The Chalice and the Blade

But for the warlike hordes that came pouring down from the arid lands of the north, as well as up from the deserts of the south, they were. And it is at this critical juncture that metals played their lethal part in forging human history: not as a general technological advance, but as weapons to kill, plunder, and enslave.

archaeological evidence thus supports the conclusion that it was not metals per se, but rather their use in developing ever more effective technologies of destruction, that played such a critical part in what Engels termed “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

Engels further linked the shift from matriliny to patriliny with the development of copper and bronze metallurgy.

The moral precepts we associate with both Judaism and Christianity and the stress on peace in many modern churches and synagogues now obscures the historical fact that originally these early Semites were a warring people ruled by a caste of warrior-priests (the Levite tribe of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua).

On the contrary, the prevailing ideology was gynocentric, or woman-centered, with the deity represented in female form.

Symbolized by the feminine Chalice or source of life, the generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature—not the powers to destroy—were, as we have seen, given highest value.

Cretan art appears to reflect a society in which power is not equated with dominance, destruction, and oppression. In the words of Jacquetta Hawkes, one of the few women to write of Crete, “the idea of a warrior monarch triumphing in the humiliation and slaughter of the enemy” is here absent. “In Crete, where hallowed rulers commanded wealth and power and lived in splendid palaces, there was hardly a trace of these manifestations of manly pride and unthinking cruelty.”26

Once again, it is important to stress that Crete was not an ideal society or utopia but a real human society, complete with problems and imperfections. It was a society that developed thousands of years ago, when there was still nothing like science as we know it, when the processes of nature were still generally explained—and dealt with—through animistic beliefs and propitiatory rites.2

For example, one remarkable feature of Cretan society, sharply distinguishing it from other ancient high civilizations, is that there seems to have been here a rather equitable sharing of wealth.

In Crete, for the last time in recorded history, a spirit of harmony between women and men as joyful and equal participants in life appears to pervade.