Chapters 1-2 Summary and Analysis

Despite society's modern trappings, people feel the tug of a distant past, when God is a woman. For years, Stone explores legends, temple sites, statues, and rituals of female deities and clergy, and discovers that what she has accepted from teachers about sun/moon gods and earth/heaven symbolism is wrong. Females appear to invent not just agriculture but also writing, and female deities are extolled around the world as healers, and their priestesses serve as physicians. Our images about female intellect are removed from prehistoric and ancient historic attitudes. Worship of female deities is found everywhere, and stories about them are hardly "innocent childlike fables", but have a specific point of view, guiding perception and teaching the young and impressionable how to behave, what to emulate or avoid, what is socially acceptable, and what is natural. Myths that...