God's Wife Edited Out of the Bible?

God's wife, Asherah, was a powerful fertility goddess, according to a theologian.

By Jennifer Viegas
Fri Mar 18, 2011

God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar.

In 1967, Raphael Patai was the first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah. The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter.

Information presented in Stavrakopoulou's books, lectures and journal papers has become the basis of a three-part documentary series, now airing in Europe, where she discusses the Yahweh-Asherah connection.

"You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him," writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. "He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many ... or so we like to believe."

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"After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife," she added.

Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.

Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.

"The inscription is a petition for a blessing," she shares. "Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherah.' Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife."

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Also significant, Stavrakopoulou believes, "is the Bible's admission that the goddess Asherah was worshiped in Yahweh's Temple in Jerusalem. In the Book of Kings, we're told that a statue of Asherah was housed in the temple and that female temple personnel wove ritual textiles for her."

J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News that he agrees several Hebrew inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah."

"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant."

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Asherah -- known across the ancient Near East by various other names, such as Astarte and Istar -- was "an important deity, one who was both mighty and nurturing," Wright continued.

"Many English translations prefer to translate 'Asherah' as 'Sacred Tree,'" Wright said. "This seems to be in part driven by a modern desire, clearly inspired by the Biblical narratives, to hide Asherah behind a veil once again."

"Mentions of the goddess Asherah in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) are rare and have been heavily edited by the ancient authors who gathered the texts together," Aaron Brody, director of the Bade Museum and an associate professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pacific School of Religion, said.

Asherah as a tree symbol was even said to have been "chopped down and burned outside the Temple in acts of certain rulers who were trying to 'purify' the cult, and focus on the worship of a single male god, Yahweh," he added.

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The ancient Israelites were polytheists, Brody told Discovery News, "with only a small minority worshiping Yahweh alone before the historic events of 586 B.C." In that year, an elite community within Judea was exiled to Babylon and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This, Brody said, led to "a more universal vision of strict monotheism: one god not only for Judah, but for all of the nations."

EROCx1: Mp3 - Nate Dogg Tribute Mix

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The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers

The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers
Secret Mysteries of America's Beginning
Part 4 [IV] of the Series ©2010 Chris Pinto

The first and only documentary to go where no film has ever gone before: into the hidden faith of America's founding fathers. Many founders were involved in secret societies, and yet it is often claimed these men were Christians who were trying to build a Christian nation. But was their faith the true faith of the Bible? And is it possible, as some claim, that the exact opposite is true?

What did the founders believe about the Person of Jesus Christ? Were they fighting for Christianity, or against it? Moreover, is it possible that the events of the American Revolution have a much darker significance in the pages of Bible prophecy than most church leaders are aware?

Charles Thomson was the Secretary of the Continental Congress, and the man responsible for the final design of the Great Seal of the United States. He was said to be more familiar with the events and people surrounding the American Revolution than any other man of his era. He spent years documenting the history of the War for Independence, knowing many details which had escaped others. Though encouraged to publish his remarkable history, he chose to destroy it. He said: "I shall not undeceive future generations." Since we are the 'future generation' of which Thompson referred how have we been deceived about our Founding Fathers? What was Thomson hiding? How has it affected the Church and society in America today?

The Secret Faith & Religious Beliefs of:

1. Thomas Paine - inspired the American Revolution.
2. Thomas Jefferson – Declaration of Independence ~Author.
3. John Adams - the second President of the United States.
4. Benjamin Franklin – Signed all of the founding documents.
5. George Washington - "America’s Father" 1st President.
6. Confronting David Barton's "fabled" view of American history, showing from his own writings the error of his teachings.
7. Secret Societies worked to change the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
8. Patriotic Christianity; Dominionism and building the NOW.
9. Prophetic implications used to build the kingdom of Antichrist.

Elders, Earth, Time & 2012

Elder Floyd Red Crow Westerman on
Native American Prophecy & Philosophy.

The spirit world is more real than most of us believe, the spirit world is everything. It is the Hopi belief, that if your not spiritually connected to the earth, its likely you will not remain. Its not the end of the world, its the end of us. Earth has all the time of in the world.

Every day that you don't do what's right, is a day that you've lost an option and your loosing your options every day…

---

YouTube video featuring a 1998 audio recording
of Terence McKenna discussing 2012.

www.GaianBotanicals.com

High Society: Drugs in History, Science & Culture

High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History, Science & Culture

By: Mike Jay

An illustrated cultural history of drug use from its roots in animal intoxication to its future in designer neurochemicals

• Featuring artwork from the upcoming High Society exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, one of the world’s greatest medical history collections
• Explores the roles drugs play in different cultures as medicines, religious sacraments, status symbols, and coveted trade goods
• Reveals how drugs drove the global trade and cultural exchange that made the modern world
• Examines the causes of drug prohibitions a century ago and the current “war on drugs”

Every society is a high society. Every day people drink coffee on European terraces and kava in Pacific villages; chew betel nut in Indonesian markets and coca leaf on Andean mountainsides; swallow ecstasy tablets in the clubs of Amsterdam and opium pills in the deserts of Rajastan; smoke hashish in Himalayan temples and tobacco and marijuana in every nation on earth.

Exploring the spectrum of drug use throughout history--from its roots in animal intoxication to its future in designer neurochemicals--High Society paints vivid portraits of the roles drugs play in different cultures as medicines, religious sacraments, status symbols, and coveted trade goods. From the botanicals of the classical world through the mind-bending self-experiments of 18th- and 19th-century scientists to the synthetic molecules that have transformed our understanding of the brain, Mike Jay reveals how drugs such as tobacco, tea, and opium drove the global trade and cultural exchange that created the modern world and examines the forces that led to the prohibition of opium and cocaine a century ago and the “war on drugs” that rages today.

Table of Contents

A Universal Impulse
High Societies - The Evolution of Drugs - Animal Intoxication - Drugs and Shamanism - Drugs and Culture - The Culture of Kava - The Culture of Betel - Drug Prohibitions - Drug Subcultures - The Cultures of Ecstasy

From Apothecary to Laboratory
What Is a Drug? - Drugs in Antiquity - Renaissance Herbals - Witches and Flying Ointments - The Invention of Laudanum - Linnaeus and the Enlightenment - The First Synthetic Drugs - Opium and the Romantics - The Club des Haschischins - Freud and Cocaine - Addiction and Drug Control - Mescaline, LSD, and Beyond - Drugs of the Future

The Drugs Trade
Drugs of the New World - The Psychoactive Revolution - Tobacco in China, Tea in Europe - The Opium Wars - The Anti-Opium campaign - Temperance and Prohibition - The 'War on Drugs' - Epilogue: The Decline of Tobacco

Download pre-publication sample pages in PDF format

About the Author:
Mike Jay is a leading specialist in the study of drugs across history and cultures. The author of Artificial Paradises, Emperors of Dreams, and The Atmosphere of Heaven, his critical writing on drugs has appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The International Journal of Drug Policy. He sits on the editorial board of the addiction journal Drugs and Alcohol Today and on the board of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. He lives in England.

Owsley "Bear" Stanley has joined the ancestors

(Reuters) - Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was 76.

The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco's Bay Area.

"He made acid so pure and wonderful that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their band in its honor," former rock 'n' roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Hendrix's song "Purple Haze" was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley's product, though the guitarist denied any drug link. The ear-splitting psychedelic-blues combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch.

Stanley briefly managed the Grateful Dead, and oversaw every aspect of their live sound at a time when little thought was given to amplification in public venues. His tape recordings of Dead concerts were turned into live albums, providing him with a healthy income in later life.

"When it came to technology, the Bear was one of the most far-out and interesting guys on the planet," Cutler wrote. "The first FM live simulcast could be, in part, attributed to his vision, as could the first quadraphonic simulcast on radio."

The Dead, a fabled rock band formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 known for its improvisational live concerts, wrote about him in their song "Alice D. Millionaire" after a 1967 arrest prompted a newspaper to describe Stanley as an "LSD millionaire."

Steely Dan's 1976 single "Kid Charlemagne" was loosely inspired by Stanley's exploits.

'COMMUNITY SERVICE'

According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started cooking LSD after discovering the recipe in a chemistry journal at the University of California, Berkeley.

The police raided his first lab in 1966, but Stanley successfully sued for the return of his equipment. After a marijuana bust in 1970, he went to prison for two years.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he told the Chronicle's Joel Selvin.

"What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."

He emigrated to the tropical Australian state of Queensland in the early 1980s, apparently fearful of a new ice age, and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He lost one of his vocal cords to cancer.

Stanley was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky, a state governed by his namesake grandfather from 1915 to 1919. He served in the U.S. Air Force for 18 months, studied ballet in Los Angeles and then enrolled at UC Berkeley. In addition to producing and advocating LSD, he adhered to an all-meat diet.

Cutler, speaking on behalf of the family, said in an interview that Stanley and his wife, Sheila, were driving to their home near the city of Cairns along a dangerous stretch of highway when he evidently lost control during a storm. He died instantly; his wife broke her collar bone.

Stanley is also survived by four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

By: Dean Goodman, Peter Bohan and Todd Eastham

Also See: Bruce Eisner’s Interview with an Alchemist

Jonathan Ott: A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate

The Psychedelic Salon Podcast: 256 “A Drug Enhancer Called Chocolate”

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PROGRAM NOTES:

[From Wikipedia] Jonathan Ott has written eight books, co-wrote five, and contributed to four others, and published many articles in the field of entheogens. He has collaborated with other researchers like Christian Rätsch, Jochen Gartz, and the late ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson. He translated Albert Hofmann‘s 1979 book LSD: My Problem Child (LSD: Mein Sorgekind), and On Aztec Botanical Names by Blas Pablo Reko, into English. His articles have appeared in many publications, including The Entheogen Review, The Entheogen Law Reporter, the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (AKA the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs), the MAPS Bulletin, Head, HighTimes, Curare, Eleusis, Integration, Lloydia, The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, and several Harvard Botanical Museum pamphlets. He is a co-editor of Eleusis: Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds, along with Giorgio Samorini.

A sampling of books by Jonathan Ott

Pharmacophilia, or, The Natural Paradises

Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History<

Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion 

By R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kramrisch,
Dr. Carl Ruck, Jonathan Ott

Shamanic Snuffs or Enthogenic Errhines

By Jonathan Ott

 

Ayahuasca Analogues Pangean Entheogens

By Jonathan Ott

Albert Einstein writes about God

 
Letter to Eric Gutkind
By Albert Einstein (1954)
May 16, 2008 Letter sold at auction for $404,000.00
Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilized interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted; as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual "props" and "rationalization" in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes.

Yours,
A. Einstein

 http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/173

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/science/17einsteinw.html?_r=1