The Chalice and the Blade Excerpt

[Guest guest]

The following is the entire first section of Chapter 8, The Other

Half of History: Part 1, The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane

Eisler. I have posted this for any reader out there who may be

intrigued enough by this to explore the book in full. I also want to

make my own contribution in addition to sharing Ms. Eisler's. I

welcome anybody's constructive commentary on the following:

Learning to value and develop all of the qualities within

ourselves, those generally labeled "masculine" and/or "male" or

"feminine" and/or "female," leads to valuing each other as the

full-fledged human beings we are. This is simultaneous internal

and external growth and development. It's true yoga, the union of

psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual. As within, so

without. And now, Ms. Eisler:

 

"Like travelers 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 order 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 modern 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 word 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 l 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 l

stands for the resolution of our problems through freeing 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 force or the threat of force. The 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."