The Most High God
Aphrodite Governs Desire and Sexuality
Although it’s not possible definitively to prove theories concerning Goddess culture, they do raise some fascinating possibilities. The implications of these discoveries could revolutionize current understanding of history and human development. According to the new theories, the mythologies of the Middle East gradually replaced the Mother Goddess with a Father God, originally warlike, who creates a world of matter separate from himself. The Goddess was the world, with her sacred groves and animals and her identification with the earth itself (a notion that survives in Gaia, the Greek goddess of earth, and our own image of Mother Nature). But the Father God of Mesopotamia, who went on to become the patriarchal God of the Israelites, Christians, and Muslims, remains apart from his creation. Although this Divine Father later evolved into an ethical deity characterized by mercy and compassion, the roots of the dualistic split between matter and spirit that has wracked Western culture and theology for thousands of years can already be seen in this distance between Creator and creation. Concomitantly, the Goddess model of relationship among all aspects of creation devolved to the model of a male deity ruling by mastery and control, dominating what he has created. That domination is passed on to humanity in Genesis 1:28, when Yahweh tells Adam, “Fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Over time, the Father God in the sky became associated with light and good, and the Mother Goddess of the earth, with darkness and evil. Even before the exaltation of Yahweh and Allah, the peoples of the Middle East had begun downgrading their goddesses by making them the lesser consorts of male gods, turning them into war deities, or replacing them altogether.
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