by William G. Dever. https://archive.org/details/DidGodHaveAWife/mode/2up Page 34 The Scandinavian branch of this school tended to be more extreme, positing not only celebrations of “divine kingship” in ancient Israel, but even of the hieros gamos, or “sacred marriage” of the gods. In these rites, priests and priestesses, the king and queen, or even “cult prostitutes” supposedly […]
Dr. Justin Sledge | ESOTERICA. She has a kind of erotic aspect to her. She’s known as the lady of voluptuousness and happiness. … But with his assimilation to the fatherly deity El, Yahweh seemingly inherits as it were the consort wife of El known in Ugaritic mythology as Atherat and cognate in Hebrew as […]
by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Much was now purged from Judaic religion that had once been acceptable, even in the Jerusalem Temple: notably Asherah, God’s long-standing wife, now recast as one of the seductresses who had turned the people of God from the right path. She was the most prominent victim of Jerusalem’s theological spring clean, which […]
In the ancient temples of the goddess, the Sacred Prostitute was a priestess highly trained and skilled in the arts of sexuality and pleasure. Because sex was viewed as a natural and joyous act which brought forth new life and mirrored the fertility of the earth, there was no shame in sexuality. Men sought out […]
Chapter in part II of Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qurʾan as Literature and Culture by Roberta Sabbath – 978-90-47-43096-4 characterized as a handmaiden of Inanna and, as such, may have been a temple harlot responsible for promoting the land’s fertility through sacred sexual intercourse. As a negatively numinous figure Lilith is identified in […]
Definitions, Scope and Topicality by Heide Goettner-Abendroth. The subject of Modern Matriarchal Studies is the investigation and presentation of non-patriarchal societies, those that existed in the past and those that still, to some degree, are still with us now. Even today there are peoples with matriarchal patterns in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania. None […]
Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. By Cynthia Eller. Steinem had been speculating about the origins of the patriarchy as early as 1972 … The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, […]
by Riane Eisler. In traditions that go back to the dawn of civilization, the female vulva was revered as the magical portal of life, possessed of the power of both physical regeneration and spiritual illumination and transformation. Far from being seen as a “dirty cunt,” woman’s pubic triangle was the sacred manifestation of creative sexual […]
by Karen Armstrong. One of the consequences, [of our scientific culture] however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the ‘spiritual’ or the ‘holy’ which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of the […]
by Marija Gimbutas. The difficulty with the term matriarchy in 20th century anthropological scholarship is that it is assumed to represent a complete mirror image of patriarchy or androcracy – that is to say, a hierarchical structure with women ruling by force in the place of men. This is far from the reality of Old […]
by Elizabeth Fisher. As long as the masculine role is aggrandized and the female role derogated, as long, that is, as nature is seen from a male-supremacist view, human sexual encounters will be tainted. We are imprisoned in a conquest vocabulary which places females in the “submissive position.” Convention equates the female’s role in sex […]
by Raine Eisler. It is remarkable, that given the fact that much of the bible is based on Canaanite and Mesopotamian myths, that the female divine is absent. Even though the goddess was very important to the Hebrews until the destruction of the second temple.
by Riane Eisler. “a woman who behaves as a sexually and economically free person is a threat to the entire social and economic fabric of a rigidly male-dominated society.”
by Gerda Lerner. Surrender for money was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess of love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury
From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. by Mircea Eliade. We are almost tempted to see, in this artistic flowering under the sign of Aphrodite, the radical desacralization of physical love. But in fact it is a camouflage, inimitable and rich in meanings, such as is found in so many other creations of the […]
by Merlin Stone. Published 1976, New York: The Dial Press. Professor R. K. Harrison wrote of the Goddess religion, “One of its most prominent features was the lewd, depraved, orgiastic character of its cultic procedures.” … Professor W. F. Albright, one of the leading authorities on the archaeology of Palestine, wrote of the female religion […]
by Wolfgang Lederer. The fertility of the Mother demands the blood of men, the Earth needs to be fertilized with corpses if she is to revitalize the dead from her full breasts; and if she is to bring forth new life, new crops, new infants, then she demands the sacrifice of infants. Thus we universally […]
by Sibylle von Cles-Reden. The mother-cults and legends of classical Greece contain indications of a primitive Mediterranean religion in which the phallus was an object of veneration. When we find Demeter sometimes surrounded by a strange swarm of small phallic beings, the so-called Dactyls or “fingers*, this is surely a reflection of an age before […]
by Joseph Campbell. The fear of woman and the mystery of her motherhood have been for the male no less impressive imprinting forces than the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself.
by Edwin Oliver James. 1959, New York, Praeger. The antecedents of the goddess cult The goddess cult in Mesopotamia and Egypt
by James Frazer. Why exactly so many savages have made it a rule to refrain from women in time of war, [1] we cannot say for certain, but we may conjecture that their motive was a superstitious fear lest, on the principles of sympathetic magic, close contact with women should infect them with feminine weakness […]