If You Liked Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade
If you liked Riane Eisler's groundbreaking book The Chalice and the Blade, you will almost certainly like Switching to Goddess.
In many ways, Switching to Goddess is a 21st-century update of The Chalice and the Blade -- only Switching's written by an archaeologist and tries to "clean up" some of the analytic, interpretive and other flaws Chalice has been accused of over the years. That Chalice might contain such flaws should come as no surprise, since although much of it is based on archaeological data, Eisler had no background in archaeology.
First published by Harper & Row in 1987, Chalice swept through the literate world like lava spilling over the sides of a volcano. Well-known British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu called it "the most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species," and Hungarian systems theorist Ervin Laszlo called it "a seminal work, destined to be debated and discussed for years" and "required reading for anyone concerned about our destiny on earth." According to the Los Angeles Weekly, Chalice was not only "the most significant work published in our lifetimes," but also one that might even "make the future possible" (Eisler 1988, p. ii).
Chalice had its critics, of course, as do all scholarly works, and one of the aims of Switching is to answer and counter these critics, and to offer more, better and newer evidence from more and in some cases less controversial scholars, to support many of the same conclusions reached in Chalice.
At their deepest cores, both Chalice and Switching are about an actual never-never time in human history that predated institutionalized warfare, human violence, and human social ranking. To me, if readers get nothing else out of either book, both Chalice and Switching will have scored landslide victories. How can we humans ever achieve what I call "institutionalized warlessness" if we think we've never achieved it at any point during our two-million-year tenure on the planet?
Although Eisler implies that her pre-4000-BC goddess-centered utopia was the norm across the planet, Switching tries to avoid such sweeping generalizations. It focuses instead on five slices of space/time, which it calls "relatively utopian." These five slices are: Neolithic Southeast Europe; the Neolithic Near East; early Bronze-Age Crete; the early Bronze-Age Indus Valley; and Neolithic Japan. Although Switching makes no generalizing claims that everyone everywhere before c. 4000 BC lived in relatively utopian, goddess-centered societies, what it does do is present expert evidence from several well-respected archaeologists and anthropologists that this was indeed the case for its five space/time slices.
As I said before, I think most of what what makes Chalice (and now Switching) so radically important is this: I know of no one before Eisler who put it so bluntly: contrary to all you've heard, there was a time before war. And if that's true, then humans are not warlike by nature. War is not in our genes. We did warlessness once, we can do it again. This was the Great New Hope that I think sent The Chalice and the Blade racing through the literate world leaving a breathless, careening spiral of joy in its wake, allowing readers to cast off our sour, heavy yoke of hopelessness regarding humanity's future.
Although Chalice seems to imply there's no controversy over the existence of pre-4000-BC warlessness, Switching admits there is a "war going on over war," with "hawks" insisting there's never been a time before war, and "doves" such as archaeologist Raymond C. Kelly and anthropologists Keith Otterbein and Douglas Fry insisting there indeed has been. What Switching does do is argue forcefully for why the doves in this war make more sense than the hawks.
As does Chalice, Switching also tells how we might get our pre-4000-BC golden era back again. Although both books agree we need to recapture that era, they disagree on how this recapture might come about. Eisler's solution has to do with what she calls "partnership" versus "dominator" behavior. Put simply, in the goddess Golden Era, women and men related as equal partners, while in the god-dystopia that followed, they did not. Eisler seems to be saying that mostly what we need to do to recapture the old Great Goddess days is to somehow get men to stop lording it over women.
Switching to Goddess pays attention to male domination of women, but sees it as just one part of a whole carnival of domination that burst upon the scene in the wake of the c. 4000 BC switch.[1] In its five time-place slices, Switching to Goddess sees a switch from everyone and her grandpop being equal, to a situation in which everyone's suddenly perched on a particular rung on a gigantic status ladder. On the lower rungs cling the unimportant, lesser, icky people, while the important, "more" and "cleaner" people cluster together on the rungs toward the top. Everyone dominates those on the rungs below them, and gets dominated by those on the rungs above. So it wasn't just men who began to dominate women -- it was the rich suddenly dominating the poor, adults dominating the elderly, older children dominating younger, people dominating each other on the basis of skin color and other aspects of physical appearance, free people dominating slaves, and so forth.
At any rate, like Chalice, Switching agrees we need to stop ranking, and return to "linking" with each other. But, says Switching, that's just one part of the fix. To return to Guiding-Goddess utopian days we need to do three other things too:
First, drop the sky/war/father gods who first burst onto the scene c. 4000 BC in the Mediterranean area (and later in the Indus Valley, China, Japan, and down the west coast of the Americas). Supersized, superordinate cultural constructs like the "warrior-sovereign-storm god" Yahweh/Jehovah[2] can radically shape societal behavior -- even though on a conscious level we're largely unaware of it.
Second, reinstate the earth/peace/mother goddesses whom these war gods displaced. Just dropping the war gods is not enough. For starters, knowing what we do about the ubiquity of supernatural religion in all known human groups, it is probably not possible to rid ourselves of these nasty deities without giving people satisfying replacements. Furthermore, just like the war gods, the Neolithic Guiding Goddesses were also (and still are) supersized, superordinate cultural constructs -- only ones that probably crown us with a "Factor X" -- an at-present unknown set of characteristics helping us maintain societies that are warless, non-violent and non-dominating.
Third, we need to ditch the force that lead to the switch to war/sky/father gods in the first place -- "starvation culture." In a nutshell, starvation culture is a kind of cultural virus that uses an unconscious fear of scarcity to motivate people. It arose because during the 5th and 4th millennia a large part of the planet turned to desert, probably causing hundreds of thousands of the world's first farmers to starve to death. Among a few groups who survived, temporary starvation behavior became set in stone and passed down from one generation to the next.
Starvation culture explains in a dramatic, chillingly accurate way the day-to-night switch from near utopia to blatant dystopia that happened in several world areas at the same time goddesses seemed to give way to gods (and the Neolithic gave way to the Bronze Age). It explains the sudden concurrent rise of the world's first group-sanctioned "taking behavior" (institutionalized warfare; rape; incest; human slavery). Likewise it explains the world's first group-sanctioned ranking systems (in modern studies of long-starving groups, it's often young males who seem to be some of the last to perish -- and the young males who survive are those who learn to accept stealing from, and abusing the weak -- not only accept it, but come to consider it enjoyable, praiseworthy and laudatory.
In conclusion, those of you who loved The Chalice and the Blade will also probably enjoy Switching to Goddess. The same goes for anyone wanting to read about a time in history that predated institutionalized warfare, human violence, and social ranking -- and how we might get that golden era back again.
Oh! I almost forgot. Although Switching is armed to the teeth with expert academic sourcing for most everything it says, its "voice" is never dry or boring. Some might even call Switching's voice scandalously flippant. Here are a few examples:
In total and mind-blowing contradiction to “what we would expect from experience elsewhere,” says [archaeologist] Jane McIntosh, “the clues from the Indus Civilization seem to be showing us a state without violence or conflict.” Jane is dumbfounded: “Can this really be so, in defiance of all our experience of the world elsewhere? Who were these peace-loving people? Where did they come from? How did they come together to create a state?” (McIntosh 2002: 12).
Societies doing war leave behind a trail of telltale clues that give away their dirty little secret. They can’t stand it for example until they paint and etch scenes of their battles, hand-to-hand combat, and armies facing each other with weapons bristling, and war flags flying. In their cemeteries they leave men buried with shields, helmets, swords and battle axes....
Thing is, we don’t find any of these dirty little clues in the humongous ancient Indus Valley (McIntosh 2002; Kenoyer 1998). No war art, no war weapons, no parry fractures, no siege engines....
Or this one:
... backlashers say just because a figurine is breast-bedecked doesn’t mean it’s female. For gosh sake, men have breasts too! (Lesure 2002: 602). Tatsuo Kobayashi, a leading archaeologist of the Japanese Jomon period, whines as follows: Golly gee! Men have breasts! Who cares if all the Jomon clay figurines have breasts – that doesn’t make them women! Kobie goes on to say that if the figurines can’t be his sex, they can’t be any sex at all: “it is considered here that these clay figurines are neither male nor female … but rather they are images that surpass the realms of gender…” (Kobayashi 2004: 155).
Still others say: “Gee if that clay statuette over there doesn’t have breasts of a certain heft don’t try to sell me on its being a woman -- could be a man, darling” (See Meskell 1998) (never mind the poor statuette is also minus a penis). Well I say if breast-bedecked figurines sans penises are men, our ancestors were trying to tell us something. My bet is it’s this: Whether you’re man or woman, the important thing is feeding and nurturing others. Breasts are a jim-dandy symbol of feeding and nurturing, and maybe Neolithic men who had them were put up on pedestals....
Or this
Never let it be said that Guiding-Goddess people were wet-noodle wimps.... Archaeologists have dug up scores of images of Minoans somersaulting – from front to rear – over the backs of bulls (figures 4.6, 4.11-4.13). Although modern matadors say this can’t be done, I don’t believe it for a second. Just because we can’t do something, what makes us think our ancestors couldn’t? I suspect our Goddess-centered ancestors packed a lot more pluck than we do. Mother Goddess societies would drape people with a kind of self-sense we god peoples can’t even imagine. We’re birthed and ‘loved’ by deities who’d just as soon see us stoned to death as look at us. How could we ever have healthy senses of self?
SOURCES
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.
Fry, Douglas P. “Conclusion: Learning from Peaceful Societies.” In Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution and Peaceful Societies around the World, edited by Graham Kemp and Douglas P. Fry, 185-204. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
---------. Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Kelly, Raymond C. Warless Societies and the Origin of War. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Leeming, David. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Otterbein, Keith. How War Began. Texas A&M Anthropology Series No. 10. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
[1] The switch from goddess utopia to god dystopia happened c. 4000 BC in the Mediterranean area, a bit later in the Indus Valley, China and Japan, and even later down the west coast of the Americas.
[2] Leeming, 2005, pp. 128-29)
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