Is divination banned by the Bible?
1. How it began
Genesis1:14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years”.
From the beginning, people have had intuition. That gut feeling that we all experience from time to time, but which we are unable to explain logically. Sometimes it is not even for us, but for the people around us or those we love. Some of us get it while we are awake, some through our dreams at night, and some even have telepathic or psychic abilities. Some call it the ability to pick up frequencies. I believe this was God’s way of communicating directly with us until the Bible came along and said that we should communicate through prayer and that there had to be an intermediary.
It was a time of freedom and free will as we all had direct communication with our creator, call it God, spirit or energy. Science says we are stardust. It’s no wonder that when people couldn’t understand their intuition, they looked for answers in the origins, in the stars and planets, their source of creation or their Creator, if you like. The first evidence of astrology dates back to around 5000 years ago, around the 3rd millennium BC, and even the Bible is full of astrological symbolism. Over time people looked for answers everywhere: dreams, beans, palms, runes, tea leaves and later coffee cups and tarot cards to name but a few.
As the human population grew, people gathered together in groups that eventually grew into societies. Society needed order and control, it didn’t like unlimited individual freedom, so the best way to keep power over people was to limit their knowledge, because knowledge is power. But how do you stop people seeking answers and guidance? Through fear!
2. The Bible
Written by men under supposed divine inspiration, the whole story is about social control through fear, instilling the idea of a chosen one, from individuals like Abraham, Moses, Noah, Job, the apostles, to whole populations like the Israelites, depending on the message they wanted to convey.
Genesis 6:8 – “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”
Genesis 39:2 – “The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man, and he was in the house of his Egyptian master.”
Genesis 39:21 – “But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him mercy and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison.”
Exodus 11:3 – “And the Lord gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the people.”
Judges 6:16-17 – “The Lord answered, “I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.”
Gideon replied, “If now I have found favour in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me.”
Acts 7:46-47 – “David found favour before God and asked to find a dwelling for the God of Jacob. But Solomon built Him a house.”
Luke 1:30 – “Then the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God.’”
They came up with horrific stories about how people who did not obey God’s word as delivered by the chosen ones were punished. The Old Testament is full of examples of this.
When prayers were not answered, they said that God worked in mysterious ways.
Isaiah 55:8-9 – “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Well, my interpretation of “mysterious ways” is intuition, astrology and divination. It’s still a mystery to many, and although scientists say there’s no scientific proof that it works, in my life experience I’ve seen it work many times. I am sure I am not the only one.
3. Lilith and Eve
The earliest surviving mention of Lilith’s name appears in Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree, a Sumerian epic poem found on a tablet in Ur, dating from around 2000 B.C. She is portrayed as a female demon who kills mothers and children. Scholars believe that the demon goddess was blamed for the high infant and child mortality rates. She is mentioned only once in the Bible, in Isaiah 34:14, although translators sometimes lack confidence in their readers’ knowledge of Babylonian demonology. The King James Bible translates “the lilith” as “the screech owl”, suggesting the bird-like qualities of the Babylonian she-demon. The Revised Standard Version picks up on her nocturnal habits and calls her “the night hag” instead of “the lilith”. She reappears in the Talmud, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Alphabet of Ben Sira and the Zohar. However, the best known and most popular account of Lilith comes from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, an anonymous text dating from sometime in the Middle Ages. The author speaks of a woman with a desire for emancipation who rebels against her husband’s (Adam’s) need to control her. Lilith demands to be treated as an equal by Adam, since they were both created by God from the earth, but Adam wants Lilith to be submissive and to please him.
There are two creation stories in the Bible and this may explain Adam’s two wives.
Genesis 1:26 – Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
In this version of human origins, man and woman (“humankind” in the New Revised Standard Version) are created together and appear to be equal.
Genesis 2:7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
Genesis 2: 18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
In the second version, the woman is created after the man, from his rib, to fit in with him. In other words, to please the man.
“Lilith” by Janet Howe Gaines appeared in the October 2001 issue of Bible Review. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in September 2012.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/lilith/
The story of the alphabet explains why Lilith kills babies. When she fled Paradise, God sent three angels to look for her and said that if she did not return to Adam, he would kill 100 of her children every day. So Lilith’s killing of babies was in retaliation for Adam’s mistreatment and God’s punishment. She makes a promise to the three angels that she will not kill any baby wearing an amulet with her name on it.
The symbolism of this pact with the divine is very important. Lilith is not separating her from the Creator, but from Adam, her unfaithful husband.
Whether you believe this story or not, what is most important is that there is an important distinguishing feature in the stories of Lilith and Eve, the fruit of knowledge. In Lilith’s story she already knows that she is equal to Adam, she does not need to eat a fruit of knowledge. In fact it is not even mentioned in her story. She already has the knowledge of retribution and negotiation. So God created us with knowledge, just like the angels.
Another notable thing to take away from The Alphabet of Ben Sira is that after thousands of years, the battle between the sexes, patriarchy and matriarchy, feminism in a male-dominated world, still resurfaces, although this would be the subject of another book for another time.
Religion replaces Lilith with Eve, although she was no better, just perhaps a little more disciplined. Her story is not about eating a forbidden fruit and convincing Adam to eat with her. Her story is about searching for answers, wanting knowledge and wisdom and sharing it with others. The symbolism in Genesis 3 is surprisingly easy to interpret. The serpent has been a symbol of healing, death and rebirth, protection and wisdom throughout the world for many years before the Bible was written. The forbidden fruit, as the Bible confirms, is knowledge and wisdom. It’s important to note that Eve didn’t want to keep it all to herself, but was happy to share her newly acquired knowledge and wisdom with her husband.
Genesis 3:5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Throughout the Bible, women are portrayed as servants to their husbands; they rarely speak and, with few exceptions, have little role in society. They are only blessed by God when they bear children. Either like Sarah, the wife of Abraham, when she was 90 years old, or like Jochebed – the mother of Moses, Hannah – the mother of Samuel, Elizabeth – the mother of John the Baptist and Mary – the mother of Jesus.
It doesn’t really matter whether you believe that Jesus is the true Son of God or just a historical figure of social revolution. What is certain is that through his actions and teachings, Jesus changed the way women were viewed and began to gain a little more influence in society.
4. The burning of the witches
Daniel interpreted King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Aaron turned his staff into a snake before Pharaoh, Jesus raised Lazarus, gave sight to the blind and performed many other miracles during his life. Were these miracles or witchcraft? I find it interesting that when God is given credit for them, they are miracles, but when God is not given credit or no obvious role in God’s plan is seen, they are witchcraft. But let’s not forget that the first miracle performed by Jesus is the turning of water into wine, about 600 litres of it. I don’t know how big the wedding was, but it sounds like the best party ever!
It is estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 people were killed, sometimes burned alive, during the almost 400 years of witch hunts in Europe and America by both Catholic and Protestant denominations. To be accused of witchcraft it was enough to be a pagan/polytheist and to disobey the ruling church of the area. But they extended the list to include natural healers, fortune tellers and other forms of divination, psychiatric illness or even someone’s sexuality or sexiness. As these were mostly local women, and some people were uncomfortable with the killing of mothers and wives, they went so far as to say that women did not have souls. I find it interesting that if someone claimed that the Virgin Mary came and spoke to them, or a certain painting of Jesus or Mary in a church started to cry, or whatever other event that could increase the number of believers and therefore the number of donations, it was a miracle. If people paid a natural healer, for example, it was witchcraft. Imagine today’s homeopaths beeing accused of witchcraft. The church also wanted to be seen as the protector of the poor, the orphans and the sick, but at the same time they were not making money for the church, they were taking money from it. While they “took care” of the orphans in the hope that when they grew up they would pay this debt for the rest of their lives, it was much easier to get rid of the sick and especially the mentally ill by accusing them of witchcraft or being possessed by demons.
5. Back to stardust
Medicine has discovered that a mother can carry the cells of her children in her body all her life, even from her lost pregnancies and stillbirths. It seems that these cells can even help the mother’s body to heal in the event of illness, many years after a pregnancy. Although there are still tests to be done to fully understand the implications of this discovery, I think it is fantastic.
I see this discovery as confirmation that we are stardust. Just as a mother remains connected to her children throughout her life, not only emotionally as we believed until recently, but also biologically, at the cellular level, we remain connected to our Creator, the Universe, the stars, at the cellular level, and I dare say even emotionally, through our intuition and psychic abilities. Would it be too much to dare to think that our Creator, God, is actually a Mother and not a Father? Certainly it would, for many. But what they don’t understand is that this is science proving the existence of God. Not their God, of course, not the God of the Bible or any other religion, but the true God. And the true God never intended to have messengers, because we are all connected, always.
https://www.space.com/35276-humans-made-of-stardust-galaxy-life-elements.html
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/education/alp/are-we-really-made-of-star-stuff/