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male and female created he them.
    How could God create female in his own image if he did not have a female image? But this he did, and she was called Athiret. Later Athiret became known to the Hebrews as Asherah, our heavenly mother, and the Lord became known as El, our heavenly father.
    And so it was that El and Asherah desired to experience their great and divine love in a physical form and to share such blessedness with the children they would create. Each soul who was formed was perfectly matched, given a twin made from the same essence. In the book called Genesis, this is told as Adam’s twin being created from his rib, which is to say his own essence, as she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, spirit of his spirit.
    Then God said, “And they shall become as one flesh.”
    Thus the hieros-gamos was created, the sacred marriage of trust and consciousness that unites the beloveds into one flesh. This is our highest gift from our father and mother in heaven. For when we come together in the bridal chamber, we find the divine union that El and Asherah wished for all their earthly children to experience in the light of pure joy and the essence of true love.
    For those with ears to hear, let them hear it.
    EL AND ASHERAH, AND THE HOLY ORIGINS OF HIEROS-GAMOS,
FROM THE BOOK OF LOVE AS PRESERVED IN THE LIBRO ROSSO
    Since meeting Bérenger, Maureen had become committed to understanding and experiencing the
hieros-gamos
in all its forms. Her eyes had been opened to a kind of love that she had previously never realized could exist outside fairy tales and legends. But this kind of epic union, this all-encompassing, nurturing love, was possible. If Maureen could experience it, be transformed by it, then she was certain that everyone could. She and Bérenger realized that this was part of their destiny: to help others find love as they had been blessed to find it themselves.
    Maureen closed the book, content to sleep with visions of El and Asherah dancing in her dreams.

    Maureen’s dreams did not obey her desires.
    Her dreaming was usually lucid and clear; complete sequences and coherent images came to her unbidden in her sleep. Always, they contained important messages for her or provided urgent clues to be followed. Until tonight. This dream was chaotic, frenetic, with flashes of image, sound, and emotion, moving through time and space. Some of the images seemed to relate to each other; others did not. But there wasone constant factor through the entire dream. No matter the image, no matter the time frame, each flash of vision contained one unifying element.

    Fire.
    The fire burned hot in the town square, the pitch that had been poured upon the kindling to make it ignite faster and burn hotter was effective. Hundreds of people surrounded the stake and its victim. Or victims? Sweat poured down the faces of onlookers as hell appeared to rage before them. In one flash the crowd was weeping, in another jeering. Two different fires. Two different cities. One, then another, then back again. In the first city, she saw the faces in the crowd. They were shocked, terrified, saddened. She did not see the victim, only the flames, which leaped high in the center of the square, enveloping in their terrible embrace what was once a human being. Maureen saw the faces of weeping men and women in the crowd, and one man in particular came into focus for her. He was dressed plainly enough, as a merchant perhaps, but there was something in his demeanor that marked him as different. He stood tall, and despite his obvious distress he had the presence of a king. As she watched a single tear roll down his cheek, she felt the man’s terrible grief—and guilt—over the tragedy unfolding before him. Then another bright flash of fire moved her attention away from the man and back to the space where the stake had been. But it wasn’t flame she saw now; rather it was a blinding white light that burst into the sky and rose to heaven. The sky