Years later, the word 'asherah' (plural - asherim) no longer referred to a specific goddess but it started to mean all the trappings of the worship of the goddesses (and sometimes the gods) and it included the priests, altars and groves. The asherah was also the fetish statues - reclining or standing nudes, and phallic stones or poles. Asherah could also be the coerced act of sacred prostitution by male and female prostitutes. (The women had to make the choice between having their hair shaved or offering service in the ‘temple’.)
The original rather passive goddess Asherah metamorphosed into a wide variety of goddesses with different functions. From military perspective, the warrior class of goddesses is of particular interest. These would be deities like:
- Anath - virgin/warrior goddess, sister of Baal and Astarte, defeater of death.
- Astarte - goddess of sexual love and war, sister of Anath but possibly not Baal.
- Ishtar - have power over bodily love and war, goddess of prostitutes and pubs.
There seems to have been a common theme linking war and fertility, which originated in different countries at around the same time but there is an incredible logic to it - a reality which exists to this day.
The worship of gods and goddesses in the ancient world was based on logic and careful observation of what went on in the world and then deducing causes from this. It is the same as modern science where causes are deduced without being observed and then turned into dogmatic scientific ‘religion’.
After every war, there is a baby boom, an absolute population explosion - this we can observe and study. In the long-gone days of Canaan with its many wars and the Middle-Eastern practice of multiple rapes of the vanquished, it must have been far more pronounced - recent events in Bosnia proved this as well. Women with infertile husbands who went away suddenly bore children - as Bathsheba rather dryly pointed out to King David after their night of passion, I am with child. If fertility increases during war, then with seemingly perfect logic, the ancients deduced it had to be the goddess of fertility who caused the wars.
Historians do the same - they deduce causes which almost inevitably turn out to be wrong. This is not due to stupidity or maliciousness - it is being human, which means the inability of dealing with completely illogical or random events. Much of humanity holds the belief of creation being due to superhuman power or to a logical ('survival of the fittest' type) evolution - the God-fearing and atheist both want a beginning and end - and a logical reason for what happens in between. Humanity cannot deal with unpredictability. It wants to believe it can understand. Religious belief and secular ethics is after all, formulized wishful thinking - the linking together of random facts in a recognizable pattern. All this is nonsense and is no closer to the truth than a belief in goddesses of war.
Wars have no logical causes. This means, they cannot be prevented through belief in the inherent good of humanity or ethics (UN resolutions). And by the same token peace cannot be maintained with wishful thinking.
War will come to every single people, no matter what they do or do not do - it is only a matter of time. This is the only truth there is about war.
