When God Was a Woman (1976)

Merlin Stone wrote about an interesting topic: how the goddess-centered religions of early peoples in the area from Egypt and Greece to India gave way to the male god-centered religions that came to predominate in these areas and what the change did to the status of women. This is a book first published in 1976 and has a definite feminist flavor. Also, if written today there would be later archaeological evidence for her to cite. Nevertheless, the author did hold my attention although occasionally I felt that she was pushing a bit too hard to make her points. The material on the origin of Biblical stories was very interesting, especially the Creation and events in the Garden of Eden.

I really enjoy Stone's approach to Goddess worship. The one problem I have with the book is that it provides a lot of information in a short amount of space, and I have a hard time keeping it all straight, especially as I am unfamiliar with many of the places she is describing. Her book, however, is wonderful, and it provides a different look at what people worshiped before the Judeo-Christian God took over. ( )

An overly feminist book to say the least, at the beginning and cropping up from time to time, but besides that I did enjoy it to a degree. There are many things which I definitely don't agree with her on and I can say I marked the book up pretty good while reading it. She tries to present goddess worshipping peoples as the pinnacle of achievement and present the Indo-European "invaders" as warmongers and the bringers of patriarchal society. She doesn't show you that these goddess worshippers were just as bloody and savage as the rest of the peoples yet any perusal of history books out there will verify it. She cries quite a bit about woman loosing their status and how the "evil patriarchs" crushed them down. Her thoughts on the origins of the tree from the Garden of Eden where interesting and I think possibly worthy of looking into as well as some of her thoughts on Indo-European religion and how it influenced Judaism and Christianity are very interesting and are worth thinking over, particularly the Levites and their possible origin. I will definitely re-read this book at a later date after going through some history books of the time to see how well it holds up. ( )

It's obvious that a lot of research went into this book. Unfortunately, most of the time it feels like Stone is simply recounting stories rather than using them to pull together her own thesis. At times, I struggled to find the point she was making between the numerous examples and linguistic nuances that she provides. Basically, I got a lot of information out of this book but I didn't know what to do with that information.

As someone with only a passing interest in religion and women's studies, I wouldn't recommend this book. ( )

Witch"