-
CALLING ALL ASTRAL PLANES DEPARTMENT -
The Ghost Box: What are ghost boxes? How does the ghost box work?
When the Apollo astronauts returned to their lunar landers, they all noticed that moondust, which had clung to their boots and suits, had some interesting properties. For starters, it smelled like spent gunpowder; as if someone had just fired a gun in the lander.
After every moonwalk (or "EVA"), the astronauts would accidently bring moondust back inside the lander. Moondust was incredibly clingy, sticking to boots, gloves and other exposed surfaces. No matter how hard they tried to brush their suits before re-entering the cabin, some dust (and sometimes a lot) made its way inside.
Once their helmets and gloves were off, the astronauts could feel, smell and even taste the moon.
The experience gave Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt history's first recorded case of extraterrestrial hay fever.
"It's come on pretty fast," he radioed Houston with a congested voice.
Years later he recalls, "When I took my helmet off after the first EVA, I had a significant reaction to the dust. My turbinates (cartilage plates in the walls of the nasal chambers) became swollen."
Hours later, the sensation faded. "It was there again after the second and third EVAs, but at much lower levels. I think I was developing some immunity to it."
Other astronauts also noticed the dust.
"It is really a strong smell," radioed Apollo 16 pilot Charlie Duke. "It has that taste -- to me, [of] gunpowder -- and the smell of gunpowder, too." On the next mission, Apollo 17, Gene Cernan remarked, "smells like someone just fired a carbine in here."
However, moondust and gunpowder are not the same thing. Modern smokeless gunpowder is a mixture of nitrocellulose (C6H8(NO2)2O5) and nitroglycerin (C3H5N3O9). These are flammable organic molecules "not found in lunar soil," says Gary Lofgren of the Lunar Sample Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Hold a match to moondust and nothing happens, at least, nothing explosive.
What is moondust made of? Almost half is silicon dioxide glass created by meteoroids hitting the moon. These impacts, which have been going on for billions of years, fuse topsoil into glass and shatter the same into tiny pieces. Moondust is also rich in iron, calcium and magnesium bound up in minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. It's nothing like gunpowder.
So why the smell? No one knows.
ISS astronaut Don Pettit, who has never been to the moon but has an interest in space smells, offers one possibility:
"Picture yourself in a desert on Earth," he says. "What do you smell? Nothing, until it rains. The air is suddenly filled with sweet, peaty odors." Water evaporating from the ground carries molecules to your nose that have been trapped in dry soil for months.
Maybe something similar happens on the moon.
"The moon is like a 4-billion-year-old desert," he says. "It's incredibly dry. When moondust comes in contact with moist air in a lunar module, you get the 'desert rain' effect, and some lovely odors."
Gary Lofgren has a related idea: "The gases 'evaporating' from the moondust might come from the solar wind." Unlike Earth, he explains, the moon is exposed to the hot wind of hydrogen, helium and other ions blowing away from the sun. These ions hit the moon's surface and get caught in the dust.
It's a fragile situation. "The ions are easily dislodged by footsteps or dustbrushes, and they would be evaporated by contact with warm air inside the lunar module. Solar wind ions mingling with the cabin's atmosphere would produce who-knows-what odors."
Schmitt offers yet another idea: The smell, and his reaction to it, could be a sign that moondust is chemically active.
"Consider how moondust is formed," he says. "Meteoroids hit the moon, reducing rocks to jagged dust. It's a process of hammering and smashing." Broken molecules in the dust have "dangling bonds"--unsatisfied electrical connections that need atomic partners.
Inhale some moondust and what happens? The dangling bonds seek partners in the membranes of your nose. You get congested. You report strange odors. Later, when the all the bonds are partnered-up, these sensations fade.
Another possibility is that moondust "burns" in the lunar lander's oxygen atmosphere. "Oxygen is very reactive," notes Lofgren, "and would readily combine with the dangling chemical bonds of the moondust." The process, called oxidation, is akin to burning. Although it happens too slowly for smoke or flames, the oxidation of moondust might produce an aroma like burnt gunpowder. (Note: Burnt and unburnt gunpowder do not smell the same. Apollo astronauts were specific. Moondust smells like burnt gunpowder.)
Curiously, back on Earth, moondust has no smell. There are hundreds of pounds of moondust at the Lunar Sample Lab in Houston. There, Lofgren has held dusty moon rocks with his own hands. He's sniffed the rocks, sniffed the air, sniffed his hands. "It does not smell like gunpowder," he says.
Lofgren and others believe that moondust on Earth has been "pacified." All of the samples brought back by Apollo astronauts have been in contact with moist, oxygen-rich air. Any smelly chemical reactions (or evaporations) ended long ago.
NASA never intended for the geological samples to come into contact with the Earth's atmosphere. Astronauts took special "thermos" containers to the moon to hold the samples in vacuum. But the jagged edges of the dust unexpectedly cut the seals of the containers, allowing oxygen and water vapor to sneak in during the 3-day trip back to Earth. No one can say how much the dust was altered by that exposure.
Schmitt believes "we need to study the dust in situ--on the moon." Only there can we fully discover its properties: Why does it smell? How does it react with landers, rovers and habitats?
NASA plans to send people back to the moon in 2018, and they will stay much longer than Apollo astronauts did. The next generation will have more time and better tools to tackle the mystery.
Source: NASA
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/30jan_smellofmoondust.htm
The Ghost Box: What are ghost boxes? How does the ghost box work?
The argument has been made that
Thomas Edison was working on a ghost communication device – a ghost box
of sorts, to contact the dead. However, there are many Edison
experts that would argue that it was only legend, a myth that is
untrue. They will point out that he neither believed in the
afterlife, nor did he believe spirits and ghosts could be contacted
through an electronic device.
Whatever the truth behind Edison, one has to believe it makes a good story and backdrop to the ghost box. Even more intriguing, some today claim they are in contact with Thomas Edison via the ghost box, but many respected researchers of the latest ghost box technology have yet to make contact with the famous, dead inventor.
That brings us to the latest development of the ghost box. EVP or electronic voice phenomena was discovered in the late ‘50s, and has become well known today thanks to numerous TV shows featuring ghost investigators. Many are not aware of the two-way communication devices called ghost boxes. Following on the heels of the Spiricom , a ghost box of sorts that many believe to be the first two-way communication device between the earthly realm and the spiritual realm, Frank’s box truly was the first of its kind.
Frank’s Box is a ghost box that produces random voltage to create raw audio from an AM tuner, where it is then amplified and then fed into an echo chamber and recorded. In short, ghost boxes such as Frank’s box create audio bits and white noise that ghosts and/or spirits can then manipulate into forming words – real time two-way communication.
Frank Sumption was the original inventor of the ghost box, as he conceived of the idea by experimenting with Stefan Bion’s EVPMaker software to record EVP, and was also inspired by an October 1995 Popular Electronics Magazine article that asked, “Are the dead trying to communicate with us through electronic means? Try these experiments and see for yourself.”
Today Frank is experimenting on various improvements to his ghost box design. Most other ghost boxes are not random band sweeping, but linear sweeping of the AM or FM bands. That is not to say other bands, such as shortwave, weather, etc are not being experimented with by Frank and other Instrumental Transcommunication experimenters. Others since have developed their own ghost boxes, such as Paranormal System’s "MiniBox" and Joe Cioppi’s “Joe’s Box.” Both of these devices are smaller in size and are becoming available for purchase.
Recently, in late 2007 to be exact, another discovery was made by a retired electrical engineer known as Sum Duc. His find has been dubbed the “Radio Shack Hack.” Here is his story: “I was in Radio Shack looking for parts for a new type of device for ITC I’m currently working on. I saw the AM/FM 12-469 on the shelf and thought, ‘I bet I can make this work.’ I had no idea it would be so simple.”
Since that time, other researchers such as Mike Coletta have figured out how to alter the older version 12-470 AM/FM radio, too. Mike has posted many of his videos on YouTube to help others make their own ghost boxes. What has been great is the fact that so many have made their discoveries and research public, such as Frank Sumption, Joe Cioppi, Bruce Halliday, Steve Hultay, Sum Duc, Mike Coletta, and more. Links to their websites are at the end of this article as a big thank you.
The ghost box can be used for EVP, as it can be recorded, then analyzed for messages from spirits and ghosts. However, what makes the ghost box unique is that it can be heard audibly through either an external speaker or headset, where responses from the other side can be heard and responded to live – not unlike chatting with someone by walkie-talkie.
It does require the user to train his or her ear to hear the messages that are brought forth, as the noise and audio bits can at times be somewhat distracting. But if one experiments long enough with a ghost box, it will become apparent that the audio sound bites and white noise will begin to be manipulated to form answers to questions, phrases and more. For this reason alone, we recommend recording all sessions and listening to them later. Upon playback, one might be amazed at what is captured in the audio.
The function of the ghost box and how it works seems to be affected by the strength of radio signals in an area. Poor signal quality reduces the ability for spirits and ghosts to make contact through the device. Perhaps there is not enough audio bits to be manipulated successfully for real-time communication. That would indicate that enhancing the antenna on these devices could improve results by the researcher, according to Bruce Halliday.
The biggest debate over the ghost box might be just who in the heck is coming through these devices? Are they spirits? Ghosts? Demons (the religious ask)? Aliens? Our own projected thoughts? The research continues in this area, but many believe both ghosts, spirits and beings from another realm are making contact through the ghost box.
Experimenters have received positive, good messages, as well as negative and cursing messages. This would indicate that perhaps the range of messengers who are able to manipulate this device into audible words is broad.
Some believe that there are spirits from the light called “controls” or “operators” who work to establish contact and can bring other spirits and ghosts forward through the ghost box. Some of these same operators have been recorded coming through different ghost boxes by different people in different geographical locations. This would lead one to think that operators are involved from the other side in order to try and organize a grid of control and functionality.
Whatever the case may hold to be true, it does appear that one’s connection with the other side seems to influence how good and what type of results will be experienced through the ghost box. It just may be that those who are recording the best results might be psychic in nature, truly connected with the spirit realm prior to the existence of any ghost box.
Angels & Ghosts will work in 2008 to run experiments with different ghost box configurations for utilizing and recording the altered Radio Shack ghost box. Thank you to all who have freely shared their work and ideas with the world.
Source: Angels and Ghosts
http://angelsghosts.com/ghost_box
Whatever the truth behind Edison, one has to believe it makes a good story and backdrop to the ghost box. Even more intriguing, some today claim they are in contact with Thomas Edison via the ghost box, but many respected researchers of the latest ghost box technology have yet to make contact with the famous, dead inventor.
That brings us to the latest development of the ghost box. EVP or electronic voice phenomena was discovered in the late ‘50s, and has become well known today thanks to numerous TV shows featuring ghost investigators. Many are not aware of the two-way communication devices called ghost boxes. Following on the heels of the Spiricom , a ghost box of sorts that many believe to be the first two-way communication device between the earthly realm and the spiritual realm, Frank’s box truly was the first of its kind.
Frank’s Box is a ghost box that produces random voltage to create raw audio from an AM tuner, where it is then amplified and then fed into an echo chamber and recorded. In short, ghost boxes such as Frank’s box create audio bits and white noise that ghosts and/or spirits can then manipulate into forming words – real time two-way communication.
Frank Sumption was the original inventor of the ghost box, as he conceived of the idea by experimenting with Stefan Bion’s EVPMaker software to record EVP, and was also inspired by an October 1995 Popular Electronics Magazine article that asked, “Are the dead trying to communicate with us through electronic means? Try these experiments and see for yourself.”
Today Frank is experimenting on various improvements to his ghost box design. Most other ghost boxes are not random band sweeping, but linear sweeping of the AM or FM bands. That is not to say other bands, such as shortwave, weather, etc are not being experimented with by Frank and other Instrumental Transcommunication experimenters. Others since have developed their own ghost boxes, such as Paranormal System’s "MiniBox" and Joe Cioppi’s “Joe’s Box.” Both of these devices are smaller in size and are becoming available for purchase.
Recently, in late 2007 to be exact, another discovery was made by a retired electrical engineer known as Sum Duc. His find has been dubbed the “Radio Shack Hack.” Here is his story: “I was in Radio Shack looking for parts for a new type of device for ITC I’m currently working on. I saw the AM/FM 12-469 on the shelf and thought, ‘I bet I can make this work.’ I had no idea it would be so simple.”
Since that time, other researchers such as Mike Coletta have figured out how to alter the older version 12-470 AM/FM radio, too. Mike has posted many of his videos on YouTube to help others make their own ghost boxes. What has been great is the fact that so many have made their discoveries and research public, such as Frank Sumption, Joe Cioppi, Bruce Halliday, Steve Hultay, Sum Duc, Mike Coletta, and more. Links to their websites are at the end of this article as a big thank you.
The ghost box can be used for EVP, as it can be recorded, then analyzed for messages from spirits and ghosts. However, what makes the ghost box unique is that it can be heard audibly through either an external speaker or headset, where responses from the other side can be heard and responded to live – not unlike chatting with someone by walkie-talkie.
It does require the user to train his or her ear to hear the messages that are brought forth, as the noise and audio bits can at times be somewhat distracting. But if one experiments long enough with a ghost box, it will become apparent that the audio sound bites and white noise will begin to be manipulated to form answers to questions, phrases and more. For this reason alone, we recommend recording all sessions and listening to them later. Upon playback, one might be amazed at what is captured in the audio.
The function of the ghost box and how it works seems to be affected by the strength of radio signals in an area. Poor signal quality reduces the ability for spirits and ghosts to make contact through the device. Perhaps there is not enough audio bits to be manipulated successfully for real-time communication. That would indicate that enhancing the antenna on these devices could improve results by the researcher, according to Bruce Halliday.
The biggest debate over the ghost box might be just who in the heck is coming through these devices? Are they spirits? Ghosts? Demons (the religious ask)? Aliens? Our own projected thoughts? The research continues in this area, but many believe both ghosts, spirits and beings from another realm are making contact through the ghost box.
Experimenters have received positive, good messages, as well as negative and cursing messages. This would indicate that perhaps the range of messengers who are able to manipulate this device into audible words is broad.
Some believe that there are spirits from the light called “controls” or “operators” who work to establish contact and can bring other spirits and ghosts forward through the ghost box. Some of these same operators have been recorded coming through different ghost boxes by different people in different geographical locations. This would lead one to think that operators are involved from the other side in order to try and organize a grid of control and functionality.
Whatever the case may hold to be true, it does appear that one’s connection with the other side seems to influence how good and what type of results will be experienced through the ghost box. It just may be that those who are recording the best results might be psychic in nature, truly connected with the spirit realm prior to the existence of any ghost box.
Angels & Ghosts will work in 2008 to run experiments with different ghost box configurations for utilizing and recording the altered Radio Shack ghost box. Thank you to all who have freely shared their work and ideas with the world.
Source: Angels and Ghosts
http://angelsghosts.com/ghost_box
-
SMELLS LIKE GREEN CHEESE DEPARTMENT -
The Smell of Moondust
The Smell of Moondust
When the Apollo astronauts returned to their lunar landers, they all noticed that moondust, which had clung to their boots and suits, had some interesting properties. For starters, it smelled like spent gunpowder; as if someone had just fired a gun in the lander.
After every moonwalk (or "EVA"), the astronauts would accidently bring moondust back inside the lander. Moondust was incredibly clingy, sticking to boots, gloves and other exposed surfaces. No matter how hard they tried to brush their suits before re-entering the cabin, some dust (and sometimes a lot) made its way inside.
Once their helmets and gloves were off, the astronauts could feel, smell and even taste the moon.
The experience gave Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt history's first recorded case of extraterrestrial hay fever.
"It's come on pretty fast," he radioed Houston with a congested voice.
Years later he recalls, "When I took my helmet off after the first EVA, I had a significant reaction to the dust. My turbinates (cartilage plates in the walls of the nasal chambers) became swollen."
Hours later, the sensation faded. "It was there again after the second and third EVAs, but at much lower levels. I think I was developing some immunity to it."
Other astronauts also noticed the dust.
"It is really a strong smell," radioed Apollo 16 pilot Charlie Duke. "It has that taste -- to me, [of] gunpowder -- and the smell of gunpowder, too." On the next mission, Apollo 17, Gene Cernan remarked, "smells like someone just fired a carbine in here."
However, moondust and gunpowder are not the same thing. Modern smokeless gunpowder is a mixture of nitrocellulose (C6H8(NO2)2O5) and nitroglycerin (C3H5N3O9). These are flammable organic molecules "not found in lunar soil," says Gary Lofgren of the Lunar Sample Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Hold a match to moondust and nothing happens, at least, nothing explosive.
What is moondust made of? Almost half is silicon dioxide glass created by meteoroids hitting the moon. These impacts, which have been going on for billions of years, fuse topsoil into glass and shatter the same into tiny pieces. Moondust is also rich in iron, calcium and magnesium bound up in minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. It's nothing like gunpowder.
So why the smell? No one knows.
ISS astronaut Don Pettit, who has never been to the moon but has an interest in space smells, offers one possibility:
"Picture yourself in a desert on Earth," he says. "What do you smell? Nothing, until it rains. The air is suddenly filled with sweet, peaty odors." Water evaporating from the ground carries molecules to your nose that have been trapped in dry soil for months.
Maybe something similar happens on the moon.
"The moon is like a 4-billion-year-old desert," he says. "It's incredibly dry. When moondust comes in contact with moist air in a lunar module, you get the 'desert rain' effect, and some lovely odors."
Gary Lofgren has a related idea: "The gases 'evaporating' from the moondust might come from the solar wind." Unlike Earth, he explains, the moon is exposed to the hot wind of hydrogen, helium and other ions blowing away from the sun. These ions hit the moon's surface and get caught in the dust.
It's a fragile situation. "The ions are easily dislodged by footsteps or dustbrushes, and they would be evaporated by contact with warm air inside the lunar module. Solar wind ions mingling with the cabin's atmosphere would produce who-knows-what odors."
Schmitt offers yet another idea: The smell, and his reaction to it, could be a sign that moondust is chemically active.
"Consider how moondust is formed," he says. "Meteoroids hit the moon, reducing rocks to jagged dust. It's a process of hammering and smashing." Broken molecules in the dust have "dangling bonds"--unsatisfied electrical connections that need atomic partners.
Inhale some moondust and what happens? The dangling bonds seek partners in the membranes of your nose. You get congested. You report strange odors. Later, when the all the bonds are partnered-up, these sensations fade.
Another possibility is that moondust "burns" in the lunar lander's oxygen atmosphere. "Oxygen is very reactive," notes Lofgren, "and would readily combine with the dangling chemical bonds of the moondust." The process, called oxidation, is akin to burning. Although it happens too slowly for smoke or flames, the oxidation of moondust might produce an aroma like burnt gunpowder. (Note: Burnt and unburnt gunpowder do not smell the same. Apollo astronauts were specific. Moondust smells like burnt gunpowder.)
Curiously, back on Earth, moondust has no smell. There are hundreds of pounds of moondust at the Lunar Sample Lab in Houston. There, Lofgren has held dusty moon rocks with his own hands. He's sniffed the rocks, sniffed the air, sniffed his hands. "It does not smell like gunpowder," he says.
Lofgren and others believe that moondust on Earth has been "pacified." All of the samples brought back by Apollo astronauts have been in contact with moist, oxygen-rich air. Any smelly chemical reactions (or evaporations) ended long ago.
NASA never intended for the geological samples to come into contact with the Earth's atmosphere. Astronauts took special "thermos" containers to the moon to hold the samples in vacuum. But the jagged edges of the dust unexpectedly cut the seals of the containers, allowing oxygen and water vapor to sneak in during the 3-day trip back to Earth. No one can say how much the dust was altered by that exposure.
Schmitt believes "we need to study the dust in situ--on the moon." Only there can we fully discover its properties: Why does it smell? How does it react with landers, rovers and habitats?
NASA plans to send people back to the moon in 2018, and they will stay much longer than Apollo astronauts did. The next generation will have more time and better tools to tackle the mystery.
Source: NASA
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/30jan_smellofmoondust.htm
-
HIDING THE WEDDING RING DEPARTMENT -
Did God Have A Wife?
Did God Have A Wife?
In 1975-1976, prior to the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, Dr. Ze'ev Meshel of Tel Aviv University, an experienced archaeologist, geographer and trekker, excavated a site not far from the border known as Quntilat Ajrud. This site, small but conspicuous, was located in Darb Ghazza, an important ancient route from Eilat to Rafah and Gaza. In the 8th and 9th centuries B.C.E., a travelers inn was located here, part of which was a shrine. Meshel's excavations yielded Hebrew inscriptions, both on pottery sherds and on the wall plaster. Four of the inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah." One reads: "Blessings of Yahweh of Shomron and his Asherah." Another reads: "To Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah" (Teman was a city in Edom). This reference to the god of Teman and his Asherah is repeated in two other inscriptions. It is noteworthy that Yahweh here is a local god, the god of Shomron and Teman - not the god of the universe. In the pagan world, for example, people prayed to the Ba'al of Hermon and the Ba'al of Hatzor.
A few years before the dig in Sinai, William G. Dever, author of the book "Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel", unearthed an inscription in a cave in Khirbet al-Qom (the biblical city of Maqeda, 15 kilometers west of Hebron), which also mentions Yahweh and his Asherah. Quntilat Ajrud, as we have said, was located on the Egyptian border, which was part of ancient Israel at the time. Back then Shomron was the capital and Eilat was within its jurisdiction. So these inscriptions linking Asherah to Yahweh were found both in Israel and Judea.
Who was this Asherah? In the Canaanite pantheon, she was the wife of El and the mother of all other gods. Are these inscriptions talking about the same goddess, who is now Yahweh's consort? "Asherah" appears in the Bible 40 times, almost always in reference to wooden structures, sacred columns or trees that are uprooted, smashed or burned by those who wish to purify the community of pagan ritual. There is no question that these are symbols of the goddess. But worship of her was quite widespread in ancient Israel, at least in the days of Queen Jezebel and her husband Ahab: 400 prophets of Asherah ate at Jezebel's table and participated, with the prophets of Ba'al, in the great contest on Mt. Carmel against Elijah - a contest that ended in the slaughter of the prophets of Ba'al (and probably the prophets of Asherah, too, although the text does not say so explicitly).
The Bible, as we know it, does everything to present a pure monotheistic approach, and mentions little of the popular religion of the time, which was still suffused with many pagan elements. It seems quite plausible that there were Israelites who believed that the god of Israel, like the gods of other peoples, had a wife named Asherah.
In his introduction to the book, Dever writes: "This is a book about ordinary people in ancient Israel and their everyday religious lives, not about the extraordinary few who wrote and edited the Hebrew Bible. It is also a book for ordinary people today who know instinctively that 'religion' is about experience, not about the doctrines of scholars, theologians and clerics, who study religion dispassionately and claim authority. My concern in this book is popular religion or, better, 'folk religion,' in all its variety and vitality." Archaeologist Louis Binford astutely observed that archaeologists are poorly equipped to be paleo-psychologists.
Dever admits with praiseworthy candor that he is not objective, and feels obliged to provide us with a brief summary of his personal history and religious background. From his father, a "fire and brimstone" fundamentalist preacher, he inherited his love of the Bible, but not his fundamentalism. His education began at a church school in Tennessee, but later took a sharp turn when he went to Harvard University and chose archaeology over theology. Over the past 40 years, he has been teaching and conducting digs in Israel and Jordan. Eventually, he converted to Judaism and joined the Reform movement, although he regards himself as a secular humanist.
Unsurprisingly, the best chapter in the book is the one entitled "The archaeological evidence for folk religion in ancient Israel." Here, he describes a dozen small household shrines with similar architectural features and artifacts: altars, ledges, incense bowls, food remnants, and remnants of sacrifices and tributes. These were family shrines that had no need for priests. These pagan family rituals are described in detail by the prophet Jeremiah: "The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cake for the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto other gods" (Jeremiah 7:18). This "queen of heaven" was the goddess Astarte.
A notch above them were the outdoor bamot or open-air altars (the most beautiful discovered to date is the one at Tel Dan). The largest of these ritual buildings were the temples, such as those unearthed in Nablus and Arad. After the return to Zion, in the early Second Temple period, monotheistic religion took over completely. From this time on, all the pagan structures and paraphernalia disappeared - including household shrines, open-air sanctuaries, incense bowls and figurines.
Sex with the Shekhina
Two chapters of the book are devoted, of course, to Asherah. One explores the cult of Asherah and the archaeological and especially iconographic evidence for it (accepted by the author and some scholars, but not all). The other is about women's cults and "official Yahwism." Are these female figurines, consisting only of the upper torso and in particular, large breasts - a very common artifact, of which over a thousand have been unearthed - Asherah? The author claims they are, but this is highly unlikely. They are probably fertility charms. It is very important to remember that no iconographic evidence of Israelite gods has ever been found in First Temple sites (and later, of course). Reading what other scholars have to say about this topic, both those who agree with the author and those who don't, is thus extremely enlightening. One chapter of the book is called "What does the goddess do to help?"
For the Israeli reader, brought up on Yehezkel Kaufmann, the renowned Bible scholar, who claimed that Israelite religion in the biblical era was strictly monotheistic from the outset, with negligible traces of paganism at the fringes, this book offers a different and more up-to-date picture. A person could say, okay, almost 3,000 years ago our forefathers believed that god had a wife, but this silly idea disappeared from the world a long time ago. But this is not true. Not only has this approach not died out, but it is still warmly embraced by many pious Jews (not always consciously), through the influence of kabbala.
The concept of the Shekhina has many meanings. In kabbala, the Shekhina represents the female element of the Sefirot, or divine emanations. In kabbala, the primary objective in worshipping God is to bring about the sexual union between the male principle - the sixth Sefira, known as Tiferet or Yesod, and the female principle - the tenth Sefira, usually called Shekhina (but also known as Malkhut, Knesset Yisrael and Atara). In certain versions of the siddur (Jewish prayerbook) influenced by kabbalistic traditions, such as those used in the Hasidic community, certain prayers and mitzvot are prefaced by the following verse in Aramaic - "Leshem yihud kudsha berikh hu veshechintay." In English translation: For the sake of the union of the Holy One, Blessed be He, and his Shekhina. That union, to remove any doubts, is a sexual coupling. The purpose of this act is to restore harmony to the world, after it was knocked off kilter by the sins of the Jewish people, the evil machinations of the "Sitra Achra" (the "Other Side") and the experience of galut (exile).
Dever learned about this kabbalistic outlook from "The Hebrew Goddess" by Rafael Patai, but he did not read Yehuda Liebes' Hebrew article "Zohar and Eros" (Alpayim, 1994) and Moshe Idel's "Kabbala and Eros," which has only been published in English recently. If this sounds bizarre to the reader, I take the liberty of throwing modesty to the winds and drawing attention to another, even more bizarre phenomenon. When religious Jews sway back and forth in pious prayer, this swaying has a profound pantomimic significance. To quote from the book "Tzava'at Ha-Ribash" (about Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, also known as the Besht, the founder of Hasidism), "prayer is intercourse with the Shekhina, and just as one rocks back and forth at the start of intercourse, thus one must initially rock oneself back and forth in prayer. Then one may stand still and cleave deeply to the Shekhina. And while rocking back and forth and bringing oneself to a state of tremendous arousal, think: Why am I rocking? Because the Shekhina may be standing before me, and the very thought arouses great passion."
Source: Haaretz.com
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/952289.html