Zoe nodded thoughtfully. ‘Think of what was going on then. She”—Zoe pointed to the clay Venus—”was shaped by hands and a mind that were reeling under an incredible explosion of knowledge. This was back when the wheel was invented, when they domesticated animals, when people began painting on the walls of caves, when the first tiny groups of early people discovered that you could grow a crop by planting the seeds—”

“When God was a woman,” Thalia interjected.

“Pardon?”

“Look around you. God has boobs.”

Zoe frowned.

“What a world!” Thalia said. “They’ve got thighs as big as mine and back then those people made her God.” She laughed deeply and her entire body quaked beneath a voluminous black sweater and stretch pants.

“Odd,” Zoe said softly. “Because of Seth, I know a lot about modern religions.” She looked around. “And almost nothing about—” She swept her arm in arc around the room. “I never really thought about what came before. I mean, I assumed that the Venus figures were just one of a lot of little idols in a vast pantheon of gods … animals, a bunch of cults, and so on. You know, not really legitimate religion.”

“Not legitimate religion,” Thalia repeated as she walked along the table gazing at the women arrayed there. “That’s thanks to my people.” She stopped and looked back at Zoe. “The Torah—and the Christian Old Testament are full of admonitions to destroy the pagan temples, to burn their holy texts, to obliterate them from the landscape. But let me tell you, fifteen thousand years—maybe twenty-five or thirty thousand years before Yahweh got written up in the holy scriptures, God was a woman. The Great Goddess wasn’t just part of a fertility cult or one of a bunch of animistic totems; she was acknowledged as the creator of the universe, the giver of all life. And not just in one place—all over the world. Follow me.”

She set off down the aisles between the tables with amazing speed. Zoe hurried after her. “Look at the tag.” She pointed to a terra-cotta Venus. “She’s from Sumer and they called her Nana or Innana. And next to her”—she indicated a figure carved from serpentine—”she’s the great Sun Goddess of the Eskimo, the supreme creator, same as the Japanese Creatress.”

Thalia kept walking. “India, Arabia, Anatolia, Australia, Egypt, Africa, all around the Mediterranean, God was a woman. They called her Isis.” She pointed to an alabaster carving and marched on. “Ishtar, Asherah, Hathor, Anahita, Au Set, Ishara, and a hundred other names, but she looks the same regardless of culture and there is no doubt that they all represent the Great Goddess who created the world and everything beneath it.” Thalia stopped so suddenly Zoe almost ran into her. “This was monotheism from the very beginning.”

They stopped by the largest of the Venus figures, an Anatolian stone statuette almost three feet high showing the female figure giving birth to a ram’s head and three bull’s heads.