When God Was a Woman
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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When God Was a Woman is the U.S. title of a 1976 book by sculptor and history professor Merlin Stone. It was published earlier in the UK as The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women's Rites. It has been translated into French as Quand Dieu était femme (SCE-Services Complets d'Edition, Québec, Canada) in 1978 and 1989.
Drawing upon the work of Margaret Murray and Robert Graves, Stone postulates a prehistoric matriarchy, painting ancient societies, including Ancient Egypt as matriarchal paradises, destroyed by the patriarchal Indo-Europeans. She concludes that the Hebrew Levites, because of their clearly patriarchal outlook "must have been Indo-Europeans", alleging misogyny and hatred of goddess worship within Israelite society, which she connects to the later development of Christianity. It reflects the rise of feminist theology in the 1970s to 1980s, along with authors such as Elizabeth Gould Davis and Riane Eisler.
See also
- Mother Goddess
- Potnia Theron
- Dodona
- Elam
- Dolmen deity
- Çatalhöyük
- Venus figurines
- Feminist theology
- Second-wave feminism
- Marija Gimbutas
- Matriarchal Studies
- The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory
