EISLER, Riane

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

Harper and Row, San Francisco 1987.

 

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

Prehistoric Goddess-Based Cultures

Eisler begins her book with the questions: “Why do we hunt and persecute each other? Why is our world so full of man’s infamous inhumanity to man —and to woman? How can human beings be so brutal to their own kind? What is it that chronically tilts us toward cruelty rather than kindness, toward war rather than peace, toward destruction rather than actualization?” (p. xiii) She claims that we were not always like this and uses evidence from archeology of prehistoric cultures to support this claim.

She tells us that the female figurines (“Venus” figurines), found in archeological sites over a wide geographic area testimony to the veneration that ancient peoples had for the powers that govern life and death, powers which they associated with woman. She identifies these figurines and many other feminine images with goddess worship.

Eisler also points out that Neolithic art does not portray scenes of battles, warriors, or “violence-based power”; there are no heroic conquerors or indications of slavery. In Neolithic archeological sites there are no “lavish ‘chieftain’ burials, large caches of weapons, or fortifications”.

“The Goddess-centered art we have been examining, with its striking absence of images of male domination or warfare, seems to have reflected a social order in which women, first as heads of clans and priestesses and later on in other important roles, played a central part, and in which both men and women worked together in equal partnership for the common good”. (p. 20)

Drawing from prehistoric art and artifacts, Eisler develops one of her most interesting theses: that these goddess-based societies were associated with important technological and social developments. “The Neolithic agrarian economy was the basis for the development of civilization leading over thousands of years into our own time. And almost universally, those places where the first great breakthroughs in material and social technology were made had one feature in common: the worship of the Goddess.” (p. 9)

Among these developments, Eisler includes agriculture, hunting, fishing, domestication of animals, construction, sewing, weaving, and the arts, use of natural resources (fibers, leather, metal); law, government, judgeship; religion, prayer, priesthood; dance, drama, oral literature; trade, administration, education, prediction of future events. There may even have been an early form of script, as yet undeciphered, but no written literature.

Eisler points out that the earlier societies were organized differently from ours and that there is much evidence of female deities in them. She indicates that there is no evidence in these early societies that men dominated women. She also insists that the women did not dominate the men, that is, these early cultures were not “matriarchal”. She wants to get beyond “cultural and linguistic assumptions inherent in a dominator paradigm: that human relations must fit into some kind of superior-inferior pecking order.” (p. 27)

Eisler’s intention is to establish that the goddess-based culture is the locus of the best known social ordering precisely because it was goddess-based and that all cultures that are not goddess-based (and very specifically the cultures in which Christianity exists and which were shaped to some extent by Christianity) are intrinsically violent and unjust. By “goddess-based” or “goddess-worshiping”, Eisler is not so much describing the theology of these people as their attitude toward women. For Eisler, a culture with a female god is “deifying” woman, whereas a culture with a male god is “deifying” man. The source of the “superiority” of goddess-based cultures for Eisler is not really their supposedly more peaceful social relations (although this may entice the non-feminist reader), but the presumed superiority of place given to women in a culture that portrays the deity as female.

Transformation to Chaos

After centuries of peace and development, a great change occurred. Nomadic tribes, roaming the less desirable parts of the earth looking for grazing land, “grew in numbers and ferocity”. By the fifth millennium BC there began a pattern of destruction of Neolithic cultures by invasions and natural catastrophes, producing what Eisler refers to as a “mounting chaos.”

The one thing they  [the invading cultures] all had in common was a dominator model of social organization: a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm. Another commonality was that, in contrast to the societies that laid the foundations for Western civilization [the goddess-based societies], the way they characteristically acquired material wealth was not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction.” (p. 45, italics in the original).

Other changes after the invasions that are apparent from the archeological record include indications of slavery, oppression of women, warfare, weapons, chieftain burials (indicating social inequality), others buried with the chieftain (apparently killed for that purpose) appropriation of goddess symbols to powerful men, fortifications, and the disappearance of female figurines.

Cultural Transformation Theory

Eisler’s central thesis is that a transition took place historically from earlier idyllic societies to more aggressive cultures. This transition is explained by cultural transformation theory. This theory proposes that there are two basic models of society:

1) The dominator model, which is based on ranking groups in society and on the threat or use of force to maintain these rankings; and

2) The partnership model, which is based on linking groups in society with no implication of inferiority or superiority among groups.

Cultural transformation theory also proposes that the original direction of the evolution of society was toward the partnership model, but that the dominator model took over after “a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption” (p. xvii). The chaos was caused by an invasion from violent “peripheral” groups. The shift in social structure was apparently accompanied by a shift in the types of technologies developed by the society, from life-sustaining technologies to war-related technologies, from the chalice to the blade. Cultural transformation theory also proposes that we can transform ourselves back to the partnership model of society.

How the Transformation Occurred: The Judeo-Christian Bible

Eisler claims that people’s ideas about society were changed from partnership to dominator by force (war and law) and manipulation (including “’spiritual education’ carried out by the ancient priesthoods” (p. 84), through rituals and sacred stories). Her predominant example of the latter is the Bible. Eisler discusses hypotheses that the Old Testament was put together by many authors and repeatedly edited to meet evolving male-dominated political agendas. Male dominance was gradually increased by having men assume all the powerful and prestigious jobs, even those previously done by women. They also began to destroy, demote, or transform the goddess to reduce or eliminate her original meaning and power.

Then Eisler goes into some depth on how the Judeo-Christian Bible utterly eliminates the goddess and any possibility of a female deity. This is also where we read the second reference to Christ’s death, which she uses to characterize Christianity as a death-centered religion. She claims that, despite some important ethical teachings, the Bible is full of material designed to impose and maintain a dominator system of society.

With respect to the New Testament, Eisler refers to Christianity and to the Blessed Virgin Mary throughout the book and devotes particular attention to Jesus Christ in Chapter 9. Eisler describes the teachings of Jesus as putting more importance on the virtues she considers “feminine”: universal love, humility, meekness, spiritual equality, etc. Her descriptions of his preaching and how he treated women as equal to men are accurate enough. She considers Jesus’ ideas to be supportive of a “gylanic” view of society. She also states, “that there is absolutely no corroborating evidence of his existence in documents other than highly suspect Christian sources.” (p. 122). Yet, “perhaps the most compelling argument for the historicity of Jesus is his feminist and gylanic thought and actions.” (p. 122).

Eisler clearly associates devotion to Mary with ancient goddess worship. She compares the images associated with the goddess to those of Mary:

“Indeed, if we look closely at the art of the Neolithic, it is truly astonishing how much of its Goddess imagery has survived.... [the Neolithic pregnant Goddess] survives in the pregnant Mary of medieval Christian iconography. The Neolithic image of the young Goddess or Maiden is also still worshiped in the aspect of Mary as the Holy Virgin. And of course the Neolithic figure of the Mother-Goddess holding her divine child is still everywhere dramatically in evidence as the Christian Madonna and Child”. (p. 22)

In end note 9 of Chapter 7, she quotes an author who portrays the Council of Ephesus as the Church’s willingness to allow people to “worship” Mary as the Mother of God, and uses this as evidence that goddess worship extended into medieval times. In fact, she can only understand Marian devotion as a vestige of goddess worship:

“Indeed, the tenacity with which for millennia of Western history both women and men have, in the figure of the Christian Virgin Mary, clung to the hunger for such a reassuring image [of a giving and nurturing mother]. However, like so many otherwise puzzling aspects of history, this tenacity only becomes comprehensible in the context of what we now know about the millennia-long tradition of Goddess worship in prehistory”. (p. 76)

However, none of this is to say that Christianity has identified an adequate place for women. After comparing the ancient mythical family led by the goddess to the divine family headed by God the Father, Eisler points out that “the only woman in this religious facsimile of a patriarchal family organization [the Father, the Son, and Mary] is only mortal -- clearly, like her earthly counterparts, of an inferior order.” (p. 24)

Not finding sufficient evidence for her thesis in the Bible, even when she distorts it, Eisler introduces what she calls the “suppressed” Christian scriptures, the gnostic gospels that were ordered to be destroyed when the Church determined the canon of Scripture. Apparently, some were saved and discovered in 1945. Eisler says that these writings indicate that women exercised more leadership in the early Church than we had thought, and suggests that the male hierarchy was imposed later. This hierarchy approved for inclusion in the New Testament only those documents, which support its (the hierarchy’s) existence.

Androcracy and Gylany; Domination Hierarchies and Actualization Hierarchies

After describing the cultural transformation in terms of domination and linking, Eisler introduces new terminology. She begins to call dominator societies “androcratic”, man-ruled, societies. Androcratic is proposed as “a more precise term than patriarchy to describe a social system ruled through force or the threat of force by men.” (p. 105) Partnership societies are now “gylanic”, a term Eisler composed from gyne (woman), andros (man), and “l” from lyein or lyo (to solve or dissolve) or from the English word “linking”.

Eisler discusses the concepts of domination hierarchies and actualization hierarchies. The former involve the use of the threat of force to maintain the hierarchy and are characteristic (according to the author) of male-dominant societies. The latter refer to “progressions from lower to higher ordering of functioning” such as within an organism. The function of an actualization hierarchy is to maximize the organism’s potential. These hierarchies are nurturing, and foster health and growth and could, therefore, occur in a “gylany.”

Eisler examines the periodic swing of history’s pendulum between “androcratic” and “gylanic” attitudes. She relates this to sexually repressive and sexually permissive periods, respectively, which in turn are supposedly correlated with less creative, father-identified, and more creative, mother-identified, periods. She claims that this dynamic is due to our androcratic social structure which will not allow peaceful, creative urges to go very far before reigning them in and even reversing them.

Authority, the Family, and Feminism

Since it is critical to Eisler’s future society that traditional authority be abolished, she jumps from prehistory to the Enlightenment to find support from thinkers who would otherwise be incompatible with feminism. Eisler believes that the ideas of the Enlightenment have not failed; they have only been incompletely applied. She claims that the critical aspect of the Enlightenment was a break not with religion, but with “the androcratic premise that a static and hierarchic social order was the will of God.” (p. 160)

What Hobbes, Rousseau, Comte, Mill, Marx all share is a “common antiandrocratic assumption that under the proper social conditions, human beings could and would live in free and equitable harmony.” (p. 161) That is, they all favored, in one way or another, a rejection of “traditional” authority. According to Eisler, capitalism was “an important step in the move from a dominator to a partnership society.” (p. 163) However, it is still based on greed and class distinctions, and causes economic-based wars, so capitalism is still “fundamentally androcratic.” Next, socialism and communism made some improvements in social equality, according to Eisler, but communism was still founded on violence. Abolitionism, pacifism, anarchism, anticolonialism, and environmentalism fail to address the problem in its entirety. Only feminism captures and addresses the fullness of the problem of and the solution to our social ills: androcracy. (Eisler does criticize the “unabashedly androcratic” thinkers like Burke, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.)

The practical ramifications of Eisler’s theories are felt in the areas of life and the family. Eisler repeatedly implies a connection between “traditional” religions and violence against women is made more explicit. She indicates her support for abortion and its importance in a woman’s “freedom”. But most strikingly, close to the end of the book, Eisler declares war on the family:

“The two basic human types are male and female. The way the relationship between women and men is structured is thus a basic model for human relations. Consequently, a dominator-dominated way of relating to other human beings is internalized from birth by every child brought up in a traditional, male-dominated family”. (p. 168)

And later:

“Only feminism offers the vision of a reordering of the most fundamental social institution: the family.” (p. 169)

Her futurist version of marriage and child-rearing is summarized here:

“Along with the celebration of life will come the celebration of love, including the sexual love between women and men. Sexual bonding through some form of what we now call marriage will most certainly continue. But the primary purpose of this bonding will be mutual companionship, sexual pleasure, and love. Having children will no longer be connected with the transmission of male names and property. And other caring relationships, not just heterosexual couples, will be fully recognized”. (p. 202)

Quality of life rather than quantity of life will be paramount and “... as Margaret Mead predicted, children will be scarce, and thus highly valued.” (p. 202)

 

TECHNICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL EVALUATION

Scientific Support

Throughout the book, Eisler invokes varies field of study to give more “scientific” weight to her position. They seem calculated to provide a veneer of scientific respectability rather than to add any real analytical rigor to her arguments. Even her use of archeology is suspect. It is important to remember that Eisler is talking mostly about prehistoric cultures ‑cultures which left no written record. This means that archeologists must “reconstruct” the lives of these peoples from the artifacts they left behind. This process requires, in addition to a large amount of information, an even larger amount of imagination and conjecture. It is conceivable that other explanations could account for the archeological data presented by Eisler. She places more certainly in modern interpretations of ancient artifacts than in written history.

Social Structure: From Partnership to Intrinsic Moral Inferiority of Men

Eisler insists that the critical element in the perfect society is the social structure. For her, changing the structure will change behavior. In describing opposing social structures, Eisler adds layer upon layer of dualities, linking each new layer to those she introduced earlier, with little or no analysis or justification. We are left with two lists of societal characteristics. Eisler associates these characteristics with each other, within each list, to the point of identifying constructs, which are not conceptually interchangeable. This is what the list looks like:

          ranking                                                        linking

dominator societies                                    partnership societies

domination hierarchies                               actualization hierarchies

       androcratic                                                     gylanic

  sexually repressive                                      sexually permissive

    father-identified                                          mother-identified

       less creative                                               more creative

The first three pairs in the list describe what could reasonably be considered opposing principles of social organization. But from the third pair to the fourth pair we see a radical shift from gender-neutral conceptual terms to gender-laden ideological terms. The only basis for linking gender with the earlier concepts is a set of suppositions about prehistoric cultures. The historic evidence Eisler gives is a combination of inaccuracies and contradictions. This is not to say that the conceptual dualities cannot be linked to gender-related tendencies, but that Eisler does not establish this link very well. The next two layers of duality are increasingly tenuous in their connection to the ones that came before and are increasingly ideological. We have now introduced psychological (and to some extent moral) terms, associating one side of the global duality with sexual repression and the other with sexual permissiveness (a priority of Eisler’s which emerges more clearly with each chapter). But then to link this duality with father-identification and mother-identification (whatever these really mean psychologically), is to imply very peculiar things about fatherhood and motherhood, experiences which definitively separate men and women. Then we jump back to gender-neutral concepts regarding creativity, closing the loop of Eisler’s thinking. This leaves the reader back in relatively non-ideological intellectual territory, but with the mud of pseudo-scientific feminist insinuations thickly caked on his or her boots.

Association of Religion with Violence toward Women

Eisler frequently juxtaposes statements, which are unrelated or not clearly related in ways that produce a kind of “guilt by association.” For instance: “Ideologically, our world is in the throes of a major regression to the woman-hating dogmas of both Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. There is in literature and film an unprecedented barrage of violence against women, of graphic portrayals of woman-murder and rape...” (p.153) Thus she links Christianity and Islam with pornography and rape. This paragraph of the book is illustrative of hundreds of paragraphs where several complex and multifaceted realities are thrown together with little or no attempt to analyze them. The result is that everything in the paragraph is tainted by the foulest-smelling ingredient. This superficial treatment does not begin to get at the source of the horrible crimes against women.

Modern Thought — Modern Problems

From a radical feminist point of view, Eisler’s estimation of most of the thinkers and systems she mentions is not surprising. Only the ones who are blatantly anti-woman and/or in favor of authority of some kind are really criticized. The others, despite their woman— and family-damaging personal attitudes and philosophical doctrines, are praised because they contribute to the fundamental objective of the radical feminist: the abolition of any religious, moral, or other authority but their own, which is an authority of personal opinion and convenience and of moral relativity and subjectivity. She also fails to admit that harmony does not exist even among those calling themselves feminists.

Eisler does not seem to recognize that the threats of nuclear war and totalitarianism are the result of the work of the thinkers she praised in the previous chapter (albeit in a limited way) for their rejection of any moral authority that would have guided and contained the human being’s use of science, technology, and political power. This is true also of the other global problems she mentions (ecological, political, and social). The only voice that has been raised consistently to urge human beings to use their knowledge and technical ability responsibly has been the very Church she condemns as “androcratic.” Of course, we soon see where the rub is here too. The major “global problem” that the Church has not quite agreed with Eisler on is the so-called “population explosion.” And the disagreement is not so much with respect to whether there is a population problem or not, but with how such a problem, to the extent that it exists, should be handled.

It is astonishing that Eisler does not admit that the very “androcracy” she is criticizing has been pouring billions of dollars over the last few decades into the population control she so desires. And that this has been done primarily for the sake of the military and economic (and racial) domination she claims to detest. And that it has been done in lieu of the agrarian aid that she claims women of developing countries need. And that when loans for economic and educational efforts have been given it has frequently been with population control provisions forced onto the people as a condition for the loans. Once again, it becomes clear that Eisler is less interested in peace, justice, and freedom of peoples than in irresponsible sexuality, which entails the technological domination by women of their own (and other, poorer, women’s) bodies.

Attitude toward the Family

One could read Eisler’s statements regarding the family as being opposed to those situations in which men abuse their position in the family through violence toward their wives and children; situations in which they neglect their duties through drunkenness, gambling, or abandonment; or even situations in which the husband does not treat his wife as the equal partner that she is in the marriage and in raising of the children. This generous reading could come from her use of the term “male-dominated” (since a Christian marriage and family is not a question of domination but of mutual love and service) and from her examples of wife-beating and deadbeat dads (which everyone would agree are wrong). However, Eisler never makes the distinction between the “traditional” family and these abuses, distortions, or outright rejections of the family. In the context of her work, the “traditional” family is “male-dominated”, oppressive of women, and psychologically dangerous to children. She refers to “the modern equalitarian family” (p. 162), but never states what this means. In view of her positions on a woman’s right to have sex with whomever she wishes, use contraception and procure abortions regardless of her husband’s views on these matters, and her advocacy of other partnerships besides heterosexual, it is clear that the Christian family, even with full partnership of the spouses and the inculcation in the children of the virtues Christ taught and lived, would still constitute an “androcratic” institution to Eisler, simply because it would constrain her sexual freedom through recognition of the relatedness and responsibility associated with sex.

Conclusion

Eisler describes an end state with many desirable characteristics, but her entire book is about destroying not only the structures that have caused so much suffering, but also the elements that give any real hope for achieving a peaceful society. She has ruled out the one modern religion which by her own admission advocates spiritual equality, peace, and “feminine” virtues because some men have distorted it; or more exactly, because men happen to occupy positions of authority and service in that religion. And she has condemned attempts to protect the most vulnerable human being in existence —the pre-born child.

To a large extent, Eisler does not have to wait for the future to realize her vision of marriage and child rearing. Everything she has predicted has come true: Marriage for many is only about companionship and sexual pleasure and can be ended when these conditions cease to exist. Love, therefore, need have no element of commitment necessarily attached to it. Marriage and children are not necessarily connected either in our society, as the majority of children born now are not born into “traditional” families, and many marriages are purposefully childless. Socially, homosexual relationships are openly accepted. And the crusade for legal acceptance marches on unabated. Margaret Mead’s prediction, on the other hand, only turns out to be half-true. In many countries, children are scarce, but the child abuse, effects of divorce, and prevalence of childhood mental illnesses experienced in those countries are hardly indications that those children are highly valued.

 

DOCTRINAL EVALUATION

Treatment of Scripture in General

Eisler’s treatment of a written, historical document (particularly in contrast to her treatment of prehistoric art) is truly perplexing. First, we are told that Jesus Christ probably did not exist. Then we are told he might have existed since he said and did things that were not consistent with his culture. Then we are told that the documents that record these unusually woman-friendly behaviors are the same ones promulgated by a group of men who presumably hate women, since they insist that the religion Jesus started was to be led by men. Because to Eisler it is incompatible to treat women as spiritual equals with men and to have an exclusively male hierarchy, the hierarchy must be a later invention by men. To further her argument, she refers to documents, in which she says that women figured as Church leaders, but that these documents were suppressed by men.

Eisler does not give any reason why these “androcratic” men would have supported scriptures (the approved documents) that are —by her estimation— so full of “gylanic” principles. Even Christ’s instructions to His Apostles regarding how they are to exercise their authority is precisely in the spirit of “power as responsibility” which Eisler claims is characteristic of goddess-worshiping cultures. From both the service-based description of the Apostles’ power and the analogy of the Church to the body in the writings of Paul, it is clear that the structure of Church leadership described in the New Testament constitutes what Eisler calls an “actualization hierarchy” since it is formed for the sake of the health, growth, and nurturance of the whole organism. So the hierarchy in the New Testament fulfills the structural requirements of a “gylanic” society without any hint of goddess-worship. This alone disproves her thesis that only goddess-based cultures promoted the idea of power as responsibility and hierarchies in service of the whole organism.

Regarding the suppression of the gnostic gospels, the issue of which documents would form the official canon of the New Testament is a matter of faith in the authority (and infallibility) given by Jesus to his Apostles. Regarding the human process by which the Scriptures were written and edited, the important points are:

1) whatever the human methods used, God is still the author inspiring the human instruments;

2) this does not free the human instruments from their own cultures and biases or even from errors in things not intended to be revealed truth;

3) Scripture must be read and interpreted as a whole and in conjunction with Tradition to be properly understood, not in small pieces as Eisler presents it.

Treatment of the Creation and Fall

From Christian doctrine, we know that man was created by God with natural, preternatural, and supernatural gifts. Then, through the sin of our first parents, we lost the preternatural and supernatural gifts and suffered a wounded (though not destroyed) nature. Thus, Eisler is correct in one sense when she says that it is not “natural” or “necessary” for the human person to live in violent and unjust circumstances, in the sense that these circumstances are not what God intended for humanity and do not correspond to the dignity of the human person. Eisler’s error is in thinking that the cause of injustice and suffering is merely social structure, and not personal sin.

The reader of this book needs to see Pope John Paul II’s analysis of the creation accounts to obtain the best perspective on this topic. While Eisler would have been correct if she claimed that many Christians have interpreted the Genesis creation accounts as indicative of a superiority of man over woman, she is not correct in saying that the text itself must mean this; that is, that the text is the political tool of a violent, male-dominating elite. John Paul II, using the Hebrew texts, shows how the two creation accounts are quite compatible and in fact convey the same message in two different writing styles. Chronology of creation is not really the issue in these stories. They both show the equality and the complementarity of woman and man. It is interesting that Eisler assumes that the first creation account —the one she considers more “equalitarian”— is therefore the older account, and that the second account —wherein Eve is created from Adam’s rib— is a more recent imposition by the “priestly ruling class”. In fact, the first account is considered by scholars to be the more recent account and the “male-supremacist tale” is from a more ancient time.

Many questions surround Eisler’s interpretation of the Fall. Why does she identify paradise (the Garden of Eden) with the old religion and to identify the loss of that paradise with an act (according to Eisler) of fidelity to that religion? If Eve refused to give up the old religion, why did it disappear? If the priests wanted to obliterate the religion, why did they tell a story of its heroism? And if Eve failed in her brave act to restore the old religion, why do the priests of the new religion mourn her failure as the introduction of evil into the world, rather than rejoice over it as the victory of their dominating and warlike ways?

Eisler states that after the Biblical paradise of Eden a “male god decreed that woman henceforth be subservient to man” (p. xv). The reader should compare this interpretation of Genesis 3:16[1] to Pope John Paul II’s analysis[2]. John Paul’s treatment casts the verse as God’s warning about one (among many) of the consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, rather that as a normative prescription or an arbitrary punishment. Eisler does indicate that there is a change in the relationship between man and woman, that the subservience is not what characterized the relationship at its beginning. However, the way she phrases this sentence implies that the change in the relationship between the sexes was an arbitrary event imposed simply because the god in question happened to be “male.”

Eisler’s interpretation of this passage is found in endnote 39 of Chapter 6. In this note, Eisler quotes Genesis 3:16 and comments that this passage “strongly suggests that at that time women not only lost the right to choose who they would have sex with but also the right to use birth control technologies. That the use of contraceptives goes back to antiquity is verified by ancient Egyptian papyri ((describing the use of spermicides)).”

And here we come to the central obsession of radical feminists: the right to relations between man and woman ((venereal pleasure)) without “partnership”, “responsibility”, or “life”, three of the major characteristics that Eisler praises in the ancient goddess-based cultures.

Similarly, her explanation of the story of Cain and Able illustrates Eisler’s contradictory positions. While the agrarian peoples are supposed to be the peaceful ones and the pastoralists the aggressors, it is the agrarian brother who murders the pastoralist brother. If this is prompted by the “warrior god” preferring a blood sacrifice, why would this bloodthirsty god be so sad over the loss of the agrarian (garden) existence of Adam and Eve? Why would the people write this story as the story of their “warlike” god, characterize the agrarian life of Eden as a paradise if it were not the preferred existence of their god? Why would this same god not annihilate Cain, but even protect him from harm?

Certainly, in the stories and some of the laws in the Old Testament, it is clear that women are not on an equal footing with men socially and legally. They are frequently portrayed as a form of property of their fathers or husbands. Eisler also recalls for the reader some of the most heinous examples of abuse of women that the Old Testament has to offer.

However, none of what is portrayed in the Old Testament stories of abuse of women (gang rape, murder, selling of daughters, prostitution, etc.) is sanctioned by Christianity, a detail that Eisler neglects to note. Moreover, all of these practices are condemned by Christian society and would most likely exist more pervasively if it were not for Christianity. In fact, the New Testament is a striking break with these kinds of stories of the Old Testament. Given the claims of both parts of the Bible, this break is reasonable. In the Old Testament there is the fall and the promise of a redeemer, followed by generations of holiness and horror that coexist in the same culture and even in the same persons, regardless of what social structure the Hebrews used. To read as normative all the stories in a book whose central message is that human beings are wounded and in need of a redeemer is not quite logical. And in light of the New Testament, which is such a striking contrast to the Old, it is impossible to understand. For example, the reader should compare Jesus’ treatment of the woman caught in adultery to the prescribed treatment of such women in the Old Testament. Clearly, Jesus Christ does not consider the woman to be the “damaged property of her husband” which should be destroyed by stoning since its economic value is lost (Eisler’s interpretation), but a daughter of God who is no more or less guilty than the man involved and who needs to reform her ways as much as he does.

Treatment of Christ

Although much of what she says about Jesus is reasonable, Eisler’s work is full of blatant misrepresentations of the New Testament. To the average person who does not read the Gospel daily, these misrepresentations may pass as scholarship. Several examples are worth pointing out:

—“He [Jesus] praises the activist Mary over her domestic sister Martha.” (p. 122). Anyone who has read the exchange between Martha and Jesus is well aware that the “activist” in the scene is Martha. But Eisler’s point here is to denigrate household work traditionally done by women.

—She refers to the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene and to the Apostles after the Resurrection as visions although they are clearly told as instances of his physical presence.

—Eisler claims that “we read of a disciple of Jesus called Tabitha or Dorcas, conspicious [sic] for her absence from the well-known, official count of twelve.” (p. 12) The New Testament distinguishes between disciples (of which we have a count of 72 at one point, but clearly not intended to be a cap on the number since thousands become disciples later on) and Apostles (of which there are clearly twelve). Eisler has “uncovered” a non-issue.

—Eisler insists that adultery is an issue of male “sexual property rights” rather than an issue of marital fidelity. As a result, she implies that in the scene with the woman caught in adultery, Jesus prevents the woman from being stoned because he disagrees with imposing restrictions on a woman’s sexuality. In fact, adultery was proscribed for both men and women in the Old Testament and by Jesus. In the scene with the woman, Jesus is pointing out the hypocrisy of the men in conveniently forgetting that it takes two to commit adultery (and that it is sinful for both) and he is showing mercy to the woman to whom he said, “Go and sin no longer” (Jn 8, 3-11).

Eisler’s treatment of Christ’s Passion and Death consists of a few passing comments about a death-based religion interjected into her discussion of goddess-based cultures. She offers absolutely no analysis or justification. Clearly, the objective in Eisler’s work is to selectively present archeological findings to support goddess worship in specific contrast to Christianity. Examples throughout the book indicate her almost complete ignorance or misrepresentation of Christian believe and practice and the frequent contradictions she enters into to maintain her position. The quote comparing images of childbirth and of crucifixion is a clear example of her contradictions as well as her lack of knowledge of basic Christian theology. If the central religious image of our time is a man dying on a cross, then according to Eisler’s own logic, we must live not only in a “dominator” society, but in one in which men are subjugated. He took on the guilt that she claims Christians heap on to women. Aside from this, she is leaving out the frequency of Mary in religious images, which she herself comments on several times in the book. Much more importantly, even a superficial knowledge of the Gospel story would reveal that Jesus Christ’s death is understood to be a path to life, a release from the fear of death, and a breathtakingly eloquent statement of the Godhead abstaining from a display of “masculine power”. If anything, the chthonic portrayals of the goddess are more likely to be indications of fear of death than any Christian image would be.

Treatment of Mary

Eisler frequently mentions Mary, the Mother of God, but always in the context of female deities. Eisler sees devotion to Mary as a clinging to an unconscious memory of a goddess. Otherwise, to her, Marian devotion is an anomaly in what she imagines to be the Christian paradigm, rather than an intrinsic part of Christianity: a proof that it is not “male-violence based” religion. Rather than seeing Mary as a proof of the “feminine ethos” in Christianity, Eisler insists that Marian devotion is a recalcitrant goddess-worshiping tendency that the hierarchy of the Church has not succeeded in wiping out.

Regarding Eisler’s portrayal of Mary as a member of the “official Christian pantheon,” first, Christianity has no pantheon because it has only one God. Second, how can Mary be merely mortal and in the pantheon (the grouping or temple of all the divinities) at the same time? Third, if she includes Mary in the group she refers to as a pantheon she should include St. Joseph and all the male and female saints throughout the ages, in which case Mary is alone neither in her mortality nor in her gender.

The most glaring difference between Mary of Nazareth and any of the goddesses Eisler mentions is that Mary is a historical person, parts of whose life are recorded in historical documents. Therefore, it would be more reasonable to say that the goddess images (if that is in fact what they are) are precursors of the Christian reality, wherein the critical roles of woman as spouse, mother, and virgin are not only symbolized but lived in the person of Mary, than to say that the images of Mary are merely developments of images found in prehistoric art, or worse yet, that the ancient goddess is worshiped in these images of Mary.

Christian Society vs Goddess-Based Society

Eisler directly relates patriliny (tracing lineage through the father) to ownership of women by men. Where the latter has existed, so has the former. However, the reverse is not the case. They are not intrinsically related practices any more than matriliny means that men are the property of women. Eisler throws in references to “Bible readings from pulpits” in the middle of a discussion of a Greek play simply because patrilineal descent is expressed in the Bible. Using evidence from outside Christianity, she insinuates that evils accepted and taught by other cultures are also accepted and taught by Christianity. No Christian denomination preaches matricide, rape, or pillage, even if many Christian children take their last name from their father. It is very striking that Eisler never quotes the New Testament in support of her criticism of Christian society.

It is interesting that Eisler takes the trouble to assure us that the goddess-based societies were not utopias. This raises the question of why we should return to those cultures. If Christian belief and teaching is in favor of equality, peace, and development and only fails when human beings are imperfect, and if the same can be said about the ancient goddess-based societies, then there is no argument for returning to that goddess worship. First, the precise character of the goddess-based societies is uncertain, since all we know is from archeological conjecture. Second, we already have a religion that supports the same laudable goals, if only we would adhere to it. If western civilization is so permeated by a male dominant, violence-based ethos, why would the description she gives of the values in the ancient goddess-based culture be appealing? If we consider peace, equality, responsibility, harmony, and artistic and technological development to be good things, then they must be values in our culture as well.

Religion as an Instrument of Power

From Eisler’s point of view, there is no issue of faith or of the truth of the content of a religion. For her, religion is simply a source of myths and images that can be used to manipulate society through the molding of human consciousness. But even from this point of view, she is very selective about which stories and images she chooses to characterize Christianity for her reader. She does mention the Madonna, but then claims that this image is not strong. The only other image she can recall is the crucifixion, even though the Resurrection is actually the central theme of all of Christianity and is celebrated every week. She never points out the images of Christ serving the Apostles, of the prodigal son’s return to his father (too patriarchal), of the good Samaritan, the parable of the talents (the most eloquent story of power as responsibility and trusteeship), the woman at the well, and so many more that would completely negate Eisler’s accusations regarding Christian imagery.

Eisler clearly does not believe in these Christian teachings and images. But then, neither does she believe in the goddess. Religion for her is a tool to shape society. “Religion supports and perpetuates the social organization it reflects.” One might wonder how Eisler would explain the extent to which Christ at his time, and the Church throughout time has been a “sign of contradiction”, telling society that it needs to change and that what it considers acceptable or even good is in fact evil? Among the things about which the Church has had to be a sign of contradiction have been issues that Eisler praises in the Neolithic cultures: power as service and responsibility, care for the poor, equitable distribution of wealth, equality of men and women, the culture of love and life over the culture of death, etc. If she is looking for a religion that preaches life, happiness, equality, compassion, dignity, love of beauty, etc., she does not need to go into prehistory. Christianity preaches everything she claims to want. But she still rejects this religion of a “male” deity.

Power in the Church

Eisler frequently refers to the Neolithic cultures having an understanding of power as responsibility and stewardship rather than domination and force. It would be disingenuous, if not ignorant, to fail to recognize that the concept of power (including God’s power) in the New Testament is explicitly understood as service and stewardship: the Son “came to serve, not to be served”. Several parables involve the concept of stewardship: that the authority that one has comes from God and must be exercised in service to all (for instance, the parable of the talents, or the parable of the owner of the vineyard who left his vineyard in the hands of others). In fact, it is striking that these parables involve examples of those who do not exercise their stewardship responsibly and are, therefore, condemned. In fact, Christ’s anger is generally manifested toward those in authority who abuse their authority (the scribes and Pharisees, those who bought and sold in the temple under the auspices of the temple authorities, and even St. Peter just after he was made the first Pope when he sought to exert his authority to dissuade Christ from his mission), not toward those who may be considered to be on the lower rungs of society. These latter were the ones he treated as companions. When speaking of a kingdom, he makes it clear that it is not a kingdom of this world. When his disciples discuss who is to be the greatest among them, he makes clear that the greatest one is the servant of the rest. He reinforces this teaching with his own example at the Last Supper. He heals the ear of the man Peter had struck with his sword in the garden of Gesthemane. Although he himself suffered and died a cruel death, this was because others would not accept his message of conversion and peace, not because he preached suffering for its own sake. He himself enjoyed life, including parties, weddings, visits with friends, and walks in the country. He preached happiness, not gloom: the Beatitudes themselves are often translated as “Happy the one who....” But he knows that suffering is inevitable in this life and he preaches a path to happiness that includes and transcends the reality of suffering. He preached life, not death, and ultimately overcame death to bring eternal life.

It is true that Christians throughout history —including some holding positions in the Church’s hierarchy— have engaged in activities that are patently unChrist-like. It is also true that well-known writers and theologians, as well as ordinary lay men and women, have been influenced (as all humans are) in their view of women by the social and cultural milieu in which live. Nevertheless, unChrist-like behaviors are, obviously, condemned by Christianity. And the culturally-constrained attitudes have changed gradually over time, precisely due to increased understanding of and more consistent application of Christ’s teachings. That it should take millennia to undo errors about women that Eisler herself admits took millennia to formulate, should be no surprise to her.[3] Eisler never refers to the countless documents from popes and bishops condemning murder, slavery, unjust war, abuse of workers, unjust distribution of wealth, and unjust use of government authority, documents that have often outlined positive means to build a more humane society.

With respect to ways that power has been exercised in the Church, clearly there have been members of the hierarchy who have not seen their positions as positions of service and responsibility. Eisler may be correct in saying that “dominator” social models have abused the Church through some men (and also women) seeking power in positions that should be for service. But what really bothers Eisler is not whether power is exercised as responsibility and service, but whether women can exercise power through the hierarchy of the Church. This is not an issue of equality, since Christ clearly considered women to be equal to men. It is fundamentally a question of sacramental theology. This ought to be a most satisfactory theology for Eisler since it is intimately concerned with symbols or signs. In particular, she ought to be impressed with the sacramental meaning of the Eucharist and the corresponding sacramentality of Holy Orders, dealing as they do, with male-female partnership. The essential point to emphasize here is that in this symbolism the whole Church is female. In a sense, every woman is a sign of the Church, Mother of Christ and of Christians, Spouse of Christ, His Own Body. Man’s whole attitude toward God must be learned from woman. So, at least potentially, woman is the possessor of a knowledge and wisdom that is critical to being a Christian.[4]

The most logical conclusion to make from Eisler’s book is that we should return to the teachings of Christ, redoubling efforts to overcome social and cultural behaviors and attitudes that are un-Christian.

 

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Assuming that Eisler’s true objective is to achieve a more peaceful and just society, her fundamental errors are three:

1) She depends more on changing structures than on changing hearts and developing virtues. This error dooms all attempted human transformations to failure.

2) She fails to look objectively at the potential for Christianity to achieve her objective.

3) She describes an end state with contradictory characteristics: love, responsibility, equality, child rearing, stability, justice, social harmony, mental and physical health, etc.; and irresponsible and uncommitted sexual relations (sex without consequences), a condition which turns out to be incompatible with most of the other characteristics she desires. Maintaining a vision of a future with contradictory characteristics is another guarantee of failure.

However, one must seriously question Eisler’s objective of achieving a peaceful and just society. The only logical conclusion to draw from her book, once all the inaccuracies are corrected and the contradictions cancel each other out, is that she truly desires (whether consciously or not) a condition under which no external authority could ever constrain any woman’s behavior, particularly her sexual behavior. At the same time, male behavior must be constrained by female authority.

And yet, even this conclusion does not seem to justify the disproportionately complex and convoluted methods used to support it, especially since in many countries this objective is already largely attained. This disproportion is what gives the impression that feminists are using their intellects more as expressions of deep emotional drives (such as dealing with victimization at the hands of an aggressor and re-enacting this aggression toward others) than as means to integrate experience and emotion with knowledge and reason to achieve a more enlightened understanding of and influence on reality.

A.B. (1998)

 

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[1] Gen 3,16: "To the woman also he said, I will multiply thy sorrows and thy conceptions. In sorrow shall thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband's power and he shall have dominion over thee." The last part is also translated: "Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

[2] Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem, On the Dignity and Vocation of Woman, August 15, 1988; and On the Original Unity of Man and Woman.

[3] In Chapter 10, Eisler has no problem transcending Henry Adams' "androcratic" stereotypes to appreciate his main point, but she can not manage to do the same with Catholic priests.

[4] For more on why the Catholic priesthood is reserved to men, see: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Concerning the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood, Inter Insigniores , October 15, 1976; and John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem, On the Dignity and Vocation of Women, August 15, 1988.