CHAPTER 5
When God Was a Woman

Neolithic art, and even more so the more developed Minoan art, seems to express a view in which the primary function of the mysterious powers governing the universe is not to exact obedience, punish, and destroy but rather to give.¹

Riane Eisler

Early human learning centered on three challenges: developing the art of complex speech to facilitate communication, discovering technologies to extend the capabilities of the human mind and body, and mastering the arts of living in ever larger units of social organization to accommodate population growth. Early humans learned to use fire, domesticate plants and animals, and construct houses of wood, stone, skins, and sundried mud. They created complex languages and social codes. They undertook continental and transcontinental migrations to populate the planet, adapting to vastly different physical topographies and climates as they went. Along the way, they negotiated the transition from roaming as bands of gatherer-hunters² to living as settled agriculturalists in villages, towns, and cities, and they established the intellectual, technological, and social foundation on which human civilization rests to this day. At each step they moved ever further away from life as one with the beasts of jungle, plain, and forest on the path to becoming distinctively human.

We now take these accomplishments so much for granted as to ignore the extraordinary learning and sharing they involved. We further ignore or deny the archaeological evidence that this all occurred during the period prior to the era of Empire, in the days of goddesses and high priestesses that most historians give short shrift.

A WELL-KEPT SECRET

As cultural historian Riane Eisler observes, “One of the best-kept historical secrets is that practically all the material and social technologies 94fundamental to civilization were developed before the imposition of a dominator society.”³ The domestication of plants and animals, food production and storage, building construction, and clothing production all were discoveries and inventions of what she characterizes as the great partnership societies in which women often had lead roles in developing and applying the underlying technologies.⁴ These societies developed the institutions of law, government, and religion that are the foundations of complex social organization and cultivated the arts of dance, pottery, basket making, textile weaving, leather crafting, metallurgy, ritual drama, architecture, town planning, boat building, highway construction, and oral literature.

It is also noteworthy that when historians do mention the accomplishments of the early humans, they rarely mention the relatively egalitarian nature of their social structures and until very recently were prone to use a language that might lead the reader to believe that the early societies comprised only men. For example, a respected college history text published in 1958 offers this observation on pre-Empire humans:

Whereas all of the men who had lived heretofore were mere food-gatherers, Neolithic man was a food-producer. Tilling the soil and keeping flocks and herds provided him with much more dependable food resources and at times yielded him a surplus.⁵

Such a statement would presumably be unthinkable in a contemporary history text, not only because of the sexist language, but as well because it overlooks gender as a critical dimension of the human experience and the seminal contributions of women to many of the most important early human advances. Recognizing the distinctive role of women in the initial humanization of the species, we can more easily understand the enormous cost to our humanity of five thousand years of imperial repression of women, the importance of gender balance, and the essential role of women leaders in birthing Earth Community.

Credit for exposing the consequences of the male chauvinist view of history rightly goes primarily to women like Eisler who have examined the archaeological evidence through the lens of gender to provide a fuller understanding of human experience and possibility. Eisler presented the result of her inquiry in 1987 in the pathbreaking feminist classic, The Chalice and the Blade, which juxtaposes the chalice as the symbol of the power commonly associated with the feminine to give 95and nurture life—the ultimate creative power—against the blade as the symbol of the power commonly associated with the masculine to dominate and extinguish life—the ultimate destructive power.

There were, of course, no written languages during this early period. Therefore, we know its people only by what remains of their physical artifacts, the stories and legends eventually recorded by early scribes, and practices of isolated Stone Age cultures that have survived as a living record. We can only infer from the available fragments of data what went on in the minds of these early people, their values, their spiritual beliefs, and the variety of their ways of living. There is, however, compelling evidence to suggest that during the crucial pre-Empire days humans lived in relatively egalitarian social units, worshipped the regenerative powers of the Goddess, and depended on women for leadership in many aspects of family and community life.

Given the ambiguity of the data and the variety of human experience, it is inevitable that modern interpretations of preliterate life differ significantly, and all interpretations are subject to challenge. My intention in this chapter is not to document or resolve the contrasting interpretations, but simply to place the current five-thousand-year era of Empire in the larger context of the long trajectory of human development.

IN THE BEGINNING

The available fossil evidence suggests that the earliest humanlike species appeared in Africa some four to five million years ago and that the earliest modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged on that continent somewhere between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years ago and migrated outward to populate the planet.⁶

The broad outlines of the lives of these early peoples are reasonably clear. Until about 11,000 BCE, when the Ice Age ended, most humans were organized into bands of five to eighty male and female adults and their dependent children. They were food gatherers, rather than producers, and lived by scavenging for wild berries and roots, hunting wild animals, and fishing the streams. The women replenished the tribe by bearing the children, nursing the infants, and gathering food; the men were generally larger and stronger than the women and thus more naturally suited to roles as hunters and warriors. Members of the band shared the available food and the benefits of community life.⁷

Because the gatherer-hunter lifestyle supports only low population densities, in most settings some bands had to migrate periodically as the population increased, in search of berries, roots, wild grains, and game, perhaps following the seasonal movements of the animals they hunted for flesh and skins.

Some took advantage of new opportunities as glaciers receded and water levels rose to create new habitats that brought forth an abundance of fish, shellfish, and waterfowl. Warming temperatures encouraged the growth of a lush variety of fruits and other edible vegetation available for the picking. As the communities grew, they learned to augment nature’s largesse through active participation in its regenerative processes by collecting and planting the seeds of edible plants. The establishment of permanent settlements also facilitated processes of wealth accumulation that were impossible for itinerant gatherer-hunters.

Others who had lived by following animal migrations reduced the uncertainty of the hunt by learning to domesticate animals into managed herds. These people became nomadic pastoralists who guided their flocks and herds of goats, sheep, cattle, and horses across the landscape in search of green pastures. Moving regularly with their animals, the nomadic pastoralists could accumulate only the surplus they could transport. Thus, they commonly measured wealth primarily by the size of their herds.

GODDESS CIVILIZATIONS

Beginning about 7000 BCE, centers of settled agriculture began to appear in favored regions of Eurasia, subSaharan Africa, and the Americas. Many of the more important were located in the Near and Middle East in what are now the territories of Turkey, Greece, Iraq, Iran, and Syria; throughout the Mediterranean region; and as far north as England. The ancient Aegean civilization centered in Crete and the lesser islands of the Aegean Sea between the present states of Greece and Turkey was one of the earliest and most enduring.⁸

Settled Agriculture

Settled agriculture no doubt grew out of the astonishing accumulation of botanical knowledge that modern ethnobiologists find to be characteristic of gatherer-hunter peoples—representing the shared learning of many individuals over generations spanning many thousands of years. 97Drawing on this knowledge, some among those responsible for gathering experimented with selecting and cultivating the seeds of particularly useful crop species. As the gathering was predominantly the women’s responsibility, it is likely that women led the early development of the arts of cultivation.

Because settled agriculture allowed for higher population densities, it accelerated technological innovation and created a requirement for more complex forms of organization as the first sizable towns appeared. Because it generated surpluses, it created the possibility for a few to expropriate the surplus for their exclusive personal use.⁹

As best we can determine, early humans were relatively undifferentiated by occupation, status, or power. The fortunes of the individual rose and fell with the fortunes of the band or tribe. Generative power, as manifested in the power to reproduce, to heal, to gather food, and to win the favor of the animal spirit for a successful hunt, was at the center of community life. Symbols and rituals that acknowledged and honored the power of Creation in its feminine form were among the earliest expressions of a distinctively human consciousness.

One of the few specialized roles in the pre-agricultural societies was that of the shaman, either woman or man, who demonstrated the power to heal through communication with the spirit world. This was perhaps the earliest occupational specialization. These times were scarcely free from violence and competition, yet a cultural commitment to the collective potency of band and tribe generally prevailed. The generative power of the Spirit was the foundation of social organization; the cooperative quest for generative power generally prevailed as organizing principle.

Temples of the Goddess

As humans formed themselves into larger social units, the functions of the lone shaman became the functions of an organized body of priestesses and priests, and the temple emerged as one of the first centers of institutional power responsible for administrating affairs affecting the whole of the community. The many functions of the temple ranged from allocating land to mediating disputes and divining the most auspicious time for planting.

Eisler points to the general absence of heavy fortifications and thrusting weapons in the archaeological record of the large pre-Empire agriculture-based Neolithic civilizations as evidence that their people 98were peaceful and relatively egalitarian. There was little sign of damage through warfare. Burial practices and the generally uniform size and design of houses further suggested generally egalitarian societies with little of the differentiation by class, race, and gender that is characteristic of the societies that followed. The varied artworks of these Neolithic civilizations support a similar conclusion. There are no scenes of battles, images of noble warriors and wrathful gods, nor depictions of conquerors dragging captives in chains.

There is, by contrast, an abundance of female figures and symbols of nature associated with the worship of the Goddess. A central religious image of these early times appears to be a woman giving birth, creating and nurturing life in the manner of Earth. According to Eisler, “those places where the first great breakthroughs in material and social technology were made had one feature in common: the worship of the Goddess.” Similar Goddess symbolism is found in each of the three main centers where agriculture was first developed: Asia Minor and southeastern Europe, Thailand, and Middle America.¹⁰

In When God Was a Woman, artist and art historian Merlin Stone identifies accounts of sun goddesses in the lands of Canaan, Anatolia, Arabia, and Australia and among Eskimos, Japanese, and the Kasis of India. There are accounts from Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Africa, Australia, and China of female deities who brought forth not only the first people but also the entire Earth and the heavens above.¹¹ Eisler, Stone, and others conclude that the cosmology of the earliest religions of both the gatherer-hunter and agricultural societies centered on a Great Mother deity as the source of life and protection from nature’s threatening forces.

For a period of as much as six thousand years, prior to the emergence of Empire, the emphasis in the Goddess societies was on the development and application of technologies that nurture life.¹² Humans were expected to enter into partnership with the productive processes of nature, an activity for which women—the life givers of the human species—were presumed to have special affinity.¹³

Eisler argues that evidence the early Goddess-worshipping societies were matrilineal, tracing descent through the woman, does not necessarily mean they were matriarchal in the sense of treating men as subservient. She explains:

For here both men and women were the children of the 99Goddess, as they were the children of the women who headed the families and clans. And while this certainly gave women a great deal of power, analogizing from our present-day mother-child relationship, it seems to have been a power that was more equated with responsibility and love than with oppression, privilege, and fear.¹⁴

Others, including some feminist historians, have challenged Eisler’s conclusions as too sweeping in suggesting that the Goddess-worshipping societies were all peaceful and egalitarian. Merlin Stone maintains that at least some of the Goddess societies were not only matrilineal, but as well matriarchal and reduced men to an inferior and dependent position. She points to evidence that through their control of the temple the priestesses controlled inheritance, “the urban activities of the craftsmen, the traders and the rural employment of farmers, shepherds, poultry keepers, fishermen and fruit gardeners,”¹⁵ and the buying, selling, and renting of land.¹⁶

Stone cites evidence that in some societies, women arranged to take multiple lovers of their choice, often in the context of temple rituals, thereby securing their own sexual freedom, obscuring the paternity of their children, and thus creating a situation in which the line of succession could be traced only through the woman.¹⁷ Later stories from the lands of Libya, Anatolia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, and Russia also describe the Goddess as a courageous warrior and leader of armies.¹⁸

Millennia after the shift from partnership to domination, Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) wrote of his travels to northern Africa and the Near East forty-nine years before the birth of Jesus. Among his accounts are reports of women in Ethiopia who carried arms and practiced a form of communal marriage in which children were raised so communally that even the women themselves often became confused as to who was the birth mother of a particular child. He reported on warrior women in Libya who formed armies and invaded neighboring countries.¹⁹

Our concern here is not with whether women-led societies are always more peaceful and egalitarian than male-led societies, but merely to note the evidence of the rich variety of the early human experience, which included peaceful, egalitarian, highly accomplished societies of substantial size in which women had strong leadership roles.

TURNING TO EMPIRE: A GENDER PERSPECTIVE

According to Eisler, divergent paths taken by the nomadic pastoralists and the settled agriculturalists played out in divergent worldviews and social structures. The settled agricultural societies organized around the generative partnership power we think of as feminine, worshipped female goddesses of life, honored female as well as male leaders, and directed their creative energies to the discovery and development of technologies that sustain and enhance life. Some historians believe that the story found in the biblical account of the Garden of Eden, where woman and man lived an idyllic life, is based on a collective memory of these distant times.²⁰

By contrast, the nomadic pastoralist tribes tended toward venerating the power dominator societies associated with the masculine. Their path led them to worship violent male gods, honor the warrior, treat women as male property, and devote substantial creative energy to producing ever more effective weapons. As Eisler observes, they sought to improve their condition “not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction.” This gave them an advantage in subsequent combat with the more prosperous agriculturalists, whose lands and labor they eventually appropriated through conquest.²¹

Rejecting the Feminine

Ultimately, the early Goddess-worshipping agricultural civilizations fell to invasions by the God-worshipping nomadic pastoralist tribes that began in earnest around 4300 BCE and continued in a succession of waves through 2800 BCE. As the invaders penetrated the first great agricultural civilizations that inhabited the lakeshores and riverbanks of the fertile heartlands, they killed the men, enslaved the women, and replaced their relatively equitable, life-centered, and partnership-oriented religions, cultures, and institutions with wrathful male gods, warrior cultures, institutions of domination, and technologies of destruction. Earth Goddess gave way to the sky God.

Thus began what Eisler calls “a bloody five-thousand-year dominator detour.” As the pre-Empire societies honored the power to give life, so later societies honored the power to take life. Kings and emperors bolstered their demands for obedience with claims of personal divinity or divine appointment.²² Angry male gods representing dominator 101power displaced the female and male gods representing generative power. Priestesses were gradually stripped of power and replaced by priests. Wives became the chattel of their husbands. The poor became the servants of the rich. The regenerative power of the Spirit gave way to the dominator power of the sword. Humans came to mistake dominance for potency, domination displaced partnership as the organizing principle of society, and the era of Empire was born.

According to Eisler, the invasions typically brought periods of cultural regression and stagnation. Towns and villages disintegrated. The magnificent painted pottery, shrines, frescoes, and sculptures of the Goddess civilizations fell into neglect or were destroyed. The primary use of metals for ornamentation and tools gave way to a primary use of metals for weapons.²³ Artifacts from this period depicted heavily armed male warrior gods. Graves from the subjugation period might contain an exceptionally tall or large-boned male skeleton and a variety of weapons along with the skeletons of sacrificed women who were the wives, concubines, or slaves of the man who died. As social structures became more authoritarian and hierarchical, it appears that those most likely to rise to the pinnacles of power were the physically strongest and presumably the most ruthless and brutal. Women were reduced culturally and institutionally to “male-controlled technologies of production and reproduction.”²⁴

With time, the conquered societies entered into a new period of material production and accumulation, but with a striking change in the pattern of distribution. Previously priority had gone to public works and an improved standard of living for all. Now the men at the top appropriated the bulk of the wealth and power. Their subjects had little choice but to make do with the leftovers. Those who achieved their positions of power by destroying and appropriating the wealth of conquered peoples continued their established pattern of appropriation, distributing the spoils among those who faithfully served them—a pattern that remains familiar to this day.²⁵

Domesticating People

As the capacity to produce a surplus increased, rulers learned that, much as the pastoralists had learned to domesticate animals, so too they could domesticate other humans. Rather than kill their captives, they consigned them to forced labor tending the flocks and fields, freeing 102themselves for less arduous endeavors. Thus, the institution of slavery was born as a new tool of production that also served to humiliate and punish vanquished foreign enemies. As urban markets for agricultural products grew and became more profitable, the demand for slaves and serfs grew accordingly.

As rulers came to recognize the benefits of slavery, they began stripping citizenship from criminals in their own cultural group and condemned them to slavery rather than death or imprisonment as the preferred punishment for their crimes. The institution of debt generated its own crop of slaves. The last resort of the desperately poor was to borrow against a pledge of their labor or the labor of their children. A debtor who defaulted became a slave. Some were so desperate in their impoverishment that they “voluntarily” chose slavery over starvation, much as the desperately poor now “voluntarily” present themselves to companies offering sweatshop work under slavelike conditions or sign up for military service. The demand for slaves made trafficking in slaves acquired through kidnapping and piracy one of the earliest and most profitable forms of commerce.²⁶

TURNING TO EMPIRE: A SCALE PERSPECTIVE

In contrast to Eisler’s analysis, Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, deals with the transition to Empire as purely a response to the practical need to organize large numbers of unrelated people into peaceful and coherent social units.

Small Is Equitable

In the early gatherer-hunter days, the survival of the band typically required that all able-bodied members contribute to gathering food, which largely precluded class-based social stratification. Land and other resources were shared in common. Similarly, in the early permanent agricultural settlements, which involved tribal units of several hundred people, it was necessary for every able-bodied person to share in the physical labor of tilling and harvesting the fields and—when necessary —in the defense of the village. Crafts like weaving baskets and cloth, pottery, carpentry, and simple metalworking were a routine part of life in most every household. The sharing of assets and labor combined 103with a lack of surplus beyond immediate daily needs left little opportunity for any individual to become disproportionately wealthy.

The social unit of the tribal village was still small enough that most people knew each other by name and relationship, which eased the task of mediating relationships without formal systems of laws and enforcement. Governance mechanisms were characteristically both informal and highly egalitarian, with major decisions normally reached in meetings of all adult members, conducted without an evident leader, in which all information was public and freely shared. There were no specialized occupational functions, everyone shared in the labor, and there were no slaves or specialized menial roles. Visitors to contemporary tribal assemblies are commonly impressed by this practice of the purest form of democracy.

Beyond Kinship

Trust and group identity have long been important issues for humans for the very reason that our nature embodies a broad range of possibility, from deadly violence to self-sacrificial love. When contiguous concentrations of population became too large for all members to be related by blood or marriage or to know each other by name, the problem arose of how to assess the intentions of strangers and minimize the potential for violence.

The solution, according to Diamond, was to establish the formal hereditary office of the chief. The chief was a permanent centralized authority who made all the significant decisions, held a monopoly on the right to use force, controlled important information regarding relationships with neighbors and the promises of the gods regarding future harvests, wore distinctive identifying regalia, and expected obsequious respect from those of lower rank.

The chief was in turn supported by one or two levels of bureaucracy composed of generalist retainers, who carried out functions such as extracting tribute, managing irrigation, and organizing labor for public works projects—and received a portion of the tribute in return for their services. Commonly, the office of the chief either combined the offices of political and religious leader or provided support for priests who affirmed the divine nature of the chief’s appointment to legitimate the extraction of tribute. Specialized priests received a share of the tribute in return for this service. 104

Perils of Coercive Power

The solution of a powerful ruler to maintain order set in play a dilemma that has confounded the human species since the size of the human population exceeded the limits of organization based on kinship. To fulfill his function the ruler must have the right and the means to impose his will and to extract tribute by coercive force. This requires a retinue of loyal warriors and tax collectors. He must also invest in legitimating symbols of authority and in culture workers who keep the populace enthralled with stories of his divine powers and righteousness. Those who perform these functions must be supported out of the surpluses produced by farmers, artisans, traders, and others engaged in actual productive work.

Rulers had to be skilled in the political arts of maintaining the loyalty of retainers, the acquiescence of the ruled, and a monopoly on coercive power, while fending off internal competitors for the throne and the armies of neighboring states. The larger the state, the greater the cost of maintaining necessary public functions, including security, and the greater the need for extraction to support these functions—which in turn depended on the exercise of coercive power. Yet the greater the coercive power of the ruler and his retainers, the greater the temptation to abuse this power for personal gain.

As Diamond points out, the distinction between statesmanship and kleptocracy is largely a matter of how the surplus, extracted as taxes or tribute, is divided between serving public purposes and supporting the self-indulgence of the ruling elite. The right to use coercive power to maintain order and extract a surplus creates an almost irresistible temptation to abuse.

SMALL AND BALANCED

Diamond and Eisler both offer important insight into the cultural and institutional realities of the human experience. Diamond brings a scale perspective, Eisler a gender perspective. Neither is complete in itself. The scale perspective directs attention to the complexity of the organizational challenge created by increasing population density in an interdependent world, quite apart from gender considerations. The gender perspective points to the profound truth that addressing the organizational challenge 105in ways consistent with the needs of life and the potentials of the species requires balancing the masculine and feminine principles.

Security in the Service of Life

The society that honors only the masculine principle traps itself in a destructive cycle of predatory competition and violence. The society that honors only the feminine principle invites predation by societies organized exclusively on the masculine principle. A viable society must have the capacity to defend its integrity against predators of both domestic and foreign origin.

Societies that successfully balance the feminine and masculine principles to the end of nurturing life will be more prosperous and more productive of technological advances suited to improving human well-being than societies that suppress the feminine principle and give priority to the destruction and domination of life. To bring the feminine and masculine principles into balance is a defining challenge of the cultural turning.

Spiritual Identity

The gender perspective also offers important insights into human spiritual expression and highlights the centrality of spirit and gender to our identity and sense of meaning, our contemporary politics, and the choices we now confront as a species. We humans are born with a capacity distinctive among Earth’s species to reflect on our own mortality, ponder the meaning of Creation, and ask “Why?” By our answers, we define ourselves, our possibilities, and our place in the cosmos.

In our efforts to comprehend and communicate about the incomprehensible, we necessarily resort to familiar metaphors to describe that which is beyond description. Whatever our choice of metaphor, the image of the sacred evoked can never reveal more than a small fragment of the infinite. The choice of metaphor speaks volumes, however, about our political orientation and spiritual maturity.

When women held significant power, they chose female deities represented by life-giving and nurturing images associated with the feminine. When men subordinated women, they also subordinated the life-nurturing female deities to violent male deities. A rendering of the 106divine as exclusively masculine or feminine diminishes the reality of the Spirit, which transcends gender.

Matriarchy and patriarchy are both within the range of human possibility; neither one is the natural condition of human society. The challenge for the future, as Eisler suggests, is to move ahead to a society of gender equality beyond matriarchy, patriarchy, monarchy, and their other dominator equivalents. This understanding is foundational to our effort to become whole human beings and to create whole and balanced human societies reflective of the possibilities of an integral Spiritual Consciousness.

HIS-STORY

We humans live by the stories that define our origins and our nature. History as written by male historians has been quite literally his-story —the heroic story of male warriors, male kings, male presidents, male religious leaders, male philosophers, and male artists. From time to time his-story may include mention of a queen, an empress, a Joan of Arc, a female writer, poet, or artist presented as aberrant deviations from the normal course of events. Raised on his-stories, we grow up taking for granted that it is the natural place of men to rule and women to submit.

Similarly, most of his-story consists of stories of one imperial ruler conquering another or one elite faction prevailing over another in a competition for power. We come to understand that competition, greed, and violence are simply the natural order and that, no matter how destructive they may be, they are the necessary drivers of technological and social progress. The “masculine” power to dominate and destroy is good and just; the feminine power to create life is dangerous and deceitful, a pathway to sin and self-destruction. To worship a male god is “pious.” To worship a female god is “pagan.”

Contemporary feminist scholars challenge us with some audacious questions. Why should the power to take life rank above the power to create it? Why do we assume that the worship of a male god is more advanced than the worship of a female god?

Much of what we have come to take for granted about ourselves is choice, not destiny. Whether or not the gendered perspective of Eisler and others is correct in every detail or was true of all early societies is 107less relevant than the deeper understanding that the gendered analysis gives us of the variety and possibility of the human experience.

The gendered perspective invites us to open our minds to the possibility that greater participation of women in leadership positions is not only just but may also be essential to the process of freeing ourselves as a species from the grim self-limiting organizational calculus of Empire. In any event, opening our minds to the truth that the era of Empire is no more than a five-thousand-year blip in the four- to five-million-year arc of human learning about ourselves and our possibilities is an essential first step in the great work of our time.

The early human experience offers a powerful reminder that we humans are a complex species with an extraordinary range of possibilities. One of history’s best-kept secrets is the evidence that the most significant advances on the path to the actualization of our distinctive humanity came during a period when human relationships with one another and Earth were in relative balance and people worshipped the nurturant power of the Goddess. The turn to Empire was in part a practical response to the need to bring order to relationships among strangers in the face of population growth. This is the perspective of scale. The turn to Empire was, at a deeper level, a consequence of the suppression of the generative power of the feminine by the dominator power of the masculine. This is the perspective of gender.

The scale perspective and the gender perspective each point to important lessons for our time. The scale perspective points to the truth that equity and consensual decision making come most naturally in self-reliant communities of place in which people have enduring personal relationships of mutual trust and caring, and in which they control the resource base on which their livelihoods depend. The misguided turn to the dominator relations of Empire as a solution to demands for order in the face of population growth undermined the relationships of trust and caring essential to the realization of the fullness of our humanity and transferred resource control to an elite ruling class.

The gender perspective points to the truth that the healthful and dynamic functioning of human society depends on balancing the generative 108and nurturant power associated with the feminine and the more assertive dominance power associated with the masculine. The era of Empire not only upset this balance but actively deprecated and denied the feminine, resulting in a violent human assault against life itself.

Empire is a social pathology of some five thousand years in the making. To replace the life-destroying cultures and institutions of Empire with the life-serving cultures and institutions of Earth Community, we must recognize the enduring presence of Empire beneath the veneer of contemporary democratic institutions, the costs of Empire, and the dynamics of domination by which Empire creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of diminished human possibility. We must know our history.