ORIGINS
"The Head"
 
"That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the very beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity."
Augustine
 

 

Introduction
 
It is difficult for people living in the shadow of the patriarchal [male-centered] monotheistic heritage to understand how the paternal Creator God we associate with the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions has evolved naturally from more ancient traditions in polytheism. The tendency is to perceive polytheistic deities as debased objects of idol worship, either empty of real content because they are false man-made gods, as mere projections of human personality, or at best representing only one aspect of primitive nature such as fertility, or astral bodies such as the moon or sun. In fact the converse is the case. "Yahweh" is a tribal patron form of a more ancient cosmic Deity, who only regains a semblance of His original cosmic [universal] nature in the Christian form many centuries later, although now without His divine consort, and their sacred garden of immortality.
 

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is a particular tendency to see the aniconic aspect of Yahweh as intrinsically superior to the idolised deities of polytheism, and to infer that this "true" God of His people has appeared paradoxically as a revealed "God of History", first to Abraham in the starlight and later to Moses out of a cloudy pillar. Despite clearly manifesting in "Yahweh" as a tribal patron God, rather than a cosmic God of all and only later being vested by pre-exilic Jewish culture with strict monotheistic attributes, this Deity finally appears as a cosmic Deity in the Christian and Islamic form with the full dimensions of an aniconic, monotheistic, cosmic, paternal Creator Deity - the "one true God of all", who has revealed his nature in ever deeper stages to his followers.
 

This is calculated to reinforce the unquestioned acceptance of the patriarchal Creator Deity and mask the evolutionary nature of all deities as projections of conscious awareness and human culture. Long before "Yahweh" made His entry onto the stage of history as a jealous patron deity, ancient astral deities had already encompassed the
major advances later seen in the Christian idea of the Supreme Creator God, who is both the God of reality and the God of the mind.
 

In rediscovering the underlying nature of this "God behind God" and His complementary relationship with the Goddess, with whom He is inextricably fused in deep union, we will not only discover our true origins of deity in the joyful marriage of complements - male and female, mind and body - but also our much more ancient roots in the links between the conscious mind and the immortal unfolding of fertility which were already discovered 20,000 years ago with the first developments of human culture. In a real sense these ancient traditions, far from being more primitive, capture in archetypal form realities towards which our modern scientific society is only now converging after a long period of imbalance and confusion.
 

In finding our true cultural roots of deity, we can finally come to a position in which we can discover in a vastly older tradition the continuity of vision that will sustain us in a closed but living ecosystem in which we have unparalleled powers of stewardship of nature.

 
"El" [singular form of 'elohiym] - archetype of the fatherly aspect of the Christian trinity - is the kind old fatherly God of Canaan.