Genesis of Eden
Diamond, Irene and Orenstein, Gloria (ed) 1990 Reweaving
the World,
Sierra Club Books, San Francisco ISBN0-87156-623-0
NOTE: This extract is included as an essential reading for transforming the world. You are requested to purchase the book yourself as it is, without question, essential reading material.
Riane Eisler THE GAIA TRADITION AND THE PARTNERSHIP FUTURE:
AN ECOFEMINIST MANIFESTO
THE LEADING-EDGE social movements of our time-the peace, feminist, and ecology movements, and ecofeminism, which integrates all three-are in some respects very new. But they also draw from very ancient traditions only now being reclaimed due to what British archaeologist James Mellaart calls a veritable revolution in archaeology. These traditions go back thousands of years. Scientific archaeological methods are now making it possible to document the way people lived and thought in prehistoric times. One fascinating discovery about our past is that for millennia a span of time many times longer than the 5,000 years conventionally counted as history -prehistoric societies worshipped the Goddess of nature and spirituality, our great Mother, the giver of life and creator of all. But even more fascinating is that these ancient societies were structured very much like the more peaceful and just society we are now trying to construct. This is not to say that these were ideal societies or utopias. But, unlike our societies, they were not warlike. They were not societies where women were subordinate to men. And they did not see our Earth as an object for exploitation and domination. In short, they were societies that had what we today call an ecological consciousness: the awareness that the Earth must be treated with reverence and respect. And this reverence for the life-giving and life-sustained powers of the Earth was rooted in a social structure where women and "feminine" values such as caring, compassion, and nonviolence were not subordinate to men and the so-called masculine values of conquest and domination. Rather, the life-giving powers incarnated in women's bodies were given the highest social value. In the words of Greek archaeologist Nicolas Platon, who for 50 years excavated the civilization of Minoan Crete where this type of social organization survived until approximately 3,300 years ago, it was a social organization where "the whole of life was pervaded by an ardent faith in the goddess Nature, the source of all creation and harmony."I
THE GAIA TRADITION
Most accounts of Western civilization start with Sumer or with the Indo-European Greeks. These accounts generally describe anything prior to Judeo-Christian religion as "pagan." And they usually leave us with the impression that prior societies were both technologically and morally 11 primitive." But the new knowledge now accumulating from archaeology shows that this is a highly misleading view.
The Paleolithic period, about 25,000 years ago, is generally considered to mark the beginning of Western culture. It is thus the logical place to begin the re-examination of our past. And it is also a good place to begin to reassess our present-and potential future-from a new perspective. Under the conventional view of Paleolithic art as the story of "man the hunter and warrior," the hundreds of highly stylized carvings of large-hipped, often pregnant women found in Paleolithic caves were dubbed "Venus figurines"-objects in some ancient, and presumably obscene, "fertility cult." They were often viewed as obese, distorted erotic symbols; in other words, as prehistoric counterparts of Playboy centerfolds.
But if we really look at these strangely stylized oval figures, it becomes evident that they are representations of the life-giving powers of the world. As UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and other archaeologists now point out, they are precursors of the Great Goddess still revered in historic times as Isis in Egypt, Ishtar in Canaan, Demeter in Greece, and later, as the Magna Mater of Rome and the Catholic Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
Similarly, earlier scholars kept finding in Paleolithic drawings and stone and bone engravings what they interpreted as barbed weapons. But then they could not figure out why in these pictures the arrowheads
THE GAIA TRADITION AND THE PARTNERSHIP FUTURE / 25
or barbs were always going the wrong way. Or why these "wrongway weapons" regularly seemed to miss their mark. Only when these pictures were re-examined by an outsider to the archaeological establishment (someone not conditioned to see them as "failed hunting magic") did it become clear that these were not pictures of weapons. They were images of vegetation: trees and plants with their branches going exactly the right way.
This same view of human nature-or "man's nature"-as a self-centered, greedy, brutal, "born killer" has long shaped what we have been taught about the next phase of human culture: the Neolithic or agrarian age (approximately 8000-1500 B.C.). The conventional view, still perpetuated by most college survey courses, is that the most important human invention -the development of the technology to domesticate plants -was also the beginning of male dominance, warfare, and slavery. That is, with "man's" invention of agriculture -and thus the possibility of sustaining civilization through a regular and even surplus food supply-came not only male dominance but also warfare and a generally hierarchic social structure.
But once again, the evidence does not bear out the conventional view of civilization as the story of "man's" ever more efficient domination over both nature and other human beings. To begin with, anthropologists today generally believe that the domestication of plants was probably invented by women. Indeed., one of the most fascinating aspects of the current reclamation of our lost heritage is the enormous contribution women have made to civilization. If we look closely at the new data we now have about the first agrarian or Neolithic societies, we actually see that all the basic technologies on which civilization is based were developed in societies that were not male dominated and warlike.
As James Mellaart writes, we now know that there was not one cradle of civilization in Sumer about 3,500 years ago.2 Rather, there were many cradles of civilization, all of them thousands of years older. And thanks to far more scientific and extensive archaeological excavations, we also know that in these highly creative societies women held important social positions as priestesses, craftspeople, and elders of matrilineal clans. Contrary to what we have been taught of the Neolithic or first agrarian civilizations as male dominated and highly violent, these were generally peaceful societies in which both women and men lived in harmony with one another and nature. Moreover, in all these peaceful cradles of civilization, to borrow Merlin Stone's arresting phrase from the book of the same title, "God was a woman" (New York: Dial Press, 1976).
There is today much talk about the Gaia hypothesis (so called because Gaia is the Greek name for the Earth). This is a new scientific theory proposed by biologists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock that our planet is a living system designed to maintain and to nurture life. But what is most striking about the Gaia hypothesis is that in essence it is a scientific update of the belief system of Goddess-worshipping prehistoric societies. In these societies the world was viewed as the great Mother, a living entity who in both her temporal and spiritual manifestations creates and nurtures all forms of life.
This consciousness of the essential unity of all life has in modern times been preserved in a number of tribal cultures that revere the Earth as our Mother. It is revealing that these cultures have often been described as "primitive" by anthropologists. Equally revealing is that frequently in these cultures women traditionally hold key public positions, as shamans or wise women and often as heads of matrilineal clans. This leads to an important point that once articulated may seem obvious. The way a society structures the most fundamental human relations -the relations between the female and male halves of humanity without which our species could not survive-has major implications for the totality of a social system. It clearly affects the individual roles and life choices of both women and men. Equally important, though until now rarely noted, is that it also profoundly affects all our values and social institutions-whether a society will be peaceful or warlike, generally egalitarian or authoritarian, and living in harmony with or bent on the conquest of our environment.
MYTH AND REALITY
Previously unknown pre-patriarchal societies have been coming to light since World War II. Rich evidence has been yielded by the excavation of important sites such as Catal Huyuk in Turkey (the largest neolithic site ever excavated) and what Marija Gimbutas calls the civilizations of Old Europe in the Balkans and Greece (which even had a written language thousands of years before Sumer, which she is now deciphering). But perhaps most fascinating is that, in fact, we actually have known about these societies all along. That is, almost all societies have legends about an earlier, more harmonious time. For example, one of
THE GAIA TRADITION AND THE PARTNERSHIP FUTURE / 27
the most ancient Chinese legends comes to us from the Tao Te Ching, which tells of a time when the yin or feminine principle was not yet subservient to the male principle or yang, a time when the wisdom of the mother was still honored above all. Hesiod, the Greek poet (ca. 800 B.C.), also writes of an age when the Earth was inhabited by a golden race who "tilled their fields in peaceful ease" (in other words, the Neolithic) before a lesser race brought with them Ares, the Greek god of war.
Not so long ago people rejected the scientific finding that the Earth is round rather than flat even though, according to ancient records, Greek scholars had come to this conclusion centuries earlier. Similarly, the new archaeological findings of a more harmonious and peaceful past are today viewed by some people as impossible, even though they, too, are verified by ancient records.
In fact, we all know of this earlier time from no less a source than the best known story of Western civilization: the story of the Garden of Eden. This biblical story explicitly tells us there was an earlier time when woman and man (Adam and Eve) lived in harmony with one another and with nature. The Garden is probably a symbolic reference to the Neolithic period, since the invention of agriculture made possible the first gardens on Earth. Even the question of what ended this peaceful era is explicitly answered in the biblical story. This lost paradise was a time when society was not male dominated: as the Bible has it, it was a time before a male god decreed woman to be subservient to man.
We have been taught that our fall from paradise is an allegory of God's punishment of man and particularly woman for the sin of disobeying the command not to eat from the tree of knowledge. But what the archaeological evidence reveals is that this story (like the Babylonian myths from which it derives) is based on folk memories of a time before (as the Bible also tells us) brother turned against brother and man trod woman down under his heel.
If we look at both the archaeological and mythic record from this new perspective, we begin to understand many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of the Garden of Eden. Why, for example, would Eve take advice from a serpent? The answer is that the serpent was in ancient times a symbol of oracular prophecy (as in the Greek temple of Delphi, where a woman, the high priestess or Pythoness, was still in historical times inspired by a serpent, the Python, to prophesy the future). Moreover, because the serpent was for millennia associated with the worship of the Goddess (as a symbol of cyclic regeneration, since it sheds and regrows its skin), Eve's continued association with the serpent also represents a refusal to give up the old Goddess-centered religion. The punishment of Eve for her refusal to acknowledge Jehovah's monopoly of the tree of knowledge is a mythical device to justify male dominance and authoritarian rule. But the underlying story-with critical significance for our time-is that it records a major social shift. This shift, now being extensively verified by the archaeological evidence, is the dramatic change that occurred in our prehistory from an egalitarian and peaceful way of living to the violent imposition of male dominance.
THE LOST CIVILIZATION
Even in the nineteenth century, when archaeology was still in its infancy, scholars found evidence of societies where women were not subordinate to men. But their interpretation of this evidence was that if these societies were not partriarchies, they must have been matriarchies. In other words, if men did not dominate women, then women must have dominated men. However, this conclusion is not borne out by the evidence. Rather, it is a function of what I have called a dominator society worldview. The real alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy, which is only the other side of the dominator coin. The alternative, now revealed to be the original direction of our cultural evolution, is what I call a partnership society: a way of organizing human relations in which beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species the difference between female and male diversity is not equated with inferiority or superiority.
What we have until now been taught as history is only the history of dominator species-the record of the male dominant, authoritarian, and highly violent civilizations that began about 5,000 years ago. For example, the conventional view is that the beginning of European civilization is marked by the emergence in ancient Greece of the Indo-Europeans. But the new archaeological evidence demonstrates that the arrival of the Indo-Europeans actually marks the truncation of European civilization. That is, as Marija Gimbutas extensively documents, there was in Greece and the Balkans an earlier civilization, which she calls the civilization of Old Europe.3 The first Indo-European invasions (by pastoralists from the and steppes of the northeast) foreshadow the end of a matrifocal, matrilineal, peaceful agrarian era. Like fingerprints in the archaeological record, we see evidence of how wave after wave of barbarian invaders from the barren fringes of the globe leave in their wake destruction and what archaeologists call cultural impoverishment. And what characterizes these invaders is that they bring with them male dominance along with their angry gods of thunder and war.
The archaeological record shows a dramatic shift after these invasions. We see the disappearance of millennial traditions of art and pottery, a sharp decrease in the size of settlements, the appearance of 11 suttee" chieftain tombs (so called because with the male skeleton are sacrificed women, children, and animals to serve him even after death). Warfare now becomes endemic, along with "strongman" rule, since these invaders, as Gimbutas writes, "worshipped the power of the lethal blade."
One of the most striking manifestations of this change is found in the art. Now begins something dramatically absent before: the idealization of male violence and male dominance in an art that glorifies killing (scenes of "heroic" battles) and rapes (as in Zeus's fabled rapes of both mortal women and goddesses). And equally striking is the transformation of myth. Here, too, "strongman" rule is idealized and even presented as divinely ordained, as the bards, scribes, and priests of the ruling men systematically distort and gradually expunge the myths and images of the civilization of Old Europe from their sacred and secular tales. But although these, too, become distorted, memories of an earlier and better time still linger in folk stories and legends.
In the nineteenth century, the archaeological excavations of Sophia and Heinrich Schliemann established that the Homeric story of the Greek sacking of Troy was historically based. Similarly, the probable historical basis for the legend of Atlantis is now being revealed by twentieth century archaeological excavations. The fabled civilization of Atlantis was said to have ended when large land masses sank into the sea. What geologists and archaeologists now reveal is that approximatelY 3,500 years ago massive earthquakes and tidal waves in the Mediterranean caused large land masses to sink into the sea. For example, as in the legend of Atlantis, most of the island of Thera, or Santorini, was swallowed by the sea.
These cataclysmic events seem to have marked the end of what scholars call Minoan civilization, a highly technologically developed Bronze Age civilization centered in the Mediterranean island of Crete. Minoan Crete had the first paved roads in Europe, and even indoor plumbing. In sharp contrast to other "high civilizations" of antiquity (such as Sumer and dynastic Egypt), Crete had a generally high standard of living, with houses built for both beauty and comfort. Its art, too, is very different from that of Sumer and Egypt: it is so natural, so free, so full of the celebration of life in all its forms, that sober scholars have described it as unique in the annals of civilization for its grace and exuberant joy.
But what really makes Minoan Crete unique is that it was neither a male-dominant nor warlike culture. Archaeologist Nicolas Platon, the former head of the Acropolis Museum and director of antiquities in Crete, notes that this was a "remarkable peaceful society." He also notes that here descent was still traced through the mother and that "the influence of women is visible in every sphere. 114 For example, the only Minoan fresco of tribute is not the conventional picture of an aggrandized king with a sword in his hand and kneeling figures at his feet characteristic of male-dominant ancient civilizations. It is rather the picture of a woman. And instead of sitting on an elevated throne, she is standing with her arms raised in a gesture of benediction as men approach with offerings of fruits, wine, and grains.
In other words, in this highly creative and peaceful society, masculinity was not equated with domination and conquest. Accordingly, women and the "soft" or "feminine" values of caring, compassion, and nonviolence did not have to be devalued. Power was seen as actualizing power -as the capacity to create and nurture life. It was power to, rather than power over: the power to illuminate and transform human consciousness (and with it reality) that is still in our time symbolized by the "feminine vessel," the chalice or Holy Grail.
NATURE, CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY
We have been taught that in "Western tradition," religion is the spiritual realm and that spirituality is separate from, and superior to, nature. But for our Goddess-worshipping ancestors, spirituality and nature were one. In the religion of Western partnership societies, there was no need for the artificial distinction between spirituality and nature or for the exclusion of half of humanity from spiritual power.
In sharp contrast to "traditional" patriarchal religions (where only men can be priests, rabbis, bishops, lamas, Zen masters, and popes),
THE GAIA TRADITION AND THE PARTNERSHIP FUTURE / 31
we know from Minoan, Egyptian, Sumerian, and other ancient records that women were once priestesses. Indeed, the highest religious office appears to have been that of high priestess in service of the Goddess. And the Goddess herself was not only the source of all life and nature; she was also the font of spirituality, mercy, wisdom, and justice. For example, as the Sumerian Goddess Nanshe, she sought justice for the poor and shelter for the weak. The Egyptian Goddess Meat was also the goddess of justice. The Greek Goddess Demeter was known as the lawgiver, the bringer of civilization, dispensing mercy and justice. As the Celtic Goddess Cerridwen, she was the goddess of intelligence and knowledge. And it is Gaia, the primeval prophetess of the shrine of Delphi, who in Greek mythology is said to have given the golden apple tree (the tree of knowledge) to her daughter, the Goddess Hera. Moreover, the Greek Fates, the enforcers of laws, are female. And so also are the Greek Muses, who inspire all creative endeavor.
In fact, this association of woman with the highest spirituality with both wisdom and mercy -survived well into historical times. Even though women were by then already barred from positions of spiritual power, Sophia (the Greek word for wisdom) is still female. So also is the Hebrew word for wisdom, hochmah. And even though we have not been taught to think of her this way, the Catholic Virgin Mary (now the only mortal figure in the Christian holy family of divine Father and Son) still perpetuates the image of the Goddess as the Merciful Mother.
We also know from a number of contemporary tribal societies that the separation between nature and spirituality is not universal. Tribal peoples generally think of nature in spiritual terms. Nature spirits must be respected, indeed, revered. And we also know that in many of these tribal societies women as well as men can be shamans or spiritual healers and that descent in these tribes is frequently traced through the m er. In sum, both nature and woman can partake of spirituality in societies oriented to a partnership model. In such societies there is no need for a false dichotomy between a "masculine" spirituality and a "feminine" nature. Moreover, since in ancient partnership societies woman and the Goddess were identified with both nature and spirituality, neither woman nor nature were devalued and exploited.
It is often said that the answer to our mounting environmental crises is a "return to nature." According to this view, the roots of our ecological problems lie in the shift from a religious to a secular or scientific/technological worldview. We are told that with the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment, "modern man" became alienated from both himself and nature.
But if we carefully examine both our past and present, we see that many peoples past and present living close to nature have all too often been blindly destructive of their environment. While many indigenous societies have a great reverence for nature, there are also both non-Western and Western peasant and nomadic cultures that have over-grazed and over-cultivated land, decimated forests, and, where population pressures have been severe, killed off animals needlessly and indifferently. And while there is much we can learn today from tribal cultures, it is important not to indiscriminately idealize all non-Western cultures and/or blame all our troubles on our secular-scientific age. For clearly such tribal practices as cannibalism, torture, and female genital mutilation (which continue into our time under the guise of ethnic or religious tradition) antedate modern times. And some indigenous and/or highly religious societies (whether in reaction to an extremely harsh environment or to conquest by a foreign culture) have been as barbarous as the most "civilized" Roman emperors or the most "spiritual" Christian inquisitors.
Another widely held notion is that technology is causing our global problems. But technology is integral to the human condition. Indeed, the story of human culture is to a large extent the story of human technology. It is the story not only of the fashioning of material tools but also of the fashioning of our most important and unique non-material tools: the mental tools of language and imagery, of human-made words, symbols, and pictures. Advanced technologies are the extension of human functions, of our hands' and brains' capacity to alter our environment, and ourselves. Indeed, technology is itself part of the evolutionary impulse, the striving for the expansion of our potential as human beings within both culture and nature.
Once we look at technology from the new perspective provided by the gender-holistic analysis of our past and present, it is clear that the problem is not now nor has it ever been simply that of technology. The same technological base can produce very different types of tools: tools to kill and oppress other humans or tools to free our hands and minds from dehumanizing drudgery. The problem is that in dominator societies, where "masculinity" is identified with conquest and domination, every new technological breakthrough is basically seen as a tool for more effective oppression and domination. That is, what led to the nineteenth century's exploitation of women, children, and men in sweat shops and mines and the twentieth century factories of dehumanizing assembly lines where workers became cogs in industrial machines was not the invention of machines. Rather, it was the use to which that mechanization was put in a dominator system. Similarly, the use of modern technologies to devise ever more effective and costly weapons is not a requirement of modern technology. It is, however, a requirement of dominator systems, where throughout recorded history the highest priority has been given to technologies fashioned not to sustain and enhance life, but technologies to dominate and destroy.
In sum, the basic issue is not one of technology versus spirituality or nature versus culture. The fundamental issue is how we define nature, culture, technology, and spirituality -which in turn hinges on whether we orient to a dominator or a partnership model of society.
It is not science and technology, but the numbing of our innate human sensibilities that makes it possible for men to dominate, oppress, exploit, and kill. What passes for "scientific objectivity" in a dominator society is the substitution of detached measuring for an inquiry designed to enhance and advance human evolution. Even beyond this, what often passes for "higher" spirituality in a dominator society is equally stunted and distorted. For what this system requires is that spirituality be equated with a detachment that often condones and encourages indifference to avoidable human suffering -as in most Eastern religions. Or it leads to the Western dualism that justifies the domination of culture over nature, of man over woman, of technology over life, and of high priests and other so-called spiritual leaders over "common" women and men.
RECLAIMING OUR PARTNERSHIP TRADITIONS
In ancient times the world itself was one. The beating of drums was the heartbeat of the Earth-in all its mystery, enchantment, wonder, and terror. Our feet danced in sacred groves, honoring the spirits of nature. What was later broken asunder into prayer and music, ritual and dance, play and work, was originally one.
For many thousands of years, millennia longer than the 5,000 years we count as recorded history, everything was done in a sacred manner. Planting and harvesting fields were rites of spring and autumn celebrated in a ritual way. Baking bread from grains, molding pots out of clay, weaving cloth out of fibers, carving tools out of metals -all these ways of technologically melding culture and nature were sacred ceremonies. There was then no splintering of culture and nature, spirituality, science, and technology. Both our intuition and our reason were applied to the building of civilization, to devising better ways for us to live and work cooperatively.
The rediscovery of these traditions signals a way out of our alienation from one another and from nature. In our time, when the nuclear bomb and advanced technology threaten all life on this planet, the reclamation of these traditions can be the basis for the restructuring of society: the completion of the modern transformation from a dominator to a partnership world.
Poised on the brink of eco-catastrophe, let us gain the courage to look at the world anew, to reverse custom, to transcend our limitations, to break free from the conventional constraints, the conventional views of what are knowledge and truth. Let us understand that we cannot graft peace and ecological balance on a dominator system; that a just and egalitarian society is impossible without the full and equal partnership of women and men.
Let us reaffirm our ancient covenant, our sacred bond with our Mother, the Goddess of nature and spirituality. Let us renounce the worship of angry gods wielding thunderbolts or swords. Let us once again honor the chalice, the ancient symbol of the power to create and enhance life-and let us understand that this power is not woman's alone but also man's.
For ourselves, and for the sake of our children and their children, let us use our human thrust for creation rather than destruction. Let us teach our sons and daughters that men's conquest of nature, of women, and of other men is not a heroic virtue; that we have the knowledge and the capacity to survive; that we need not blindly follow our bloodstained path to planetary death; that we can reawaken from our 5,000-year dominator nightmare and allow our evolution to resume its interrupted course.
While there is still time, let us fulfill our promise. Let us reclaim the trees of knowledge and of life. Let us regain our lost sense of wonder and reverence for the miracles of life and love, let us learn again to live in partnership so we may fulfill our responsibility to ourselves and to our Great Mother, this wondrous planet Earth.
From: Riane Eisler
1987 The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future.
Harper & Row, San Francisco. ISBN 0-06-250287-5
Thumbnail Sketch Review:
The Chalice and the Blade is a classic work in the complementary relationship between masculine and feminine in human society and the evolutionary existential dilemma caused to human culture by the passage from the nurturing chalice of feminine fertility - partnership society - to the violent blade of patriarchal dominator society. Eisler hightlights this by reviewing social history from the Paleolithic through the patriarchail take-over to the present and future of society. The transition from the feminine partnership chalice to the male dominator blade is typified by the overthrow of the Minoan culture in Crete by male cultures associated by Eisler with a change in metallurgy in her landmark chapter 'dark order out of chaos'.
Eisler's work has an uncanny relation to the Genesis. I first heard of her through Terrence McKenna's writing to which I have an affinity through the heritage of the sacraments. When I first researched it when beginning the Genesis I found it so parallel that for many months or even a year I kept the Chalice and the Blade almost unread in a kind of tapu state forgotten in the haste of writing, until prompted by a chance E-mail comment on 'ecofem' just as I completed it, I disintered it only to find all the lines had converged, arriving at exactly the same destination and fitting hand in glove with the Renewal as the liberation of religion in relationship and as verdant chaos refertilizing the rule of order. Even the chapter on 'Jesus and Gylany' is an echo of the springtime Bridegroom of reconciliation put in true perspective.
I have chosen this passage and Riane's future view of the healing of evolution in partnership. Again this is uncanny, because I have, only over the last few days, quite independently, come, through completing the Genesis writing, to a clear view of relationship itself as the immortal 'religion'.
Riane stands out as the pioneer of the chaos-order synthesis of the chalice and blade of social history of gender reconciliation - the quantum complementarity principle in human society.
Chris King 2 Sept 1998
Dark Order Out of Chaos: From the Chalice to the Blade
We measure the time we have been taught is human history in centuries. But the span for the earlier segment of a much different kind of history is measured in millennia, or thousands of years. The Paleolithic goes back over 30,000 years. The Neolithic age agricultural revolution was over 10,000 years ago. Catal Huyuk was founded 8500 years ago. And the civilization of Crete fell only 3200 years ago.
For this span of millennia - many times as long as the history we measure on our calendars from the birth of Christ - in most European and Near Eastern societies the emphasis was on technologies that support and enhance the quality of life. During the thousands of years of the Neolithic great strides were made in the production of food through farming, as well as in hunting, fishing, and the domestication of animals. Housing was advanced through innovations in construction, the making of rugs, furniture, and other household articles, and even (as in Catal Huyuk) town planning.' Clothing had left the time of skins and furs far behind with the invention of weavin' and sewing. And, 9 as both materially and spiritually the foundations for higher civilization were being laid, the arts also flourished.
As a general rule, descent was probably traced through the mother. The elder women or heads of clans administered the production and distribution of the fruits of the earth, which were seen as belonging to all members of the group. Along with common ownership of the principal means of production and a perception of social power as responsibility or trusteeship for the benefit of all came what seems to have been a basically cooperative social organization. Both women and men-even sometimes, as in Catal Huyuk, people of different racial stocks-worked cooperatively for the common good.1 Greater male physical strength was here not the basis for social oppression, organized warfare, or the concentration of private property in the hands of the strongest men. Neither did it provide the basis for supremacy of males over females or of "masculine" over "feminine" values. On the contrary, the prevailing ideology was gynocentric, or woman-centered, with the deity represented in female form. Symbolized by the feminine Chalice or source of life, the generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature-not the powers to destroywere, as we have seen, given highest value. At the same time, the function of priestesses and priests seems to have been not to serve and give religious sanction to a brutal male elite but to benefit all the people in the community in the same way that the heads of the clans administered the communally owned and worked lands.3 But then came the great change-a change so great, indeed, that nothing else in all we know of human cultural evolution is comparable in magnitude.
The Peripheral Invaders
At first it was like the proverbial biblical cloud "no bigger than a man's hand"-the activities of seemingly insignificant nomadic bands roaming the less desirable fringe areas of our globe seeking grass for their herds. Over millennia they were apparently out there in the harsh, unwanted, colder, sparser territories on the edges of the earth, while the first great agricultural civilizations spread out along the lakes and rivers in the fertile heartlands. To these agricultural peoples, enjoying humanity's early peak of evolution, peace and prosperity must have seemed the blessed eternal state for humankind, the nomads no more than a peripheral novelty. We have nothing to go by but speculation on how these nomadic bands grew in numbers and in ferocity and over what span of time.' But by the fifth millennium B.C.E., or about seven thousand years ago, we begin to find evidence of what Mellaart calls a pattern of disruption of the old Neolithic cultures in the Near East.' Archaeological remains indicate clear signs of stress by this time in many territories. There is evidence of invasions, natural catastrophes, and sometimes both, causing large-scale destruction and dislocation. In many areas the old painted pottery traditions disappear. Bit by devastating bit, a period of cultural regression and stagnation sets in. Finally, during this time of mounting chaos the development of civilization comes to a standstill. As Mellaart writes, it will be another two thousand years before the civilizations of Sumer and Egypt emerge.6 In Old Europe the physical and cultural disruption of the Neolithic societies that worshiped the Goddess also seems to begin in the fifth millenniUM B.C.E., with what Gimbutas calls Kurgan Wave Number One. "Thanks to the growing number of radiocarbon dates, it is now possible to trace several migratory waves of steppe pastoralists or 'Kurgan' people that swept across prehistoric Europe," reports Gimbutas. These repeated incursions and ensuing culture shocks and population shifts were concentrated in three major thrusts: Wave No. 1, at c. 43004200 B.C.E.; Wave No. 2, c. 3400-3200 B.C.E.; and Wave No. 3, c. 30002800 B.C.E. (dates are calibrated to dendrochronology).' 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.8 But the term Indo-European has stuck. It characterizes a long line of invasions from the Asiatic and European north by nomadic peoples. Ruled by powerful priests and warriors, they brought with them their male gods of war and mountains. And as Aryans in India, Hittites and Mittani in the Fertile Crescent, Luwians in Anatolia, Kurgans in eastern Europe, Achaeans and later Dorians in Greece, they gradually imposed their ideologies and ways of life on the lands and peoples they conquered.9
There were other nomadic invaders as well. 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 and mountains (Jehovah or Yahweh). And gradually, as we read in the Bible, they too imposed much of their ideology and way of life on the peoples of the lands they conquered.
These striking similarities between the Indo-Europeans and the ancient Hebrews have led to some conjecture that there may here be some common origins, or at least some elements of cultural diffusional' But it is not the bloodlines or cultural contacts that cannot be found that are of such interest. It is what seems most definitely to unite these peoples of so many different places and times: the structure of their social and ideological systems. The one thing they all had in common u7as a dominator model of social organization: a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm. Another commonality was that, in contrast to the societies that laid the foundations for Western civilization, the way they characteristically acquired material wealth was not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction.
Metallurgy and Male Supremacy
In that classic Marxist work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 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. Engels further linked the shift from matriliny to patriliny with the development of copper and bronze metallurgy.11 However, though this was a pioneering insight, it was only crudely on the mark. For it is only in light of recent research that we can see the specific-and sociologically fascinating-ways copper and bronze metallurgy radically redirected the course of cultural evolution in Europe and Asia Minor. What brought about these radical changes does not seem to relate to the discovery of these metals. Rather it relates to a fundamental point about technology we have been making: the uses to which these metals were put. The assumption under the prevailing paradigm is that all important early technological discoveries must have been made by "man the hunter" or "man the warrior" for the purpose of more effective killing. In college courses and popular modern epics like Arthur C. Clarke's film 2001, we are taught this has been so starting with the very first crude wood and stone implements, which by this logic were clubs and knives for killing others. 12 Hence it has also been assumed that metals were first and foremost used for weapons. However, the archaeological evidence shows that such metals as copper and gold had long been known to the people of the Neolithic. But they used them for ornamental and religious purposes and for the manufacture of tools.13
New dating techniques not available in Engels's time indicate that metallurgy in Europe first appears in the sixth millennium B.C.E. among people living south of the Carpathian Mountains and in the region of the Dinaric and Transylvanian alps. These first metal finds are in the form of jewelry, statuettes,' and ritual objects. By the fifth and early fourth millennium copper also seems to have come into general use for manufacturing flat axes and shaft-hoe axes, wedge-shaped tools, fishhooks, awls, needles, and double-spiral pins. But as Gimbutas points out, the copper axes of Old Europe "were wood-working tools, not battle axes or symbols of divine power as they were known to be in protoand historic Indo-European cultures."Il The archaeological evidence thus supports the conclusion that it was not metals per se, but rather their use in developing ever more effective technologies of destruction, that played such a critical part in what Engels termed "the world historical defeat of the female sex.1115 Nor did male dominance become the norm in Western prehistory, as Engels implies, when gathering-hunting peoples first begin to domesticate and breed animals (in other words, when herding became their main technology of production). Rather, it happened much later, during the millennia-long incursions of pastoral hordes into the more fertile lands where farming had become the main technology of production. As we have seen, technologies of destruction were not important social priorities for the farmers of the European Neolithic Age. But for the warlike hordes that came pouring down from the and lands of the north, as well as up from the deserts of the south, they were. And it is at this critical juncture that metals played their lethal part in forging human history: not as a general technological advance, but as. weapons to kill, plunder, and enslave. Gimbutas has painstakingly reconstructed this process in Old Europe. She begins with the fact there was no copper in the regions where the pastoralists came from, the and steppes north of the Black Sea. 'This leads to the hypothesis," she writes, "that the horse-riding Kurgan people of the steppe were aware of the metal technology which existed in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C.E. south of the Caucasus Mountains. Probably by no later than 3500 B.C.E. they had leamed metallurgical techniques from the Transcaucasians, and soon afterward, they were exploiting the ores of the Caucasus."l' Or more specifically, soon afterward they were forging more lethally effective weapons out of metal.11
Gimbutas's data are based on large-scale post-World War 11 excavations as well as on the introduction of new dating techniques. To condense radically, they indicate that the transition from the Copper to the Bronze Age (when copper-arsenic or copper-tin alloys first made their appearance) occurred in the period between 3500 and 2500 B.C.E. This is considerably earlier than the date of circa 2000 B.C.E. traditionally given by earlier scholars. Moreover, the rapid spread of bronze metallurgy over the European continent is linked with the evidence of now increasingly massive incursions of the extremely mobile, warlike, hierarchic, and male-dominated pastoralist peoples from the northern steppes whom Gimbutas calls the Kurgans. "The appearance of bronze weapons-daggers and halberds-together with thin and sharp axes of bronze and maceheads and battle-axes of semi-precious stone and flint arrowheads, coincides with the routes of dispersal of the Kurgan people," writes Gimbutas.",
The Shift in Cultural Evolution
This is by no means to say that the radical change in the cultural evolution of Western society was simply a function of wars of conquest. As we shall see, the process was far more complex. However, there seems little question that from the very beginning warfare was an essential instrument for replacing the partnership model with the dominator model. And war and other forms of social violence continued to play a central role in diverting our cultural evolution from a partnership to a dominator direction. As we will see, the shift from a partnership to a dominator model of social organization was a gradual, and after a while predictable, process. However, the events that triggered this change were relatively sudden, and at the time, unpredictable. What the archaeological record tells us is startlingly congruent with the new scientific thinking about unpredictable change-or how long-established states of systems equilibrium and near equilibrium can with relative rapidity shift to a far from equilibrium, or chaotic, state. Even more remarkable is how this radical change in our cultural evolution in certain respects fits the nonlinear evolutionary model of "punctuated equilibria" proposed by Eldredge and Gould, with the appearance of "peripheral isolates" at critical "bifurcation points."Il The "peripheral isolates" that now emerged from what are literally the fringes of our globe (the barren steppes of the north and the and deserts of the south) were not a different species. But, interrupting a long stretch of stable development guided by a partnership model of society, they brought with them an entirely different system of social organization. At the core of the invaders' system was the placing of higher value on the power that takes, rather than gives, life. This was the power symbolized by the "masculine" Blade, which early Kurgan cave engravings show these Indo-European invaders literally worshiped. For in their dominator society, ruled by gods-and men-of war, this was the supreme power.
With the appearance of these invaders on the prehistoric horizonand not, as is sometimes said, with men's gradual discovery that they too played a part in procreation-the Goddess, and women, were reduced to male consorts or concubines. Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more "effeminate" men became the norm.
How fundamentally different these two social systems were, and how cataclysmic were the norm-changes forced by these "peripheral isolates"-now become "peripheral invaders"-is summarized in the following passage from Gimbutas's work:
"The Old European and Kurgan cultures were the antithesis of one another. The Old European were sedentary horticulturalists prone to live in large wellplanned townships. The absence of fortifications and weapons attests the peaceful coexistence of this egalitarian civilization that was probably matrilinear and matrilocal. The Kurgan system was composed of patrilineal, socially stratified, herding units which lived in small villages or seasonal settlements while grazing their animals over vast areas. 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. Weapons are nonexistent in Old European imagery; whereas the dagger and battle-axe are dominant symbols of the Kurgans, who like all historically known IndoEuropeans, glorified the lethal power of the sharp blade."Il
Warfare, Slavery, and Sacrifice
Perhaps most significant is that in the representations of weapons engraved in stone, stelae, or rocks, which also only begin to appear after the Kurgan invasions, we now find what Gimbutas describes as "the earliest known visual images of Indo-European warrior gods."Il Some figures are "semi-anthropomorphic," reports Gimbutas about the excavations of a series of rock carvings in the Italian and Swiss alps; they have heads and arms. But the majority are abstract images "in which the god is represented by his weapons alone, or by weapons in combination with a belt, necklace, double-spiral pendant, and the divine animal-a horse or stag. In several of the compositions a sun or stag antlers occur in the place where the god's head should be. In others, the god's arms are represented as halberds or axes with long shafts. One, three, seven, or nine daggers are placed in the center of the composition, most frequently above or below the belt."" "Weapons obviously represented the god's functions and powers," writes Gimbutas, "and were worshipped as representations of the god himself. The sacredness of the weapon is well evidenced in all IndoEuropean religions. From Herodotus we know the Scythians made sacrifices to their sacred dagger, Akenakes. No previous engravings or images of weapon-carrying divinities are known in the Neolithic Alpine region. 124
This glorification of the lethal power of the sharp blade accompanied a way of life in which the organized slaughter of other human beings, along with the destruction and looting of their property and the subjugation and exploitation of their persons, appears to have been normal. Judging from the archaeological evidence, the beginnings of slavery (the ownership of one human being by another) seem to be closely linked to these armed invasions. For instance, these findings indicate that in some Kurgan camps the bulk of the female population was not Kurgan, but rather of the Neolithic Old European population .25 What this suggests is that the Kurgans massacred most of the local men and children but spared some of the women, whom they took for themselves as concubines, wives, or slaves. Evidence that this was standard practice is found in Old Testament accounts from several mfllennia later, when the nomadic Hebrew tribes invaded Canaan. In Numbers 31:32-35, for example, we read that among the spoils of war taken by the invaders in their battle against the Midianites, there were, in this order, sheep, cattle, asses, and thirty-two thousand girls who had had no intercourse with a man. The violent reduction of women, and thus also of both their female and male children, to the status of mere male possessions is also documented in Kurgan burial practices. As Gimbutas notes, among the first known evidences of "Kurganization" are a number of graves dating from sometime before the fourth millennium B.C.E.-in other words, shortly after the first wave of Kurgan invaders swept into Europe.26
These are the "chieftain graves" characteristic of Indo-European dominator rankings, indicating a radical shift in social organization, with a strongman elite at the top. In these graves-in Gimbutas's words clearly an "alien cultural phenomenon"-a marked change in burial rites and practices is also evident. In contrast to Old European burials, which showed little indication of social inequality, there are here marked differences in the size of the graves as well as in what archaeologists call "funerary gifts": the contents found in the tomb other than the deceased .21
Among these contents, for the first time in European graves, we find along with an exceptionally tall or large-boned male skeleton the skeletons of sacrificed women-the wives, concubines, or slaves of the men who died. This practice, which Gimbutas describes as "suttee" (a term borrowed from the Indian name for the immolation of widows, which continued there into the twentieth century), was apparently introduced by the Indo-European Kurgans into Europe. It appears for the first time west of the Black Sea at Suvorovo in the Danube delta.28 These radical innovations in burial practices are, moreover, characteristic of all three of the Kurgan invasions. For example, in the socalled Globular Amphora culture that dominated in northern Europe almost a thousand years after the first wave of Kurgans arrived, the same brutal burial practices, reflecting the same type of social and cultural organization, prevail. As Gimbutas writes, "The possibility of coincidental deaths is over-ruled by the frequency of these multiple burials. Generally, the male skeleton is buried with his gifts at one end of the cist grave, while two or more individuals are grouped at the other end.... Male dominance is confirmed by Globular Amphora tombs. Polygyny is documented by the cist grave at Vojtsekhivka in Volynia, where a male skeleton was flanked in heraldic order by two women and four children, a young man and a young woman lay at his feet. 1129
These high-status graves are also repositories of other articles deemed important to these ruling-class men not only in life but in death. "A warrior-consciousness previously unknown in Old Europe," reports Gimbutas, "is evidenced in equipment recovered from Kurgan graves: bows, and arrows, spears, cutting and thrusting 'knives' (protodaggers), antler-axes, and horse bones."' Also found in these graves are symbolic objects such as pig or boar mandibles and tusks, dog skeletons, and auroch or cattle scapulae, providing further archaeological evidence that there has been not only a radical social shift but a radical ideological shift as well. These burials show the great social value now placed on technologies for destruction and domination. They also contain evidence of a strategy for ideological obliteration and takeover we are to see more and more of: the appropriation by men of important religious symbols that their subject peoples once associated with women in the worship of the Goddess. "The tradition of placing boar and pig mandibles, dog burials, and aurochs or cattle scapulae exclusively in male graves," notes Gimbutas, "can be traced to Kurgan I-II (Srednij Stog) graves in the Pontic steppe. The economic importance attached to pigs and boars as a food source is overshadowed by religious implications of the bones of these animals found solely in association with high-ranking males 6f the community. The symbolic ties now evidenced between men and the boar, pig, and dog are a reversal of the religious significance these animals held in Old Europe, where the pig was the sacred companion of the Goddess of Regeneration. 1131
The Truncation of Civilization
Spreading westward and southward, the archaeological landscape of Old Europe is now traumatically altered. "Millennial traditions were truncated," writes Gimbutas, "towns and villages disintegrated, magnificent painted pottery vanished; as did shrines, frescoes, sculptures, symbols, and scri pt. 1131 At the same time there now comes into play a new living war machine, the armed man on a horse-which in its time must have had the impact a tank or an airplane has among primitives in ours. And in the wake of the Kurgan devastation, we find their typical warrior-chieftain graves, with their human sacrifices of women and children, their animal sacrifices, and their caches of weapons surrounding the dead chiefs .33
Writing before the excavations of the 1960s and 70s, and before Gimbutas systematically organized both the old and new data using the latest carbon and dendrochronology dating techniques, the European prehistorian V. Gordon Childe describes the same general pattern. Childe characterizes the culture of early Europeans as "peaceful" and "democratic," with no hint of "chiefs concentrating the communities' wealth."34 But then he notes how all this gradually changed, as warfare, and particularly the use of metal weapons, is introduced.
Like Gimbutas, Childe observes that as weapons increasingly appear in the excavations, so do chief's tombs and houses that clearly evidence social stratification, with strongman rule becoming the norm. "Settlements were often planted on hill tops," writes Childe. Both there and in the valleys they are now "frequently fortified." Moreover, he too emphasizes that, as "competition for land assumed a bellicose character, and weapons such as battle-axes became specialized for warfare," not only the social, but also the ideological organization of European society underwent a fundamental alteration.31 Even more specifically, Childe notes how as warfare becomes the norm "the consequent preponderance of the male members of the communities may account for the general disappearance of female figurines." He remarks how these female figurines, so ubiquitous in the earlier levels, are now "no more in evidence" and then concludes: "The old ideology has been changed. That may reflect a change from a matrilineal to patrilineal organization of society." Gimbutas is even more specific. Based on the systematic study of Old European chronologies, drawing from her own work and that of other archaeologists, she painstakingly describes how in the wake of each new wave of invasions there is not only physical devastation but what historians call cultural impoverishment. Already in the wake of Wave Number One the destruction is so massive that only pockets of Old European settlement survive-for example, the Cotofeni complex of the Danube valley of Oltenia, western and northwestern Muntenia, and the south of Banat and Transylvania. But even here there are signs of significant change, notably the appearance of defense mechanisms such as trenches and ramparts.17 For the majority of Old European settlements, such as the Karanovo farmers of the lower Danube basin, the Kurgan invasions were, in Gimbutas's words, catastrophic. There is wholesale material destruction of houses, of shrines, of finely crafted artifacts and works bf art, which have no meaning or value to the barbarian invaders. Masses of people are massacred, enslaved, or put to flight. As a result, chain reactions of population shifts are set in motion.' Now what Gimbutas calls "hybrid cultures" begin to appear. These cultures were based on "the subjugation of remaining Old European groups and their rapid assimilation into the Kurgan pastoral economy and agnatically-linked [patrilinear], stratified societies."3' But these new hybrid cultures are far less technologically and culturally advanced than the cultures they replaced. The economy is now based primarily on breeding. And though some of the Old European techniques are still in evidence, the pottery is now strikingly uniform and inferior. For example, in the Cernavoda Ill settlements that appear in Romania after Kurgan Wave Number Two, there is no trace of pottery painting or of the Old European symbolic designs. In east Hungary and western Transylvania the pattern is similar. "The diminished size of communities-no larger than 30 to 40 individuals-indicates a restructured social system of small herding units," writes Gimbutas.1 And fortifications now begin to appear everywhere, as gradually the acropolis or hill fort replaces the old unwalled settlement. And so, as prehistoric excavations evidence, the archaeological landscape of Old Europe is transformed. Not only do we find increasing signs of physical destruction and cultural regression in the wake of each wave of invasions; the direction of cultural history is also profoundly altered. Slowly, as the Old Europeans, for the most part unsuccessfully, try to protect themselves from their barbaric invaders, new definitions of what is normal for both society and ideology begin to emerge. Everywhere now we see the shift in social priorities that is like an arrow shot through time to pierce our age with its nuclear tip: the shift toward more effective technologies of destruction. This is accompanied by a fundamental ideological shift. The power to dominate and destroy through the sharp blade gradually supplants the view of power as the capacity to support and nurture life. For not only was the evolution of the earlier partnership civilizations truncated by armed conquests; those societies that were not simply wiped out were now also radically changed. Now everywhere the men with the greatest power to destroy-the physically strongest, most insensitive, most brutal-rise to the top, as everywhere the social structure becomes more hierarchic and authoritarian. Women-who as a group are physically smaller and weaker than men, and who are most closely identified with the old view of power symbolized by the life-giving and sustaining chalice-are now gradually reduced to the status they are to hold hereafter: male-controlled technologies of production and reproduction. At the same time the Goddess herself gradually becomes merely the wife or consort of male deities, who with their new symbolizations of power as destructive weapons or thunderbolts are now supreme. In sum, through the gradual process of both social and ideological transformation we will examine in more detail in the chapters that follow, the story of civilization, of the development of more advanced social and material technologies, now becomes the familiar bloody span from Sumer to ourselves: the story of violence and domination.
The Destruction of Crete
The violent end of Crete is particularly haunting-and instructive. Because it was an island to the south of the European mainland, Crete was walled off for a time from the warlike hordes by the mothering sea. But at last here too the end came, and the last civilization based on a partnership rather than a dominator model of social organization fell.
The beginning of the end followed the mainland pattern. During the Mycenaean period, controlled by the Indo-European Achaeans, Cretan art becomes less spontaneous and free. And now clearly visible ip the Cretan archaeological record is a much greater concern with, and emphasis on, death. "Before they came under Achaean influence the Cretans characteristically did not make much of death and funerary rites," notes Hawkes. "The attitude of the Achaean elite was quite otherwise."' Now we find evidence of great expenditures of wealth and labor on provisions for the royal and noble dead. And, most tellingly, due partly to the Achaean influence and partly to the mounting threat of another wave of invasions from the European continent, there are clear signs of a growing martial spirit. Just when and how the Mycenaean period began and ended in Crete is still the subject of much controversy. One theory is that the Achaean takeover, both of Crete itself and of what appear to have been khnoan settlements on the Greek mainland, came in the wake of a series of earthquakes and tidal waves that so weakened Minoan civilization it could no longer resist the barbarians pressing down from the north. The difficulty is that the time usually assigned to these disasters is circa 1450 B.C.E., and there is at that time no evidence of an armed invasion of Crete." Nevertheless, whether it was by actual conquest following earthquakes, by a coup brought about by military pressures, or by Achaean chieftains marrying Cretan queens, we do know that during the final centuries of Cretan civilization the island came under the rule of Greek-speaking Achaean kings. And although those men adopted many of the more civilized Minoan ways, they also brought with them a social and ideolbgical organization oriented more toward death than life.
Some of our knowledge about the Mycenaean period comes to us from the so-called Linear-B tablets found in both Crete and the Greek mainland, which have now been deciphered. In the tablets found in both Knossos and Pylos (a Mycenaean settlement on the southern tip of Greece) names of divinities are listed. To the profound satisfaction of those who had long contended there was continuity between Crete and classical Greece, these reveal that the deities of the later Olympian pantheon (Zeus, Hera, Athena, Artemis, Hermes, etc.) were already worshiped, albeit in different forms and contexts, centuries before we next hear of them in Hesiod and Homer.11 In conjunction with the archaeological evidence, these tablets also reveal, as Hawkes put it, "a well-balanced marriage between the Cretan and Achaean divinities." But this Mycenaean marriage of Minoan and Achaean culture was to be short-lived. From the Pylos tablets, many of which were, in Hawkes's words, "drawn up during the last days of peace as part of a vain effort to avert catastrophe," we learn that the Mycenaean wanax, or king, had received advance warning that Pylos was to be attacked. "The emergency was faced without panic," writes Hawkes. "The clerks remained at their benches patiently recording all that was done." Dispositions of rowers were made to provide a defensive fleet. Masons were sent out, presumably to begin to build fortifications along the long unfortified coastline. To equip the soldiers, about a ton of bronze was collected, and nearly two hundred bronzesmiths assembled. Even bronze belonging to sanctuaries of the Goddess was requisitioned in what Hawkes calls "a moving testimony to the crisis of turning from peace to war."Il But it was all to no avail. "There is no sign that the much-needed walls ever went up at Pylos," writes Hawkes. "From the tablets that record the effort to save the kingdom one must turn to the fabric of the royal hall to discover that it failed. The barbarian warriors broke in. They must have been astonished by the painted rooms and the treasure they contained.... When they had finished looting they cared nothing for the building with its unwarlike foreign embellishments. They set fire to it and it burned furiously.... The heat was so great that some of the pottery vessels in the pantries melted into vitreous lumps, while stone was reduced to lime.... In the storerooms and the tax office by the entrance the abandoned tablets were fired to a hardness that was to preserve them for all time."46 And so, one by one, both on the Greek mainland and islands and in Crete, the achievements of this civilization that reached an early high point for cultural evolution were destroyed. "Probably the Story was everywhere much the same, as Mycenae, Tiryns and all the other royal strongholds except Athens were engulfed by the barbarian tide," writes Hawkes. "Dorians in time took all the Peloponnese except Arcadia and went on to dominate Crete, Rhodes and all the adjacent islands. The most venerable of all the royal houses, Knossos, may have been among the last to fall.""
By the eleventh century B.C.E. it was all over. After taking to the mountains, from where for a time they waged guerrilla war against the Dorian settlements, the last pockets of Cretan resistance collapsed.' Along with masses of immigrants, the spirit that had once made Crete, in Homer's words, "a rich and lovely land" now fled the island that had for so long been its home." With time even the existence of the self-confident women-and men-of Minoan Crete was to be forgotten, as was peace, creativity, and the life-sustaining powers of the Goddess.
A Disintegrating World
The fall of Crete approximately three thousand years ago can be said to mark the end of an era. It was an end that, as we have seen, began millennia earlier. Beginning in Europe somewhere around 4300 or 4200 B. C. E., the ancient world was battered by wave after wave of barbarian invasions. After the initial period of destruction and chaos, gradually there emerged the societies that are celebrated in our high school and college textbooks as marking the beginnings of Western civilization.
But concealed within this purportedly grand and glorious beginning was the flaw that has widened into the most dangerous of chasms in our time. After millennia of upward movement in our technological, social, and cultural evolution, an ominous split was now underway. Like the deep cracks left by violent movements of the earth in that time, the breach between our technological and social evolution on the one hand and our cultural evolution on the other would steadily widen. The technological and social movement toward greater complexity of structure and function resumed. But the possibilities for cultural development were now to be stunted-rigidly caged in a dominator society.50
Everywhere society was now becoming male dominant, hierarchic, and warlike. In Anatolia, where the people of Catal Huyuk had lived in peace for thousands of years, the Hittites, an Indo-European people mentioned in the Bible, took over. And although their archaeological remains, such as the great sanctuary at Yazilikaya, show the Goddess was still worshiped, she was increasingly relegated to the status of the wife or mother of new male gods of war and thunder. The pattern was similar in Europe, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. Not only was the Goddess no longer supreme, she was also being transformed into a patroness of war. Indeed, to the people living through these terrifying times, it must have seemed as though the very heavens, once thought to be the abode of a bountiful Goddess, had been captured by antihuman supernatural forces allied with their brutal representatives on earth. Not only was "divinely-ordained" strongman rule and chronic warfare everywhere becoming the norm; there is also considerable evidence that the period from c. 1500 to 1100 B.C.E. was one of uncommonly intense physical as well as cultural chaos. It was during this time that a series of violent volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tidal waves rocked the Mediterranean world. Indeed, so profoundly was the physical environment shaken and rearranged that what happened may account for the tale of Atlantes, an entire continent that supposedly sank during an inconceivably vast and devastating natural disaster. Coupled with these natural terrors came still further man-made terror. From the north the Dorians were pushing deeper and deeper into Europe. Finally Greece and even Crete fell under the onslaught of their iron weapons. In Anatolia, the warlike Hittite empire collapsed under the pressure of new invaders. This move in turn drove the Hittites southward into Syria. The lands of the Levant were also invaded during this period, by both land and sea, by displaced peoples, including the Philistines we read about in biblical accounts. 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. Even as far south as Egypt there were repercussions, as invaders called in hieroglyphics the People from the Sea (believed by many scholars to be Mediterranean refugees) tried to take over the Nile Delta at the beginning of the eleventh century B.C.E. They were defeated by Ramses 111, but we can still see them today on the murals of his funerary temple in Thebes, where they stream past us in ships, chariots, and on foot with families and ox carts.
In Canaan, in what biblical scholars believe were three migratory waves, the Hebrew tribes, now consolidated under the rule of the Levitic warrior-priests, began a series of wars of conquest." As we can still read in the Bible, despite their war god Jehovah's promises of victory, it took them hundreds of years to overcome the Canaanite resistancewhich is variously explained in the Bible as decreed by God to provide his people practice in warfare, to test and punish them, or to keep cultivated areas from desolation until the invaders' numbers would be sufficiently increased." As we can also still read in the Bible, for example in Deuteronomy 3:3-6, the practice of these 'divinely inspired' invaders was of "utterly destroying the men, women, and children of every city. "
All over the ancient world populations were now set against populations, as men were set against women and against other men. Wandering over the width and breadth of this disintegrating world, masses of refugees were everywhere fleeing their homelands, desperately searching for a haven, for a safe place to go. But there was no such place left in their new world. For this was now a world where, having violently deprived the Goddess and the female half of humanity of all power, gods and men of war ruled. It was a world in which the Blade, and not the Chalice, would henceforth be supreme, a world in which peace and harmony would be found only in the myths and legends of a long lost past.
The Other Half of History: Part I
Like travellers through a time warp, we have, through archaeological discoveries, journeyed into a different reality. On the other side we found not the brutal stereotypes of an eternally depraved 'human nature" but amazing vistas of possibilities for a better life. We saw how in the early days of civilization our cultural evolution was truncated and then completely turned around. We saw how when our social and technological evolution resumed it was in a different direction. But we also saw how the old roots of civilization were never eradicated. The old love for life and nature and the old ways of sharing rather than taking away, of caring for rather than oppressing, and the view of power as responsibility rather than domination did not die out. But, like women and qualities associated with femininity, they were relegated to a secondary place. Neither did the human yearning for beauty, truth, justice, and peace disappear. Rather, it was submerged and suppressed by the new social order. The old yearning would still occasionally struggle for expression. But increasingly it would be without any clear sense that the underlying problem was a way of structuring human relations (beginning with the relation between the two halves of humanity) into rigid, force-based rankings. So successful had the transformation of reality been that this seemingly self-evident fact-that the way a society structures the most fundamental of human relations profoundly affects all aspects of living and thinking-was in time almost totally obscured. As a result, even our complex modem languages, with technical terms for everything one can and cannot imagine, have no gender-specific words to describe the profound difference between what we have until now called a dominator and a partnership society. At best, we have words like matriarchy to describe the opposite of patriarchy. But these words only reinforce the prevailing view of reality (and 'human nature") by describing two sides of the same coin. Moreover, by bringing to mind emotion-laden and conflicting images of tyrannical fathers and wise old men, patriarchy does not even accurately describe our present system. Partnership and dominator are useful terms to describe the two contrasting principles of organization we have been examining. But though they capture an essential difference, they do not specifically convey one critical point: there are two contrasting ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity that profoundly affect the totality of a social system. We are now at the point where for both clarity and economy of communication we need more precise terms than those offered by our conventional vocabulary in order to continue probing how these two alternatives affect our cultural, social, and technological evolution. We are also about to take a close look at the civilization of ancient Greece, which was noted for the first precise expression of scientific thinking. The two new terms I propose, and will in certain contexts be using as alternatives to dominator and partnership, draw from this precedent. 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.' Gy derives from the Greek root word gyne, or "woman." An derives from andros, or "man." The letter I 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 1 stands for the resolution of our problems through the freeing of both halves of humanity from the stultifying and distorting rigidity of roles imposed by the domination hierarchies inherent in androcratic systems. This leads to a critical distinction between two very different kinds of hierarchies that is not made in conventional usage. As used here, the term hierarchy refers to systems of human rankings based on forceor the threat of force. These domination hierarchies are very different from a second type of hierarchy, which I propose be called actualization hierarchies. These are the familiar hierarchies of systems within systems, for examples, of molecules, cells, and organs of the body: a progression toward a higher, more evolved, and more complex level of function. By contrast, as we may see all around us, domination hierarchies characteristically inhibit the actualization of higher functions, not only in the overall social system, but also in the individual human. This is a major reason that a gylanic model of social organization opens up far greater evolutionary possibilities for our future than an androcratic one.
continued ...
The Other Half of History: Part 2
Almost two thousand years ago on the shores of Lake Galilee a gentle and compassionate young Jew called Jesus denounced the ruling classes of his time-not just the rich and powerful but even the religious authorities-for exploiting and oppressing the people of Palestine. He preached universal love and taught that the meek, humble, and weak would some day inherit the earth. Beyond this, in both his words and actions he often rejected the subservient and separate position that his culture assigned women. Freely associating with women, which was itself a form of heresy in his time, Jesus proclaimed the spiritual equality of all. Not surprisingly, according to the Bible, the authorities of his time considered Jesus a dangerous revolutionary whose radical ideas had to be silenced at all cost. How truly radical these ideas were from the perspective of an androcratic system in which the ranking of men over women is the model for all human rankings is succinctly expressed in Galatians 3:28. For here we read that for those who know the gospel of Jesus, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Some Christian theologians, such as Leonard Swidler, have asserted that Jesus was a feminist, because even from the official or "sacred" texts it is clear that he rejected the rigid segregation and subordination of women of his time.' But feminism has as its primary aim the liberation of women. So to call Jesus a feminist would not be historically accurate. lt would seem more accurate to say that Jesus' teachings embody a gylanic view of human relations.
This view was not new and was, as we have noted, also contained in those portions of the Old Testament congruent with a partnership society. But it was obviously most forcefully-indeed, in the eyes of the religious elites of his time, heretically-articulated by this young carpenter from Galilee. For although the liberation of women was not his central focus, if we look at what Jesus preached from the new perspective of cultural transformation theory, we see a startling, and unifying, theme: a vision of the liberation of all humanity through the replacement of androcratic with gylanic values.
Jesus and Gylany
The writings in the New Testament attributed to disciples who had ostensibly known Jesus, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are generally considered the best source on the "real" Jesus. Although they too were written years after Jesus died, and were undoubtedly heavily edited, they are probably still a more accurate reflection of Jesus' teachings than other portions, such as Acts or Corinthians. Here we find that the cornerstone of dominator ideology, the masculine-superior/feminine-inferior species model is, but for a few exceptions, conspicuous by its absence. Instead, permeating these writings is Jesus' message of spiritual equality. Even more striking-and all-pervasive-are Jesus' teachings that we must elevate "feminine virtues" from a secondary or supportive to a primary and central position. We must not be violent but instead turn the other cheek; we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us; we must love our neighbors and even our enemies. Instead of the "masculine virtues" of toughness, aggressiveness, and dominance, what we must value above all else are mutual responsibility, compassion, gentleness, and love. When we look closely, not only at what Jesus taught but at how he went about disseminating his message, time and time again we find that what he was preaching was the gospel of a partnership society. He rejected the dogma that high-ranking men-in Jesus' day, priests, nobles, rich men, and kings-ate the favorites of God. He mingled freely with women, thus openly rejecting the male-supremacist norms of his time. And in sharp contrast to the views of later Christian sages, who actually debated whether woman has an immortal soul, Jesus did not preach the ultimate dominator message: that women are spiritually inferior to men.
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. Curiously, perhaps the most compelling argument for the historicity of Jesus is his feminist and gylanic thought and actions. For, as we have seen, the overriding requirement of the system has been the manufacture of gods and heroes that support rather than reject androcratic values. It is thus hard to see why a figure would have been invented who, as we read in John 4:7-27, violated the androcratic customs of his time by talking openly with women. Or whose disciples "marveled" that he should talk at all with women, and then at such great length. Or who would not condone the customary stoning to death of women who, in the opinion of their male overlords, were guilty of the heinous sin of having sexual relations with a man who was not their master. In Luke 10:38-42, we read how Jesus openly included women among his companions-and even encouraged them to transcend their servile roles and participate actively in public life. He praises the activist Mary over her domestic sister Martha. And in every one of the official Gospels we read about Mary Magdalene and how he treated her-a prostitute-with respect and caring. Even more astonishing, we learn from the Gospels that it is to Mary Magdalene that the risen Christ first appears. Weeping in his empty sepulchre after his death, it is Mary Magdalene who guards his grave. There she has a vision in which Jesus appears to her before he appears in visions to any of his much-publicized twelve male disciples. And it is Mary Magdalene whom the risen Jesus asks to tell the others that he is about to ascend .2 it is not surprising that in his time the teachings of Jesus had-as they still have-great appeal to women. Although Christian historians rarely refer to this, even in the official scriptures or New Testament, we find women who are Christian leaders. For example, in Acts 9:36 we read of a disciple of Jesus called Tabitha or Dorcas, conspicuous for her absence from the well-known, official count of twelve. In Romans 16:7 we find Paul respectfully greeting a woman apostle named Junia, whom he describes as senior to himself in the movement. "Greet Mary, who bestowed labor on us," we read. "Salute Andronicus and junia, my kin and my fellow prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me" (emphasis added). Some scholars believe that the New Testament epistle Hebrews may actually have been written by a woman named Priscilla. The wife of Aquila, she is described in the New Testament as working with Paul, with her name usually mentioned before that of her husband. And as the historical theologian Constance Parvey points out, in Acts 2:17 we find the explicit designation of women as prophets. Here we read, "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (emphases added). So, clearly, despite the very strong social pressures of that time for rigid male dominance, women took leading roles in the first Christian communities. As the theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza points out, this is further confirmed by the fact that so many meetings of early Christians mentioned in the New Testament were in women's houses. In Colossians 4:15, for example, we read of the church in the house of Nympha. In 1 Corinthians 1:11 we read of the church in the household of Chloe. In Acts 15:14, 15 and 40 we read that the church in Philippa began with the conversion of the businesswoman Lydia. And so on and on .4 As already noted, in this same New Testament we keep reading about Mary Magdalene. This woman who, as a prostitute, has violated that most fundamental androcratic law that she should be the sexual chattel of her husband or master is clearly an important member of the early Christian movement. In fact, as we shall see, there is compelling evidence that Mary Magdalene was a leader of the early Christian movement after Jesus died. Indeed, she is portrayed in one suppressed document as sharply resisting the reimposition within some Christian sects themselves of the kinds of rankings Jesus challenged-evidence that would obviously not be included in the scriptures the leaders of these sects were to put together as the New Testament. To the androcratic mind the idea that Jesus was involved in a gylanic counter-revolution is inconceivable. To paraphrase the parable, it would seem easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for such a notion to enter the minds of fundamentalists whose cars today bear bumper stickers exhorting others to "get right with Jesus." To begin with, why would Jesus have concerned himself with the elevation of women and feminine values from their subservient place? To them it would seem obvious that, being who he was, Jesus would have been consumed by far more important concerns-which, by conventional definition, rules out anything that could be called women's issues. It is, in fact, remarkable that Jesus taught what he did. For Jesus was himself an androcratic product, a Jew born into a time when Judaism was still rigidly male dominant. This was a time when, as we read in John 8:3-11, women were still regularly stoned to death for adultery, in other words, for violating their husband's or master's sexual property rights. It is in this instance most revealing that Jesus not only prevented such a stoning but in so doing defied the scribibs and Pharisees who deliberately set up this situation to trap him into revealing himself as a dangerous rebel. There is, however, a way in which Jesus' gylanic teachings are not so remarkable. Jesus has long been recognized as one of the greatest spiritual figures of all time. By any criterion of excellence, the figure portrayed in the Bible displays an exceptionally high level of sensitivity and intelligence as well as the courage to stand up to established authority and, even at the risk of his life, speak out against cruelty, oppression, and greed. So it is not surprising that Jesus should have been aware that the "masculine" values of dominance, inequality, and conquest he could see all around him debasing and distorting human life must be replaced by a softer, more 'feminine" set of values based on compassion, responsibility, and love. Jesus' recognition that our spiritual evolution has been stunted by a way of structuring human relations based on violence-backed rankings could have led to a fundamental social transformation. It could have freed us from the androcratic system. But as in other times of gylanic resurgence, the system's resistance was too strong. And in the end the church fathers left us a New Testament in which this perception is often smothered by the superimposition of the completely contradictory dogmas required to justify the Church's later androcratic structure and goals.
The Suppressed Scriptures
The reality of old masterpieces has often been revealed by art restorers, who must scrape away layer upon layer of distorting overpainting, grime, and old shellac. In the same way, the gylanic Jesus is now being revealed by the new scholarship of theologians and religious historians probing beneath and beyond the New Testament. To gain a better understanding of the real nature of early Christianity, we have to go outside the official scriptures contained in the New Testament to other ancient Christian documents, some of which have only recently been found. Of these, the most important-and revealing-are the fifty-two Gnostic gospels unearthed in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, an outlying province of Upper Egypt.-I Elaine Pagels, a professor of religious studies at Princeton, writes in her book The Gnostic Gospels, that "those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard themselves as 'heretics.' "I Nonetheless, much of what has been previously known about such "heretic" scriptures came from the men who attacked them-which would hardly be calculated to give us an objective view. In fact, the men who starting about 200 C.E. took control of what later was called the 'orthodox," or only true, church ordered all copies of such texts destroyed. But, as Pagels writes, "Someone, possibly a monk from the nearby monastery at St. Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction-in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1600 years."I And duefo a series of events that read like a detective story, it took another thirty-four years after the discovery of these suppressed Gnostic gospels before scholars completed their study and Pagels's.book at last brought them to public attention in 1979. According to Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University, some of these recently discovered sacred Christian writings are older than the Gospels of the New Testament. He writes that they date to "possibly as early as the second half of the first century (50-100)-as early as, or earlier, than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and john."I The Gnostic gospels were thus written at a time when androcracy had already been the Westem norm for a very long time. They are not gylanic documents. And yet, what we find in them is a powerful challenge to the norms of a dominator society. The term gnostic derives from the Greek word gnosis, or knowledge. This is in contrast to the still widely used term agnostic, for one who believes such knowledge cannot be known with certainty, or is unknowable. Like other mystical Westem and Eastern religious traditions, Gnostic Christianity held the seeming unheretical view that the mystery of higher or divine truth is knowable to all of us through religious discipline and moral living. What then was so heretical about Gnosticism that it had to be banned? Specifically, what we find in these Gnostic gospels is the same idea that caused the Hebrew priesthood to revile and seek to do away with Jesus. This is that access to the deity need not go through a religious hierarchy headed by a chief rabbi, high bishop, or pope. It is, rather, available directly through gnosis, or divine knowledge-without having to pay homage or tithes to an authoritarian priesthood. What we also find in these scriptures that were suppressed by the "orthodox" Christian priesthoods is the confirmation of something long suspected both from a reading of the official scriptures and from Gnostic fragments discovered earlier. This is that Mary Magdalene was one of the most important figures in the early Christian movement. In the Gospel of Mary we again read that she was the first to see the risen Christ (as is also recorded in passing in the official Gospels of Mark and John).' Here we also read that Christ loved Mary Magdalene more than all the rest of the disciples,,,as is also confirmed in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip." But just how important a part Mary may have played in the history of early Christianity only comes to light in these suppressed scriptures. What we read in the Gospel of Mary is that after the death of Jesus Mary Magdalene was the Christian leader who had the courage to challenge the authority of Peter as the head of a new religious hierarchy based on the claim that only he and his priests and bishops had a direct line to the godhead." 'Consider the political implications of the Gospel of Mary," comments Pagels"As Mary stands up to Peter, so the gnostics who take her as their prototype challenge the authority of those priests and bishops who claim to be Peter's successors."" There were other related, and equally fundamental, doctrinal differences between the emerging and increasingly hierarchic church headed by Peter and other early Christian communities, such as most Gnostics and sects hke the Montanists and Marcionites. Not only did these sects, in contrast to the men now described as the fathers of the church, honor women as disciples, as prophets, and as founders of Chrisfianity; as part of their finn commitment to Jesus' teachings of spiritual equality, they also included women in their leadership. To even further emphasize the basic gylanic principle of linking and to avoid permanent rankings some Gnostic sects chose their leadership at each meeting by lot. This we actually know from the writings of such enemies of Gnosticism as Bishop Irenaeus, who supervised the church in Lyons circa 180 C.E." 'At a time when the orthodox Christians increasingly discriminate between clergy and laity," writes Pagels, "this group of gnostic Christans demonstrated that, among themselves, they refused to acknowledge such distincfion. Instead of ranking their members into superior and inferior 'orders' within a hierarchy, they followed the principle of strict equality. All initiates, men and women alike, participated equally in the drawing: anyone might be selected to serve as priest, bishop, or prophet. Furthermore, because they cast lots at each meeting, even the distinctions established by lot could never become permanent ranks.' For the androcratic Christians who were everywhere seizing power on the basis of rank, such practices were horrible abominations. For example, Tertullian, who wrote circa 190 C.E. for the "orthodox" position, was outraged that "they all have access equally, they listen equally, they pray equally-even pagans if they happen to come." He was similarly outraged that "they also share the kiss of peace with all who come."" But what outraged Tertullian most-as ell it might, since it threatened the very foundation of the hierarchic infrastructure he and his fellow bishops were trying to impose in the church-was the equal position of women. "Tertullian protests especially the participation of 'those women among the heretics' who shared with men positions of authority," notes Pagels. " 'They teach, they engage in discussion; they exorcise; they cure'-he suspects that they might even baptize, which meant that they also acted as bishops!' " To men like Tertullian only one "heresy" was even greater than the idea of men and women as spiritual equals. This was the idea that most fundamentally threatened the growing power of the men who were now setting themselves up as the new "princes of the church": the idea of the divine as female. And this-as we can still read in the Gnostic gospels and other sacred Christian documents not included in the official or New Testament scriptures-was precisely what some of the early followers of Jesus preached. Following the earlier, and apparently still remembered, tradition in which the Goddess was seen as the Mother and Giver of All, the followers of Valentinus and Marcus prayed to the Mother as the "mystical and eternal Silence," as "Grace, She who is before all things," and as "incorruptible Wisdom.""I In another text, the Trimorphic Protennoia (literally translated, the Triple-Formed Primal Thought) we find a celebrafion of such powers as thought, intelligence, and foresight as feminine-again following the earlier tradition in which these powers were seen as attributes of the Goddess. The text opens as a divine figure speaks: "I am Protennoia the Thought that dwells in the Light ... She who exists before the All.... I move in every creature.... I am the Invisible One within the All.... I am perception and Knowledge, uttering a Voice by means of Thought. I am the real Voice." '
In another text, attributed to the Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, par adise itself-the place where life began-is described as the Mother's womb.11 And in teachings attributed to Marcus or Theodotus (circa 160 C.E.), we read that "the male and female elements together constitute the finest production of the Mother, Wisdom."Il Whatever form these "heresies" took, they clearly derived from the earlier religious tradition when the Goddess was worshiped and priest esses were her earthly representatives. Accordingly, almost uniformly divine wisdom was personified as female-as it still is in such feminine words as the Hebrew hokma and the Greek sophia, both meaning "wisdom" or 'divine knowledge," as well as in other ancient mystical traditions, both Eastem and Western. Another form these heresies took was the "unorthodox" way they depicted the holy family. "One group of gnostic sources claims to have received a secret tradition from Jesus through James and through Mary Magdalene," reports Pagels. "Members of this group prayed to both the divine Father and Mother: 'From Thee, Father, and through Thee, Mother, the two immortal names, Parents of the divine being, and thou, dweller in heaven, humanity, of the mighty name.' " Similarly, the teacher and poet Valentinus taught that although the deity is essentially indescribable, the divine can be imaged as a dyad consisting of both the female and the male principles. Others were more literal, insisting that the divine is to be considered androgynous. Or they described the holy spirit as feminine, so that in conventional Catholic Trinity terms, out of the union of the Father with the Holy Spirit or Divine Mother, came their Son, the Messiah Christ.
The Gylanic Heresies
These early Christians not only threatened the growing power of the "fathers of the church"; their ideas were also a direct challenge to the male-dominated family. Such views undermined the divinely or dained authority of male over female on which the patriarchal family is based. Biblical scholars have frequently noted that early Christianity was perceived as a threat by both Hebrew and Roman authorities. This was not just because of the Christians' unwillingness to worship the em peror and give loyalty to the state. Professor S. Scott Bartchy, former director of the Institute for the Study of Christian Origins at Tiibingen, West Germany, points out that an even more compelling reason the chings of Jesus and his followers were perceived as dangerously radical was that they called into question existing family traditions. They considered women persons in their own right. Their fundamental threat, Bartchy concludes, was that the original Christians "disrespected" both the Roman and the Jewish family structures of their day, both of which subordinated women.1' If we look at the family as a microcosm of the larger world-and as the only world a small and pliable child knows-this "disrespect" for the male-dominated family, in which father's word is law, can be seen as a m@jor threat to a syst,em based on force-backed ranking. It explains why those who in our time would force us back to the "good old days" when women and 'lesser men" still knew their place make a return to the "traditional" family their top priority. It also sheds new light on the struggle that tore apart the world two thousand years ago when Jesus preached his gospel of compassion, nonviolence, and love. There are many interesting similarities between our time and those turbulent years when the mighty Roman Empire-one of the most powerful dominator societies of all time-began to break down. Both are periods of what "chaos" theorists call states of increasing systems disequilibrium, times when unprecedented and unpredictable systems changes can come about. 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. This is no great surprise, for it is during such periods of great social disruption that, as the Nobel-Prize-winning thermodynamicist Ilya Prigogine writes, initially small "fluctuations" can lead to systems transformation .27 If we look at early Christianity as an initially small fluctuation that first appeared on the fringes of the Roman Empire (in the little province of judaea), its potential for our cultural evolution acquires new meaning and its failure an even greater poignancy. Moreover, if we look at early Christianity within this larger framework, which views what happens in all systems as interconnected, we may also see there were other manifestations of gylanic resurgence, even within Rome itself. In Rome, for example, educafion was changing so that aristocratic girls and boys were sometimes offered the same curriculum. As the historical theologian Constance Parvey writes, "within the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. many women were educated, and some were highly influenfial and exercised great freedom in public life."I There were still legal restricfions. Roman women had to have male guardians and were never given the right to vote. But, parficularly in the upper classes, women increasingly entered public life. Some took up the arts. Others went into professions such as medicine. Sill others took part in business, court, and social Iffe, engaged in athlefics, went to theaters, sporing events, and concerts, and traveled without being required to have male escorts. In other words, as both Parvey and Pagels note, there was during this period a movement toward the "emancipafion" of women. There were other challenges to the androcratic system, such as slave rebellions and rebellions of outlying provinces. There was the Jewish uprising under Bar Kokhba (132-135 C.E.) that was to mark the end of Judaea.1 But as androcracy's force-based rankings were challenged, as early Chrisfians espoused nonviolence and spoke of compassion and peace, Rome became even more despofic and violent. As the excesses of its emperors (including the Chrisfian Constanfine) and the famous circuses of the Roman Empire all too hideously reveal, the gylanic challenge to this bloody dominator society failed. Indeed, even within Chrisfianity itself, gylany was not to succeed.
The Pendulum Swings Back
'Despite the Orevious public activity of Christian women," Pagels observes, "by the year 200, the majority of Christian communities endorsed as canonical the pseudo-Pauline letter of Timothy, which stresses (and exaggerates) the anfi-feminist element in Paul's views: 'Let a woman leam in silence with all subn-dssiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men: she is to keep silent.'. . . By the end of the second century, women's participation in worship was explicitly condemned: groups in which women continued on to leadership were branded as herefical."" As Pagels further writes, "Whosoever investigates the early history of Chrisfianity (the field called 'patristics'-that is, study of 'the fathers of the Church') will be prepared for the passage that concludes the Gospel of Thomas: 'Simon Peter said to them (the disciples): Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life.' Jesus said, 'I myself shall lead her, in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' "
Such an outright exclusion of one half of humanity from being worthy of life-even more ironically, the half from whose body life itself comes forth-makes sense only in the context of the androcratic regression and repression that now set in. It serves to verify what so many of us have known deep inside without being able to pinpoint just what it was: something went terribly wrong with Christianity's original gospel of love. How otherwise could such a gospel be used to justify afl the torture, conquest, and bloodletting carried out by devout Christians against others, and against one another, that makes up so much of our Westem history? For in the end, there was in the Western world an unpredictable and dramatic systems change. Out of the chaos of the breakdown of the classical world of Rome, a new era took form. What began as a minor mystery cult became the new Western religion. But although its continual message was of the transformation of both self and society, instead of transforming society this "peripheral invader" was itself transformed. Like others before it and most since then, Christianity became an androcratic religion. The Roman Empire was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire. Already by 200 C.E., in this classic case of spirituality stood on its head, Christianity was well on its way to becon-dng precisely the kind of hierarchical and violence-based system Jesus had rebelled against. And after Emperor Constantine's conversion, it became an official arm, that is, the servant, of the state. As Pagels writes, when 'Christianity became an officially approved religion in the fourth century, Christian bishops, previously victimized by the police, now commanded them. "I According to Christian histories, it is said that in 312 C.E., on the day before Constantine defeated and killed his rival Maxentius and was proclaimed emperor, he saw in the setting sun a divinely sent vision: a cross inscribed with the words in hoc signo victor seris (in this sign you will be victor). 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. 34 Butthe bloodshed and repression that ushered in the Christianization of Europe was not confined to Constantine's private acts. Nor was it confined to his public acts and those of his Christian successors, such as later edicts that heresy to the Church was now a treasonous act punishable by torture and death. It was now to become standard practice for Church leaders themselves to command the torture and execution of all who would not accept the 'new order." It was also to become standard practice to methodically suppress all "heretical" information that could conceivably threaten this new androcratic hierarchy's rule. Rather than being pure spirit and both mother and father, God was now explicitly male. And, as Pope Paul Vi was still to assert nearly two thousand years later, in 1977, women were barred from the priesthood "because our Lord was a man." At the same time, the Gnostic gospels and other texts like them, which had circulated freely in the Christian communities at the beginning of the Christian era, were de nounced and destroyed as heresies by those who now called them selves the orthodox, that is, the only legitimate, church. As Pagels writes, all these sources-'secret gospels, revelations, mystical teachings-are among those not included in the select list that constitutes the New Testament collection.... Every one of the secret texts which gnostic groups revered was on-dtted from the canonical collection, and branded as heretical by those who called themselves orthodox Christians. By the time the process of sorting the various writings ended-probably as late as the year 200-virtually all the fem inine imagery for God had disappeared from orthodox tradition. 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 communifies 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 Chris tian martyrs. gut for the men who were now everywhere using Chris tianity to establish their rule, Christian fife and Christian ideology had to be made to fit into the androcratic mold. As the years went by, the Christianization of Europe's heathens became the excuse for once again firmly reinstating the dominator tenet that might makes light. This not only required the defeat or forceful conversion of all who did not embrace official Christianity; it also re quired the systematic destruction of -pagan" temples, shrines, and "idols" and the closing of the ancient Greek academies where "heretic" inquiry was still pursued. So successful was the Church's proof of "moral" right by might that until the Renaissance, over a thousand years later, any artistic expression or pursuit of empirical knowledge that was not 'blessed" by the Church was practically nonexistent in Europe. And so thorough was the systematic destruction of all extant knowledge, including the mass burning of books, that it even spread outside of Europe, to wherever Christian authority could reach. Thus, in 391 C.E., under Theodosius 1, the now thoroughly andro craticized 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 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, Hyatia. For this woman, now recognized as one of the greatest scholars of all time, was according to Cyril an iniquitous female who had even presumed, against God's commandments, to teach men. In the officially sanctioned writings, Paulist-or as scholars are increasingly discovering, pseudo-Paulist-dogmas authoritatively reasserted that woman and all that is labeled feminine is inferior and so dangerous that it must be strictly controlled. There were still a few exceptions, notably the writings of Clement of Alexandria, who still characterized God as both feminine and masculine and wrote that "the name 'humanity' is common to both men and women."I But in the main, the model for human relations proposed by Jesus in which male and female, rich and poor, Gentile and Jew are all one was expurgated from the ideologies as well as the day-to-day practices of the orthodox Christian Church. The men in control of the new orthodox Church might in ritual raise the ancient Chalice, now become the cup of Holy Communion filled with the symbolic blood of Christ, but in fact the Blade was once again ascendant over all. Under the sword and fire of the alliance of Church and ruling class fell not only pagans, such as Mithraists, Jews, or devotees of the old mystery religions of Eleusis and Delphi, but also any Christian who would not knuckle under and accept their rule. 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. And so, ironically, Jesus' revolution of nonviolence, in the course of which he died on the cross, was converted into rule by force and terror. As the historians Will and Ariel Durant noted, in its distortion and perversion of Jesus' teachings, medieval Christendom was actually a moral setback. Rather than being any longer a threat to the established androcratic order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order. Nonetheless, the struggle of gylany against androcracy was far from over. At certain times and places during the dark centuries of androcratic Chrisfianity-and the despofic kings and popes who ruled Europe in its name-the gylanic urge to resume our cultural evolution would reemerge. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, this continuing struggle has been the major unseen force shaping Westem history and is once again in our time corning to a head.
Breakthrough in Evolution: Toward a Partnership Future
Science fiction writers' visions of the future are filled with incredible technological inventions. But by and large, theirs is a world singularly bereft of new social inventions. In fact, more often than not, what they envision takes us backward while seeming to go forward in time. Be it in Frank Herbert's Dune' or George Lucas's Star Wars, what we frequently find is actuall' the social organization of feudal emperors and medieval overlords transposed to a world of intergalactic high-tech wars. After five thousand years of living in a dominator society, it is indeed difficult to imagine a different world. Charlotte Perkins Gilman tried in Harland. Written in 1915, this was a tongue-in-cheek utopia about a peaceful and highly creative society in which the most valued and rewarded work-and the top social priority-was the physical, mental, and spiritual development of children. The catch was that this was a world where all the men had wiped themselves out in a final orgy of war, and the handful of surviving women had, in an amazing mutation, saved their half of humanity by teaming to reproduce themselves all by themselves. But as we have seen, the problem is not men as a sex, but men and women as they must be socialized in a dominator system. There were men and women in the Neolithic and in Crete. There are men and women among the peaceful !Kung and BaMbuti. And even in our male-dominated world not all women are peaceful and gentle, and many men are. Clearly both men and women have the biological potential for many different kinds of behaviors. But like the external armor or shell that encases insects and other arthropods, androcratic social organization encases both halves of humanity in rigid and hierarchic roles that stunt their development. If we look at our evolution from the perspective of androcracy and gylany as the two possibilities for human social orga nization, we see that it is not by accident that the sociobiologists who are today trying to revitalize androcratic ideology with yet another in fusion of nineteenth-century social Darwinism so frequently cite insect societies to support their theories. Neither is it accidental that their writings reinforce the view that the normative model for rigidly hier archic social rankings-the male-dominator/female-dominated model of human relations-is preprogrammed in our genes. As many scientists have pointed out, evolution is not predeter mined.1 On the contrary, from the very beginning we have been active co-creators in our own evolution. For example, as Sherwood Washburn wrote, our invention of tools was both the cause and effect of the bi-pedal locomotion and erect posture that freed our hands to fashion ever more complex technologies.' And, as both technology and society have grown more complex, the survival of our species has become increasingly dependent on the direction, not of our biological, but of our cultural evolution. Human evolution is now at a crossroads. Stripped to its essentials, the central human task is how to organize society to promote the survival of our species and the development of our unique potentials. In the course of this book we have seen that androcracy cannot meet this requirement because of its inbuilt emphasis on technologies of destruction, its dependence on violence for social control, and the tensions chronically engendered by the dominator-dominated human relations model upon which it is based. We have also seen that a gylanic or artnership society, symbolized by the life-sustaining and enhancing Chalice rather than the lethal Blade, offers us a viable alternative. The question is how do we get from here to there?
A New View of Reality
Scientists like Ilya Prigogine and Niles Eldredge tell us that bifurcations or evolutionary branchings in chemical and biological systems involve a large element of chance.' But as the evolutionary theorist Erwin Laszlo points out, bifurcations in human social systems also involve a large element of choice. Humans, he points out, "have the ability to act consciously, and collectively," exercising foresight to choose their own evolutionary path." And he adds that in our "crucial epoch" we "cannot leave the selection of the next step in the evolution of human society and culture to chance. We must plan for it, consciously and purposefully." Or as the biologist Jonas Salk writes, our most urgent and pressing need is to provide that wonderful instrument, the human mind, with the wherewithal to image, and thereby create, a better world .8 Initially this may seem an impossibly difficult task. But as we have seen, our views of reality-of what is possible and desirable-are a product of history. And perhaps the best proof that our ideas, symbols, myths, and behaviors can be changed is the evidence that such changes were in fact effected in our prehistory. We have seen how the image of woman was once venerated and respected in most of the ancient world and how images of women as merely sexual objects to be possessed and dominated by men became predominant only after the androcratic conquests. We have also seen how the meaning of symbols such as the tree of knowledge and the serpent that sheds its skin in periodic renewal were completely reversed after that critical bifurcation in our cultural evolution. Now seemingly firmly associated with terrible punishment for questioning male dominance and autocratic rule, these same symbols were not so long ago in evolutionary time seen as manifestations of the human thirst for liberation through higher or mystical knowledge. We have seen that even after the imposition of androcratic rule, the meaning of our most important symbols has often shifted radically through the impact of gylanic resurgence or androcratic regression. A striking example is the cross. The original meaning of the crosses incised on prehistoric figurines of the Goddess and other religious objects appears to have been her identification with the birth and growth of plant, animal, and human life. This was the meaning that survived into Egyptian hieroglyphics, where the cross stands for life and living, forming part of such words as health and happiness.' Later, after impaling people on stakes became a common way to execute them (as shown in Assyrian, Roman, and other androcratic art), the cross became a symbol of death. Later still, the more gylanic followers of Jesus again tried to transform the cross on which he was executed into a symbol of rebirth-a symbol associated with a social movement that set out to preach and practice human equality and such "feminine" concepts as gentleness, compassion, and peace.11 In our time, centuries after this movement was co-opted by the androcratic/dominator system, the way we interpret ancient symbols and myths still plays an important part in how we shape both our present and our future. At the, same time that some of our religious and political leaders would have us believe a nuclear Armageddon may actually be the will of God," we are seeing a vast reaffirmation of the desire for life, not death, in an accelerated, and indeed unprecedented, movement to restore ancient myths and symbols to their original gylanic meaning. For instance, artists like Imogene Cunningham and Judy Chicago are for the first time in recorded history using female sexual imagery in ways that are strikingly reminiscent of Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Cretan symbolisms of birth, rebirth, and transformation. Also for the first time in recorded history, images from nature, such as seals, birds, dolphins, and the green forests and grasses-in earlier times symbols of the unity of all life under the Goddess's divine power-are being used by the ecology movement to reawaken in us the consciousness of our essential link with our natural environment.
Often unconsciously, the process of unraveling and reweaving the fabric of our mythical tapestry into more gylanic patterns-in which masculine" virtues such as 'the conquest of nature" are no longer realized-is in fact already well under Way.
What is still lacking is the 'critical mass" of new images and myths that is required for their actualization by a sufficient number of people. Perhaps 'most important is that women and men are increasingly questioning the most basic assumption of androcratic society: that both male dominance and the male violence of warfare are inevitable. Among studies by anthropologists bearing on this point, a cross-cul tural study conducted by Shirley and John McConahay found a sig nificant correlation between the rigid sexual stereotypes required to maintain male dominance and the incidence of not only warfare, but wife beating, child beating, and rape." As will be detailed in a second book continuing our reports, these systems correlations are verified by a growing number of new studies undertaken precisely because scientists in many disciplines are beginning to question the prevailing models of reality." Moreover, by studying both halves of humanity, scientists are today in ground-breaking ways expanding our knowledge about the possibilities for human society, as well as for the evolution of human consciousness. Indeed, from the perspective of cultural transformation theory, the much written about modern 'revolution in consciousness" can be seen s the transformation of androcratic to gylanic consciousness.'9 An im portant index of this transformation is that, for the first time in recorded history, many women and men are frontally challenging destructive myths, such as the "hero as killer. "'O They are becoming aware of what "heroic" stories ranging from those of Theseus to Rambo and james Bond actually teach us and demanding that children of both Aexes be taught to value caring and affiliation instead of conquest and domination." In Sweden, laws have already been enacted to phase out the sale of war toys, which have traditionally served to teach boys lack of empathy with those they hurt, as well as all the other attitudes and behaviors that men require for killing others of their kind.1 And peace demonstrations by millions of people all over this planet are dramatic evidence of a renewed consciousness of our connectedness with all of humanity. Women and men all over the world are, for the first time in such large numbers, frontally challenging the male-dominator/female-dominated human relations model that is the foundation of a dominator worldview.23 At the same time that the idea of the "war of the sexes" is being exposed as a consequence of this model, its further result of seeing "the other" as "the enemy" is also being challenged. There is, most significantly, a growing awareness that the emerging higher consciousness of our global "partnership" is integrally related to a fundamental reexamination and transformation of the roles of both women and men.' As the psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller writes, in society as presently constituted only women are "geared to be carriers of the basic necessity for human communion"26-and to in fact value their affiliations with others more highly than even themselves. In contrast to men, who are generally socialized to pursue their own ends, even at the expense of others, women are socialized to see themselves primarily as responsible for the welfare of others, even at the expense of their own well-being.21 This dichotomization of human experience, as Miller extensively documents, creates psychic distortions in both women and men. Women tend to be so overidenfified with others that the threatened loss, or even disruption, of an affiliation can be, as she writes, "perceived not as just a loss of a relationship but as something closer to a total loss of self." Men, on the other hand, often tend to see their human need for affiliation as "an impediment" or "a danger." Thus, they can perceive service to others not as something central but rather secondary to their self-image, something a man "may desire or can afford only after he has fulfilled the primary requirements of manhood. These views of gender roles and of reality are, as we have seen, fundamental to androcratic society. But, as Miller writes, "it is extremely important to recognize that the pull toward affiliation that women feel in themselves is not wrong or backward.... What has not been recognized is that this psychic starting point contains the possibilities for an entirely different (and more advanced) approach to living and functioning-very different, that is, from the approach fostered by the dominant culture...