There is a question that has been arising for me more and more deeply as I work on the Living Attributes Codex: What happened to the feminine? Not simply to women, but to the feminine as a source of wisdom, intuition, spiritual authority, healing, creation and embodied knowing.
When I look back through history, I see many different expressions of feminine spirituality. Some were honoured, some were incorporated into religious traditions, some were transformed, and some were actively rejected or demonised. I am particularly interested in what happens when women’s spiritual knowledge exists outside the structures of established religious authority.
I am not suggesting that all of these traditions were the same, nor that there was one continuous feminine spiritual tradition that was deliberately erased. History is far more complex than that. What I am exploring is something subtler. Again and again, I find women who possessed, practised or represented forms of spiritual knowledge that did not fit comfortably within the dominant religious or social structures of their time. I also find that the way these women were described could change dramatically depending upon who was doing the describing.
The woman herself may not have changed, but the label placed upon her could change.
Asherah and the Sacred Feminine
One of the earliest doorways into this exploration for me is Asherah. Asherah was a prominent goddess in the ancient Levant, associated in different contexts with motherhood, fertility and divine presence. Archaeological evidence, including inscriptions from sites such as Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom, has led some scholars to interpret references to “Yahweh and his Asherah” as evidence of a divine feminine presence associated with Yahweh. The interpretation of these inscriptions remains debated, and they cannot simply be presented as proof that ancient Israelite religion universally worshipped Yahweh alongside a goddess named Asherah.
However, the evidence does open an important historical question for me. What did the feminine look like within the religious landscape before later traditions became more firmly defined? I am not trying to reconstruct an ancient religion from fragments of archaeological evidence. Instead, I am asking what these fragments invite us to consider about the relationship between the feminine, spirituality and power.
For me, Asherah represents an invitation to look again at the possibility that the sacred feminine was once understood as an integral dimension of divine reality rather than as something separate, subordinate or threatening. I do not see this as an argument for replacing one hierarchy with another. Rather, it encourages me to consider what may happen when a dimension of spirituality associated with the feminine is no longer given equal value.
Sophia and the Wisdom of the Feminine
Another doorway into this exploration is Sophia. Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom, and within Jewish wisdom literature, particularly Proverbs, Wisdom is personified in feminine form. She speaks, teaches, calls, guides and participates symbolically in the ordering of creation. Sophia therefore provides an important image of feminine wisdom within a tradition that would eventually become foundational to Christianity.
For me, Sophia represents something deeply significant because she reminds us that wisdom does not have to be masculine in order to be authoritative. Wisdom can be receptive as well as directive, intuitive as well as intellectual, and embodied as well as conceptual. These qualities are not exclusively feminine, of course, but they have historically been associated with the feminine and, in some cultures, have been undervalued for precisely that reason.
This is one of the qualities I want to restore through the Living Attributes Codex. I am not suggesting that feminine wisdom is superior to masculine wisdom. I believe that both belong within the wholeness of human consciousness. The sacred feminine does not need to replace the sacred masculine. It needs to be restored to the conversation.
The Woman of Endor and Spiritual Authority
The Woman of Endor provides another fascinating doorway into this exploration. In 1 Samuel 28, King Saul secretly seeks out a woman at Endor who is described in the Hebrew text using the term ʾôb, commonly translated in ways such as medium or spirit-medium. Saul has already prohibited such practices, yet when he is desperate for guidance, he seeks her out.
The story raises important questions about spiritual authority. Who is permitted to access spiritual knowledge? Who is permitted to interpret it? Who decides which forms of spiritual practice are legitimate and which are condemned? The Woman of Endor possesses knowledge that Saul believes he needs, even though the very practice through which she provides it has been prohibited by the authority of the kingdom.
The woman is often referred to today as the “Witch of Endor,” but that is a later and much more culturally loaded description than the terminology found in the Hebrew text. This distinction matters to me because the word “witch” carries meanings that developed through later religious, social and cultural traditions.
I am not suggesting that the Woman of Endor was secretly practising what we would now call a modern form of feminine spirituality, because we simply cannot know that. Nor can we assume that her practices were equivalent to those of women later accused of witchcraft. What interests me is the transformation of her image and the question of how spiritual authority can be viewed when it exists outside an accepted system.
When spiritual knowledge exists beyond established religious authority, who gets to decide whether it is wisdom, superstition, danger or something else entirely?
Mary Magdalene and the Woman Who Witnessed
Mary Magdalene offers another example of how a woman’s image can change through history. The accepted Gospels present Mary as an important follower of Jesus and a witness to his crucifixion, burial and resurrection. In the Gospel of John, she encounters the risen Christ and is entrusted with the message to take to the disciples. Her role as a witness is therefore significant within the Christian tradition.
Yet later Christian tradition increasingly associated Mary Magdalene with the image of a repentant prostitute. The accepted Gospels don’t identify her as a prostitute, and the association developed through later interpretation and the merging of different female figures within Christian tradition.
This distinction between the biblical texts and later tradition is important to me. Once again, we can observe how the image of a woman can be reshaped through interpretation. The woman who witnessed becomes the woman who sinned. The woman who carried a message becomes the woman whose identity is defined by a supposed sexual history that is not actually given to us in the accepted Gospels.
I am not suggesting that every later interpretation was part of a deliberate attempt to silence women. History rarely works in such a simple way. However, I do believe it is worthwhile to examine how cultural stories are formed, repeated and eventually accepted as though they have always been true. Mary Magdalene therefore invites me to consider what happens when a woman’s spiritual authority is remembered through the interpretations of others rather than through her own actions and testimony.
King James and the Changing Meaning of Spiritual Practice
This brings me to King James. James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, was deeply involved in the persecution of people accused of witchcraft. His involvement was personal rather than merely political. Following the North Berwick witch trials of 1590–91, James became convinced that witchcraft represented a genuine threat to his kingdom and his Protestant faith. He personally interrogated people accused during the trials and subsequently wrote Daemonologie, which was published in 1597.
In Daemonologie, James argued for the reality of witchcraft and supported its prosecution. His work is particularly significant to my exploration because he also discussed the biblical Woman of Endor within this framework. A woman who appears in the biblical story as someone consulted for spiritual communication could now be interpreted through the early modern category of the witch.
There is an important distinction that I want to preserve here. James did not write the King James Bible. The King James Version was produced by teams of translators and was based substantially on earlier English translations. James supported and commissioned the translation project, but he was not its author or translator. Nor is there historical evidence that he personally removed a “Divine Feminine” from the Bible.
That would be an historical claim that goes beyond the evidence. What we can say is that James lived within, participated in and reinforced a religious and political culture in which certain forms of spiritual practice were increasingly understood as dangerous, heretical or demonic. His Daemonologie is one particularly clear example of this worldview.
This is where the distinction between spiritual practice and witchcraft becomes important. Not every person accused of witchcraft was practising a spiritual tradition, and not every accusation reflected actual behaviour. Accusations could arise from social conflict, fear, economic tensions, personal disputes and broader cultural anxieties. Some accused people may have practised forms of folk healing or magic, while others may not have practised anything that we would recognise as supernatural at all.
For this reason, I do not want to rewrite history by simply replacing the word “witchcraft” with “women’s spirituality.” Instead, I want to ask a more precise question: What kinds of women’s knowledge, healing practices, divination, mediumship, folk traditions and spiritual practices became vulnerable to being labelled as witchcraft?
That is a very different question, and for me it is a much more meaningful one.
When the Story Changes
This is where my own spiritual inquiry begins. Throughout history, I see women associated with many different forms of knowledge. They have been described as wise women, healers, midwives, prophetesses, seers, mediums, mystics and keepers of traditional knowledge. These roles were not interchangeable, nor were they necessarily always respected. However, they remind me that feminine knowledge has taken many forms across different cultures and periods of history.
At times, these forms of knowledge were welcomed. At other times, they were incorporated into accepted religious structures, dismissed as superstition or treated with suspicion. In some circumstances, they became associated with practices that authorities considered dangerous or forbidden.
This is where the word “witchcraft” deserves careful consideration. It can describe particular beliefs and practices involving magic or supernatural power, but historically it has also functioned as an accusation. A person could be labelled a witch without that label accurately describing what she believed or practised.
This is why, when I am speaking about the broader spiritual question within the Living Attributes Codex, I prefer to use terms such as feminine spiritual knowledge, women’s spiritual practices, traditional healing practices, folk spiritual practices, or spiritual practices outside established religious authority. These terms allow me to explore what may have existed without automatically accepting the profound judgement contained within the word “witchcraft.”
I think the deeper question is not whether every woman called a witch was actually a wise woman, healer or spiritual practitioner. We cannot know that, and history does not support such a sweeping conclusion. The deeper question is how societies determine which forms of knowledge are legitimate and which are considered dangerous, and how those judgements affect the women who hold that knowledge.
Historical Record, Scholarly Interpretation and Spiritual Interpretation
This distinction is particularly important to me as I develop the Living Attributes Codex because I want to honour both spiritual meaning and historical integrity.
There are three different layers to this exploration. The first is the historical record, which includes archaeological evidence, biblical texts, manuscripts, court records and other historical sources. These sources provide us with what can reasonably be established about the past, although they are often incomplete.
The second is scholarly interpretation. Historians, archaeologists, theologians and other scholars examine these sources and develop interpretations about what they might mean. Those interpretations can differ, particularly where evidence is incomplete, ambiguous or contested.
The third is my own spiritual interpretation. This is where I ask what these stories mean to me and what they might reveal about our relationship with the feminine, wisdom, power, spirituality and human consciousness.
These three layers are connected, but they are not the same. My spiritual interpretation is not historical proof, and historical uncertainty does not mean that a story has nothing meaningful to teach us. I believe we can hold both things at once. We can honour what the evidence tells us while also allowing the stories to open deeper questions within our own consciousness.
What the Divine Feminine Means to Me
For me, the Divine Feminine is not simply a goddess, a religion or a historical personality. It is a way of describing qualities of consciousness that have often been associated with the feminine, including intuition, receptivity, compassion, nurturing, creativity, embodiment, wisdom, beauty, relational intelligence and the capacity to listen deeply.
I do not believe these qualities belong exclusively to women, nor do I believe that the future requires us to replace a masculine hierarchy with a feminine hierarchy. That would simply reproduce the same imbalance in another form.
The restoration I am interested in is one of wholeness. It is about allowing the feminine and masculine dimensions of consciousness to exist in respectful relationship with one another. It is about restoring value to qualities that have sometimes been dismissed because they are associated with the feminine. It is also about recognising that wisdom does not always arrive through authority, doctrine or intellectual certainty. Sometimes wisdom arrives through the body, through intuition, through experience, through contemplation, and sometimes through another woman saying, “I know this because I have lived it.”
The Sacred Spiral of Remembering
This is where the Sacred Spiral of the Living Attributes Codex becomes meaningful for me. A spiral does not simply move backwards. It returns to something, but it returns with new awareness. We revisit an old story and discover that there is more to understand. We encounter a familiar woman from history and allow ourselves to see her again, not necessarily through the label that was placed upon her, but through the divine complexity of the human being behind it.
Perhaps this is part of what remembering really means. It is not about inventing a past that never existed. It is about becoming willing to look again. Asherah invites us to look again at the ancient feminine within the religious landscape of the Levant. Sophia invites us to look again at Wisdom as feminine. The Woman of Endor invites us to look again at the question of spiritual authority outside established religious structures. Mary Magdalene invites us to look again at how a woman’s identity can be transformed by later interpretation. The history of witch-hunts invites us to look again at the difference between a person’s actual practices and the label placed upon them.
Reclaiming What Was Never Truly Lost
The Divine Feminine was never truly erased. Perhaps aspects of feminine wisdom were fragmented, reinterpreted or separated from one another and given different names. Intuition was sometimes dismissed as superstition, healing was sometimes viewed with suspicion, spiritual communication was sometimes forbidden, and embodied wisdom was sometimes regarded as inferior to intellectual or institutional authority.
I don’t believe, however, that we need to recreate the past to reclaim what is valuable within it. Nor do we need to declare that every woman who was called a witch was secretly a spiritual teacher. Doing so would simply replace one historical distortion with another.
What we can do is become more discerning. We can ask what actually happened. We can distinguish historical evidence from interpretation, honour the women whose lives were documented, acknowledge the women whose stories were distorted or lost, and recognise that feminine wisdom does not require permission to exist.
This is the deeper invitation of the Living Attributes Codex. It is not about returning women to an imagined past. It is about bringing the wisdom of the feminine into conscious relationship with the present. It is about remembering that intuition and intellect can coexist, that strength and tenderness can coexist, that authority and receptivity can coexist, and that the masculine and feminine can exist in relationship rather than opposition.
The Divine Feminine was never truly lost. Beneath the names and labels placed on her throughout history, she has continued to speak. And what we are being called to do now is not to invent her again, but to remember how to listen deeply.
Heart to Heart, Elizabeth
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