posted June 20, 2009 08:03 PM         

http://www.amazon.com/Chalice-Blade-Our-History-Future/dp/0062502891

The Chalice and the Blade:
Our History, Our Future
by Riane Eisler

Reviews

"The most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species." -- Ashley Montagu

"The Chalice and the Blade may be the most significant work published in all our lifetimes." -- LA Weekly

"As important, perhaps more important, than the unearthing of Troy or the deciphering of cuneiform." -- Bruce Wilshire, professor of philosophy, Rutgers University

"Some books are like revelations, they open the spirit to unimaginable possibilities. The Chalice and the Blade is one of those magnificent key books that can transform us and... initiate fundamental changes in the world. With the most passionate eloquence, Riane Eisler proves that the dream of peace is not an impossible utopia. -- Isabelle Allende, author of The House of the Spirits

"Excellent from every point of view... A very important picture of human evolution." -- Nicholas Platon, author of Crete and former director of the Acropolis Museum

"The greatest murder mystery and cover-up of all time." -- New Age Journal

Clears up many historical mysteries... provides foundations upon which to build a more humanistic world. -- The Humanist

"Validates a belief in humanity's capacity for benevolence and cooperation in the face of so much destruction." -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"A notable application of science to the growth and survival of human understanding." -- Marija Gimbutas, author of Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe

"A gem....A rare combination of poetic expression and sober sustenance."--Jesse Bernard, author of The Future of Marriage and The Female World

"Eisler gives us a revealing study of history and an offer of hope. She demonstrates that to be human can be to affirm life, not death, in one of the most compelling books of the year." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Eisler's highly readable synthesis . . . is an important contribution to social history." -- -- Publishers Weekly

"Everyone . . . should have the opportunity to read it." -- The Chicago Tribune

Description

The phenomenal bestseller, with more than 500,000 copies sold worldwide, now with a new epilogue from the author--The Chalice and the Blade has inspired a generation of women and men to envision a truly egalitarian society by exploring the legacy of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping cultures from our prehistoric past.

About the Author

Riane Eisler is an internationally acclaimed scholar, futurist, and activist, and is co-director of the Center for Partnership Studies in Pacific Grove, California. She is the author of Sacred Pleasure and The Partnership Way.

posted July 15, 2009 06:35 PM         

Dean.

------------------
I realized it for the first time in my life:
there is nothing but mystery in the world,
how it hides behind the fabric of our poor,
browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.

Sue Monk Kidd, "The Secret Life of Bees", p79

posted July 16, 2009 08:02 PM         

Yup.

You're welcome.

sesame -

I havent finished it yet, but
I'm learning that, for one thing,
everything I learned about prehistory
was a load of bullocks.

I'm also gaining insight into the
wrong-headed philosophy that underpins
the way of life people have been espousing
for the past several thousand years.

posted July 17, 2009 05:11 PM         

From The Chalice And The Blade:

The Neolithic

[About 40 years ago], our knowledge of prehistory was immeasurably advanced by the exciting discovery and excavation of two new Neolithic sites: the towns of Catal Huyuk and Hacilar. They were found in what used to be called the plains of Anatolia, now modern Turkey. Of particular interest, according to the man who directed these excavations for the British Institute of Archeology at Ankara, James Mellaart, was that the knowledge unearthed at these two sites showed a stability and continuity of growth over many thousands of years for progressively more advanced Goddess-worshiping cultures.

"A. Leroi-Gourman's brilliant reassessment of Upper Paleolithic religion," wrote Mellaart, "has cleared away many misunderstandings..." ... In other words, the Neolithic culture of Catal Huyuk and Hacilar have provided extensive information about a long-missing piece of the puzzle of out past -- the missing link between the Paleolithic Age and the later, more technologically advanced Chalcolithic, Copper, and Bronze Ages.... As in Paleolithic art, female figurines and symbols occupy a central position in the art of Catal Huyuk, where shrines to the Goddess and Goddess figurines are found everywhere.. Gradually, a new picture of the origins and development of both civilization and religion is emerging.. almost universally, those places where the first great breakthroughs in material and social technology were made had one feature in common: the worship of the Goddess.

Digging up the buried treasure of antiquity is as old as the grave robbers who plundered the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. But archeology as a science dates back only to the late 1800s. Even then, the earliest archeological excavations, though also motivated by intellectual curiosity about our past, primarily served a purpose akin to that of grave robbing: the acquisition of striking antiquities by museums in England, France, and other colonial nations. The idea of archeological excavation as a way to extract the maximum information from a site -- whether or not it contained archeological treasures -- took hold only much later. In fact, it was not until after Worl War II that archeology as a systematic inquiry into the life, thought, technology, and social organization of our forebears truly began to come into its own.

...But perhaps most important is that a number of remarkable technological breakthroughs, such as the Nobel Prize winner Wiilard Libby's dating by means of radiocarbon, or C-14, adn the dendrochronological methods of dating by the girth of trees, have vastly increased archeology's grasp of the past. Formerly dates were largely a matter of conjecture -- of comparisons of objects estimated to be less, equally, or more "advanced" than one another. But as dating became a function of repeatable and verifiable techniques, one could no longer get away with saying that if an artifact was more artistically or technologically developed, it must date to a later and thus presumably more civilized time.

As a consequence, there has been a dramatic reassessment of time sequences, which in turn has radically changed earlier views about prehistory. We now know that agriculture -- the domestication of wild plants as well as animals -- dates back much earlier than previously believed. In fact, the first signs of what archeologists call the Neolithic or agricultural revolution begin to appear as far back as 9000 to 8000 B.C.E. -- that is, more than ten thousand years ago.

The agricultural revolution was the single most important breakthrough in the material technology of our species. Accordingly, the beginnings of what we call Western civilization are also much earlier than was previously thought.

...But while the excavations carried out at Catal Huyuk, as well as at nearby Hacilar (inhabited from approximately 5700 to 5000 B.C.E.), have yielded some of the richest data about this early civilization, the southern Anatolian plain is only one of several areas where settled agricultural societies worshiping the Goddess have been archeologically documented... In short, though only twenty-five years earlier archeologists were still talking of Sumer as the "cradle of civilization" (and though this is still the prevailing impression among the general public), we now know there was not one cradle of civilization but several, all of them dating back millenia earlier than was previously known -- to the Neolithic. ...Moreover, we also know something else of great significance for the original development of our cultural evolution. This is that in all these places where the first great breakthroughs in our material and social technology were made -- to use the phrase Merlin Stone immortalized as a book title -- God was a woman.

The new knowledge that civilization is much older and more widespread than was previously believed is understandably producing much new scholarly writings, with massive reassessment of earlier archeological theories. But the centrally striking fact that in these first civilizations ideology was gynocentric has not, except among feminist scholars, generated much interest. If mentioned by nonfeminist scholars, it is usually in passing...

Indeed, the prevailing view is still that male dominance, along with private property and slavery, were all by-products of the agrarian revolution. And this view maintains its hold despite the evidence that, on the contrary, equality between the sexes -- and among all people -- was the general norm in the Neolithic.

posted July 17, 2009 05:20 PM         

There is little doubt that at Eleusis something was drunk by each initiate and each saw something during the initiation that was utterly unexpected, transformative, and capable of remaining with each participant as a powerful memory for the rest of their life. It is an incredible testament to the obtuseness of the scholars of the dominator society that not until 1964 did someone make bold to suggest that a hallucinogenic plant must have been involved. That person was the English poet Robert Graves in his essay 'The Two Births of Dionysus':

The secret which Demeter sent around the world from Eleusis in the charge of her protege Triptolemus is said to have been the art of sowing and harvesting grain... Something is wrong here. Triptolemus belongs to the late second millennium B.C.; and grain , we now know, had been cultivate at Jericho and elsewhere since around 7,000 B.C. So Triptolemus's news would have been no news... Triptolemus's secret seems therefore concerned with hallucinogenic mushrooms, and my guess is that the priesthood at Eleusis had discovered an alternative hallucinogenic mushroom easier to handle than the Amanita Muscaria; one that could be baked in sacrificial cakes, shaped like pigs or phalloi, without losing its hallucinogenic powers.

This was the first of many observations Graves made on the underground tradition of mushroom use in prehistory. He suggested to the Wassons [[who then "discovered" psillocybin mushrooms and brought them back to the "civilized" world]] that they visit Mazatecan Mexico for evidence supporting their theories on the impact of intoxicating mushrooms on culture. Graves believed that recipes in classical sources for the preparation of the ritual Eleusinian beverage contained ingredients whose first letters could be arranged to spell out the word "mushroom" -- the secret ingredient. Such a cypher is called an ogham after the similar poetic device in use in Irish riddlery and poetics. Graves readily grants that "you are at liberty to call me crazy," but then goes on to defend his thesis very well.

~ Terence McKenna, "Food of the Gods"