(Book Excerpt 6) Asherah: Roots of the Mother Tree ed. by Trista Hendren Et Al

[Editor’s Note: This excerpt series is from Asherah: Roots of the Mother Tree ed by Claire Dorey, Janet Rudolph, Pat Daly, and Trista Hendren (Girl God Books, 2025).]

Asherah and Taghonia: A Moroccan Rain Ritual with Roots in Ancient Goddess Worship

Laura Shannon

The Great Mother Goddess was honoured throughout ancient North Africa and the Near East, with many different names. In and around Canaan, she was known as Asherah, Mother of Creation, Queen of Heaven, and consort of the male god El/Yahweh.^[1] In Canaan, countless archaeological discoveries of ‘images of the Goddess, some dating back as far as 7000 BCE, offer silent testimony to the most ancient worship of the Queen of Heaven in the land that is today most often remembered as the birthplace of both Judaism and Christianity.’^[2]

Hebrews arrived in Canaan around 1250 BCE, and began a campaign of horrific violence to destroy the existing polytheistic religion (multiple female and male deities, the Goddess predominant) and replace it with their own newly monotheistic paradigm of one male god. The Old Testament reports how Jehovah ‘commanded’ his followers to destroy Asherah and those who worshipped her. People ignored these orders and continued to revere the Queen of Heaven, but in the end – after centuries of brutal violence – Asherah was vanquished, her followers were converted, and her rites were forgotten.

At least, that is the standard narrative. However, traces of Asherah as the life-giving Goddess associated with trees and wooden poles still survive in women’s folk art and ceremonial customs throughout the region. These rituals and symbols may have survived since pre-patriarchal times through the agency of the Canaanite women who were captured, not killed, by the invading Hebrews. One possible example of surviving Asherah worship may be discerned in the rain-bringing ritual known in Morocco as Taghonja.

Asherah

The many names for the Near Eastern Goddess – Asherah, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Aset, Isis, Anat, Tanit, Elat, Baalat, Attoret, Athirat, Atiratu, Athtar, Ashertu, Ishtar – can all be understood as iterations of one Great Mother. In Syria and Palestine, Asherah was the most popular of these. Asherah is named in inscriptions and depicted in terracotta plaques and statues, identified with the Tree of Life along with other attributes. In clay pillar-figures, she is shown as a fertile goddess with generous breasts, and Ugaritic texts from Syria (ca. 1300 BCE) call her a wet nurse.

In ancient Egypt and elsewhere, rain was seen as the life-giving milk of the Mother Goddess. Asherah was associated with water in her epithet as ‘bride of the sky’, whose lovemaking with her consort Baal, the storm god, brought rain to the people after the dry season or a time of drought. This is significant, when considering how the worship of Asherah may have survived in rain-bringing rituals in the Near East and North Africa.

In Canaan, Asherah’s sacred places included high hills and mountaintops, ‘under every spreading tree and every leafy oak’.^[3] Identified with the Tree of Life, Asherah was represented by wooden poles or pillars known as asherim. These were ‘cut and shaped from a tree’, ‘adorned with silver and gold’, and ‘had to be carried’.^[4] Her rites were chiefly in the hands of the women, who honoured her with incense and liquid offerings, and baked sweet cakes for the Queen of Heaven.^[5] Women also wove elaborate veils to dress the asherim, Asherah’s wooden pillars or poles.^[6]

Dozens of Old Testament references in the first millennium BCE report the violence with which Israelites attempted to suppress the worship of the Queen of Heaven. In Exodus 34:13, Jehovah exhorts Israelites to ‘destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves’. In Ezekiel 6:3-7 and elsewhere, Jehovah threatens all those who keep the old ways of Goddess worship with wholesale slaughter.^[7]

The people resisted. The book of Jeremiah describes a telling altercation which took place in a Hebrew colony in Egypt around 600 BCE, where the women assert:

“We have no intention listening to this word you have spoken to us in Yahweh’s name but intend to go on doing all that we have vowed to do, offering incense to the queen of heaven and pouring libations in her honor as we used to do, we and our fathers, our kings and our leaders in the town of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We had plenty of food then, we lived well, we suffered no disasters. But since we have given up offering incense to the queen of heaven and pouring libations in her honor we have been destitute and have perished either by sword or by famine.”^[8]

As Merlin Stone points out, this passage reveals that ‘the religion of the Goddess and the reverence paid to Her, even by the Hebrews of that time, was… not a new religion that they had recently adopted, but one that these Hebrews had followed before—in Jerusalem. It also strongly hints that this was a religion of women.’^[9]

Despite the resistance, after hundreds of years of brutal violence, the Israelites did eradicate the overt Goddess worship which had been part of women’s daily lives for millennia. Asherah’s sacred trees were cut down and the asherim were burned.^[10] The Goddess religion was wiped out. Or was it?

Again, the Old Testament describes how the besieging Hebrews killed the Canaanite men, boys, mothers and mature women, but captured virgin women for their own sexual use. (Numbers 31:17, 31:32–35, Deuteronomy 21:10–14). These young women, after witnessing the terrible slaughter of their families, were forced to become wives of the Hebrews. We can imagine their desperate need for comfort, connection and strength after this individual and collective trauma. Where else would they turn for succour if not to the Mother Goddess Asherah? Having been brought up in the worship of Asherah by their mothers and grandmothers, they would most likely have surreptitiously continued to honour her in the private spheres of their own homes, even though public offerings to asherim were now forbidden. These Canaanite women most likely ensured the continuing reverence of Asherah, albeit in disguise.

For she was not uprooted, she did not disappear. Her worship continues, in other forms and names. Images of a life-giving Goddess identified with trees, poles, and pillars are found everywhere in women’s folk art and ceremonial customs throughout North Africa and the Near East. The Tree of Life remains a central symbol in textile motifs, jewellery designs, and seasonal ceremonies.^[11] The women of this region have not abandoned their reverence for trees, fertility, milk, rain, and the mysterious divine female figure, Taghonja, who combines all these aspects, as did Asherah.

Taghonja

One of the survivals in which remnants of Asherah worship can be most easily discerned is a rain-bringing ritual widespread throughout the Maghreb, the Sahel and North Africa.^[12] It is also found in Syria, Palestine (where it is also practiced by Greek Christians) and Armenia, and is related to the Peperouda rain-bringing rituals of Greece and Bulgaria.^[13] I shall describe this ceremony as it takes place in southern Morocco, a region where ‘glimpses of a pre-patriarchal worldview remain visible through the overlays of Christianity and Islam imposed by Romans and Arabs respectively, showing matriarchal structures from earlier times’.^[14] Here, the ritual is called Taghonja.

In times of drought, when rain is needed, women fashion a female figure (from doll-sized to life-sized) from a large wooden ladle or a portable wooden pole. This could be a broom, threshing shovel, winnowing fork, a large ladle, or a reed cane. Smaller wooden ladles are tied crossways across this central pole to give her hands, while her head could be formed by a third ladle, a pestle, or a pot-stirring stick. Alternatively, Westermarck describes, women in the Doukkala region of Morocco ‘may also make use of an ordinary piece of wood instead of a ladle and carry this to a neighbouring shrine, where they place it in a standing posi­tion and dance and play round it singing.’^[15]

Both the figure and the ritual are called Taghonja, a name based on a Berber word for ‘ladle’.^[16] This is significant, as the ladles which serve as her hands are meant to fill will rain and pour out the abundant flowing water the community so desperately needs.

Indeed, the simplest Taghonja ‘dolls’ are made from a single wooden ladle dressed as a bride.

Westermarck and other scholars acknowledge the Taghonja figure as an evident descendant from an ancient mother goddess, of the earth or the rain or both.^[17] Laoust considers parallels with the Carthaginian goddess Tanit, or the ‘Berber goddess’, whom he does not name; in any case, he states, Taghonja is ‘clearly the name of a divinity… of immense popularity.’^[18]

The Taghonja is known as the ‘bride of the rain’, reflecting Asherah’s epithets, ‘bride of the sky’ and ‘consort of the storm god’. The women dress her in wedding garments embroidered with silver and gold, and adorn her with fine bridal jewellery. Does this not remind us of the wooden asherim pillars adorned with cloth and dedicated to Asherah thousands of years ago? Does this not echo the description of asherim in the book of Jeremiah, of wooden poles or pillars ‘cut and shaped from a tree’, ‘adorned with silver and gold’, and ‘carried’?

Once the Taghonja is prepared, the women burn incense, pour libations, and offer sweet cakes, just as Asherah’s followers used to do. Accompanied by singing, dancing, clapping, and drumming with frame drums – women’s ways of worship also referenced in the Old Testament – the women and children carry the Taghonja in procession to a source of water, such as a stream or lake. They may also carry her to sacred trees and groves, a mosque or shrine, threshing grounds, ‘high places’ such as a  hilltop or rooftop, and other sites in some way connected with fertility and water.

The women sing prayers such as ‘O Tlghunja, O mother of hope, O God give rain’, or ‘Taghenja has loosened her hair, O God mayest thou wet her ear-rings’, or ‘Agunja asked for hope, make the morning rainy, O our lord’.^[19] In one version of the ritual, a woman blessed with a large family places the Taghonja on the roof of her house while praying for rain, with her hair unbound. If her hair flutters in the wind, it is seen as a sign that rain is coming. Not only in North Africa, but also throughout the Balkan and Slavic lands as well as Anatolia and the Caucasus, a woman’s hair unbound and uncovered is a powerful charm to bring rain.^[20]

In some instances, women remove more than their headscarves. According to Westermarck, women of the Tsoul tribe in the Rif practice a rain-bringing ritual where they ‘go to a place where they cannot be seen by men and play there, in a state of complete nakedness, a game of ball called kura with wooden ladles.’^[21]  A kura or koura is a small ball densely woven from heather twigs, used in the ancient Berber game thakourth. This game is normally played exclusively by men and boys to bring joy and welcome the arrival of spring, so a secret game played by women is unusual indeed. Traditionally, thakourth is not merely a game: it is also considered a means of community conflict resolution, bringing together neighbours and friends to resolve difficulties and settle disputes.^[22] Might there be a connection between practices designed to bring peace in the community and the coming of rain?

Women and children carry the Taghonja between sacred sites and from door to door, dancing and singing, flinging nuts, dried fruits, sweets, and drops of water over the Taghonja, the earth, and one another, laughing as if already enjoying the delight, abundance, and sweetness of the longed-for rain. Twice I have witnessed this ritual in southern Morocco, and both times, before the ceremony was finished, rain began to fall.

Above all, I remember the women’s laughter, how the Taghonja brought joy and delight to faces lined with worry from years of drought. One of the possible etymologies for the Hebrew name Asherah – aleph-shin-resh – is the same as the root of the word me’ushar, ‘to be blessed’.^[23] This root is also associated with happiness and laughter.^[24] I can certainly imagine devotees of Asherah in antiquity laughing joyfully as they decorate and celebrate Asherah and her asherim.

According to Miriam Robbins Dexter, another possible Semitic root of Asherah is the Hebrew ʾāšar, ‘to tread, to go straight on.’^[25] In the footsteps of the women, in their procession from water source to threshing ground under gentle raindrops from the sky, carrying their wooden pole dressed as a divine female figure to whom they pray for rain, I see how Asherah too, treads on. Even if hidden from view, her worship was not eradicated after all. It simply went underground, like streams of precious water. This water is there, for those with eyes to see. And it flows straight on.

---

^[1] Kosnick 2017.

^[2] Stone, 1978:231.

^[3]  Ezekiel 6:3.

^[4] Jeremiah 10:3-5.

^[5] Jeremiah 44:17-18; 7:18-19.

^[6] 2 Kings 23:7.

^[7] See also Judges 6:25, 2 Chronicles 34:4, Isaiah 17:8, Jeremiah 17:2, Micah 5:14, Ezekiel 6:13.

^[8] Jeremiah 44:15-19.

^[9] Stone 1978:243.

^[10] 2 Kings 23:6.

^[11] Shannon 2019a.

^[12] Abu-Zahra 1988.

^[13] Shannon 2014.

^[14] Shannon 2019b.

^[15] Westermarck 1926.

^[16] Other names include Tlghunja, Tlghenja, Talghunja, Tlganja, Aghunja, Aghenja, Taghenja, and Tenoghja.

^[17] Westermarck 1926.

^[18] Laoust 1920:228.

^[19] Westermarck 1926.

^[20] Barber 2013.

^[21] Westermarck 1926.

^[22] Beljedoui 2024.

^[23] Helman 2025, this volume, citing Pass 2020.

^[24] Moriah 2025, this volume.

^[25]  Dexter 2025, this volume.

References

Abu-Zahra, Nadia. ‘The Rain Rituals as Rites of Spiritual Passage’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 pp. 507-529. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Beljedoui, Radhia. ‘Algerian villagers celebrate spring with ancestral ball game’. Arab Weekly, 22 May 2024.

Dexter, Miriam Robbins. ‘The Great Goddess Asherah’, this volume, 2025.

Kosnick, Darlene. History’s Vanquished Goddess: ASHERAH. Emergent Press, 2017.

Laoust, Emile. Mots et choses berbères: notes de linguistique et d’ethnographie: dialectes du Maroc. Paris: A. Challamel, 1920.

Pass, Rachael. ‘Meet Asherah, the Little Known Jewish Tree Goddess.’ HeyAlma, 6 February 2020. Cited in Ivy Helman, ‘Asherah and the Trees’, this volume, 2025.

Shannon, Laura. ‘Language of the Goddess in Balkan Women’s Circle Dance.’ in Feminist Theology, Sage Publishing, 2019.

Shannon, Laura. ‘What I Learn from Women in Southern Morocco’. feminismandreligion.com, November 2, 2019.

Shannon, Laura. ‘Um Regen tanzen: Lebensspendendes Geschenk des Himmels an die Erde’, in Neue Kreise Ziehen Fachzeitschrift für meditativen & sakralen Tanz, Heft 1, 2014.        

Stone, Merlin. When God Was A Woman. Mariner Books, 1978.

Usus, Mohammad.  ‘The Call for Rain in Imazighen (Berber) Rituals and Legends in North Africa’ in Folk Culture (Bahrain). Vol 4, Issue 14, 2011.

Westermarck, Edward. Ritual and belief in Morocco (2 vols.) London: Macmillan, 1926.

Meet Mago Contributor, Trista Hendren