Portrait of the Jewish Mother Goddess [ha-Shekinah] in her Tuscan temple by Fanny Belattar
The ancient cult of the Mother Goddess
In particular the Jewish Mother Goddess known as the Shekinah who is still included in Jewish worship today. She wasn’t originally just for the Jews but was a shared symbol.
One day she spoke to me with a mysterious light shining through a huge and ancient oak in Tuscany or perhaps it was just her story – hidden and forgotten for centuries – that reached me.
It seemed like a message for our era…
In Old Testament times the Ancient Hebrews had a Goddess and worshipped her alongside the God known as Yahweh (or ‘Jehovah’ or ‘the Lord God’). For around six hundred years her statue stood in the Holy of Holies, the most sacred part of the Temple of Jerusalem, and was worshipped alongside Yahweh.
In fact, the Ancient Jews worshipped various Gods (Baal for instance) and Goddesses inherited or borrowed from their neighbors the Canaanites, Phoenicians, and others.
So the ‘big idea’ that both Jews and Christians are taught that these are two monotheistic religions is only true for some of their history.
The Mother Goddess of the Jews has various names including Asherah, Astarte, and the Shekinah.
During, before and after this period of Goddess worship in the temple there was also a widespread popular cult of Asherah, centered around large wooden statues found in most villages, and in homes too there were small clay figures, many of which have been found from the time of the Hebrew monarchy.
Illustrations:
Astarte holding sacred flowers. Plaque from Beth Shemesh, Israel.
A modern interpretation of the Mother Goddess figure by [Instagram] julia.yurami The pointed end imitates the shape of the Goddess statues that were pushed into the earth to hold them up.
The Moses Panel in the Dura Europos synagogue (3rd century C.E.), showing the Shekinah with the infant Moses in her arms.
Why does this matter?
In Western countries (and the Islamic world) we have cultures that have evolved from these (now) monotheistic religions where an infinitely powerful male figure is the supreme chief and giver of moral laws.
Although important figures descended from ancient Mother Goddess worship like the Shekinah (for Jews) and the Virgin Mary (for Catholics) are also present they are subordinate and limited compared to the previous religious atmosphere of God and Goddess.
The ever-present image of a powerful solitary masculine God influences the way we see the human world and its men and women.
That fierce Big Daddy with all his rules and regulations is also like the banner that flies above armies at war and other forms of aggressive male competitiveness.
In a nutshell
Let’s bring the Mother Goddess out of the shadows patriarchal religion has placed her. Let’s celebrate and dwell on her values: not obedience but succour, not anger and righteousness but love and forgiveness, not an abstract being atop the clouds but one down here amongst us and all living things on the earth and in the waters. Hers is the ‘soft power’. Hers is the balm and respect for life that we urgently need, that the planet needs.
The Shekinah/Asherah in the past
The large wooden statues of the Goddess were often set up in groves of trees. In translations of biblical texts into Greek, Latin, English, and other languages the word Asherah has usually been translated as ‘trees’ or ‘groves of trees’, swapping a Goddess statue for a clump of trees, one of many ways that her presence in the older Jewish religion has been hidden.
Asherah, Hebrew: אֲשֵׁרָה [ʾăšērā] was, for example, appealed to by pregnant women to help in their labour. In a 7th-century B.C.E. Hebrew incantation text, found in Arslan Tash in Upper Syria, the help of the Goddess Asherah is sought for a woman in delivery.
After the destruction of the temple in C.E. 70 and the expulsion of the Jewish people from their lands their religion became ever more controlled by ascetic male intellectuals. The popular elements, the folk beliefs and practices, the statuary, Goddess figurines, etc. became ever more forgotten. They embodied powers seen as female such as nurturing, seductiveness, subtlety, procreation, emotional sensitivity, warmth, and the ability to connect with other beings. The Goddesses of the Middle East were also warriors with supernatural powers.
But the Jewish religion since then, and Christianity and Islam which significantly draw upon it, are centered on the story of a powerful male God with any images of female power presented as secondary and subordinate. It is a strongly subversive and presently essential act to remind people that our cultural heritage also contains images and beliefs that are much more female-friendly and that celebrate communion and fertility rather than leadership and competition.
Worshipping the Asherah
There is a popular Jewish festival still observed today where believers build little wooden shelters to sleep in for a few nights, called sukkhes or ‘booths’ which descends from the pre-expulsion festival which, on its final day was celebrated by a huge wine-fuelled orgiastic gathering in Jerusalem. [Patai ch.7] ‘According to Biblical command, every male Israelite was duty-bound to make the pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year: on Passover in the spring; on the Feast of Weeks, seven weeks later; and on the Feast of Booths (Sukkhes) which fell in autumn, two weeks after New Year.[60] Of the three, the greatest and most enthusiastically celebrated was the last one, on which, more than on any other Hebrew holiday, the populace was commanded to rejoice.[61] From descriptions contained in the Mishna and in Talmudic sources, we know not only the ritual details of this joyous feast, [62] but also the fact that both men and women participated in it, and that on the seventh day of the festival, the two sexes used to mingle and commit what is euphemistically referred to as “lightheadedness.”’ According to Patai at the beginning of the ceremony statues of the Cherubim (sacred male and female statues which stood in the Temple during this period) were possibly shown engaged in intercourse and ‘incited the crowds to the commission of this “light-headedness,” which could have been nothing but an orgiastic outburst of sexual license.’ [Patai Ch 7]
So we can see that as well as eliminating the potent Mother Goddess figure the modernized Abrahamic religions are also based on the prohibition of something quite common in the ancient world: the sacralization of sexuality as an expression of nature and fertility and joyful physicality, of communal intoxication.
Instead, these contemporary religions only license a very small (as small as possible while still allowing for the continuation of the population) amount of permissible physical erotic contact.
Hence all the palaver about virginity, marriage, adultery, etc.
That includes of course the concern about property being handed down to one’s own blood offspring; an essential idea for a society and culture based around the primacy of private property. The one in fact that we live in and that is destroying the planet and the future of all living beings.
One of our Chevrah said ‘I am Nature: Nature is not out there but in here.’
The idea of the Great Mother is exactly that, we don’t have to live in separation and anxiety from her flowing streams, her energies, her universal love and acceptance called ‘life’.
