The Chalice and the Blade

The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler is an international bestseller first published in 1987 and now in 26 foreign editions, including most European languages as well as Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish. The book introduces a new conceptual framework for studying social systems that pays particular attention to how a society constructs the roles and relations between the female and male halves of humanity. It proposes that underlying the long span of human cultural evolution is the tension between what Eisler calls the dominator or domination model and the partnership model. The book traces this tension in Western culture from prehistory to the present, and closes with two contrasting scenarios for the future. It challenges conventional views about cultural evolution.

The method of social analysis that led to The Chalice and the Blade is the study of relational dynamics. In contrast to earlier studies of society, this method addresses the question of what kinds of social systems support our human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity, or alternately for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness. The study of relational dynamics is an application of systems analysis: the study of how different components of living systems interact to maintain one another and the larger whole of which they are a part. Drawing from a transdisciplinary database, it applies this approach to a wide-ranging exploration of how humans think, feel, and behave individually and in groups. Its sources include cross-cultural anthropological and sociological surveys, and studies of individual societies as well as writings by historians, analyses of laws, moral codes, art, literature, scholarship from psychology, economics, education, political science, philosophy, religious studies, archeology, the study of myths and legends; and data from more recent fields such as primatology, neuroscience, chaos theory, systems self-organizing theory, non-linear dynamics, gender studies, women’s studies, and men’s studies.

A distinguishing feature of the study of relational dynamics is that it pays particular attention to matters that are marginalized or ignored in conventional studies. It highlights the importance of how a society constructs the relations between the male and female halves of humanity, as well as between them and their daughters and sons, taking into account findings from both the biological and social sciences showing the critical importance of the “private” sphere of family and other intimate relations in shaping beliefs and behaviors.

The Chalice and the Blade compares two underlying types of social organization in which the cultural construction of gender roles and relations plays a key role. Eisler places human societies on what she calls the partnership-domination continuum. On one end of the continuum are societies orienting to the partnership model. On the other end are societies orienting to the dominator or domination model. These categories transcend conventional categories such as ancient vs. modern, Eastern vs. Western, religious vs. secular, rightist vs. leftist, and so on.

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