| When God Was a Woman | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Merlin Stone |
| Original title | The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women's Rites |
| Publisher | Barnes and Noble |
| Publication date | 1976 |
| ISBN | ISBN 015696158X |
| OCLC Number | 3397068 |
| Dewey Decimal | 291.2/11 |
| LC Classification | BL458 .S76 1978 |
When God Was a Woman is the U.S. title of a 1976 book by sculptor and art historian 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 into German as Als Gott eine Frau war in 1989.
Drawing upon the work of Margaret Murray and Robert Graves, Stone postulates a prehistoric matriarchal religion, 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. According to her the Bible was an attempt to change that symbolism and celebrate the victory of male oriented rites and gods.
It reflects the rise of feminist theology in the 1970s to 1980s, along with authors such as Elizabeth Gould Davis, Riane Eisler and Marija Gimbutas.