Merlin Stone Remembered

by David B. Axelrod

  A Levite Account of Creation—

  Theology or Politics?

  Let us take a closer look at the tale of creation and the subsequent loss of Paradise as related by the Hebrew leaders and later adopted and cherished by the advocates of Christianity. As we compare the Levite creation story with accounts of the Goddess religion, we notice how at each turn, in each sentence of the biblical myth, the original tenets of the Goddess religion were attacked.

  Stephen Langdon wrote, “Thus beyond all doubt the Nippurian school of Sumerian theology originally regarded man as having been created from clay by the great mother goddess.” Professor Kramer tells us, “In a tablet which gives a list of Sumerian gods the goddess Nammu, written with the ideogram for ‘sea’ is described as ‘the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth.’” One Sumerian prayer goes as follows: “Hear O ye regions, the praise of Queen Nana, Magnify the Creatress, exalt the dignified, Exalt the glorious One, draw nigh unto the Mighty Lady.” The Egyptians wrote, “In the beginning there was Isis, Oldest of the Old. She was the Goddess from whom all becoming arose.” Even in Babylonian periods there were prayers to Mami or Aruru as the creator of human life. Yet the worshippers of Yahweh, perhaps one thousand years later, asserted that it was a male who initially created the world. It was the first claim to male kinship—maleness was primal.

  According to legends of Sumer and Babylon, women and men had been created simultaneously, in pairs—by the Goddess. But in the male religion it was of ultimate importance that the male was made first, and in the image of his creator—the second and third claims to male kinship rights. We are next told that from a small rather insignificant part of man, his rib, woman was formed. Despite all that we know about the biological facts of birth, facts the Levites certainly knew as well, we are assured that the male does not come from the female, but the female from the male. We may be reminded of the Indo-European Greek story of Athena being born from the head of Zeus.

  Any unpleasant remnant or reminder of being born of woman had to be denied and changed. Just as in the myth of the creation through an act of masturbation by the Egyptian Ptah, the Divine Ancestress was written out of reality. We are then informed that the woman made in this manner was presented as a gift to the man, declaring and assuring her status—among those who accepted the myth—as the property of the male. It tells us that she was given to him to keep him from being lonely, as “a helper fit for him.” Thus we are expected to understand that the sole and divine purpose of women’s existence is to help or serve men in some way.

  The couple so designed was placed in the Garden of Eden—paradise—where the male deity warned them not to eat any of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. To the ancient Hebrews this tree was probably understood to represent the sacred sycamore fig of the Goddess, the familiar asherah which stood beside the altars of the temples of the Goddess and Her Baal. The sacred branch being passed around in the temple, as described by Ezekiel, may have been the manner in which the fruit was taken as “communion.” According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple’s conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, “And they knew that they were naked.” So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves.

  But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolized sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first—upon the advice and counsel of the serpent.

  It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offered Eve the advice. For people of that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counselor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in a most dangerous manner.

  The relationship between the woman and the serpent is shown to be an important factor, for the Old Testament related that the male deity spoke directly to the serpent, saying, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.” In this way the oracular priestesses, the prophetesses whose advice and counsel had been identified with the symbolism and use of the serpent for several millennia, were now to be regarded as the downfall of the whole human species. Woman, as sagacious advisor or wise counselor, human interpreter of the divine will of the Goddess, was no longer to be respected, but to be hated, feared or at best doubted or ignored. This demand for silence on the part of women, especially in the churches, is later reflected in the passages of Paul in the New Testament. According to the Judaic and Christian theology, women’s judgment had led to disaster for the whole human species.

  We are told that, by eating the fruit first, woman possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake of the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as the sexually tempting but God-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumbed to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity—Her fruit, Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.

  The Hebrew creation myth, which blamed the female of the species for initial sexual consciousness in order to suppress the worship of the Queen of Heaven, Her sacred women and matrilineal customs, from that time on assigned to women the role of sexual temptress. It cast her as the cunning and contriving arouser of the physical desires of men, she who offers the appealing but dangerous fruit. In the male religions, sexual drive was not to be regarded as the natural biological desires of women and men that encouraged the species to reproduce itself but was to be viewed as women’s fault.

  Not only was the blame for having eaten the fruit of sexuality, and for tempting Adam to do the same, laid heavily upon women, but the proof or admission of her guilt was supposedly made evident in the pain of childbirth, which women were assured as their eternal chastisement for teaching men such bad habits. Eve was to be severely punished as the male deity decreed: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.”

  Making use of the natural occurrence of the pains of the pressure of a human child passing from the womb, through a narrow channel, into the outside world, the Levite writer pretended to prove the omnipotent power of his deity. Not only was woman to bear the guilt for sexual consciousness, but according to the male deity her pain in bearing a child was to be regarded as punishment, so that all women giving birth would thus be forced to identify with Eve.

  But perhaps most significant was the fact that the story also stated that it was the will of the male deity that Eve would henceforth desire only her husband, redundantly reminding us that this whole fable was designed and propagated to provide “divine” sanction for male supremacy and a male kinship system, possible only with a certain knowledge of paternity.

  We are perhaps all too familiar with the last line of the decree, which announced
that from that time on, as a result of her sin and in eternal payment for the defiant crime which she had committed against the male deity, her husband was awarded the divine right to dominate her, to “rule over” her to totally assert his authority. And in guilt for what she had supposedly done in the very beginning of time, as if in confession of her poor judgment, she was expected to submit obediently. We may consider here the more practical reality that, once the economic security of women had been undermined by the institution of male kinship, women were forced into the position of accepting this one stable male provider as the one who “ruled the roost.”

  Once these edicts had been issued, the couple was expelled from the Garden of Eden, the original paradise where life had been so easy. From that time on they were to labor for their livelihood, a most severe warning to any woman who might still have been tempted to defy the Levite Yahweh. For hadn’t it been just such a woman, listening to the advice of the serpent, eating the forbidden fruit, suggesting that men try it too and join her in sexual consciousness, who had once caused the downfall and misery of all humankind?

  [contents]

  ancient mirrors

  of womanhood

  Ancient Mirrors, Vol. 1

  Ancient Mirrors, Vol. 2

  Original covers designed by Merlin Stone for the two-volume set Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: Our Goddess and Heroine Heritage, published by her own New Sibylline Books in 1979.

  Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood:

  A Reflection on the

  Poetic Genius of Merlin Stone

  by David B. Axelrod

  A wealth of inspiration for your own creative work in fiction, dance, poetry, song, drama, painting, graphics.

  (Merlin’s description of her book

  on a promotional bookmark)

  Merlin Stone is remembered for her thorough scholarship, which finally gave credence to the importance of the Goddess through the ages, but her second book, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, may well be a work of even greater genius. Much more information about the Goddess was needed to counter the tremendous weight of the patriarchy, which suppressed Goddess religions. In her second book, Merlin presented her facts in an even more accessible and enjoyable format.

  The study of the Goddess, for a long time prior to Merlin and a few other feminist writers, was heavily biased. When Otto Rank wrote his study on The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909), he barely mentioned women as having a place in what was clearly a patriarchal mythos. Nor did Joseph Campbell give much attention to women who completed what he identified as an archetypal “hero cycle” in his own The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The list of major studies in mythology and comparative religion that did not acknowledge the true function of the Goddess is so long that it clearly demonstrates the importance of Merlin Stone’s work. In a patriarchal world dating back well before Thomas Bulfinch’s Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855), the “hero” reigns supreme. Where are the “heroines,” the stories of women of bravery, power, wisdom, and influence? It was absolutely necessary for Merlin to provide us with even more explication of our Goddess heritage.

  In When God Was a Woman, Merlin presents her extensive research about the Goddess religion from a distinctly feminist point of view, culminating in her unraveling the myth of Adam and Eve. Anticipating the furor that might result from these pronouncements, Merlin was careful to provide extensive research and documentation of pre-patriarchal Goddess religions. Without Merlin’s attention to detail, we might not fully understand or even believe her conclusions about the conscious suppression of women in the Judeo-Christian myth of our creation. Merlin begins Ancient Mirrors with a quote from an early feminist author, Clara Colby: “Nothing would be more interesting in connection with the Woman’s Bible, than a comparative study of the accounts of creation held by people of different races and faiths” (from The Woman’s Bible, “Comments on Genesis,” 1895). Ancient Mirrors answers that prophetic call for more clarity.

  However, the intention of Ancient Mirrors actually goes beyond the self-assigned mission of Merlin’s first book. Knowing that some readers might find the style of When God Was a Woman to be a challenge—a “scholarly” read—Merlin recast her wealth of knowledge into a much more accessible form when she wrote Ancient Mirrors. One could think of Ancient Mirrors as a sequel to Merlin’s first, ground-breaking book. Even Merlin said that she had so much information still left to impart after her first book, she felt she had to create another volume. But it would be a mistake to think that Ancient Mirrors is only a sequel. We often hear people praise the eloquence and poetry in the Songs of Solomon. We can also praise the “Songs of Stone.”

  It would be useful to consider the arc of Merlin Stone’s life as a way to better understand the depth of her creative genius in creating Ancient Mirrors. If we all—rich and poor, educated and uneducated— seek some vision of the truth, one could make the case that all four central elements of Merlin’s life and training came together in her writing the book: work, study, inspiration, and even a touch of “madness.” The “ordinary” working person may toil on in relative obscurity, but that person also wants to believe life is meaningful. Of course, those who live a life of letters, pursuing degrees or devoted to the arts, seek the truth. Whether it is superstition or there is some science that explains it, it is often believed that mental illness allows an uncommon glimpse into a deeper realm. Certainly, a different brain thinks outside the box. Then there are those who devote themselves to religion or are truly inspired. In an unpublished novel, excerpts from which are included in Merlin Stone Remembered, Merlin identified the need that many people have to set out on a quest. And what greater quest is there than to find some eternal “Truth”? At intervals in her life, Merlin never shirked or diminished the importance of basic, hard work—even as a waitress or, when Lenny met her, as a switchboard operator in a Miami Beach hotel. Working people, as much as any of us, quest for meaning in their lives. As central to Merlin’s existence was her art and her studies—a life of the mind. She achieved not just her bachelor’s degree and a master of fine arts degree, but through her vigorous independent study, she was rightfully awarded an honorary doctorate. Her scholarship was certainly a quest to bring us all a central Truth.

  However, for all Merlin’s scholarship, to this day, some people still attempt to dismiss her findings as “madness.” For her scholarship and writings, in another age, Merlin would have been burned at the stake, or certainly locked away as a lunatic. Of course, one person’s madwoman is another’s prophet, and it is here we should acknowledge the sheer inspiration exhibited by Merlin Stone in creating forty-seven poems for many of the nearly one hundred twenty goddesses she presents in Ancient Mirrors. Her work is the nexus of all Merlin’s experience as an artisan, a scholar, a “mad” risk-taker, and an inspired teacher of the Truth about the Goddess. In her Introduction, Merlin admits that she “reject[ed] the idea of a strictly academic presentation of the information that I had found.” She read the numerous scholarly studies where the “entire footnote biased emphasis” was on male-oriented figures. “Thus, I openly admit to my own bias in choosing to study only female images. … It was also clear to me that, if I was going to present material at all, I was going to do so with respect—the respect of seriously considering the religious ideas of others as more than intellectual curiosities. … People had prayed to, honored, held as sacred [these goddesses]” (Stone, “Introduction,” vol. I, p. 12).

  Ancient Mirrors presents the story, function, and rituals for goddesses covering a substantial period of time and in an extensive range of countries and cultures. Not only has Merlin found the facts that document the existence of each goddess, she has actually created a “liturgy” for many of them—poems and prayers that can be recited to honor the goddess and invoke her powers. For example, she reverentially invokes Neit, the Egyptian goddess:

  Most ancient Mother,

  Great Radiant One,

&nb
sp; Lady of the Stars,

  Mistress of the Celestial Ocean. …

  The Earth nestles between Her thighs,

  as daily She gives birth to the Sun.

  (Ancient Mirrors, vol. II, pp. 75–76)

  The poem/prayer itself is seventy-one lines long, and in place of a simple, scholarly enumeration of Neit’s attributes, Merlin brings us into the metaphoric world of the goddess whose powers created and, daily, re-create our existence for us:

  Her eye creating the Nile,

  the stars glowing with emerald light

  set into her very body,

  the single word ‘beauty’ marked as a glyph

  between Her sacred horns.

  (Ancient Mirrors, vol. II, p. 76)

  The “eye” becomes the Nile. The “stars glowing” are the body of the Goddess herself. All “beauty” exists within her. The sense that the very body of the Goddess provides us with our world is a central concept that poetry, with its devices of synecdoche (allowing the part to represent the whole) and personification, fosters. But more so, Merlin had an artist’s sense of texture and color so that her poems take on a sculptural and tactile feeling.

  For the Hebrew goddess Shekhina, known in the Bible as “the Bride of Sabbath,” Merlin laments:

  too long has She been in exile,

  too long have Her people

  sorrowed at Her absence …

  Still the candles are lit,

  still the sacred braided loaf is baked,

  in hopes that Her ancient Sabbath spirit