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[Index] When God Was a Woman November, 2009 Author: Judith Hayes Taken from: The Happy Heretic - When God Was a Woman It’s true, you know. There was a time when God was a woman. I’m not talking about the almost universally misunderstood concept of “pagan fertility cults.” In fact, those three words are all derogatory, incorrect depictions created by the totally male-dominated fields of archaeology, anthropology and theology, from their inception to the 20th century. And then, in 1976, a woman named Merlin Stone came along and wrote a book. I have stolen her title, When God Was a Woman. However, my motive springs purely from admiration. I cannot think of a better title! If you have not read her book yet, please do so. It is marvelous. It will explain so much about how we got to where we are today, with men running (and ruining) the world while we women are still trying to slowly clamber into positions of power. In most parts of the world that clambering has been rewarded with very little success. And, where such success has been found, it has usually only been achieved by women who behave like men. Our wretched struggles can of course be laid at the altar of our old friend—religion. Surprise, surprise. (I have never met Merlin Stone and have nothing to gain by the sale of her book except for the joy of sharing knowledge. Her book is still available on Amazon.) Early on in her book Stone adopts a most interesting approach to the simple act of the capitalization of words. It affects your entire perception of the subjects at hand. And I will do the same. Then there is the problem of translations. As I’ve talked about many times, the Bible suffers a great deal from obviously intentional mistranslations. There are two blatant examples. First, the Hebrew word for “young woman” was translated to “virgin” in order to elevate the status of the Virgin Mary. Second, the word “slave” was incorrectly translated as “servant” in order to lessen the harshness of life in Jesus’ world of the New Testament. There are similar problems, as we shall see, in discussions of the Goddess and how She was worshipped. The Birth of the Goddess Discovering the relationship between sex and babies was not as easy as it would seem. The two seem to have nothing to do with each other. The act of sexual intercourse is so far removed from any signs of pregnancy that figuring out the connection took humans a very long time. A female could have sex only once and then become pregnant. But she could also engage in sexual intercourse numerous times and never become pregnant. It did not seem to be a cause and effect arrangement. Every now and again a woman would become fat and then a tiny, fully formed human being would emerge from her body. This must have been viewed as a miraculous event! And the fact that only females could do this astonishing thing would naturally have made females appear to be miracle-workers themselves. Women made other human beings! It would have been a small step indeed to then perceive any deities that might exist as being female. A small step indeed. And that appears to be what happened with early humans. The Goddess was born. From the Upper Paleolithic Period (around 25,000 bc) many Venus figurines have been found which obviously emphasize the female form. Already there was something special about just being female. Lightly dismissed by 19th-century, male scholars as some sort of representation of “fertility cults,” these extremely early figures are far more than that. There are just too many of them to write off so easily. Nor have any matching male figures been found from that era that feature exaggerated penises. These Venus figures have been found in areas as far apart as Spain, France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Russia. The sites and figures span a period of at least ten thousand years. Trying to discover the origins of Goddess worship is very difficult for many reasons. For one thing Goddess figurines are found in so many places, covering such enormous time periods, that a “beginning” may never be found. Another problem is that Goddess worship is known by so many names that uncertainty is bound to follow. Here is a partial list of some of the names the Goddess was known by: Al Lat, Al Uzza, Anahita, Anaitis, Anat, Anath, Aphrodite, Sun Goddess of Arinna, Artemis, Aruru, Asherah, Ashtart, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Ate, Athar, Athena, Attar, Attoret, Au Set, Baalat, Brigit, Cerridwen, Cybele, Danu, Demeter, Devi, Diana, Elat, Ereshkigal, Gaia, HannaHanna, Hat-Hor, Hathor, Hepat, Hera, Inanna, Inara, Ininni, Innin, Ishara, Ishtar, Isis, Istar, Kupapa, Lato, Lilwanis, Maat, Mami, Mawu, Nammu, Nashe of Lagash, Neith, Nekhebt, Nidaba, Nikkal, Nina, Ningal, Ninhursag, Ninlil, Ninmah, Ninsikil, Nut, Rhea, Sarasvati, Shala, Sybella, Tiamat, Ua Zit, Utu and Wurusemu. It’s clear that many of these names are derivatives of each other. The Goddess was also worshipped by Her more generic names such as Queen of Heaven, The Divine Ancestress, The Mother of All Deities, The Great Goddess and so on. But by far the largest problem with identification has to do with the violent, determined, centuries-long demolition of statues (i.e. “pagan” idols) and sanctuaries belonging to the Goddess. Many of those destructions were recorded carefully (gleefully?) in the Bible: “Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.” (Deut 12:2-3—KJV) Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all violently opposed to the ancient Goddess-worship and did their best to destroy all they could. Yet so may remnants survived that there is no doubt about the widespread worship of the Goddess in those ancient centuries. The practice of matrilineal descent would be a natural offshoot of Goddess worship. Of course you’d inherit land, property and titles from your only known parent—your mother. (This practice continued all the way to the reign of Cleopatra, a woman more well known to us.) Though it appears that the Goddess originally reigned alone, at some period (different in different places) She acquired a son or brother who was also Her lover and consort. Known in various languages as Damuzi, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Osiris or Baal, this consort died in his youth, causing an annual period of grief for those who worshipped the Goddess. Just one example of this would be in Babylon of the eighteenth to the sixth centuries bc. The Goddess was known as Ishtar and Her dying son/lover was called Tammuz. As late as 620 (or so) bc, the Bible’s book of Ezekiel speaks of this practice of “weeping for Tammuz.” (Ezek 8:14) “Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” The dying son/lover played a role much later as new religious cults were formed, as we shall see. I’m Pregnant! We’ll probably never know for sure, but it seems likely that women would have been the first to discover the connection between sex and pregnancy, since they dealt with their monthly menstrual periods and would have finally figured it out. However, when it was eventually understood, the idea of paternity suddenly entered into human thought, and the world was changed forever. Once sex and babies were finally connected, the act of sexual intercourse was considered sacred in the temples of the Goddess. Women who made love in the Goddess’ temples were known as “sacred women” for obvious reasons—they were making babies. What could be more sacred or important? Unfortunately, although the earliest known examples of written language are from 3000 bc, they were almost exclusively for the purpose of keeping monetary accounts of temple activities. Thus, any histories of Goddess worship were written after the invaders with their male gods had long ago begun destroying the Goddess temples and artifacts. One example of this comes from Mesopotamia from about 3000 bc to the beginning of the ad period. During that time the language used was Akkadian. In that language the word qadishtu means literally “sacred women” or “holy women.” These were the Goddess worshippers who engaged in the rather important business of creating new life. But the male historians of the past two centuries have translated that word, qadishtu, to mean “prostitute” or “temple prostitute.” Doesn’t quite seem the same, does it? Anyway, there is no doubt that the written records only tell us how the Goddess and Her Priestesses and temples were destroyed, not the details of how She was revered. But why were these things destroyed and who did it? They Came from the North Variously referred to as Indo-Europeans, the Sea Peoples or just the northern invaders, the arrival of these invaders had definitely occurred by 2400 bc, but may have occurred even earlier, in a series of invasions. Whatever brought the northern invaders into the Near and Middle East (possibly weather?) they brought their male warrior god and/or supreme father god with them. Facing the ancient Goddess-worshipping people, the battle was on. These new gods brought with them many references to mountains of fire and earthquakes and thunder and smoke and so on, all obvious references to volcanoes, and those references run riot throughout the Old Testament in describing Yahweh. It would appear that the northerners were originally volcano-worshippers. In any event, their gods were male. And they made it their business to install their male god in the lands they conquered. It wasn’t easy. But the Bible makes countless references to the “pagan” religions they tried to stamp out. In the Beginning In the Beginning there was the Goddess. In the beginning of the Bible, however, there are two utterly different, contradictory stories of how life began, but they have one thing in common: they both go to extreme lengths to emphasize the subordination of women to men. In the first biblical account, Chapter 1 of Genesis, God creates a male and a female simultaneously. In the second account, Chapter 2 of Genesis, God makes a female out of one of the male’s ribs. Is that silly or what? It is quite similar to the equally silly Greek story of Athena (female) being born straight from the head of Zeus (male) and makes the same point: not only are males superior to females, but females are not even required to make a new human being. Preposterous propaganda! Enter the Serpent Long ago, in the Near and Middle East, the serpent was regarded as a source of wisdom and prophetic counsel. The reasons are unclear; but the practice of speaking strangely and “prophetically” after a snakebite was (and still is) a very common occurrence. Hallucinations are also produced from snake venom, and if death does not occur such visions and pronouncements may be considered divine. In the Sumerian town of Dir the Goddess was worshipped as the Divine Serpent Lady. Sculptures unmistakably reveal the divine nature of serpents. In both Hebrew and Arabic the terms for magic are derived from the words meaning serpent. A “snake tube” dated to about the thirteenth century B.C. was believed to hold food for the sacred snakes. There can be no doubt about the connection between serpents and Goddess worship. Yet another clear connection appears in a Seal Stone of the Goddess Athena, dated around the fifth century B.C. It unambiguously features Athena with a very large serpent. (Figure 5.) You can probably already see where this is headed—Goddess worship, serpents, the new male god trying to take over. It all fits. The Garden of Eden fable suddenly makes some sense. Eve, obviously inferior to Adam, allowed a serpent to talk her into sinning. Thus she brought about the downfall of all humankind. It was a female and a serpent who screwed everything up for everybody. Sound familiar? The Fall of the Goddess In the Bible the Hebrews are so busy trying to stamp out Goddess worship that they won’t even dignify Her by name. They only refer to “other gods.” The best example of this is in the First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” What other gods? Well, they really meant the Goddess, who had been worshipped as far back as memory served. It wasn’t easy to stamp out thousands of years of Goddess worship. Centuries of suppression still could not separate the people from their ancient ways and there were so many “idols” to destroy that the task was impossible. So one way the Hebrews thought they could at least destroy the power of the idols was to knock off their ears or noses. This would account for the missing noses of so many ancient statues. (And, centuries later, with the invention of the airplane, it might even explain the missing nose of the Sphinx.) As the invaders marched through the lands of the Goddess, their conquests were referred to as overcoming “the orgiastic nature worship.” It was replaced, so one historian claimed, by “Israel with its pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism and its severe code of ethics.” Those words are thoroughly contradicted by the dozens of Hebrew massacres described throughout the Old Testament. Just one of those descriptions of the “ethical” behavior of the conquering Hebrews: (Hosea 13:16) “Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.” Lofty? It took a long time, but slowly the Goddess was demonized, often to the point of ridiculousness. One example: As late as the sixteenth century ad, Hebrew scholars compiled a text known as the Kabbalah. In it the name of Lilith, once described in a Sumerian table as “the hand of Inanna” who brought men into the temple of the Goddess, was now presented as the symbol of evil, the female devil. Supposedly Lilith and her fellow female demons did their best to “provoke men to sexual acts without benefit of a woman, their aim being to make themselves bodies from the lost seed.” Hello? Are you having as much trouble imagining this as I am? The fable warns against Lilith who might be hovering about, just waiting for available sperm from which she could create demons and illegitimate children. I am not making this up. Not only was the almighty sperm provided with preposterous significance, but the nearly impossible task of gathering up “lost seed” and somehow inserting it into your own vagina, is truly laughable. Lost seed? Was it found on the ground? Did women hold out their hands, asking for semen? It’s just one example of how desperately men wanted to subdue women, and how difficult that undertaking was. And, even compared with so much foolishness in religious fables, the stolen seed fable is remarkably stupid. Christianity was just a tiny, unimportant cult when it began and it really didn’t amount to much until the Emperor Constantine embraced it around ad 300. But from that point on, Goddess temples, such as the temples of Isis, were converted into Christian churches. The Goddess was doomed. By the time St. Paul was writing about Christ, around ad 60, he went so far as to claim, outright, that “man is not of the woman but the woman of the man.” (1 Corinthians 11:8) More male desperation. If anyone out there has ever seen a male give birth, please let me know about it. Paul continued to rail against the still-popular Goddess worship: (Acts 19:27) “So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.” The new rules about the new male god also, not coincidentally, changed all the laws about inheritance and titles. Now it was the male who conferred these things, and this is why the genealogy of Jesus, as recorded in the book of Matthew, is so preposterous. Jesus is supposedly “descended” from King David; yet the line of descent is traced, unabashedly, from David to Joseph, Jesus’ step-father! Women had to be so unimportant as to be eliminated altogether in conferring kinship. So trying to eliminate Goddess worship was an uphill battle all the way. Christians had as much trouble as the Hebrews in this. But as the gospels of the New Testament created the story of Jesus, some very familiar themes appeared that might have helped. For example, instead of the son/lover of the Goddess dying, the son of Mary, Jesus, was said to have died. The women, instead of “weeping for Tammuz” every year, could now mourn the death of Jesus annually. To make it even more palatable, and what probably won the day, was the elevation of the Virgin Mary to such an extant that she was comparable to the Goddess. Mary is still highly venerated to this day and is often called “the mother of God” which is uncannily similar to one of the names of the Goddess—the Mother of All Deities. Life without the Goddess So today we are left with the legacy of the ultimate victory of gods over the Goddess. From the early witch-hunts, which left thousands (perhaps millions) of women murdered for being witches, to the actual ownership of women by their husbands, the males won. Harems came into being and wife-beating was/is accepted in large parts of the world. Female circumcision was invented. Even in today’s world, in 2009, endless wars are still being fought over lands supposedly “given” to men by their male gods. In many parts of the world women are forced by men to cover their shameful, sinful bodies from head to toe, no matter what the weather, and they look ridiculous in the process. They must also be very uncomfortable. It has been an ugly fall for the Queen of Heaven, who was ruthlessly demoted to the “evil temptress,” and women are still paying for it. We’ll never know what it might have been like to live in a world dominated by the Goddess. We can never go back. But we can close our eyes and try to imagine what life was like when women were revered, and babies were tiny miracles, and the estrogen-driven nurturing instinct had not yet been replaced with testosterone-driven aggression. We can only imagine what life might have been like—when God was a woman.