Edward Dodge - A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible

Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow
Everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go

Sarah Josepha Hale, 1830

For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.

Luke 8:17

W e live in interesting times. The Internet allows us to travel freely around our planet delve back in time, read ancient texts, connect with other seekers helping us to understand our existence. Edward Dodges A History of the Goddess: From Ice Age to the Bible delivers an opportunity to examine our hoary past, survive our difficult present, and hopefully appreciate a better and more fruitful future.

There are currently almost eight billion people on Earth, and, according to some, we have been around for about six million years. There are stone tools dated from 2.5 million years ago. Homo sapiens emerged around 200,000, cave paintings around 30,000, and human settlements around 12,000 years ago. Seeing the world through the blinders of religious dogma, fundamentalist Christians declare the world is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. Belief can be used to bully, to mislead people into falsehoods.

Where do religious beliefs come from? How does the past evolve towards today? What were the social interactions that moved us foreword or held us back? Who are we? When did gods become God?

After he commenced researching the direct references to cannabis in the Christian Bible, Dodge began asking deep questions. He wanted to understand: Why cannabis went from being sacred in the time of Moses to being rejected later on, since we know that cannabis is not part of Judeo-Christian traditions today. A noble endeavor.

Being beyond threescore years and ten, I have experienced a few social changes. When I was a youngster, women could not lead a worship service, they had to wear hats and only men could speak from the pulpit. My world in provincial Northern Virgina was highly segregated, with separate facilities, sundown laws, etc. It was very disconcerting, I didnt have any acculturated prejudices, my family was from out west. We moved to Nashville, there was still prejudice, but it appeared softer there was more interaction between folks. Then we moved to Oregon, where there were different biases, and as the years went by, the pace of change accelerated.

Coming of age in the 1960s gave me direct experience with marijuana, and a reverence for its use. Cannabis was more than something to get high with, there was something deeper, something more profound.

Dr. Sunil K Aggarwal says, [C]annabis happened to make [the] compounds that bind to receptors in the human system which goes back 600 million years when multicellular organisms were becoming multicellular, and were trying to figure out how to send communication and modulate action. In Homo sapiens , its a really integrated system for cell communication.

Cannabis is one of the basic building blocks of life humans share more than 40% of our genome with cannabis. Marijuana and mankind have had a abiding beneficial relationship that was rudely disrupted by religious beliefs several thousands of years ago. Cannabis and the Goddesses in the Bible were concealed by religious zealots intent on obfuscation.

Edward Dodge tells us how and what happened. Great job!

Onward to the Utmost of Futures,

Peace,

Kris Millegan

Publisher

TrineDay

February 14, 2021

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

- Genesis 3:6-7

VOLUME I
Goddess Traditions

Artemis, Mistress of Animals

S he is the Feminine Divine, she has taken many names and forms through the ages. She is the Mother of God and the Wife of God. We know her today as Mother Earth, Mother Nature, and Gaia. In pagan mythology she manifests as all the goddesses, each of whom represents a piece of her infinite possibilities. She is the Queen of Heaven. She is the Triple Goddess; the mother, maiden, and death who represents the cycles of life. The philosophers call her Sophia, which is Wisdom. She is the mother of us all who offers beauty, joy, and abundance.

For those who believe in God there is a Goddess to match, and her traditions are far older than monotheism, going back deep into the Ice Age. The Earthly Mother and the Heavenly Father were traditionally seen as the original deities and the parents of all the pagan gods. The rise of monotheism as told in the Old Testament is the story of the divorce of God from the Goddess and the condemnation of her ancient traditions.

The Goddess is in the Bible, but she is whitewashed out of the stories and denounced by the Biblical writers who describe her as shameful and abominable, except where she presents as wisdom. The Bible story is told from only one side though, we dont get to hear her perspective. It is the story of one spouse in an angry and contested divorce. But in their condemnations, the biblical writers make clear the existence of the Goddess, even as they were trying to write her out of history.

T he Goddess appears unnamed in the opening lines of

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.