Merlin Stone Remembered

by David B. Axelrod

  Thank you, thank you, thank you for the years and energy you have given to bringing the Goddess back into our lives.

  Blessed be,

  P.S. This is the very first fan letter I have ever written! Now I hope I mail it!

  Merlin and Olympia Dukakis were longtime friends and associates.

  Amherst, MA 01002, October 9, 1991

  Dear Merlin,

  You were my first embodied Goddess teacher, Merlin, and I hasten to add, one of the few Real Teachers I’ve ever had. It really feels essential to include you in this first issue. You created such a sage (typo: I wanted to type “safe” but it works) classroom that I was able to overcome my shyness and request the space to read my poem about Demeter and Persephone. Do you remember?

  Baltimore, MD 21217, December 8, 1980

  Dear Merlin Stone,

  It was with tremendous admiration and excitement that I recently completed your book When God Was a Woman. A number of women in Baltimore and I have all been involved in our own independent research of matriarchal history and participated in a workshop which was held this year and last at the Women’s Growth Center. We were thrilled to see that your research confirmed much the same material that we had unearthed.

  Plano, TX 75075, December 22, 1993

  Dear Merlin,

  Seven months ago, I read When God Was a Woman and today I am about to finish Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood. In between these two books, I have read more than a score of others on the same topic. I have also watched, several times, the film done by Canadian public television in which you appeared. All this has been life-changing for me, but you must know the impact of your work already.

  Since reading your first book I have been on a women’s retreat, joined a women’s drumming group, been to a Cradle Basket ceremony, an Earth Blessing ceremony and had myself officially unbaptized by a group of women friends. Where all this is leading, I do not know. But I do know that it is leading me where I am supposed to go.

  My first reaction to When God Was a Woman was anger, why had I never learned this information before? I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, the master’s is from a women’s university. I have read thousands of books in my life, many of them histories. Yet, nothing I had read or learned contained my own story. This makes a travesty both of education and written histories.

  My second reaction was joy. Here, at last, was what I had always known deeply, below consciousness. You, and others, have given me myself. So, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  Oxford OX2 6JA, United Kingdom, August, 1993

  Dear Merlin Stone,

  I would like to try to tell you how much your book has meant to me. Reading it was like unraveling a fabric which I had long suspected was flawed and coming apart—the basic ‘God the Father’ construct I had been brought up with.

  More importantly, your book has been part of putting something infinitely more empowering in its place. The perspective I have now got on human spirituality, namely that we have worshipped female deities for at least four times as long as we have worshipped male, has also changed my feminism. From having been involved in an apparently endless effort to establish equality, I now have a feeling of the strength and authority of thousands of years behind me, meaning that the task in front of us is to integrate what women do well with what men do well.

  Satellite Beach, FL 32937, July 9, 1977

  Dear Merlin,

  I read your book, When God Was a Woman, with interest and joy. It was an affirmation of feelings I’ve had for as long as I can remember, that the idea of a male god, condemning women to perpetual subservience to men, must be total nonsense, and terribly damaging to men as well as women. I have talked about your book and recommended it to anyone who will listen to me; since my friends are feminists, their response would warm your heart. I’m not sure how many books it will sell, but have a hunch that your work will become a classic.

  Created as a thank-you for a quotation used to promote the comic strip Mother Goddess Funnies.

  [contents]

  the legacy of

  merlin stone

  Merlin in Phoenicia, New York, 1992.

  The Legacy of Merlin Stone:

  One Feminist’s View

  by Carol F. Thomas

  For me, Merlin Stone was one of the most remarkably gifted artists, sculptors, and writers this country has ever known. Her books, When God Was a Woman and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, exploded on college campuses, in women’s consciousness groups, and among millions of other women who wondered how they had come to a place of proscribed subjugation, patriarchal mandates, and limited choices and opportunities. Until Stone’s first book, When God Was a Woman, appeared in 1976, there was only one prevailing and uncontested myth in contemporary American culture: the creation story of Adam and Eve and that of male supremacy, divinely ordained male domination in all political, educational, financial, and, most important, religious institutions. In all the major contemporary religions, except perhaps Hinduism, there is a prevailing male deity. There is no deity representing the qualities of the mothering, nurturing, and nourishing one, known by her many names and images as Goddess.

  Yet, her values, principles, and perspective of the universe had endured and sustained a cooperative, all-encompassing artistic, peaceful, and imaginative way of life long before patriarchy. For at least eight thousand years and as much as twenty-five thousand years, people all around the globe had known of her creation of the universe, a profound valuing of life, compassion, equality, love for each other, all of which had been part of a vital life force. The Goddess was integral in understanding the meaning of life and an individual’s place on Earth. The Goddess fostered our desire to care for the earth and respect the planet in all of its infinite splendor.

  For a majority of Americans, this mythic patriarchal structure is still validated by a prevailing male deity. What a man wants and what a deity living in the sky wants are precisely the same. In a very real sense, Merlin Stone singlehandedly exposed and exploded this mythic hoax—a hoax that nonetheless still remains the prevailing belief system in contemporary American life. It was Merlin who, through her archeological and historical evidence, revealed an extremely complex theological structure in which the woman was seen to be the autonomous creator of new life and was, therefore, understood to be sacred, divine, to be honored and revered. Stone points out the development of later male-worshipping religions, and the ideological inventions and masculinist mythic structures associated with them, which erased from history the earlier communities associated with the leadership, perspective, and values of the feminine. Having definitively established the earlier matrilineal communities, Stone goes on to submit the bleak regard, the irritable and narcissistic perspectives, of patriarchy, with a need for mastery, competition, tribal warfare, and deficit definitions of women.

  To those of us subjected to these masculine mandates, based on power and subjugation, the emergence of Merlin’s voice provided us with an alternative to bondage in wedlock, adherence to patriarchal rules and mandates, mores and regulations derived from the Old Testament, and male deity notions and beliefs. Merlin’s fastidious and precise research illuminated and explicated ancient texts that determined, without a doubt, the authenticity and veracity of a time during which the values, precepts, and concepts of women were predominant—women who, in their own language, artifacts, behaviors, principles, and perspective, ruled their world.

  The emphasis within these matrilineal communities was on the essential nurturing values. Merlin Stone revealed a deep, expansive, and capacious consciousness. As she points out in her essay “Ruminations on Gaia Consciousness and Goddess Reverence”:

  It is the consciousness that knows there are no fences, no black borderlines, no names of countries in the view from the moon. This is a period of time in the history of humans and of a consciousness of the ecologica
l relationship of humans to our environment, whether that environment is natural or human made. It is time to observe and question what we have so far developed to better life on the planet, and to decide which directions are valuable and which are destructive if life on planet Earth is to continue to exist at all. We have arrived at a time that allows us a planetary consciousness and, along with it, a planetary conscience. (Stone, 44)

  Words such as these were a call to action for me and for all women. In the twenty-first century, contemporary American culture has the opportunity, the responsibility, and the obligation to encourage its population to move away from the delusions and distortions of patriarchy and more fully examine the complexity, intellectual gifts, and heightened awareness and sensibilities with respect to saving the habitat of humanity. Stone shifts our attention to saving Mother Nature, saving Mother Earth. Where and how, we might ask, did we lose the historical and pre-historical basis of knowing the fullness of our planet, constellations, and our own capacities for both destruction and enhanced creation? Merlin Stone speaks of women’s immanence. “Immanence” is associated with the knowing, being, intuitive, profoundly affective, and spiritual connection to the universe. In a very real sense, we are but bits of the universe—brothers and sisters of each and every feature of the cosmos and each and every species on Earth.

  However, writing in 1976, Merlin Stone pointed out that without the “female principle, the nurturing, nourishing, caring, compassionate, cooperative energy that allows life to continue,” our planet will die. She concludes, “Mother Nature is all. Mother Nature is the essence of life and it is this idea that we must really begin to understand in terms of time and in terms of space” (Stone, 44–45). It is time for another “Great Awakening,” not of the frenzied, primitive, superstitious ceremony to make supplications to a great Father God who has chosen us for special privileges and protection. Rather, it is time for an awakening of the human consciousness—pre-, sub-, and unconsciousness, fully aware of the nature of the real world and its true character.

  As I read Merlin Stone, here is what strikes me as the bedrock of her discoveries—what gave so many of us a new ground on which to rebuild our lives and to build a women’s movement. According to Merlin, there was a time when male Homo sapiens did not have any knowledge or understanding of their material participation in the creation of life. Therefore they worshipped the female life force as singularly responsible for reproduction and continuity of the species. As Stone points out in her discussion of “history” and “prehistory,” there have been egregious errors in understanding these terms. Her reworking of the human chronological “calendar” uncovers two thousand years of recorded history prior to the world of fifth-century Greece and the works of Homer. Matrilineal communities, such as the one on the island of Crete, flourished for thousands of years. When men discovered their power and their stake in the process of reproduction, then the assertions of male ownership, hierarchy, primogeniture, and animal husbandry began. Men introduced ownership of women and children and heightened competition between and among different cultures, fostering constant war and violence.

  It is liberating and empowering to recognize the earlier epochs during which life on Earth was not just matriarchal but was reflective of an entirely different value system. Merlin went on to expound, and my own observations and studies confirm, that contemporary American culture remains wedded to the puritan trope that denigrates and disparages women. Women are perceived as immanent, carnal, and created by the male deity to be subservient and obedient to men. Men are purportedly superior and transcendent, and spiritually aligned with a Father God, a deity who protects them and directs their warring and violent activities. We are, in fact, engaged in perpetual warring activities. Merlin Stone intrepidly points out the facts and then offers another way of living, submitting that if we do not admit the fantasy, folly, and foolishly antiquated myths of patriarchy, our planet will be destroyed, and with it, its human population. As she observes in the preface to the 1990 edition of Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood:

  The perceptions and values of women’s spirituality and Goddess reclamation hold the vision of a truly humane and life-nurturing future. I realize now that my original hopes and goals while doing my research were identical to the hopes and goals of so many others. They are far from fulfilled, but by rejoicing in our gains and keeping a protective watch over our garden, it may yet bear the fruit of a better tomorrow. (p. xix)

  Merlin Stone invites us back in time chronologically from eight thousand to twenty-five thousand years ago, when an extraordinarily different matrix of principles and values existed. It was a time when “the coin of getting psychological or material benefits from regarding others as less important, less intelligent, less creative, less moral, even less real [emphasis added] than oneself” (Mirrors, xi) had no conceptual framework. Such views were, indeed, anathema to a culture of equality that led many women to feel that “we are experiencing and observing the birth and childhood of a spiritual philosophy … which could transform life on this planet” (Mirrors, xii).

  As a clinical psychologist, I sense that, psychoanalytically, Americans remain an “Old Testament” nation. As Merlin Stone points out, in order to save planet Earth and ourselves, we must become increasingly mindful of the fact that “the Earth is a sphere, textured with snow and with grass, with water and with mountains.” She continues:

  We see that the sphere is inhabited by life forms of all kinds, made possible by the nature of the sphere itself. The further we get, the wider the view, until we see the sphere spinning around in space, a part of a much larger cosmological system. The life forms that exist on Earth have developed in a continual evolutionary process, and are still evolving. There is the intuitive belief that this evolution will be toward humans of greater consciousness, to a species of people, perhaps already evolving, who do not see physical combat and violence as the solution to the myriad problems of existence on the planet. (Stone, “Ruminations,” p. 43)

  It was precisely this view that I and so many women who read Merlin’s books responded to, personally, with completely life-changing results.

  In the early 1980s, and while I was teaching at Saint Leo University in Florida, I experienced the great pleasure of discovering the work of Merlin Stone. Ironically, I was just completing a doctor of ministry degree at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. My dissertation focused on the gospel of Saint John and Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. It seemed at the time a tentatively “feminist” way to understand the relation between the sacred and the profane. As I continued to explore and examine this passage, it continued a dialogue essentially based on patriarchy. The holy man is purportedly able to telepathically “see” the promiscuity of the woman before him, but accepts her cup of water and sends her on her way to engage in a more ethical, moral, and “religious” way of life. In terms of all the topics we were given for a dissertation, this passage seemed to me to begin perhaps a more equitable relationship between the transcendent and the “immanent.”

  Having spent four summers at the seminary, I was increasingly shocked at the patent absurdities of both Old and New Testaments, their various authors, and the ongoing redaction. This is to say nothing of superstitions, egregious historical miscalculations, misogyny, and rigid patriarchal interpretations. When I finished my DMin degree, I decided to pursue a PhD at Union Institute and University, which went beyond the traditional dissertation to allow a “creative project” focusing on the body of knowledge I derived from my research. Having explored the Western metaphysical colleges and universities, I sought more knowledge with respect to a broader understanding of the human condition and the individual’s place in the world.

  In order to accomplish this objective, I chose, for my dissertation, a focus on five aspects of women’s experience. First, I would complete the required traditional dissertation, but then I would choose five different areas of contemporary American women’s liv
es. During my studies in ministry and while teaching at Saint Leo University, tremendous changes in ideologies, politics, and religious perspectives were taking place. Merlin Stone moved the rock from the cave’s door, and the Goddess was resurrected. Given the static nature of the prevailing “totalitarian” epistemologies, new voices, new perspectives, and new knowledge were being excitedly disseminated. This was the time of renewed feminist theoretical and epistemological knowledge.

  The five women’s studies courses I created for my creative project were designed to provide a fledgling undergraduate course in women’s studies. The five courses included “The Psychology of Women,” “Inventing the American Woman,” “Early American Literature by Women,” “Creative Writing and Poetry: Our Own Voices, Our Own Stories,” and “Contemporary Women’s Spirituality: Heart, Soul, and Spirit.” My inquiries indicated that these were the areas of greatest interest and utility to women. The courses were one semester each in length and consisted of night and weekend classes to accommodate the women’s families and work lives. Each class contained approximately fifteen to thirty students and was centered heavily on class participation.

  By far the most popular class was the Women’s Spirituality class, in which female students carefully read and discussed Merlin Stone’s works. The goals and objectives of the class were rigorous. We encouraged one another to move toward a richer, fuller perspective of what constitutes divine encounter and experience. Following Merlin’s scholarship and commentary, the students heightened their awareness and became more mindful of the world from a feminist perspective. They even gained a spiritual strength from their Goddess studies.