The scriptures we have believed for two thousand years, pertaining to original sin and the inherent evil of women, that have given patriarchy its authoritarian validation for treating women as witches and economic slaves, prove to be a misreading - probably deliberate - of an astronomical myth that accurately and yet poetically explained the nature of the cosmos thousands of years before Genesis. After discussing what the author describes as the ''pathology of patriarchy'', the fear of women linked in the masculine mind to the fear of sexual inadequacy and death, Richard Roberts turns back the clock to examine the B.C. religions of a feminine deity, the Great Mother, tracing her dominant influence in Europe for some 6,000 years from 7200 B.C. to 1200 B.C., the dawn of the Iron Age when the religion of the Mother Goddess wanes and patriarchy commences its ascendancy.