There is also the surprising evidence of papyri from Elephantine, Egypt, where there was an important Jewish colony. The documents show that these Jews paid dues to the temple in Jerusalem. Anat is a Hittite goddess, daughter of Ashera, sister of Baal. There is an accumulation of evidence, then, that the Goddess was excised from Judaism only in the centuries immediately before the birth of Christ - in fact it seems to have happened in the Roman period. The great difficulty we face in understanding the roots of Western religion are, I think, related to the difficulty we have in understanding religious metaphor.
Statements intended as metaphorical teachings are misunderstood, and taken literally.
I think we have much to learn from the Kogi and other ancient traditions - about the world, about ourselves and our own past, and about how to think. The greatest intellectual challenge that faces us today, at the end of probably the most terrible and murderous century in human history, is the collapse of our confidence in materialist, rationalist thought. We have to find another benchmark to distinguish between statements that help us to understand, and statements that deceive. And the starting point for that search, I suggest, is to learn about, and think deeply about, the common understanding that humanity once seems to have shared when truth was described in rich metaphors and the material world was perceived as the trace of an idea standing between memory of the past and all the possible futures.