Hello, and welcome to Home to Her, the podcast that's dedicated to reclaiming the lost and stolen wisdom of the sacred feminine. I'm your host, Liz Kelley, and on each episode, we explore her stories and myths, her spiritual principles, and most importantly, what this wisdom has to offer us right now. Thanks for being here. Let's get started. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Hey everybody, this is Liz joining you as usual from Central Virginia and the unceded lands of the Monacan Nation, and I am so glad that you are here with me today. And as always, if you would like to know whose native lands you are residing on, be sure to check out the map at native land. ca. It's a map of the entire world, super helpful, and I always put that in the show notes, so if you don't remember, you can check it out there. And If you are interested in learning more about the sacred feminine, there's so many ways that you can do that. You could certainly check out past podcast episodes here. We've got almost a hundred at this point that you can go through, but there's some other ways that you can learn from me specifically to go on over to Home to Her. You'll find articles there and you'll also find the past podcast episodes. And then you can find information about my book, Home to Her, Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine, which is published by WomanCraft Publishing. That's available wherever you buy your books and also on Audible now. And it would be great if you wanted to keep up with episodes and whatnot to follow me on social media. You can find me at Home to Her on Instagram and Facebook. And I love your feedback. Social is a really good way to reach out to me. So if you have questions or comments on the most recent episodes, suggestions, I always love to hear from you. And so with that, I want to tell you about my guest today. Her work has been hugely influential to me, and I'm guessing that if you have been on the Sacred Feminine path for a while, it may have been for you as well. She's been on my wish list of podcast guests since the very beginning, and I also think if you have delved into the historical record of the Sacred Feminine at all, I think the odds are very high for having me. That you've heard of her or read some of her work. So I am so honored that she's with me today, and I'm just thrilled to be able to share this conversation with you. Dr. Riane Eisler is the recipient of many honors, such as the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award earlier given to the Dalai Lama, and internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, and cultural historian. She is author of many books, including The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U. S. printing and 27 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, hailed by Nobel Peace Laureates. Desmond Tutu as a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking, and Nurturing Our Humanity from Oxford University Press, co authored with Douglas P. Fry. Riane's innovative whole systems research offers new perspectives and practical tools for constructing a less violent, more egalitarian, gender balanced, and sustainable future. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Systems, which provides practical applications of her work, and she's editor in chief of the online Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies published at the University of Minnesota. She keynotes conferences worldwide, has taught at many universities, has written hundreds of articles and contributions to both scholarly and popular books, pioneered the application of human rights standards to women and children, has addressed the UN General Assembly, and consults to businesses and governments on the partnership model introduced by her work. And she is joining us today from her home on the Monterey Peninsula in California. Riane thank you so much for being here. It's such an honor to be with you.

Well, it's a great pleasure for me to be on your show and with you.

Thank you. And I was just thinking as I was reading out all of these impressive accomplishments, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, how how we have choice in, in how we choose to show up in the world. And That I think so many people that have been on this show and, and others that I've encountered that are doing work that touches what I do, it feels like a very sacred mission and that also we don't ever have to say yes to those callings. We can choose to do something that's perhaps less challenging. And so I just want to say on behalf of me and my listeners and all of us around the world, so much for saying yes to such a, an incredible life path. I think we are really, really benefiting from it.

That's more of a calling for me.

I absolutely understand. Yeah. Well, I love to start with guests on hearing about spiritual backgrounds, your spiritual background growing up. And part of the reason why I like to start there is I'm just curious. I enjoy hearing these things, but also I think it's really interesting to, to tie that thread through. the beginnings and how that has showed up in your life and in your work including perhaps the pieces that you wanted to keep and, and even the ones that perhaps pointed you in different directions. So if that's all right with you, I would love to start there.

I certainly can start because the passion that I have for this work is really deeply rooted in my childhood experiences. I was a child refugee with my parents from the Nazis. And from one day to the next, My whole world was changed from being this cute little girl that people would pat on the head. I, my parents and I, we became hunted with license to kill. And so that's where my passion is rooted and really where my spiritual journey is rooted too. Because I, we were able, my parents were able to get an entry permit to Cuba, one of only two places that would take Jewish refugees fleeing Nazis at that time. And so I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana. And every night I would join my father in praying. The, which is the Jewish prayer. And at the end of it, I would silently pray that everyone by name now, 'cause I knew the names of all of those who were left behind would be all right. And that space. Collapsed when I saw the newsreels years later of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. And I found out that most of my extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins were killed. by the Nazis. And so my spiritual journey was a rather jagged one because I thought that the god that I had prayed to was either didn't exist or was mad or crazy or evil. And it was really only years later when I came back to the questions of my childhood. Which were obviously questions, well, questions that I think many of us have asked at some point in our lives. Does it have to be with, you know, this way? As we're told, you know, by stories like Original Sin, right, we're evil, or Selfish Genes, which really, they fight each other, because one is secular and one is religious, but it's the same message, we're bad, we have to be rigidly controlled from the top, right? Starting with God fearing. And so years later, I came back to these questions of, as I said, does it have to be this way when we humans have so, such a capacity for caring for sensitivity? Why has there been so much cruelty, so much violence? And I set out to answer these questions. And lo and behold, I found the Divine Feminine, and I found as detailed in my book, The Chalice and the Blade which as you said is really a textbook in, and it is a textbook, by the way, in many places, but it's very accessible, it tells a story, it tells our story, and it shows that there was a time when, yes, when the divine was Feminine. That does not mean, however, that the opposite of patriarchy is matriarchy. It's really the other side of the coin. The opposite of patriarchy is what I call partnership, rather than domination.

Yeah, and it's funny, I My own, you know, journey to the, to the Divine Feminine was very, it was very much an embodied kind of intuitive thing that, that landed for me. And I, I was raised a conservative Christian in a Southern Baptist household. So just no exposure to anything feminine in the face of God whatsoever. And But it was an intuitive felt sense after many kind of experiences that I, you know, felt kind of mystical and unexplained where I'm like, there must be a divine feminine and now I just want to, you know, hug that version of me and just, you know, because she, there's so much evidence, you know, as, as amassed by you and Maria Gambutis and just so many people who've been doing this work for decades, but yeah. You know, even this was even 10, 11 years ago, it wasn't in the forefront of my consciousness and nothing, even my advanced degrees, you know, I had to had put it into, into my consciousness yet. So I want to go back to that and talk about that a little bit about how, how do we continue to get this in front of women. But And everyone, but I'd love to hear you tell me about, did you, was it, did you find the divine feminine through your research or was there some moment before that where it kind of seeped into your consciousness in the way that I described for me and what was that like for you?

You know, it's really very interesting because as you know, I started this work by using a new methodology. Which is an inclusive methodology, the study of relational dynamics, and it really, relational is the key word. What kinds of relations does a particular social system support? Which is a question that we should be asking and we need to be asking. You know, is it this top down, oppressive relationship, which in its most rigid forms is it a life and death issue, really or is it mutuality, mutual respect, mutual accountability? Transparency is a word that has crept into our language, hasn't it? Which has absolutely no no place in the domination system, right? Of course it's not going to be transparent. So, but my journey you know, I sometimes talk about my life being like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, because in a school in Cuba, and my parents, my mother in law, you know, sold her jewelry, which she could smuggle out, to send me to a good school, a bilingual Methodist school. And it was a very interesting time because my parents, you know, I got very tired of being, you know, the Methodists, as you probably know, are very proselytizing. And so every day we had to go to chapel, and every day Mr. Munoz, who was the head of the school, would ask, Do you believe in Jesus Christ? And I got very, very tired of being the only kid who didn't raise their hand, you know. And so I raised my hand. You know, I mean, I was very young. And my parents found out, and they hired a rabbi to teach me that I'm Jewish, as if I didn't know, because we had to escape, you know. But but the questions that I would ask, We're not the usual questions, like in the Bible, it says that henceforth woman is to be subservient to man, right? And I wanted to know, well, what was it like before the henceforth? And nobody wanted to talk about that. And I also wanted to know why did Eve, you know, woman ask advice from a snake? I mean, we don't usually do that. I don't know. And nobody wanted to talk about that. And fast forward well, also in that school, by the way, there was a teacher who taught about prehistory. I had no idea that there was such a time. And I was fascinated. By the concept. I mean, this is why I talk about my life like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, because later, I mean, years later, when I undertook my research on our past, present, and the possibilities for our future to answer the questions of my childhood, or try to answer them. When I went back to prehistory, I found out, for example, that there was a time before the hence, you know, before the henceforth, when woman was not, as we are told in one of the stories, because there are two creation stories in the Bible, you know. And, but the best known one is the one of Eve and Adam in the fall, quote unquote, from paradise due to the sin of, and that's bizarre, of even thinking of, of asking for wisdom, for knowledge on our own, which of course is fundamental to domination regimes, isn't it? Anyway, I found out that the snake, for example, was not only a symbol of the regeneration of life and associated with the veneration of a female deity, a goddess but that snakes were also symbols of oracular prophecy. But think about the Oracle of Delphi, already in historic times in Greece. A female priestess, a pisoness she was called, worked with snakes, and if you look at the Minoan statues of the so called goddess or priestess, I think, figures, they have snakes coiled around their arms, and they're in an oracular trance. So when I say that my journey was like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together. The coming together happened with my calling to really do this work. I mean, I, I just had to.

Yes, so many good things. I, I'm looking, I wish I can, I can't turn the camera over there for, for viewers, but I have a replica of that Minoan snake goddess and got to see her when I was in Crete several years ago. And one of the reasons I have this on my arm and, you know, that's the, For listeners, it's a, it's a tattoo that I got recently of a snake on my my wrist.

Well, the snake has a lot of meaning for you.

Very much so. Very much so. And has carried that for some time for me. Yeah.

I did an interview recently with the Scientific American. And the woman who interviewed me is Indian. And she She wanted to know whether snakebites put you in an oracular trance, and because she saw that a lot of the Indian gurus used, you know, snakes and went into this trance.

So

it's a well known ancient lore that if you survive that bite you are in a regular trance and you access some kind of knowledge. That often, it's, it's, it's you know, my, my late husband who I miss terribly because we had 45 years of being together David Loy he was a student of, of, of forecasting, and he was also interested in what is still called the paranormal.

Yes.

Very interested. In fact, when he was the project head of the study of the effects of television on adults at the UCLA School of Medicine, which is when we first met. He was very interested in that because Selma Moss, who was in that school and many of you know who she was because she studied the paranormal she was fired. And there was this forlorn little group studying mental telepathy that met in the basement. Of the UCLA schools of medicine and they asked David if he would be their faculty sponsor and he said sure and so I became it's very unreliable. Sometimes we access it and sometimes we don't.

Yes, and it's interesting. I won't go into the whole story, but I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, that area now, and have been here for about three years, but there's a Department of Perceptual Studies that's part of the University of Virginia's School of Medicine, and they're also studying similar things, near death experiences, out of body experiences, the paranormal and whatnot. And I am always so fascinated by that intersection of the science and the kind of, you know, I don't know what to call it, but we tend to put that more in, like, the mystical realm, I guess. I love when those things kind of come together and we think in that way to explore those things together.

Well, I think that this is off subject, perhaps, but, you know, we malign the Enlightenment. But the enlightenment was a time when one social movement after another after that challenged traditions of domination. You know, the challenge to the so-called Divine right of King Su, their whole subjects. And then the feminist movement challenging the so-called divinely ordained right of men to the lower women and children, and then the abolitionist and civil rights, et cetera, movements. Challenging the so called divinely ordained right of a, quote, superior race to rule over inferior ones all the way to today, to the environmental movement, challenging man's once hallowed conquest and domination of nature erodes challenging the same thing, a tradition of domination. Yeah. And that became very evident to me in doing my research. Prehistory, that using the conventional categories and, and yes, being highly educated, which means not going, you know, to, to universities, fragments our consciousness, because it's all very siloed, isn't it?

Yes.

And very, it, it, it makes it almost impossible to connect the dots. And my work is connecting the dots. And surely. That's what neuroscience shows today, for example. That early, the early years in our intimate relations, our family and other intimate relations are fundamental to our worldview.

And

the conversation today about trauma is very much of a partnership trend. Because we're realizing that domination systems, as I have written in my books, are trauma factors. So it is.

Yeah.

Well,

and that kind of is a nice tee up to a question that I wanted to ask you. So I think if I'm calculating right, at least from my edition of the Chalice and the Blade, it's been 37 years, I think, since that came out. Yeah. And 86. Yes. I think my copy was 87. But I would love to know what you think, you know, from, from that point of publishing that work to now. How do you think our understanding of this. existing paradigm of dominator culture has shifted. And you just named, you know, our, our conversation around trauma is obviously one of those, but maybe what are some of the ways in which you've seen things shift in, in that timeframe?

Well the talk about gender is very much of the partnership trend. I don't like the term toxic masculinity. Because that's what men are taught, but it is domination masculinity. In that, well maybe if I were to tell you the difference between what I call partnership and domination systems. Yeah. That would be a good place to start. Because I realized very early on in my research to try to answer the questions, you know, does it have to be this way? Yeah. I couldn't answer them using the conventional social categories that we have, like right left, religious secular, eastern western, northern southern. For one thing there have been repressive, violent regimes in every one of these categories. So, none of them tells us what we have to build. You know, we can critique them, too. You know, forever. But if we have no idea of what kind of configuration we have to put together we, we, we can't lay the foundations for that. So I started to draw from a much larger database because the other thing about our conventional categories, if you really think about it, which we're taught not to do They all either marginalize or ignore nothing less than the majority of humanity, women and children. And that is fatal. I mean, you can't talk about systems studies if you do that. And so I drew from a much larger database, obviously. And I also drew from prehistory. So it's the whole of our history, the whole of humanity, and also, of course, if you, if you leave out women and children, you leave out family, because they were confined, you know, they had no access to the, quote, men's world, it used to be called, remember, the public sphere. And so a lot of the feminists struggle. Has been to gain access to that, to the professions through higher education. But at the same time we have been indoctrinated, really, through our, quote, higher education. It isn't the people who are into the God fearing, you know, the kind of background that you came from. But it's also progressives I remember. Because I was a pioneer in getting, I wrote the first article for the really the Human Rights Quarterly, which was the, you know, the publication of the Human Rights Movement, on what later, the same year, 86 on what later became known as Women's Rights are Human Rights. And we've always said, we've made this distinction, it's okay to interfere. in what states do, but it's not okay to interfere in what families do. And actually what happens in families is fundamental. And the good news are people like you who free themselves of that and take a different direction. Because we humans and I'm, I've been very non linear, but there's so much to cover. Really neuroscience shows that that kind of background tends, tends is the word, to make people accept domination and violence. Punitive families,

which makes total sense to me. Yeah. And I, I want to, I want to, I want to come back to that. I want to talk about that more, but one of the things that I was also thinking about as I was preparing for this conversation was you know, when I began this, this, this particular journey, you know, that I have been on with learning more about the divine feminine. And then of course, that is seeped into every aspect of my life. One thing that felt really frustrating for me in being able to articulate it to other people was this awareness that I mean, you just named it so eloquently, but that we don't participate in systems that were created with the, with the input of women or children at all. Like we just were, were erased from them. And so yet. gaining success and higher education and financial resources within those systems, which is something that I was able to do. It, and yet I still felt like I didn't belong in those places, which of course makes total sense because they weren't designed for me. But trying to articulate that to people in a way that they could see was so frustrating because It's the absolute undercurrent of everything. And. If you can't see it, you can't see it. And so, and I, I wonder, I just, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And I, there was part of me that wants to say, well, things are changing so rapidly and they are, and it's amazing. And I would say even in my own life over the last 10 years, I am surrounded by people who do see it and understand it. And I talk to them every day, and I feel like the numbers are growing. And yet I also talk to women who are still very much And in that, in that same framework and model of I am achieving, I'm doing all the things, and I cannot find my sense of self in this place, and I turn it on myself. And so I just wonder, you know, it's obvious to me in war torn cultures who's suffering the most, you know, like we see it. It's the women and children. There is no question, but there's a different kind of. Thing that's happening here in the United States. And I think in other wealthier nations where it's it's it's it's much harder to actually see a name in some ways. So I just I'm curious what that you know how you understand that and how you respond to that.

Well, what you are talking about is my journey, my journey of discovery, which is what my books are really about. Because, like in my second book, which I wrote ten, which was published ten years after Chavez, A Sacred Pleasure. I go into, and it foreshadows a lot of what I have written. I mean the subtitle is Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. And of course, you know, that's one of the trends, isn't it? I mean, trauma, as we know, is embedded in our bodies. It's not so simple to say, well, I no longer believe, because It's it's there. You bring up my whole journey because after that book I wrote on, I really wanted to see how can we change this, you know, chalice does end with that with two scenarios, you know, breakthrough of evolution or breakdown of evolution. And it's still as relevant, if not more so. Frankly, even though there have been more discoveries, like discovery that women hunted, for example, or that the hands in the, in the IC caves were women's hands. I mean that, but you know, the guy who, who published on that, he didn't publish that until he went emeritus. The Academy just doesn't accept this yet, I mean, and it's not well known, isn't it, that the fingers of the hands of women and men are different? He happened to know that. And lo and behold, you know, we were always told, right, that these are handprints of the artist, which were he, right? And it turns out that they're women's most of the time. So, I mean, we're finding out so much, but my work brings it all together. And to continue on my journey I became more and more interested in changing and cultural transformation. What do we need to do? Because we've inherited a lot of this I mean, you know, and I'm very worried, for example, about AI at this point, because it's garbage in and garbage out, you know, it will be programmed with all of this, quote, knowledge, which is A lot of it just isn't true, and we have to participate in making new stories that more accurately reflect our past, our present, and the possibilities for our future. Because the thing about it is not enough to protest and to critique and to disrupt. You have to have a sense of where you want to go. I promised you I would describe the partnership and domination systems, as far as I have, my findings are that the cultural transformation is not from left to right, or from religious or secular, or eastern and western, because, you know, I mean, look at Nazi Germany, it was a secular isn't a question of religious or secular, look at the Taliban. You know they're religious and yet look at the Unitarians. I mean, you know those categories, you can have the partnership and domination orientation because it's always a matter of degree in both. Religious or secular, eastern or western, northern or southern, so on and so on. But the configuration is what, we don't want to go back to any good old days, okay? But what the study of prehistory shows is a certain configuration. Take a place like Çatalhöyük, for example, which I think you are very well familiar with. It's one of the largest early farming sites ever excavated.

And modern day Turkey, for listeners, yeah, who may not know, it's modern

day Turkey. Turkey in Anatolia. And as Ian Hodder, who is one of the excavators said in his interview, there's a movie being made about my life and my work. And he was interviewed for it. And he said it was definitely a dynamic society guided for a woman actors for a man and the between them for linking rather than ranking that it's not only that you have in a partnership system, the opposite of what you have in a nomination system Which, in a domination system, you have top down control authoritarian family. Family is part of my research. Economics is part of my research. And, of course, society and all the social institutions. But as you move to the partnership system, which we see in so many people, like, Many of the ones that you are in touch with, they've rejected that model of family, haven't they? That, which takes me to the second part of the configuration, which is gender. I don't know if you've noticed, and let's look at the MAGA movement, or the Taliban, or Nazi Germany. It, it doesn't really matter. They always have the subordination of the female form to the male form of humanity. And those are the two basic forms that we have. So what, you know, the, the, the caveman cartoon, right? In one hand, he's got a club, a weapon. In the other one, he's yanking a woman, he's hauling a woman by the hair, he's pulling her. So male dominance, violence, war, let's just quote human nature, which is a lie. Because getting back to Tzotal Huya, we had a thousand years of no destruction from warfare. Can you believe that? It's, it's proof that war is not inherent in human nature. But how many people know about Tsar Tomgul Yak? And how many people know, even in some of the newer books, which bits and pieces, you know, are, are coming out with this evidence? They don't talk about the fact that it was not a male dominated society, as Hodder, Ian Hodder, the archaeologist, wrote in an article in the Scientific American being born male or female was not effective in determining one's opportunities and one's status. You know, we have to learn about our past. We have to learn the truth about our past, and about the possibilities about what's really happening today, and also about the possibilities for our future, because that's the struggle for our world today, is between partnership and domination, and violence and abuse is built into domination systems. Whether it's child and wife violence, you know, beating, whatever, you know, killing, quote, domestic violence and that. You see, we've learned as women and men, because this is not a question of women against men or men against women. It's a question of social structure. And men don't have it so good. They have to give nothing less than their lives. Because some guy on top, like a Putin, wants more territory, right? Wants more real estate. I mean, but they do get to control their families in that system. They get to call the shots, if you will. So, you really have to consider the whole picture, and you have to consider story. and language.

Yes. And I was thinking about too, I know that you have been working on this Peace Begins at Home campaign, which I would love to hear you talk about, but even that language, domestic violence versus family violence, which I know is the term that you would prefer. It really, it does. There's so many ways I think, and we, in which we kind of minimize the. The, the violence and the impact and normalize it. We could look at that in a lot of different ways like a, a A woman was raped as opposed to a man raped her, you know, like we switch it around, like, so it's, it's something that happened to her as opposed to an action that was actually done. Or I, I just, I was talking to someone who's very conscious yesterday and we were literally talking about this, the language that we use and metaphors of violence, and then two minutes later, she says, without even realizing it, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of this. Butcher! Like, oh my god, it's everywhere! But I, I wonder if you could speak to that, you know, that shift, that domestic violence, family violence, because when I think about, when I was reading about your, your thoughts around this, what I was thinking about is that all pervasiveness of dominator culture. And like, where do you even start to, you, you pull, you've got to pull at so many different threads to get at it because it's so insidious. Right. But that feels like a very big one. What's happening in the home?

Well We have to focus on that. And in my book on economics, because that's what I now really very much focus on, the real wealth, the real wealth. You know, it's a play on Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. You know, care has been devalued as it's coded feminine, right? Yes. And so what I propose is really in that book is the caring economics of partnerism. I mean, we, we, you know this from having been in the corporate world. We don't want a piece of the existing pie. We want to bake a better economic pie. That's what it's about. Certainly. We have to go back to the basic question of what do we value, and what do we measure? Because we measure what we value, and we value what we measure. So all of this is interconnected, and so is language, of course. And yes, there's a lot to do, but you know, we have to remember something, which is that our cultures are human creations. We can recreate them, but we have to know what we want to create. And if we keep talking about dismantling the top of the domination pyramid, you know, economics and politics is conventionally defined, and leave the base intact, it keeps revealing itself, doesn't it? So, it's not coincidental. That talking about the Divine Feminine is horrific for anybody, well, you know very well. And I want to ask you how, are you the only one in your family who left or is there somebody else?

Well, what I'll say about my family is it was not a super rigid, you know, fundamentalist kind of family. I think the, the, the faith was very forefront, but more on, I would say in an intellectual way, not in a you know, I demand allegiance at all costs, but I would, what I would say is that my own journey, yes, I was the only one really that left. And that was very challenging for my family. And particularly the relationship that I have with my mother and I, you know, getting a book deal definitely helped. It normalized what I was doing a bit in a way that I think made it more comfortable and palatable. And I, I will say she's come a long way, but yes, I am pretty much still the only one who's on this different path for sure.

But you are on this path. And there are so many people on this path. But we have to have a frame. My work you know, and this has been a very non linear interview the divine feminine is an inconceivable concept to people who are brought up in a rigid domination system. And frankly it is a system that has very rigid gender stereotypes. And it has the ranking of what is considered masculine, you know, violence competition, eat, but dog eat dog competition, not competition. Because I think there is competition in partnership systems too. But it's a question of, I see that you're orating. You know, I used to do a lot of keynote speeches. Thanks. And I, I see somebody who's really a very good orator. Well, I, it's something I want to aspire to. And that's competition in a way. But it's not this, and of course dogs don't eat dogs. I mean, you know, but we've been taught to accept that. It, it is a lot of unlearning and relearning. But we have to Know the foundations that we have to build because, and we see what are the foundations on which domination systems we build themselves. And it starts with family and childhood, because that's what neuroscience shows that nothing less than the structure of our brains. And with it, how we feel, how we think, how we act. Including how we vote is really very much a question of what kind of family, and most people don't have the courage, frankly or the capacity, really, they're so traumatized. You weren't. You, a very interesting clue is what you said, that it wasn't that you have to obey or else. That's kind of, I was rearing. is fundamental to conditioning people to fit into domination systems. You either follow the strong man leader, right, or else. So then is gender. And we are so used to look at what happens to domestic violence. And even though there's a movement to call it coercive control now, you know, California. Ireland, Great Britain have, have coercive control searches. It's, I think we need to call it what it is, violence in the family, family violence. And yes, we are planning a campaign. And those who are interested in it, please get in touch because it is so fundamental. So we have to show we, we are trying to get. Especially spiritual and religious leaders to speak out for nonviolent families, because so many people think that spanking is not violence. I mean, this is insane. Of course it's violence. It's hitting. And what do children learn from that? They learn that it's okay for those who are bigger and stronger to use violence to impose their will on those who are weaker and smaller. I mean, it's so simple, isn't it? Then there is economics. If we don't really change our economic system, we're trying to. People like you, but dropping out. Is creating an alternative is what we have to do. And we have to start with creating we tried to with social wealth economic indicators which you can find on our website at center for partnership. org, which really show. Whether the real wills of our nation, especially in our post industrial age, when economists say that our most important capital, which I really hate, is human capital, you know, capacity development. I mean, when we, we know from neuroscience that whether or not we have these flexible, creative people, etc. largely depends on the type of, Education and of care they receive very early on, isn't it? So, and of course, story and language. Your example of the woman who said, I'm going to butcher this is so good because what she really meant was something that doesn't require the term. I'm going to misspeak. You know, that's, that's perfectly acceptable. We are so used to using, well, I, and we can change it like that old adage of killing two birds with one stone. Well, how about hashing two birds with one egg?

Yes, my therapist likes to say feeding two birds with one scone, which I also like.

I love that. So we have to count on human creativity, but we really need to build the partnership configuration. And that means taking into account that disenfranchising women is very much related to not having the work a deity that is feminine. Yes. And it's just very simple that the return of the feminine divine is part of the movement. But for people who are heavily traumatized, That's humancy, isn't it?

Yes. Well, and one of the things that I noticed coming up, I'm noticing in our conversation, and I think it's sort of a residual memory of when I was first reading your book, is a feeling of anger and that that there's so many ways in which this information is not easily accessible to us or When I really started and you will know this I think very well but when I started kind of going down my own searching path and reading I would find information from From people like Maria Gambutis, or I cannot remember the name of the man who did the, the research in or the excavations in Minoan Crete, but you will find these sort of picking apart. Yeah, there's this picking apart of people's work and questioning it and holding it to a standard of, almost an impossible standard, like I, I so deeply respect you doing this work and writing this at a time when you did I can only imagine the, the potential opposition that you were running into, or I think about people like Max DeShue who ended up leaving Harvard because she knew she could never do the research she wanted to do there. It wasn't going to be taken seriously. And so I, all of that was kind of coming to a head for me when I first read the chalice and the blade. And I feel like kind of rising up now because it really is. It feels like in a way that these Systems are kind of designed to self perpetuate and so then therefore squash down anything that's really going to challenge it. And I, I wonder for you, somebody who's been doing this work, which is so sacred and important for decades now, where have you found kind of the resilience to keep going with it? As I would imagine you've run into some blocks along the way.

Well, you know, look, perseverance is what it takes. Yeah. But that perseverance is an existential commitment. I, I think that we, I don't know what the outcome will be of this struggle between domination and partnership, and I think in the short run we're in for some difficult times. But in the long run, if we have a different frame, if we understand. And if we are not distracted, I mean, this, this whole conversation about capitalism versus socialism is a complete distraction, because both Smith and Marx perpetuated the hidden system of gendered values, the devaluation of caring for people starting at birth and caring for our Mother Earth. It is, there is nothing in either of their writings about caring for nature. Nature was there to be exploited. And as for caring for people, it was to be done for free by a woman in a male controlled household. These systems came out of the 1700s, the 1800s, when the domination system was just beginning to be challenged in an organized way. There have always been people who have challenged it. But most of them have met with an untimely death. And it's only as that changed. And the system, and it changed during times of great disequilibrium. I mean, I really recommend that people read that's another thing that really has me worried is the shortening of the attention span. And that's why we're making a movie because people are more inclined to watch than to read. But I really think that, well, most of my books are on audio, so you can listen to them. And I really think that that's very, very important, and that we connect the dots. Because it's not, the people pushing us back really have a very coherent frame. It's a domination frame, starting with God fearing, fearing, you know, the, remember the promise keepers? But maybe you're too young. But, you know, men were told that they either control their families or they leave them. Those are their only choices. I mean, that's, that's really, and the very rigid gender stereotypes. How else can you rank? masculine over feminine. Unless you have very rigid gender stereotypes. So a lot of things that seem absolutely disconnected happening today are movement towards partnership, but it's happening in bits and pieces.

Well, and I guess maybe that, that kind of leads me to what feels like a, a final question for you, which is, I, I, I know, is, is hope a part of your framework at this point, and do you have, you know, hope for our future? Like, how do you hold that based on where we are in this moment in the, you know, the career and the work that you've done over all this time?

Well, I know what I said earlier is that culture is a human creation. Yeah. We can uncreate and recreate it, but we have to know what we're trying to build, and as long as we don't take into account family, childhood, gender, changing our, the values behind our economic system, and yes, changing our stories and our language, those are the four cornerstones. On which the old system, the domination system, and really this old system is only about 5 years old. Because war was non existent before then and so was really this rather nonsensical idea that the divine is only in male form. We have this, I mean, in Christianity, we have this ridiculous holy family, which only the father and the son are divine, the only mortal. is the mother of God. I mean, this makes no sense whatsoever, does it?

Not at all. Yes. I mean, what's more divine than the mother of God? That makes no sense. Right.

And of course we know from the Gnostic Gospels what an important part Mary Magdalene played in the early Christian movement, and that, yes, she was a partner to Jesus, and of course Jesus was a Jew, preaching not preaching, you know, do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Isaiah said, you know, that, that, that, it dates back to Isaiah in the Old Testament. I mean, he was trying to teach partnerships, so called feminine values of care, rather than coercion. And we have to be very conscious of how in domination systems, caring and coercion, there's a confluence between them, isn't there? In starting in families. In economics, you know, those on top will take care of us, right? No, they won't. Not as long as they are indoctrinated that there has to be somebody who wins and who loses. Somebody on top and somebody on bottom.

Yes.

So it's all connected. And you say about hope, and I say I, People ask me that question, you know, do I have hope, and I, of course, have hope, because I believe That we humans can recreate our culture once we understand our past, our present, and the possibilities for the future.

Well, I want to thank you for your contribution and your work over all of these years. And you know, I wouldn't be doing what I do if it weren't for you. And it certainly gives me hope and a sense of great purpose and it's very much a calling for me too. So I'm just so deeply grateful for You know, not only your time with me today, but also all that you are contributing and have contributed in helping us see these systems and imagine something new and something different that's going to be more supportive. So much gratitude.

I thank you for the work that you're doing. And I invite you and our listeners, our viewers to join us. in this campaign for nonviolent families. First of all, of course, we'll have much more happiness, economically we'll save tons and tons of money, and yes, there is a link between, and I show this link in my work, between what happens in families, And what happens in war and terrorism crime you know, it is, the arm bone is connected to the wrist bone and we have to connect the dots.

Yes. Yes. And I will make sure that there's information about all of your work in the book. In the show notes, I know that there's this, the partnerism site, which sort of breaks out how we can move more to partnerships systems. There's Rhianna's just amassed an incredible amount of resources in addition to her books and all of her writings, there's so much. So I will make sure that I put all of that in the show notes as well as any information about the Peace Begins at Home campaign. And Yeah, I just want to thank all of you for listening as always. It's such a joy to be able to share these conversations with you. And even if I can't see you out there, I know that it just feels good. It feels good to know that we're in this together. We're not alone. We are, we are seeking different ways of moving in the world together. So I'm deeply grateful for you too. And until next time, I hope you take such good care of yourselves and I'll be with you again soon.

Home to Her is hosted by me, Liz Kelley. You can visit me online at hometoher. com, where you can find show notes and other episodes. You can read articles about the Sacred Feminine, and you'll also find a link to join the Home to Her Facebook group for lots more discussion and exploration of Her. You can also follow me on Instagram, at home to her, to keep up to date with the latest episodes. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you back here soon.