HSS: The Shekinah: Image of the Divine Feminine

[Guest guest]

Dear Jagbir,

 

Can you please add this to the Holy Spirit Shekinah (HSS) site.

 

Thanks!

 

violet

 

 

 

 

The Shekinah: Image of the Divine Feminine

 

The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the feminine face

of God as it was conceived in the mystical tradition of Judaism,

originating perhaps in the rabbinic schools of Babylon and transmitted orally

for a thousand years until it flowered in the writings of the Jewish Kabbalists

of medieval Spain and southwestern France. In Kabbalah, religion ceases to be a

matter of worship and collective belief. It becomes a direct path of communion

between the individual and the Divine. In the imagery of the Shekinah, Kabbalah

gives us the cosmology of the soul and the relationship between the two aspects

of the godhead that has been lost or hidden for millennia. The mythology of the

Kabbalah is so gloriously rich, so broad in its imaginative and revelatory

reach, and so intensely nourishing to a world that lacks any awareness of the

Divine Feminine, that to discover this tradition is immensely exciting. The

Shekinah reveals the missing imagery of God-as-Mother that has been lost or

obscured in both Judaism and Christianity.

 

Whereas the Old Testament is the written tradition of Judaism, Kabbalah offers

the hidden oral tradition, wonderfully named as " The Voice of the Turtle "

(turtledove). This mystic knowledge or mystic tradition of the direct path to

God was described as the Jewels of the Heavenly Bride. The Bronze Age imagery of

the Great Goddess returns to life in the extraordinary beauty of the Kabbalistic

description of the Shekinah and in the gender endings of nouns that describe the

feminine dimension of the godhead. But the Divine Feminine is now understood as

cosmic soul, the intermediary between the godhead and life in this dimension

who, as the Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human

in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship.

 

The mythology of this tradition restores the image of the sacred marriage in the

union of the Divine Father-Mother in the ground of being. There is not a Mother

and a Father 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 invisible dimensions they bring into being and

sustain. No other tradition offers the same breathtaking 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. Yet one has the feeling that

this way to union with the Divine may descend from some unknown source that

nourished Egypt, Sumer, and India.

 

The Kabbalistic tradition describes the feminine image of the godhead as Mother,

Daughter, Sister, and Holy Spirit, giving woman what she has lacked throughout

the last two and a half thousand years in Judeo-Christian culture - an image of

the Divine Feminine in the godhead that is reflected at the human level in

herself. The Shekinah is Divine Motherhood, Mother of All Living. Women can know

themselves, in their role as mothers, in their care and concern for the

well-being of their loved ones, as the instinctive custodians of her creation.

 

The thirteenth-century " Zohar, The Book of Radiance or Splendor " that was the

principal text of Kabbalah, contemplates the mystery of the relationship between

the female and male aspects of the godhead expressed as Mother and Father, and

their emanation through all levels of creation as Daughter and Son. The

essential conception of this mystical tradition expresses itself as an image of

worlds within worlds. Divine Spirit (Ain Soph or Ein Sof) beyond form or

conception is the light at the center, the heart, and moves outward as creative

sound (word), thought and energy, bringing into being successive spheres,

realms, veils, or dimensions imagined as veils or robes that clothe and hide the

hidden source yet at the same time transmit its radiant light.

 

The transmission of light from source to the outer, manifest level is also

imagined as an inverted tree, the Tree of Life, whose branches grow from its

root in the divine ground and extend through the worlds of emanation. The primal

center or root is the innermost light, of an unimaginable luminosity and

translucence. The inner point expands or is sown as a ray of light into a

dimension described in some texts as a sea of glory, in others as a palace that

acts as an enclosure for the light; from this womb it emanates as a radiant

cascade, a fountain of living water, pouring forth light to sustain and permeate

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

[principal text of Kabbalah] describes nature as the garment of God.

 

The Divine Feminine

Andrew Harvey & Anne Baring - Conari Press

Berkeley, CA

ISBN 1-57324-035-4 (hardcover)

Pgs. 86, 88-89