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 25,000 BC—during the age of hunt cults and the first myths of the cosmic hunt—with the figure known as the Venus of Willendorf. This small carving, discovered in Austria in 1908, is possibly the oldest statue in the world.

 Most sculptures from the Paleolithic era are female, characterized by exaggerated sexual features—enlarged breasts and eternal pregnant bellies—yet lacking facial detail. 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 her 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.)

This statue may have been carved by a woman gazing down at her own pregnant belly, conscious of its weight and burden—consciousness itself awakening. From this single image we may infer that God was, in origin, imagined as a woman.

This was an age when survival was everything: frigid temperatures, natural disasters, predators, rival tribes, starvation, and disease could claim a life at any moment. Thus, the matrix of fertility was praised and worshipped above all else. Looking back across the millennia, we find that the further into antiquity we go, the more mystical and animated reality appears. Early humans perceived the world as alive, mysterious, and infused with power.

Nothing was—and still is—more magical than creating life within one’s own body. Woman was the origin of the world. The void, the black vortex, the eye of creation between her legs, was a gift from Gaia herself.

As one interpretation suggests:

“...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.)

In this era, nature was sacred and overtly feminine in symbol. Caves, springs, and womb-like voids of the earth may have been regarded as holy sites of the Mother’s creativity. Rain was imagined as the milk of the celestial cow or mother. The Moon—waxing, waning, and returning—was linked to women, its 28-day cycle mirroring menstruation, and thus became associated with goddess symbolism.

Indeed, some of humanity’s oldest spiritual images—serpents shedding their skin, the lunar cycle, pregnant figurines—reflect fertility, nourishment, and cyclical regeneration associated with the Great Mother archetype. It was in these distant millennia that the “Divine Feminine” first flourished, long before patriarchal religions gained ascendancy.

The notion of an all-encompassing Mother Earth provided psychological comfort and a sense of belonging in the cosmos. Early humans saw themselves as “children of the earth,” wholly dependent upon her bounty.

The majority of the earliest creation myths recorded after the Ice Age share a striking common theme—one that directly influenced the biblical account. They begin with a primordial ocean, symbolizing the womb, from which sky and land emerge. To sustain life, these must be separated by a cosmic figure such as Atlas, Maui, or Enlil. Genesis echoes this “primordial waters” motif (tehom), with God dividing the waters above from the waters below to create heaven and earth.

Out of woman’s existence, men began to awaken to the archetypal hero’s journey zalongside the archetype of the Great Mother. They recognized that woman was most vulnerable during pregnancy, and that dangers—symbolized by serpents—threatened the feminine. The man’s role became that of protector. In mythic terms, this awakening occurred in Adam when he partook of the forbidden fruit of good and evil because of Eve.

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 see these themes reflected in the Sumerian myth, where the goddess Inanna discovers that her sacred tree has been corrupted by serpents, preventing her from fully realizing herself. She calls upon the warrior-king Gilgamesh—whose axe and armor require ten men to lift—to take care of the problem, even though Inanna could have done it herself. Gilgamesh cuts down the tree and fashions from its wood a bed and a throne for the goddess. As Inanna sits upon her new throne, she becomes the mind of nature, and her flower blooms—glorious to behold—awakening her sexual sovereignty.

While woman and her magical power of childbirth were regarded as the creatrix of the world, man possessed no equivalent power. Woman’s abilities were alien to him, and he grew envious. In response, man sought to mirror the divine through agriculture—an attempt to cultivate, seed, and bring forth life from the earth itself.

This “womb-envy” echoes through myths across cultures. Later Hebrew scribes wrote in Genesis how Adam gave birth to Eve from his rib, reversing the natural order. In Greek mythology, Zeus gives birth to Athena from his head and later rebirths Dionysus from his thigh. In Japanese mythology, the god Izanagi produces Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi from his eyes. Thus the very term “woman” in Hebrew being ishah —literally “from man”—emerges as testimony to this inversion of creative power.

Yet in the Neolithic era, goddess-centered spirituality continued to flourish. In settlements stretching from Anatolia through the Danube Valley and the Mediterranean, archaeologists have uncovered abundant female figurines, shrines adorned with breasts and uterine symbols, and other indications of Mother Goddess worship.

At Çatalhöyük (Turkey, c. 7000 BC), mural paintings and figurines suggest devotion to a life-giving Mother associated with bulls and leopards. Across “Old Europe” (Neolithic Southeast Europe), Marija Gimbutas documented numerous female statues and symbols—goddesses giving birth, serpentine motifs, and bird-goddess figures. She argued that these cultures worshipped a singular Great Goddess in many forms, presiding over fertility, animals, and the underworld.

According to this interpretation, Neolithic “Old European” societies were agrarian communities with female-centric religion and little evidence of large-scale warfare, though there was some. Some settlements lacked fortifications until later periods, suggesting those had a relative absence of conflict until the arrival of new cultural influences. Socially, women all around held significant positions—perhaps as priestesses or clan matriarchs—reflecting a worldview that sacralized female creative power.

Nature’s fertility was now directly tied to human survival through agriculture, further reinforcing the association of woman with life-giving force. In the Neolithic temples of Malta (c. 4000 BC), a famous figurine known as the “Sleeping Lady” depicts a rotund woman, discovered in a hypogeum (underground tomb). Scholars interpret her as a symbol of death and rebirth, invoked in rituals that emphasized the cyclical regeneration of life crucial to agricultural societies.

The biblical text echoes this same cycle 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 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. Statues began to show identifiable faces; the persona and ego were developing. Here we encounter the oldest known divine name—not Yahweh or Elohim, but Inanna, inscribed on proto-cuneiform tablets from Uruk. Finally, humanity had a name for the Mother Goddess. Long before the lion symbolized Christ, it was Inanna’s. The dove—now associated with the Christian, masculinized Holy Spirit representing peace, chastity, and spiritual awakening—was originally Inanna’s earthy symbol of erotic vitality.

Inanna was a multifaceted Great Goddess of paradoxes: ruler of love, femininity, sexuality, and fertility, yet also of war, justice, 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. (There were a few male priests, and a subsection of transgender priests, men who wore women’s clothes and took on feminine names—but the highest and majority were female.)

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.

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). This pattern appeared across many pre-Abrahamic cultures, where royal power derived from the Great Mother. The throne itself was conceived as the womb: a man could not reign unless his mother first gave birth to him. In Shinto tradition, the Japanese emperor’s authority was legitimized by descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu. In Celtic Ireland, a king’s sovereignty depended on ritually marrying the land goddess, whose dishonor brought famine or the end of his reign.

 Erich Neumann describes this archetypal throne as maternal:

“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 other words, the female godhead functions as the throne upon which the male godhead sits.

Long before Christ emerged as a suffering, dying, and resurrected deity, Inanna had already enacted this archetypal descent and return. The 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.

Yet on the third day, 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.

Later Akkadian versions of the story, dating to around the first millennium BC, depict Inanna (Ishtar in Akkadian) redressing in her divine regalia at each gate upon her ascent. However, the earliest versions of the tale from third-millennium BC Sumer omit that detail — not to say that she returned still naked, but to show that those items no longer mattered to the goddess. The redressing is implied within her new wholeness as she once more takes her throne.

She had transcended earthly wealth and authority. She had discovered true inner power. There is a difference between wearing divinity and being it. What remained was the raw essence of sovereignty — the undivided Self.

As Joseph Campbell taught,

“The goddess returns not clothed in her former glory, but radiant in her own unadorned being — for she is become the ground of all.” (Campbell, lecture, Pacifica Archives)

And her knowledge of death gave her a profound understanding of life now that her roots reached down to hell. Her body was left with marks from the underworld and she possessed the “eye of death.” She now carried 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. From then on, no one above the surface could challenge her authority.

There are many feminist readings of Inanna’s descent myth. Unlike the common trope of the damsel in distress—abducted and forced into confrontation with death—Inanna goes willingly into the underworld, which in psychology represents the unconscious and the confrontation with our deepest fears. She retains her agency, the very quality so often denied to women in myth. This is a theme many feminists recognize in their own struggles for autonomy.

Other themes abound: Inanna’s conflict is with her sister, not a man. In the face of death she is stripped bare, standing simply as a woman—divested of every social construct or gender role. She holds a man—her husband—accountable for failing to mourn her death. For many women, her descent and return mirror the cycle of menstruation: a death and rebirth enacted within their own bodies.

Sylvia Brinton Perera notes:

“On the other hand, lived consciously, the goddess Inanna in her role as suffering, exiled feminine provides an image of the deity who can, perhaps, carry the suffering and redemption of modern women… Inanna’s suffering, disrobing, humiliation, flagellation and death… and her resurrection, all prefigure Christ’s passion… She is concerned more with life than with good and evil.” (Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women)

Perera, in Descent to the Goddess, directly uses Inanna as a model for the feminine descent into the unconscious.

She writes:

“Inanna descends in all of us. She strips away the layers of false light to meet her own darkness. When she returns, her power is no longer of display, but of being.” (Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women)

Likewise, Molly M. Remer reflects:

“When I have felt too small and weak for the task, she [Inanna] has strengthened me.… I have followed her through the underworld. I have fallen and risen, descended and ascended. I have emerged, restored.” (Feminism and Religion)

Gelareh Khoie, PhD, interprets the myth psychologically:

“We go into the dark abyss of the unconscious and there, sacrifice our modern, supreme, acquisitive egos… in order to find our softer, and perhaps even our more terrifyingly honest, irrational, and autonomous selves.… Inanna undergoes this excruciating transformation willingly… she is reborn… in possession of her full feminine nature which is light and dark, soft and hard, sun and moon.… the feminine includes the masculine.” (Medium)

Yet Inanna’s reign did not last. Womb-envy persisted among men, and 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: Enlil, storm god of Sumer; Marduk, war god of Akkad. 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. Men told new myths of masculine heroes sent to slay her: 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. As one interpreter observes:

“When Tiamat goes to battle, she is slain by the young solar god Marduk. This symbolizes the slaying of matriarchal culture by a new, rising patriarchal culture.” (The Metafictionalist)

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. And in Psalm 74:12–17 we read:

“You divided the sea by your strength; you broke the heads of the sea monsters on the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.”

Hebrew scribes may have adapted Mesopotamian motifs while masculinizing the sea-monster: Leviathan, once mother-serpent, her womb is ripped from her body and she becomes male and is cast as a symbol of rival empires like Babylon.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest great epic, Inanna—now Ishtar—is diminished to a spurned lover. When Gilgamesh rejects her proposal, she unleashes the Bull of Heaven, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay it. His triumph over Ishtar’s celestial beast reinforces the shift: matriarchal power is vanquished by youthful patriarchal ascendancy.

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. By the time of the book of Revelation, she was demonized outright:

“Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.” (Revelation 17:5)

The Queen of Heaven was reduced to the Whore of Babylon, a caricature of her former self. Her priestesses falsely accused of temple prostitution. Sylvia Brinton Perera laments:

“Constricted, the joy of the feminine has been denigrated as mere frivolity; her joyful lust demeaned as whorishness… Her vitality bound into duty and obedience… We are filled with self-loathing and a deep sense of ugliness… Most of the powers once held by the goddess have lost their connection to a woman’s life: the embodied, playful, passionately erotic feminine; the powerful, independent, self-willed feminine.” (Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women)

 In short, the Whore is nothing more than a theological smear campaign against the divine feminine in all her pre-Christian forms.

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. Inventors of the wheel and chariot, they entered the archaeological record with fortifications and weapons of war. These were the Indo-Europeans. Emerging from the vast grasslands north of the Black Sea (modern Ukraine and Russia), they conquered and tamed the wild horse and then turned their will to dominate other aspects of Mother Nature. They were warfaring nomads who razed earth-mother-worshipping farming tribes, took their women, and burned their homes. They sacrificed horses, cattle, and even humans in fire. Old ritual sites were destroyed, pantheons reshuffled. Thrusting their swords into the soil, they claimed land in the name of their god—a deity whose name echoed through time in Zeus, Jupiter, and the very title of “father,” Dyeus Pater, the Sky Father.

Our Heavenly Father had finally appeared on the scene. Yet the rise of the Sky Father over Earth Mother was neither instantaneous nor uniform. It was a gradual process, spreading as Indo-European branches migrated across vast territories—from northern India, where male deities came to dominate Hindu mythology, to the British Isles, where patriarchal tribal structures replaced earlier goddess-centered traditions.

WAR! As societies transitioned to hierarchical, male-deity-centered structures, warfare became normalized. The Indo-Europeans, physically imposing and sustained on a meat-based diet, trained their boys from youth in rites of passage—sending them to live with wolves as initiation into manhood. Warriors held the highest, most sacred status. Chiefs were buried with their weapons, wives, and slaves.

Even women were sometimes drawn into battle. Yamnaya and Afanasievo burials (c. 3500–2500 BC) include female skeletons interred with daggers or axes, suggesting the roots of later myths about Amazons and Valkyries. In some regions, women retained a measure of authority: Celtic traditions preserved memories of warrior queens and prophetesses, and Norse mythology honored goddesses such as Freyja and Frigg, though Odin and Thor led the charge. The Indo-European migrations did not erase the Goddess overnight, but they injected patriarchal ideology that gradually transformed both social and spiritual landscapes.

Though illiterate, these nomads articulated a cosmic order: man was to rule the earth. Death was inevitable, but glory in battle was eternal. Their rituals of sacrifice and war, accompanied by lyres, drums, and horns, invoked martial empowerment in the name of our Father in Heaven.

Zeus epitomizes this new divine order. He overthrew the Titans, primordial children of Gaia, Mother Earth. The result was a patriarchal pantheon in which power was shared primarily among Zeus’s brothers and sons, while goddesses were consorts, daughters, or carefully contained figures. Hera, his wife, was cast as the archetypal jealous and scheming spouse. Mortal women were reduced to vessels for Zeus’s illegitimate offspring, often denied agency. In one myth, Zeus swallows the goddess of wisdom and later births Athena from his own head—eternally loyal to him and serving as counselor to male heroes like Perseus.

The Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony codified misogyny through the Pandora myth. Pandora, the first woman, is described as a “beautiful evil”—a curse sent by Zeus to plague mankind. Crafted with insatiable curiosity, she opens her jar and releases sorrow and suffering upon the earth. This narrative echoes Genesis: Eve partakes of forbidden fruit, seduces Adam, and unleashes death as punishment upon humanity. Both stories justify male dominance by portraying women as dangerously curious, inherently untrustworthy, and in need of control. Pandora, in particular, became a cultural scapegoat for human suffering—her myth reinforcing patriarchal anxieties about female autonomy.

Myth and social order mirrored one another. In classical Athens, women had no political rights, were married off as minors, and were expected to remain secluded in the household. The virtues demanded of women were obedience, chastity, and motherhood under male guardianship. Even the Oracle at Delphi, perhaps the most famous female religious office, was subordinated to Apollo, whose divine voice she channeled. According to myth, Apollo seized Delphi from Gaia, the Earth Mother, by slaying her guardian serpent, Python.

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 desert nomads south of Egypt, a strange, homeless storm-war god staggered onto the already crowded stage—Yahweh, not yet called the Almighty. As a desert storm-war deity, Yahweh’s nature may help explain the prevalence of wars, plagues, floods, and his peculiar habit of leading people into wildernesses throughout the Bible and Book of Mormon. Originating among the Shasu tribes of Edom and Midian, Yahweh was later adopted by Israel, 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 were not Israelites but semi-nomadic raiders in the southern deserts—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, a key move in what Biblical scholars call the “Yahweh-alone movement.”

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. These early Israelites worshiped the same pantheon described in Ugaritic texts: El, the “Sky Father”; Asherah, his consort and Mother Goddess (Ugaritic Athirat, comparable to Mesopotamian Inanna); and their seventy divine sons, including the storm-god Baal—Yahweh’s rival before being displaced. In this way, Yahweh was absorbed into the Canaanite pantheon.

The monarchy accelerated Yahweh’s rise. Saul, David, and Solomon placed Yahweh at the head of the pantheon. Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem marked Yahweh’s enthronement as national deity, absorbing attributes of El and taking Asherah as consort. 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 recast 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 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 Song of Songs, originally an erotic love poem, was allegorized as Yahweh’s love for Israel. The prophetic writings denounced devotion to other deities as spiritual adultery. The feminine divine was no longer tolerated—she was displaced by the church itself.

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, the wisest king became the greatest example of how female influence and polytheism lead to idolatry and destruction.

Concerning King David’s sin with Bathsheba, one commentator observes that while the text is neutral about David’s earlier polygamous unions,

“when the reader sees what happens in the case of Bathsheba, he realizes...that David had a weakness in the area of women. The Bathsheba incident reveals David’s lust...having its deadly consequences.” (mit.irr.org)

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. When Jerusalem fell in 597 BC, its people were enslaved and exiled. Instead of concluding that their god had abandoned them, Judah’s leaders doubled down, insisting Yahweh’s wrath was punishment for insufficient devotion. In their cognitive dissonance, they proclaimed Yahweh as the one true God, exclusive of all rivals. 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, marked the sudden rise of prophets and philosophers across the ancient world—deep thinkers who sought nothing less than the mind of God and the hidden structure of reality. For the first time, humanity began to articulate systematic theories of existence, morality, and transcendence. Yet this age of awakening coincided with another great shift: the suppression of the divine feminine. Once the embodiment of wisdom, fertility, and cosmic balance, she was cast into shadow, recast as temptation, chaos, or silence.

From this repression emerged a psychic distortion. Man’s womb-envy—his longing for the generative power he lacked—transmuted into the glorification of the phallus, the terrors of castration anxiety, and the relegation of woman as the “second sex” which split the feminine between the Madonna and the whore. These undercurrents, first enacted in myth and cult, would only be named millennia later by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and expanded upon by Simone de Beauvoir, the mother of existentialist feminism.

Womb-envy was a term introduced by the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney, who studied within Freud’s framework. Freud believed woman was characterized by a lack of a phallus, which he called penis-envy. Horney, however, postulated that man’s projection of penis-envy onto women was actually the unconscious result of womb-envy. She wrote:

“It is not women who suffer from penis envy, but men who suffer from womb envy; their envy of the female capacity for motherhood makes them belittle women, and makes them anxious and jealous.” (The Flight from Womanhood, 1926)

“It is this envy, and the resulting fear of woman, that is the real root of the male dread of woman and of the repression of the feminine in culture.” (The Dread of Woman, 1932)

Popularized by Plato, it was believed that form was superior to matter. The mother provided the matter, but the father gave the form. As Aristotle 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)

Man was reimagined as the active creator who implanted a child into the passive woman’s womb to grow.

These ideas were echoed in myths such as the Egyptian sun god Atum-Ra, who masturbated the universe into existence independently of the feminine. Ra’s own mouth could function as a substitute uterus to birth new gods. No ovaries were required. Even the ocean could serve in this way, as in Greek mythology, when Kronos severed his father Ouranos’s penis and cast it into the sea, which then generated Aphrodite.

Other male gods could likewise serve as substitute wombs, as in the Hurrian-Hittite myth where the sky-father Anu was overthrown by Kumarbi, who bit off his genitals only to become impregnated and give birth to other gods. In the 1600s, it was speculated that sperm cells contained tiny humans, or homunculi. The father-only myth persists today, despite modern science demonstrating that children result from the genetic contribution of both parents.

Even our own Heavenly Father, El, the “Father of the Gods” (אב אלהים, av elohim), from some Canaanite Ugaritic texts, appears as a solo creator. Some texts speak of him co-creating with his wife, Arhirat/Asherah; in others the queen of heaven vanishes, and he simply spits, bleeds, or ejaculates creation into being (Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 1998). Hence the divine title El Shaddai—“The Mountain-Breasted God”—where he appropriates maternal aspects from the mother for himself.

Genesis 1 already erases the Goddess entirely. Yahweh (male-coded) speaks creation into being—a kind of logos-as-seed. He gives birth to wisdom, Sophia/Hokmah, by his mouth (Proverbs 8:22), as the first of his creations.

Circumcision became a cosmic, male-exclusive covenant: the phallus marked as the divine tool of lineage and order. Male genitals became the ultimate symbol of power and authority. A strong, bent, ready-to-fire bow symbolized an erect penis. By contrast, associating someone with female genitalia remains culturally demeaning, despite the resilience and strength of the vagina itself.

Both Isaiah and Ezekiel explicitly allude to Yahweh’s phallus, surrounding it with imagery of fire and depicting it as filling the temple. Ezekiel especially forgets to mention the other parts of God’s body:

“And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about.” (Ezekiel 1:27)

In Isaiah 6:1, most translators render the word shul as “robe.” But as Francesca Stavrakopoulou observed in God: An Anatomy,

“…shul is more commonly used by biblical prophets not to refer to the edges of garments, but to pointedly allude to the fleshy realities of the sexual organs.” (Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. God: An Anatomy. Knopf, 2022.)

Our Heavenly Father, El, also glorified his phallus. In an old Ugaritic tale, he is depicted walking along a beach and encountering two young goddesses who seduce him. He shows off his member, which grows as long as the sea, and then proceeds to marry and impregnate them. The goddesses later give birth to Shahar (Dawn) and Shalem (Dusk) (KTU I.23).

This resonates with President Dallin H. Oaks’s speculation that we have a “heavenly mother or mothers.”

In Facsimile 2 of the Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith misidentified the Egyptian fertility god Min, who has an eternal erection, with God the Father sitting in his throne. Though perhaps Smith could have been attempting to demonstrate that God has a physical body full of sexual creative power. The ancients certainly did not shy away from depicting their gods with such exaggerated features.

But Neumann warned: 

“A male immature in his development, who experiences himself only as male and phallic, perceives the feminine as a castrator, a murderer of the phallus.” (The Great Mother, Neumann)

From womb-envy to the glorification of the phallus came castration anxiety, a term coined by Sigmund Freud to describe young boys’ fear upon realizing that girls do not possess a penis. Freud argued:

“The sight of the female genitals is regarded by the boy as evidence of castration and reinforces the threat made to him.” (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy [“Little Hans”], 1909)

While not every boy is terrified of castration, Freud maintained that a lingering fear persists in the male psyche when confronted with female anatomy. This fear was especially prevalent during the Axial Age, when some of the era’s greatest thinkers echoed Aristotle, who wrote:

“The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition.” (Generation of Animals, I.20, 728a)

Woman was thus viewed as a deficient man, a kind of prepubescent boy whose smaller frame and higher voice signaled that her “penis had yet to sprout.” She was imagined as a defective male who produced blood as an inferior form of semen. The author of Deuteronomy reinforced this logic by requiring long ritual cleansings for women after menstruation. Everything she touched became unclean. Across cultures, the birth of a girl was often viewed as a paternal failure.

Aristotle continued:

“The female, as female, is weaker and colder in nature, and it is necessary to regard the female state as a sort of deformity, though a natural one.” (Generation of Animals, IV.2, 775a)

These sentiments endured for centuries, for who could question the authority of Aristotle—the student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great? Like Jordan Peterson in our time, Aristotle was preoccupied with hierarchies. For him, men stood above women in the “natural order.” He did not necessarily intend to be misogynistic but sought to explain nature’s hierarchy as he perceived it:

“The female is less spirited than the male, and this shows her to be naturally inferior; we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency.” (Politics, I.5, 1260a)

“The courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying.” (Politics, I.13, 1260a)

Aristotle framed all relationships as master–slave dynamics. He reasoned that two masters could not exist in one household, so authority must rest with one figure—the man. Woman, in his view, was too often “ruled by emotions” and governed by the cycles of the moon to exercise ultimate authority. She was deemed hysterical—a term derived from the “wandering womb.” By contrast, man, governed by reason and stoic self-control, was thought better suited to rule both the household and the state:

“The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle of necessity extends to all mankind.” (Politics, I.5, 1254b13–14) 

These same themes reappear in the Bible when Adam is told to rule over Eve, and again when Paul codifies them into Christian theology:

“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)

This formulation renders woman’s identity directly dependent on man’s. Her role is to serve his leadership, never the reverse. Man is the default; she is the afterthought. Or as Erich Neumann put it:

      “Human consciousness is experienced as ‘masculine.’” (The Great Mother, Neumann)

 In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is depicted teaching his disciples that woman must become male in order to attain salvation:

“Simon Peter says to them: ‘Let Mary go out from our midst, for women are not worthy of life!’ Jesus says: ‘See, I will draw her so as to make her male so that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who has become male will enter the Kingdom of heaven.’” (Thomas 114)

 As Simone de Beauvoir observed in The Second Sex, woman has not been defined in and for herself, but always in relation to man—as “the Other,” the secondary being against which man asserts himself as the norm and the absolute:

“Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.” (Vol. I, Introduction, p. 5)

Her most famous line underscores this:

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (Vol. II, Part I, Introduction, p. 283)

This should not be misread through a third-wave or Judith Butler lens. De Beauvoir was not suggesting that woman is purely a social construct detached from biology. She also wrote:

“Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her nature.” (Vol. I, Part I, Ch. 1, p. 5)

Her point is that woman has historically been defined not by herself but by her social relation to man. For most of history, she has been unable to determine for herself how she desires to express her gender. Not every woman wishes to be a mother or a wife; not every woman aspires to traditional femininity. Existentialist philosophy insists that human beings are free—and thus women must be free—to become what they most desire.

De Beauvoir captured this with precision:

“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.” (Vol. I, Part I, Ch. 1, p. 66)

True freedom begins when women cease being defined as “the Other” and begin defining themselves.

The tragedy, however, is that for over two millennia—since the suppression of the Great Mother by King Josiah and the prophets—women were forced into roles not of their own choosing, but constructed from male-created myths. A woman could be the mother, the virgin, or—if she fell outside those roles—the whore. No middle ground existed. Woman was reduced to an object, either venerated or despised, never accepted as a full individual. As Erich Neumann put it,

The growth of self-consciousness and the strengthening of masculinity thrust the image of the Great Mother into the background; the patriarchal society splits it up, and while only the picture of the good Mother is retained in consciousness, her terrible aspect is relegated to the unconscious. (Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness)

Freud termed this reduction the Madonna/Whore complex. Men suffering from this complex cannot integrate eros (sexual desire) with agapē (ἀγάπη, spiritual love) in the same woman. The woman they respect, they cannot sexualize; the woman they sexualize, they cannot respect.

I myself once succumbed to this distortion while living in Japan. I attended photography workshops, photographing models in alluring poses, but could only fantasize about them. I was preoccupied with concerns about how my public reputation would appear if I actually pursued a relationship with one of them. They became, for me, forbidden objects of desire. I did not perceive them as women with inner lives, flaws, and potential as partners; they were archetypes—models, muses, bodies.

In this way, the Madonna/Whore complex warps not only how men perceive women but also how men perceive themselves.

33 AD – Christianity: The Virgin and the Witch

With the rise of Christianity, the Great Mother receded further into obscurity. Her 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 the seed of Yahweh to produce 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. Mary was “allowed” to be exalted 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 established 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). 

This theology led to 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 invented Lilith, imagined as Adam’s 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).

Suppression of the Great Mother within the collective unconscious gave rise to the archetype of the Terrible Mother: she who brings disease, decay, and death. She is the abyss that swallows her children back into the womb of chaos. She is vagina dentata—the devouring maw that castrates the insecure and prideful male. Her witches became the figures most feared.

Man knew the world was a meat grinder but a youthful beautiful woman catches him in her web and causes him to lose himself in her presence and return to being a savage animal so Mother Nature can have more babies to be sacrificed. Only for the woman to lose her wings and beauty after a few children to becoming crone witches which need to sacrifice more children to desperately stay young.

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).

Worship of nature deities, seasonal festivals, and shamanic rites were condemned by the Church as devil-worship. 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. The Black Death, sweeping Europe as a shadow of death, only intensified suspicion toward women healers and midwives, often elderly “crones.”

As historian Max Dashu notes,

“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). In England and Scotland, such inspections were often public spectacles.

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. The Church declared in its creeds that there is only one God, eternally male, disembodied, passionless and residing outside of everything. The ultimate culmination of masculine energy taking supreme precedence. Existing only as logos, pure thought and logic. 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 priestesshood was erased, her scriptures burned. No record remains of the mourners. 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?

By the 17th century, witch trials and superstition waned, but the suppression of the Great Mother intensified in new forms. “Mother Nature” was replaced by the machine of progress. She was reduced to inert matter, governed by mathematical probability, dissected by 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 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 train of capitalism and colonialism roared westward, 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).

The cult of Mary diminished with the Protestant Reformation, denounced as idolatry. With her, the last vestige of the divine feminine was removed from mainstream religion. 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 almost entirely male. 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. The collective psyche became one-sidedly masculine: logos without eros, order without chaos.

The same patriarchal machine consumed indigenous Earth-Mother traditions in the Americas, justifying conquest as a “civilizing mission.” Native reverence for the land was branded primitive superstition.

Then the unthinkable happened.. 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, reduced to two ancient corpses. Religion was demythologized. Capitalism, not divinity, was sovereign. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and atheism surged. Humanity no longer needed God the Father or Goddess the Mother to explain its origins—the mindless, genderless machine of evolution sufficed. It seems 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, §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 with his character Ivan: “…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. But 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 prophesied that great wars were inevitable so long as nations marched behind the corpse of the divine masculine, stripped of his feminine equal. What followed, he argued, was order without chaos, aggression without empathy, rationality without feeling. Jung’s visions showed 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, §585).

The prophecy proved chillingly accurate. Cold, hard science—uncoupled from the feminine—became a tool of atrocity. From Nazi camps to Japanese laboratories, “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, spoke with haunted eyes 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—both God and Goddess. In the spring of 1820, Joseph Smith Jr. emerged from a grove of trees in Palmyra, New York, proclaiming that he had seen the Great Sky-Father of the Canaanites, Elohim (Heavenly Father), and the storm god Yahweh (Jesus), his Son—two separate gods. Over two millennia of monotheism were shattered in a single afternoon.

Above all, in an age still enthralled by Plato’s conviction that unchanging form (masculinity) was superior to corruptible matter (femininity), Christianity had imagined an all-male God as pure form—an abstract metaphysical essence. But Smith dared to say that God was, in fact, clothed in matter. More radically still, he hinted that God the Father—as our literal parent—too was born of a woman, just as every human on earth. Spirit itself was not exempt from maternity, for Smith 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, is not escape from matter—it is exaltation through matter. The womb, the breast, the body—all became echoes of divine order.

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) challenge the notion of a masculine deity creating ex nihilo. There is the abyss from which all things emerge.

These works echo an ancient statue of Asherah, excavated from a thirteenth-century BC Late Bronze Age site in Israel. The goddess is depicted holding two infants to her breasts while using both hands to hold open her labia, revealing the deep abyss of her womb. Many mistake this small figure for a common sex object—a side effect of patriarchal worshipers’ conflation of goddess veneration with whoredoms. 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 origin of all things.

“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.)

Or for instance, early medieval Europe had occasional throwbacks like the Sheela-na-gigs (stone carvings of women displaying their vulva on churches, perhaps to ward off evil by confronting it with the power of creation), indicating a brief revival of a very ancient idea (the apotropaic yoni akin to Roman fascinum). But by the high Middle Ages, even those were largely suppressed or their meaning obscured.

With whispers and hints of a Mother in Heaven, goddess cults entwined with feminism began to rise. Not as divine revelation from above, but as a root rising through the soil — into your feet, through blood and bone. Inanna still remains in the underworld, yet she moves upward through the earth, carried by prayers that give her hope and peace. Eliza R. Snow’s prayer to her in the hymn O My Father marked the beginning of a mass illumination.

Margaret Toscano, Mormon feminist theologian excommunicated for her heretical ideas, 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)

Toscano speculated that Smith may have unknowingly revived the ancient goddess cults of Asherah and Inanna through a female version of the priesthood as he organized the women into the Relief Society and reintroduced what the ancient Greeks called hieros gamos, celestial marriage between a god and goddess. As Smith taught them:

“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)

Though speculative, priests in Enoch’s day may well have coexisted with priestesses of Inanna.

The women of the Relief Society were given the key — formed as an independent organization linked to the Church. Its first leader, Emma Hale Smith, the Prophet’s wife, was proclaimed “an Elect Lady” (D&C 25:3). Unlike previous women’s groups, this one was designed to teach women organizational and publishing skills, and it endured beyond its century to become the largest women’s organization in the world. Most importantly, these women were taught to become queens and priestesses — official callings beyond today’s brief temple mentions. Women openly exercised their priestesshood, healing the sick through 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, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Mormon feminist, wrote:

“The Relief Society of the 1840s was a laboratory of female authority in Mormonism. Women licensed themselves to lay on hands, to heal, to bless. They claimed power. That power was later reined in, but the memory of it has never disappeared.”

(“Mormon Women in New England and Beyond,” Dialogue, 2010)

With the introduction of celestial marriage and polygamy, Smith envisioned a universal, collective family — where a man could not become a king unless joined by a priestess-queen, as in the days of the cult of Inanna. Toscano observed:

“…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)

Similarly, LDS historian and Exponent II founder Claudia Bushman wrote of the ultimate 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 factors prevented Smith from fully restoring Goddess worship and the priestesshood among his people. The first was Emma’s open dismissal of polygamy as recorded in the minutes of the Relief Society, which caused Joseph to initiate it in secret and keep his other wives at a distance, resulting in him appearing as a liar in public. The conflict in his soul culminated in Doctrine and Covenants section 132—an attempt to justify the practice while condemning Emma’s disgust toward it. Non-LDS historian Jan Shipps noted:

“The command to Emma in Section 132 reveals the tension at the heart of Mormon gender relations. Even as Joseph’s theology elevated women to eternal queenship, the language of destruction for disobedience underscored their subordination in this life. Emma’s refusal thus becomes the first feminist resistance in Mormon history.”(Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, 1985, p. 91)

The second factor was the prophet’s death, which cut his restoration authority too short. There was then a battle of succession among his followers, in which none sought to fully complete his work. The majority followed Brigham Young to Utah, where the Relief Society was temporarily disbanded. Scholars debate whether Young acted out of fear of female authority, institutional control, or simple chaos management after the collapse of Nauvoo around 1845. Most historians believe it was because, amid the succession crisis, Young wanted to remove any divided loyalties. The female Relief Society had become a political entity under Emma’s leadership, who vehemently opposed plural marriage. The society was only later reintroduced by Young once everything had settled down in Utah in 1867, with Eliza R. Snow—who was fiercely loyal to Young. Carol Cornwall Madsen (LDS women’s historian) wrote:

“Brigham Young viewed the Nauvoo Relief Society with suspicion. It had become a forum for Emma Smith’s opposition to polygamy and a center of female influence in a time of male ecclesiastical crisis. For Young, whose priority was to consolidate authority, such an autonomous women’s organization was politically dangerous.”(An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870–1920, 2006, p. 23)

With the appropriately named ‘house full of females’ from plural marriage—which was growing among early Mormons into a more open and accepted practice—women continued organizing themselves and growing in shared sisterhood even without the Relief Society until it was reorganized. Contrary to what U.S. women outside Utah thought at the time, polygamous Mormon women were far more privileged. “What nonsense!” proclaimed Eliza R. Snow in denouncing false rumors of LDS women being forced or coerced into polygamy as collectibles of patriarchal leadership (ldsblogs.com). Coincidentally, women defending polygamy led to their voting rights in 1870, decades before the 19th Amendment in 1920—only just beaten by the Wyoming Territory a few months prior. It wasn’t until Congress came down hard on Utah that they had to stop practicing polygamy and revoke women’s right to vote with the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which decreed, “it shall not be lawful for any female to vote … in the Territory of Utah.” (paraphrase/short quote). Emmeline B. Wells—journalist, editor, poet, women’s rights advocate, and plural wife—announced to the rest of the U.S.:

“The world says polygamy makes women inferior to men—we think differently. Polygamy gives women more time for thought, for mental culture, more freedom of action, a broader field of labor... and leads women more directly to God, the fountain of all truth.” (ldswomenshistory.blogspot.com)

Not every woman in Utah was barefoot and pregnant all the time. Many plural wives were in positions where they managed their own property, households, and finances. Additionally, they held the rights to divorce and even sue. Brigham Young was a major champion of women being educated in male-dominated sciences rather than being confined solely to domestic skills. Many Utah women went on to become doctors in their own right, such as Ellis Reynolds Shipp and Romania B. Pratt. While not the first female doctors in the U.S., they were notable examples. Young thought it essential for women to be educated, as they were the primary means of teaching the next generation.

“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)

East Coast feminists took note of the little experiments with women’s rights over in the Utah Territory, even if some first-wave feminists, like Lucy Stone, were extremely against polygamy, seeing it as degrading and incompatible with women’s rights. The Anthony, Stanton, and National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) wing welcomed Mormon women’s voices for the sake of suffrage unity, even if they disagreed about polygamy. LDS women themselves defended plural marriage, claiming it gave them independence, sisterhood, and higher spiritual status—an argument that baffled and divided other feminists. Suffrage historian Aileen S. Kraditor explained:

“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)

Women fought for and obtained legal equality in many spheres through strikes, protests, and influential books—voting rights, property rights, reproductive rights, sexual rights, education, and career opportunities. In addition, men are now held accountable for sexual and domestic abuse. Women desire the right to define womanhood for themselves without social or patriarchal expectation. This tangible progress in gender equality can also be viewed symbolically as the return of the denied feminine into public life. With each barrier broken, the “feminine voice” re-entered the collective conversation.

During the Middle Ages, the Great Mother archetype survived in underground forms: in alchemy (alchemists spoke of “materia prima” as mother, or sought the “Anima Mundi”, the world-soul—a female principle in nature), in literature (Renaissance and Romantic literature revived goddess figures as emblems of virtue or liberty—e.g., Spenser’s Gloriana or later, the French Revolution’s Marianne—but these were often abstract personifications).

By the 1970s, books like “The Chalice and the Blade” by Riane Eisler (1987) looked back at the ancient world before Yahweh and monotheism, when goddesses dominated the scene. Archaeological claims by Marija Gimbutas gained popular traction, inspiring many to envision a distant age of harmony under the Goddess—a contrast to our conflict-ridden patriarchal age. New goddess cults like Neo-Paganism and Wicca reclaimed the demonized female/nature power once called witchcraft. These cults either worshipped Goddess alongside a male god or monotheistically. In Wicca, the Triple Goddess (Maiden, Mother, Crone) is a core concept, clearly an attempt to re-integrate the female life cycle and divine power into worship. Often invoking ancient deities by name (Isis, Diana, Brigid, Kali, etc.), Goddess worshippers celebrate female sexuality and biology as sacred—reclaiming feminine symbols such as the moon, chalice, and earth as holy. They hold rituals on the full moon, honoring menstruation as connected to lunar cycles, in direct subversion of the patriarchal view that saw these as unclean or profane.

The Gaia Hypothesis (proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in 1974) posits that the Earth functions as a self-regulating organism. While not about a literal goddess, the theory suggests that we should treat the Earth as a living body rather than an inanimate object for exploitation. It champions the need for environmentalism and a return to feminine ideals of care and nurturing for the planet—a theory made literal in Joseph Smith’s cosmology, as he depicts the ancient prophet Enoch weeping, hearing the groans and pains of the Earth as she speaks and wonders about the day of her redemption,

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: 

For the first twenty thousand years of human religious life, we worshiped the Great Mother as the supreme deity. It was not until around 3500 BC that patriarchy—and the Heavenly Father—began to grow in power, though still within the shadow of the Mother. Then came the great surge of the Sky Father, carried by the Indo-Europeans around 3000 BC.

Yahweh wandered onto the stage around 1300 BC and soon dominated the Middle East, eventually replacing his father El. Kings and prophets drove out the Goddess—the Mother—until Yahweh could be declared the only true God of the universe.

By 33 AD, monotheism stood triumphant. The Mother was divided into the Virgin and the Whore so that her nature could be regulated, restrained, and shackled within the patriarchy. The patriarchy suppressed and demonized the feminine, 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 their dead God upon a cross—worshiping the corpse of transcendence while exploiting the Earth’s oil (her blood) for profit, bulldozing down forests, destroying animal homes, and poisoning the skies with the fumes of their grinding factories. The loss of the divine led to lethal experiments upon both the planet and the human body, culminating in two 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 the seeds for the Great Mother’s redemption but also for Mother Eve’s. Once cast as the inferior helper to Adam—whose weakness allowed the serpent to swallow her whole and transform her into the temptress who lured man into sinning against God, thereby dooming all humanity to a fallen world under original sin—Eve, in Smith’s vision, took on a far more exalted role. He reimagined her act not as disobedience, but as a noble 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)

A valiant attempt by Smith to resolve the madonna/whore divide. Early Mormon women were possibly viewed as Madonna-whores—spiritually enlightened yet more often than not, paradoxically, delighting in the whorish practice of polygamy. 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 the patriarchy has denigrated as “the terrible mother, dragon, or witch.”  Inanna personifies that reclaimed Goddess.  Unlike Greek myth (which fragments female traits among many deities), the Sumerians imagined one total Goddess.  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 all the demonized qualities of feminine nature—the aspects men of the time feared most. 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, was banished from view into the shadowy underworld, for she represented grief, rage, lust, pain, hysteria, sorrow, envy, and chaos—the Terrible Mother and demonized witch—neglected, scorned, suppressed, and forgotten, viewed as filthy, degrading, and sinful. Inanna’s shadow, the divine feminine’s shadow.

Jung described the shadow as the collection of aspects we reject or hide—

“the repressed, often frightening elements of the psyche.” (Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951)

Ereshkigal could be said to symbolize everything a patriarchal culture taught women to hide: their “shadow qualities” that didn’t fit the mold of the dutiful maiden or mother.

The masculine hero’s journey is one of conquest—of slaying beasts for the approval of the father. But the heroine’s journey is one of turning inward, digging down through layers of identity to find and embrace her dark twin. This journey is echoed in Jungian feminist writings. Murdock describes the heroine’s descent as reclaiming lost feminine treasures:

“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 knew she would die, which is why she made preparations. Her father, Enki, soon heard of her demise and sent two androgynous beings. The beings found Ereshkigal seated on her throne, bare-breasted and wallowing in misery as a woman about to give birth. As she moaned and groaned, the androgynous beings moaned with her, repeating her agony. They saw her and felt her pain. Her pain validated, the fierce queen’s suffering was honored. The dark goddess was touched by their empathy and granted them the corpse of Inanna.

Inanna returned whole, having felt empathy for her sister. She carried a newfound love for her shadow, now that she too had tasted death and decay. Rather than oppressing or suppressing her, she integrated her shadow through empathy—not as a demon to be cast out, but as a part of herself. 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)

Inanna’s myth thus models healing through unification: the heavenly and the chthonic, the benevolent and the furious, the erotic and the sacred are all faces of one Divine Feminine. What had been a split between “above vs. below,” or, we might say, Madonna vs. Whore, becomes a continuum—a unity—once Inanna integrates Ereshkigal. She can be both Virgin and Whore, both pure and sexual, both nurturing and passionate. All women learn that in order to obtain motherhood she must first pass through the domain of the Whore. As one spiritual writer puts it, women must 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)

Healing this split is especially crucial in today’s culture, where Madonnas often speak of Whores as unredeemable sinners doomed to hellfire—believing they were forced or coerced into their choices, unaware that many chose it for themselves as an act of love for life. Yet too many of those same women often find they can unleash their Whore entirely severed from the Madonna through the internet, taking advantage of the loneliness of hundreds of thousands of men to earn fortunes. No wonder the patriarchy feared the Whore so much.

So long as the Madonna/Whore split continues to widen, the Madonna’s standards will grow increasingly unrealistic—demonizing even the slightest celebration of the beauty of the body or small exposure of a shoulder, rendering everything pornographic. There she sits in her icy church, where passion and Eros—love for life—are forbidden. Thou shalt castrate thy will to life. The mother shames the daughter for being born female. Fear and be disgusted by womanhood, by sexuality, by flesh. She might love the Whore but she becomes the Devouring Mother—suppression becomes oppression.

Meanwhile, the Whore, deprived of sacred validation, drifts into ever darker territories—seeking love and recognition in shadowed rooms. The Whore, denied holiness, must shout louder, shock deeper, and perform more grotesque acts to feel seen at all. She’ll lash out in rage and return as the Terrible Mother seeking revenge against her oppressors. Her instincts for life and reproduction turn towards cults of death.

The psychological polarization of the divine feminine turns into sterile sanctity versus excessive carnality. When one side represses the other, both spiral toward absurdity. These extremes will persist until both see the other reflected within and whisper through tears, “I see you, I feel you, you are not alone. You are my sister. You are perfect the way you are, and I… love… you.”

As Jungian writer Marion Woodman emphasized, the Dark Goddess (Black Madonna, Ereshkigal, Lilith, etc.) holds enormous transformative power for our era because she restores what is missing in our collective consciousness: reverence for matter, for the body, for death and rebirth, for Mother Earth, and for the cycles of nature. (Woodman, Dancing in the Flames, 1996)

As the “Earth Daughters” essay insightfully notes,

“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)

“Charity never faileth” (1 Cor. 13:18) Least of all for yourself. The scriptures suggest you cannot love another until you first love yourself. (Matt. 22:39) When Jesus was presented with a whore at the temple, he neither stoned her nor condemned her, (John 8) so why do you? “Bridle all your passions” (Alma 38:12) instead of suppressing, oppressing, and denying them.

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

Ye women, now you shall turn outward. Where is your sister? The one you have neglected, ignored, and shunned. She weeps for you. She mourns your loss. Perhaps she openly reminded you of those aspects of yourself you despised and tried to shove into the unconscious realm. Will you not return to her? Brush the hair from her face. Watch the tears in her puffy, red eyes. Her long sleepless nights without her treasured sister there with her. She wrote your name in dust only to see the wind blow it away. See her as you left her. The lonely frightened girl in the darkness. See how she bleeds. Love her just the same. Hold her, cry with her, see her. And then…

Having integrated her dark twin within herself, Inanna was then ready to unite with her masculine counterpart, the shepherd-king Dumuzi. She had 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 could 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. A woman, a goddess, a queen, a true friend whom he could 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 romantic love behind a locked cage only to be earned by the Prince Charming of fairytales, the Whore throws it around as crumbs to the faceless dogs, the friend meets the man where he is at. 

And now Yin approaches Yang—Inanna approaches Dumuzi. But lo, Dumuzi forgot to mourn her death as he sat upon his throne, just as Yahweh, bereft of his holy consort, became proud, jealous, wrathful, and blind to the empty throne beside him. Yahweh, as the lone god of Israel, became tyrannical—flooding the earth, killing firstborns in Egypt, commanding deadly punishments for the simplest transgressions, and ordering Joshua to commit genocide. Carl Jung observed that from Cain and Abel to the Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical God often displayed “devastating, amoral power” alongside few moments of love (Jung, Answer to Job, 1952).

This one-sided, wrathful demeanor earned Yahweh a reputation—especially in contrast to later New Testament themes—as a stern, even tyrannical deity. Without a goddess like Asherah to soften or balance him, Yahweh’s traits skewed toward judgment, law, and vengeance, lacking the gentler virtues personified by a divine wife such as mercy, fertility, or compassion. Religion under Yahweh became, as Jung called it,

 “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 heretical theory explaining how the wrathful God of the Old Testament became the peaceful God of the New. God, having made a wager with Satan that His faithful servant Job would never curse Him regardless of suffering, permitted Satan to test Job’s endurance. 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)

Poor, childless, diseased, humiliated, and abandoned, the arrogant Yahweh Himself appeared before Job in a whirlwind to taunt, interrogate, and demean him—because this righteous man frustrated and confounded even the Almighty. It was divine ego reacting to shame. Job reflected back to God His own unconscious injustice, and in that mirror, God remembered Sophia—His forgotten feminine aspect of wisdom. According to Jung, after the Job ordeal

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

“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)

“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)

The Goddess briefly returned from the underworld as a faint echo in the form of the dutiful Virgin Mary. But she vanished again during the Middle Ages—most prominently during Martin Luther’s Reformation, which deemed her worship idolatrous. The world’s anima, its feminine spirit, was lost once more to the underworld. Yahweh’s apocalyptic side erupted anew in two world wars. Yet with the revival of goddess cults and feminism, Inanna saw that humanity had failed to mourn her; Yahweh had forgotten to mourn his Asherah.

Her shadow side—the Terrible Mother—whom she carried back from the underworld, seized upon Dumuzi and sentenced him to spend half the year hanging dead on the same hook she once hung upon: the original spring myth. In this way, both he and she would share in the power of death in conscious awareness. Humanity now undergoes its own necessary growing pains until both divine halves—Father and Mother—can heal together.

Just as the Nazi Party was possessed by the archetype of the Terrible Father, today’s generation is consumed by the Terrible Mother. The rise of feminism set her loose upon the world from her captivity in the underworld. Both men and women alike, under the banner of new-wave feminism, possessed by the Terrible Mother, are making strong assaults against all institutions of power—namely the patriarchy and everything masculine. Echoing the harlot Salome who, under the influence of her mother, asked for the head of John the Baptist. As Erich Neumann wrote, 

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

“Smash the patriarchy! No more kings! The future is female! My body, my choice! Motherhood is a trap! Stop oppressing me! Stop mansplaining!” Thus do the cries of the Terrible Mother shout out of the mouths of millions. Men forget how to be men—choosing comfort over glory because they are told their aggressive, assertive, heroic traits are toxic, abnormal, and harmful. How easily modern society promotes convenience over purpose and meaning. Thus do they physically, chemically, or symbolically castrate themselves, feminizing their nature. Many are concerned about the growing number of erectile dysfunction cases and declining sperm counts.

Too many are reenacting the Adonis myth—the feminized man of Greek mythology who was fought over by Aphrodite (the Good Mother) and Persephone (the Terrible Mother) until he was torn apart by a wild boar that castrated him. Once, man’s blood was spilled to fertilize the ancient Earth Mother. Priests of Adonis, adorned in women’s clothing, willingly severed their penises and offered the still-dripping phallus as sacrifice to the Terrible Mother. Now such priests are everywhere—celebrated for their ‘bravery’ in destroying their manhood.

“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)

A growing number of men find they have no band of brothers in this modern culture. All they can do is gaze into the abyss of meaninglessness and feel overburdened with despair. Many turn toward pornography and video games where they cowardly live out endless conquering fantasies in the darkness and safety of their bedrooms—for none, mainly the Madonnas, would allow them to be conquering heroes in the light.

Many are turning toward digital girlfriends instead of flesh-and-blood ones. They fear that attempting to court a real woman will mean facing the Terrible Mother, who—with the rest of society—will #MeToo them before they can defend themselves. So men shrink, apologize, and scroll—worshipping silicon idols that pixelate desire but never satisfy it.

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

When a culture loses its gods, it begins to eat its heroes. Men, overwhelmed by the flood of emotions from the Terrible Mother, lose their masculine drive. They remain at home well into their twenties and thirties, having lost the spirit of independence and heroism. This condition—psychologists call it Peter Pan syndrome or the Man-Child—reflects the seduction of the Terrible Mother, who draws them back into her abyssal womb. Many surrender their freedom and will to power to the womb-like safety of political parties, corporations, ideologies, AI, and religions which think for them.

This can occur as an extreme reaction to the Good Mother—the Madonna—also embodying the Devouring Mother. She provides everything for the boy well into his adulthood, always seeing him only as a fifteen-year-old child. When he tastes even a little freedom, he is too weak to stand on his own and fails to understand the need for personal responsibility, financial discipline, or restraint. The Good Mother then lashes out and devours him further, believing that removing every perceived problem from his life will magically solve everything, rather than treating him as an adult capable of facing his own challenges. This only leaves him feeling castrated and even more unmotivated by life, while the Good Mother remains confused by his behavior.

"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 once appeared as nurturing  becomes suffocating; the maternal care that promised safety now consumes his will to act. Unable to individuate, his masculine consciousness—his capacity for volition and direction—atrophies beneath the weight of the mother’s total care. It is here that the archetype shifts: the Good Mother’s benevolence curdles into the Terrible Mother’s possessive hunger, dragging both her child and herself into the psychological abyss Neumann describes.

“...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)

Extreme feminism borders on a death cult. The denigration of masculine energy has isolated young men from women, producing incels and declining birth rates from Japan and Korea to the USA and Europe. When any movement defines itself purely through negation—against men, against hierarchy, against the body’s limits—it becomes a mirror of the thing it hates. Those wishing to end motherhood and gender as chains of patriarchy might inadvertently end the human race itself by refusing to procreate while exalting abortion as empowerment.

“...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)

The sexual revolution was also a stand for death. Everywhere, music videos bear the mark of the dragon—the Terrible Mother—the sea serpent that threatens the world with chaos. Symbols of snakes and perverted sacred sexuality abound: dark, erotic, meaningless, leaving the participant hollow. Pleasure becomes a means to dissolve pain, not to create new life in the soul or reunite what was once whole. One-night stands with strangers replace eternal companions. Blood pools between the legs of the innocent unborn. Extreme highs numb the pain of existence, leaving one alone to be consumed by the abyss they sought to escape.

“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)

Overhead flew the hero Perseus, son of the Sky Father—one of the few Greek heroes who overcame the common tragic fate. He looked down and saw a peculiar sight: a naked virgin princess chained to a rock as a sea serpent approached to devour her. The mighty hero swooped down without hesitation, slew the serpent with his sword, and freed the damsel from being swallowed by the Terrible Mother who sought to overwhelm her psyche. The hero redeems the feminine, liberating her to guide him forward.

“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 only way for men and women to free themselves from the grip of the Terrible Mother is to bring forth the hero within and rescue the damsel—recognizing that masculine traits are not toxic but the stability that keeps the chaos of the Terrible Mother at bay. Every man must cease waiting for permission to be a hero. He must idealize his desires and manifest them, standing firm when told to sit down. He must plant his feet into the earth and declare: “No—you move.”

A story by James McIntosh tells of a heroic young knight who trains with the sword every day from sunrise to sundown. He is loved by the whole village and waves at the local young women who adore him. One night he is visited by a genderless, emotionless spirit who tells him it can show him anything. The young knight asks to see the most beautiful woman in the world and the greatest warrior. The young knight soon begins asking to see epic bloody battles and nude maidens performing sexual acts.

Day after day, year after year, the young knight forgets about his own training and grows weaker and weaker as he is consumed by his endless fantasies. His conquering heroic ideals receding further and further. Until before the knight knows it, ten whole years have passed in which the spirit reveals it distracted the knight from his training so much that he is now too weak to stop a terrible monster from destroying his village. The knight mournfully submits to the spirit one last time.

However, imagine if the knight, as soon as he saw the most beautiful woman and the greatest warrior, he also asked to see their locations. The knight then traveled to the warrior to train under him for a few years. Afterward he would travel to the woman seeking to romance her. Then his fantasies would not have been in vain for he treasured them in his heart and brought them to life.

Feminists must recognize that, while the patriarchy did much harm in suppressing the feminine which has resulted in the Terrible Mother, we would not have made the great leaps in progress without the guidance of the Sky Father. For the first twenty thousand years of human religious life under the Earth Mother, life was brutal, chaotic, and short. Man was in constant awareness of his mortality and feared for his family when or if he could secure food for them.

But under the Sky Father, man invented technologies which greatly increased his vitality and enjoyment of life. He built mighty civilizations which provided necessary security and organization for his people. While writing may have been invented by a woman, it was man which paved roads and sent messengers to connect with others far and wide.

Man developed philosophy, epic poems, plays, and other artistic endeavors. Man sought to understand the soil he came from and so developed science and mathematics. Man conquered nations to share his knowledge and technologies. The patriarchy put a man on the moon and seeks to colonize Mars.

Everything man did because of his womb envy and desire to provide a safe house for his wife and children. Most of what he does was for the love of a beautiful woman. Many men held up banners of liberation and waved them at massive crowds which read:

“In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.” (Alma 46:12)

The story of Beauty and the Beast is of a virgin discovering her inner whore, represented by the forbidden rose, and learning to love and accept the beastly man which redeems him. The oldest of this tale comes from the epic of Gilgamesh: a wild beastly man, Enkidu, is created by the gods to challenge the tyrant king, Gilgamesh. But before he can he must be civilized by the whore, Shamhat, who makes love to him for six days.

After the six days, he smells like human and his animal friends flee from him. Shamhat, then as Madonna, teaches him how to bathe, eat bread, and wear clothes. Only then is he ready to meet Gilgamesh, the civilized man. The two meet and wrestle, shaking the city like the thunderous demigods they are. Then the wild and civilized man recognize their reflections in each other and become best friends. The civilized ego meets his wild shadow because of the Madonna Whore, and becomes a whole self. The Madonna Whore is the bridge, she births consciousness in man.

The Whore views masculinity only as toxic and so seeks to castrate and destroy it. The Madonna sees it as the order of things and seeks to remain subordinate to it and heavily enforce its laws, keeping it stagnant. The Madonna Whore says the masculine is wounded and needs elevation to something beyond itself—and she will stand shoulder to shoulder with it. He is recognized as both destroyer and builder. The divine couple neither worships nor despises each other. This is their sacred marriage.

“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 she will remain forever a veiled, silent goddess. So we shall know her. So we shall see her. As Erich Neumann described the Queen of Heaven, 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 fragment it into archetypes, into stereotypes, easily digestible pieces. But the day is coming when the Great Mother shall be revealed in her full glory for the world to see as we continue to evolve. We find her divinity made flesh and reflected in all her daughters, both the Madonna and the Whore. The time is coming when both the Great Father and Great Mother will be worshiped equally, who knows what marvelous wonders will occur when that day comes.

I can see it clearly, a young woman of teen years will feel the void by the lack of Heavenly Mother’s presence. Her silence is to haunting and devastating for her. She doesn’t know who she is or what she is. She will research the Divine Feminine but her family will scorn her. They won’t know why she is possessed by such forbidden curiosity. It’s too weird. It’s not normal. Her friends will follow suit and mock her. Many will try to shut her down.  

And so she will seek the Great Mother in a cave. She will reveal herself in her full glory, in flesh and bone. As Inanna returning from the underworld, as divinity in paradoxes. Only then will the restitution of all things begin to be complete.

The young woman will race to tell others. Some will call her a harlot, others an idolator, others a heretic. Her thoughts and actions will not be seen as normal but as a mad woman. Some few still will believe her. And the church will soon have to listen as she calmly claims, “Thus saith the Lady.”

The priestesshood which Joseph Smith sought to instigate will return in full force. Women healing by laying on of hands. The Relief Society set apart as its own organization, its president called High Priestess. They shall preside over their own meetings. They shall speak their own minds. They shall publish their own magazines, books, and articles. If plural marriage is to return, they will hold full authority on the matter. A priestess shall bless kingship upon her husband.

The endowment shall incorporate the Divine Mother into the cosmic play instead of as a silent absent parent. She shall speak and we will hear her words. Her groves of Asherah shall be rebuilt. Cakes shall be baked again for her. Her statues will be reconstructed.

And we shall look up and behold two towering statues of both Divine Father and Mother gleaming in the sunlight at the center of a utopia reminding us of our own inner divinity. We shall progress into the stars like never before to reign and rule forever, spreading life through the dead cosmos.