A look at the Divine Goddess

But not the New Age kind

I’m reading a book right now with a bold and surprising thesis: before the rise of the major patriarchal religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam), most of the world’s religion centered around Goddess worship. The Goddess went by different names in different regions, but across the world this fairly unified Goddess-centered religion held as much global cultural influence as the God-focused religions of today.

The book, When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone, is a bit dense and often confusing, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as pleasure reading. But Stone has done something it seems few researchers have tried to do: she has gone around the world attempting to piece together all the little mentions of ancient Goddesses into a coherent picture of a widespread and highly influential Goddess worship religion. She tracks this Goddess religion across such diverse places as the Middle East, Australia, Japan, India, Egypt and China, and makes the case that almost everywhere women ruled church and society for between seven and twenty-five thousand years before the rise of today’s major religions. The implication is big: before the world was mostly patriarchal it was mostly matriarchal, stemming from a belief in the divine woman.

Now, this is compelling to me for obvious reasons, though I’m not quite ready to adopt it as my worldview based on one book. Here I wanted to share a few key points from the book that I have found fascinating and which ring true.

Before men had kids

Here’s something I had never thought of: there was probably a time before humans understood the male role in conception. Therefore, there was likely a world where new life seemed to spring exclusively from female bodies. Because in this era there would be no biological connection made between man and child, only between woman and child, family lineage, names and possessions necessarily would have to pass through the female line.

The view that women were the sole bearers of new life, argues Stone, contributed to the veneration and worship of women as divine. Within this context, Goddess-based religions would naturally dominate global religion. Women alone created new life, and so it would be natural to imagine a Divine Creatress of the Universe.

Goddess cults

The way we understand prehistoric Goddess worship religions today is shaped in large part by the language used to describe such religions in historical texts—usually derogatory and mentioned in passing. ”In most archaeological texts,” Stone writes, “the female religion is referred to as a “fertility cult,” perhaps revealing attitudes towards sexuality held by various contemporary religions that may have influenced writers.” However, the research shows that across the world the various forms of the Goddess held all the same types of powers as modern Gods—She held the role of Creatress of the Universe, and determined human fates, health and laws. She also commonly hunted and lead armies into battle.

She also had sex. As a result, “academic authors wrote of the sexually active Goddess as “improper,” “unbearably aggressive,” or “embarrassingly void of morals,” while male deities who raped or seduced legendary women or nymphs were described as “playful,” even admirably “virile.””

Finally, there is the pervasive habit of writing about a “God” with the pronoun “He,” and a “goddess” with the pronoun “she.” Throughout the book, Stone writes about the Goddess and Her attributes. A small but high-impact change.

Egyptian women

Stone’s examination of Egyptian culture was particularly striking to me, given that my early schooling had an outsized focus on Egypt (not sure about you, but for me elementary school was filled with many units on Egypt and visits to a local museum with an Egypt exhibit). Yet I remember hearing nothing of this: Egyptian culture was mostly matrilineal, with name and property passing down through the female line. Additionally, “obedience was urged upon husbands,” and “women were remarkably free…as late as the fourth century BC there existed side by side with patriarchal marriage, a form of marriage where the wife chose the husband and could divorce him.”

This challenges a notion I didn’t even quite realize I held: that women have been mostly subjugated throughout history, and that there has been a long slow march of progress leading to our modern society where women have more rights and freedoms than ever before.

Stone paints a different picture. In most places throughout the world, women were free and powerful until the rise of the major patriarchal religions. And we have been recovering since then.