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An early contemporary proponent of the worship of the prehistoric Mother Goddess, Stone analyzes the creation story in Genesis from a non-Christian perspective. To her, the tale is an allegorical story about the Hebrew deity Yehwah supplanting the Mother Goddess, represented by the tree of life and the serpent, and Hebrew religion supplanting the worship of the Goddess. Stone claims that the forbidden knowledge concerns sex, sexuality, and reproduction, specifically the knowledge that men have a role in reproduction, and that the story describes the process by which traditional matriarchal societies were thrust aside by patriarchal societies. To Stone, "The Adam and Eve myth. . . had actually been designed to be used in the continuous Levite battle to suppress the female religion."
Stone discusses a number of ancient Near Eastern nature religions some of which represented the Goddess by a serpent and others of which performed an early form of communion by eating the fruit of a tree which grew next to an altar to the Goddess. These goddesses, first and foremost the Creator Goddess, also represented wisdom, human creativity, sex, sexuality, reproduction, new life, and / or destiny or fate.
"Symbols such as serpents, sacred fruit trees and sexually tempting women who took advice from serpents may once have been understood by people of biblical times to symbolize the then familiar presence of the female deity. In the Paradise myth, these images may have explained allegorically that listening to women who revered the Goddess had once caused the expulsion of all humankind from the original home of bliss in Eden." pages 198-199
"It is here that our understanding of the sacred sexual customs and matrilineal descent patterns enters the matter, further clarifying the symbolism of the forbidden fruit. In each area in which the Goddess was known and revered, She was extolled not only as the prophetess of great wisdom, closely identified with the serpent, but as the original Creatress, and the patroness of sexual pleasures and reproduction as well. The Divine Ancestress was identified as She who brought life as well as She who decreed the destinies and directions of those lives, a not unnatural combination. Hathor was credited with having taught people how to procreate. Ishtar, Ashtoreth and Inanna were each esteemed as the tutelary deity of sexuality and new life. The sacred women celebrated this aspect of Her being by making love in the temples.
Considering the hatred the Hebrews felt toward the asherim, a major symbol of female religion, it would not be too surprising if the symbolism of the tree of forbidden fruit, said to offer the knowledge of good and evil, yet clearly represented in the myth as the provider of sexual consciousness, was included in the creation story to warn that eating the fruit of this tree had caused the downfall of all humanity. Eating of the tree of the Goddess, which stood by each altar, was dangerously "pagan" as were Her sexual customs and Her oracular serpents.
So into the myth of how the world began, the story that the Levites offered as the explanation of the creation of all existence, they place the advisory serpent and the woman who accepted its counsel, eating of the tree that gave her the understanding of what "only the gods knew" - the secret of sex - how to create life.
As the advocates of Yahweh destroyed the shrines of the female deity wherever they could, murdering when they could not convert, the Levite priesthood wrote the tale of creation. They announced that male supremacy was not a new idea, but in fact had been divinely decreed by the male deity at the very dawn of existence. The domination of the male over the female, as Hebrew women found themselves without the rights of their neighbors, rights that they too may have once held, was not simply added as another Hebrew law written into the Bible as one of the first major acts and proclamations of the male creator. With blatant disregard for actual history, the Levite leaders announced that woman must be ruled by man, declaring that it was in agreement with the original decree of Yahweh, who, according to these new legends, had first created the world and people. The myth of Adam and Eve, in which male domination was explained and justified, informed women and men alike that male ownership and control of submissively obedient women was to be regarded as the divine and natural state of the human species.
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Lots more at... http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/whm2000/stone2.htmlhttp://www.amazon.com/When-God-Woman-Merlin-Stone/dp/015696158X |
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