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Prologue:
The Almighty rules the cosmos from His side of a half-empty throne. His chair, made of ancient olive wood, with ornate gold-rubbed carvings, imposes over the long-relinquished and noticeably vacant, unadorned, cedar chair that stands next to his. On the empty seat, a fresh cut bouquet of wild flowers and a wedge of honey cake have been placed as offerings to the Queen of Heaven, who had at one time shared the throne with Him.
Yahweh, who places those offerings on her side of the throne every day, still misses her. The fragrant wild flowers remind Him of her scent, and the honey cake, of her sweet tooth. His warm brown eyes, still sparkle at the thought of her; allowing himself a small knowing smile, He remembers when she had been, "daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him."
Those idyllic days long gone, have given way to a tempest of words, deeds and intrigue: where waves of wrath, hate, cruelty, betrayal and revenge roil in the chasm that exists between Yahweh and his former consort.
Once Upon a Time in Heaven…
"Before humans walked the earth, He had breathed life into one of His most wondrous creations—an enchantingly beautiful goddess whom He named Asherah. In the old language, her name had meant 'bliss,' and that is what she had brought to Him every single day they'd been together.
She was His divine companion, His consort and His wife. He'd imbued her with most of His own qualities and powers; she was His alter ego—the female dimension to His divinity. In her role as the Heavenly Mother, she and Yahweh birthed many celestial beings—seventy gods and goddesses in all.
In times of yore she had been one of the most venerated and most powerful of all the deities, her preeminence was second only to her creator. Asherah's role as the goddess of fertility, motherhood and nurturing was deeply rooted in the cyclical renewal of life within nature, as it related to the earthly life cycle of humans.
The concept of fertility, as it pertained to the Mother Goddess, revolved not only around the issues of producing offspring, but to other integral aspects as well. In the old religion, followers prayed to the goddess to bless other events that were intrinsically tied to the land, such as weather events (drought or flood), and the husbandry of crops and livestock—all of which directly influenced the continued prosperity and good fortune of her worshipers.
Asherah, archetype for all Mother Goddesses who came after, had been worshiped in many ancient cultures under other names that span time and space: Athirat, Ashorath, Ishtar, Astarte, Artemis and Venus to name a few.
Under Every Living Green Tree
Throughout her tumultuous deity, Asherah remained a figure mired in paradox: she was continually sought and hidden, lost and discovered, she ascended and descended and, she was immanent and transcendent. Perhaps her greatest paradox of all, lies within the metaphor she is most closely associated with: The Tree of Life—grounded to the earth, it grows its branches upward to reach toward the heavens and to the promise of eternal life.
Her glory was to be discovered in high places. She planted her Asherim poles next to altars in temples and on top of hills overlooking the ocean. On hewed timber crafted obelisks, on simple wooden poles and upon living trees, her icons: The Tree of Life, The Serpent and The Lion, were carved. It was said that her idols were found under every living green tree.
In her time, the enigmatic goddess had been the mistress of many guises. She was the fountain of fertility and the spring of life. She was sensuality and sex personified. Her personas ran the gamut from the loving Venus to the raging blood thirsty Whore of Babylon."
Lost but not Forgotten
Asherah was lost to us by deliberate action of fundamentalist monotheists whose agenda was to rid the bible of all the gods and goddesses of the old religion. Her images were torn down, her stories were rewritten, and then her name was forgotten—well, almost…
Mrs. God?
Many have dismissed the claim as impossible. God never had a wife—so said the experts. But what if he actually did? What if we were able to reread the torn out pages of the early Bible wherein Asherah's divinity had been celebrated? What are we to make of the unearthed pieces of pottery in archaeological digs that depict the celestial consorts on a throne together and that contain inscriptions of offerings to them both?
We would find that the long thought forsaken, divine couple, had indeed been worshiped together as God and wife: as Yahweh and his Asherah.
If the zealous monotheist editors of the early Bible had been able to erase all mention of her out of the scripture—as was their intention: Asherah, Hebrew Mother goddess, Consort of Yahweh and Queen of Heaven, would never have been seen or heard from again. Alas, those very same revisionist writers of the bible, who had been openly critical of Asherah, begrudgingly cited her at least 40 times in the Good Book. Unfortunately, in their attempt to portray the goddess in the worst light possible, the mentions that had been left in the bible were mostly of the unfavorable kind.
"Thou Shalt Not Put False Gods Before Me"
During the days of early Judaism, emerging Israeli settlers had come from an ancient culture that had traditionally worshiped many deities. In order to bring His new followers into the fold, Yahweh had found it necessary to populate his heavenly pantheon with Gods and Goddesses that were associated with the familiar functions of everyday life such as: love, war, fertility, motherhood, crops and good fortune.
God's Chosen People were not yet ready to fully embrace the concept behind the covenant they had made with Yahweh; they remained reluctant to put all of their faith in Him as the Almighty. The budding followers continued to cling to the ancient folkloric pre-religion of Judaism, seeking comfort in the more naturally apprehensible magical theism of the old ways.
As the time wore on, the celestial pantheon had become overcrowded with too many gods whose traits often overlapped. Yahweh's ultimate divinity was constantly being challenged. The time had come for him to enforce the covenant that he'd made with the Israelites when He had spoken through Moses: "Thou shalt not put false gods before me."
Now it would be up to God to clean up his celestial house and abide by his own commandment—and clean house, he did.
Once and for all, God supplanted all of the other co-deities. The entire process took nearly a thousand years to accomplish, but by the by the end of the millennium, Yahweh assumed the mantel of Supreme Being.
He—and He alone—was in control of the divine powers and functions formerly in the hands of the gods and goddesses: who had been discredited, rendered powerless, eliminated from the bible and sent into oblivion.
Divorce Divine Style
For the most part, the gods accepted their fate and allowed themselves to willingly fade into obscurity. All except—Asherah.
After God had neutralized all of the other divine beings in his pantheon, he had the unfortunate task of sending his wife to the same fate. His cherished Asherah would be the ultimate casualty of his mandate to become the one true Almighty.
The battle between the revisionists and the old religion had played itself out, the earthly politics of the many versus the One had been decided. The fate of Asherah, who had been held in the balance for so long, longer than any of the other gods or goddesses, was sealed and inexorably heading toward the inevitable.
The religion of the revised bible, book of the iconoclastic monotheists, had been aimed at the citizenry of the ancient culturally elite centers of the coastal cities, where the wealthy and those of royal blood, had come to regard the worship of multiple gods as primitive and old fashioned.
The door was about to be shut on the oral tradition of the folkloric myths of the old religion. The farmers, the shepherds, the common folk of the tiny villages and the nomads who roamed the wilderness of the desert; they who did not worship in a grand temple, but chose instead to set up idols outside in nature to worship. The denizens of the outland, who were poor and largely illiterate, still clung to the old ways and to some of the old gods: unfortunately, 'the old ways' were about to be pulled out from under them.
With great sadness and with a heavy heart, Yahweh was resigned to fulfilling his destiny, he would be the only God, even if it meant ripping his beloved Asherah from his side. Perhaps because his pain was so great, the Almighty had decided that the best way to end their union should be carried out as promptly as possible—by making a clean break.
God divorced Asherah: suddenly, swiftly and without warning or explanation. He stripped her of her divinity, kicked her out of heaven, and cast her down to earth. Evidently, the divine divorce ended so badly, with Asherah suffering a fall from grace so complete and utterly devastating, that she was never able to recover from it. She went nearly mad.
Hell Hath No Fury…
After her fall, Asherah could not contain her rage. She had been discarded like trash. What could she have possibly done to deserve such a hard-hearted fate? She had been nothing but a devoted and loving wife and mother. In all respects, her marriage to Yahweh had been perfectly blissful. Not once had she ever tried to usurp her husband's Almighty divinity. Asherah had never been less than completely happy to share the throne with her consort.
Nothing could have prepared the Goddess for what had come to pass. Ever steadfast in her devotion to her husband, she had stood by Yahweh, even as He had rid himself of all the other gods and goddesses; He had never let on that she too would fall victim to his scourge.
The once loving and trusting spirit of the Goddess became possessed by darkness from her unbridled hate. Asherah had developed an all-consuming obsession to avenge her divorce from Yahweh. In a desperate attempt to regain some of what she'd lost, the goddess grasped at the remaining threads of her divinity, while fiercely trying to avoid fading into oblivion.
Once considered as the Heavenly Mother to all of God's divine creations and as the co-creatress who bore all of the gods in the pantheon, Asherah had served as a kind of celestial nursemaid to the angels that God had created before her. All of the angels except the one, who was the first and oldest of all his creations. The angel that had been created before time itself— Samael aka Lucifer.
Long gone from Heaven, Lucifer hardly knew Asherah. During the few times that they had met, her roving eye had made him uncomfortable. Since he was comparatively ancient to this trumped-up variation of a stepmother, he had little use for his Father's trophy wife and tended to ignore her. But as fate would have it, Asherah became fascinated with the fallen angel. She had developed incestuous inclinations toward Lucifer that would play themselves out through a portentous turn of events…
