Eve's Apple

Genesis got it wrong. Women aren’t an afterthought — we are the origin story.

Christian narratives often center Eve’s origin from Adam’s rib. But archaeology and history remind us: women were divine before this story even existed. Long before monotheistic religions rewrote the divine narrative, the divine feminine was the roots of power—birthgiver, creator, warrior, healer, and ruler. The patriarchal myth that women came from men is a designed erasure.

For tens of thousands of years, human cultures revered a Great Mother or Divine Feminine—embodied in prehistoric figurines and spirits long before patriarchy shaped spirituality.
These early depictions maintained a powerful, independent role for feminine forces in creation and life.

Inanna / Ishtar & Asherah

In Mesopotamia, Inanna (Ishtar) reigned as queen over love, war, justice, and political power. Her myths include ruling over the heavens and underworld—and influencing fertility, law, and societal structure—thousands of years before the Bible. Inanna (later Ishtar) dominated the Sumerian pantheon—often exceeding even male deities in reverence. Her legacy shaped later figures like Astarte and Aphrodite. Similarly, Asherah was worshipped in early Israelite religion as a nurturing, maternal goddess—perhaps even spoken of as Yahweh’s consort. The Bible’s efforts to erase her point not to her insignificance, but to how threatening her reverence was to emerging patriarchy.

Other Matron Goddesses Across Cultures

Cybele—Phrygian “Mother of All,” later adopted by Greeks and Romans as an earth – and mother-goddess.

Egyptian goddess Maat—personifying truth, balance, and cosmic order.

As Christianity rose, it systematically dismantled goddess traditions. Mary often replaced Cybele as “Mother of God,” and others were recategorized as saints or symbolic figures to fit patriarchal theology. Still, echoes of the divine feminine—like Mary’s compassionate laments—parallel mournful goddess archetypes from ancient lore.

The Virgin Mary, revered in Catholicism, mirrors ancient mother-goddess archetypes. Early iconography draws from Isis and other mother-child imagery—Mary isn’t a departure. She’s a carefully curated echo of what was erased.

Christian sainthood, especially the rise of Marian devotion, is often interpreted as repackaging pre-Christian goddess worship within a male-dominated, monotheistic framework.

Recognizing this history means recognizing that our power didn’t need permission to exist—it was suppressed, not created.

The narratives that define women as afterthoughts were crafted to disempower. But when we look back—really look—we see the original truth: we were never minor characters. We’ve always been divine. Life comes from the wombs of women, not the ribs of men.