EISLER, Riane
The Chalice
and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Harper and Row,
San Francisco 1987.
SUMMARY OF
CONTENTS
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.
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.
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.
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.