Goddess Restoration Project
You can take Goddess out of the Church,
but NOT out of the Woman.
Modern day Priestesses are back!
but NOT out of the Woman.
Modern day Priestesses are back!
Restoring Goddess
SUNY Orange Honors Capstone Dissertation by Professor Andi Nowack, Phi Theta Kappa 2010-2012
At first glance, evidence of the Goddess once worshipped alongside the God of the world’s most influential Abrahamic religions (i.e. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) may have little meaning. The suggestion that a Goddess was once worshipped alongside the God of Abraham may come as a shock. In the U.S., Goddess is not as readily available as in Eastern countries, and when compared to the more traditional belief in God, is often discredited and demonized. Goddess may mean even less to the contemporary religious individual, unless the individual is Wiccan or Neo-Pagan, and yet the feminine divine is not confined to such simple categories. Wicca, a relatively new religion and valid in the sense that it means something to a particular group of people, does not accurately represent Goddess of ancient times. Charlotte Allen wrote an article entitled “The Scholars and the Goddess” in which great effort is expended on her part to debunk all feminine spirituality. Allen’s statement that contemporary Pagans “neither worship Satan nor practice the sort of malicious magic traditionally associated with witches . . . [and] tend to be white, middle-class, highly educated, and politically involved in liberal and environmental causes” reveals the long standing idea that witches or witchcraft is still associated with Satanism or devil worship (18). The validity of belief in Goddess is often demonized, discredited, and convoluted. The belief in God, on the other hand, while not followed by everyone, is still an integral part of Western culture. The article also reveals a strong urge to debunk a matriarchal Goddess for which there is no hard archeological evidence (no more than there is to prove the existence of God), but for which there is, as this paper will show, historical mention often enough to elicit such an impassioned argument.
The issues raised by the reassignment of feminine sacred symbols as Satanic may be a detriment to how mortal genders relate to one another during life on earth. There is a strong suggestion of pre-Abrahamic Goddess worship, the suppression and demonization of which has distorted views of what it means to experience healthy feminine spirituality, going so far as to falsely accuse, persecute, torture and execute followers of Goddess spirituality.
In the year 2000, I lived in Woodstock and rented a room from artist Paul McMahon, and there had the rare opportunity to study under Paul and Bhagavan Das, who studied under Ram Das, who studied under Neem Karoli Baba, who studied under the famous Babaji of India. It was through word of mouth, handed down by generations, that I learned that all the minor goddesses of India, such as Parvati, Durga, and Kali are in essence manifestations of a supreme Mother Goddess, Devi — the very same concept applied to Christ as being an avatar of His Father. Perhaps it was my early dealings with this influence of Goddess worship that led me to search for evidence of Goddess at the roots of my own culture. I was born to Catholic parents who left the church when I was six years old. For the next eight years, I attended church on Saturdays with my parents in a Christian fundamentalist cult known as the Worldwide Church of God. That version of the WWCG is no longer in existence, but can best be described as a fusion between Christianity, Jehovah’s Witness, and Judaism. From the age of six to fourteen, I was no longer allowed to celebrate Christmas or my own birthday. Strict Bible studies were a part of my weekly life, and my knowledge of scripture is one benefit that I have retained from this experience.
When I was fourteen years old, the WWCG fell apart and was debunked as a cult, and my entire childhood seemed a sham that was lost. I decided that I wanted truly understand, then, which God was the right God since it had cost me so much. I left my parents’ church of choice and began a personal quest for spiritual knowledge that has led me down many paths. In 2007, I decided to fully pursue my Catholic roots and complete all the sacraments. I attended a Cursillo three-day retreat for Christians, and it was a deeply moving experience. Ultimately, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, I was unable to remain an active part of the Catholic institution, though I still cherish some aspects of it.
The one thing that I learned through my experiences, if anything, is that if God is real, He (or She) is not separate from the individual. God is not a harsh dictator sitting upon a throne in the clouds, far away, casting judgment on the ants crawling below. God, to me, is the ants, the leaves, the clouds, the wind, the water, the rocks, all creatures minute and grand, and the quiet voice inside my heart. Since I am a human being who seeks to find beauty in all human beings and since I firmly believe that if there is a God, that God must have created male and female with equal love, it occurred to me that God must be beyond gender. At the same time, God must include aspects of both father and mother to be complete. If God is beyond gender, then logically God must include and encompass all aspects of gender. Yet, whenever I tried to express the Catholic prayers and refer to God as She, even though I had been told by many religious authorities that God was indeed beyond gender, I would always get strange looks and find myself corrected by the nun or priest standing nearby. To my young mind, this seemed directly hypocritical, and so I have sought answers. For the reason of feeling deeply spiritual, of being a woman and having a connection to God which I could not wholly understand through the traditional means provided to me, I have searched for evidence of Goddess and found that in spite of every effort to remove Her throughout history, She lives on in the most unlikely of places.
Patriarchal religion still has the most influence on socio-cultural and family structures, particularly in the Middle East and here in the West. Patriarchy continues to influence history, as so many wars have been fought and are still being fought in the name of God. As so many civilized people are staunchly unwilling to part with the scriptures, traditions, and rituals of old, and as people of various spiritual beliefs or no spiritual beliefs have no choice but to integrate with these patriarchal religious views in order to coexist with fellow members of the human race, the evidence of this pre-Abrahamic Goddess might surpass a mild curiosity and become incredibly useful information in the struggle for culture and gender integration. If humanity is unwilling to part with the “Father,” perhaps it would be useful to recall the “Mother,” to recount the manner in which She has been forgotten in history and yet remains as a ghost, in a vague and diminutive form.
One of the most significant finds of Goddess evidence is an archeological site in Turkey, discussed by anthropologist Kathryn Rountree in her article “Archeologists and Goddess Feminists at Catalhoyuk: An Experiment in Multivocality.” Nine-thousand year-old Çatalhöyük was uncovered in the 1960s at the Konya Plain in Anatolia. Originally excavated by archeologist James Mellaart “between 1961 and 1965 . . . [Çatalhöyük] became famous for its association with the ancient worship of a female deity evidenced by the discovery of many clay ‘Mother Goddess’ figurines, especially that of a large, stately woman seated flanked by leopards” (8). The discoveries of these Goddess idols excited people who sought the divine feminine. It became an important spiritual site for such individuals. Ann L. Barstow’s influential 1978 essay, as well as the writings of archeologist Marija Gimbutas, brings attention to Mellaart’s work. Such findings have “led modern followers of Goddess spirituality to adopt Çatalhöyük as a quintessential Goddess site” (9). After the young Mellaart was evicted by Turkish authorities under strange circumstances, the site sat dormant until 1993 when the dig was taken over by archeologist Ian Hodder.
As a woman and a Goddess-feminist, Rountree was eager to visit Çatalhöyük and meet Hodder, but left feeling rather disappointed in Hodder’s dismissal of the spiritual significance of the site. However, those archeologists and visitors who believe in the ancient Goddess with as much reverence as any other apostle displayed attitudes of excitement while on the site, as revealed by Rountree: "Everyone who told me about it exclaimed, “Have you seen the Mother Goddess?” Not one of these archeologists asked, “Have you seen the new female figurine?” Later . . . one woman scientist asked if she could touch the figurine. Doing so, she exclaimed, without a detectable hint of irony, “I have touched the Goddess!” (26). Rountree further expresses in her footnotes an interest in the use of the generic term “Mother Goddess,” particularly since there was no indication of this figurine being pregnant or holding a baby. She questions the uses of the term “Mother Goddess” among different users in different contexts, and the politics that may or may not accompany the use of the term. Rountree’s position on the struggle between the interpretations of archeologists versus the “Goddess-feminists for whom Çatalhöyük is an important ancient and contemporary sacred site” is that the current archeological voices of authority have reached consensus to dismiss Mellaart’s findings and interpretations entirely (7).
Hodder explains that “when the past is claimed by present communities . . . reflexivity has been forced on archeology” (8). Hodder is claiming that this reverence for the feminine did not exist in prehistoric civilization. Sarah Pomeroy, PhD. extrapolates, “If it is impossible to draw any conclusion about social systems in prehistory, then we must recognize that it is as foolish to postulate masculine dominance in prehistory as to postulate female dominance” [emphasis mine] (15). In his study of the Neolithic materials at Çatalhöyük, Mellaart discovered a strong suggestion that women held more power and were held in higher respect in prehistoric civilization. Barstow recounts that Mellaart concluded, “an interpretation of the religious artifacts, and not vice versa . . . suggests a mode of community control in which women and men lived more interdependently, with more sharing of power, than we know of in later societies” [emphasis mine] (9). This evidence poses the question of what meaning the clay Goddess figurines may have held for Neolithic peoples. Even if, as Hodder claims, they were merely fertility symbols, there is a strong suggestion that the value of femininity was held in much higher regard among human ancestors. Barstow’s consideration of Hodder’s interpretation of the female figurines, drawing on the perspective of art history, sheds light on Hodder’s assumption that they were carved by men and thus represent male desires. Barstow reveals that Mellaart, “[f]ailing to find any evidence of central authority at [Çatalhöyük], no plaza or palace, no large grain bin or major shrine, . . . speculated that authority was shared” (9). Based on this evidence, in prehistoric society women were most probably considered as equals, and not as mere sex objects to men as contemporary media and culture would have it.
In addition to the site at Çatalhöyük, scholars and scientists have attempted to shed light on a Hebrew Goddess, Asherah. There exists another significant Goddess find credited to French archeologist Claude Schaeffer who in 1929 discovered clay tablets at the Syrian site of Ras Shamra, the ancient Uragit. According to G. Douglas Young, Schaeffer unearthed “Semitic texts in alphabetic cuneiform, dating from about the early part of the fourteenth century B.C.E. It can hardly be doubted that the stories . . . had been handed down for some time prior to their being written” (124). Scholarly voices seem restrained in proclaiming the validity of the Hebrew Goddess, or seem constrained to diminish Her role as much as possible. The dating of the tablets logically constitutes them as original Biblical scripture, and yet they will not be incorporated into the Bible.
The actual name of Asherah appears twice in the currently accepted Bible and only in regard to the idols built for the Goddess, but evidence of a Mother Goddess concept appears much earlier. In the beginning of the Bible is a significant passage about the creation of life on earth being interdependent in regard to gender. Anthropologist Benjamin Urrutia states that “a straightforward reading of Genesis 1:26-27 suggests very strongly that the original writer had both male and female deities present at the organizing of the world: ‘let us make mankind . . . in our image and likeness . . . male and female’" [emphasis mine] (1180). This is as forthright as Urrutia dares to get.
Gender issues come in to play, for God is not only Father but also Mother, a polytheistic arrangement. Monotheistic religion is an institution that came much later with religious “reformers such as Ezra, responsible for the expulsion of foreign wives (Ezra 10:10-11) and . . . of Anath and Asherah [and] gave us what since then has been the orthodox version of Judaism” (1180). Ezra, among other prophets, participated in the reformation to remove Goddess from worship. Urrutia seems to be afraid of upsetting the status quo, but he points out that from the very start of things, God is not alone in the act of creation.
Asherah’s name is mentioned only twice in the current Bible. The book of II Kings 17:10, states, “the Israelites set up pillars and Asherahs for themselves on every high hill and under every leafy tree;” in II Kings 17:16, “they made an Asherah.” The biblical recognition indicates the significance of this Goddess to the ancient Hebrews. Historian and anthropologist Raphael Patai explains that “the twofold mention of Asherah alone indicates the relatively great importance of the worship of this Goddess among all the deities served by the Israelites in the 160 or 170 years preceding their Assyrian exile” (47). The mention of multiple deities being worshipped indicates a higher level of religious tolerance among ancient people. Allen claims that “there is no indication, either archeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal Goddess” (19). While this is true, so far as current academic publications show, scholars such as Raphael Patai and Elaine Pagels have proved that neither was the worship of the father God that is so well known today originally perceived as that of a single, monotheistic deity, but like the continued worship of Goddess during the great witch hunts of Europe, was transformed into a new mythology that came much later than its origin.
The first major reformation of Judaism came about during what Jewish scholars call the post-exile period, around the 5th century B.C.E. Monotheism took out of context the concept that all is one, redefining it to mean that the one chosen by a particular group is all that there is or can be. Patai claims “that Asherah held the position of the chief or [M]other [G]oddess for at least three centuries prior to the Ugaritic period” (39). Patai reveals that Asherah’s worship can be traced back three centuries prior to the Bronze Age, or from approximately 6000 B.C.E. Long before Yahweh became separated from other gods, He had a long and much celebrated dual reign with Asherah that encompassed the entire Near East. This suggests that the monotheistic version of God, who is jealous of all other gods, was created in man’s image, or the image of idealistic prophets, and not vice-versa.
Patai reveals the history of the Canaanite Asherah, “[A]s preserved on numerous tablets . . . and dating from the 14th century B.C. . . . figured prominently as the wife of El, the chief god. Her full name was ‘Lady Asherah of the Sea’—apparently her domain proper . . . just as that of her husband El was heaven” (38). Judging by this date, the Canaanite version of Asherah came into prominence centuries after the Hebrew influence. Noteworthy is that in the liturgies of present-day Catholicism, a religion descendant of Judaism, Mother Mary is referred to as “Stella Maris,” the Star of the Sea. According to Patai, a plethora of material unearthed at Ugarit (modern-day Ram Shamra close to the Mediterranean) near the turn of the twentieth century proves that Asherah was, for Hebrews and Canaanites, the highest matriarchal Goddess, “Progenitress of the Gods.” It may be that the current Christian “Mother of God” had origins in human history as the Mother Goddess, but suffered demotion from divinity, and was lowered from the status of being equal or complementary to God.
As the religions of the ancient East during and prior to the Ugaritic period were polytheistic, in each region where a god or Goddess was worshipped, the deity’s personality assumed the character of the locale. Patai states, “Thus there was . . . an Asherah of Tyre, an Asherah of Sidon, and there were Asherahs of many other localities (just as there is a Virgin of Fatima, a Virgin of Guadalupe, etc.)” (39). Hebrew Goddess worship was, according to Patai, practiced in the capital cities of Israel and Judah, and even when the early campaigns began to stamp out other male pagan gods, during the reign of King Solomon, as Asherah, Yahweh’s wife, was not seen as a threat.
Allen does admit that “scholars agree the ancients were polytheists” but overlooks the significance of this statement (20). Patai reminds us that more often than not, the pre-Bronze Age male gods were considered synonymous. Patai continues, “Peoples whose traditional religions included the worship of these gods lived all around the Hebrew kingdom and in its midst . . . To accept their gods did not mean the importation of foreign deities but the joining in old, traditional, local worships” [emphasis mine] (43). Deities often represented one another and had a shape shifting quality. Asherah’s daughter Astarte was considered divine in her own right and a manifestation of her mother, much as Jesus was a manifestation of the Yahweh on earth, according to the Christian religion. God and Goddess both assumed varied forms to suit various purposes in religion.
Feminist author and journalist Barbara G. Walker made two comments concerning the thousand names of the Goddess. The first is that "Every female divinity . . . may be correctly regarded as only another aspect of the core concept of a female Supreme Being." Walker's other significant comment is, "If such a system had been applied to the usual concept of God . . . there would now be a multitude of separate 'gods' with names like Almighty, Yahweh, Lord, Holy Ghost . . . ad infinitum, each one assigned to a particular function in the world pantheon" (346). Allen is correct in that Yahweh did not represent a different aspect of other male gods, but, as Patai has pointed out, the gods were viewed by nations as different names and personalities of the same supreme creator. This logic should be just as easily applied to the many Goddess names representing different aspects of the same supreme force of creation.
Something happened in the Israelite history that changed the way they chose to worship God, but the exact reasons are unclear. Patai reveals that when campaigns began to eradicate all pagan gods in favor of Yahweh, Asherah was at first not attacked. Initially, Her temple “escaped unharmed and her worship survived down to the end of Israelite monarchy” (48). There is a strong suggestion that reverence for Goddess was so deeply entrenched in the populace that even the most zealous reformists dared not take action against Her. Patai poses the theory that Asherah was regarded as “complementary to, rather than competitive with, Yahweh, and [H]er worship therefore [was] tolerated” (48). Whatever the real reason may be, Asherah’s significance to ancient Hebrews cannot be denied. Patai states that “the continuity of Asherah worship in Israel is a fact which must be recognized and remembered in any attempt to trace the subsequent role played by the concept of a female divinity in the popular religion of the people of Judea and their heirs, the Jews” (48). The Goddess was an integral part of the worship of the Israelites at their roots, and yet in the Christian sense, later became termed “pagan” and synonymous with devil worship.
The first religious reform in the history of the Judean kingdom spawned the persecution of Goddess, according to Patai. The campaign began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa (908-867 B.C.E.), “under the influence of a prophet” (48). Biblical record suggests that the reform may have resulted from a royal family feud. Asa’s mother (or by some accounts, grandmother), Macaah, had favored his older brother Abijah, who had a short reign before him. She held the position of “queen-mother” during Abijah’s reign, and brought the worship of Asherah into the southern part of Palestine. When Asa assumed the throne, he had the Asherah idols “hew[n] down, and removed the Asherah idol made by his mother (or grandmother), at the same time deposing Macaah herself from her exalted position of queen-mother” (49). Patai then tells us that Jehoshafat (870-846), the son and successor of Asa, continued in the footsteps of his father by forcefully having all Asherah idols removed from the kingdom Judah, because shortly after Asa’s death, the idols began springing up everywhere again. Shaking the people from Goddess worship was so difficult that Joash (836-798), the successor of Jehoshafat, eventually yielded to their desires. Kings continued to deconstruct and restore the Goddess. Patai continues, “Asherah was reintroduced into the [Hebrew] temple . . . [and] remained [there] until King Hezekiah (727-698) removed it . . . Hezekiah cut down the Asherah and broke into pieces the Brazen Serpent which Moses had made” (49). When Hezekiah’s son and successor, Manasseh (698-642) ascended, it is interesting that the only item reintroduced to the temple under Manasseh’s counter-reformation was the Asherah idol. The restoration of Asherah without the Brazen Serpent, at the request of common folk, suggests that the people of Judah valued Goddess more than a relic of Moses.
The only Goddess that is widely known or recognized in the West today is the Wiccan version, and She is often discredited as demonic while those who practice Goddess spirituality are incorrectly labeled as either Satanists or atheists. Allen attempts to downplay the witch hunts of Europe, during which the accused witches’ crime was worshipping the Goddess that Allen denies in an echo of previous political agendas. According to archeologist Marija Gimbutas, “In the period of the Great Inquisition, [the witch] was considered to be a disciple of Satan. The dethronement of this . . . Goddess whose legacy was carried on by . . . the best and bravest minds of the time, is marked by blood and the greatest shame of the Christian Church” [emphasis mine] (319). The symbols of feminine divine have been reassigned to represent evil instead of restorative power. While Allen dismisses these symbols as not being Satanic, she also fails to recognize or assign further meaning to the Goddess who sticks out like a sore thumb in history, but whom nobody can accurately define.
The Mother Goddess worshipping witches were accused of being disciples of Satan. Therefore, it is pertinent to examine exactly what the “devil,” or Satan, is. Belief in Satan as the supreme force of evil, according to The Origin of Satan by Princeton’s professor of Theology Elaine Pagels, began with the occupation of Judea by Rome, where one finds a nation torn apart by war and revolution. The old reformers needed to assert themselves yet again as the true Jews, and suddenly from a religion that did not previously have a devil, Satan was born. Satan became a stronger presence in the scriptures as reformists refined the more sadistic qualities of God into a separate character. To understand how the character Satan came about is to understand how it can be and has been altered to mean anything or anyone who does not conform to the political and/or religious status quo, including the country folk who clung to an ancient form of Goddess worship.
The God of the Jews (and eventually the Christians), Jehovah or Yahweh, was at first, only one of many gods. Pagels explains that early Christians “claimed the pagan gods were evil, but did not question their existence!” There is in the Old Testament no mention of Satan as a character separate from or opposed to Jehovah. When the word satan first appears in the Hebrew text, it is not the name of an actual entity but rather a word used to refer to any spirit of God when carrying out a specific purpose. Pagels explains that “The [Hebrew] root [word] śṭn means 'one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as adversary. (The Greek term diablos, later translated ‘devil,’ literally means ‘one who throws something across one’s path’)” (39). Any spirit working for Jehovah to trick humans (such as Job) was referred to as ‘a satan,’ including various angels, who were God’s first children, the elder siblings of mankind. In the Old Testament, God deals pain and suffering to humans with “alarming frequency” as Richard Cavendish describes in the encyclopedia of Man, Myth & Magic, “but in these early traditions there is no hint of the presence of a Devil” because God is the one inflicting all the damage (569). Jehovah at first behaves very much like a pagan god, having both merciful and sadistic qualities. This revision of the mythology to create a character that represents a “supreme force of evil” further whittled down the gray areas or aspects of God, creating a duality of good and evil, replacing the former duality of masculinity and femininity.
The faction of Jewish enemies who sided with the Roman enemy, were seen as the “intimate enemy,” as Pagels describes in chapter two. These were the scholars, the younger generation, the generally more open minded people who were willing to integrate the pagan gods of the Romans. Satan became a wholly separate identity from God when Jehovah needed to be redefined as a God who was wholly good, to suit the needs of the ‘true Jews’ in defining themselves against those who were straying from the orthodox path, “and biblical texts which originally had nothing to do with [Satan] were taken as scriptural evidence of his existence” (Cavendish 569). This need to sort out “us” versus “them,” as is often the case during wartime, was deeply felt by the Jews who did not want to relinquish old traditions to the new Roman ideologies and were outraged by those who would integrate pagan gods with their own God, although Patai has pointed out that this would be more like restoring more tolerant ways of the past, where God and Goddess reigned side by side, rather than actually introducing something new.
The revelation that the satan is a spirit of God who was slowly separated from the court of God by human necessity, and the myth behind the fallen angel Lucifer, the firstborn angel, suggests that Satan is the most intimate enemy of all - the one that comes right from home. Intimate relationships between human beings, especially between men and women, families and neighbors, or on a grander scale, the relationships between nations competing for resources, or religions competing for supremacy over each other, all have the potential to leave any one party as the scapegoat du jour. The biblical scholar Jon Levenson says, “the enemies cease to be merely earthly powers . . . and become, instead or in addition, cosmic forces of the utmost malignancy” (qtd. in Pagels 38). Most accounts of witch-related accusations occurred between friends, family members and neighbors who had some disagreement over property, power or money. As the character of Satan was created out of a need of separatists to define “us” versus “them” on a spiritual scale (to justify earthly wars), this idea grew over time to encompass anything or anyone who did not conform to patriarchal monotheism, including Goddess worshippers, i.e. “pagan” country folk. Feminine divine was redefined as satanic, even though the origin of Goddess worship can be clearly traced to the evidence that Goddess and God shared reverence in the temples long before the first reformation, and Goddess had nothing whatsoever to do with the much later construct of Satan as a supreme force of evil. It seems that Satanism has become another generic catch-all term, like paganism, to categorize anyone or anything that does not fit the status quo.
Satan did not begin as a separate personality, but was separated later to suit political need of segregating groups with different levels of tolerance for religious preferences. The witch hunts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries in Europe demonstrate the bloody genocide of those deemed to be Satanists. The torture and executions of women accused as witches during this period is estimated to be more than eight million by Gimbutas. That figure does not including the Salem witch trials. This is a holocaust against simple country women based on religious non-conformity. Women make up more than half the population of the planet, and yet still this is not taught in history or commonly discussed. Though worship of God as father claims to respect life, history suggests that the opposite is true.
To understand how worship of the Goddess has been demonized, one must examine the root of what certain symbols associated with witchcraft or devil-worship really represent. Carl Liungman’s Dictionary of Symbols gives a surprising definition of the pentagram, saying “The pentagram within a circle has no meaning by itself. A filled version of the sign is used as a symbol of war in the United States and appears on tanks and fighter jets.” It is a symbol for the planet Venus, because it is an exact traced outline of the movement of Venus’ orbit. What that means is, as Liungman describes, “This planet is the only one in our system that can clearly be identified with a graphic structure unambiguously derived from a plotting of its astronomical movements in space” (333). Furthermore, depending on where Venus is along its orbit, it can be seen either in the morning sky or evening sky. Thus, Venus is known half the year as the morning star and half as the evening star. Lucifer is referred to as the morning star in Isaiah 14:12 and Christ is referred to as the morning star in Revelation 22:16. An eight-pointed star, according to Liungman, is a more ancient symbol for the planet Venus, but is rarely used in the West except as “a Christmas star or the star of Bethlehem” (319). Judging from this very basic knowledge, the dual aspects of “the morning star” have been separated in Judeo-Christian religion as Christ versus Satan. Venus is represented in Greek mythology as Goddess of both love and war, bearing the dual nature of life-giver and life- taker, hence the two star symbols. The duality of life and death is the very nature of mortal existence. Instead of accepting an integrated whole, these halves were separated, and amidst the focus upon what is good and what is evil, the true meaning of morality was lost. Perhaps it is that Goddess bears the coveted power to decide when and if to bestow life, a power which has been symbolically stolen away from Her by a God created in man’s image.
The serpent, another symbol of evil, is often mistaken for the devil, the same devil that has also been described as having horns and cloven hooves, but no biblical evidence whatsoever supports any such physical descriptions. The serpent in the classic Garden of Eden story was originally written as simply a serpent. Neolithic man saw the serpent as a symbol of life force, sexual power, and healing. This ancient symbol carried through to modern man and survives on the medical caduceus symbol found on hospitals, pharmacies and ambulances. Gimbutas states that the idea of regenerative energy as represented by “the dynamism of the serpent is a very ancient and recurrent human preoccupation” (58). The serpent above all other animals has the ability to restore dying life energy, the same energy seen in vines, growing trees, phalluses, spirals and stalagmites, though more concentrated and powerful in the living creature. Historian Richard Cavendish elaborates that “[i]n some paintings of the [Garden of Eden] scene, including Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel, the serpent itself is female” (2829). While this rendition is often interpreted as depicting the inherent evilness of women, it may reveal a symbol of restorative feminine power.
The same coiling, serpentine energy was depicted by the symbol of ram’s horns, or goat’s horns. The hoof print made in the mud by a cloven-hoofed animal resembles a heart (another Venus symbol), or more specifically, the outer labia of a woman’s vagina. Livestock were held in great honor because the community depended on animals for milk, clothing, meat, and basic survival. These were considered gifts from the Great Goddess, or Mother Earth, in an effort of unconditional love for Her human children.
The core human brain is reptilian by nature, where the cold-blooded survival instincts of fight or flight reside. The main line of the central nervous system, the spinal cord leading up to this core very much resembles a serpent standing upright on its tail, with the head being the core of the brain, and the tail residing in the coccyx. In India this spinal-cord energy represented by the serpent is known as kundalini, and is awakened by sexual activity. It is legendarily a holy grail of sorts, a path to awakening God consciousness. Consequently, sex in Tantra is a sacred act, meant to emulate the love of God and Goddess on Earth. Nothing is considered shameful or degrading about such an act.
Early humans lived closer and more attuned to nature than modern humans, and took spiritual and philosophical meaning directly from everyday life and the surrounding environment. Gimbutas writes of the fascination with ram’s horns, “From the 7th millennium BC onward . . . The ram continues to be identified as an animal sacred to the Bird and Snake Goddess throughout the Copper and Bronze ages” (75). The described hoofed and horned being that many are led to believe is Satan is not a biblical description of the Devil, but a misrepresentation of the ancient nature god, Pan, and/or the livestock who were honored as gifts from Mother Earth to nourish humans. Nowhere in the Bible is Satan physically described. There is mention of a serpent in Genesis, as there is mention of a horned dragon in the Book of Revelation, but neither of these symbolic creatures was originally written to represent Satan. The symbols of ram’s horns, of cloven hoofs, and serpents were all cleverly reassigned to Satan by means of torturing this information out of unnumbered simple country women during the witch hunts of Europe and the Salem witch trials, again in effort to suppress and squash feminine power and feminine spirituality.
Feminine spiritual symbols were reassigned to represent something to be shunned and feared. The witch as portrayed in fairytales and children’s fiction is a gruesome hag plotting evil deeds. The image of this monster appears on Halloween decorations and in storybooks. Ask any average child to draw a picture of a witch, and most often that child will produce an image that resembles the green-skinned monstrous hag rather than a kind and wise crone. The Anglo-Saxon word for “witch” translates into “wits,” therefore it can be safely assumed that a witch is merely a woman who has her wits about her! What is truly fearful to society, perhaps, is an independent, self-reliant woman with her own plans and designs, with as much decision-making power as any free man. Cavendish reports, “A Wicca manifesto from New York proclaimed that: ‘The Witch lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us . . . There is no ‘joining’ witch. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch” (2833). Yet the stigma that has been created around the word witch still elicits certain repulsion and fear from the uninformed person. A spiritual gender war has been waged against the Goddess for quite some time, the segregating effects of which remain today. Whether or not God and Goddess are real is beyond the point. The symbols still mean something to the human psyche. Feminine spirituality has, by means of religious reformation and segregation over thousands of years, been all but entirely stamped out. Though many witches practice Goddess craft today, the ones I have met are hesitant to reveal their beliefs and for the most part do not advertise their religious views openly for fear of being shunned and/or categorized as Satanists.
The inaccuracy with which Allen reports the time span and death toll of the great witch hunts of Europe is disturbing, claiming that they took place “during a relatively short period, 1550 to 1630” and that “the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants” (20). Suffrage activist, Egyptologist, anthropologist and women’s rights pioneer campaigner Margaret Alice Murray labored extensively researching the subject and uncovered “court records from Great Britain and France spanning from 1440 to 1673” (209). According to Murray, this two hundred plus years is twice as long as Allen’s estimate. The papal authority must have been interested in pursuing the trials and executions of accused witches, because two lengthy documents were issued authorizing Dominican Inquisitors to exterminate such persons, advertising to all of Europe the “new epidemic” (which was more accurately an ancient way of doing things that was there long before Christianity). Interestingly, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s1967 The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century states: "[T]he system of the new witch-craze had achieved its final form by the 1480s . . . referring to . . . the papal bull Summs Desiderantes Affectibus issued by Pope Innocent VIII in December 1484 and the Malleus Maleficarum published . . . two years later, in 1486 . . . The importance of the papal bull of 1484 is incontestable. . . . What the Dominicans had been doing hitherto was local. . . . From now on a general mandate was given . . . And the Malleus, which is inseparable from the bull, gave force and substance to that mandate . . . it built up a solid base for a new mythology . . . the Malleus explicitly called on other authorities, lay and secular, not merely to obstruct, but positively to assist the inquisitors in their task of exterminating witches" (68-70).
According to Trevor-Roper, by the time of the Malleus, the witch-craze of rural mountain areas of Europe, and the most difficult to colonize as they were far from the influence of new capitalist cosmopolitan centers had already been in effect for nearly two centuries, extending the time frame twice as far as Murray’s count and quadrupling Allen’s estimates. The religious prejudice against Goddess-oriented practice did not cease with the reformation of ancient Judaism or the invention of Satan, but was carried out through the evolution of Christianity. In spite of great efforts of suppression, Goddess still lives on today in fresh manifestations, suggesting that human need for the divine feminine is a significant force to be reckoned with and not easy to kill off.
Goddess spirituality, or Paganism, if you will, had been discarded, though it has been brought back to the West under strange new guises. Allen is correct in her assessment of the most widely known Western version of Goddess worship, that “Wicca was the creation of an English civil servant and amateur anthropologist Gerald B. Gardener (1884-1964) . . . [and] origins of the Goddess movement lay in an interest among the romantics . . . mostly men” (19). Allen is correct in identifying Wicca as a distinctly new religion but, Wicca’s portrayal of God and Goddess side by side is more aligned with ancient Hebrew practices of worshipping Asherah along with Yahweh. Whether or not Wicca is an accurate portrayal of ancient Goddess worship is questionable. Allen describes the Wiccan religion created by Gardener “[f]rom his own experience . . . includ[ing] such Masonic staples as blindfolding, initiation, secrecy, and ‘degrees’ of priesthood” (19). This movement was created by elite Caucasian men. Most of the rites were “conducted in the nude . . . hav[ing] sexual and even bondage-and- discipline overtones.” This, no doubt, appealed highly to the Romantics of a post- Victorian era who “wanted a blissful sexual communism, a society in which chastity and monogamy were not important” (20). The Wiccans of the twentieth century were seeking freedom from the strict oppression of arranged marriages and a society which frowned upon notions of free love.
Current notions of paganism in mind, one can still not accurately define what it meant to be pagan in the ancient sense, probably because said pagans were not concerning themselves with world-conquest and had no need for the segregating terms and categories of a proper religion. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “pagan” comes from the Middle English, from Late Latin paganus, from Latin, meaning a civilian, or country dweller. As far as pagans revering a Goddess or practicing witchcraft, Cavendish reminds that, “beliefs in witchcraft . . . have been so widely observed that . . . the more important elements were . . . common to Paleolithic man and spread with him to most of the . . . world” (2816). Witches and witchcraft are relatively new terms. The ideas of worshipping Goddess have been around far longer and are much older than Abrahamic religion. Gimbutas, in the entirety of her text, backs Cavendish’s reluctant admission that “witchcraft” merely became a catch-all phrase for any sort of early ritualistic behavior of humankind that was decidedly not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim by nature. The term “pagan” is, indeed, a similar generalizing slur that I personally have heard used to refer to atheists, communists, liberals, and again, anyone not possessed of patriarchal-religious or even certain political values. The country bumpkin, who refuses to worship in a designated church or join a designated army, is the most accurate definition of a “pagan” that there is!
What can be determined with certainty is that the mistake that contemporary Pagans such as I have made, as Charlotte Allen unintentionally reveals, has been the attempt to do exactly what ancient extremists have done in reverse, which is to unseat the patriarchal God by denouncing religion altogether. Goddess, or the feminine aspect of God is then overlooked altogether or brought to focus as Gimbutas’ parthenogenetic Goddess. The legacy of the Goddess has been discredited and ridiculed as a result of this unproven attempt, and as, in general, people need to cling to something, the surety presented by the patriarchal God in a written history dominated by patriarchal authorities dictates that the power majority rules. In spite of attempts to erase holistic spirituality, the presence of the Goddess remains, though in a greatly diminished form. She is not even granted Goddess status, but must be considered merely human compared to God. Due to many years of societal-religious dissent regarding gender, the issue of God’s missing half still deserves a fresh perspective in the hopes of attaining credibility for the discarded feminine divine. Gimbutas explains, “Many of today's biblical scholars point out that God does not have to be worshipped as a male, since the biblical Creator has female characteristics . . . a Christian Goddess would be a viable option” (89). In spite of this logic and the claim of religious authorities that God is above gender, to recite the usual prayers in a traditional church and address God as Mother is still considered sacrilege or at the very least elicits stares. Yet Mary, the Mother of God, is revered in Catholicism, having seemingly greater status than Christ sometimes, especially in the more indigenous cultures that had to integrate through colonization. The Mystica Online Encyclopedia by A.G.H. offers this viable explanation:
Christianized Ephesus had been a sacred city where the Divine Mother was worshiped by "all Asia and the world" (Acts 19:27). During the [Church Council of Ephesus (432 AD)] . . . people rioted in the streets demanding the worshipping of the Goddess be restored. The prime candidate was Mary, the Virgin and Mother of Christ. The bishops conceded so far in allowing Mary to be called the Mother of God, but they forbade her to be called Mother Goddess or Goddess (96).
Goddess worship has been so entrenched in humanity’s history that She could never be totally erased, despite every violent effort to do so. To offer diminutive human replacements, which still depict the feminine as smaller or less divine than the masculine, has not been enough.
Evidence of the Goddess remains, though in a greatly demoted form, as Mary, the Stella Maris, is not even granted Goddess status, but must be considered merely human compared to God. She is also not permitted to know the full realization of sexual power, but must remain immature as a virgin in order to be good enough for God’s use. Gimbutas writes, “In later Christian times, the . . . Earth Mother fused with the Virgin Mary. Thus it is not surprising that in Catholic countries the worship of the Virgin surpasses that of Jesus” (319). When the new ideology of a monotheistic male God could not erase a well-established Goddess, as impossible to erase as Venus’ visibility in the sky of planet Earth, Goddess symbols and ideas were reintegrated in a lesser form. In spite of this dethronement of the Goddess, even as the humbled Virgin she remains a prominent and necessary figure to religion. Gimbutas beautifully describes the “folk sculptures of the Mother of God, [where] she is huge and powerful, holding a tiny Christ on her
lap” (319). One might easily make the connection that Gimbutas was referring to Michelangelo’s Pieta, the one and only piece of artwork he was ever compelled to sign.
The Pieta depicts Mother Mary as a giant. Physically, she is enormous in size compared to the freshly crucified Jesus lying broken in her arms. Surely this was not an error on the part of the master sculptor. The unusual proportion may symbolize Mary’s support. In that moment preceding resurrection, God needed his mother. One need not look far to find the parallels between Christ’s death and resurrection, and the mythologies in every culture around the world that consistently surround the symbolic death and rebirth of every male god, who is inevitably restored through the unconditional love of a divine feminine counterpart. In this version of mythology, Mother’s restorative power is passed on to the Father, but implied in the hushed tones of the papal-commissioned art.
Some effort has been made by women to attain equal religious status with men. Cavendish writes that “reformed Judaism appointed its first female rabbi in New York in 1972” (2835). In 1993 there was a newspaper from the United States that reported thousands of Catholic women became involved in a neo-pagan underground cult that worshipped nature and Goddess. Cavendish also shares the story of a spring equinox ritual conducted by Roman Catholic nuns from Philadelphia, “in which some 40 women in masks danced to the sound of drums before an altar with . . . figures of women wreathed in flowers” (2835). Reports have also been heard of entire convents full of modern day nuns referring to the Holy Spirit as She. If one were to view the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) as a family photo, one might ask whose face is missing from the picture. The mother has been reduced to the more acceptably neutered form of a ghost. Cavendish also shares, “In 1994, Manchester Cathedral in England witnessed an ecumenical women’s service in which God was referred to as She and a Christa, a crucified female Christ, was carried in procession through the nave” (2835). While these are all valiant efforts of women to get an even foothold in a male-dominated religion, they are not nearly enough to level the steep climb that still exists towards religious and spiritual gender equality.
Rather than replace God, Goddess should be given equal recognition, if for no other reason than that these ideals have been for centuries affecting every little girl and boy who is made to attend a traditional church, instilling harmful gender values that carry into adulthood and are bequeathed to future generations. Feminist Mary Daly argues that “the Judaeo-Christian tradition of God as male has authorised the assumption that feminineness is a secondary, deficient, inferior form of being” (qtd. in Cavendish 2834). Since women’s suffrage in the twenties, the women’s civil rights movement in the sixties, and more recently in the nineties, the world has for the first time in recorded history seen the long-awaited beginning of women’s liberation, but it is not yet fully actualized due, mainly, to religious beliefs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had pointed out that “woman is considered a secondary being in the Bible and . . . this [is] being used to justify unequal treatment of women in American life” (qtd. Cavendish 2834). The biblical role of Eve has been the argument against women’s liberation in Judeo-Christian cultures for centuries, and that psychological warfare against women continues today. It is time to wake up and remember the Goddess who restores life to God, to refute the lie that to be born female is to be born inferior, or worse, to be born inherently evil.
According to a 2009 article in “The Age,” former President of the United States Jimmy Carter left his Southern Baptist Church after more than sixty years of attending. His decision was “unavoidable” after church leaders prohibited women from being ordained and insisted that women be "subservient to their husbands." Carter claims that in former years he tried to change the institution from the inside out by sticking with it, but in the end he was left with no choice but to hope that his absence might do what his presence could not. The former President’s commentary on his decision beautifully expresses the distress that society still suffers from outdated dogmas: "At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities [emphasis mine]. And, later: "The truth is that male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world (Misra).
These ideas, and the research presented in this paper raise an important question about how traditional, patriarchal, monotheistic religion instills harmful gender-views in people from a young and vulnerable age. Little girls and boys made to attend church will all be brainwashed with the assumption that God is Father and if Christian, that God’s mother is merely human and a perpetual virgin. They will be made to believe in a bogeyman called Satan who has no physical description, but whose traits, characteristics, and preferences can take any shape or form depending on what the religious leader wants to suppress or separate from the group, including but not limited to feminine-oriented spirituality. This type of psychological warfare does not promote a world of tolerance, peace, mutual respect and inclusiveness. By looking back to ancient times, before the birth of religions and their various reforms, we may find something that more closely resembles equality and tolerance among people of all genders, colors, and spiritual perceptions. If Goddess is a concept that is so unfounded, insignificant, un-provable, and “bunk” as Allen claims, then why is She so hard to get rid of? You can take Goddess out of the Church, but not out of the woman, or more accurately, any woman who dares to look within and recognize her own worth. Perhaps the only way to find spiritual equality in the future is to first seek it in the distant past. Perhaps, when gender equality is achieved inwardly, in the spiritual sense, it will then manifest outwardly in the physical world.
Works Cited
The issues raised by the reassignment of feminine sacred symbols as Satanic may be a detriment to how mortal genders relate to one another during life on earth. There is a strong suggestion of pre-Abrahamic Goddess worship, the suppression and demonization of which has distorted views of what it means to experience healthy feminine spirituality, going so far as to falsely accuse, persecute, torture and execute followers of Goddess spirituality.
In the year 2000, I lived in Woodstock and rented a room from artist Paul McMahon, and there had the rare opportunity to study under Paul and Bhagavan Das, who studied under Ram Das, who studied under Neem Karoli Baba, who studied under the famous Babaji of India. It was through word of mouth, handed down by generations, that I learned that all the minor goddesses of India, such as Parvati, Durga, and Kali are in essence manifestations of a supreme Mother Goddess, Devi — the very same concept applied to Christ as being an avatar of His Father. Perhaps it was my early dealings with this influence of Goddess worship that led me to search for evidence of Goddess at the roots of my own culture. I was born to Catholic parents who left the church when I was six years old. For the next eight years, I attended church on Saturdays with my parents in a Christian fundamentalist cult known as the Worldwide Church of God. That version of the WWCG is no longer in existence, but can best be described as a fusion between Christianity, Jehovah’s Witness, and Judaism. From the age of six to fourteen, I was no longer allowed to celebrate Christmas or my own birthday. Strict Bible studies were a part of my weekly life, and my knowledge of scripture is one benefit that I have retained from this experience.
When I was fourteen years old, the WWCG fell apart and was debunked as a cult, and my entire childhood seemed a sham that was lost. I decided that I wanted truly understand, then, which God was the right God since it had cost me so much. I left my parents’ church of choice and began a personal quest for spiritual knowledge that has led me down many paths. In 2007, I decided to fully pursue my Catholic roots and complete all the sacraments. I attended a Cursillo three-day retreat for Christians, and it was a deeply moving experience. Ultimately, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, I was unable to remain an active part of the Catholic institution, though I still cherish some aspects of it.
The one thing that I learned through my experiences, if anything, is that if God is real, He (or She) is not separate from the individual. God is not a harsh dictator sitting upon a throne in the clouds, far away, casting judgment on the ants crawling below. God, to me, is the ants, the leaves, the clouds, the wind, the water, the rocks, all creatures minute and grand, and the quiet voice inside my heart. Since I am a human being who seeks to find beauty in all human beings and since I firmly believe that if there is a God, that God must have created male and female with equal love, it occurred to me that God must be beyond gender. At the same time, God must include aspects of both father and mother to be complete. If God is beyond gender, then logically God must include and encompass all aspects of gender. Yet, whenever I tried to express the Catholic prayers and refer to God as She, even though I had been told by many religious authorities that God was indeed beyond gender, I would always get strange looks and find myself corrected by the nun or priest standing nearby. To my young mind, this seemed directly hypocritical, and so I have sought answers. For the reason of feeling deeply spiritual, of being a woman and having a connection to God which I could not wholly understand through the traditional means provided to me, I have searched for evidence of Goddess and found that in spite of every effort to remove Her throughout history, She lives on in the most unlikely of places.
Patriarchal religion still has the most influence on socio-cultural and family structures, particularly in the Middle East and here in the West. Patriarchy continues to influence history, as so many wars have been fought and are still being fought in the name of God. As so many civilized people are staunchly unwilling to part with the scriptures, traditions, and rituals of old, and as people of various spiritual beliefs or no spiritual beliefs have no choice but to integrate with these patriarchal religious views in order to coexist with fellow members of the human race, the evidence of this pre-Abrahamic Goddess might surpass a mild curiosity and become incredibly useful information in the struggle for culture and gender integration. If humanity is unwilling to part with the “Father,” perhaps it would be useful to recall the “Mother,” to recount the manner in which She has been forgotten in history and yet remains as a ghost, in a vague and diminutive form.
One of the most significant finds of Goddess evidence is an archeological site in Turkey, discussed by anthropologist Kathryn Rountree in her article “Archeologists and Goddess Feminists at Catalhoyuk: An Experiment in Multivocality.” Nine-thousand year-old Çatalhöyük was uncovered in the 1960s at the Konya Plain in Anatolia. Originally excavated by archeologist James Mellaart “between 1961 and 1965 . . . [Çatalhöyük] became famous for its association with the ancient worship of a female deity evidenced by the discovery of many clay ‘Mother Goddess’ figurines, especially that of a large, stately woman seated flanked by leopards” (8). The discoveries of these Goddess idols excited people who sought the divine feminine. It became an important spiritual site for such individuals. Ann L. Barstow’s influential 1978 essay, as well as the writings of archeologist Marija Gimbutas, brings attention to Mellaart’s work. Such findings have “led modern followers of Goddess spirituality to adopt Çatalhöyük as a quintessential Goddess site” (9). After the young Mellaart was evicted by Turkish authorities under strange circumstances, the site sat dormant until 1993 when the dig was taken over by archeologist Ian Hodder.
As a woman and a Goddess-feminist, Rountree was eager to visit Çatalhöyük and meet Hodder, but left feeling rather disappointed in Hodder’s dismissal of the spiritual significance of the site. However, those archeologists and visitors who believe in the ancient Goddess with as much reverence as any other apostle displayed attitudes of excitement while on the site, as revealed by Rountree: "Everyone who told me about it exclaimed, “Have you seen the Mother Goddess?” Not one of these archeologists asked, “Have you seen the new female figurine?” Later . . . one woman scientist asked if she could touch the figurine. Doing so, she exclaimed, without a detectable hint of irony, “I have touched the Goddess!” (26). Rountree further expresses in her footnotes an interest in the use of the generic term “Mother Goddess,” particularly since there was no indication of this figurine being pregnant or holding a baby. She questions the uses of the term “Mother Goddess” among different users in different contexts, and the politics that may or may not accompany the use of the term. Rountree’s position on the struggle between the interpretations of archeologists versus the “Goddess-feminists for whom Çatalhöyük is an important ancient and contemporary sacred site” is that the current archeological voices of authority have reached consensus to dismiss Mellaart’s findings and interpretations entirely (7).
Hodder explains that “when the past is claimed by present communities . . . reflexivity has been forced on archeology” (8). Hodder is claiming that this reverence for the feminine did not exist in prehistoric civilization. Sarah Pomeroy, PhD. extrapolates, “If it is impossible to draw any conclusion about social systems in prehistory, then we must recognize that it is as foolish to postulate masculine dominance in prehistory as to postulate female dominance” [emphasis mine] (15). In his study of the Neolithic materials at Çatalhöyük, Mellaart discovered a strong suggestion that women held more power and were held in higher respect in prehistoric civilization. Barstow recounts that Mellaart concluded, “an interpretation of the religious artifacts, and not vice versa . . . suggests a mode of community control in which women and men lived more interdependently, with more sharing of power, than we know of in later societies” [emphasis mine] (9). This evidence poses the question of what meaning the clay Goddess figurines may have held for Neolithic peoples. Even if, as Hodder claims, they were merely fertility symbols, there is a strong suggestion that the value of femininity was held in much higher regard among human ancestors. Barstow’s consideration of Hodder’s interpretation of the female figurines, drawing on the perspective of art history, sheds light on Hodder’s assumption that they were carved by men and thus represent male desires. Barstow reveals that Mellaart, “[f]ailing to find any evidence of central authority at [Çatalhöyük], no plaza or palace, no large grain bin or major shrine, . . . speculated that authority was shared” (9). Based on this evidence, in prehistoric society women were most probably considered as equals, and not as mere sex objects to men as contemporary media and culture would have it.
In addition to the site at Çatalhöyük, scholars and scientists have attempted to shed light on a Hebrew Goddess, Asherah. There exists another significant Goddess find credited to French archeologist Claude Schaeffer who in 1929 discovered clay tablets at the Syrian site of Ras Shamra, the ancient Uragit. According to G. Douglas Young, Schaeffer unearthed “Semitic texts in alphabetic cuneiform, dating from about the early part of the fourteenth century B.C.E. It can hardly be doubted that the stories . . . had been handed down for some time prior to their being written” (124). Scholarly voices seem restrained in proclaiming the validity of the Hebrew Goddess, or seem constrained to diminish Her role as much as possible. The dating of the tablets logically constitutes them as original Biblical scripture, and yet they will not be incorporated into the Bible.
The actual name of Asherah appears twice in the currently accepted Bible and only in regard to the idols built for the Goddess, but evidence of a Mother Goddess concept appears much earlier. In the beginning of the Bible is a significant passage about the creation of life on earth being interdependent in regard to gender. Anthropologist Benjamin Urrutia states that “a straightforward reading of Genesis 1:26-27 suggests very strongly that the original writer had both male and female deities present at the organizing of the world: ‘let us make mankind . . . in our image and likeness . . . male and female’" [emphasis mine] (1180). This is as forthright as Urrutia dares to get.
Gender issues come in to play, for God is not only Father but also Mother, a polytheistic arrangement. Monotheistic religion is an institution that came much later with religious “reformers such as Ezra, responsible for the expulsion of foreign wives (Ezra 10:10-11) and . . . of Anath and Asherah [and] gave us what since then has been the orthodox version of Judaism” (1180). Ezra, among other prophets, participated in the reformation to remove Goddess from worship. Urrutia seems to be afraid of upsetting the status quo, but he points out that from the very start of things, God is not alone in the act of creation.
Asherah’s name is mentioned only twice in the current Bible. The book of II Kings 17:10, states, “the Israelites set up pillars and Asherahs for themselves on every high hill and under every leafy tree;” in II Kings 17:16, “they made an Asherah.” The biblical recognition indicates the significance of this Goddess to the ancient Hebrews. Historian and anthropologist Raphael Patai explains that “the twofold mention of Asherah alone indicates the relatively great importance of the worship of this Goddess among all the deities served by the Israelites in the 160 or 170 years preceding their Assyrian exile” (47). The mention of multiple deities being worshipped indicates a higher level of religious tolerance among ancient people. Allen claims that “there is no indication, either archeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal Goddess” (19). While this is true, so far as current academic publications show, scholars such as Raphael Patai and Elaine Pagels have proved that neither was the worship of the father God that is so well known today originally perceived as that of a single, monotheistic deity, but like the continued worship of Goddess during the great witch hunts of Europe, was transformed into a new mythology that came much later than its origin.
The first major reformation of Judaism came about during what Jewish scholars call the post-exile period, around the 5th century B.C.E. Monotheism took out of context the concept that all is one, redefining it to mean that the one chosen by a particular group is all that there is or can be. Patai claims “that Asherah held the position of the chief or [M]other [G]oddess for at least three centuries prior to the Ugaritic period” (39). Patai reveals that Asherah’s worship can be traced back three centuries prior to the Bronze Age, or from approximately 6000 B.C.E. Long before Yahweh became separated from other gods, He had a long and much celebrated dual reign with Asherah that encompassed the entire Near East. This suggests that the monotheistic version of God, who is jealous of all other gods, was created in man’s image, or the image of idealistic prophets, and not vice-versa.
Patai reveals the history of the Canaanite Asherah, “[A]s preserved on numerous tablets . . . and dating from the 14th century B.C. . . . figured prominently as the wife of El, the chief god. Her full name was ‘Lady Asherah of the Sea’—apparently her domain proper . . . just as that of her husband El was heaven” (38). Judging by this date, the Canaanite version of Asherah came into prominence centuries after the Hebrew influence. Noteworthy is that in the liturgies of present-day Catholicism, a religion descendant of Judaism, Mother Mary is referred to as “Stella Maris,” the Star of the Sea. According to Patai, a plethora of material unearthed at Ugarit (modern-day Ram Shamra close to the Mediterranean) near the turn of the twentieth century proves that Asherah was, for Hebrews and Canaanites, the highest matriarchal Goddess, “Progenitress of the Gods.” It may be that the current Christian “Mother of God” had origins in human history as the Mother Goddess, but suffered demotion from divinity, and was lowered from the status of being equal or complementary to God.
As the religions of the ancient East during and prior to the Ugaritic period were polytheistic, in each region where a god or Goddess was worshipped, the deity’s personality assumed the character of the locale. Patai states, “Thus there was . . . an Asherah of Tyre, an Asherah of Sidon, and there were Asherahs of many other localities (just as there is a Virgin of Fatima, a Virgin of Guadalupe, etc.)” (39). Hebrew Goddess worship was, according to Patai, practiced in the capital cities of Israel and Judah, and even when the early campaigns began to stamp out other male pagan gods, during the reign of King Solomon, as Asherah, Yahweh’s wife, was not seen as a threat.
Allen does admit that “scholars agree the ancients were polytheists” but overlooks the significance of this statement (20). Patai reminds us that more often than not, the pre-Bronze Age male gods were considered synonymous. Patai continues, “Peoples whose traditional religions included the worship of these gods lived all around the Hebrew kingdom and in its midst . . . To accept their gods did not mean the importation of foreign deities but the joining in old, traditional, local worships” [emphasis mine] (43). Deities often represented one another and had a shape shifting quality. Asherah’s daughter Astarte was considered divine in her own right and a manifestation of her mother, much as Jesus was a manifestation of the Yahweh on earth, according to the Christian religion. God and Goddess both assumed varied forms to suit various purposes in religion.
Feminist author and journalist Barbara G. Walker made two comments concerning the thousand names of the Goddess. The first is that "Every female divinity . . . may be correctly regarded as only another aspect of the core concept of a female Supreme Being." Walker's other significant comment is, "If such a system had been applied to the usual concept of God . . . there would now be a multitude of separate 'gods' with names like Almighty, Yahweh, Lord, Holy Ghost . . . ad infinitum, each one assigned to a particular function in the world pantheon" (346). Allen is correct in that Yahweh did not represent a different aspect of other male gods, but, as Patai has pointed out, the gods were viewed by nations as different names and personalities of the same supreme creator. This logic should be just as easily applied to the many Goddess names representing different aspects of the same supreme force of creation.
Something happened in the Israelite history that changed the way they chose to worship God, but the exact reasons are unclear. Patai reveals that when campaigns began to eradicate all pagan gods in favor of Yahweh, Asherah was at first not attacked. Initially, Her temple “escaped unharmed and her worship survived down to the end of Israelite monarchy” (48). There is a strong suggestion that reverence for Goddess was so deeply entrenched in the populace that even the most zealous reformists dared not take action against Her. Patai poses the theory that Asherah was regarded as “complementary to, rather than competitive with, Yahweh, and [H]er worship therefore [was] tolerated” (48). Whatever the real reason may be, Asherah’s significance to ancient Hebrews cannot be denied. Patai states that “the continuity of Asherah worship in Israel is a fact which must be recognized and remembered in any attempt to trace the subsequent role played by the concept of a female divinity in the popular religion of the people of Judea and their heirs, the Jews” (48). The Goddess was an integral part of the worship of the Israelites at their roots, and yet in the Christian sense, later became termed “pagan” and synonymous with devil worship.
The first religious reform in the history of the Judean kingdom spawned the persecution of Goddess, according to Patai. The campaign began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa (908-867 B.C.E.), “under the influence of a prophet” (48). Biblical record suggests that the reform may have resulted from a royal family feud. Asa’s mother (or by some accounts, grandmother), Macaah, had favored his older brother Abijah, who had a short reign before him. She held the position of “queen-mother” during Abijah’s reign, and brought the worship of Asherah into the southern part of Palestine. When Asa assumed the throne, he had the Asherah idols “hew[n] down, and removed the Asherah idol made by his mother (or grandmother), at the same time deposing Macaah herself from her exalted position of queen-mother” (49). Patai then tells us that Jehoshafat (870-846), the son and successor of Asa, continued in the footsteps of his father by forcefully having all Asherah idols removed from the kingdom Judah, because shortly after Asa’s death, the idols began springing up everywhere again. Shaking the people from Goddess worship was so difficult that Joash (836-798), the successor of Jehoshafat, eventually yielded to their desires. Kings continued to deconstruct and restore the Goddess. Patai continues, “Asherah was reintroduced into the [Hebrew] temple . . . [and] remained [there] until King Hezekiah (727-698) removed it . . . Hezekiah cut down the Asherah and broke into pieces the Brazen Serpent which Moses had made” (49). When Hezekiah’s son and successor, Manasseh (698-642) ascended, it is interesting that the only item reintroduced to the temple under Manasseh’s counter-reformation was the Asherah idol. The restoration of Asherah without the Brazen Serpent, at the request of common folk, suggests that the people of Judah valued Goddess more than a relic of Moses.
The only Goddess that is widely known or recognized in the West today is the Wiccan version, and She is often discredited as demonic while those who practice Goddess spirituality are incorrectly labeled as either Satanists or atheists. Allen attempts to downplay the witch hunts of Europe, during which the accused witches’ crime was worshipping the Goddess that Allen denies in an echo of previous political agendas. According to archeologist Marija Gimbutas, “In the period of the Great Inquisition, [the witch] was considered to be a disciple of Satan. The dethronement of this . . . Goddess whose legacy was carried on by . . . the best and bravest minds of the time, is marked by blood and the greatest shame of the Christian Church” [emphasis mine] (319). The symbols of feminine divine have been reassigned to represent evil instead of restorative power. While Allen dismisses these symbols as not being Satanic, she also fails to recognize or assign further meaning to the Goddess who sticks out like a sore thumb in history, but whom nobody can accurately define.
The Mother Goddess worshipping witches were accused of being disciples of Satan. Therefore, it is pertinent to examine exactly what the “devil,” or Satan, is. Belief in Satan as the supreme force of evil, according to The Origin of Satan by Princeton’s professor of Theology Elaine Pagels, began with the occupation of Judea by Rome, where one finds a nation torn apart by war and revolution. The old reformers needed to assert themselves yet again as the true Jews, and suddenly from a religion that did not previously have a devil, Satan was born. Satan became a stronger presence in the scriptures as reformists refined the more sadistic qualities of God into a separate character. To understand how the character Satan came about is to understand how it can be and has been altered to mean anything or anyone who does not conform to the political and/or religious status quo, including the country folk who clung to an ancient form of Goddess worship.
The God of the Jews (and eventually the Christians), Jehovah or Yahweh, was at first, only one of many gods. Pagels explains that early Christians “claimed the pagan gods were evil, but did not question their existence!” There is in the Old Testament no mention of Satan as a character separate from or opposed to Jehovah. When the word satan first appears in the Hebrew text, it is not the name of an actual entity but rather a word used to refer to any spirit of God when carrying out a specific purpose. Pagels explains that “The [Hebrew] root [word] śṭn means 'one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as adversary. (The Greek term diablos, later translated ‘devil,’ literally means ‘one who throws something across one’s path’)” (39). Any spirit working for Jehovah to trick humans (such as Job) was referred to as ‘a satan,’ including various angels, who were God’s first children, the elder siblings of mankind. In the Old Testament, God deals pain and suffering to humans with “alarming frequency” as Richard Cavendish describes in the encyclopedia of Man, Myth & Magic, “but in these early traditions there is no hint of the presence of a Devil” because God is the one inflicting all the damage (569). Jehovah at first behaves very much like a pagan god, having both merciful and sadistic qualities. This revision of the mythology to create a character that represents a “supreme force of evil” further whittled down the gray areas or aspects of God, creating a duality of good and evil, replacing the former duality of masculinity and femininity.
The faction of Jewish enemies who sided with the Roman enemy, were seen as the “intimate enemy,” as Pagels describes in chapter two. These were the scholars, the younger generation, the generally more open minded people who were willing to integrate the pagan gods of the Romans. Satan became a wholly separate identity from God when Jehovah needed to be redefined as a God who was wholly good, to suit the needs of the ‘true Jews’ in defining themselves against those who were straying from the orthodox path, “and biblical texts which originally had nothing to do with [Satan] were taken as scriptural evidence of his existence” (Cavendish 569). This need to sort out “us” versus “them,” as is often the case during wartime, was deeply felt by the Jews who did not want to relinquish old traditions to the new Roman ideologies and were outraged by those who would integrate pagan gods with their own God, although Patai has pointed out that this would be more like restoring more tolerant ways of the past, where God and Goddess reigned side by side, rather than actually introducing something new.
The revelation that the satan is a spirit of God who was slowly separated from the court of God by human necessity, and the myth behind the fallen angel Lucifer, the firstborn angel, suggests that Satan is the most intimate enemy of all - the one that comes right from home. Intimate relationships between human beings, especially between men and women, families and neighbors, or on a grander scale, the relationships between nations competing for resources, or religions competing for supremacy over each other, all have the potential to leave any one party as the scapegoat du jour. The biblical scholar Jon Levenson says, “the enemies cease to be merely earthly powers . . . and become, instead or in addition, cosmic forces of the utmost malignancy” (qtd. in Pagels 38). Most accounts of witch-related accusations occurred between friends, family members and neighbors who had some disagreement over property, power or money. As the character of Satan was created out of a need of separatists to define “us” versus “them” on a spiritual scale (to justify earthly wars), this idea grew over time to encompass anything or anyone who did not conform to patriarchal monotheism, including Goddess worshippers, i.e. “pagan” country folk. Feminine divine was redefined as satanic, even though the origin of Goddess worship can be clearly traced to the evidence that Goddess and God shared reverence in the temples long before the first reformation, and Goddess had nothing whatsoever to do with the much later construct of Satan as a supreme force of evil. It seems that Satanism has become another generic catch-all term, like paganism, to categorize anyone or anything that does not fit the status quo.
Satan did not begin as a separate personality, but was separated later to suit political need of segregating groups with different levels of tolerance for religious preferences. The witch hunts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries in Europe demonstrate the bloody genocide of those deemed to be Satanists. The torture and executions of women accused as witches during this period is estimated to be more than eight million by Gimbutas. That figure does not including the Salem witch trials. This is a holocaust against simple country women based on religious non-conformity. Women make up more than half the population of the planet, and yet still this is not taught in history or commonly discussed. Though worship of God as father claims to respect life, history suggests that the opposite is true.
To understand how worship of the Goddess has been demonized, one must examine the root of what certain symbols associated with witchcraft or devil-worship really represent. Carl Liungman’s Dictionary of Symbols gives a surprising definition of the pentagram, saying “The pentagram within a circle has no meaning by itself. A filled version of the sign is used as a symbol of war in the United States and appears on tanks and fighter jets.” It is a symbol for the planet Venus, because it is an exact traced outline of the movement of Venus’ orbit. What that means is, as Liungman describes, “This planet is the only one in our system that can clearly be identified with a graphic structure unambiguously derived from a plotting of its astronomical movements in space” (333). Furthermore, depending on where Venus is along its orbit, it can be seen either in the morning sky or evening sky. Thus, Venus is known half the year as the morning star and half as the evening star. Lucifer is referred to as the morning star in Isaiah 14:12 and Christ is referred to as the morning star in Revelation 22:16. An eight-pointed star, according to Liungman, is a more ancient symbol for the planet Venus, but is rarely used in the West except as “a Christmas star or the star of Bethlehem” (319). Judging from this very basic knowledge, the dual aspects of “the morning star” have been separated in Judeo-Christian religion as Christ versus Satan. Venus is represented in Greek mythology as Goddess of both love and war, bearing the dual nature of life-giver and life- taker, hence the two star symbols. The duality of life and death is the very nature of mortal existence. Instead of accepting an integrated whole, these halves were separated, and amidst the focus upon what is good and what is evil, the true meaning of morality was lost. Perhaps it is that Goddess bears the coveted power to decide when and if to bestow life, a power which has been symbolically stolen away from Her by a God created in man’s image.
The serpent, another symbol of evil, is often mistaken for the devil, the same devil that has also been described as having horns and cloven hooves, but no biblical evidence whatsoever supports any such physical descriptions. The serpent in the classic Garden of Eden story was originally written as simply a serpent. Neolithic man saw the serpent as a symbol of life force, sexual power, and healing. This ancient symbol carried through to modern man and survives on the medical caduceus symbol found on hospitals, pharmacies and ambulances. Gimbutas states that the idea of regenerative energy as represented by “the dynamism of the serpent is a very ancient and recurrent human preoccupation” (58). The serpent above all other animals has the ability to restore dying life energy, the same energy seen in vines, growing trees, phalluses, spirals and stalagmites, though more concentrated and powerful in the living creature. Historian Richard Cavendish elaborates that “[i]n some paintings of the [Garden of Eden] scene, including Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel, the serpent itself is female” (2829). While this rendition is often interpreted as depicting the inherent evilness of women, it may reveal a symbol of restorative feminine power.
The same coiling, serpentine energy was depicted by the symbol of ram’s horns, or goat’s horns. The hoof print made in the mud by a cloven-hoofed animal resembles a heart (another Venus symbol), or more specifically, the outer labia of a woman’s vagina. Livestock were held in great honor because the community depended on animals for milk, clothing, meat, and basic survival. These were considered gifts from the Great Goddess, or Mother Earth, in an effort of unconditional love for Her human children.
The core human brain is reptilian by nature, where the cold-blooded survival instincts of fight or flight reside. The main line of the central nervous system, the spinal cord leading up to this core very much resembles a serpent standing upright on its tail, with the head being the core of the brain, and the tail residing in the coccyx. In India this spinal-cord energy represented by the serpent is known as kundalini, and is awakened by sexual activity. It is legendarily a holy grail of sorts, a path to awakening God consciousness. Consequently, sex in Tantra is a sacred act, meant to emulate the love of God and Goddess on Earth. Nothing is considered shameful or degrading about such an act.
Early humans lived closer and more attuned to nature than modern humans, and took spiritual and philosophical meaning directly from everyday life and the surrounding environment. Gimbutas writes of the fascination with ram’s horns, “From the 7th millennium BC onward . . . The ram continues to be identified as an animal sacred to the Bird and Snake Goddess throughout the Copper and Bronze ages” (75). The described hoofed and horned being that many are led to believe is Satan is not a biblical description of the Devil, but a misrepresentation of the ancient nature god, Pan, and/or the livestock who were honored as gifts from Mother Earth to nourish humans. Nowhere in the Bible is Satan physically described. There is mention of a serpent in Genesis, as there is mention of a horned dragon in the Book of Revelation, but neither of these symbolic creatures was originally written to represent Satan. The symbols of ram’s horns, of cloven hoofs, and serpents were all cleverly reassigned to Satan by means of torturing this information out of unnumbered simple country women during the witch hunts of Europe and the Salem witch trials, again in effort to suppress and squash feminine power and feminine spirituality.
Feminine spiritual symbols were reassigned to represent something to be shunned and feared. The witch as portrayed in fairytales and children’s fiction is a gruesome hag plotting evil deeds. The image of this monster appears on Halloween decorations and in storybooks. Ask any average child to draw a picture of a witch, and most often that child will produce an image that resembles the green-skinned monstrous hag rather than a kind and wise crone. The Anglo-Saxon word for “witch” translates into “wits,” therefore it can be safely assumed that a witch is merely a woman who has her wits about her! What is truly fearful to society, perhaps, is an independent, self-reliant woman with her own plans and designs, with as much decision-making power as any free man. Cavendish reports, “A Wicca manifesto from New York proclaimed that: ‘The Witch lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us . . . There is no ‘joining’ witch. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch” (2833). Yet the stigma that has been created around the word witch still elicits certain repulsion and fear from the uninformed person. A spiritual gender war has been waged against the Goddess for quite some time, the segregating effects of which remain today. Whether or not God and Goddess are real is beyond the point. The symbols still mean something to the human psyche. Feminine spirituality has, by means of religious reformation and segregation over thousands of years, been all but entirely stamped out. Though many witches practice Goddess craft today, the ones I have met are hesitant to reveal their beliefs and for the most part do not advertise their religious views openly for fear of being shunned and/or categorized as Satanists.
The inaccuracy with which Allen reports the time span and death toll of the great witch hunts of Europe is disturbing, claiming that they took place “during a relatively short period, 1550 to 1630” and that “the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants” (20). Suffrage activist, Egyptologist, anthropologist and women’s rights pioneer campaigner Margaret Alice Murray labored extensively researching the subject and uncovered “court records from Great Britain and France spanning from 1440 to 1673” (209). According to Murray, this two hundred plus years is twice as long as Allen’s estimate. The papal authority must have been interested in pursuing the trials and executions of accused witches, because two lengthy documents were issued authorizing Dominican Inquisitors to exterminate such persons, advertising to all of Europe the “new epidemic” (which was more accurately an ancient way of doing things that was there long before Christianity). Interestingly, British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s1967 The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century states: "[T]he system of the new witch-craze had achieved its final form by the 1480s . . . referring to . . . the papal bull Summs Desiderantes Affectibus issued by Pope Innocent VIII in December 1484 and the Malleus Maleficarum published . . . two years later, in 1486 . . . The importance of the papal bull of 1484 is incontestable. . . . What the Dominicans had been doing hitherto was local. . . . From now on a general mandate was given . . . And the Malleus, which is inseparable from the bull, gave force and substance to that mandate . . . it built up a solid base for a new mythology . . . the Malleus explicitly called on other authorities, lay and secular, not merely to obstruct, but positively to assist the inquisitors in their task of exterminating witches" (68-70).
According to Trevor-Roper, by the time of the Malleus, the witch-craze of rural mountain areas of Europe, and the most difficult to colonize as they were far from the influence of new capitalist cosmopolitan centers had already been in effect for nearly two centuries, extending the time frame twice as far as Murray’s count and quadrupling Allen’s estimates. The religious prejudice against Goddess-oriented practice did not cease with the reformation of ancient Judaism or the invention of Satan, but was carried out through the evolution of Christianity. In spite of great efforts of suppression, Goddess still lives on today in fresh manifestations, suggesting that human need for the divine feminine is a significant force to be reckoned with and not easy to kill off.
Goddess spirituality, or Paganism, if you will, had been discarded, though it has been brought back to the West under strange new guises. Allen is correct in her assessment of the most widely known Western version of Goddess worship, that “Wicca was the creation of an English civil servant and amateur anthropologist Gerald B. Gardener (1884-1964) . . . [and] origins of the Goddess movement lay in an interest among the romantics . . . mostly men” (19). Allen is correct in identifying Wicca as a distinctly new religion but, Wicca’s portrayal of God and Goddess side by side is more aligned with ancient Hebrew practices of worshipping Asherah along with Yahweh. Whether or not Wicca is an accurate portrayal of ancient Goddess worship is questionable. Allen describes the Wiccan religion created by Gardener “[f]rom his own experience . . . includ[ing] such Masonic staples as blindfolding, initiation, secrecy, and ‘degrees’ of priesthood” (19). This movement was created by elite Caucasian men. Most of the rites were “conducted in the nude . . . hav[ing] sexual and even bondage-and- discipline overtones.” This, no doubt, appealed highly to the Romantics of a post- Victorian era who “wanted a blissful sexual communism, a society in which chastity and monogamy were not important” (20). The Wiccans of the twentieth century were seeking freedom from the strict oppression of arranged marriages and a society which frowned upon notions of free love.
Current notions of paganism in mind, one can still not accurately define what it meant to be pagan in the ancient sense, probably because said pagans were not concerning themselves with world-conquest and had no need for the segregating terms and categories of a proper religion. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “pagan” comes from the Middle English, from Late Latin paganus, from Latin, meaning a civilian, or country dweller. As far as pagans revering a Goddess or practicing witchcraft, Cavendish reminds that, “beliefs in witchcraft . . . have been so widely observed that . . . the more important elements were . . . common to Paleolithic man and spread with him to most of the . . . world” (2816). Witches and witchcraft are relatively new terms. The ideas of worshipping Goddess have been around far longer and are much older than Abrahamic religion. Gimbutas, in the entirety of her text, backs Cavendish’s reluctant admission that “witchcraft” merely became a catch-all phrase for any sort of early ritualistic behavior of humankind that was decidedly not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim by nature. The term “pagan” is, indeed, a similar generalizing slur that I personally have heard used to refer to atheists, communists, liberals, and again, anyone not possessed of patriarchal-religious or even certain political values. The country bumpkin, who refuses to worship in a designated church or join a designated army, is the most accurate definition of a “pagan” that there is!
What can be determined with certainty is that the mistake that contemporary Pagans such as I have made, as Charlotte Allen unintentionally reveals, has been the attempt to do exactly what ancient extremists have done in reverse, which is to unseat the patriarchal God by denouncing religion altogether. Goddess, or the feminine aspect of God is then overlooked altogether or brought to focus as Gimbutas’ parthenogenetic Goddess. The legacy of the Goddess has been discredited and ridiculed as a result of this unproven attempt, and as, in general, people need to cling to something, the surety presented by the patriarchal God in a written history dominated by patriarchal authorities dictates that the power majority rules. In spite of attempts to erase holistic spirituality, the presence of the Goddess remains, though in a greatly diminished form. She is not even granted Goddess status, but must be considered merely human compared to God. Due to many years of societal-religious dissent regarding gender, the issue of God’s missing half still deserves a fresh perspective in the hopes of attaining credibility for the discarded feminine divine. Gimbutas explains, “Many of today's biblical scholars point out that God does not have to be worshipped as a male, since the biblical Creator has female characteristics . . . a Christian Goddess would be a viable option” (89). In spite of this logic and the claim of religious authorities that God is above gender, to recite the usual prayers in a traditional church and address God as Mother is still considered sacrilege or at the very least elicits stares. Yet Mary, the Mother of God, is revered in Catholicism, having seemingly greater status than Christ sometimes, especially in the more indigenous cultures that had to integrate through colonization. The Mystica Online Encyclopedia by A.G.H. offers this viable explanation:
Christianized Ephesus had been a sacred city where the Divine Mother was worshiped by "all Asia and the world" (Acts 19:27). During the [Church Council of Ephesus (432 AD)] . . . people rioted in the streets demanding the worshipping of the Goddess be restored. The prime candidate was Mary, the Virgin and Mother of Christ. The bishops conceded so far in allowing Mary to be called the Mother of God, but they forbade her to be called Mother Goddess or Goddess (96).
Goddess worship has been so entrenched in humanity’s history that She could never be totally erased, despite every violent effort to do so. To offer diminutive human replacements, which still depict the feminine as smaller or less divine than the masculine, has not been enough.
Evidence of the Goddess remains, though in a greatly demoted form, as Mary, the Stella Maris, is not even granted Goddess status, but must be considered merely human compared to God. She is also not permitted to know the full realization of sexual power, but must remain immature as a virgin in order to be good enough for God’s use. Gimbutas writes, “In later Christian times, the . . . Earth Mother fused with the Virgin Mary. Thus it is not surprising that in Catholic countries the worship of the Virgin surpasses that of Jesus” (319). When the new ideology of a monotheistic male God could not erase a well-established Goddess, as impossible to erase as Venus’ visibility in the sky of planet Earth, Goddess symbols and ideas were reintegrated in a lesser form. In spite of this dethronement of the Goddess, even as the humbled Virgin she remains a prominent and necessary figure to religion. Gimbutas beautifully describes the “folk sculptures of the Mother of God, [where] she is huge and powerful, holding a tiny Christ on her
lap” (319). One might easily make the connection that Gimbutas was referring to Michelangelo’s Pieta, the one and only piece of artwork he was ever compelled to sign.
The Pieta depicts Mother Mary as a giant. Physically, she is enormous in size compared to the freshly crucified Jesus lying broken in her arms. Surely this was not an error on the part of the master sculptor. The unusual proportion may symbolize Mary’s support. In that moment preceding resurrection, God needed his mother. One need not look far to find the parallels between Christ’s death and resurrection, and the mythologies in every culture around the world that consistently surround the symbolic death and rebirth of every male god, who is inevitably restored through the unconditional love of a divine feminine counterpart. In this version of mythology, Mother’s restorative power is passed on to the Father, but implied in the hushed tones of the papal-commissioned art.
Some effort has been made by women to attain equal religious status with men. Cavendish writes that “reformed Judaism appointed its first female rabbi in New York in 1972” (2835). In 1993 there was a newspaper from the United States that reported thousands of Catholic women became involved in a neo-pagan underground cult that worshipped nature and Goddess. Cavendish also shares the story of a spring equinox ritual conducted by Roman Catholic nuns from Philadelphia, “in which some 40 women in masks danced to the sound of drums before an altar with . . . figures of women wreathed in flowers” (2835). Reports have also been heard of entire convents full of modern day nuns referring to the Holy Spirit as She. If one were to view the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) as a family photo, one might ask whose face is missing from the picture. The mother has been reduced to the more acceptably neutered form of a ghost. Cavendish also shares, “In 1994, Manchester Cathedral in England witnessed an ecumenical women’s service in which God was referred to as She and a Christa, a crucified female Christ, was carried in procession through the nave” (2835). While these are all valiant efforts of women to get an even foothold in a male-dominated religion, they are not nearly enough to level the steep climb that still exists towards religious and spiritual gender equality.
Rather than replace God, Goddess should be given equal recognition, if for no other reason than that these ideals have been for centuries affecting every little girl and boy who is made to attend a traditional church, instilling harmful gender values that carry into adulthood and are bequeathed to future generations. Feminist Mary Daly argues that “the Judaeo-Christian tradition of God as male has authorised the assumption that feminineness is a secondary, deficient, inferior form of being” (qtd. in Cavendish 2834). Since women’s suffrage in the twenties, the women’s civil rights movement in the sixties, and more recently in the nineties, the world has for the first time in recorded history seen the long-awaited beginning of women’s liberation, but it is not yet fully actualized due, mainly, to religious beliefs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had pointed out that “woman is considered a secondary being in the Bible and . . . this [is] being used to justify unequal treatment of women in American life” (qtd. Cavendish 2834). The biblical role of Eve has been the argument against women’s liberation in Judeo-Christian cultures for centuries, and that psychological warfare against women continues today. It is time to wake up and remember the Goddess who restores life to God, to refute the lie that to be born female is to be born inferior, or worse, to be born inherently evil.
According to a 2009 article in “The Age,” former President of the United States Jimmy Carter left his Southern Baptist Church after more than sixty years of attending. His decision was “unavoidable” after church leaders prohibited women from being ordained and insisted that women be "subservient to their husbands." Carter claims that in former years he tried to change the institution from the inside out by sticking with it, but in the end he was left with no choice but to hope that his absence might do what his presence could not. The former President’s commentary on his decision beautifully expresses the distress that society still suffers from outdated dogmas: "At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities [emphasis mine]. And, later: "The truth is that male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world (Misra).
These ideas, and the research presented in this paper raise an important question about how traditional, patriarchal, monotheistic religion instills harmful gender-views in people from a young and vulnerable age. Little girls and boys made to attend church will all be brainwashed with the assumption that God is Father and if Christian, that God’s mother is merely human and a perpetual virgin. They will be made to believe in a bogeyman called Satan who has no physical description, but whose traits, characteristics, and preferences can take any shape or form depending on what the religious leader wants to suppress or separate from the group, including but not limited to feminine-oriented spirituality. This type of psychological warfare does not promote a world of tolerance, peace, mutual respect and inclusiveness. By looking back to ancient times, before the birth of religions and their various reforms, we may find something that more closely resembles equality and tolerance among people of all genders, colors, and spiritual perceptions. If Goddess is a concept that is so unfounded, insignificant, un-provable, and “bunk” as Allen claims, then why is She so hard to get rid of? You can take Goddess out of the Church, but not out of the woman, or more accurately, any woman who dares to look within and recognize her own worth. Perhaps the only way to find spiritual equality in the future is to first seek it in the distant past. Perhaps, when gender equality is achieved inwardly, in the spiritual sense, it will then manifest outwardly in the physical world.
Works Cited
- A.G.H. Women & Religion: Reinterpreting Scriptures to Find the Sacred Feminine. (2005): 86-97. Points of View Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 9 Apr. 2010. Allen, Charlotte. "The Scholars and the Goddess." Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 2001): 18-22.
- Points of View Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 9 Apr. 2010.
- Barstow, Ann. “The Uses of Archeology for Women's History: James Mellaart's Work on the Neolithic Goddess at Çatal Hüyük.” Feminist Studies Vol. 4, No. 3 (Oct. 1978): 7-18. JSTOR. Web. 08 Feb. 2012.
- Cavendish, Richard, et al. Man, Myth, & Magic: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion, and the Unknown. Vol. 4. New York. M. Cavendish, 1997: 2816-2834. Print.
- Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess with forward by Joseph Campbell. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989: 58-319. Print.
- Liungman, Carl G. Dictionary of Symbols. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1938: 333. Print.
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