Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons,for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. – Deuteronomy
Once upon a time, in a sandy land much given to war, we took our burdens, our character weaknesses and our failures and heaped them upon the backs of two fine goats.
The high priest, in his breastplate of gold, laid his hands upon the goats’ adorned heads, saddling them with the weight of a nation’s transgressions. One was sacrificed to the nation’s sole god, who had become a god of war and division. This god ensured the people of their specialness if they cut down the sacred groves, set themselves apart and hardened their hearts against their neighbors.
The other was driven into the wilderness.
The sacrifice of the scapegoats – one to the blade and the other to exile – purifies the community, according to the ancient Abrahamic paradigm. Hierarchical dualism comprises the tent-poles of authoritarian systems and authoritarian faiths. It is the exile or destruction of the Other that binds the community together, ensuring the cohesion of communal righteousness.
Cultures that enshrine war as a god require scapegoats to function because – if you peek under the tabernacle’s tent-flap – these societies function poorly in measures of health, shared abundance and kindness. When much of your cultural energy goes toward conquering the neighbors, you’re not sowing the fields, or pursuing new avenues of innovation or artistic expression, or building hospitals.
Warrior cultures typically have a strongman on top – in ancient times, a monarch believed to have been divinely appointed or descended – attended by a flock of “treasured” elites. And whenever people begin to question the inequities of dominator culture, the leader and the elites immediately point to the Other.
It’s their fault. If we only drive them away or kill them, then we will be pure.
It’s a Wizard of Oz-level distraction, of course, because the goats are just goats – intelligent, witty creatures capable of surviving in marginal places. Killing the goats makes us feel pure and righteous, and that’s what matters in the end.
During wide swathes of history – and especially in the lead-up to World War II – the scapegoats were Jews. During other periods, they were old women or the neighborhood eccentric, condemned as witches. Sometimes they were folks with minor doctrinal differences, or who worshiped the same god with slightly different words and gestures.
Feminists. Liberals. Environmentalists and sundry treehuggers. The LGTBQ community, particularly trans people.
But if you look back at that motley assortment of ancient texts that we call the Bible, the oldest scapegoats are Pagans – the Canaanites and their neighbors, the people of Asherah, the Tree of Life who was also called Astarte, Aphrodite, Auset, Ishtar.
Kill them, thunders the god of war. Drive them out.
‘I mean, I am like so filled with humility right now’
Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. — Samuel
I was thinking of scapegoats and Asherah poles this week after the publication of a truly piece-of-shit article in The Atlantic. I won’t bother linking to it, but I will tell you that it’s an ahistorical and mighty hubristic piece written by a popular rabbi that blames Pagans for, well, everything.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump? “Pagan,” the author proclaims. Appearance-focused celebrity culture with a focus on lip fillers and Botox? Pagan. Gun-toting Christian nationalists obsessed with power? Pagan. Annoying hemp-wearing vegans who cry when a horse is killed, but advocate the late-term abortion of fetuses with Trisomy 18? Pagan.
“They’re not like us,” he sniffs, while he conveniently forgets the definition of irony. “We monotheists are filled with humility.”
The author, in his defense, didn’t have today’s Pagans in mind when he shat out his words. He cherrypicked and misread Greek philosophers, proclaiming Paganism to be the worship of force/violence or beauty (including nature), in perpetual opposition to the One Male Person of monotheism.
He didn’t have a sense of Pagans as real people at all, both now and in ancient times – and that is exactly the point. Because in this paradigm, we aren’t people with families, hopes, dreams, occasionally rewarding careers and tax bills to pay. We’re filthy subhuman animals – goats and dogs, also known as the Other.
This sort of shit-piece used to be much more common than it is today. Paganism has been the ultimate scapegoat since Christians struck a deal with the Roman Emperor Constantine, allowing them access to the levers of power. But the hatred of the Other long predates the marriage of empire and monotheism: It is, perhaps, the fatal human flaw of tribalism that typically crops up during periods of privation and conflict … and that still crops up today in the very land of its mythical birth.
Once upon a time, there was a mighty and ancient people who lived by the sea. Over the centuries, they drifted into two separate communities: the valley-dwelling farmers and the herders of the hills, who lived a harsher, less abundant life than those in the fertile valley.
Still, they spoke the same language, traded and married with one another. They made offerings before images of the Tree of Life, and cakes for the Queen of Heaven. When wars threatened, the pragmatic people of the Valley found a way to absorb and accommodate the stranger – but the Hill people were more inclined to fight. In fact, the Hill people were so good at fighting that they became sought-after mercenaries throughout the region, particularly in Egypt.
During the long press of time, prophets arose among the Hill people, who abandoned their gods in favor of one single male god of war. As I learned in my college class on ancient religions in the Near East, the rules of Deuteronomy weren’t for practical reasons, such as maximizing protein sources or avoiding trichinosis. Rather, they were intended to differentiate the Hill people from their Valley neighbors.
The Hill people cut down the Asherah poles that once stood before that god’s tent-tabernacles, the symbol of Life, Death’s beloved wife. And this death-god wasn’t through; he spoke through his prophets and high priests, urging them to scorn the Valley people, to drive them out and claim that land of milk and honey as their own.
“Kill them all,” the war-god hissed in the holy of holies.
Thankfully, this demand remained in the realm of myth, for the most part; actual genetic research shows that the people of the Near East are the direct descendants of the Valley people and their neighbors in the hills.
Seriously, what’s wrong with dogs?
You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. – Anne Lamott
The prejudice against the Pagans – the Canaanites, the people of the fertile valley – was so deeply rooted that even Jesus hated them. When you grow up in a society that scapegoats the Other, it can be damn hard to break out of that even when you yourself are Other, born the bastard son of a woman suspected of adultery.
Out of love for her mentally ill daughter, a Canaanite woman approached Jesus on the road, asking for his help. He refused, calling her a dog, unworthy of the gifts meant for Israel’s people. Likely expecting to be kicked, she knelt before him and pleaded: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
And he gave in and healed her daughter.
This story is one of the reasons I have been convinced since Sunday school that Jesus was fully human – an oft-wise teacher and healer, but given to the same boneheaded mistakes and prejudices of his fellow primates. The Canaanite woman is just as much of a child of the Divine as he is – perhaps more so in that moment; while she acts out of love and humility, he first denies her out of the arrogance of prejudice.
We never hear from this woman again. She is Other, the daughter of Asherah, and this story is not her story.
Perhaps we need to tell her story – the Woman from the Valley who so loved her sick daughter that she sought out healer after healer, and humbled herself before the feet of a man who reviled her.
Who taught this healer the virtue of dogs, who are known for their devotion and who would sacrifice their pride for love.
History shows us that driving the Other out does not purify the people, but only compounds the arrogance and hatred of tribalism. If you look at the legacy of pogroms, witch hunts, religious wars and genocides, they do notstop with the targeted group, but expand to ever-widening circles of harm.
Because power-over systems are built on a scapegoat; if one is put to the knife, another needs to be found.
Here’s the thing: Donald Trump, Elon Musk and all the sundry “baddies” are not Pagans, and labeling them as such doesn’t drive out the iniquities of monotheistic power-over culture. You, my dear Hill person, are not chosen or better or sought-after because you have a relationship with one particular face of deity. And, if you proclaim your humility, you are not, in fact, humble. The opposite, actually.
Speaking for the Valley people here, we really don’t mind that you have different beliefs or ritual practices or cultural practices. We will honor your sacred places as sacred and protect your altars. We will trade with you, and marry you, and tend the orchard with you. We’ll sit down for some creative communal problem-solving.
But you don’t get to desecrate our altars or burn our xoana. That’s just dirty pool.
This Earth does not belong to you, or to us, or to anyone; She is part of the Goddess, sacred in her own right. Possession is a mind trick, and so is hierarchical dualism; there is no Other but only us, in all our differences and many similarities. Hate never made anyone holy.
Feed your dogs and love them, bring the goats home to the garth. Let us rewrite the story of Canaan together, as children of the Tree of Life.
White Cat Grove 
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