When God Was A Woman

Preface

How did it actually happen? How did men initially gain the control that now allows them to regulate the world in matters as vastly diverse as deciding which wars will be fought when to what time dinner should be served?

This book is the result of my reactions to these and similar questions which many of us concerned about the status of women in our society have been asking ourselves and each other. As if in answer to our queries, yet another question presented itself. What else might we expect in a society that for centuries has taught young children, both female and male, that a MALE deity created the universe and all that is in it, produced MAN in his own divine image—and then, as an afterthought, created woman, to obediently help man in his endeavors? The image of Eve, created for her husband, from her husband, the woman who was supposed to have brought about the downfall of humankind, has in many ways become the image of all women. How did this idea ever come into being?

Few people who live in societies where Christianity, Judaism or Islam are followed remain unaware of the tale of Eve heeding the word of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, eating the forbidden fruit and then tempting Adam to do the same. Generally, during the most impressionable years of childhood, we are taught that it was this act of eating the tasty fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that caused the loss of Paradise, the expulsion of Adam and Eve, thus all humankind, from this first home of bliss and contentment. We are also made to understand that, as a result of this act, it was decreed by God that woman must submit to the dominance of man—who was at that time divinely presented with the right to rule over her—from that moment until now.

The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is not exactly the latest news, but few contemporary happenings have affected women of today any more directly. In the struggle to achieve equal status for women, in a society still permeated by the values and moralities of Judeo-Christian beliefs (which have penetrated deeply into even the most secular aspects of our contemporary civilization) we soon realize that a thorough examination of this creation legend, alongside its historical origins, provides us with vital information. It allows us to comprehend the role that contemporary religions have played in the initial and continual oppression and subjugation of women—and the reasons for this.

In prehistoric and early historic periods of human development, religions existed in which people revered their supreme creator as female. The Great Goddess—the Divine Ancestress—had been worshiped from the beginnings of the Neolithic periods of 7000 BC until the closing of the last Goddess temples, about AD 500. Some authorities would extend Goddess worship as far into the past as the Upper Paleolithic Age of about 25,000 BC. Yet events of the Bible, which we are generally taught to think of as taking place in the beginning of time, actually occurred in historic periods. Abraham, first prophet of the Hebrew-Christian god Yahweh, more familiarly known as Jehovah, is believed by most Bible scholars to have lived no earlier than 1800 BC and possibly as late as 1550 BC.

Most significant is the realization that for thousands of years both religions existed simultaneously—among closely neighboring peoples. Archaeological, mythological and historical evidence all reveal that the female religion, far from naturally fading away, was the victim of centuries of continual persecution and suppression by the advocates of the newer religions which held male deities as supreme. And from these new religions came the creation myth of Adam and Eve and the tale of the loss of Paradise.

What had life been like for women who lived in a society that venerated a wise and valiant female Creator? Why had the members of the later male religions fought so aggressively to suppress that earlier worship—even the very memory of it? What did the legend of Adam and Eve really signify, and when and why was it written? The answers I discovered have formed the contents of this book. When God Was a Woman, the story of the suppression of women’s rites, has been written to explain the historical events and political attitudes that led to the writing of the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall, the loss of Paradise and, most important, why the blame for that loss was attributed to the woman Eve, and has ever since been placed heavily upon all women.

Introduction

Though to many of us today religion appears to be an archaic relic of the past (especially the writings of the Old Testament, which tell of times many centuries before the birth of Christ), to many of our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents these writings were still regarded as the sacred gospel, the divine word. In turn, their religious beliefs, and subsequent behavior and social patterns, have left their imprint on us in various ways. Indeed, the ancient past is not so far removed as we might imagine or prefer to believe.

In fact, if we are ever to fully understand how and why man gained the image of the one who accomplishes the greatest and most important deeds while woman was relegated to the role of ever-patient helper, and subsequently assured that this was the natural state of female-male relationships, it is to these remote periods of human history that we must travel. It is the ancient origins of human civilizations and the initial development of religious patterns we must explore. And this, as you will see, is no easy task.

It is shocking to realize how little has been written about the female deities who were worshiped in the most ancient periods of human existence and exasperating to then confront the fact that even the material there is has been almost totally ignored in popular literature and general education. Most of the information and artifacts concerning the vast female religion, which flourished for thousands of years before the advent of Judaism, Christianity and the Classical Age of Greece, have been dug out of the ground only to be reburied in obscure archaeological texts, carefully shelved away in the exclusively protected stacks of university and museum libraries. Quite a few of these were accessible only with the proof of university affiliation or university degree.

Many years ago I set out upon a quest. It eventually led me halfway round the world—from San Francisco to Beirut. I wanted to know more about the ancient Goddess religion. Along the way were the libraries, museums, universities and excavation sites of the United States, Europe and the Near East. Making my way from place to place, I compiled information from a vast variety of sources, patiently gleaning each little phrase, prayer or fragment of a legend from a myriad of diverse information.

As I gathered this material about the early female deities, I found that many ancient legends had been used as ritual dramas. These were enacted at religious ceremonies of sacred festivals, coinciding with other ritual activities. Statues, murals, inscriptions, clay tablets and papyri that recorded events, legends and prayers revealed the form and attitudes of the religion and the nature of the deity. Comments were often found in the literature of one country about the religion or divinities of another. Most interesting was the realization that the myths of each culture that explained their origins were not always the oldest. Newer versions often superseded and displaced previous ones, while solemnly declaring that this is as it was in the beginning of time.

Professor Edward Chiera of the University of Chicago wrote of the Babylonian myth of the creation of heaven and earth by the god Marduk that Marduk, the new god of this rather new city, certainly had no right to appropriate to himself the glory of so great a deed … But in Hammurabi’s time Babylon was the center of the kingdom … Marduk, backed by Hammurabi’s armies, could now claim to be the most important god in the land. Professor Chiera also explained that in Assyria, where the god Ashur eventually became the supreme deity, The Assyrian priests gave the honor to Ashur simply by taking the old Babylonian tablets and recopying them, substituting the name of their own god for that of Marduk. The work was not very carefully done, and in some places the name of Marduk still creeps in.

In the difficulties I encountered gathering material, I could not help thinking of the ancient writing and statuary that must have been intentionally destroyed. Accounts of the antagonistic attitudes of Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (Islam) toward the sacred artifacts of the religions that preceded them revealed that this was so, especially in the case of the Goddess worshiped in Canaan (Palestine). The bloody massacres, the demolition of statues (i.e., pagan idols) and sanctuaries are recorded in the pages of the Bible following this command by Yahweh: You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, set fire to the carved images of their gods and wipe out their name from that place (Deut. 12:2, 3). There can be little doubt that the continuous attacks, as recorded in the Old Testament, destroyed much precious and irretrievable information.

In later periods Christians were known throughout the world for their destruction of sacred icons and literature belonging to the so-called pagan or heathen religions. Professor George Mylonas wrote that, during the reign of the early Christian Emperor Theodosius, The Christians, especially in the large cities of Antioch and Alexandria became the persecutors and the pagans the persecuted; temples and idols were destroyed by fire and their devotees mistreated. As the worship of the earlier deities was suppressed and the temples destroyed, closed or converted into Christian churches, as so often happened, statues and historic records were obliterated by the missionary fathers of Christianity as well.

Though the destruction was major, it was not total. Fortunately many objects had been overlooked, remnants that today tell their own version of the nature of those dread pagan rituals and beliefs. The enormous number of Goddess figurines that have been unearthed in excavations of the Neolithic and early historic periods of the Near and Middle East suggest that it may well have been the evident female attributes of nearly all of these statues that irked the advocates of the male deity. Most pagan idols had breasts.

The writers of the Judeo-Christian Bible, as we know it, seem to have purposely glossed over the sexual identity of the female deity who was held sacred by the neighbors of the Hebrews in Canaan, Babylon and Egypt. The Old Testament does not even have a word for Goddess. In the Bible the Goddess is referred to as Elohim, in the masculine gender, to be translated as god. But the Koran of the Mohammedans was quite clear. In it we read, Allah will not tolerate idolatry … the pagans pray to females.

Since a great deal of information was gleaned from university and museum libraries, another problem I encountered was the sexual and religious bias of many of the erudite scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the available information in both archaeology and ancient religious history was compiled and discussed by male authors. The overwhelming prevalence of male scholars, and the fact that nearly all archaeologists, historians and theologians of both sexes were raised in societies that embrace the male-oriented religions of Judaism or Christianity, appeared to influence heavily what was included and expanded upon and what was considered to be minor and hardly worth mentioning. Professor R. K. Harrison wrote of the Goddess religion, One of its most prominent features was the lewd, depraved, orgiastic character of its cultic procedures. Despite the discovery of temples of the Goddess in nearly every Neolithic and historic excavation, Werner Keller writes that the female deity was worshiped primarily on hills and knolls, simply echoing the words of the Old Testament. Professor W. F. Albright, one of the leading authorities on the archaeology of Palestine, wrote of the female religion as orgiastic nature worship, sensuous nudity and gross mythology. He continued by saying that It was replaced by Israel with its pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism and its severe code of ethics. It is difficult to understand how these words can be academically justified after reading of the massacres perpetrated by the Hebrews on the original inhabitants of Canaan as portrayed in the Book of Joshua, especially chapters nine to eleven. Professor S. H. Hooke, in his collection of essays Myth, Ritual and Kingship, openly admits, I firmly believe that God chose Israel to be the vehicle of revelation.

Albright himself wrote, It is frequently said that the scientific quality of Palestinian archaeology has been seriously impaired by the religious preconceptions of scholars who have excavated in the Holy Land. It is true that some archaeologists have been drawn to Palestine by their interest in the Bible, and that some of them had received their previous training mainly as biblical scholars. But he then proceeded to reject this possibility of impairment, basing his conclusion primarily upon the fact that the dates assigned to the sites and artifacts of ancient Palestine, by the scholars who took part in the earlier excavations, were subsequently proven to be too recent, rather than too old, as might perhaps be expected. The question of whether or not the attitudes and beliefs inherent in those suggested religious preconceptions had perhaps subtly influenced analysis and descriptions of the symbolism, rituals and general nature of the ancient religion was not even raised for discussion.

In most archaeological texts the female religion is referred to as a fertility cult, perhaps revealing the attitudes toward sexuality held by the various contemporary religions that may have influenced the writers. But archaeological and mythological evidence of the veneration of the female deity as creator and lawmaker of the universe, prophetess, provider of human destinies, inventor, healer, hunter and valiant leader in battle suggests that the title fertility cult may be a gross oversimplification of a complex theological structure.

Paying closer attention to semantics, subtle linguistic undertones and shades of meaning, I noticed that the word cult, which has the implicit connotations of something less fine or civilized than religion, was nearly always applied to the worship of the female deities, not by ministers of the Church but by presumably objective archaeologists and historians. The rituals associated with the Judeo-Christian Yahweh (Jehovah) were always respectfully described by these same scholars as religion. It was upon seeing the words God, and even He, each time carefully begun with capital letters, while queen of heaven, goddess and she were most often written in lower case, that I decided to try it the other way about, observing how these seemingly minor changes subtly affected the meaning as well as the emotional impact.

Within descriptions of long-buried cities and temples, 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. The overt sexual nature of the Goddess, juxtaposed to Her sacred divinity, so confused one scholar that he finally settled for the perplexing title, the Virgin-Harlot. The women who followed the ancient sexual customs of the Goddess faith, known in their own language as sacred or holy women, were repeatedly referred to as ritual prostitutes. This choice of words once again reveals a rather ethnocentric ethic, probably based on biblical attitudes. Yet, using the term prostitute as a translation for the title of women who were actually known as qadesh, meaning holy, suggests a lack of comprehension of the very theological and social structure the writers were attempting to describe and explain.

Descriptions of the female deity as creator of the universe, inventor or provider of culture were often given only a line or two, if mentioned at all; scholars quickly disposed of these aspects of the female deity as hardly worth discussing. And despite the fact that the title of the Goddess in most historical documents of the Near East was the Queen of Heaven, some writers were willing to know Her only as the eternal Earth Mother.

The female divinity, revered as warrior or hunter, courageous soldier or agile markswoman, was sometimes described as possessing the most curiously masculine attributes, the implication being that Her strength and valor made Her something of a freak or physiological abnormality. J. Maringer, professor of prehistoric archaeology, rejected the idea that reindeer skulls were the hunting trophies of a Paleolithic tribe. The reason? They were found in the grave of a woman. He writes, Here the skeleton was that of a woman, a circumstance that would seem to rule out the possibility that reindeer skulls and antlers were hunting trophies. Might these authors be judging the inherent physical nature of women by the fragile, willowy ideals of today’s western fashions?

Priestesses of the Goddess, who provided the counsel and advice at Her shrines of prophetic wisdom, were described as being fit for this position since as women they were more intuitive or emotional, thus ideal mediums for divine revelation. These same writers generally disregarded the political importance of the advice given or the possibility that these women might in fact have been respected as wise and knowledgeable, capable of holding vital, advisory positions. Strangely enough, emotional qualities or intuitive powers were never mentioned in connection with the male prophets of Yahweh. Gerhard Von Rad commented, … it has always been the women who have shown an inclination for obscure astrological cults.

The word gods, in preference to the word deities, when both female and male deities were being discussed, was most often chosen by the contemporary scribes of ancient religion. Conflicting translations, even something as simple as Driver’s He did sweep from the fields the women gathering sticks to Gray’s To and fro in the fields plied the women cutting wood raise questions about the accuracy of the use of certain words chosen as translations. It is true that ancient languages are often quite difficult to decipher and to then translate into contemporary words and terms. In some cases a certain amount of educated guessing takes place, and this is temporarily useful, but it is here that preconceived attitudes may be likely to surface.

Unfortunately, instances of possibly inaccurate translation, biased comments, assumptions and speculations innocently blend into explanations of attitudes and beliefs of ancient times. Male bias, together with preconceived religious attitudes, which appears in both major and minor matters, raises some very pressing and pertinent questions concerning the objectivity of the analysis of the archaeological and historical material available at present. It suggests that long-accepted theories and conclusions must be re-examined, re-evaluated and where indicated by the actual evidence, revised.

In 1961 a series of mistakes was described by Professor Walter Emery, who took part in the excavations of some of the earliest Egyptian tombs. He tells us that The chronological position and status of Meryet-Nit is uncertain, but there is reason to suppose that she might be the successor of Zer and the third sovereign of the First Dynasty. Writing of the excavation of this tomb by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1900 he says, At that time it was believed that Meryet-Nit was a king, but later research has shown the name to be that of a woman and, to judge by the richness of the burial, a queen. He goes on to say, In 1896 de Morgan, then Director of the Service of Antiquities discovered at Nagadeh a gigantic tomb which, from the objects found in it, was identified as the burial place of Hor-Aha, first king of the First Dynasty. However later research has shown that it is more probable that it was the sepulchre of Nit-Hotep, Hor-Aha’s mother. And again he tells us that On the mace of Narmer a seated figure in a canopied palanquin was once thought to be that of a man, but a comparison of similar figures on a wooden label from Sakkara shows that this is improbable and that it almost certainly represents a woman. Yet, despite his own accounts of this series of assumptions that the richest burials and royal palanquins of the past were for men, rather than women, in describing the tomb of King Narmer he then states, "This monument is almost insignificant in comparison with the tomb of Nit-Hotep at Nagadeh and we can only conclude that this was only the king’s southern tomb and that his real burial place still awaits discovery … (my italics). Though some pharaohs did build two tombs, one might expect a possibly or probably" rather than such an absolute conclusion and the implied dismissal of the possibility that, in that period of earliest dynastic Egypt, a queen’s tomb just might have been larger and more richly decorated than a king’s.

In Palestine Before the Hebrews, E. Anati described a group of Asiatics arriving in Egypt. In this description he explains that it is the men who have arrived and with them they bring their goods and their donkeys, their wives and children, tools, weapons and musical instruments, in that order. Anati’s description of the earliest appearance of the Goddess is no less male-oriented. He writes, "These Upper Paleolithic men also created a feminine figure apparently representing a goddess or being of fertility … the psychological implications of the mother goddess are therefore of tremendous importance … Here undeniably is the picture of a thinking man, of a man with intellectual as well as material achievements" (my italics). Could it possibly have been the female ancestors of those women who are listed along with the donkeys and other goods who were thinking women, women with intellectual as well as material achievements?

Dr. Margaret Murray of the University of London, writing on ancient Egypt in 1949, suggested that the whole series of events surrounding the romantic relationships of Cleopatra, who actually held the legitimate right to the Egyptian throne, was misunderstood as the result of male bias. She points out that, The classical historians, imbued as they were with the customs of patrilineal descent and monogamy, besides looking on women as the chattels of their menfolk, completely misunderstood the situation and have misinterpreted it to the world.

These are just a few examples of the sexual and religious biases that I encountered. As Cyrus Gordon, Professor of Near Eastern Studies and formerly Chairman of the Department at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, writes, We absorb attitudes as well as subject matter in the learning process. Moreover, the attitudes tend to determine what we see, and what we fail to see, in the subject matter. This is why attitude is just as important as subject matter in the educational process. Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the pagan religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.

Despite the many obstacles, I sought out and gathered the existing information and began to collate and correlate what I had collected. As I undertook this process, the importance, the longevity and the complexity of this past religion began to take form before me. So often there was just the mention of the Goddess, a part of a legend, an obscure reference, tucked away in some four or five hundred pages of scholarly erudition. A deserted temple site on Crete or a statue in the museum at Istanbul, with little or no accompanying information, began to find its place in the overall picture.

Painstakingly bringing these together, I finally began to comprehend the total reality. It was more than an inscription of an ancient prayer, more than an art relic sitting on a museum shelf behind glass, more than a grassy field strewn with parts of broken columns or the foundation stones which had once supported an ancient temple. Placed side by side, the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle revealed the overall structure of a geographically vast and major religion, one that had affected the lives of multitudes of people over thousands of years. Just like the religions of today, it was totally integrated into the patterns and laws of society, the morals and attitudes associated with those theological beliefs probably reaching deep into even the most agnostic or atheistic of minds.

I am not suggesting a return or revival of the ancient female religion. As Sheila Collins writes, As women our hope for fulfilment lies in the present and future and not in some mythical golden past … I do hold the hope, however, that a contemporary consciousness of the once-widespread veneration of the female deity as the wise Creatress of the Universe and all life and civilization may be used to cut through the many oppressive and falsely founded patriarchal images, stereotypes, customs and laws that were developed as direct reactions to Goddess worship by the leaders of the later male-worshiping religions. For, as I shall explain, it was the ideological inventions of the advocates of the later male deities, imposed upon that ancient worship with the intention of destroying it and its customs, that are still, through their subsequent absorption into education, law, literature, economics, philosophy, psychology, media and general social attitudes, imposed upon even the most non-religious people of today.

This is not intended as an archaeological or historical text. It is rather an invitation to all women to join in the search to find out who we really are, by beginning to know our own past heritage as more than a broken and buried fragment of a male culture. We must begin to remove the exclusive mystique from the study of archaeology and ancient religion, to explore the past for ourselves rather than remaining dependent upon the interests, interpretations, translations, opinions and pronouncements that have so far been produced. As we compile the information, we shall be better able to understand and explain the erroneous assumptions in the stereotypes that were initially created for women to accept and follow by the proclamations in the male-oriented religions that, according to the divine word, a particular trait was normal or natural and any deviation improper, unfeminine or even sinful. It is only as many of the tenets of the Judeo-Christian theologies are seen in the light of their political origins, and the subsequent absorption of those tenets into secular life understood, that as women we will be able to view ourselves as mature, self-determining human beings. With this understanding we may be able to regard ourselves not as permanent helpers but as doers, not as decorative and convenient assistants to men but as responsible and competent individuals in our own right. The image of Eve is not our image of woman.

It is also an invitation to all men—those who have previously questioned the reasons for the roles and images of females and males in