Merlin Stone's book is rubbish

Alice C. Linsley


Recently a friend emailed me to say that she just bought a book at the Goodwill for $1.00 because it had a provocative title. She wanted to know if I had read When God Was a Woman. The original title, which appeared on the earlier UK publication, was The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women's Rites. The author, Merlin Stone (1931-2011), was an American sculptor who taught art history.

I read the book when I was in seminary. It was circulating among the women who were preparing for ordination and I am certain it influenced some of the less discerning. Then I had doubts about the book's value. Today I would say Stone's book is rubbish.

There is neither historical nor anthropological support for her thesis that the Hebrews suppressed goddess worship. She tries to prove that the Canaanites had a matriarchial and matrilineal structure. She is wrong on both counts. In the ancient world only Kushite queens exercised political power (matriarchy), and it was the Nilo-Saharan Horites who traced some lines through mothers (matrilineal). The Horites are hardly distinguishable in history from the Hebrews or Ha-biru.

It is this kind of shallow research and neo-pagan feminism that leads to bad things in the Church, like women priests. A lesbian Episcopal priest once argued with me on the question of women priests. Here is how she argued: God called Esther and Ruth and Judith to leadership in community. They weren't ordained because of ancient, cultural misogyny. 

This "priestess" asserts that the Episcopal Church was guided by the Holy Spirit in unilaterally deciding to ordain women to the priesthood. If this is true, why attempt to establish precedent by listing women in the Bible, none of whom were priests. Not a single female can be found in the Bible or in the history of the Church who was a priest, despite desperate theories about "Junia" and "Presbytera."

Goddesses in the ancient world

Goddesses existed in ancient cultures as representations of aspects of nature: skies (Nut), seas, wind, fire, water, etc, or as representatives of the Feminine Principle which is complementary to the Masculine Principle, but never portrayed as superior. The goddesses to which Stone refers are late comers compared to Hathor-Meri, the most important female venerated in the ancient world.

Hathor-Meri, the mother of Horus, was said to conceive by the overshadowing of the sun, the emblem of the Creator. She is the archetype of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose people were Horites. Christ fulfills the Horus myth and the Horite expectation of the Seed of Ra born of their ruler-priest lines. Mary is the virgin daughter of the ruler-priest Joachim. Mary is a variant of the ancient Egyptian name Meri.

In conceiving the Seed of God, Hathor-Meri became the tabernacle of the Deity or sh ntjr, meaning God's tent. A biblical female who stands as a sign of the blessed Theotokos is Oholibamah. Her name means most high tent and she is a Horite bride of Esau the Younger.

Mary's full name was "Miriam Daughter of Joachim Son of Pntjr Priests of Nathan of Beth Lehem." From the earliest predynastic times among the Egyptian Horites, ntjr designated the king. The name Panther or p-ntjr meant "God is King." It is certain that Mary was of the ruler-priest class because even those who hated her admit this. Sanhedrin 106a says: “She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters.”

The Horites are the most ancient caste of temple and shrine attendants known to have existed. Their religious practices were evident as early as 3600 BC at Nekhen (Hierakonpolis) in Sudan. Votive offerings at the temple of Horus were up to ten times larger than the normal mace heads and bowls found elsewhere, suggesting that this was a very prestigious shrine.

Remember what the angel Gabriel said to Mary? "The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. Therefore that holy thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." (Luke 1:35, cf. Gen. 3:15)

Related reading: C.S. Lewis, Priestesses in the Church?; Why Women Were Never Priests; The Biblical Worldview is Binary; The Canaan Abraham Knew; Who Were the Horites?; God as Male Priest; The Destruction of Hazor: Another theory; Women Priests (Part1)