One idol, across the ages
The Divine Wisdom
The feminine wisdom that stands beside creation.
Why these are the same idol
Every literate culture eventually had to answer the same question: where does the order and craft in creation come from? Again and again the answer was personified as a feminine figure standing beside the maker, Wisdom, who was “there when he set the heavens in place”.
In Hebrew scripture she is Hokhmah, present at creation in Proverbs 8. The Gnostics called her Sophia, the Aeon whose fall and restoration shapes the cosmos. The Greeks knew Athena, born from the head of Zeus, goddess of craft and strategy. The Egyptians had Isis, mistress of magic and hidden names.
These were not vaguely similar, in the Hellenistic world they were actively merged. The Isis aretalogies absorb Athena and Sophia by name; Jewish and Christian writers read Hokhmah and Sophia as the same figure. The mask changes; the function, wisdom beside the throne, does not.