💌 Dear Reader, Love Edward Dodge

 

Dear Reader,

    I hope you enjoy my book. It’s a pretty radical story and not everyone will like it, but hopefully it will at least stimulate some thinking and conversation.

It was a journey of learning for me. I grew up going to church and I was surprised to learn that modern scholars overwhelmingly accept that the early Israelites were pagan before they became monotheists, and that God had a wife. I wanted to learn how this fit into the traditional Biblical narrative, and I wanted to know who the wife of God was, and it meant to worship her.

I learned that the goddesses were deeply rooted in nature and the cycles of life. I learned that they got kicked out of the temple and the Biblical writers were deeply hostile to them.  I discovered that the feminine divine has always been with us and the countless depictions of goddesses are all part of it. I learned that many of the issues we are fighting about in today’s culture wars were fought about before. The old goddesses of the Bible represented feminism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, sexual freedom for women and gays, transgendered people, cannabis and psychedelics, even abortions.

The feminine divine is being rediscovered in Western culture after being denied and repressed for centuries. We need to bring her back, women will never be equal to men in a world with no Goddess, and we will never be able to live in harmony with the environment if we don’t believe that the Earth is our living, breathing Mother.

My goal now is to turn these stories into graphic novels and animation. I want to tell the stories of the Lost Goddesses of Israel. These characters are remarkable and full of vigor and personality. These goddesses are not like the Greek Olympian goddesses who are weak by comparison. These are the old goddesses of the matriarchy, with roots thousands of years back in the Neolithic.

Edward Dodge is a clean energy developer and writer from Washington D.C. with degrees from Cornell University. He studied the history of cannabis which provided the origins of this book.

You can visit his website at www.historyofthegoddess.com and his blog at  https://edwarddodge.substack.com.

You can visit his YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCewtIeQPSqOxs25IP0Np6g

Connect with Edward at Twitter and Facebook.

This book explores the Goddess worshipping traditions that were always a part of

human spirituality but were eliminated in the Bible on the path to monotheism. There is an unexplored narrative in the Bible, the early Israelites were pagan and God had a wife, her name is Asherah and she appears many times in the Bible. The Earthly Mother and the Heavenly Father were the original gods far back in history and they got a divorce in the Old Testament so that God could rule alone. But the Earthly Mother never went away and we can follow her traditions through Christianity and into the modern world.

The religious wars of the past that eliminated these women-led Goddess religions are directly reflected in today’s culture wars where the secular left is struggling to break free of the moral dictates of religious conservatives. In the Goddess temples of antiquity, we see unbridled feminism, egalitarianism, nature worship, sexual freedom for women and gays, cannabis and sacred plants, transgendered people as high priests, even abortions. The world today is in flux and many people are rediscovering the Feminine Divine, she is an important part of our collective experience.

You can pick up your copy of A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible at Amazon.