Customer Reviews

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The Chalice and the Blade describes idyllic, Goddess-worshipping societies that Eisler believes existed several thousand years ago in eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. She presents images of agrarian villages that had no defensive fortifications because there was no war. The communities were non-violent and egalitarian. There was no hierarchy and no sexism. There was no class system or great disparities of wealth. The people were deeply spiritual and practiced free love. They were profoundly connected to the natural world. Eventually, however, aggressive warrior nomads from the east (patriarchal peoples who worshipped male sky gods destroyed these peaceful, Goddess-worshipping communities. The warrior nomads killed the men, raped the women, and took the children as slaves. The Goddess was suppressed and the patriarchy has ruled ever since.

Reisler invites the reader to mourn the loss of ancient communities, and reconnect with their underlying values. I read the book as a life-affirming myth that challenges the abusive aspects of our patriarchal traditions. The Chalice and the Blade celebrates the value of partnership, equality, collaboration, non-violence, and connectedness to nature. Eisler gives us some sense of the enormous power to heal that resides in the repressed feminine and lunar realms. However, I would offer the following cautions:

1. It is possible that Eisler has extrapolated a few scraps of evidence into a highly idealized society that didn't really exist quite as she imagines it.

2 . It is possible that Eisler's vision is pyschologically naive in the sense that everything has a dark side. If the Goddess societies existed, they would, by necessity, have a dark side.

3. It is possible that the problem with western society is not that it has a male image of divinity but that it has a one-sided, gender-specific image of divinity. Substituting a Goddess-based image might not lead to Utopia, but might bring its own set of problems. Perhaps we need images of the divine that honor both genders.

4. Eisler is a nationally known advocate of partnership models as superior forms of human interaction in contrast to "dominator" approaches. Faced with the choice of partnership or domination, the former is clearly preferable. A more neutral way of distinguishing between these two approaches would be to substitute consensus for partnership and hierarchy for domination. It is possible that each approach - consensus and hierarchy - has its own merits and drawbacks. The negative shadow of consensus systems might be passive aggression, confusion, paralysis. It is possible that when grounded with love and respect, hierarchical systems can be generative and empowering.

I suspect that humanity would best be served by a society that reveres both male and female, earth and sky, soul and spirit, hierarchy and collaboration, passion and gentleness - a social order with a pluralistic approach that reflects mythopoetic diversity and celebrates consciousness. Yet, whatever the book's shortcomings I must confess that my heart is with Eisler.

I'd like respond to some recent reviews that suggest Riane Eisler's work is not based on fact and that it lacks plausibility. It is quite a sweeping dismissal of a scholarly and well researched ten year work, drawing from many disciplines, from a woman whose life has been dedicated to helping us understand the mess we are in: how we got here, how violence is perpetuated, and how we can get out of it. Riane Eisler presents us with a roadmap to peace; whether we have the wisdom to understand it and respond to it is something else. Until violence against children and women has been abated there will be no peace. Violence begets violence.

Quoting from Adele Gettys "Goddess, Mother of Living Nature." "Since time immemorial our ancestors have left sacred images of the female form. From the caves of Lascaux in France to the Balkans in Eastern Europe the art and artifacts of the Paleolithic and Neolithic, which represent human's earliest myth-making impulses, indicated a deep reverence for life, and, in particular, for the Great Mother."

30,000 year old Stone Age nude figures are the first Western Goddess Representations. Twenty thousand years later, in the agricultural societies of the Neolithic (8,000----3,000 BCE) female images still predominated, indicating a remarkable, millennia-long cultural continuity. And, none were depicted with weapons. This is very important material, for to understand it means to reclaim our heritage.

In the depths of my own profound spiritual journey twenty- five years ago, awakening to the loss of the Sacred Feminine, . . . living in isolation, creating constantly . . . Riane's book came into my hands. I was amazed and heartened to learn that humanity had such a history. Like many folks, I had never heard of the Goddess or our pre-history. Barbara Walker's "The Crone" also found it's way into my hands about that time. There is Merlin Stone's well researched book, "When God Was A Woman," which fleshes out even more this picture of a harmonious, egalitarian, spiritual and immensely creative life that spanned thousands of years, before patriarchy and "father god."

The most convincing thing of all is that the religion and the temples of the Goddess, in her many names, are referred to again and again in the Bible. And, somewhere in the Koran it states, clearly with disgust, that some peoples engaged in the abomination of "worshiping women."

The research of Riane Eisler, noted anthropologist Maria Gimbutus, and more recently James DeMeo, PhD (among many, many others) drawing upon global archaeological and anthropological evidence present substantial proof that our ancient ancestors were non-violent. In his book, "Saharasia: The 4,000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World" professor DeMeo writes, "These early peoples were peaceful, unarmored, and matrist (partnership model) in character. I have concluded that there does not exist any clear, compelling or unambiguous evidence for the existence of patrism (patriarchy--dominator model) anywhere on Earth significantly prior to c.4000 BCE . . . . . . and the earliest evidence appears in specific locations, from which it first arose, diffused outward over time to infect nearly every corner of the globe."

It has been now a bit more than 2,500 years since religious myths of the sacred marriage of the Goddess and her divine lover faded from Western Cultural consciousness. Today our sacred images and myths tend to focus more on death, punishment, and pain than on sex, birth, and pleasure.

Riane writes, "One of the challenges of our time is to create for ourselves and our children images and stories of the sacred more congruent with a partnership than dominator social organization. Images and stories in which giving and receiving pleasure and caring, rather than causing or submitting to pain, occupy center stage.

For in truth we are living in a dysfunctional and antihuman system that threatens to destroy us all. At the same time, there is a new partnership system that is struggling to emerge."

In this time of regression to a harsher, more violent dominator system, Riane's wise words are needed more than ever. May we pay attention to them.

Janie Rezner, Mendocino, CA

Books like this, if read by a broad enough audience, could alter the course of history. Her insights are broad, her treatments are fair, and her paradigms apparently offer some degree of validity judging from the last section of her book (before the Epilogue) in which she describes 25 years ago much of the transformation we are witnessing today.

The general thesis of her book is essentially this. The"Dominator" model of the world in which men rule not only each other, but especially women, with an iron and violent fist, is in fact an inovation that was introduced to a previously more egalitarian, Goddess-oriented civilization. The original civilizations looked at creation and recognized that the creation of life is essentially a female process, symbolized by the Chalice. It was only later when "civilization" decided that the power to take life superceded the power to give life, and replaced the Goddess with the Hero/War God (symbolized by the blade). Over the course of several centuries, the broad social paradigms shifted, and we find our ancestors of recorded history so steeped in the dominator model (as opposed to the more female "partnership" model...) that we take it for granted as simply the way we are, or worse, the way God made us.

Eisler offers for the reader's consideration the possibility that we don't have to accept the violence-laden tendencies of the dominator model anymore. With the rise of feminism in the past century, men and women alike are beginning to question the basic premise of a male-dominated society, and looking for ways to re-weave the social fabric...with some success. Indeed, perhaps enough success that we might be on the cusp of a new social transformation, moving away from the dominator model that has really only been the source of so much suffering, and toward a partnership model which values aliance and relationships more than possession and power. Unfortunately, we will be required to experience a backlash of fundamentalism for a while, as the bastions of the dominator model (monotheistic religion, communism, and capitalism) fight for their very survival.

There are disturbing bits of awareness in this book for those readers (such as myself) who have not read much in the way of feminist material. It is shocking to learn of the basic, dogmatic, written tenets of religious and contemporary philosophy (including those of St. Augustine, Marx, and Nietzsche to name a few) who directly state that the subjugation of the female sex is essential for the survival of the human species! As we watch the burka-shrouded forms of Afghani women beg in the streets of Kabul at this time, we are reminded of how real, and how insidious this objective of the dominator model truly is.

I only give this book 4 stars because there is a quality about her argument that leaves me slightly undone. Maybe it's because I, too, am a product of the old system that struggles to make the transformation. But I think it has to do with her insistance on an "absolute," i.e. that the way women would run the world is inherintly better than the way men would run the world. Her argument is founded on experience, but is therefore also limited by paradigm. The partnership models she discusses at length in the early part of her book in Neolithic times and in Minoan Crete, were systems based on the cooperation of both men and women. She acknowledges this. Yet there is this nagging sense that she insists that the virtues of such a society are the exclusive realm of the female. I am inclined to think that this is possibly a paradigm-driven bias. Such virtues are now attributed to women more than men BECAUSE of the past 6000 years of the application of the dominator model, but successful transformation is wholly dependent on a mutual transformation of both women and men to a full partnership model that benefits from the inherent strengths of BOTH men and women, not just women. For while it is nearly impossible to disagree that virtually all of the tragic events of history can be pinned to boorish, often childish, frequently violent behavior of men, that behavior is not necessarily programmed by biology so much as by socialization (of course both play a role). So to suggest that "female virtues" are inherently superior to "male qualities" is missing a big part of the picture. Men were responsible for the subjugation of women. But what other developments do we presently benefit from that sprung from the strengths of men? The key lies in her description of a "partnership," rather than on the suggestion that "one is better than the other." Truthfully, I think that this is what she intends (she is not a "man-basher"), but since her emphasis is only on the negative contributions of men, the potential for real partnership is never fully explored in this book.

That said, this is a well written, thought provoking book that, as I said at the outset, could indeed facilitate the very transformation she discusses, if people would read it, talk about it, think about it, and reflect on whether or not we as a species really think that the course we've been on is in fact a healthy one.

This book is based upon the premise that our current society arose from a patriarchal, dominator system and prior to the advent of Christianity there were peaceful, agricultural societies that worshipped goddesses.

From this premise the author hypothesizes that if we humans as a whole adopt the partnership characteristics of the ancient matriarchal societies, we will also become a peaceful, egalitarian society.

The majority of the book explores the earliest civilizations and their worship of the Goddess and then the deliberate destruction of these civilizations by power-hungry men who utilized religion to control and manipulate people. This we all know to be a fact. Those events did take place. But what most us of don't know (and are learning now) is that many aspects of the Bible were derived from the Goddess religions.

Consider the story of Adam and Eve: Eve is responsible for the downfall of man. Eve is symbolic of the Goddess, and the men who created the new religion reversed meanings of Goddess symbols to demonstrate their beliefs. For example, in Goddess religions the serpent was a regenerative life symbol but in the Christian Bible it is a symbol for Satan (Satan being representative of the Goddess). Taken in context of a patriarchal and dominator model, it is completely understandable why this particular group of men sought to destroy the Goddess religion: to obtain absolute power over all people.

In light of this information I developed a better understanding of human history and a greater compassion for all humanity. Yes much of the information in this book will be a shock to those unfamiliar with the subject material, but from learning about the tragedies and mistakes of our past we can build ourselves a better future. For this very reason I highly recommend this book and all books that seek to enlighten the human race to its greatest potential.

This book, in many ways, changed the way I thought. It raises awareness to the fact that there were goddess worshiping, female oriented societies in Neolithic times. It examines these societies and compares them to the warring, male-dominated cultures that eventually took over. In the book, some of the interpretation of the archeological evidence is speculative, but usually only in regards to the meaning of the symbols used in those cultures, and when this type of speculation occurs, it is easy to spot so you can judge for yourself. In regards to larger issues about the structure of those ancient cultures, the conclusions drawn based on the archeological remains are more concrete and obvious. This book is an easy and enjoyable read, and opens your mind to how things might change as we swing back towards being in balance with the feminine aspect.

Eisler presents a fresh answer to questions posed by many feminist writers in history and sociology. What has been the role of women in history and culture. How influential have women been in creating cultural norms? What role have women played in spiritual development, language capability, establishment of community and government? Eisler contends that a partnership of genders, formed in Neolithic times and carried through nascent Mediterranean civilizations, was usurped by male dominant invaders. To Eisler, The Chalice represents women's values of sharing and nurturing. The Blade, of course, is the symbol of war and male dominance through conquest, both of civilizations and of women. She concludes that while male domination has a long history, efforts are being made to overcome The Blade mythology and that The Chalice ideal can be restored and gender "partnership" can be reasserted. It's a captivating thesis, deserving further attention.

Eisler sees Neolithic society functioning in a spiritual Environment governed by The Goddess. Using this term as a universal, much in the way European historians use "God" in referring to any unnamed deity, she contends this spirit guided all early Mediterranean and European peoples. Feminine values held equal stature with [undefined] male values. It isn't clear whether men worshipped The Goddess or their own pantheon. She stresses that worship of The Goddess need not result in matriarchy. Eisler turns to Minoan Crete as the finest example of the "partnership" ideal. As archeologists uncovered the Minoan civilization, their astonishment at its grandeur grew. The discovery of unexpectedly high levels of technology without associated expansionist tendencies Eisler views as typifying what she later terms a "gylanic" society. Cooperation in the domestic environment obviated development of imperialist ambitions.

The real culprits in this scenario are two invading peoples, the Kurgans and the Hebrews. Invading the Mediterranean from northeast and south, they overran many cultures, transforming them utterly and imparting a new social order. Male dominated and driven by a passion for conquest, they imposed The Blade as a new social norm. War became the highest accomplishment, with male domination an enduring social result. A whole new mythology was established with part of the story being the subjugation of women, domestic or conquered. We are operating under that mythology today, she insists.

As Eisler progresses from ancient to modern times, her tone becomes more strident, moving from research to propaganda. She admits early in the book that she's utilizing a method known as "active research" which re-examines historical and archeological data to fit her scenario. This, of course, is fraught with pitfalls, and she stumbles into several. The universality of her Goddess throughout the Neolithic world has no basis in evidence. She scorns the Willendorf "Venus" figurines, but avoids altogether the various cave painting sites predating them. Nearly all the human figures in those paintings are hunters; none appear to be female. While Minoan civilization did surprise many, there's not a shred of evidence to indicate male-female "partnership" as its basis. The weren't expansionist, but it's just as likely that it was deemed unnecessary or too costly. It is far more likely Minoan civilization arose from people fleeing other invaders and finding Crete a sanctuary. Perhaps her gravest misinterpretation arises as she tries to come to grips with the rise of Christianity. She sees the Madonna as a continuation of The Goddess ideal. Claiming the Roman Saturnalia, adopted by Christians as the Messiah's birthday, succeeded because that holiday was special to The Goddess. Saturn was a god of agriculture and patron of clan elders who imparted the wisdom of experience over winter fires. Any goddesses who were revered during the Solstice simply gained attention from the universality of the holiday.

Eisler's errors result from zealousness and a narrow view. Two major factors erode her credibility. One is her focus on the Mediterranean scene. She fails utterly to take into account other peoples around the world, where male domination is common, if not prevalent. This widespread circumstance suggests a deeper root for human social structure. However, like so many feminist writers, Eisler shares their abhorrence of biological foundations for gender differences. E. O. Wilson, a favourite target of feminist writers since his 1975 publication of Sociobiology, garners no mention in the text. He rates but a lengthy and disparaging footnote at the back of the book. Yet even when Eisler was composing this book, zoology and molecular genetics were already forcing grudging recognition of sociobiology's value in human studies. More recent research is confirming Wilson's early ideas.

Eisler's book has worth in seeking to break the militaristic and male domination mythology we live under. That her evidence is suspect doesn't devalue her desire to replace that social framework with greater emphasis on nurturing and sharing. If these values were given more emphasis in education, she contends, it would go far to reducing our injurious attitude toward the environment. She portrays advocates of The Goddess as recognizing the cyclic pattern of nature in contrast to the linear and destructive force of "progress." It's an admirable cause, written with clarity, but hollow in foundation. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Riane Eisler's The Chalice and The Blade is a great book for many reasons. One is that is has influenced many other writers. Another is that it is a book which influences aspects of feminism today. First published in 1988, it is also a book that has created controversy down to this day. It is spurned and embraced by feminists and non-feminist, philosophers and historians. Some feminists either want to add this book as a great item to their lexicon, or burn it and look elsewhere.

Non-feminists also want to burn it. Philosophers love or hate the vision and ethics of the book. Historians scorn the book or are intrigued by its possibilities. These are all signs of greatness, when great emotion and reaction is incited. I credit Riane Eisler with great vision, for that is what this book is: A vision of how things could have been, are, and may be. Visions are meant to expand the mind and open people's eyes to different possibilities. Eisler's famous vision fueled by Marija Gimbutas's work on goddess anthropology from the same time period. Eisler envisions a past where the chalice was worshipped, a golden age of peace that did not involve the subjugation of women in their "proper place" before everything went wrong in the Garden of Eden, but an age when men and women lived together in peace.

She writes of a Utopian Society attacked from outsiders who believed in subjugation and social hierarchy. (You may want to check out Catal Huyak, the controversial Turkish site where fodder for much of this began)
Looking back at Eisler's landmark work knowing what we now know, gives rise to many more speculations. Recently in the Black Sea there were found what looks like actual bones of Women Amazons, or Riders who carry weapons. This isn't that far from Catal Huyak. I'm not sure what it all means but I hope we find out. Chalice and the Blade is a speculative vision, which means, like fiction or a political treatise that it is not meant to be taken as actual history.

People are always speculating about history, novels written about it. If people are so upset about a book, chances are, you should read it. The Chalice and the Blade is a vision of what might be another aspect of history, and done to keep humanity's minds open to a diferent future. Since it was written in 1988, it's good to keep up on material that has been researched since and been discovered. For instance, thanks to Paula Gunn Allen, we know that while not being a utopia, she does write in her essay, When Women Throw Down Bundles: Strong Women Make Strong Nations, that certain tribes of Indians did live in a Society much like Eisler describes before their people were cruelly and methodicaly tortured and killed. Eisler's book is a landmark in feminism, and women's alternative spirituality movements, and for that reason, should be read to see the big picture.

I give the book four stars because of it's influence and vision. I would've given it five if it was updated with new info.

Riane Eisler postulates two alternatives for human society in The Chalice and the Blade. The first, and most familiar, is what she terms the "dominator model." In the dominator model, diversity requires ranking and hierarchy, giving some power over others. The more unfamiliar model, the "partnership model," does not equate diversity with either superiority or inferiority, but rather with community. "There are two critical ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity that profoundly affect the totality of a social system." (p. 105) . She coins two terms to represent these models: 1) "Gylany," drawn from the Greek words for woman and man, she uses to describe partnership modes, and 2) "Androcracy," literally "rule by men," she frequently uses as a substitute for "patriarchy."

Her title derives from symbols for these two paradigms: the chalice, symbolizing life begetting, community and sharing; and the blade, symbolizing the power to take rather than give lifethis is the ultimate power to establish and enforce domination. She points out that for millennia the blade has been a masculine symbol, this is not the problem.

"The root of the problem lies in a social system in which the power of the Blade is idealizedin 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.'" (p. xviii)

She further points out that the directions of partnership cultures and dominator cultures will be quite different. Partnership cultures emphasize technologies to sustain and enhance life while dominator cultures develop technology to destroy and dominate. Consider our own culture, where schools resort to nearly every fund-raising dodge imaginable, even relying on the proceeds of gambling, while the military/industrial complex consumes the lion's share of our resources. The average teacher in California makes less than a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate who goes to work programming computers for a defense contractor! What would it be like if schools got all the money they needed and the Army had to hold bake sales to buy new hardware?

This book is an origin myth. It attempts to explain where we came from, how we evolved from an age of partnership to an age of domination. It also explores how we might begin to reverse the process. Numerous scholars have challenged Eisler's ideas and her use of archaeological evidence. I have noticed her sifting through Hebrew history and using only those aspects which support her theories, while ignoring important writings and events which tend to support a partnership paradigm while she is exposing the dominator model. Regardless of how well the evidence fits the history she lays out, this is a masterful piece of social deconstruction. Whether a golden partnership age existed or not, we do not live in one now, and we never will unless we learn to live differently together.

Eisler starts her chronicle with old Europe. She spends three chapters exploring the stone age, neolithic art, Goddess worship, and the equalitarian nature of partnership culture evinced through archaeological exploration Crete and the work of Marija Gimbutas. Then she begins to describe the Indo/Aryan/Kurgan invasions of Europe. She examines the role of metallurgy and male supremacy. She notes growing evidence of warfare, human sacrifice, and slavery.

She decries the truncation of civilization as partnership gives way to male domination of societies. She shows how memories of the partnership age lingered on in myths and religious practices for thousands of years until myths morphed, giving solar/warrior Gods supremacy over fertility/mother Goddesses. Women and sexuality were marginalized, securing the male domination of culture. She traces the effects of patriarchy through classic culture and the Christian mythos into the very heart of our modern civilization.

Although she does a masterful job of tracing the history of the problem, she offers little in this book for solving the problem. She spends 180 pages telling us how and where we went wrong, only to offer a paltry 18 pages generalizing about what we need to do now. I found this disappointing, but there's only so much that can be crammed into the pages of a single book. Her book, The Partnership Way, acts as a guide through this book for a group wishing to work within the partnership paradigm.

The Chalice and the Blade presents a powerful deconstruction of our society. It offers an "origins myth" to us and gives us a prophetic challenge to live differently. Although her use of scholarship has been attacked, this book is still worth reading. You don't have to run out and buy an Apple  Computer to "think different," you can read this book! A solid five stars.

(If you'd like to discuss this book or review in more depth, click on the "about me" link above and drop me an email. Thanks!)

Before I read this book, I knew very little about Goddess worship. So for me this book was informative. What I liked about this book is it opened my eyes to see the world from a different perspective. I'm sure that this book was written with her own bias. Every book, whether fiction or non-fiction, has this element. It did get me to ask questions about where we are headed as a society where dominating people (considered a male trait) is rewarded. I've noticed since I was a young woman in the seventies and eighties that women are becoming more masculine in their behavior and viewpoint of life. You see this exemplified in popular culture. I would like to see a partnership society where we work together instead of a 'survival of the fittest' mentality. Maybe Ms. Eisler doesn't have the all the facts. I don't know. I would have to read other books on pre-history and Goddess worship to make that decision. Still, if you want to explore the ideas of what it might have been like during pre-history and of what a society based on humanist ideas could be like instead of a world of materialism, this book is for you.

When I picked up this book, with it's provocative blurb from Ashley Montague boldly splashed across the front cover --"The most important work since Darwin's "Origin of the Species."" -- I was expecting a well reasoned and intellectually honest work on the history of social/sexual organization in the ancient world. A more general and approchable version of Gerda Lerner's "The Creation of Partiarchy." Instead what I found what utopian claptrap masquerading as history and archeology.

Apparently, according to Eisler, there really was a golden age when human societies were as close to perfection as is humanly possible. The key, she tells us, to that perfection was worship of "the Goddess" and an "equalitarian" society in which women were more equal than men. Great stuff if you're interested in political and social theory, particularly of the faddish kind, the problem with "The Chalice and the Blade" is that it pretends to base this theory in arceological fact -- historical fact, unfortunately for Eisler, actually having a written record of what people believed and how their societies were organized.

Eisler's penchant for putting theory that agrees with her premises above an actual pursuit of real knowledge of the ancient world is revealed in many elements of the work. In the way she equates matrilineal and matrilocal societies to peaceful communities that come off as being something akin to a combination of agrarian commune and art colony, rather then evil, "dominator" warrior societies which are the doing of men and men alone. This, I'm sure, would suprise the descendants of the numerous historically attested cultures that were very much warrior societies that were both matrilocal and matrilinial, the Maori of New Zealand, and most of the Algonquin speaking Indians of eastern North America including the Iroquis and the Powhattan Empire, for example.

Another example is her reliance on only two sources for the bulk of her archo! logical support, and of these, Gimbutas is really the primary source of Eisler's history, to the extent that I began to wonder if I was just reading a rehash of Gimbutas work paraphrased by Eisler.

The most striking fault I could find, however, was the degree to which Eisler (and I'm assuming from the footnotes, Gimbutas) see to be able to derive entire social structures, religious beliefs and socio-political philosophies of people who left no written records (or in the case of the Minoans, no records yet translated) from the scant material remains -- foundations of buildings, grave goods, potsherds, and small decorative items -- that would seem to this trained historian to be relatively mute on such matters. Yes, there have been found several small statuary renditions of female figures. But it is a leap of faith to claim them as icons of "Goddess" worshippers when they could just as easily be votive items, decorative items, attempts at portrature, etc... When people start making definitive statements about what prehistoric art must have meant to its makers, they've left the realm of history and archeology and stepped into the land of speculation. Unfortunately, Eisler seems to have crossed that boundary before she even began work on this book. Her almost constant use of emotionally charged adjectives such as "brutal" and "insensitive" also makes it clear to me that an objective history of social/sexual systems was never what she had in mind. Instead of a work of history, she has presented us with a screed masquerading as history.

Of course many people who've read this far have probably labelled me a reactionary anti-femnist for the tone of this review, and that's unfortunate, because, I do believe that many elements of Eislers theories have a basis in fact that has been underappreciated outside of academic circles. But politicised social theory made up to look like history isn't the way to go about bringing those facts to the light of day. It should not be necessary to ! manufacture a feminine "golden age" to demonstrate that nomadic herding cultures appear to have tried very hard to stamp out fertility based religions of conquered agriculturalists, just as its shouldn't be necessary claim all Greek culture came from Egypt to prove that Black Africans could produce Egyptian culture, or that the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were evangelical Christians to prove that Christian mores played a role in the development of the US government. I don't object to Eisler's femnism, or even to most of the thrust of her theories, it's her disregard for proper historical interpretation that ultimately soured me on "The Chalice and the Blade."