The Chalice and the Blade
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
September 21, 2003

Reading: from The DaVinci Code, explanation of Chalice and Blade.

	Today’s question is sure to vex:
	Does the God we worship have a sex?
	Some things have got one - or two or three,
	Like cats and oysters and you and me.
	Some things have no sex at all
	– A rock, a star, a waterfall.
	Some see sexes everywhere
	In mountains, caves and the Anjou pear.
	Some say God is beyond all that
	God doesn’t even wear a hat!
	But if God’s not man or woman, gay or straight,
	How can we mere humans relate?
	That’s my message in a nutshell.    But I need to start with a little disclaimer.  I’m going to be talking about sex, not in the meaning of an act between people, but as the division of the human species into male and female.  It’s always difficult for a minister to do this because each us has a different experience of our sexuality.  Some are celibate, some are active, some are partnered, some are single, some are gay and some are straight, some are parents and some will never have children.  I’m going to talk about some aspects of sexuality, but that means I have tl leave out others which are also very important.  Maybe I’ll get around to those in other sermons.  If I step on your toes this morning, or you need to tell me how short-sighted or wrong I am, please feel free to do so at coffee hour.  I’d love to have a sermon talkback today, but unfortunately I have a wedding to perform in Cambridge.  	
	This sermon started out innocently enough: I read the summer potboiler recommended by my UU colleagues, the DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown.  Brown, who is the son of a mathematics professor and a singer of sacred music, has an interest in science and religion which forms the background for this cracking good murder mystery that involves secret societies, hidden symbols in 500-year-old paintings, the search for the Holy Grail, and a Harvard professor who has to figure it all out.
	The book makes great number of surprising claims about religious history, some of which echo with things I’ve studied.   But I didn’t know how much of it was factual.   There is a page at the front of the book claiming that certain aspects of it are true, including the following statement: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”  I guess this is the opposite of the usual disclaimer you see at the front of works of fiction – maybe we should call this a “claimer.”  
	Well, I was intrigued, particularly by the discussion of the chalice that I just read.  I was particularly interested in something that would back up the claim that the chalice is an ancient symbol for the womb.  I’m interested in anything that would throw new light on our worship symbols.  Let me remind you why.
	The flaming chalice, is of course, in widespread use in the denomination.  According to the UUA website, it is our official symbol.  “It is also a part of worship in many congregations -- services often begin by lighting a chalice while saying some brief reflective words. 
	There is no one official meaning of the flaming chalice. Like our faith, it stands open to new and ongoing interpretation and significance.”  
	Since there is no official meaning, it is incumbent on a UU minister to be on the lookout for any meaning that anyone may ascribe to the chalice.  This is why I was intrigued by the womb suggestion.
	The conventional explanation of how the chalice came to be ours is that it was used as a recognition symbol for an underground railway operated in the early 1940's by the Unitarian Service Committee in an effort to get Jews out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.  The Czech artist who drafted the symbol used the flame as a sign of freedom, but the chalice recalled Jan Hus, a Czech national hero and martyr, who had been persecuted because he wanted to serve Holy Communion to the common people.  Thus the chalice recalls the cup of the Eucharist or Holy Communion, which in turn is symbolic of the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, which in turn is a seder cup, a symbol of the Exodus.  We can see in this traditional story that the chalice has layers and layers of deep associations of the Beloved Community, democracy, the sacred sharing at meals, life beyond death, liberation and heroism.
	But the DaVinci Code goes it one step further, by identifying the Chalice with the Holy Grail, but then saying that both are only symbolic of a religious quest called the divine feminine.  The Chalice is such a symbol because of its womb-like shape.  But as the passage I read indicates, the chalice is only a symbol for the Holy Grail, not the Grail itself.  As to what the Grail turns out to be actually in the book, I’ll let the curious find out for themsleves.  If there were a hell, surely one of the lowest circles would be reserved for those who give away endings to good mystery stories.
	The Holy Grail is, of course, well known in Western literature.  By legend it is the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper, and which was also used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch Jesus’ blood as he was crucified.  But the word grail may come from a Latin word gradale which referred to dishes brought to the table at various stages (gradus is the Latin word for stage) of the meal.  So the grail might not have been a cup or chalice at all, but an open dish.  The medieval quest for the grail is usually set in the court of King Arthur, originally the knight who quested was Percival or Parisfal; in later versions that was changed to Galahad.  The first story of the quest was French, in the late Twelfth Century, and the quest has been retold by many writers and composers since then.  Three notable Nineteenth Century ones are Tennyson’s poem “Idylls of the King,” Wagner’s opera Parsifal and, closer to home, James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfaul”, which presents a very democratized version of the quest, suitable for this American Unitarian author.  He opens with the lines I like to quote as the opening words of our Flower Communion service:
	“And what is so rare as a day in June? 
	Then, if ever, come perfect days; 
	Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, 
	And over it softly her warm ear lays”
Sir Launfaul in the poem goes questing for the Grail, but finds it at last not in some far off land, but in his own castle revealed to him after he does a kindness for a leper at his gate.  It was in his home all along:  you find suggestions of this same plot in The Wizard of Oz, which is a kind of remake of the grail legend.
	The notion that the Grail story originated in fertility myths was popularized in the early Twentieth Century by Jessie Weston in her book “From Ritual to Romance” and the theme was picked up by T. S. Eliot in the writing of “The Waste Land.”  Perhaps one or both of these would provide insight on our chalice, but I discovered this suggestion late in my reearch and it will now have to wait to another sermon.
	For our purposes, the point is that the Grail legend has been one of the enduring staples of Western Literature for eight hundred years.  The grail, as I said, might or might not be a chalice or cup.  If it’s a chalice, the fertility theory would say it represents the female womb.  
	But what about the blade and the chalice?  The DaVinci Code passage makes such a firm pairing of the two as symbols for male and female, that I thought there must be some history behind it.  There is, in a sort of way, but it is neither ancient nor compelling. I found a book written in 1987 called simply The Chalice and The Blade by Riane Eisler.  Unfortunately, about all there is about chalices is the title.  Eisler uses the chalice and the blade as shorthand symbols for male and female as she discusses her thesis, but I could find no examples of the use of a chalice in art, ancient or modern, to represent a womb or in association with other emblems of fertility.  There is not even an entry for the word “chalice” in the index of the book, which I find peculiar in a work which has the word in the title.
	But what, you are asking, is Eisler’s thesis?  Some of you may be familiar with the book and others of you may be familiar with the idea through the old UU adult RE curriculum “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven.”  It is basically the idea of the Goddess.  
	Now I’m about to be a bit critical, and I don’t want to be misunderstood as Goddess-bashing. The thesis  of the Chalice and the Blade is both a religious claim and an historical one.  As a religious claim, it is that the damaging effects of millennia of male oppression and patriarchy can begin to be compensated if we, today, conceive God as a woman.  As an historical claim, it is that before the dawn of written history, virtually the entire human race worshipped the Goddess (one goddess) and was so organized that men and women were equal in power and privilege. 
	Eiler points to some specific examples.  If you’ve ever seen a catalogue for a Goddess tour, you’re probably familiar with them.  We have cave paintings from the Neolithic in Spain and France.   We have the so-called Venus of Willendorf and similar statutes from the paleolithic: small female figurines with exaggerated breasts and genitals; we have the layout of the temples on Minoan Crete, which are interpreted as being in the form of a the Goddess’s body, with the entrance through the birth canal.  And also from the same culture, the famous pair of snake-handling figurines dressed in gowns which expose their breasts.  These are all taken to be clear signs of not only of Goddess worship, but of equality between the sexes.
	The story goes on that the bad patriarchs, pagan polytheists and then Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheists somehow moved in, obliterating the Goddess worship, and that it survived only as an underground phenomenon in Wicca and in the incorporation of female divinities in the cults of the Saints and the Virgin Mary.  This latter part of the story, the feminine undercurrent within the masculine monotheistic traditions, is better documented than the prehistoric part.
	Putting the historical and the religious parts of the claim together, the religious path which is mapped out is to rediscover the ancient religion of the human race and in so doing, tear down the structures of patriarchy that continue to oppress us all, particularly women.  It is a superfically appealing proposition.
	At the risk of being labeled an unreconstructed patriarchalist myself, I will declare that I am a lot more sympathetic to the religious part of this Goddess enterprise than to the historical.   I feel the same way about many claims for a pagan Celtic past. I suppose it was, in part, to bolster this skepticism that I reached for the recently published “debunking” book, by an author whose name is confusingly similar to that of her opponent.  The Chalice and the Blade was written by Riane Eisler, and this book is by Cynthia Eller, published by Beacon Press in 2000, and called “The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.”
	Now pause right there; those of you who are fans of Joseph Campbell know that the popular meaning of the word “myth” may be a story which is factually untrue, but the deeper meaning is a story whose truth does not lie in its factual accuracy.  Eller uses the word with sensitivity and care, but she takes the Matriarchal Prehistory myth apart piece by piece, discussing all of the archaelogical, genetic, art historical, ethnographic, linguistic and literary evidence offered its support.  As a scholarly exercise in demolition, it is expertly done.  The blasting caps are planted in just the right places, the fuses are set, and the whole is blown up very neatly before our eyes with a minimum of dust and debris. (I know, that’s a very male metaphor, but – boys wil be boys).
	But Eller is also a feminist, and she takes extra pains to show us why, in her opinion, the idea that the human race once worshipped a goddess is not only unsupported by the evidence, but a bad idea for women.  She shows how the idea of separate religion for women arose not in the liberated 1970's but in the Victorian 1860's, as a paternalistic bow to what were deemed the feminine characteristics.  The fact that women have wombs, that they give birth has been used by men from time immemorial to keep them in their place.  The patriarch’s argument is that because of these functions women cannot attain the higher reaches of intellect or the spirit of which men are capable.  (You may hiss here).  So in urging modern women to adopt a religion which emphasizes their reproductive biology, modern feminists are playing into this ancient sexism.  Eller concludes that the myth of ancient Goddess worship does not advance the cause of feminism.
	Now as to the historical argument, I have to say the skeptics have the better of it.  Eisler’s original argument for a general matriarchal prehistory seems to me to be composed out of a teaspoon of evidence mixed with quarts of wishful thinking. There is simply no one from the Paleolithic to come forward and tell us whether the Venus of Willendorf is a sacred depiction of the Goddess or a male sex toy or something else entirely. We don’t know now, and we aren’t likely to know in the future.
	But as to the religious side of the argument, I am of two minds.  I like the idea of embodiedness, certainly in the way I think about myself and other humans. I think the idea that we could somehow put our brains in a jar and we would be the just the same as we are now is not only an illusion but a dangerous one.  Each of us is one being with many aspects.  Dualism of mind and body, of flesh and spirit is an illusion.  There is a complex relationship between the physical and the mental which is what makes us who we are.  In conventional Christian terms, we are all incarnations of a divine spirit. 
	And I applaud contemporary pagans and Goddess worshipers for encouraging us to speak of our sexual aspects in positive terms.  Our sexual identities are part of our core definitions of ourselves, our sex drives are at once the most grand and the most disturbing of our appetites, and if it is glorious to be a human with our different sexes, why should we deny that glory to the one we worship?
	Yet it is reductionist to claim that our sexual parts are all or even most of who we are.  And it is rank stereotyping to view all of those with the same plumbing as somehow equivalent to each other.  There are across the board characteristics of men and of women, but the variation between individuals of the same sex is greater and more multidimensional than the differences between men and women.
	But these are ideas about humans.  About God, I am also sympathetic to the conventional Christian view, going back to St. Thomas Aquinas, that God is wholly other, and God is beyond having a sex, as God is beyond every other characteristic of the human.  There is more latitude for theology that way.  You don’t have to conceive of God as a man or a woman or even as a person.  At yesterday’s meeting of the Citizens Against the Death Penalty we heard from Paris Carriger, who spent 20 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.  This is the kind of experience which might sharpens ones’ theology, so when Paris gave his idea of God, I paid special attention.  He said, “Everything living has a connection to every other thing living, and that connection is what I call God.”
	OK –  God is a connection.  What sense does it make to talk about a connection having a sex?  No more than to talk about a connection having hair of a certain color or a certain race. 
	Yet we want a god to whom we can relate emotionally, and for most of us this will mean a God conceived as a person.  Voltaire said that if God made man in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.  We have made gods in our own image.  Montesquieu pointed out that if the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.  There is something comforting about a God who looks like us.
	 And the conventional Christian view is not so pure as it seems anyway.  While the official position is that God has no sex, the terms used for God both in the Bible and in conventional theology are almost exclusively male: Lord, Father, Yahweh.  The big exception, a female noun used for God in the Hebrew Bible is Sophia, or Wisdom.  There may not be a good logical case for assigning a sex to God, but if three millenia of words and images have already assigned a sex, it might be time for a sex-change operation.
	The Fall Equinox is upon us, and as the sun moves below the equator, we think of balance.  I might try again to balance an egg on its end in a couple of days.  If you find the world or the church too patriarchal, you are free to put your own spin, sexual or otherwise, on the deity you worship.  None of us can ever know God as God is in God’s self anyway – we must approach God through metaphors and analogies.  If you want to see in our flaming chalice a womb, which is the locus of a new life of the spirit, go ahead.  If you want to see the church building as the body of the goddess, you are welcome to do that as well (though you’ll have to figure out what to do with the steeple).  In most Christian churches, the baptismal font would probably make a better womb than would a chalice, for many of them use the metaphor of baptism being a rebirth.  But maybe the chalice is our womb of rebirth, and we come back to it every week for new spirits.
	So in criticizing the historical claims, I don’t want to undercut the validity of a vision of divinity which is useful for today or tomorrow, to balance out the oppressions of centuries of male dominance.  My reaction is not to the Goddess herself but to some of the overblown claims in what is otherwise a worthy quest, a quest for the Holy Grail of balance, where the lion lies down with the lamb, the yin and yang interpenetrate but do not overcome each other.
	It’s a vital and serious task to recover from patriarchy, but I don’t think the picture of the mythical matriarchal prehistory really points the way to a future any of us would want.   As much trouble as the idea of having two sexes is – and I’m not even talking here about those brave pioneers who explore a middle way between the two – few people seriously would want to do away with the sexual division of the race or assign all of one sex to the trash heap.  We are diverse as a species, and our sexuality is only the beginning of our diversity, but it is genetically vital to it.  As I’ve pointed out in earlier sermons, it is our sex differences which make possible our evolutionary progress as a species; no amoeba ever painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
	The Chalice and the Blade: our different sexes will be with us as part of the human condition, and none of us will ever be completely easy with it.  There will always be a tension between the Chalice and the Blade, as there is a tension between the summer and the winter.  Meanwhile, our own Chalice will continue to grace our altar and our stationery – look for it soon on a T shirt -- and you can put whatever meaning you want upon it.  There’s always womb for another metaphor.
Amen.