Editor’s Note
While Merlin Stone may be best known for research into the thousands of years of lost goddess religions, she was also very keenly aware of the scourge of racism. In a 1979 article she wrote for Plexus: A Bay Area Women’s Newspaper, Merlin attests to the fact that “the issue of racism within the women’s movement is one that touches me deeply. … After years of concern, compassion and guilt about racism (long before my consciousness of sexism), it recently dawned on me that perhaps I was in a position to do something about it.” (“Racism,” Vol. 5, No. 10, p. 5) She was writing to encourage women’s groups to include more women from Third-World countries and to be sure they paid minority speakers an equal stipend. Acknowledging her own position of importance in the women’s movement, she raised her voice for racial equality.
The parallels between gender discrimination and racial discrimination were obvious to Merlin as she wrote her books. In Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, Merlin was thorough in establishing the importance of goddesses of numerous ethnicities. In her commentary on goddesses in India, for example, she notes how Kali was relegated to a lower, “darker” place as a further way for people of a lighter complexion to assert their supremacy (Stone, Ancient Mirrors, p. 222). When God Was a Woman was equally notable for the documentation of the worship of the Goddess among people of diverse cultures and races.
In 1981, Merlin published Three Thousand Years of Racism: Recurring Patterns in Racism—an essay of approximately ten thousand words—as a twenty-eight-page pamphlet including two pages of annotated bibliography. She used her own imprint, New Sibylline Books, “in conjunction with Women Against Racism.”
The actual facts about that organization and the historical events that precipitated the release of the essay seem to be lost. However, books and essays were appearing at that time that asserted a new identity among African-American women, including, in that same year, Gloria Watkins’s Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (under the nom de plume Bell Hooks, South End Press, 1981) and Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class (Random House, 1981). In her own promotional statement for Three Thousand Years, Merlin states: “Our western educational system leaves many people with the idea that white people have a proud cultural heritage. … Educators must … [stress] the proud cultural heritages that all races possess.” (New Sibylline flier, 1982)
She achieved some success with educators. State University of Colorado adopted her pamphlet as a part of its freshman orientation. The University of Santa Clara, California, proposed that Merlin visit to hold “contact meetings” to better educate students on campus. Even years after the pamphlet’s publication, the County of Santa Clara got Merlin’s permission to give its social workers a copy as “an excellent tool to help workers … build bridges with one another.” (Letter requesting permission, June 1991) In addition to her concerns about racism within the women’s movement itself and the implicit racism of America’s educational system, Merlin was highly concerned about the broader struggle toward racial equality in the U.S. and abroad. Women worldwide were uniting to take a stand against apartheid and for racial as well as gender equality.
It should also be noted that while Merlin Stone, born Marilyn Jacobson in 1931, was not a practitioner of a specific religion, she was born Jewish. Her childhood and most formative years would bear witness to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. She was fourteen when the concentration camps were liberated and the full consequence of the Holocaust emerged for the world. Her analysis of Hitler’s Aryan empire, as part of Three Thousand Years of Racism, together with her identifying the clear patterns of racism, were absolutely a natural consequence of Merlin Stone’s personal and scholarly life.
—David B. Axelrod