The “Greatest Vaccine Debate”: Evidence vs. Anecdote with Farina, Wilson, Kirsch, and Kory

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/30

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for The Chalice and the Blade, she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She received the Humanist Pioneer Award. Drawing on neuroscience and history, she argues that peace begins at home and calls for a shift in worldview to build more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate societies rooted in connection rather than control. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade—now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). 

In this interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Eisler examines Homer through her partnership versus domination lens, arguing The Odyssey and The Iliad glorify the hero as killer and vilify the feminine. Eisler connects Homeric narratives to her four cornerstones—family and childhood, gender, economics, and care for Earth—insisting peace begins at home. She contrasts the blade with the chalice, symbolizing nurturing power and transformation. Penelope’s subordination and the execution of enslaved women exemplify domination’s logic. The interview invites reconstructive storytelling.

Interview conducted on October 18, 2025.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we’re here with Riane Eisler. We’re going to be talking primarily about The Odyssey, following the faith-based conversation, language, and narratives. Why The Odyssey?

Riane Eisler: I was surprised, going back to The Odyssey and The Iliad, to find that Homer was the propagandist—the secular propagandist—for what I call the domination system. I had thought about the fact that The Odyssey is full of references to the older, more partnership-oriented system in which female figures and deities also played a significant role. But I didn’t realize how The Odyssey and The Iliad are pure propaganda for the hero as a killer—the hero’s journey centered on the hero as a killer.

National Geographic has prominently covered Mary—famously, a December 2015 cover story on how the Virgin Mary became “the world’s most powerful woman,” and more recent historical features—Mary as the only female figure in a very strange pantheon where only the Father and the Son are divine, and she, the mother of God, is the only mortal figure. Maybe they will also share a new analysis of the Odyssey. It’s in the air, this revisiting. It’s both deconstruction and reconstruction.

Jacobsen: Do you find that this reinvention or re-presentation within a contemporary cultural milieu is almost like—metaphorically—an immune system reaction, the mythos defending itself from diminution?

Eisler: I don’t think of it as the immune system, though I like that idea. The immune system of humanity is at risk because of the domination system. As I’ve said many times, we’re not only interconnected by technologies of transportation and communication but also by technologies of destruction, such as nuclear bombs, and more slowly by climate change caused by technology guided by a domination system. We are facing an existential risk. You may be right that this revisiting is, in a sense, an immune system reacting to the contemporary regression to rigid domination systems, which idealize the hero as killer. 

The reaction does consist of both deconstruction and reconstruction because we humans need stories—we live by stories. The stories we’ve inherited, whether secular or religious, are not only justifications of domination but also vilifications of the female. You see clues of that throughout The Odyssey. The four cornerstones are all there.

Jacobsen: What values do cultures use to define the “hero,” and why is the killer elevated within that set of values in The Odyssey?

Eisler: Domination systems are held together by fear and force—fear of pain, whether it’s fear of being fired by those on top or punished by caregivers or parents. It’s something taught very early. I always return to the four cornerstones research identifies: family and childhood; gender; economics—because we don’t reward care, which is coded subordinate and “feminine” though it is central to the distinction between domination systems and partnership systems; care for people starting at birth; and care for Mother Earth.

Mother Earth—that’s another clue, isn’t it? And of course, there’s story and language. When we intervene in story and language, we take into account all four of these cornerstones, plus probably a fifth one, which I didn’t make a cornerstone because it’s implicit: fear and violence, pain or pleasure, holding the system together.

I wrote about this in Sacred Pleasure, which came out in 1995 with HarperCollins. That book prefigures much of my later thinking and writing.

Jacobsen: How are women as personae portrayed in The Odyssey? Some general characterizations—how is the female form represented and implicitly judged in The Odyssey? You also hinted at this earlier.

Eisler: One of the core components we haven’t recognized as linked to the domination system is how nearly all progressive social movements over the last 300 years have challenged the same thing, a tradition of domination —whether the Enlightenment, which questioned the so-called divinely ordained right of kings to rule; the feminist movement, which questioned the so-called divinely ordained right of men to rule over women and children in their homes; the anti-racism movement, beginning with abolitionism; the environmental movement, challenging the so-called divinely ordained right of man to dominate nature, or the peace movement.

If you look at war rather than peace, the assumption is that peace is not just an interval between wars. Peace begins at home. That connects the dots between the first cornerstone—family and childhood—and warfare. People who are raised in domineering households, in highly punitive environments, learn those models of power early on.

Research shows that people raised in domination households—highly punitive environments—are much more likely to accept and support wars. But the point you’re making is about the female form, and I want to emphasize this, how integral the subordination of women and rigid gender stereotypes are to all four cornerstones.

We’ve long assigned fixed roles to the male and female forms and ranked the male over the female, with no one in between, even though there have always been people in between. This ranking is central to all four cornerstones. We have a gendered system of values in economics: there’s always money for weapons, for wars, for the hero as killer—but somehow never enough for feeding, nurturing, and caring for children. It’s a very irrational system, what I call “reality stood on its head.”

In reimagining The Odyssey, the female forms are either vilified—the Sirens devour men; Scylla and Charybdis are a monsters—or sexualized, reduced to sexual objects for the male hero. Yet within The Odyssey, figures like Circe and Calypso remain powerful female archetypes. That power is a remnant of earlier, partnership-oriented traditions. But in the Homeric framework, these figures are vilified, and even Penelope—though still powerful in her way—is subordinated. Odysseus, the hero as killer, must be her consort to gain legitimacy, but she herself is portrayed as obedient and constrained.

Even her son, Telemachus, can tell her to be silent—an astonishing reflection of the patriarchal norms of the time. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, is ordered by Odysseus to execute the enslaved women after they clean up the carnage left by his slaughter of the suitors. Odysseus is a killer—that’s his defining trait—and that legacy of violence has persisted into our modern epics, our blockbuster films where the hero kills the villain.

The villain isn’t always female today, but in The Odyssey, the villains are often female, including the enslaved women. There’s no trial, no notion of justice or human rights—only the rule that might makes right.

Jacobsen: If the phrase could summarize the dominator model in that kind of literature, “might makes right,” what would be the equivalent summary statement for a partnership model?

Eisler: It’s The Chalice and the Blade—two symbols, both powerful. The blade represents domination, power over others, and it has become embedded in our language and institutions. The chalice, by contrast, symbolizes partnership, the power to nurture, to sustain, to create rather than destroy.

It’s a sign of movement toward partnership thinking to reject that older idea of power as domination. Ultimately, in the domination system, power means the power to take life—the hero as killer. The chalice represents a very different power: the power to nurture life. Women’s bodies, for example, produce milk—literally sustaining life.

This creates what I call a biological obstacle to domination. So, in the mythology of the domination system, women and female archetypes must be controlled or diminished. The Jungian archetypes are steeped in this framework. The animus—the masculine principle—has agency, while the anima—the feminine—is either man’s inspiration or his temptation and ruin.

We’ve been indoctrinated from birth into this domination mythology. That’s not to say Jung didn’t make valuable contributions. His concept of the shadow is an important one, and we’re still in a transitional period where these frameworks coexist.

Would a society oriented more toward partnership still require such archetypes? A society where care work is economically rewarded, and children aren’t raised in fear or physical pain? What’s clear is that our task now is to show that there’s a better alternative—and that alternative is partnership, a system of mutuality rather than of in-group versus out-group.

Jacobsen: As a side note, historically, how has the chalice been used—either in ritual or mythology? Since we’re talking about old myths, it seems appropriate to explore that. The blade’s symbolism is obvious, but the chalice’s story seems more elusive.

Eisler: I’m not an expert on the mythology of the Holy Grail, which of course is the chalice, but obviously it’s been co-opted into later stories. In the Arthurian legends, for example, the hero encounters the Grail and transforms. Through contact with the Grail, he gains the capacity for empathy, which is a profoundly human trait.

That story is one of the few that makes explicit the possibility of transformation. We are a remarkably flexible species; we can change. We can recapture our capacity for empathy. But even in that story, the empathy is directed toward a king, a superior within a rigid social hierarchy—which is rarely noted.

Jacobsen: The Odyssey—what are some of your original findings in reframing it?

Eisler: I think, first of all, it’s essential to recognize the clues to an earlier time. All of Odysseus’s major adversaries are female monsters—the vilification of the feminine as a narrative device.

The vilification of the female—of woman—is everywhere. Penelope remains an influential figure, so the clues are still there. The hero is the killer; he slays monsters, exploits Calypso and Circe sexually, and ultimately gains his power through Penelope, who becomes his instrument for authority and rulership.

There are so many signs of domination in The Odyssey. Take the double standard surrounding Odysseus’s infidelities with Circe and Calypso. His sexual adventures are treated as natural and unremarkable—of course, he does that. Meanwhile, poor Penelope must remain chaste, endlessly weaving and fending off the suitors.

Then there’s the execution of the enslaved women, killed supposedly for having relations with the suitors. Were they forced? Did they even have a choice? It doesn’t matter to the narrative; they’re vilified and slaughtered without question. The scene is a chilling emblem of absolute power and moral hypocrisy.

Jacobsen: That raises the question—how would one rewrite The Odyssey? If we’re engaging in both deconstruction and reconstruction, what would The Odyssey look like if it were not only the hero’s journey but the journey of both hero and heroine?

Eisler: We’ve never really had the heroine’s journey as a central theme of mythology. 

Jacobsen: In contemporary media—which I don’t watch much of—the heroines often invert the male model. They become violent, aggressive, adopting the same dominator values in a So, basically, the female form becomes the man-killer hero, and what’s changed is the shape, not the content.

Eisler: Absolutely. She’s still conditioned to accept that as the “normal” or “natural” order. It reminds me of what Gandhi said: we must not mistake the habitual for the natural norm. That observation is profoundly relevant.

Because when the heroine imitates the hero, nothing changes—it’s still the same story. It still glorifies killing. That’s NOT reconstruction; it’s co-option!

Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Riane. 

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