“What I really want is to know more about this.” Zoe pointed to the stone. “I mean, guys didn’t just wake up one day and say to themselves, ‘We’re part of making babies too and we’re stronger so let’s take all the land.’ ”

Thalia gave her a long, incredulous stare. “I don’t know what you have up your sleeve and I don’t want to know. But I hope God goes with you.”

“She will,” Zoe said, surprised by the depth of her own conviction. Then, nodding at the stone: “So tell me.”

“You’re right. This transition took a while. Remember that there were six or eight millennia of change for civilization to get from the Goddess to Yahweh. I think the time of the Garden of Eden was the era when small settlements of early people lived undisturbed and for the most part out of contact with any other settlements. But women changed all that and in doing so dug a pitfall for the Great Goddess.

“Women invented agriculture because they were the ones weighed down with children. You can discover weaving and domesticate wild grains while you’re feeding your babies and keeping them alive… you can’t very well do that while hunting. So they planted and eventually society realized that you could obtain food this way. Agriculture let families get larger. Hunter-gatherer women had to space babies out like four or five years apart, since they moved frequently and the mothers couldn’t physically carry a lot of kids. Plus you simply can’t feed that many kids without agriculture. But when the family settled down with its fields, mobility was no longer vital for survival and the babies could come closer and closer together.

“The brute strength of men assumed greater and greater importance as settlements grew larger and began competing with each other. This is when agriculture really took off because you need farmers in order to support a standing army, government bureaucrats, and so forth—hunter-gatherer societies just don’t produce enough food to make this possible. But agriculture made for its own problems, it took up space that you needed to claim for your own and keep others away from. It also started a population boom because the more fields you planted the more people your society could support, and the more it could support the more people you had.

“Conflicts had been rare in the past, but the expanding population meant that men now had to fight against other men to protect their homes and communities. In fact the need for security propelled civilization from small communal settlements into full-fledged governments.”

“So, if I accept this line of reasoning,” Zoe said, “then I’d assume that men took this newfound power to heart and realized that they weren’t totally at the mercy of the Goddess they worshiped, so they wanted a piece of the action and that’s why they introduced the male deity.”

“They also wanted a cut of the earthly goodies as well. The matrilineal system passed all property down from woman to woman; children’s heritage traced through the mother’s side because there was no way to establish paternity.