TOXIC FEMININITY: THE DEVIL IS TRANS
In my previous article, we talked about who Lucifer is, but at the same time, we barely scratched the surface of his identity. So today, let’s go deeper.
For millennia, there has been a much-followed tradition of referring to female goddesses as Lucifer: Isis, Diana, Astarte, Ashtoreth, to name a few. Even the devotees of Mary Magdalene in the South of France, who held the Gnostic belief that Mary was the consort of Jesus, referred to her as Mary-Lucifer. In one of their gnostic gospels, Mary Magdalene is so enlightened that she asks Jesus multiple questions to help him explain the gospel to his much slower male followers, who resented Mary for being just smarter and all around better. (#Girlpower #bossbabe) This ties in to threads from other goddess religions where only women are considered to be truly enlightened, and that for men to be saved through enlightenment themselves they must participate in sex magic rituals with temple prostitutes.
One of these goddesses was Ishtar, the trickster goddess of Mesopotamian fame who stole the sacred Mes from Enki in order to give them to the people of Uruk. “And what were those Mes?” you ask. They were the gifts of civilization, ie. Enlightenment. Like Prometheus bringing fire to humanity and Lucifer bringing the knowledge of good and evil to Adam and Eve, Ishtar saw that what her god had done was not good.
Dude Looks Like a Lady
The Bible indicates that angels don’t have gender, though it’s worth noting that in the human frame of reference, all the angels in the Bible, fallen or otherwise, are referred to as male. Even the word “Ishtar” is grammatically male, and it’s unclear (at least from my research) whether the Sumerians started out worshipping Ishtar as male or female, but at least by the time of Babylon, Ishtar was considered the same entity as the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna.
In Inanna, we find our first ties to the succubus Lilith, who in some legends is claimed to have been her handmaiden. While that’s worth noting, I think Lilith deserves her own full discussion, which I don’t have enough time for today. I know some people (see also: Abby Libby) think Lilith and Lucifer are the same being, but I disagree and may one day chase that bunny trail.
Inanna/Ishtar was a goddess so sexually voracious that she was known to exhaust her lovers to the point of death (go on, get it out of your system, I’ll wait). Though framed as a goddess of love and war, I think it more accurate to name her the goddess of strife and sexual perversion, because there was nothing too sexually gross for her; the more twisted the better.
Those who rebelled against the gender binary threw themselves into her cult. Men who worked as priests for Inanna/Ishtar took on female names and composed songs in a Sumerian dialect generally used in literary texts by women. One Akkadian hymn ascribes to this goddess the power to transform men into women, and it is said that her menservants were crossdressers.
(For more on the cult of Ishtar watch this episode)
Both Ishtar and Inanna were considered to be goddesses/personifications of the planet Venus, and were called both Morning and Evening Star. Ishtar has had many names in many different cultures: Astarte, Ashtoreth, Asherah, Aphrodite, and Venus, to name a few. But despite her more milquetoast latter depictions, her opposition to God has been a lot more vicious and thorough than you might know.
I Can’t Make Jokes About Heresy
Anyone who’s read the Old Testament will have at least a cursory familiarity with Ishtar’s alter-ego, Asherah. But if you’re anything like me, you may have only seen her as a minor player among the pantheon that seduced Israel.
It’s worse than you think.
Asherah was worshiped as the Queen of Heaven or the Queen of the Stars, and the stars in that title were understood to be all the spirits of light who lived in heaven—another connection to Lucifer, who took with him a third of the stars in heaven when he fell.
One of her many symbols included a golden calf (sometimes a full-grown heifer instead). It this representation of Asherah as a calf that, I would argue, has lent the devil its horns. Isis, Astarte, and other iterations of the same goddess are all depicted as having horns, some because of their connections to cows, others because of their connection to the crescent moon.
You may remember the part in the Old Testament where the Israelites grow tired of waiting for Moses to return from Mount Sinai and convince Aaron to build them a golden calf. (You done messed up, A-aron.) It helps to understand both Moses’ and God’s extreme anger at this offense when you realize that the Israelites were not just worshiping an object but an idol meant to represent Asherah. And Asherah was not just any false god, not just any pretender to the throne; she was a goddess who claimed Yahweh was her husband. She didn’t leave it at that, either; she claimed she chose him as her husband, allowed him to marry her, thus placing herself as the one in charge of God.
And who, you might ask, were the children of this alleged union? Shahar and Shalem, the twin Canaanite gods who together represent the duality of Venus—Shahar, Lucifer, now framed as the son of God. Could there be a greater heresy than that?
And this is not the first time she’s come for that throne. In the days of Inanna, it was said that she travelled down into the underworld, died, and remained dead for three days until she was rescued and brought back to life. Her and her consort, Tammuz, claimed that his flesh was the bread and his blood the wine. When she was Isis, she called herself the good shepherd, and her consort/on-again-off-again-brother-husband Osiris called himself king of kings, lord of lords, the resurrection and the life. At every turn, this ankle-biter has attempted identity theft of the highest order.
The Devil’s in the Details
Three times in the Torah (Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21) God commands the Israelites not to cook a baby goat in its mother’s milk. God never wastes words or makes off-hand statements. When He repeats Himself, it’s because it’s a big deal, and we need to pay attention.
For a long time, scholars wondered why this passage was so important, and the general consensus seemed to be either A) some things we just don’t know or need to understand, since that’s just a function of God’s law, or B) maybe there are digestive issues related to eating meat cooked in dairy.
Recent archeological discoveries paint a clearer picture.
Not only did the children of Israel, who were steeped in paganism at that time, cook baby goats in their mothers milk and sprinkle it on their fields as a fertility ritual, they did so because this was a specific dish said to have been served at Yahweh and Asherah’s wedding feast.
Don’t forget that Israel as a nation fell because of Asherah worship, not just worship of Moloch and Ba’al. King Solomon himself succumbed to compromise when he began following her Sidonian counterpart, Ashtoreth, and it was this that began the nation’s slow rot.
Step on Snek
Asherah was considered to be an Ophidian mother goddess, meaning she was strongly associated with serpents. Her symbols included trees and snakes wound around poles (or for a fun variation, snakes wound around trees, much like in the Garden of Eden). The Caananites worshipped her both as Tannit and as Hawwa. Tannit, as a feminine form of Tannin, means “the one of the serpent.” Hawwa is significant because it was the Canaanite word for Eve. (Yes, they worshipped Eve as Asherah, because the first identity Lucifer tried to steal, after losing his own in the fall, was Eve’s.)
I find it significant that, in Numbers 21, after the Israelites have been bitten by venomous snakes, God instructs Moses to hang a bronze snake on a pole. Those who look at it are healed. Much discussion has centered around what this means, but to me, the answer is clear. When you kill an enemy, you stick their corpse up on a stake so that everyone can look on their defeat. I suggest that the snake was not hung on the pole as a representation of Jesus on the cross; to me that has always felt vaguely blasphemous. I suggest, instead, that the snake was impaled on the pole or portrayed as something dead and defeated, and that in order for the Israelites to be healed, they had to bear witness to Asherah’s humiliation and acknowledge the true God, Yahweh.
A Nation Whose God is Ishtar
Like Azazel who taught the humans both weaponry and womanry, Isis and Astarte were also said to be goddesses of war who taught women the art of makeup. This might not seem so glaringly evil on its face, until you realize that Hecate, another personification of Isis whose name is derived from an old title for Isis (Heq-Maa), taught women the art of abortion. Every abortion carried out today is an act of worship, whether conscious or otherwise, to Ishtar. Every pride parade, every sex change, every sexual perversion is an act of service to Ishtar.
For millennia, Lucifer has been openly understood to be female, because at some point after his fall, the Devil became trans. Maybe it was in the garden, with Eve as the weak link, that he decided that the best way to undermine the entirety of humanity was to attack the feminine. Maybe it was because he wanted so badly to be the Eve to God’s Adam. When considered this way, I wonder if there are vague homosexual undertones to Lucifer’s fall. With the LGBTQ+ community’s attempt to co-opt the rainbow as a sign that God is having gay sex, it’s interesting to note that those who follow Ishtar have a great need to see Yahweh as homosexual, and if there’s anything the Devil is good at, it’s projection. (There’s a joke in here about the forbidden fruit and the Devil being fruity, but I’m too mature for that.)
(No, I’m not.)
The flames of Lucifer worship are stoked every day as feminists use Aphrodite as a rallying cry, and Ariana Grande sings that God is a woman, and it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to recognize the ties of gender dysphoria that connect our present day to ancient Sumer.
The signposts of Ishtar/Lucifer worship are everywhere if you know where to look. Our own Statue of Liberty is a statue of Lucifer. She stands bearing witness to enlightenment and freedom from religious oppression, the torch in her hand mirroring the lotus held upright by Astarte in representation of the light from the sun’s rays, the fire held by Prometheus as he stole from the gods. If you need more convincing, look at the face of Guillaume Geef’s 1848 Statue of Lucifer and tell me it is not the same face as our Lady Liberty, their posture the same, the chain on their ankle the same.
So who is Lucifer really?
Our monotheistic view of the world encourages us to approach God’s opposition as a monolith, but I would argue that the Devil is legion. In the same way that the language of humanity was fractured at the tower of Babel and has continued fracturing and diverging since, Lucifer has only fragmented more and more over time. It’s no accident that he has taken so many names, so many similar, but different, personas, no accident that we find traces of the morning star’s fall in Ba’al and Tammuz, Hephaestus and Zeus, and numerous other gods I have no time to cover today. He scrambles frantically for a name, an identity, much as the culture that worships him screams out for names, for identities.
Whatever else might be the case, it’s certain that Lucifer’s identity is chaos and hatred and destruction. He is, after all, the father of lies and confusion. Even the rising trend in claiming multiple personality disorder is another manifestation of his fragmentary nature. How could he form a cohesive whole when the very God he stands against is the source of all unity?
So it makes sense that you would see Lucifer echoed in all figures of all pantheons, scattered across time and history like atoms in the wake of an explosion. For every fingerprint God has left on creation, Lucifer has tried to cover it with his own, like a child doodling over a masterpiece with crayons.
It’s time, now, to stop looking for Lucifer and to start looking to God, instead.
