The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (8 page)

Yet not only was Asherah Yahweh's consort, but also, magically and paradoxically, his creator, sometimes honoured by the title `Holiness', which later became her husband's (and, of course, the Pope's). She reigned jointly as supreme deity with Yahweh for 600 years, together with other lesser pagan gods, after the Israelite tribes arrived in Canaan .22

Had her star not waned, presumably Asherah might have been in a position to have had sharp words with Yahweh about his treatment of Eve - for originally she had the Law on her side. The Semitic `Asherah' probably derives from the Old Iranian asha, meaning `Universal Law', which some take to be synonymous with matriarchal law, `like the Roman ius naturale'23 (literally `natural law'). Yahweh would have had to defer to her judgement.

Once, Asherah's influence was great among the ordinary Israelites, although they were soon to be denounced for her worship. In the Old Testament her name is often translated as `grove', a reference to the sacred tree-lined places where the Great Mother was worshipped in the prior matriarchal period: `They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles [carved fetish objects] on every high hill and under every spreading tree.'24 However, the later Yahwists wasted no time in hacking the goddess' holy groves to pieces and even summarily burning her priests and followers on their altars - presumably not simply because they represented the goddess whose power they had come to hate and fear, but also because her devotees included the gedishimlgadishim.

These were cross-dressing young men, elaborately made-up and bejewelled who serviced the temple pilgrims, just like their female counterparts, as sacred prostitutes. Indeed, legends of Asherah tell of her special servant, `Qadesh wa-Amrur', which is traditionally, but inaccurately, interpreted coyly as `fisherman of Lady Asherah of the sea'. However, confusingly, 'qedesh' can also mean `holy' or `divine', presenting an intriguing dilemma in Biblical interpretation, especially where certain passages in the New Testament are concerned - as we will see ...

There was even a shrine to Asherah in the Jerusalem Temple, as Hebrew scholar Raphael Patai points out:

Of the 370 years during which the Solomonic Templae stood in Jerusalem, for no less than 236 years ... the statue of Asherah was present in the Temple, and her worship was part of the legitimate religion approved and led by the king, the court, and the priesthood and opposed by only a few prophetic voices crying out against it at relatively long intervals .21

One shrine was raised by King Manasseh, in the form of an Asherah pole,26 which the writer of the Old Testament book of 2 Kings utterly abhors as sacrilege both to the Lord God and to the memory of King Solomon, who had built the Temple. This was somewhat hypocritical, as Solomon himself was not averse to goddess-worship, as his biblical critics were fond of pointing out: `As Solomon grew old, his [foreign] wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been. He followed Astoreth the goddess of the Sidonians ... So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord ...' 27

Solomon's fondness for the goddess was also singled out for condemnation by John Milton in his Paradise Lost:

... Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians call'd Asarte, Queen of Heav'n, with crescent Horns; To whose bright image nightly by the Moon Sidonian Virgins paid their Vows and Songs, In Sion [Jerusalem] also not unsung, where stood Her Temple .... built By that uxorious King, whose heart though large, Beguil's by fair Idolatresses, fell To idols foul 28

`That uxorious King' is the much-married Solomon, whose most politically ambitious union was with a daughter of a Pharoah who worshipped `the Goddess of the Sidonians' - and of course this divinity was none other than Asherah.

Almost certainly one of Solomon's foreign women who `turned his heart after other gods' was his lover, the legendary Queen of Sheba, whose fabulous kingdom of Sabia with its great city Marib formed part of the Yemen. Not much is known about her, apart from her fabulous wealth and her dazzling beauty - but she was apparently a black woman, `dark, and comely', according to the erotic poem, the Old Testament Song of Songs 29 But it is known that she carried the traditional title for Sabian queens of Makeda or Magda ('Great Lady'), and disappeared from history in Ethiopia, where it is believed she gave birth to Solomon's son. And she was a worshipper of the Sun (primal God) and Moon - a Mother Goddess, presumably a version of Asherah who, as we have seen, was called by the Canaanites Qaniyatu elima or `She Who Gives Birth to the Gods', or Rabbatu athiratu yammi, Lady Who Traverses the Sea - in other words, the Moon. Whatever the source of his inspiration, Asherah would certainly have figured in Solomon's pantheon, despite defensive Israelite claims that he converted Sheba to the monotheism he himself notoriously failed to follow.

As the grip of the fiercely patriarchal Yahwists tightened, officially God no longer had a wife - indeed, to claim the contrary, or to honour her in any way, was to invite dire penalties. Because of the hatred of Yahweh's priests, Asherah, like the other goddesses who bore her archetypal stamp, was literally demonized, although a second - and arguably more vicious - cycle of diabolization of the ancient deities would take place under the later auspices of the Christian Church. From being creator and bride/mother of God and mother of Lucifer, the great goddess Asherah/Astarte/Isis/Ishtar became inherently evil. It is no coincidence that the Old Testament emphasizes the fact that four hundred of her prophets ate at the table of the wife of King Ahab (873-852 BCE), the loathed Jezebel - clearly they considered this sort of association to be typical of Asherah's devotees.

`Now I am nothing at all ...'

The Great Mother also becomes a metaphor for Hell, although there is another, more intriguing, interpretation. When the Biblical writer tells Lucifer `Thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit', according to Barbara Walker,

`this "pit" was a metaphor for Helel, or Asherah, the god's own Mother-Bride; and his descent as a lightning-serpent into her Pit represented fertilization of the abyss by masculine fire from heaven. In short, the Light-bringer challenged the supreme solar god by seeking the favors of the Mother.'3o

The church fathers may translate Lucifer's sin - hubris - as `pride', but, as Walker points out, `its real meaning was "sexual passion"."' Although the Greek word does carry the meaning of `pride', this also involves `lechery', `both words [being] associated with penile erection ... Patriarchal gods especially punished hubris, the sin of any upstart who became - in both senses - "too big for his breeches"."'

Originally there was an Argive festival called Hubristika, or a `Festival of Lechery' in which ordinary men `broke a specific taboo' by dressing in women's clothes in order to assume their acknowledged magical powers. With the advent of Christianity, this festival was denounced as devil-worship, together with any other practice that implied a belief in the power of women 33 Tellingly, Goddess-worshippers in the area now called Switzerland were compelled with the dominance of Christianity to desecrate the Great Mother's statues while reciting `Once I was the Goddess and now I am nothing at all.'3a

With the radical demotion of the goddesses, all things feminine were fair game. A version of the apocryphal Old Testament Book of Raziel tells how `witchcraft and sorcery were imparted to woman by the fallen angels of Uzza and Azail, and also the use of cosmetics, which were ranked as wicked enchantments.'35 Goddesses such as Isis-Hathor and Astarte were believed to impart all feminine secrets to their devotees, from using camel dung as contraceptives to casting spells to secure lovers.

However, Yahweh and his prophets did not suffer alone: other testosterone-fuelled deities had trouble with the Feminine. We have seen how the Greek Prometheus, like Lucifer, brought fire - symbolizing both civilization and intellectual inquiry - to humankind, against the will of Zeus, the all-powerful Olympian god. Empathizing with the sad fate of mankind, Prometheus acted out of compassion, to be rewarded by the eternal torture of having his liver eaten by his own totemic eagle, only to have it restored every night so the horrendous cycle could begin again. In Aeschlus' Prometheus Bound Prometheus mutters: `Mankind I helped, but I could not help myself', and reflects bitterly on `The mind of Zeus [that] knows no turning, and ever harsh the hand that newly grasps the sway.' However, he foresees a karmic punishment for Zeus at the hands of `the Fates triform and the unforgetting Furies' - the children of lo, the Moon-cow goddess (like Isis-Hathor in Egypt), who had also suffered at the hands of Zeus.

However, while Zeus the all-powerful will be brought low by the feminine he has oppressed, unfortunately - or so it seems - the converse is true where the almighty Biblical Yahweh is concerned. Although there remain strong undercurrents of the Feminine in modem Judaism, it is not usually recognized, certainly among the Orthodox.

In this light, the Biblical description of Lucifer, the fallen one, as a `shielding cherub' is particularly interesting. From the Hebrew K'rubh, which in turn is thought to derive from the Akkadian karibu - the cherubim were intermediaries between God and humanity, and not the morbidly obese infants with implausibly tiny wings so favoured by sentimental Victorians. In fact, a `graven image' existed in the Jerusalem Temple that graphically depicted two Cherubim engaged in a sexual embrace, representing a sacred mystery. Interestingly, there is not a hint of condemnation of this image in Jewish literature, even though the people fornicated orgiastically after seeing these statues carried before them in religious processions. As Patai notes of this custom,

`Since one of the two Cherubim was a female figure, we find that, in addition to the Canaanite goddess whose worship was condemned by the Hebrew prophets and Jewish sages [Asherah], the Temple of Jerusalem contained a replica of the feminine principle which was considered legitimate at all times .116

When Asherah was banished, the female cherubim lived on, unmolested - although, eventually, only with their femininity obscured and forgotten.

Much as the Israelites were loath to admit it, they carried a great deal of Egyptian thinking away with them when Moses led their flight from slavery in the land of the pyramids. Not only did Yahweh himself evince characteristics of the Egyptian destroyergod Set, but the Israelites also seem to have absorbed some of the feminine imagery of the dynastic age. Archaeologists excavating the palace of King Ahab of Israel (873-852 BCE) in Samaria discovered an ivory stele depicting two crouching female entities wearing distinctly Egyptian-style collars and clothes, and apparently holding the ceremonial lotus.

Raphael Patai suggests that they were really `female genii', similar to the equally female Shekhina, who survived incognito as the Christian `Holy Spirit', or the more blatantly feminine `Sophia', the Gnostics' embodiment of wisdom. Patai writes:

The Talmudic term `Shekhina' denotes a tangible - visible and audible - manifestation of God on earth - yet originally `the Shekhina concept stood for an independent, feminine divine entity prompted by her compassionate nature to argue with God in defense of man. She is thus, if not by character, then by function and position, a direct heir to such ancient Hebrew goddesses ... as Asherah ...;'

Although the Shekhina as such do not appear in the Bible, they are represented there metaphorically as Hokma or `Wisdom'. Intriguingly, Hokma may originate in one of the ancient titles of the Egyptian Isis, Heq-Maa, `Mother of Magical Knowledge', which dates back to the days of the powerful heq or tribal wise woman. Its derivative, the later Greek Hecate, or Wise Crone, was associated with the dark phase of the Moon and women's mysteries, including the secrets of life and death. The Neoplatonist scholar Porphyry (c. 234-305 CE) wrote in praise of her: `The moon is Hecate, the symbol of her varying phases ... Her power appears in three forms, having as symbol of the new moon the figure in the white robe and golden sandals, and torches lighted; the basket which she bears when she has mounted high is the symbol of the cultivation of crops which she made to grow up according to the increase of her light.'38 With historical inevitability, the much-loved Hecate was to

become one of the Christians' names for the Queen of Hell, while her threefold power was absorbed into Christianity by the medieval clergy who metamorphosed it into `The threefold power of Christ, namely in Heaven, in earth, and Hell."' But, as we will see, Hecate was especially singled out for anathema by the Church because of her alleged conspiracy with midwives to subvert the natural order by helping women, either by easing their pains or aborting unwanted foetuses - in other words, helping women to empower themselves 40 In a garbled version of this, in one old tradition, Satan's wife Lilas was supposed to hover about the birth-bed and kill newborns4'

In the Old Testament Book of Proverbs Hokma/Wisdom, the predecessor of Hecate, has a major role to play:

Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice? .. she takes her stand ... and cries aloud: To you, 0 men, I call out; I raise my voice to all mankind. You who are simple, gain prudence; You who are foolish, gain understanding. Listen, for I have worthy things to say; I open my lips to speak what is right. My mouth speaks what is true, For my lips detest wickedness ... They are faultless to those who have knowledge. Choose my instruction instead of silver, Knowledge rather than choice gold, For wisdom is more precious than rubies, And nothing you desire can compare with her.'42

The section of Proverbs known as the Proverbs of Solomon reinforces Wisdom's gender: `Wisdom reposes in the heart of the discerning/and even among fools she lets herself be known' 43 Proverbs also states that Wisdom, with her Aphroditean symbol of the dove, was God's first creation, and ever since as the Shekhina, in Patai's words, `she has been God's playmate' 44 Seemingly a Tinkerbell-like creature45 of darting intelligent light, the Shekhina was believed to possess a mind of her own, which she never hesitated to use in performing her function of influencing, even opposing, God. Clearly a feisty being capable of being tough with Yahweh had no very rosy future. As Patai notes: