Mother GOD
God is A WOMAN." The single on ARIANA GRANDE'S new album is a reminder that archaeologists believe GOD was considered female for the first 200,000 years of human life on earth. On July 13, 2018, Arianna Grande declared, in a four-octave vocal range.
"When all is said and done / you’ll believe God is a woman.
In her groundbreaking 1976 book, When God Was a Woman, historian Merlin Stone traces ancient worship of the Goddess back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. In the Near and Middle East, she writes, we can find evidence that the " development of the religion of the female deity in this area was intertwined with the earliest beginnings of religion so far discovered anywhere on EARTH." This Goddess was unquestionably the supreme deity to rule them all; "creator and lawmaker of the Universe, prophetess, provider of human destinies, and inventor, healer, hunter, and valiant leader in battle.
True, female Gods have been considered heretical in many cultures for millennia, and the suggestion that God is anything other than an old, white man in the sky is, for some, still a deeply troubling thought. (Just look at Harmonia Rosales's 2017 reimagining of Michelangelo's.
The
Creation of Adam
"The Creation of Adam" depicts both God and the first Black man as Black women, for proof that daring to widen religious imagery can cause a serious uproar.) But if we travel back to the ancient origins of human civilization, we find evidence that female deities were worshipped far and wide for millennia. Long before the main world religions were established, during the earliest periods of human development, many belief systems venerated a supreme female creator.
Divine Ancestress.
It's worth noting that many anthropologists believe these Upper Paleolithic societies are likely to have followed a matrilineal structure, meaning women held supreme status at the center of the household.
These communities revered ancestor worship, whereby “the concept of the creator of all human life may have been formulated by the clan's image of the women who had been their most ancient, primal ancestor." In other words, the Divine Ancestress. Indeed, anthropologists studying the rites and rituals of Paleolithic communities over the last two centuries have discovered countless stone figurines of pregnant women across Europe, the Middle East, and India, some dating back to 25,000 BC.
That Point to the worship of the divine feminine,
During this period in the ancient world, the worship of female deities was widespread and immensely powerful. But it was with the advent of agriculture after the Paleolithic age that Goddess worship started to take off. Statuettes from that period representing the Mother Goddess have cropped up in Canaan (Palestine/Israel) and Anatolia (now Turkey), and Goddess figurines have appeared all over the Neolithic communities of Egypt, dating back to 4000 BC. "The deifications of the Goddess in the ancient world were variations on a theme," writes Lynn Rogers in Edgar Cayce and the Eternal Feminine with representations of the supreme female Creator in Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Ethiopia, Libya, India, Elam, Babylon, Anatolia, Canaan, Ireland, Mesopotamia, and even ancient Judah and Israel. But there could be no doubt that she was, as mythologist Robert Graves describes it, "immortal, changeless, omnipotent." .
In her book Mother God, Sylvia Browne offers a detailed history of the female principle that flourished after the Paleolithic period. The Inuit people had Sedna, the goddess of the sea and mother of the ocean, while the Assyrian and Babylonian cultures worshipped Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. In Aztec culture, Teleoinan was considered the Mother of the Gods. According to the ancient Egyptians, Isis was the Goddess of children and magic, while in ancient Sumer, the primary goddess was Inanna, the goddess of love and war. Meanwhile, the ancient Phoenicians had two female Goddesses of equal status Anat, the fertility goddess and Astarte, the Mother Goddess..
Some might say the disappearance of the Goddess occurred naturally with the march of modern civilization. But, as many historians and theologians have pointed out it's likely no coincidence that the patriarchal cultures that conquered earlier Indigenous populations are fundamentally intertwined with the downfall of the GODDESS, and the reframing of this revered form of worship as cultic, lewd, and primitive..
When women rise to prominence, misogyny often ensues, and by 1500 BC, Goddess –worshipping civilizations had mostly fallen from grace. Scholarship differs in its the analysis of why, but many experts assert that the dominant masculine religions and patrilineal customs brought to Europe by invading Indo-Europeans seriously upset the state of play..