Part of the Casswiki article series Books
When God Was a Woman is a book by art historian Merlin Stone, first published in 1976 under the title The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women’s Rites in Great Britain. The book presents an archaeologically documented story of the religion of the Goddess, where, during the prehistorical era, women’s roles were far more prominent than in patriarchal cultures.
In this work, the author describes how, in the past, the women were displayed as leaders, sacred entities (goddesses) and benevolent matriarchs. Then, she presents how the religious myths of the goddess were gradually co-opted by the male-dominated religions from the “northern peoples” in the distant past, where the goddess myths were re-written in such a way to establish the goddess religions as either harmful or sinful.