The Story of God as History’s First Trannie

A lesbian friend of mine is fond of declaring that God is a man and that the proof is irrefutable. The way she puts it is, would a woman have let men screw things up the way they have for the last few thousand years?

She has a good point, doesn’t she? Though, in fact, I don’t actually believe in some heavenly patriarch, or a matriarch either, for that matter, sitting on high on a pearly throne and zapping me in the ass from time to time with an errant thunderbolt, just to keep me on my toes.

It is interesting to note, however, that the God of human tradition started out in the long ago as a She, and not a He. For thousands upon thousands of years, virtually everywhere throughout the ancient world, in the Mediterranean basin, in Africa, India, as far away as Australia, early humans worshipped The Goddess.

That is hardly surprising, when you give it some thought. It was abundantly clear to one and all that the woman was the “giver of life,” since she was the one having the babies while Papa got to hang out with the boys and pass out cigars. It is probably a bit difficult for us to grasp, but it was many centuries before the man’s part in the scheme of things was finally and fully grasped. Mostly, for the guy, it was a chorus or two of, “I’m gonna get some poontang, I’m gonna get some poontang,” and back to business, and no one even thought much about down the road when it was baby-time.

Face it, it was just too long between last night’s follies and this morning’s nappies. Besides, with those wooly mammoths to kill, sabre-toothed tigers nipping at your behind, and mysterious obelisks from outer space to ponder, who could keep track of a quickie nine months earlier? I have forgotten one or two myself by the time I got out of the parking lot.

Understandably, these societies were matrilineal, which is to say, property and possessions, such as they were (the bone china, the rocker, membership to the club) passed from mother to daughter, and Junior could just get out there and hustle up a pterodactyl for soup, thank you, and this time pluck him before you bring him in the house.

In time, one clever woman had the idea of planting some food in the ground and hanging around to harvest it instead of following the water buffalo all over the map. Well, once they had figured out what to do with the grain when it got ripe, and there was home-baked bread fresh from the oven (and nothing makes a cave smell homier, I can assure you), who were they going to thank for that innovation, I ask you? Herself, of course, and besides the “giver of life,” woman now also became the “giver of food.” Rack up them medals, Momma, you rule at these Olympics!

Wait, there’s more. As I said, the first plantings were probably grain of one sort or another. Corn, I suppose, or wheat, or rice in those places where sushi was popular. But I feel sure that in no time at all, here and there they had added potatoes to the garden, and carrots and herbs and the occasional kumquat. Julia Child did not invent that stuff, you know.

Well, when you could just throw some fresh veggies into your slow cooker and have the neighbors over to your cave for Saturday night dinner, what was the point of wearing out your Manolo Blahniks hiking all over the place looking for a side of beef, and maybe going hungry for your efforts.

And since it was woman, too, who “invented” agriculture, and who everyone immediately agreed was also the giver of food, and since the result of all this was that the Joneses and the rest of their tribe could now stay comfortably put, and the first trailer parks were established (this was before they got cheapened by all those tacky places in Florida), it was at this point that the concepts of hearth and home came into the picture. And who do you think they pegged right off the bat as the patron of the hearth and home? Bingo. You go, girl. Another trip to the podium.

Since these little retirement communities were scattered practically all over the globe, and the postal service was as unreliable then as it is today, this Goddess was worshipped by lots of different names: Nana, Innana, Isis, Ishtar, Ishara, Hawthor, just to mention a few.

What is peculiar, though, since Kinko’s was still a few miles down the road, and these people quite clearly were not yet up to scanning images and emailing them, is that she was represented, in paintings and pottery, in an amazingly similar physical form from place to place.

Now, we might as well be honest, here: when you look at these representations, there is very little resemblance to Madonna, early or late. Okay, no skirting the facts, this was some beefy tomato. Obese is the word I am groping for (sometimes it takes a bit of groping to get what you are after, in case you did not know that).

Well, hey, just get over it, fellas. String bikinis were banned everywhere in those days with the exception of Australia, and there they were permitted only for the boys, because those lifeguards are practically their number one tourist attractions.

This woman, our friendly Goddess, was meant to be seen as a symbol of abundance. I ask you, is fertility and a passel of little ones what you think of when you look at Beyonce? (I’m not talking here about any fantasies of helping make that happen; this is intended to be a scholarly treatise and not some one-handed reading for the more lascivious among you.)

Now, time-wise, we have been talking so far about what the paleontologists refer to as the Stone Ages (early and middle and late, if you want to be precise), so-called because the people you mostly hung out with all lived within a stone’s throw of your own cave, and transportation was still pretty primitive, this being before the wheel came about, so no stretch limos for prom night.

In time, however, we entered into what quickly became known as the Bronze Age, named for the fact that practically every decorator and dress designer got it into his head that you could not call yourself civilized if you did not feature this color prominently in your home furnishings and your wardrobe. Fashion is the oldest vice, isn’t it? Well, I suppose thumb-sucking pops up there somewhere, too, but I absolutely promised myself when I sat down to explain all this to you that just this once I was not going to say a single word about sucking, because someone bet me one hundred dollars I could not do it, and I have already picked out the most divine frock at J. C. Penny, which costs seventy-nine ninety-nine, so even with the tax, I will have enough left for a banana daiquiri the first time I wear it.

Unfortunately, this fashion trend was like that business of the baggy pants and that gangbangers look today, it just did not go away, no matter how much you wished it might, and this went on for, oh, two thousand years or more. We can only hope that the baggy pants don’t last quite that long, although it seems to me as if by this time they are halfway there, at least.

Anyway, somewhere around the middle of this decorating period, men got a little smarter. I’m sorry to say that for some of them that was the last such advance, alas. One or two of them, however, began to fathom that maybe all that humping and grunting they had expended so generously a while back had something to do with this infant Mrs. Bobbett had suddenly produced out of nowhere.

Probably this realization resulted in large part because he was now spending lots more time sitting around the cave, and began to notice a change in the old lady’s figure, and then another one just after she came back from the maternity ward with this little creature, and his mother-in-law made the mistake of saying the baby had daddy’s eyes, and that got him to thinking. This was the first recorded incidence of such activity among some members of the male gender and, for one or two examples that I know personally, the last.

By this time, the trailer parks had become actual settlements and towns, and those little kitchen gardens had many of them grown into considerable spreads. The few knickknacks that the mother had handed down to her daughter in the past had now become estates of considerable value.

The role of the male in these societies had changed too. Apart from taking care of business, say, every Saturday night, the old role had been that of hunter and gatherer. You had to be fast to chase down a wild boar, and certainly quick on your toes if one decided to chase you down instead, and you needed the wits to differentiate between the two situations, lest the bacon bring you home instead of the other way round.

By now, though, chances were you might have your own little brood of piggies, or maybe your neighbor did, and you could pick up your pork chops on the way home from the office, and not have to spend all that time and energy running things down.

On the other hand, now that we had those split-level caves, and the farms with amber waves of grain, and the towns with their supermarkets and beauty salons and roast beef, people from different villages began to notice and to covet their neighbors’ rumps, among other things, and some of them became very competitive in taking what they wanted.

In this new era of wine, women and song, it became more important for a man to be able to defend and protect from usurpers what he had accrued, and under those circumstances, brute strength became paramount.

Well, what are we talking about there, but naked power? And power corrupts. How else can you explain certain politicians and their successes?

It surely was not long before some of the boys were sitting around one Friday night at Moe’s, shooting the fecal fragments, when they began to contemplate that, if they were big enough and strong enough to rule these lands and their towns, why weren’t they strong enough to run their own homes as well? It didn’t take more than a beer or two before the stark reality hit home: pussy whipped, plain and simple.

Plus, what about all those goodies that the women had been holding onto firmly up till now? Which, you understand, had increased significantly in quantity and value with these more stationary lives, so that they now had not only actual homes, many of them with two-cart garages, but all the furnishings and attendant paraphernalia as well.

I have no doubt, too, that one or two of the boys even thought longingly about that bone china (oh, get real, what did you think those decorators were doing on their days off?). Probably, though, they kept that thought to themselves, and nattered on instead with the others about the homestead and all the neat tools in the workshop in the garage, which they used, but the women owned. Hey, whose pole is it, then, someone surely wanted to know, hers or mine?

We all know, of course, how those drinking marathons generally end up. I have a very clear picture in my mind of Wayne Caveman stumbling home, late and drunk, and Loretta Caveman waiting in a total snit, because the chicken breasts in mushroom soup are absolutely ruined, thank you very much, and he compounds his sins by suddenly announcing to the little woman, “I own you, bitch. From now on, I say jump and you say how high.” Well, sure as anything, he will sleep for the night on the living room rock, licking overcooked mushroom soup out of his beard.

However, once the seed had been planted in those masculine minds, it took root and began to grow just as surely as that early wheat had. Women may have excelled in agriculture and home economics, but scientists have clearly proven that, from their earliest days, men were the acknowledged masters in two arenas, at least: slinging bullshit and making mischief.

The problem here was, how to go about changing the status quo, and still be able to get a little from time to time, since no woman was about to do it with a man who had one hand on her what’s-it and the other on her title deeds.

This is where the priests come into the picture, a new breed of them. See, originally, too, this priest business had been the work of women, but with the ever-increasing demands of this great new society, women found it was all they could do to keep up with the housecleaning (Goddess forgive, try to get him to tie on an apron and lend a hand) and ferrying the kids back and forth to school and soccer games, and shopping and the garden club and Oprah.

Well, obviously something just had to give, and increasingly, men began to take over the priestly duties, and for a long time, too long, as it turned out, the ladies, distracted as they were by other matters, gave not the slightest thought to the fact that these male priests were bigger and stronger, and in general, hornier (that has nothing to do with the historical context, I just threw that in to make sure nobody went to sleep) than the old priestesses.

Of course, you know how men stick together, particularly when they are up to no good. In no time at all, there were those priests, backing Wayne up in his rebellion, and just to make their point, they organized a couple of stonings and a burning at the stake, the latter of which quickly replaced the limbo party as the most popular entertainment option, and none too soon, either, as those of us with bad backs can attest.

And from that point, you can easily see that it is only a hop, skip and a jump to the witch trials, and once the sleazy magazines started running ads for models and escort services, the heyday of the Goddess was over.

It had been only a little while earlier that men got together in the shade of the hawthorn fig tree, which at that time was sacred to the Goddess, and ate the fruit of the tree as a symbol of her body (which, let’s be realistic, one of two of them partook of more directly when they got back home, but in the Italian families, at least, that subject was taboo, being considered unmanly).

Now, here we were, in hardly more time than it takes Revlon to create a new wrinkle cream, and a bunch of Hebrew scribes were telling a story about this wicked, wicked woman who conned an innocent (oh, right!) man into eating this fruit off of a tree, and so bringing the good times to a disastrous end. How the mighty have fallen.

Well, the lesson that everyone learned from all this is, that if you want to change the way things work, it is very useful if you can enlist the religious powers that be to help you.

The real point is, of course, that, in no time at all, “The Goddess” had had a sex change, and become “The God,” which is to say, history’s first trannie, and the inspiration to legions of others down through the centuries, men to women, women to men, until sometimes you not only can’t tell who’s who, but what’s what, either.

Oh, wait, I can’t end this sad but informative treatise without mentioning the Temple of Artemis, which was located at Ephesus. This temple was generally regarded as man’s last great erection to the Goddess.

Of course, St. Paul (this is long before he got together with Peter and Mary) made everybody’s erections his personal business. There is a man who lives down the street from me who is very nearly as bad and it is very difficult, when entertaining gentleman callers, to explain why we have to climb over the back fence instead of coming in by the front porch, and don’t think you don’t have to pray a lot under those circumstances, which is what brought me to religion in the first place.

And if you have read the Good Book, you know that Paul made up his mind to convert the Ephesians, and he nattered and nagged and preached and prayed, and eventually he wore everyone down, and the temple was destroyed (it’s only been recently that archeologists have found a few leftover stones) and every trace of the Goddess was wiped out.

Here, however, is one of those intriguing little sidebars that I think makes the scholarly pursuit of history so fascinating. The Ephesians hadn’t any more than gotten their rocks off and hauled the last of them away in their pickups than somebody announced in The Christian Daily that Mary, the mother, had given up her day job and retired to a senior living center in—are you ready—Ephesus, because the cost of living was much lower there, and we all know what it’s like trying to get by on social security, and if you happen to be in Poughkeepsie, it can take the whole bloody check just to pay for fuel oil in the winter.

So the locals, at least, still had a Goddess, of sorts, to play bingo with on Saturday night.

It’s so nice to have a dame about the house, don’t you think?