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Ancient Israelites and Judahites were polytheists, meaning that they worshiped multiple gods alongside YHWH, including El, Ba’al, Shemesh, and female goddesses like Asherah.1 For much of Ancient Israelite and Judahite religion, it seems obvious to contemporary scholars, based on archaeological and textual evidence, that YHWH and Asherah formed a heavenly divine power couple, with YHWH as the heavenly king (vice-regent prior to his fusion with El, and patriarchal ruler following the fusion) and divine father of the gods, the kosmos, and the people of Israel, and Asherah as the heavenly queen, the divine mother and bride. This feature of preexilic religion made the Deuteronomistic editors of the Hebrew Bible, as well as preexilic and exilic prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deutero-Isaiah, deeply uncomfortable, and they railed against practices like the worship of multiple gods (or even just YHWH) by means of idols as causes of the Assyrian and Babylonian Exiles. But while explicit, separate worship of the goddess Asherah was excluded from the Deuteronomic, Josianic form of Judahite religion that went on to influence the Hebrew Bible, neither the goddess nor the instruments of her worship disappeared entirely from either Scripture or from postexilic, “Second Temple” or “Early” Judaism. Objects like the burning bush, the budding staff of Aaron, and the menorah all bespoke the asherim, artistically beatified almond trees, which had once adorned Israelite and Judahite high places with no censure from the Priestly source in the Torah; and the goddess herself simply became, in the Sapiential tradition, the figure of Chokmah or Sophia, “Wisdom.”
That Wisdom is an Early Jewish goddess who functions in a subordinate but co-creative role with the Jewish god, who is typically gendered masculine, is an uncomfortable observation for modern Jews and Christians; it may well have been for ancient Jews and Christians, too, but that does not make her any less a goddess. One need only read Proverbs 8:22-31 to get this impression:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, / the first of his acts of old. / Ages ago I was set up, /at the first, before the beginning of the earth. / When there were no depths I was brought forth, / when there were no springs abounding with water. / Before the mountains had been shaped, / before the hills, I was brought forth; / before he had made the earth with its fields, / or the first of the dust of the world. / When he established the heavens, I was there / when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, / when he made firm the skies above, / when he established the fountains of the deep, / when he assigned to the sea its limit, / so that the waters might not transgress his command, / when he marked out the foundations of the earth, / then I was beside him, like a master workman; / and I was daily his delight, / rejoicing before him always, / rejoicing in his inhabited world / and delighting in the sons of men. (RSV)
That the figure here is a goddess, albeit one of the first divine beings to be created in the pantheon composed of God, “sons of God,” “holy ones,” “angels,” and the like, is clear; what is perhaps more subtle for the untrained reader is that Wisdom has an obviously sexual relationship to God. As Michael Coogan points out, the image of God “delighting in” or, really in Hebrew, “laughing with” Wisdom is a sexual image, drawn from parallel texts like, for example, Sarah’s “laughter” in Genesis 18:13-14, or Isaac and Rebekah “laughing” together in the field in 26:8, revealing to King Abimelech that they are husband and wife, not brother and sister. Wisdom is God’s spouse, whose sexual relationship with him is integral to the creation of the world order. As Philo says, “God is Wisdom’s husband” (De cherubim 14.49): the Ancient Israelite and Judahite depiction of YHWH as a divine husband and Asherah as his divine wife has resurfaced in the form of a more philosophized myth, in a subordinate, emanative hypostasis of Wisdom (see, e.g., Wis 7:22-8:1), not dissimilarly to, say, the reinterpretation of Egyptian mythological figure of Isis in Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride as a goddess, yes, but a goddess who, as the World Soul, is subordinate to more primary and masculine principles like the Logos and the monadic God.
The goddess figure endures in both later Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism, she is reworked in the mystical categories of the Shekhinah, Malkhut, and the Sabbath Bride: she is the divine feminine whose union with the divine masculine in the soul and in the world is essential to the world’s repair. In Christianity, she is, straightforwardly, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is not only thought of and described in Christian texts as God’s Bride and the Theotokos, the Mother of the God-Man Jesus Christ, but also absorbed as Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean and Near East the qualities of the various nuptial and maternal goddess cults that Christianity replaced or subsumed. It is worth being careful here, for there is a way of misrepresenting this fact that is somewhat more conspiratorial, but it is certainly the case that the Mary of Christian veneration and cult is not simply the biblical character and not simply a theological mediation between divinity and humanity, but is in fact the latest iteration in a series of goddesses whose virginity, sexuality, regality, maternity, ferocity, and cunning enchanted and frightened the ancient world. It is one and the same goddess that is the Mary of the Sub tuum praesidium and the “Champion General,” a popular Constantinopolitan hymn sung in celebration of Mary’s salvation of the city from enemies during the Lenten chanting of the Akathist Hymn:
O Champion General, we your faithful inscribe to you the prize of victory as gratitude for being rescued from calamity, O Theotokos. But since you have invincible power, free us from all kinds of perils so that we may cry out to you: Rejoice, O Bride unwedded.
Mary the defender of the imperial city joins a host of other ancient goddesses connected to cities: if Roma herself was the goddess of the Old City, Mary is the goddess of Nova Roma, the New Rome, Constantinople; and of course, Justinian’s cathedral was dedicated, after all, to none other than Holy Wisdom herself.
The most revolutionary goddess tradition of the ancient world was probably that of the Devimahatmya, a puranic revelation concerning the goddess Devi that dates to the 5th or 6th century CE.2 That text, a bhakti text to Devi, posits that the feminine principle of divinity is the primary, ultimate reality in the kosmos, whose various manifestations—Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Durga, and Mahaswarasati or Kausiki, also known as Kalki—restore dharma at key junctures in the cosmic process overseen by devas more traditionally thought to be supreme like Brahma, Visnu, and Siva. The goddess is variously identified with maya, prakriti, and shakti, the last of which is the primordial cosmic energy of the universe which manifests in all material forms in the Shaktism branch of contemporary Hindu bhakti. The goddess Devi is the granter of boons to the two human characters of Devimahatmya, a vaisya and ksatriya who each ask for moksa and the return of their kingdom, respectively; Devi grants both without denying or chiding either, implying that this is a goddess who is as much concerned for the world as with providing liberation from it.
In a loosely analogous sense, Sophia, Wisdom, is God’s shakti, his energeia of creation which at the economic level includes a destructive element of apocalyptic violence in response to the world’s adharma. It is for this reason that the Blessed Virgin is both the sweet Mother of God to whom Christians go in prayer and supplication as well as the Champion General and warrior queen leading the war against the powers of darkness in the universe on behalf of her Son; that Devi is both Mahalakshmi and Kali, goddess of Death, herself. The divine feminine is not a passive or purely receptive force: it is a force whose erotic and maternal geniuses are generative of a real ferocity for the world’s safety and sanctity. The face of the mother bear to her cubs is gentleness itself; to the potential threat, hell and all its fury.
Women are powerful: if today, March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation, says anything it is surely that. Male attempts to control the goddess are never finally successful, whether one is speaking of the cosmic realm, Scripture, or simply in the women in a man’s life. The goddess is passionate for justice: she invites, desires, and receives male cooperation but does not require it for bringing peace to the world. Mary’s humble receptivity to the will of God in the virginal conception and birth of Jesus is what Latin Catholics and Greek Orthodox celebrate in this Feast Day, typically: Mary’s one response in the Angelus is Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, while on the doors of the iconostasis in every Orthodox Church she is lithe at the loom, surprised and sweet in response to Gabriel’s archangelic tidings. But that is decidedly not the Mary of the Magnificat, whose real intentions in consenting to the divine will are clear:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior:
of he has looked down upon the humility of his maidslave;
behold from now all generations will bless me,
because the Powerful has done wonders for me,
and holy is his name,
and his mercy is for generation and generation to those fearing him.
He has made power in his arm,
and he has despoiled the proud in the mind of their heart;
he brought down the dynasts from thrones and exalted the humble;
the hungry he filled with good things
and the rich he sent away empty.
He helped Israel his child3
remembering mercy,
just as he said to our fathers,
to Abraham and his seed unto an age. (Lk 1:46-55)
Mary is an iconoclast and a revolutionary: she agrees to Jesus’ conception and birth because she understands that within her social context, becoming the mother of the Messiah is the most liberative thing she can do for the world. But this hymn not just on her lips but on the lips of centuries of Christians who venerate her not merely as a first-century Jewish teenager who became the recipient of a miracle, but as a fully deified human being, assumed to heaven body and soul and crowned alongside her Son as Queen Mother, this is language of imploring prayer: Mary is a divine instrument of judgment on the mighty, Goddess Wisdom herself trampling down the mighty, Mahakali reveling in the apocalyptic restoration of dharma.
On this Feast, we may be tempted to discomfort with the explicit language of Mary as the goddess, as Devi or Sophia or whomever. In some Catholic and Orthodox apologetics, the desire to stave off Protestant accusations of Mariolatry is such that it is exactly this which is frequently denied: “We don’t worship Mary,” “Mary is not a goddess,” “the saints are not gods,” etc. I understand the rhetorical need to do this, but it is ultimately false. Mary is obviously a goddess, the goddess in Christian apocalypse, or at least her primary humanized visage, where the sophianic creation itself is her ultimate face. Genuine monotheism both does not begrudge goddesses their due and does not compete with them; the Protestant problem is not a legitimate need for Catholic and Orthodox guarantees that ancient Christian communions do not practice idolatry, but a failure to do good philosophy or to attend to the emanative, created divinity of the world. The goddess cannot be suppressed forever; the submergence of each of her epiphanies only presages her next great arising from the ocean of being, for Creaturely Sophia will never stop striving for ultimate union with the Divine Sophia, the Soul of the World for realization of its archetype in the Mind of God. And so it is only appropriate to say: Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη Μαρία, ὁ Κύριος μετὰ σοῦ…
See Mark Smith, The Early History of God: YHWH and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), Chapter Three, “YHWH and Asherah” (curse Kindle for not providing page numbers for academic books published in the early 2000s); Michael D. Coogan, God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says (New York: Hachette, 2010), 161-188.
The best English translation is still, for now, Thomas B. Coburn, Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a Study of Its Interpretation (New York: SUNY, 1991). For more, see this podcast over at Yogic Studies.
Pais in Greek can mean “child” or, by euphemism, “slave.” The positive spin that ancient societies put on slavery was often that the master was the “father” of his slaves. Of course, this social discourse mainly served to mask the horrors of slavery with a polite veneer, but the idiom is present in Greek biblical literature, often played to great effect with the concept of Israel as both “son” and “slave” of God.
one of my favorites of yours
I’m a quiet admirer of you writings but I particularly enjoyed this. I’ve never really understood the paranoia about Mary in Protestant and even many catholic and orthodox circles. St Lawrence of Brindisi called her “the crowned goddess of heaven”. There’s also a renowned carmelite work that says as much-“if it can be said of the saints they were changed into god by grace, what of her who is the mother of God? let one who reflects on these matters understand that in a real sense can be called and is a goddess”. Maybe it’s my sensibility to reference the feminine side of reality, but it seems clear she is the appointed and created goddess of the universe according to the will of the Trinity. Providing we understand the principles of grace and participation, it seems silly to worry about it. Mary isn’t God as in gif himself, absolute being, but she is the goddess through absolute theosis. Sure we don’t want to over mythologize her as though she wasn’t a historical human, but she became more than human and even “more than a creature” to quote sergius. People intuitively respond to Mary as a goddess once they understand her dignity. It seems awkward falling over ourselves to make sure we don’t give off the impression she wasn’t God. People find Mary compelling and attractive spiritually, I don’t have much to do with the institutional church these days but I have never lost my profound respect for her. I appreciate this great writing abs it was a very devotional experience for me. Thank you!