Eventually, per Gimbutas, these warlike tribes moved west and conquered the more peaceful peoples of the Mediterranean basins and Fertile Crescent.Įisler plays Gimbutas’ theory forward into recorded history, with the superimposing of these dominator cultures over the conquered peoples’ more partnership values, thus creating the basis of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite and Greek civilizations that most of us read about studying ancient history in school. These people were herders rather than farmers and were the original domesticators of the horse, using it as their greatest weapon of war. But on the eastern periphery of Europe, what is now the steppes of Russia, where sources of food at the time were scarce, a completely different civilization (more an amalgam of nomadic tribes really) emerged, that was warlike, hierarchical, with art and burial customs that celebrated war and death. In contrast to the dominator paradigm, this form of organization tends to be promoted and maintained by more secular ideologies of democracy, gender and racial equality, and religious tolerance.Īccording to Gimbutas’ findings, the civilizations that developed around 5000 BCE in the fertile valleys around the Mediterranean were agrarian, relatively peaceful, relatively egalitarian, and (based on their art and burial customs) celebrated life and the life-affirming mystery of birth. Peer relationships between equals are featured rather than rigid codes of behavior between superiors and inferiors, and are founded on the principals of peace, love, joy and non-violence, expressed in the celebration of birth, life and sexual and other unions between people. The partnership paradigm is the non-hierarchical, egalitarian or “flat” organization of people where power is exercised “with” rather than “over” others.
#CHALICE AND THE BLADE BOOK CODE#
As a side note, because “power corrupts” and particularly when not shared among peers, this form of organization tends toward corruption unless it is accompanied by a strong moral code involving fear of God. This order is maintained by rules reflecting institutionalized coercion backed by violence when necessary, and in fact violence and war are generally celebrated as the height of human endeavor and willingness to die as its most profound expression. As it is expressed in Western culture and even our contemporary institutions, man has “power over” woman, white over color, and adult over youth. Summarized briefly, the dominator paradigm is the hierarchical organization of people into a “pecking order” where each person’s place in that order is marked by having “superiors” and/or “inferiors” that encompasses gender, racial and age differences. In The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler lays out the Gimbutas’ evidence for these two fundamentally different ways for organizing human society, and then reinterprets biblical and other recorded history in terms of the threading and conflict of these two paradigms through the development of our contemporary Western civilization. Eisler combines this insight with the findings of archeologist Marija Gimbutas regarding early European civilizations since 5000 BCE, who discovered in her digs evidence of cultures consistent with the dominator paradigm, but also those reflecting a very different organization, which Eisler labeled “The partnership paradigm”. Her experience as a youth with Nazism infecting and eventually overwhelming her country gave her frightful insight into a basic paradigm of human society, which she calls “the dominator paradigm” (which I often refer to as “patriarchy”), represented in its extreme by the violent, authoritarian fascist German state. Born in Vienna, Austria, her family fled from the Nazis to Cuba when she was a child, and she later emigrated to the United States where she continues to live and work today. The book is The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler, a feminist, activist and futurist with degrees in sociology and law from the University of California. In the early 1990s I read a book that, more so than anything I had read before or since, transformed the way I look at the world and helped me distill and inspired me to pursue my life’s purpose.
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