The Chalice and the Blade presented a radical re-visioning of human prehistory. Drawing upon the important work of archaeologists Marija Gimbutas and James Mellaart, Eisler looked upon the cultures of Old Europe (in the Paleolithic and Neolothic) and discovered that many of the societies associated with reverence of the Mother Goddess seemed, based on all available archaeological evidence, much more peaceful and caring than cultures that rose later. While many suggested that these societies were matriarchal in social organization, Eisler rebelled with a simple heresy that defied the existence of matriarchy or patriarchy. Instead, she put forward the theory that what existed were gylanic, or partnership, societies, based on linking, rather than ranking, relationships and structures. There were no hierarchies, and domination/submission social relations were nowhere in evidence. For those of us who accepted the possibility of Eisler’s theories, the impact of this revelation rolled like a shockwave back through our human past and up into our future. The implications were shocking! Our previous understanding of human history, of gender relations, of power and class melted in the face of this. Intuitively, it really hit. This deep yearning for Utopia, for a return to Eden… it’s as if Eisler was the piper calling us home. With this understanding of our past we have the potential to build a different future!
I came to Dr. Eisler’s writing through the works of contemporary visionary philosophers such as Ralph Abraham, Starhawk, Robert Anton Wilson, and especially Terence McKenna. His most fundamental speculative theories, particularly his monkeys on dope theory of human evolution and his time wave methodology, simply would not have existed without The Chalice and the Blade as a foundation. There’s no question that Eisler rearranged his head in as powerful a way as any of the Amazonian shamanic practices he engaged in. To look at history and contemporary culture through a partnership lens is to walk through a different reality tunnel, to get a glimpse beyond the matrix.
Riane Eisler continues to write books firmly rooted in partnership principles. The story she tells us is that we continue to carry partnership deep within us, drawn from our collective history, and that we can push for a partnership resurgence to shift us away from the violent, controlling dominator paradigm.
MungBeing: Going back to Paleolithic times, how did partnership social structures evolve, and what role did Goddess archetypes and myths play in this development?
Riane Eisler: Everything about prehistory is conjecture. But then a lot about history also is because it’s the perspective of the person who is writing it down for the group that’s writing it down. What we’ve been seeing, as our friend Terence [McKenna] pointed out in the book where he used my work so much, is an archaic revival, a renewed interest in a better understanding of our early indigenous cultural origins. My work fits squarely into that in that it looks at both new ideological data and old data, as well as myth, that has given us clues to an earlier way of living and of viewing the world. I didn’t start in prehistory, I started to see patterns cross-culturally, but I had such an intense interest. I was fascinated by ancient mystery cults, by some of the material on Minoan Crete, so I started to more systematically look at prehistory.
As non-conventional students of archaeology and myth have pointed out, there always is a story to art, particularly to the symbolic and religious art of pre-modern times. The way we’ve been taught about the [Stone Age Paleolithic] era is perhaps most vividly and misleadingly summed up by the caveman cartoon where he’s got a weapon in one hand, and with the other hand he’s dragging a woman by the hair. We think nothing of showing that cartoon to children before their capacity for critical thinking is formed. The message is very clear: from the very beginning of time immemorial, violence, the clubs, the dragging, male dominance… those are given, they’re inherent in human nature. If you look at the art of the Paleolithic there isn’t a single image that remotely expresses that idea about the Paleolithic. The most familiar images are the cave paintings of the animals, but what most people don’t realize is that it was the giving of life and the renewal of life that was really the major theme of Paleolithic art. You see that in the so-called Venus figurines, the large-hipped, very stylized female figures. Many of them look as if they’re pregnant with their breasts, their vulva very prominently etched. If you talk to a conventional archaeologist to this day they’ll say, oh well, they have no real significance, they’re just dolls. They completely ignore, for example, the Venus of Laussel. It’s very clear that she has some mythical and ritual significance because she is carved at the entrance of the cave sanctuary, and [the] story [of the image] must have something to do with woman’s life-giving powers, most specifically the connection between the woman’s monthly bleeding and the giving of life. In one hand, she has a crescent bow with thirteen notches, in the other hand she is pointing to a very clearly etched vulva. Women’s menstrual cycles and lunar cycles are both thirteen and we know, in the absence of artificial lighting, women menstruate in synch with the cycles of the moon, and groups of women when they live together tend to menstruate at the same time, too. A lot of the burials going way way back were what we call red ochre burials, symbolizing not death but life-giving blood, the menstrual blood.
Our job, and this is very important for artists, is what I call deconstructing and reconstructing, not just to critique what the conventional story is. We know the conventional stories - the message is there’s something wrong with us. We’re governed by selfish genes, or we sin so we must be punished, we must be controlled. That’s a metamythology that tells us we really can’t make the changes that are today so urgently needed, the shift from what I call a domination system to a partnership system. The fact of the matter is that today the mix of high technology and the domination system could take us to an evolutionary dead end. This does not mean we should go back to any “good old days” in prehistory. If we really look at the Paleolithic and Neolithic, and Minoan Crete and what’s happening in so many areas today, we see that the alternative is there for us, that we can move to what I call a partnership system, but to do that we have to think outside the conventional categories of ancient versus modern, or religious versus secular, or right versus left, or industrial versus pre or post industrial, and understand what kind of configuration creates the condition for relations that are not based on these top down rankings that are ultimately backed up by force, but of relations of mutual respect, mutual benefit, mutual accountability. Artists and writers can do so much by highlighting the fact that there are foundations we must build. It’s up to us to change those stories so that they support partnership rather than domination. As I point out in The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure we have to start with those which deal with myths and the relationship between myth and reality. We humans live by stories.
MB: In The Chalice and the Blade you examined the archaeological record of Minoan Crete and other excavation sites that point to the existence of early partnership societies. In the art of Minoan Crete there’s all this wonderful work celebrating life, there’s the cosmic egg, the snakes and the horned gods and all of this beautiful feminine imagery, but there’s little evidence it was a highly militarized society or that violence was fetishized, which suggests that a rather peaceful, comparatively egalitarian (or compassionate) and non-violent culture flourished. The mindset or reality tunnel of many archaeologists, presumably influenced by a dominator historical model, did not allow them to judge the evidence in its most obvious ways. It’s like they were wearing blinders.
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RE: We’ve been taught to have those blinders. Our conventional language only allows us matriarchy as an alternative to patriarchy, when in fact matriarchy, which is rule by mothers rather than rule by fathers, is the other side of the dominator coin, where one half of humanity is subordinate to the other half. When anthropologists found societies where women are not subordinate to men they tended to call them matriarchies, even though they themselves qualified that by saying, “well, it isn’t that men are subordinate, it’s just that women have more power, there’s more of a balance of power.” The term partnership, and the term that I introduced, is gylany; gyn is for woman, and with the letter l it’s linking rather than ranking. We need a new language. and my work tells a story that clarifies a great deal. People always say to me, “a lot of things didn’t seem to connect at all, you’ve given me a container for understanding what’s really going on.” What I call the partnership system and the dominator system transcends all these old categories. It’s the fragmentation of our minds by these old categories that gets in the way because none of them describe the totality of the social systems and the primary human relations without which none of us would be here. Gender relations, parent-child relations are simply not considered “important” by most “serious” studies of politics, economics, which is really crazy because where do people first learn what is considered normal or moral? They learn it in their early intimate relations, either experiencing or observing. One of the distinguishing things about my work, my methodology, is what I call the study of relational dynamics. First of all it looks at what kind of relations does a particular cultural configuration support or inhibit, and secondly it looks at systems self-organization, how elements of a system mutually reinforce one another. And third, most important, how can we really achieve transformational change? We have to look at the whole system and really pay attention to the primary human relations.
MB: Humans share a cross-cultural mythology about a “Golden Age” when we lived in Paradise, and how we subsequently fell from this ideal time/space. In the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden there is a strange, illogical dissonance in the myth. The angry male God casts the humans from this peaceful, blessed existence, and the Bible turns to stories of violence, domination, punishment, and people are asked to worship this God who ripped us from the womb-like Eden.
RE: The clues to an earlier time and the idealization of that time are not only in the Bible. The Greek poet Hesiod writes about a golden race living in peace until a lesser race brought with them Ares, the god of war. The Chinese Tao-Te Ch’ing talks about a more peaceful, more prosperous, more equitable time, and in that legend we have some very specific clues. It says it was a time before the yin or the feminine principle was subordinate to the yan or the male principle. These are all clues to a massive cultural shift, and the shift was to the domination system. You say that it’s
not very logical to say there was a better time and then you see what comes so much later in the Bible, it preaches violence, it preaches suppression of women - there’s nothing logical about the shift. The myths are to impose or maintain a particular way of looking at the world and living in it, they both perpetuate and impose it, and that’s what you see in that. I think that in light of the brutality that came later, it became very idealized as perfect. I make a point in my work of saying it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t ideal, but it was much better because it oriented toward partnership rather than domination systems.
MB: Something unique about your philosophy is that you don’t seem to believe that males, or humans in general, are inherently violent.
RE: What we have again is the dominator mindset, and we see it in people such as [Richard] Dawkins. It’s such a shame because he’s such a bright man. When people say “inherently violent” they don’t mean that, what they mean is that this is a behavior, a genetic predisposition that characterizes humans, and particularly males, since time immemorial. Of course that is absolute nonsense. We are inherently violent, we are inherently caring, but what does that mean? That we have the genetic capacity for both of these behaviors. Even when somebody has a genetic predisposition what we really have to look at is the expression of it. A study by a Danish group of scientists [showed that] men who engage in antisocial behavior are ones who were abandoned, abused as children. But [evolutionary theorists] are so caught in the domination mindset that what they emphasize are always those characteristics that are in the domination system associated with “real masculinity” and domination and violence. They go to enormous lengths to try to explain caring behaviors on the basis of pure selfishness. More specifically, in the male’s case they try to explain it as the male being programmed to pass on his gene. That ignores the fact that a certain segment of the male population is not interested in heterosexual sex. It ignores one of our closest genetic relatives, the bonobo chimpanzee. If we observe them in the wild the males don’t seem to be the least bit interested in paternity, nor is there any violence in their sexual relations. What we need to see is a more balanced view. For one thing, we have to teach about evolution that we receive chemical rewards through pleasure, not only when we are cared for but when we love, when we care for another being, a friend, a lover, a child or parents. That often slips under the rug in the analysis of evolution and how important that capacity for caring is in human survival.
MB: You have also pointed out the dominator mindset of evolution more often looks at it as a linear progression.
RE: Absolutely, and it isn’t. We’re now talking about cultural evolution in particular. We can see that the European Middle Ages looks like the Taliban of today with the Inquisition, the Crusades, the witch burnings, women had no rights, children were brutalized, people being drawn and quartered and disemboweled. It was a society very oriented toward the domination system and we have moved from that to a large extent but there have been regressions. Khomeini, the whole phenomenon of religious fundamentalism is a massive regression. It’s about top down rule, it’s highly punitive.
MB: In some of your more recent works you’ve talked about the importance of sacred sexuality. How does that play into helping to create better partnership relations, or break down the dominator model?
RE: In Sacred Pleasure I start by pointing out something that really struck me, that candles, flowers, music, wine are what we associate with our most sacred rites, but they’re also what we associate with sex, with romance. That is not coincidental. Look at the first written records of Western history that have been deciphered from the tablets of Sumer, and read the hymns of Inanna, the goddess of love and creation, the most revered deity. Her sacred marriage to the king-god Enki is such an affirmation of the importance of the divine feminine, in her role in creating and supporting and illuminating and nurturing life. [It’s] a clue to a time when sexuality and spirituality were all of one cloth. Look at the Judeo-Christian Bible: there’s the “Song of Solomon,” it’s all about the beautiful [woman] who sings about her lover, how he sleeps between her breasts so nice, how his kisses are sweeter than wine. This was an old erotic hymn that sort of got co-opted, but if you read it objectively it’s about love and ecstasy and very explicit sexuality. The contemporary role is to try to re-conceptualize and reclaim sexuality from two mechanisms in domination culture that distort the pleasure bond. One is the notion we’ve inherited that sex is bad. [The other is] the eroticization of domination and violence which is huge and very characteristic of times of regression to the domination system. Unfortunately we are living in such a time now.
The attempt to eroticize domination and violence is very regressive, yet it’s fed to young people day and night not only in pornography but also in ads, in stories. The artist has to make a distinction between erotica and pornography. Pornography is about domination and violence, it’s about control, it’s not about pleasure… it’s about a pathological kind of sexuality and unfortunately there are artists who consider themselves very progressive who are into this and I think that it’s hard because we’ve all been exposed to it but I really would like to urge artists and writers to reexamine that. Arthur Miller is so idealized but his sexuality is about degrading women isn’t it.
MB: I have a tendency to be pro-pornography because I think there needs to be in this world far more openness about sexuality. Sexuality is so repressed in our society as it is, we need to learn more about who we are as sexual beings. A lot of people, especially younger people these days, if they’re sensitive and smart enough they can receive information from pornography and not necessarily have it warp them.
RE: Can we make a distinction between erotica and pornography? I think that’s a very basic distinction because so much of pornography is not about the giving and receiving of mutual pleasure, it’s about degrading another person. If you read Sacred Pleasure it is not anti-sexual [in] orientation, it has a very pro-sexual orientation. I always thought it was very odd that people let their children go and watch infliction of pain and killing, that’s okay, but they say no, you should never watch nude pictures of women and men or men and men or women and women, the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure. So much of pornography is the eroticization of violence and domination and unconsciously it programs people, in particular males, because so much of it is the woman basically being degraded and controlled. In Sacred Pleasure I wrote about the so-called liberality of the Athenians, about homosexuality. They weren’t at all liberal, what they were for was pederasty. It was only okay if it was an older man with a young boy, but for an older man to play the subservient role of the woman that was not acceptable. So again you’ve got the eroticization of domination: very deeply rooted and we have to recognize it.
MB: Yes, it has to be recognized. Perhaps the best remedy is to try to purge the dominator mindset from pornography itself… make “partnership porn,” erotica that doesn’t reinforce the dominator mindset.
RE: There is such beauty in the human body and in the giving and receiving of pleasure so rather than… porn is a rather ugly word by now, I wouldn’t try to reclaim it, I would just do what I suggested and make a distinction between erotica and pornography and have especially young people and artists really begin to look at it from that perspective. What you learn from pornography is how two bodies should relate. That’s very political: one body is supposed to control, the other is supposed to be controlled and dominated, and if that body is supposed to also be humiliated and degraded, what are you really teaching about how people should relate? This is not just about what people do in bed, it’s about what we accept in the world as normal and pleasurable.
MB: Right now, we’re seeing a very scary kind of dominator resurgence in politics. It’s always been there, of course, but with Bush going to war, and with the rise of Christian fundamentalism having a large stranglehold over American politics, and Islamic fundamentalism continuing to spread, it’s no accident that at the same time Bush is going to war there are attacks on gay rights and abortion rights in the US. What can we do looking at the world through a partnership lens, how do we solve some of these contemporary problems that we have?
RE: The first step is to free ourselves from some of the contemporary conversation that tries to frame everything in terms of old categories such as Eastern versus Western or religious versus secular or capitalist versus socialist or right versus left, and we have to become acquainted with, understand the configuration of the partnership and domination models, to understand that the tension in the world is between those two configurations. Once we understand that then we can pay attention to what are the leverage points. By leverage points I mean intervention that has a cascade of systemic effects, and that’s what my work is about.
Why do I pay so much attention to the part of the configuration of the partnership or domination system that deals with family and other intimate relations? It’s for a very simple reason: we’ll continue to have these regressions until we see much more of a shift from domination to partnership in those foundational relations, to respect human rights or to accept human rights violations are just the way things are, that they’re normal, natural, even moral. We must continue our work to dismantle the top of the domination pyramid. We have to pay a lot of attention to political issues in the conventional sense, but we have to expand the definition of what is important politically, what is important in foreign policy, for example. [We have to] take those issues that are today considered just women’s issues or just children’s issues, take them from the back of the burner to the front burner. Why? Because it’s only with culture change worldwide we’ll see some of the longer range changes that will give us some authorization to build a [society] more truly democratic, more respectful of diversity and human rights. As long as people continue to grow up in these dominator families, the psychosocial dynamics I describe in my work will continue and we will see the scapegoating dynamics, the violence, and we’ll continue to have regressions. It’s not coincidental that every one of those regressions - you talk about fundamentalism - presents a top priority to get women “into their place,” a code for subservience, in a “traditional family,” another code phrase for the authoritarian, male-dominated punitive family. Children learn early on that it’s very dangerous to challenge authority no matter how brutal or unjust. [They also learn to] start identifying with those in power who oppress you, and scapegoat, express your rage and your horrible feelings on those you perceive as powerless. That is really what lies behind those people who want to get women back into their traditional place, who are against gay rights, who are against reproductive freedom. [They] are also for holy wars. The good news is that today there’s not only a strong movement challenging the use of violence in international relations, but there’s beginning to be a strong movement challenging the use of violence, which is a way of imposing and maintaining domination, in intimate relations.
MB: I’ve been noticing and examining a real cultural split between Canada and the US right now, particularly with regard to the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the US. In Canada we have this continuing cultural and political trend where we’re becoming increasingly tolerant, liberal, urban and secular. In the younger people I know there seem to organically exist a lot more equitable family relations, there seems to be a natural tendency toward partnership style relations within this climate.
RE: I think it is a natural tendency, as it’s far less stressful, it’s far more pleasurable. The problem is it’s quite often so literally beat out of people, violence against children very early on. We need parental education more respectful of children, more what we’d call authoritative than authoritarian, non-violent, and much more caring. Canada has a much more caring family policy, and universal health care. We’re told there’s always money for control, for prisons, for weapons, for wars, and then we’re told there isn’t enough money for the stereotypical women’s work of caring and care giving, like health care, child care, paid parental leave, these are the connections we really need to understand if we want worldwide to have more equitable economic systems. One of the most ignored issues in foreign policy is that you cannot solve the global problem of poverty without giving much more support to the work of caring and care giving. It’s not coincidental that in the United States, older women over the age of 65 are twice as poor as men over 65. Or for that matter that globally 70 percent of those living in absolute poverty, who are close to starvation, are female. It’s the result of an economic system that came out of a dominator paradigm, where the most fundamental human work of caring for ourselves and others, even for our Mother Earth, has no visibility in the economic indicators. These are some directions I point out in my new book The Real Wealth Of Nations, that you can’t isolate economics from the larger social context.
