The Chalice and the Blade: How has the book stood the test of time and why it matters
/The first half of this summer was my time to work like a dog, taking care of the needs and desires of both kids and bureaucrats. Even my Tarot card for the month indicated I had best let go of my own wishes and sacrifice for “the greater good.”
Well, I can survive drudgery but not boredom, so I listened to an audiobook every chance I got, often only a few minutes a day. The book was The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.
It’s a hefty book in print, a monumental work of multidisciplinary anthropology, psychology and sociology with some biology thrown in for kicks. And no, I am not implying that this constitutes “light reading” for me. I suspect that the heavier my circumstances, the heavier the reading material required to relieve my stress. (We can analyze my nerdiness later.)
Thus, this post is first a book review and second a contemplation of the broader significance of its claims.
I don’t write about books here unless they are extraordinarily good, so you can guess at my opinion on this one. Eisler’s book is one of those few that shake my foundations and persuade me to rethink some long-held beliefs and subconscious assumptions.
Creative Commons image by Chi Bellami
To be clear, The Chalice and the Blade is often heavy going. It is an academic text and I can tell already that I will need a second listen to be able to reliably quote details from it. It doesn’t have the entrancing lyricism of Braiding Sweetgrass, though I would put the two on the same shelf under “Books that rekindle the will to live” and it is relatively readable and accessible given the academic treatment.
What it has is substantial academic and scientific backing for a thesis that challenged growing cynicism even when it was first published in 1987. Yup, it’s a pretty old book, which I have only now discovered. I had heard whispers of its concepts, usually without attribution or sufficient background to be convincing, but this was my first time reading it.
The central thesis of The Chalice and the Blade is that between 25,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago human society was structured in a fundamentally different way from what has followed in the last 3,000 years. During the Neolithic and up until the early Bronze Age, Eisler asserts, the most developed human societies were largely egalitarian with a high degree of equity between the sexes and social classes.
Those Neolithic human cultures left behind a lot of goddess figurines, which is the part I had previously vaguely heard about. But in popular culture I had also heard a lot of statements claiming, “That old theory about ancient goddess-worshiping cultures has been debunked.” These were mainly on social media and they didn’t cite any sources, but the sheer volume of such assertions led me to believe there was probably something to it.
So, the first thing I did when I finished The Chalice and the Blade was to look up academic and scientific criticism, updates and/or confirmation of the book. And I found that it has largely stood the test of time.
Eisler’s work was made possible by the advent of carbon dating. Before the 1980s, archeologists mostly dated their finds relatively (i.e. this one is older than that one because it looks more primitive). And their dating method was pretty subjective and not all that scientific. They’d look at the technology of a culture they dug up and assess its level of technological and cultural advancement and date it based on the assumption that everyone started out primitive and both gradually and linearly became more complex and technologically skilled.
Carbon dating turned the field on its head—not that most of the old-school archeologists were paying attention. As Eisler shows through a survey of archeological data from around the Mediterranean Sea, many human societies developed significant technology and culture—with more sophisticated ceramics, water systems, script and egalitarian social organization—and then they lost it all, in some cases repeatedly.
The facts Eisler cites from archeological finds—the lack of signs of great social disparities (houses all about the same size and so forth), the many goddess figurines, the scarcity or complete lack of weapons in these Neolithic Mediterranean finds and so forth—are solid. Eisler’s interpretations are both intriguing and persuasive though not yet fully investigated.
Among Eisler’s analytical claims are the following:
The event (or rather repeated events) that changed relatively peaceful, egalitarian, goddess-worshipping societies around the Mediterranean into war-obsessed empires inspired by heavy-handed sky gods (Ra, Zeus, Apollo, Jehovah, etc.) was successive invasions by nomads from areas with less human-friendly climates such as the Eurasian steppe and the Saharan Desert.
Therefore, humans are not by nature warlike, selfish, cruel and power hungry. Apparently it was harsh environments that turned some in that direction and then they infected others with the social disease of Patriarchy or what Eisler calls “the Androcratic system.”
It is, then, possible for humans to return to what Eisler calls “the Gylanic system” with all the benefits of technological advance, egalitarianism, peace and goddess worship if we continue the trajectory of the women’s movement and promote egalitarian, cooperative and democratic values in childhood education and society at large.
The data and scientific facts laid out in The Chalice and the Blade are impressive, and fact checking didn’t uncover any major holes or earth-shattering updates in the science since 1987. Those facts caused me to question some of my assumptions acquired through popular culture and mainstream education. But how do Eisler’s extrapolations hold up today?
It is tremendous to look at the beginnings of human civilization from the perspective of relatively advanced cultures of the Neolithic that were then degraded to a barbaric state before what our schools tell us was the infancy of civilization in ancient Egypt and Greece. Our prehistory is not a seamless progression from primitive cave people bashing each other over the head with wooden clubs and stone axes to vicious tribes whacking one another with bronze and then finally iron weapons.
How is it possible that archeologists have known all this since I was a small child, and yet our schools still continue to teach ancient history in that tired and inaccurate linear form? Eisler would say that the “Androcratic system” and those who gain inordinate power from it have always suppressed information that might undermine its supremacy.
Eisler draws a lot of big conclusions from the data. She insists that nomadic tribes brought warlike tendencies, hierarchy and angry sky gods from elsewhere. There is some evidence for this, but it is a bit sketchier simply because wandering tribes with primitive technology leave far less for archeologists to find than people with cities, aqueducts, metallurgy, stone-carved script, sculptures and advanced pottery.
Part of me wants to believe Eisler’s conclusions, based on just the data presented, but there are implications that Eisler doesn’t explore, particularly in her second thesis claiming that the archeological record proves that humans aren’t hardwired for war, hierarchy and cruelty.
It’s nice to know that some humans didn’t start out that way. It turns out that when The Chalice and the Blade was translated into Chinese (among 25 other languages), Chinese archeologists embarked on a project to duplicate Eisler’s work in their region and found strikingly similar results. So, it is likely that it wasn’t just the humans of the Mediterranean.
But what then of the warlike tribes that invaded these cultures? They were just as human and arguably, since they murdered a lot of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping people, both around the Mediterranean and in ancient China (and most likely elsewhere as well), we have a lot of their genes today. Are we still really the heirs to a peaceful world or the descendants of those who destroyed it?
Eisler does document how after the invaders took over they generally went local and took up the leisurely and peaceable ways of those they had conquered after a couple of generations—only to be conquered in their turn when the next invasion came a few centuries later. So, there is some reason to argue that the tendency to be murderous and domineering was based more on environment than on genes, but still eventually the warlike tribes took over and stamped out the developed cultures of the Neolithic almost everywhere.
Even more tenuous is Eisler’s extrapolation, arguing that because humans once lived in a cooperative, egalitarian and largely peaceful society that we can do it again in our much more technologically complex age. I definitely hope she’s right, but the last thirty-plus years since the book was published, don’t do much to bolster that hope.
So, it’s a fascinating book—intriguing, well-researched and readable for an academic work. I was sorry when I came to the end and plan on rereading it soon. That’s the book-review part of this post.
As for my changing worldview, I am still observing the reverberations of Eisler’s facts and analysis on my thought processes and life. First, I am relieved to find that the social media trolls dismissing the study of ancient goddess worship are pretty much just plain wrong. I have long had a natural tendency to look to the older goddesses in my spiritual seeking. Now I feel even more confident in that respect.
Second, I have always had difficulty with anything regarding my own European ancestry, not knowing much beyond the last several hundred years of tyranny, war and injustice. Eisler holds out hope that if we dig deeper, there may be plenty of value to find.
Finally and most importantly though, there is my battered spirit of hope. I have been pushed—kicking and screaming but eventually resigned—into cynicism over the past few years. The world and personal circumstances have conspired to show me just how broken, un-evolved and selfish humans can be and how frighteningly common that state is. Eisler’s analysis offers a societal goal that I could choose to put my shoulder into—one with at least some basis in scientific facts and reality.
I’m at a point in my life where I’m shedding a lot of things that didn’t work out—a marriage, a home, an adopted country, a line of work—and starting over in a lot of ways. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing for the next ten or twenty years and before reading Eisler’s book, it seemed like the best bet was just to hunker down with the remnants of my family, try to live well, balancing ethics and sanity, and not put much stock in the future.
Frankly, that’s what I have been doing. But for the first time in a while, I have a glimmer that maybe that isn’t all there is left, that there might be a reason to keep pushing the rocks of social justice, spirituality and passing on wisdom and skills up the hill.
No guarantees mind you. It’s all just a theory. But I’ll take a life-affirming theory with scientific backing over dead certainty of doom whenever I get the chance.
