Who Is Astoreth?
Honouring Astoreth in your life is a way of honouring life itself – seeing yourself in the universe. Astoreth is the Goddess of Love and War – the two sides of the coin within ourselves. She is a reminder to make peace with ourselves.
The honouring of Astoreth was recorded in the Hebrew bible, but she is more commonly known as Astarte.
To celebrate the energy of Astoreth - also known as Astarte - is to celebrate independent spirit – we can call on her to help us achieve our goals and to persevere when life’s obstacles and battles get us down.
To the Egyptians, Astarte was honoured as a Goddess of War and to the Semites she was a Goddess of Love and Fertility. King Solomon built a Temple to Her as Astoreth, near Jerusalem.
The cult of Astarte spread from around 1478 BC from Phoenicia and on to Greece, Rome and even to the British Isles. Prophets of the Bible condemned her worship as they believed sexual rituals and animal sacrifices to be part of her worship.
Astoreth in Israel
Astarte was perceived as both a beautiful goddess and a dangerous one. Her horns represent fertility, but they could appear fearsome. In her warrior aspect she was the "mistress of horses and chariots."
Various depictions of Astarte have been found in Israel. Her name appears in the Hebrew Bible as Ashteroth Karnaim, where Karnaim means ‘of the two horns.’
A mold was found in a shrine in Israel depicting a naked goddess with two horns dating back to between the 16th and 18th centuries BC.
Similarly in ancient Taanach in northern Israel, they found a terracotta stand with a naked goddess flanked by two lions, above this is a tree and at the top a bull calf entering a doorway and above that a winged sun disc believed to date back to 10th Century BC.
It has been interpreted as an Israelite cult deity and also a Canaanite cult object. One interpretation is that as the Goddess is on the bottom level she underpins everything – she stands as the foundation of heaven, earth and the underworld. The calf represents her consort, her male aspect. The door represents entering the worldly and underworldly planes. The tree represents her energy going down into the earth through the roots and up to the heavens through the branches.
Holding in her grasp the aspects of love and fertility, fire and sexual prowess, war and victory – Astarte is a Goddess of life force energy, creative drive and inner strength.
Opposites Reconciled
Again like Kali, the Hindu Goddess, who is celebrated as the Creator and the Destroyer and ultimately the Mother, we wonder how you can embody the flip sides of love and war, fertility and death?
It is a real challenge to our Western psyche to see the mother as the destroyer. In order to create, the mother also has to destroy, just like the cycles of life with Mother Nature. We are born and we die, so we emerge from the Mother and then return to her.
We cannot escape the fires of life, we cannot escape the death of loved ones or the death of a relationship, we must embrace them and when we honour Astoreth, she gives us the courage and inner strength to go on.
As my kindred spirit and fellow EOL writer Amoda says in her book How to Find God in Everything – “Every time we close down to numb the pain or tighten to defend against discomfort, we resist what is happening in the now. And in turning away from this moment, we give our power away: we become victims of our circumstances.”
If we happily meditate or do yoga but then all our buttons get pushed in the ‘real world’ when bad things happen or we get very upset when we remember the traumas of our past, we are not living our yoga or our meditation. We are using it as a place to hide, to feel better about ourselves, to build our spiritual ego.
Our yoga, meditation or any other practice is there to reflect back to us how we live our lives and where we can make changes.
Most of the time we are seeking good or even peak experiences, running from the painful experiences and feeling distraught that we don’t have enough of the good experiences. We are constantly judging our experiences.
“Every experience of you life is a calling from God. Every experience – whether it is pleasurable or painful – is an invitation to embrace the fullness and depth of the moment as it is now,” says Amoda.
Ways of honouring Astoreth…
• Meditate on Astoreth and your independent spirit at the Crescent Moon.
• Feast – the traditional way of honouring the Goddess was to feast and make offerings of honey, beer, wine and incense. Placing a pomegranate on your altar is an honouring of the energies of Astoreth (the fruit bearing eggs). The Egg is also a sacred symbol of Astarte/Astoreth as the Goddess of Fertility. (Naturally honouring Astarte/Astoreth takes on potent significance if you trying to have a baby.)
• You can use the crystals of Rose Quartz, Garnet, Smokey Quartz and Fire Agate to instil the energies of Astoreth within you as they give peace and fire.
• Make an affirmation to be resilient, resourceful and to see your path clearly.