The Missing Divine Feminine - Part 1: What an Ayahuasca Ceremony Taught Me About God
"Gracias Padre, Gracias Madre.”
I'll never forget the first time I heard those words during an ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica. People around me were chanting prayers with gratitude to both a divine Father and a divine Mother. As someone who moved to the US from Turkey, a conservative Muslim-majority country, at 23, I was struck by something profound: Where was this balance in the Christianity I'd encountered in America and Islam I saw in Turkey?
That simple gratitude sent me on a years-long journey that would completely change how I understood the divine. And what I discovered might surprise you, too.
In the US, I'd learned the Lord's Prayer like millions of others:
"Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…"
After my Ayahuasca experience, every time I heard it, the same questions nagged at me. Why only "Father"? Where was the divine feminine I'd experienced in those ceremonies? And here's what really puzzled me: this fatherly king ruling from heaven felt so... limited. How could an omnipotent God be confined to one location or gender?
I began asking people about the origins of the phrase "Heavenly Father." Most had never really thought about it - it was just embedded in our culture, unquestioned.
That's when I remembered something from my childhood in Turkey.
In an elementary Turkish textbook, I'd learned about ancient Turkic beliefs in something called Kök Tengri - literally "Sky Father." At the time, it seemed like just another history lesson. But now, something clicked.
Could this ancient Turkic Sky Father be related to the Christian Heavenly Father?
Here's where it gets fascinating. "Kök" means "root" in Old Turkic, but it also means sky, blue, and green. When you combine blue and green, you get turquoise - the color of Turkish stone, known for its protective and healing properties, and a color associated with Turkic origins.
"Tengri" translates to "Sky God" or simply "God" or "Father." So Kök Tengri was essentially the "Sky Father" - the highest divine being personifying the heavens themselves.
But here's another catch: this wasn't unique to ancient Turks.
I discovered that Indo-Europeans (the ancestor culture of most European peoples) worshipped Dyeus Phter - literally "Sky Father." This Proto-Indo-European root is where we get:
Zeus (Greek) - the sky god
Jupiter (Roman) - literally "God Father"
Deus (Latin) - meaning god
Even our word "deity" comes from this same root
Consider this: what we refer to as "God" today was originally understood as the spirit of the sky above us thousands of years ago.
However, here's what really got me excited—and what answers my original question about the missing feminine.
Both the Turkic Sky Father and the Indo-European Sky Father had wives—divine wives who represented Mother Earth.
In Turkic mythology, she was called Umay. In Indo-European traditions, she was Degom, the Earth Mother. These weren't just symbolic figures - they were seen as literally married, like humans.
Picture this: in the northern hemisphere, during winter, Sky Father and Earth Mother are separated. But when they reunite in spring, their sacred marriage brings fertility to the land. The spring rains were seen as the Sky Father's gift to his Earth Mother wife, impregnating the soil and creating new life.
A perfect balance of masculine and feminine divine energy.
Once I started looking, I found this Father/Mother pattern across the globe:
Viracocha and Pachamama (Inca creator god and earth mother - I actually heard "Pachamama" constantly in Central and South America!)
An and Ki (Sumerian sky god and earth goddess)
El and Asherah (Canaanite high god and his consort)
Even in humanity's earliest civilizations, this divine balance of the masculine/feminine was central to spiritual understanding.
This is where our modern story gets complicated. As I dug deeper into the origins of our current religions, I discovered something remarkable: the same Sky Father figure appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - but his divine consort mysteriously vanished.
Those ceremonies I experienced were preserving something ancient that we'd forgotten in conventional religion. That gratitude to both "Padre" and "Madre" wasn't just indigenous wisdom. It was echoing a spiritual truth that spans continents and millennia.
I'm not suggesting we need to overhaul our entire religious understanding, although you're welcome to do so if this resonates with you. However, there's something powerful about acknowledging that the divine feminine was once central to human spirituality—and still is in many traditions around the world.
So when I heard "Gracias Padre, Gracias Madre" in that ceremony, I wasn't just experiencing an indigenous ceremony. I was connecting to humanity's oldest spiritual wisdom: the recognition that creation itself emerges from the sacred marriage of masculine and feminine divine forces.
Maybe it's time we remembered that balance.
In my future posts, I'll take you on a journey through ancient Mesopotamia, where I discuss how the Sumerian god An - the original Sky Father - directly influenced the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in ways that bring us to today, to our conventional religions.
