Religion has forgotten its women of faith This Easter at least 65 per cent of those attending Church of England services will be women. In the US, 86 per cent of the female population describe themselves as members of faith-organisations and 66 per cent pray every day - as opposed to less than half of men. How so? Aren't we told the story of religion as a cautionary tale of gender mismanagement? That an early, matriarchal, goddess-worshipping society gave way to warring, patriarchal monotheism - and from then it has been pretty much downhill for women? On the face of it, broad historical patterns could bear this out. Women are conspicuous by their presence in the early societies that honour the goddess. On the wild borders of Syria and Turkey the oldest religious building in the world is being excavated at Göbekli Tepe. Here, gouged from a tablet of stone is a striking image of a woman; she seems to be giving birth and having sex at the same time. As child-bearers, women were thought to have a special connection to the powers of fertility and the earth - and so, like their divine counterparts, had to be celebrated and kept onside. But then civilisation got greedy; populations stabilised, citadels were built, and we wanted more. An all-powerful, smiting god (Zeus, Yahweh) appears on the heavenly scene as populations engaged in ever more ambitious territorial expansion. Warriors needed a warrior god to lead them. Christianity too, once it became the official religion of the vast Roman Empire, began to value the muscular foot-soldiers of God more highly than the handmaids of Christ - deaconesses, priestesses, the female owners of house-churches - who had originally helped to establish the Christ cult. However, despite all this, drawing perhaps on the folk-memory of those primal, prehistoric goddesses, some of the most powerful women in the world have managed to exploit religion to further their cause. Democratic classical Athens, where women could not vote or speak out in public, reserved huge respect for their religious females. Athenian priestesses held pole position. These women were the keepers of the keys of temples - buildings that were, to all intents and purposes, giant banks. We meet these priestesses on headstones. Independently wealthy, educated, respected, priestesses were even allowed to address the all-male democratic assembly. In late antiquity too, women exploited their connection to the divine to win out in a man's world. The empresses of Byzantium, the world's first true monotheist empire, had enormous influence. One particularly colourful individual, Theodora, wife of Justinian, ended up controlling a territory that spanned a million miles. Starting life as an erotic dancer and prostitute, she eventually shared the throne with her husband and helped to implement groundbreaking legal reforms based on Christian morality (the notion of innocence until proven guilty, penalties for rape, the outlawing of pimps et al). Theodora had a powerful ally. At the Council of Ephesus, called by the Byzantine Patriarch, the lowly Virgin Mary had been declared Mary theotokos: Mary the Mother of God. Ephesus was once home to the virgin goddess Artemis and Mary was being intimately linked to that pagan power. Theodora exploited this connection mercilessly. From the capital of Constantinople the one-time guttersnipe ruled her Empire, spanning three continents, as the Queen of Heaven; an earthly incarnation both of Mary the Mother of All and of the great goddesses of antiquity. This fierce, productive relationship between women and the divine is tenacious. High in the hills of Assam today is the extraordinary Shakti Temple of Kamakhya. Here, locals will tell you, the Yoni (womb or vagina) of Sita fell to ground as her husband Shiva, wild with grief, paraded her corpse around the world. The Yoni is in fact a huge, subterranean, cleft rock, continuously moistened by a sacred spring. Once a year the waters here flow red, as oxide is washed through by monsoon rain. The goddess of Kamakhya demands blood sacrifice, and the poorest families will bring goats and even buffalo to be slaughtered in her honour. Young virgins are offered in service to the goddess and are consulted on matters of great importance - a right normally reserved for male Brahmins. This tradition for female potency seems to have been codified when the Devi Mahatmya was created in India in the sixth century, as travelling Brahmins came into contact with real warrior women who controlled their tribe's ritual practices. Certainly, 21st century Bengali women have a reputation for being fiercer than their south-western counterparts. Even if most of us no longer worship at sacred Yoni shrines, women are still the backbone of church and temple. Women have always represented 50 per cent of humanity, but never 50 per cent of human history - with the exception of ritual and religion, where their influence is writ large through 40 millennia of the human experience. Organised religion, which has spent the past 1,700 years downgrading the role of women, might combat the encroachment of secularism more robustly if it remembers - and celebrates - its potent female roots. The writer is a historian. Her television series "Divine Women" begins on April 11 on BBC 2