When God Was A Woman
As I sit here on International Women’s Day, reflecting on the fact that Google and Apple have removed it from our calendars … along with Pride Month, Black History Month, Indigenous People month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day … I am pondering, what was the world like when God was a woman?
Merlin Stone explores just that in her book of the same title, released in 1976, just two years after women won the right to open their own bank accounts. In it she describes a history of matriarchal religion that far outdates and precedes our current “God the Father” view, with evidence of goddess cultures dating back 40,000 years to a time of “God the Mother.”
Long before the written word came to be, this view of God as a woman was not only the predominant view, but the natural and accepted reality of the times. It made sense. Everyone knew that women gave birth to humanity and were responsible for bringing life into this world. So of course God, who gave birth to all of creation, would also be a woman. God the Mother was viewed as a nourishing and nurturing life force, who loved and provided for all.
It wasn’t until much later in time that the male view of God came into being, ushered in with the advent of the written word and its lasting power of re-writing history. So much so that today we often don’t even think to question why God is ascribed to an exclusively male role in all our current religious texts. God the Father is now just the norm … along with his attributes of force, control, punishment and hierarchy. “Fear of God” was never meant to be inherent, it was created as a power play to control the masses.
It’s worth examining how much this God view has contributed to where we stand today as a society. How many moves are we making out of fear? Fear of other? Fear of God? Fear of self? Fear that continues to divide us all instead of bringing us together. Like a cancer cell that decides to go rogue and begins to divide amongst itself, working against the whole organism; succeeding in its desire to multiply but then eventually killing its host and self along the way.
There is a Native American proverb that says, “No tree has branches so foolish to fight amongst themselves.” It’s obvious the result is only self-annihilation. So why are we still stuck in this loop? What is holding this fear in place and how do we stop feeding it?
Perhaps part of the answer is a return to God the Mother. Perhaps choosing to worship the divine feminine is a way to bring back balance to the energy of the earth at this time and counteract the current agenda of subdivision and fear-mongering. Perhaps the Divine Mother, with her willingness to see all of humanity as her children, and all worthy of love, can bring us back together. Perhaps it is time to reinstate God as woman back on her throne.