Article: From the Blade to The Chalice by Riane Eisler

[whimsicaldeb]

thank you abcrystcats for first talking about Riane Eisler and this book.

http://www.partnershipway.org/html/subp ... halice.htm

FROM THE BLADE TO THE CHALICE
copyright 2005
RIANE EISLER

Exerpted and adapted from
Riane Eisler, The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future

We stand at an evolutionary crossroads: breakdown or breakthrough. Ours is a time when the lethal power of the Blade – amplified a millionfold by megatons of nuclear or biochemical warheads – threatens to end all life. But there is another alternative: a way of life where the life-giving and illuminating power of the Chalice guides our world.

As co-creators of our own evolution, the path we take is ours to choose. There is the path of domination that at our level of technological development may take us to an evolutionary dead end. There is the path of partnership: a gylanic world based on mutual respect, mutual accountability, and mutual benefit.

In the world as it will be when women and men live in full partnership, there will, of course, still be families, schools, governments, and other social institutions. But like the emerging egalitarian family and social-action networks, the social structures of the future will be based more on linking than rankings of domination. Instead of requiring individuals to fit into pyramidal hierarchies, these institutions will be heterarchic, allowing for both diversity and flexibility in decision making and action.

The roles of both women and men will be far less rigid, allowing the entire human species a maximum of developmental flexibility. Practices like female sexual mutilation, wife beating, and all the other brutal ways through which androcracy has kept women "in their place" will be seen not as hallowed traditions but as what they are – crimes spawned by domination and cruelty. Wars, terrorism, and other forms of violence will no longer be glorified as 'heroic" in epics and myths but condemned for what they are – the barbaric aberrations of a species turned against itself.

As the consciousness of our linking with one another and our natural environment firmly takes hold, we can expect to see the old nation-state as a self-absorbed political entity wither away. Many of our new institutions will be more global in scope, transcending national boundaries.

However, rather than more uniformity and conformity, which is the logical projection from the dominator system viewpoint, there will be more individuality and diversity. Smaller social units will be linked in matrices or networks for a variety of common ends, ranging all the way from the cooperative cultivation and harvesting of oceans to the sharing of knowledge and the advancement of the arts.

There will also be other, as yet unforeseeable, global ventures to develop more equitable and efficient ways of utilizing all our natural and human resources, as well as new material and social inventions that we at this point in our development cannot yet foresee.

With the global shift to a partnership society will come many technological breakthroughs. There will also be adaptations of existing techniques to new social requirements. Some of these maybe better technologies of craft - for example, a return to the pride of creativity and individuality in weaving, carpentry, pottery, and other applied arts. But at the same time, since the goal is to free humanity from insectlike drudgery, this will not mean a return to more labor-intensive technologies in all fields. On the contrary, allowing us the time and energy to actualize our creative potentials, we can expect that mechanization and automation will play an even more life-supporting role. And both small- and large-scale methods of production will be utilized in ways that encourage, and indeed require, worker participation, rather than, as required in a dominator system, turning workers themselves into machines or automatons.

The development of safer and more reliable birth control methods will be a top technology priority. We will also see much more research on understanding and slowing down the aging process, ranging from already emerging techniques to replace worn-out body parts to means of regenerating body cells.

Since technologies of destruction would no longer consume and destroy such a vast portion of our natural and human resources, as yet undreamed (and presently undreamable) enterprises will be economically feasible. The result will be the generally prosperous economy foreshadowed by our partnership prehistory. Not only will material wealth be shared more equitably, but this will also be an economic order in which amassing more and more property as a means of protecting oneself from, as well as controlling, others will be seen for what it is: a form of sickness or aberration.

At the heart of this new economic order will be the replacement of the presently failing "dual economy," in which the male-dominated economic sector that is rewarded by money, status, and power must in its industrial stages cannibalize both social and ecological systems. Instead we can expect that the nonmonetized “informal” economy – of household production and maintenance, parenting, volunteer community service, and all the cooperative activities that permit the now over-rewarded competitive activities to appear successful – will be appropriately valued and rewarded. This will provide the now-missing basis for an economic system in which caring for others is not just given lip service but is the most highly rewarded, and therefore most highly valued, human activity.

Through the reaffirmation and celebration of the transformative mysteries symbolized by the Chalice, new myths will reawaken in us that lost sense of gratitude and the celebration of life so evident in the artistic remnants of the Neolithic and Minoan Crete. By reconnecting us with our more innocent psychic roots – before warfare, hierarchies of domination, and the ranking of male over female became our ruling norms – this mythology will not move us back psychically to the world as it was in the technological childhood of our species. On the contrary, by intertwining our ancient heritage of gylanic myths and symbols with modern ideas, it will move us forward toward a world that will be much more rational, in the true sense of the word: a world animated and guided by the consciousness that both ecologically and socially we are inextricably linked with one another and our environment.

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. Other caring relationships, not just heterosexual couples, will be fully recognized.

All institutions, not only those specifically designed for the socialization of children, will have as their goal the actualization of our great human potentials. The life-formative years of childhood will be the active concern of both women and men. Not just biological parents, but many other adults will take various responsibilities for that most precious of all social products: the human child. Social policies and funding will support caring and caregiving.

Rational nutrition as well as physical and mental exercises, such as more advanced forms of yoga and meditation, will be seen as elementary prerequisites for healthy bodies and minds. And rather than being designed to socialize a child to adjust to her or his place in a world of rank orderings, learning will be – as we are already beginning to see – a lifelong process for maximizing flexibility and creativity at all stages of life.

In this world, where the actualization of our higher evolutionary potentials – our greater freedom through wisdom and knowledge and our great capacities for consciousness and caring – will guide social policy, a primary focus of research will be the prevention of personal and social illness, of both body and mind. Beyond this, our yet untapped, but increasingly recognized, mind powers will be extensively researched and cultivated. The result will be that as yet undreamed of mental and physical potentials will be uncovered and developed.

For above all, this gylanic world will be a world where the minds of children – both girls and boys – will no longer be fettered. It will be a world where limitation and fear will no longer be systematically taught us through myths about how inevitably evil and perverse we humans are. In this world, children will not be taught epics about men who are honored for being violent or fairy tales about children who are lost in frightful woods where women are malevolent witches. They will be taught new myths, epics, and stories in which human beings are good, men are peaceful, and the power of creativity and love symbolized by the sacred Chalice – the holy vessel of life – is the governing principle. For in this gylanic world, our drive for justice, equality, and freedom, our thirst for knowledge and spiritual illumination, and our yearning for love and beauty will at last be freed. And after the bloody detour of androcratic history, both women and men will at last find out what being human can mean.

[stilltrucking]

Oh what a brave new world.
In the year 2525 AF
Only a select few on the tail ends of the bell curve will have access to subversive writers like Homer, Shakespeare, Hemingway.

Sounds goo WD, think we are moving towards that utopia. Just a couple more nuclear wars to go. Then after the fire next time, after the flood we will finally arrive at Zion. It is just over the next hill, arond the bend, at the next mile marker. Beyond the twilight zone.

Just GO, I should i put it with the the other spontaneous nonsense.

Meanwhile what are we going to do about this patriarchial mighty smighty god of the Jews"?

Naomi Wolf gets religion
NAOMI WOLF has found Jesus!
Wolf first made a name for herself with "The Beauty Myth," a 1991 feminist critique of feminine stereotypes. Admired by some and ridiculed by others, Wolf has since written on everything from motherhood to promiscuity. During the 2000 election campaign, she famously advised Al Gore to work on being an "alpha male," and her most recent book, a folksy memoir about her father, left many erstwhile fans clearing their throats in embarrassment.

…

People like the early American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had little time for religious cant. Stanton mocked the biblical account of Eve's origin in Adam's rib as "a petty surgical operation to find material for the mother of the race. It is on this allegory that all the enemies of women rest their battering rams."

As for Wolf, it's hard to argue with a vision. But if Wolf, who insists she's still committed to feminism, really needs a great American tradition to help her through her midlife crisis, she could do worse than emulate Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 118.column


I like this article a lot. So if we can kill off enough men maybe there is some hope left?

Paste

As despairing as man's inhumanity towards man is these days, there is hope for a more peaceful future if you know where to look. It can be found near a garbage dumpster in the Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya.

Last April, Robert M. Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University, and his colleague Lisa Share reported that a troop of pugnacious baboons have actually learned to be nice to each other! I have previously written about this troop of savanna baboons because there was an uncanny similarity of their behavior to that of the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

But much has changed since then, and I owe this particular troop of baboons an apology.

The large despotic males, in typical male baboon fashion, ruled this troop by fear, intimidation, and violence while keeping smaller and less aggressive baboons away from a prized source of food -- the local dumpster. That is until fate would have it that all the dominant adult males contracted bovine tuberculosis from discarded contaminated meat and died, leaving behind all the females, their young, and those males of the troop who had been too subordinate to challenge them.

This resulted in a much healthier, more relaxed social hierarchy that has persisted for twenty years, even though the male survivors have since died and been replaced by males from other troops (In baboon society, the females stay with the troop while the males leave to join other troops after reaching puberty). So the troop's resident baboons are somehow instructing the immigrant males in their new social behavior. Sapolsky said, "We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmittal, but the jerky new guys are obviously learning 'we don't do things like that around here.'"

It is an entirely new, previously undocumented code of peaceful conduct for a baboon society, and it has been learned! If only humans were that smart
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Williamson0526.htm

[abcrystcats]

So if we can kill off enough men maybe there is some hope left?

I don't think it needs to be done that way. Eisler's "gylanic" vision is egalitarian and includes both men and women.

Couple things I was thinking about in the shower this morning:

The part about this book that most bothers me is Eisler's explanation of why the matrilinear societies were replaced what she calls "androcracies" or domination-based models. She says bands of roaming thugs from patriarchal cultures began taking over and spreading their philosophy of might over right. While this might be true, Eisler never touches on the issue of scarce resources. She never says WHY these bands of roaming thugs took over in the first place.

The Minoan culture existed in sort of a vacuum on the island of Crete. That is why it might have lasted longer as a matrilinear egalitarian society. But, eventually, it too was overrun.

We STILL have plenty of conflicts involving scarce resources and as long as our population increases, the conflicts will increase too. Since Eisler never really got to the heart of this problem, she didn't have to find a way to solve it at the end of her book. By describing it as a problem of roaming thugs, she made it sound almost like an accident that we have patriarchy/androcracy. As if some bad people made us do it. Well, it wasn't bad people, or bad men even, it was a way of SURVIVAL. In order to overcome androcracy we have to address the issue of violence directly. The "gylanic" vision of Eisler doesn't really do this.

So that brought me to my SECOND set of thoughts.

I started turning over the only matrilinear culture I've really studied -- that is the Nayars of South India. To this day, the Nayars have a matrilinear and male/female egalitarian tradition. Property is passed down through the female lines, and female lines of kinship are considered closer than male -- for example, your sister's son is considered your child as well, but your brother's son is still a nephew. The lion's share of inheritance went to my ex-husband's sister. He and his brother got something, but it was not land, it was a small gift of money, I think. The bulk went to Sati. Decisions are made by the senior male, but he is not considered the head of household -- that role belongs to the oldest female and she has veto rights on virtually any decision made by the senior male.

The origin of this arrangement might have been goddess worship, but it was necessitated by the fact that the Nayars were warriors. They are a warrior caste. The men went off to fight and the women stayed home, so much of the decisionmaking and line of descent remained with the women. It was a cooperative solution to a problem.

Since the Nayars were very successful warriors, respected and powerful in India, they managed to keep their matrilinear descent and their whole way of life virtually untouched until about 100 years ago, when British (androcracy) laws and ways of life began to force a change.

This tells me that the Chalice and the Blade maybe aren't two opposing forces. On the contrary, perhaps the Chalice and the Blade can be made to work together, as they did in Nayar culture. We would do well to study such successful examples of gylanic societies to see what made them last as long as they did. I think we would find that the Blade can be a powerful force for good, as well as evil.

Just a thought.

Here's a paper (now posted on the internet, I see) on Nayar marriage and kinship ties. As you can see, this was not an entirely ideal system from our 21st century perspective. Women were strictly forbidden from associating with any man below the ranking of their particular subcaste. But the polyandrous marriages were a
way of life and a working part of Nayar culture in 1900 and even beyond.

The Nambudiri Brahmins complicated things considerably because they were the only other subcaste the Nayars normally married into, and yet the Nambudiris were patrilineal.

http://orion.oac.uci.edu/~dbell/html/body_gough.html

There is also a horrible paper on the Nayars by a Dr. J-somebody, but I won't post a link because it seems to have some truth and a lot of inaccuracies.

AHA!! EDIT-EDIT-EDIT

I just found a MUCH better link, easier to read and understand. K. Gough tends to be a bit obtuse at times. This gives the broader picture:

http://www.jadski.com/kerala/f2familiesinkerala.htm

[abcrystcats]

Oh, and, stilltrucking, if Naomi Wolf saw a vision of Jesus maybe it was because, according to Eisler, Jesus resurrected the gylanic vision of life as it should be.

There is no inherent conflict between the words of Jesus and the goals of feminism and a gylanic society. They go hand in hand. You have to read further -- into the Acts and Letters -- if you want to revisit patriarchy.

That was one of the things Eisler pointed out that I really liked.

[hester_prynne]

I dunno.
I think Lysistrata had a good idea.
Wasn't she the one who moved beyond rhetoric and straight into action....?

H

[stilltrucking]

Cat this good stuff here I mean it is a good conversation. I suppose matrilineal uncles are important in my family. Funny the religon is so patriarchial but in the mundane details of how we led our lives it was matriarchial. A puzzlement to me. You know how fascinated I am about mother daughter relaitonsips. Sons are simple. I have gone through one hell of an expensive devorce, and I never been married. Thinking about the Save the World song LR posted, I figure I got about 40k tied up in my nephew.


I have not read the link yet. Cat I have no doubt that men and women, or women and men, can work this out, we can turn it around in a spirit of sister/brotherhood. No doubt. As far as the thugs I don't know. We always going to have to deal with that. Unless we want to start tinkering with our souls. (genetic engineering) Warriors, yes we will need warriors. But we have just got too good at war fare. What did you think of the baboon article. Do apes have a culture? A society at least. Is this what will happen to us. What will it take to start the cultural revolution? I don't think people see the situation as desperate enough to start a rebellion (non violent) just not bad enough yet. We don't have enough people with their backs up against the wall yet. I wonder about old Kurt Vonnegut and his call for the extinction of man. Is it a factor of old age that we become so consious of our own personal extinction that we confuse it with our world view? Preachers on TV and in brick and mortor churches too, pulling down a good living preaching the fear, end times are here. get it while you can, James Hagee pulled down a nifty two million dollars for himself last year. Jesus wants us to die rich.

s*it ranting

I got read the article be back and try to edit this.
I am trying to remember if I washed my face this morning. Geezer memory, I can tell you what my true love was wearing on a certain night fifty years ago, but I can't remember what I did two hours ago.

[hester_prynne]

http://www.lysistrataproject.org/aboutu ... andVibrate

H

[stilltrucking]

I am not going to post a link but The Manifesto Ship of Fools by the mad bomber Ted K is up on the net somewhere.

Heading towards an iceberg but the gay first mate is not going to steer the ship until they guarantee his rite to suck cocks. It ain't just the gays of course, he don't live nobody out. women men, dogs, cats, like a noah's ark head for catastrophe

Hester it is all about sex. It is, such a dam good joke, the basis of Freud's work as cultrual anthropologist was based on repression. I think e-dog or perezoso posted good copy on subject of civilisation based repressed sexual energy. So that was what was/is so appealing about Bush II. Not the man to get a blow job in the oval office. No pubic hair in his mouth oh lordy


The bear your typical big old friendly cowboy from san antone. His great grand dad a hero of the Alamo. In the last election he kept on going on about Clinton's morals. I kept asking him why was he talking about Clinton. Kerry is who is running against. Such evil genius. What gifts have the Jews given the 20th century, Freud and the public relations industry, Einstein and bombs? And Marx and...

nothing to do with this just a rant. Yeah the bear was your typically courteous friendly Texas until he married my sister, he loves her so much he has married her twice.

[abcrystcats]

Do apes have a culture?

That is a good question, ST, and it has been asked before. Maybe I'll write something in the Cathouse about it a bit later. Thanks for reminding me.