Goddesses and Goodness : Riane Eisler Launched a Movement by Seeing a Society of Partners, Not Dominators

It is an idyllic place where Riane Eisler lives with her husband, David Loye--a graceful old house hidden away in a garden, its rooms nevertheless filled with light. Pale Chinese carpets line the floors, ethnic art objects are on the walls and shelves, quiet prevails.

Scattered throughout are original and copied figurines that bear witness to the worship of the goddess in various prehistoric societies. There are also a few latter-day vestiges, like one very modern and colorful Mexican bird goddess that Eisler pats fondly on a tour of the house, saying of it in passing, “That was David’s dowry.”

A perfect place for one whose message is that for 20,000 years of human society, its end overlapping with the beginning of recorded history about 5,000 years ago, the world was an idyllic place, with men and women living in partnership, in harmony with nature, in more equitable social structures than today, and in peace--shunning violence, not knowing war.

“It gave me a chance to finish this work in a setting that was like a magical garden,” she said of moving here from Westwood 12 years ago. “It was a space to really remove myself.”

In her work, “The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future,” Eisler writes of a time when people worshiped a nurturing, life-giving goddess of nature, symbolized by the chalice. They celebrated life and developed highly civilized agrarian societies, the highest being Minoan Crete. It ended when waves of invasions of warlike hunters and herders, worshipers of male deities of vengeance, destruction and death, symbolized by the blade, overthrew these societies. The rest is history.

To Eisler, as she told one audience in Santa Monica recently, this period when society shifted from a partnership to dominator model, “has held us in its vise for 5,000 years” and it’s time to break out.

If we lived in partnership once before, she says, we can do it again. She sees not a utopian fantasy, but a real possibility of building a “pragmatopia.” Those who work for a peaceful and just society need not be called visionaries, she says. The evidence is in the past; it is realistic to work for new social structures based on partnership.

Are her theories remote, esoteric, irrelevant, off the wall, a pack of lies, unsubstantiated in the past, improbable for the future? To some who have read her, or heard about her views, they are all these things.

Yet the book, published two years ago by Harper & Row, is in its 14th printing--available in Finnish; coming out soon in Italian, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Greek, with a Japanese translation under negotiation.

For all its data and reading of the past, the book is a call to action. It has been taken as such by both men and women to a degree Eisler did not anticipate.

One year ago, Eisler and Loye founded “The Center for Partnership Studies” as a way of responding to a growing constituency. Recently, it was moved into donated office space in Malibu, which will serve both as the international headquarters and a regional center. One paid staff member is on board, an executive director will be hired soon and numerous volunteers are at work on everything from fund-raising and networking to developing workshops, position papers and events.

She and Loye have developed a workbook, called “The Partnership Way,” a study and organizing manual for “The Chalice & the Blade.” Harper & Row will publish it soon, but the center is already selling photocopied versions, so great is the demand, Eisler said.

In the crowded little room in her home that initially housed the center, Eisler pulled out a file drawer full of letters, and sheafing through them, said, “This is how the organization grew. People weren’t just writing to say how much it meant. They said, ‘I want to be a part of it.’ So, a group of people got together and said, ‘What will we do?’ . . . The idea is obviously one whose time has come.”

Smiling her trademark radiant smile, Eisler mentioned the satellite centers that have formed: a potluck supper discussion group that meets in Chicago, centers in formation in San Francisco, Princeton, Santa Fe and Hawaii.

“There is even,” Eisler said in pure delight, “a woman in the Seychelles running a partnership salon.”

The result of 12 years of research that followed a complete physical and emotional collapse, the book, Eisler says, is really the culmination of an anguished, lifelong search on her part--a Jewish woman now in her late 50s who fled the Nazis with her parents from her native Vienna, grew up as a refugee in Havana and later Los Angeles, and saw her whole belief system collapse.

Her normal demeanor is one of glowing smiles and warm, upbeat talk of “tremendous opportunity” and “marvelous” occurrences. At times she is almost effusive, but she can and does occasionally break through with a tough, blunt statement. Such was her manner in describing what happened after the war when she saw the newsreels about the death camps and learned the fate of the relatives she and her father had been praying for at the end of each day.

“God died a very painful death-- for me ,” she said tersely. The old model having failed for her, she spent her life unsystematically searching for something else, a mythos, or system of beliefs, that would give life meaning. After her collapse, she got organized about it.

Examining existing research in archeology, religion, myth and art, she made the connections out of which her theory of a peaceful world organized on a partnership model evolved. While it’s true that her hypotheses have been dismissed or ignored by many in the mainstream scientific community, she does have her supporters, including anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who called her book “the most important work since Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species.’ ”

The book has seemed to take on a life of its own, spawning a movement that, some observers express vague fears, could turn into something of a cult.

Eisler herself seems a woman at a crossroads now, the center of much attention and adulation, faced, perhaps unexpectedly, with the possibility of becoming a guru. She seems pulled at times, enjoying the success and limelight, yet claiming she is no organizer, and that the whole concept of guruism is antithetical to the partnership model.

The center held its first public event several weeks ago at a church in Santa Monica. A turnaway crowd of about 600 came to hear Eisler and Margaret Papandreou, ex-wife of former Greek prime minister Andreas Papandreou and a feminist peace activist working with Women for a Meaningful Summit. The two women, and their mutual organizations, are co-sponsoring a partnership conference and festival in Crete in 1991.

Dominator Model

The audience seemed a mixture of starry-eyed dreamers, some with the distinctive look of what is loosely called the New Age, and politically minded activists involved in the nitty-gritty of movements for social change.

Eisler gave an overview of her theories, stressing the connections between the personal and political, warning “you can’t graft the ecological movement, feminist movement, peace movement onto a model based on forced domination.”

The dominator model has gone into self-destruct, she said. Under such a system, she said, current problems such as dysfunctional families and co-dependency are not personal but social problems. Society itself, she said, is in denial on a global level. The evidence is around us in the population explosion, the destruction of the rain forests, the threat of ecological collapse and nuclear holocaust.

She was smiling and upbeat as she delivered those apocalyptic words. She seems to have visualized the future and, sounding convinced, told people to reclaim their history, and shape the future with it: “You’re in for an adventure.”

She got a strangely moving standing ovation at the end. The audience did not leap to its feet. Rather, one by one, serious-looking older women, the type of citizens who have unfailingly provided the labor for social causes and community work, receiving little credit over the years, rose to their feet. Not a smile, not a tear, not a starry eye among them, they just stood there solemnly applauding a message it seemed they had known and been waiting to hear articulated all of their lives.

Back in Carmel, curled up on an apricot velvet couch with her legs tucked under her, Eisler was no less smiling and upbeat. At times her manner obscures the seriousness of her research and her credentials. This is someone who has experienced more than a little of the dark side of life.

She has, however, come through, and so it is in a rather light and circuitous manner that she tells her life story, details her research and describes what’s next. At one point she laughed at all the detours she was taking and distractions that were occurring, and remarked that “this is a bit like the book. It’s not linear.”

Her husband David wandered in and out from time to time, offering commentary at one point, tea at another and later bringing a plate of mango slices, telling Eisler to mind her energy.

“You see,” she smiled, when he had left to make peppermint tea, “the kind of relationship we have.”

‘A Refugee Child’

A heroine to many feminists, especially those of a spiritual bent, and decidedly a feminist herself, her central image and driving force remains the fact she was “a refugee child,” she said.

The world changed forever for her on Kristallnacht, in November, 1938, when the Nazis came to her home, beat and arrested her father. Her mother managed to get him released through sheer courage and bravado, which, Eisler said, is the greatest gift, other than life, that her mother gave her.

They fled to Havana, where she, “an alien little kid with long braids,” went to a Methodist school and heard fire and brimstone in chapel, watched her Catholic friends go to confession, and remained terrified of the violence of the street kids and sexual pawing of men she passed in the slum streets where she lived.

“Poverty is not ennobling” is her blunt summary of those lessons.

She moved to Los Angeles with her parents when she was 14, finished high school and UCLA and started law school. She dropped out when she married George Eisler, she said. They had two daughters, Loren and Andrea, both of whom now live in Southern California. For a while, she tried to make a go of being “a conventional wife in the suburbs. I was not good at it.”

She returned to UCLA law school, graduated in 1967 and went to work for an entertainment law firm.

“I had zilch consciousness about women,” she said of herself then. When one of the partners in the firm paid her the supreme compliment that she did not think like a woman, she said, “I thought, ‘Yummy.’ ”

Saying she began to wake up, it is clear she did so with a vengeance. She quit her job, marriage and smoking, she said, in the space of three months in 1967. Noticing a classified ad looking for an attorney to help start a women’s law center, she went to an organizing meeting and “jumped in feet first,” she said.

Feminist Activist

She became a feminist activist, raising her children, becoming a founding director of the L.A. Women’s Center Legal Program, serving on the board of a women’s clinic, teaching a class on the social and legal status of women at UCLA, lecturing, writing and producing feminist plays, and writing two books, “Dissolution,” and the “Equal Rights Handbook.”

“Dissolution,” she said, accurately predicted the disaster that no-fault divorce would be for women, given their inequality in marriage and society.

Somewhere in all of that activity, her parents died within eight months of each other. She collapsed.

“I got terribly ill. It was a complete physical and emotional breakdown, probably predictable, but not by me.”

She came to a total halt, she said, had to give up practicing law and turned to the business of healing herself. When she was still ill, she met David Loye, then on the faculty at UCLA Medical School. Loye had entered the room when she was nearing this part of her story and she asked him to talk about it.

“I quickly realized, besides falling in love with her,” Loye said, “I recognized, ‘This woman is going to do something important. I’ve got to help her.’ I dropped my work for a year, took the stress out of her system as much as I could, defused tensions for her so the natural healing could take over and collaborated on the ERA handbook.”

It has been like that ever since.

“David, he who helped heal me,” Eisler said, sounding in awe at her good fortune, “is also a social psychologist and futurist. He is a fantastic in-house resource for me. A lot of the theoretical work couldn’t have developed with as much precision if I hadn’t had you.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he answered her. “I knew the standards she had to meet.”

Research Program

With “The Chalice & the Blade” already working in her, she said, they moved to Carmel and she set to work on a structured research program.

“I worked in isolation. It was tremendously important. I couldn’t have done it in a university--there was no preconceived paradigm and the vastness of the area would have been frowned on.”

She read everything. “It was like sifting for gold,” she said. “So many sources were not feminist sources. It was there, but it was buried and I was trying to find it. I’m not an archeologist, but I dug.”

Her training as a lawyer helped her as much as her feminist instincts, she said. She can recognize patterns and systems, and was able to make correlations, for example between the “strongman” rule of family and state.

“In many ways, I think the book is a brief or argument: here is the evidence. This is what you do when you prepare a case, and underneath all of this was the passion.”

She worked in isolation from academe, but not from her husband. He has written his own books, among them “The Sphinx and the Rainbow: Brain, Mind and Future Vision,” and “The Healing of a Nation,” the latter on race relations, and is at work on another, but he and Eisler work closely together.

He played a major part in editing and advising on “The Chalice & the Blade,” and they are developing further papers based on it, such as a recent one on economics. They both have been involved in founding the center and setting its policy, and he also seems to manage and promote, to some degree, Eisler’s career direction at this point.

He said he wanted her to be taken seriously in the scientific community, encouraged her to develop a theory of “cultural transformation” in “The Chalice & the Blade,” which she did, based on the chaos theory in the new physics that deals with how systems organize and change.

‘A Risk Worth Taking’

“It was a risk worth taking,” he said, in that it broadened the book’s appeal beyond a feminist community. “It would force men on the leading edge of science to pay a little attention. This has happened. I interwove it (the chaos theory) and I think it works. I’ve seen enough of the male scientific world to have much hope in it for the future of the world. I worked overtime to get Riane into that setting, form an alliance with those guys. It may get more of this perspective into that vital connection.”

He was proud of her recent appearance before a group of prominent Soviets and Americans at a UC Berkeley conference on human rights earlier this month.

Before a mostly male group, she was one of the few to raise the question of women’s rights, and it took guts, Loye said. Whether it is a Soviet emphasis on economic rights as human rights, or an American emphasis on political rights, both keep it in the public arena, far from the domain of wife beating, purdah, rape, child abuse, sexual segregation.

“My point,” Eisler said, “is if people are brought up in a household where human rights violations are commonplace, people like that are not going to respect the human rights of a stranger.”

She is pleased to speak before such influential groups and wants to see the center, with a speakers bureau, recognized in a similar fashion. (“I need to be cloned,” she said.) The center itself, besides the Crete conference, is planning a partnership and the family conference in 1990.

“It’s important that David and I step back and that others come forward,” she said of the center. She is not an organization person or administrator, she said. She longs for the day someone else will take over, and insists it will not be hard to let go.

Concern About Direction

At times, those familiar with her express concern about the direction she may be going in. They are more uneasy than convinced, do not want to be quoted, but vaguely wonder if she is not becoming a self-promoter, liking the limelight, getting too connected with what they disparagingly see as New Age cultism and fuzziness.

Eisler herself warns of co-option, and says any system is tainted with the dominator model and cannot be taken on wholesale. And that includes the New Age, she said.

“The concern with guruism is dominator stuff, not to speak of the charlatanism. It diverts people to ways of life that do not transform society.”

She has several other books to write, all stemming from “The Chalice” and she wants to get at them, she said.

She has found she is at her highest self, transcending her own limits, when she is being truly creative.

“When I’m at my best, I’m an instrument. I think the work that has been given me to do is truly integrative work. All these various pieces of my life have been integrated and transformed. Not that I’ve arrived, let me hasten to add. No woman of my generation is truly liberated. We carry a lot of dominator baggage with us. But there is a true spiritual dimension (to this work). Not otherworldly, but illuminating our experience right here on this beautiful planet.”