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Once the story of Adam and Eve is understood as a polemical (and largely successful) “tale with a point of view” intended to discredit Goddess religion, any and all exegetical attempts to rescue the story from sexist interpretations by later scholars and theologians seem doomed to failure. Stone’s decoding of the way in which the Genesis story transformed the sacred symbols of Goddess religion into symbols of evil may be much ignored by scholars of the Bible to this day, but it cannot be refuted, because it is based on the “gestalt” of the story, not the interpretation of the subtleties of the meanings of its words. Nor did I understand that the Genesis story which I had studied and taught took the sacred symbols of Goddess religion– the snake, the tree and the fruit of the tree, the female body-and turned them upside down. I had written my undergraduate thesis on the prophets, studying their words in the original Hebrew, but I did not understand that their constant references to the Hebrew people “whoring” after “idols” and worshipping “on every high hill and under every green tree” referred to the fact that many of the Hebrew people were choosing to worship Goddesses in sacred places in nature. I had not heard of the theories of Indo-European invasions of warlike patriarchal peoples into areas already settled by peaceful matrilineal, matrifocal cultures in Europe and India. in Religious Studies from Yale, I did not “know” that Goddesses were worshipped at the very dawn of religion. Though I could then and can now criticize details in the book, the amassing of information and the comprehensive perspective When God Was a Woman provided was news to me when I first read it. My copy of When God was a Woman is copiously underlined in red and blue ink, testimony to many readings. Do you remember?” As I type this phrase more than thirty-five years after first reading it, my body again reacts with chills of recognition of a knowledge that was stolen from me, a knowledge that I remembered in my body, a knowledge that re-membered my body. Stone’s words had the quality of revelation: “In the beginning…God was a woman. The fact that I remember this viscerally underscores the impact that When God Was a Woman had on my mind and my body. I can still remember reading the hardback copy of When God Was a Womanwhile lying on the bed in my bedroom overlooking the river in New York City early in 1977. Do you remember?” Feminst foremother and author of these words Merlin Stone died in Feburary last year. REMEMBERING MERLIN STONE, 1931-2011 by Carol P. Christ Home › Feminism › REMEMBERING MERLIN STONE, 1931-2011 by Carol P. Christ