The prophet's dictionary guide to the supernatural

times, particularly the fatal flogging of little boys. This Asiatic goddess with eunuch priests occupied the place of a multi-breasted mother goddess responsible for conception. As Ashtoreth, she is a throwback to the Amazons. 111. Asa—The ninth century king of Judah who deposed his grandmother, who set an idolatrous shrine in the land. Refer to 1 Kings 15:13. A powerful reformation king who fought to return Israel to true Yahweh worship. His name means “physician, healing.” 112. Asherah—Pagan goddess of Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit of Syria, and a Canaanite goddess of Tyre who ruled over the sea. The wife of El, the cruel war god of sexuality, particularly of bizarre sexual rituals. The name meant “lady of the sea.” Asherah was also the consort of Baal, the thunder god, at times. Her cultic object was an obscene wooden female sex organ, aside from the female breast. She often appeared as a nude woman flanked on the right and left by a lion and lily. Her association with the lily as a symbol of her sexual grace was to exemplify the serpent’s fertility rites and sadistic sexuality. She was rendered erotically appealing by a serpent wrapped about her representing reproductive powers as a fertility goddess. Asherah’s cult centered on male prostitution where priests called qedeshim performed or submitted to homosexual rites for worshippers. The word qedeshim means sodomites. Asherah’s fertility rituals involved perverse sexual orgies infused with homosexuality, which ended in the massacre of their participants. These bloody sessions destroyed the male worshippers of a religion and were often characterized by mass human sacrifices. Asherah worship, observed as a grisly massacre, allowed the goddess—thought to love blood gifts —to wade in the blood bath of those dying in her rituals. 1 Kings 15:13; 2 Kings 21:7; 2 Chronicles 15:16. She was the goddess of the coast and was known to rule the seas and to take and award the sea’s fortunes at will. Eventually she became the wife of Baal. Asherah had her own prophet’s staff in 1 Kings 18:19. It was set next to Baal’s image of similar nature. Asherah went from wife to sister (or vice versa) of El. She is also Astarte and Anath and imaged as a naked woman riding a beast holding a serpent. In this way, she was known as the holy (dedicated) courtesan of the temple. Prostitutes and vice dominated her temple worship, glamorized lust and elevated murder to a ceremonial worship form. Bloody orgies butchered the people, mostly males, to satisfy her grisly appetite for blood. The most ecstatic of these rituals was slaughtering and dismembering humans and wading