HIS story begins before the lineage of kings born to David, before the lineage of priests born to Aaron, before the lineage of Hebrews born to Yisrael.
HIS story begins with the birth of creation. In the beginning there was emptiness and from its darkness came light. Rehem is the Hebrew word that describes the womb-like creative energy that shaped the universe. All creation stories begin with the unknown darkness. Quantum physics confirms that chaos precedes creation and creation returns to chaos. Thus in the beginning was the void, the womb, the chalice, the sacred feminine.
Aboriginal people worship a Divine Matriarch who gives birth to all. Life and death are revered, both attributed to the Great Mother, the one who gives birth and the one who destroys.
Just as the male god of the modern era is called by different names, the Divine Mother has many names. Born in the triple cradles of civilization, she was known as Inanna of Sumer, Hathor of the Nile, Shakti of the Indus Valley. She became Ishtar of Mesopotamia, Anat of Parthia, Ashtoreth of Canaan, Astarte of Yisrael, Aphrodite of Cyprus, Athena of Greece. The Great Goddess is One with Many Names. In gratitude for her abundance of life, fertility rituals are held to honor her. During ritual mating in the fields or on the altars, the spirit of the Divine Father in the form of the sun is attracted from the heavens to fertilize the body of the earth, the Divine Mother incarnate. Sukkot is still celebrated in the fall as a remnant of a festival dedicated to the Divine Mother.
The Creator of the ancient Hebrews was loved as a divine couple: the Father/Mother God, El and Eloha. Through blood rituals experienced in female form, women were naturally connected to the Divine. Men sought divine favor through women, their wives blessed the harvest, and priestesses blessed the people by anointing kings. Hebrew men paid tribute to the goddess Astarte, just as Egyptian men paid tribute to Isis, and Parthian men paid tribute to Ishtar. Despite Avraham’s dedication to a male god, his people viewed the creator as a couple.
King Solomon appreciated the power of the Sacred Feminine by adorning the Temple with exuberant images to invoke the favor of the Goddess. He employed and enslaved Phoenician craftsmen who endowed the Holy Temple with a traditional Phoenician design: an outer corridor, an open central courtyard, and an inner holy of holies. At the entrance to the temple were two pillars representing the masculine and feminine aspects of the Divine. The upper part of the pillars was decorated with intertwined chains and a hundred bronze pomegranates, a symbol of fertility.
Solomon invited the most powerful woman of the time to his palace: Queen Makeda of Sheba. His country of Saba encompassed most of the Nile River in what is now known as Ethiopia. The queen would not marry Solomon, but she did bear him a son, Meyelek, who took Sheba with the gift of Solomon’s ring. Legend has it that Prince Meyelek returned to Jerusalem wearing the ring proving to Solomon that he was the king’s heir. Royal advisers avoided the dark-skinned spawn of the king’s illicit affair, but a priest believed the boy and followed Meyelek back to his homeland.
Queen Makeda was such a powerful force in Solomon’s day, uniting most of North Africa under her magnanimous rule that just as the Hebrews desired a king like David to unite the tribes of Israel against foreign oppression, so too made the people of the river Nile. wish for a Queen Messeh. Mesheh is the Egyptian word for the most revered beast, the crocodile, from its fat the oil is extracted to anoint the true king.
It was not until the Babylonian captivity that the Hebrew view of life became dualistic. Parthian Zorastrialism adopted a polarized view of the world that influenced the writings of the Hebrew scribes. During the long captivity, the Zadok priesthood decided to preserve the Hebrew faith by adding to the five books of Moses (the Torah) the words of the prophets (the Nevi’im) and the historical records of the scribes (the Ketuvim), the collection the works were forever tainted by Parthian black-and-white philosophy.
The polarity affected the Hebrews and also the Greeks who were duly conquered by the Persians. When Alexander the Great returned world order to the Greeks, the spread of Hellenism throughout the Western world was well spiced by Parthian ideology. Then light and dark took sides, the right hand forgot it was connected to the left, the masculine separated from the feminine. Civilization became polarized when humans lost contact with the Divine Feminine and separated from Unity.
When the tribe of Judah and the Zadok priesthood returned to Jerusalem, they found Solomon’s Temple desecrated by the Macedonians. The Shekhinah or female face of god no longer resided in the Holy of Holies. Perhaps that is why the Essenes camped at Qumran. So the Hebrew leaders became strict. Mothers had great power over their children and could influence them with their foreign customs, language, and religion. No more crossing with foreign women.
From 200 B.C. C. until 200 d. C., Hebrew scholars decided on the writings that would become the modern Tanakh. Much of the miqra had been translated from ancient Hebrew into a Greek version to be read by common people called the Septuagint. The Torah and the Nevi’im were established as canonical, but some of the original Kevutim were left out. Like the Council of Nicaea in Constantinople, which chose only a few of the many stories that make up the New Testament, the Council of Alexandria chose to omit some of the writings of the Hebrew scribes. These forgotten scriptures can be found in The Apocrypha and The Pseudoepigrapha, some of which were stories of heroic women: Susannah, Esther, Judith.
The Sacred Marriage or Heiros Gamos has been practiced since Mesopotamian times. A high priestess would anoint and mate with the chosen king, elevating him to the status of divine ruler. Through such an ancient ritual, Herod Antipas became ruler of the land by marrying the Hasmonean princess Mariamne, a priestess of the Mother Goddess. High priestesses were of matriarchal lineage. Mariamne was the great-aunt of Mary Magdalene through her Hasmonean mother. Although Magdala was also the name of a town in the Galilee and Migdol was the Egyptian equivalent of it, the word means Tower of the Divine.
Mary anointed Yeshua in a Holy Matrimony. The Feminine Face of God, the Shekhinah, returned incarnated in the wife of the Divine Son, Mary Magdalene, the Divine Daughter.
