Big $ Brainwashing!! A billionaire (google) spends more than $100 million to defeat the CA billionaire Wealth Tax vote! Wow.

 California voters yesterday rejected a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ net worth. During the run-up to the election, the “no” side raised roughly 10 times as much as the “yes” side, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone spending more than $100 million into a political action committee working to defeat the measure. The “Yes on 40” campaign said the measure sought to protect healthcare for Californians and that they will put a tax back on the ballot in 2028 if patients are not protected. Sophie Austin reports for AP News.

 would have imposed a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of Californians whose net worth exceeds $1 billion. Most of the money would have been used to backfill federal funding cuts to healthcare, and 10% would have gone toward education and food-assistance programs.

“Buying an election is not the same as winning the debate,” the measure’s proponents said in a statement on Monday. “The billionaires may have bought themselves a temporary victory at the ballot box, but they have not bought themselves an end to this debate, and this is only round one.”

Billionaires donated millions of dollars to a political action committee, Building a Better California, working to defeat the measure. The committee, which backed other measures on the ballot designed to nullify the tax, raised more than $333 million, nearly a third of which came from Brin.

California is home to more than 250 billionaires (around 255 according to recent Forbes estimates), maintaining its position as the U.S. state with the highest concentration of billionaire residents. [1, 2]

• Total Count: Approximately 250–255 billionaires live in or claim residency in the state.
Collective Wealth: Their total net worth is estimated at around $1.87 trillion to $2.06 trillion.
Top Figures: Prominent California billionaires include Meta's Mark Zuckerberg (the state's richest resident) and Nvidia's Jensen Huang.

But some of the state’s wealthiest people aren’t taking any chances and have already moved out of state, starting with its two wealthiest people, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to their representatives, Page (estimated fortune: $288 billion) and Brin ($265 billion) are now residents of Florida and Nevada, respectively. 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2026/10/14/how-californias-billionaire-exodus-is-changing-whos-richest-in-other-states/ 
 Eisenhower had a 91% marginal tax rate on the rich! But now it's considered wrong to have a progressive tax on the rich. What are the results? https://theconversation.com/us-national-debt-keeps-rising-after-years-of-tax-cuts-and-this-will-make-policymaking-all-the-more-difficult-292099
•  

  Even as the U.S. economy grew, lawmakers have cut taxes repeatedly, sometimes with bipartisan support, instead of paying down debt.

  The series of tax cuts since 2001 has added over $10 trillion to the debt, according to an analysis of Congressional Budget Office data by the Center for American Progress. In fact, without these series of cuts, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be decreasing, the study found.

   

Someone takes interest in my research and so I summarize it again! thanks to Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

 https://alisav.substack.com/p/the-symphony-in-my-head-how-a-hidden

nice to hear more recognition of auditory reality via music training! Fields Medal math professor Alain Connes has a great talk called "Music of Shapes" on yt - he describes orchestration as different spacetimes all harmonized. He goes deeper into the truth of music as noncommutative nonlocality. He likes to read scores on the subway in Paris... to help him do mathematics.

I actually got a peer-reviewed academic paper published in this noncommutative music secret to meditation and biophysics - see the open access "Cosmos and History" Dec. 2024 article "noncommutativity music as biophysics" - https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1100

Your ability is very impressive!! I can somewhat relate from my own music training but - my article explains my focus on something a bit more strange about music. Have you heard of the book "The Haunting Melody"? That writer was with Brahms and Freud in Vienna - arguing that music is the gateway to our subconscious. I think there is a deeper truth to this that also ties into political economy (not like Jacques Attali but even deeper). thanks,

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Catherine Condon

Catherine Condon 39m

I am totally ignorant of what you’ve laid out. I’m captivated and would like to read more. I want to read the book you’ve mentioned. Any place else I should look for more info?

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voidisyinyang

voidisyinyang 1m

The Haunting Melody:Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music is a 1953 book by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik (1888–1969), a prominent early student of Sigmund Freud

https://archive.org/details/hauntingmelody0000unse

If you allow me to share - I don't want to "spam" but I grew up in Minneapolis where music training was taken very seriously (must have been the very long cold winters). I started music training at age 3 and classical piano at age five. Turns out early music training increases the corpus callosum that integrates the right and left brain.

But by age 15 I was taking "adult" music theory and I noticed a logical error. I was also training with a University music professor in private lessons (ear training, orchestration, music composition). He said "Oh that's just logarithms."

OK but my dad was a serious lawyer and I took logic seriously - and I stuck to my "guns" so to speak. I thought I had discovered a great secret to reality and my music teachers began giving me some mystic books and philosophy of science, etc.

My 1st year of college I went to Hampshire and I took quantum physics from Herbert J. Bernstein - (he designed NASA's quantum teleportation system but he also collaborated with Anton Zeillinger who got the Nobel prize in 2022 on nonlocality).

Anyway - suddenly I noticed the SAME logical secret I had discovered from my music theory class!! I kept this to myself but I wrote home about it - who was I? Just an undergrad but again I stuck to "my guns" and I pursued it.

My theory was that this secret to basic music explains the foundation of reality - and also harmonizes reality. Anyway - I was in a music composition degree at University of Wisconsin Madison but I was also protesting all the time on social environmental justice. My professor claimed my transcription of a Schoeberg piano sonata to string quartet was "communist" - he called me in to a meeting to say this and to order me to redo my past assignments that already had gotten "As" and Bs." I was protesting a lot nearby the music building so I put two and two together - he and his co-professor had gone through Princeton and bragged that we could all go to Princeton. They were into computer avant-garde music and I didnt' realize that was a whole Anti-Communist CIA propaganda "freedom" thing. hahaha

So I did my undergraduate in "sustainability" but determined to pursue my music secret - I noticed a qigong master Effie P. Chow giving a demonstration. I was skeptical but thought this might be the secret I was looking for. I asked for "Half off" the price - and brought my gf - we paid $10 each. Sure enough after she filled the room with qi and had us make "qi balls" I felt a very strong force - magnetic force pushing the centers of my hands apart. A security guard wandered in at St. Mary's University - Minneapolis - asking what was going on in there since the fuse got blown in the room behind us! The Chinese lady was small and I was hooked.

I found John Beaulieu's book on "Biosonics" - he was a Ph.D. but in psychiatry but he ended up training in music tuning as healing energy - using tuning forks. Sure enough he explained the secret of Qi energy was the SAME secret I had discovered.

Now I was off the races and I wrote a monograph that got me into graduate school for Liberal Studies at U of Minnesota - self-designed. I did my master's thesis on what I called "sound-current nondualism." But I had to test it out! A qigong master did a presentation at my University spiritual healing class and I had done enough research to realize he was the real deal. He works with Mayo clinic doctors - his name is Chunyi Lin and he has the http://springforestqigong.com clinic

So I took his classes to finish my degree - through the African Studies Department! Self-directed based on the racial Contract book - that Platonic philosophy as the "great chain of being" from equal-tempered tuning logarithms with inverse exponential growth for the elite is inherently racist and also promotes eugenics.

I then experienced seriously mind-body transformation and I could feel the center of my brain. I saw ghosts that Chunyi Lin was healing - and I had telepathy and telekinesis and I did serious healing - with no touching.

But the energy was too strong and out of control and I experienced a spacetime vortex! I stopped practicing seriously after that (by serious I mean celibacy also has to be maintained both mentally and physically).

I went into a "dirty tantra" practice and my goal was to cause a global revolution out of Minneapolis via free love psychic healing energy. I sat in full lotus in public all the time while I read one scholarly book a day and had psychic energy healing experiences with "strangers." I called this "Etherealize Pranarchy!" (a pun on Prana and Ether and anarchy and realize).

OK... then I did lots of free research posted online - you can find that at my academia edu site. https://independent.academia.edu/hempeldrew

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shamanic Deer Skull Masks of the Northern European Mesolithic African-Trait people, 10,000 BCE Mesolithic hunter-gatherers

 

  It showed that the [Danish, 4500 BCE] person was female and had dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes. She was also more closely related to hunter-gatherers from mainland Europe than those [neolithic farmers] who lived in central Scandinavia at the time, according to a report in Nature Communications.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/17/neolithic-dna-ancient-chewing-gum-denmark 

 At Star Carr in what is now Yorkshire, the sediments of an ancient and now-vanished glacial meltwater lake have preserved a rare level of detail of an ancient hunter-gatherer settlement, occupied on and off for roughly a thousand years from about 9,300 BCE to 8,300 BCE. It may have been a seasonal winter retreat, part of a long-term lifestyle in between nomadism and full “sedentism.” Alongside stone tools, wood, bone, and antler crafts that would have decomposed at most sites this old were here preserved in the mud, revealing the inhabitants as expert carpenters who made everything from ax shafts to large platforms mounted on stilts made from entire carved tree trunks. Genetic analysis reveals that these Mesolithic Europeans, part of the first-ever Homo sapiens group to live in Great Britain after the ice retreated, were dark-skinned, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, “unlike any modern group of people in physical appearance.” Most strikingly, these Star Carr people made elaborate headdresses and masks from parts of smoothed and carved deer skulls, with thirty-three different examples found so far.

 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Carr_Frontlets

 A total of 21 headdresses made from red deer skulls were found in this excavation and these were donated to the British Museum, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and the Rotunda Museum. A later series of excavations led by Nicky Milner, Chantal Conneller, and Barry Taylor from 2004 to 2010 and then 2013–2015 discovered a further twelve red deer frontlets as well as some roe deer examples.

Since the first discoveries at Star Carr, antler frontlets have been found at ten prehistoric sites in northern Europe.^[1]

 In his original 1954 work Clark also suggested that they could have functioned as disguises for hunting deer or as costumes for ritualised dancing.^[4] Conneller argued that the headdresses could have "facilitated a bodily transformation". She argues that this was not a literal transformation into deer, but something that affected change in a human by taking on the effects of an animal.^[5]

 From Anthropocene post

 Most strikingly, these Star Carr people made elaborate headdresses and masks from parts of smoothed and carved deer skulls, with thirty-three different examples found so far. Eleven thousand years later, we know nothing of their meaning, with hypotheses ranging from practical hunting camouflage to symbolic religious regalia. They hunted and ate a lot of deer, and may have seen it as defining their culture to some extent. This hunter-gatherer “Mesolithic” genetic and technological package defined human life in Europe for around seven thousand years, from the retreat of the glaciers to the coming of the agricultural Neolithic to the continent, and Star Carr is one of the few keyholes we have to see a bit more of just how richly complex their lives were.

 https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-ice-age?embedding_publication_id=951083

 During the Last Glacial Maximum.... Europe was too cold so people only lived in Ukraine?

We call this the “Last Glacial Maximum,” and for most of the world, it took place between about 26,000 and 20,000 years ago. Much of Europe was simply uninhabitable, either covered by ice sheets or near enough to them that frigid arctic desert was the main landscape. On the frozen grasslands of the Ukraine, people clung on by hunting and scavenging woolly mammoth, even using their bones and tusks as the framework for large, elaborate houses. This is a replica of a house excavated at the village of Mezhyrich: 

 

After about 20,000 years ago, however, the ice sheets began to recede for good. The arctic desert became mammoth steppe, the mammoth steppe became new-growth woodland, and people left their refuges to explore the new landscapes. They adopted new ways of life to fit their emerging environments: new cultural practices and new subsistence strategies for a new world. The Clovis hunters who made their way south into the vast and un- or barely inhabited tracts of the Americas were one of these groups, following the mammoth, mastodon, and bison across a largely unexplored land. As Europe became increasingly forested, the mammoth and horses who had wandered the mammoth steppe disappeared, and deer, aurochs, and boar became the favored prey. The Natufian hunter-gatherers of today’s Near East exploited huge expanses of wild grasses, the forerunners of domesticated crops, and hunted gazelle.

This was the final Paleolithic, the last gasp of the old Stone Age.............

 The people who survived in Northern Europe, for example, turned to intensive reindeer hunting with a new weapon, the bow and arrow....All of that meant fewer people in a harsher landscape, and for some 1200 years (12,900 years before the present to 11,700), these conditions persisted........

 After 1200 years, around 11,700 years before the present, the Younger Dryas came to an end. The warming resumed, and the Holocene - our present era - began. The ice melted, sea levels rose, and the environment changed once more. A whole clutch of new cultures and practices emerged to capitalize on the new possibilities. In Europe, these new cultures belonged to the Mesolithic period. They were quite different from what had come before. Genetic evidence suggests that Mesolithic people only had a small bit of ancestry from the Paleolithic Europeans who had lived there for tens of thousands of years. As the population changed, cave painting, a practice that had lasted for perhaps 20,000 years, came to an end. The tools changed, too: Rather than making large spearpoints and blades, they created small, modular blades called “microliths,” which could then be placed into a variety of antler, wood, or bone handles and used for a number of different purposes. Rather than making an arrowhead and a separate scraper to clean hides, Mesolithic people made microliths, which could be used for either purpose in the right setting....

 The rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, and greater moisture created a diverse array of wetland environments on sea- and lakeshores across Europe, and this was where Mesolithic people often resided. At the site of Star Carr in Yorkshire, which was then a reed-covered lakeshore, Mesolithic Britons plied the waters in small boats, lived in wigwam-like houses, and hunted deer. They wore deer skulls, with antlers attached, as masks: Whether they did this as a disguise while hunting or during some kind of shamanic ritual is impossible to say, but the masks look pretty cool:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the Golden Road: How Buddhist monks arrived in Alexandria Egypt, prominent by 1st century

 The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World? Speakers : Speakers: William Dalrymple

Romans bought their Silk in Kerala - a "highly erotic garment" - transparent and showing everything off with Indian jewelry... and even receipts to show off the value.  Buddha in Alexandria Egypt, 1st CE:

 

Celebrated writer and historian William Dalrymple discusses The Golden Road, exploring India's pivotal role as the heart of ancient Eurasia. 

 Buddhism in turn is "historicized" as a human - by Roman Alexandrian influence.... whereas previously Buddha was not depicted as a human icon but rather the Dharma wheel of law....

 William Dalrymple playlist on India

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My great-grandfather William Edward Engel was the manager of the Sitka South Dakota Grain elevator before it became a cooperative in 1917

 For 72 years (from 1917 to 1989), a cooperative from nearby Selby owned and operated the grain elevator at Sitka.

 My grandmother was born in Sitka when my great-grandparents lived there as the Engel father was the manager of the Sitka grain elevator in 1912!! That was the year she was born. They moved to North Dakota where my great-grandfather worked as the head carpenter for the nursing school...

 

 https://forums.kitmaker.net/t/abandoned-grain-elevator-in-sitka-south-dakota/50564

 the abandoned grain elevator and one home,

 Grandma Emma was probably born at that home since that is her listed birth place! Wild.

 Date of Birth: January 28, 1912

Place of Birth: Sitka, Walworth County, South Dakota
Parents: William Edward Engel and Emma Schlekau

  4 miles to the west along the railroad there is Glenham, population 112 in 2020

the property and facility in Sitka, South Dakota, were owned by James G. Brady. [1]

• 1909: James G. Brady leased the railroad siding from the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad and constructed the original grain elevator at Sitka. [1]
1917: Brady sold the facility to the Farmer's Selby Equity Exchange (the Selby cooperative), which operated the elevator site for the next 72 years

 Wow so my great-grandfather worked for James G. Brady! wild.

 https://www.grainjournal.com/article/1150963/a-century-at-the-sitka-elevator

 

 “In October 1909, George Witte, a carpenter working on the Brady elevator at Sitka, fell from a scaffold and sustained injuries from which he died later.”

Wow my great-grandfather was also a carpenter so he replaced George Witte!! My great-grandfather was the manager before the below fellow who also did not survive! wow. 

 “In December 1918, Wm. Fansler, age 42, manager of the elevator, died of double pneumonia following an attack of influenza. ... Mr. Fansler was replaced by a Mr. Richardson, and in 1919 Lloyd Engelbretson was hired as manager.”

 Schilling Farms continued to use the elevator until about 2009 for farm storage: wheat, corn, sunflowers and beans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RNA transmits environmental phenotypes (like physical fitness) to offspring via Sperm maturity process of extra-cellular vesicles

 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)00388-2 Read more at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-dads-fitness-may-be-packaged-and-passed-down-in-sperm-rna-20251222/

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6L__oKL8Q8w 

 

Asherah "Mother of Gods" figurines forces a reassessment of religion in early Israel: The Kundalini Snake Tree Consort of El-Yahweh

 

Yahweh and Asherah, a divine couple worshipped in Jerusalem and Judah - 40 occurrences of Asherah in the Hebrew bible... Dr. Angela Natel on the polytheistic cult of Baal/Asherah/El/Yahweh 

6th Century BCE, PaleoHebrew blessing from "bovine" faces of Asherah and Yahweh... 

Many figurines have been discovered that are considered to have been representations of Asherah. However, as no figurine has yet been found with a plaque identifying her with Asherah there is always a measure of doubt as to exactly which of the several goddesses attested to ancient Israel at the time they do actually represent....Therefore
Asherah is often associated, in a syncretistic way, with (among others) Anat, Astarte, Ishtar,
the ‘Queen of Heaven’, Ashteroth and Qudshu.42 It seems likely that Asherah was
synonymous with one or two of these, but much less likely that she was associated in any
way with most....Qudshu is a “Name of Athiratu, mother of the
gods. Both Athiratu and Qudshu mean ‘holy place, sanctuary’.” Johannes C. de Moor, A Cuneiform Anthology of Religious Texts from Ugarit, edited by Johannes C. de Moor and Klaas Spronk, (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 32, n. 140. A similar note on KTU 1.16.I.11 is made by de Moor on 212, n. 73. That Asherah was also known as Qudshu is also supported by Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan,

 

 engorged breasts has led some scholars to conclude that the figures represent
pregnancies successfully carried to term, and place further emphasis on the role of the
mother as the one who suckles the infant and provides further sustenance and growth....The Judean Pillar-Figurines, 41. While arguing for a rather
broad spread in dating, beginning with the 10th century BCE, Engle placed the majority of figurines in the 8th
century, extending into the 7th. James Robert Engle, “Pillar Figurines of Iron Age Israel and Asherah/Asherim,”
(PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1979), 18-26. He has also noted that the majority of JPFs have been found
in locations belonging to the southern kingdom and during the divided monarchy

 https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/76301889/viewcontent-libre.pdf?1639511155=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DEconomic_implications_of_the_Deuteronomi.pdf&Expires=1793802919&Signature=fo6frFqxGFoYjlhmjmiNysRW-DSNPfH614ZpirHoMARoLRLPirAWcjSgnkJkSQFqaLgHKdQMw5PxHFmDsO-WsGKRcTWgwU0JytniTBd75GGWNmtrPOQuXjBx6uVfEHxo1DHXa1D-r-pP0ioh5oXOPmh88Apq7P8SeOtpBc59uT30lpR7wQW13ioS8eZrxXVPhqSyX6sS1PKRkK23D4Njs14PxPgSA0t6a-8~JMxaSQF0YAcbPZRXRsI6dXBI5cwO1ujOo-VAlIDg6B2O10wQItcMMVwQ0Lj2wnlOP5lmzGPs-mwM6YeM5MOiCsevcuVNrhrXlWfXxnT8zJM7yzGF5Q__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA Economic Implications of the Deuteronomistic Reform and the Elimination of the Goddess Asherah. Lucienne Elise Breingan. A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree Doctor of Philosophy School of Theology (Strathfield) Faculty of Theology and Philosophy Office of Graduate Research PO Box 968, North Sydney NSW 2059 Australia Date Submitted: 31st December 2014 "Is it beyond question that there is not much more of Deuteronomy that was authored in Judah as opposed to imported from Samaria? It is evident that at first glance at least some of the text appears to have a considerable northern influence, but in view of the northern propensity towards a traditional cult (and here bull and Asherah worship is referred to specifically, " The symbol of the Canaanite god El was the bull, or calf.132 If it is to be considered that YHWH and El are the same deity (or one the syncretistic form of the other),133 it follows that their iconography would also be ‘transferable’.... Yahweh’s appropriation of El’s consort, Asherah, fits naturally into this schema, and like the bull symbolism, it was something which the Old Testament rejected.”....YHWH and El, right down to their common symbol of a calf or bull. This could be the very reason why Asherah is also the consort of YHWH – perhaps at some stage in the pre-history, YHWH was synonymous with El and then later emerged as a separate entity.” Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel, 25; Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 44-75.....archaeological excavation has uncovered a limited number of sites at which imagery, or at least maṣṣeboth thought to be associated with YHWH, are present – least of all are the bull figurines from the northern sites such as the Bull Site at Dothan....Many bāmôth contain maṣṣeboth of different sizes in close proximity to one another, which could well be representations of the divine pair YHWH and Asherah...Many biblical characters are accused of having erected an asherah, to the chagrin of the Lord. The most notable of these are Maacah in 1 Kings 15:3 and Manasseh in 2 Kings 7....the serpent was directly related to the worship of Asherah, who is included in the official worship of the deity YHWH....Nehushtan was representative of YHWH’s healing powers, especially from the venom of serpents....Ze’ev Meshel, Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (Ḥorvat Teman): An Iron Age II Religious Site on the Judah-Sinai Border, (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2012). The question of the significance of Asherah in ancient Israel is one which has fascinated scholars in recent years. A major catalyst for such a fascination was the discovery of inscriptions linking Asherah with YHWH at sites at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud (of which the final report has recently been released)3 and Khirbet el Qom. These discoveries brought biblical references to Asherah into sharp focus,

 

 Asherah was also linked to sacred fertility rites, which may have included women of status in ritual activities, though the association with temple prostitution is now debated.

 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah

 eel and Uehlinger have argued that although
אׁשרה takes a definite article in the biblical text, this can be seen as a Deuteronomistic
technique to associate Asherah with Baal, paralleling her with הבאל instead of with the
name of YHWH which never takes a definite article.8 The plural form of the name is also a
device used by Dtr to associate Asherah with Baal. These are often pluralised in conjunction
as ‘the Baals’ and ‘the Asherahs’, but never is there an instance of ‘the YHWHs’.9 Such a
method increases the ‘common’ nature of the deities and in doing so devalues them.
According to Keel and Uehlinger, this is “to be understood as the Deuteronomistic technique
for slandering ‘Canaanite’ deities.”10 

 Meindert Dijkstra, “I Have Blessed you by Yhwh of Samaria and His Asherah: Texts
with Religious Elements from the Soil Archive of Ancient Israel,” in Only One God? Monotheism in Ancient
Israel and the Veneration of the Goddess Asherah, edited by Meindert Dijkstra, Bob Becking, Mario C.A. Korpel
and Karel J.H. Vriezen, (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 

 the worship of the asherah as a cultic symbol beside the shrine of YHWH, with its
golden calf iconography, resulted in the long term in an amalgamation of the roles of these
two deities. As people came to make sacrifices to the god YHWH, they were also presenting
them to the asherah, intimately associated with the goddess Asherah.

 Olyan states that: “The
patriarchal narratives of cult founding at Bethel, Hebron and Beersheba indicate that the
sacred tree and the pillar (maṣṣeba) were legitimate in the Yahwistic cult early on, and were
not considered illegitimate in the time of the Yahwist or Elohist.”55 Thus the biblical texts
clearly show that there is no syncretism with the “Canaanite” cult, and that Asherah was a
legitimate member of the Israelite pantheon from its earliest times. Conversely, Day
concludes that YHWH and El are syncretistic, rather than one god known by different
appellations.56 Day states that “It is interesting that the Old Testament has no qualms in
equating Yahweh with El, something which stands in marked contrast to its vehement
opposition to Baal (cf. Hos. 2.18).”

 Margalit, “The Meaning and Significance of Asherah,” 277. He also states that “This hypothesis, if
demonstrable, would explain the lack of explicit reference to Athirat's consortship as a redundancy eschewed
by the Ugaritic poets, and at the same time extricate the Hebrew epigraphist from the horns of a dilemma at
both Kh. el-Qom and Kuntillet ‘Ajrud.” 269

 some suggesting that
it refers instead to the cultic symbol of the asherah, citing the one next to the altar in the
Jerusalem Temple as precedence. One is hard pressed to find a scholar who disagrees that
this is somehow linked with the cult of Asherah in one way or another.72
There has been much discussion regarding the linkage between Yahweh and
Asherah/ the asherah in the inscription, and whether or not the pictographs on the same
pithos are somehow related to the inscription. Do they illustrate the inscription in some
way? Some have made an argument for this, citing details in the picture – such as the
second figure planting (its?) foot in the footprint of the first – that could indicate that the
two figures are husband and wife.73 This supports the theory that in this context the
inscription is referring to the goddess Asherah, who is the consort/wife of the god Yahweh
(of Samaria).74

 Asherah is portrayed throughout the DH as a threat to
Yahwism in a way that constantly conflated the deity herself with her iconography.146 Thus,
it is clear that while her iconography is endemic to an environment in which worship can be
conducted away from the Temple in Jerusalem, it is potentially ‘robbing’ that Temple
complex of valuable revenue. In this sense it is her, and not YHWH’s, images and other cultic
paraphernalia that are widespread throughout the land. Prior to Dtr’s reforms, the cult of
YHWH had not been entirely austere and image-free

 

 

  as it is known that there were asherim dedicated
to YHWH by the altar in the Temple by this time, and that it is clear from other biblical
passages and archaeological evidence, such as the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el Qom
inscriptions, that YHWH and Asherah were commonly worshipped together, and by logical
extension even in the Temple in Jerusalem.