis is that in essence it is a scientific update of the belief system of Goddess-worshipping prehistoric societies. In these societies the world was viewed as the great Mother, a living entity who in both her temporal and spiritual manifestations creates and nurtures all forms of life. This consciousness of the essential unity of all life has in modern times been preserved in a number of tribal cultures that revere the Earth as our Mother. It is revealing that these cultures have often been described as "primitive" by anthropologists. Equally revealing is that frequently in these cultures women traditionally hold key public positions, as shamans or wise women and often as heads of matrilineal clans. This leads to an important point that once articulated may seem obvious. The way a society structures the most fundamental human relations -the relations between the female and male halves of humanity without which our species could not survive-has major implications for the totality of a social system. It clearly affects the individual roles and life choices of both women and men. Equally important, though until now rarely noted, is that it also profoundly affects all our values and social institutions-whether a society will be peaceful or warlike, generally egalitarian or authoritarian, and living in harmony with or bent on the conquest of our environment. ------------------------------------------ All of which takes us to the next, and final, chapter of this book, where we come full circle to what we began with: the myths and images that shape how we see ourselves and our world. For one of the great challenges we face today is to create and disseminate new myths and images that make it possible for us to see that we do have choices, that we are not doomed to eternal misery by "selfish genes" or "original sin"-and most important, that in the last analysis the choice of our future is up to us.

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