God Isn't a Man — and the Reason Why Is About Money, Not Heaven.
For 30,000 years, the divine was a woman. Then someone needed to know who'd inherit the farm.
by Amanda Leon
The pungent smell of frankincense hung so thickly in the air it burned my eyes. Patting down my fluffy-satin-silk-white-cupcake dress to no avail as I adjusted my pearl crown upon my head, I remembered that that nun said “God doesn’t care if you walk down the aisle naked.”
It was my first communion. Not a choice, but a natural unfoldment of events that long predated me.
Diligent little Catholic that I was, I knelt, sad, and stood at all the right times. I turned the pages and sang the Psalms. I listened — genuinely listened — as a man in green and gold robes at the front of the gold-bedecked church explained the difference between good and bad. St. Charles Borromeo first. Then St. Jerome. Church occurred every week, and I never once thought to ask who had handed that man the authority to sort the world into clean and unclean while the rest of us knelt on the floor and took notes.
A child doesn’t question. A child doesn't follow the money. A child just kneels.
The Badass Nuns Who Taught Me to Question Authority
Then I landed at Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart — an all-girls French Catholic prep school run by an order of nuns — and the nuns did something the priests never had. They taught me that to be a good Catholic was to be a questioning Catholic.
God, they said, did not want me to swallow the Bible, the Pope, and the priest as finished doctrine. Faith was not obedience. Faith was the work of asking, doubting, going back to the primary sources and reading the thing in the language and the century it was actually written in. Even the popes had contradicted one another down the long line of them. Interpretation was everything. Context was everything. And context, I came to see, is precisely the thing most people leave out when they tell you what a sacred text "obviously" means.
Take the line everyone thinks they understand — turn the other cheek. I had always heard it taught as meekness. Be the bigger person. Absorb the blow, take the high road, swallow it. But read it in its own world, it’s own context, and it inverts completely. A man striking down at someone beneath him used the back of his hand. To strike an equal, he had to use an open palm. So when you turned and offered the other cheek, you were not surrendering — you were forcing his hand, daring him: if you're going to hit me again, you'll have to do it as if I were your equal.It was defiance dressed as submission. This was the same man who flipped the tables in the temple. Not a doormat. A boat-rocker.
I have never forgotten what that contextual reinterpretation taught me, because it is a key that opens almost every locked door in religious history: the received reading is often the reverse of the original, and when you find the reversal, you can usually find who it served.
So I learned to read everything that way. Find the context. Find the reason. Follow the money. Follow the power.
The Question I Couldn't Stop Asking
Which is how I arrived, as a teenager in a green plaid skirt, at the question that would not leave me alone.
Why was God a man?
And close behind it: why could the women only ever be nuns, never priests? I knew nuns who could deliver a sermon that left the male priests sounding like they were reading a cereal box. Sister Karam — you are the GOAT. Yet she could shape thousands of girls' souls and still never be permitted to drop Jesus into a circular white communion wafer so we could then eat him. (Yes, this is how Catholicism works –cannibalism) That is supposedly the work only a man can do.
It made no sense against the plainest evidence we all have. Life comes from a woman. The womb is literally a portal that drops souls into this universe. The woman is the creator, the life-giver, the one whose body opens and produces another body. If you were going to pick a human being to model your idea of a Creator on, the choice is almost insultingly obvious.
Do you know how much brainwashing it takes to convince people not to believe what their own eyes are telling them?
That question sent me looking. Here is what I found.
The Original Wasn't a Metaphor
For most of human history, the divine was her.
Stretching back to roughly 30,000 BCE, the Sacred Feminine was the dominant image of the holy, for the simple reason that the power to make life looked like a feminine power. In a cave in the Dordogne, someone carved a pregnant woman out of reindeer antler some thirty-two thousand years ago — older than agriculture, older than the wheel, older than the first written word by tens of thousands of years. They did not carve a king. They carved the one thing every human being in that cave already knew to be a miracle: a body that makes another body.
She is not a single lucky find. From central Europe to the Near East, archaeologists have pulled thousands of small figurines out of the ground, nearly all of them female, many tucked into niches built into the walls of homes. At Çatalhöyük, a town nine thousand years old, the central deity appears as three women in one — a young woman, a mother in the act of giving birth, and a crone. Maiden, mother, crone: the whole arc of a woman's life, carved into the wall as the face of God.
Then, in 1976, an art historian named Merlin Stone spent a decade gathering the scattered evidence into a single argument and published When God Was a Woman. Her thesis was that the civilizations of the Near and Middle East worshipped the Goddess long before patriarchal religion suppressed her — and, tellingly, that under her reign women traded in the marketplace and inherited land and title from their mothers. Hold onto that last detail. It is the seam where the spiritual story and the economic one are sewn together, and we are about to pull the thread.
Let me be the questioning Catholic here and tell you what the nuns would want me to tell you: not everyone agrees. Some scholars read these figurines as evidence of a reigning Goddess; others caution they could be charms, portraits, or art made for its own sake. The grand theory of a single lost matriarchy is contested, and I won't pretend otherwise. But notice what is not in dispute. For tens of thousands of years, when human hands reached for the shape of the sacred, they kept making her. The debate is about what the figurines meant. It is not about whether they exist. They sit in museum drawers by the thousand, and what comes next rests on firmer ground than any of them.
What Changed — Follow the Plow
The shift from goddess to god is recent. It runs back only about five or six thousand years, and it arrives bolted to two other things: the rise of patriarchal social structure and the consolidation of monotheism. The engine underneath it is not spiritual. It is economic.
When human beings stopped foraging and settled into plow agriculture, they produced, for the first time, a surplus — and with surplus came a brand-new idea: private property. The thing worth noticing is the timing. Women's subordination shows up in the ancient Middle East at the very same moment as private property and the plow. Three arrivals, one window.
So why did the property end up in men's hands?
The plow chose them. The older hoe-farming had sat comfortably alongside women's work; the plow did not. It demanded sustained upper-body strength and the muscle to drive large animals, and it did not combine with pregnancy and nursing the way the hoe had. The labor that generated the surplus — the labor that created the property — concentrated in male hands, and whoever produces the surplus is the one who claims it. I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where lazy thinking wants to insert the word natural. It was not natural law. It was an accident of one particular farming technology, and we should call it that.
Now the pivot. The single asymmetry that builds everything that follows:
A woman always knows the child is hers. A man never does.
Maternity is witnessed. Paternity is only inferred. And the moment you own property you intend to pass to your children, that gap becomes the most consequential fact in the world. Before DNA, the only way a man could manufacture certainty that his heirs were his own was to control the woman who produced them — her virginity before marriage, her fidelity within it, her seclusion, her shame. Passing wealth down the male line is the cleanest available solution to the paternity problem, and monogamous marriage is the machine built to enforce it. The historian Gerda Lerner put it without flinching: men came to treat women's reproductive capacity as a commodity they appropriated. Friedrich Engels called the same moment the world-historic defeat of the female sex.
Here is how you know it was about the ledger and not about virtue. In the societies that passed wealth through women — mother to daughter — the policing of female sexuality largely falls away, because when descent runs through the mother, paternity simply does not matter; you always know whose child it is. The control appears exactly where inheritance needs it and vanishes exactly where it doesn't. That is the closest thing history offers to a controlled experiment, and it returns a verdict: the rules were never about a woman's ‘purity.’ They were about a man's estate.
And then they wrote it into law. The Mesopotamian codes — Ur-Nammu around 2100 BCE, Hammurabi around 1750 — fixed inheritance through the male line and set the penalty for adultery with an asymmetry that gives the whole game away: drowning for the wife, a fine for the husband. You do not punish a woman's body that severely unless her body is the ledger your fortune is written on.
This, it turns out, is just “follow the money” applied to scripture. The nuns trained me for it without knowing what I'd aim it at.
How They Edited Her Out
A male God who writes the rules, watches the bedroom, and brands female desire a sin is the cheapest and most scalable paternity-enforcement system ever devised. You don't have to post a single guard when installing surveillance inside the woman's own conscience.
So the Goddess had to go. And she didn't fade quietly — she was edited out, deliberately, over centuries. We know this because she left fingerprints.
The religion of ancient Israel was never the clean monotheism we inherited. As the anthropologist Raphael Patai documented in The Hebrew Goddess, it carried strong polytheistic elements from its earliest days, chief among them the cult of the mother goddess — worshipped for roughly three thousand years before the male priesthood finally eradicated her. Her name was Asherah. On the walls at Kuntillet Ajrud, a believer left a blessing in plain ancient Hebrew: Yahweh and his Asherah. The scholar Mark S. Smith laid out the consort evidence in the journal Theological Studies; the archaeologist William Dever, examining the goddess on her lion throne — a throne the ancient world reserved for deities, never mortals — concluded that the plainest reading of the evidence is the one we were trained to flinch from: many Israelites believed their God had a wife.
The erasure is written into the text itself, if you read scripture as the record of a struggle rather than a settled peace. Asherah stood inside the Holy of Holies for much of the early temple period and was torn out only by the reforms of Hezekiah and then Josiah — and she kept coming back. The Bible logs order after order to cut down her sacred groves and burn her poles. You do not legislate for centuries against a thing that has no power. The sheer ferocity of the editing is the measure of how large she once stood. They didn't forget the Goddess. They worked, across generations, to make us forget her.
Monotheism's victory, then, was never only theological. It closed the system. One God. One line. One enforced certainty.
The Edit Came Home
And the editing did not stop at the temple wall. It moved into the female body and took up residence in how women are taught to feel about their own.
The cycle that announces a body's power to make life — the literal mechanism of the first thing humanity ever called divine — got recast as something dirty, something unclean, something to hide. Read it as theology and it makes no sense. Read it as inheritance law and it is perfectly efficient: shame keeps the bleeding party quiet, and a woman taught to be ashamed of the very thing that makes her sacred is a woman unlikely to ask who profited from the shame. The Victorians called her ambition hysteria. We renamed it anxiety and built a wellness industry around it. The diagnosis changed. The instinct to contain her did not.
This is why a girl who could out-preach any priest in the building is still handed a habit instead of a pulpit. Why is the most obvious choice to drop a soul into this universe — the body of Christ into wafer — still overlooked. Not theology. Inheritance, running downstream, thousands of years later, still doing the job it was built to do — to me, to you.
The Cafeteria Catholic
I started this on my knees in a white dress. Here's where I'm standing now.
I identify as a Cafeteria Catholic. Catholicism is etched in my bones the way a person carves their initials into a tree, no matter how much the tree grows, the initials scar remains. Some of what those nuns gave me sits at the core of who I am, and I keep it — gratefully, deliberately, with both hands help close to my heart. What I reject, wholeheartedly, is the hierarchy and the patriarchy stitched on top of it, because I can now see those for what they are: man-made additions, installed later, by people who were following the money long before I learned to.
And what I'm left with is simpler and larger than the thing I knelt for in the puffy white dress. There is no masculine without the feminine. There is no God the Father without an equal God the Mother. God is not a man and God is not a woman. God is simply all that is — both, at once, and always was, until someone with an estate to protect decided one of those faces was more convenient erased.
May I present an invitation to you? It's the same one the nuns gave me. Look at the context. Ask who wrote the text, and who curated it, and who it served. Follow the money. Follow the power. Then study religion — study life — and decide for yourself what is true.
I already have. The oldest evidence is still sitting in a museum drawer: a woman, carved by hand thirty-two thousand years ago, by someone who looked at where life actually comes from and simply believed his or her own eyes.
She was the first face we ever gave to God.
She was never the rib.
With love always,
Amanda
CITATIONS & NOTES
Sacred Feminine, ~30,000 BCE — Goddess Worship: An Overview, Encyclopedia.com.
Dordogne antler figurine, ~32,000 yrs — Goddess Worship: An Overview, Encyclopedia.com.
Thousands of mostly-female figurines in wall niches — Eric Edwards, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (citing Malone 1993; White 2006).
Çatalhöyük triple goddess (maiden/mother/crone) — Goddess Worship: An Overview, Encyclopedia.com; Brooklyn Museum, Fertile Goddess.
Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York: Dial Press, 1976); UK title The Paradise Papers: The Suppression of Women's Rites. Goddess worship before patriarchal suppression; women inherited land and title from their mothers.
Interpretive debate / "art for art's sake" — Çatalhöyük Research Project (citing Balter 2005).
Subordination + private property + plow arrive together; 5,000–6,000-yr male-monotheism shift — Patriarchy, Encyclopedia.com; Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enl. ed. (Wayne State University Press, 1990).
Subordination + private property + plow arrive together; 5,000–6,000-yr male-monotheism shift — Patriarchy, Encyclopedia.com; Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enl. ed. (Wayne State University Press, 1990).
Plow vs. hoe / male control of surplus — Ester Boserup, Woman's Role in Economic Development (1970); Alesina, Giuliano & Nunn, "On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough," Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 2 (2013): 469–530.
Female reproductive capacity appropriated as commodity — Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, 1986).
"World-historic defeat of the female sex" — Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State(1884).
Matrilineal societies police female sexuality less — UCL, How did the patriarchy start — and will evolution get rid of it? (2022).
Hammurabi Law 129 — adulterous wife and partner bound and thrown into the water, husband may pardon; male-line inheritance framework — Code of Hammurabi, Law 129, trans. L.W. King, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School (avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamcode.asp); cf. Code of Ur-Nammu (~2100 BCE).
Mother-goddess cult central to early Israelite religion; Asherah in the Holy of Holies, removed by Hezekiah & Josiah — Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enl. ed. (Wayne State University Press, 1990; orig. 1967).
"Yahweh and his Asherah"; lion throne reserved for deities — Mark S. Smith, "God Male and Female in the Old Testament: 'Yahweh and his Asherah,'" Theological Studies 48, no. 2 (1987): 333–341; cf. Smith, The Early History of God (1990); William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? (Eerdmans, 2005).
Mother-goddess cult central to early Israelite religion; Asherah in the Holy of Holies, removed by Hezekiah & Josiah — Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enl. ed. (Wayne State University Press, 1990; orig. 1967).
Biblical orders to destroy Asherah's groves/poles — references in Kings and Deuteronomy; cf. Patai (n. 13).
