It has been some time since I have posted to this blog, for a while I thought I was done writing altogether and needed to take a break. But then inspiration struck and I got a new idea for the new year. I completed a 50,000-word outline for a new book and I will be serializing it on this blog as I work through the research and get the text together.
Tentatively titled, Smash the Matriarchy: the Pagan Israelite Reformation against the Mother Goddess, this book is a secular, scholarly follow-up to A History of the Goddess: from the Ice Age to the Bible.
I always knew that my first book would require a scholarly follow-up because the first book was not attempting to be academic, it was intentionally formulated as an intuitive and spiritual exploration of Goddess themes in the Bible and human history. I am very proud of A History of the Goddess but at the same time, I recognize that there are details in the scholarship that are not super tight and could be improved.
In this new project, I am taking a conventional secular approach to history. I stand by the big picture and broad themes presented in the first book, I have also continued to learn a lot about the subject since publishing it and there are some really important details that I was not aware of before that make the argument stronger.
There are two primary themes in this new project, one is that the Israelite goddesses in the Bible are representative of old matriarchal tribes when women did not live under the patriarchal authority of men. These very old cultures were indigenous to the region and eventually overtaken by conquering empires and warrior kings who forced women into subordinate positions in society. The shift from matriarchy to patriarchy happened much more recently in history than we are taught to believe.
The second theme is to look at the Bible stories from the pagan perspective. We can draw a connective thread through the Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions into the Bible and see the transition to monotheism, and to a certain extent understand why it happened.
Today’s scholars widely agree that the historical Israelites were polytheistic and that God had a wife when King Solomon's temple stood in Jerusalem until its destruction in 586 BCE. But this knowledge has not filtered out to the general public.
Armed with new information from archaeology and scholarship we can now see the Biblical story differently from what many of us were taught in church. We can now see the story from the pagan point of view.
When we combine the mythical stories with the historical record we can see evidence of a severe culture war among the pagan Israelites as Yahweh, the young LORD of the Bible, rose to power and overthrew the older generation of gods. In other words, the patriarchal cult of Yahweh rose in influence and threw out certain traditions its members objected to and replaced them with new ones.
These older gods, most notably Baal and Asherah, are castigated in the Bible as foreign sources of temptation, but we now know from archaeology that these were the native gods of the Israelites and represented ancient traditions. And while we can be glad that some of these traditions are now long gone, others never completely went away and remain at the heart of today's culture wars.
Asherah was the one-time wife of God, the Israelite mother goddess. She represents matriarchal women’s power and independence. Traditions rooted in the indigenous farmer tribes that had been living in the region for thousands of years since the dawn of the Neolithic. Asherah was divorced and the goddesses were overthrown in the successful effort to institute patriarchal authority and rule by conquering shepherd kings over the peasant farmers.
In matriarchy, family lines are tracked through the mothers and not through the fathers. This means that women are not obligated to be monogamous, or virgins before they are married, and these societies are generally more sexually promiscuous. We see this in indigenous tribes around the world and it was a topic of much discussion in the colonial era.
In patriarchy, women’s sex lives must be carefully monitored and policed in order to control for paternity. Nuclear family marriages then place men in power over their wives who are isolated from one another. While in matriarchal tribes, the women all stayed together and the people lived in groups as extended clans, creating a more equitable balance of power between the sexes.
Women once had independence and power but their rights and freedoms were taken away to ensure that wives would be submissive to their husbands. This effort took a long time and required the powerful goddesses of the matriarchy, who were not submissive to the male gods, be removed from the pantheon otherwise all the wives and daughters might get the wrong ideas about how to properly behave.
Women’s rights were not the only issue being fought over. The native Israelites had some pretty nasty traditions that we can be thankful were sent into the cultural waste bin. Superstitious idolatry and public sex might raise eyebrows today but probably wouldn’t cause a civil war, child sacrifice is another matter. Though still controversial among scholars, I believe that disputes over the sacrifices of human children were at the heart of the effort to replace Baal, the incumbent king of the gods, with the reformist cult of Yahweh.
The Yahwists were fairly successful in their efforts against Baal, but they had much more trouble with the holy women and the goddesses. It was not so easy to break the spirits of the women and the patriarchs never completely succeeded. The greatest rival to Yahweh was never Satan or Baal, it was always the Queen of Heaven who was the most popular deity in the land. And the ongoing reverence for Mother Earth today gives lie to the idea that the Heavenly Father ever truly ruled the universe alone.
In this book, we overlay the myths of Mesopotamia, Greece, and the Bible onto the scholarly historical timeline and demonstrate that a profound culture war and religious reformation played out within the Israelite community during the First Temple period. Much of this was purposefully lost when monotheistic history and theology were formulated with the writing of the Hebrew Bible. Women had been steadily losing their rights over the course of the Bronze Age, but in the Iron Age, we see them lost altogether as both the Greeks and Hebrews formalized patriarchal society and subordinated women to men in law, custom, and myth.
I will be reaching out to scholars and seeking feedback as I work through the material.
I encourage your comments and I look forward to seeing what you have to say.