At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman.
Do you remember ?
 

The scorned and forgotten feminine principle is begging to be
   acknowledged and embraced in our modern age.  The loss of the
  feminine has had a disastrous impact on our culture.   The gifts of
      the feminine have not been fully accepted or appreciated.
  Meanwhile, the masculine, frustrated by an inability to channel its
  energies in harmony with a well-developed feminine, continues to
   lead with the sword arm, brandishing weapons recklessly, often
               lashing out with violence and destruction.

      In the ancient world, the balance of opposite energies was
 understood and honored.  But in our modern world, male attributes
   and attitudes have dominated.  The end result of the devaluated
  feminine principle is not just environmental pollution, hedonism,
           and rampant crime-the ultimate end is holocaust.

  Hostility toward women was founded on the stated position of the
  church fathers, which was in part based on the story of Adam and
                                   Eve.

                                                    M.Starbird

Throughout the christian era, men have been defining female weakness and
passivity as sexy, and female strength or tough-mindedness as a personal threat
to their male egos.  For many generations, women wishing to be
attractive to men have played weak, played dumb, played
bubbleheaded incompetence in order to stimulate men's
interest.  Unfortunately, more often than not, they
also stimulated men's thinly disguised contempt, which was
patronizing to their faces and degrading behind their backs.
And these attitudes were rooted in one primary cause:
Western patriarchal religion.

                                           B.Walker

In Robert Graves's translation of The Golden Ass by the Roman
    writer Apuleius of the second century AD, the Goddess Herself
                          appears and explains:

      I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all elements,
  primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of
   the dead, queen also of immortals, the single manifestation of all
 gods and goddesses that are.  My nod governs the shining heights of
  Heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silences of the
 world below.  Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by
  countless names, and propitiated with all manner of different rites,
                yet the whole round earth venerates me.

Some legends described the Goddess as a powerful, courageous
  warrior, a leader in battle.  The worship of the Goddess as valiant
  warrior seems to have been responsible for the numerous reports of
    female soldiers, later referred to by the classical Greeks as the
                               Amazons.

Goddess worship continued into classical times shortly before the
 birth of Christ.  It is possible that at the time of the Hittite invasions
   many of the Goddess-worshipping peoples may have fled to the
  west.  The renowned temple of the Goddess in the city of Ephesus
    was the target of the apostle Paul's zealous missionary efforts
 (Acts 19:27).  This temple, which legend and classical reports claim
  was founded by Amazons.  According to reports the queen of this
  land assigned the tasks of spinning wool and other domestic duties
  to the men, while law was established by the queen.  The rights to
 the throne belonged to the queen's daughter and succeeding women
  in the family line.   Herodotus wrote,Ask a Lycian who he is and
 he answers by giving his own name, that of his mother ans so on in
    the female line.  Nicholas of Damascus reported, They name
      themselves after their mothers and their possessions pass by
     inheritance to the daughters instead of the sons.  Heraclides
  Ponticus said of the Lycians, From of old they have been ruled by
                               the women.
 

                       M.Stone

For how many generations have we suffered the burden and excesses of male preferences, male choices, males abuses of power?  Two thousand years of male ascendency and the "double standard" perpetrated as a result of the declaration-
later institutionalized!- "the child is a boy."  No wonder icons of the Madonna weep in shrines around the world!

M.Starbird
 

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