RECLAIMING THE GODDESS PART 3
The Goddess was worshipped as part of the mourning for Tammuz. Tammuz is a male deity who originated in what is today Iraq and was imported into Israel. In the Sumerian myth, He goes to the underworld with the heat of summer. He is then rescued from the underworld and death by the Goddess Inanna come Fall. Thus the world and the life giving rains are reborn. To worship Tammuz is to participate in this myth, which doesn’t work without a Goddess rescuing him. So reenacting this myth in some sense is another way to worship the Goddess.
The only mention of Tammuz in the Hebrew Bible is from the condemnation of the practice by Ezekiel. Ezekiel is sitting at home with the tribal elders and he falls into trance and has a vision where a divine figure takes him on a spiritual tour of some of the many ways that Israel had worshipped the divine besides worshipping YHVH only. The relevant text is 8:14 “Next he brought me to the entrance of the North gate of the House of the Lord [that is the Temple in Jerusalem] and there sat the women bewailing Tammuz.”
I think we can easily implement a grief practice tied into the 17nth of Tammuz, a traditional fast day, but dedicate it to the theme of birth and death. We mourn because we know that all things, including the divine, are part of the cycle of birth and death, and if we reject death, we are rejecting life. Of course, the insistence of our ancestors that YHVH is outside of the cycle of birth and death is a core feature of monotheism and their rejection of indigenous religion. But we can reclaim these insights and we can wail for the dying God who will be reborn with the Fall rains. This is harder to do if you live where I do, because the land doesn’t die back in the summer. Still, we must mourn if we are to live.
The goddess can be worshipped by planting some kind of spiritual garden that emphasizes fertility (see Ackerman Under Every Green Tree pp.185ff). We’ve no idea what these gardens might look like and the texts are obscure (Isaiah 1:29-30, 17:10-11, 65:3 and 66:17) We might also recall the mystifying story of the mandrakes in Genesis. (Genesis 30:14-17)
We can reclaim this by planting gardens that are sensual and dedicated to the Goddess. Maybe some plants that have really strong scents. Maybe some plants that have really showy flowers, maybe some that have lots and lots of babies (i.e. fruit) or grow incredibly prolifically, or have fruit that looks like male and female genitalia (think different kinds of summer squash).
The Goddess might be worshipped with sacred sex. One possibility is a ritual such as our ancestors did with the Midianites that is most likely a fertility ritual (Numbers Chapter 25). Rabbi Ohad Ezrachi has an imaginative reconstruction for another aspect of sacred sex in his book Kedesha. Kedeshim and Kedeshot (plural of Kedesha) literally means a sacred males and females. The term is usually translated as sacred prostitute (see for instance the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38), but there’s nothing in the literal meaning of the Hebrew to suggest selling one’s body for sex; the usual translation is a slander. Taya Shere, a co-founder of the Kohenet (priestess) institute also explores these themes. http://taya.ma/offerings
Personally, I’m not at all sure how to relate to this, especially as a guy. It’s beyond my cutting edge. But I have to think that embracing female sexuality and pleasure is absolutely an element of worshipping the Goddess.
Weaving and sacred fabric art is another path to the Goddess. Following Jill Hammer’s The Hebrew Priestess (pp. 47ff), it is clear that there was a sacred activity done in the Temple precincts of weaving cloth for the Goddess who was in the Temple. We’ve no idea what this weaving actually entailed (and the Biblical references are a bit unclear).
One obvious reclamation of this would be a Goddess oriented Tallit, the ritual prayer shawl. We don’t think of the tallit as being male oriented in the first place. There has been a movement in the last 30-40 years, perhaps starting with the rainbow tallit of Reb Zalman, the founder of Jewish Renewal, to make them be more than just the dull white with blue stripes of my childhood. But I’ve never heard of a talllit that has woven into it one of the Goddess figurines from ancient Israel. And that would be seriously cool.
These blog posts have only explored some of the possible ways to reclaim the Goddess, starting with our ancient ancestors. This is a theme to which I will return because I believe in the importance of finding a way to incorporate gendered divinity into my prayer practice.
