When God Was a Woman
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When God Was a Woman is the U.S. title of a 1976 book (ISBN 0-15-696158-X) by sculptor and history professor Merlin Stone. It was published earlier in the UK as The Paradise Papers. It has been translated in french as Quand Dieu était femme (SCE-Serivces Complets d'Edition, Québec, Canada) in 1978 and 1989.
Drawing largely upon the speculations 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", finding it "ironic" that "Aryan Nazis" would have exterminated "equally Aryan Jews", alleging misogyny and hatred of goddess worship within Israelite society, which she connects to the later development of Christianity. She also attempted to link Hitler's teachings to the ancient Hittites largely because of the similarities of the names.
It reflects the rise of feminist theology in the 1970s to 1980s, along with authors such as Elizabeth Gould Davis and Riane Eisler.
[edit] References
- Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked, Spence Publishing, New York, 1998. ISBN 0-9653208-9-8; review: R. Sheaffer, Skeptical Inquirer (1999)[1]
