When god was a woman: book review

Fantastic foremothers

Any anthropologist worth his salt will agree that the earliest human societies were matriarchal. Nepal’s own Satya Mohan Joshi once mentioned to me the stories of Kathmandu’s mother goddesses who ruled the kingdom before men. But centuries of patriarchy has completely obliterated the evidence of such societies. In her book, When God was a Woman, Merlin Stone provides a refreshing outlook on ancient goddess worship and how they were obliterated by successive religions.

Let us start with what we know. In so many religions, the deity of agriculture is a woman—Laxmi in Hinduism, Demeter in Greek are just examples. And so are the deities of knowledge—Saraswati, Athena, etc. These attributions are not arbitrary—it is now agreed that farming and writing were developed in the earliest matriarchal civilizations. Stone documents evidence of worship of such female figures as far back as 25,000 BC in many parts of Europe and Asia.

Women had a high status in this society: Women, as the “gatherers,” stayed at home, which means, in modern terms, they owned the property. As mothers, they were the center of society. It was perhaps so because for a very long time, men’s role in procreation was not understood, and women were revered as sole creators of life.

And also as carriers of wisdom, women were worshipped. Mythologies of that age show mother goddesses as the Supreme Being, maybe comparable to the all-powerful Allah or Jehovah today. This goddess went by various names in many places: Isis, Innana, Ashtarte, and even finds mention in the Bible as a pagan goddess.

Gradually, as farming developed, men began staying home; as knowledge of men’s role in reproduction grew, so did the concept of monogamy and inheritance based on blood relations. While Stone attributes the changes in society to “Northern invaders” with regards to such aspects, I would go for less dramatic versions by other writers. For, gradually, a newer generation of myths came up, and those were based on the conquest of the feminine spirit. Indra’s conquest of Vritrasura is incomplete without the sorrow of his mother Danu, and Greek stories are full of the suppression of wise females, like Medusa.

Many other civilizations, like Egypt’s, contain similar stories. Perhaps the most prominent of them is the Jewish one where the female Eve is mercilessly suppressed. In fact, the Bible is one of the best proofs of this phenomenon. ‘Patriarch’ Abraham is the person who instituted the worship of the Biblical, patriarchal God. But Rachel, the wife of his grandson Jacob, continues to worship the old gods, among whom Innana is mentioned by name. There are also hints that the worship of these gods was widely prevalent then as opposed to the worship of Abraham’s Jehovah.

Today, we believe these new generations of myths are the oldest knowledge that we possess. Hinduism claims to be the oldest religion, and Judaism lays claim to the oldest monotheism. But that is just the effect that these mythmakers wanted to create: make us believe this is how it always was, that there was nothing before.

Stone’s book is essentially about the power of myths: how deeply the things we believe in shape us. We believe that our patriarchal myths have been there forever, since man’s days as an animal. We believe this is the way it should be, because it was ordained by nature. But these myths hide a dirty cover-up job. Those who buried one layer of myths under another knew that that was the most powerful and lasting way of perpetuating their version of the story. 

I had always been bothered about why, if women were capable of anything (as I believed), there were so few societies where women were powerful, so few role models of women scholars, leaders, and inventors. It always led me to doubt my capacities and fall back on the prevailing belief that women just aren’t good enough. But I gained confidence from the numerous examples of all kinds of capable and successful women in this book. I began to believe that apart from the physical category, a woman can do anything she wants to if she has the opportunity.

Perhaps assumptions of the kind that I made also blinded the earliest scholars of ancient history, because there are records of scholars who found such evidences and dismissed them. Scholars preferred to study periods when patriarchy was strong, and judged the idols of earlier mother goddesses, who often had huge, ungainly figures, by the standards of modern beauty – “fragile, willowy ideals,” in the words of Stone. They thought these figures belonged to some kind of “ancient Aphrodite.” When they came across stories of queens who took new kings every year, they believed the woman had become the queen only after marriage, when the evidence was to the contrary: permanent queen and renewable kings.

In essence, their Victorian social setting prevented them from seeing women as anything other than sexual objects, let alone ancient seats of power and objects of worship. This realization led me to question everything: not just the obvious patriarchal ideas floating around, but also the in-depth scholarship that justifies them. I realized that I needed to reanalyze every assumption about gender I have and my society has, and separate facts from contemporary values. The scholars also found the myths of women’s sexual liberties “shocking and morally depraved,” but it made me wonder if we went backwards in time instead of forward.

Going back in time and reviving these pagan religions or customs are not the answer to the gender discriminations that women face today. In the words of Stone, “Our hope is in the future, not in some mythical, glorious past.” And yet, knowledge of foremothers who were wise and respected gives women role models to look up to. I hope this book inspires confidence in women, as it did in me.

Published in Republica, March 7, page 12