My New Book is Coming Out!

A History of the Goddess: from the Ice Age to the Bible

I have written a new book that is coming out soon, called, “A History of the Goddess: from the Ice Age to the Bible”. This book is provocative, I did know what I was getting myself into when I stumbled into the story. 

I am reorienting this blog now to discuss ancient history, religion, mythology and connecting it to current events where I see a fit.

I heard about this character from the Bible, Asherah, whom the scholars and archaeologists say was the “Wife of God,” but I had never heard of her and I grew up going to church regularly and was fairly well educated on the Bible. 

Who is the Wife of God?

This is the new title for this blog because that was the question that launched my journey into this subject. The answers I learned were completely shocking and I think other people will be shocked as well. I looked into this question as a hobby, but after learning some I knew I needed to share it with others.

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The main takeaway from my book is that there are characters in the Bible that we are not taught about, whose identities are never fully revealed in the text, but were very important in the culture of the time and could be politically relevant today.

I went through the exercise of tracking every reference to goddesses in the Bible and put their stories into historical terms so that we can see the progression of changes in culture. A new narrative appears in the Bible, one where the Heavenly Father and the Earthly Mother, who had traditionally been mates and the parents of all the pagan gods, get a divorce. 

With the emergence of monotheism, the Heavenly Father now ruled alone, with his wife and children out of the picture. Most of the kids were killed off, but the Earthly Mother could not be so easily dispatched. She was beaten and locked in the closet, where she remains today, struggling to free herself. 

Today's culture wars are a reflection of the religious reformation that played out in King Solomon’s temple. Monotheism requires that all the other temples be shut down and their religious traditions eliminated, and the goddesses were the most popular in the hearts of the people.

In the goddess temples, we see women in leadership, nature worship, sexual freedom, transgendered people celebrated as high priests and shamans, they used cannabis, psychedelics, and plant drugs, and even had abortions. The biblical writers condemned all these activities which had existed for thousands of years. Religious values in turn became the basis for society’s laws.

There is a common set of traditions, symbols, and religious motifs for Goddess worship that we can trace all the way through history from the Ice Age through the Bible and into today’s current events.

In the Old Testament, we are talking about the Canaanite Triple Goddess of Asherah, Astarte, and Anat and their qedesha priestesses. We don’t have characters like these in Western Civilization anymore, they are wild and unbridled female archetypes that were removed from our culture with force and violence by patriarchal authorities.

The Triple Goddess represents the Mother, Maiden, and Death and the cycle of life and is one of the most important symbolic religious motifs repeating across cultures.

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The early Hebrews were pagan, monotheism as a concept was introduced later and fought over for centuries before it was instituted. The pagan Hebrews worshipped the same gods as their neighbors and had a tribal identity as the followers of El, the Canaanite Heavenly Father and Creator of the Universe. The biblical text reveals the worship of El very clearly.

The patriarch Jacob was first given the name Israel, which means “wrestles with El/God.” He then built an altar which he called El Elohe Israel, “El is the God of Israel” (Genesis 33:20). El was given the new name Yahweh by Moses when he first became the monotheistic God. Moses then began persecuting the pagan traditions such as worship of the Golden Calf which was the traditional symbol of El.

El had a family who were the pantheon of other ruling gods and some appear in the Bible. El’s son was Baal, the King of the gods and equivalent to the Greek Zeus. Baal was the chief rival to the Yahwists, the partisan followers of Yahweh who worked to shut down the rival temples. Numerous times in the Bible the temples to Baal are destroyed by the Yahwists and the priests are killed.

The Yahwists never succeeded in shutting down the goddess temples though, the goddesses were much tougher rivals.

Asherah was the Canaanite mother goddess, the Lady of the Sea, she was the wife of El and the mother of 70 gods who belonged to her. She was worshipped with an Asherah pole, a carved wooden totem pole that stood next to the altars of El and Baal. The Yahwists liked to chop the Asherah poles down and the people would put them back up as soon as they were able.

Astarte was the Queen of Heaven and the most popular goddess. The goddess of love and war, she is in the tradition of Ishtar of Babylon, Inanna of Sumer, Aphrodite of the Greeks, and the Roman Venus. The later Greeks and Romans removed her war powers and diluted her importance.

This most ancient and widely worshipped of all gods has many names and more stories than any other archetypal deity. We continue to see Ishtar’s warrior image today as Wonder Woman, who was modeled on the legends of the Old Aphrodite and the Amazon warriors that followed her. Ishtar was also transgendered, sprouting a beard or wings as needed, riding a lion into battle, and leading the kings to victory.

Astarte/Ishtar’s cult was highly sexual by our standards. Ishtar was the Hierodule of Heaven, the courtesan of the gods. Notoriously promiscuous, she did not believe in monogamy for herself or anyone else and could be cruel to lovers who became attached to her. The followers of Astarte/Ishtar believed that sex makes the flowers grow and the entire culture could not have enough sex. They practiced temple prostitution and in some cultures, all women were obligated to have sex with a stranger at the temple at least once in her life.

The Hebrew prophets heaped scorn upon Astarte, calling her Ashtoreth, which means “shameful Astarte,” and the vile goddess of Sidon. Sidon was the Phoenician city that held her main temple, and where Queen Jezebel was raised.

The goddess Anat, death in the Triple Goddess, goes unmentioned in Biblical text, but not because she was unknown to the Biblical writers. Anat was the consort of Baal and his greatest defender.

Anat was a fearsome blood-soaked goddess of slaughter and vengeance, similar to the Hindu Kali, she wore a necklace of human skulls and a belt of human hands. She delighted in slaughter, chopping off limbs with a laugh, wallowing up to her vulva in blood and gore.

Anat’s favorite activity was slaughtering the enemies of Baal, and there were no greater enemies of Baal than the Yahwists. Anat loved to tear out the guts of the Hebrew prophets and tell fortunes from their entrails. The Biblical writers were afraid of Anat so they left her out of the text. Anat is she who must not be named.

Anat made all the gods tremble in fear, her mythology is wild. In the Ugaritic texts, Anat threatens to smash El’s skull in and make his grey beard run red with blood. She then confronts Mot, the god of death like Hades, cuts him in half with a sword, grinds him up with a sieve, and feeds him to the birds, restoring Baal to life and majesty. That is one terrible, powerful goddess.

Asherah, Astarte, and Anat were also consolidated into a single triune cosmic deity named Qedesh who was worshipped in Egypt and Syria, and Kadesh was their sacred city (Miriam the sister of Moses was buried in Kadesh). Qedesh is like Shakti of the Hindus, the Goddesshead from which all of creation is derived.

The qedesha were the sacred priestesses of the goddess temples. They were a class of priestesses that were common throughout the ancient Near East. Known as the “Holy Ones” and the “Set Apart”, they were given the honorable title of “Virgins” and children born to them were “virgin-born” and were heroes of many legends, like Sargon of Akkad.

The qedesha appear in the Bible, they served in King Solomon’s temple for its entire history. English translations call them “cult prostitutes” or harlots and ignore the importance they played in the cultures of the time.

Earth Mother traditions celebrated transgender people and they served as high priests for thousands of years. Men voluntarily castrated themselves as eunuchs in service to the Goddess. The Galli served the goddess Cybele in Rome, the Megabyzi at the temple to Artemis in Ephesus, and the Enaree roamed with the Scythian Amazon warriors, among many others.

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Why should we care about these old goddesses? Aside from the trivia of illuminating some misunderstood characters from the Bible?

These old mythologies present us with a theological argument for the Feminine Divine, a female aspect of God that is his match and mate, and who has decidedly different moral teachings on matters of sex, drugs, and death, the role of women, and our connections to nature. We can look in the Bible and see evidence of rival religious traditions, rooted in Mother Earth, that stand in direct contrast to the authoritarian traditions of the Heavenly Father alone. 

Organized religion is fundamentally political, it always has been, as religion serves to organize the most basic beliefs and traditions of any culture. Before you can have any laws, there has to be an accepted set of beliefs everyone in the culture agrees to. Morality varies widely over time and across cultures, but every culture roots its morality in its common religious values.

Legal principles of marriage and inheritance are rooted in religious values, our sexual morals, acceptable intoxicants, and ideas around death are fundamentally rooted in religion. In the Western world, homosexuality was condemned and made illegal until just recently because of Christian cultural values.

Christianity rejects the use of psychedelic drugs, claiming any spiritual insights gained from them are false. Before the war on drugs, American Christians worked to make Native American peyote rituals illegal. Christian culture rejects the use of marijuana even though it causes no death and disease, while they accept alcohol and tobacco which are major killers. Our laws and cultural values on abortion, suicide, and euthanasia are rooted in religious teachings and debated in terms of whether Christians are allowed to impose their values on the broader society.

Sex, drugs, ecstatic dance, and wild, frenzied worship similar to a nightclub rave was legitimate religion for thousands of years, including the Dionysian festivals and the Eleusinian Mysteries of the ancient Greeks. These traditions were rejected and forcibly ended when Christianity rose to become the state religion of Rome in the 4th century and monotheistic intolerance was institutionalized.

Without realizing it, the modern progressive left that is fighting for feminism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, racial justice, sexual freedom for women and gays, transgender rights, marijuana and psychedelic plant legalization, and abortions, are fighting a religious battle. 

The left likes to talk about intersectionality, Goddess is the intersection. Literally every culture war fight today is rooted in this ancient religious war over whether Goddess Earth Mother traditions would be allowed to continue.

Reconnecting with the feminine divine and these ancient traditions has political and cultural implications that will resonate for centuries to come.