A HISTORY OF THE GODDESS:
FROM THE ICE AGE TO THE BIBLE
By Edward Dodge
It’s a funny story behind my book. I never knew anything about the goddesses in the Bible, never heard of them growing up in church, and did not set out to write a book about them.
I was actually investigating the story of cannabis in the Bible, cannabis history is a hobby of mine, I find it fascinating because the use of both hemp fibers and cannabis drugs goes back to the Neolithic Revolution in an unbroken thread of history that leads right to today.
Cannabis is all over the Bible, the early Israelites were pagan before they were monotheists and they had a full pantheon of gods in King Solomon’s temple, and they were burning herb. We don’t get taught about this in Church.
In studying cannabis, I stumbled into the story of the goddesses. I was shocked when I learned that modern scholarship totally accepts the pagan roots of the Israelites and that God once had a wife. Cannabis and the Goddess were thrown out of the temple together.
Wife of God? How can that be? This violates everything I ever was taught about God.
Her name is Asherah and she appears 40 times in the Bible. She is described as a foreign goddess, but really, she was native to the Israelites. Asherah was the Mother Goddess, the wife of God, and there are other powerful goddesses as well. Astarte was the goddess of love and war, the Queen of Heaven, she was the most popular goddess in the Ancient Near East and she had many names, like Ishtar and Inanna. Her sister Anat was the terrifying and unstoppable goddess of death and slaughter. Anat is “she who must not be named” because she was conspicuously omitted from the scripture. They had priestess too, the qedesha, who are described as “temple-prostitutes” but their name means “holy.” They had male transgender counterparts as well.
These characters are completely outrageous in their personalities and temperament. These are the old goddesses of the matriarchy, when women had authority and independence, before their positions were reduced by the patriarchal warrior kings. These iconic goddesses needed to be removed from the culture as monotheism took over, because the goddesses would give young women the wrong ideas about how to behave. We couldn’t be telling stories that celebrate women’s sexuality, authority, and independence, can we?
Now I am shifting into telling these stories and I want to
turn them into graphic novels and animation. I am seeking collaborators if
anyone is interested in getting involved.
https://www.lostgoddess.io/
This book explores the Goddess worshipping traditions that were always a part of human spirituality but
were eliminated in the Bible on the path to monotheism. There is an unexplored narrative in the Bible, the early Israelites were pagan and God had a wife, her name is Asherah and she appears many times in the Bible. The Earthly Mother and the Heavenly Father were the original gods far back in history and they got a divorce in the Old Testament so that God could rule alone. But the Earthly Mother never went away and we can follow her traditions through Christianity and into the modern world.
The religious wars of the past that eliminated these women-led Goddess religions are directly reflected in today’s culture wars where the secular left is struggling to break free of the moral dictates of religious conservatives. In the Goddess temples of antiquity, we see unbridled feminism, egalitarianism, nature worship, sexual freedom for women and gays, cannabis and sacred plants, transgendered people as high priests, even abortions. The world today is in flux and many people are rediscovering the Feminine Divine, she is an important part of our collective experience.
You can order your copy at Amazon.
Edward Dodge is a clean energy developer and writer from Washington D.C. with degrees from Cornell University. He studied the history of cannabis which provided the origins of this book.
You can visit his website at www.historyofthegoddess.com and his blog at https://edwarddodge.substack.com.
You can visit his YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCewtIeQPSqOxs25IP0Np6g
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