Asherah, Part I: The lost bride of 

Yahweh
Posted on October 27, 2010 by Carisa

Asherah

They worshiped Her under every green tree, according to the Hebrew Bible
(what Christians call the Old Testament).  The Bible also tells us Her image was
to be found for years in the temple of Solomon, where the women wove
hangings for Her.  In temple and forest grove, Her image was apparently made
of wood, since monotheistic reformers demanded it be chopped down and
burned.  It appears to have been a manmade object, but one carved of a tree and
perhaps the image was a stylized tree of some kind.
The archaelogical record suggests that Asherah was the Mother Goddess of
Israel, the Wife of God, according to William Dever, who has unearthed many
clues to her identity. She was worshiped, apparently throughout the time Israel
stood as a nation.  In many homes, images like the one above decorated
household shrines.

Who was She, this lost Goddess of the Hebrews? And why is She no longer
worshiped in the Judeo-Christian religions of today?

The Asherah votive emphasizes Her breasts, suggesting Her role as a fertility
goddess, but Her stance represents Her nature as a mother in general.  She no
doubt aided in the concerns of mothers, including conception and childbirth,
but was probably also the mother of all, a comforter and protector in an
uncertain world. Inscriptions from ancient Israel tell us that Yahweh and “his
Asherah” were invoked together for personal protection. Her identification with
trees suggests that Asherah was, in effect, also Mother Nature — a figure we
remember in our language, but unfortunately have lost as a part of our
mainstream religions. She was, in other words, everything you would expect
from the feminine half of the divine creative duo, a Great Mother.
Asherah’s image was lost to us not by chance, but by deliberate action of
fundamentalist monotheists.  First Her images were torn down, then Her stories
were rewritten, then Her name was forgotten.  In fact, Her name appears 40
times in modern translations of the Bible, but not at all in the first English
translation, the King James Bible.  Since no one knew who Asherah was
anymore in the 17th century when the King James Version (KJV) was being
created, Her name was translated as groves of trees or trees or images in groves,
without understanding that those trees and groves of trees represented a mother
goddess.

When archaeologists unearthed a treasure trove of Canaanite stories and other

writings in Ugarit, in modern day Syria, they discovered that the mysterious
“Asherah” was not an object, but a Goddess: the mother goddess of the
Canaanites. When archaeologists discovered Her in Israel as well, a whole new
picture of early Hebrew religion began to emerge.  The argument is
straightforward: 1. Asherah was a known Canaanite Goddess, the Mother
Goddess and wife of the Father God. 2. The name is mentioned repeatedly as
having been worshiped by the Israelites, to the dismay of monotheists. 3. Her
name is found in inscriptions with Yahweh and 4. A mother goddess image is
found frequently in the homes of ancient Israel. 5. She was worshiped,
according to the Bible, in the woods with Baal AND in Yahweh’s temple. The
common sense interpretation is that Israelites worshiped the mother goddess
Asherah. And that She was the wife of whichever male God had the upper hand
at the time: El, or Baal, or Yahweh.  Israelite religion was not much different
from Canaanite religion. The gods vied for supremacy, but the goddess
remained.
Since archaeologists in the Holy Land tended to be religious and to enter the
field of biblical archaeology in order to unearth evidence substantiating the
Bible’s story, it has taken awhile for the plain truth to become clear.  Gradually,
however, more objective archaeologists, such as Dever, are making headway in
proving Asherah’s case.  The Bible says Hebrews kept worshiping Asherah; the
archaeological record confirms it. What the Bible doesn’t say, and the
archaeological record shows, is that Asherah was a mother goddess.
In Ugarit, She was known as Athiratu Yammi, She who Treads on the Sea.  This
suggests She was responsible for ending a time of chaos represented by the
primordial sea and beginning the process of creation.  The Sea God, or Sea
Serpent Yam is the entity upon which She trod.  In a particularly bizarre and
suggestive passage in the Bible, 2 Kings 18:4, one monotheistic reformer,
pursuing the typical course of smashing sacred stones and cutting down
Asherahs records this additional fact: He broke into pieces the bronze snake
Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to
it. (It was called Nehushtan.)
Um, say what?  This odd passage opens up a whole can of worms for me.  Here
are the serpent and the tree being worshiped together. (Garden of Eden
anyone?) So, ah.. what exactly were people doing out there in the woods? They
were worshiping idols, of course, burning incense, we are told.  This passage
from Hosea is instructive: Hosea 4:12,13 condemns those who “inquire of  a
thing of wood,” suggesting they were asking questions of an oracle,  and who
sacrifice under oak, poplar and terebinth “because their shade is good.” They are
accused also of playing the harlot, which could be a reference to sexual activity,
or simply an analogy in that the monotheists are claiming the people sold out to
the “false” Canaanite gods.  Israel was considered the bride of Yahweh in
monotheistic thought, so worshiping other gods was whoring after them.

These passages make sense when you understand that this tree symbolism is
closely connected with Asherah.  Now we know She was worshiped in the wood, 
with an image made of wood and that people sought knowledge and made
sacrifices there.

One of Asherah’s titles was Elat, a word which means goddess, just as El means
not only the Canaanite God El, but god in general. Interestingly, the word Elat is
translated in the Bible as terebinth, a large shade tree found in Israel. A great
deal of the time, God is a translation not of Yahweh, his particular name given to
Moses, but of the Hebrew name Elohim, which is plural, gender neutral,
meaning “gods.”  This word is also related to the word for oak tree.  What did it
really mean to the ancients to worship in a grove of trees? To see the gods as like
the oaks? The goddess as a green tree spreading Her leaves over the worshiper,
providing shade in a hot country?

Hebrews were not alone in worshiping gods of the forest, of course.  Celtic,
Greek, and Germanic peoples also worshiped in groves.  Their gods were gods of
nature.  Were the Israelites really so different?

In the Bible, Elohim created a man and woman. Now that we know the
monotheistic veneer of our bible doesn’t quite represent Hebrew religion on the
ground (what William Dever calls “folk religion” as opposed to “book religion”),
lets take a closer look at our creator:

Genesis 1:26:
“Then Elohim said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them
rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all
the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’

So Elohim created man in his own image, in the image of Elohim he created
them; male and female he created them.”

Takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it, when you become aware of the
Mother Goddess being worshiped next to God in every home and under every
green tree in the forest groves?  Who is this “US” doing the creating? Well,
evidently, the creator(s) is/are male and female, like the creatures he/She/they
created.

Now move on to a later passage, in 1 Kings 18: 19 , which makes it clear that 
Asherah was served by 400 prophets. This is no minor religion. Maybe when the
prophets complained She was worshiped under every tree, they meant it. Every
tree, every home, and also, sometimes, in the temple.

In Exodus, we are told that God warned the people to get rid of Asherah’s
emblems when they conquered the land of Canaan; in the periods of the books
of the Judges and the Kings, we are told that the “good” prophets, kings and
reformers continually had to burn and smash the idols of Asherah; finally, in
Jeremiah, we are told that worship of Asherah has resulted in the fanatical
monotheistic God’s decision to wipe out Israel and Judah (the southern portion
of the formerly united kingdom) via the invasion of outside peoples.  The thing
is, we are told most of these things by a single author, or group of authors: the
Deuteronomist.  This is a character (or possibly group of characters) writing and
rewriting portions of the Bible in later days, around the 7th century BC, either
just before or during the exile of the Jews to Babylon. According to the
Deuteronomist, the priest Hilkiah claims in 2 Kings, chapter 22, to have
“discovered” the ancient laws of Moses during temple renovations.  These
writings, “The Book of the Law” were mysteriously mislaid leading Israel to get
its religion all wrong, apparently.

The works of the Deuteronomist conveyed a story that the Israelites had a
covenant with Yahweh to worship him and only him. He claimed the Israelites
had taken Canaan by force through a holy war in which they massacred the
original inhabitants, putting to death (by God’s command) men, women and
children in Jericho.  (This claim is not supported by the archaelogical record.)
And he claimed that God was a jealous God, one who demanded to be
worshiped alone and who would punish the unfaithful by bringing other nations
to conquer them if they worshiped others.

Was this really the religion of Israel? Apparently not.  The common folk kept
right on putting up their Asherahs in the woods and the temple and the little
votive Asherahs in their home shrines.  Only after Israel was conquered and the
people of Judah returned from exile in Babylon did the fundamentalist fanatics
with their violent, patriarchal, monotheistic God win the argument. The
Deuteronomist’s work, along with the works of two other primary authors, the
Yahwist and the Elohist, were compiled by a fourth source, called the Priestly
source, to become the Bible we have today.

Asherah, tree goddess, mother of life, was lost.  Truly, we were cast out of the
Garden of Eden by Yahweh, or at least, his supporters.  Separated from the Tree
of Life, our mother, we flounder like orphans.  America’s religiosity is more
comparable to Iran’s than to that of Western Europe, where Yahweh’s religion is
in decline.  Is it coincidence that we, the worshipers of a male warrior, spend
our money on war while children are allowed to live in poverty without health
care? Worshipers of a sky god, we are so alienated from our earthly mother that
we endanger all of human life by our activities. And the hard edge of the
fundamentalist who claims to have found the one true law and believes those
who think otherwise are worthy of death (or eternal damnation)  is still with us
today.

The Wife of God has disappeared -- or, has She? Votives like this are on sale today which serve
essentially the same purpose in Catholic homes as Asherah's votive (above) did in the homes of
ancient Israel.

Still, I think it has only ever been a relatively small percentage of people who
hold to the hardest edge of monotheism.  We are surrounded by Mother Nature
and she seeps into our traditions.  The Shekinah,  Mary, the Mother of God, the
Christmas Tree and the Easter Egg, the bumper sticker imploring us to Honor
Thy Mother with an image of the earth as seen from above, the fairies and elves
and lost brides of our children’s tales are all ways in which the Mother Goddess
seeps back into our lopsided psyche.  The Goddess is lost, officially, but
remembered deep within. Archaeology’s gift of restoring Asherah to our
consciousness reminds us of what we already know: God does indeed have a
wife. He must.  For if we are his children, then we must have a mother.

 https://thequeenofheaven.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/asherah-part-i-the-
lost-bride-of-yahweh/
acessado em 18/02/2021 às 10:55h

Asherah, Part II: The serpent’s bride

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Carisa
Continued from Asherah, Part I
——————————————————————————————–

Eve with the serpent by the Tree of Knowledge. Painting by John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope
(1829-1908).

Is the world good, or bad? Who made us, and why? These are some of the
questions ancient myths and religions attempt to answer.  And the answers
matter. A belief in a goddess who is Mother Nature personified is different from
a belief in a jealous and vengeful warrior creator. It’s different because it shapes
how we feel about the world, and what we do while we’re in it. When the writers
and compilers of our historic religion decided to edit out the Hebrew Goddess
Asherah, they changed how we see the world.  They changed us and, so, they
changed our world.
Eve and the Serpent
Some of the Bible’s most devout readers seem unaware of the impossibility of
literal belief in its accounts.  Take creation, for example. The account of
humankind’s creation by the Elohim  (translated God, but technically a plural
word) in Genesis 1:26 is followed in Chapters 2 and 3 by another creation story
which contradicts it on several key points.  In this second account, the personal
God Yahweh is given as the name of the Creator in the original Hebrew text. 
This God is spoken of in the singular, unlike the first account, in which Elohim
says “let us” create man in “our” image. Rather than speaking as the head of a
council, Yahweh clearly creates alone.  He walks in the Garden of Eden in which
He has placed his creations, implying that He has physical form.  Whereas
Elohim created both male and female in “our” image, at the same time, together,
Yahweh creates only the man at first. He places him in a garden with two trees,
the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.  He is instructed to eat from the
first, but not the second and told that if he eats from the Tree of Knowledge he
“will surely die.”

In the first account, there is no mention of the Garden of Eden or the magical
trees. Humans are made last, after everything else: light and dark, earth and
sea, plants and animals.  God (or the gods) pronounces the creation good and
creates man and woman to rule over the creatures, which have all already been
created. In the second account, man is made after plants and the animals are
created afterward, to amuse Adam, because he is lonely.  Unlike the first
account, in this version of the story, woman is made later, when the animals
fail to relieve Adam’s loneliness.  She is not even conceived in the same fashion. 
Adam is made of mud (his name means both mankind and red earth) and filled
with the breath of God.  Eve is made from Adam’s rib while he is sleeping.
The author of the second account then goes on to tell what is certainly one of the
best known stories in the Judeo-Christian tradition:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God
had made.  He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from
any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,
but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of
the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “
“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman.  “For God knows that
when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing
good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing
to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. 
She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.  Then the
eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they
sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking
in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the
trees of the garden.  But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was
naked; so I hid.”
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree
that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me — she gave me some fruit
from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:1-13)
God goes on to administer several punishments for the offense of eating from
the Tree of Knowledge.  The humans are cast out of the garden and so prevented
from eating of the Tree of Life.  The man will toil in the earth with difficulty; the
woman will be ruled over by her husband and give birth to children in pain; the
snake will crawl on his belly (some commentators have inferred from this that
the snake originally had legs) and be hated by humans.  Two angels and a
flaming sword guard the entrance to the garden. We can never go back.
 A small votive statue of the Mother Goddess Asherah, typical of those archaeologists have found in
many ancient Israelite homes.

The Serpent God

The great historian of mythology Joseph Campbell dryly observes that nothing
is said in the story to indicate that the serpent in the story was a deity in his own
right throughout the ancient world.  Likewise, it should be observed that no
ancient Hebrew reader of this story would have had any difficulty identifying the
Tree of Life with the Mother Goddess Asherah, whose Tree of Life
image according to the Bible was worshiped “under every green tree” and which
also resided in the temple of Solomon for 236 of the 370 years it stood in
Jerusalem.
It may also be that Eve herself is an allegory for Asherah, as her name means
mother of life and is linguistically related to Asherah’s.

Joseph Campbell believed that the serpent in the Eden story was lifted directly
from either the Sumerian God Enki, God of Water and Wisdom, or his son
Ningizzida. Both of them were identified as Serpent Gods, among other things. 
Enki was possessed of the food and water of life as well as the tablets of wisdom.
Ningizzida was Lord of the Tree of Truth. These gods may have been carried into
Canaan with the Israelites after they left the Sumerian/Babylonian city of Ur, or
absorbed from their eastern neighbors at a later time. (Much of the Hebrew
Bible was compiled, edited and rewritten after the Hebrews were conquered and
exiled in Babylon in the 6th century BC.) Virtually all of the first 11 chapters of
Genesis are rewritten from the much older Sumerian tales.  In them, Enki rather
than Yahweh creates humans from mud, and saves the prototype of Noah from
the flood by teaching him to build an ark. (For more on the Biblical links to the
creation stories of the Sumerians, see my earlier post, In the Beginning…)
We know that Asherah worship was connected with prophecy. Serpents were
also connected with both wisdom and prophecy throughout the eastern
Mediterranean: in Greece, the oracle of Delphi was called Pythia, after a great
serpent (python) who was defeated by the god Apollo there; in Sumer/Babylon
the god Enki was lord of water and wisdom and symbolized as a great walking
serpent (dragon), as was his son Ningizzida whose symbolic image was a staff
surrounded by two twining serpents.

The Sumerian god Ningizzida, appearing as two serpents twining around a central pole, as depicted
on a vase from Sumer about 4,000 years ago. Ningizzida was the son of Enki. Enki, a water god
and the God of Wisdom, created humans from clay in Sumerian myth. Either one of them could
have been the inspiration for Eden's serpent.

Ningizzida was an underworld deity and paradoxically a guardian of the Sky

God Anu’s celestial palace.  He was also a god of trees. The Greek god Hermes,
messenger of the gods, had a staff entwined by serpents, too.  This image of
mystical knowledge has been conflated by the medical profession with the Rod
of Asclepius (originally a single serpent wrapped around a staff) which was an
ancient image of healing.  Thus, both life and knowledge have been connected
with snakes for a very long time.  So have goddesses.

The Serpent Goddess

In Minoan Crete a mysterious goddess bearing serpents is very ancient; in
classical Greece, Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, bears the serpent covered head of
Medusa on her shield.  Throughout ancient Canaan, images can be found of a
goddess holding or surrounded by serpents.  Some believe she is Astarte (the
Canaanite version of Ishtar, who is in turn the Babylonian version of Inanna). 
Inanna is said to have stolen the me, the magical tablets of wisdom, from Enki,
and to have delivered that knowledge to her own people. Others believe the
Canaanite serpent goddess is Asherah, in part because this goddess is often
depicted standing on a lion and Asherah is also called the Lion Lady (a topic for
another day).
 The Serpent Goddess of ancient Crete, from the Minoan culture which predated Israel's but traded
with the earlier Canaanites.This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris
73 and is freely available
at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snake_Goddess_Crete_1600BC.jpg under the creative
commons cc-by-sa 2.5 license.

Asherah is a shortened version of the Mother Goddess’ full name, which is

Athiratu Yammi, She Who Treads on the Sea. Yam, the Sea God, like many
deities of the primordial sea, was represented as a serpent. Serpents, water and
wisdom all suggest an unconscious connection to the depths of everything, the
place out of which creativity comes. Perhaps her ability to walk on water
identifies her as one who can wield serpent powers (powers of wisdom,
prophecy and/or healing).  Asherah, would then be not only the Goddess Life,
but the Goddess Wisdom. Accompanied by her serpent totem she can dispense
knowledge from deep within the source of all things. The one who created life
from formlessness knows how to create and can share this ability with us. 
Unless, of course, we are barred from knowing her.

And that is no doubt the real meaning of the tale.  For here the message to its
ancient reader is plain.  You are in this vale of tears because you worshiped at
the foot of the Tree Goddess.  And in conveying this message, the Yahwist turns
the old meaning of these symbols on their head.  For this reason Campbell calls
this story a “conspicuously contrived, counterfeit myth.”  Yahweh appears here
as a tyrant.  Do not pursue wisdom, or you will suffer my wrath.  Also, unlike all
comparable pagan myths, instead of presenting nature, right here on earth, as
sacred, we now see ourselves as locked out of paradise.  Nature is Adam’s
enemy; he is to toil and sweat to eke out a living from the land. Man is woman’s
enemy; she is to serve her husband.  Under the Deuteronomist’s law she is in
fact the property of her husband, given a status no better than that of a slave.
Whereas women no doubt saw Asherah as especially their protector in
childbirth, they are now told their worship of her caused all the pain of labor.

This is a very sad story.  In rejecting the goddess, we now know that Yahweh was
in fact rejecting his own wife.  Asherah was the wife of the Canaanite El in
Phoenicia, and the wife of Baal in Israel, but archaeologists have now uncovered
evidence from ancient inscriptions showing that many also considered her the
wife of Yahweh.

A portion of the Nine Dragon Screen in the Forbidden City, China. These beneficial dragons are
controlling wind and rain. Photo by Shizhao, Wikimedia Commons.

Serpent Power
We can certainly find the origins of the particular images of Mother of Life, Tree
of Life and serpent without leaving the ancient Near East. However, it’s
probably worth pointing out that these ideas are so widespread as to be literally
worldwide. In Viking mythology, the World Tree, Yrggdasil, sits at the center of
the world.  It has a dragon within it and more serpents lie beneath it than
anyone could imagine.  The God Odin hangs himself on the tree in order to
acquire power over the runes (both knowledge and prophetic knowledge.) In the
East, the water/wisdom/serpent power is considered benevolent. Chinese
dragons are water gods with powers over rains and rivers and the ability to
bestow good luck.  Buddha achieved enlightenment while sitting under the
Bodhi tree, protected from the rain by a giant cobra. In Hindu yoga, a serpent
power called kundalini is said to reside at the base of the spine and practitioners
attempt to raise the serpent upward toward the top of the head, creating
mystical awareness if they succeed.  In the New World, a feathered Serpent God
named Quetzalcoatl was the God of Wisdom, associated with priestly power. 
Serpents were also part of African mythology and many Egyptian gods and
goddesses as well as pharaohs bore an image of a cobra around their heads.
There are only two explanations for this widespread similarity of belief.  Either
the idea of serpent power is an archetype deeply rooted in the human
unconscious (our own primordial sea), or it is so ancient that it traveled with us
when some of our ancestors came out of Africa and spread around the world.

Unlike many of our Eastern neighbors, we in the Christian West are used to
thinking of dragons as bad guys in need of conquering by heroes.  Many are also
used to thinking of the serpent in Eden as Satan, but this was a later, Christian
adaptation of the tale.  He is never identified as such in the Hebrew story, nor is
he considered to be the Devil in Jewish tradition.

Yahweh Gets All Snakey

And now we are about to enter some pretty weird territory. There are some
indications that Yahweh himself claimed Serpent Power.  Perhaps the most
peculiar imagery in the Bible (and that’s saying something) connects Yahweh
himself with the serpent. We are told in 2 Kings 18:4, for example, by an angry
prophet that the bronze serpent of Moses was worshiped alongside the image of
Asherah.  The people of Israel were burning incense to this bronze serpent head,
as they would to a god, and they called it Nehushtan (related to nachash, the
Hebrew word for snake).
We first encounter the serpent powers of Yahweh in connection with Moses in
Exodus Chapter 7, when that great leader is attempting to persuade Egypt’s
pharaoh to let the Israelites (who are slaves) go free. In this account, Moses and
his brother Aaron each cast down their staffs and both turn into serpents.
Pharaoh’s wizards cast down their staffs which turn into serpents as well, but
Aaron’s serpent staff proceeds to swallow the Egyptian serpents.

Moses also uses his magical staff in bringing the plagues on Egypt. Here are two
examples:

Then the Lord said to Moses…”Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes out to
the water.  Wait on the bank of the Nile to meet him, and take into your hand
the staff that was changed into a snake.  Then say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of
the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: Let my people go…By this you will
know that I am the Lord. With the staff that is in my hand I will strike the
water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood.  The fish in the Nile will
die, and the river will stink; the Egyptians will not be able to drink the water.’
“ (Exodus 7:14-18)
And later:

When Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky, the Lord sent thunder and
hail, and lightning flashed down to the ground.  So the Lord rained hail on the
land of Egypt.(Exodus 9:23)
Notice the staff’s power over the waters of river and sky (like those of the
Chinese dragon). Later we are told, significantly, that this serpent staff parts the
waters of the Red (or Reed) Sea:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “…Raise your staff and stretch out your hand
over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on
dry ground.” (Exodus 14: 15-16)
Next, we are told that the Hebrews wandering in the desert are saved from a
plague of snakes via a similar magical snake:

Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the
people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We
have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD
to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the
LORD said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and
everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of
bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that
person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. (Numbers 21:6)
This is the serpent image being worshiped alongside Asherah’s tree image to the
dismay of later reformers.

The Serpent’s Bride

Like the serpent, the Mother Goddess is one of humankind’s oldest symbols. 
Often depicted in the nude (like Eve), she is to be found in Neolithic and
Paleolithic sites throughout Europe and the Near East, reminding us that in the
original creation stories, it is likely that humankind drew a parallel between a
mother giving birth from her own body and the earth, or the universe, giving
birth to all things, including us.  One of the most striking features of the Myth of
Eden is that Eve is born out of the body of Adam, a fairly obvious reversal of
biological fact.  All men are born of mothers.
A divine pair of Creators, such as El and Asherah, or Yahweh and Asherah, also
makes good metaphoric sense. But the Yahwist priests made an entirely
unheard of claim: they said their God was male and ruled alone. There was a
Father, but no Mother.  Yahweh absorbed the old bearded man image of
Canaanite El and the Storm and War God attributes of the Canaanite God Baal. 
Left behind were the serpent, the tree, and the mother. Scratch the surface of
the Bible stories just a little and you’ll find the serpent staff and the tree worship
of Asherah under every green tree, but in official monotheistic doctrine the
obvious meaning of these symbols is disavowed.

Mary treads on a serpent in this German painting by an unknown artist from around 1700 BC.

And so we lost Asherah, the Bride of God, the Tree of Life, and the ability to
access Divine Wisdom.  I believe this loss has created a collective wound in the
Western psyche, one which is continually returned to in our stories:   Cinderella
covered in ashes  must be sought by the prince who has only her shoe; Sleeping
Beauty is knocked out for 100 years by the witch who wasn’t invited to her party,
until she too is found by her prince; the Grail (a deeply feminine/womb image)
must be sought by the true knight; a medieval legend claims Mary Magdalene as
the secret bride of Christ; and Mother Mary is enthroned in Heaven (without
ever admitting who She really is, even though she is still pictured sometimes
treading upon a serpent.)

If we seek this lost mother and Bride of God, however, we may yet find that her
fruits are available to us. Could it be that wisdom, and long life, are  still to be
had here in the grand garden created for us, male and female, the only creatures
who were made in the image of the divine? Is our mother only waiting for us to
find our way back to the foot of the tree? Perhaps when we eat of the fruit, the
“eyes of our minds,” as one gnostic author wrote, will be opened.  Maybe we will
finally recognize that we have been in Eden all along, and then we can begin
working toward recreating the Paradise Garden we were meant to have all
along.

Photo by Jean-Pol GRANDMONT

https://thequeenofheaven.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/asherah-part-ii-the-
serpents-bride/

acessado em 18/02/2021 às 10:56h

Asherah, Part III: The Lion Lady

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Carisa
 Qadesh, standing on a lion, posed between the Egyptian gods Min and Resheph. Photo by Rama,
Wikimedia Commons.

The lion rider:

These days a naked lady holding a snake and riding a lion is not the first image
which comes to mind when the word “holy” is spoken. However, that is exactly
the title of the goddess at the center of the picture above. This particular
example is Egyptian, but this is a Canaanite (pre-Israelite) goddess from the
Bronze Age, who is depicted much the same way throughout the region all the
way up to Syria in that time period.  She is labeled Qadesh (Qudshu), which
means “the Holy One.” Who is she?  Some say an as yet unknown deity
whose name is Qadesh. Most, however, assume this is an epithet of one of the
major Canaanite goddesses.  She might be Astarte (Ashtart, biblical Ashtoreth),
the western variant of Babylonian Ishtar, goddess of the planet Venus (a.k.a. the
Morning and Evening Star) and the Goddess of Love and War.  This goddess
was associated with a lion there. But more likely she is Asherah, the Mother
Goddess,  who is called in some written documents the Qadesh and also is
frequently given the title the Lion Lady.
This Egyptian version is from the wealthy New Kingdom era, after Egypt had
thrown off its West Asian warlords, the Hyksos, and gone on to conquer the
Canaanites who worshiped this goddess.  She is depicted in both Canaan and
Egypt wearing the wig of Hathor, an ancient Egyptian Goddess of Love and
Fertility, and here she also bears Hathor’s cow horns and sun disc.  These are no
doubt intended to show that this Canaanite goddess is equated with Hathor,
that they are aspects of the same divine feminine power.

The flower and the nudity are natural symbols of fertility; the snake is
associated with wisdom. This fits with the archaelogical evidence that Asherah
was worshiped by the Canaanites and later Israelites as the Mother Goddess and
the Tree of Life.  (See Asherah Part I and Part II.) But why is Asherah the Lion
Lady?
I don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know that Asherah’s
association with lions is far from unique in the ancient world. In fact, the Lady
of the Lions is an image that extends across time for more than 6,000 years and
across a wide geographic region as far as Minoan Crete to the west, Anatolia
(Turkey) to the north, and Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylon, modern Iraq) to the
east. More than 40 goddesses in Egypt were associated with lions or other
felines. Asherah herself would continue to be depicted with lions past the
heyday of the Canaanites and through the days when Israel was the nation
ruling that region.

Often, a goddess with lion symbolism is associated with a god identified with the
bull.  This is the case with Asherah, whose spouse was originally El, the Bull
God, Father God of the Canaanites.  Mythologist Joseph Campbell associated
lions with the sun and bulls (and snakes) with the moon.  So it is possible we
have the remains here of an ancient identification of Sun Goddess and Moon
God (just the reverse of the later pattern, interestingly).

Some Lion Goddesses are warriors. Lion-headed Sekhmet once battled the
enemies of the sun god in Egypt and the lion (sometimes tiger) riding goddess
Durga battles demons in India. One of the primary associations with lions is
clearly strength, power and protection.  They often appear in positions
suggesting they are guarding a person or place of importance.  Lions were
emblems of the ruling tribe of Judah (the tribe of King David). According to the
Hebrew Bible, the throne of King Solomon was covered with ivory, overlaid with
gold and featured lions on each side of the armrests.  Six steps led up to it and
twelve lions stood on them, one at either end of each step. (I Kings 10:18-20.)
The biblical passage claims nothing like it had ever been seen before. Maybe
Solomon’s throne was the fanciest ever, and maybe not, but the lions guarding it
certainly weren’t a new idea. In fact, lions were guarding the thrones of deities
and kings well, all over the place before, during, and long after Solomon’s day.
Lions are considered so powerful that their images eventually came to protect
the thrones of kings as far away as China and England. Lions also guarded the
gates of the great cities of the ancient empires of the Babylonians, the Hittites,
and the early Greek Mycenaeans.

Variations on the lion often served as guardians of the sacred. Two cherubim,
which are depicted in ancient art as winged lions, sometimes with human heads,
are said to be guarding the way back into the Garden of Eden. (Later, cherubim
were seen as angels.) Two cherubim of gold sat atop the Ark of the Covenant,
guarding it with their wings. The enigmatic human-headed lion, the Great
Sphinx, guards the Great Pyramids still today.

Perhaps most importantly, lions guarded the thrones of goddesses long before
Solomon’s day, perhaps before even the invention of kingship. Long, long ago,
back into the murky past of the Neolithic towns of the world’s first farmers in
Anatolia, these giant felines guarded the throne of the Goddess. Lions have been
the companions and perhaps the guardians of the Goddess, in other words,
since the beginnings of what we might call Western Civilization and spread from
there throughout the entire Old World.

The Lion Ladies

 Ancient goddess whose name is unknown from one of humankind’s most ancient towns, Catal
Hoyuk, in what is now Turkey. She was created about 8,000 years ago. Photo by Stanisław Nowak,
Wikimedia Commons.

The figure to the right was created by an unknown artist about 8,000 years ago
in an Anatolian town called Catal Hoyuk in what is now the country of Turkey. 
Although she was created long before writing was invented, we can clearly see
she is a figure of some power, seated on what appears to be a throne. Her
armrests are supported by two large felines, just as were Solomon’s 5,000 years
later.  These are sometimes identified as leopards, and they may be, but it seems
more likely to me that they were lionesses. At the time this statue was made,
Asiatic lions roamed this area and throughout the rest of western Asia.  They
could be found as far eastward as India, where their only living descendants
(about 400 of them) can still be found today.

Notice that the Lion Lady here is, like Asherah and a great many Mother
Goddesses, naked.  We do not know her name, but we recognize her anyway. 
Unless she represents a queen who inexplicably rules in the nude (an
assumption which might make conservative scholars squirm even more
uncomfortably in their seats), the common sense interpretation of this figure is
that she is a goddess–and a powerful one at that.

Cybele

Compare this image to the sketch of a statue of the Greco-Roman Goddess

Cybele.  Cybele comes originally from the same area as the Catal Hoyuk
goddess, just much, much later (6,000 years later).   Although lions are often
considered a solar symbol and some goddesses associated with them are Sun
Goddesses, Cybele is an Earth Goddess. The Romans called her Magna Mater,
or Great Mother, Mountain Mother, and Mother of the Gods.  Originally a
Nature Goddess, she could be a powerful protector of nations as well.  The
crown on her head represents the walls of a city and her lions could also be
found hitched to her chariot. She was adopted into Rome about 200 BC with the
hope she would defend them against Hannibal in the Second Punic War.
Apparently, Rome’s confidence in her was well placed, as they defeated
Hannibal and eventually went on, of course, to become the greatest empire in
the ancient world.
 One of many lions patrolling the Ishtar Gate

Inanna, with a lion on a leash.

The lion on the left is patrolling the wall of the Ishtar Gate, built by the
Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II  in about 600 BC.  This was the king who
conquered Judah and brought its residents captive to his city.  Ishtar, after
whom the gate was named, was the Babylonian Goddess of Love and War.
Below the picture of the gate is a relief showing the earlier version of Ishtar, the
ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna who can be seen with a lion on a leash. The
Sumerians created the first complex cities, writing, and the wheel, among other
things, about 5,000 years ago. They believed much of their knowledge was given
to them by Inanna, who stole the tablets of wisdom from the Wisdom God Enki.
A few more Lion Ladies are shown below.

This seal impression from the great palace of Knossos in Minoan Crete shows a goddess on top of
a mountain flanked by lions. Another seal found in Knossos depicts a goddess walking with a lion
and carrying a staff, much like the Sumerian Inanna above. The Minoans were an advanced pre-
Greek maritime Bronze Age civilization with a very broad sphere of influence from about 2700 BC
until 1400 BC when they were taken over by the early Greek Mycenaeans.
Sekhmet, the lion-headed Warrior Goddess of Egypt. Photo by Gerard Ducher, Wikimedia
Commons.

OK, not technically a Lion Goddess, but the Norse goddess Freyja, with her cat-drawn chariot is
certainly reminiscent of Cybele, with her lion-drawn chariot. It may also be relevant that the Egyptian
Cat Goddess Bast was originally a Lion Goddess. Sometimes the kitties get scaled down and a bit
more domesticated as time passes. Freyja is a Goddess of Love and Fertility.

Forteza (fortitude) from the Tarocchi tarot deck created in the 15th century. The equivalent card in
later decks is typically referred to as Strength and nearly always depicts a woman as the lion’s
tamer. Could she represent a late symbolic memory of the ancient Lion Goddesses?
https://thequeenofheaven.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/asherah-part-iii-the-
lion-lady/

acessado em 18/02/2021 às 10:57h