Tag: Asherah

God did have a wife, say religious scholars

Thanks to Msgr James for sending this article link about God’s wife and his “divorce” from MotherGod.  See my “theories” after the short article.

Veiled Mother of the World by Russian esoteric Christian Nicholas Roerich
Veiled Mother of the World, 1930, by Russian esoteric Christian Nicholas Roerich

http://www.helium.com/items/2119975-god-had-a-wife

Religious scholar: God had a wife

by Terrence Aym, March 20, 2011

According to theologian and historian Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God had a wife and her name was Asherah.

Wikipedia states that Asherah is mentioned in the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, Judges, the Books of Kings, the second Book of Chronicles, and the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah. She crosses many of the ancient cultures and the ancient Hebrews saw her as God’s wife or “the Queen of Heaven.” She’s generally considered identical with the Ugaritic goddess Athirat by most religious historians.

The Book of Jeremiah written about 628 BC refers to the “Queen of Heaven” and many believe it’s a reference to Asherah that was not expunged by heavy editing several hundred years later.

An Oxford scholar has argued that the Book of Kings reveals the Hebrews worshiped Asherah and Yahweh in Yahweh’s Israelite temple.

Although during the past decades many religious scholars, historians and some theologians have discussed Asherah and her relationship to the Hebrew God Yahweh, it’s generally recognized that the first to discover that the ancient Hebrews worshiped both deities equally was historian Raphael Patai.

Patai voiced the argument of God and His wife, and presented evidence, to the skeptical world of 1967.

Now, more than four decades later, the world is catching up to Patai’s milestone work thanks in large part to Stavrakopoulou’s research while at Oxford University and her continuing work as a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter.

In a written statement to the British press accompanying a three-part series airing in Western European countries about her research, Stavrakopoulou stated, “You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him. He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many…or so we like to believe.”

But then she shared her bombshell finding with the media stating that “After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife.”

Evidence in scripture and artifacts

Her startling theory which flies in the face of modern organized religion is based on artifacts from the past and ancient texts. She points to many unambiguous artifacts—primarily amulets and figurines—that have been found by archaelogists over the years. Many are from the Ugarit, an ancient Canaanite coastal city located in what later became Assyria and then, Syria.

All of the artifacts, she argues, show that the goddess Asherah was a very powerful figure, linked strongly to Yahweh, as his wife, and as the powerful fertility goddess of Creation.

Agriculture, the first and most important invention of humans, was strongly influenced by such things as a fertility goddess. Because crops were a life or death issue to everyone, Asherah was pictured as being equal to Yahweh and, in fact, his loving bride.

Her link to the Hebrew God, Stavrakopoulou says, is equally evident from an inscription discovered on a section of 8th Century BC pottery recovered from a site in the Sinai desert—as well as within the text of the Hebrew version of the Old Testament.

While describing the importance of the pottery’s message, Stavrakopoulou explained, “The inscription is a petition for a blessing. Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from ‘Yahweh and his Asherah.’ Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife.”

Ancient Israelites were polytheists

The director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, Aaron Brody, believes that all the hard evidence reveals the ancient Israelites were polytheists.

Asherah fell into disfavor soon after some high-ranking Israelites were banished to Babylon. About that time the famous Temple of Jerusalem was razed. Brody thinks those events during 586 BC were followed by a purge in Judea among the worshipers of Asherah.

Eventually only one male God—without a wife—was accepted and preached and believed by people of all the countries of the world.

Thus it might be said that by the 5th Century BC, as far as the Israelites were concerned, God got a “divorce.”

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I don’t think God got a divorce. Mother-God just went underground; they are still married. Her veiling herself up and going into hiding was a mutual decision, I believe, because human-kind was not ready for a Divine Pair. If female humans were not respected enough to have souls, are even not not respected enough to be able to drive cars without being flogged, be able to hold jobs, own real estate, if human females are not respected enough to be able to walk out doors after dark, or stand at the bus-stop, or play in the yard during the day(!) without fear of kidnapping and rape, then female Deities could not be respected, either. She went underground, our Judeo-Christian goddess did.  Only in the Western world are women receiving the above mentioned privileges. The majority of us Western Women are avoiding rape and kidnapping (See Wikipedia’s article on worldwide rape statistics). Therefore, only in the Western world do we have the Sacred Feminine, the “Goddess” taking her veils off and coming into the open again alongside her spouse, Father-God. The Eastern mythologies may have goddesses married to their gods, but they are so sexist and misogynist they kill female babies (China, India), enslave daughter-in-laws (India and other countries), and sexually enslave girls and women for life in horrible brothels (India, the Far East, too many to list).

Asherah or God-the-Mother was considered God’s equal and his spouse for centuries up until around 500 years before Christ. For several reasons at that time, among which was all the perversions surrounding Her worship, it was deemed “safer” to go to all-male-god religion. People just could not separate sex from Goddess worship, and her temples and places of worship (groves of trees on hilltops) had become glorified brothels. Not family friendly at all!

Even today whenever we try to start up churches that worship Mother God alongside Father God, we end up with so many nut-cases that only think with their hormones. There is always one or two who show up at our meetings and ruin it for everyone by doing things like hitting on the under-age daughters of participants, stalking adult female members, and worse. I have seen it again and again in various cities and towns all over this country the past 20 years as I have tried to start God-and-Goddess Judeo-Christian churches. It is easy to see how the ancients got tired of this unfortunate side effect regarding God’s female counterpart and decided to go to all-male deities. In those days you had bandits and even groups of soldiers who would “just for the fun of it” go raid Asherah worshippers, raping priestesses and devotees, murdering anyone who got in the way of their fun. Just think of the brothels in India, the Far East and Eastern Europe where sex slaves are abused daily, repeatedly to this day. Whenever we have a place of worship that centers around a Divine Union of God and God-ess, a large segment of the population fixates on the sexual aspect of that. Even some of the all-Goddess churches I have visited, worshipped with, or worked with have large lesbian memberships (and some have all-lesbian leadership) that frown on heterosexuality.

Mary Magdalene and Jesus depicted as husband and wife, Magdalene pregnant
Pregnant Mary Magdalene & Jesus depicted as Husband & Wife, 1910 Scotland Church window

The hormones really come out whenever the Feminine Divine takes her veils off and gets human attention. For the same reason Mary Magdalene was kept hidden “veiled”, edited out of mainstream Christianity (she remained in Gnostic scriptures and in underground Christianity as evidenced by the stained-glass church window over a century old in Scotland). It’s easier to have a celibate god and a virgin non-sexual mother as we discuss in our Restoring the Goddess  lessons based on Margaret Starbird’s wonderful work. The only females that are “safe” are asexual unnatural virgins or hyper-sexual prostitutes. Males like Jesus must be stripped of their sexuality, made celibate with no hint of human sexuality.

It’s sad, and I don’t know when we will finally get there, but at least here in the Western world we can discuss,  study and have a web-based honoring of Her. In the Middle Eastern world we’d all hang…or be beheaded, stoned to death, etc. for blasphemy, apostasy and perversion. Yes, we would be the perverted ones. Not the people who “circumcise” their female population at the age of 7 or 8 so that 90 percent of (for example) Egyptian women cannot achieve climax during relations with their husbands. Why do they want marriages like that, the Egyptian men? It is baffling that Westerners are called sexually perverted. Even Allah had a wife named Allat (she’s the same as Asherah, but the Arabic version). But don’t bring Her up, either.

I cover all this evidence of God and Allah having a Divine Spouse in my online slide presentation God Has a Wife! here:

I am glad the author of the article mentioned Raphael Patai’s work. In our online study program we have a whole course on his famous book, The Hebrew Goddess. Very inspiring book, in a scholarly way. Here’s our (old) page on the Hebrew goddess. Remind me to update that old page and add this latest research findings and my pet theories. (smile)

If you have watched our God Has a Wife! slide show presentation all the way to the end and want to take our course based on Patai’s book Hebrew Goddess, let me know.  The Hebrew Goddess lessons are on the passworded pages of our Mystery School’s website and we usually charge membership dues for it. Send me an email or comment below if you HAVE THE BOOK and are SERIOUS ABOUT READING IT. I will let you access the Hebrew Goddess lessons thru the back door, at no cost.  Click here to order the book from Amazon: The Hebrew Goddess
In Her,
+Katia

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Asherah, Baal, Asherah Poles, Yahweh having a wife?

AsherahPoleBeingChoppedDownI received the following email from an author named Frank Verderber. He read the Asherah material on our website, and I think viewed my God Has a Wife! presentation. He responded as follows (and I wonder how I should respond back to him — he’s obviously not a “believer” in a Feminine God alongside the Masculine God…).

Frank Verderber writes:
Some of what you printed is true concerning Asherah, but most is not.
You quote the Bible as reference concerning her, and that’s fine, except
you make a wholly unfounded statement [ a belief statement, not
corroborated] that she was a consort of Yahweh. The Israeli God Yahweh
had no consort, and was referred to as also as EL, Adoni, Ja or Jah as
general descriptions of Divine character. Yahweh is his personal name
and means “was, is, and always” which in the Greek would be rendered
“Alpha and Omega.” The idea that there was a redaction of the Hebrew
Scriptures around 500 BC is spurious conjecture based on “Documentary
Hypothesis”, and has been refuted eloquently and abundantly. However,
this idea of a consort was conjuncture – that came from a few 19th
Century Epigraphers, that mistakenly confused Baal ceremonies with those
of the Israeli’s ceremonies of Yahweh. IF you are interseted in
understanding the role of Asherah the Sea goddess, you need to read the
a few anthologies Akkadian and Urgaritic myths [See: The Ancient Near
East, Volumes I & II, by James B. Pitchard] In them Baal is furious
that he has no princedom but he has the high honor of serving El.
Puissant Baal makes a great amount of tumult and so enters Asherah as a
“sister” who then requests that a princedom [house] be made for Baal.
El orders a “house” be made for him down by the Sea [Mediterranean] And
so it is the geographic location of Canaan or the Gaza strip that holds
the House of Baal or if you can interpolate: the “House of Lucifer.”
That is why there are so many epics regarding the hyper human-angelic
populous called the Nephilim or the Anakites. That is why there is so
much trouble in that region of the world. However, Asherah is the later
name of the original goddess In-nanna who was the daughter of Nanna at
the time of the River People, Apsu [before the Chaldees, Ur, the Sea
people] Nanna is the Moon god whose symbol is the crescent moon, and a
flame, while In-nanna is the Star. Shamoush was In-nanna’s sibling and
his symbol was the Sun. If you follow the development of Asherah, you
will find that she is no more than one of the following goddesses whose
name changed within geographic regions [ In-nanna = Astarte = Asherah =
Venus = Cybele = Artemus = and today = Fatima. Interestingly, Fatima
from Spain, is the name given to the town in Spain before the Europeans
took it from the Islamic leaders. But note that Mohammad’s sister was
named Fatima. Can you now see the Middle-eastern genesis of the goddess?

I hope this was constructive.

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Frank continues: Concerning Asherah poles:

Asherah is the Hebrew word translated to English as “groves” in the OT. It relates to the Babylonian (Astarte)-Canaanite (Ashtoroth or Ashtoreth depending on which area) goddess of fortune, fertility and happiness, the supposed consort of Baal. It also implies the sacred trees or poles set up near an altar for “her” worship.

When Moses went back up Sinai to receive the replacement tablets–regarding the Canaanites (and others), God told him…

Ex 34:13 But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves:

Baal is always associated with gardens and trees. One can see the later use by the Celts concerning “May Poles” and still in use today. Asherah or Astarte or Venus were understood as Warrior goddesses, who could destroy an enemy encampment by seducing the enemies of her devotes. The idea is sexual in nature and translates to the use of the modern idea of feminine aura or power. This idea has always been around – found esecially in the wiccan cults. But Asherah is more at a cluster or many, such as in the ancient Qualmish gods of the Kaaba in Mecca.

Frank J. Verderber BSGS ASCT
Author
Blandford, Ma
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So. Any ideas what to say to him in response? Don’t think he’s very open to our point of view, but at least he is very polite and not overly condescending.

Here is my (Katia’s) God Has a Wife! presentation which I think the gentleman must have viewed because it’s there I talk about Asherah and Asherah poles.
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