ELIZABETH ELLAMES

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. The name 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.

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, became deeply involved in the persecution of people, predominantly women, accused of witchcraft. Following the North Berwick witch trials of 1590–91, James became convinced that witchcraft represented a genuine threat to his kingdom and to his Protestant faith. He personally participated in the interrogation of people accused during the trials and later wrote Daemonologie, published in 1597.

In Daemonologie, James argued for the reality of witchcraft and supported its prosecution. His writings provide an important window into how supernatural practices were understood within the religious and political culture of his time.

He also discussed the biblical Woman of Endor, the woman consulted by King Saul to communicate with the dead. Her story is significant because it illustrates the tension surrounding practices involving divination, spiritual communication and the unseen world. Such practices could exist within religious stories and traditions while simultaneously being condemned when practised outside accepted religious authority.

There is, however, an important historical distinction to make. James did not write the King James Bible. The King James Version was produced by teams of translators who drew substantially on earlier English translations. James supported and commissioned the translation project, but he was neither its author nor its translator. Nor is there historical evidence that he personally removed a “Divine Feminine” from the Bible. To make that claim would take the historical evidence further than it allows us to go.

What is historically useful is something broader: examining the culture in which James lived and the ways in which particular forms of knowledge and spiritual practice could become classified as dangerous, heretical or demonic.

And this brings me to the question I am really interested in.

What Happened to Women’s Traditional Knowledge?

For generations, women held and transmitted practical knowledge about the body, birth, healing, plants, seasons, family and community. Much of this knowledge was passed through observation, experience and oral tradition, often from one woman to another rather than through formal institutions.

This could include herbal medicine and healing, childbirth and midwifery, folk remedies, knowledge of plants and nature, divination and the interpretation of omens, spiritual and ritual practices, charms and protective traditions, ancestral customs and other forms of traditional knowledge.

These practices were not universally regarded as witchcraft, nor were they necessarily understood by the women who practised them through the category of “witchcraft” at all. And not every woman accused of witchcraft was a healer, midwife or spiritual practitioner. Accusations could arise from social conflict, economic tensions, personal disputes, fear and wider cultural anxieties.

That distinction is important because I do not want to romanticise the past by suggesting that every woman accused of witchcraft was secretly a keeper of ancient feminine wisdom. Nor do I want to simply replace the historical category of “witchcraft” with the modern category of “women’s spirituality.”

The more useful question is this:

What kinds of women’s traditional knowledge and practices became vulnerable to being condemned or labelled as witchcraft?

That question takes us beyond the figure of the “witch” and towards the women themselves: the knowledge they possessed, the roles they occupied within their communities, the practices they passed between generations, and the authorities that determined which forms of knowledge were legitimate.

When the Story Changes

Throughout history, women have been 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, and their social status varied considerably between cultures and periods. Sometimes such knowledge was respected. Sometimes it was incorporated into established religious or medical structures. At other times it was dismissed as superstition or treated as dangerous.

This is where the history of witchcraft becomes particularly interesting to me. The word “witchcraft” does not simply describe a set of practices. In many historical contexts, it also functioned as a category of accusation. A person could be labelled a witch without that label accurately representing what she believed, practised or intended.

For this reason, when I explore this subject within the Living Attributes Codex, I prefer to speak more precisely about feminine spiritual knowledge, women’s spiritual practices, traditional healing practices, folk spiritual traditions, or practices that existed outside established religious authority.

These terms allow us to investigate what may have existed without automatically accepting the judgement contained within the word “witchcraft.” The deeper issue, then, is not whether the women called witches were secretly wise women, healers or spiritual practitioners. History cannot support such a sweeping conclusion.

It is the question of who gets to decide what knowledge is legitimate. Who is authorised to heal? Who is authorised to interpret the unseen? Who is permitted to teach? Who is believed when she speaks about the body, nature, birth, death or spirit? And what happens when knowledge traditionally held within a community begins to fall outside the authority of the institutions that define what is acceptable?

This is where my historical inquiry and my spiritual inquiry meet. I am not trying to create a new mythology about women persecuted as witches. I am interested in something more subtle: what happens when a culture changes the meaning of a practice, changes who is authorised to hold particular knowledge, or changes the language through which that knowledge is understood.

Because when the name of something changes, our perception of it can change with it. A healer can become a heretic. A seer can become a sorceress. A woman carrying traditional knowledge can become a woman whose knowledge is considered dangerous.

And when a practice is condemned, marginalised or removed from accepted cultural memory, what may be lost is not simply the practice itself. We can also lose the language surrounding it, the stories that explain it, the confidence to practise it, and the intergenerational pathways through which knowledge is transmitted. That is the history I want to explore more deeply. Not a history of “witches” as misunderstood goddesses. Not a story of a single institution deliberately erasing a feminine tradition.

But a more complex history of knowledge, authority, gender, religion and cultural memory — and of what happens when the meaning of a practice changes. Because sometimes the most profound form of loss is not when something disappears completely. It is when we inherit it under a different name.

What the Divine Feminine Means to Me

My view is that 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 don’t 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