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The Goddess Re-Awakening

The Feminine Principle Today

Theosophical Publishing House

Reclaiming Our Goddess Heritage: The Feminine Principle in our Past and Future

RIANE EISLER

In most "traditional religions" the supreme or only deity is male. But what we are now learning is that our most ancient traditions are traditions in which both men and women worshipped a Great Mother, a Great Goddess who was the mother of both divine daughters and divine sons.

As we reclaim these ancient traditions, we are also reclaiming the consciousness that women and men can work in equal partnership, that we can honor the feminine in both sexes, that peace is not a utopian dream. We are increasingly aware that both women and men can be more gentle and compassionate, governed by what sociologist Jessie Bernard calls a "female ethos of love/duty." And we are reminded that the earth is indeed our Mother, to be respected and revered, rather than polluted and exploited.

Recent archeological discoveries indicate that war and the "war of the sexes" are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. They also indicate that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting drama of what actually happened in our past. But for us to construct such a future requires that the feminine principle—so long denied, degraded, and subordinated in both our belief systems and our lives—be reinstated to its rightful place.

Our Hidden Heritage: Old Clues and New Findings

The conventional view, still taught us in most of our schools and mass media, is that a just and peaceful society is merely a utopia: an impossible dream. We are taught religious dogmas of "original sin" and their secular updates in sociobiological theories about "selfish genes." Not coincidentally, in both cases, these notions are imbedded in stories about how male dominance is either divinely or scientifically ordained.

We are also taught that Western civilization begins with brutally male-dominant and highly warlike societies and that if there was anything before patriarchy in our prehistory it was so primitive as to be unworthy of serious attention. For example, we have been told that European civilization begins with the Indo-European invasions: with a way of structuring society in which women and anything associated with the "feminine" is held in contempt and relegated to a subordinate and subservient position.

Indeed, history as conventionally written has been literally the story of men, of the male half of humanity, with only an occasional line, or at best page, about "their" women. But if we reexamine our past taking into account the whole of our history, including the latest findings about our prehistory, drawing from a data base that includes the whole of humanity—both its female and male halves—a very different picture emerges.

A good entry point into this new and more hopeful picture of our cultural evolution is through a fresh look at the many familiar legends about an earlier, more harmonious and peaceful age. The Judaeo-Christian Bible tells of a garden where woman and man lived in harmony with each other and with nature—a time before a male god decreed that woman henceforth be subservient to man. The Chinese Tao Te Ching describes a time when the yin or feminine principle was not yet ruled by the male principle or yang, a more harmonious time when the wisdom of the mother was still honored and humanity lived in peace. The ancient writings of the Greek poet Hesiod tell of a "golden race" who tilled the soil in "peaceful ease" before a "lesser race" brought in their god of war.

While for many people these stories are merely religious or poetic allegories, there is general agreement among scholars that in many respects they are based on prehistoric events. However, until now, one key component—the allusion to a time when women and men lived in partnership—has generally been viewed as no more than fantasy.

But just as when archeology was still in its infancy and the excavations of Heinrich and Sophia Schleimann helped establish the reality of Homer's Troy, more recent archeological excavations—deriving from what British archeologist James Mellaart calls a veritable archeological revolution—indicate that stories of a time when women were not dominated by men are also based on earlier realities. For example, Mesopotamian and later biblical stories about a garden where woman and man lived in partnership derive in part from folk memories of the first agrarian (or Neolithic) societies, which planted the first gardens on this earth. Similarly, the legend of how the glorious civilization of Atlantis sank into the sea appears to be a garbled recollection of the matrifocal Minoan civilization, a remarkably peaceful and uniquely creative culture now believed to have ended when Crete and some surrounding islands were massively damaged by earthquakes and enormous tidal waves.

These new archeological discoveries, coupled with reinterpretations of older digs using more scientific methods, reveal a long period of peace and prosperity when our social, technological, and cultural evolution moved steadily upward. They show evidence for many thousands of years when all the basic technologies on which civilization is built were developed in societies that were not male dominant, violent, and hierarchic. Most important, they show that while these early cradles of civilization—going back many thousands of years before Sumer—were not utopian societies in the sense of being perfect; they were societies organized along very different lines from ours.

As Mellaart reports from his excavations of Catal Huyuk (the largest early agrarian or Neolithic site ever found), the characteristic social structure of these first cradles of civilization appears to have been generally equalitarian. He writes how the comparative size of houses, the nature of their contents, and the "funerary gifts" found in graves show that there were no extreme differences among people in status and wealth. Data from Catal Huyuk and other Neolithic sites also indicate that in these societies, where women were priestesses and craftspeople, the female was not subordinate to the male. Indeed, in sharp contrast to most present-day religions, the supreme deity was female rather than male: a Goddess rather than God. Finally, dispelling the notion that war is "natural," these societies do not seem to have had wars. There is a general absence of fortifications as well as an absence in their extensive and considerably advanced art of the scenes so ubiquitous in later art: "noble warriors" killing one another in battles, gods and men raping women, "glorious conquerors" dragging back prisoners in chains.

Even more fascinating, and relevant to our time, is that this type of social organization continued well into the Bronze Age, culminating in the "high" civilization of Minoan Crete. Nicolas Platon, the former director of the Acropolis Museum and Superintendent of Antiquities in Crete (an island he excavated for over fifty years), reports how this technologically developed civilization, with its viaducts, paved roads (the first in Europe), and advanced civic amenities, had a generally high standard of living. Even though there were differences in status and wealth and probably a monarchic type of government, there is evidence of a large emphasis on public welfare, which is very unusual in comparison with other "high" civilizations of the time.

Here, as in the earlier Neolithic, the subordination of women does not appear to have been the norm. Cretan art shows women as priestesses, as figures being paid homage, and even as captains of ships. As Platon writes, in Minoan Crete "the important part played by women is discernible in every sphere." And, as in the earlier Neolithic where images of female deities are ubiquitous, Platon reports that in this last-known matrifocal society the "whole of life was pervaded by an ardent faith in the goddess Nature, the source of all creation and harmony."

These archeological findings provide evidence that, contrary to what we have been taught, the original direction of cultural evolution was in this more peaceful and socially and ecologically balanced direction. But the archeological record also shows that, following a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption, there occurred a fundamental social shift.

At this pivotal branching, the cultural evolution of societies that worshipped the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe—in our time still symbolized by the ancient "feminine" chalice or grail—was interrupted. There now appeared on the prehistoric horizon invaders from the peripheral areas of our globe, from the arid steppes of the north and barren deserts of the south, who ushered in a very different form of social organization. As University of California archeologist Marija Gimbutas writes, these were people who literally worshipped "the lethal power of the blade" —the power to take rather than give life, which is the ultimate power to establish and enforce human rankings.

Human Possibilities: Two Alternatives

It makes sense that the earliest depiction of divine power in human form should have been female rather than male. When our ancestors began to ask the eternal questions (Where do we come from before we are born? Where do we go after we die?), they must have noted that life for them emerges from the body of woman. It would have been only natural for them to image the universe as an all-giving Mother from whose womb all life emerges and where, like the cycles of vegetation, it returns after death to be again reborn.

It also makes sense that societies with this image of the powers that govern the universe should have a very different social structure from societies that worship a divine Father who wields a thunderbolt and/or sword. It further seems logical that, in societies where the powers governing the universe are conceptualized in female form, women would not be seen as subservient, and that "effeminate" qualities such as caring, compassion, and nonviolence would be highly valued. What does not make sense is to conclude that societies where men do not dominate women have to be societies in which women dominate men.

Nonetheless, when the first evidence of these prehistoric societies began to be unearthed in the nineteenth century, the scholars of that day concluded that since they were not patriarchies they must have been matriarchies. Then, when the evidence did not seem to support that conclusion, it again became customary to argue that human society always was—and always will be—dominated by males.

But matriarchy is not the opposite of patriarchy: it is the other side of the coin of a dominator model of society. This is a way of structuring human relations where the primary principle of social organization is ranking, beginning with the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The real alternative to a patriarchal or male-dominant society is a very different way of organizing social relations. This is the partnership model where, beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species between male and female, diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority and the primary principle of social organization is linking rather than ranking.

Models of society are abstractions. But societies that orient primarily to one or the other of these models have characteristic configurations or patterns. These patterns, however, are discernible only when we look at the whole picture. In other words, the reason these patterns were not generally seen in the past is that scholars were looking at a very incomplete and distorted picture—one that excluded no less than one half of the population: women.

For example, from the conventional perspective focusing only on the activities and experiences of men, Hitler's Germany, Khomeini's Iran, the Japan of the Samurai, and the Aztecs of Meso-America would seem to represent completely different cultures. But once we also look at the situation of women in these societies, we are able to identify the social configuration characteristic of rigidly male-dominated societies. We then see striking commonalities: all these otherwise widely divergent societies are not only rigidly male dominant but also have a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure and a high degree of social violence, ranging from wife-beating within the family to aggressive warfare on the larger tribal or national levels.

Conversely, we can also see striking similarities among otherwise extremely diverse societies that are more sexually equalitarian, societies where to be considered "real men" males do not have to be dominant. Characteristically, such societies tend to be not only much more peaceful but also much less hierarchic and authoritarian. This is evidenced by anthropological data (i.e., the BaMbuti and !Kung), by contemporary studies of trends in more sexually equalitarian modern societies (i.e., Scandinavian nations such as Sweden), and by the prehistoric and historic data (detailed in The Chalice and The Blade, some of which has been briefly presented in the previous section).

The larger picture that emerges from this gender-holistic perspective also indicates that, contrary to popular misconceptions, the problems of male dominance and male violence are not innate. There were obviously both women and men in the more peaceful and equalitarian societies now being explored by archeology. Moreover, clearly throughout history not all men have been violent. And today many men are rejecting their stereotypical "masculine" roles—for example, the men who are today redefining fathering in the more caring and nurturing way once stereotypically associated only with mothering.

In short, the problem in dominator societies is not men as a sex. It is rather the way male identity must be defined in male-dominant societies where, by definition, "masculinity" is equated with domination and conquest—be it of women, of other men, or of nature.

To maintain a male-dominant society, boys must be systematically socialized for domination, and therefore for violence. Male violence has to be idealized—as we see in so much of our normative literature celebrating violent "heroes" (for example, the biblical King David, the Homeric Ulysses, and modern "he-men" such as Rambo). Indeed, in these societies violent behaviors are systematically taught to males from early childhood through toys like swords, violent video games, GI Joe dolls, and guns, while only girls are systematically socialized for nurturance, compassion, and caring.

What further becomes discernible by looking at human society from this larger perspective is that throughout recorded history there have been times and places in which the partnership thrust has reasserted itself: times when women, and the more "soft" or "feminine" values, were also in the ascendancy.

For instance, although this is rarely noted by most religious scholars, in many of the early Christian communities women and men lived as equals, with women taking the same leadership roles as men. In fact, according to the Gnostic Gospels, Mary Magdalene was one of Jesus' main apostles: a major leader in the early Church—and the only one who dared to stand up to Peter and reproach him for trying to set up the same kind of hierarchic religious structure Jesus had preached against. It is also notable that many of these early Christian communities, which both preached and practiced nonviolence and equality, saw the deity as female and male, in other words, as holy Mother and Father.

The Troubadours and Troubatrixes, who flourished in the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughters Alix and Marie, likewise elevated woman and the feminine from their subservient and despised status. In doing this, they asserted that the feminine principle is integral to both women and men, arguing that masculinity should be a gentle thing—as in the term "gentleman." And it was the Troubadours who introduced what the Church called Mariology: the worship of a Divine Mother, in essence a reinstitution of the ancient worship of the Goddess. At first the Church persecuted the Troubadours as heretics. But when they could not eradicate this deeply rooted worship, they coopted it: the Goddess became the Virgin Mary, the one mortal figure in a holy family where only the father and son were now proclaimed divine.

The most visible recent partnership resurgence in the West occurred during the 1960s. This was a time when the second phase of modern feminism gained unprecedented power as the "women's liberation" movement, and many women and men rejected the violence of war and an unjust and oppressive economic and political system. But, once again, the partnership thrust was met with massive dominator resistance. The progressive sixties were followed by regressive years.

As is characteristic of dominator regressions, massive energy and resources were poured into a drive to reverse women's gains such as to again deprive women of reproductive freedom and to block the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution. At the same time—in keeping with the dominator configuration of rigid male dominance, a high degree of institutionalized violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure—there was a push for increased militarization and opposition to funding for social programs that would create a more equalitarian social structure. Instead, social and economic policies reversed many of the gains of minorities and women, thus again widening, rather than narrowing, the gap between those on the bottom and those on the top.

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Excerpted from The Goddess Re-Awakening by Shirley Nicholson. Copyright © 1989 Theosophical Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
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