Veiled Mother of the World, 1930, by Russian esoteric Christian Nicholas Roerich
Yay. God-the-Mother is coming out more and more in various religions. The Mormons have always believed She existed, and a Heavenly Mother has been in their doctrine all along. But they have told their leaders not to preach sermons about Her (due to persecution, being called a “sex cult” back in the 1800s). Now that is changing. Pretty cool.
Mormons also believe Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. My daughters love hanging out with Mormon friends, one whose parents have prominent paintings of Jesus and Magdalene on the wall. (Painted by Mormon artists).
Here’s a news article about the Heavenly Mother being increasingly mentioned by LDS (Mormon) leaders. It has an interesting Madonna-like picture of Her with a hidden face.
God Has a Wife! (and Goddess has a husband) — as we’ve been saying here on this website since 1999. Here’s our 2006 God Has a Wife! slideshow for more images of Her…
The Awakening formerly called The Return (of Persephone and of Spring) by Jonathan Earl Bowser
Attention devotees of the Divine Feminine, aka God-ess. Â She is Returning today! April 3rd is an ancient holiday marking the ascension from “hell” of Persephone. Â Like Jesus Christ, she descended into Hell, but she did it every year in Fall with the “death” of the growing season. Â Then on April 3rd, she is “resurrected” and ascends to rejoin her mother, the Earth who has been mourning for her and refusing to produce all winter. This ancient holy day is part of the Spring Equinox season which begins nowadays on March 20 and goes to the 3rd.
This painting by famed Goddess artist Jonathan Earl Bowser used to be called simply the Return, but now it’s called the Awakening.  I like  both titles since the latter implies a spiritual awakening alongside the physical “awakening†of the fertile mother earth. Look for the hidden symbols in the painting, such as the DNA spiral, the astrological symbol for the earth (circle with a dot inside). Persephone is treading on water, on lily pads where lotus flowers will soon grow.
Below is a list of other esoteric alternative holy days for this first week of April.  Buddha’s birthday comes this week, also.
And be ready for the Goddess of Fate day on the 5th. “May Fortuna Smile Upon You!” was the ancient Greek and later Roman greeting today (and all week). Â If you were an ordained priest or priestess of God-the-Mother you would greet everyone thusly, generating the response, “And upon you!”
Esoteric, Alternative Holy Days for First Week of April
April 1 thru 4 – Iroquois Thunder Ceremony – In thanksgiving for the rains. Iroquois believe Sky Woman descended from the Sky and Created Earth.
April 2 thru 10 – Hindu Festival honoring Maha Devi as Gauri – life, growth, and fruition.
April 3Â Â – the Ascension of Persephone
–  Buddha’s Birthday  563 BCE (Although the Zen Buddhists celebrate his birthday on the 8th of April)
April 4 – Greek Megalesia of Cybele – Games dedicated to the Great Mother (Greek).
April 5 – Roman Day of Fortuna – Goddess of Fate (Roman).
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.”
* * * * * * * * *END OF ARTICLE* * * * * * * *
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. Â 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.
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, Â 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 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
