Category Archives: publishing

The Monday Book: WHEN GOD HAD A WIFE

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The Monday book comes from Paul Garrett this week.

Throughout history, deities have been both male and female; whether the Sumerian gods of Enki and Nammu, the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, or the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans. It seems Judeo-Christianity is one of the few religions with a singular male deity.

Or not.

 In When God Had A Wife, The Fall and Rise of the Sacred Feminine in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, Lynn (Bear and Company, 2019) Picknett and Clive Prince put forth the theory that this was not always so, even after the time of Jesus. Picknett and Prince relate the history of Judaism from the Egyptian enslavement through the 4th century BCE. Using the Bible and over 100 other sources, they attempt to prove that the so-called “sacred feminine” has been a major part of religious practice throughout the history of both sects.

Worship of a female goddess took many forms, until about 400 BCE when Nehemiah “discovered” the book of Deuteronomy. (Quotation marks by the authors; they posit that he actually wrote it.) Up until that time the Jews worshiped a goddess named Asherah, among others who is the female counterpart to Baal.  Asherah was a goddess of fertility and nurture. Hundreds of small Asherah statues litter ancient Jewish sites, including Jerusalem. There is some evidence that they once adorned the courtyards of the Jewish Temples. Asherah statues usually have large breasts and a prominent pubic triangle. This is not meant to be erotic. The breasts represent nurture and the pubic area creation.

The Old Testament mentions Asherah more than half a dozen times, mostly in Judges and Kings. One of the most interesting is from Judges 6:25-30 wherein the townspeople demanded the life of Gideon’s son after they found Gideon had cut down the Asherah statue.

Even though repressed by the religious elites, female worship did not go away, but took the form of Wisdom. According to the authors, the word wisdom (Sophia) in biblical writing echoes the sacred feminine, even when uttered by Christ.

In the New testament it gets more controversial. According to the authors, Jesus also had a female counterpart, Mary Magdalene, who took on the role of goddess. The Church falsely accused her of being a prostitute as a means of discrediting her. The Magdalene controversy is interesting, with some so-called Gnostic gospels, even indicating Mary was Jesus’ wife. The Church labeled the Gnostic texts heretical in the first Millennium, BCE.

The authors theorize that with Mary Magdalene out of the picture, it became clear that there was a void that needed to be filled, hence Mary, Mother of Jesus (the Madonna) was recruited to take her place, resulting in various Madonna cults arising throughout Christendom.

This is obviously a controversial topic among modern Christians. It occurs to me that only a few hundred years ago these authors might have been burned at the stake. But all nature is binary: up/ down, left/ right, dark/light good/evil, male/female, yin/yang. Why should the same balance not occur in the deity?

Was the sacred feminine suppressed by the chauvinistic church, or is it yet another of the myriad cults and fads in Judeo-Christianity that have come and gone through the centuries? After thousands of years, I doubt that the controversy will be laid to rest any time soon.

Elites

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I broke my own self-rule about arguing Facebook the other day. A bunch of Alphas were saying if the electoral college were abolished, we wouldn’t have had an insurrection.

Even while suggesting that this was in error for two reasons, and that DC urbanites do not understand rural mindsets—immediate personal anger reactions to that were intriguing—I knew this was on their turf, inside a pack of people who need each other in their careers. It was the kind of place where you’re talking to one person, and 12 others jump in from the sidelines, like the drunk guest behind the couch who suddenly rises mid-heartfelt speech on social justice and says, “Shut up, I gotta piss!”

My friend calls Internet research “academic trolling;” lobbing a post and watching reactions to see how long it takes to turn to an inevitable conclusion: blame the victim, or hit a conspiracy theory (and that these exist on the Liberal side is REALLLLLLY hard to explain to lefties). We co-authors of the conspiracy theory book are madly capturing screen shots and threads from false flaggers, slow-waking evangelicals realizing they’ve been had, and elitists.

In that vein, several Alphas couldn’t believe that rural and urban voters have different motivations. It will be easier to reproduce one comment here than paraphrase: When my team drafted the Maryland Democratic Party 2020 Platform, we engaged people on the Shore and Western Maryland to find out what’s important in their communities: healthcare, infrastructure improvements, jobs, schools, and protecting the environment. They also want us to protect family farms from encroachment by agribusiness. Putting it simply, their real wants and needs are pretty nearly the same as everyone’s. The methods to meet their needs differ from urban areas, but not their needs. So thinking they need also to have disproportionate political power through a Byzantine electoral college is in error.

Yeah…. How can we put this? What are the different ways in which those words would be defined in a rural versus urban environment—leaving aside the charm of being engaged, rather than represented on the team in the first place? Especially when “everyone’s” is casually used to mean “people like us.”

Ethnocentrism (the assumption that others want to be like us because we are the best way to be) is rampant in many places in America these days. The domestic terrorists and rioters are inexcusable. Equally inexcusable is to dismiss the people who did not riot, who still want what they were lied to about getting with the dangerous madman we elected: to be heard. They backed the wrong horse, but to call them names and dismiss them as morally (and intellectually) inferior is dangerous.

Class is the last place in America where we don’t have to examine our condescension. That is also dangerous. We got a lot of good info from the conversation. (Permit me one personal indulgence comment? Some real Alpha gem mansplainers live in brownstones.)

Wealthy, educated Alphas living large online must by our very existence be part of the solution, not the problem; it is unfortunate that we dismiss opportunities to examine ourselves as otherwise. We will keep telling ourselves we’re right, right up to the moment that people ignored and denigrated by this dismissal set our world ablaze. There’s a reason the false conspiracy theory Q astroturfers keep using the word “Elites.” They know their audience. They listened to them, the better to manipulate them, sadly. But they listened to them.

I wish we knew ourselves half so well. And I wish we were better listeners. This is going to go badly.