I have since read for myself many of the books upon which Eisler bases her research, and I find her still a very credible and cogent introduction to a growing literature. What has been most important for me here, however, is a response to what Letty Russell has called "the quest for a useable past." I suppose most of us have retained the assumption from college that "history begins at Sumer." This book expands our notion of history back 25,000 years into the Upper Paleolithic, with particular emphasis on the Neolithic period beginning 7,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. As she and her sources amply demonstrate, these cultures possessed all of the trappings of what we call civilization--settled towns, weaving and pottery, metallurgy, law and medicine, trade, even a written language. And, most importantly, they almost without exception worshipped the Goddess--the one creatrix and preserver of the world. As Marija Gimbutas has demonstrated, there were no gods, only the Goddess. For the vast expense of human time on earth, as Merlin Stone puts it, "God was a woman. Do you remember?" This book was what started me remembering, deep in my bones.

Marija Gimbutas (The Language of the Goddess) has carefully traced the symbolism and iconography of these Goddess-worshipping cultures to delineate a basic theology of the Goddess. She sees four primary aspects to this worship, consistent over space and time and traceable into the later "historical" cultures, including Israel. The main theme of Her worship was the mystery of birth and death and the renewal of life, both human and the totality of nature and the cosmos. She is the Creatrix, the one Goddess in the way we experience the one God today as Christians. She is the Giver of Life, the Renewing and Eternal Earth (the earth is her body), the Goddess of Death and Regeneration, and of Energy and Unfolding. The image of the bird/Spirit hovering over the waters at Creation in Genesis retains some of this imagery. The cycles of the seasons and the fertility of animals and crops were central to Her worship, but She is much more than that. Death was always associated with rebirth, as the ancient womb/tombs and the vulvular cowerie shells indicate. Spirals and snakes carry both the aspect of the eternal and the never-ceasing divine energy and wisdom that rule the cosmos. This 2nd century hymn of Isis recounted by Apuleius captures the awe in which She was held throughout the ancient world from the beginning:

I am She that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that is in Hell and in Heaven, manifesting alone under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets, the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world in diverse manners, in variable customs, and by many names.

Eisler, Stone (When God was a Woman), Raphael Patai (The Hebrew Goddess), and others document what must be the greatest cover-up in history. Where did this Goddess go? What happened to Her? Eisler deals with the shift from what she calls partnership to dominator cultures, the triumph of the blade over the chalice. Beginning about 4500 BC and continuing up to the fall of Crete in 1200 BC, several waves of invaders swept Europe and the Middle East as far as India--the so-called Indo Europeans, or Kurgans. They were pastoralists from the Russian steppes who sought new land for their herds and were perhaps fleeing geologic upheaval; and they brought war, metal weapons, the horse, male dominance, slavery, hierarchy, and male gods of storm and mountain and war--Hyksos, Hittites, Achaeans, Dorians, Aryans, and Hebrews. They conquered and absorbed cultures that had not known war, had no fortifications or technologies of destruction or hierarchical leadership of religion or state. From the conquered they learned most of the arts of "civilization" but imposed a system of dominance and force upon a culture of cooperation and egalitarianism.

What we have called history was written-and perhaps more importantly, edited-- by the winners. In Greece, Persia, the Middle East and India ancient myths of the Goddess were obliterated or rewritten, and creation myths recast Her as the enemy-- the serpent who must be slain, her life-giving tree forbidden. She was made a consort of a more powerful God, an inferior part of a pantheon, and was finally edited out altogether. The fundamental unity of the Great Goddess in her triple guise as maiden, mother, and crone devolved into polytheism, and the role and respect of women declined precipitously as matrilineal cultures became patrilineal and patriarchal and women became regarded as property. The new conquerers placed more stock in the powers that take life than in the powers that give life. They introduced the notion of oppositional dualism--light and dark, good and evil, male and female. This process in Canaan has been well traced by George Tavard (Woman in Christian Tradition) and Patai and others, but it is also well-documented in Greece and Crete and Sumeria and Babylon. In our own history, the Bible records the triumph of the Hurrian peoples from Ur who first invaded Canaan, then Egypt, and returned under Moses to conquer Canaan once again in a reign of death and destruction. Women like Deborah gave way to Tamar; the Goddess of the Canaanites, Asherah, was attacked and suppressed. After a brief resurgence of women's dignity and autonomy in the Jesus movement, better documented in the suppressed gospels like that of Mary Magdalene, women once again succumbed to silence in the churches.

The coverup was continued by the archaeologists and scholars and Biblical scholars who either ignored what they found or reinterpreted it in the light of their own world view. The religious consciousness of the entire ancient world is reduced to a fertility cult. To give one example: I was in the bookstore of the Jewish Museum and was directed to a new encyclopedia of the archaeology of Israel, huge and expensive and supposedly definitive. I eagerly looked to discover the recent archaeological data about the Goddess culture of Canaan, only to find no mention except for the puzzled note that the ubiquitous female (read: "Goddess") figurines scattered like pebbles through every dig in Israel must be statuettes made by mothers for the purpose of teaching their daughters about menstruation! I have mercifully read other scholars since, like the Dothans, who write about the Greek origins of the Philistines in the People of the Sea, who recognize the essentially religious character of their findings.

My concern in my own research has been to recover the lost bits of this great Goddess tradition that still lurk beneath the surface of the Christian scriptures. I have looked at the stories of Creation, both the primordial Bird-Goddess and the later story of Adam and Eve which stands the Goddess creation tradition on its head. The Tree of Life and the serpent sacred to Her, and the wisdom of Her priestess have now become symbols of evil and temptation. I believe too that the Song of Songs may retain a vision of Her sense of the Good Earth, Eden without the Fall. I have also examined Mary Magdalene in the light of the Great Goddess Isis.

My intent in my further work is to go back to the cultural traditions that surrounded, interpenetrated and influenced the people of Israel and their experience of Divine Reality, and to see how these traditions are reflected in scripture. I have looked at the Philistines and their origins in the Mycenean world. Was the Witch of Endor the priestess of an oracle like Delphi, or bearing the traditions of Crete? Next, the Canaanites who were in the land before the Israelites came, and whose Goddess Asherah was worshipped almost continuously in the Temple in Jerusalem. Was, for instance, the leader and judge Deborah a Canaanite priestess? I want also to examine the goddesses of Egypt to see how their influence is felt in ancient Israel and still in the time of Jesus.

The underlying question of this study for me is how a renewal of religious imagination can be life-giving for women, and men, too. Is this, in the immortal words of Ringo Starr, "a different religion from ours?" A recent conference on feminine theology was very controversial and a rabid response by the Presbyterian Layman's Leaguerabid suggests that the battle against this so-called heresy is raging. I still feel that the Christian vision is large enough to contain women's religious experience. But how would the world be different if the primary image of the Christian faith were not a naked man dying on a cross but a naked woman giving birth, if "this is my body, this is my blood" were said not by Christ but by Mary? The Neolithic experience of divine reality is that the primary function of the mysterious powers governing the universe is not to exact obedience, to punish or destroy but to give, that the earth itself is the divine body. Perhaps Ntozake Shange is right: "we need a God who bleeds now, whose blood is not the end of anything."

Gradually over these last years an intellectual interest and conviction in the importance of feminine images of God has given way for me to a personal relationship with the living Goddess. I pray to Her and She answers, to comfort and challenge. She is there in my dreams. I sense deeply what Her values are, what She wants for my life, the promise She holds forth for us all. In many ways She is not so different from the divine power that Jesus addressed as Father, except that I know that I am made in Her image, as Christian scripture and tradition promise and so rarely demonstrate. I think that Jesus knew Her too, and the women who were with him knew that. I think there is a great hunger for Her rising in our own time. Is there a place for Her in the Church or in our world? I hope so. The priests of the Temple in Jerusalem never succeeded in kicking Her out for long.