About 2,600 years ago, God’s female counterpart was stricken from official religious life in ancient Israel and buried deep. But she has a name, and it’s been found on ancient shards of pottery. Here’s who she was, how she disappeared, and how she kept showing up, in the Bible and in my own life. What Is the Divine Feminine? Feminine energy is collaborative, warm, nurturing, and compassionate. It’s about being in the flow, moving with life’s natural rhythms, and creativity. Also included is trusting your intuition, that innate and divine gift everyone has. Plus, there’s receptivity, which means being open to receive love, learning to relax, and just be. The need to always be active and doing is a more masculine trait. However, the divine feminine is not tied to gender. Regardless of sex, we all have both divine masculine and divine feminine energy within us. Asherah, the Goddess Removed from the Bible Asherah was a prominent mother goddess in the Canaanite religion, associated with fertility, motherhood, and sacred groves. In ancient texts from the 13th century BCE, she was depicted as the partner of the high god, known as El. But in the smaller kingdom of Israel, they wanted to focus on just one god, so she was erased from the ancient biblical texts and lost to us. However, archaeologists found writing on pottery in ancient Israel and Judah, from the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, that invokes “Yahweh and his Asherah.” That suggests some Israelites believed Yahweh had a divine feminine counterpart. If you grew up with any Abrahamic religious teaching, there’s a good chance nobody ever mentioned her name. When I found this out, I was outraged. I thought, “They changed the Bible and took out the goddess.! How could they!” How the Divine Feminine Got Lost Asherah worship was removed during King Josiah’s reforms about 2,600 years ago. Scholars point to three overlapping forces: 1) A push to worship Yahweh alone as the one God 2) Political control gained by closing local shrines 3) A patriarchal shift that left less room for feminine divine imagery. That’s the official story. But the feminine was never fully gone. They could never erase her, even if they took her out of the religious texts. Some traditions survived underground or were transformed into something more acceptable to the religious culture of the time. For example, the Shekinah, a feminine noun in Hebrew, came to stand for the divine spirit within us. The Divine Feminine Kept Showing Up Next, the divine feminine reappears later in history as Sophia, which is actually the Greek word for wisdom. Maybe the goddess was no longer welcome in a religious context, but wisdom still was1 In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom speaks in her own voice, as a woman, and says she was with God before creation. In the Greek book, The Wisdom of Solomon, from the 1st century BCE, Sophia guides and protects Israel and is connected with creation, salvation, and divine knowledge. Later in Gnostic Christianity, a branch the church later rejected, she is a central figure in a story of a broken world and its redemption. Now here’s a really big spot where Sophia shines. In Constantinople, now Istanbul, a great church was named Hagia Sophia, meaning Holy Wisdom. It was dedicated to Christ as the Wisdom of God. But keep this in mind, one of the most famous buildings in the world took its name from wisdom herself. They didn’t fully bury the divine feminine. Wisdom has a human face, too. The Old Testament has two wise women in Samuel, who advised and negotiated. One of them talks a general out of destroying her city. That’s very wise. Today, I introduce myself as a wise woman, and it turns out we’ve been recognized for our wisdom for eons. You can find this language in England from the middle ages into the 1800s, and also in Germany and Scandinavia. Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary Other women bring the feminine forward in early Christianity. Mary Magdalene shows up as a disciple, a witness to the resurrection, and a spiritual seeker and knower. Some ancient documents, like the Nag Hammadi texts found in Egypt in 1945, suggest that she and Jesus were life partners and that the other apostles were upset because he showed himself to her first. Christianity gave Mother Mary an enormous spiritual role but focused only on virginity, purity, and motherhood. We know women are much more than that. The idea that she remained a virgin her whole life wasn’t initially in the text. It showed up that way over time. The Come Back of Divine Feminine Today In the early 1990s, I saw a segment on 60 Minutes about the rise of Goddess groups, and I fell head over heels for the idea. I started one in my living room in Connecticut. We met once a month to explore a spiritual path that included the sacred feminine in a way I hadn’t experienced growing up. One ritual came to me intuitively. We stood in a circle, one woman held a bowl, and another poured water into it, a way ...
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