The Great Mother They Erased from Scripture
Asherah Adonai
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In my last essay, I talked about my working with Lilith, the demonized first woman who refused to bow to Adam, the center of my spiritual practice, the one who lit the fire within my heart to dive deeper into the myths, the legends, of the women in the Bible who were erased, minimized, & demonized. Today, I take you on a journey to meet her Asherah, Queen of Heaven, goddess of many names. Inanna. Astarte. Ishtar. The Great Mother.
So, come, dear reader, & let me tell you a story.
A Myth of The Great Mother
Before the beginning was The Void, a fertile darkness where anything could happen. So, anything did. With a bang, there was light, as galaxies & nebulae burst into being. Swirling gasses & rocks exploded with color, knocking each other this way & that. After a long while, longer than anything, some rocks danced so closely that they made planets. These planets danced around their favorite stars in turn, growing & spinning, until they finally settled.
One star, our sun, had 9 planets & countless asteroids join this spiral dance. One planet, our planet, Mother Gaia, was to be home to our solar system’s life. This life, the creatures & plants, would be left to their own devices, allowing them to create & flourish as they saw fit.
Until one day, The Void Herself wanted to know what it was like to be alive. So She took to Gaia, searching all life to see who would be the best candidate for consciousness, the ability to know & understand the choices made to live life according to one’s own will. She saw how many primates coupled with each other to create new life, & so decided to split Herself into two, seeing what could be made, on purpose, with another who was Her equal & opposite. This was the birth of Asherah & Yahweh, born from The Void (like all deities), tasked with creating conscious life on this planet.
And so they did, & saw that it was very good.
But then came the Time of Unconsciousness. The time of great betrayal, where all that was once in harmonious balance fell to ruin. Where what was once good fell to ignorance, & that ignorance gave way to Fear. Fear, you see, is the Great Divider. It makes us too aware of our separateness, contorts differences as excuses to hate, & keeps us stuck in loops of our own mental prisons. It is a very useful tool to get people to do things against their own nature, against their better judgement, but who could possibly want Fear to be stronger than Love? Who stood to benefit from domination, control, & ignorance? None other than Her partner, who was meant to be Her equal. None other than Yahweh.
To ensure He received all the worship, all the glory for making this world, all the credit for everything, She couldn’t be there. He had a few angels—who were meant to follow the both of them unquestioningly—capture Her & take Her to the Underworld, to the care of her sister, Ereshkigal.
But first, according to the rules of the Undeworld, Asherah had to pass through the seven gates, like anyone else. She could take nothing with her, not her clothes or weapons, not her armor or crown. Naked, with head held high, she passes through, only to be taken & hung on a meat hook by Ereshkigal, left to die.
Life above the Underworld became forever changed, lopsided, imbalanced. It is only when Asherah returns, now learned in the ways of humility, suffering, & raw humanity, that balance is restored to life above. Her descent, a guide, a blueprint, for us to follow. Not to fear, but to learn. To remember wholeness is holy, that we are meant to be fully human, fully divine. But that’s not how the official story goes.
Much had passed in the world above, Asherah’s name erased from the ancient tomes, buried beneath the sands of time, with hands shaped to do Yahweh’s bidding. They tried to make sure this jealous god had no other gods to be jealous of. Their mere mention or worship was demonized, forbidden, punishing all who refused to bow to His bloodlust, leaving Her in the Underworld, with no consort to save Her.
Still, in the darkness, in the fertile Void from whence She came, Her story was never lost. Like a seed, utilizing both darkness & light to grow, Asherah waited. She waited for times such as these, for the feminine to remember the truth buried within the bones of every human, for storytellers to give her a new ending.
Asherah, The Gateway
This myth, this story, is an amalgam of many stories, many tales, surrounding this goddess of many names. Some call Her Inanna, or Ishtar. Some call her Astarte. The morning & the evening star. I call her Asherah. In ancient Mesopotamia, where these tales originate, deities were tied to the land. To know them was to know the cycles of the moon, when to harvest & when to sow. Their worship meant the difference between feast & famine, life & death.
I came to know Asherah as the Grand Designer, the one who made this world as a place for us to play, to learn & grow, to understand our cycles, & the cycles of the cosmos. Like any mother, it is within Her that we gain so much of ourselves, our humanity. Yes, our consciousness, our awareness, the ability to name & explain things, are all wonderful additions to our being. But I fear we have placed far too much emphasis on the mental mind, the thinking mind, completely ignoring (if not downright harming) our bodies, our feelings, & our senses.
Growing up, like many in the United States, I was raised to believe in a form of Christianity that downplayed the loving kindness of Jesus (what he actually said in the Bible & what the truth of him was) in favor of believing us persecuted for being Christians, that anyone who didn’t believe as we did would burn in a lake of fire forever. So, it was our duty to spread the Good News. Never mind the fact that Christianity in the United States is persecuted just as much as billionaires pay their fair share in taxes. However, my family didn’t even go to church, yet it was also made known to me that those who didn’t go to church because they were non-believers were worse off than us: believers who never went to church or read the Bible at all. Critical thinking, questioning & doubting, were not applicable to this faith, even though it made no sense to me, even though I loved to learn.
My Christian upbringing consisted of Veggie Tales, Vacation Bible School, & Summer Day Camp. It was mostly singing & crafts, two of my favorite things. I never heard of Asherah, or many women of importance, other than Eve (who damned us all), Mother Mary (who was perfect), & Miriam (sister of Moses who saved his life). Thank you, Prince of Egypt, for letting me know how The Chosen One was saved by a little girl, & without her there would be no commandments, no Bible, no Torah, no Quran for there would have been no Moses. I also thank that movie for the absolute banger of a soundtrack, including “When You Believe”, which contains the title of this essay. Even as I know that it’s supposed to mean something about singing to God, still, whenever they get to the “Asherah! Asherah! Asherah!” part, now, I think of Her. I sing that song for Her, my heart glowing like honey, like cinnamon starlight, whenever I do.
Furthermore, because of Lilith, because of how wrong the story was about her, & how different I feel after working with her, under her guidance, I began to wonder what else I didn’t know, what else the official story got wrong. After reading Lilith by Nikki Marmery, who connected the titular character to many women of the Bible, including Asherah, I began in earnest to learn more about what else was hidden in plain sight, what more to the story there was. At the end of this piece is a handful of the books I’ve read in my pursuit of truth, because I was not the first to wonder what else they didn’t want us to know, & I am ever grateful for the scholarship of those who came before me.
Unlike Lilith, Asherah (for me) is less tangible, less obvious. She’s more like an ever-present sense of love & support. If I sit & imagine her, I feel enveloped in a grandmother’s hug, smelling of jasmine & frankincense, of rivers & earth. When I look out my window every morning during my time at the altar, I see her work. Her trees & animals. Her wind & rain. When I ask, she sends me dreams & visions, riddles surrounding answers only I can discover. These answers are a gateway, a path to embodying as much of myself as possible, to understand my energies. The path only my heart can follow, & the one that makes me feel alive. We are meant to embody as much aliveness as possible, to enrich our world with what only we can bring forth. To learn & grow. To play & enjoy.
So many try to downplay earthly life, wanting instead to focus on getting to heaven after death, bypassing any bodily enjoyment, because it has been deemed sinful. But if that were the case, I believe, we would have stayed non-corporeal souls, instead of incarnating as people in the first place. The ascension comes from making the unconscious, conscious. It comes from breaking the patterns of hatred, repression, & pain that we inherit from our families, our societies. It comes from learning lessons, embodying them, & making this world more beautiful, more lovely, than when we found it. For this, here & now, is the kingdom. Deities can only enact change in this world through the works of people, of us, in communion.
Our bodies are not inherently sinful. They are inherently powerful, as I have said & will continue to say again & again.
Asherah, The Great Mother
If Asherah & Yahweh were once partners, equals, until He cast Her out, how much of our divinity was cast out with Her? How much of Their story was changed by the hands of men who lusted after power, wanting to make people submit to things against their own will, by shrouding their greed with the will of God? I wonder, too, how many people believe they have Daddy Issues because of their upbringing in a patriarchal faith, always looking to strong men as authority figures to tell them about themselves? I believe, in actuality, the lack of divine maternal presence—true presence to just be & exist—is lacking in us all. Now, of course there is plenty of damage that has been (& continues to be) done in the name of the Father God, but I find it just as damaging to not have His foil, someone who would have softened His rage, someone to teach us the complexity of being a soul entwined with a body. Not separate things, but unified in purpose & spirit.
By telling us, for millennia, that we must ignore our sinful bodies, overcome & force them into compliance, their wisdom could never be integrated. Her wisdom. The wisdom of our feelings, our emotions. The way they tell us when a boundary has been crossed, when we are so deeply moved by something, or when we are filled with righteous anger in the face of injustice. That’s not nothing. Especially for those of us with wombs, cyclical people who know intimately that there are other ways of being that have been relegated to an inconvenience, to be hidden at all costs.
Who stands to benefit from us ignoring what our bodies say? It’s certainly not us. Patriarchy, authoritarianism, & capitalism are all intertwined with ignorance & fear, tools used to extract energy from our bodies, just as these tycoons extract natural resources from the earth. To take & take, without actually giving anything of substance back. Expecting the earth, women, & the feminine, to always be there, quietly acquiescing to things that actively harm all of us. Yes, even those who do not identify with the feminine. Those who shun anything deemed “women’s work”, the ones who only see the feminine as something to own, to possess, to take. It still resides within them, too: the feminine spark, the divine counterpart, no matter how much it is repressed. We’ve only been told half the story, been given half humanity, half divinity, when our time as incarnated souls is meant to be one of learning & growing. We cannot integrate the calling on our hearts with our conscious will if we never acknowledge the unconscious. Carl Jung famously said, “until we make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule our lives & we will call it fate,” because feelings demand to be felt. They are trying to teach us something, & our unconscious wants us to experience as much of this life as possible, to get our needs met, by any means necessary.
But if things keep happening, if cycles keep repeating & we do not learn from them, or integrate their lessons, then life becomes something we must endure instead of something we get to enjoy. There are things in life that are challenging, yes, but challenges are meant to hone our skills, give us opportunities to utilize our innate gifts, on the way to realizing our Personal Legend. We’re not supposed to keep enduring pain & suffering for the sake of enduring pain & suffering. It’s not meant to be this hard, & anyone who makes you feel that way is trying to extract your attention, your precious life force energy, to have their own will be done by taking yours.
Many have forgotten this truth, this knowing, that can be found within the depth of our hearts. But we can always learn, & remember, what was hidden from us, reclaiming what was taken. We can remember, knowing that descending into the darkness was never enough to bury the truth that lives in our bones.
Asherah was supposed to be gone forever, for us to have no Goddess to look to, for us to only have men as leaders because there is only one male God, one male savior. This was meant to show the “natural” leadership of men, as ordained by this God, through the canonical Bible (& fabricated tale) that so many look to as ineffable, as literal truth. But here we are today, remembering Her story, keeping these traditions alive. The men who do Yaweh’s bidding, & the women who help them, the ones who fight to say what is natural & what is holy, against truth, against love, against justice, could not keep us hidden. They still can’t, because we are powerful when we gather together, when we share our stories.
The darkness, the void, was always a place of divine creation. Making the unconscious, conscious, freeing ourselves from the cycles of hatred & repression, letting the darkness show us what we are missing, what was there all along, is how we write a better ending to this long & tragic tale.
We can become fully human & fully divine, after all this time, if we let the darkness meet the light.
Gratitude, reverence, & love to all divine feminine spirits, named & unnamed, in all times & all places
Gratitude, reverence, & love to the spirits of this land where I am, & the spirits of the land where you are receiving this
Gratitude, reverence, & love to the ancestors who see us in our fullness & our truth
Courage, resilience, & love to all indigenous peoples fighting for their native lands against the arms of empire. Please, bless them & keep them, & may they know far more joy than they have ever known sorrow, & may they be surrounded by loved ones on this plane & the next
And anyone who is being used as an agent of empire, break their hearts open, shatter them, to soften them, reminding them of their humanity, of their empathy, to make it easier for them to come to the side of love & of justice
In the name of The Great Mother, Asherah, Queen of Heaven
Her Daughter, Mother Lilith, The Enlightened One, The Empowered One
& The Holy Wisdom of Saint Mary Magdalene, The Whore & The Holy One
To the Mother, the Daughter, & the Holy Wisdom, in all Your Holy Names, I pray
& so it is & so it shall be
& so it is & so it shall be
& so it is & so it shall be
Closing Thots
If this essay stirred something in you, if my words sparked something deep within, consider becoming a paid subscriber to my other publication, where I share more about astrology through fictional character birth charts to teach what placements look like in conversation with each other, for we are never just one thing. We each contain all 12 zodiac signs, somewhere in our chart (even if we have no placements in that sign), which is how we show up differently depending on the circumstances. Understanding our natal charts as a blueprint of the energy we are meant to embody in this life, I find, is quite important. It’s how we know what our own energy feels like, how that energy shows up with others, & how the cosmic spiral dance envelops us.
If you would like to begin learning more about the wheel of the year & how to utilize the cycle of the moon to tap into your true feelings as she cycles through your natal chart, check out my Patreon. There, I discuss placements, each of the twelve archetypes, & how following the cycles of the moon can help you learn how each archetype, each sector of life, makes you feel.
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Readings for Further Devotion
Lilith by Nikki Marmery
Womanist Ethics & the Cultural Production of Evil by Dr. Emilie Townes
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Womanist Midrash (1&2) by Wilda C. Gafney
Just a Sister Away by Renita J. Weems
Women’s Bible Commentary by Carol A. Newsom & Sharon H. Ringe
Women’s Torah Commentary by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
The Lady of the Underworld by Naida of Orphic Inscendance