The chalice and the blade
"In prehistorical times, Eisler argues, women and men lived together in egalitarian communities devoted to nurturance; with the imposition of male domination, female values gave way to creeds of hierarchy, aggression, power, obedience. Eisler, a futurist, posits a new society based on the recovery of more humane values."--Library journal (6/1/85).
Stats for nerds
2recommend
10mentions
7people
2014–2024years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A more accurate way to say it would be, as the last ice age ended societies that were built on participatory economies were completely destroyed by organizations that behaved based on domination patterns.
This is well documented in Rianne Eisler’s seminal 1987 book “the chalice and the blade” and is also well described by the Strauss-Howe theory of the four turnings, etc. there’s plenty of documentation on this.
I think what frustrates people is when they’re confronted with this type of data because it’s so conflicts with Neoliberal historical views. This is why Howard Zinn had to write “a peoples history” and other such books. These demonstrably show that the contemporary, modern explanation of growth and prosperity is only written from the perspective of those who did the dominating. This is a trope at this point, We know “this the Victors write the history” yet even if we know this, we still completely ignore it.
- Agree with all in this article. +1 for link to Democracy for Realists.
If there's one silver lining today, it's that we're coming to terms with our multitude of "folk theories". An encyclopedia spanning critical reassessment of common knowledge and common sense.
For more of same: historian Jill Lepore's The Last Archive podcast blew my mind. Highest recommendation. For example, TIL anti-vax is as old as vax. Same talking points, same tribes, same consequences. TIL the privacy battle was fought, and lost, 50+ years ago.
https://www.thelastarchive.com
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My first exposure to the idea of "misinformation" was Raine Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade" https://www.amazon.com/Chalice-Blade-Our-History-Future/dp/0.... Eisler explains how victors didn't just write history, they actively rewrote it. Actively seeking out and obliterating any contrary narratives. Remything (repurposing) stories for their own purposes.
Then Orwell's "1984", of course.
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Younger me was probably a postmodern and Popperian hybrid. I really thought the truth was knowable and would eventually be discovered. The major hurdles were effort and "science progresses one funeral at a time". I applauded the skeptics debunking pseudoscience and so forth.
Now I am starting to acknowledge and recognize reactionaries and unbelief. Constant. Overwhelming. Exhausting.
Worse, any progress begats pushback, backlash, doubling down.
It's like we can't win.
Today, I subscribe to David Graeber's theories for making social progress. Work in the margins. Push forward where you can, strategically. Don't storm the castle. Conserve your strength. Pick your battles. Take the (really) long view.
- Also see: https://www.newyorker.com/books/book-currents/francis-ford-c...
With comments from Coppola about Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, but also Cao Xueqin's The Dream of the Red Chamber, William Bolitho's Twelve Against the Gods, Cole and Chinoy's project Directors on Directing, and Goethe's Elective Affinities
- All around agreement - though I’d nitpick the degree to which psychopathy was pervasive, accepted, recognized and promoted
Namely it seems to be very rare in hunter gatherers and highest in “advanced” economies
You can read my theory on the original resource trauma was here: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
Yd might be causal to the loss of megafauna, but ultimately my claim is that was the loss of megafauna and resulting requirement to change society in the neolithic to domination based agrarianism
Riane Eiseler documented most of this in Chalice and the blade
- Wow, I can't wait to see that!
>In a series of Instagram posts in July 2023, Coppola stated that the film had been heavily influenced by the following books:
Bullshit Jobs, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and The Dawn of Everything, all works of the anthropologist David Graeber; The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse;[7] The Chalice and the Blade by sociologist Riane Eisler; The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama; The War Lovers by Evan Thomas; and The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.[8]
- Unpopular opinion: Hard times will come again, and masculine men will again become sexy.
There is a constant battle between dominator/partnership societal subgroups (a distinction by Riane Eisler in Chalice and the Blade) which one naively could distinguish as patriarchal-masculine / matriarchal-feminine. The abundance of resources the past decades has rendered the traditional, masculine and competitive men obsolete, and women have shifted their focus in more feminised versions.
But as history has repeatedly shown, periods of prosperity always come to an end, and the wheel keeps turning.
