When God Was a Woman

[GoddessWhispers]

I thought, what with all the discussion of Abrahamic faiths lately that a discussion of the first faith, goddess, would keep the balance. No, Atheists don't give any credence to female god forms either. However, as a woman, it's a beautiful thing to discover at one time we were as honored for our sex as all that created all that exists. And as long as that faith was born once, it can never truly die in the hearts of every living woman that is the power in her own life, that some gave the name:Goddess! We are all creatress of our reality. Hail us! The human goddesses, that sisterhood that gives birth to eternity. That's not religion. That's biology baby!

Merlin Stone

When God Was a Woman

(1976)

An early contemporary proponent of the worship of the prehistoric Mother Goddess, Stone analyzes the creation story in Genesis from a non-Christian perspective. To her, the tale is an allegorical story about the Hebrew deity Yehwah supplanting the Mother Goddess, represented by the tree of life and the serpent, and Hebrew religion supplanting the worship of the Goddess. Stone claims that the forbidden knowledge concerns sex, sexuality, and reproduction, specifically the knowledge that men have a role in reproduction, and that the story describes the process by which traditional matriarchal societies were thrust aside by patriarchal societies. To Stone, "The Adam and Eve myth. . . had actually been designed to be used in the continuous Levite battle to suppress the female religion." [page 198]

Stone discusses a number of ancient Near Eastern nature religions some of which represented the Goddess by a serpent and others of which performed an early form of communion by eating the fruit of a tree which grew next to an altar to the Goddess. These goddesses, first and foremost the Creator Goddess, also represented wisdom, human creativity, sex, sexuality, reproduction, new life, and / or destiny or fate.

"Symbols such as serpents, sacred fruit trees and sexually tempting women who took advice from serpents may once have been understood by people of biblical times to symbolize the then familiar presence of the female deity. In the Paradise myth, these images may have explained allegorically that listening to women who revered the Goddess had once caused the expulsion of all humankind from the original home of bliss in Eden." pages 198-199

"It is here that our understanding of the sacred sexual customs and matrilineal descent patterns enters the matter, further clarifying the symbolism of the forbidden fruit. In each area in which the Goddess was known and revered, She was extolled not only as the prophetess of great wisdom, closely identified with the serpent, but as the original Creatress, and the patroness of sexual pleasures and reproduction as well. The Divine Ancestress was identified as She who brought life as well as She who decreed the destinies and directions of those lives, a not unnatural combination. Hathor was credited with having taught people how to procreate. Ishtar, Ashtoreth and Inanna were each esteemed as the tutelary deity of sexuality and new life. The sacred women celebrated this aspect of Her being by making love in the temples.

Considering the hatred the Hebrews felt toward the asherim, a major symbol of female religion, it would not be too surprising if the symbolism of the tree of forbidden fruit, said to offer the knowledge of good and evil, yet clearly represented in the myth as the provider of sexual consciousness, was included in the creation story to warn that eating the fruit of this tree had caused the downfall of all humanity. Eating of the tree of the Goddess, which stood by each altar, was dangerously "pagan" as were Her sexual customs and Her oracular serpents.

So into the myth of how the world began, the story that the Levites offered as the explanation of the creation of all existence, they place the advisory serpent and the woman who accepted its counsel, eating of the tree that gave her the understanding of what "only the gods knew" - the secret of sex - how to create life.

As the advocates of Yahweh destroyed the shrines of the female deity wherever they could, murdering when they could not convert, the Levite priesthood wrote the tale of creation. They announced that male supremacy was not a new idea, but in fact had been divinely decreed by the male deity at the very dawn of existence. The domination of the male over the female, as Hebrew women found themselves without the rights of their neighbors, rights that they too may have once held, was not simply added as another Hebrew law written into the Bible as one of the first major acts and proclamations of the male creator. With blatant disregard for actual history, the Levite leaders announced that woman must be ruled by man, declaring that it was in agreement with the original decree of Yahweh, who, according to these new legends, had first created the world and people. The myth of Adam and Eve, in which male domination was explained and justified, informed women and men alike that male ownership and control of submissively obedient women was to be regarded as the divine and natural state of the human species.

But in order to achieve their position, the priests of the male deity had been forced to convince themselves and to try to convince their congregations that sex, the very means of procreating new life, was immoral, the "original sin." Thus, in the attempt to institute a male kinship system, Judaism, and following it Christianity, developed as religions that regarded the process of conception as somewhat shameful or sinful. They evolved a code of philosophical and theological ideas that inherently espoused discomfort or guilt about being human beings- who do, at least at the present time, conceive new life by the act of sexual intercourse - whether it is considered immoral or not.

This then was the unfortunate, unnatural and uncomfortably trap of its own making into which the patriarchal religion fell. Even today we may read in the Common Prayer Book of Westminister Abbey under the Solemnization of Matrimony, "Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fortification; that such persons that have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body"

The picture takes form before us, each tiny piece falling into place. Without virginity for the unmarried female and strict sexual restraints unmarried women, male ownership of name and property and male control of the divine right to the throne could not exist. Wandering further into the Garden of Eden, where the oracular cobra curled about the sycamore fig, we soon discover that the various events of the Paradise myth, one by one, betray the political intentions of those who first invented the myth." pages 216-218

"Let us take a closer look at the tale of creation and the subsequent loss of Paradise as related by the Hebrew leaders and later adopted and cherished by the advocates of Christianity. As we compare the Levite creation story with accounts of the Goddess religion, we notice how at each turn, in each sentence of the biblical myth, the original tenets of the Goddess religion were attacked. . . . ~continues here~

[ivytheplant]

In this same vein, you might also be interested in the book The Hebrew Goddess by Dr. Ralph Patai. It's a fascinating book detailing the strong feminist divinity that was present in Judaism.

[GoddessWhispers]

Thank you for the title. I'll search my local public library first and see what I find.

edit to add a Yahoo find. The Hebrew Goddess (site)

Edited January 5, 2007 by GoddessWhispers

[chaoszerg]

If there is a godess then that would explain all the hostile weather that has been happening around the world......... ..........................

Lol joking.

[GoddessWhispers]

Actually, the practice of naming twisters or hurricanes after women only, stopped in 1978. Ever since then, men have had equal opportunity. Now that glass ceiling can shatter like confetti, men are finally equal to big windy! And if the dude's really p***ed, like an F5 rage-on, we can hope to duck flying cows and pigs, oh my.

We ain't in Kansas anymore Dorothy, Fred's on a tear!

[Radian]

God is authoritative, strong, issues wrath which is like the father, and masculine. God is loving, understanding, forgiving, in charge of procreation, beauty, tender, and is like the mother, which is feminine.

Ultimately, (IMO of course), God is more feminine than masculine. I have pondered the very thought just how many prophetesses were written OUT of the bible due to misogyny-

[Grandpa Greenman]

All Hail Danu,

Mother Goddess of the Earth,

Who waters the tree of life,

Mother of the Gods,

Mother of the Tribes of Men,

Mother of the Kindred.

Bless us this day,

With abundance.

[JeremiahGateFan]

I believe that in order for the divine to truly be divine, he has to posess both qualities that are inherintly feminine and those that are inherintly masculine. So, similar to the wiccans and other neopagan faiths, I believe that either there is more than one god, or God is androgynous possesing both sorts of qualities.

[John from Lowell]

I believe that in order for the divine to truly be divine, he has to posess both qualities that are inherintly feminine and those that are inherintly masculine. So, similar to the wiccans and other neopagan faiths, I believe that either there is more than one god, or God is androgynous possesing both sorts of qualities.

I agree with this view. It is time to integrate the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine.

In my view neither can be honored more than the other without its eventual downfall. Our current day patricial views are in trouble and the one-sided feminist views are equally out of balance.

I also think the Divine is androgynoue or all embracing of both energies. I think it is wise to make an effort to understand this concept.