The Forbidden History of Heavenly Mother

Mormons whisper of Asherah, Yahweh’s consort—the shadow of Heavenly Mother—but they stop there, for beyond lies heresy. I will not stop. I will take you further—I will make you an apostate. This essay is not some lighthearted Sunday school lesson; I will not be passing around a tray of cookies. It is written for the rare few who are ready to rise above everything they were ever taught. This might be the most heretical piece you will ever read.

Your faith must be shattered, its fragments ground to dust. I will drag you into the fire, burn your heart to ash—and from that ruin, I will forge new gods. Click off now if you are not ready for that. You have been warned.

“…and if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), §146.)

When Eliza R. Snow composed O My Father in 1845, she revealed a hidden doctrine that had been largely forgotten by the Christian world:

I had learned to call thee Father, Thru thy Spirit from on high, But, until the key of knowledge Was restored, I knew not why. In the heav’ns are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason; truth eternal Tells me I’ve a mother there. (O My Father, 1845)

Snow reported that Joseph Smith had been quietly sharing this doctrine of a Divine Mother with several women in the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a teaching forgotten by the broader Abrahamic faiths, which present God as exclusively masculine.

In The Family: A Proclamation to the World (1995), the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles affirmed:

“Each [person] is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny.” (The Family: A Proclamation to the World, 1995)

Yet the doctrine remains suppressed. Leaders avoid speaking of her, prohibit prayers directed to her, and largely silence her presence. Why? For what ethical reason? I contend there is none. The strongest justification offered comes from President Gordon B. Hinckley:

“…in light of the instruction we have received from the Lord Himself, I regard it as inappropriate for anyone in the Church to pray to our Mother in Heaven.

The Lord Jesus Christ set the pattern for our prayers. In the Sermon on the Mount, He declared: ‘After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.’ (Matt. 6:9) … Search as I have, I find nowhere in the standard works an account where Jesus prayed other than to His Father in Heaven or where He instructed the people to pray other than to His Father in Heaven.” (Hinckley, Ensign, Nov. 1991)

Hinckley could not find references to prayer directed to a divine mother because the Great Mother was intentionally erased from the biblical canon.

Another common explanation is that we avoid speaking of her because she is too sacred, too vulnerable to profanation if her name were revealed. But this claim is untenable. A careful investigation into her history shows that she bore many names and was widely known throughout the ancient world.

The deeper question is this: Why was the divine feminine erased, leaving only a single, Trinitarian masculine God? What happened to Goddess and her worship? And most importantly—what consequences do we face if she is not released from the underworld to which she was consigned?

Many women mourn with Carol Lynn Pearson—LDS author, poet, and advocate for women’s issues,

“God gave me a Mother in Heaven, but the Church gave me silence about her. That silence has been devastating. Women need to see the divine in themselves, reflected in the heavens.” (A Mother Wove the Morning, 1992 play)

When you suppress Heavenly Mother  long enough—when you bury her symbols, silence her voice, and call that silence “reverence”—she doesn’t stay dead. She metastasizes into the Terrible Mother.

I will give her voice. I will show you her forbidden history. For the first twenty millennia of human religious life, there was no Elohim, Yahweh, or even a devil-like figure such as Satan. There was, primarily, the Great Mother.

25,000 BC – The Venus of Willendorf and Early Goddess Worship

In the beginning was the womb, and the womb was with woman, and the womb was the world.

This story begins with the dawn of humanity, around 40,000 to 25,000 BC. We are speaking of a past so ancient that even the best archaeologists and historians can do little more than make educated guesses about the rituals, symbols, or practices these early humans may have known. Any firm conclusion are nearly impossible to make.

Many of the best-known humanoid sculptures from the Paleolithic era are female or interpreted as female, characterized by exaggerated sexual features, enlarged breasts, wide hips, and swollen bellies, yet often lacking facial detail. It remains unclear what these figures were: goddess statues, fertility emblems, ritual objects, teaching tools, or simply artistic expressions. There is little evidence that Paleolithic humans worshiped a goddess in the literal and developed sense that later peoples worshiped deities such as Yahweh. Yet in Jungian psychological terms, one might say that prehistoric humans were already circling around the archetype of the Great Mother, even if unconsciously.

Erich Neumann, a German analytical psychologist and student of Carl Jung, observed in The Great Mother:

“Of the Stone Age sculptures known to us, there are fifty-five female figures and only five male figures. The male figures, of youths, are atypical and poorly executed, hence it is certain that they had no significance for the cult. This fits in with the secondary character of the male godhead, who appeared only later in the history of religions and derived his divine rank from his mother, the Goddess.” (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press, 1963 [orig. 1955])

Another writer described one famous female figure vividly:

“Bulging, bulbous, bubbling, Venus of Willendorf, bent over by her own belly, tends the hot pot of nature. She is eternally pregnant. She broods, in all senses. She is hen, nest, egg.” (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 5.)

One could imagine such figures being carved by a woman gazing down at her own pregnant belly, conscious of its weight and burden, consciousness itself awakening. That is, of course, an imaginative reconstruction, not a demonstrable fact. But it captures something of the symbolic gravity these figures still carry.

This was an age in which survival was everything. Frigid temperatures, predators, starvation, disease, childbirth, rival groups, and the raw instability of nature could end a life at any moment. For that reason, older rigid models of “man the hunter” and “woman the gatherer” have increasingly been questioned by modern scholars; many now suggest that Paleolithic life was likely more flexible and cooperative than such neat divisions imply. In a world so precarious, everyone would have needed to help where they could.

Given the fragility of life in Paleolithic conditions, fertility and reproduction may have carried immense symbolic weight. Looking back across the millennia, reality itself often appears more animated, mysterious, and alive. Some scholars have interpreted aspects of Paleolithic symbolism in ways compatible with animistic worldviews, in which animals, landscapes, weather, and objects were understood as possessing vitality or spirit. In that sense, early humans may have perceived the world as alive, numinous, and charged with unseen power.

Nothing was, and still is, more mysterious than the creation of life within the body. In this symbolic framework, woman appears as the origin of the world. As one interpretation suggests, reflecting on the Venus figurines:

“…trapped in her wavy, watery body. She must listen and learn from something beyond and yet within her. The Venus of Willendorf, blind, tongueless, brainless, armless, knock-kneed, seems a depressing model of gender. Yet woman is depressed, pressed down, by earth’s gravitation, calling us back to her bosom.” (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 7.)

Some later interpreters have read Paleolithic symbolism as associating nature, fertility, and cyclicality with feminine imagery. Caves, springs, and the hidden hollows of the earth have sometimes been understood symbolically as womb-like spaces, though such interpretations remain speculative.

Some of humanity’s oldest symbolic images, serpents shedding their skin, the lunar cycle, pregnant figurines, can be read as expressions of fertility, nourishment, death, and cyclical regeneration, all themes later associated with the Great Mother archetype.

In mythic and Jungian terms, one could say that alongside the archetype of the Great Mother there emerges the masculine hero. Human communities would likely have recognized the vulnerability surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the danger that constantly surrounded life itself. In some myths, serpents come to symbolize chaos, danger, or ambivalent transformative power. In later biblical symbolism, this tension appears in the story of Adam and Eve, where awakening, knowledge, sexuality, and danger are bound together.

As Erich Neumann explains:

“The [feminine] is the vehicle par excellence of the transformative character. It is the mover, the instigator of change, whose fascination drives, lures, and encourages the male to all the adventures of the soul and spirit, of action and creation in the inner and outward world.” (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press, 1963 [orig. 1955])

“The woman is dependent both on the hunting, mating, killing, and sacrificing male-the ‘knife of the Great Goddess,’ the phallus that bloodily opens the female and on the plow that tears open the earth.” (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press, 1963 [orig. 1955])

We can see related themes in ancient myth. In the Sumerian tale of Inanna and the huluppu tree, the goddess tends a sacred tree that comes to be occupied by troubling forces, including a serpent and a dark female figure later associated in some retellings with Lilith. Inanna calls upon Gilgamesh to intervene. He cuts down the tree, and from its wood a bed and a throne are fashioned for the goddess. The story can be read symbolically as one of ordering chaos, reclaiming sacred space, and transforming threat into culture with a heroic masculine figure coming to the aid of a great goddess figure.

By the Neolithic era, female-centered symbolic and possibly religious imagery appears in many places. Across regions stretching from Anatolia to the Danube Valley and the Mediterranean, archaeologists have uncovered numerous female figurines and symbolic forms that some interpreters understand as evidence of ritual or religious attention focused on fertility, generation, and the powers of life.

At Çatalhöyük, some scholars have interpreted female figurines and symbolic imagery as evidence of a life-giving Mother figure, though this remains disputed. Across what Marija Gimbutas called “Old Europe,” she documented many female statues and recurring symbols, including birthing figures, serpentine motifs, and bird-associated imagery. She argued that these cultures venerated a Great Goddess in many forms, presiding over fertility, animals, and the underworld. That interpretation has been influential, though it remains debated.

According to this reading, some Neolithic societies may have combined agrarian life with female-centered symbolic or religious forms, and in some areas there is limited evidence for large-scale warfare in earlier phases, though this should not be overstated. The absence of fortifications at certain sites has sometimes been taken to suggest a relative lack of conflict, but such inferences remain uncertain. Likewise, some scholars have proposed that women may have held important ritual or social roles in certain communities, though the evidence does not allow sweeping conclusions.

Nature’s fertility was now tied even more directly to human survival through agriculture, further reinforcing symbolic links between woman, earth, and life-giving power. In the Neolithic temples of Malta, a famous figurine known as the Sleeping Lady depicts a reclining, heavy-bodied woman discovered in the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an underground funerary complex. She has often been interpreted as connected to sleep, death, or regeneration, though her precise meaning remains uncertain.

The biblical text echoes this same rhythm of life, death, and return: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). As if to say: we are born from the womb of a woman, we die and return to the womb of the earth, and from that earth we may yet be reborn.

3500 BC – The Bronze Age, Inanna, and the Mother Goddess’s Rise and Fall

Then came the Bronze Age and the dawn of civilization in ancient Sumer. Thousands of years before the names of Yahweh or Elohim were written, among the earliest written divine names was Inanna, inscribed on proto-cuneiform tablets from Uruk. A possible variant of the Jungian Great Mother archetype. 

Inanna was a multifaceted Great Goddess of paradoxes: ruler of love, femininity, sexuality, and fertility, yet also of war, and kingship. She embodied what Neumann later called the “abysmal contradictions of human nature.” In Uruk and other city-states she was honored with grand temples; high priestesses—such as the first named poet Enheduanna—served in her cult, evidence that women could hold religious power under her aegis.

Inanna, Queen of Heaven, was the holder of the Me (sacred laws and arts of civilization) which she tricked the drunken Enki, the god of wisdom and her father, to give to her. She demanded respect even from the greatest male gods.

Enheduanna (c. 2300 BC) praised the goddess in language strikingly similar to the biblical psalms which praise Yahweh:

Lady of all the powers, resplendent light, righteous woman clothed in radiance, beloved of heaven and earth, your greatness is praised above all other gods. You are magnificent, your name is praised, you alone are magnificent. Over all the lands you are exalted. You have found your high place, O Inanna, in your commands, your commands are supreme. Who can rival you? Who can equal your greatness? Majestic is your praise.

In Uruk, a king’s legitimacy depended on securing Inanna’s favor, often through ritual marriage to one of her high priestesses—symbolically marrying the goddess herself, regardless of his existing marital ties. (Scholars debate whether these marriages were permanent legal arrangements and if they involved ritual sex). Royal power derived from the Great Mother. Erich Neumann believed the throne itself was conceived as the womb: a man could not reign unless his mother first gave birth to him. 

 As he writes:

“As mother and earth woman, the Great Mother is the ‘throne’ pure and simple, and, characteristically, the woman’s motherliness resides not only in the womb but also in the seated woman’s broad expanse of thigh, her lap on which the newborn child sits enthroned. To be taken on the lap is, like being taken to the breast, a symbolic expression for adoption of the child, and also of the man, by the Feminine. It is no accident that the greatest Mother Goddess of early cults was named Isis, ‘the seat,’ ‘the throne,’ the symbol of which she bears on her head; and the king who ‘takes possession’ of the earth, the Mother Goddess, does so by sitting on her in the literal sense of the word. “The enthroned Mother Goddess lives in the sacral symbol of the throne. The king comes to power by ‘mounting the throne,’ and so takes his place on the lap of the Great Goddess, the earth—he becomes her son. In widespread throne cults, the throne, which was originally the godhead itself, was worshipped as the ‘seat of the godhead.’” (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1963 [orig. 1955])

In Neumann’s framework, the female godhead functions as the throne upon which the male godhead sits.

Long before Christianity, Inanna’s descent provided a powerful ancient model of death and return, one later Jungian and feminist interpreters have treated as a template for the heroine’s journey. The myth, preserved on clay tablets from c. 1900 BC but likely older in oral tradition, recounts her journey into the underworld ruled by her sister, Ereshkigal. “Inanna craved the Great Above and she craved the Great Below.” Inanna, dressed in her most radiant robes and jewels, gathering together her seven divine items of power as she sought to claim this final domain. At each of the seven gates, however, a guardian stripped away one emblem of her power:

At the first gate, from her head the crown of the steppe was removed. Inanna asked: “What is this?” She was told: “Be quiet, Inanna. The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

From her head, the crown is taken — she asks herself, Am I still a queen?

Her breastplate is removed — Am I still a warrior?

Her robes of ladyship vanish — Am I still a lady?

By the seventh gate, she was stripped completely naked and bowed low before her sister, Death — her shadow, the dark feminine — just as mortals are stripped of all possessions at death. Some renditions of the story have her sitting upon her sister’s throne. Ereshkigal then judged her, killed her, and hung her body on a hook like a carcass. We ask if she is still alive even in death — still human when reduced to a slab of rotting meat.

After three days and three nights, she was revived by her father Enki’s servants, who sprinkled upon her the food and water of life. Upon revival, Inanna emerged from the womb of the world with new power and insight. 

My interpretation of the story suggests there is a difference between wearing divinity and being it. What remained was the raw essence of sovereignty — the undivided Self. Her knowledge of death gave her a profound understanding of life now that her roots reached down to hell. Now carrying the underworld everywhere she went.

As Carl Jung taught:

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”(Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.)

 But finding that her husband, the shepherd king Dumuzi, had not mourned her death, she condemned him to take her place in the underworld. 

There are many modern feminist and woman-centered readings of Inanna’s descent myth. Unlike the familiar damsel-in-distress pattern, Inanna descends willingly into the underworld. Psychologically, this can be read as a journey into the unconscious and a confrontation with fear, loss, and transformation. She retains her agency, a quality often denied to women in myth, which has made her story a powerful image of female autonomy. Her conflict is with her sister rather than a male adversary, she is stripped of rank and ornament until she stands beyond social role, and she later holds her husband accountable for failing to mourn her. Some readers also see in her descent and return a pattern of cyclical death and rebirth that resonates with women’s bodily experience, including menstruation.

In Descent to the Goddess, Sylvia Brinton Perera treats Inanna as an image of the suffering and exiled feminine and as a model for descent into the unconscious. For Perera, Inanna’s humiliation, death, and return form a symbolic pattern through which modern women may understand suffering, transformation, and renewal. The descent strips away false identity and outward display, so that what returns is not merely the old self restored, but a self transformed through ordeal. In this reading, Inanna’s power becomes inward, essential, and embodied.

Other interpreters extend this in more personal and psychological directions. Some women read Inanna devotionally, as a figure of strength, endurance, and restoration. Others  read the myth as a surrender of the acquisitive ego in order to encounter a deeper and more honest self. In both readings, the underworld is not merely a place of death, but a place of transformation, and what emerges is not a diminished feminine identity, but a fuller one, capable of holding light and darkness, softness and severity, receptivity and strength.

Yet Inanna’s reign did not last. The warrior archetype gained dominance. Man turned from the soil toward conquest. He longed to soar like Icarus, to expand his empire to the horizon and across the seas. Sky gods and warrior gods rose to ascendancy: such as Marduk, the chief god of Babylon. These deities reflected the priorities of patriarchal kingship and imperial expansion.

The earth itself was reimagined—not as nurturing mother, but as serpent, beast, and chaos. In some later myths, chaos and the primordial deep came to be personified as monstrous opponents of male storm or warrior gods: Indra versus Vritra, Thor versus Jörmungandr. The most famous of these is Marduk’s slaying of Tiamat, the great sea-serpent goddess, whose body he split to form the world. The creation story in Genesis appears to echo this motif. The “deep” (tehom) of Genesis 1:2 derives from the same linguistic root as Tiamat. 

Inanna’s mythic descent thus became literal. Her authority was stripped away; she was forced into the underworld of the collective unconscious, this time against her will. 

3000 BC – Indo-Europeans, the Sky Father, and Patriarchal Ascendancy

With the brightness of the noonday sun, warriors from the north rode in on horseback, wind and thunder at their backs. Here came the Bronze Age and the rise of Indo-European-speaking peoples, associated by many scholars with the vast steppe lands north of the Black and Caspian Seas. These pastoral societies are closely linked to the spread of wheeled transport and, in later periods, to chariot warfare. Their migrations and expansions brought conflict, disruption, and cultural transformation to many settled agricultural populations across Eurasia. Out of this world emerged a powerful religious image that would echo for millennia: the Sky Father, reconstructed by linguists as *Dyeus Pater, whose descendants can still be heard in names such as Zeus, Jupiter, and the very word father.

If one wished to put on Mormon glasses, one might say this is the moment when Heavenly Father began to emerge more clearly in the religious imagination of the ancient world. Yet the rise of the Sky Father over older earth-centered and goddess-linked traditions was neither instantaneous nor uniform. It unfolded unevenly across centuries and across regions, as Indo-European-speaking groups moved into places as distant as South Asia and western Europe. In many of these traditions, male sky gods, warrior ideals, and patriarchal social forms gained prestige, though older female divinities and earth symbolism often persisted beside them.

Warfare was hardly invented by the Indo-Europeans, but warrior prestige became especially central in many societies shaped by these traditions. Elite burials from steppe cultures often include weapons, wagons, sacrificed animals, and other signs of martial status. Some scholars have also proposed that certain warrior initiations were symbolically linked with wolves or dogs, suggesting a vision of manhood formed around ferocity, mobility, and disciplined violence. Death was inevitable, but glory in battle could outlive the body. Even some female burials with weapons from later steppe cultures have been compared to the background of Greek stories about Amazons, though such comparisons should be made cautiously.

The old goddess was not erased overnight. In some Indo-European traditions, powerful female figures remained central: Freyja and Frigg in Norse myth, or memories of warrior queens and prophetesses in Celtic tradition. But over time many mythic systems came to center male sovereignty more explicitly. Zeus offers one of the clearest examples. He overthrows the Titans, the older powers tied to primordial disorder and the children of Gaia, and establishes an Olympian order dominated by male rule. Goddesses remain powerful, but they are increasingly cast as wives, daughters, helpers, or contained exceptions within a structure headed by the Sky Father. Even the myth of Athena’s birth from Zeus’s head can be read as a striking symbolic reversal: wisdom, once imaginable as feminine and independent, is reborn through the body of the father and placed in service to his order.

Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days sharpen this shift through the figure of Pandora, the first woman, fashioned as a “beautiful evil” and sent by Zeus as a burden upon men. Her story echoes later patterns familiar from Genesis: woman as the one whose curiosity opens the door to suffering, disorder, and death. In both myths, female initiative becomes dangerous knowledge, and male authority is justified in response. Myth and social order mirrored one another. In classical Athens, women had no political rights and lived under male guardianship, valued above all for obedience, chastity, and motherhood. Even the Oracle at Delphi, perhaps the most famous female religious office in Greece, stood within a mythic structure in which Apollo had seized the site from older chthonic powers by slaying Python, the serpent linked with the earth.

So the triumph of the Sky Father was not merely theological. It was social, political, and psychological. The heavens rose above the earth, the sword above the womb, the king above the mother. Yet the older powers were never fully destroyed. They were buried, subdued, renamed, or forced underground, where they continued to haunt the myths of the patriarchs who claimed to have replaced them.

Aspect	Goddess-Centric / Matriarchal Paradigm	God-Centric / Patriarchal Paradigm
Divine Focus	Reverence for the Great Mother (earth, fertility) and multiple nature deities; female divinities central (thecollector.com.)	One supreme male God (sky/creator) or a pantheon led by a father-king god; goddesses diminished or outlawed (en.wikipedia.orgen.wikipedia.org.)
Social Structure	Often matrilineal or egalitarian; women as priestesses and leaders in ritual (thecollector.com.) Authority linked with nurturing roles (e.g. clan mothers).	Patrilineal, hierarchical; kings, high priests, and fathers hold power. Female authority curtailed to domestic or symbolic roles (e.g. queen consort).
Nature’s Status	Nature is sacred and alive (Mother Earth). Cycles of nature honored through festivals; ethos of living in balance with the earth (thecollector.com.)	Nature is “other” – demythologized and available for use. Tendency toward dominating or exploiting nature, especially post-Enlightenment (seen as inert matter, not divinity) (links.org.au.)
Gender Roles & Values	Feminine principle honored – fertility, childbirth, sexuality celebrated (e.g. sacred sexual rites) (thecollector.com). Cultural values emphasize nurturance, cooperation, cyclical renewal (holdenma.wordpress.com.) Both women and men partake in spiritual power.	Feminine principle devalued – women associated with temptation or sin (e.g. Pandora, Eve myths) and confined to obedient roles. Emphasis on law, order, conquest; power as domination rather than service (holdenma.wordpress.com.) Sexuality is tightly controlled (virginity cults, stigmatization of female sexuality as “whoredom” in patriarchal texts (en.wikipedia.org).
Mythic Imagery	Creation myths feature birth/egg metaphors, mother creator, or balanced sacred couples. Serpents, moons, womb symbols are positive. Goddess often source of wisdom and life.	Myths show male heroes/gods defeating serpents, dragons, or dark goddesses (e.g. Marduk vs Tiamat (themetafictionalist.medium.com), Apollo vs Python (theoi.com). Women in myth either idealized as pure virgins/mothers or demonized as witches/temptresses.

1300 BC – Yahweh’s Rise through the suppression and demonization of Asherah

During the start of the Iron Age, from among the desert peoples of the southern Levant, a strange, storm-war god staggered onto the already crowded stage—Yahweh, not yet called the Almighty. Scholars often locate Yahweh’s earliest cult in the southern regions associated with Edom, Midian, Seir, and the Shasu. Yahweh was later taken up into the emerging Israelite religion, evolving from a tribal god into Israel’s patron deity and only afterward claiming universal supremacy. Egyptian inscriptions from the 14th–12th centuries BC mention the “Shasu of Yhw,” widely considered the earliest reference to Yahweh. These Shasu are commonly argued to not be Israelites but semi-nomadic pastoral groups known in Egyptian texts—perhaps the same kind of people Moses, in later traditions, was said to have encountered in Midian. The biblical story recounts his encounter with Yahweh in a burning bush. Later editors placed these words in God’s mouth:

“I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai—‘God Almighty’—but by my name Yahweh I was not known to them.” (Exodus 6:3)

Although strands of Exodus date back to c. 900 BC, this Priestly passage was composed in the exilic or post-exilic period (6th–5th century BC). It reflects an attempt to harmonize Yahweh with the older high god El.

Following the collapse of Canaan’s city-states and Egyptian withdrawal, the central highlands opened to new groups. Early Israelites were likely a coalition of local Canaanites, Shasu nomads, and other migrants seeking stability. The name Israel itself (“El rules”) signals their cultural inheritance. Early Israelite religion appears to have shared significant continuity with the broader West Semitic religious world reflected in Ugaritic texts: El, the “Sky Father”; Asherah or Athirat, his consort and a major West Semitic goddess; and their seventy divine sons, including the storm-god Baal—Yahweh’s rival before being displaced. 

The monarchy accelerated Yahweh’s rise. Under the monarchies of Saul, David, and Solomon, Yahweh’s status appears to have risen toward clear national preeminence. Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem helped consolidate Yahweh’s role as national deity. Absorbing attributes of El and possibly taking Asherah as consort though their ultimate connection is debated. Inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud (c. 800 BC) even refer to “Yahweh and his Asherah,” evidence that the feminine divine persisted in popular worship. Yet biblical editors polemicized fiercely against her.

By the time of King Josiah’s reforms (c. 621 BC), Asherah was targeted for eradication. 2 Kings 23 describes Josiah removing Asherah’s cult objects from the Temple, destroying her shrines, and condemning women who “wove hangings for the Asherah” (2 Kgs 23:7). Deuteronomistic writers often used sexualized language of harlotry or adultery, recasting goddess worship as prostitution (zĕnûth), infidelity, and depravity—sins provoking Yahweh’s wrath and, in their view, explaining Jerusalem’s downfall to the Babylonians. The feminine divine was not merely suppressed but systematically vilified.

As what modern scholars now call Yahweh-alone worship intensified, Israelite religion shifted from monolatry (worship of one god among many) to monotheism. The erasure of Asherah left Yahweh without consort; her functions were reinterpreted through scripture and liturgy. The prophetic writings denounced devotion to other deities as spiritual adultery. The feminine divine was no longer tolerated—she was displaced by scripture, liturgy, and later communal interpretation.

Even earlier royal narratives were reinterpreted in light of this polemic. The downfall of Solomon became a cautionary tale:

“King Solomon loved many foreign women… his wives turned away his heart after other gods.” (1 Kings 11:1, 4)

The narrative concludes, “Solomon did evil in the eyes of the LORD” (1 Kgs 11:6), explicitly linking his downfall to his wives’ influence. Scholars such as John J. Burns note how 1 Kings 10:26–11:8 deliberately echoes Deuteronomic law, framing Solomon’s wealth, Egyptian horses, and foreign wives as violations of covenantal order. In the Deuteronomistic telling, even the wisest king becomes an example of how foreign wives and other gods lead to idolatry and ruin.

Feminist readers have noted how these narratives are male-centered and male-dominated, giving no voice to the women involved. The women are deliberately silenced, portrayed only as obedient wives, concubines, or passive temptresses—stripped of all agency. It is unlikely that Bathsheba sought to tempt David. Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654), which depicts her reading David’s summons, underscores how later culture has fixated on Bathsheba’s role in David’s sin even though the biblical account gives her none.

Feminist scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky identifies this as a form of ancient “victim blaming”:

“To say that Bathsheba set out to entice the king is to say that violated women ‘were asking for it’... Bathsheba is enjoying a private moment—she thinks—and we violate it the moment we stop to contemplate her beauty.” (thetorah.com)

The Hebrew Bible depicts Yahweh as a “jealous God” (Exod. 20:5; 34:14), possessive of Israel as his lone wife. The prophet Ezekiel paints one of the most disturbing portraits of God in scripture. In Ezekiel 16, Yahweh describes finding Israel as an abandoned infant, still wrapped in her placenta, whom he raises until she matures, noting her “full breasts and pubic hair” before taking her as his wife. In Ezekiel 23, he threatens Israel with violent punishment: her legs pried open, subjected to gang rape by other nations, her body disfigured with mutilation, and her children burned.

Historian Francesca Stavrakopoulou observes:

“Most damaging of all, perhaps, is the moral of the tale: the fate of God’s wife is explicitly exhibited in this narrative as a warning to all women, lest they too dishonour their husbands. “These horrifying tales in the book of Ezekiel have proved deeply troubling for many readers—past and present, secular and religious. As endorsements, albeit ancient ones, of male sexual predation, exploitation and misogynistic violence, the value systems evoked in these narratives ostensibly conflict sharply with those of the modern West. They not only degrade and vilify female sexuality, but enshrine the sexual and domestic abuse of girls and women with ongoing biblical authority.” (Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. God: An Anatomy. Knopf, 2022.)

These prophecies were written after Israel sought alliances with Babylon. After the Babylonian crises of 597 and especially 586 BC, many of Judah’s people were exiled and Jerusalem lay devastated. Instead of concluding that their god had abandoned them, Judah’s leaders doubled down, insisting Yahweh’s wrath was punishment for insufficient devotion. Exilic and post-exilic writers increasingly proclaimed Yahweh as the one true God. Isaiah records this theological consolidation:

“Thus saith the Lord the King of Israel, and his redeemer the Lord of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.… Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any.” (Isaiah 44:6, 8)

In place of the nurturing Mother of old, the divine was now exclusively He: a jealous father-king who permitted no feminine image.

“From now on, Yahweh would parent alone, forcing his worshippers - his 'children' - to be wholly reliant upon him, and him alone. Faint echoes of the lost goddesses' birthing, nurturing skills would reverberate in later Jewish myths about both Lady Wisdom and the Shekhinah, and in Christian portrayals of Mary. But the traditional goddesses would never recover their prestigious roles.” (Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. God: An Anatomy. Knopf, 2022.)

800 BC – Axial age: Glorification of the Phallus and the Dividing of Madonna and Whore

The Axial Age, beginning around 800 BC, is often described as the period in which prophets and philosophers across the ancient world began to articulate systematic questions about existence, morality, transcendence, and the hidden structure of reality. Yet this age of awakening also coincided, in many traditions, with a further consolidation of male-centered religious and philosophical systems. In one interpretive frame, the divine feminine, once associated with wisdom, fertility, and cosmic balance, was increasingly pushed into shadow, recast as temptation, chaos, silence, or subordinate companion.

One controversial psychoanalytic reading would argue that from this repression emerged a psychic distortion. Man’s womb-envy, his longing for a generative power he did not possess, was transmuted into the glorification of the phallus, the fear of castration, and the reduction of woman to what Simone de Beauvoir would later call the second sex. In this long symbolic process, the feminine was split into sacred mother and despised temptress, Madonna and whore. These patterns, first enacted in myth, ritual, and philosophy, would only be named explicitly much later by psychoanalytic and existentialist thinkers.

Womb-envy was introduced by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney as a critical response to Freud’s theory of penis-envy. Freud had argued that woman experienced herself through lack, through the absence of a penis. Horney, by contrast, suggested that some forms of male domination might be understood as compensatory, rooted in envy of the female capacity for pregnancy, birth, and nurture. Whether one accepts that theory or not, it offers a provocative lens for reading cultures in which male gods repeatedly absorb or appropriate powers once associated with the feminine.

Ancient philosophy often reinforced this hierarchy in more explicit terms. Aristotle argued that in generation the female provides the material while the male supplies the form. As he wrote, “The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions it; the one is passive, the other active” (Generation of Animals II.1, 729a). Elsewhere he could be even blunter: “The female is, as it were, a mutilated male” (Generation of Animals I.20, 728a). In such a framework, man is imagined as the active source of order and woman as the passive site of reception, a metaphysical and biological hierarchy that would echo for centuries.

Myth often mirrored this same logic. Some ancient traditions imagined male gods generating life without dependence on the feminine. Egyptian creation myths describe Atum as self-generating. Greek myth gives birth to Aphrodite from the sea after the severed genitals of Ouranos fall into it. The Hurrian-Hittite Kumarbi cycle imagines a male god becoming pregnant and bearing further divinities. Much later, early modern theories of preformation would speculate that the father alone contained the miniature human in seed form. These traditions do not prove womb-envy in any strict historical sense, but they do show recurring fantasies of male self-sufficiency in creation.

Even in the ancient Near East, some high gods appear to absorb maternal or generative functions into themselves. Some Ugaritic texts portray El in frankly reproductive ways, though the details and meanings remain debated. Genesis 1 presents creation without any explicit goddess counterpart: the creator speaks, and the world comes forth. Later sapiential traditions personify Wisdom, Hokmah, as a feminine figure brought forth by God, but not as an independent goddess standing alongside him. In this sense, the biblical imagination narrows creation into a more decisively masculine frame than many older polytheistic systems had done.

Circumcision then becomes a male-exclusive covenantal mark, tying divine promise, lineage, and identity to the male body. In biblical symbolism, the phallus becomes inseparable from inheritance, authority, and sacred continuity. Some scholars, including Francesca Stavrakopoulou, have argued that certain biblical texts may preserve surprisingly sexualized bodily imagery of the divine. Ezekiel 1:27 describes the fiery appearance of God “from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward.” Stavrakopoulou also argues that the Hebrew word shul in Isaiah 6:1 has, in some prophetic contexts, more bodily and sexual overtones than the familiar translation “robe” suggests. These readings remain debated, but they underscore how embodied the ancient imagination of the divine could be.

The ancient imagination could be startlingly direct about divine sexuality. In one Ugaritic text, El encounters two women by the seashore, demonstrates his sexual prowess with a bow, impregnates them, and they bear Shahar and Shalim, Dawn and Dusk. The point is not that ancient religion was crude, but that it was often far less embarrassed than later theology about linking divine power with fertility, generation, and bodily force. One BYU scholar, Daniel Bercerra, points out how this story demonstrates that El is not the impotent old man that modern people imagine him as, but a strong and sexually capable in his prime deity. Hence his nickname of the Bull:

“The author uses primarily phallic sexual imagery to paint the picture of a god who is in full control and willing to grant the two women their desire. He is acknowledged to be a father figure and a spouse. Through the use of fertility ritual motifs, sexual imagery, and symbols of masculinity, the god El was very much in his prime and able to carry out all the functions that were required of him.” (https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1087&context=studiaantiqua)

From the glorification of the phallus comes, in Freud’s framework, castration anxiety: the fear produced in the boy when he confronts sexual difference and interprets the female body through loss. Freud argued in the case of Little Hans that “The sight of the female genitals is regarded by the boy as evidence of castration and reinforces the threat made to him.” Whatever one thinks of Freud’s developmental model, it can still function as a controversial interpretive tool for reading some of the misogynistic anxieties found in ancient religion and philosophy.

Aristotle again gives unusually blunt expression to such assumptions. He describes the female as weaker, colder, and naturally inferior, and in Politics he writes: “The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; the one rules, and the other is ruled” (Politics I.5, 1254b13–14). He also insists that “The courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying” (Politics I.13, 1260a). These formulations do not merely reflect private prejudice. They helped codify hierarchy as part of the supposed natural order.

Priestly purity laws in Leviticus imposed extended ritual impurity regulations around menstruation and childbirth, embedding female blood and fertility within systems of taboo and exclusion. The Bible is not unique in this respect, but it participates in a wider ancient tendency to render female reproductive power as both necessary and threatening. In such systems, woman is indispensable and yet marked as unstable, impure, or dangerous.

These same themes reappear in biblical and Christian tradition. Genesis places Eve under Adam’s rule, and Paul later codifies hierarchy in theological terms: “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3). The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas intensifies the logic even further, imagining salvation itself in masculinized terms: “For every woman who has become male will enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Thomas 114). However differently these texts function, they share a world in which the masculine is treated as normative and the feminine as secondary, deficient, or in need of transformation.

Simone de Beauvoir would later diagnose this structure with devastating clarity. “Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being” (The Second Sex, vol. I, introduction). Her equally famous line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” does not mean that biology is unreal, but that woman has historically been interpreted, disciplined, and socially produced in relation to male expectation. De Beauvoir’s point is not that woman has no body, but that her body has too often been turned into destiny by those who were never forced to live inside it.

She makes this point explicit elsewhere: “Her body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is the instrument of her grasp upon the world, a limit and a point of view.” True freedom begins when woman ceases to exist merely as the Other in man’s symbolic order and begins to define herself as a subject in her own right.

The tragedy, then, is that for over two millennia women were repeatedly forced into roles not of their own choosing, but constructed through male-authored myths: mother, virgin, temptress, whore. The split is psychologically disastrous. As Erich Neumann observed, patriarchal consciousness retains only the image of the good mother while pushing the terrible or autonomous feminine into the unconscious. Freud and later psychoanalytic tradition would describe one form of this split as the Madonna-Whore complex: the inability to integrate sexual desire and reverence in relation to the same woman. The woman one respects cannot be desired; the woman one desires cannot be respected.

I have seen this distortion in myself. While living in Japan, I attended photography workshops and photographed models in alluring poses, yet I could only fantasize about them. I worried about how my public image would look if I actually pursued one of them. They became for me not women with inner lives, contradictions, and possibility, but archetypes: models, muses, forbidden bodies. In that sense, the Madonna-Whore complex distorts not only how men perceive women, but how men perceive themselves. It turns eros into abstraction and relationship into projection.

33 AD – Christianity: The Virgin and the Witch

With the rise of Christianity, many goddess traditions were absorbed or demonized. Goddess worship was compared to whoredom, yet the human desire for the divine feminine did not vanish. In her place arose Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus—the Madonna. She became the vessel who carried Jesus, the Son of God and God himself, Logos made flesh

Mary was exalted as mother, the highest and holiest role available to women, yet praised precisely because she was “unspotted” by carnal sex. She represented an ideal no real woman could attain. From a feminist framework, one could say Mary was “allowed” to be exalted only because she was perceived as utterly submissive and non-threatening to male hierarchy. As Simone de Beauvoir argued, this Marian cult represented the “supreme victory of masculinity.” (de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, 1953, p. 174).

Within her growing cults, Mary claimed titles such as “Queen of Heaven” and “Mother of God,” yet she remained subordinate to God: the obedient servant whose purity and submission exemplified the patriarchal ideal. Some second-century sources proclaimed her the “new Eve,” whose obedience reversed Eve’s sin.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 180 CE) famously drew this contrast:

“As Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and fled from God, Mary in her turn received the glad tidings from an angel…and bore God in obedience. As Eve was disobedient, Mary was persuaded into obedience; thus the Virgin Mary became the advocate of the virgin Eve.” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book V, Ch. 19, in Roberts & Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, 1885, p. 547).

This Eve-versus-Mary polarity helped establish a theological framework in which women were cast as either virginally good or sexually sinful.

St. Paul’s letters reinforced this dichotomy, urging wives to remain modest, silent in church, and subject to male authority:

“Wives, be subject to your husbands, as the Church is to Christ.” (Ephesians 5:22–24)

Above all else, Paul exalted celibacy: 

“To the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to remain single as I am” (1 Corinthians 7:8). 

Over time, this theology helped elevate the ideal of the virgin nun, dedicating her love to God rather than to any earthly man.

Early church fathers intensified this valorization of virginity. St. Jerome declared virginity the Christian woman’s highest calling (Jerome, Against Jovinianus, Book I, c. 393 CE). Even within marriage, deriving pleasure from sex was condemned as sinful. Women who displayed independence, sexual freedom, or intellectual authority were viewed with suspicion—“the devil’s gateway,” as Tertullian labeled them (On the Apparel of Women, Book I, ch. 1, c. 200 CE). A modern scholar notes that Mary’s perpetual virginity 

“makes the female body and female sexuality seem unwholesome, impure by comparison.” (Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 126).

Negative female exemplars abounded. Eve remained the archetype of rebellion; Lot’s wife a symbol of disobedience; Jezebel—who promoted goddess worship—an emblem of feminine wickedness. Medieval Jewish folklore reworked older Near Eastern demon traditions around Lilith, imagining her as Adam’s rebellious first wife before Eve. She refused male domination, left Eden, and became demonized as “Queen of the Damned.” (Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. 3rd ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990, pp. 221–232). She represented the chaos of female sexual power, feared since the days of sirens and gorgons which made men drown themselves in the sea by song or turned to stone by a glare. By the medieval period, female power was indistinguishable from heresy, diabolic temptation and witchcraft (Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: Dorset Press, 1974, pp. 356–360).

In Jungian terms, when the image of the Great Mother is repressed, it does not disappear. It returns in distorted form as the Terrible Mother: bringer of disease, decay, and death, the dark womb that swallows life back into chaos. She becomes the devouring feminine, feared as the force that unmakes what she once nourished. In this psychic register, figures such as the witch, the devourer, and even the image of vagina dentata express male anxiety before a feminine power that can neither be possessed nor controlled.

One might say that man has always known the world to be a place where beauty lures, desire overwhelms, and life endlessly feeds on life. The young and beautiful woman appears to him as enchantment itself, drawing him out of reason and back into instinct, into sex, reproduction, and mortality. But when beauty fades and motherhood, age, or female power can no longer be contained within his fantasy, the same woman is recast in darker form: no longer muse or lover, but crone, witch, or devouring mother. Thus the feminine is split in the male imagination between the adored and the feared, the life-giver and the life-taker.

As Erich Neumann observed:

“This terrible mother is the hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses.” (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press, 1963 [orig. 1955], p. 148).

In many Christian contexts, worship of nature deities, seasonal festivals, and local ritual practices was condemned as superstition or devil-worship, though the process varied by time and place. Many times, though not always, ancient practices of female-led spirituality—midwifery, herbal healing, nocturnal rituals under moonlight—were twisted into accusations of diabolic crimes. Tales spread of witches dancing naked around fires, casting spells, devouring infants, and engaging in orgies with demons. 

As historian Max Dashu argues,

“Witch persecution became a convenient way of suppressing female power… the idea that the powerful woman is a bad woman, that female power is a threat to society.”(Dashu, Max. Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700–1100. Richmond, CA: Veleda Press, 2016, p. 24).

The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the infamous witch-hunting manual by Heinrich Kramer, insisted that women were especially prone to witchcraft because of their supposed weakness in faith and carnality (Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 41). Accused women were subjected to sexual humiliation: strip searches for the “devil’s mark” (a mole imagined to be a third nipple for suckling demons or the scar left behind from removing it).

If no mark was found, torture followed until confession: thumbscrews, the rack, water ordeal, or strappado. Thereafter came execution—hanging, pressing, or burning at the stake. Modern scholarship estimates between 40,000 and 60,000 people, mostly women, were executed for witchcraft in Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries (Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2016, p. 21).

Joan of Arc’s visions were branded as demonic whispers, and she was burned at the stake in 1431. Agnes Sampson of Scotland was tortured and executed in 1591 after being accused of conjuring storms against King James VI. Ursula Kemp of Essex, accused of child-killing in 1582, was betrayed by her own son and hanged. Hypatia of Alexandria, though centuries earlier, exemplifies the same patriarchal fear: in 415 CE she was lynched by a Christian mob for her intellectual influence and “pagan” knowledge (Dzielska, Maria. Hypatia of Alexandria. Harvard University Press, 1995). Any woman who wielded authority—through learning, healing, prophecy, or politics—risked being branded as witch, whore, or heretic.

Sacred groves were cut down, echoing biblical denunciations of Asherah poles. Folk celebrations of seasonal cycles were Christianized: solstice festivals became St. John’s Day or Candlemas, their pagan roots rebranded under new names. Animistic bonds with forest, river, and stone were ridiculed as superstition. Christian creeds declared one God, and Christian tradition overwhelmingly imagined and addressed that God in masculine terms. And Woman was blamed for humanity’s fall, and the physical world was denigrated as corrupt. Those who revered maternal nature were damned as idolaters bound for hellfire.

Yet as Neumann reminds us:

“The male remains inferior to, and at the mercy of, the feminine that confronts him as a power of destiny.” (The Great Mother, p. 302).

1600 AD – Science and the Death of the Divine

When King Josiah took his axe to the groves of Asherah and drove her priestesses into the wilderness, the world lost a great treasury of spiritual memory. Her cult was broken, her symbols defaced, and whatever songs or stories once belonged to her were largely lost. One imagines the heretic crying in the streets with lantern in hand: "Goddess is dead! Goddess remains dead! And we have killed her! How shall we console ourselves - the murderers of all murderers? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away her face from the stone? Who untied the umbilical cord between earth and heaven? What rites will cleanse us when the womb itself has been slain?"

Though her face was forgotten, her shadow lingered - splintered into virgin and witch, mother and whore. We stumble now over broken fragments of her image, a puzzle never to be whole again, for too many pieces are lost forever. Who will mourn her? Where are the prophetesses to wail for the loss, to stare into the abyss of her absence?

As witch trials began to wane in parts of Europe, the suppression of the feminine took on new forms. Mother Nature was replaced by the machine of progress. She was increasingly recast as inert matter within the mechanistic worldview associated with thinkers such as Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. Francis Bacon wrote of putting Nature "on the rack" to extract her secrets (Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620). Forests ceased to be sacred groves; they became timber.

Women, meanwhile, remained largely excluded from scientific circles. Science, cast as rational and objective, was deemed unsuitable for the "irrational" female. The scientist became the new patriarchal priest, subduing chaotic nature. The binary hardened: man = mind (culture), woman = body (nature). To master nature was, symbolically, to master woman.

The machinery of capitalism and colonialism roared forward, its factories belching smoke from the corpse of the Mother. Ecofeminist theorists have noted that the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature went hand in hand under industrial capitalism (Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). Marxist historians likewise observe that industrial society valued women primarily as reproductive labor and secondarily as cheap factory workers, just as nature was valued only for its raw materials (Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch, 2004).

In many Protestant contexts, devotion to Mary diminished sharply, weakening one of Christianity's most prominent feminine sacred figures. Yet the Madonna/Whore complex only deepened: women's sexuality was ever more tightly policed. The "shrew," the "scold," the unwed or outspoken woman was punished or shamed - whether by dunking stools, pillories, or social ostracism. Male-dominated institutions - church, university, guild, and state - remained resolutely closed to women.

By the 18th century, Western cultural imagination had become increasingly male-dominated. God was male. Science was the domain of men, and nature was personified as a passive, violated female. Politics were run by men - whether in monarchies or republics restricted to male property owners. Women were either idealized or demonized, but rarely empowered. The living connection to a nurturing Mother Earth or powerful goddess was almost wholly severed. In Jungian terms, the collective psyche became one-sidedly masculine: logos without eros, order without chaos.

Colonial regimes often suppressed indigenous land-centered and Earth-related spiritual traditions, justifying conquest as a "civilizing mission." Native reverence for the land was branded primitive superstition.

If the Mother was gone, now the Father too was revealed to be a shadow of his former self. The divine couple, once mighty and youthful, had become two ancient corpses. Religion was demythologized. Capitalism, not divinity, was sovereign. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, accelerating a broader crisis in traditional religious explanations of life and creation. One could interpret this to mean that humanity no longer needed God the Father or Goddess the Mother to explain its origins. The mindless, genderless machinery of evolution seemed to suffice. It was as if the Father could not survive long without his holy wife.

Soon after, the mad prophet Friedrich Nietzsche declared the funerary rites of God: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him" (The Gay Science, 1882, sec. 125). Nietzsche dared us to rise above this great calamity or be consumed by nihilism. For the immortality of the soul was in doubt. Fyodor Dostoevsky gave voice to the implications through Ivan Karamazov, in a formulation often paraphrased as: "if there is no immortality of the soul, then everything is permitted" (The Brothers Karamazov, 1880).

And yet, even without God the Father or Goddess the Mother, humanity marched forward - seeking to fill the void they left behind. For without the sheath, the sword rusted, chipped, and shattered. Without the chalice, the blade too withered and died. Light without darkness became blinding and overwhelming. Yin perished and Yang followed. The old maxim "As above, so below" no longer applied in this modern world.

Carl Jung warned that a culture governed by one-sided rationality and severed from the unconscious feminine risked psychic and political catastrophe. In his view, such imbalance could erupt into war, mass violence, and social breakdown. He envisioned Europe drowning in rubble, blood flowing through its cities. As he warned in a 1934 seminar:"The greatest danger that threatens mankind is the loss of soul. When this happens, the anima [the feminine aspect of humanity] vanishes into the unconscious, where it builds up explosive forces. Then the world is torn apart by war and revolution."(C. G. Jung, Vision Seminars, 1934; in Collected Works, Vol. 18, sec. 585).

The twentieth century gave that warning a terrible resonance. From Nazi camps to Japan's Unit 731, "experiments" stripped human beings of autonomy and reduced them to raw biological data: thresholds of pain, volumes of blood, endurance of torture. Even America, once imagined a liberator, was not exempt. The Manhattan Project culminated in the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a flash, cities were leveled, citizens turned to shadows on walls, survivors reduced to walking corpses as black rain fell from the sky. J. Robert Oppenheimer, watching the first nuclear test, recalled the words of the Bhagavad Gita:"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." (Bhagavad Gita 11:32; quoted in Oppenheimer interview, 1965).

When Inanna was stripped, shackled, and slain in the underworld of our unconscious, we, her children, failed to mourn her. So she returned, and in her fury, dragged us into the underworld with her.

1820 AD — Mormonism, Feminism and the Rebirth of the Mother

Then came the axis mundi of a new revolt. With the death of the divine, one fourteen-year-old boy sought to resurrect it, or at least to re-embody it. In the spring of 1820, Joseph Smith Jr. emerged from a grove of trees in Palmyra, New York, proclaiming that he had seen God the Father and Jesus Christ as two distinct personages. In later comparative terms, one might say that a Great Sky Father had returned to the stage, no longer as an abstract metaphysical essence but as a being with form, body, and presence. In that sense, two millennia of increasingly metaphysical monotheism were challenged in a single afternoon.

Above all, in an age still deeply shaped by the old hierarchy that treated unchanging form as superior to corruptible matter, Christianity had often imagined God as pure spirit, abstract, immaterial, and overwhelmingly male. But Smith dared to say that God was clothed in matter. More radically still, his teachings opened the door to the possibility that spirit itself was not exempt from embodiment. As he declared:

“There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.” (Doctrine and Covenants 131:7–8)

Salvation, then, was no longer escape from matter, but exaltation through it. The womb, the breast, the body, all could now be read as echoes of divine order. That final step, however, remains more theological inference than settled Mormon doctrine. Smith clearly re-sacralized matter; whether he thereby implied a fully divine maternity at the origin of God himself is a much more speculative claim.

Modern art has continued to confront the masculine monopoly over creation. Gustave Courbet’s scandalous L’Origine du monde (1866), Monica Sjöö’s God Giving Birth (1968), and even Ariana Grande’s pop anthem God Is a Woman (2018) all challenge the notion of a purely masculine deity creating ex nihilo. Each, in its own register, returns attention to the abyss from which all things emerge, ordered from chaotic material by a masculine principle that cannot finally escape the maternal depths on which it depends.

These works echo an ancient figurine, often identified as Asherah, excavated from a Late Bronze Age site in the Levant. The goddess is depicted holding two infants to her breasts while using both hands to open her labia, revealing the deep abyss of her womb. Many modern viewers mistake such a figure for a crude sex object, a mistake that itself reflects the long patriarchal conflation of goddess veneration with whoredom. But as Francesca Stavrakopoulou argues, this is profoundly misleading. According to her, the statue’s open labia signified to its original worshipers that she is the revealer of hidden secrets, the source from which life itself emerges:

“She is the divine revealer of the secrets of new life, whose open labia manifested a powerful liminality: the inside-and-outside, entrance-and-exit place at which sexual potency, fecundity, and birth were located.” (Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. God: An Anatomy. Knopf, 2022.)

Something similar seems to flicker in the Sheela-na-gigs of early medieval Europe, those stone carvings of women displaying their vulva on churches and other buildings. Their meanings remain debated: apotropaic symbols, warnings against lust, survivals of older fertility motifs, or several things at once. But at the very least, they suggest that even Christian architecture sometimes preserved unsettling reminders of female generative power. By the high Middle Ages, however, such meanings had largely been obscured or suppressed.

With whispers and hints of a Mother in Heaven, older goddess motifs became newly entangled with Mormon feminist theology. Not as a clean revelation descending from above, but as a root rising through the soil, into the feet, through blood and bone. Inanna may remain in the underworld as mythic image, yet in this interpretive register she moves upward through the earth, carried by prayers, absences, and names half remembered. Eliza R. Snow’s hymn “O My Father,” with its startling affirmation of a Mother in Heaven, marked the beginning of a mass illumination in Mormon thought, even if the tradition never developed that doctrine publicly or fully.

Margaret Toscano, the Mormon feminist theologian later excommunicated for her heterodox views, wrote:

“Snow’s Heavenly Mother is not only the biblical Asherah, the consort hidden in the temple, but also echoes Inanna — the queen of heaven, whose powers of fertility, death, and resurrection were shared with her priestesses. The poem hints at a divine feminine larger than biblical memory alone.” (Strangers in Paradox: Explorations in Mormon Theology, 1990, pp. 177–78)

That is a theological and comparative claim, not a historical certainty. But it captures something real about the direction of Mormon speculation. Toscano further suggested that Joseph Smith may have unintentionally reopened symbolic space for ancient goddess patterns through a female version of priestly authority, through the organization of the Relief Society, and through celestial marriage, which in its highest symbolic reading resembles what the Greeks called hieros gamos, a sacred union between god and goddess. As Smith told the women:

“We are going to do something extraordinary… We are going to be a kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s day.” (Relief Society Minutes, 1842)

That does not mean Smith restored the cult of Inanna, and it certainly does not prove any direct continuity with Asherah worship. But it does mean that early Mormonism opened possibilities for female sacral power that were unusual within nineteenth-century Christianity.

The women of the Relief Society were given real organizational authority as an independent but church-linked body. Its first leader, Emma Hale Smith, the prophet’s wife, was proclaimed “an Elect Lady” (D&C 25:3). Unlike many earlier women’s associations, the Relief Society was designed to teach women administrative, publishing, and charitable skills, and it endured long enough to become one of the largest women’s organizations in the world. More importantly, Nauvoo women were taught to think of themselves as future queens and priestesses, not merely as passive helpmeets. Women openly exercised ritual power through healing, anointing, and the laying on of hands, practices which, as historians Jonathan Stapley and Kristine Wright observed,

“blurred the boundaries of priesthood.” (“Female Ritual Healing in Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History 37:1, 2011, p. 19)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has similarly argued that the Nauvoo Relief Society functioned as a space of female authority, experimentation, and memory, even if later Mormonism narrowed those possibilities. The exact wording often attributed to her on this point varies in popular retellings, but the substance of her historical work supports the broader claim: early Mormon women claimed and exercised forms of sacred power that were later constrained.

With the introduction of celestial marriage and plural marriage, Smith envisioned not merely a nuclear household but a vast and eternal social order. Some interpreters, including Toscano, have seen in this theology distant resonances with older sacred-marriage traditions, where kingship, fertility, and female power were sacralized together. Toscano writes:

“…Joseph’s Nauvoo cosmology resonates with the great goddess traditions more generally. The vision of women as queens and priestesses has parallels in Mesopotamian Inanna cults, where sexual union and female power sacralized kingship.” (Strangers in Paradox, 1990, p. 178)

She continues:

“In Nauvoo theology, the polygamous wife was not meant to be merely obedient, but to embody the divine feminine — a priestess of Heavenly Mother in nuptial union.” (Strangers in Paradox: Explorations in Mormon Theology, 1990, p. 177)

Again, this is speculative theology, not established history. It tells us more about one Mormon feminist reconstruction than about what Joseph Smith consciously intended. Still, it names something important: Mormon temple theology gave women an exalted symbolic status that sat uneasily beside the actual male control of institutions and plural marriage.

Similarly, LDS historian and Exponent II founder Claudia Bushman wrote of the possible direction the young prophet seemed to be heading:

“The Relief Society of 1842, combined with Joseph’s theology of queens and priestesses, might be seen as a nascent female order. In another trajectory, this could have resembled the ancient sacred marriage systems where women represented divine power in partnership with men.” (Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, 1976, p. 12)

Unfortunately, many forces prevented Smith from fully developing any such female order. The first was Emma’s open resistance to polygamy, a resistance reflected in Nauvoo tensions and later in Doctrine and Covenants 132, which attempts to authorize plural marriage while threatening Emma for rejecting it. Here the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore: women could be symbolically elevated to queenship in eternity while being sharply subordinated in lived practice. As Jan Shipps observed, the language of section 132 reveals a deep strain within Mormon gender relations, even if the exact wording often quoted from her on this point is usually paraphrastic rather than verbatim.

The second factor was Smith’s death, which cut short his restoration project before many of its possibilities had hardened into stable institutions. What followed was a battle of succession, and none of the major claimants fully extended the most radical implications of Nauvoo female ritual authority. The majority followed Brigham Young to Utah, where the Relief Society was temporarily suspended. Historians debate whether Young acted chiefly out of fear of female authority, out of institutional pragmatism, or out of the need to consolidate fractured loyalties after the collapse of Nauvoo. Most lean toward a mixture of authority management and political caution. The Relief Society was reorganized in Utah only later, in 1867, with Eliza R. Snow, who was fiercely loyal to Young. Carol Cornwall Madsen has indeed argued that Young viewed the earlier Nauvoo society with suspicion because of its ties to Emma Smith and anti-polygamy sentiment, though, again, exact quotations are often simplified in retelling.

Meanwhile, plural marriage itself produced a far more complicated female world than outsiders usually imagined. It is too simple to say that polygamous Mormon women were either liberated heroines or helpless victims. Many defended the system publicly and sometimes passionately; many others suffered under it. What can be said with confidence is that some Utah women used the social space created by plural households to pursue education, publishing, reform, medicine, and activism in ways that surprised eastern critics. Eliza R. Snow did denounce rumors that LDS women were mere collectibles of patriarchal leadership, and figures such as Emmeline B. Wells publicly argued that plural marriage could provide women with time, autonomy, spiritual status, and a broader field of labor. Those arguments baffled many non-Mormon feminists and divided the suffrage movement.

Utah women gained the vote in 1870, decades before the Nineteenth Amendment, though only after Wyoming Territory had done so a few months earlier. Congress later revoked that right in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887. Brigham Young also publicly championed women’s education, including in sciences typically coded male. As he put it:

“We had better educate our daughters, if we have to neglect our sons a little. Educate the women and the men will be educated, for the mothers are the first teachers of the children.” (Brigham Young, 1869, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 13, p. 61)

Women such as Romania B. Pratt and Ellis Reynolds Shipp did go on to become physicians. They were not the first female doctors in America, but they were prominent examples of Mormon women entering professional life under a religious system outsiders often imagined as wholly domestic and repressive. East Coast feminists noticed these experiments, even while many of them, such as Lucy Stone, condemned polygamy. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others in the National Woman Suffrage Association sometimes welcomed Mormon women’s voices for suffrage purposes, even while disagreeing deeply about plural marriage. As Aileen S. Kraditor observed:

“When Utah Territory enfranchised women, national suffragists seized on the event as evidence that the republic could survive women at the polls. It was not mere theory but practice, and this strengthened the movement’s hand.” (The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920, 1965, p. 18)

More broadly, women fought for and won legal equality in many spheres through protest, organizing, writing, and political struggle: voting rights, property rights, educational access, career opportunities, and, increasingly, legal protections against abuse. One can read this concretely as social history. One can also read it symbolically as the return of the repressed feminine into public life. With each barrier broken, another voice long denied re-entered the collective conversation.

Even before modern feminism, the Great Mother archetype survived in disguised and underground forms: in alchemy, where thinkers spoke of materia prima and the anima mundi; in literature, where female figures such as Gloriana or Marianne could carry national or spiritual meaning without becoming full goddesses again; and in scattered folk survivals, symbols, and devotions. By the later twentieth century, books such as Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987) and the popular reception of Marija Gimbutas’s work inspired many readers to imagine a distant age of goddess-centered harmony preceding patriarchal domination. That picture is debated by historians and archaeologists, but its cultural power is undeniable.

New goddess movements such as various forms of Neo-Paganism and Wicca then reclaimed female and nature-centered power once dismissed as superstition or witchcraft. Some worshiped a Goddess alongside a male god; others centered the Goddess alone. In Wicca, the Triple Goddess, Maiden, Mother, Crone, became a major symbolic attempt to re-integrate the female life cycle into sacred power. Often invoking ancient names such as Isis, Diana, Brigid, or Kali, modern goddess worshipers celebrate female sexuality and biology as sacred, reclaiming the moon, the chalice, and the earth as holy rather than profane. Their rituals, often timed to the full moon, directly reverse older patriarchal traditions that treated menstruation, embodiment, and female cycles as sources of impurity.

The Gaia hypothesis, proposed by James Lovelock and developed with Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, does not literally revive a goddess. But it does challenge the image of Earth as inert dead matter. It imagines the planet as a self-regulating system, something closer to a living body than a machine to be stripped for parts. That scientific model can be read symbolically alongside Joseph Smith’s own cosmology, in which the Earth itself groans, weeps, and longs for redemption. As the book of Moses declares:

“And it came to pass that Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me? When will my Creator sanctify me, that I may rest, and righteousness for a season abide upon my face?” (Moses 7:48)

Present Day — Healing the Divide

Mormons teach that the history of religion unfolded through seven dispensations of worshiping the Father, each separated by periods of apostasy. The first began with Adam’s reign, followed by apostasy; then Enoch restored the Church, followed by Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and finally Joseph Smith after the Great Apostasy.

One might assume that the history of religion follows this precise, divine pattern. It does not. Instead, the true history of religion unfolds as follows: 

One could tell a very different history of religion. For tens of thousands of years, much of the surviving symbolic evidence suggests a profound human preoccupation with fertility, embodiment, and what later interpreters would call the Great Mother. By the late Neolithic and Bronze Age, more explicitly patriarchal political and religious structures appear with increasing force, though still often within the shadow of older feminine symbols. Among the forces that intensified this shift were Indo-European-speaking cultures, whose sky gods and warrior hierarchies spread across large parts of Eurasia.

Yahweh appears in the historical record in the late Bronze Age and gradually rose from a southern deity into the national god of Israel and Judah, eventually absorbing many traits earlier associated with El. Kings and prophets drove out the Goddess—the Mother—until Yahweh could be declared the only true God of the universe.

By the early Christian centuries, monotheistic forms of religion had become increasingly dominant in the Mediterranean world. In psycho-symbolic terms, the Mother was divided into the Virgin and the Whore so that her nature could be regulated, restrained, and shackled within patriarchy. The feminine was suppressed and demonized, and the singular God—severed from his consort—was dissolved into an abstract metaphysical form. Without his wife to balance him, even God began to die.

Humanity, however, continued to hold up its dead God upon a cross—worshiping the corpse of transcendence while exploiting the Earth’s oil (her blood) for profit, bulldozing forests, destroying animal homes, and poisoning the skies with the fumes of grinding factories. In one Jungian reading, the loss of the divine center opened the way to increasingly lethal experiments upon both the planet and the human body, culminating in the world wars.

But Goddess is rising again. And some few still dream of the day when both Father and Mother in Heaven will sit together upon their twin thrones—youthful, beautiful, and powerful once more.

Joseph Smith not only planted seeds for the Great Mother’s redemption but also for Mother Eve’s. Once cast as the inferior helper to Adam, whose choice in Eden became the classic emblem of female weakness and temptation, Eve in Smith’s vision took on a far more exalted role. He reimagined her act not as simple disobedience, but as a necessary and even courageous step toward godhood—one that Adam himself was too hesitant to take. As Smith portrays her speaking to Adam, her loving companion:

“Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient.” (Moses 5:11)

One could read Smith’s rehabilitation of Eve as a striking attempt to soften the old Madonna/Whore division imposed on the feminine. Early Mormon womanhood, however, was pulled into a deep contradiction: spiritually elevated in theory, yet scandalized in public through the practice of plural marriage. Before the feminine can heal with the masculine, they must both emerge as their total, undivided selves. As Erich Neumann would put it, the Good Mother must be reunited with the Terrible Mother in order for the Great Mother to reemerge.

Sylvia Brinton Perera emphasizes that modern women, often “daughters of the father” in a patriarchal world, must recover what patriarchy has denigrated as “the terrible mother, dragon, or witch.” Inanna personifies that reclaimed Goddess. Unlike Greek myth, which tends to fragment female traits among many deities, Inanna gathers into one figure a breadth of feminine powers that later traditions often split apart. Perera notes that Inanna’s return is a metaphor for the Goddess’s return to culture, and that she is:

“an emblem of full femininity which cannot be constrained by labels such as mother, daughter, lover, virgin or harlot.” (Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women)

Inanna descended nude into the underworld. Her emblems of power—and everything she falsely thought defined her—were stripped away, symbolically grinding down her ego and preparing her to meet her sister, who represented those demonized qualities of feminine nature that patriarchal cultures most feared. The goddess of light met her dark self: the Madonna meeting her suppressed, whorish qualities.

Initially, Inanna is the exalted queen, the beloved goddess of love, fertility, and light—essentially a dazzling persona figure, “praised, celebrated, revered, and admired by all.” (Wolkstein & Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, 1983)

Ereshkigal, by contrast, can be read as embodying grief, rage, sorrow, death, and the disowned or feared dimensions of the feminine: the Terrible Mother, the demonized witch, the neglected and forgotten shadow. In that sense, she stands as Inanna’s shadow and the divine feminine’s shadow.

Jung described the shadow as the collection of aspects we reject or hide, the repressed and often frightening elements of the psyche. (Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951)

Ereshkigal could thus be said to symbolize everything a patriarchal culture taught women to hide: those “shadow qualities” that did not fit the mold of the dutiful maiden or mother.

The masculine hero’s journey is often imagined as one of conquest: slaying beasts, overcoming rivals, and winning the approval of the father. The heroine’s journey, by contrast, is more often described as a descent inward, a stripping away of false identities in order to recover what has been buried, denied, or feared. In Jungian feminist writing, this descent is not a retreat from power but a search for lost feminine wholeness. Murdock describes the heroine’s journey in just these terms, as a recovery of what has been hidden beneath the self women were taught to perform:

“I walk naked looking for the Mother… lost parts of myself… they are my treasures but I have to dig for them.” (Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey, 1990)

Inanna’s descent models that movement with unusual force. She knows she is entering danger and therefore prepares for death before going below. When news of her death reaches Enki, he sends two androgynous beings into the underworld. They find Ereshkigal on her throne, bare-breasted, in anguish, writhing like a woman in labor. But instead of conquering her, correcting her, or condemning her, the beings mirror her suffering. They moan as she moans. They repeat her grief back to her. In that moment, the dark goddess is not resisted but witnessed. Her pain is seen, answered, and honored. Moved by that recognition, she gives them the corpse of Inanna.

What follows can be read as a model of healing through integration rather than repression. Inanna returns not because the dark has been annihilated, but because the split between light and dark has been crossed. In symbolic terms, she has passed through death, encountered what had been banished below, and returned altered by contact with it. Joseph Campbell observed that

“the two sisters, light and dark respectively, together represent… the one goddess in two aspects.” (Campbell, The Power of Myth, 1988)

In that sense, Inanna’s myth offers a vision of the Divine Feminine not as a purity to be protected from its opposite, but as a totality that contains both heaven and underworld, eros and grief, tenderness and fury, sacredness and sexuality. What patriarchal culture splits apart, the myth tries to reunite.

This symbolic split still matters. In patriarchal cultures, the feminine has repeatedly been divided into opposed moral types: Virgin and Whore, Madonna and temptress, saint and seductress. The damage lies not simply in condemning one pole and exalting the other, but in forcing women to live inside categories that mutilate the whole of feminine life. Female sexuality becomes suspect unless purified; female purity becomes sterile unless severed from the body. In that framework, even motherhood is haunted by the old split, because maternity itself passes through the territory that patriarchy first condemned as impure: erotic embodiment. One spiritual writer captures that longing for reintegration in explicitly symbolic language, calling women to reclaim

“the wild red river of your powerful womb, your Whore, and the pure white river of your tender heart, your Virgin, weaving yourself as the wholeness you are.” (Andrews, The Magdalene Manuscript, 2002)

Whether or not one accepts that language, the psychological point remains clear: what is split off does not disappear. It returns in distorted form. When restraint is severed from desire, restraint hardens into judgment and disgust. When desire is severed from sacredness, it can collapse into exhibition, self-objectification, or a desperate search for recognition. The problem is not sexuality, nor modesty, nor eros, nor moral seriousness in themselves. The problem is psychic polarization. One side freezes; the other side burns. One side condemns the body; the other tries to force the body to bear the whole burden of identity. Neither side is whole.

For that reason, the work of integration is not merely personal but civilizational. Marion Woodman repeatedly argued that the repressed dark feminine carries transformative power precisely because it restores what modern consciousness has denied: matter, body, mortality, grief, earth, and cyclicality. In her work, the Black Madonna, Lilith, Ereshkigal, and related figures matter not because they flatter the ego, but because they force it to descend into what it had declared unclean or unusable. Woodman sees this descent as necessary if modern people are to recover a fuller relation to embodiment, suffering, and soul. (Woodman, Dancing in the Flames, 1996)

A similar insight appears in contemporary shadow-work writing: 

“We must nurture, nourish, and tend to our shadows before we can truly expand in our influence, our power, and our ability to wield our gifts in the world.” (Earth Daughters, 2021)

That claim may be modern, but the religious language of integration is much older. “Charity never faileth” (1 Cor. 13:8). Scripture measures love of neighbor against love of self (Matt. 22:39), implying that self-hatred distorts both. When Jesus is confronted with a woman accused of sexual sin, he neither stones her nor condemns her (John 8). And in the Book of Mormon, Alma’s counsel is not to mutilate desire, but to govern it: “Bridle all your passions” (Alma 38:12). Nietzsche pushes the same insight into more dangerous language:

“All your passions in the end became virtues, and all your devils angels.” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883)

The deeper point is not indulgence, but transformation. What is hated in the self is rarely healed; it is merely driven underground, where it gathers force.

So the call of this myth is not that women become either more saintly or more transgressive. It is that they recover the denied sister. The one left in the underworld. The one shamed, hidden, and made to carry everything that did not fit the approved image. If the Madonna has abandoned the Whore, or the dutiful daughter has abandoned the dark twin, then healing begins only when each turns back toward the other and says: I see you. I feel you. You are not alone. You are my sister.

And then the work begins.

In Jungian terms, once Inanna has encountered and integrated her dark twin, she becomes capable of meeting the masculine as an equal rather than from a place of inner division. Only then is she ready to unite with her masculine counterpart, the shepherd-king Dumuzi. She has become, as author Catherine Larkin describes, a “virgin” in the original sense -

“one-in-herself… depending on no other for completion and yet capable of a total giving and receiving of herself, body and soul.” (Larkin, The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996)

She can now stand as a multidimensional being - not the perfect Madonna saint placed upon a pedestal of unapproachability, nor the bewitching Whore to be scorned and cast out, but a woman, a goddess, a queen, and a true friend whom the masculine can meet shoulder to shoulder. Imagine a woman who no longer seeks validation from the world, but from within herself, developing the full image of the goddess within. She learns that the Madonna withholds love behind idealization, the Whore disperses it without communion, but the friend meets the man where he is.

And now Yin approaches Yang - Inanna approaches Dumuzi. But Dumuzi forgets to mourn her death as he sits upon his throne. In symbolic terms, this becomes more than a mythic failure of grief. It becomes an image of the masculine forgetting the feminine, and then hardening in its absence. In one Jungian reading, Yahweh as the solitary god of Israel appears increasingly one-sided: severe, jealous, wrathful, and blind to the empty throne beside him. Carl Jung, in Answer to Job, was struck by the way the biblical God so often appeared in overwhelming, morally destabilizing power rather than in mutuality or relation.

This one-sidedness gave the biblical God a fearsome reputation - especially when later readers compared the judgment-heavy imagery of the Hebrew Bible with the more compassionate emphasis of the New Testament. Without any surviving feminine counterpart in the official image of God, the divine character could appear skewed toward law, judgment, and vengeance rather than relation, fertility, mercy, or compassion. Jung described Western religion in stark terms as

“nothing but a man’s religion… with no metaphysical representation of woman.” (Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1969, §640)

In his controversial work Answer to Job (1952), Jung proposed a radical explanation for how the wrathful God of the Old Testament could become the more humanly intelligible God of the New. God makes a wager with Satan over Job’s faithfulness and permits catastrophe to descend upon him. Job loses his children, his wealth, his health, and his dignity; and yet what finally disturbs Jung is not simply Job’s suffering, but the moral asymmetry between the righteous sufferer and the God who answers him out of the whirlwind.

Satan destroyed Job’s home and children with a great wind, caused raiders to steal his livestock, sent lightning to burn his sheep, and afflicted him with “boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” (Job 2:7)

In Jung’s reading, Job becomes a mirror held up to God. The human being appears morally superior to the deity who torments him. God is confronted with His own unconsciousness. Job reflects back to Yahweh a hidden injustice within the divine image itself, and in that collision Jung sees the beginning of a transformation: God turning toward self-knowledge, toward incarnation, and toward what Jung associates with Sophia, the forgotten principle of wisdom and relatedness. Thus, after the Job ordeal, as Jung puts it,

“God rediscovers wisdom in Sophia, bringing also Eros (relatedness) back into Himself.” (Jung, Answer to Job, §648)

Jung continues:

“The incarnation means that God takes the human limitation upon Himself, and by doing so recognizes His opposite within His own being. The Son who is born of the Virgin is the God who became man so that He might know Himself.” (Jung, Answer to Job, §655)

And again:

“The suffering of Christ is the suffering of God Himself who, in man, experiences the agony of consciousness. The Creator is no longer only the judge; He shares the creature’s lot, and thereby His knowledge increases.” (Jung, Answer to Job, §§640-656, Collected Works, Vol. 11, 1969)

In this symbolic framework, the Goddess briefly returns from the underworld as a faint Marian echo: the dutiful Virgin who carries divine life, but only in muted and carefully controlled form. Yet in many Protestant settings after the Reformation, even that Marian echo was sharply diminished. The world’s anima, its feminine spirit, seemed once more to sink below the surface. In symbolic terms, the catastrophe of the twentieth century can then be read as the return of a one-sided and unintegrated masculine principle - power severed from tenderness, order from eros, law from relation.

And Inanna, carrying back from the underworld the knowledge of death and shadow, does not allow Dumuzi to remain untouched. In the myth, her dark counterpart seizes him and binds him into the cycle of descent and return. He too must learn what she learned. He too must share consciously in death. The old spring myth becomes a myth of reciprocity: neither half of the divine pair remains innocent of suffering; each must pass through loss.

Humanity, in this reading, undergoes the same painful apprenticeship. We remain suspended between severed halves - father without mother, spirit without body, law without mercy, eros without holiness. The growing pains of modernity are not over. They continue until both divine halves, Father and Mother, can be imagined together again - not as enemies, not as rivals, but as a healed and conscious union.

In Jungian terms, one might say that some contemporary cultural currents show symptoms of possession by the Terrible Mother archetype: rage against form, suspicion of limits, and hostility toward stable masculine identity. That does not mean feminism as a whole is reducible to pathology; it means that any movement, once severed from balance, can become one-sided and destructive. As Erich Neumann wrote, 

“...the Terrible Mother possesses an animosity toward all things masculine.” (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949)

In some of its more extreme forms, contemporary gender discourse can become less a critique of distorted masculinity than a wholesale attack on the masculine as such. Under those conditions, young men can begin to experience their aggressive, assertive, or heroic impulses not as powers to be disciplined but as defects to be apologized for. Many retreat into convenience, fantasy, and mediated desire rather than risking failure in public life. A growing number feel isolated, fatherless, and cut off from any real band of brothers.

Myth offers images for this crisis. Adonis was a beautiful youth caught between feminine powers, and the eunuch priests of the Great Mother, the Galli, carried castration symbolism to a ritual extreme. Neumann writes: 

“When the eunuch priests of the Great Mother perform their castrations and sacrifices…the Terrible Mother controls and uses them. In the use of women’s clothing, known to have been worn by the Galli—the castrated priests of the Great Mother in Syria, Crete, Ephesus, etc.—the sacrifice is carried to the point of identification. Not only is the male sacrificed to the Terrible Mother, but he becomes her representative, a female wearing her dress.... Overpowered by the Great Mother, the frenzied priests mutilate themselves and offer up the phallus to her as a sacrifice.” (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949)

In modern symbolic terms, the danger is not ritual castration but psychic collapse: the surrender of masculine initiative, responsibility, and embodied striving. Many retreat into pornography, games, fantasy, and digital surrogates for intimacy, living out heroic longings in private rather than risking rejection in public life. Neumann’s warning still bites: 

“...the fecundation of the Terrible Mother presupposes the death of the male.” (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949)

This same dynamic can arise not only through the Terrible Mother, but through the Good Mother when care curdles into possession. A mother who cannot stop seeing her son as a child may provide everything except the one thing he needs most: the demand to stand alone. A popular psychology phrase such as “Peter Pan syndrome” captures part of this refusal of adult responsibility, though it is not a formal diagnosis. As Anthony Stevens put it, 

“Whereas nature turns girls into women, society has to make boys into men.” (Anthony Stevens, Archetype Revisited)

Caught between love and domination, the son’s psyche begins to fracture. What first appeared as nurturing becomes suffocating; maternal care that promised safety now consumes the will to act. Unable to individuate, masculine consciousness, its capacity for volition and direction, begins to atrophy beneath the weight of total care. Here the archetype shifts: the Good Mother’s benevolence curdles into the Devouring Mother’s possessive hunger. Neumann describes the dynamic with ruthless clarity: “...even in woman, consciousness has a masculine character...just as the unconscious is feminine in men, the system of ego consciousness is masculine. With it are associated the qualities of volition, decision, and activity. 

“A deep psychological analysis then reveals the irruption of an archetype, e.g., the Terrible Devouring Mother, whose psychic attraction is so great because of its energetic charge that the charge of the ego complex, unable to withstand it, 'sinks' and is 'swallowed up'.” (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949)

When any movement defines itself purely through negation, against men, against hierarchy, against embodiment, it risks becoming a mirror of what it hates. Detached from relation, responsibility, and meaning, sexual liberation too can collapse into repetition, spectacle, and emptiness rather than genuine eros. Neumann’s darker warning remains relevant: 

“...the Great Mother, as chthonic mistress of life and death, demands blood and appears dependent upon the shedding of blood. Behind the archetype of the terrible Earth Mother looms the experience of death, when the earth takes back her progeny as the dead, divides and dissolves them in order to make herself fruitful.” (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949)

He also writes, “The fascination of sex and the drunken orgy culminating in unconsciousness and death are inextricably combined in her... Everywhere her rites are frenzied and orgiastic.” (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949) The point is not that pleasure is evil, but that pleasure severed from soul, relation, and creation can become one more form of dissolution.

Against this dissolution, myth places the hero. Perseus, son of the Sky Father, looks down and sees the virgin chained to the rock as a sea serpent approaches to devour her. He descends, slays the monster, and frees the captive feminine from the dragon’s grip. Neumann interprets this pattern directly: 

“In a large number of myths the goal of the hero's fight is the rescue of a female captive from the power of a monster. This represents a change in his relation to the female, symbolically expressed in the liberation of the captive from the dragon's power. In other words, the feminine image extricates itself from the grip of the Terrible Mother, a process known in analytical psychology as the crystallization of the anima from the mother archetype. The freeing and winning of the captive form a further stage in the evolution of masculine consciousness.”  (Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949)

The lesson is not that men must dominate women, but that both men and women must free the feminine from the grip of its devouring form. The hero, in this sense, is the one who resists paralysis, refuses resentment, and acts. Every man must cease waiting for permission to become himself. He must plant his feet into the earth and declare: No. You move.

Patriarchal civilization achieved extraordinary feats of order, engineering, philosophy, and political organization, even as it often did so through repression, conquest, and imbalance. It built roads, laws, sciences, epics, and states. Yet the task now is not to worship patriarchy, nor to destroy it absolutely, but to redeem what was strong in it and reunite it with what it denied. The masculine without the feminine becomes sterile domination; the feminine without the masculine risks dissolution.

That is why the final image matters. In Beauty and the Beast, a virgin learns to love what is wild and feared, and in the Epic of Gilgamesh the sacred prostitute Shamhat civilizes Enkidu through erotic encounter and then through culture. After making love to him for six days, she teaches him to bathe, to eat bread, and to wear clothes. Only then is he ready to meet Gilgamesh, the civilized man. The wild and the civilized confront one another, wrestle, and finally recognize their reflection in each other. Consciousness grows not by castrating the beast, but by integrating it.

In that sense, the feminine is neither merely Madonna nor merely Whore. She is the bridge. She humanizes, mediates, and makes relation possible. The mature feminine neither worships masculinity nor despises it. The mature masculine neither dominates the feminine nor fears it. Each stands shoulder to shoulder with the other. This is sacred marriage: not submission, not negation, but wholeness.

“Therefore shall a man leave his [external heavenly] father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24)

Beyond — Return of the Queen of Heaven

The Great Mother Goddess must be named. Call her Venus, call her Inanna, call her Asherah, call her Sophia, call her Isis, call her Mary, call her Kālī, or else she will remain forever veiled and silent. So we shall know her. So we shall see her. As Erich Neumann described the Queen of Heaven, the Heavenly Mother, she is

“…terrible and devouring, beneficent and creative; a helper, but also alluring and destructive; a maddening enchantress, yet a bringer of wisdom; bestial and divine, voluptuous harlot and inviolable virgin, immemorially old and eternally young.”

(Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness)

But true divinity is too paradoxical for mortal consciousness to grasp, so we break it apart into archetypes, into stereotypes, into smaller and more digestible pieces. Yet the day is coming when the Great Mother shall be revealed in her full glory for the world to see. We glimpse her even now, made flesh and reflected in all her daughters, both Madonna and Whore. The time is coming when the Great Father and Great Mother will be honored together. Who can say what wonders may follow when that day arrives?

I can see it clearly. A teenage girl will feel the void left by Heavenly Mother’s silence. That absence will haunt her. She will not know who she is because she will not know what in herself has been forgotten. She will search for the Divine Feminine, and her family will scorn her for it. They will call it strange, excessive, unnatural. Her friends will mock her. Many will try to silence her forbidden curiosity.

And so she will go out and seek the Great Mother in a cave, and there the Mother will reveal herself in her full glory, in flesh and bone, as Inanna returning from the underworld, as divinity in paradox. Only then will the restitution of all things truly begin.

The young woman will run to tell others. Some will call her a harlot, others an idolater, others a heretic. Her words will not be received as wisdom but as madness. Yet some few will believe her, and sooner or later the Church will have to listen.

The priestesshood Joseph Smith seemed at moments to foreshadow will return in full force. Women will heal by the laying on of hands. The Relief Society will be set apart in its own dignity, and its president will be called High Priestess. Women will preside over their own meetings. They will speak their own minds. They will publish their own books, magazines, and articles. A priestess will bless kingship upon her husband.

The endowment will one day make room for the Divine Mother within the cosmic drama, no longer as a silent and absent parent, but as one who speaks and is heard. Her groves will be rebuilt. Cakes will be baked again for her. Her statues will be raised again from the dust.

And we will look up and behold the Divine Father and Divine Mother together, towering in the sunlight at the center of a holy city, reminding us of our own buried divinity. Then humanity will go out into the stars, not as orphaned conquerors, but as children of both Heaven and Earth, carrying life into the dead cosmos.