The world according to Asherah

The World According to Asherah traces the footprints of the divine feminine in texts, rituals, and music from the Palaeolithic era to the Middle Ages. It shows how Asherah was suppressed – and how she nevertheless remained alive in the memory of humanity.

The World According to Asherah is a book on the borderline of anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, and music history. It provides an introduction to the history of myth and religion from Palaeolithic nomads to Mesopotamia, culminating in the Marian cult – with analogies to various other cultures, mostly Indo-European, but also Asian. The core of the book focuses on the goddess Asherah (or rather the divine couple El/Elohim and Asherah) and the evolution of her cult, liturgy, and presentation in pre-biblical Ugaritic texts and different layers of the Bible, as well as how she is reflected in Gnosticism, Kabbalah, or the Marian cult.

Since liturgy has always been intertwined with singing and music, the development of liturgical chant, its forms, and cross-cultural analogies run through the entire book, with an essential focus on intonation and its evolution. The catharsis of Asherah's story comes in the final, philosophically-minded chapter, which analyses the consequences of replacing the archetype of the divine couple with strict patriarchal monotheism, why we need myth, and how myth returns.