The Chaos
The Phoenicians, a Semitic people from Syria and Palestine, established Carthage in North Africa about 800 BCE, built an empire including the Western Mediterranean, and were ruled by despotic kings who practiced ritual grave murder, child sacrifice, and owned thousands of slaves. During this same period, 800 to 700 BCE, the Egyptians declined in power, to be conquered and ruled by Kushite kings. These kings were expelled by the Assyrians one hundred years later, about 700 BCE. Then the Persians ruled, 500 to 300 BCE, until they were thrown out by Alexander the Great, a Greek. Alexander conquered Judea in 333 BCE, promoting the spread of Greek culture, influencing Hebrew thought. Following this conquest, power in the Eastern Mediterranean passed from Persia to Greece. However, Alexandria, the port city of Egypt on the Nile River, became the major center of learning and its library justifiably famous.
In Egypt, the reign of the Ptolemy’s preserved brother-sister marriages (both from the same mother) in royal families, under a system of matrilineal kingship which had existed for thousands of years before not only in Egypt but also in Old Europe, in Mesopotamia, in Crete, Anatolia, and throughout the entire Goddess worshipping world.
Under both Persian and Greek reigns, strict sexual segregation was maintained wherever possible between males and females: The Office of High Priestess was abolished; women were veiled and also put into harems. Circumcision was required for young men and excision of the clitoris was required for young women, to guarantee that they would be unable to enjoy their sexual experiences fully.
“Jewish tradition long held that there were two factions of Jews: the “Hellenizers” who adopted Greek mode of dress and behavior, and the “pious” who did not.”1 However, even the most loyal and pious were influenced by Greek ideas and Hellenistic Judaism developed in dialogue with Greco-Roman civilization as a gender-segregated social system.
During the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, c. 264 to 146 BCE, historians note that human sacrifice once again became important, and recent excavations reveal that hundreds were burned alive in great pits. After the onset of the Punic Wars, gladiator fights began in Rome. Rome conquered North Africa between 200 to 50 BCE and then went on to conquer Egypt, c. 30 BCE, After the Punic Wars ended, the Roman Republic compensated by instituting a military expansion, conquering the Iberian Peninsula (Spain), Gaul (France), parts of Britain, and the Alpine regions.
Rome superseded Greece after c. 200 BCE. Philosophically, Rome integrated some Greek and Persian ideas which were anti-female and had previously been tolerated but not fully assimilated in the semi-matriarchal Roman belief system. However, the Mystery religions of Cybele/Attis from Anatolia still flourished, as did the Baccahae from Greece, Isis/Osiris from Egypt, and Mithras from Persia. Each had a large popular following and many were still female-centered and Goddess worshipping. The Roman Republic entered a new period of strict authoritarianism, with harsher punishments and slavery laws, resulting in civil wars.
DeMeo says, “In 97 BCE the Roman Senate enacted laws forbidding human sacrifice to the gods on the altar of Saturn, and both Cicero (c. 60 BCE) and Seneca (c. 50 BCE) spoke out against the use of judicial torture.”2 But by C.50 BCE, this Republic collapsed and was replaced by the Imperial Roman Empire of Caesar. Julius Caesar (c. 45 BCE) was Rome’s first divine king, with temple and priests devoted to him. He ordered the first large amphitheater built in Rome where gladiator and sacrificial spectacles occurred.
Octavius Augustus (c. 10 BCE), whom the French writer Voltaire labeled a “debauched murderer”, sacrificed over 300 men on the altar of Caesar and enacted the following laws on women: Women found guilty of adultery lost their dowries, one half to the husband and one half to the state; divorce was made more difficult for women who also were required to remarry within 18 months; widows had to remarry within two months; sterile couples inherited only one-half of anything that was willed to them. These laws were intended to keep adult women eternally bound to men and prevent their exercise of free will as to how they wished to live their lives. Octavius Augustus moralized against sexuality while furious over his own impotence. He required his third wife to recruit young virgin girls from the lower classes to service him regularly in a futile attempt to restore his potency. He banished the poet Ovid to his death on the Black Sea for his heterosexual love poems. Finally, he murdered his own granddaughters for what he saw as their sexual transgressions.
Against this background, the root causes of both the European and Spanish Inquisitions are to be found at the interface of the Transition Times within those lands of Canaan, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Greece, and the collapse of the Roman Empire. It is here that the evidence surfaces, indicating radical change taking place in the mindset of influential thinkers and writers, all males, regarding the extent of the realm of male divinity, which will impact the future rights of women everywhere in the Western world.
That radical change was the belief, which had to be enforced, that everyone regardless of tribal affiliation, race, gender or family clan, was required to think and believe as though of one mind. There would only be one doctrine to which all people had to align themselves; any deviation would be treated as treasonous. Previously, crimes were equated with overt behavior which was punishable. Now, the crime is any personal belief determined to be unacceptable to the society of men who are in the position to rule. What had been written and then enforced in the Hebrew culture was a legal if not spiritual descendant of the Assyrian, Hittite, Babylonian lawgivers. Those kings asked for the blessings of the gods and goddesses, but these laws were not religious and certainly not perceived as emanating from a deity or divine source, neither male nor female. This is the crucial divergence between past laws and those of the Hebrews, and it is the primary reason the new laws had such a powerful impact on the future of womankind.
The laws or covenants in the Old Testament are said to come directly from the Yahweh god, warlike and jealous. Increasingly, he was credited with defining the narrowing parameters of what was now acceptable and unacceptable male and female behavior, as well as the fines or punishments for that behavior. The priests showed a willingness to send representatives to all villages to ensure that the laws were enforced, even if it meant intruding into private lives.
Before proceeding further, it is important to note that the original ancient Hebrew scrolls may well have had different translations from those used in the current era Bible, and they, therefore, used different words to describe both Yahweh and the laws. However, if those scrolls had a different translation, that translation was either not included or was lost when the Bible portion, known as the Old Testament, was translated many times into Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and English. This distinction is important. Those whose knowledge of the Old Testament laws comes directly from the scrolls are apt to find the translations in the Christian Bible so different from what they were taught as to be offensive. Nevertheless, it is the Old Testament as it has been transmitted in this Bible that has had its effect directly on the early Christian writers, on the Church of Rome, and ultimately used as justification for the Inquisition. Indeed, it is the language of these Old Testament passages which will be lifted intact and used as evidence, even older than Christianity, against dissidents and directly against women.
Neither Hebrews, Greeks nor Romans existed in isolation; they were all influenced by Goddess-worshiping peoples. Old European Goddess peoples had traveled westward, settling across continental Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, up into the colder areas of Germanic and Scandinavian countries, and across the channel to the island of Britain, Scotland and Ireland, taking powerful ideas of their Goddess worship with them. Their beliefs had existed over 5,000 years by these times.
Who Invented Yahweh?
This question is central to understanding what happened in the Inquisition because the Hebrew Yahweh God became the “voice of authority” for the Old Testament. (Bible or “biblos” simply means book.) These writings will become part of the Judeo-Christian phil
osophy, which in turn becomes the ruling mindset of the new Holy Roman Empire and then perpetrates the Inquisition. So, it is informative to inquire as to how this Yahweh God was created, understanding that all deities or ideas of divinity are created by and interpreted through human beings. Therefore, the new male god was a transparency of characteristics that the men who envisioned him found admirable, desirable, worthy of emulating.
First of all, Yahweh did not exist concurrently with the early centuries of the Great Goddess. Archeology has taught us that.
Secondly, the concept of Yahweh has no counterpart in any other Western religious belief system.
Thirdly, he appears in written history approximately 1000 to 900 BCE with the initial writings of the Hebrew Old Testament, but is patterned after a more ancient male sky/thunder god from earlier warrior cultures (i.e. Assyrians, Hittites, Scythians) who invaded the stable agricultural societies of Mesopotamia.
The indigenous Canaanites were Goddess worshipping cultures of long duration. The Hebrew were nomadic shepherds who had been moved from Egypt to Babylon to Canaan over centuries, where they came in very close contact with the Goddesses Isis and Hathor in Egypt and with Ishtar/Inanna in Babylon (Iraq). They could not have been oblivious of the prevalence and the power of the Great Goddess cultures, nor of their beautiful, powerful cities, nor of their wealthy merchants who were both women and men. And because they did have contact with these peoples, they also were aware of their religious practices. No matter where these Hebrew people went, they were surrounded by the people of the Goddess, people who were used to assimilating newcomers into part of the existing community as a primary means of peacekeeping. In order to prevent this assimilation with Goddess peoples, the laws of the Hebrew forbade intermarriage. At first these are tribal laws, similar to the secular laws of the other cultures ruled by Near Eastern kings. They are harsh because there were no jails, no institutions to hold wrongdoers, and they were swift.
But shortly, the Hebrew came to conquer the Canaanites, and they came to believe that their Yahweh had bequeathed the land to them. They introduced their new male god, at first called Elohim (El was also the name of the Canaanite Father God), meaning the “gods or god.” In the Masoriatic text of the Old Testament, Exodus 22:28, Elohim means “Judges” which is reminiscent of the Sumerian “Annunaki,” which is an alliance of gods and judges. Moses is introduced to God the Father as Yahweh on the mountain. When Moses asks for a name, Yahweh replies, “I Am that I am”; “I Am that hath sent you,” to the people of Israel. Biblical scholars place dates for Moses from 1300 to 1250 BCE and Abraham about 1800 to 1700 BCE.3
This father God has no name, but is a disembodied Voice, a voice that will shortly speak the Law. So this god has no form and no name. In order for people to call him something, without committing sacrilege to that which is too holy to speak out loud, the Tetragammaton resulted, which was created out of the four consonant YHWH with two vowels added for pronunciation: A for Adonai (lord) and E for Elhohim (father god), which spells Yahweh and renders the sacred now pronounceable. Yahweh may also have a linguistic Semitic root derived from HWY, the word for wind, which is related to both air and breath. Merlin Stone in When God was a Woman notes that the name Yahweh may alternatively be derived from the older Sanskrit (Indo European) word yahweh, which means “overflowing.”4
In Myths of the Goddess, we see that “Yahweh is the ancestral god of nomadic tribes. The Semites like the Aryans were a patriarchal people who honored their male ancestors … the idea (of a great father) must have originated by the tribal ancestor who guided the tribe and helped it in times of adversity. He is not tied to a sanctuary but to a group of men, whom he accompanies and protects.”5
In Exodus 20:3–4, He tells the people, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto another any graven image or likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” The Hebrews are forbidden to make or create any representation of the likeness of the divine’s entity, to make representations of votives, protective amulets, or to hold onto anything bringing them in direct contact with divinity. Rather, the instruction is to detach the mind from appearance (i.e the physical body), so the worship of the divine cannot be confused with the worship of nature or anything of this world.6 These instructions and prohibitions are in direct contrast to practices of Goddess worship in order to distance themselves from all aspects of the predominant Goddess religion, to distinguish their own practices, and to make it impossible for their people to identify with the sacred aspects of this earth, or hold onto previously sacred objects or their signs.
This god has no female aspect of himself:
In this radical new conception of the deity, all image making is forbidden. It is this innovation above all, that marks this as a new stage in the evolution of consciousness; for the sacred essence, which is the organizing principle of the tribe and of their world, is conceived of as not in nature; it is unrepresentable to the eye, though not, significantly, to the ear. God can be heard but not seen.7
There are two versions of the Hebrew creation myth in the Old Testament: One is called Yahwist and the other Priestly, after different groups of scribes/priests who wrote them. One, Ezra from Babylon who was in service of the Persian Empire, wrote the Yahwist version resembling the Babylonian creation stories of yearly flood and dry land emerging in spring. In Canaan, the “creation moment” is autumn when the rain comes. Therefore, there are two celebrations of a Jewish New Year with feasts: one in spring following the Babylonian and one in autumn following the older Canaanite festival. Both Babylon and Canaan were Goddess-worshipping areas at the time the Old Testament was being written. However, there is no word for “Goddess” in Hebrew. Instead, all references to the Goddess have substituted the word “abomination.” Our modern dictionary defines abomination as “to regard with intense aversion or loathing.” It means to detest something vile or shameful.
The stage is now set for battle. How bold and audacious a battle it was to be: The newcomer god who is just a man’s voice pitted against the ancient Goddess, who surrounded him and his nomadic people on all sides, who was the very essence of life on earth, in the heavens and among all peoples. It was the male usurper against the Goddess who was the life force, the breath of life, the blood of life everlasting.
Why did He revile Her? How did He expect to win?
Yahweh’s scribes, priests, and kings set about winning by sabotaging the socio-political process of behavior and by making all behavior other than that narrowly described by the priests as being lawful, punishable by severe means. The initial chapters of the Old Testament are a political document, written for people of Canaan, telling these men and women exactly how to behave if they wished to stay alive and be included in the new power-wielding tribe. So, it is to the Old Testament itself that we will now turn our attention. Its own words, as they have been translated to us, will trace the development of the new beliefs.
The Old Testament
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in Palestine represents the oldest extant Hebrew texts of the books of the Old Testament, dating from about the third century BCE. Although these laws appear in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, said to have been written at the time of Moses, bible scholars generally date their writings between 1000 and 600 BCE.8 From the Scrolls, it can also be determined that the Levite priests were still in control. They had the banners and the trumpets, which are described in the Scrolls as though in a manual of war. “This account of the leadership of the Levites of the time of Moses, may give us some idea of how strict the adherence to the old Mosaic position of the Levites must have been throughout the centuries.” The Sanskrit word for warrior is “Yuddha,” which may explain the name of the Hebrews as Yehudi (Judah).9
The Old Testament comes to us as very old, but at the time it was being written, it was of course brand new: new god, new ideas, new laws and customs. It is old only in re
lation to the much newer Christian testament.
In Old Testament Genesis, chapter 1: 1–25 through the disembodied “voice” of the male god, is told the story of the creation of light, heavens, earth, water and animals, as though they had never existed beforehand. In fact, they certainly did, and existed for many thousands of years, with numerous “creation” stories before.
In Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’” Here, the sovereignty of the Goddess is taken away from Her even though it is the Goddess who has presided over the well-being of the earth and its creatures from time immemorial. This is the first power play for control of the entire earthly environment: taking it from the female, the Great Goddess, Her priestesses and holy women, and placing it in the hands of the male or the disembodied male voice of a new divinity who has never obtained this awesome responsibility before.10
“Having dominion over …” means the power or right of governing and controlling; it is translated as having sovereign authority … a territory usually of considerable size under a single ruler: lands or domains subject to control (New College Dictionary). There is no doubt that the intent of this new religion was to have sovereign rulership, which meant male control, over the entire earth. This is the radical idea, contrary to what existed nearly everywhere else at the time it was written. Elsewhere, Greece had both a shared Olympian pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, even though there were some serious restrictions on upper-class Greek women. Rome was in the process of being founded, and the Great Goddess Cybele had yet to arrive from Anatolia. The Minoans of Crete were no longer ascendant but still influencing Greece with their vast knowledge and culture, as well as being emulated in Egypt and Syria. The Goddess Ishtar was still in Babylon (as both the Old and New Testament testify), and the dissemination of Old European Goddesses was still in process across the European continent.
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