“In the beginning, God was a woman…”
Merlin Stone opens her landmark exploration with this arresting truth and then takes us deep into a history we were never meant to remember.

Long before patriarchal religion claimed authority, cultures across the ancient Near and Middle East honored the Great Goddess. Under her reign, women held economic and social power that would later seem radical:

• they bought and sold property,
  
  

• traded freely in the marketplace,
  
  

• and inherited land and title through their mothers.
  

Stone documents—carefully and with riveting detail—how these Goddess-centered societies were systematically overturned. As patriarchal Judeo-Christian traditions rose, women’s rites were suppressed and their stories rewritten. The Great Goddess was recast as wanton and depraved, and one of the most enduring legends of Western culture—the fall of Adam and Eve—was used to confirm the myth of woman as the source of sin.

Why This Matters to Us Women Today

For those of us who carry the ancestral memory of wise women and healers, Stone’s research explains the unease we often feel toward traditional religious structures. It puts words to the quiet distrust of the Church and the almost cellular instinct to hide our spiritual knowing.

Our foremothers were not simply herbalists and midwives; they were guardians of a feminine spirituality that honored the earth and the divine within women themselves. When male-deity driven Christianity sought dominance, these women—and their wisdom—were hunted, silenced, and nearly erased.

Many of us still feel that inherited caution: the fear that fully showing our intuitive power might invite danger. Stone’s work validates that this fear is not imagined; it is a collective trauma passed through generations.

A Call to Remember and Reclaim

When God Was a Woman is more than history—it’s an invitation.
To remember that the sacred has never been solely masculine.
To rediscover the divine feminine that lives in our own bodies and in the natural world.
And to understand that honoring this lineage is not rebellion—it’s restoration.

For modern daughters of witches and wisdom keepers, reading Stone’s book is both revelation and remembrance. It offers the context behind the ache to hide and the courage to step forward. Each time we speak our spiritual truth or tend the sacred in our own lives, we heal a piece of what history tried to erase.

If you’ve ever wondered why you feel both drawn to the divine and wary of traditional religion—
if you sense a deeper feminine lineage whispering through your bones—
this book will give you language for what your soul already knows.

Essential reading for anyone ready to reclaim women’s power,
and to gently, boldly let the wisdom of the Goddess be seen once more.