"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
This verse is vastly known throughout the western world. God as the center of creation, power, and worship. However, few people are aware that El, the entity we adopted as the Almighty Creator, wasn't alone.
Ruling and creating alongside him was Asherah. In mythological texts from the Late Bronze Age, she is called "the creator of the gods." Her symbol is the pubic triangle, for She is a nude Goddess. Around the triangle are branches, leaves, and flowers, indicating her fertility powers as the bearer of life itself.
As Israel moved towards a monotheistic regime, the outsider god Yaweh, the god of war, assimilated the figure of El, the creator, into his persona, becoming the only God. Asherah's representation was gradually replaced by the tree instead of her own body, losing the characteristics of the nude Goddess and her place of power in a pantheon increasingly masculine until Israel worshipped no god beyond Yaweh.
Asherah, the mother of creation, was outcast, and her shrines destroyed. The tree, her symbol, burned to dust. Her history, forgotten.
This piece is a protest against the never-ending efforts of a patriarchal society to silence feminine voices and strip them from positions of power. Here, Asherah rises again from an unknown corner of the Universe to reclaim a place of worship she should never have lost.
She's every woman, mother, daughter, and sister. She's everywhere, all the time. The power holding the sun up in the sky, pushing the grass and trees from under the ground up to the surface. Newborns cry her name out loud, the departed call for her help in the last whisper before they become one with Earth once again.
She's worshipped by God himself. As an equal. As any woman should be.
And will be.
Concept: ©MONOGRAMA - #GUARDIAN108 - Geo Location: http://bit.ly/3iDPvVp
