THE COURAGE OF TURTLES - Central Washington University

Eisler 28
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I have called the partnership model cf social relations. Based upon the full and equal
partnership between the female and male halves of our species, this model was already
well-established a long time ago, before, as the Bible has it, a male god decreed that
woman be subservient to man.
The new knowledge about our true human heritage is still meeting enormous
resistance, with traditional Aexperts@ from both the religious and academic
establishments crying heresy. But it is a knowledge that, in the long run, cannot be
suppressed.
It is a knowledge that demolishes many old misconceptions about our past. It
also raises many fascinating new questions. Is the real meaning of the legend of our fall
from paradise that, rather than having transgressed in some horrible way, Eve should
have obeyed the advice of the serpent (long associated with the oracular or prophetic
powers of the goddess) and continued to eat from the tree of knowledge? Did the custom
of sacrificing the first-born child develop after the destruction of this earlier worldCas
the Bible has it, after our expulsion from the Garden of EdenCwhen women had been
turned into mere male-controlled technologies of reproduction, as insurance of a sort
that conception had not occurred before the bride was handed over to her husband?
We may never have complete answers to such questions, since archeology only
provides some of the data and ancient writings, such as the Old Testament, were
rewritten so many times, each time to more firmly establish, and sanctify, male
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control. But what we do have is far more critical in this time when the old patriarchal
system is leading us ever closer to global holocaust. This is the knowledge that it was not
always this way: there are viable alternatives that may not only offer us survival but also
a far, far better world.
17
See, for example, R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade; R. Eisler AViolence and Male-
Dominance: The Ticking Time Bomb,@ Humanities in Society, Winter-Spring 1984, 7:1/2:3-18;
R. Eisler and D. Loye, AThe >Failure= of Liberalism: A Reassessment of Ideology from a New
Feminine-Masculine Perspective,@ Political Psychology, 1983, 4:2:375-391; R. Eisler, ABeyond
Feminism: The Gylan Future,@ Alternative Futures, Spring-Summer 1981, 4:2/3: 122-134. [Au.]
18
Ibid. [Au.]