Rating: 
Summary: A classic that is still a delightful read
Review: Though this book has been on the market for some time I would like to say that it is still refreshing, exciting, and a pleasure to read. It has influenced and enlivened a whole generation of feminine scholarship on the roots of our troubled civilization and the hopes for its healing. I would also point out that the picture it presents of the operation of the dominator and partnership styles in our lives is not based solely on information about prehistory, or only the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas, but brings together evidence from field after field to support its conclusions. The data of anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as psychology, reveal the same structure and the same dynamics of the struggle between the dominator and partnership alternatives throughout history.
Rating:
Summary: I can only hope this book is prophetic for our world!
Review: The material in The Chalice & The Blade is startling and exciting. It reinforces current beliefs that women have not always been the chattel and property of men that has been perpetrated upon them within our history. It is categorized as "women's studies", but everyone should read it, and rethink many of the processes of government, culture, religion, in fact all phases of our human existence. A great read! Rosemary Moon
Rating: 
Summary: Futurists should refrain from pretending to be historians.
Review: When I picked up this book, with it's provocative blurb from Ashley Montague boldly splashed across the front cover --"The most important work since Darwin's "Origin of the Species."" -- I was expecting a well reasoned and intellectually honest work on the history of social/sexual organization in the ancient world. A more general and approchable version of Gerda Lerner's "The Creation of Partiarchy." Instead what I found what utopian claptrap masquerading as history and archeology. Apparently, according to Eisler, there really was a golden age when human societies were as close to perfection as is humanly possible. The key, she tells us, to that perfection was worship of "the Goddess" and an "equalitarian" society in which women were more equal than men. Great stuff if you're interested in political and social theory, particularly of the faddish kind, the problem with "The Chalice and the Blade" is that it pretends to base this theory in arceological fact -- historical fact, unfortunately for Eisler, actually having a written record of what people believed and how their societies were organized. Eisler's penchant for putting theory that agrees with her premises above an actual pursuit of real knowledge of the ancient world is revealed in many elements of the work. In the way she equates matrilineal and matrilocal societies to peaceful communities that come off as being something akin to a combination of agrarian commune and art colony, rather then evil, "dominator" warrior societies which are the doing of men and men alone. This, I'm sure, would suprise the descendants of the numerous historically attested cultures that were very much warrior societies that were both matrilocal and matrilinial, the Maori of New Zealand, and most of the Algonquin speaking Indians of eastern North America including the Iroquis and the Powhattan Empire, for example. Another example is her reliance on only two sources for the bulk of her archo! logical support, and of these, Gimbutas is really the primary source of Eisler's history, to the extent that I began to wonder if I was just reading a rehash of Gimbutas work paraphrased by Eisler. The most striking fault I could find, however, was the degree to which Eisler (and I'm assuming from the footnotes, Gimbutas) see to be able to derive entire social structures, religious beliefs and socio-political philosophies of people who left no written records (or in the case of the Minoans, no records yet translated) from the scant material remains -- foundations of buildings, grave goods, potsherds, and small decorative items -- that would seem to this trained historian to be relatively mute on such matters. Yes, there have been found several small statuary renditions of female figures. But it is a leap of faith to claim them as icons of "Goddess" worshippers when they could just as easily be votive items, decorative items, attempts at portrature, etc... When people start making definitive statements about what prehistoric art must have meant to its makers, they've left the realm of history and archeology and stepped into the land of speculation. Unfortunately, Eisler seems to have crossed that boundary before she even began work on this book. Her almost constant use of emotionally charged adjectives such as "brutal" and "insensitive" also makes it clear to me that an objective history of social/sexual systems was never what she had in mind. Instead of a work of history, she has presented us with a screed masquerading as history. Of course many people who've read this far have probably labelled me a reactionary anti-femnist for the tone of this review, and that's unfortunate, because, I do believe that many elements of Eislers theories have a basis in fact that has been underappreciated outside of academic circles. But politicised social theory made up to look like history isn't the way to go about bringing those facts to the light of day. It should not be necessary to ! manufacture a feminine "golden age" to demonstrate that nomadic herding cultures appear to have tried very hard to stamp out fertility based religions of conquered agriculturalists, just as its shouldn't be necessary claim all Greek culture came from Egypt to prove that Black Africans could produce Egyptian culture, or that the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were evangelical Christians to prove that Christian mores played a role in the development of the US government. I don't object to Eisler's femnism, or even to most of the thrust of her theories, it's her disregard for proper historical interpretation that ultimately soured me on "The Chalice and the Blade."
Rating:
Summary: Required reading for the next millenium
Review: Having read this book over a year ago, there is hardly a day that goes by that I do not relate something that happens in the world and in my life to the insights I gained from that experience. This was the missing puzzle piece I needed to formulate a code by which to live. I will do whatever I can to pass this information on to my children. I believe it is our only hope if we are to survive as a species.
Rating:
Summary: The chalice and the blade, a guide in history.
Review: In The chalice and the blade, Riane Eisler shows how the
beginnings of male-centered religions destroyed the old
world, where the Garden of Eden was a reality and giving the
stuff of which the legends later was made. She takes us
through the destruction of the godesscult to the repressive
society that we still live in today.
Eisler succedes in describing how the knowledge, about the ancient equalitarian
partnership society, can help us today towards a new partnership,
to defeat oppression, war, and build a new world.
Lena M Bohlin
Sweden
Rating:
Summary: The Chalice and the Blade: beyond feminism
Review:
C&B is the seminal work in cultural transformation for the world. It takes no scholar to recognize there are significant problems in our world. Doomsday pronouncements are readily available; and quick-fixes have become as common as Birkenstocks. Eisler's work offers something completely different.
Beginning with the literally "hard evidence" unearthed by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler builds a case for the declining spiral of western civilization commencing some 15K years ago. This epoch--if one can speak of such a vast time span as an epoch--is characterized by dominance of the majority by the self-selected few--and while not necessarily so--has taken the form of patriarchy. Eisler then describes a more distant past characterized by cooperation, equality and what she neologizes as "gylany." This gylanic culture, or a culture run by "partnership principles," is one which existed before, and can again exist in our world. Eisler refers to this process as "cultural transformation."
This work not only paints a hopeful picture for our future, but is the definitive response to both radical feminism and the so-called men's movement. While the latter make marginal progress and often have the effect of further polarizing issues, Eisler demonstrates a true paradigm shift toward linking, cooperation, equality and peace. C&B is the seminal work for our future.
--J.B.
Rating:
Summary: A Useful Revisionist Exercise
Review: Riane Eisler marshalls compelling evidence from many disciplines to assert that the struggle between a "gylanic" social structure based on male-female partnership exemplified in ancient Crete and Turkey, and a male dominated "androcracy", has been the major unseen force shaping western history and is once again in our time coming to a head."
Eisler writes that the "root of the problem lies in a social system in which the power of the blade is idealized." In contrast to this male-oriented power, Eisler describes the power of the chalice, "the power to transform death into life through the mysterious cyclical regeneration of nature." Her book poses a radical revisioning of the past which pushes the advent of civilization further back into the Neolithic era to include cultures which practiced a "gylanic" form of society. Regarding biblical history and morality, Eisler notes that "to the extent that it reflects a [male] dominator society, it is at best stunted." Continuing with biblical history as she advances her analysis forward to the present day, Eisler writes that "the more gylanic followers of Jesus tried to transform the cross on which he was executed into a symbol of rebirth- a symbol associated with a social movement that set out to preach and practice human equality and such "feminine concepts as gentleness, compassion and peace." Eisler also details the attempt by some Gnostic Christians to establish a continuum of psycho-sexual identity in the face of opposition from church patriarchs as another instance of the gylanic retreating in the face of androcratic political power. I found this revisionist adventure to be very useful, and I recommend it to those seeking the reintegration of a culture mesmerized by scientism, materialism, and the faux enlightenment of prosperity.
Rating:
Summary: Truth and enlightenment at last . . .
Review: I LOVE IT! THIS IS REQUIRED READING FOR EVERYONE!
Rating: 
Summary: The author is a con artist
Review: I had to read this book for a women's psychology class. After finishing it I checked the internet to see what real archaeologists had to say on the topic. It turns out that this book is a (...). It is filled with conclusions that have no basis in archaeological or scientific reality. Many of Gimbutas's assertions have been discredited. Like Von Daniken, Graham Hancock, and other con artists who write about ancient astronauts, the "face" on mars, or the lost continent of Atlantis, this author has written the worst type of parapsychological and pseudohistorical bunk. If she truly wants to promote equality in the world, and not just make a fast buck, writing a bunch of garbage and trying to pass it off as history is not the way to do it.
Rating:
Summary: Our kids need to read more books like this
Review: I always find it interesting that theories and research on cultures which empower(ed) women are constantly dismissed as "probably didn't happen" or "idealistic and impossible" : whereas theories that support patriarchy are accepted by the general culture as not just "definately happened (predominantly)" and "very viable", but even sometimes "the only way to exist, ever." Very interesting.... people with more open minds can think of ways to exist and think that are definately not patriarchal... (to say nothing about well known and currently existing matriarchies of which many PEOPLE I've met know absolutely nothing about.)
Very very happy to see a book like this come out which discusses these ideas.... if we have to study white patriarchal history, I'd make this book and others like it required reading for every single highschool student (must we always only learn about male heros and never hear one whiff of the Suffragettes, of of any cultures which are not patriarchal?) Give to young girls and force the schools to start including books which give a different opinion on patriarchy!!!!
Sarah Sue Roberts
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