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Making peace in Palestine

Interview with DeAnna L'Am

by Stephanie Hiller

Deanna L'Am is leading a tour to sacred sites in Israel next year [this article was from 2000], to visit a goddess who is at least 230,000 years old.

The "Acheulian Goddess", as she has come to be called, was named for the geologic layer in which she was found, estimated to be between 230,000 and 800,000 years old. Carved with flint out of scoria stone, she is tiny enough to hold in the palm of the hand and resembles the much younger Venus of Willendorf, who is only 30,000 years old.

"Her antiquity was completely staggering to me," says Deanna, "and the fact that she was found on the Syrian Israeli border, the Golan Heights, which is the place of the tear between the two countries. The political significance of that! Just on the line, just on the bridge, where war erupted, she was buried, carrying a message of unity. Because obviously when she was around, there were no borders!"

DeAnna's coming tour will be her second visit to Israel in the company of the small Acheulian goddess. Two years ago, DeAnna returned to her former home at Neve Shalom (Wahat Al Salam), an intentional community which is the only place in Israel where Jews and Palestinians have chosen to live together, in peace. In the woman's circle, "When she was passed from hand to hand, people did feel that this is something they can belong to. It was a revelation in many ways &endash; to be exposed to goddess consciousness and to find that she was found right there where we were sitting!

"It gives Palestinian and Jewish women a sense that we have something to relate to that predates these conflicts, and it's in our image."

Building bridges is what DeAnna's life's work is all about. In the small town community of Graton, California, where she lives, she organizes seasonal pagan celebrations in the schoolyard; no one objects. DeAnna's warmth is disarming; hostilities do not thrive in her presence. Her most recent project has been to develop a community mentorship program for youth, to heal misunderstandings between teens and their elders. Past projects include creating a labyrinth at the local teen center.

On her trip to Israel, DeAnna will be building bridges as big as continents. Unlike most tours of sacred sites, hers will bring visitors into direct contact with local women. "The tour will be an attempt to link ancient goddess tradition of the Middle East with contemporary feminist consciousness, both for the part of the American women that will be traveling there and amongst the Jewish and Palestinian women that we will be meet and do ceremony with."

The group will stay at Neve Shalom for most of the trip, taking side trips from there to interesting sites that affirm the continuity of the goddess tradition in the region. When not traveling, "we'll be sitting in circle sharing our life stories, sharing ceremonial space, exploring the possibility that we all have roots that are beyond our immediate political perspective."

The Palestinian and the Jewish people share a common lineage and a tradition which can be traced back to the goddess religions that preceded the advent of Judaism. The goddess Asherah is an early Mother Creatrix from whom the Greek Aphrodite descended; her other becomings include Astarte or Ashtoreth, and the Babylonian Ishtar. Her home encompasses much of the territory known as the Levant or the Middle East, where the Semitic peoples lived for centuries in apparent equanimity until tribal differences became exacerbated by religious dictates. She was worshipped as the Tree of Life in the Garden, where the Serpent was her sacred totem. According to Merlin Stone, in her classic work, When God Was A Woman, the story of Genesis represents the manipulation and distortion of the original pagan myth to describe Her worship as a sin which women must now reject or be punished for.

Asherah was certainly not a "Jewish goddess," but even then, she is mentioned many times in the Old Testament and so is too much associated with the Jews to provide a unifying archetype acceptable to Palestinian women.

"No matter what punishment the people were given for going back to their old ways, she keeps surfacing, and they keep going back to her again and again, and that is pretty remarkable for a people who says

they are embracing this male god. For them to again and again to return to worship what the prophets called prostitution and evil, is phenomenal.

"And because she could not be suppressed, she was finally accommodated by an esoteric sect during the Middle Ages, in the Kabbalah, where she is called the Shekhina. The translation of shekhina means 'presence', and the word presence implies all- permeating. There esoteric Judaism is reclaiming that tradition of what we can say is the Jewish goddess."

Stirring the air with a flat, outstretched hand, DeAnna seems to invoke the Shekhina. Suddenly I sense that She is with us, her unmistakable aura or vibration like the cloud through which Yahweh was said to make himself manifest. Interestingly, this ancient concept hearkens back to the ancient Indian mythology from which the Hebrews, as Indo Europeans, were probably descended. In the sacred Sanskrit texts, God remains, like YHWH, the unmanifest, who can do nothing without his "shakti", the female energy and consort which brings the cosmos into being. The similarity between the two words "shakti" and "shekina" suggests that these two words may be related etymologically.

Through the shekhina, YWHW was said to appear directly to Moses, who alone among mortals possessed the special ability to talk with (invoke?) her at any time &endash; without making an appointment! &endash; a pleasure so delicious, apparently, that he neglected his wife in order to remain pure enough to commune with the holy Beloved, originating that familiar dichotomy between physical love and the sacred.

The Shekhina remains the feminine face of God down through the present day although, as Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb points out in her wonderful book, She Who Dwells Within, her attributes were assigned and described entirely by Hassidic male rabbis, who relegated her to a position secondary to God, as &endash; guess what &endash; the receptive, submissive and ultimately material aspect of His Infinite Wisdom.

The Arab people, allegedly the sons and daughters of Isaac's darker brother, Ishmael, are certainly as patriarchal as the Jews. But after Ishtar, to Deanna's knowledge, no Arab goddess survives, hence the excitement of discovering the Acheulian goddess and bringing her magic into the circle of women. But this Paleolithic artifact is so ancient, one wonders how we can make any inferences at all about her worship. For Deanna, she confirms that the Mother was worshipped as a continuous thread from the earliest times, and "In the light of her age, the conflicts of the Middle East are an eyeblink!" But what can we really know about her worship? I asked.

DeAnna acknowledges the problem. "Debbie Hirshman, curator at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, says that anything more than what we can see with our eyes is speculation. How dare anyone say how it was?

"What I am saying is we have some remnants and we have the luxury of reinventing our mythology and recreating the vision of how it was, based on a few remnants. I'm not saying we can prove it. We are reinventing and recreating our own mythology by going back to those places and creating our own celebration.

"It would be very easy for someone to say, Where is the proof? Science doesn't allow itself to say anything but what is observable. But we're not scholars here saying "this is how it was done." We're filling in the gaps in creative, artistic, ritualistic ways"

DeAnna relates her way of thinking to the work of Marija Gimbutas, whose extensive discoveries demonstrated the existence in Old Europe of gynocentric, goddess worshipping cultures which were invaded during the later Bronze age by Indo European tribes with weapons and horses. "She did her archeological homework but I think she allowed herself to read between the lines."

DeAnna's trip, then, will not only be a study of the past, but an intuitive re-creation of its culture, and simultaneously, an attempt to shape the future.

Beginning at the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea, and culminating in the Golan Heights, which is the highest place, at least in Israel, the group will also visit the ruins of Ishtar's Temple at Tel Gezer, and Miriam's Well, located in a rural part of Jerusalem, which has become a symbol of the places where women gather. They will also visit the home of Israel's national poet, Rachel.

These stops will be threaded together by the connectedness between the women. "American women bring a richer, longer background of celebrating feminine divinity of the goddess, [which can] empower the local women, awakening their connectedness as women, as part of the divine.

"I see women in the Middle East as instrumental in the peace process, because even though it may be Barak and Arafat who sign the treaty, peace is made by people. I really don't see that peace is a piece of paper. Peace is a collaboration between people and I see that women are going to be leading the way."

Original link: http://www.awakenedwoman.com/goddess_of_palestine.htm