Because Stone’s research is fastidious, precise, and so amply documented, we were encouraged—each and every one of us—to engage in a close and careful reading of the text, to cultivate a more compassionate and empathetic mode of being-in-the-world, and to perceive spirituality as compassion. Merlin challenged us to critique gender asymmetry, to work for true equality for all, and to never to see “the other,” except as a part of ourselves. Further, she encouraged us to embrace pluralism, diversity, and the radically dynamic components of the sacred with a completely open acceptance. Within the class there was a growing sense of validation and affirmation. We were increasingly able to claim the validity of our own experiences and speak with strong voices. We read and studied, and told our stories. Our narratives became liberating texts in dialogue with others, appreciating the fullness of women’s experience as a source of knowledge, empowerment, imagination, and compassion.
Indeed, as I have continued to teach my class on women’s spirituality, Merlin Stone is ever present in my classroom—her spirit guiding us with her own intrepid courage and deep desire to uncover the truths of women’s experiences. She is the lever of change for women’s lives, work, and knowledge, fostering a new way of living in harmony with the earth and one another. Each and every individual in the class is essentially awakened, sustained, and supported in her journey to increased self-knowledge, history, and voice.
In Merlin’s exhumation of women’s history—anthropologically, archeologically, ethnologically—sifting through the very artifacts of the women’s lives, she illuminates twenty-five thousand years of lost time, lost stories. Merlin explicates the crucially important contributions of women to the development of an enhanced perspective of humanity, community, cooperative and peaceful in nature. She encourages us to develop what Milton called “right reason,” but with a feminist twist. Long before anyone else dared to suggest what patriarchy had attempted to annihilate, she, with her assiduous research and energy, provided the knowledge and tools, the paths to understanding a deeper reality than what patriarchal myth proselytized as fact, as truth.
My students and I are continually dazzled by Merlin Stone’s work. We read her books in the eighties and nineties and into the twenty-first century. Then, and even now, so many of us grew up with patriarchal mandates concerning female behavior, sexual mores, and mandates based on deficient definitions of womanhood. When looked at through the lens of Merlin’s writing, we come to see our childhood and its patriarchal regulations as a terrifying “hoax.” Thankfully, some of the trepidations of the eighties and nineties, when I first taught women’s studies, are gone. The bright, dedicated students of ethnological and anthropological studies have themselves gone on to further the cause of women.
What we see now, and will continue to experience, is the tremendous impact and influence of Merlin Stone’s work. She revealed the deliberate erasure of women’s epistemologies, philosophies, literature, and ways of living in (and finding their place in) the world. My students and I were forever changed by her courage and her convictions—convictions that lived in our own hearts, souls, and bones intuitively. She brought us truth, validation, and a resounding affirmation to believe in ourselves. We left those classes inspired to believe that there was another way to live, cooperatively, creatively, artistically, among all the species on the planet, to heal the earth. Merlin has shown us the way to live in peace. May we follow her wisdom and work toward a truly humane and life-nurturing future.
What follows, in the next section of this book, are two poems I have written in response to Merlin Stone’s work, my studies, and my classroom experiences. I, like so many who discovered Merlin at a critical time in their lives, have been transformed in a way that not only changed my own path but allowed me to help other women. The poems reflect the awareness that Stone’s work can foster in all of us. My students were not simply students, but women in the cause of Merlin’s better perceptions. Thus it is a privilege to be able to include two poems of mine in this book—as a way to honor the world-changing work of Merlin Stone.
Two Poems for Merlin Stone by Carol F. Thomas
Life Studies: Natural Law
No one ever told us we had to study our own lives,
make of our lives a study as if learning history,
linguistics, or cultural anthropology, examine artifacts
and rituals, as if field studies of the Aka, Yanamama,
!Kung or Mudurucu. No one ever told us how to deconstruct
gazed alterities; examine old men’s ringing declarations—
their frayed and tattered pseudo life; past economies of
commerce, husbandry; past myth and fetishistic horn
and chalice, cloven-hoofed containers for our darknesses.
No one ever told us where to learn the million quiet
nuances of heartbeat’s antiphon in sync with ancient
world’s incessant undersong; to light upon each note
as meadow larks might light upon a branch—twig-flexed
and tensile, anchored and yet not, but ready for flight.
No one ever told us to embrace the chaos, quarks and
patterns, and that perhaps, they never were designed
for us in particular. Or how to love life’s murmuring,
rumbling, moiling, boiling evolutionary soup, in which
we dream, desire to be the song itself. No one ever told
us we held aphrodisiacs and anodynes; could summon
desire unkempt to trample through our souls at will.
All heaven and Earth boiled down to one sweet drop
and we hold it in weltered and love pummeled hearts—
a legend for our crinkly map of terra incognita,
becoming now vaulted, origamied liberty.
New Origin Story
We suffer now, bewildered and bamboozled, alienated
from the Earth, the sky, the universe, our mea culpas
projected onto stone, like gargoyles gouged from marble.
Are we angry, bitter children out to punish what we thought
was ours forever, and the planet and the Earth diminished now,
betrayed us with false promises, just like the father-god-myths
of dying white old men? Read Stevens on the patriarch, his
“no, no, no, yes, no’s,” his bleak regard for Earth, for life.
It was Nietzsche who asked, perhaps with irony,
“What if the women are right?” What if Homo Sapiens are two
species seemingly alike, but not the same, each sui generis,
singular, genders as multiple as you could ponder?
We live in different matrixes, and don’t usually agree. The
Manichean Paranoids have been with us since history began,
hiding in the Puritan’s old trope—unsavory sinners, blest
saints, this rule applied to economics exaggerates and tidies up
a complex, messy world. Even as the planet dies, Earth is
depleted, that wondrous little word, “renewable,” euphemistically
softening the deaths and crimes that have reified Earth and
all her species, women, children, those different, those they
call superfluous. Patriarchs are oligarchs, alchemizing Earth
into objects to be destroyed, prison with its ill and maimed.
Look around, the prison is our metaphor for mental health
and rehabilitation.
We do not deserve another chance.
Beyond this vale of tears awaits an adolescent’s dream,
except the adolescents are old men who will soon die.
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epilogue
Epilogue
by Carol F. Thomas
We are liberated and uplifted by the work of Merlin Stone. As t
eachers, we each have wonderful stories of our students’ journeys from subjugation to a voice of their own and a newfound freedom. Merlin Stone’s intrepid, courageous, and unaccompanied travels to research her books, her fieldnotes, her heuristic research, respecting and listening to women from dozens of different cultures and times, essentially cracked the code of the Western metaphysical tradition, exposing its lies, delusions, and distortions of truth and reality. Other fine scholars followed Merlin Stone’s lead, but it was she who, at a critical moment, provided the grounding of scholarship that exposed patriarchy’s great hoax. We have so very much to thank her for—so many more women are free, are empowered to speak the truth of their lives without strife of tongue or stuttering of words not their own. When I think of my women’s studies classes, I inevitably think of Merlin Stone and her impact on my hundreds of students. And somehow, for me I also think of Harriet Tubman, about whom Susan Griffin in one of her most famous poems wrote, “There is always a time to make right what is wrong,” and Merlin Stone has provided us with the tools to disinter our heritage as women and speak truth to power. Indeed, she encouraged us to make right and true what has been delusional and duplicitous. As Muriel Rukeyser has observed, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Merlin Stone has told the truth about thousands if not millions of women’s histories around the world. It is time to celebrate with awe and wonder the liberating power of her work.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Cynthia Stone Davis for her guidance with this book and for the personal photos and papers she shared. Thanks to Nili Weisman for sending us so much material on Merlin that we thought was lost. Thanks to Gloria Orenstein for her expertise and generosity in writing the introduction to our book. Thanks to Daniel Axelrod for his editorial assistance and skills in proofing this book. A very large measure of thanks to Linda Winburn Walker, whose devotion to the project went far beyond her assistance as typist, researcher, and advisor. Thanks to Z Budapest for inspiring the creation of this book, and to Laura Vaughan for her many key contacts and enduring faith. Thanks to Selena Fox for introducing us to Elysia Gallo and all those at Llewellyn Publishing for their genuine interest in Merlin Stone, which we believe has helped us to produce a fine book. Lastly, thanks to all the endorsers who took the time to read our early manuscript.
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Bibliography and Works Cited
Anderson, Mike. “The Lord Is My Shepherdess.” Pittsburgh Press (January 1977).
“The Awakening of the Goddess.” Los Angeles Inner Resources (Summer 1987).
Bear, Euan. “Great Goddess: Merlin Stone Discussion and Workshop, October 18–19.” In Print. Burlington, VT: Vanguard Press, 1986.
Booher, Barbara. “Reclaiming the Goddess: An Interview with Merlin Stone.” Common Ground (Winter, 1989–90).
California Institute of Integral Studies. Gaia Consciousness: A Conference and Celebration of the Re-Emergent Goddess and the Living Earth. April 6–10, 1988. San Francisco, CA.
Diner, Helen. Mothers and Amazons: The First Feminine History of Culture. Anchor/Doubleday, 1973.
The Globe and Mail. United Kingdom (December 27, 1991).
Gould Davis, Elizabeth. The First Sex. Penguin Books, 1971.
Holland, Darrell. “‘God Was Woman’ to Ancients.” Cleveland Plain Dealer (January 22, 1977).
Kennedy, Robert. Personal letter included in this book. July 29, 1965.
Long, Asphodel P. “Feminism and Spirituality: A Review of Recent Publications 1975–1981.” Women’s Studies International Forum 5:1 (1982), pp. 103–108. www.asphodel-long.com/html/feminism_and_spirituality.html.
“Messenger of the Goddess, Merlin Stone.” Aquarian Voices (November/December, 1989), pp. 10–12.
Orenstein, Gloria. Preface by Merlin Stone. The Reflowering of the Goddess. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, 1990.
Ostling, Richard N. “When God Was a Woman.” Time Magazine (May 6, 1991), p. 73.
Patai, Raphael. Foreword by Merlin Stone. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990.
Seltzer, R. M. “Goddess Worship in the Ancient Near East” by Merlin Stone. Religions of Antiquity. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
Sowers, Leslie. “Feminists Revive Ancient Goddess Worship.” Houston Chronicle (February 17, 1990), pp. 1E–2E.
Stein, Ruthe. “In the Image of the Great Goddess.” San Francisco Chronicle (April 7, 1978), p. 25.
Stone, Merlin. Als Gott eine Frau war. Stuttgart, Germany: Goldmann Buch, 1991.
Stone, Merlin. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
———. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, Vol. I. New York: New Sibylline Books, 1979.
———. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, Vol. II. New York: New Sibylline Books, 1979.
———. Eens was God als Vrouw belichaamd. Netherlands: Servire, 1979.
———. “The Goddess and Evolution.” Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth XXI: 81 (Beltane/May 1988), p. 8.
———. “Goddess Reverence in the Ancient East.” The Encyclopedia of Religion. Vol. VI. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
———. “Inner Voice: Intuition.” A lecture at a conference on “Feminist Visions of the Future,” delivered by Merlin Stone: Chico, California, 1978.
———. Juror. “The Goddess Show.” Printed announcement/flyer. Washington Women’s Arts Center, Washington, DC (February 28–March 31, 1984).
———. Quand Dieu était femme. Montreal, Canada: Éditions l’Étincelle, 1978.
———. “Ruminations on Gaia Consciousness and Goddess Reverence.” Goddess Thealogy: An International Journal for the Study of the Divine Feminine I: II (December 2011), pp. 41–49.
———. Three Thousand Years of Racism. New York: New Sibylline Books, 1981.
———. When God Was a Woman. New York: Dial Press, 1976.
———. Unpublished lecture notes. 1978.
Toms, Michael. “When God Was a Woman: An Interview with Merlin Stone.” At the Leading Edge. Burdett, NY: Larson Publications,1991.
Woman of Power: A Magazine of Feminism, Spirituality, and Politics 15 (October 1989), pp. 16–18.
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The day after Lenny met Merlin, September 21, 1976. Key Largo, Florida.
Merlin, 1933.
Erasmus Hall High School, senior photo, 1949.
Merlin’s painting
of Jenny and Cynthia (acrylic).
Mylar construction
on canvas.
Merlin in San Francisco, California, 1978.
(top) Cynthia and Merlin in California, circa 1971.
(bottom) Cynthia and Merlin in London, circa 1974.
(top) Lenny and Merlin in Milady’s Restaurant, Prince and Thompson streets, New York City, 1991.
(bottom) Grandma Merlin in Paris with Cynthia’s children, Oliver and Juliette. 1989.
Merlin in Phoenicia, New York, 1992.
(top) Merlin in her room, circa 1995, when she finished her novel.
(bottom) Merlin at home in New York City, 1995.
Merlin with her books.
Merlin on the special bench she and Lenny shared (“our bench”), 6th Avenue, between Prince and Spring streets, NYC, 1996.
Lenny and Merlin in front of their apartment at 184 6th Avenue, New York City, 1999.
Merlin, circa 1991.
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Merlin Stone Remembered Page 27
