| After the downfall of Judea, the Jewish people had felt that they were being led astray and desired to return to their own ways. They stated their views to Jeremiah: “(5) Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, all the women standing by—a great assembly—along with all the people who were living in the land of Egypt at Pathros, answered Jeremiah, (16) “As for the word you spoke to us in the name of the LORD, we will not listen to you! (17) Instead, we will do everything we said: We will burn incense to the queen of heaven and offer drink offerings to her, just as we, our fathers, our kings, and our officials did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time, we had plenty of food and good things, and we saw no disaster.… (18) But from the time we stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been perishing by sword and famine.” (Jeremiah 22:15-18) Then in the last part 19, the women insinuate that the men in their time, do no different: (19) “Moreover,” said the women, “when we burned incense to the queen of heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands’ knowledge that we made sacrificial cakes in her image and poured out drink offerings to her?” (Jeremiah 22:19) (40) Sacrificial cakes to the goddess are a time-honored tradition. In Athens, they were offered to Artemis and called Selenia and were round shaped and said to represent the moon, however, what’s more likely is that these represented mushroom caps, and the moon was the chosen substitute. (41) Archaeological evidence recently has brought more information concerning the relationship of Yahweh to Asherah. Not one, but several findings match the two together. Two large storage jars (Pithoi) were found in the Northeast Sinai area of Kuntillat ‘Arjud, dated to approx. 800 BC, which measure over three feet in height and one of them is inscribed as such: “Amaryau said to my lord…. May you be blessed by Yahweh and by his Asherah. May he bless you and keep you, and be with my lord.” (42) Located at this same site we have a different inscription which reads: “I have blessed you by Yahweh shmrn and his Asherah.” (43) At Khirbet al-Qom, about nine miles from Hebron, another inscription reads: “Uriah the rich has caused it to be written: Blessed be Uriah by Yahweh and by his Asherah; from his enemies he has saved him.” (44) In Israel, Asherah (i.e. Ashtaroth) was coupled with Baal as revealed in 2 Kings: “(4) The king ordered Hilkiah the high priest, the priests next in rank and the doorkeepers to remove from the temple of the LORD all the articles made for Baal and Asherah and all the starry hosts.” (45) But the word “ashterah” has a wider significance in the Old Testament as it is frequently applied to the wooden posts symbolizing the mother-goddess which stood beside the altars or mazzeboth (i.e. menhirs) in the sanctuaries and sacred groves where vegetation rites were performed. (46) |
According to E.O. James: “No doubt when the Biblical narratives were drawn up before and after the Exile, Asherah as the name of the goddess had become confused with anything connected with her cult, so it was employed in a generic sense, just as all vegetation gods and their cultus were called ‘Baal’.” (47) The restriction on women and worship of the goddess was in fact a patriarchal struggle against the underlying foundations of the goddess worship, that of the earth and all its sacred manifestations. The earth itself, the trees, the plants and herbs, but most especially, the mushrooms. The Levite priesthood was attempting to restrict women’s knowledge, and through them, the men and their energetic power. The focus was not just on the worship of Asherah, but also the arts of magic inherent in living in accord with the earth. In Leviticus, we learn about the restriction on necromancy: “A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:27) (48) Also, from Deuteronomy: “(3) you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. (4) It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him. (5) That prophet or dreamer must be put to death for inciting rebellion against the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery.” (Deuteronomy 13-3-5) The priests themselves of course, were fully aware of the knowledge of the mushroom. Levite priests were originally serpent priests – i.e., Levi: “great serpent,” as in Leviathan. (49) It was the Levite priesthood among the Hebrews who first took a severe approach to restricting women’s rights. The Levite priests demanded virginity until marriage for all women and the punishment inflicted was stoning to death or burning and then once married, fidelity was insured by constant threat of stoning or burning. A woman who was raped was still murdered and as Merlin Stone points in her book, When God Was a Woman, this reveals the true intent of the Levite priests, namely, the ability of the men from the Hebrew tribe to have firsthand knowledge of paternity. (50) (40) Hebrew Goddess, p. 63 (41) ibid, p. 64 (42) Translated by Raphael Patai) (Cf. Ze'ev Meshel, "Did Yahweh Have a Consort?" Biblical Archaeological Review, Vol. 5, No. 2 (March-April, 1979), pp. 24-34 (43) John Day in Journal of Biblical Studies (1985), pp. 391-392 (44) Hebrew Goddess, p. 52-53; John Day in Journal of Biblical Studies, (1985), p. 394 (45) 2 Kings xxiii. 4; Judges, ii. 13; x. 6; I Sam. vii. 4; xii. 10 (46) Jud. vi. 25, 28, 30; Deut vii. 5; xvi. 21; I Kings xv. 13; xvi. 33; 2 Kings xiii. 6; xvii. 10; xviii. 4; xxiii. 4, 6, 14; Jer. xvii. 2 (47) Cult of the Mother Goddess, p. 78 (48) Great Cosmic Mother, p. 188 (49) Great Cosmic Mother p. 155 (50) When God was a Woman, p. 156 |