Old texts consistently reedited to reduce and subordinate female divinity, while exalting the male god

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Old texts consistently reedited to reduce and subordinate female divinity, while

exalting the male god....

 

 

Though Sophia is prominent in the Gnostic creation accounts, she was being

stripped of the radiant holiness the Egyptians attributed to Isis and the

Hebrews to Khokhmah. In her ground-breaking and all-too-little-known study The

Wisdom Goddess, Rose Arthur shows how the positive view of Sophia in the early,

pre-christian scriptures was gradually broken down and degraded by a

masculinizing, christianizing movement that emphasized a " fallen Sophia. "

 

Arthur demonstrates that the older texts were consistently reedited to reduce

and subordinate female divinity, while exalting the male god. The Hypostasis of

the Archons is no more than " a christianized, patriarchalized and defeminized

summary of On the Origin of the World. " It blatantly substitutes the christian

god for the Gnostic goddess. For example, the line " But all this came to pass

according to the Pronoia of Pistis " becomes " But all these things came to pass

in the Will of the Father of the All. "

 

The pre-christian scripture Eugnostos the Blessed was revamped as the Sophia

Jesu Christi, in which Sophia rebels against the " Father of the Universe, "

repents of her fault, and is saved by her male partner, Jesus Christ. The

revisionist text repeatedly refers to the " fault of the woman. " The same process

was at work in the Pistis Sophia, where the fallen Sophia is made to sing

thirteen hymns of repentence before Jesus helps her to regain the spiritual

heights.

 

These new patriarchal discourses still had to contend with a deep-rooted

conviction in the Goddess as the ultimate source of life. Even hostile writers

acknowledge that Sophia gives the breath of life to Adam, though they show this

happening indirectly. But they view the material creation as evil, imprisoning

the souls who live in it. Often Sophia herself is shown falling into bondage.

 

In one Gnostic myth, Sophia was made prisoner by the seven archons. The essence

of Wisdom made flesh in female form was subjected to every indignity, including

being forced into whoredom. In one version, Simon Magus rescues " Helena " from a

brothel in Tyre. But in actuality she is the creator of the angels who made the

world. She is called Kyria, Lady, a Greek term corresponding to the christian

god's title Kyrios. [Allegro, 141-5] These stories don't refer to idealized

notions of sacred harlots making love in freedom, but to female degradation in

the prison-brothels of the Roman empire. While they may be taken as an

affirmation of the presence of the sacred within the enslaved women, they also

demark a clear demotion of the Wisdom goddess, who has lost her original

sovereign power.

 

The earlier view of Goddess as the supreme Source, or alternatively as a male

god's perfect partner, now gave way to the idea that she was a lower being in

need of pardon and salvation. New authors developed themes of a deluded and

foolish Sophia (controvening the very meaning of her name, " Wisdom " ). They

accuse her of breaking cosmic law by creating without a male partner and

describe her creation as defective. [Couliano, 78-9]

 

While these writers blamed Sophia for conceiving alone, the male god is praised

for creating without a partner. She is cast down and made to suffer and repent

until a superior male god deigns to " correct her deficiency. " As Sophia is

mythically overthrown, other female figures pick up aspects of her power, but

the force of the Gnostic Wisdom goddess is almost spent.

 

Under the oppressive climate of the Roman empire, with its heavy taxation,

displaced populations, urban crowding, plagues, slave economy, and arena

executions, to say nothing of pervasive violence against women, a profound

negativity had seeped into religious consciousness. People felt like prisoners

in the world, and a conviction arose that creation itself was flawed. The taint

reached back to the Goddess herself, since she manifested herself in matter, in

birth, in bodies.

 

This new doctrine identifying the female with bondage, weakness, inferiority and

fault was the final means of overthrowing the Goddess Mysteries in the

Mediterranean. The process was erratic. Judaic Wisdom mysticism, so influential

in early Gnosticism, exalted the creative power of Khokhmah, and held that

creation was good, even though the female is formally subordinated to the male

throughout the Bible. But increasingly Gnostics gravitated toward an

" value-inversion, " not only revolting against the Biblical god, but rejecting

all creation as well.

 

Although Gnostics were strongly influenced by Judaism, which features Wisdom as

a co-creator, many of their writings evince a strong animus against it. Some

emphasize the female creative principle, while others, especially the later

texts, demote her. Much of Gnostic scripture reinterprets the biblical creation

story, making Yahweh (cast as Ialdabaoth or Saklas or Authades) junior to the

creating Wisdom goddess, unaware of her presence but working with her light.

Possibly this theme originated as a reassertation of the Goddess (especially she

of ten-thousand-names in Egypt) whose scattered signatures are visible in the

Gnostic amalgam of Hellenistic, Judaic and Persian cosmologies. Some of these

accounts can be read as a defense of her divinity and creative power as against

the increasingly influential concept of a masculine god as sole creator.

 

But the syncretic Goddess of late antiquity was gradually subjected to

heavy-handed reinterpretation as Gnostics embraced a heavily polarized doctrine

of dualism. Their rejection of the " lower " world ended up dragging down the

Goddess in the midst of its attack on Judaism. It demanded rejection of the

body, of lovemaking and the ancient birth mysteries: of Earth and Nature

herself. New christian doctrines stripped Sophia of her divine qualities,

dramatically subordinating her to the Father and to Christ as her male partner

and savior. Later writers dropped the name Sophia altogether. Some introduce new

names, but the visible trend is away from myths exalting a creatrix.

 

The variant picture of the Gnostic scriptures reflects an intense campaign to

beat down goddess veneration and to split body and spirit. The tension is more

open in the Gnostic gospels precisely because the female divinity is still

powerful, in contrast to the christian canon. It was in Egypt and other centers

of the Mysteries that the last stand for open Goddess worship was fought--and

ultimately lost--on the battleground of Gnosticism.

 

Eradicating the Goddess proved to be an impossible task. She survived in myriads

of forms in popular belief, veiled as Mary or christian saints. The Virgin Mary

occupied a much less powerful position in church doctrine and scriptures than

the old pagan Goddess. Folk tradition is another story; there devotion shifted

to Mary from the old goddesses and persisted over centuries as new ethnicities

entered christendom. Due to this popular pressure and the role it played in the

clergy's conversion strategy, Mary escaped the degradation that Gnostic

christians ended up heaping on Sophia, and the stigma that theologians cast over

Eve. Catholicism ended up absorbing goddess traditions over the centuries,

through progressive engorgements, while Gnosticism gradually shed them.

 

But the story of Sophia does not end there. Her Greek worshippers succeeded in

assimilating her to Orthodox christianity, as Hagia Sophia. The greatest

cathedral of the Byzantines was raised in honor of this " Holy Wisdom, " supported

by the great porphyry pillars taken from the Ephesian temple of Artemis. The

early Orthodox Greeks regarded Hagia Sophia as a female member of the Trinity,

the " Holy Spirit. " This strand persisted in Orthodox Christian mysticism, and is

still a force in Russian spirituality. Western Christian feminists have also

reclaimed it in recent decades.

 

This title of " Holy Spirit " also belonged to Ruha d'Qudsha, the goddess of the

Iraqi Mandaeans. By the Christian era she had been demonized, but she is an

Aramaean analog to the Hebrew Shekhinah: compare Biblical ruach, " spirit " and

qadoshah, " holy, " and remember, too, the ancient Canaanite-Egyptian goddess QDSU

or Qudsha. The Aramaean goddess undergoes the same debasement in Syria and

northern Iraq as Sophia had in the eastern Mediterranean. Ruha d'Qudsha, as

mother of the " evil " planets and zodiac spirits, is another fallen, or rather

toppled, goddess. She is called deficient and defective, and must be uplifted

and guided by the Father.

 

The Torah uses the word " hovering, " as with beating wings, to describe the

divine Presence that Talmudic writers had begun to call the Shekhinah. Her image

resonates with the ancient veneration of doves as sacred to Canaanite, Syrian,

and Cypriot goddesses. Christians adopted this imagery, picturing the Holy

Spirit as a winged radiance and a hovering dove. She flutters above Mary in

innumerable scenes of the Annunciation, and above the consecrated chalice and

bread.

 

As for Khokhmah, she remained a presence within the Hebrew Scriptures. Thousands

of years after her praises were embedded in the Book of Proverbs, medieval

christian mystics were attracted to this female image of Wisdom. Hildegarde of

Bingen knew her as Sophia, Scientia Dei, and Sapientia of the seven pillars. One

of her manuscripts even shows her wearing the mural crown of the ancient goddess

of Asia Minor. Hildegarde's profoundly animistic poetry sings the praises of

Life endowed with Wisdom, as a goddess in all but name:

 

I am that supreme and fiery force that sends forth all living sparks. Death hath

no part in me, yet I bestow death, wherefore I am girt about with Wisdom as with

wings. I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that glows in

the beauty of the fields, and in the shining water, and in the burning sun and

the moon and the stars, and in the force of the invisible wind, the breath of

all living things, I breathe in the green grass and the flowers, and in the

living waters...

 

http://www.adishakti.org/_/khokhmah_and_sophia_by_max_dashu.htm