Some members of the audience protested that the woman who was possessed was just acting it out to gain attention. But Z was firm in asserting that, often when one acts something out, the spirit of the role she is acting takes over. That, Z said, was what was happening in this case. For some local color of the Californian variety (also a first for me), young girls soon came blithely tripping down the aisles distributing flowers from their baskets along the way, as if we were at a wedding. Then we were led out to an amphitheater, where many spirited feminists were waiting perched in trees and drumming to accompany the rhythms of a ritual dance that other bare-breasted Goddess revelers participated in. All the while, Barbara Hammer, who by then was already known for her work as a filmmaker focusing on lesbian issues, flew around taking videos of the great gathering of energy in the name of the Goddess.
There was only one male at the Great Goddess Re-emerging Conference. It was Geoffrey Ashe, who had written about the Goddess in his book The Virgin: Mary’s Cult and the Re-emergence of the Goddess (first published as The Virgin by Routledge & Paul, London, 1976). He invited any of us who were planning to travel to England to pay him a visit at Glastonbury Tor, where he lived. In 1978–79, as director of the Rutger’s Junior Year in France program, I decided to pay a visit to the sacred Goddess sites in England, and I contacted Geoffrey. He seemed thrilled to take me around Glastonbury and share the stories with me. But at the end of our tour when we went inside, his expression grew somber, and I felt as if I were at a summit meeting. He took out his book on The Virgin and showed me the ample bibliography and the many pages of footnotes that were appended to the text.
“You see all these footnotes and bibliographical references, don’t you?”
“Yes, I see them,” I said.
Then he showed me a number of articles from the press in England. In each of them, he had underlined the critique of his work, the paragraphs where it was denounced as worthless for the lack of sufficient references and documentation. It was outrageous. He smiled wryly and simply said, “Note that if this is what they do to men, just imagine how they will crucify women who write on the Goddess.” I felt that I had come to Glastonbury specifically to receive that warning and to view the proof that those who write on the Goddess are demonized even when they are male, but a much worse fate would be in store for women who lifted their voices in praise of Her.
When I returned to the East Coast, I was asked about the conference. It took a moment for me to relate to the word “conference.” It was so unlike what I thought a conference was—and it was, obviously, because it was more than a conference. It engaged the mind, the body, the energy, and the imagination of all those who already related to the West Coast’s expanded notions of what we should do when we have an important gathering. Inspired by Native American rituals and fueled by our imagination of what it was like in times when women had power and the priestesses would lead them in rituals, our contemporary feminist-matristic visionaries launched a new era in which we reclaimed thousands of years of pre-history as our very own herstory.
Thereafter, I could tell my students that not only did women have positions of prestige, but that at the center of it all was the acknowledgment that God was a woman, a Goddess, associated with the Great Earth Mother.
Merlin Stone was a sculptor, and you will see some of her creations for the first time in this book. It is also the case that Marija Gimbutas told me that had she not become an archeologist, she would have become a sculptor. It is important that I spend some time discussing Gimbutas, because both she and Merlin were visionaries, able to read the visual imagery of Goddess figurines that previously were believed to be the pornographic images of ancient cultures. Marija and Merlin understood that the corpulence of these figurines represented their fertility and their nurturing capacities. They also understood that the figurines revealed the sexual organs of women as gateways to pleasure, and that the Goddess religion did not have taboos on or repression of sexuality.
When Merlin Stone’s book appeared on the scene, the conversation about Goddess imagery had largely to do with the Jungian concept of the archetype of the Goddess, which would arise from the unconscious into the dream world as a symbol. Finally, we had the historical/herstorical documentation—research done with great precision by Merlin Stone. That said, Marija Gimbutas also turned her substantial archeological analysis and personal knowledge of many languages and mythologies toward the Goddess, publishing a trilogy of large books. The trilogy began with The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (first published in Europe in 1974, and then with Linda Mount-Williams, University of California Press, 1982). Later came The Language of the Goddess (with Joseph Campbell, published by Harper & Row, 1989). The culmination was entitled The Civilization of the Goddess (with Joan Marler, published by University of California Press, 1991). What was once considered merely a figment of the imagination or the unconscious took on a historical and earthly, concrete, historical reality. No longer could those who spoke of the Goddess be accused of living in a fantasy world their imagination had conjured up.
One can critique Gimbutas’s convictions from a logical point of view, but we have to realize that when she interprets her findings, be they archeological or natural, based on her life experiences in Lithuania, it is likely she saw those images with an energetic imprint that is unique to people raised in a culture with vestiges of Goddess religion. Gimbutas would have known, personally, worship practices such as kissing the earth every morning to thank the Great Earth Mother for the bounty She provides. I also understand that many feminist archeologists would have questioned, as they have, her conclusions. And, while believing in the veracity of the particular conclusions she drew from all this vast data, I know that perhaps I should have waited for more excavations and more proof before being convinced. But I also think that learning to understand how she drew her conclusions was an incredibly important educational experience. We, the feminist scholars who attended her presentations, came to feel that she was correct, and that this was a vision that she was brave enough to publish, for she also paid the price for her daring. Yet she put her entire life’s energy into expressing her truth—one that the world was not yet ready for or prepared to hear. Her work expanded our minds and continues to influence work in the field and in women’s studies as a model for thinking outside of the box.
That being said, I also think that the conclusions she drew in her trilogy of books transmit important information that is transformational, though it may not be able to be proved conclusively through material means or through logic alone. Her research methodologies and conclusions allow room for personal life experience to fuse with educational knowledge in order to impart much hope to humanity. Consider her major contributions: She restored to us at least thirty thousand years of herstory that we had been deprived of. She reminded us that there was a time when the world lived more peacefully and equitably, male and female together, and that this could have gone on for millennia. If, today, we could reclaim our ancestors’ wisdom, we might yet live in more egalitarian and peaceful relationships. Additionally, Gimbutas gave us the examples, the mythos and ethos of an era in which humanity believed in the reality of the spirit world and worshipped a supreme creator, a divine creatress, known as the Great Mother. Lastly, during this pre-patriarchal period of thousands of years, people respected the earth and all of non-human nature. They venerated both the powers of the heavenly bodies and those of all living things and beings, believing they, too, had souls.
If it were just these conclusions that we could take away from the great volumes of facts and inner knowing that Marija Gimbutas has bequeathed to us, and if this could stand as an example of “how it was done” once by our ancestors, this alone would constitute an extraordinary contribution that Marija Gimbutas has made to our contemporary civilization. There was one volume that remained unfinished when Gimbutas died, and Miriam Robbins Dexter completed it. The book, entitled The Living Goddess (University o
f California Press, 2001), brings Gimbutas’s remaining research to us as the gift of her posthumous legacy. And, though Gimbutas has been duly criticized by the specialists in her field, as Blaise Pascal once said, “The heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t know.” One might take this thought into consideration when coming down too strongly in opposition to someone’s theory whose roots include unique memories and unusual life experiences.
As I said at the start, Merlin Stone was most important to me and of major importance to the movement, anchoring us in facts and scholarship. Even so, in this introduction to a book remembering Merlin and her work, I felt it was important to contextualize her moment by mentioning the names of others who either preceded her or wrote on these subjects during the period in which the Goddess movement began to take shape. With the publication of these books, the yearning for more knowledge of the pre-patriarchal herstory of women increased. Women’s studies programs were founded, and the educational landscape was finally prepared to receive Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, with its more finely tuned critical eye and a more refined ear. Merlin had already encountered misinformed pronouncements about the superiority of women over men. Critics of the earlier books were all too willing to point out the misconstrued idea that Goddess-revering eras were necessarily matriarchies. The observation of the power and status of women in Goddess-revering cultures had much truth to it. But it was Merlin Stone who provided a critical advance—the analysis of the relationship between biology, the gender of the deity, and generalizations about the superiority of women. Merlin researched the Goddess with more accuracy and subtlety than others.
What strikes us, right from the start, about Merlin Stone’s book is how honest she is about the lack of written material about these millennia. In her Introduction, she tells us how shocked she was to find this out. She takes us along with her on her quest to uncover more information by visiting the many libraries, museums, universities, and excavations in Europe and the Near East in order to piece the larger picture together for us. Even when encountering the vastness of the patriarchal destruction of the ancient religion and civilization of the Goddess, she is careful to include the discovery that vestiges of this religion continued to be honored and even practiced during the patriarchal conquest.
Merlin discloses the multiple means that were employed to rid the world of all traces of these practices over time. Her position is that of a women’s studies scholar who notes that only male authors had created the narrative of this history, and that they revealed their biases through their use of language itself. Merlin has always stressed how extremely incorrect was their use of the term “fertility cult” to describe a “religion” that prevailed for millennia over the vast territories of Europe and the Near East. Her book is a call to women’s studies scholars, present and future, to become pioneers along with her. And, from the perspective of today, where we now find hundreds of women’s studies (feminist studies, gender studies, etc.) programs across the nation, we understand that her invitation was a clarion call to re-search and re-vise all the inherited androcentrically biased narratives of pre-history. Typical of the methodology of women’s studies scholars, Merlin always shows us how a particular version of a myth or other narrative is based on a male perspective, and how it inscribes a patriarchal version of history into all of our education about the most ancient civilization and religion. She problematizes issues about which previous writers had made incorrect proclamations based on their preconceived convictions. Thus, she questions the relationship between the sex of the divine creator and the status of women in a particular society. She teaches us how one cannot assume that, just because an entire country worships a Goddess, their women are treated with respect or are accorded an elevated social status. Rather, she explains that it is not necessarily the sex of the divinity that implies a high status, but, on the contrary, it is mostly the strength of the female kinship system. When it is matrilineal, that leads to the deity being female.
Merlin’s work exhibits a constant subtlety of thought, and she is often surprised by her own discoveries when they contradict what might have been assumed to be the case through intuition alone. Her methodology deftly shows the importance of both documentation and intuition, but she is always careful to distinguish between the two. She did make some speculative observations, as others have done, linking words and their roots from language to language, when in fact they might not be related at all. Thus, she speculates that the Hebrew Levites, the priestly class, might have been related to the Indo-Europeans where we find groups named Luwains, Luvains, and Luvites among the Indo-Europeans. But Merlin confesses that this might be a controversial speculation, and she invites others to take it into consideration. She does not proclaim it to be truth. She suggests that if we dare to make these speculations and then find the proof (and only then), that this will help us immensely to understand the practices of the different groups throughout time, and will shed light on why their practices were suppressed.
Merlin always recalls that the Hebrews continued to worship the goddesses Ashtoreth, Asherah, and Anath, baking cakes for the “Queen of Heaven” until all their idols had been destroyed and the last of the temples of the Goddess had been closed, circa fifth century BCE. Merlin’s book is an excellent example of how one can deploy the imagination and yet qualify fantastic speculations by pointing out that they are not confirmed as true. She invites the reader to entertain her (or his) own speculations because they just might lead to revelations, as long as they are admitted to be simply proposals for further investigation.
Thus, I realized that we had a longer and more complex herstory to be uncovered. This also was the time when African Americans were learning about their origins and history. Women of all backgrounds and religions asked what our actual origins were, and what were women’s contributions to civilization. We were asking how much information had actually been omitted from the history books, how much knowledge of our origins we had been deprived of, and how much of our prestige and power had been erased and silenced. We learned from Merlin Stone how immense that herstory was, and how great were the contributions to culture made by women, often under the aegis of the goddesses of their cultures. We learned how tremendous was the excision of these millennia long past, where women’s status and power as priestesses and queens prevailed for centuries before patriarchy, but also that these millennia were associated with what seemed to have been pacific, non-warrior values, and that their citizens revered both spirit and nature.
It should be said that the list of names of those who have worked hard for the women’s movement and Goddess studies is so long that there is the danger, if I tried to make such a list, that I would inadvertently leave out an important name. We also know that no one doing our good work is unimportant. Yet I have been present at events where colleagues of Gimbutas criticized her, even insulted her, in public. But the admirers and the students—the women who had taken her classes, both in the university and at home, and the women who were mentored by her—went on to continue this work both with her and after she died. Women would come out in great numbers to support her at her celebrations, knowing that those who opposed her would be present and would try to put her down—either out of a sense of competition, jealousy, or adherence to established academic versions leading them to the conviction that they were correct and she was wrong. Merlin Stone, herself, has said she encountered vehement and ongoing opposition to her work—even a death threat. Many of you know what it is like for a woman to write about the Goddess. As Geoffrey Ashe warned me so long ago, “If this is how they critique men who write about the Goddess, just wait until you see how they will treat women.” Yet we work on, as we must, and thus, it is wonderful to have this new book—containing new writings by Merlin Stone and much information even we, who knew her, didn’t know.
[contents]
merlin stone
timeline
Merlin Stone, 1992.
Merlin
Stone Timeline
1931
Born Marilyn Claire Jacobson on September 27th in Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY.
1945
Graduated from Public School #217, Brooklyn, NY.
1949
Graduated Erasmus Hall High School with Metallic Art Medal Award.
1949
Entered State University of New York, Buffalo.
1950
Married and took husband’s last name, “Stone.”
1952
Daughter Jenny born.
1955
Daughter Cynthia born.
1958
Conferred bachelor of science degree and teacher’s certificate (art), with minor in journalism, from State University of New York, Buffalo.
1958–60
Art teacher at Kenmore Junior High School, Buffalo, NY.
1962
Assistant art professor, State University College, Buffalo.
Merlin Stone Remembered Page 3
