Of all of the goddesses of wisdom, Sophia’s name is the most familiar. In contemporary women’s psychology and spirituality circles, Sophia has become an archetype of feminine wisdom. New Age spirituality sees her as the Divine Feminine. Hagia Sophia, the magnificent domed church in Constantinople has made her name familiar.* She is a part of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the west, and a forgotten goddess figure within a monotheistic, patriarchal religious tradition that denies feminine divinity. Sophia means wisdom in Greek, and her identity as a goddess figure is hidden in the Old Testament by references to her in the abstract and lowercased word “wisdom.” She is not mentioned at all in the New Testament, yet Sophia was a major divine figure in the beliefs of first-century gnostic Christians who were denounced as heretics by orthodox Christian bishops and successfully persecuted in the Fourth Century. Information about the Gnostic Christian Sophia resurfaced in the mid-twentieth century, when copies of their gospels (written at the same time or earlier than the New Testament gospels) were found hidden in the Nag Hammadi desert in Egypt. While the psychological focus is on Sophia as an archetype of wisdom, it is very important for women to know how the worship (and then even knowledge) of feminine divinity disappeared because the patriarchy is based upon the negation of women’s spiritual authority and denial of feminine divinity. The historical inferior status of women and the suppression of the goddess are related; just as the dominating position of men is related to (male) monotheism.
SOPHIA THE ARCHETYPE OF SPIRITUAL WISDOM: GNOSIS
Sophia is the archetype of spiritual wisdom or soul knowledge. Sophia’s wisdom is insightful, it is what we know through gnosis. The Greek word gnosis translates into “knowledge” of a particular kind and source. The Greek language distinguishes between what we can know objectively (logos) from what can only be known subjectively (gnosis). Objective knowledge can be learned through teachers, books, or observation of something outside of ourselves. Gnostic or noetic (an alternative spelling) knowledge is what is revealed to us or intuitively perceived as spiritually true. I think of gnosis as what we “gknow” at a soul level, it’s what we know “in our bones.” When I wrote about life-threatening illness as a soul experience, the title I chose for the book was Close to the Bone, because when such illnesses strike us or those we love, it can strip away the non-essentials and bring us close to what we know at a soul level. At a soul level, we can know that we are spiritual beings on a human path, or know that life has a purpose, or know that we are loved, or know God, or know that we are part of an interconnected universe.
As the gnostic Christians used the word, gnosis could be translated into “insight,” an intuitive process of knowing onself at the deepest level, which, as they believed or mystically experienced, was to simultaneously know God. This process has similarities to the individuation work of Jungian analysis that has to do with the Self. A person (or ego) with a connection to the Self has a sense that what she is doing with her life is meaningful. This can only be known subjectively, it is soul knowledge. To have a life oriented to the Self, rather than determined by persona (or how we are doing in the eyes of others), is a spiritual orientation. The Self is the “archetype of meaning” in Jungian psychology that can be translated by religious people into their names for divinity or as the invisible oneness (Tao) that underlies and connects everything in the visible universe. What we know through a connection with the Self is divine wisdom. This is a wisdom that isn’t the exclusive possession of authority above us; it is wisdom that dwells in us and is everywhere.
Gnosis is also that often mysterious way of knowing that men both elevate and demean and call “women’s intuition.” Far from mysterious, it’s a combination of noticing what is going on and processing what we are noticing in an intuitive way. It has to do with knowing people, of assessing character, of seeing through the facade—it’s insight into the presence or absence of soul. The click! insight that sees the underlying sexism or power politics in a situation is gnosis. The Aha! that happens when something important to you suddenly makes sense is gnosis. The moment when you know that your spouse is unfaithful, is gnosis. That inner twinge of a guilty conscience is gnosis.
Growing older and wiser is a lifelong process that accelerates in the third phase, especially if you heed gnosis in yourself. This is how the archetype of Sophia becomes known to you. She is a way of knowing, a source of inner wisdom as well as an archetypal wisewoman. When Sophia dwells in you, you perceive the soul of the matter or soul qualities in others.
SOPHIA THE MYSTIC
The mystic is an aspect of the Sophia archetype that is evoked by numinous experiences. While words are not adequate, those commonly used to describe numinosity are awe, beauty, grace, divinity, ineffability. Numinous experiences are not uncommon—most people may have had them—but a numinous experience is the defining moment for the woman who becomes a mystic. After which, to know God—this particular gnosis—becomes the central focus of her spiritual life and her spiritual life becomes her life. She may attempt to convey the experience and the meaning of it and can only do so in metaphorical language. She seeks to enter and stay in a mystical union with divinity. Women mystics flowered in medieval religious communities of women. Hildegard of Bingen was one of a number of them. Others included Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Clare of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Catherine of Genoa. At a time when women in the secular world married young, had many children and a household to run, the place for a mystic was in a religious order. Women mystics flourished in medieval times because it was possible for a nun to seek mystical union with God or Christ, and not have to attend to the daily maintenance of a household. She was celibate and her passion could be directed toward spiritual union, and she did not have the choice or necessity to support herself. Sophia defines experiences as having spiritual or philosophical meaning. The archetype not only has an aptitude for mystical events, but seeks to know their meaning.
Contemporary women mystics may still be drawn to religious communities and find that a Western cloister or Eastern ashram is fertile ground for mystical experience. But since mystics directly experience divinity, and women (especially older ones) no longer automatically defer to hierarchy, question dogma, and are aware of sexism, they also leave if they find the dogma and beliefs of a particular religion constricting and in conflict with what they deeply trust is true for them. Women have more freedom than ever to decide what they will do and one result is that women are inspired by their mystical insights to lead a personally meaningful life. Most may not even define themselves as mystics, but their mystical experiences are at the core of who they are and what they are doing with their lives. With freedom from the need to conform to institutional definitions of the meaning of their mystical experiences, women are redefining spirituality.
The receptivity to mysticism may be a talent or natural ability in a person’s psyche, or may come after meditation has become a spiritual practice. This sophianic mystical sense of oneness and revelation may occur in a holy moment or be prolonged in duration, and the insight into its meaning may be instantaneous or a lifetime quest. As more and more people meditate as a spiritual practice or as a means of stress reduction, they are cultivating a space for the Sophia archetype and opening themselves for mystical experience.
In her introduction to Weavers of Wisdom: Women Mystics of the Twentieth Century (1989), Ann Bancroft wrote: “Twelve years ago I wrote a book about twentieth-century mystics and they were almost all men. I regretted that at the time but the women’s field seemed rather empty. In the very short time between then and now, however, the women’s movement has brought in to the public eye a number of profound thinkers.”1 She also wanted to see if it were possible to find authentically feminine insights and ways of being that differed from male thoughts about spirituality; which she did. “Women tend to see all things around them as revelatory, revealing totality and completeness and a numinous quality. To see things in this way a certain attention has to be given, which women are good at. It is not the kind of attention with which one acquires knowledge but rather that which happens when one lets go of all concepts and becomes open to what is there.”2
In her profiles of women mystics, each renewed and cultivated their mystical relationship with the sacred in their own way; in nature, in creativity, in contemplation, in a deep connection with another person, and had a life other than being a mystic, which is why most did not call themselves “mystics.” Their mysticism was a source of wisdom that illuminated the particular path they had taken. For example, Joanna Macy’s mysticism matured through Buddhist meditation and deepened her already-formed concern for social justice; this led her to become an anti-nuclear and ecological activist. She practices and teaches others “deep ecology,” a meditative and active imaginative way of listening to plants and animals and even stones, to reach a deeply-felt mystical sense of a web of life. Mystical perceptions often seem to inspire activists who, like Joanna Macy, are devoted to their cause because of a visionary and loving connection with what they are trying to save or support.
Mystical experiences are also the inspiration for writing, poetry, and art. Meinrad Craighead is an example of an artist whose mysticism and paintings have become inseparable. She was an accomplished artist who, in prayer, received guidance that she must become a nun, and entered a Benedictine abbey, where she lived for fourteen years and assumed that she would stay in her religious community for life. She painted as an act of worship, and the paintings that grew out of her soul’s experience of beauty were of God the Mother. She and her paintings, which are visual expressions of her mystical wisdom, became known through The Mother’s Songs: Images of God the Mother. Sherry Anderson and Patricia Hopkins interviewed her for The Feminine Face of God and wrote of the inextricable connection between her mysticism and art. Drawing was an act of thanksgiving for her, an act that let her express an “overwhelming gratitude just for existence, I don’t know if praying made me need to draw, or if drawing made me need to pray. I’ve never been able to identify one without the other.”3 Meinrad left the abbey and now lives, paints, and teaches in New Mexico, once more following the guidance of prayer and a new element that had entered her paintings—birds soaring over the landscapes. These symbols of freedom preceded her leaving the confines of the monastery. She wrote an article shortly after her departure, in which she said it was impossible for her “to support a liturgy that exalted a masculine God image and encouraged women to lead limited, subordinated, clerically-defined lives.”4
Contemporary Sophias are often “closet mystics,” who may have changed the course of their lives after a mystical experience or whose daily work is sustained through their access to this inner wisdom, and yet this most important element is hidden. Connection or union with divinity is a private and intimate experience that is easily misunderstood by others, and it is always difficult if not impossible to adequately communicate an ineffable experience. Many women who have attempted to describe their mystical insights and found themselves having to defend or justify them arrive at the conclusion that it is enough to live with this connection, especially when what they do in their lives because of their gnosis is their individuation path.
When Sophia is not only a source of mystical insight but is also the archetype that fully engages the attention of a woman, then it is accurate to say that she is a mystic and her Self-directed task is to find a means of expression and a way to convey the insight she has acquired. There are women mystics whom we know through their writing. Among twentieth-century examples are Evelyn Underhill, Simone Weil, and Bernadette Roberts.
SOPHIA THE SPIRITUAL LEADER
The religious roles of priest, pastor, or rabbi have until the latter part of the twentieth century not been held by women. Women could not fulfill an inner calling to mediate between divinity and congregation, which is a priestly function, or preach, or be a theologian. Many women recall being ridiculed in childhood when they said that they wanted to be a priest when they grew up. This could not be a vocation for them—even if they felt a deep call to serve God. Just as girls who wanted to be doctors were often told, “You can’t be a doctor, but you can be a nurse,” they were told, “You can’t be a priest, but you can be a nun.” This is what girls and women are still being told if they are Roman Catholics.
The women’s movement of the seventies had a huge impact on admissions into medicine and law in the decade that immediately followed. Prior to then, medical school classes, if they had any women at all, had a token number. Ten out of a class of one hundred—the number of women in my own medical school class—was an unusually large percentage. A decade later it was not unusual for entering medical classes to be 50 percent women. This change in numbers was true for law schools as well. Theology graduate schools were slower to be affected, lagging behind by at least a decade, but by the end of the twentieth century, seminaries that admitted women also saw a similar rise in admissions of women. There remained overt, religiously sanctioned resistance to the ordination of women by the Roman Catholic Church and in Orthodox Judaism. In most Protestant denominations, and in Reform and Conservative Judaism, however, ordination of women became an issue when individual women sought to be priests, ministers, or rabbis, and met resistance. Most liberal denominations and synagogues now have many clergywomen.
In 2000 the annual convention of Southern Baptist leaders, representing 15.5 million people, revised previous policy, which had resulted in the ordination of fewer than a hundred women pastors and copastors, and declared that the pulpit was for men only. The Reverend Bill Merrell, their official spokesperson, quoted the apostle Paul’s assertion: “I permit no woman to teach, nor have authority over men; she is to keep silent.” (1 Timothy 2:12).
The mysticism of the Sophia archetype provides insights into the meaning of religious texts, beliefs, and rituals. With Sophia, theology can be the subject of inner dialogue, and writing the means of describing mystical experience. For some women, becoming a priest, pastor, or rabbi is an inner calling that still may not be allowed them. Obedience to male authority and the literal interpretation of selected passages of the Old Testament, Bible, or Koran characterize the religions that reject the spiritual leadership of women.
It is not just the women who are denied access to pulpits, but women in the congregation who suffer from their absence. I remember the time that I was in an Episcopalian church and Barbara St. Andrews officiated. This was in the early eighties, and the first time I ever saw a woman priest in a clerical collar speaking from the pulpit and offering communion. It seemed strangely unfamiliar, and then it liberated something in me. It was similar to when I saw someone who is Asian like me in an honored or respected role for the first time. When I witnessed it myself, my own world grew larger. Wherever there is discrimination, these “someone like me” experiences are heartwarming and affirming, unless there is such internalized self-hatred that affiliation is denied.
A THIRD-PHASE-OF-LIFE TASK
In the first and second phases of a woman’s life the tasks that absorb us are: gaining objective knowledge and experience, coping with necessity and reality, and focusing on goals and relationships. This is what we have the “juice” for. At some point after we have crossed into the third phase, priorities shift, and the question becomes: What matters to you now? This is when Sophia, the archetype of mystical and spiritual wisdom, can come into prominence.
Sophia’s concern is with spiritual or philosophical or religious meaning, which is a third-phase-of-life task. Soul and spiritual issues come to the forefront if Sophia is an active archetype. Most of us will contemplate our eventual death, not in a morbid way but because it is time to give some thought to this. The third phase is when the subject of death invites us to think about the meaning of life. The death of ailing and aging parents places middle-aged women in the oldest generation, the next to go. You may be caring for a frail and vulnerable mother and see yourself in years hence. Or you may have a life-threatening disease or a scare that makes you think about your own death. Prayer is an almost instinctual act in the midst of a crisis or when death is a possibility, and prayer activates the Sophia archetype.
Thoughts turn to death and divinity, or mortality and eternity, or our religious beliefs and personal faith; once Sophia is an active archetype, what we believe in comes up for review. In earlier phases of life, issues of faith are much more concrete and have to do with following or challenging one’s religion; the beliefs of church and temple have a direct bearing on a woman’s sexuality, reproduction and contraceptive choices, marriage, raising children, and divorce.
Women, especially in the third phase of life, are usually the most active and devoted parishioners in churches and synagogues. The clergy and theologians may for the most part be male, but it’s women who have filled the pews and kept the community going through their attendance and volunteer work. In their crone years, women may yearn for a spiritual community or find themselves attending services. This is so even for women influenced by the women’s movement who have felt at odds with the sexism and yet return to the familiarity of traditional religion.
As women influenced by the women’s movement come of crone age, many will find Sophia stirring in them and in religious quandaries that they must personally resolve. They may disagree with beliefs and yet feel at home in the liturgy, or the church leader, priest, or guru may be exposed as unworthy, or simply too young for a crone to look to for spiritual direction, and yet this is her community. Sorting out your own religious and spiritual feelings, loyalties, and beliefs are sophianic tasks. With Sophia, having two apparently contradictory feelings can be resolved by gnosis and prayer, or they can remain unresolved but held as a paradox. For example, a feminist woman may be aware of how discordant it is with her feminism and yet stay in an orthodox religion because she knows that this is the place for her to be. Another woman, also attuned to her inner Sophia, may take in the same information and know that it is time for her to leave a particular community of believers because she no longer belongs there. The Sophia archetype is not concerned with the politically correct response, but with knowing and following her particular soul path. Sometimes it leads her back to the church.
Kathleen Norris, author of Cloister Walk, is an example of a woman in the third phase of her life who grappled with her faith and the meaning of her religious tradition in an intellectual sophianic way. After twenty years away, she began attending church again and, she writes, “For reasons I did not comprehend, church seemed a place I needed to be. But in order to inhabit it, to claim it as mine, I had to rebuild my religious vocabulary. The words had to become real to me, in an existential sense.” Following her gnosis, she sought information and drew upon her experience until she knew what each word meant to her. The result was her own lexicon of significant Christian words, which she shares in Amazing Grace. In the process of seeking meaning, word by word, Norris gradually was converted, although when she began, it was not a foregone conclusion that this book would be her coming out as a Christian.
When Sophia is active as an archetype of wisdom, there is a pressing need to find meaning and reconcile one’s beliefs through gnosis. Carol Lee Flinders in At the Root of this Longing describes her journey from involvement with feminism as a younger woman to being a married woman and a mother residing in a spiritual community. On turning fifty, she was disturbed by a series of events and thoughts and an internal insistence that she reconcile her feminism and her spiritual practice. She wrote, “My feminism and my spirituality have always been closely connected, laying claims on me at the same level. I’d taken up meditation out of a driving and, yes, aching need for self-knowledge and meaning. My feminism had arisen out of that same well of feelings, and in many regards the life I’d chosen had satisfied it. Part of me, though—the part that never lost awareness of the attitudes that demean women and girls so universally and systematically—was like a muscle that was sore from continual strain and misuse.”5 Flinders held these apparent opposites in herself until she came to know them to be two halves of a spiritual whole; each completed the other. She realized that “feminism catches fire when it draws upon its inherent spirituality”6 and saw how feminism could even be defined as a resistance movement based in spirituality.
PRAYER
Prayer as the act of communing with the divine is a universal, perhaps even instinctual act and the central focus of the mystic. All spiritual traditions incorporate prayer in their worship services, and most of us have bowed our heads as a priest, minister, or rabbi prayed out loud or said a familiar prayer in unison with others in the congregation. For Sophia, prayer is as much or more about “listening” as speaking, and both halves of the “conversation” may be without words. As Anderson and Hopkins found in their research:
“Communion with the divine is a deeply personal and mysterious experience, and the women we interviewed described again and again how opening oneself to this mystery can be done in any number of ways. Some pray in solitude; others pray communally. Some pray aloud; others pray in silence. Some do both. Some pray inside, and some outside. Some follow the liturgies and formal prayers of their youth, while others make up new liturgies and rituals. Some chant their prayers and some dance their prayers and some paint or perform or swim their prayers.”7
How Do You Pray?
Think about how and when you have prayed. Widen the definition of prayer to include when you have felt touched by or in touch with divinity—with God, the Great Mystery, Mother God, Goddess, Tao, an unnamed holiness or sense of grace, whenever you had a sense that “this is a sacred moment.”
MARRIAGE AND SOPHIA
Women on a spiritual quest go inward when they are finding and developing the Sophia archetype. This private interior communion time and the gnosis that emerges shifts a woman’s focus away from outer concerns, including her marriage. Achieving balance should be possible, but when Sherry Anderson and Patricia Hopkins interviewed women whose spirituality was an inspiration to others in-depth for The Feminine Face of God, their stories raised the question of whether a woman can do this and sustain a marriage or a love relationship with a man.
“We began to notice that no one was inquiring whether women could be true to themselves and raise children, or have deep friendships, or even be in a loving relationship with another woman. The questions were explicitly about long-term relationships between men and women. And the real issues that lay beneath these questions seemed to be: In our male-dominated culture, what happens when women no longer need or want to defer to men? What happens when we no longer automatically modulate our personalities or reorganize our priorities to accommodate our husband or lover? Does the glue that holds male-female relationships together break down?”8
In their sampling, seventy-one percent of the marriages ended in divorce.9 Almost all of the women over fifty were certain that they would not marry again, while younger women believed that it would be possible to maintain a loving marriage and a spiritual path. Since solitude commonly is the developmental ground for contemplation, prayer, meditation, and mystical experience, a conflict will arise between the needs of a relationship and time for Sophia. That this will be a conflict needs to be anticipated, with the awareness that it could become an either/or choice.
SOPHIA AS AN OLD-TESTAMENT GODDESS
Sophia is coming into the western culture as more than an archetype. For many she is feminine divinity or a name for the feminine aspect of God. Women raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition have been ignorant of the fact that the God of the Old Testament, the Christian male trinity, and patriarchal monotheism have not existed from the very beginning, or that there are hidden references to goddesses in the Old Testament. It is enlightening to discover that women’s current efforts to bring a sacred feminine into religion, or have women clergy, or language for divinity that is not exclusively male is not a new invention at all, but only the current resistance to the denial of feminine divinity or sacred vocations for women. When women find Sophia in themselves, and then learn about the suppression and subsequent denial of the goddess, the intellectual knowledge enhances the gnosis and supports a crone’s growing sense of her internal wisdom.
To begin with, there is no word in Hebrew for “goddess,” so the word cannot appear in the Old Testament.10 This nondesignation has the psychological effect of nonrecognition. We learn what something is and attach qualities to it through language. Without a vocabulary, the idea of feminine divinity is even hard to imagine. The theology of patriarchy is that God is male, and that men are created in the image of God, and have dominion over everything else.
But curiously, even if there is no word for goddess and monotheism denies the possibility, there appears to be a goddess in the Old Testament’s Book of Proverbs. She was Chokmah in Hebrew, became Sophia in Greek, and then the abstract and neuter word “wisdom” in English.
Sophia as “wisdom” in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible speaks in the first person. Her description of herself and manner of speaking are that of a divine feminine being. Her attributes are those of a goddess of wisdom. She says: “I have counsel and sound wisdom, I have insight, I have strength,” and then gives a biographical account of herself, which I have shortened:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his works, before all else that he made, long ago. Alone, I was fashioned in times long past, at the beginning, long before earth itself. When there was yet no ocean I was born, no springs brimming with water, before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, before he made the earth with its fields…When he set the heavens in their place I was there, when he girdled the ocean with the horizon, when he fixed the canopy of clouds overhead and set the springs of ocean firm in their place, when he prescribed its limits for the sea and knit together earth’s foundations. Then I was at his side each day, like a master workman. I was his darling and delight, rejoicing with him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in mankind.”11
Michelangelo painted this scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Sophia is at God’s side as God reaches out with his finger to touch Adam’s finger, and yet the image that comes to mind is always of the two male figures. Sophia is in plain sight and yet we are seeing only God and Adam. When we do not have the concept or word for goddess, we can’t seem to see Sophia even though she is there.
In the Wisdom of Solomon (an apocryphal Hebrew text written about 100 B.C.E), Sophia is even more clearly a divine presence. Solomon claims that he learned everything that was hidden or manifest from Sophia, whose skill made all things. In Jewish literature, in a culture which officially maintains that there is but one God, Sophia presented a problem of how monotheism could be reconciled with the existence of a goddess. The solution has been to deny the existence of feminine divinity and consider references to her as poetic expression.
MONOTHEISM ELIMINATES THE GODDESS
The elimination of the goddess was required by the monotheism of Moses and the Israelites. When we read the Bible about warfare over the promised land and struggles against worship of “false gods,” we miss the point that the Lord (translation of Yahweh) and his prophets were eradicating the persistent worship of the goddess. Goddesses were abominations, and those who made images of them or worshiped them were cursed by the Lord.
The cosmology of Judeo-Christian theology is told in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. There is one Great Father God, who is supreme and exists from the beginning. God rules alone. He has no lineage, no family or spouse. On the first day of creation, God decreed, “Let there be light;” and there was light. On each of the next five days, God decreed, and it was done.
In The Myth of the Goddess, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford put this into a cultural context: “In Hebrew mythology all the various male deities of earlier cultures—Enlil, Ptah, Marduck, and El—coalesce into the one image of the Great Father God, who enters the stage of the Bible as though he were the first and only deity. The elevation of the god begotten of the mother goddess into the father god was finally achieved in Babylonian mythology; but now it becomes supreme, as though the idea of a mother goddess had never existed in the human psyche.”12
The Old Testament tells how Moses led his people out of Egypt to the promised land, which already belonged to goddess-worshiping people whose way of life had made Canaan the coveted land of milk and honey. After the land and people were conquered, the prophets railed against the abominations of Asherah, Anath, and Ashtoreth, as false or foreign gods. Their names did not give me a clue that these false gods were goddesses, nor could I have guessed that abominations referred to images of goddesses, shrines to them, and sacred groves on mountains. I had no idea when I was in Sunday school or even in a college religion class that the god of the Old Testament and his prophets were obliterating goddess worship, destroying statues or paintings of a divine woman, or, in the language itself, the word for her.
Asherah was the Semitic name of the Great Goddess. Asherah was called the “Mother of All Wisdom” and “She Who Gives Birth to the Gods.” Sometimes she was called simply, “Holiness,” or in reference to the moon, she was called the “Lady Who Traverses the Sea.” Asherah and her priestesses were addressed as Rabbatu, a female form of Rabbi, which means “Holy One.” Her ancient oracles of prophecy were renowned. She alone gave birth to the Seventy Deities of Heaven. Asherah was the most prominent of the Canaanite goddesses or deities. Her husband was El, and her daughter was Anath, also called Ashtoreth or Astarte. Anath’s husband and brother was Baal, the other centrally important god.
The invasion of Canaan by the Israelites around 1200 B.C.E. was in many ways a recapitulation of the invasion of Old Europe by the sky god—worshiping Kurgan nomadic warrior tribes. After wandering for forty years in the desert, the Israelites who had been slaves of the Egyptian pharaoh were by then a toughened warrior people. Like Old Europe, Canaan was a settled and cultivated land inhabited by an art-making, goddess-worshiping people. Like the Kurgans, once the Israelites settled in as victors, they were influenced by the people they had conquered to assimilate their goddess. However, unlike the Kurgans, the Israelites were monotheistic, which made this unacceptable to Yahweh. Subsequently, there followed, according to the Old Testament, the relentless effort of Yahweh’s prophets to eliminate the goddess Asherah and destroy all of her Asherah. (“Asherah” also can be translated as “sacred grove” and is the name for her sacred tree or image that was in her temples; at times, even in the Temple at Jerusalem.)
Asherah continued to be worshiped by Hebrew-speaking people for centuries after the invasion of Canaan. In the history of Israel and Judah from 1200 B.C.E. to the Babylonian exile in 586 B.C.E. described in Davies’s The Hebrew Goddess, there were apparently cycles in which only Yahweh, the god of Israel, was worshiped and cycles when Asherah was also, depending on the power politics of the time. Asherah was in the temple from 928 to 893 B.C.E. (thirty-five years), from 825 to 725 B.C.E. (a hundred years), from 698 to 586 B.C.E. (seventy-eight years) and from 609 to 586 B.C.E. (twenty-three years).13
Efforts to eliminate the goddess eventually did succeed. Virtually all that was known about Asherah was from the Old Testament, until, in the 1930s, a few tablets were found inscribed with various myths that were written about 1350 B.C.E. In the Old Testament, “Asherah” is translated “grove,” without explanation that the sacred grove represented the goddess’s genital center, birthplace of all things.14
The first and second commandments are directly related to eradicating the goddess. According to Leonard Shlain’s analysis in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the First Commandment, “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2–3), announces the disappearance of the goddess and declares that Yahweh will not tolerate mention of a goddess.15 The Second Commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Shlain’s emphasis), forbids making a likeness of anything. If the commandments are listed in their order of importance, the commandment against making images is more important than killing, adultery, stealing, and the rest of them. The prohibition against making representational art meant that it was a sin to make paintings or sculptures inspired by the beauty and power of nature or by the feminine face or body. It was a commandment of a jealous god, whose rival was a goddess.
GNOSTIC-CHRISTIAN SOPHIA
In the New Testament, divinity is also exclusively male. Father, son, and holy spirit (male) comprise the Christian trinity. However, kept literally hidden until the mid-twentieth century was the existence of early Christian gospels that were written at the same time or even before those in the New Testament. These have come to be called the Gnostic Gospels. In some of these texts, Sophia is described as a Judeo-Christian goddess, Yahweh as the son of a great mother goddess, and the Trinity as comprised of father, mother, and son.
The discovery and translation of the Gnostic Gospels coincided remarkably with the emergence of feminism in the psyches of American women. The timing has struck me as synchronistic, the information came at such an auspicious time. Originally written in Greek, these Coptic translations had been concealed and preserved for 1,500 years to be found in an era when scientific methods could preserve them, when scholarship existed that was able to translate them—scholarship that was not beholden to the church and to the maintenance of the orthodox faith—and there was interest by women scholars and theologians in Sophia and in knowing about women’s participation in early Christian communities.
In December 1945, an Arab peasant made an extraordinary archaeological discovery in a mountain honeycombed with caves in Upper Egypt near the town of Nag Hammadi. He uncovered thirteen papyrus books sealed in a huge earthenware jar, which contained gospels of the heretical gnostic Christians. Described in the text is a divine feminine creator and teacher called Sophia. Long concealed, Sophia—who was revered as a divine figure in these texts—was now being revealed as a Judeo-Christian goddess.
These papyri came to the attention of the Egyptian government when they were sold on the black market through antiquities dealers in Cairo. Officials bought one of the books—called codices—and then confiscated ten and a half of the thirteen, depositing them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. A large part of the thirteenth codex, containing five extraordinary texts, remained at large, and was discreetly offered for sale. They had been smuggled out of Egypt and were hidden in Belgium. Word of the availability of this codex reached Professor Giles Quispel at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who urged the Jung Foundation in Zurich to provide funds for their purchase. Professor Quispel acquired the papyri and smuggled what is now called “The Jung Codex” across the border; a dramatic story of the scholar as an unlikely secret agent.
An excellent account of the Nag Hammadi texts and their significance can be found in Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, published in 1979. When the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were translated, there were fifty-two texts from the early centuries of the Christian era, including a collection of early Christian gospels. They were Coptic translations, made about 1,500 years before, of still more ancient manuscripts, originally written in Greek, the language of the New Testament. The research efforts to date them concluded that some originated possibly as early as the second half of the first century (50–100 C.E., which means that they were written as early or earlier than the New Testament gospels). These texts and others like them were in circulation among the early Christians. In the middle of the second century C.E. they were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians, those who accepted the power of bishops to determine faith and practice and who came to be called the Catholic Church. Until these early texts came to light, all we knew of them came from what bishops wrote attacking them.
Christianity became an officially recognized religious cult in 313 C.E., and in 323 C.E., a mere decade later, it became the state religion of the Roman Empire (following the conversion of the emperor Constantine). Once in power, Christian bishops took possession of all texts they had determined were heretical, made possession of them a criminal offense, and burned and destroyed all of them. The campaign against them was an admission of their persuasive power, and until the Nag Hammadi books were found, all we knew about the heretics and their beliefs were through the condemnatory writings of orthodoxy. As Elaine Pagels pointed out, those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard themselves as heretics.
Gnostic congregations or groups were autonomous. There were many variations in beliefs, and many different scriptures or gospels. Many were ascribed to contemporaries of Jesus, including his brothers. Like the gospels in the New Testament, there were sayings and words attributed to Jesus. One text claimed that the true revelation of Christianity came through a woman, Mary Magdalene, who was also Jesus’ beloved. Some gnostic Christians prayed to a divine mother and a divine father. Many texts were mystical works similar in the visionary quality to the book of Revelations. Their cosmological writings were either very different than what was recounted in Genesis, or they focused on the second version of the creation of man told in Genesis 1:26–27: “Then let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” Some considered the God of Israel ignorant of his own mother, in others, Yahweh is castigated for his arrogance and jealousy.
Pagels noted that the gnostics tended to regard all doctrines, speculations, and myths—their own as well as others’—only as approaches to truth. Their ways of perceiving and understanding was in marked contrast to the authoritarian style of the bishops, for whom there was only one truth, one church, one system of organization, and, therefore, only one legitimate Christianity.
The gnostic Christians were egalitarian, which especially rankled the church fathers. Tertullian charged them with lacking distinctions: “They all have access equally, they listen equally, they pray equally—even pagans, if any happen to come.” He found it offensive that “they share the kiss of peace with all who come,” and considered them all arrogant, because “all offer you gnosis.” The place of women in gnostic congregations was especially offensive. They had authority. He charged, “These heretical women—how audacious they are! They have no modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, and, it may be, even to baptize!”16
The orthodox Christian churches were patriarchal. The “Precepts of Ecclesiastical Discipline,” which Tertullian saw as proper behavior for women, specified: “It is not permitted for a woman to speak in the church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer the eucharist, nor to claim for herself a share in any masculine function—not to mention any priestly office.”17
Also in marked contrast to orthodox Christianity, which vested power and authority at the top, with a major class distinction between the laity and the clergy, the gnostic Christians rotated positions and changed roles in their services. Bishop Irenaeus said that when they met, all members drew lots. Whoever received a certain lot had the role of priest; the one who drew the lot to offer the sacrament, functioned as bishop; another would read the scripture; and others, as prophets, would address the group, offering extemporaneous spiritual instruction. The next time the group met, they would draw lots again, so that the people taking each role changed continually. All initiates, men and women alike, participated equally in the drawing; anyone might be selected to serve as priest, bishop, or prophet, which also appalled Irenaeus.
To draw lots and rotate positions of authority and service is another example of egalitarianism, but more than this, I suspect that this was an expression of having an implicit trust in the unfolding of events. They let fate or meaningful coincidence (rather than meaningless random chance) determine who would be the vessel through which divinity would speak or act. Since Jung coined the word “synchronicity” for meaningful coincidences, we would say that they let synchronicity decide. Synchronicity has been defined, tongue-in-cheek, as “God acting anonymously,” which nonetheless alludes to an awe that can accompany an especially uncanny and significant synchronicity. Maybe we should think of it as “Sophia acting anonymously,” when we know through the synchronicity that there is no adequate explanation for how this could happen other than that we are part of an interconnected spiritual universe that has just shown us that we matter.
TO SPEAK OF SOPHIA
The fear of ridicule, of appearing superstitious, or being irritational inhibits us from sharing the mystical gnosis that may have been or still could be a turning point or a defining event once it is acknowledged by us and supported by others. When you were younger, anything mystical may have been labeled “foolishness” by pragmatic parents, or even “of the devil” by fundamental clergy or families. Friends of your youth may have reacted similarly, or listened and left you feeling that they were just humoring you. If you took part in consciousness-raising groups, you may remember that there was no place for spirituality then. And, while most subjects can be discussed with a therapist, I think it reasonable to be concerned that bringing up mystical experiences risks having them labeled as magical thinking or delusions. Obviously, insights gained from gnosis are rarely welcomed as topics of conversation at social gatherings. To break the silence and speak about what you know to be your spiritual reality, or tell another about a numinous experience or your philosophical insights or take up a religious vocation becomes possible for many women only when they are over fifty and have found friends with spiritual depth.
While some women have been in touch with Sophia’s wisdom as children and remained so all their lives, the Sophia aspect of most may remain dormant or neglected until they are over fifty because the second phase of most women’s lives is characterized by a shortage of time, with everyday life requiring a deft juggling of roles and tasks. There often is no time to cultivate Sophia until you are a crone. If you have a circle of women with whom you can share your spiritual journey, the circle can become a vessel for Sophia to develop in each woman. The receptivity to spirit, the ability to listen and value mystical experience, learning that gnosis was behind major life choices that others have made creates a safe space for Sophia’s wisdom.