"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"

Depicting both God and the first Black man as Black women, for proof that daring to widen religious imagery can cause a serious uproar.) However, if we trace the ancient origins of human civilization, we find evidence that female deities were worshipped worldwide 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.

It's worth noting that many anthropologists believe that these Upper Paleolithic societies likely followed a matrilineal structure, meaning that women held supreme status within 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, which 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 been found in Canaan (Palestine/Israel), and Anatolia (now Turkey), and Goddess figurines have been found throughout Neolithic communities in Egypt, dating back to 4000 BC.

"The deifications of the Goddess. In the ancient world, there 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, Teoinan 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 analysis of why, but many experts assert that the dominant masculine religions and patrilineal customs brought to Europe by invading Indo-Europeans significantly disrupted the status quo.

The suppression that followed makes for bleak reading. "At the dawn of Western civilization," writes Rogers, "25,000 years of ‘her-story' of the Goddess bountiful creativity were obliterated. Creation myths were rewritten, symbols of Goddess worship were denigrated, and 'the ancient belief in the Goddess as the Ground of Being. THE UNIVERSE FROM WHICH ALL EMERGED. was overturned   

As the major world religions evolved over thousands of years, however, the supreme female deity increasingly faded from view. While around 27 BC the first emperor of Rome granted the Goddess Cybele the title of Supreme Mother of Rome, by 500 AD, attitudes towards female Gods couldn't have been more different. The last Goddess temples in Rome and Byzantium were closed by the Christian emperors, and the so-called polytheistic "pagan" religions were born.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam evolved in the Middle East and Europe, the worship of a new, exclusively male order: God, King, Priest, and Father. These new theologies placed the goddess in a subordinate status, with a man as her dominant husband, or even as her murderer.

In her book, Stone writes at length about the erasure of the female deities, becoming the victim of "centuries of continual persecution and suppression by the advocates of the newer religions, which help male deities as supreme. "Worse yet, this major about-turn in religion meant the status of women around the world declined, too.

Today, rather than a history of ancient female religions celebrated for thousands of years, we are most familiar with the creation story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden, in which Eve is held responsible for humanity's downfall from Paradise. As for the supreme female deity?" The Old Testament does not even have a word for Goddess, "writes Stone.”In the Bible, the goddess is referred to as Elohim, a masculine term translated as "God". But the Koran of the Mohammedans was quite clear. In it, we read:' Allah will not tolerate idolatry…. The pagans pray to females.

Not all religions that followed in the wake of Goddess worship obscured the female deity, though. In the Path of the MOTHER, Savitri I.. Bess points out that Hindus have never stopped worshipping the Mother, "THE MOTHER, who has been obscured in the shadow of Western religions for thousands of years, "she writes," is considered to be the total of the energy in the universe."

DURGA SARASWATI,

From DURGA, the fearless goddess who vanquished her foes atop a tiger, to SARASWATI, the vast spectrum of venerated Hindu goddesses highlights the power of the feminine principle, none more so than SHAKTI, Bess notes, though her cosmic energy is entirely responsible for the creation of the Universe; she is known to be the activity in all things.

Buddhism too celebrates the feminine principle by the way of the Bodhisattva Guan Yin, whose name means “the one who hears and sees the cries of the world." With beauty, grace, and boundless compassion for the suffering of humanity, it has been said that YIN'S greatest significance is as the outpouring of the embodiment of the divine feminine.

So Grande's single is not only a sexy pop anthem, it's an also-very subtly-a reminder that there lies before us a rich history of Goddess worship altogether separate from the patriarchal religions, customs, and laws most of us were raised on. Archaeological evidence suggests that God was considered female for the first 200,000 years of human life on earth, even if male-dominated religions sought to displace the matriarchal order. Ultimately, by making ourselves independent of our heritage, and, as Stone writes, cultivate "a contemporary consciousness of the once-widespread veneration of the female deity as the WISE CREATRESS OF THE UNIVERSE and all life civilization...