The first time I noticed that my internal processes were going in a radically different direction from our prevailing culture was my reaction to 9/11. While it seemed that everywhere I looked, the prevailing mood went quickly from shock to sadness to anger, I got stuck in the sadness. I never had a sense emotionally of needing to get revenge. I felt increasingly distanced from our national march into the “war on terror.” And this eventually drove me to revisit a book I read back in the late ’80’s by Riane Eisler titled “The Chalice and the Blade.”
Eisler contrasts the “chalice” (read: matriarchal) cultures of the Neolithic agrarian era with the “blade” (read: patriarchal) cultures that formed during the early development of our Judeo/Christian history. She then tries to go beyond the either/or of these two cultures to define a partnership model of society to replace our current hierarchical model. The diary by Sven Triloqvist on “How systems can work without leaders” takes what Eisler was talking about 25 years ago into the 21st century. I’ll encourage others to read Eisler’s book rather than try to capture all of it here, but a few of her ideas will help me get to my point.
Original chalice cultures worshiped the goddess and celebrated birth as the central symbolic demonstration of their spirituality. For the blade cultures, “the central mythical image… is no longer the birth of the young god. It is his crucifixion and death” (ie, “The Passion of the Christ.) She says, “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 of effeminate.” Eisler also draws on the research of psychologist David Winter, who in looking at historical patterns was able to demonstrate that “more repressive attitudes toward women are predictors of periods of aggressive warfare.” She sounds her ultimate warning this way, “For be they religious or secular, modern or ancient, Eastern or Western, the basic commonality of totalitarian leaders and would-be leaders is their faith in the power of the lethal Blade as the instrument of our deliverance. A dominator future is therefore, sooner or later, almost certainly also a future of global nuclear war – and the end of all of humanity’s problems and aspirations.”
This is why, when our own beloved Democratic Party decided to mount a completely militarized national convention and thought they could trump the Republicans as the party of the blade, I despaired and wondered “WHERE IS THE FEMININE VOICE?” that is needed at least as a balance. I think the debacle that we are seeing in Iraq is beginning to wake up this voice in our culture. But I’m still straining to hear it clearly.
