The women at the heart of the divine

Fierce, powerful females were at the very roots of early faiths - and made Christianity what it is today, says historian Bettany Hughes.

Fierce, powerful females were at the very roots of early faiths - and made Christianity what it is today, says historian Bettany Hughes

I know the relationship between women and religion is contentious, because some of our best evidence for it is hidden, buried deep underground.

Beneath the frenetic streets of Rome twist and turn the rock-cut catacombs of Priscilla. Here, there are a series of beautiful, faded wall?paintings. In one side chapel, women sit around a dining table breaking bread and offering wine - apparently giving communion. On the flanking walls, draped in pale cloth, they raise their arms to worship God. In another chamber, a praying woman - hands and eyes lifted to the sky - dominates the scene. To her side a bishop lays his hand on a woman's shoulder. She is wearing an alb, the marker of an ordained priest. These catacombs were home to early Christians escaping persecution and plying their faith, when Christianity was first becoming a fully fledged religion. High on one ceiling is a picture of a young mother nursing her chubby baby. Discovered only a few years ago, it is the first extant image we have of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. Unlike the modern world of faith, women here are conspicuous not by their absence but their presence.

And, as a historian, that seems to me to be pretty logical. Because if you investigate the back story of religion, you'll find a tenacious and intimate relationship between the female of the species and the divine. The evidence is there, even if it has been suppressed. In the first 200 years of Christianity, over half of the churches in Rome were built by women. Headstones from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD celebrate women who were "episcopa" - not just the wives of bishops, as has often been claimed, but bishops themselves.

However, once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, with a massive geographical territory to control, the footsoldiers of Christ took precedence over the handmaids of God. Even when 19th century archaeologists and tomb-raiders rediscovered the earliest evidence of the relationship between faith and femininity, artefacts that included hundreds of thousands of naked prehistoric female figurines and lost Christian gospels were typically considered too shocking for public consumption. This history was sidelined or actively censored; mothballed in the archives or the store rooms of museums. It's only now that it is coming blinking back into the light.

Take the oldest man-made religious structure in the world - the incredible site of Gobekli Tepe on the Syrian-Turkish border. Still being excavated, this sophisticated temple complex, almost 12,000 years old, is completely re-writing the story of humanity. The men and women who shifted 16-tonne blocks of stone here and carved them into fantastical shapes were still nomads. Villages, towns, settlements of any kind had yet to be invented; it seems that society itself was forged by the desire to worship together. Religion made civilisation; not vice versa.

And women are right at the heart of this seismic shift. In between two pillars, carved with lions, stone-age worshippers scratched an image of a woman in the bare rock. Naked, wild-haired, with her legs apart, it is a most sexual depiction, a woman who looks as if she is making love and giving birth at the same time. It's a shocking picture - and a reminder that the role of divine women is highly charged. When we investigate the story of women and religion, we are not looking back to a benign golden age, when majestic females ruled the heavens and all was right with the world. In fact, fear, danger and darkness are recurring themes in this narrative.

In the oldest discovered town on earth, Catal Hoyuk, also in Turkey, there is evidence of the birth of a goddess. Dating back around 9,000 years, she's a fierce, voluptuous carved figure with huge breasts and buttocks, sitting on a throne flanked by two big cats. Found buried deep in a grain bin, her excavator, the Englishman James Mellart, described her as a pre-eminent "Mother Goddess". Subconsciously or not, Mellart was working from the presumption of his own, largely monotheistic society. We're used to one supreme divinity - so Mellart just changed the sex of his all-powerful God and made her a woman. But despite the significant role of women in early faiths, I don't think God was ever a girl. Although some in the "goddess" movement wanted to interpret Mellart's discoveries in an entirely positive way, I think there is something more complicated going on. Other examples of archaeology from Catal Hoyuk are far from cosy. Around the skulls and jaws of jackals and hyenas female breasts have been modelled; in their graves, women cradle the skulls of men painted a bright red; the dead are buried in foetal positions. Elsewhere in Eastern Mediterranean prehistory we find bodies buried in womb-shaped pithoi - earthenware pots - as if their inhabitants should end life in the way they started it. The womb becomes a tomb.

Because, of course, when real women gave birth back at the time of the origin of religion, for every child that was born alive, another would be stillborn. I am certain that women were thought to be creatures capable of actually creating both life and death. And so when the goddess proper evolves - and is given a name; Inanna, Ishtar, Aphrodite, the Magna Mater - we find she is not comfortable and comforting, but a sexually powerful creature who delights in bloodshed.

Another characteristic of divine women, from prehistory until today, has not just been a delight in bloodshed but in wisdom. And so we find virtually all deities of wisdom, and their acolytes, are female. For Hindus, the goddess of wisdom is Saraswati, Seshat was the ancient Egyptian deity of knowledge and scripture, the Greeks honoured wise Athena. Once Christianity arrives on the scene, it seems there is a natural transition for the wise priestesses of the pagan world, often educated and from high-born families, to become the priestesses of Christ. In the Bible itself we hear of the deaconess Phoebe sent by Paul to bring the news of Christ to Rome. And a fragment of a 1st century AD papyrus, now stored in the back rooms of the papyrology department of Oxford University, records Peter discussing exactly how Mary Magdalene should spread the words of Jesus. Peter calls Mary his adelphe - the word in Greek is intimate, and means "womb-companion".

Although official histories denied this female influence, the legion protests of churchmen through history speaks volumes. Tertullian writes in the 2nd century AD of the "mad insolence of women who have dared to wish to teach", the Council of Nimes in 394 outlawed the "priestly service of women", Pope Gelasius rails that "everything that is exclusively entrusted to the service of men has been carried out by the sex that has no right to do it", and as late as 829 AD the Reform Synod of Paris trumpeted "women press around the altar… indeed even dispense the body and blood of the Lord to the people. This is shameful and must not take place."

In Islam, too, revolutionary new evidence gathered over a period of 25 years by the Islamic scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi shows the premier roles women took in the early development of Islam and the promotion of the Word of God. In his body of work (so far stretching to 53 volumes) Nadwi has discovered more than 8,000 named women who worked as scholars and teachers - preaching, particularly in the early years of Islam, in mosques in Medina, Syria, Jerusalem and Cairo.

The story of women and religion has, for the past 1,700 years, been one of conflict and denial. But consider this. Of all the images of the human form found in sacred spots between 30,000 BC and 1,000 BC, over 90 per cent are of the female form. When our earliest ancestors tried to work out what it was to be human - in this life and the next - they turned to the female of the species for guidance. Once monotheism finally arrived, it was built upon these foundations. This year, when some women will once again take a pole position in the Church, following the Synod's anticipated vote on female bishops, this will not be a radical departure; but a return to the very roots of religion itself.