22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MAY 14-20, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com in mind. Of course, unless we change the economic rewards system, it won’t stick. Which fundamental figures in thinking are important to you? There are two men whose thinking I like. One is Gandhi. He said something I think is fundamental: We must not mistake the normal for the habitual. The other is Einstein, who said: You cannot solve problems with the same consciousness that created them. That’s my motto. Look at the title of The Chalice and the Blade. It’s not about feminine versus masculine, but symbols of how power is conceptualized. Is power “power over,” like the blade, the power to take life? Or is it the chalice’s power, the power to nurture and illuminate life? Men don’t have it so good in domination systems either. They get to be king of the castle of their homes, controlling women and children, and women learn to manipulate. It’s a mess for everybody. What does the current confusion over gender tell us? I think there’s a difference between gender and sex. There are two basic forms of humanity—male and female, and how those roles and relations are organized is fundamental, even though it hasn’t been considered that way. Gender is in flux, because we don’t know how much is innate and how much is acquired. But we see women taking on leadership, and we know that men can take on caring. Look at all the men caring for babies, diapering, feeding. Gender is a very fluid thing. What books have stayed with you your whole life? When I was a child, I was a ferocious reader. The Russians had a profound influence on me. I also liked Flaubert. I like the classics. Carmel is a beautiful but economically ruthless environment—vacation homes while workers commute from Salinas and beyond. Any comments about what isn’t working here? The widening gap between haves and have-nots is not sustainable. We’re back to the Gilded Age, and that brought all those movements toward partnership. But now, with AI, it’s a different ball game, and it’s quick. So we’ve got to be prepared. We should be working on a smooth transition from domination to partnership, because at our level of technology, domination is taking us to an evolutionary dead end. It’s not just climate change. It’s technologies of destruction, like nuclear bombs, like technological warfare. We should, in our self-interest, work on a smoother transition. At the very least, we should be ready with a different economic infrastructure. Tell us about your decades of work alongside your husband. Those 45 years with David Loye were the best years of my life. We did have separate studios. For the first two books I wrote, he was my in-house resource. Then we separated, and I wrote my books and he wrote his books. I wrote a book about our life. It’s full of his poetry, it tells the story of our relationship. I really wrote it as part of my grieving for him. All these people are claiming credit for rediscovering Darwin—well, David did that. He was a really strange mix of a scientist and a mystic. I loved the environmentalist in him, and the poet. He was the most creative person I ever knew. How does your typical day look? Very busy. I work every day. I do try to take care of my body with daily exercises and using my nebulizer. Pleasures? I’m a chocoholic. So a bar of chocolate. But I’m also very disciplined. The work is hard, but I do it. “The widening gap between haves and have-nots is not sustainable. We’re back to the Gilded Age.” This fragment comes from Eisler’s 1987 bestseller, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, a book that argued that patriarchy is a recent model, and absolutely not the only one possible, in human history. It’s important to add that Eisler never argued or looked for matriarchal cultures in her research, instead arguing that partnership between sexes was and is a viable social and economic model. “In fact, it is only from this historical perspective that the story of Eve taking counsel from a serpent makes any sense. The fact that the serpent, an ancient prophetic or oracular symbol of the Goddess, advises Eve, the prototypical woman, to disobey a male god’s commands is surely not just an accident. Nor is it an accident that Eve in fact follows the advice of the serpent: that, in disregard of Jehovah’s commands, she eats from the sacred tree of knowledge. Like the tree of life, the tree of knowledge was also a symbol associated with the Goddess in earlier mythology. Moreover, under the old mythical and social reality (as was still the case with the Pythoness of Greece and later the Sibyl of Rome) a woman as priestess was the vehicle for divine wisdom and revelation. From the perspective of that earlier reality, the orders of this powerful upstart God Jehovah that Eve may not eat from a sacred tree (either of knowledge or divine wisdom or of life) would have been not only unnatural but sacrilegious. Groves of sacred trees were an integral part of the old religion. So were rites designed to induce in worshipers a consciousness receptive to the revelation of divine or mystical truths—rites in which women officiated as priestesses of the Goddess. So in terms of the old reality, Jehovah had no right to give such orders. But having been given them, neither Eve nor the serpent, as representatives of the Goddess, could be expected to obey… The vilification of the serpent and the association of woman with evil were a means of discrediting the Goddess. And indeed, the most revealing example of how the Bible served to establish and maintain a reality of male dominance, hierarchism, and war is not how it dealt with the serpent. Even more revealing—and, as we will see in the chapter that follows, unique— is how the men who wrote the Bible dealt with the Goddess herself.” Sex and Religion IN HER WRITING, RIANE EISLER NEVER SHIES AWAY FROM ADDRESSING THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS. COURTESY OF RIANE EISLER The selection of photos below shows Riane Eisler since childhood. From left: Eisler at age 7, shortly before the family was forced to flee Austria; Eisler has degrees in sociology and law from the University of California; Eisler is a mother of two daughters from her first marriage; Eisler became a feminist and activist as a response to the intense sexism she witnessed and experienced in the 1950s and ’60s, particularly within the legal system; Eisler with her second husband and fellow scholar, David Loye; as a public speaker, Eisler has addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Department of State and has headlined Congressional briefings; she has given over 600 presentations at conferences, universities, corporations and governmental and nongovernmental agencies around the world.
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