Sophia: Mother, Daughter and Bride

[Guest guest]

Wow, that's incredible, i didn't know that, thank you for

sharing this fa! The Great Bear of the Skies is considered

the " Mother " of birthing into this world by many cultures and

I'll send some information on it tomorrow.

L*L*L

~ bo ~ Annette

[Guest guest]

The Holy Spirit of Wisdom as the guiding archetype of human evolution is

one of the great images of universality. Transcending the limitations of

any one religious belief, it is an image that embraces all human

experience, inspiring trust in the capacity of the soul to find its way

back to the source. Where are we to look for the finest expressions in

the human spirit in every civilization if not to the stories of the

quest that inspire and illumine human life? From Gilgamesh's search for

the herb of immortality to Odysseus' long sea journey home to Penelope,

from the medieval quest of the Grail knights to the modern scientific

search for the unified field, the impulse is the same: to discover the

living prescence that informs the phenomenal world and brings into being

the exquisite order of the universe. The image of the goddess moves

inwards, and becomes the inspiration of the quest for the sacred

marriage - the reunion of the two aspects of consciousness so long

separated from each other.

The Greek word 'Sophia' means 'wisdom'. In a twelfth-century

picture in Eynsham Abbey, Oxfordshire (UK) , in her aspect as

Sophia, is seated upon the lion throne, as were all the goddesses before

her. The divine child is held on her lap and her right hand holds the

root of the flower, which blossoms as the lily, disclosing that she is

the root of all things. The dove, for so many thousand years the

principal emblem of the goddess, rests on the lily, and a stylized

meander frames the right-hand side of the scene. All these images relate

the medieval figure of Sophia to the older images of the goddess, which

reach back into the Neolithic past. But here the goddess is given a

specific emphasis, which offers an image of Wisdom as the highest

quality of the soul and suggests that, evolving from root to flower, the

soul can ultimately blossom as the lily and, understanding all things,

soar like the bird between the dimensions of earth and heaven. Nor is

this Christian image unrelated to that of the shaman lying in trance in

the cave of Lascaux, for there, also, the bird mask he wears and the

bird resting on his staff symbolise his flight to another dimension of

consciousness.

To discover the root of the idea of Wisdom we have to go back

once again to the Neolithic era, when the goddess was the image of the

Whole, when life emerged from and returned to her, and when she was

conceived as the door or gateway to a hidden dimension of being that was

her womb, the eternal source and regenerator of life. The idea of Wisdom

was always related in the pre-Christian world to the image of the

goddess; Nammu and Inanna in Sumeria, Maat and Isis in Egypt, and Athena

and Demeter in Greece. Even the passages in the Tanakh (OT) that

describe Hokhmah, the Holy Spirit of Wisdom, powerfully evoke her lost

image, though here the image is dissociated from the word.

But as we move into the Christian era there is a profound shift

in archetypal imagery as Wisdom becomes associated with Christ as Logos,

the Word of God, and the old relationship between Wisdom and the goddess

is lost. Now, the archetypal feminine is finally 'deleted' from the

image of the divine, and the Christian image of the deity as a trinity

of Father, Son and Holy Spirit becomes wholly identified with the

masculine archetype. Because of a sequence of theological formations -

grounded on the assumption that nature was inferior to spirit, and that

whatever pertained to the female was inferior to the male - the image of

the Holy Spirit lost its former association with the feminine Hokhmah,

or Sophia, and was assimilated, first in Judaism, and then in

Christianity, to the concept of the masculine Logos, the Divine Word.

This theological development effectively erased the ancient relationship

between Wisdom and the image of the goddess.

Gnostic Christianity, however, retained the older tradition and

the image of Sophia as the embodiment of Wisdom survived. Here she was

the Great Mother, the consort and counterpart of the male aspect of the

godhead. When the Gnostic sects were repressed by the edicts of the

Emperor Constantine in 326 and 333 CE, the image of Sophia as the

embodiment of Wisdom was again lost. However, after an interlude of

several hundred years, it reappeared in the Middle Ages, in the great

surge of devotion to the Virgin and the pilgrimages to the shrines

of the Black Virgin, as well as in the philosophical impulse of these

times, expressed in the writings of great scholars, such as Scotus

Erigena (810-77 CE), who, although he lived at the time of Charlemagne,

had a profound influence on the philosophy of the later Middle Ages.

Then, in the sudden manifestation of the Order of the Knights Templar,

the Grail legends, Alchemy, the troubadors and the Cathar Church of the

Holy Spirit, Sophia, or Sapientia, as the image of Wisdom, became the

inspiration, guide and goal of a spiritual quest of overwhelming

numinosity.

It is a fascinating story, and one that reveals the soul's

constant attempt to restore relationship and balance between the

feminine and masculine archetypes reflected in the images of goddess and

god. Further, it seeks to give emphasis through the feminine archetype

to the intuitive, inward-looking tendencies of the soul as well as to

the nurturing, compassionate qualities traditionally defined as

feminine, which may not be valued in societies where only the masculine

archetype is named as divine.

--

fa

http://www.kingseyes.demon.co.uk/greatgoddess.htm

[Guest guest]

In a message dated 12/30/99 9:13:42 PM Pacific Standard Time,

fevans@... writes:

<<

Talk about rapture and passion - these songs are amazing.

>>

Hi Frances,

I was just listening to Debbie Harry's song " Rapture " when I read your post.

Probably not the same thing but it will have to do until I can listen to your

referenced music which I'm sure is Out of this World.

Take care and Happy Millennium to ya.

Dail