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by
Riane Eisler
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December 18, 2019 - January 9, 2020
the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity over the other.
At this pivotal branching, the cultural evolution of societies that worshiped the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe—in our time still symbolized by the ancient chalice or grail—was interrupted.
The chalice is a more natural, familiar symbol since it reflects the Vessel, an archetype which corresponds to our bodies, our cupped hands, our mouths, our stomachs, bladders, etc.
The first anthropomorphic religion, focusing on the worship of the Goddess, now evolved into a complex system of symbols, rituals, and divine commands and prohibitions,
Before Goddess worship, did we revere non-human divinity? If so, could this have marked our fall into egoistic narcissism?
on the contrary, equality between the sexes—and among all people—was the general norm in the Neolithic.
excepting, of course, that the deity was a Goddess, which seems to tilt the scales significantly, at least, by comparison in our patriarchal/androcratic society which has a God for a deity. Could we prevent Chalice/Blade oscillations by de-gendering our deity?
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 Some images are so realistic that they are almost lifelike, like the slithering snake on a dish
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.
“in order of importance as mother, daughter, son, and father,”
homo ludens
human playing
“the fear of death was almost obliterated by the ubiquitous joy of living.”
So was the design of buildings for privacy, good natural light, and domestic convenience and, perhaps above all, the attention to detail and beauty.
How do privacy, natural light, domestic convenience support a more balanced, less dominance-based society? Does privacy help balance power between the sexes? Does natural light preserve us as joyous worshippers of life and rather tham sad thralls of night and death?
Young men and women working in teams would take it in turn to grasp the horn of a charging bull and somersault over its back.”
which became, sadly, bullfighting and bull-running as goes on in Spain today
But now comes the eternal blockage, the point where scholars encounter the information that is automatically excluded under the prevailing worldview. For when it comes to linking this essential difference with the fact that Minoan Crete was the last, and most technologically advanced, society in which male dominance was not the norm, the vast majority of scholars suddenly go blank or quickly head in another direction. At best, they get around the difficulty with a peripheralizing strategy.
This blindspot still often prevails. We can shine more light.
The Kurgans were of what scholars call Indo-European or Aryan language-speaking stock, a type that was in modern times to be idealized by Nietzsche and then Hitler as the only pure European race. In fact, they were not the original Europeans, as they swarmed down on that continent from the Asiatic and European northeast. Nor were they even originally Indian, for there was another people, the Dravidians, who lived in India before the Aryan invaders conquered them.
Could they have been pseudo-Sanskrit speakers!!??
The most famous of these are a Semitic people we call the Hebrews, who came from the deserts of the south and invaded Canaan (later named Palestine for the Philistines, one of the peoples who lived in the area). The moral precepts we associate with both Judaism and Christianity and the stress on peace in many modern churches and synagogues now obscures the historical fact that originally these early Semites were a warring people ruled by a caste of warrior-priests (the Levite tribe of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua). Like the Indo-Europeans, they too brought with them a fierce and angry god of war
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Think Samson, the massacre machine
Friedrich Engels was one of the first to link the emergence of hierarchies and social stratification based on private property with male domination over women.
One economy based on farming, the other on stock breeding and grazing, produced two contrasting ideologies. The Old European belief system focused on the agricultural cycle of birth, death, and regeneration, embodied in the feminine principle, a Mother Creatrix. The Kurgan ideology, as known from comparative Indo-European mythology, exalted virile, heroic warrior gods of the shining and thunderous sky.
Farther south, Assyria now suddenly became a world power, pushing into Phrygia, Syria, Phoenicia, and even as far as Anatolia and the Zagros Mountains to the east. The extent of their barbarity can still be seen today in the bas reliefs commemorating the “heroic” exploits of a later Assyrian king, Tiglath–Pileser. Here what look like the populations of whole cities are stuck alive on stakes running through the groin and out the shoulders.
oof
The Garden is an allegorical description of the Neolithic, of when women and men first cultivated the soil, thus creating the first “garden.” The story of Cain and Abel in part reflects the actual confrontation of a pastoral people (symbolized by Abel’s offering of his slaughtered sheep) and an agrarian people (symbolized by Cain’s offering of “the fruits of the ground” rejected by the pastoral god Jehovah).
practically all the material and social technologies fundamental to civilization were developed before the imposition of a dominator society.
the first human-made artifacts were not weapons. Rather, they were containers to carry food (and infants) as well as tools used by mothers to soften plant food for their children, who needed both mother’s milk and solids to survive.
the sling, the boda, the cup, the bowl, the pack, the purse, the basket, the jug, the vase, the chalice
“Among those surviving children, those best able to learn and improve on their mother’s techniques, and those who, like their mothers, were willing to share, in turn had the children who were most likely to live long enough to reproduce.”
Wombman the Gatherer
From ancient Egyptian records we know that the picture of a cobra was the hieroglyphic sign for the word Goddess and that the cobra was known as the Eye, uzait, a symbol of mystic insight and wisdom. The cobra Goddess known as Ua Zit was the female deity of Lower Egypt (north) in predynastic times. Later, both the Goddess Hathor and Maat were still known as the Eye.
the first use of this most powerful tool of human communication seems to have been spiritual: a sacred script associated with the worship of the Goddess.
Thus, if the markings inscribed in the Neolithic tablets, figurines, and other objects excavated at Vinča, as well as at other Old European sites, are what they appear to be—a rudimentary form of linear script—the origins of writing are much more ancient than was formerly believed, going back well before the dominator era.
The first writings were love poems to the Goddess, not accounting tablets.
This is not to suggest, as was argued by the psychologist Julian Jaynes, that these earlier peoples were exclusively right-brained.
Later explored by Leonard Shlain: https://www.amazon.com/Alphabet-Versus-Goddess-Conflict-Between/dp/0140196013
But whether it was done in the name of gods, bishops, or kings, out of faith, ambition, or fear, this work of constantly fashioning and refashioning normative oral and written literature did not simply follow social change. It was an integral part of the process of norm changing: the process whereby a male-dominated, violent, and hierarchical society gradually began to be seen as not only normal but also right.
For it is the serpent who counsels woman to disobey Jehovah and to herself eat from the tree of knowledge, the counsel that to this day is still said to doom humanity to eternal punishment.
The Goddess' serpent was corrupted and used as a scapegoat for the violent, lost ways of androcrats.
a woman as priestess was the vehicle for divine wisdom and revelation.
It would have been natural for Adam to heed Eve's advice channeled from the Goddess' serpent. That this should lead to a fall out of Eden is the disingenuous twist that the rising patriarchy encoded in its retranslations of Genesis.
Groves of sacred trees were an integral part of the old religion. So were rites designed to induce in worshipers a consciousness receptive to the revelation of divine or mystical truths—rites in which women officiated as priestesses of the Goddess.
Mimosa trees? Acacia bushes? Ayahuasca vines? DMT trees?
the vilification of the serpent and the association of woman with evil were a means of discrediting the Goddess.
in a way, evil was invented to enforce dominance
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 a more precise term than patriarchy to describe a social system ruled through force or the threat of force by men, I propose the term androcracy. Already in some use, this term derives from the Greek root words andros, or “man,” and kratos (as in democratic), or “ruled.”
To describe the real alternative to a system based on the ranking of half of humanity over the other, I propose the new term gylany.1 Gy derives from the Greek root word gyne, or “woman.” An derives from andros, or “man.” The letter l between the two has a double meaning. In English, it stands for the linking of both halves of humanity, rather than, as in androcracy, their ranking. In Greek, it derives from the verb lyein or lyo, which in turn has a double meaning: to solve or resolve (as in analysis) and to dissolve or set free (as in catalysis). In this sense, the letter l stands for the
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if we study Christian history we learn that the conventional word for expressing the idea of ranking, hierarchy, referred originally to the government of the Church. It derives from the Greek hieros (sacred) and arkhia (rule) and describes the rank orderings or levels of power through which the men who headed the Church exerted authority over their priests and over the people of Christian Europe.
Jesus’ teachings embody a gylanic view of human relations.
Whether Jesus ever actually existed has long been debated. The argument (very well documented) is that there is absolutely no corroborating evidence of his existence in documents other than highly suspect Christian sources. Analysts also note that practically all the events of Jesus’ life, as well as many of his teachings, appear in the lives and utterances of mythical figures of other religions. This would indicate that Jesus was manufactured from borrowings from elsewhere to serve the purposes of early church leaders.
Trimorphic Protennoia
Hermetic? Trismegistus
If we look at the years immediately before and after the death of Jesus from the perspective of an ongoing conflict between androcracy and gylany, we find that, like our own time, this was a period of strong gylanic resurgence.
What Christian historians usually fail to report is that it is also said that this first Christian emperor had his wife Fausta boiled alive and ordered the murder of his own son Crispus.
yuck
This branding as heretical by Christians of Christians who believed in equality is particularly ironic in view of the fact that in the early apostolic communities women and men had lived and worked as Jesus had commanded, practicing agape, or brotherly and sisterly love. It is even more ironic if we consider that many of these women and men who lived and worked hand in hand had gone to their death as Christian martyrs.
Thus, in 391 C.E., under Theodosius I, the now thoroughly androcraticized Christians burned the great library in Alexandria, one of the last repositories of ancient wisdom and knowledge.
And aided and abetted by the man who was later to be canonized Saint Cyril (the Christian bishop of Alexandria) Christian monks barbarously hacked to pieces with oyster shells that remarkable mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher of Alexandria’s school of Neoplatonic philosophy, Hypatia.
They still claimed their goal was to spread Jesus’ gospel of love. But through the savagery and horror of their holy Crusades, their witch-hunts, their Inquisition, their book burnings and people burnings, they spread not love but the old androcratic staples of repression, devastation, and death.
Rather than being random, fluctuations in recorded history can be seen to reflect periodic movement in the prevailing androcratic system toward the “attractor” of a partnership model of social organization.
Through wave after wave of invasions and through the step-by-step replicative force of sword and pen, androcracy first acted as a “chaotic” attractor and later became the well-seated “static” or “point” attractor for most of Western civilization.
Order as the yang to the yin of Chaos. Or Logos and Eros. We write or we love.
“They were innovators and progressives,” Taylor writes of the troubadors, “interested in the arts and sometimes pressing for social reforms; they eschewed the use of force: they delighted in gay and colorful clothes. Above all, they erected the Virgin Mary into their especial patron: many of their poems are addressed to her, and in 1140 a new feast was instituted at Lyons—a feast which, as Bernard of Clairvaux protested, was ‘unknown to the custom of the Church, disapproved by reason and without sanction from tradition’—the feast of the Immaculate Conception.”
“Rational man” now spoke of how he would “master” nature, “subdue” the elements, and—in the great twentieth-century advance—“conquer” space. He spoke of how he had to fight wars to bring about peace, freedom, and equality, of how he had to murder children, women, and men in terrorist activities to bring dignity and liberation to oppressed peoples. As a member of the elites in both the capitalist and communist worlds, he continued to amass property and/or privilege. To make more profits or to meet higher quotas, he also began to systematically poison his physical environment, thereby
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And we still talk about defeating climate change...
Was explosive industrial overexpansion, the regimentation of whole populations into assembly lines, the computerization of individuals into numbers a step forward for our species?
Or were these modern developments, along with the increasing pollution of land, sea, and air, signs of cultural regression rather than cultural progress?
Certainly capitalist economics was infinitely preferable to feudal economics, which was based primarily on violence: on those endless back and forth killings and pillagings of lords and kings in their seemingly insatiable drive for more real estate as a basis for power. But in its emphasis on individual acquisitiveness, competitiveness, and greed (the profit motive), its inherent hierarchism (the class structure), and its continued reliance on violence (e.g., colonial wars), capitalism remained fundamentally androcratic.
