When God was a woman

As we approach Mother’s Day, I would like to remind the women and men of the time when the female, the nurturing mother, the Goddess, was supreme until finally being replaced by the male God of war and the sword.

This bears repeating today for the educational, historical and literacy value as well as the relevance of it for our own time. I am repeating it for all of those women and mothers who may not be aware of their historical and spiritual legacy.

In primal times there was only the forces of nature and the unknown power behind it all. Gradually there evolved the concept of a Supreme Being, a female, a She, a Goddess, who created the Universe and all of its laws. She was the ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love, Birth and Death. And so for 25,000 years there was only the Goddess. Yes, that is 25,000 years. The earliest agriculture grew up around the shrines of the Mother Goddess and became social and economic centers as well as holy places that were the germs of future cities. Growing cities evolved around these sacred centers, built to honor the Divine Mothers, the Mother Goddess, the Creatress of all of life.

The poet and religious historian Robert Graves put it in these words: “The whole of neolithic Europe had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas based on the Mother Goddess.” The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent. The concept of a Father God was unknown in religious thought. In Europe, the Great Goddess was thought of as the sole omnipotent deity. Fatherhood was not even a part of religious thinking.” In EGYPT, she was: “The Being, eternal and infinite, the creative and ruling power of heaven and earth and of every creature and every thing in them. Mother Goddess, She commands the entire universe.” In INDIA, it was the Great Goddess who gave birth to the Vedas, day and night, the seasons and all the measures of time, death and memory. Root words for motherhood produced many words of calculation, metric, mark, mentality, geometry, trigonometry and so forth. In AFRICA, it was believed that, “in women alone have been given the secrets of the Mystery.”

So, after 25,000 years, what happened? About 2800 or so years ago…there was a SEX CHANGE. The Goddesses became Gods and the divine mother became the divine father, male, in the strongly patriarchal cultures of Judaism where father was Lord, literally, of the household and women were owned like cattle or land. The Christian cult, as well as Islam, picked up on this theme and declared all belief in Goddesses as pagan and superstition. Male Gods, you see, were not pagan and superstition but female Goddesses were. How do you like that for the laugh of the day? In the Old Testament there is not even a word for Goddess and the Koran reads as follows: “only pagans pray to females.”

Christian writings commanded that the shrines of the Goddess be torn down (Acts 19:27). Paul and the early members of the Christian cult went after the female Goddess with the zeal of fanaticism, burning and looting and destroying temples. Paul’s word was that of the patriarch. There was no room for a Goddess or female deities in the developing patriarchal Christian cult. The Goddess Isis especially had to be destroyed. Paul carried this over into his writings (New Testament) commanding wives to be submissive to men and to husbands. He wrote that women were to be silent and not vote in church matters. He wrote, “women were made by God for men. Men were not made for women.” (1 Cor: chap 11) The writings of Paul were so pathological that Dr. Karl Menninger (of the famed Menninger Psychiatric Clinic) wrote in one of his essays that if you lifted these words out of the bible and read them as literature you would soon realize that you were reading the ramblings of a psychotic mind.

Church “father” Clement of Alexandria wrote: “I have come to destroy all the works of the female.” (You have never heard of a Church “Mother”…only Church “Fathers”)

In 300 A.D. Emperor Constantine commanded an end to all Goddess worship, calling it “immoral”.

In 380 A.D. the Emperor Theodosius destroyed the temples of the Goddesses and closed down the temple known as the seventh wonder of the world, the temple of the Goddess Ephesus. This Christian Emperor followed that by a massacre of over 7000 people in Thessalonica.

The degradation of women stifled into high gear in the 3rd, 4th and 5th century in Christian history. The “founder” of Western theology, Tertullian, wrote, “woman is a temple built over a sewer, the gateway to the devil. Women are the gate of hell.”

Martin Luther wrote, “If a woman dies from childbearing, it does not matter. Let her die, for that is all she is here for.” (They have churches named after this guy.)

When the Christian church really went full steam ahead in their destruction of women, the female, the Goddess within women, was during the Great Inquisition.

I am quoting now from a classic academic work on the Goddesses by Dr. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of The Goddess. The author is a Professor of European archaeology at UCLA and the curator of the Old World archaeology at UCLA’s Cultural History Museum. On page 319, she writes, “women were called Disciples of Satan and this period was one of the bloodiest in history. The witch hunt of the 15th to the 18th centuries was the most satanic event of European history. The murder of women accused as witches escalated to MORE THAN EIGHT MILLION.

Will Durant in his 12 volume History of Civilization sets the figure at more than NINE MILLION.

The nurturing Goddess… the caring mother… had been replaced with the male God of the sword.

One of the most respected and distinguished church historians of our time from Yale University, was Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette. He wrote this in plain words, bluntly. “Christianity survived, overcame and dominated, not through any teachings of Jesus, but by the brutal tyranny of the bloody sword of Constantine. The bloodiest massacres in history have been justified by telling the people they were ordered by a male God who was masculine, jealous and ordering their destruction.”

And so mothers, do remember of your day, that there was a time when the nurturing mother, the caring and gentle Goddess who created all things in her image as the giver of life and love, was Supreme. She endured for 25,000 years until finally being replaced by a male God of the sword… a God of battle and war… a God who was jealous and judgmental, and under such a God, the history of religious violence was under way… full steam… slaughtering in the name of God. Such a God endures to this day in the minds of the people of the book, (the bible)… Islam… Israel… and segments of the American White House.