(Pantheon Mythology) Goddess Inanna (Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus, the Goddess of Love and War) was older than God, so the Patriarchy made inverted her and made her the demon named Astaroth to erase and expunge her, making room for the Jewish tribal God Yahweh (Jehovah, Demiurge, Yaldabaoth...)
Inanna [a] is the ancient Mesopotamian Goddess of War, Love, and Sex (the Aphrodite and Venus of olde). She is also associated with divine law, political worldly power, sensuality, and procreation (fertility).
Originally worshipped in Sumer (by the Sumerians), she was also known to the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians as Ishtar [b]. Her primary title is "The Queen of Heaven."
She was the patron goddess of the Eanna temple at the City of Uruk, her early main religious center. In archaic Uruk, she was worshipped in three forms:
Morning Inanna (Inana-UD/hud),
Evening Inanna (Inanna sig),
Princely Inanna (Inanna NUN).0
The first two reflect the phases of her associated planet Venus [5, 6], the Morning Star. Her most prominent symbols include the lion and the eight-pointed star.
Her husband is the God Dumuzid (later known as Tammuz), and her sukkal (attendant) is the Goddess Ninshubur, later conflated with the male deities Ilabrat and Papsukkal. More
Asherah (Hebrew אֲשֵׁרָה, Romanized ʾĂšērā, Ugaritic 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚, Romanized ʾAṯiratu; Akkadian 𒀀𒅆𒋥, Romanized Aširat [3], Qatabanian 𐩱𐩻𐩧𐩩 ʾṯrt) [4] was the principal Goddess of ancient Semitic religions, appearing in biblical texts but then systematically erased.
Asherah also appears in Hittite writings as Ašerdu(š) or Ašertu(š) (Hittite 𒀀𒊺𒅕𒌈, Romanized a-še-er-tu) [5, 6] and as Athirat in Ugarit as the consort of the main God of the Bible, ʾEl [7], who became Yahweh (YHWH, Jehovah), as He announces in the Bible.
Asherah was the major Goddess in ancient Northwest Semitic cultures, associated with fertility, motherhood, sacred trees [8].
The name "Canaan" appears throughout the Bible as the "Promised Land"...an ethnic catch-all term. More
Thereafter Canaan became, for all practical purposes, the Land of Israel...all the tribes of Israel (britannica.com).
The Goddess Asherah played a major and enduring role in the old Canaanite religion of future Israel, with mythical tales and stories influencing neighboring religions. Canaan is an old name for Israel.
If we had a Goddess, religion might be wonderful
What is the modern perception and worship of Asherah? Banned, erased, forgotten. Her influence spanned cultures over many centuries. Asherah began as an ancient Canaanite goddess of love, war, fertility, with priestesses aiding in the worship of the divine feminine.
She is often portrayed as a nurturing fertility goddess, associated with fecundity and the fertility of the land. She was the consort of the Semitic peoples' God El, where She played a central role in the holy family and divine pantheon. Her worship involved ritual practices that included setting up sacred poles and offering sacrifices. Her significance in Canaanite mythology is evident in the archeological findings of inscriptions and artifacts dedicated to Her, highlighting Her enduring impact on the religious beliefs and practices... legendaryladieshub.com
Asherah was considered the Goddess of the Sea, while "Her husband El" was considered the God of "Heaven" [9] or the sky [apparently making a fallen Lucifer the satanic God of Earth in later interpretations, though Earth has always been conceived of as feminine for receiving rain from the sky that makes seeds grow], making her the Queen of Heaven (long before Mother Mary, the Catholic Queen of Heaven, or Kwan Yin).
Islam also remembers Asherah/Elat (al-Lat)
The El was the original name of the tribal Semitic God is attested to in many words still in use, such as IsraEL, GabriEL, MichaEL, RaphaEL, ELohim, Ba'EL, AzarEL, and so on.
Judaism was never actually a monotheistic religion as many claim. It has always been henotheistic and for a long time quite polytheistic, in some even pantheistic.
Asherah was sometimes called ELat (Elat, like the pre-Islamic Goddess EL-lat or al-Lat), the feminine equivalent of El [10] and held titles such as "holy" (qdš), "lady" (rbt), or "progenitress of the gods" (qnyt ỉlm) [9].
Fertility Mother Goddess Asherah
Asherah's iconography frequently depicted Her with pronounced feminine sexual features, often combined with tree motifs like date palms, highlighting her role as a fertility goddess. Some artifacts, such as the Revadim Asherah figurines, illustrate her breastfeeding children or displaying sexual imagery, emphasizing her maternal and generative symbolism.
Asherah's worship may also be reflected in phallic Asherah poles, "cultic" objects [turned occult ("hidden") by patriarchal priests wishing to erase her from his-story] frequently mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, though scholars try to debate whether these represent the Goddess Herself or sacred symbols of the holy [11, 7].
Phallic buxom Asherah pole figurine
Asherah's influence extended across many regions, including Israel and Judah (then Judea), Philistia (modern Gaza in Palestine), Egypt, Canaan, and Arabia (the Arabian Peninsula later Saudi Arabia), appearing -- like the counterpart male God -- under many different female names with many different roles rolled up into one omnipotent entity.
Asherah was considered the consort of Yahweh in the ancient Levant, as suggested by inscriptions at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom. But modern (post erasure) interpretations vary, and some scholars try to argue that these references describe holy objects rather than the Goddess [12, 13, 7].
Asherah bore many similarities with other goddesses -- such as Shapshu, Hathor, and Qetesh -- which strongly suggests her image and attributes influenced surrounding cultures.
What might have been if She were not erased?
Asherah was for millennia also linked to sacred fertility rites, which may have included women of status in ritual activities and priestesses. The denigrating association with temple prostitution, which in ancient times involved males and females, is now debated (and was clearly an attempt to explain Her away in the cover up after she was reduced and erased).
Asherah's worship was suppressed over time due to imposed monotheistic (henotheistic) reforms, and in later texts, references to Asherah were systematically erased by being retranslated as "groves" or "sacred trees" rather than directly as the Goddess. More
I dress like this to work all the time. I'm on TV!
Sofi is perhaps best known for her role as Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on the ABC sitcom Modern Family (2009–2020) and more recently as Griselda Blanco from the Netflix miniseries Griselda (2024). She has received five nominations each at the Primetime Emmy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. She rose to prominence when co-hosting two TV shows for the Spanish-language TV network Univision in the late 1990s. After acting in the English-language film... More
A thirst trap is a type of social media post intended to sexually entice viewers [1, 2, 3, 4]. It refers to a viewer's "thirst" (tanha, craving, grasping, clinginess, lust, attachment, sensual desire), a colloquialism likening sexual frustration to dehydrated thirst.
It implies desperation, with the afflicted individual being described as "thirsty" [4, 5, 6] in the Buddhist sense and soon caught in a trap.
The phrase entered into the American lexicon in the late 1990s. It is most related to internet slang that developed in the early 2010s. Its meaning has changed over time, previously referring to a graceless need for approval, validation, affection, or attention [7, 6], for which the term "attention whore" was coined. More
The great Gnostic Sophia: Sophia (Wisdom) was a Greek goddess. In Gnosticism, Sophia is "Wisdom," Sofia (Koine Greek σοφία, sophía—"wisdom," Vulgate Latin Sapientia, as in sophists) is a central idea in Hellenistic Greek philosophy and religion, Platonism, and especially Gnosticism.
Originally carrying a meaning of "cleverness or skill," the later meaning of the term, "sound judgment, intelligence, practical wisdom," is close to the meaning of phronesis ("practical wisdom, intelligence") and was significantly shaped by the term philosophía (the "love of wisdom") as used by the philosopher Plato.
Tara (Sanskrit तारा, tārā, Standard Tibetan སྒྲོལ་མ, dölma), Ārya Tārā ("Noble Tara") is also known as Jetsün Dölma (Tibetan rje btsun sgrol ma, "Venerable Mother of Liberation"). She is an important female buddha in Vajrayana and Mahayana Buddhism.
Our reading of Mahayana Buddhism, of which Vajrayana is a sub-school, suggests that the MOST powerful Buddhist goddess is actually Kwan Yin (Guanyin, a female manifestation of Avalokiteśvara) Bodhisattva. She is queen or in any case certainly the most powerful, for she looks on and hears the cries of the world with utmost compassion, a kind of Virg Yin Mary(not Jewish or Essene Miriam so much as the ultimate goddess in Gnostic Christianity, Mary Magdalene).
If Theravada Buddhism made much of personifying qualities through transcendent goddesses (devis), our vote for the Ultimate Goddess right alongside Kwan Yin (Guanyin) would certainly be the glorious Prajnaparamita of Java, Gnostic Sophia, the personification of the Perfection of Wisdom. And we wouldn't stop there. Maha Pajapati Gotami, Yasodhara (aka Bimba Devi, Rahulamata, Bhaddha Kaccana, Sundari Kaccana, etc.), Khema Theri, Uppalavanna Theri, and Queen of [Tusita] Heaven Maya would serve as the raw basis for building up goddesses, venerable enlightened Buddhist women in history.
[Earlier traditions hold to the view, one of five niyamas, that while females are of course equally capable of arahantship, full enlightenment, as well as many other accomplishments, literal buddhas only arise as males. Why this would be, or why any of the niyamas are true in and of themselves, is not explained. 5. dhamma-niyāma "the constraint of dhammas (things, phenomena)," namely, such events as the quaking of the 10,000 world-systems at the conception of a bodhisatta conception in his mother's womb and again at his birth (partition from that womb). At the end of the discussion Sumaṅgalavilāsinī passage, the Commentary states that dhamma-niyāma explains the term dhammatā in the text of the Mahāpadāna Sutta (DN ii.12) (Cf. S 12.20 for a discussion of the use of the word dhamma-niyamatā in the Pali canon sutras.
It should always be borne in mind that no individual is an actual sex but fluid because one can be reborn as any of the three genders -- male, female, pandaka. How many genders are there? The answer could easily be more than three because pandaka can be variously defined as pervert, eunuch (pansexual as the word is understood in the East not as we use it in the West), hermaphrodite, bi, gay, asexual, intersex, transgender, transsexual, crossdresser, etc.)
The Dalai Lama, who is Tibetan Vajrayana joked about this in one of his PR movies, declaring something like: "Of course a woman can become a buddha...she just has to be reborn as a man first" then laughing. People popularly regard him as the "Pope of Vajrayana Buddhism," though he is not; he's not even the pope of Tibetan Buddhism because the non-Gelug schools do not regard him as the pontiff but rather a useful political leader, a kind of temporal king who made it to the world stage with more than a little help from the CIA. This topic of gender should be questioned, debated, and explored as it seems awfully unfair and denigrating to femalehood, but might it be the case, as a Hindu priest once told our college Comparative Religion class that the reason a being, a gandhabba seeking rebirth in a human body, is reborn as a female rather than a male at any given rebirth is due to the level of attachment, affection, and clinging present in that relinking moment. If that is the case, we have all been and will all be females, so placing femininity one down from masculinity is a bad strategy that will turn around and bite us. Likewise, all females reborn as humans, as rare and difficult as it is to ever secure a human rebirth, will also experience what it's like to be a male. And we say with no confusion, it's not all it's cracked up to be.]
Humans love to carve ideal attributes in stone.
She may appear as a female bodhisattva (a "being bent on full or supreme enlightenment," the two not being the same thing, one being an arhat, the other a buddha) in Mahayana Buddhism [1].
In Vajrayana Buddhism, Green Tara is a female buddha who is a consort of the Cosmic Buddha Amoghasiddhi.
Tārā is also known as a savioress who hears the cries of beings in saṃsāra (the interminable round of rebirth and suffering) and saves them from worldly and spiritual danger [2].
In Vajrayana, she is considered to be a buddha, and the Tārā Tantra describes her as "a mother who gives birth to the buddhas of the three times [past, present, and future]" who is also "beyond saṃsāra and nirvāṇa" [3].
Earlier tradition distinguishes nirvana as being nothing like samsara, and since all we have ever known is the latter, anything else could be considered nirvana. Some do not like this definition as it seems to define nirvana, which many feel is ineffable, indescribable, and incomparable even though the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama did indeed define and describe it.
Tārā is one of the most important female deities in Vajrayana (Esoteric Buddhism) and is found in apocryphal sources like the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa and the Guhyasamāja Tantra [4].
Key Indic Vajrayana texts that focus on Tārā include the Tantra Which Is the Source for All the Functions of Tārā, Mother of All the Tathagatas (Sanskrit Sarva-tathāgata-mātṛtārā-viśva-karma-bhavanāma-tantra) and Tārā's Fundamental Ritual Text (Tārāmūlakalpa) [5, 3].
Both Green and White Tārā remain popular meditation deities or yidams in Tibetan Buddhism, and Tara is also revered in Newar Buddhism.
Tārā is considered to take on many forms or emanations, while Green Tara emanates 21 Tārās, each with different attributes—colors, implements, and activities such as pacifying (śānti), increasing (pauṣṭika), enthralling (vaśīkaraṇa), and wrathful (abhicāra) [2].
Green Tara (or "blue-green," Sanskrit Samayatara or śyāmatārā) remains the most important form of the deity in Tibetan Buddhism [6, 7].
A practice text entitled Praises to the 21 Taras is a well known text on Tara in Tibetan Buddhism within Tibet, recited by children and adults, and is the textual source for the 21 forms of Green Tārā.
The main Tārā mantra is the same for Buddhists and Hindus: oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā. It is uttered by Tibetans and Buddhists who follow Tibetan culture as oṃ tāre tu tāre ture soha. The literal translation would be "Oṃ O Tārā, I pray O Tārā, O Swift One, So Be It!" More
(Buddha's Wisdom) Transgendering the deva (shining one, god) Avalokiteshvara "who hears the cries of the world" into the Chinese devi (goddess) of compassion Kwan Yin (Guanyin Bodhisattva)
Dr. Gabor Mate distinguishes "drugs" that obtund(like alcohol) and substances that elevate consciousness; yet, we call both of these opposite experiences getting "high"
In the city-states that gave birth to Western civilization, drugs were an everyday element of a free society.
Often, they were not just available but vitally necessary for use in medicine, spiritual-religious ceremonies, and war campaigns.
Their proponents and users existed in all classes, from common soldiers to emperors. Citing examples in myths, medicine, and literature, Dr. Hillman, Ph.D., shows how drugs have influenced and inspired the artists, philosophers, and even politicians whose ideas have formed the basis for civilization as we know it.
Many of these ancient texts may seem well-known, but Dr. Hillman shows how timid, prudish translations have left scholars and readers in the dark about the reality of drug use in the Classical world.
Dr. Hillman's argument is not simply "pro-drug." Instead, he appeals to intellectual honesty to acknowledge the use of drugs in ancient societies despite today's conflicting social mores.
In the modern world, where academia and university life are often politically charged, The Chemical Muse offers a unique and long overdue perspective on the contentious topic of drug use and freedom of thought. More
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