Women's Rites, part 1

The Goddess and the Patriarch

Once upon a time in the land of the Goddess there lived a man who had everything he needed…except the superiority he felt was his due. His wife was a wealthy and well-respected woman of Ur, with a generous heart and a light hand (she had never ordered him beaten for challenging her authority, and had never divided her attentions from him by taking a second husband even though she certainly could afford to); but instead of being grateful the man was discontented. His wife had never demonstrated the miracle of giving life, and he was lonely at home with no children to look after. While out upon his wife’s vast property overseeing the tending of her flocks and herds and managing the household servants (for such was his natural role while his wife tended to her important duties within the city), the man found himself staring off into the far distance, wondering if a place existed that was beyond the reach of the Goddess.

After some time his wife noticed his distraction and asked him what the matter was. The man breathed in all his courage and confessed. “Wife,” he said, “I have been hearing whisperings from the desert, an odd tugging at my spirit and a longing to follow. I believe there is a god out there who is calling to me.”

“A god?” his wife exclaimed, mystified. “This deity who you believe is communicating with you is male?” She had heard of such things, rumblings from far off lands whispered scandalously behind cupped hands in the markets, but she had always laughed them off. A male deity? Not simply a consort to the Goddess but a god within his own right? This was as outrageous an idea as a man performing the sacred rite of life-giving—impossible. Yet, she loved her husband, and she could see how troubled he was.

“I will think on this,” she said. “Now, I have something to ask of you before we sleep…”

Time passed, and the man did not give up his notion of a strange foreign god calling to him. Day by day, word by aggrieved and wheedling word, he wore her down; until, finally, she agreed to pack up their household and mount an expedition into the unknown so that her husband might follow the demands of his heart in comfort and safety. Little did she know what she was agreeing to; for out beyond the support of her sisters and foremothers, separated from the empowering rituals of the Goddess’s priestesses—not one of which had she ever missed before—the woman would spend the rest of her life being subtly convinced that she needed her husband for protection (hadn’t she hired enough guards to do that without him?), and that the protection and guidance he offered through the condescension of the increasingly jealous and demanding god he followed—who only he could hear and communicate with—afforded him a kind of power over her that she never imagined her beloved husband would even want let alone demand. Nor would she have believed that the man she trusted enough to follow out into the wilderness would become so obsessed with this power-hungry deity that he would be driven to attempt to sacrifice their only son in some insane attempt to convince this god of his unwavering devotion (and thank Goddess she had gotten wind of that before it was too late, and that her voice pitched low and thrown from a bush was enough to convince him the sacrifice of a good ram would be sufficient). By then, of course, it was too late. Her husband held the entire household in the throes of his fanaticism; she could not have escaped if she wanted to. She died in a lonely land without the blessing of a single priestess to carry her back into the Great Mother’s embrace, destined to be remembered as no more than a footnote in the story of her husband’s rise to greatness (ironically, as The Woman Who Laughed At God), with her “obedience” to her husband and her “reverence” for him the only traits thought worthy to grant her a place among the mothers of the tribes that would come to be called Israel, and the of the cult of god-worship that her husband would found.

“So Abram departed as the Lord had instructed…”¹

I invite you to take a moment and sit with this story that I have just retold. What were your internal reactions as you were reading it? How did those reactions change when you realized that you already knew a version of this story? What emotions did you experience? Anger? Fear? Guilt? A bit of a subversive thrill? Outrage at me for daring such heresy? Sit with those feelings, and know that parts of me are feeling all this and more. I certainly took liberties with the familiar story. Abram did not actual leave Ur, after all. His father, Terah, left with his family after the death of Abram’s brother, Haran. They resettled somewhere far enough away that Terah apparently named the place after his dead son, and lived out the remainder of his days there. It was after the death of his father that Abram struck out again, along with his brother’s son, Lot. Perhaps there was simply wanderlust in his blood. Perhaps they were fleeing some kind of scandal, or religious persecution for their anti-Goddess heresy. However it happened, I rewrote the story as I did for a very specific purpose: the liberties I took with this story about the founding father of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic faith traditions is nothing compared with the liberties taken by so-called “professional” scholars when it comes to the Goddess legacy.

Nearly sixty years ago an art and art history professor named Merlin Stone became fascinated by the widespread references to a great Goddess in ancient artifacts from all around the world. It was the 1960s, second-wave feminism was gaining her collective legs, and Ms. Stone had two burning questions: Where had Patriarchy come from? and, If there was a time when a Goddess—not a god—was the divinity recognized by humanity, what affect had Her religion had on the daily lives of women? Thus began a decade long research project culminating in her landmark book, When God Was A Woman. It was a difficult journey, at every turn hampered by the intentional oversight of its importance by overwhelmingly male scholars, and the demeaning language used when the “old ways” of Goddess worship was mentioned at all (“cult” is almost always used in place of “religion” for example, even when the references were so widespread and so normalized that the word could not possibly apply). Yet, she persisted. In the preface of her book, Stone writes:

In prehistoric and early historic periods of human development, religions existed in which people revered their supreme creator as female. The Great Goddess—the Divine Ancestress—had been worshipped from the beginnings of the Neolithic periods of 7000 BC until the closing of the last Goddess temples, about AD 500. Some authorities would extend Goddess worship as far into the past as the Upper Paleolithic Age of about 25,000 BC.²

Not only did such religions exist, they appear to be the rule rather than the exception.