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| "Asherah V", ceramic mosaic, 2024 by Lauren Raine |
ASHERAH: THE ONCE AND FUTURE GODDESS
By Lauren Raine MFA
“The Divine Feminine aspect of God was deleted from the image of deity. The only place where the concept of the sacred marriage survived was in the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, known as the “Voice of the Dove.” The Divine Feminine was not only banished from Judaism, but also from Christianity which took its image of God from Judaism. Islam also had a sole male creator god. The end-result of this cosmology was that life on earth was split off from the divine world; nature was split off from spirit.”
Anne Baring from A Crucial Time of Choice (2020) (1)
Since I was a child I've made images of women who were trees. I'm not sure where it came from, certainly I had not heard of the Tree of Life, or Goddesses associated with trees. I had never heard of Goddesses. But women with roots and leaves became a personal iconography for me. In early drawings friends somehow grew leaves. In later lithographs there She was. A 9-foot-long painting I called "Gaia" (1986) for my MFA program showed the Goddess as a Trinity before the barron Tree: I wanted them to confront the viewer with the loss, destruction and disrespect our civilization has wrought on the Tree of Life that sustains us. And there are many other works that show female figures rooted and, importantly for me, intertwined within the Earth.
I realize now it was Asherah, the Great Mother, I was seeking. Asherah who was banished from the Judeo-Christian Bible. Banished from what became the religious underpinning of Western civilization as the Patriarchs of Jerusalem created the first monotheistic religion – which uniquely featured a solitary male deity with no female counterpart.
Yet it is not easy to eliminate half the human race from sanctity, although the his-story of Western religion demonstrates a long and continuing effort to do just that, sometimes by erasure or demonization, sometimes by mythic co-option. It is interesting, for example, to note that the ubiquitous ancient “trinity” of a 3-part Goddess, such as the Greek Persephone/Demeter/Hecate, a Trinity that represented the cycles of nature as personified within the ancient Great Mother. This Trinity re-occurs, probably as a result of Patriarchal re-assignment, as the masculine Hindu Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva Trinity (Creator/Sustainer/Destroyer) in Hinduism. Certainly, the European Pagan Trinity was absorbed into Christianity, masculinized as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Climate change has brought, along with globalization and the possibilities of nuclear war, the great evolutionary Crisis of our time. And that, I believe, is why the Great Mother is arising from the depths of humanity's collective unconscious, from shards and archives of the deep past, from the violence and erasures of patriarchy. Her time has come. And the Tree of Asherah, with its inter-woven roots deep in the dark Earth, and its seasonal leaves and sustaining fruit, is Her perfect metaphor.
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| Anthology by Girl God Books becoming available in 2025 |
Asherah, the ancient Goddess of pre-monotheistic Judaism, has very early origins. Certainly among the Canaanites and neighboring civilizations, and possibly going back as far as Samaria. Sacred Groves were planted for Her. She was called “the Wife of Yahweh,” the Feminine aspect of God. Ubiquitous "Asherah poles" (ashirim) mentioned in the Old Testament may have been made of wood, possibly cut from trees dedicated to Asherah. Asherah poles were apparently household icons meant to invoke prosperity and fertility. (2)
The reforms of King Josiah’s reign in Jerusalem, along with the later reforms of the Prophet Jeremiah, revised and centralized Judaism to have only God, Yahweh. All other Gods and Goddesses were banned. Asherah was called “the great abomination.” Thus women became diminished and disempowered, as they were also Biblically blamed for the now monotheistic God’s wrath. In the Old Testament we read that Asherah poles were banned, dedicated groves cut down, and Yahweh now had no wife.
With the early advent of Gnostic Christianity, Asherah, the feminine face of Deity, returned in the form of Sophia (which means “Wisdom” in the Greek language). The great Basilica in Istanbul, for example, was named Hagia Sophia (Holy Sophia – Holy Wisdom). The emblem for Sophia was a dove – a symbol that Christianity retained to this day when it created the Trilogy of Father, Son, and “Holy Ghost.” Replacing the Divine Feminine (Sophia) with the ambiguous “Holy Ghost” once again erased Sophia/Asherah from Patriarchal Christian theology.
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| "Asherah III" by Lauren Raine 2009 |
In their 2019 book When God Had a Wife: The Fall and Rise of the Sacred Feminine in the Judeo-Christian Tradition (3) Authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince provide a well-researched, convincing argument for the catastrophic consequences of the suppression of the Goddess from the great Western religions of Christianity and Judaism, revealing how we have longed for the return of the Sacred Feminine for millennia. As happened before in Jerusalem, the evolving Christian Church rewrote his-story to eliminate the feminine side of deity.
A whole lot of co-option and re-mything can go on as religions evolve. Especially, it seems, if theologians are determined to get rid of the Feminine for millennia! But the Goddess resides in the collective, often unconscious, heart of humanity, and will not ultimately be silenced. For myself, I would never have associated the Tree of leaf and root, a vision that has infused my artistic and spiritual vocabulary for more years than I remember, with an unknown ancient Goddess named Asherah had I not had a visionary experience years ago.
I went to see a Reiki practitioner because of some health problems I was experiencing. As she worked with me I entered into a kind of trance, and with my eyes closed I vividly saw a white dove. But it was not a literal kind of bird - it was a sacred emblem such as one might see in a church. I thought of the "Dove of Sophia" which I had vaguely heard of (Many years later I learned that Sophia was another name for the earlier Asherah). Associated with this image of a “Dove Icon” in that visionary moment was, I remembered, also a backdrop of branches and tree roots.
After our session was over the healer told me she saw a Goddess form present during the healing. She said that she heard what sounded like “Ashara". I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but later I learned it was the name of the Hebrew Goddess. Asherah/Sophia. And I’ve been dedicating myself to Her ever since.
We are living, right now, in a crucial time indeed. The Paradigm that is trying to arise in this time of Evolutionary Crisis is, I believe, two-fold: the collective “return of the Divine Feminine” to re-ensoul a fragmented humanity, and the urgent need to envision a sustainable civilization that will have to be founded upon the inter-dependency and spiritual ecology of, well, everything.
That’s our challenge now, to restore the Tree of Asherah. Roots below, Leaves touching the sky.
Lauren Raine MFA
(This article will be included in a forthcoming Anthology ASHERAH: Roots of the Mother Tree by Girl God Books. Edited by Claire Dorey, Janet Rudolph, Pat Daly and Trista Hendren with a Preface by Miriam Robbins Dexter, Ph.D. Cover art by Lauren Raine, Scheduled for 2025.)
Reference:
(1) Baring, Anne Ph.D. Excerpt from “A Crucial Time of Choice “, talk given for Humanity Rising August 11, 2020 www.annebaring.com
(2) Wikipedia, “Asherah Poles/Asherim”
*Deuteronomy 16:21 states that YHWH (rendered as "the Lord") hated Asherim rendered as poles: "Do not set up any [wooden] Asherah [pole] beside the altar you build to the Lord your God" or as living trees: "You shall not plant any tree as an Asherah beside the altar of the Lord your God which you shall make"………..King Josiah's reforms in the late 7th century BC included the destruction of many Asherah poles (2 Kings 23:14). Exodus 34:13 states: "Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherim [Asherah poles]."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah_pole
(3) Picknett, Lynn and Prince, Clive, When God Had a Wife: The Fall and Rise of the Sacred Feminine in the Judeo-Christian Tradition , Paperback – Illustrated, December 10, 2019, Bear and Company publishers
