Riane Eisler

longshot · #1 04-01-2007, 12:58 PM

really i just feel like cutting and pasting.
and reading. and she is one of the most important feminists, period.

Riane Eisler

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Riane Eisler is an Austrian born American scholar, writer, and social activist. Born in Vienna, her family fled from the Nazis to Cuba when she was a child; she later emigrated to the United States. She has degrees in sociology and law from the University of California. She is the author of many popular books and articles, and president of the Center for Partnership Studies. Eisler has been described as a cultural historian, an evolutionary theorist, and one of the most original thinkers of our time.

longshot · #2 04-01-2007, 12:59 PM

Eisler proposes that we need new social categories that go beyond conventional ones such as religious vs. secular, right vs. left, capitalist vs. communist, Eastern vs. Western, and industrial vs. pre or post industrial, which she notes do not describe the whole of a society's beliefs and institutions. She coined the term domination culture to describe a system of top-down rankings ultimately backed up by fear or force, noting that one of the core components of this system of authoritarian rule in both the family and the state is the subordination of women -- be it in Nazi Germany and Khomeini's Iran today or in earlier cultures where chronic violence and despotic rule were the norm. She analyzes the androcracy (governance of social organization dominated by males) of Indo-European and other societies, versus what she proposes was a partnership model (as distinct from matriarchy for the social organization of Neolithic Europe and the later Minoan civilization that flourished in prehistoric Neolithic Crete. To support the idea that neither men nor women dominated one another, Eisler cites archeological evidence from southeast Europe, especially Crete, drawing much from the research of Marija Gimbutas, James Mellaart, Nicolas Platon, and Vere Gordon Childe. Her hypothesis about prehistory also relies strongly on sources such as the Gnostic Gospels and on the history portrayed by the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod. To support her thesis for contemporary societies, she draws heavily from cross-cultural studies. She and others using her partnership/domination conceptual framework have applied her analysis to fields ranging from politics and economics to religion, business, and education.

longshot · #3 04-01-2007, 01:00 PM

Riane Eisler inspired Professor Min Jiayin of the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to edit The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture, published in 1995 by China Social Sciences Publishing House which tested Eisler's cultural transformation theory in Chinese culture, and found that there was also a shift from partnership to domination in Asian prehistory. Her work has inspired numerous other books, as well as dissertations, both in the United States and other nations.
Eisler's international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now in 22 languages, including most European languages and Chinese, Russian, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, and Arabic, was hailed by anthropologist Ashely Montagu as "the most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species".
Her newest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics – hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking,” by Peter Senge as “desperately needed,” and by Gloria Steinem as “revolutionary” – proposes a new approach to economics that gives visibility and value to the most essential human work: the work of caring for people and planet.
Riane Eisler keynotes conferences worldwide, and is a consultant to business and government on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work. International venues have included Germany at the invitation of Prof. Rita Suessmuth, President of the Bundestag (the German Parliament) and Daniel Goeudevert (Chair of Volkswagen International); Colombia, invited by the Mayor of Bogota; and the Czech Republic, invited by Vaclav Havel (one-time President of the Czech Republic).
Eisler's other books include the award-winning The Power of Partnership and Tomorrow’s Children, as well as Sacred Pleasure, a reexamination of sexuality and spirituality, and Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, which statistically documents the key role of the status of women in a nation’s general quality of life.
Riane Eisler is a founding member of the General Evolution Research Group (GERG), a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and World Business Academy]], and a commissioner of the [[World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality, along with the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other spiritual leaders. She is also co-founder of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV). She is president of the Center for Partnership Studies, dedicated to research and education.
Her pioneering work in human rights expanded the focus of international organizations to include the rights of women and children. Her research on systemic cultural transformation has impacted many fields, including history, sociology, economics, psychology, and education. She is the author of over 200 essays and articles in publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Futures, Political Psychology, and The UNESCO Courier to Brain and Mind, Yes!, the Human Rights Quarterly, The International Journal of Women's Studies, and the World Encyclopedia of Peace.
Dr. Eisler has received many honors, including the [[Humanist Pioneer award]] and the first Alice Paul ERA award. She is the only woman among twenty great thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee selected for inclusion in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist.
Dr. Eisler can be contacted at center@partnershipway.org

longshot · #4 04-01-2007, 01:08 PM

Center for Partnership Studies
The Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), located in Pacific Grove, CA., was established in 1987 for the purpose of researching, developing, and disseminating education on the partnership model as developed by Riane Eisler.

SAIV: The Spiritual Alliance to End Intimate Violence

The mission of SAIV is to stop intimate violence — the training ground for the violence of war, terrorism, political repression, and crime. SAIV was founded by Riane Eisler with Nobel Peace Laureate Betty Williams and is a project of the Center for Partnership Studies a not-for-profit 501©)(3) organization recognized as an Non-Governmental Organization by the United Nations.

longshot · #5 04-01-2007, 01:08 PM

1977 - Dissolution: NoFault Divorce, Marriage, and the Future of Women, New York. MacGraw Hill, now available at iuniverse.com
1979 - The Equal Rights Handbook: What ERA means for your life, your rights, and your future, New York. Avon, available at iuniverse.com
1987 - The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future. New York. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-250289-1
1996 - Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. San Francisco. Harper. ISBN 0-06-250283-2
2000 - Tomorrow's Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century
2002 - The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that will Change Your Life
2004 - Educating for a Culture of Peace
2007 - The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. San Francisco. Berrett-Koehler. ISBN: 978-1-57675-388-0

longshot · #6 04-01-2007, 01:10 PM

The Chalice or the Blade: Choices for our Future
By Riane Eisler

History as conventionally written has been literally the story of men. But if we re-examine our past, taking into account the whole of our history, a very different picture emerges.

People all over the world are today questioning matters that only a few generations ago were generally seen as "just the way things are." Everything, from politics and economics to sexual and family relations, is being re-evaluated. People are even reexamining the roles and relations of the female and male halves ofhumanity. And when people ask, "what does it mean to be a woman?" and "what does it mean to be a man?" They put at issue the most fundamental assumptions about our species and its future.
This questioning of "givens" -- particularly the stereotypical roles and relations of women and men--is not accidental. It is symptomatic of what systems theorists call a period of social disequilibrium a time when fundamental or transformational systems change can occur.
But transformation from what to what? What kind of a social system are we moving toward? What kind of system are we struggling to leave behind? And how does today's struggle over gender roles and relations relate to all this?

A new view of our past

We have often been told that a just and peaceful society is merely a utopia-an impossible dream. We are taught religious dogmas of "original sin" and their secular updates in socio-biological theories about "selfish genes." Not coincidentally, in both cases, these notions are embedded in stories about how male dominance is either divinely or scientifically ordained.

We are also taught that Western civilization begins with brutally male-dominant and highly warlike societies and that if there was anything before patriarchy in our prehistory it was so primitive as to be unworthy of serious alienation. For example, we have been told that European civilization begins with the Indo-European invasions - with a way of structuring society in which women and anything associated with the "feminine" is held in contempt and relegated to a subordinate and subservient position.

Indeed, history as conventionally written has been literally the story of men, with only an occasional mention of "their" women. But if we re-examine our past taking into account the whole of our history, including prehistory, drawing from a database that includes the whole of humanity--both its female and male halves-a very different picture emerges.

A good entry point into this new, and more hopeful, picture of our cultural evolution is through a fresh look at some familiar legends about an earlier, more harmonious and peaceful age. The Judaeo-Christian Bible tells of a garden where woman and man lived in harmony with each other and nature - a time before a male god decreed that woman henceforth be subservient to man. The Chinese Tao Te Ching describes a time when the yin or feminine principle was not yet ruled by the male principle or yang, a more peaceful and just time when the wisdom of the mother was still honored.

For many people these stories are merely religious or poetic allegories. But they contain important clues to a fundamental cultural shift during our prehistory. Indeed, new archaeological discoveries (coupled with reinterpretations of older excavations) show that while the earliest cradles of civilization -- going back many thousands of years before Sumer-- were not utopian societies in the sense of perfect societies, they were societies organized along very different lines from what came later. As the British archaeologist James Mellaart reports from his excavations of Catal Huyuk (the largest early agrarian or Neolithic site ever found), their characteristic social structure appears to have been generally egalitarian. He writes how the comparative size of houses, the nature of their contents, and the "funerary gifts" found in graves show that there were no extreme differences in status and wealth.

Data from Catal Huyuk and other Neolithic sites also indicate that in these societies, where women were priestesses and craftspeople, the female was not subordinate to the male. Although the sacred union of female and male was an important religious mystery, the powers that create and govern the universe were generally depicted as a goddess rather than a god.

Finally, dispelling the notion that war is natural, there is a paucity of fortifications as well as an absence in their extensive and considerably advanced art of the scenes so ubiquitous in later art-- of "noble warriors" killing one another in baffles, of gods and men raping women, of "glorious conquerors" dragging back prisoners in chains.

But the archaeological record also shows that, following a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption, the cultural evolution of societies that worshipped the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe - in our time still symbolized by the ancient "feminine" chalice or grail-was interrupted. There now appeared on the prehistoric horizon invaders from the peripheral areas of our globe (from the arid steppes of the north and barren deserts of the south) who ushered in a very different form of social organization. As the University of California archaeologist Marija Gimbutas wrote, these were people who literally worshipped "the lethal power of the blade" -- the power to take rather than give life that is the ultimate power to establish and enforce rankings of domination.

Human possibilities: Two Alternatives

When the first evidence of prehistoric societies where men did not dominate women began to be unearthed in the 19th century, the scholars of that day concluded that since they were not patriarchies they must have been matriarchies. But matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy: it is the other side of the coin of a dominator model of society. The real alternative to a patriarchal or male-dominant society is a very different way of organizing social relations. This is the partnership model, where, beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species between male and female, diversity is not equated with inferiority or superiority, dominating or being dominated.

Models are abstractions. But societies that orient primarily to one or the other of these models have characteristic configurations or patterns. These patterns, however, are discernible only when we look at the whole picture. In other words, the reason these patterns were not generally seen in the past is that scholars were looking at an incomplete and distorted picture--one that excluded no less than one-half of the population: women.

For example, from the conventional perspective focusing only on the activities and experiences of men, Hitler's Germany, Khomeini's Iran, the Japan of the Samurai, and the Aztecs of Meso America would seem to represent completely different cultures. But once we also look at the situation of women in these societies, we are able to identify the social configuration characteristic of rigidly male-dominated societies. We then see striking commonalities. First, all these otherwise widely divergent societies are rigidly male-dominant. Second, they are characterized by hierarchies of domination and "strong-man" rule, both in the family and state. Third (as is required to maintain hierarchies of domination) they are characterized by a high degree of institutionalized or socially accepted violence, ranging from wife and child beating within the family to aggressive warfare on the larger tribal or national level.

Conversely, we also see striking similarities between otherwise extremely diverse societies where there is more gender equity--societies where to be considered "real men" males do not have to be dominant. Characteristically, such societies tend to be not only much more peaceful but also much less hierarchic and authoritarian. This is evidenced by anthropological data (i.e., the BaMbuti and Tiruray), by contemporary studies of trends in modem societies (i.e., Scandinavian nations such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland), and by the prehistoric and historic data detailed in The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure, some of which has been briefly presented in the previous section.

The larger picture that emerges from this gender-holistic perspective also indicates that, contrary to popular misconceptions, male dominance and male violence are not innate. Clearly throughout history not all men have been violent. And today many men are consciously rejecting their stereotypical "masculine" roles -- for example, the men who are today redefining fathering in the more caring and nurturing way once stereotypically associated only with mothering.

In short, the problem in dominator societies is not men. It is rather the way male identity must be defined in male-dominant societies where, by definition, "masculinity" is equated with domination and conquest-- be it of women, other men, or nature.

To maintain this type of society, boys must be systematically socialized for domination, and therefore, for violence. Male violence has to idealized - as we see in so much of our normative literature celebrating violent "heroes" (for example, the Biblical King David, the Homeric Ulysses, and modern "he-men" such as Rambo). Indeed, in these societies violent behavior patterns are systematically taught to males from early childhood through toys like swords, guns, and violent video games, while only girls are systematically socialized for nurturing, compassion, and caring.

Not only that, in these societies sex becomes an act of male conquest and domination, as in the common description of men's affairs with women as "scoring." In addition, the family structure of these societies has to be one where men rule, women serve, and children learn early on that it is very dangerous to challenge orders, no matter how unjust.

Evolution at the crossroads

A clear understanding of these systems dynamics is today urgently needed. Ours is an age when "man's conquest of nature" is rapidly taking us to an evolutionary dead-end. It is an age when the lethal power of the blade, amplified a million-fold by megatons of nuclear warheads, threatens to put an end to all human civilization.

It is therefore not coincidental that our time, when the mix of high technology and a dominator system of social organization poses a danger to all life on this earth, should also be a time when women and men all over the world are increasingly questioning the stereotypical gender roles and relations appropriate for a dominator society. Nor is it coincidental that on the grassroots level groups working for equality, development, and peace are proliferating--even against strong dominator resistance and intermittent regressions.

For perhaps the most critical fact emerging from the new view of our past and potential future made possible by the study of society from a perspective that takes into account the whole of humanity, both women and men, is that all the modern movements for social and economic justice are neither radical nor new. Rather, such seemingly diverse progressive movements as the "rights of man," utopian and scientific socialist, abolitionist, and feminist movements of the 18th and 19th centuries and the anti-colonial, peace, ecology, civil rights and women's movements of the 20th century are part of a resurging thrust towards a social system that is not geared towards man's conquest of women, other men, or nature.

Most critically, rather than being a peripheral, or what is in male-dominant systems the same, a "women's issue," the social construction of gender roles and relations is central to the kind of future we will have. The domination of the female half of humanity by the male half is a basic template for all forms of domination, conditioning children early on to consider such relations normal. A related dynamic is that values such as nonviolence, caring, and compassion can only attain social governance when those stereotypically associated with such "feminine" values are no longer subservient.

These are systems dynamics that those trying to push us back to the "good old days" when all women and most men still knew their place in rigid hierarchies of domination maintained by fear and force intuitively recognize-which is why for them returning women to their "traditional" place is a top priority. It is why for the so-called Christian right in the United States a return to the "traditional family" (a code word for a male-headed authoritarian family) is so critical - as it was for the Nazis when Hitler came to power and for the Iranian fundamentalists after Khomeini seized control. For in every case what we arc dealing with is a regression to a more rigid dominator society, which requires as a cornerstone for its foundations the domination of half of humanity over the other.

It is therefore essential that those working for a more equitable and peaceful world also become conscious of these dynamics. Indeed, the struggle for our future is not between capitalism and communism or between religion and secularism. It is a struggle about what kinds of relations we have, be it in our intimate or our intemational relations.

If those who still believe that domination, exploitation, and violence are "just the way things are" prevail, we face a very grim future, and ultimately no future at all. But if we recognize that a future orienting to partnership rather than domination is a viable alternative, and become conscious of the centrality of partnership gender roles and relations to the construction of such a future, there is realistic hope.

Riane Eisler gives on new view of our past and our future

longshot · #7 04-01-2007, 01:20 PM

By Scott London

When we look back on the history of western civilization it seems clear that our culture has long been dominated by stereotypically "masculine" values such as competition, violence and domination. Our history books are replete with tales of battles, conquests, and the struggle for dominion.
But there is growing evidence that there was a time in early human history, culminating some 5,000 years ago, when the feminine principles of inclusion, partnership, and harmony between the sexes governed human affairs.
What is interesting is that much of the anthropological probing in this area is being done at a time when we are beginning to recognize the need for new models and new ways of organizing human affairs — in politics, in economics, in education, and, not least, in our personal relationships. The old formulas no longer seem adequate to address our mounting global problems.
Riane Eisler has been at the center of the effort to create a more "gender-holistic" society. She is internationally recognized for her work in anthropology, human rights, peace, feminist, and environmental issues. She is the author of the widely acclaimed book The Chalice and the Blade, an international bestseller now in its 23rd printing. She is also the author of The Partnership Way, and Sacred Pleasure.
I met with Riane Eisler to explore her views on women, men, and the politics of sexuality. Our conversation ranged widely from Paleolithic art to pornography, from the trouble with Darwin to the trouble with certain Church doctrines, from the search for more enlightened business practices to the need for less gender-bashing. But it began with the subject of her then newly-published book Sacred Pleasure…

*

Scott London: How did you hit upon the connection between sex and spirituality?
Riane Eisler: I actually began to see the connection the way many people begin to see it — experientially. We know from studying evolution, and we know from studying neuropeptides now (which is such a fascinating area of study), that we humans get chemical rewards not only by being loved but also by loving someone, not only by being touched in a pleasurable way but by touching another, be it a lover or a child, in a way that gives pleasure. So I think that many of us who have left behind this notion that sex is bad and dirty, and that our bodies are somehow sinful, are able to have what we might call an altered state of consciousness experience with sex — an ecstatic experience. So, for me, there was a link there. It's the same kind of experience that you might have while meditating or fasting — that moment of incredible illumination that you cannot put into words.
But there is an intellectual way in which I also linked sex and spirituality — by studying the history of sexuality and spirituality and asking, How did we get here? How did we come to this place of so much confusion? As a culture, we are now trying to reconnect this link. So many people today are saying, "Wait a minute, I want to put them back together — I want sexuality and the sacred back in my daily life right now."
London: The title of your book Sacred Pleasure brings together two words that many people would be hard pressed to use in the same sentence — "sacred" and "pleasure."
Eisler: Yes, we have been taught to associate the sacred with fear, not pleasure. People associate spirituality with the fear of God, or with divine retribution, or with Hindu deities chopping each other to bits — often it's associated with either the inflicting or the suffering of pain. But this was not always the case. The sacred was originally associated with the celebration of life, with nature, and, yes, with pleasure. That is something that many, many people today are trying to move toward. So, that is how the title Sacred Pleasure came to be.
London: One of the things you've set out to do in your work is to dispel some pervasive myths about sex and spirituality.
Eisler: Yes. As you know, a myth, at least in the scholarly sense, is a story that represents some ultimate sacred truth, one that people often take for granted. Because so many myths have been shown to be "illusions," we tend to equate myth with falsehood. I use the term myth in both senses — as a story we have been taught about the ultimate truth, and as a story that came out of the social construction of human relations.
London: So, in that sense, the story of Adam and Eve represents a myth, for example.
Eisler: Yes, very definitely. That is a myth that offers some fascinating clues to what archeology, linguistics, art history, and the study of folklore increasingly regard as the key event shaping culture as we know it. It helps us understand the shift from a partnership way of structuring human relations to a what I call a dominator model.
Look at what that story tells us. It tells us that there was a time when woman and man lived in harmony with one another and with nature. (It got very idealized, but it was certainly more of a partnership model.) But then, about four or five thousand years before the common era, you begin to see signs of severe stress, of enormous climate changes and natural disasters, and horde after horde of nomadic invaders from the more arid fringe-areas brought with them a very war-like, male-dominated, strong-man-rule way of living. Now, all of a sudden, people are ashamed of their bodies. Shame, fear, guilt, we all know, are means of controlling people, aren't they? Woman also becomes subservient to man. This is reflected in the myth of Adam and Eve. And, of course, the very next story after that in the Bible is one of brother killing brother
London: Does Christianity have something to do with the body becoming associated with sin and pain and violence?
Eisler: That idea certainly became one of the centerpieces of medieval Christianity. But if you analyze so-called primitive Christianity and the teachings of Jesus you find an emphasis on caring, non-violence, and compassion. He stopped the stoning of a woman, he fed the hungry and he healed the sick — "women's work," right? He exemplified stereotypically feminine values. Only later did the Church become authoritarian and rigidly male-dominant. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-burnings — these are all chapters of our history that we need to understand for what they were — wars against women by the Church.
So it wasn't simply a question of religion, and it certainly had nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. It is one of the ways that dominator systems distort this enormous human yearning for bonding and for connection that we have, by constantly associating it with domination and with violence.
So I can't really put it at the door of the Church. But what I can say is that it's shocking that to this day the Church has not condemned violence in intimate relations — be it against children, against women, or against men — as part of its central teachings. That is shocking and highly immoral
London: Another way in which the connection between sexuality and the sacred can become perverted is through domination and control rather than sin.
Eisler: Yes, we see a lot of that in pornography — the linking of sex with domination and violence. It's not natural; it's part of the social construction of sexuality for the requirements of this top-down model, man-over-women, man-over-man, nation-over-nation, race-over-race. Ultimately, of course, these rankings are backed up by fear of pain and violence, as they must be.
London: Alan Watts, in his book Beyond Theology, suggested that the Church's strict disapproval of adultery, promiscuity, and so on was a necessary means of keeping sex sacred. It was also a way to make sure that sex didn't become boring, because if it were freely available it would no longer be regarded as sacred.
Eisler: I like much of Alan Watts's work, but he must have been totally ignorant about Church history to make a statement like that.
London: Or he may have said it partly in jest, as he was wont to do...
Eisler: Let's hope so. But even half in jest it's very misleading, because what the Church condemned was not sexual violence, but sexual pleasure. If sex were so sacred, why would the Church hierarchy be celibate? And why would we have teachings like "it's better to marry than to burn"?
The truth of the matter is that this was a period in which people were being canonized for mortifying their bodies in the name of erotic love. You know, in the mystical writings pleasure was definitely condemned as being sinful. It is crazy — pathological — but that is part of our heritage.
London: I was just talking to a woman the other day who told me she objects to some of the connections you make between sex and spirituality. She said that she doesn't believe in God and doesn't think of herself as a spiritual being. What are your views are about sex between two people who don't think of themselves as spiritual?
Eisler: Well, first of all, the notion of God and spirituality as being inextricably linked, especially this God who is a king and a lord... I mean, I can understand how a lot of people have basically rejected the whole notion of spirituality along with religion. But I would like to suggest that there is a difference between institutional religion and spirituality. And if she objects to the term "spirituality" let her use something else. But there is a dimension in evolution that makes us unique in terms of our yearning for love, our yearning for beauty, and our yearning for justice. We are the only known species which has been struggling to create a more just and equitable society. I think we need to be able to find ways of honoring that through what has traditionally been called the spiritual.
London: You referred to the shift that took place as we moved from a social order based on partnership and equality to one based on domination and violence. Your research suggests that this shift was one of the defining moments of our history as a species. How did you come to that realization?
Eisler: Well, it was really through the process of simple observation, free from what I think of as "the blinkers" that have impeded scientists from seeing the whole picture. My model is one that takes a dynamic view of human society and culture, and what I began to see in my historical research were patterns that had not been visible before — connections between different elements of social systems. For example, I saw that in tribal societies and in highly advanced industrialized societies, the more that society was rigidly male-dominated, the more it went along with a strong-man-rule approach in the family and the state, and the more it accepted institutionalized social violence — from child-beating and wife-beating to warfare — as part of the social system.
As you move to the other side of the spectrum — say, for example, the Scandinavian bloc countries in our time where you have a much more equal partnership between men and women — you find a guidance-system of more stereotypically feminine values. There is funding for "women's work" — taking care of children, caring for people's health, caring for the environment. There is economic and political democracy. It is not coincidental that the first peace academies came out of the Scandinavian bloc countries. Why? Because they are oriented more to the partnership configuration.
This model has been very useful to many people around the world for getting beyond the old categories which don't help us, such as capitalist vs. communist, the developed world and the developing world, and so on.
London: You have synthesized a tremendous amount of data about prehistoric cultures which suggests that men and women in those early days essentially did live in a partnership mode.
Eisler: Yes. And that is another reason why I was able to see these patterns — I drew from a larger database. Most sincere studies concerned with our mounting global crises tend to focus just on what is happening today. That is limited. You don't see patterns and you can't learn from what has happened in history. I drew from a database that includes the whole of our history, including, as you noted, our prehistory. Although, I have to say to you, at the beginning of my work, these patterns... I mean, I saw them without even going into prehistory, but once I understood the partnership and dominator configuration it was so compelling because the evidence was right there.
London: Did we fall from grace as a civilization?
Eisler: There was a period of thousands of years — much longer than the 5,000 years of what we call "recorded history" — when indeed societies lived according to a different set of values. They were not ideal societies and it wasn't perfect — you know, there is always a matter of degree. But there is no evidence that these were societies where men dominated women. There is no evidence that these were societies that were chronically at war. These were also societies that saw nature not as something to be exploited. There was what we today call an "ecological consciousness." They saw the world as a great mother from whose womb all of life ensued, to whose womb all of life returned at death — like the cycles of vegetation — once again to be reborn. It is very much like this supposedly "new" Gaia hypothesis developed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. Well, that is an update of the belief systems of early societies we are now finding out about.
London: So, in a way, we are coming full circle today.
Eisler: I sometimes think of the last 5,000 years as a "detour." But, I must say, my model of cultural evolution is non-linear; it's not a cyclical one. It certainly is a huge departure from the nineteenth-century notion of cultural evolution as being a linear progression upward from savagery and barbarism to "civilization." I mean, look at Hiroshima or the death camps in Nazi Germany. Those were periods of tremendous dominator regression.
London: The image many of us have of our heritage has been handed down from our reading of Charles Darwin and evolutionary theorists who have told us that we are the descendents of cave-men who dragged their women around by the hair. Your work tells a very different story.
Eisler: Yes. The cave-man archetype is a projection of our own society. In the cave art of Stone Age societies, there isn't a single image like that. First of all, there are no images linking sex with domination and violence. In the art of the Paleolithic societies, you find that women's bodies are a form of sacred art. It is part of a view of the world in which art serves to answer questions about where we come from before we are born, where do we go when we die and so on.
What I have tried to show in my work (and once you articulate it, it's perfectly obvious) is that how we learn to think about physical and intimate relationships — not just sexual relationships, but also those between parent and child, for example — is a basic template for all relations. If we are constantly bombarded with images where one person dominates the other through sex and violence, then that unconsciously keeps us trapped. It makes it very hard for us to envision any human relations in which the mutual exchange of benefits — pleasure, if you will — is the primary cement that holds society together.
London: So, you're not talking about sexism here so much as basic, unquestioned assumptions that men and women both share.
EISLER: That's right. The basic model of how two bodies should relate is the male-superior, female-inferior model. Because of this some people may say, "Oh, this is something against men." No, the problem is not men. Women have internalized that macho image as the ideal just as much as men have. Women, like men, have also bought into a notion of femininity that is passive. That is ridiculous because women are no more inherently passive than men. Just look at women; given half a chance they assert themselves. Sure, women will manipulate if they can't assert themselves. All disempowered people will do that.
London: What you are talking about reminds me of the work of Carol Gilligan. In her groundbreaking research, she discovered that men and women basically inhabit different psychological cultures or orientations. Does that fit your perception as well?
Eisler: But I want to make something crystal-clear that sometimes gets fuzzy, and that is that this is learned behavior. We know perfectly well that there are women who can be very cruel and violent, just as there are men who can be very caring. Indeed, today, men are becoming so much more attuned to, for example, doing fathering in ways that stereotypically used to be called mothering — having the immense pleasure of taking care of their little babies in an intimate way, of doing "women's work." If it were all innate, men couldn't do this. And if women were indeed less inherently active than men, you wouldn't see women climbing mountains and flying airplanes and putting out all this energy. So that is nonsense.
Some of the major contributions to science have actually been made by women. However, because we have had such a male-centered approach to science, some of the names of women are not even known to people. That needs to be reclaimed. We need to reclaim our whole history, including the major contributions women have made in non-traditional — that is, male — roles as well as in their traditional roles (and by "traditional" I don't mean "subservient," which is the way it is used by the fundamentalist Right; I mean in the care-taking roles that men are also beginning to fulfill).
London: There is a wing of feminism now, exemplified by scholars like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, which feels that men are inherently dominating. They talk, for instance, about the fact that men's approach to nature is akin to the approach of a rapist — you know, plundering, ravaging, penetrating, that sort of thing. What has their response been to your ideas?
Eisler: Well, Andrea Dworkin and I have had direct contact and she really likes my work very much. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin — although I must admit that they sometimes get very depressing — have been misunderstood a great deal. I think it's because they are not as careful about constantly saying, "Wait a minute, this is not inherent." I think it would be very helpful if they would do that more.
I think what they are talking about is the social construction of a dominator-mindset. But I think it's a great disservice to all of us to say to that "that is men." Women can share that mindset, and some women actually do, of course. It's a dominator mindset, not a male mindset.
London: Feminists have often used the expressions "patriarchy" and "matriarchy," but you've abandoned these in favor of a different set of concepts. Was this a deliberate choice?
Eisler: Yes, this was a very deliberate choice. When archeologists in the 19th century found evidence that there were societies where great goddesses were worshipped, where women were priestesses, etc., they immediately thought, "Oh, if it isn't patriarchy, it's matriarchy." Even though some scholars, like J.J. Bachofen, made a point of saying that women didn't dominate men in these societies — that they were more mother-centered, or that there were no illegitimate children — they did two things: 1) they called it "matriarchy" (matriarchy is rule by mothers and it is semantically the other side of the coin of patriarchy), and 2) they got caught in this linear model, saying in effect, "yeah, it was nicer living then, but it was an inferior state of evolution." The implication is that patriarchy is a higher stage. Why? Because it came later. I mean, this is the trouble with the idea of linear progression.
And there was another reason why I wanted to abandon patriarchy. It's a very emotionally-laden word. For some people, the "patriarchs" are the fathers in the Bible who begat and begat and begat. Patriarchy for them is all these guys begetting [laughs]. For other people patriarchy is this 5,000-year horror-story. So I just felt that I needed a new terminology. And because the language didn't give us alternatives to "matriarchy" and "patriarchy," I had to invent them.
London: In some respects, your work is rooted in your own personal experience. In the opening pages of The Chalice and the Blade you talk about your own childhood, which one could say was a lesson in domination.
Eisler: Yes. I think that what we study has a great deal to do with us, with our life experiences. Certainly, having been born in Vienna at a time, within my cultural framework, of massive dominator-regression...
London: This was in the 1930s during Hitler's rise to power.
Eisler: Yes, when you heard the motto "Let's get women back into their place," and you had strong-man-rule in the family and in the state. As the historian Claudia Koonz writes in terms of gender stereotypes, the ideal Nazi man was a warrior and the ideal Nazi woman was his mother. There you have pure dominator stereotypes — she had no other function in life except to give birth to a guy who was going to go kill. It's a crazy model when you analyze it from that perspective. It's almost funny. But that's how it was. That was a traumatic experience for me. We had to flee for our lives.
London: What happened?
Eisler: The Gestapo came to our house with some Austrian looting-party types — because coming to a Jewish home and confiscating was also a way of lining your pockets, of course. In those days, "confiscate" was a nice code word for "armed robbery." When they came my mother recognized one of the men because he had worked for the family business. She just got furious. She said, "How dare you come here, we have been so good to you. This man who you have just pushed down the stairs and dragged away from here, he has been so good to you, how dare you come here?"
London: — Referring to your father.
Eisler: Yes, my father. She could have been killed. But something really miraculous happened. Part of it had to do with the fact that the dominator personality responds to authority. And also greed, because she was told, "Bring so and so much money to Gestapo headquarters and we will give him back to you." Now, if she hadn't spoken up like that, both my father and mother and I would be dead, because my mother and I, like so many others, would have stayed, waiting and hoping that he would be released, and would have, in turn, been sent to the gas chambers. Some people feel that I have a great deal of intellectual courage — courage to challenge intellectual sacred cows, and so on. I think that my mother has a great deal to do with that.
London: Your background may also help to explain why your work is so empirically grounded.
Eisler: Yes, my passion for finding alternatives has always been very empirical. For example, the idea of cooperation vs. competition has always seemed a little pie-in-the-sky to me. People can "cooperate" within a dominator system to do the most horrible things to other people. So my work tries to show what we all know from simple observation — that, yes, you can have human relations based on domination backed up by fear of pain; but we can also have human relations based on the mutual giving and receiving of benefits, of pleasure — and that is what we really yearn for as human beings.
We have been trying to find a better way for over 300 years now. All of the various social movements have challenged one or another form of domination — from the Rights of Man movement against the despotic rule of kings, to the women's movement against the despotic rule of men, to the Civil Rights movement, the abolitionist movement, the peace and pacifist movements. These movements have all challenged patterns of domination. What I have tried to do is to really provide an integrated conceptual framework. Part of that is a revisioning of not only our future, but also of our past — really setting the record straight. My work says: This way of living is not the only human possibility.
London: You were trained as a lawyer. How did you make the jump from law to women's issues, and later to history and anthropology and all these other questions?
Eisler: Actually, the anthropology and sociology came before the law, and so also did my work as a systems scientist at the RAND Corporation — doing very different work, war games, rather than the work that I'm now interested in.
But the law was very important in terms of my development as a multi-disciplinary scholar and as a systems theorist, because in law you have to recognize patterns. A client doesn't come to you and say, "Would you apply Section 1222 of the Civil Code." They say, "Hey, I've got a problem, this and this happened," and then it is up to the attorney to see the patterns. So it wasn't just training in anthropology and sociology, and later a tremendous amount of work in the study of myth and ancient religion, but the legal training was enormously helpful.
London: You've said that we're living in a time of "massive dominator regression."
Eisler: Yes. Just to give you one example, Congress just gave the Pentagon $7 billion for new weapons programs — more than it wanted or even asked for. That's fine, except we are told we don't have enough money for so called women's work — feeding children, caring for our environment, caring for people's health. Now, that hidden subtext of gender is not, I would submit to you, a women's issue, it's a central issue of our survival as a species at this point. It's a question of the mix of a dominator-ethos of conquest and domination and high technology. Well, the "blade" in terms of the title of my earlier book is the bomb, it's bacteriological warfare, and man's conquest of nature is about to do us in. So these are central issues. From a systems standpoint, we had better pay attention.
London: Tell me about the response to The Chalice and the Blade. I think I read somewhere that, at its peak, you received some 300 letters a day from readers of the book.
Eisler: Well, it's been a phenomenal response. It's been an international response, ranging from the former Chairman of the Board at Volkswagen to scholars at the Chines