The Imposter Queen of Heaven

The biblical story begins with a profound disruption of cosmic order, and that disruption enters creation through the act of a woman. In Genesis, Eve’s transgression together with Adam’s breaks the unity between humanity and God, shatters the harmony of creation, and distorts the woman’s original vocation. The text describes that shame enters the human experience as the man and woman hide from the presence of the Lord (Genesis 3:7–8). Suffering and disorder follow, for God declares to the woman that her sorrow and conception will be multiplied, and she will bring forth children in pain (Genesis 3:16). And to Adam He says, “Cursed is the ground because of you” (Genesis 3:17). Thus the rupture is not merely moral but cosmic. The fall touches the woman’s world directly: fruitfulness becomes painful, relationships become strained, and communion with God is severed. The feminine dimension of creation; designed to be the vessel of life, relational harmony, and divine presence; becomes the symbolic locus of the fracture.

This is not an indictment of womanhood itself; Scripture uses the woman as a mythic-structural symbol to represent the fall of humanity. As the feminine represents receptivity, life-bearing, relationship, and the embodied interface between God and creation, the fall through Eve represents the collapse of creation’s life-bearing order. What is lost in Genesis is not only innocence but the integrity of the vessel through which life was given. The story of Scripture therefore chooses the feminine symbol to carry the storyline of fall, exile, judgment, and finally restoration.

The prophets consistently adopt the woman-image to narrate the drama of Israel’s history, and through Israel to narrate the story of the entire world. Daughter Zion becomes the central female figure, embodying Eve’s fall but also the potential reversal of it. The prophets describe Zion as unfaithful, abandoned, barren, humiliated, and in agony like a woman in labor. Isaiah speaks of her as a forsaken wife grieved in spirit (Isaiah 54:6), one who remembers the shame of her youth (Isaiah 54:4), a barren woman told to sing because more are her children now than the children of the married woman (Isaiah 54:1). Micah describes Zion crying out in labor pains (Micah 4:10), and Lamentations portrays her as a widow sitting in grief.

All of this consciously mirrors the consequences given to Eve in Genesis: shame, pain in childbirth, relational rupture, and removal from divine presence. Zion’s story is Eve’s story retold at the national and cosmic scale. Yet the prophets also describe Zion’s future as the complete reversal of the fall. The same woman who was barren now becomes fruitful. The same woman who felt shame is told she will remember it no more. “Fear not,” God says to her in Isaiah 54:4, “you will not be put to shame.” Her tent is expanded and her descendants inherit the nations (Isaiah 54:2–3). Where Eve’s motherhood became painful, Zion’s motherhood becomes a symbol of overflowing new life.

Even more significantly, God declares that her Maker is her husband (Isaiah 54:5), restoring the relational unity that Eden lost. In Zechariah 2:5, God promises, “I will be a wall of fire around her, and I will be the glory within her.” This is the reversal of Genesis 3: when Adam and Eve hid from God’s presence and were expelled from the garden, creation lost the indwelling presence of God. Zion’s restoration restores that presence. Thus Zion is not simply a city or a nation but the healed feminine, the restored vessel of divine presence, the prophetic echo of Eve redeemed.

This restoration is cosmic. In Eden, God walked with humanity; in restored Zion, God dwells in her midst (Zechariah 2:10–11). In Eden, fruitfulness flowed without pain; in Zion, the barren woman bursts into song (Isaiah 54:1). In Eden, there was no shame; Zion’s shame is removed forever (Isaiah 54:4). In Eden, creation was ordered; in Zion, God becomes the protective fire and inner glory, reordering the world. This restored feminine reality becomes the prophetic foundation for the New Testament’s final imagery.

Revelation continues this feminine arc. In Revelation 12, John sees a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She is radiant with heavenly light, the cosmic image of restored glory. She is in labor, echoing Micah 4:10 and Isaiah 66:7–9, where Zion gives birth to the redeemed community. The dragon seeks to destroy her and her child, but God protects her in the wilderness. She gives birth to the Messiah, but she also remains active long after Christ’s ascension because the text says the dragon makes war on “the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 12:17). This means the woman spans history: she is present at Christ’s birth, present during the persecution of the church, and present at the final conflict. She is therefore not one individual woman in the first century; she is the prophetic Woman; Zion restored, the community of God personified, the healed feminine principle of creation.

Revelation 21 then presents the final woman: the Bride, the New Jerusalem, descending from heaven “having the glory of God.” This is Isaiah 54 transposed into consummation. “Prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,” she is the chosen vessel filled with divine glory, the place where God dwells with humanity once again (Revelation 21:2–3). The narrative that began with Eve’s fall ends with the Bride’s glorification. The feminine vessel that was corrupted in Genesis is perfectly restored at the end of the age.

Because of this, the final woman cannot be Mary. The restoration described in Isaiah 54, Zechariah 2, Micah 4, and Revelation 21 is eschatological, affecting nations, glory, creation, and divine dwelling. Mary did not live during the end-time gathering of nations, the descent of divine glory, or the final reordering of creation. The woman of Revelation 12 spans thousands of years of salvation history and produces a final remnant that keeps God’s commandments. Mary, though honored and blessed, does not fulfill these corporate, cosmic, and eschatological roles.

Likewise, the final woman cannot be the Roman Catholic Church, because Revelation 12 identifies the woman’s children as “those who keep the commandments of God” (Revelation 12:17). Scripture makes clear what those commandments are: no idolatry (Exodus 20:4), no altering the Sabbath (Exodus 20:8–11), and no killing (Exodus 20:13). However, the Roman Catholic Church historically altered the commandments. It transferred the Sabbath to Sunday without any divine command. The Church itself acknowledges that this change rests on ecclesiastical authority rather than Scripture. It modified the second commandment by merging it with the first in certain catechisms and splitting the tenth in order to maintain the number at ten, despite the biblical prohibition on making images: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them.” Exodus 20:4–5 also “You saw no form… therefore do not make an image” (Deuteronomy 4:15–16). Statues and images became central in worship, contrary to the strict wording of the commandment.

The commandment against killing was likewise compromised. The Sixth Commandment says, “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). Jesus reinforced this absolute prohibition when He declared, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Yet the Roman Catholic Church developed the doctrine of “just war,” institutionalized warfare in the name of Christ, and sanctioned crusades, inquisitions, forced conversions, executions, and the punishment of heretics. The early Christians refused to kill; by contrast, vast numbers were killed by Christians in later centuries under ecclesiastical authority. Revelation’s faithful woman is always persecuted; she never persecutes. She is in the wilderness, not upon the political thrones of Europe. She is faithful to God’s commandments, not the modifier of them.

Revelation contrasts two women: the pure woman of Revelation 12 and the harlot of Revelation 17. The pure woman is clothed with the sun, representing restored divine glory. The harlot is clothed in purple and scarlet, representing earthly wealth and political power. The pure woman is persecuted; the harlot persecutes. The pure woman dwells in the wilderness; the harlot rides the beast and fornicates with kings. The pure woman keeps God’s commandments; the harlot holds a golden cup full of abominations. The pure woman produces faithful offspring; the harlot is drunk with the blood of the saints (Revelation 17:6). These structures are not arbitrary; they represent the final division between the restored feminine and the corrupted feminine.

Therefore, the restored woman cannot be any institution that changes God’s commandments, embraces images, participates in political power, or sheds blood. The biblical standard excludes such an institution from being the end-time holy woman. Instead, the Revelation 12 woman must be the faithful, persecuted remnant that keeps the commandments of God and the testimony of Jesus, embodying the purity, obedience, and glory originally intended for Eve and restored in Zion.

The feminine arc of Scripture thus moves from Eve’s fall to Zion’s purification to the Woman of Revelation 12 and ultimately to the Bride of Revelation 21. The pattern is consistent: what was broken through the feminine vessel is restored through the feminine vessel. Eve fell and creation fell with her. Zion is healed and creation is healed with her. The Bride descends radiant with the glory of God, and a new heaven and new earth come with her. Where Eve brought exile, the Bride brings return. Where Eve lost glory, the Bride is filled with glory. Where Eve’s act shattered cosmic order, the Bride’s glorification completes the restoration of all things. The final woman is therefore the purified, commandment-keeping, glory-filled people of God, the called-out assembly made holy and radiant. She is the healed Eve, the restored Zion, the triumphant woman of Revelation, and the New Jerusalem in whom God dwells forever.

Kenealy was a 19th-century researcher of ancient religions whose book “The Book of God: The Apocalypse of Adam-Oannes” argues that all mystery religions preserved fragments of one original, primordial symbolic system. In it, he identifies the ancient “Queen of Heaven” figures; such as Isis, Astarte, Rhea, Cybele, and similar goddesses; as mythological expressions of a universal feminine principle found throughout early sacred symbolism.

In Kenealy’s reading of the ancient Mysteries, symbols such as the ark, the argha, the cup, the crescent moon, the boat, and the womb represent a generative cosmic vessel or world-mother concept. These symbols appear across Egyptian, Phoenician, Indian, Chaldean, and Greco-Roman traditions as emblems of a feminine power believed to bring forth and sustain life. The argha was depicted as a boat-shaped vessel; the ritual cup or patera functioned as a symbolic matrix; the crescent moon represented fertility and cyclical renewal; and the boat on the primordial waters represented the cosmic womb carrying the seeds of existence.

For Kenealy, these symbols form a continuous mythic thread: the ancient nations developed goddess cults around this feminine vessel, turning the symbolic matrix into a personalized deity who promised protection, prosperity, and worldly fortune. Figures like Isis and Astarte became embodiments of this system, merging cosmology with ritual, sexuality,war, and earthly power.

In his analysis, the “Queen of Heaven” of the Mystery traditions is not a historical person but a mythological construct representing humanity’s attempt to personify the forces of nature, fertility, and cosmic generation. This mythic feminine principle; transformed into goddesses, mother-deities, and world-souls across civilizations; became the foundation of many ancient religious systems and their associated rites, symbols, and initiations.

He then draws heavily from the Wisdom literature to describe how this true Queen promises “riches,” but the nature of those riches is crucial. In the paraphrased Proverbs, Wisdom is more precious than gold and rubies; length of days is in her right hand and “in her left riches and honour,” and she is “a tree of life” to those who hold her. In the Wisdom of Solomon, she says that all gold is as a little sand compared with her, that “all good things together came to me with her, and innumerable riches in her hand,” and that she is “a treasure unto men that never faileth,” making those who possess her “friends of God.” These “riches” are spiritual: friendship with God, participation in divine light, immortality of the soul, and moral transformation. They are not commercial wealth, not empire, not political security.

This is the starting point: the original Queen of Heaven in Kenealy’s system is identical with biblical Wisdom – the holy feminine principle that God uses to create and sustain the universe, the one by whom “the Lord… founded the earth” and “established the heavens,” whose ways are peace and whose fruit is life. Her “riches” are the opposite of greed: she weans the soul off perishable goods and turns it toward the eternal.

But Scripture also exposes a counterfeit “queen of heaven.” Jeremiah names her directly: the people bake cakes to the queen of heaven, pour out drink offerings, and stubbornly insist that when they worshipped her they had plenty of food, were well off, and saw no evil (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–19). In other words, the idol-goddess of the nations promises material security, prosperity, and protection from war and famine. Her cult is explicitly tied to assurance of “riches,” but they are earthly – grain, wine, peace in the land – and they are obtained through idolatry and disobedience to Yahweh.

This same pattern is brought to its final form in Revelation’s great harlot. Kenealy’s translation of Revelation 18 underlines the economic dimension: the kings of the earth “have harlotted with her,” the traffickers of the earth “have been enriched through the abundance of her odious things,” and the merchants mourn because “no man shall buy her merchandize any more.” He lists gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, every luxury, even the “souls of men.” This woman boasts: “I am a throned queen; I am no widow, and shall see no sorrow,” and she is destroyed in one hour. Her cup, like the ark/cup of the mysteries, is a feminine symbol – but now it holds the “wine of the passion of her foul impurity,” the very opposite of Wisdom’s life-giving wine.

Once this is clear, it becomes obvious why the queen of heaven of the mysteries – the wealth-promising, empire-entangled goddess – cannot be Mary and cannot be the restored woman of Revelation 12 / 21.

Mary in Scripture never appears as a dispenser of riches or as the center of a political-religious system. She identifies herself as the lowly handmaid of the Lord (Luke 1:38) and sings a song that reverses the values of Babylon: God scatters the proud, brings down the mighty from their thrones, sends the rich away empty, and exalts the lowly (Luke 1:52–53). Her words are a direct contradiction of the harlot’s boast “I sit a queen… I shall see no sorrow” and the merchants’ grief over lost luxury. Mary does not invite men to her own throne or promise that those who honor her will gain wealth and security in this age. She points away from herself: “Do whatever He tells you” (John 2:5). Any later Marian cult that promises worldly favors, prosperity, or political victory is not Mary herself, but a re-appearance of the old queen-of-heaven pattern Jeremiah condemns – a human grafting of pagan goddess-expectations onto the name of the mother of Jesus.

Nor can the mystery “queen of heaven” be the restored woman in Revelation. The woman of Revelation 12 is persecuted, driven into the wilderness, nourished by God apart from political power. Her offspring keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus (Revelation 12:17). She has no merchants, no city of trade, no cup of luxury. The Bride of Revelation 21 – the New Jerusalem – has the glory of God, not the glory of Babylonian commerce; there is no buying and selling in her streets, and nothing unclean enters. Her “riches” are the presence of God, the healing of nations by the tree of life, and the river of living water.

By contrast, the whore of Revelation 17–18 is explicitly tied to the old queen-of-heaven cult Kenealy traces through the nations: she rides the beast, fornicates with kings, intoxicates nations, and enriches merchants through her religious-political alliance. Her “cup” is the ultimate perversion of the ark/cup/womb symbol Kenealy shows in the mysteries. The true cup is the womb of Wisdom, the vessel of life and truth. The false cup is the womb of idolatry, filled with abominations and with the blood of saints. The true feminine principle gives spiritual riches and leads upward to God; the false queen promises riches of earth and binds souls to the beast.

In that light, the “queen of heaven” who promises riches in the sense of political security, luxury, and commercial prosperity cannot be Mary, who in Scripture is poor, humble, and opposed to the rich of this age. She cannot be the restored Zion-woman, who is persecuted, commandment-keeping, and glorified only by God. She is the harlot of Revelation, the final form of the ancient mystery-goddess, the cup-bearing woman whose womb is not the ark of life but the vessel of all abominations on the earth.

The “queen of heaven” of popular religion and empire – the one who trades in gold and slaves, who says “I sit as queen” and promises safety and wealth – is the whore of Revelation.

Any system that presents a female figure (whether called Mary or by any other name) as the dispenser of worldly prosperity, political favor, or commercial blessing belongs, not to the restored woman of God, but to the lineage of that harlot.

As a continuation of this argument, Kenealy’s work on the mystery religions adds another layer to the contrast between the true restored woman of Scripture and the counterfeit queen of heaven who becomes the whore of Revelation. Kenealy reads the ancient mystery religions as fragments of one early revelation, a primeval Apocalypse originally given to Adam or Oannes. In his view, all the great priestly systems of antiquity – Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Tsabaean, Mexican, and others – guarded, in their inner Mysteries, the remnants of this one revelation. At the center of that revelation stood a Triune reality: the supreme God (On), a Holy Spirit understood as a feminine Mother or Queen of Heaven, and a Word or Messenger figure, the Adamic “Son of Man.” He claims that almost every major feature of ancient creeds flowed from this hidden Apocalypse and was preserved, in symbolic form, in the Mysteries. For him, when he looks at goddess, womb, and cup symbols in the ancient world, he is not seeing random pagan fantasies but distorted echoes of one original truth about a feminine Holy Spirit, the true Queen of Heaven.

He further insists that the Mysteries were guarded by inner initiates. The real truth of the Apocalypse was reserved for the adepts in the Greater Mysteries, while the common people received only the outer, often idolatrous shell. The Apocalypse itself, in his scheme, functions as a secret ritual book, the hidden script of all genuine Mystery-rites, concealed under names like the Golden Fleece, the Golden Bowl, the Golden Ancile, the Golden Napkin, the Book of Thammuz (Osiris), and many other enigmatic titles. Each of these stands, in a veiled way, for a vessel – a bowl, a cup, a napkin, a tabernacle, a tree, a staff – some container of the divine word. This is crucial for understanding how he links the Queen of Heaven to the womb and cup: a book is a vessel of truth, a vessel is an ark or cup, and that ark or cup is in turn a symbol of the Holy Spirit as Queen of Heaven.

In his definitions he is explicit: the Holy Spirit is for him the second Great Being of the universe, the Great Mother, Nature itself, called Providence, Anima Mundi, the Queen of Heaven. He links this figure to Isis, Venus, Lakshmi, Juno, Ceres, Rhea, and the other great mother-goddesses of the nations, all of whom function as wombs, seas, matrices, and mothers of various divine or semi-divine beings. Kenealy’s treatment of semi-divine beings forms another essential continuation of the ancient mystery pattern he traces. Throughout his work he describes figures who stand between the human and divine realms, not as full gods but as hybrid beings, the offspring of unions that are neither purely mortal nor purely divine. These figures appear in countless traditions, and Kenealy regards them as relics of a primordial symbolic system that later became mythologized. In the ancient narratives he cites, the pattern is always the same: a powerful being from a higher realm unites with a woman or a feminine creature in the earthly realm, and their offspring emerges as a hero, giant, demigod, or culture-founder. These beings are not ordinary mortals; they possess extraordinary strength, knowledge, or supernatural attributes, and they are often remembered as rulers, warriors, sages, or bringers of forbidden arts.

One example he gives is the Scythian origin story, in which a divine being mates with a half-woman, half-serpent figure, producing a son named Scythes. This child, born from a union between a god and a monstrous feminine form, becomes the ancestor of an entire people. Another example is Memnon, born of Aurora, who although treated as a heroic man, is transformed after death into a supernatural bird. Ach-icarus is described as a prophet and demigod, a figure neither wholly mortal nor divine. Ganymedes, whom Kenealy equates with Enoch in symbolic tradition, becomes a heavenly being after first existing as a mortal. Even beings like Phanes, Pan, and Phoenix appear as intermediaries, cosmic personalities born from the womb of the goddess yet not belonging to the highest ranks of divinity.

For Kenealy, these figures all belong to the same category: semi-divine beings. They are hybrid offspring, exalted mortals, or elemental powers who emerge from the symbolic womb of the goddess; the world-mother as imagined by the mystery religions. Isis, Astarte, Rhea, Cybele, and similar deities are portrayed as mothers of gods, spirits, titans (Nephilim), and hero-figures, each one generating beings who influence humanity, transmit knowledge, or rule over aspects of creation. These offspring are not supreme gods but intermediaries, the agents through whom the nations believed divine instruction, culture, and even destructive powers entered the world.

This pattern matches the logic governing many ancient myths: the divine realm descends into the human realm through a woman, producing beings of immense stature. These semi-divine beings introduce arts, technologies, or religious rites, often leading humanity into powerful but corrupted systems of knowledge. They are celebrated in one culture, feared in another, and often worshipped after death. Kenealy treats them not as inventions of isolated cultures but as variations of an archetype found everywhere. In his view these stories are distorted reflections of an original symbolic truth that degenerated into literal goddess worship, hybrid myths, and cults devoted to divine-human intermediaries.

Although Kenealy never uses the term commonly associated with ancient giants or watchers, his descriptions align precisely with that type of being: powerful hybrids, born from a union of higher beings and earthly women, remembered as heroes of antiquity and sometimes feared as destroyers. In every culture he examines, these semi-divine figures stand at the threshold between the earthly and the divine, embodying a mixture of power, knowledge, and corruption. For him, they are the mythologized remnants of a symbolic system that humanity once held in purity but later turned into idolatrous narratives about gods mating with mortals, giving birth to giants, heroes, and supernatural intermediaries.

This aspect of Kenealy’s work fits seamlessly into the larger theme of the counterfeit feminine principle he traces. The ancient goddess (lilith/Inanna/Isis/Venus), as world-mother, becomes the generator of these hybrid beings, and the myths surrounding them represent the nations’ attempt to preserve a memory of something ancient while distorting it into stories of demigods and monstrous births. As the goddess-cult decays, the beings born from her myths become ever more corrupt, leading toward the final image Kenealy associates with the mystery tradition: a counterfeit “mother” figure whose children are not bearers of life and wisdom but the powerful agents of deception and ruin remembered in legends across the ancient world.

pope Francis bowing to the Queen of heaven

This provides the background for his understanding of the “cup of abominations” in Revelation. At the level of historical religion, Kenealy acknowledges that the same Queen of Heaven was worshipped in grossly idolatrous ways, in connection with harsh sacrificial systems and what he calls “far greater abominations,” including vicarious human sacrifice.

Thus the womb-cup symbol becomes the harlot’s golden chalice, brimming with abominations and blood – human sacrifice, priestcraft, and idolatrous rites linked to empire and wealth.

The great harlot of Revelation makes the merchants of the earth rich through her luxury; the kings of the earth fornicate with her; her city is a hub of trade in gold, silver, precious stones, fine linen, purple, scarlet, every luxury, even the souls of human beings. She boasts that she sits as a queen, is no widow, and will never see sorrow. In Kenealy’s language, the same cup symbol that once spoke of divine life now speaks of intoxicating worldliness and material wealth.

The pagan queen of heaven promises riches in the sense of political power, commercial success, and security in this age. This is the woman whose priests and kings have always claimed that, under her patronage, there is prosperity, plenty, and victory in war. This is the line that runs from Jeremiah’s queen of heaven to the goddess cults of empire to the whore of Revelation.

Because of this, the queen of heaven in her idolatrous form cannot be Mary. Mary does not present herself as a goddess, does not demand a throne, does not promise economic prosperity to those who venerate her. In Scripture she is poor, humble, and self-emptying. She exalts God who casts down the mighty and sends the rich away empty. She offers no cup of luxury; she points to her Son’s obedience. Any Marian devotion that reimagines her as a cosmic dispenser of worldly wealth, victory, and privilege is no longer dealing with the Mary of Scripture but with the old queen-of-heaven archetype that Kenealy traces through the mysteries and that the Bible condemns. In the same way, the queen of heaven in her political, wealth-promising guise cannot be the restored woman of Revelation. The biblical restored woman is a suffering remnant who keeps God’s commandments, rejects idolatry, refuses the sword, and lives apart from the power structures of this world. She is the opposite of the harlot who makes the merchants rich and drinks the blood of the saints.

In the ancient Mysteries, the four cardinal points represented the structure of the created world. North, South, East, and West were not merely directions but the pillars of the cosmic order, the boundaries that mark the world’s shape. When Egyptian priests spoke of the world-axis, the “cross” was not a Christian symbol but a geometric and cosmological one. A vertical line intersecting a horizontal line created a fourfold world structure, and at the center point, the place where heaven and earth meet, they placed the Eye of Osiris. Osiris represented divine consciousness, the seeing principle, the life and ordering power within the cosmos. His eye at the center of the fourfold axis symbolized the divine presence that holds creation in balance.

The question then is: how does Isis, the Queen of Heaven, relate to this cross-shaped world-axis? And how does the anima mundi relate to Isis? In Egyptian theology, Isis is not only the wife of Osiris but also the one who gathers his fragments, resurrects him, protects Horus, and embodies the sustaining life-force of the cosmos. She is mother, womb, throne, and world-matrix. This is why she is depicted as the throne on which the king sits, or as the cow who gives milk to the gods (hybrids), or as the starry canopy of the heavens. Her domain is the entire created order. She is the mother of nature. The anima mundi, the soul of the world, is simply a later philosophical expression of the same idea: the internal life-force, the immanent spiritual principle that animates all things.

Thus, in ancient symbolism, the world-axis belongs to the masculine principle of order under the elements, direction, law, and consciousness, while the womb-cup, ark, argha, and moon belong to the feminine principle of life, receptivity, and manifestation. The eye at the center of the cross is the divine intellect; the cup is the vessel that receives its seed and gives birth to the corrupted cosmos. Together they form a mystery-union: the axis and the womb, the consciousness and the matrix, Osiris and Isis.

If one applies this logic to the biblical contrast between the true feminine and the false feminine, the symbolic structure becomes clearer. The restored Woman of Revelation, clothed with the sun, represents creation healed, not creation deified. She is not the anima mundi; she is the community redeemed, the vessel purified and filled with the glory of God, not the mother-goddess of the cosmos. She is the redeemed Zion, not the mother of nature. Her relation to God is covenantal, not metaphysical. She embodies obedience, purity, and suffering rather than cosmic generative power. She does not stand as the womb of the universe but as the prepared bride of the Lamb.

Likewise, Mary cannot be the anima mundi or Isis or the Queen of Heaven in the ancient goddess sense. In Scripture she is never placed at the center of the world-axis, never depicted as the soul of the world, never conferring life to the cosmos. She bears Christ as a humble vessel and recedes into silence. Her language in the Magnificat contradicts the pride of the goddess-cult, because she declares herself the lowly servant and rejects the authority structures that exalt the rich and mighty. The ancient world-soul promises prosperity; Mary proclaims the opposite.

This brings us to the Whore of Revelation. In the symbolic logic of antiquity, the queen of heaven in her pagan form is not the true feminine matrix but the corrupted one. The same womb-symbol that once signified the life-bearing power of the Spirit now signifies the intoxicating power of idolatry. The same queen that once sustained the cosmos in myth now rides the beast and fornicates with kings. The fourfold world-axis, which in the Mysteries marked the order of creation, now becomes the global reach of Babylon’s influence over nations, merchants, and political powers. Her cup is no longer the argha of life but the chalice of impurity. She no longer stands as the anima mundi but as its parody: instead of being the soul of the world, she drains the souls of the world. Instead of ordering creation, she disorders it.

Thus Isis and the anima mundi in their ancient forms correspond, in the Revelation contrast, not to Mary or the restored Woman but to the Whore. The ancient goddess is the mother of nature, the dispenser of worldly prosperity, the protector of cities, the patroness of kings, the one who promises safety and riches to her followers. This is exactly what Jeremiah’s queen of heaven promised the Israelites: when we worshipped her, we had plenty of bread and saw no evil. This is what Babylon’s merchants praise: her trade, her wealth, her luxuries.This is what the kings desire: her intoxicating partnership, which they choose over any true restoration, and the result is the corrupted state of society. The goddess of the four cardinal points has become the global power seated on many waters, spanning nations and tongues. The eye of Osiris on the cross, once the ordering gaze of the divine, becomes the all-seeing power of empire. The cosmic mother becomes the mother of harlots.

Kenealy’s system therefore reinforces, rather than contradicts, the biblical contrast. The true feminine is the purified Woman of God, restored Zion, the bride of Christ. The false feminine is the queen of heaven in her idolatrous historical form – Isis, Rhea, Astarte, the anima mundi (corrupted cosmos) as goddess, the wealth-promising deity of nations – culminating in the Whore of Revelation.

See attached pdf for further reading into the ancient mystery religions.

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