Asherah

Asherah (Athirat in Ugaritic) is one of the great goddesses of the Canaanite pantheon, wife of the supreme god El and mother of the seventy gods that form his divine court (the «sons of Athirat»). In the texts of Ugarit (14th century BC) she receives the title of «Lady of the Sea» (rabbatu athiratu yammi) and acts as intercessor before El. Mother goddess of fertility, she was venerated by means of the asherah, a stylized sacred pole or tree erected in the «high places» throughout the Levant. Archaeology has revealed that in ancient Israel and Judah she was worshiped for centuries alongside Yahweh: the inscriptions of Kuntillet Ajrud mention «Yahweh and his Asherah». The reform of King Josiah (7th century BC), narrated in 2 Kings 23, ordered to remove and burn her pole from the Temple of Jerusalem.

As a great mother goddess, Asherah presided over the fertility of the land, the herds and human beings, and was invoked for rain and dew. In her role as El's consort she was the matriarch of the pantheon, and in the domestic sphere she was associated with the protection of the household, with childbirth and with midwives. Her cult, one of the most enduring of the ancient Near East, spread for over a millennium from Ugarit to Tyre, Sidon, the high places of Israel and Judah, and New Kingdom Egypt, where she was absorbed under the title Qudshu.

In time her figure came to be confused with that of Astarte, a distinct goddess of the same Canaanite world with whom she shared attributions. That confusion should not be stretched a step further than it already goes. The demon Astaroth of the grimoires does not come from Asherah: he comes from the Hebrew name of Astarte, Ashtoreth, which the scribes vocalised with the vowels of bosheth, shame, in order to debase it. And the one who turned him into a male demon, a duke of hell, was not rabbinic tradition but the Christian demonology of the sixteenth century, which fixes him in the Pseudomonarchia daemonum of Johann Weyer (1577).

The most characteristic symbol of Asherah is the asherah-pole, a sacred pole or tree (often a stylized palm or tamarisk) that represented the goddess in the sanctuaries. In Syro-Palestinian iconography she is associated with the lion, on which she sometimes appears standing, and with intertwined serpents. In Egypt, under the advocacy of Qudshu, she is represented as a naked goddess facing forward on a lion, holding lotus flowers and serpents. Numerous Jewish «pillar figurines», small female terracotta effigies that emphasize her attributes as a nurse and protector of fertility, have been linked to her domestic cult. Her iconographic trace allows following her continuity from the Canaanite pantheon to the popular practices of monarchical Israel, before Josianic monotheism eradicated her official cult.