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What does not make sense is to conclude that societies in which men did not dominate women were societies in which women dominated men.
In this model—beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female—diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.5
The underlying problem is not men as a sex. The root of the problem lies in a social system in which the power of the Blade is idealized—in which both men and women are taught to
equate true masculinity with violence and dominance and to see men who do not conform to this ideal as “too soft” or “effeminate.”
This was the shift in emphasis from technologies that sustain and enhance life to the technologies symbolized by the Blade: technologies designed to destroy and dominate. This has been the technological emphasis through most of recorded history. And it is this technological emphasis, rather than technology per se, that today threatens all life on our globe.11
They tell a story that begins thousands of years before our recorded (or written) history: the story of how the original partnership direction of Western culture veered off into a bloody five-thousand-year dominator detour.
This is the alternative of breakthrough rather than breakdown: how through new ways of structuring politics, economics, science, and spirituality we can move into the new era of a partnership world.
Indeed, the prevailing view is still that male dominance, along with private property and slavery, were all by-products of the agrarian revolution. And this view maintains its hold despite the evidence that, on the contrary, equality between the sexes—and among all people—was the general norm in the Neolithic.
The image of the Old European most of us carry within us today is of those frightfully barbaric tribesmen who kept pushing southward and finally outdid even the Romans in butchery by sacking Rome. For this reason one of the most remarkable and thought-provoking features of Old European society revealed by the archaeological spade is its essentially peaceful character. “Old Europeans never tried to live in inconvenient places such as high, steep hills, as did the later Indo-Europeans who built hill forts in inaccessible places and frequently surrounded their hill sites with cyclopean stone
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Indeed, most of what we have learned to think of as our cultural evolution has in fact been interpretation. Moreover, as we saw in the preceding chapter, this interpretation has more often than not been the projection of the still prevailing dominator worldview. It has consisted of conclusions drawn from fragmentary data interpreted to conform to the traditional model of our cultural evolution as a linear progression from “primitive man” to so-called “civilized man,” who, despite their many differences, shared a common preoccupation with conquering, killing, and dominating.
In sharp contrast to later art, a theme notable for its absence from Neolithic art is imagery idealizing armed might, cruelty, and violence-based power. There are here no images of “noble warriors” or scenes of battles. Nor are there any signs of “heroic conquerors” dragging captives around in chains or other evidences of slavery.
Nor do we here find, again in contrast to later dominator societies, large caches of weapons or any other sign of the intensive application of material technology and natural resources to arms. The inference that this was a much more, and indeed characteristically, peaceful era is further reinforced by another absence: military fortifications.
In Neolithic art, neither the Goddess nor her son-consort carry the emblems we have learned to associate with might—spears, swords, or thunderbolts, the symbols of an earthly sovereign and/or deity who exacts obedience by killing and maiming. Even beyond this, the art of this period is strikingly devoid of the ruler-ruled, master-subject imagery so characteristic of dominator societies.
What we do find everywhere—in shrines and houses, on wall paintings, in the decorative motifs on vases, in sculptures in the round, clay figurines, and bas reliefs—is a rich array of symbols from nature. Associated with the worship of the Goddess, these attest to awe and wonder at the beauty and mystery of life.
And everywhere—in murals, statues, and votive figurines—we find images of the Goddess. In the various incarnations of Maiden, Ancestress, or Creatrix, she is the Lady of the waters, the birds, and the underworld, or simply the divine Mother cradling her divine child in her arms.5
These too are symbols of the Goddess, whose body is the divine Chalice containing the miracle of birth and the power to transform death into life through the mysterious cyclical regeneration of nature.7
But with all of this, the many images of the Goddess in her dual aspect of life and death seem to express a view of the world in which the primary purpose of art, and of life, was not to conquer, pillage, and loot but to cultivate the earth and provide the material and spiritual wherewithal for a satisfying life. And on the whole, Neolithic art, and even more so the more developed Minoan art, seems to express a view in which the primary function of the mysterious powers governing the universe is not to exact obedience, punish, and destroy but rather to give.
And if the central religious image was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life—rather than death and the fear of death—were dominant in society as well as art.
Analogizing from this different conceptual framework, we can see that the fact that women played a central and vigorous role in prehistoric religion and life does not have to mean that men were perceived and treated as subservient. For here both men and women were the children of the Goddess, as they were the children of the women who headed the families and clans. And while this certainly gave women a great deal of power, analogizing from our present-day mother-child relationship, it seems to have been a power that was more equated with responsibility and love than with oppression, privilege,
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Technological and social evolution tend to become more complex regardless of which model prevails. But the direction of cultural evolution—including whether a social system is warlike or peaceful—depends on whether we have a partnership or a dominator social structure.
In the Cretan towns without military fortifications, the “unprotected” villas on the edge of the sea, and the lack of any sign that the various city-states within the island fought one another or embarked on aggressive wars (in sharp contrast to the walled cities and chronic warfare that were elsewhere already the norm), we find this firm confirmation from our past that our hopes for peaceful human coexistence are not, as we are so often told, “utopian dreams.” And in the mythical images of Crete—the Goddess as Mother of the universe, and humans, animals, plants, water, and sky as her
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But once we are face to face with the full import of what this past foreshadowed—what we, at our level of technological and social development, could have been and still can be—we confront a haunting question. What brought about the radical change in cultural direction, the shift that plunged us from a social order upheld by the Chalice to one dominated by the Blade? When and how did this happen? And what does this cataclysmic change tell us about our past—and our future?
With the appearance of these invaders on the prehistoric horizon—and not, as is sometimes said, with men’s gradual discovery that they too played a part in procreation—the Goddess, and women, were reduced to male consorts or concubines. Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more “effeminate” men became the norm.
This is accompanied by a fundamental ideological shift. The power to dominate and destroy through the sharp blade gradually supplants the view of power as the capacity to support and nurture life.
The technological and social movement toward greater complexity of structure and function resumed. But the possibilities for cultural development were now to be stunted—rigidly caged in a dominator society.50
But there was no such place left in their new world. For this was now a world where, having violently deprived the Goddess and the female half of humanity of all power, gods and men of war ruled. It was a world in which the Blade, and not the Chalice, would henceforth be supreme, a world in which peace and harmony would be found only in the myths and legends of a long lost past.
This is that one of the best-kept historical secrets is that practically all the material and social technologies fundamental to civilization were developed before the imposition of a dominator society.
The myths attributing our major physical and spiritual inventions to a female deity may thus reflect their actual invention by women.29 Such a hypothesis is just about inconceivable under the prevailing paradigm. For it pictures woman as dependent and secondary to man, not only intellectually inferior, but according to our Bible, so much less spiritually developed than man that she is to blame for our fall from grace.
Still, force could not be constantly used to exact obedience. It had to be established that the old powers that ruled the universe—as symbolized by the life-giving Chalice—had been replaced by newer and more powerful deities in whose hands the Blade was now supreme. And to this end one thing above all had to be accomplished: not only her earthly representative—woman—but the Goddess herself had to be pulled down from her exalted place.
In some Middle Eastern myths this is accomplished by a story of how the Goddess is slain. In others she is subdued and humiliated by being raped. For instance, the first mention of the powerful Sumerian god Enlil in Middle Eastern mythology is associated with the rape of the Goddess Ninlil.
Now, perhaps nowhere as poignantly as in the omnipresent theme of Christ dying on the cross, the central image of art is no longer the celebration of nature and of life but the exaltation of pain, suffering, and death.25 For in this new reality that is now said to be the sole creation of a male God, the life-giving and nurturing Chalice as the supreme power in the universe has been displaced by the power to dominate and destroy: the lethal power of the Blade. And it is this reality that to our day afflicts all humanity—both women and men.
For although the liberation of women was not his central focus, if we look at what Jesus preached from the new perspective of cultural transformation theory, we see a startling, and unifying, theme: a vision of the liberation of all humanity through the replacement of androcratic with gylanic values.
Jesus’ recognition that our spiritual evolution has been stunted by a way of structuring human relations based on violence-backed rankings could have led to a fundamental social transformation. It could have freed us from the androcratic system. But as in other times of gylanic resurgence, the system’s resistance was too strong. And in the end the church fathers left us a New Testament in which this perception is often smothered by the superimposition of the completely contradictory dogmas required to justify the Church’s later androcratic structure and goals.
It serves to verify what so many of us have known deep inside without being able to pinpoint just what it was: something went terribly wrong with Christianity’s original gospel of love. How otherwise could such a gospel be used to justify all the torture, conquest, and bloodletting carried out by devout Christians against others, and against one another, that makes up so much of our Western history?
And so, ironically, Jesus’ revolution of nonviolence, in the course of which he died on the cross, was converted into rule by force and terror. As the historians Will and Ariel Durant noted, in its distortion and perversion of Jesus’ teachings, medieval Christendom was actually a moral setback.41 Rather than being any longer a threat to the established androcratic order, Christianity became what practically all this earth’s religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.
As Taylor himself writes, “the question we are bound to ask is why did the Church feel, however obscurely, that there was some common factor uniting the Troubadours, the Cathars, the Baghards, and the various minor sects which preached a chaste love? . . . The answer can only be that there was such a common factor: . . . While their dogma and ritual differed greatly and some of them claimed to be still within the Church, psychologically they had one thing in common: mother identification. This is the only heresy in which the medieval Church was really interested.”
As with the hallowed legend of Don Juan, this brutal contempt for women and anything considered feminine was a signal.
The message (permeating writings that bridged all national and ideological barriers) was that a shift to an “unwarlike” and “unmanly” world—a world no longer governed by the “masculine” Blade—was not to be tolerated.
These works also reveal something else of the greatest importance: the configuration of values that McClelland called affiliation, Taylor called matrist, and we have called gylanic are in male-dominated systems generally confined to a separate world subordinate or ancillary to the larger “men’s” or “real” world—the world of women.
periods of the rising status of women are characteristically periods of cultural resurgence.
What the findings of the new feminist scholarship now make possible is documentation that this happens not because of some mystical, cyclical, and inexorable principle or “fate” (e.g., Adams’s juxtaposition of the “Virgin” and the “Dynamo”). It happens for a very simple and practical reason that would have been apparent to historians had they included women in the history they studied. In times and places when women are not strictly confined to the private world of the home—in times when they can move more freely into the public world en masse, as carriers and disseminators of the “female
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the mainstream of society.
All this leads to a final and fundamental point. Despite some periodic weakening in the androcratic infrastructure during periods of gylanic ascendance, until very recent times the subordinate status of women has remained substantially unchanged. Correspondingly, so also has the subordinate status of values like affiliation, caring, and nonviolence, stereotypically associated with women.
Viewed from the perspective of Cultural Transformation theory, the systems function of the massive and brutal violence against women today is not hard to see. If androcracy is to be maintained, women must be suppressed at all cost. And if this violence—and the incitements to violence through the revival of religious calumnies against women and the equation of sexual pleasure with the killing, raping, and torturing of women—is mounting all over our globe, it is because never before has male dominance been as vigorously challenged through a global, mutually reinforcing, synergistic women’s
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In the past, the pendulum has always swung back from peace to war. Whenever more “feminine” values have risen for a time, threatening to transform the system, an aroused and fearful androcracy has thrust us back. But must the current swing backward inevitably bring on more and more domestic and international violence and, with it, more and more suppression of
civil liberties and rights? Is there really no way out of another—now, nuclear—war? Is this to be the end for the cultural evolution that began with such hope in the age of the Goddess, when the power of the life-giving Chalice was still supreme? Or are we now close enough to gaining our freedom to avert that end?
We clearly see the key role of repressive gender and parent-child relations in the rise of fundamentalism—be it Eastern or Western, Muslim or Christian. While this phenomenon is generally mislabeled as religious fundamentalism, it is actually dominator fundamentalism. It is the reinstatement of authoritarian rule in both the family and the state or tribe, rigid male dominance, and the idealization of violence as a means of control.
For instance, new findings of archeologist Dean Snow contradict the long-standing assumption that the sole creators of the stunning French and Spanish cave art of the Upper Paleolithic were men. Snow reexamined the handprints artists left as their “signatures” on the cave walls, taking into account the differing finger formations on female and male hands. And it turns out, as he wrote in his 2013 article in American Antiquity and noted in his interview with National Geographic, that the handprints on cave walls are predominantly female.
