Recovering the Feminine Gender of the Holy Spirit (Part 2)
The Shekinah-Sophia
Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit
[Author’s Note: This essay was a webinar I gave on August 13th this year to the online ‘Madonna Rising’ Chartres Community week organized by Ubiquity University. The title formed the first part of a trilogy of webinars on the overall subject of the Divine Feminine.]
The highly-developed cosmology of this tradition preserves the ancient Bronze Age image of the sacred marriage, reflected in the union of the Divine Father–Mother in the Divine Ground.[1] There is not a Father God but a Mother-Father who are one in their eternal embrace, one in their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continuous act of creation through all the dimensions they bring into being and sustain. From the perspective of divine immanence, there is no essential separation between spirit and nature or spirit and matter. No other cosmology offers the same breath-taking vision in such exquisite poetic imagery of the union of male and female energies in the One that is both. The Song of Songs was the text most used by kabbalists for their contemplation of the mystery of this divine union.
The Zohar or Book of Radiance or Splendour contemplates the mystery of the relationship between the female and male aspects of Divine Spirit expressed as Mother and Father, and their emanation through all dimensions of creation as Daughter and Son. The essential concept of this mystical tradition expresses itself in an image of worlds within worlds rather than as a hierarchy of descent. Divine Spirit named as Ain Soph or Ain Soph Aur, beyond form or conception, is the ineffable light at the root, the Source, the Divine Ground of Being. Emanating as creative Sound or Word, Light, Intelligence and Love, it brings into being successive spheres, realms, or dimensions named as veils or robes which clothe and hide the hidden source, yet at the same time transmit its radiant light.
The transmission of this ineffable light from the source to the outer manifest level is, as described earlier, an inverted tree – the Tree of Life – whose branches grow from its root in the divine ground and extend through invisible worlds or dimensions of being of which we are not aware because our minds have become closed to their existence.
The primal centre or root is the innermost light, of an unimaginable luminosity and translucence, utterly different from the light we see in this world. This center expands or is sown as a ray of light into what is described in some texts as a sea of glory, in others as a palace or womb which acts as an enclosure for or receptacle of the light. From here it emanates as a radiant cascade, a fountain of living water, pouring forth light to create, permeate and sustain all the worlds or dimensions it brings into being. All life on earth, all consciousness, is that light and is therefore utterly sacred. The Zohar describes nature as the garment of God.
This cascade of light flows through the ten Vessels, Powers or Attributes of the Divine, named as the Sefiroth, which are connected by the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life. The first Vessel (Kether) is a state of perfect equilibrium and contains all that was, is and will be. The divine impulse towards emanation moves the energy to expand beyond the first Vessel to the second; it is then received and contained by the third Vessel. This process of expansion and containment is repeated three times until this Tree is complete and the emanating energy balanced. The process of emanation then proceeds through further worlds, and the laws or archetypes which govern each world or level of creation come into being until they manifest as our own world.
In this extraordinary cosmology, the Shekinah or feminine face of the god-head is named as Cosmic Womb, Palace, Enclosure, Fountain, Apple Orchard and Mystical Garden of Eden. She is named as the architect of worlds, source or foundation of our world, and also as the Radiance, Word or Glory of the unknowable ground or godhead. Text after text uses sexual imagery and the imagery of light to describe how the ray which emanates from the unknowable ground enters into the womb—the Great Sea of Light—of the Celestial Mother and how she brings forth the male and female creative energies which, as two branches of the Tree of Life, are symbolically, King and Queen, Son and Daughter. A third branch of the Tree descends directly down the centre, unifying and connecting the energies on either side. All elements or aspects of the Tree of Life are connected through the twenty-two paths. The heart centre of these three branches or pillars as they are sometimes described, is called Tiphareth. If the question were asked: Where does the Shekinah appear on the Tree of Life? The answer is no-where because the Shekinah is the Tree of Life.
The Shekinah is named as the indwelling and active Holy Spirit. She is the divine guide and immanent presence who delivers the world from bondage to beliefs that separate it from its source, restoring it ultimately to union with the divine ground. She brings into being all spheres or dimensions of manifestation which are ensouled and sustained by the ineffable source until, through them, she generates the manifest world we know and remains here until such time as the whole creation is enfolded once again into its source.
Kabbalism calls this last, tenth sphere Malkuth, the Kingdom, where the divine Mother-Father image is expressed as the male and female of all species. Humanity, female and male, is therefore the expression of the duality-in-unity of the god-head. The Shekinah is forever united with her beloved Spouse in the divine ground or heart of being and it is their union in the god-head that holds life in a constant state of coming into being. Yet she is also present – here with us – in the material reality of our world. The sexual attraction between man and woman and the expression of true love between them is the enactment or reflection at this level of creation of the divine embrace at its heart that is enshrined in the cherished words of the Song of Songs: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” (6:3) Human sexual relationship, enacted with love, mutual respect and joy, is a sacred ritual that is believed to maintain the ecstatic union of the divine pair.
Because she brings all worlds into existence as her robes or veils, and dwells in them as divine presence, nothing is outside spirit. In the radiance of that invisible cosmic Sea of Light, everything is connected to everything else as through a luminous circulatory system. Moreover, the Shekinah is deeply devoted to what she has brought into being, as a mother is devoted to the well-being of her child. All life on earth, all levels and degrees of consciousness, all forms of what we see and name as ‘matter’, are the creation of that primal fountain of Light and are therefore an expression of divinity.
Blue and gold are the colours associated with the Shekinah. As cosmic soul, She is the radiant ground or ‘light body’ of the human soul — at once its deepest, essential ground, its outer ‘garment’, the physical body, and its animating spirit or consciousness. She is the holy presence of the ‘glory of God’ within everyone. All of us, moving from unconsciousness and ignorance of this radiant ground to awareness of and relationship with it, live in her being and grow under her power of attraction until we are reunited with the source, discovering ourselves to be what in essence we always were but did not know ourselves to be—sons and daughters of God, living expressions of divine spirit. The blackness of the Shekinah’s robe, comparable to the black robe or veil of Isis – who was also called ‘The Widow’ during her search for Osiris – signifies the darkness of the mystery which hides the glory of her Light — imagery that was carried forward to the Black Madonna of Chartres and other cathedrals and churches in France.
The Shekinah was called ‘The Precious Stone’ and ‘The Stone of Exile’ (lapis exilis), which at once connects her with the twelfth century image of the Holy Grail, described as both a vessel that is the source of boundless nourishment and as a stone. She was also called the ‘Pearl’, and ‘The Burning Coal’. She could be described as the glowing gold of the hidden treasure at the heart of life, the jewelled rainbow of light thrown between the divine and human worlds, the seamless robe which unites the manifest and unmanifest dimensions of life.
It is not difficult to discern the imagery of Kabbalism woven into the fabric of well-known fairy tales. In the story of Cinderella, for example, the veiled form of the Shekinah as the forgotten image of the Divine Feminine can be recognized as the fairy God-mother who presides over her daughter’s transformation from soot-blackened drudge to royal bride. Harold Bayley, who wrote a remarkable book called The Lost Language of Symbolism at the beginning of the last century, said that the figure of Cinderella could be understood to represent the human soul as it moves from ‘rags to riches’.[2] Cinderella’s three splendid dresses, which could be equated with the ‘robe of glory’ of certain kabbalist and gnostic texts, represent the soul’s luminous sheaths or subtle bodies, as dazzling as the light of the moon, sun and stars. Just as the soot-blackened girl in the fairy tale puts on her three glorious dresses to reveal herself as she truly is, so does the human soul don these ‘robes of glory’ as she moves from the darkness of ignorance into the revelation of her true nature and parentage.[3]
To reconnect with the tradition of the Divine Feminine that has been repudiated, obscured and almost lost over some two and a half thousand years, we could turn to the magnificent passages in the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament and the Books of Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha which carry vestiges of this lost cosmology.
In the Book of Proverbs (8:23-31), Wisdom tells us that she is the Beloved of God, with Him from the beginning, before the foundation of the world. She speaks from the deep ground of life as the hidden law which orders it and as the Craftswoman of creation. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo has painted her tucked into the crook of God’s arm. With their vivid imagery, these passages transform the idea of the Holy Spirit, speaking as Divine Wisdom, from abstract idea into living presence. In the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha, Wisdom is described as sitting by the throne of the Lord in heaven (9:10) and is spoken of as the Holy Spirit (9:17).
Elsewhere, Wisdom speaks as though, like the Shekinah, she were here, in this dimension, dwelling with us in the midst of her kingdom, accessible to those who seek her out. She is unknown and unrecognized, yet working within the depths of life, striving to open our understanding to the divine reality of her presence, the sacredness of her creation, her justice, wisdom, love and truth. In the Book of Ben Sirach (24:1-20) Wisdom, perhaps recalling the time when she was honored and worshipped in the First Temple, proclaims herself to be the soul and intelligence of the cosmos, rooted in tree, vine, earth and water and active in the habitations of humanity. She is the principal of justice that inspires human laws. She appeals to all those who are desirous of her, to fill themselves with her fruits, “For my memorial is sweeter than honey, and mine inheritance than the honeycomb.” (24:20)
Here is the language of the immanence of the Divine Feminine in the world. Who wrote these magnificent verses? Was he a high-priest of the First Temple whose words were secretly preserved and taken to Alexandria where the Jewish community continued to worship the Queen of Heaven as Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit? Did he hear a voice speaking to him or did he have a vision of a great feminine being, as Apuleius had of the goddess Isis and wrote down what he heard her say to him?[4] To those who, like Solomon, prized her more highly than rubies, Wisdom was their wise and luminous guide. Solomon’s beautiful and moving words in praise of Wisdom come to mind:
I prayed and understanding was given me: I called upon God, and the Spirit of Wisdom came to me… I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light, for the light that cometh from her never goeth out… For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty… She is the brightness of the everlasting Light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness… She is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of stars: being compared with the Light, she is found before it… I loved her, and sought her out from my youth. I desired to make her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty. (Wisd. of Solomon 7:7,10, 25, 26, 29, 8:2)
During the last fifty years or so, it has become increasingly clear that there was a great underground stream of human experience which flowed from the thriving city of Alexandria into several different channels — into the writings of the early Christian Gnostics discovered at Nag Hammadi; into the Hermetic Tradition and the later Alchemists; and to the transmitters, both Jewish and Christian, of the ancient cosmology of Kabbalism. Hellenistic Egypt in the second and third centuries CE seems to be the ultimate source of all these traditions, yet we now know that the roots lie deeper, in the temple teachings of a far older time, whether in Palestine or Egypt. Alexandria was a Greek city, the meeting place of East and West — a vibrant crucible for the exchange of ideas and teachings between Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians and Jews, and also sages from the East bringing teachings from far-away Persia and India. This vital stream of esoteric teaching which was later to suffer such repression and persecution at the hands of the late Roman Emperors and the Christian Church, is a vital yet largely unknown aspect of our spiritual inheritance. In Alexandria, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit was called Sophia – the Greek word for Wisdom – a name which descended to the time when the Emperor Justinian built the great Christian Basilica in Constantinople called Hagia Sophia, whose fate has been to be turned, once again, into a mosque (2020).[5]
The Gnostics were a group of early Christians, among them the descendants of Jews who had fled Jerusalem in 70 CE and who claimed to have the secret teaching that Jesus imparted to his closest disciples, including his older brother James and Mary Magdalene. Many Gospels now lost were in circulation among them, including the four that have come down to us and possibly one called The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, written by Mary Magdalene, that found its way to France, possibly taken there by her. It has been restored to us in a remarkable recent translation that fills in the crucial passages that are missing in the previously known versions of the Gospel of Mary, including the one in the Nag Hammadi Library.[6] In it are found these startling words of Jesus (called the Aramaic ‘Yeshua’ in this text): ‘My words are the Way, the Truth and the Life. For my words are given of the Spirit, and no one comes to the Kingdom except through Her Teachings. If you had known and understood my teachings, then you would have known and understood the one who sent me also.’[7]
By the year 200, as Elaine Pagels tells us in Chapter Three of her book The Gnostic Gospels, “Every one of the secret texts which gnostic groups revered was omitted from the canonical collection, and branded as heretical by those who called themselves orthodox Christians. By the time the process of sorting the various writings ended… virtually all the feminine imagery for God had disappeared from the orthodox Christian tradition.”[8] Until 1977, when the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 were published, no-one knew that some groups of early Christians had had an image of the Divine Mother whom they had named “The Invisible within the All.”[9] Some texts speak of how, as the Eternal Silence, the Divine Mother received the seed of Light from the ineffable source and how, from her womb, she brought forth all the emanations of Light, ranged in related pairs of feminine and masculine energies. They saw her as the womb of life, not only of human life, but the life of the whole cosmos. They knew this Divine Mother as the Holy Spirit and saw the dove as her emissary.
I find it fascinating that the imagery and mythology of the Divine Mother in Gnosticism is so similar to the imagery of the Shekinah in Kabbalism that they seem to belong to one and the same tradition, with the difference that in Gnosticism – that flourished in the Greek-speaking world – the Holy Spirit was called Sophia instead of Shekinah. Now, with the research of Margaret Barker confirming the presence of exiled or refugee groups from Jerusalem in Alexandria, the dispersed fragments come together and the relationship would seem to be confirmed.
From the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE Wisdom became associated with Christ as the Logos, the Divine Word, and lost all connection with the Divine Feminine. From now on, the Christian image of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit was wholly identified with the masculine archetype. The ancient connection between the Holy Spirit and the Divine Feminine was irrevocably and, for western civilization, tragically lost, except for a brief period of a hundred or so years which saw the rise of the Cathar Church of the Holy Spirit in the Languedoc area of France. This Church was annihilated by a Crusade against it led by the Church in Rome and by the establishment of the Inquisition in that area. The monotheism of the three Patriarchal religions has led to the situation today where the Earth is no longer viewed as sacred and we are confronted with the catastrophic effects of the loss of the Divine Feminine.[10]
(End of the Essay)
[1] See Baring, Anne & Cashford, Jules, The Myth of the Goddess, Evolution of an Image, Penguin Books Ltd., London, 1993, pp. 211-216
[2] Bayley, Harold, The Lost Language of Symbolism, Vol.1, Williams & Norgate, London, 1912
[3] Mead, G.R.S. The Hymn of the Robe of Glory in Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, John M. Watkins, London 1906
[4] Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. Robert Graves, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, London 1950
[5] Hagia Sophia was originally started in 360 CE but the Basilica we see today was built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE. It was a Christian Basilica until 1453 when, under the Ottoman Empire, it became a mosque. When the Empire was dissolved in 1923, it became a Christian Basilica again until 2020 when it became a mosque again.
[6] De Quillan, Jeanne, Éditions Athara, Foix, France 2010
[7] The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, p. 65, 35:12
[8] Pagels, Elaine, The Gnostic Gospels, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., London, 1979, p. 57
[9] Ibid Chapter 3
[10] See my talk “A Crucial Time of Choice” given to Humanity Rising, 11th August, 2020, Day 82