RECLAIMING THE ANCIENT HEBREW/JEWISH GODDESS
This is the first of a three part blog post on reclaiming the ancient Hebrew Goddess worship. I am putting aside the development of the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of the divine in Rabbinic and Kabbalistic Jewish thought for another day.
The core reason I am interested in reclaiming the worship of the Goddess is that worshipping the Goddess, either alone or in conjunction with the God, should help us reconnect with the more than human world. I believe that there is a difference between male and female energy. Female energy tends to be more grounded in connection with the earth and male energy tends to be more up in the heavens and less connected. I say “tends” because we should note that one of the manifestations of the Goddess in the Hebrew Bible is as the “queen of heaven” (Jeremiah, 7:18 and 44:17-25) and that there are male Gods connected to the earth in other mythologies such as Hephaestus, the Greek God of the forge and male Gods connected to the underworld such as Mot, the God of death in Canaanite mythology or Hades, the God of the underworld in Greek mythology.
I believe that reclaiming worship of the Goddess is important for men, women and the other people who don’t exactly fit one of those two categories. Most of what I’ve read about efforts to reclaim the worship of the Goddess has been aimed at women and rightly so because reclaiming the Goddess can be an important step in reclaiming women’s wholeness as women. But I think it is crucial for me to reclaim as a guy, and perhaps not as straightforward for men.
We have, at best, hints about how and where our ancestors worshipped the Goddess. Let me bring together these hints as a starting point in reclaiming the Jewish Goddess. I will enumerate eight different aspects of reclaiming the worship of the ancient Hebrew Goddess. The list draws primarily from the work of Susan Ackerman, William Dever, Jill Hammer, Saul Olyan and Ziony Zevit along with primary texts from the Hebrew Bible, the authors of whom spoke against the worship of the Goddess. Zevit and Dever in particular pay a lot of attention to the archaeological evidence.
These 8 aspects are, in no particular order:
o Worship of Asherah as the consort of YHVH
o The wooden pole as a representation of the Goddess
o The worship was done in high places (bamot) and in sacred groves
o The Goddess was offered cakes for the queen of heaven.
o The Goddess was worshipped as part of the mourning rites for Tammuz
o The Goddess was worshipped by planting spiritual gardens
o The Goddess was worshipped in sacred sexuality.
o The Goddess was worshipped through weaving sacred cloth
