Sophia/Wisdom
Embodied Divine Wisdom
Psyche or Soul: Feminine Aspects of God
Ajna Chakra is the Seat of Sophia
What Sophia is, and how she came into being, I will relate;
I will withold no mysteries from you,
but will track her from her first beginnings,
and bring the knowledge of her into the open.
--Wisdom of Solomon 8:22
I will withold no mysteries from you,
but will track her from her first beginnings,
and bring the knowledge of her into the open.
--Wisdom of Solomon 8:22
Daniel Mirante - Golden Veiled Sophia (oil on panel, 2012)
The feminine mind is pictorial and symbolic and
comes close to what the ancients called Sophia.
--C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 189.
"God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The saying holds for God, for the anima mundi and for the soul of man. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
Dr. Monika Ardelt said "I define wisdom as a combination of cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions." In wisdom, cognition encompasses intuitive insight in addition to rational knowing. The reflective aspect adds witnessing our life as a detached observer. Compassion is more than sympathy...it is empathy. A truly wise person feels more deeply, thinks more clearly, and acts more effectively than do most other people.
Wisdom is really a bottom-up approach. You cannot command wisdom from the top.
I define wisdom as a combination of cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions. The cognitive dimension is knowing something, but it's not necessarily knowing a lot or knowing about how the universe originated or the latest news in quantum physics. It’s deeper knowledge about the human condition and the deeper meaning of life. For example, the philosopher Kekes says wise people don't necessarily know more than other people, but they know the deeper meaning of what everybody else knows. A good example is: We are all mortal…wise people understand the meaning of ‘we are all mortal’ and they live their lives accordingly. That means they set priorities, taking into account that their life will end eventually. They also recognize that the lives of all their loved ones will eventually end, and they live their lives in a way that appreciates other people in a deeper way. Wise people know about the interpersonal aspects of life. They know about other people, how they relate, how to relate to other people, but they also understand themselves.
Wisdom traditions say know thyself. So, what does this mean? Know thyself? It means to really look deep into oneself and understand who I am at a really deep level. For that, one needs the reflective component of wisdom. The reflective component of wisdom basically means looking at things from different perspectives, but also looking at yourself from an outside perspective, which requires self-reflection and self-examination. If you do that, you realize that you don't only have positive aspects, but also negative aspects. By accepting this - that there are positive and negative aspects in you - you reduce your ego-centeredness and become more tolerant to other people who might also be not perfect. So once you can accept that you are not perfect, it is easier to accept that other people aren't perfect either. And that leads to the compassionate component, which I basically define as sympathy and compassion for others. So those three components I would define as wisdom, but it’s the combination of the three components that matters.
There are basically two paths to wisdom. One is through what he calls ultimate limit situations - situations, crises, obstacles in life, but really more devastating than that. I would argue, actually, that wisdom also develops through the minor crises and obstacles in life--basically learning from negative experiences in life. You can also learn from positive experiences, but the negative experiences jolt people out of their everyday rut and sometimes might force them to change priorities. Somebody loses a job at mid-life and questions what is really important in life; and then they start a new career or something that might be more meaningful…[and] they might want to contribute more to society. In this way, he [Pascual-Leone] would argue, this is one pathway to wisdom. The other pathway, what he would argue, is meditation. He would say that we don't necessarily have to have those traumatic experiences. One can just sit and reflect on what is important…without necessarily having this really big event. So negative experiences can actually be the teacher that help to develop wisdom.
People say learning from experiences is really important to develop wisdom, but the key is learning from experiences, not just having experiences. It doesn't mean that every negative experience will automatically lead to wisdom. It could also lead to despair and devastation. It's not automatic. But a negative experience might lead to post traumatic growth.
- See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1521.aspx#sthash.U8CeHbhB.dpuf
Wisdom Model
http://www.wisdompage.com/Ardelt01.html
I have much more sympathy with Sophia than with the demiurge but faced with the reality of both my sympathy counts for nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.
Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 249, Para 334.
Sophia is always ahead, the demiurge always behind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.
https://books.google.com/books?id=51ZbBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA399&lpg=PA399&dq=,+corbin,+eternal+sophia&source=bl&ots=iUs_HKgx0i&sig=6s6aEDg87TkCZo6Ev8qLM_umiws&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBGoVChMI9cKt2q2SxwIVjNCACh2KzgLe#v=onepage&q=%2C%20corbin%2C%20eternal%20sophia&f=false
comes close to what the ancients called Sophia.
--C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 189.
"God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The saying holds for God, for the anima mundi and for the soul of man. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 35.
Dr. Monika Ardelt said "I define wisdom as a combination of cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions." In wisdom, cognition encompasses intuitive insight in addition to rational knowing. The reflective aspect adds witnessing our life as a detached observer. Compassion is more than sympathy...it is empathy. A truly wise person feels more deeply, thinks more clearly, and acts more effectively than do most other people.
Wisdom is really a bottom-up approach. You cannot command wisdom from the top.
I define wisdom as a combination of cognitive, reflective, and compassionate dimensions. The cognitive dimension is knowing something, but it's not necessarily knowing a lot or knowing about how the universe originated or the latest news in quantum physics. It’s deeper knowledge about the human condition and the deeper meaning of life. For example, the philosopher Kekes says wise people don't necessarily know more than other people, but they know the deeper meaning of what everybody else knows. A good example is: We are all mortal…wise people understand the meaning of ‘we are all mortal’ and they live their lives accordingly. That means they set priorities, taking into account that their life will end eventually. They also recognize that the lives of all their loved ones will eventually end, and they live their lives in a way that appreciates other people in a deeper way. Wise people know about the interpersonal aspects of life. They know about other people, how they relate, how to relate to other people, but they also understand themselves.
Wisdom traditions say know thyself. So, what does this mean? Know thyself? It means to really look deep into oneself and understand who I am at a really deep level. For that, one needs the reflective component of wisdom. The reflective component of wisdom basically means looking at things from different perspectives, but also looking at yourself from an outside perspective, which requires self-reflection and self-examination. If you do that, you realize that you don't only have positive aspects, but also negative aspects. By accepting this - that there are positive and negative aspects in you - you reduce your ego-centeredness and become more tolerant to other people who might also be not perfect. So once you can accept that you are not perfect, it is easier to accept that other people aren't perfect either. And that leads to the compassionate component, which I basically define as sympathy and compassion for others. So those three components I would define as wisdom, but it’s the combination of the three components that matters.
There are basically two paths to wisdom. One is through what he calls ultimate limit situations - situations, crises, obstacles in life, but really more devastating than that. I would argue, actually, that wisdom also develops through the minor crises and obstacles in life--basically learning from negative experiences in life. You can also learn from positive experiences, but the negative experiences jolt people out of their everyday rut and sometimes might force them to change priorities. Somebody loses a job at mid-life and questions what is really important in life; and then they start a new career or something that might be more meaningful…[and] they might want to contribute more to society. In this way, he [Pascual-Leone] would argue, this is one pathway to wisdom. The other pathway, what he would argue, is meditation. He would say that we don't necessarily have to have those traumatic experiences. One can just sit and reflect on what is important…without necessarily having this really big event. So negative experiences can actually be the teacher that help to develop wisdom.
People say learning from experiences is really important to develop wisdom, but the key is learning from experiences, not just having experiences. It doesn't mean that every negative experience will automatically lead to wisdom. It could also lead to despair and devastation. It's not automatic. But a negative experience might lead to post traumatic growth.
- See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1521.aspx#sthash.U8CeHbhB.dpuf
Wisdom Model
http://www.wisdompage.com/Ardelt01.html
I have much more sympathy with Sophia than with the demiurge but faced with the reality of both my sympathy counts for nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.
Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 249, Para 334.
Sophia is always ahead, the demiurge always behind. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 32-35.
https://books.google.com/books?id=51ZbBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA399&lpg=PA399&dq=,+corbin,+eternal+sophia&source=bl&ots=iUs_HKgx0i&sig=6s6aEDg87TkCZo6Ev8qLM_umiws&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBGoVChMI9cKt2q2SxwIVjNCACh2KzgLe#v=onepage&q=%2C%20corbin%2C%20eternal%20sophia&f=false
http://gnosis.org/gnostic-jung/Remember-Sophia.html
Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Paragraph 229.
As I once dreamt, my will to live is a glowing daimon, who makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me at times. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 119.
Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. ~Carl Jung; CW 13; Paragraph 229.
As I once dreamt, my will to live is a glowing daimon, who makes the consciousness of my mortality hellish difficult for me at times. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 119.
The interpretation of the figure of Sophia, in the context in which I mentioned it, can only be done with the material handed down from antiquity, and there the interpretation is very simple.
She is the Sapientia Dei, as she appears in the wisdom of Solomon.
To this Sophia is dedicated the Hagia Sophia of Byzantium.
From the proper name Sophia are derived the names of saints, among them the so-called ''Wicked Sophie."
The Hagia Sophia or Sancta Sapientia has of course nothing to do with witches, but Wicked Sophie can probably be connected with the witch-hunts, for the inclemency of the
weather was frequently attributed to witches.
Sophia cannot be brought together with Eve, since Eve has nothing to do with magic, but she probably can with Adam 's first wife, Lilith.
The "Eternal Feminine" in Faust is the Sapientia Dei, who is this same Sophia.
It cannot be doubted that since such figures always have a shadow, Sophia has one too.
This shadow would be a perversion of the divine into the dark and magical.
Naturally this is the witch, or the arch-sorceress Hecate, who, three-headed and three-bodied, represents the lower equivalent of the Trinity (psychologically, the lower function triad ). --C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1; Page 462
She is the Sapientia Dei, as she appears in the wisdom of Solomon.
To this Sophia is dedicated the Hagia Sophia of Byzantium.
From the proper name Sophia are derived the names of saints, among them the so-called ''Wicked Sophie."
The Hagia Sophia or Sancta Sapientia has of course nothing to do with witches, but Wicked Sophie can probably be connected with the witch-hunts, for the inclemency of the
weather was frequently attributed to witches.
Sophia cannot be brought together with Eve, since Eve has nothing to do with magic, but she probably can with Adam 's first wife, Lilith.
The "Eternal Feminine" in Faust is the Sapientia Dei, who is this same Sophia.
It cannot be doubted that since such figures always have a shadow, Sophia has one too.
This shadow would be a perversion of the divine into the dark and magical.
Naturally this is the witch, or the arch-sorceress Hecate, who, three-headed and three-bodied, represents the lower equivalent of the Trinity (psychologically, the lower function triad ). --C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1; Page 462
Sophia Dreaming, Gaelyn Larrick
http://www.artservingspirit.com/image/all_prints/elemental_alchemy/index.html
It represents the Pleroma by a bluish white light emanating a double helix, the projection of
the human genome or Anthropos, pictured as a golden embryo in the womb of the earth.
http://www.artservingspirit.com/image/all_prints/elemental_alchemy/index.html
It represents the Pleroma by a bluish white light emanating a double helix, the projection of
the human genome or Anthropos, pictured as a golden embryo in the womb of the earth.
This primary substance [the chaos] is round (massa globosa, rotundum), like the world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one.
--Jung, Aion CW 9 II: §376
A circle contains and expresses chaos. We dissolve into flux and coagulate
into a temporary order, which dissolves again.
Jung suggested there is an unconscious wisdom; a wisdom that is currently refused by the order of the ego, and that part of the process of therapy is to get in contact with this wisdom and listen to it, without being possessed by it.Disorder arises again, because the ego can only translate the unconscious via symbols,which may open to misinterpretation. We still need the ego to judge the value and meaning of that wisdom, at the same time as we suspend the ego’s judgmental dismissal of that wisdom. Hence, for individuation, the ego needs a new relation to disorder and an ability to tolerate processes outside its control.
[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. (Aion CW 9 II: §304)
--Jung, Aion CW 9 II: §376
A circle contains and expresses chaos. We dissolve into flux and coagulate
into a temporary order, which dissolves again.
Jung suggested there is an unconscious wisdom; a wisdom that is currently refused by the order of the ego, and that part of the process of therapy is to get in contact with this wisdom and listen to it, without being possessed by it.Disorder arises again, because the ego can only translate the unconscious via symbols,which may open to misinterpretation. We still need the ego to judge the value and meaning of that wisdom, at the same time as we suspend the ego’s judgmental dismissal of that wisdom. Hence, for individuation, the ego needs a new relation to disorder and an ability to tolerate processes outside its control.
[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. (Aion CW 9 II: §304)
I, the fiery life of divine wisdom, I ignite the beauty of the plains, I sparkle the waters, I burn in the sun, and the moon, and the stars.
- Hildegard von Bingen
It is even very important that the anima is projected into the earth, that she descends very low, for otherwise her ascent to the heavenly condition in the form of Sophia has no meaning…She is the one that is rooted in the earth as well as in the heaven, both root and branch of the tree. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 533.
The soul has its own peculiar world. Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236.
Life inevitably leads down into reality. Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508.
A variety of forms is revealed through the realization of the self. The self is dissolved into many egos. When the self has become conscious it leads to "participation mystique." ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 36.
Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world.
As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world.
Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you.
But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you.
Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives.
Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and
obliterate the image of my child in me.
This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 288.
Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being.
The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood.
If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche.
~Carl Jung; CW 10; "The Undiscovered Self"; Civilization in Transition. P. 528
As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world.
Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you.
But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you.
Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives.
Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and
obliterate the image of my child in me.
This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 288.
Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being.
The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood.
If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche.
~Carl Jung; CW 10; "The Undiscovered Self"; Civilization in Transition. P. 528
The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Pages 141-142.
It was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Greco-Roman world that the soul is a substance. Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a “psychology without the soul.” ~Carl Jung; CW 8.
It was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Greco-Roman world that the soul is a substance. Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a “psychology without the soul.” ~Carl Jung; CW 8.
A Culture of Immanence
“Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature, that we are different from Nature? No, we are in Nature and think exactly like Nature.” C.G. Jung, The Earth Has a Soul
“Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature, that we are different from Nature? No, we are in Nature and think exactly like Nature.” C.G. Jung, The Earth Has a Soul
The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire By James Hillman
"Matter" comes from the root word "Mater" or "Mother" and is ultimately the "Great Mother" which gives form to all of Creation and consequently has historically been legitimately worthy of the highest respect and veneration.
Sadly over recent centuries the role of "Matriarchy" has in many circles been an object of denigration.
One can only hope that at the Dawn of the 21st Century that the utterly majestic role of
The Feminine will be more widely understood and embraced.
[It is a tragedy that even at the dawn of the 21st Century "Matter" is rejected and considered to be "Evil" as in so doing harmony with the soul and the attainment of "Gnosis-Individuation" shall not be attained.]
Psyche cannot be totally different from matter, for how otherwise could it move matter?
And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche?
Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible.
If research could only advance far enough, therefore, we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and psychological concepts.
~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 261.
Sadly over recent centuries the role of "Matriarchy" has in many circles been an object of denigration.
One can only hope that at the Dawn of the 21st Century that the utterly majestic role of
The Feminine will be more widely understood and embraced.
[It is a tragedy that even at the dawn of the 21st Century "Matter" is rejected and considered to be "Evil" as in so doing harmony with the soul and the attainment of "Gnosis-Individuation" shall not be attained.]
Psyche cannot be totally different from matter, for how otherwise could it move matter?
And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche?
Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible.
If research could only advance far enough, therefore, we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and psychological concepts.
~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 261.
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. ~Carl Jung; Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.
All of the transient,
Is parable, only: 12105
The insufficient,
Here, grows to reality:
The indescribable,
Here, is done:
Woman, eternal, 12110
Beckons us on.
Johann W. Goethe, Faust, 12104-12111
I, your soul, am your mother, who tenderly and frightfully surrounds you,
your nourisher and corrupter; I prepare good things and poison for you.
I am your intercessor with Abraxas.
I teach you the arts that protect you from Abraxas.
I stand between you and Abraxas the all-encompassing.
I am your body, your shadow, your effectiveness in this world, your manifestation in the world of the Gods, your effulgence, your breath, your odor, your magical force.
You should call me if you want to live with men, but the one God if you want to rise above the human world to the divine and eternal solitude of the star. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 371.
Is parable, only: 12105
The insufficient,
Here, grows to reality:
The indescribable,
Here, is done:
Woman, eternal, 12110
Beckons us on.
Johann W. Goethe, Faust, 12104-12111
I, your soul, am your mother, who tenderly and frightfully surrounds you,
your nourisher and corrupter; I prepare good things and poison for you.
I am your intercessor with Abraxas.
I teach you the arts that protect you from Abraxas.
I stand between you and Abraxas the all-encompassing.
I am your body, your shadow, your effectiveness in this world, your manifestation in the world of the Gods, your effulgence, your breath, your odor, your magical force.
You should call me if you want to live with men, but the one God if you want to rise above the human world to the divine and eternal solitude of the star. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 371.
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/sophia.html
The spirit of the depths forced me to say this and at the same time to undergo it against myself since I had not expected it then. I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul.
I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.
From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets herself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp.
I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.
~Carl Jung; The Red Book
If the human [soul] is anything, it must be of unimaginable complexity and diversity, so that it cannot possibly be approached through a mere psychology of instinct. I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism.
My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. . . .
Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this .world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 399 and Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4, pp. 331 f.
The spirit of the depths forced me to say this and at the same time to undergo it against myself since I had not expected it then. I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul.
I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.
From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets herself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp.
I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.
~Carl Jung; The Red Book
If the human [soul] is anything, it must be of unimaginable complexity and diversity, so that it cannot possibly be approached through a mere psychology of instinct. I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism.
My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. . . .
Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this .world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 399 and Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4, pp. 331 f.
"Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint, or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female." ”The Development Of Personality" ~ Carl Gustav Jung
" For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths. In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
http://mythosandlogos.com/Hillman.html
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate -- an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence -- that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives on the sense of having or being soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggest that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. These four qualifications I had already put forth some years ago. I had begun to use the term freely, usually interchangeably with psyche (from Greek) and anima (from Latin). Now I am adding three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy -- that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."
http://mythosandlogos.com/Hillman.html
"Eros weaves links between us and the others, but there are also internal connections. Connection is the right term. For example, we talk about network of associations when the various amplifications of an archetypal form is a network. They connect each other and form a plot. For this reason, Jung said that archetypes act for contamination. To contaminate in Latin means weave. Likewise, our mental processes constitute a network, a network of associations. Than also our feelings appear as a network. We continuously create connections. To make active imagination is like weaving a cloth and this put us in connection to destiny, because unconscious fantasies are their destiny. " --Marie Louise von Franz
Translate Baphomet into Hebrew letters. Beth, Peh, Vav, Mem, Tau (or BPhOMTh).
Now write out the common Hebrew "Atbash cipher": Write the Hebrew alphabet on one line from Aleph to Tau. Then write it again on the next line down, this time from Tau to Aleph.
Now use the Atbash to transpose the letters of BPhOMTh:
B = Sh (Beth = Shin)
Ph = O (Peh = Vav)
O = Ph (Vav = Peh)
M = Y (Mem = Yod)
Th = A (Tau = Aleph)
So BPhOMTh = ShOPhYA
And now you know the true identity of Baphomet. It is Sophia - the Mother Goddess of the Gnostics.
Translate Baphomet into Hebrew letters. Beth, Peh, Vav, Mem, Tau (or BPhOMTh).
Now write out the common Hebrew "Atbash cipher": Write the Hebrew alphabet on one line from Aleph to Tau. Then write it again on the next line down, this time from Tau to Aleph.
Now use the Atbash to transpose the letters of BPhOMTh:
B = Sh (Beth = Shin)
Ph = O (Peh = Vav)
O = Ph (Vav = Peh)
M = Y (Mem = Yod)
Th = A (Tau = Aleph)
So BPhOMTh = ShOPhYA
And now you know the true identity of Baphomet. It is Sophia - the Mother Goddess of the Gnostics.
Sophia, Alex Grey
Some see Sophia as a deity in her own right, others see her as representing the Bride of Christ (Revelation 19), others as a feminine aspect of God representing wisdom (Proverbs 8 and 9), and others as a theological concept regarding the wisdom of God.
Some see Sophia as a deity in her own right, others see her as representing the Bride of Christ (Revelation 19), others as a feminine aspect of God representing wisdom (Proverbs 8 and 9), and others as a theological concept regarding the wisdom of God.
Jaime Zollars - The Maze She Breathes
Pareidolia, Android Jones
We need to integrate with God the feminine Wisdom embodied in Sophia to save ourselves and our world from destruction and chaos.
The archetype of the Wise Women inhabits not ethereal regions where all appears as bright and luminous, the Wise Women inhabits like the magician the shadows. She is at home near the earth, even inside the earth, inside the dark, moist, primordial womb, the source of all fertility. The Wise One is no longer young. She is mature, rooted. She is likely to be old. Like a priest she may have even loved, but she has now transcended all sexuality and reproductivity and has reached a state of superior wisdom.
The Wise Women In contrast also to her male counterpart—the Magician— a non spiritual mind seeks not to penetrate beneath the surface of things and probe the mysteries of nature, rather, she looks inward into the mysteries of Being. This earthly knowledge extends to the body and more specifically to the very distinct realities of the female body, with its mysteries of fertility and procreation. Women who knew this much were much respected and feared..
This is the knowledge of the Sybil, of the Oracle of Delphi, of the forest spirits. In later centuries, patriarchal institutions resented and persecuted this source of feminine power because it lay out of their control and it dealt with many topics which were not well understood and stigmatized because of their inherent feminine nature. Many Wise Women were accused of being “witches” and were cruelly tortured and put to death.It is natural for both Wise women and Magician to seek separation from her sisters who toil in the world. Their quest for special knowledge requires long hours of solitude for study and reflection. Most often, both become a seer, an advisor. The Queen of Sheba, the counterpart to Solomon—the Magician King—illustrates this type of leadership.Perhaps the most powerful and inspiring embodiment of the archetype of the Wise One is the gnostic Figure of Sophia—Wisdom.
As a powerful Christian archetype the “feminine” aspect the Wise Women come up in the Christian Trinitarian conception of the Holy Spirit. Who is Sophia? Literally she is Wisdom, because the Greek word Sophia means “wisdom” in English. More than that, she has been revered as the Wise Bride of Solomon by Jews, as the Queen of Wisdom and War (Athena) by Greeks, and as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom by Christians.
Solomon was considered married to Sophia. One of the many layers of symbolism attributed to the Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles) is that it speaks of Solomon’s marriage to Holy Sophia. Sophia surfaced in the Eastern Christian tradition with the construction of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople (converted to a Mosque 1453 and today a Muslim museum in Istanbul). Sophia has survived in the West today in the form of Gnosticism. Sophia plays a very active role in Jung’s Answer to Job (Hiob), where she also completes Quaternity.
http://stottilien.com/2013/02/01/queen-mother-wise-woman-and-lover-rediscovering-the-archetypes-of-the-mature-feminine/
The Wise Women In contrast also to her male counterpart—the Magician— a non spiritual mind seeks not to penetrate beneath the surface of things and probe the mysteries of nature, rather, she looks inward into the mysteries of Being. This earthly knowledge extends to the body and more specifically to the very distinct realities of the female body, with its mysteries of fertility and procreation. Women who knew this much were much respected and feared..
This is the knowledge of the Sybil, of the Oracle of Delphi, of the forest spirits. In later centuries, patriarchal institutions resented and persecuted this source of feminine power because it lay out of their control and it dealt with many topics which were not well understood and stigmatized because of their inherent feminine nature. Many Wise Women were accused of being “witches” and were cruelly tortured and put to death.It is natural for both Wise women and Magician to seek separation from her sisters who toil in the world. Their quest for special knowledge requires long hours of solitude for study and reflection. Most often, both become a seer, an advisor. The Queen of Sheba, the counterpart to Solomon—the Magician King—illustrates this type of leadership.Perhaps the most powerful and inspiring embodiment of the archetype of the Wise One is the gnostic Figure of Sophia—Wisdom.
As a powerful Christian archetype the “feminine” aspect the Wise Women come up in the Christian Trinitarian conception of the Holy Spirit. Who is Sophia? Literally she is Wisdom, because the Greek word Sophia means “wisdom” in English. More than that, she has been revered as the Wise Bride of Solomon by Jews, as the Queen of Wisdom and War (Athena) by Greeks, and as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom by Christians.
Solomon was considered married to Sophia. One of the many layers of symbolism attributed to the Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles) is that it speaks of Solomon’s marriage to Holy Sophia. Sophia surfaced in the Eastern Christian tradition with the construction of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople (converted to a Mosque 1453 and today a Muslim museum in Istanbul). Sophia has survived in the West today in the form of Gnosticism. Sophia plays a very active role in Jung’s Answer to Job (Hiob), where she also completes Quaternity.
http://stottilien.com/2013/02/01/queen-mother-wise-woman-and-lover-rediscovering-the-archetypes-of-the-mature-feminine/
Sophia, Gnostic Sanctuary
Iconic historical stage design for "The Queen of the Night" sequence from Mozart’s Magic Flute - Simon Quaglio in 1818
Transcendental contemplation – of beauty or of the sublime – gives way to immanent participative and transformative interaction.
The integration of various transcendental spiritual traditions, the intermingling of cultures, the earthquake in continental philosophy, the increase in those participating in spiritual practice, the underground creative movements, the myriad of potent voices populating the web: all the emergent perspectives mingling and mixing in the minds and hearts of the people of this world forming new ways of relating and creating and being together. Something is emerging from the depth of our collective psychic life: a new myth, a new perspective, a new relationship to the earth and each other. It is a spiritual shift, becoming a cultural shift, transforming the social matrix.
While immanence may be the vision of the mystic and philosophers, the emergent effects are there for all to see. Vertical power structures lose their potency, and horizontal and rhizomal movements take root. New ways of organizing, socializing, creating, and sharing emerge: the culture of immanence blossoms forth. The multiplicity of voices grows louder.
Now it is emerging everywhere, blossoming forth as a culture of creativity. This new paradigm is all around us. It is a shift that is occurring within us, at the very heart of our ways of being, becoming, and knowing. It is a deep spiritual truth that is emerging into the collective mind and potentiating a cultural shift. It is a contemplation of the unnameable, of the unspeakable, which, nevertheless, begins to be uttered in our poetry, our art, our news ways of conceptualizing, and in our collective dreaming. It is the transcendental emerging into the social body, not through fixated perspectives or empty representations, but through the collective energy of our creative acts.
“The Culture of Immanence”, Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
The integration of various transcendental spiritual traditions, the intermingling of cultures, the earthquake in continental philosophy, the increase in those participating in spiritual practice, the underground creative movements, the myriad of potent voices populating the web: all the emergent perspectives mingling and mixing in the minds and hearts of the people of this world forming new ways of relating and creating and being together. Something is emerging from the depth of our collective psychic life: a new myth, a new perspective, a new relationship to the earth and each other. It is a spiritual shift, becoming a cultural shift, transforming the social matrix.
While immanence may be the vision of the mystic and philosophers, the emergent effects are there for all to see. Vertical power structures lose their potency, and horizontal and rhizomal movements take root. New ways of organizing, socializing, creating, and sharing emerge: the culture of immanence blossoms forth. The multiplicity of voices grows louder.
Now it is emerging everywhere, blossoming forth as a culture of creativity. This new paradigm is all around us. It is a shift that is occurring within us, at the very heart of our ways of being, becoming, and knowing. It is a deep spiritual truth that is emerging into the collective mind and potentiating a cultural shift. It is a contemplation of the unnameable, of the unspeakable, which, nevertheless, begins to be uttered in our poetry, our art, our news ways of conceptualizing, and in our collective dreaming. It is the transcendental emerging into the social body, not through fixated perspectives or empty representations, but through the collective energy of our creative acts.
“The Culture of Immanence”, Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
Immanence is an insight of philosophers, mystics, and sadhus alike: a realization that all of our efforts at transcendence are mere preparations for immanence.
Transcendence prepares us for an immanent turn, when we shift our gaze from fantasies of the ‘beyond’ and realize the truth of a divinity which saturates life. This immanent turn is available as we must move beyond the dualities inherent in thought and open to a world of multiplicity, possibility, and potential. It is an opening which leads us to the insight that the divisions we hold between sacred and profane, between good and evil, between one god and another, are but root illusions.
Opposition is but the dynamic play of the divine, and human beings hold the potential to dialectically integrate this oppositional nature through the creative capacity of conscious awareness. It is only within this process of dialectical synthesis that we can realize immanence as the divine play of life, as creation and pro-creation through opposition and integration. It is lila– the dance of sacred lovers. It is the dance of the divine mother and father forever playing out their games of love and strife. And it is the dance of consciousness which is capable of awareness of this wondrous game of love… which we call life.
“Then there are what might be termed mothers in a figurative sense. To this category belongs the goddess, and especially the Mother of God, the Virgin, and Sophia. Mythology offers many variations of the mother archetype, as for instance the mother who reappears as the maiden in the myth of Demeter and Kore; or the mother who is also the beloved, as in the Cybele-Attis myth.” (Carl Jung, 9i, para. 156)
“The qualities associated with [the mother archetype] are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility.” Carl Jung, 9i, para. 157)
“Other symbols of the mother in a figurative sense appear in things representing the goal of our longing for redemption, such as Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem.” (Carl Jung, 9i, para. 156)
Transcendence prepares us for an immanent turn, when we shift our gaze from fantasies of the ‘beyond’ and realize the truth of a divinity which saturates life. This immanent turn is available as we must move beyond the dualities inherent in thought and open to a world of multiplicity, possibility, and potential. It is an opening which leads us to the insight that the divisions we hold between sacred and profane, between good and evil, between one god and another, are but root illusions.
Opposition is but the dynamic play of the divine, and human beings hold the potential to dialectically integrate this oppositional nature through the creative capacity of conscious awareness. It is only within this process of dialectical synthesis that we can realize immanence as the divine play of life, as creation and pro-creation through opposition and integration. It is lila– the dance of sacred lovers. It is the dance of the divine mother and father forever playing out their games of love and strife. And it is the dance of consciousness which is capable of awareness of this wondrous game of love… which we call life.
“Then there are what might be termed mothers in a figurative sense. To this category belongs the goddess, and especially the Mother of God, the Virgin, and Sophia. Mythology offers many variations of the mother archetype, as for instance the mother who reappears as the maiden in the myth of Demeter and Kore; or the mother who is also the beloved, as in the Cybele-Attis myth.” (Carl Jung, 9i, para. 156)
“The qualities associated with [the mother archetype] are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility.” Carl Jung, 9i, para. 157)
“Other symbols of the mother in a figurative sense appear in things representing the goal of our longing for redemption, such as Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem.” (Carl Jung, 9i, para. 156)
Detail The Spirit of Compassion. 1930-31. Rayner Hoff. British. 1894-1937
This is the heavenly Sophia, the anima mundi or soul of the world, Perfect Nature, the paradise where Beatrice awaits Dante, the celestial form of the zodiac, the inerratic or realm of fixed stars of Plato. The vital soul has reclaimed itself from the past and no longer alone and fixated and bound to its conditioning is instead situated between the dragon on one side and Sophia on the other. The vital soul no longer is in danger of being swallowed and used by the dragon. Instead, that Old Master of the Sublunary realm--the dragon--now serves the soul who has freed itself from slavery. The sage is one who has gained control of the power of life, who uses the dragon in service to the soul of the world. Sophia and her companion of power, the dragon, are reunited in service to the unfolding intelligence of the universe through the agency of the human psyche.
http://www.sophiaandthedragon.com/meeting/modern_alchemy.htm
http://www.sophiaandthedragon.com/meeting/modern_alchemy.htm
http://lisagawlas.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/activation-of-the-womb-of-creation-is-underway/
Womb of Creation
From infancy, human consciousness must perform the triumphant feat of individuating. We blossom into our unique individuality out of a primal unity and oneness (Newman 1954, Jung 1956, Edinger 1972). The development of self-awareness is a first act of transcendence, as we surmount the flow of sensations and intensities to muster an “ego”. The development of the ego supports the experience of being an “I”, an individual.
The spectacular journey into self-hood begins in a safe and protected environment, the womb. The womb of our mother mirrors the larger womb of creation from which we emerge. We develop within the mother’s body and her body serves as the first and primary matrix of our experience. The infant in the womb is pure possibility, pure potential. The infant experiences no language, only pulsations, movements, and cycles of activity and sleep. Time is the rhythm of the mother’s heart; space the containment of the mother’s body.
As the baby is born into the world it bring with it this presence of pure possibility. To gaze into the eyes of a newborn is to know pure potential. Many of us have experienced such precious moments, holding an infant in our arms; a twinkle within the infants eye opens our hearts to a wild and powerful universe within a fragile form.
As the infant comes into the world it knows no difference between the womb-like world of the mother’s body and a larger world. Instead the infant world is still a reflection of the divine mother. There is confused distinction between self and other. In some sense there is the unity between self and the divine mother. A unity which will always be closely aligned with our sense of wholeness. And in another sense there is the fusion and diffusion of self and other within archetypal forms and fragments.
Within this unity of experience there is a flow of sensation, some internal and some external. The infant gets cold, or hungry, or feels pleasure at the breast. The imagination is forced to create meaning out of the enigma of existence, out of a flow of sensation. And from early on in life there is a primal process of splitting, as the infant sorts sensations into dualistic pairs of pleasure and pain, good and bad, love and hate. These are the origins of archetypal dualistic pairs that reside within our mind as ur-symbols, forming a foundational archetypal network through which we navigate the world.
As the infant experiences desire for food or love or warmth, imagination arises. The infant imagines that which is good, and wishes for that which is pleasurable. A wish for the mother’s breast or the father’s arms or a loving gaze. This is the divine in creative form, as creative imagination. The baby cries out their desire for pleasurable things, for the fulfillment of their wishes. These first acts of imagination give rise to creative potential.
But there is also fantasy about that which is feared. Haunting images of a dark and shadowy archetypal inner world emerge. Story book images of wicked witches, roaring dragons, spiders or slimy snakes in dark chambers emerge form archetypal fantasy networks which reside within shadow worlds.
As we grow into self-hood each of us learns to navigate a ‘real world’, but our conceptions of the world are always based, in more measure than we can admit, upon creative imagination and fearful fantasy. Though we may learn to wean ourselves from our reliance upon a primal unity with the divine mother, she remains there with us as the foundational archetype from which all other archetypal images arise. Though we do leave our own mother’s body we are always within the matrix of the divine mother– as the earth which contains and nourishes us, as the prima materia from which we all emerge.
References:
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Edward F. Edinger, Ego and archetype
http://thejungian.com/2012/12/13/thea-the-womb-of-creation/
The spectacular journey into self-hood begins in a safe and protected environment, the womb. The womb of our mother mirrors the larger womb of creation from which we emerge. We develop within the mother’s body and her body serves as the first and primary matrix of our experience. The infant in the womb is pure possibility, pure potential. The infant experiences no language, only pulsations, movements, and cycles of activity and sleep. Time is the rhythm of the mother’s heart; space the containment of the mother’s body.
As the baby is born into the world it bring with it this presence of pure possibility. To gaze into the eyes of a newborn is to know pure potential. Many of us have experienced such precious moments, holding an infant in our arms; a twinkle within the infants eye opens our hearts to a wild and powerful universe within a fragile form.
As the infant comes into the world it knows no difference between the womb-like world of the mother’s body and a larger world. Instead the infant world is still a reflection of the divine mother. There is confused distinction between self and other. In some sense there is the unity between self and the divine mother. A unity which will always be closely aligned with our sense of wholeness. And in another sense there is the fusion and diffusion of self and other within archetypal forms and fragments.
Within this unity of experience there is a flow of sensation, some internal and some external. The infant gets cold, or hungry, or feels pleasure at the breast. The imagination is forced to create meaning out of the enigma of existence, out of a flow of sensation. And from early on in life there is a primal process of splitting, as the infant sorts sensations into dualistic pairs of pleasure and pain, good and bad, love and hate. These are the origins of archetypal dualistic pairs that reside within our mind as ur-symbols, forming a foundational archetypal network through which we navigate the world.
As the infant experiences desire for food or love or warmth, imagination arises. The infant imagines that which is good, and wishes for that which is pleasurable. A wish for the mother’s breast or the father’s arms or a loving gaze. This is the divine in creative form, as creative imagination. The baby cries out their desire for pleasurable things, for the fulfillment of their wishes. These first acts of imagination give rise to creative potential.
But there is also fantasy about that which is feared. Haunting images of a dark and shadowy archetypal inner world emerge. Story book images of wicked witches, roaring dragons, spiders or slimy snakes in dark chambers emerge form archetypal fantasy networks which reside within shadow worlds.
As we grow into self-hood each of us learns to navigate a ‘real world’, but our conceptions of the world are always based, in more measure than we can admit, upon creative imagination and fearful fantasy. Though we may learn to wean ourselves from our reliance upon a primal unity with the divine mother, she remains there with us as the foundational archetype from which all other archetypal images arise. Though we do leave our own mother’s body we are always within the matrix of the divine mother– as the earth which contains and nourishes us, as the prima materia from which we all emerge.
References:
Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness
Edward F. Edinger, Ego and archetype
http://thejungian.com/2012/12/13/thea-the-womb-of-creation/
Madonna della rosa, attribuited to Michelino da Besozzo or to Stefano da Verona- circa 1435.
http://www.wga.hu. US Public Domain via wikimedia
http://www.wga.hu. US Public Domain via wikimedia
Divine Mother as Rose Here we see a 14th Century paining of the Madonna of the Rose. The rose is often associated with the Mother archetype. Carl Jung points out that the mother archetype “can be attached to … various vessels such as the baptismal font, or to vessel-shaped flowers like the rose.” (9i, para. 157) In the Western tradition we see the rose associated with the Virgin Mary. Cardinal Newman (1801 – 1890) said:
“She is the Queen of spiritual flowers; and therefore, is called the Rose, for the rose is called of all flowers the most beautiful. But, moreover, she is the Mystical or Hidden Rose, for mystical means hidden.”
The divine mother archetype is related to the hidden. She represents the mystical gnosis, and the rose a symbol of such gnosis.
“She is the Queen of spiritual flowers; and therefore, is called the Rose, for the rose is called of all flowers the most beautiful. But, moreover, she is the Mystical or Hidden Rose, for mystical means hidden.”
The divine mother archetype is related to the hidden. She represents the mystical gnosis, and the rose a symbol of such gnosis.
"Let there be no doubt that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My Samadhi is their Samadhi. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is my inheritance. Those billions are my one." --Frank Herbert, The God-Emperor of Dune, p. 260.
The Sacred Feminine
http://veronicagodeanu.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/archetypesfree.pdf
http://veronicagodeanu.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/archetypesfree.pdf
It is the Medial within that sends us on a search for knowledge of all kinds: spiritual, metaphysical, gnostic, mystical, psychological, intellectual, scientific, genealogical, and technical. Paradoxically, the Medial wants and seeks to know, yet ultimately, through Life’s initiations, falls in love with not knowing. As Medial women, we are drawn toward the unknown, the outer edges of conventionality and the familiar—or it draws us. We may be terrified, excited, compelled, and enchanted, all at once. Medial women are seekers and keepers of esoteric knowledge and wisdom, and value gnosis: direct mystical experience. Our Medial dimension helps us to realize eventually that we are that which we have been seeking. We all have this energy available to us in some form, at its most basic level, it is our intuition.
The Medial woman serves truth and assists others by helping them find meaning in their life experiences, especially the difficult ones. She holds sacred space for them while they make their way and may offer silence, healing, dream work, ritual, art, poetry, music, song, dance, ecstatic trance, guided inner journeys, astrological readings, channeled material, or teachings. She can be evocative, provocative, and inspiring, as well as a disturbing bringer of chaos when she is not self aware. She can also intoxicate and entrance others, take them into sublime experiences, whether it is through a painting, a song, dance, writing, or trance, and she can lead them into harm’s way if her intentions are power-driven. It all depends on how conscious she is and where her devotion lies.
The Medial woman serves truth and assists others by helping them find meaning in their life experiences, especially the difficult ones. She holds sacred space for them while they make their way and may offer silence, healing, dream work, ritual, art, poetry, music, song, dance, ecstatic trance, guided inner journeys, astrological readings, channeled material, or teachings. She can be evocative, provocative, and inspiring, as well as a disturbing bringer of chaos when she is not self aware. She can also intoxicate and entrance others, take them into sublime experiences, whether it is through a painting, a song, dance, writing, or trance, and she can lead them into harm’s way if her intentions are power-driven. It all depends on how conscious she is and where her devotion lies.
Passage indeed O soul to primal thought,
Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness,
The young maturity of brood and bloom,
To realms of budding Bibles.
O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,
Thy circumnavigation of the world begin,
Of man, the voyage of his mind's return,
To reason's early paradise,
Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions,
Again with fair creation.
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
Passage to India, verse 7 1981, p. 383
Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness,
The young maturity of brood and bloom,
To realms of budding Bibles.
O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me,
Thy circumnavigation of the world begin,
Of man, the voyage of his mind's return,
To reason's early paradise,
Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions,
Again with fair creation.
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
Passage to India, verse 7 1981, p. 383
Pouisson, and doubled below - Sword in Grail
Bride of God
Jung believed that alchemy was the connection between the ancient world of the gnostics and the modern era, which would see the return of Sophia Wisdom. Sophia mediates between our inner and outer worlds, between what C.G. Jung called the axis of ego and Self. Sophia is "below and outside the Pleroma". The Sophia image is as central a Jungian archetype of the anima as the earth-mother.
Sophia describes herself as Logos--the word of god. As Rauch, the spirit of god she rests on a throne and abides over earth. As the cosmogenic pneuma she pervades over the heavens and earth and all creatures and is the logos of John. Jung goes on to enumerate further characteristics of Sophia, of which the most important is the connection she has with Ishtar, trees and the attribute of wisdom, and several other associations with Sophia and Wisdom, spirit, creatrix, etc. Mary, as the bride of god she is also an incarnation of her prototype--Sophia.
With the mediating help of Sophia, the divine feminine principle of wisdom, we can decode the inner meaning of geometric shapes, numbers, and other symbols ...
Nature is riddled with pre-existent geometrical patterns, with the web of “skillful
formation” woven by Sophia throughout creation. When we discover it, suddenly the world is restored from bewildering chaos to meaningful order. When we find these evidences of Sophia, it is like receiving firsthand proofs of the divine order. In large measure, the problems we face today, both as individuals and as a culture, result from the severing of Sophia from science, of astrology from astronomy, geometry from mathematics, meaning from phenomena. We take things in life so literally, that we have lost all sense of symbolic thinking and hidden spiritual
process. Our concepts have turned to stone, and it’s this stone against that stone in a perpetual struggle of opposites.
“This forgetting of Sophia has cost humanity dearly,” says Howell. “Without her a sword seems to separate men and women, and a struggle for supremacy is
underway on the part of both.” So we need to reverse this destructive trend by seeking “the spiritual implications hidden within these physical symbols.” According to Howell’s quest for the archetype of Sophia, She represents “the loving, intimate, kind, helpful, and practical aspect of Holy Wisdom in each individual, and, at the same time, the great ordering principle of the physical creation of the cosmos.” Sophia twinkles, teaches through jokes, she reveals through unveiling, she confirms with synchronicities; she is is eternally patient, never insists, inspires us with “attacks of insights, those wonderful Aha! moments,” says Howell.
Sophia is the Comforter, the Paraclete, the inner guide and feminine face of intuition, sent to assure us that the world is orderly, beautiful, wise, and worthy of our love. Comforters after all are “kind, practical, cheery presences and usually
give good advice,” adds Howell, who fits the description perfectly.
The Medial is the High Priestess of liminal space, the chaotic, uncomfortable territory between ‘here’ and ‘there’, the pupa stage we must pass through in any initiation. She is the wise woman who greets and guides seekers and pilgrims as they cross thresholds and make their passages. Her primary mode of being in the world is to bring new ideas, images, and information in from the vast realms of collective consciousness, as well as from stillness.
She lives on the border between realities, mediating the depths of the collective unconscious to those around her, and dives deeply into her own unconscious, willing to experience and explore the unknown contents, whatever they are. She has courage and a healthy respect for the power of the unconscious and what emerges from it, whether it is bright or dark.
A strongly Medial woman needs to develop the focused awareness and boundaries of the Amazon woman, as she may be a psychic sponge, absorbing the feelings and unconscious contents from those around her. She must learn to distinguish what belongs to her, and what belongs to others, what is personal and what is impersonal.
The Medial may be more inclined than women with other archetypal strengths to lose her sense of self and unable to know what she herself needs. This can easily happen to some when they are with other people, groups, or in relation to ideologies. She is so highly attuned to what others think, feel, want, and need—even if they don’t know it themselves—that she can end up living someone else’s life or agenda. If she herself is not well-grounded in her own sense of herself, holding her boundaries well, and does not know how her gift is to be used, the gift can become her curse. The inner Amazon can help a Medial women learn how to define and sustain their own boundaries.
http://www.blueroomconsortium.com/pdfs/Article_New_Alice%20Howell.pdf
Jung believed that alchemy was the connection between the ancient world of the gnostics and the modern era, which would see the return of Sophia Wisdom. Sophia mediates between our inner and outer worlds, between what C.G. Jung called the axis of ego and Self. Sophia is "below and outside the Pleroma". The Sophia image is as central a Jungian archetype of the anima as the earth-mother.
Sophia describes herself as Logos--the word of god. As Rauch, the spirit of god she rests on a throne and abides over earth. As the cosmogenic pneuma she pervades over the heavens and earth and all creatures and is the logos of John. Jung goes on to enumerate further characteristics of Sophia, of which the most important is the connection she has with Ishtar, trees and the attribute of wisdom, and several other associations with Sophia and Wisdom, spirit, creatrix, etc. Mary, as the bride of god she is also an incarnation of her prototype--Sophia.
With the mediating help of Sophia, the divine feminine principle of wisdom, we can decode the inner meaning of geometric shapes, numbers, and other symbols ...
Nature is riddled with pre-existent geometrical patterns, with the web of “skillful
formation” woven by Sophia throughout creation. When we discover it, suddenly the world is restored from bewildering chaos to meaningful order. When we find these evidences of Sophia, it is like receiving firsthand proofs of the divine order. In large measure, the problems we face today, both as individuals and as a culture, result from the severing of Sophia from science, of astrology from astronomy, geometry from mathematics, meaning from phenomena. We take things in life so literally, that we have lost all sense of symbolic thinking and hidden spiritual
process. Our concepts have turned to stone, and it’s this stone against that stone in a perpetual struggle of opposites.
“This forgetting of Sophia has cost humanity dearly,” says Howell. “Without her a sword seems to separate men and women, and a struggle for supremacy is
underway on the part of both.” So we need to reverse this destructive trend by seeking “the spiritual implications hidden within these physical symbols.” According to Howell’s quest for the archetype of Sophia, She represents “the loving, intimate, kind, helpful, and practical aspect of Holy Wisdom in each individual, and, at the same time, the great ordering principle of the physical creation of the cosmos.” Sophia twinkles, teaches through jokes, she reveals through unveiling, she confirms with synchronicities; she is is eternally patient, never insists, inspires us with “attacks of insights, those wonderful Aha! moments,” says Howell.
Sophia is the Comforter, the Paraclete, the inner guide and feminine face of intuition, sent to assure us that the world is orderly, beautiful, wise, and worthy of our love. Comforters after all are “kind, practical, cheery presences and usually
give good advice,” adds Howell, who fits the description perfectly.
The Medial is the High Priestess of liminal space, the chaotic, uncomfortable territory between ‘here’ and ‘there’, the pupa stage we must pass through in any initiation. She is the wise woman who greets and guides seekers and pilgrims as they cross thresholds and make their passages. Her primary mode of being in the world is to bring new ideas, images, and information in from the vast realms of collective consciousness, as well as from stillness.
She lives on the border between realities, mediating the depths of the collective unconscious to those around her, and dives deeply into her own unconscious, willing to experience and explore the unknown contents, whatever they are. She has courage and a healthy respect for the power of the unconscious and what emerges from it, whether it is bright or dark.
A strongly Medial woman needs to develop the focused awareness and boundaries of the Amazon woman, as she may be a psychic sponge, absorbing the feelings and unconscious contents from those around her. She must learn to distinguish what belongs to her, and what belongs to others, what is personal and what is impersonal.
The Medial may be more inclined than women with other archetypal strengths to lose her sense of self and unable to know what she herself needs. This can easily happen to some when they are with other people, groups, or in relation to ideologies. She is so highly attuned to what others think, feel, want, and need—even if they don’t know it themselves—that she can end up living someone else’s life or agenda. If she herself is not well-grounded in her own sense of herself, holding her boundaries well, and does not know how her gift is to be used, the gift can become her curse. The inner Amazon can help a Medial women learn how to define and sustain their own boundaries.
http://www.blueroomconsortium.com/pdfs/Article_New_Alice%20Howell.pdf
THE WEDDING OF SOPHIA
The Divine Feminine in Psychoidal Alchemy, By Jeffrey Raff
http://books.google.com/books?id=bnFOYSltny0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
The Divine Feminine in Psychoidal Alchemy, By Jeffrey Raff
http://books.google.com/books?id=bnFOYSltny0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Green Sophia by Daniel Mirante
The dragon is another archetypal image of the mother.
The dragon is another archetypal image of the mother.
In considering our relationship to the earth, the archetype of Sophia rises to prominence. Jung has written that Sophia is the archetype of greatest universality. She is found throughout all cultures and all times. She carries great wisdom and an all-embracing erotic vision of life, closely tied to the earth. She is not just an abstract principle, but a path (encoded in her fundamental processes) moving us towards a goal. If we have a deeper understanding of Sophia’s principles, we will see she requires us (on many levels) to look at the quality of our living experience.
Sophia in her early form:
The earliest forms of Sophia emphasized her power and influence on earth and in the human psyche. In the ancient text of Hypostasis of the Archons, found at Nag Hammadi, it is written that Sophia preexisted and gave birth to the male godhead. She chastises his arrogance when he says there is no other god before him. She claims her spiritual authority. She says “you are wrong, Samuel” (meaning Lord of the blind) and stretches forth her finger to send light into matter. She then follows the light down into the region of “Chaos.”
This power of Sophia within the earth realm was seen in early visions: “I am nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen of the immortals, My nod governs the shining heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below. I know the cycles of growth and decay.” (1)
Certainly, from the beginning of time Sophia has been represented by the Great Mother from whom all life arises and is sustained. She was worshipped from 25,000 to 5,000 BC, an immense period of time in human history. Her fecundity is honored in the corpulent statue of Venus of Willendorf (2).
Themes of the intertwining of nature and spirit, and the paradox of life and death are everywhere in images of the Great Feminine. In ancient Mesopotamia, she was depicted as Ishtar, with a winged headdress and holding the ring of divine authority. She was sculpted with owls at her feet representing the secrets of the underworld and death.
In pre-dynastic Egypt she was often shown as a bird goddess with her arms uplifted, again like wings. Another frequent association was with the lion: a fire symbol. This theme was evident in the statues of Sekhmet. It was said that Sekhmet, carrying the paradox of fierce feminine power, would return in times of epoch change. The New York Times reports that 17 statues of Sekhmet have been found at Luxor in March 2006.
The uniting of paradoxes is evident in Isis: the great Goddess of the two lands of light and dark of Egypt. She is the agent for the resurrection of Osiris; by conceiving Horus, she brings forth the basic symbol of transformation in the uniting of the paradoxes.
Sophia’s Power: Veiled
For a period of time Sophia was evident in the city states of Greece and Rome. Her qualities were expressed through the ancient goddess Cybele. Here, also, she was often shown with lions, thought to represent the fiery and ecstatic state associated with her worship. However, Cybele began to fade in Rome about 200 BC as did the goddesses worshipped elsewhere: Isis in Egypt, Artemis in Ephesus, and Demeter in Greece. Similarly, Athene (Minerva) goddess of wisdom; became redefined as the daughter of Zeus, now the goddess of civilization. She was occasionally portrayed with only a small reminder of her heritage: an owl in her hand. To add insult to injury, she was considered to be the inventor of the bridle to tame the horse.
With the further emergence of the Greek Culture there was a marked decline in the power of Sophia. In particular, when the work of Aristotle stressed the world of ideas, and rationality; Logos, which had been her prerogative, became defined as masculine.
Buddhism, Christianity, Islam: (530 B.C to 0 – 600 A.D) all make mention of Sophia, yet each tradition adapts her to their own cosmology; and all increasingly become critical of nature. The goal of all these spiritual traditions is to rise above the earth and achieve Nirvana. Heaven, or Paradise.
The strongest belief in Sophia was retained by Gnostics (2-3 A.D.). While some Gnostic sects saw Sophia as God’s playmate, existing before the manifest world and responsible for helping man journey back to the Source, others blamed her curiosity for the fall of the soul into matter. This, for them, was a tragedy, for the material world was seen as unworthy. Women and earthiness were judged as the cause of all man’s problems. These Gnostics held a dim view of sexuality and treated women in the patriarchal style of the times. And so Sophia became split; her more negative aspect was called the Whore of Babylon, and earth, as a valued expression of creation, was lost.
Sophia, in her new form, surfaced as the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. She is first really noticed within the Catholic Church in 431 A.D. She became very prominent in early art where she was depicted as a vessel of rebirth and higher transformation. She was seen, usually, as a divine protector in early Renaissance times: a figure that mankind could appeal to in times of trouble. She became increasingly “elevated” through the years and in 1950 the church declared the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. Jung wrote that while it was good that the Church finally recognized the importance of the feminine, it had exalted Mary in the masculine sense and this would be injurious to the feminine principle of wholeness.
It was through the Black Madonna that Christianity retained Sophia’s connection with nature. The Black Madonna was sometimes called the lady of the caves where her statues were often hidden. The blackness there may have been related to the fact that she had been rescued by the locals after being burned as “pagan” by the church. Her darkness, however, could reflect earlier times, for Isis and Cybele were black of skin. The Black Madonna became the Mary of indigenous people and is still found in Poland, Spain, Mexico.
While Christianity basically ignored nature, or saw it as sinful, it is important to recognize that some mystics of the Christian church retained the integration of nature and spirit: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Jacob Boehm (1575-1650) spoke of their love for the beauty and importance of the natural world as an expression of God. They believed our spirit’s journey was vitally intertwined with the earth. Many writers also felt that the Sophianic message went into the essential teachings of Jesus. Jung wrote in “Answer to Job” that Sophia softened the Old Testament Yahweh and helped the Old Testament God remember compassion.
The fundamental challenge of Sophia and our relationship to nature , however, resurfaces in recently discovered esoteric texts. Of particular note is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, written in the 2nd century but not found until 1896 (with fragments published in the western world in 1996). Mary Magdalene is described here as an intimate of Christ, mentored by Him and recognized as one who supported and taught the apostles. Early tapestries illustrate this prominence and relationship. This gospel records further teachings of Christ, such as:
“All that is born, all that is created and all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other.” And then Christ goes on to say: “all that is composed will be decomposed.” This is the fundamental Sophianic challenge: to view ourselves as a process unfolding within nature. Such a view places us beyond religious dogma, and opens us to on-going Creation.
What wisdom awaits us here? Man’s deep fear of illness and death informs his pervasive need to control nature. Certainly, man’s innate intelligence is here to cure illness and provide palliative care for the dying. What we have not done is penetrate further into how fundamentally we are interwoven and united with nature, and how she provides the cog-wheel of our evolution.
Deep exploration of the psyche has revealed a new understanding of what we have described as the “descent journey” or “dark night of the soul”. We have not appreciated how fundamental this process is and only get a glimpse of understanding it when we consider life’s crisis, losses and depressions. Several years of research using high dosage LSD, music and therapeutic support with terminally ill cancer patients have uncovered a basic building block of this experience (Fig 1):
These patients experienced birth and death. They realized that they had died before. As a fetus, they saw that even the process of being born is a dying to an old way of knowing. These cancer patients recognized that descent journeys arose from an archetypal layer within the psyche itself and that it opened them to a new and different type of existence. They found a faith in the continuity of life and they died with much less anxiety and pain medication.
For us to mature as a species we must open to the deeper capacity of our psyches and come to reflect on its foundational aspects. Sophia, as an inclusive archetype, understands “the dark.” The wholeness she encompasses includes nature as our container and our destroyer and we need to grapple with that to find its wisdom. Henri Corbin has written: “It is not the incarnate Sophia’s role to bind or connect us to the earth, but to help us recognize that our understanding of ourselves as separate from the earth is a delusion.”
Here we see throughout the themes of descent and the balancing of opposites: the basic principles of soul work It is evident in the inserted circles of Demeter and Kali: the nurturing container (she who brings forth new life) and the transformer (she who demands the sacrifice that leads to truth). It is seen in the caduceus: the active equilibrium of opposing forces coming together in such a way as to create a higher form. It is evident in the earth, as child close to her heart, and in the symbols of the Kabbala whose purpose is to connect the finite world with the infinite. --Bernice H. Hill
http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/technology-and-environment/810-sophia-and-sustainability
Sophia in her early form:
The earliest forms of Sophia emphasized her power and influence on earth and in the human psyche. In the ancient text of Hypostasis of the Archons, found at Nag Hammadi, it is written that Sophia preexisted and gave birth to the male godhead. She chastises his arrogance when he says there is no other god before him. She claims her spiritual authority. She says “you are wrong, Samuel” (meaning Lord of the blind) and stretches forth her finger to send light into matter. She then follows the light down into the region of “Chaos.”
This power of Sophia within the earth realm was seen in early visions: “I am nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen of the immortals, My nod governs the shining heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below. I know the cycles of growth and decay.” (1)
Certainly, from the beginning of time Sophia has been represented by the Great Mother from whom all life arises and is sustained. She was worshipped from 25,000 to 5,000 BC, an immense period of time in human history. Her fecundity is honored in the corpulent statue of Venus of Willendorf (2).
Themes of the intertwining of nature and spirit, and the paradox of life and death are everywhere in images of the Great Feminine. In ancient Mesopotamia, she was depicted as Ishtar, with a winged headdress and holding the ring of divine authority. She was sculpted with owls at her feet representing the secrets of the underworld and death.
In pre-dynastic Egypt she was often shown as a bird goddess with her arms uplifted, again like wings. Another frequent association was with the lion: a fire symbol. This theme was evident in the statues of Sekhmet. It was said that Sekhmet, carrying the paradox of fierce feminine power, would return in times of epoch change. The New York Times reports that 17 statues of Sekhmet have been found at Luxor in March 2006.
The uniting of paradoxes is evident in Isis: the great Goddess of the two lands of light and dark of Egypt. She is the agent for the resurrection of Osiris; by conceiving Horus, she brings forth the basic symbol of transformation in the uniting of the paradoxes.
Sophia’s Power: Veiled
For a period of time Sophia was evident in the city states of Greece and Rome. Her qualities were expressed through the ancient goddess Cybele. Here, also, she was often shown with lions, thought to represent the fiery and ecstatic state associated with her worship. However, Cybele began to fade in Rome about 200 BC as did the goddesses worshipped elsewhere: Isis in Egypt, Artemis in Ephesus, and Demeter in Greece. Similarly, Athene (Minerva) goddess of wisdom; became redefined as the daughter of Zeus, now the goddess of civilization. She was occasionally portrayed with only a small reminder of her heritage: an owl in her hand. To add insult to injury, she was considered to be the inventor of the bridle to tame the horse.
With the further emergence of the Greek Culture there was a marked decline in the power of Sophia. In particular, when the work of Aristotle stressed the world of ideas, and rationality; Logos, which had been her prerogative, became defined as masculine.
Buddhism, Christianity, Islam: (530 B.C to 0 – 600 A.D) all make mention of Sophia, yet each tradition adapts her to their own cosmology; and all increasingly become critical of nature. The goal of all these spiritual traditions is to rise above the earth and achieve Nirvana. Heaven, or Paradise.
The strongest belief in Sophia was retained by Gnostics (2-3 A.D.). While some Gnostic sects saw Sophia as God’s playmate, existing before the manifest world and responsible for helping man journey back to the Source, others blamed her curiosity for the fall of the soul into matter. This, for them, was a tragedy, for the material world was seen as unworthy. Women and earthiness were judged as the cause of all man’s problems. These Gnostics held a dim view of sexuality and treated women in the patriarchal style of the times. And so Sophia became split; her more negative aspect was called the Whore of Babylon, and earth, as a valued expression of creation, was lost.
Sophia, in her new form, surfaced as the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. She is first really noticed within the Catholic Church in 431 A.D. She became very prominent in early art where she was depicted as a vessel of rebirth and higher transformation. She was seen, usually, as a divine protector in early Renaissance times: a figure that mankind could appeal to in times of trouble. She became increasingly “elevated” through the years and in 1950 the church declared the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. Jung wrote that while it was good that the Church finally recognized the importance of the feminine, it had exalted Mary in the masculine sense and this would be injurious to the feminine principle of wholeness.
It was through the Black Madonna that Christianity retained Sophia’s connection with nature. The Black Madonna was sometimes called the lady of the caves where her statues were often hidden. The blackness there may have been related to the fact that she had been rescued by the locals after being burned as “pagan” by the church. Her darkness, however, could reflect earlier times, for Isis and Cybele were black of skin. The Black Madonna became the Mary of indigenous people and is still found in Poland, Spain, Mexico.
While Christianity basically ignored nature, or saw it as sinful, it is important to recognize that some mystics of the Christian church retained the integration of nature and spirit: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Jacob Boehm (1575-1650) spoke of their love for the beauty and importance of the natural world as an expression of God. They believed our spirit’s journey was vitally intertwined with the earth. Many writers also felt that the Sophianic message went into the essential teachings of Jesus. Jung wrote in “Answer to Job” that Sophia softened the Old Testament Yahweh and helped the Old Testament God remember compassion.
The fundamental challenge of Sophia and our relationship to nature , however, resurfaces in recently discovered esoteric texts. Of particular note is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, written in the 2nd century but not found until 1896 (with fragments published in the western world in 1996). Mary Magdalene is described here as an intimate of Christ, mentored by Him and recognized as one who supported and taught the apostles. Early tapestries illustrate this prominence and relationship. This gospel records further teachings of Christ, such as:
“All that is born, all that is created and all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other.” And then Christ goes on to say: “all that is composed will be decomposed.” This is the fundamental Sophianic challenge: to view ourselves as a process unfolding within nature. Such a view places us beyond religious dogma, and opens us to on-going Creation.
What wisdom awaits us here? Man’s deep fear of illness and death informs his pervasive need to control nature. Certainly, man’s innate intelligence is here to cure illness and provide palliative care for the dying. What we have not done is penetrate further into how fundamentally we are interwoven and united with nature, and how she provides the cog-wheel of our evolution.
Deep exploration of the psyche has revealed a new understanding of what we have described as the “descent journey” or “dark night of the soul”. We have not appreciated how fundamental this process is and only get a glimpse of understanding it when we consider life’s crisis, losses and depressions. Several years of research using high dosage LSD, music and therapeutic support with terminally ill cancer patients have uncovered a basic building block of this experience (Fig 1):
These patients experienced birth and death. They realized that they had died before. As a fetus, they saw that even the process of being born is a dying to an old way of knowing. These cancer patients recognized that descent journeys arose from an archetypal layer within the psyche itself and that it opened them to a new and different type of existence. They found a faith in the continuity of life and they died with much less anxiety and pain medication.
For us to mature as a species we must open to the deeper capacity of our psyches and come to reflect on its foundational aspects. Sophia, as an inclusive archetype, understands “the dark.” The wholeness she encompasses includes nature as our container and our destroyer and we need to grapple with that to find its wisdom. Henri Corbin has written: “It is not the incarnate Sophia’s role to bind or connect us to the earth, but to help us recognize that our understanding of ourselves as separate from the earth is a delusion.”
Here we see throughout the themes of descent and the balancing of opposites: the basic principles of soul work It is evident in the inserted circles of Demeter and Kali: the nurturing container (she who brings forth new life) and the transformer (she who demands the sacrifice that leads to truth). It is seen in the caduceus: the active equilibrium of opposing forces coming together in such a way as to create a higher form. It is evident in the earth, as child close to her heart, and in the symbols of the Kabbala whose purpose is to connect the finite world with the infinite. --Bernice H. Hill
http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/technology-and-environment/810-sophia-and-sustainability
With the mediating help of Sophia, the divine feminine principle of wisdom, we can decode the inner meaning of geometric shapes, numbers, and other symbols through intuition, to enrich our experience of living and deepen our appreciation of the mystery of form. Life has come out of the sea, and as it did so millions of years ago, it emerged in tiny forms of exquisite design. The geometric web by which creation lifted life into being was preexistent. Its counterpart lies in the seas of our own personal and collective unconscious, as Carl Gustav Jung pointed out. Through awareness we can discover preexisting patterns that can show us meaningful order in the chaos we experience at times in the world, and in our personal lives.
Sophia is emerging now, in these times of immense change, to challenge us again with her ways of knowing. She instructs us through her basic principles: (1) the creative tension of opposites (2) descent journeys (3) transcendence to a new form. Repetitive experience with each of these principles changes the nature of our ego, our reality and our relationship to “the Other.” These principles demonstrate the dynamism embedded in an energy matrix of Nature and the direction of our soul’s evolution. Awakening to these vital underlying patterns raises intense questions for us about our relationship to nature: questions that now need to be confronted.
Our Limited World Views:
(1)Polarization around: Father God - Mother God
Our culture is unconsciously imbued with a masculine God. Philosophers have pointed out that man’s image of himself will necessarily be translated to his image of God. Human beings create the kind of God they are prepared to receive at a given historical period of time. So for 20,000 years we had Mother God, and for 2,500 years we have had Father God. Wars are now stirred between rival definitions of this male God.
Jesus taught during strong patriarchal times (as did Mohammed). These teachings were taken up by the Church, which framed them in that masculine preference and projected them on all institutions. The denigration of the feminine and of matter inherent in that worldview contributes to our lack of awareness of the earth today as a living entity.
In contrast to this patriarchal view consider the following: “Source is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. There is a force-a Source of consciousness, in which we all reside (even the bad guys) and of which we are composed. The True God is beyond form. No being can ever be separate from God because all things in form manifestation take place within the Source. Some parts have forgotten their Divine identity-have no memory of the wholeness of which they are a part. They compete for power with others, and they neither acknowledge, nor comprehend the endless supply of Living Power, energy and love that eternally circulates between Source and all living things which are manifest.” (3)
Here is the integral perspective; earth is seen as a natural part of an immense living dynamic process, which, like us, arises from Source.
(2) Polarization: Life and Death
In America, we keep death hidden. It is very un-American to die. It’s a failure, for we should never lose a battle and America is a warrior culture. This fear of death gets translated into fear of nature, matter itself, and a devaluing of the earth.
Jung wrote that death becomes the most important issue to examine after mid-life. It is a question we must wrestle with, for death draws the two worlds together and we are the bridge.
Boulder, Colorado is a unique place. The Buddhist Institute of Shambhala has established a Death College. Last fall it offered a 7 week course. The text was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. We practiced dying: we lay on our right side in fetal position; holding the right nostril closed, and imagined the process. We were introduced to how the energy withdraws from the extremities, fades through the senses of eyes, ears, taste; how “father” energy from the head area joins “mother” energy from the lower body in the heart and then moves gradually on into the Illumined Mind. Yogis train themselves to awaken at this point. This juncture is possibly the basis of ‘near death’ experiences. For most, according to Buddhist teachings, the soul is drawn back into another life.
We were also sent on field trips. The first was to the local funeral home to be instructed in the embalming and cremation process. Then to a medical lab to examine 5 well-explored cadavers; handle the organs and note the remarkable way the body systems fit together. What remains in one’s mind is the implacable coldness, the clay of our physical being, once the soul has left. The body goes on its own journey of descent and return.
Many of the world’s people, like the Buddhists, of course, believe in reincarnation. They hold that it takes more than one lifetime for the soul to mature. The theosophists would say that we all must undergo four initiations before there is sufficient soul infusion for conscious living. They would say that mankind, as a whole, is just entering the 1st initiation, where the heart begins to integrate with the intellect. The second and third initiations have been demonstrated by the lives of such people as Ghandi, Mother Theresa, and the Dalai Lama. Christ was believed to have taken the fourth initiation, which requires a profound sacrifice.
Huston Smith, after a lifetime of study of the world’s religions, has written that he believes that things are not as bad as we tend to think they are. Yes, life and death are a mystery, yet we should have more faith in the process.
Challenge of Polarity 3: Individual Responsibility and Earth
Sophia has faith in the living processes, and she comes to teach us that. Her reconciliation of dark and light, nature and spirit generates a certain detachment, a wider understanding. She asks us to be more “philosophical”(i.e. philo…sophia ) about our own life and death. In this, she offers us a living universe that is much more immense and complex than held by our present view.
How would a sense of detachment relate to the sustainability of the earth? Certainly not through the notion of “The Rapture,” where believers in Christ consider they will be instantly transported to Heaven while unbelievers will be left behind. Such a view, like fundamentalism itself, demonstrates the wrong use of will, a quick fix for the fear engendered in these changing times. Believers in the Rapture would hurry the demise of the earth to hasten this process.
Jung, again, pointed to a different function of detachment, when he wrote of the process of individuation, the way for increasing self-knowledge. The very principles of the Jungian work: the creative tension of opposites, descent journeys and the transcendent function are born on the carrying wave of the Sophia archetype. These principles move us through matter and ultimately bring greater light and a sense of union. They change our view of reality and the basis of our choices. This is Sophianic wisdom.
Our way through the present environmental crisis requires that we mature; that we free ourselves from too local, too self-serving a perspective; that we move beyond our fear of life’s cycles to become “citizens of the world.” Jung wrote “My work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man…not only the meaning of his life, but his renewal and the renewal of his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern.” Addressing the earth's issues requires a profound renewal of our institutions and an expanded perception of our own soul’s journey, intertwined with nature herself. It is time.
http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=810&Itemid=40
• (1) Visions of Apuleius (Metamorphoses II)
• (2) A rich pictorial record of Sophia can be found in the ARAS website; Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom by Caitlin Mathews; and Light from the Darkness by Peter Birkhauser.
• (3) Voyagers.” Ashayana Deane. Wild Fire Press, Columbus, NC 2002.
• (4) Fig 1: Beyond the Brain, Stanislav Grof, State University of New York, 1982.
• (5) Fig 2: Sacred Mirrors, The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, Inner traditions International 1990
Our Limited World Views:
(1)Polarization around: Father God - Mother God
Our culture is unconsciously imbued with a masculine God. Philosophers have pointed out that man’s image of himself will necessarily be translated to his image of God. Human beings create the kind of God they are prepared to receive at a given historical period of time. So for 20,000 years we had Mother God, and for 2,500 years we have had Father God. Wars are now stirred between rival definitions of this male God.
Jesus taught during strong patriarchal times (as did Mohammed). These teachings were taken up by the Church, which framed them in that masculine preference and projected them on all institutions. The denigration of the feminine and of matter inherent in that worldview contributes to our lack of awareness of the earth today as a living entity.
In contrast to this patriarchal view consider the following: “Source is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. There is a force-a Source of consciousness, in which we all reside (even the bad guys) and of which we are composed. The True God is beyond form. No being can ever be separate from God because all things in form manifestation take place within the Source. Some parts have forgotten their Divine identity-have no memory of the wholeness of which they are a part. They compete for power with others, and they neither acknowledge, nor comprehend the endless supply of Living Power, energy and love that eternally circulates between Source and all living things which are manifest.” (3)
Here is the integral perspective; earth is seen as a natural part of an immense living dynamic process, which, like us, arises from Source.
(2) Polarization: Life and Death
In America, we keep death hidden. It is very un-American to die. It’s a failure, for we should never lose a battle and America is a warrior culture. This fear of death gets translated into fear of nature, matter itself, and a devaluing of the earth.
Jung wrote that death becomes the most important issue to examine after mid-life. It is a question we must wrestle with, for death draws the two worlds together and we are the bridge.
Boulder, Colorado is a unique place. The Buddhist Institute of Shambhala has established a Death College. Last fall it offered a 7 week course. The text was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. We practiced dying: we lay on our right side in fetal position; holding the right nostril closed, and imagined the process. We were introduced to how the energy withdraws from the extremities, fades through the senses of eyes, ears, taste; how “father” energy from the head area joins “mother” energy from the lower body in the heart and then moves gradually on into the Illumined Mind. Yogis train themselves to awaken at this point. This juncture is possibly the basis of ‘near death’ experiences. For most, according to Buddhist teachings, the soul is drawn back into another life.
We were also sent on field trips. The first was to the local funeral home to be instructed in the embalming and cremation process. Then to a medical lab to examine 5 well-explored cadavers; handle the organs and note the remarkable way the body systems fit together. What remains in one’s mind is the implacable coldness, the clay of our physical being, once the soul has left. The body goes on its own journey of descent and return.
Many of the world’s people, like the Buddhists, of course, believe in reincarnation. They hold that it takes more than one lifetime for the soul to mature. The theosophists would say that we all must undergo four initiations before there is sufficient soul infusion for conscious living. They would say that mankind, as a whole, is just entering the 1st initiation, where the heart begins to integrate with the intellect. The second and third initiations have been demonstrated by the lives of such people as Ghandi, Mother Theresa, and the Dalai Lama. Christ was believed to have taken the fourth initiation, which requires a profound sacrifice.
Huston Smith, after a lifetime of study of the world’s religions, has written that he believes that things are not as bad as we tend to think they are. Yes, life and death are a mystery, yet we should have more faith in the process.
Challenge of Polarity 3: Individual Responsibility and Earth
Sophia has faith in the living processes, and she comes to teach us that. Her reconciliation of dark and light, nature and spirit generates a certain detachment, a wider understanding. She asks us to be more “philosophical”(i.e. philo…sophia ) about our own life and death. In this, she offers us a living universe that is much more immense and complex than held by our present view.
How would a sense of detachment relate to the sustainability of the earth? Certainly not through the notion of “The Rapture,” where believers in Christ consider they will be instantly transported to Heaven while unbelievers will be left behind. Such a view, like fundamentalism itself, demonstrates the wrong use of will, a quick fix for the fear engendered in these changing times. Believers in the Rapture would hurry the demise of the earth to hasten this process.
Jung, again, pointed to a different function of detachment, when he wrote of the process of individuation, the way for increasing self-knowledge. The very principles of the Jungian work: the creative tension of opposites, descent journeys and the transcendent function are born on the carrying wave of the Sophia archetype. These principles move us through matter and ultimately bring greater light and a sense of union. They change our view of reality and the basis of our choices. This is Sophianic wisdom.
Our way through the present environmental crisis requires that we mature; that we free ourselves from too local, too self-serving a perspective; that we move beyond our fear of life’s cycles to become “citizens of the world.” Jung wrote “My work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man…not only the meaning of his life, but his renewal and the renewal of his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern.” Addressing the earth's issues requires a profound renewal of our institutions and an expanded perception of our own soul’s journey, intertwined with nature herself. It is time.
http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=810&Itemid=40
• (1) Visions of Apuleius (Metamorphoses II)
• (2) A rich pictorial record of Sophia can be found in the ARAS website; Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom by Caitlin Mathews; and Light from the Darkness by Peter Birkhauser.
• (3) Voyagers.” Ashayana Deane. Wild Fire Press, Columbus, NC 2002.
• (4) Fig 1: Beyond the Brain, Stanislav Grof, State University of New York, 1982.
• (5) Fig 2: Sacred Mirrors, The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, Inner traditions International 1990
Image: Ukrainian (Kyiv) Icon, Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, 1812.
Jung on the Incarnation of the God-Man and Sophia
Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process itself will follow certain prefigurations.
The approach of Sophia betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved.
In this decision we can discern the "philanthropic" influence of Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one, the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed directly from the hand of the Creator, but shall be born of a human woman. So this time priority falls to the Second Eve, not only in a temporal sense but in a material sense as well. On the basis of the so-called Proto-Evangelium, the Second Eve corresponds to "the woman and her seed" mentioned in Genesis 3:15, which shall bruise the serpent's head.
And just as Adam was believed to be originally hermaphroditic, so "the woman and her seed" are thought of as a human pair, as the Queen of Heaven and Mother of God and as the divine son who has no human father. Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel for the coming birth of God. Her independence of the male is emphasized by her virginity as the “sine qua non” of the process.
She is a "daughter of God" who, as a later dogma will establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning.
The divine immaculateness of her status makes it immediately clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, is also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasized in the ancient writings, suggests that in this newest creation of his Yahweh has allowed himself to be extensively influenced by Sophia.
For Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who leads the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man's bodily resurrection.
As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she holds the place of the Old Testament Sophia.
Remarkable indeed are the unusual precautions which surround the making of Mary: immaculate conception, extirpation of the taint of sin, everlasting virginity. The Mother of God is obviously being protected against Satan's tricks. From this we can conclude that Yahweh has consulted his own omniscience, for in his omniscience there is a clear knowledge of the perverse intentions which lurk in the dark son of God. Mary must at all costs be protected from these corrupting influences.
The inevitable consequence of all these elaborate protective measures is something that has not been sufficiently taken into account in the dogmatic evaluation of the Incarnation: her freedom from original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose common characteristic is original sin and therefore the need of redemption. The status “ante lapsum” is tantamount to a paradisal, i.e., pleromatic and divine, existence.
By having these special measures applied to her, Mary is elevated to the status of a goddess and consequently loses something of her humanity:
she will not conceive her child in sin, like all other mothers, and therefore he also will never be a human being, but a god.
To my knowledge at least, no one has ever perceived that this queers the pitch for a genuine Incarnation of God, or rather, that the Incarnation was only partially consummated. Both mother and son are not real human beings at all, but gods.
This arrangement, though it had the effect of exalting Mary's personality in the masculine sense by bringing it closer to the perfection of Christ, was at the same time injurious to the feminine principle of imperfection or completeness, since this
was reduced by the perfectionizing tendency to the little bit of imperfection that still distinguishes Mary from Christ. Phoebus loses more lights!
Thus the more the feminine ideal is bent in the direction of the masculine, the more the woman loses her power to compensate the masculine striving for perfection, and a typically masculine, ideal state arises which, as we shall see, is threatened with an enantiodromia.
No path leads beyond perfection into the future there is only a turning back, a collapse of the ideal, which could easily have been avoided by paying attention to the feminine ideal of completeness. Yahweh's perfectionism is carried over from the Old Testament into the New, and despite all the recognition and glorification of the feminine principle this never prevailed against the patriarchal supremacy. We have not, therefore, by any means heard the last of it.
Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Answer to Job,
Pages 397-399; Para. 625-627.
Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process itself will follow certain prefigurations.
The approach of Sophia betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved.
In this decision we can discern the "philanthropic" influence of Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one, the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed directly from the hand of the Creator, but shall be born of a human woman. So this time priority falls to the Second Eve, not only in a temporal sense but in a material sense as well. On the basis of the so-called Proto-Evangelium, the Second Eve corresponds to "the woman and her seed" mentioned in Genesis 3:15, which shall bruise the serpent's head.
And just as Adam was believed to be originally hermaphroditic, so "the woman and her seed" are thought of as a human pair, as the Queen of Heaven and Mother of God and as the divine son who has no human father. Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel for the coming birth of God. Her independence of the male is emphasized by her virginity as the “sine qua non” of the process.
She is a "daughter of God" who, as a later dogma will establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning.
The divine immaculateness of her status makes it immediately clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, is also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasized in the ancient writings, suggests that in this newest creation of his Yahweh has allowed himself to be extensively influenced by Sophia.
For Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who leads the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man's bodily resurrection.
As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she holds the place of the Old Testament Sophia.
Remarkable indeed are the unusual precautions which surround the making of Mary: immaculate conception, extirpation of the taint of sin, everlasting virginity. The Mother of God is obviously being protected against Satan's tricks. From this we can conclude that Yahweh has consulted his own omniscience, for in his omniscience there is a clear knowledge of the perverse intentions which lurk in the dark son of God. Mary must at all costs be protected from these corrupting influences.
The inevitable consequence of all these elaborate protective measures is something that has not been sufficiently taken into account in the dogmatic evaluation of the Incarnation: her freedom from original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose common characteristic is original sin and therefore the need of redemption. The status “ante lapsum” is tantamount to a paradisal, i.e., pleromatic and divine, existence.
By having these special measures applied to her, Mary is elevated to the status of a goddess and consequently loses something of her humanity:
she will not conceive her child in sin, like all other mothers, and therefore he also will never be a human being, but a god.
To my knowledge at least, no one has ever perceived that this queers the pitch for a genuine Incarnation of God, or rather, that the Incarnation was only partially consummated. Both mother and son are not real human beings at all, but gods.
This arrangement, though it had the effect of exalting Mary's personality in the masculine sense by bringing it closer to the perfection of Christ, was at the same time injurious to the feminine principle of imperfection or completeness, since this
was reduced by the perfectionizing tendency to the little bit of imperfection that still distinguishes Mary from Christ. Phoebus loses more lights!
Thus the more the feminine ideal is bent in the direction of the masculine, the more the woman loses her power to compensate the masculine striving for perfection, and a typically masculine, ideal state arises which, as we shall see, is threatened with an enantiodromia.
No path leads beyond perfection into the future there is only a turning back, a collapse of the ideal, which could easily have been avoided by paying attention to the feminine ideal of completeness. Yahweh's perfectionism is carried over from the Old Testament into the New, and despite all the recognition and glorification of the feminine principle this never prevailed against the patriarchal supremacy. We have not, therefore, by any means heard the last of it.
Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Answer to Job,
Pages 397-399; Para. 625-627.
Sophia, Soul of the World
Kathleen Damiani Mindscape, Nick Gonzalez-Goad
"But where shall understanding be found?"
I move with roaring, howling, and radiant might.
I move with the infinite and nature's powers.
I hold the love of the Lord of Lords. I hold
The fire of the soul. I hold life and healing.
--Vak speaking of herself, Rg Veda
Who is this fierce immensity that is female, cosmic, who holds life love and healing? She speaks of herself through ancient poets and visionaries as Perfect Nature, as the Soul of the World, as the ancient goddesses of justice and natural law, and as Sophia, guardian angel of philosophy and teacher of men in the Wisdom literature of the Bible.
The word philosophy was coined by Pythagoras and comes from the Greek word philein (brotherly love) and sophia, wisdom. He was the first person to call himself a philosopher, which he defined as one who is attempting to find out. Before Pythagoras (6th c. BCE), wise men called themselves sages, meaning those who know. (Manly P. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic Hermetic Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Philosophy, LXV).
Philosophers, poets and visionaries personified wisdom as a powerful female who nourished their spiritual imagination and philosophical insight: The heavenly Sophia is the philosopher's Angel, "his initiator and tutor, the object and secret of all philosophy, the dominant figure in the Sage's personal religion." She is the form of light, "conjoined with his star, which rules him and opens the doors of wisdom for him, teaches him what is difficult, reveals to him what is right, in sleeping as in waking." Socrates declared Perfect Nature to be the sun of the philosopher, the "original root of his being and at the same time the branch springing from him." (Majriti, "Goal of the Sage," quoted in Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 17)
Sophia personifies wisdom, the subject of ancient traditions concerned with integrity in the marketplace, politics, and the royal court. In the Biblical Wisdom literature, she teaches men that clear perception and discernment are more important than gold. Because the teachings were rooted in life instead of doctrine and spoken by a divine female, Sophia became problematical and excluded from the religious formulations of monotheism. Sophia's exile from mainstream religion mirrors the alienation suffered by modern individuals who experience betrayal, abandonment, scapegoating, exclusion, and loss--of homeland or loved one.
Sophia, the "person" in the word "philosophy," was named Sophia after the Greek word for wisdom. She was described in the five Biblical books classified as wisdom literature, written in the postexilic period, from 500 B.C.E. on. Sophia is not only a teacher of men in these texts, but also co-creator of the world. Sophia speaks about her identity, power and function and her mysterious presence with God at creation in passages reminiscent of earlier speeches of wisdom goddesses found in sacred texts in India, Egypt, and Sumeria.
Sophia eventually disappeared from the development of mainstream theological tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam because she was problematical. Being a "she" did not fit into the increasingly male-dominated religions that excluded the feminine in favor of an all-male god that creates everything. Such a concept would be ludicrous for the earlier matrifocal societies who were well aware that the source, bearer, and protector of newborn life is the woman, not the man.
For centuries, the frequent presence of Sophia in the Wisdom literature was a difficult issue for Biblical scholars attempting to account for her apparent divinity and role in creation:
She remained, however, a vital force in religious visions, esoteric traditions, and schools of philosophy. She appeared as two Sophias in gnosticism: the world soul and the embodied soul. In medieval alchemy, as Sapientia she was the goal of the transformation process. In Persian Sufism, Sophia inspired mystical devotion and poetry. Sophia is shown suckling two philosophers on a 12th century manuscript. She is depicted as the Queen of the Liberal Arts, which correspond to the seven planets and are divided into the trivium and quadrivium. The basis of Western academic education was based upon this organization until the 16th century.
Sophia was the central figure in the visionary philosophies of Jacob Boehme, Mother Anne Lee of the Shakers, Rudolph Steiner's Anthroposophical movement, and the 19th century Russian school of Sophiology represented by Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, and Sergei Bulgakov.
Here is a selection of titles and interpretations of Sophia:
http://www.sophiaandthedragon.com/sophia/soul_of_world.htm
Kathleen Damiani Mindscape, Nick Gonzalez-Goad
"But where shall understanding be found?"
I move with roaring, howling, and radiant might.
I move with the infinite and nature's powers.
I hold the love of the Lord of Lords. I hold
The fire of the soul. I hold life and healing.
--Vak speaking of herself, Rg Veda
Who is this fierce immensity that is female, cosmic, who holds life love and healing? She speaks of herself through ancient poets and visionaries as Perfect Nature, as the Soul of the World, as the ancient goddesses of justice and natural law, and as Sophia, guardian angel of philosophy and teacher of men in the Wisdom literature of the Bible.
The word philosophy was coined by Pythagoras and comes from the Greek word philein (brotherly love) and sophia, wisdom. He was the first person to call himself a philosopher, which he defined as one who is attempting to find out. Before Pythagoras (6th c. BCE), wise men called themselves sages, meaning those who know. (Manly P. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic Hermetic Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Philosophy, LXV).
Philosophers, poets and visionaries personified wisdom as a powerful female who nourished their spiritual imagination and philosophical insight: The heavenly Sophia is the philosopher's Angel, "his initiator and tutor, the object and secret of all philosophy, the dominant figure in the Sage's personal religion." She is the form of light, "conjoined with his star, which rules him and opens the doors of wisdom for him, teaches him what is difficult, reveals to him what is right, in sleeping as in waking." Socrates declared Perfect Nature to be the sun of the philosopher, the "original root of his being and at the same time the branch springing from him." (Majriti, "Goal of the Sage," quoted in Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 17)
Sophia personifies wisdom, the subject of ancient traditions concerned with integrity in the marketplace, politics, and the royal court. In the Biblical Wisdom literature, she teaches men that clear perception and discernment are more important than gold. Because the teachings were rooted in life instead of doctrine and spoken by a divine female, Sophia became problematical and excluded from the religious formulations of monotheism. Sophia's exile from mainstream religion mirrors the alienation suffered by modern individuals who experience betrayal, abandonment, scapegoating, exclusion, and loss--of homeland or loved one.
Sophia, the "person" in the word "philosophy," was named Sophia after the Greek word for wisdom. She was described in the five Biblical books classified as wisdom literature, written in the postexilic period, from 500 B.C.E. on. Sophia is not only a teacher of men in these texts, but also co-creator of the world. Sophia speaks about her identity, power and function and her mysterious presence with God at creation in passages reminiscent of earlier speeches of wisdom goddesses found in sacred texts in India, Egypt, and Sumeria.
Sophia eventually disappeared from the development of mainstream theological tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam because she was problematical. Being a "she" did not fit into the increasingly male-dominated religions that excluded the feminine in favor of an all-male god that creates everything. Such a concept would be ludicrous for the earlier matrifocal societies who were well aware that the source, bearer, and protector of newborn life is the woman, not the man.
For centuries, the frequent presence of Sophia in the Wisdom literature was a difficult issue for Biblical scholars attempting to account for her apparent divinity and role in creation:
- Her divine status, evident from her speeches, does not easily fit into monotheism.
- Her teachings are rooted in life, not in obedience to rules, gods or priests; these teachings demand individual integrity and justice in the marketplace and royal court, and are achieved through clear perception and devotion to her, wisdom, and by abandoning "marketplace consciousness"--giving up the quest for gold & possessions.
- She is associated with the natural order and meaning of creation, rather than the revelation and salvation of monotheistic religions. Sophia had many of the characteristics of earlier wisdom goddesses who carry the banner of the supremacy, primacy, and justice of the natural order of the cosmos rather than the capricious brutal rule of man whose focus is on profit and domination.
- Her gender is unacceptable in religions that deify only the male. The strenuous effort of Hebrew prophets to turn their people away from the worship of popular local deities to an ever-stricter monotheism admitted no divine reality save one demanding wifeless male god.
She remained, however, a vital force in religious visions, esoteric traditions, and schools of philosophy. She appeared as two Sophias in gnosticism: the world soul and the embodied soul. In medieval alchemy, as Sapientia she was the goal of the transformation process. In Persian Sufism, Sophia inspired mystical devotion and poetry. Sophia is shown suckling two philosophers on a 12th century manuscript. She is depicted as the Queen of the Liberal Arts, which correspond to the seven planets and are divided into the trivium and quadrivium. The basis of Western academic education was based upon this organization until the 16th century.
Sophia was the central figure in the visionary philosophies of Jacob Boehme, Mother Anne Lee of the Shakers, Rudolph Steiner's Anthroposophical movement, and the 19th century Russian school of Sophiology represented by Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, and Sergei Bulgakov.
Here is a selection of titles and interpretations of Sophia:
- the philosopher's angel, the object and secret of all philosophy in Iranian Sufism
- the wisdom principle in the human being, the intellectual aspect of the soul which redeems itself by renouncing error (philosophy)
- the World Soul, anima mundi
- divine feminine (also God's co-creator, female half)
- Holy Ghost
- Virgin Mary
- equated with Jesus by St. Paul
- Perfect Nature
- the visionary organ of the soul in Iranian Sufism
- the meaning implanted by God in creation, the divine mystery of creation
- the wisdom handed down from generation to generation by sages
- the goal of the individual transformation process within the esoteric interpretations of the three main religions of the West: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
- the highest stage of the anima in male psychology (Jung)
http://www.sophiaandthedragon.com/sophia/soul_of_world.htm
Carlo Dolci (1616 – 1686) Angelo annunciante, o/tl, 52 x 40 cm, Louvre Paris
The Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith has provided the long awaited, first principal, biological explanation of the human condition, our capacity for so called ‘good and evil’. With the clarifying, biological explanation for why we humans became competitive, selfish and aggressive, it is now possible to look into and explain the rather elusive concept we refer to as our ‘soul’— our species’ instinctive memory of a time when our distant ancestors lived in a cooperative, selfless, loving, innocent state, or, as it is referred to metaphorically in the religious context of the Christian Bible, humanity’s time in the ‘Garden of Eden’.
Not all scientists are necessarily adverse to grappling with religious concepts. Recently two quantum scientists have claimed that they can prove the existence of the soul, a quantum entity that acts as the program for the computer of our brain, and exists independently of the physical body after death. One psychologist says that the concept of soul is merely an extrapolation we make based on the duality that we experience between body and consciousness.
Neurobiologists and evolutionary psychologists hold that the soul, or at least a belief in it, evolved as an adaptation to bestow on the individual either an equanimity, or social trustworthiness that ultimately represented a competitive advantage.
Jungian psychoanalysts relate the concept of soul to the concept of the collective unconscious. Carl Jung himself described the collective unconscious as a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.”
The Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith goes further and suggests that not only is our collective unconscious inherited, but it is in fact a genuinely altruistic instinctive orientation. This, he says, is the source of our moral guidance, the voice of which is our conscience, and which we have learnt to call our ‘soul’.
Griffith says that having a selfless instinctive orientation is a truth that humanity could not admit to until we could first explain the crux problem on Earth of the human condition, the dilemma of our capacity for so called ‘good and evil’. This dilemma has troubled the human mind since we first became fully conscious, thinking beings: are humans essentially ‘good’ and, if so, what is the cause of our ‘evil’, destructive, insensitive and cruel side? Until this could be explained, and humans defended, admitting to a selfless instinctive heritage has simply been too confronting of our present selfish and destructive state.
Griffith has at last explained the human condition; and it turns out the explanation is simple: our brains are made up of two different ‘learning systems’; one is a gene-based system, our instincts, a learning system we share with all other animal species, while the other is a nerve-based system—our conscious intellect which is unique to us humans. When our intellect began to develop and challenge our already well-established instincts for control of our minds, a terrible battle broke out between these two learning systems, the effect of which was the extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive state that we call the human condition.
With the defence of our aggressive, selfish state established, Griffith says that it is now safe to admit that we have selfless instincts; and to explain that they were instilled in our primate ancestors through a process he calls ‘love-indoctrination’. Our ape ancestors lived in conditions conducive to extending the period that their offspring spent in infancy, and there was an opportunity for selection for greater and more intense levels of maternalism (where a mother protects her offspring in order to ensure the survival of her own genes). This combination of an extended, nurturing infancy and more maternal mothers then resulted in dependant infants in-effect being ‘trained’ in selfless behaviour, because to an observer such as a child, the mother’s maternalism appears to be selfless behaviour, she appears to be giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. From her infant’s perspective, this is real, unconditional love and the infant’s brain is being indoctrinated in that behavior. Griffith says that if you apply this training across all the members of the group, the result is an unconditionally selflessly behaved, cooperative, fully integrated society. And then, with this training in unconditional selflessness occurring over many generations, the unconditionally selfless behaviour will become instinctive–a moral soul will be established and our genes will inevitably follow and reinforce that development process.
Griffith sites religious texts and classical and modern literature to support his theory. Most scientists attempt to disenfranchise arts and religion as legitimate sources of insight into the human condition. For example in his latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson says that, “The intricate distortions of the mind may be transmitted by the arts in fine detail, but they are constructed as though human nature never had an evolutionary history. Their powerful metaphors have brought us no closer to solving the riddle than did the dramas and literature of ancient Greece.”
With regard to religion, Wilson says bluntly: “Religion can never solve the riddle. The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival.”
However Griffith says it makes sense that the works of art, philosophy and religion that have resonated down through the ages have done so, not because they were survival tools, but because they contained profound truth about our condition. For example, Griffith says the following lines from Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, corroborates that humans have altruistic instincts (which Wordsworth equates with a ‘heavenly’ state), which are then later buried by our consciousness:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Griffith also finds corroboration in the metaphor of the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge, a story central to the Abrahamic traditions, arguing that it contains the same truths as those expressed by Wordsworth – that we have a selfless instinctive heritage, and that an emerging consciousness later came into conflict with our instinctive state.
With the scientific explanation of the human condition now found, these texts are revealed to be profound, which is not surprising, because we have always been intuitively aware of our condition.
http://www.zmescience.com/science/science-explains-our-soul/
Science at Last Explains Our Soul is a post from ZME Science. (c) ZME Science – All Rights Reserved.
Not all scientists are necessarily adverse to grappling with religious concepts. Recently two quantum scientists have claimed that they can prove the existence of the soul, a quantum entity that acts as the program for the computer of our brain, and exists independently of the physical body after death. One psychologist says that the concept of soul is merely an extrapolation we make based on the duality that we experience between body and consciousness.
Neurobiologists and evolutionary psychologists hold that the soul, or at least a belief in it, evolved as an adaptation to bestow on the individual either an equanimity, or social trustworthiness that ultimately represented a competitive advantage.
Jungian psychoanalysts relate the concept of soul to the concept of the collective unconscious. Carl Jung himself described the collective unconscious as a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.”
The Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith goes further and suggests that not only is our collective unconscious inherited, but it is in fact a genuinely altruistic instinctive orientation. This, he says, is the source of our moral guidance, the voice of which is our conscience, and which we have learnt to call our ‘soul’.
Griffith says that having a selfless instinctive orientation is a truth that humanity could not admit to until we could first explain the crux problem on Earth of the human condition, the dilemma of our capacity for so called ‘good and evil’. This dilemma has troubled the human mind since we first became fully conscious, thinking beings: are humans essentially ‘good’ and, if so, what is the cause of our ‘evil’, destructive, insensitive and cruel side? Until this could be explained, and humans defended, admitting to a selfless instinctive heritage has simply been too confronting of our present selfish and destructive state.
Griffith has at last explained the human condition; and it turns out the explanation is simple: our brains are made up of two different ‘learning systems’; one is a gene-based system, our instincts, a learning system we share with all other animal species, while the other is a nerve-based system—our conscious intellect which is unique to us humans. When our intellect began to develop and challenge our already well-established instincts for control of our minds, a terrible battle broke out between these two learning systems, the effect of which was the extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive state that we call the human condition.
With the defence of our aggressive, selfish state established, Griffith says that it is now safe to admit that we have selfless instincts; and to explain that they were instilled in our primate ancestors through a process he calls ‘love-indoctrination’. Our ape ancestors lived in conditions conducive to extending the period that their offspring spent in infancy, and there was an opportunity for selection for greater and more intense levels of maternalism (where a mother protects her offspring in order to ensure the survival of her own genes). This combination of an extended, nurturing infancy and more maternal mothers then resulted in dependant infants in-effect being ‘trained’ in selfless behaviour, because to an observer such as a child, the mother’s maternalism appears to be selfless behaviour, she appears to be giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. From her infant’s perspective, this is real, unconditional love and the infant’s brain is being indoctrinated in that behavior. Griffith says that if you apply this training across all the members of the group, the result is an unconditionally selflessly behaved, cooperative, fully integrated society. And then, with this training in unconditional selflessness occurring over many generations, the unconditionally selfless behaviour will become instinctive–a moral soul will be established and our genes will inevitably follow and reinforce that development process.
Griffith sites religious texts and classical and modern literature to support his theory. Most scientists attempt to disenfranchise arts and religion as legitimate sources of insight into the human condition. For example in his latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson says that, “The intricate distortions of the mind may be transmitted by the arts in fine detail, but they are constructed as though human nature never had an evolutionary history. Their powerful metaphors have brought us no closer to solving the riddle than did the dramas and literature of ancient Greece.”
With regard to religion, Wilson says bluntly: “Religion can never solve the riddle. The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival.”
However Griffith says it makes sense that the works of art, philosophy and religion that have resonated down through the ages have done so, not because they were survival tools, but because they contained profound truth about our condition. For example, Griffith says the following lines from Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, corroborates that humans have altruistic instincts (which Wordsworth equates with a ‘heavenly’ state), which are then later buried by our consciousness:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Griffith also finds corroboration in the metaphor of the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge, a story central to the Abrahamic traditions, arguing that it contains the same truths as those expressed by Wordsworth – that we have a selfless instinctive heritage, and that an emerging consciousness later came into conflict with our instinctive state.
With the scientific explanation of the human condition now found, these texts are revealed to be profound, which is not surprising, because we have always been intuitively aware of our condition.
http://www.zmescience.com/science/science-explains-our-soul/
Science at Last Explains Our Soul is a post from ZME Science. (c) ZME Science – All Rights Reserved.
1970 - Mati Klarwein
> Sophia is the philosopher's angel (Iranian Sufism).
> Sophia has been summed up simply as "Life." She is the wisdom principle in man, which is the intellectual aspect of the soul, (which) redeems itself by renouncing error (philosophy)
> Sophia is the World Soul (anima mundi), divine feminine. Perfect Nature…
> Sophia is the visionary organ of the soul (Ir. Sufism).
> The "fourth person of God" (Russian Sophiology).
> Sophia is "this 'wisdom', this 'understanding,' (which) "must... signify something like the 'meaning' implanted
by God in creation, the divine mystery of Creation." (Gerhard von Rad).
> Sophia represents the wisdom that was handed down from generation to generation by sages (James
Robinson, ed. The Nag Hammadi Library.) She appears as the goal of individual transformation in the esoteric interpretations of the 3 largest western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She personifies a certain archetypal power or presence within the human psyche that pre-dates the formation of these religions and whose ancestral roots were described in spiritual traditions around the world:
India: Sakti/Saci: the Dyad: creative principle, the manifesting power: "I am the form of the Immensity; from me the world arises as Nature and Person (prakrti-purusa)." The all-powerful goddess described in the Devi Bhagavata Tika as a "dual energy, presiding deity of life and intellect,... called the universal ruler.
the union of intellect and life, their uniting and going apart." (Danielou 1964,265)
Rg-Veda: Vak—the Word, exalted "beyond the Heavens and beyond this broad Earth." This is the vibration of Truth, the source and nourisher of Creation.
Ancient Near Eastern wisdom goddesses:
Mesopotamian wisdom goddess symbolized wisdom tradition in Syria.
Isis: "the cognomen of lsis was ... the Black One. Apuleius stresses the blackness of her robe... and since ancient times she was reputed to possess the elixir of life as well as being adept in sundry magical arts.
She was also called the Old One, and she was rated a pupil of Hermes, or even his daughter. She appears as a teacher of alchemy... signifies earth,... and was equated with Sophia.... She is ... the vessel and the matter of good and evil. She is the moon... the One, who art All." [CW 14 (14-15)
]Pallas Athene: name in pre-Greek and Etruscans in Italy from Etruscan word for "holy vessel of the priest" (althanulus), "clay beaker for use in sacrifice" (atena) and "pan" (attana). (Pallas is a Greek word for robust maiden or youth).
Maat: The central idea of wisdom teaching is Maat, 'law', 'justice', 'primeval order'.... She came down to mean at 'the beginning of time' as the right order of all things.... The divine Maat, a central concept in Egyptian wisdom teaching, embodies law, world order, justice. ... there can be no doubt that Israelite teachers have been dependent on the idea of the Egyptian goddess of order and have even borrowed characteristic, individual expressions. (Themis is her Greek counterpart, the foundation of law in nature that was the basis of development of Western law).
Sophia after 5th c. before common era:
Torah/Old Testament: Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom which is a "she" who personifies integrity, honesty, clear perception, the power by which kings and princes rule, and the creative power present with Yahweh at creation.
New Testament: Sophia was first equated with Jesus, then deleted from mainstream religion because she was a problematic presence in the exclusively male monotheistic theology.
New Testament: Sophia is the Sun Woman in Revelation, (Ch. 12), who stands in glorious radiance crowned with stars. Under her feet is the moon, she is pregnant and pursued by the great dragon. She is the feminine Anthropos, the counterpart of the masculine principle... she adds the dark to the light, symbolizes the hierogamy of opposites, and reconciles nature with spirit. [CW 11 (711)]
"Anamnesis of Sophia" (Jung): Sophia personifies the existence of another "fact" about the creation of the world; that Yahweh is a lower, more unconscious mode of a much greater power lying beyond being and knowing. Jung proposes that Yahweh is himself subject to the tides of consciousness/unconsciousness. In Answer to Job, Job becomes greater than God because he can "see" God's shadow, because he is victim of it. "Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself."
[CW 11 (617) '"Anamnesis of Sophia' refers to the recollection by God of Wisdom: 'But at that time she was still hidden in Yahweh, or rather, she was not yet remembered by him.'" [CW 11 (742)]
In Iranian Sufism, Sophia is Perfect Nature, the object of ecstatic vision. She is also called: the philosopher's Sun, the Daena—the visionary organ of the soul"; personal master and suprasensory guide, sun of the heart, etc. She is the guide in exile, the watcher and shepherd, and paradoxically, the essential individuality and the "pre-terrestrial vision of the celestial world."
Perfect Nature was described in an 11th century text as '"the philosopher's angel,' his initiator and tutor, and the object and secret of all philosophy, the dominant figure in the Sage's personal religion. She has been equated with the Purple Archangel of Supreme Illumination in the writings of the Persian Neoplatonists.
Socrates declared Perfect Nature to be the sun of the philosopher, the "original root of his being and at the same time the branch springing from him." The philosopher's Angel is the Form of light, the heavenly Sophia "conjoined with his star, which rules him and opens the doors of wisdom for him, teaches him what is difficult, reveals to him what is right, in sleeping as in waking." (Corbin, 1978, 17)
Sophia was the goal of transformation, the "lead deity" in these traditions:
> Gnosticism (Thunder Perfect Mind; 2 Sophias, higher & lower—Sophia Achamoth, the generative wisdom
of the world).> Alchemy (Sapientia, moon, tree, ogdoad, alchemical salt—the psychic form of the body, the
ash remaining that serves to fix the 'volatile' spirit.)
> Russian Sophiology
Other associations & identities:
> Christian mysticism (Sophia equated with Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, and was the object
of mystical visions for Jacob Boehme, etc.)
> Jungian psychology: the 4th & highest stage of anima development in male psychology.
> Contemporary spiritual schools: Anthroposophy, Creation Spirituality movement, Sophia movement
in American churches and Robert Sardello's Sophia school in North Carolina.
http://azothgallery.com/alchemical/k_damiani_sophiameanings.html
> Sophia has been summed up simply as "Life." She is the wisdom principle in man, which is the intellectual aspect of the soul, (which) redeems itself by renouncing error (philosophy)
> Sophia is the World Soul (anima mundi), divine feminine. Perfect Nature…
> Sophia is the visionary organ of the soul (Ir. Sufism).
> The "fourth person of God" (Russian Sophiology).
> Sophia is "this 'wisdom', this 'understanding,' (which) "must... signify something like the 'meaning' implanted
by God in creation, the divine mystery of Creation." (Gerhard von Rad).
> Sophia represents the wisdom that was handed down from generation to generation by sages (James
Robinson, ed. The Nag Hammadi Library.) She appears as the goal of individual transformation in the esoteric interpretations of the 3 largest western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She personifies a certain archetypal power or presence within the human psyche that pre-dates the formation of these religions and whose ancestral roots were described in spiritual traditions around the world:
India: Sakti/Saci: the Dyad: creative principle, the manifesting power: "I am the form of the Immensity; from me the world arises as Nature and Person (prakrti-purusa)." The all-powerful goddess described in the Devi Bhagavata Tika as a "dual energy, presiding deity of life and intellect,... called the universal ruler.
the union of intellect and life, their uniting and going apart." (Danielou 1964,265)
Rg-Veda: Vak—the Word, exalted "beyond the Heavens and beyond this broad Earth." This is the vibration of Truth, the source and nourisher of Creation.
Ancient Near Eastern wisdom goddesses:
Mesopotamian wisdom goddess symbolized wisdom tradition in Syria.
Isis: "the cognomen of lsis was ... the Black One. Apuleius stresses the blackness of her robe... and since ancient times she was reputed to possess the elixir of life as well as being adept in sundry magical arts.
She was also called the Old One, and she was rated a pupil of Hermes, or even his daughter. She appears as a teacher of alchemy... signifies earth,... and was equated with Sophia.... She is ... the vessel and the matter of good and evil. She is the moon... the One, who art All." [CW 14 (14-15)
]Pallas Athene: name in pre-Greek and Etruscans in Italy from Etruscan word for "holy vessel of the priest" (althanulus), "clay beaker for use in sacrifice" (atena) and "pan" (attana). (Pallas is a Greek word for robust maiden or youth).
Maat: The central idea of wisdom teaching is Maat, 'law', 'justice', 'primeval order'.... She came down to mean at 'the beginning of time' as the right order of all things.... The divine Maat, a central concept in Egyptian wisdom teaching, embodies law, world order, justice. ... there can be no doubt that Israelite teachers have been dependent on the idea of the Egyptian goddess of order and have even borrowed characteristic, individual expressions. (Themis is her Greek counterpart, the foundation of law in nature that was the basis of development of Western law).
Sophia after 5th c. before common era:
Torah/Old Testament: Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom which is a "she" who personifies integrity, honesty, clear perception, the power by which kings and princes rule, and the creative power present with Yahweh at creation.
New Testament: Sophia was first equated with Jesus, then deleted from mainstream religion because she was a problematic presence in the exclusively male monotheistic theology.
New Testament: Sophia is the Sun Woman in Revelation, (Ch. 12), who stands in glorious radiance crowned with stars. Under her feet is the moon, she is pregnant and pursued by the great dragon. She is the feminine Anthropos, the counterpart of the masculine principle... she adds the dark to the light, symbolizes the hierogamy of opposites, and reconciles nature with spirit. [CW 11 (711)]
"Anamnesis of Sophia" (Jung): Sophia personifies the existence of another "fact" about the creation of the world; that Yahweh is a lower, more unconscious mode of a much greater power lying beyond being and knowing. Jung proposes that Yahweh is himself subject to the tides of consciousness/unconsciousness. In Answer to Job, Job becomes greater than God because he can "see" God's shadow, because he is victim of it. "Self-reflection becomes an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowledge of God, then God must also learn to know himself."
[CW 11 (617) '"Anamnesis of Sophia' refers to the recollection by God of Wisdom: 'But at that time she was still hidden in Yahweh, or rather, she was not yet remembered by him.'" [CW 11 (742)]
In Iranian Sufism, Sophia is Perfect Nature, the object of ecstatic vision. She is also called: the philosopher's Sun, the Daena—the visionary organ of the soul"; personal master and suprasensory guide, sun of the heart, etc. She is the guide in exile, the watcher and shepherd, and paradoxically, the essential individuality and the "pre-terrestrial vision of the celestial world."
Perfect Nature was described in an 11th century text as '"the philosopher's angel,' his initiator and tutor, and the object and secret of all philosophy, the dominant figure in the Sage's personal religion. She has been equated with the Purple Archangel of Supreme Illumination in the writings of the Persian Neoplatonists.
Socrates declared Perfect Nature to be the sun of the philosopher, the "original root of his being and at the same time the branch springing from him." The philosopher's Angel is the Form of light, the heavenly Sophia "conjoined with his star, which rules him and opens the doors of wisdom for him, teaches him what is difficult, reveals to him what is right, in sleeping as in waking." (Corbin, 1978, 17)
Sophia was the goal of transformation, the "lead deity" in these traditions:
> Gnosticism (Thunder Perfect Mind; 2 Sophias, higher & lower—Sophia Achamoth, the generative wisdom
of the world).> Alchemy (Sapientia, moon, tree, ogdoad, alchemical salt—the psychic form of the body, the
ash remaining that serves to fix the 'volatile' spirit.)
> Russian Sophiology
Other associations & identities:
> Christian mysticism (Sophia equated with Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, and was the object
of mystical visions for Jacob Boehme, etc.)
> Jungian psychology: the 4th & highest stage of anima development in male psychology.
> Contemporary spiritual schools: Anthroposophy, Creation Spirituality movement, Sophia movement
in American churches and Robert Sardello's Sophia school in North Carolina.
http://azothgallery.com/alchemical/k_damiani_sophiameanings.html
Jung on The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and “Dharma Kaya,” “Perfect Enlightenment,” “Godhead,” “Gnostics,” “Sacrifice,” “Redemption”
O nobly born (so and so), listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it. O nobly born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or color, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good.
Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha.
This realization is the Dharma kaya state of perfect enlightenment; or, as we should express it in our own language, the creative ground of all metaphysical assertion is consciousness, as the invisible, intangible manifestation of the soul. The "Voidness" is the state transcendent over all assertion and all predication. The fullness of its discriminative manifestations still lies latent in the soul.
The text continues:
Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light Buddha Amitabha.
The soul is assuredly not small, but the radiant Godhead itself. The West finds this statement either very dangerous, if not downright blasphemous, or else accepts it unthinkingly and then suffers from a theosophical inflation. Somehow we always have a wrong attitude to these things.
But if we can master ourselves far enough to refrain from our chief error of always wanting to do something with things and put them to practical use, we may perhaps succeed in learning an important lesson from these teachings, or at least in appreciating the greatness of the Bardo Thodol which vouchsafes to the dead man the ultimate and highest truth, that even the gods are the radiance and reflection of our own souls.
No sun is thereby eclipsed for the Oriental as it would be for the Christian, who would feel robbed of his God; on the contrary, his soul is the light of the Godhead, and the Godhead is the soul. The East can sustain this paradox better than the unfortunate Angelus Silesius, who even today would be psychologically far in advance of his time.
It is highly sensible of the Bardo Thodol to make clear to the dead man the primacy of the psyche, for that is the one thing which life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, in the midst of all these "given" things, to wonder by whom they are "given." It is from this world of "given" things that the dead man liberates himself; and the purpose of the instruction is to help him towards this liberation.
We, if we put ourselves in his place, shall derive no lesser reward from it, since we learn from the very first paragraphs that the "giver" of all "given" things dwells within us. This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary, indeed vital, for us to know it.
Such knowledge, to be sure, is suitable only for contemplatives who are minded to understand the purpose of existence, for those who are Gnostics by temperament and therefore believe in a savior who, like the savior of the Mandaeans, is called "knowledge of life" (Manda d'Hayye). Perhaps it is not granted to many of us to see the world as something "given."
A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as "given" by the very nature of the psyche. It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see
all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen. Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances.
That is why attempts of this kind were always the object of secret initiations, culminating as a rule in a figurative death which symbolized the total character of this reversal. And, in point of fact, the instruction given in the Bardo Thodol serves to recall to the dead man the experiences of his initiation and the teachings of his guru, for the instruction is, at bottom, nothing less than an initiation of the dead into the Bardo life, just as the initiation of the living was a preparation for the Beyond.
Such was the case, at least, with all the mystery cults in ancient civilizations from the time of the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries. In the initiation of the living, however, this "Beyond" is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a psychological "Beyond" or, in Christian terms, a "redemption" from the trammels of the world and of sin.
Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything "given."
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Psychological Commentary on the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, Pages 513-514, Paragraphs 839-842.
and “Dharma Kaya,” “Perfect Enlightenment,” “Godhead,” “Gnostics,” “Sacrifice,” “Redemption”
O nobly born (so and so), listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it. O nobly born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or color, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good.
Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness, but as being the intellect itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha.
This realization is the Dharma kaya state of perfect enlightenment; or, as we should express it in our own language, the creative ground of all metaphysical assertion is consciousness, as the invisible, intangible manifestation of the soul. The "Voidness" is the state transcendent over all assertion and all predication. The fullness of its discriminative manifestations still lies latent in the soul.
The text continues:
Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light Buddha Amitabha.
The soul is assuredly not small, but the radiant Godhead itself. The West finds this statement either very dangerous, if not downright blasphemous, or else accepts it unthinkingly and then suffers from a theosophical inflation. Somehow we always have a wrong attitude to these things.
But if we can master ourselves far enough to refrain from our chief error of always wanting to do something with things and put them to practical use, we may perhaps succeed in learning an important lesson from these teachings, or at least in appreciating the greatness of the Bardo Thodol which vouchsafes to the dead man the ultimate and highest truth, that even the gods are the radiance and reflection of our own souls.
No sun is thereby eclipsed for the Oriental as it would be for the Christian, who would feel robbed of his God; on the contrary, his soul is the light of the Godhead, and the Godhead is the soul. The East can sustain this paradox better than the unfortunate Angelus Silesius, who even today would be psychologically far in advance of his time.
It is highly sensible of the Bardo Thodol to make clear to the dead man the primacy of the psyche, for that is the one thing which life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, in the midst of all these "given" things, to wonder by whom they are "given." It is from this world of "given" things that the dead man liberates himself; and the purpose of the instruction is to help him towards this liberation.
We, if we put ourselves in his place, shall derive no lesser reward from it, since we learn from the very first paragraphs that the "giver" of all "given" things dwells within us. This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary, indeed vital, for us to know it.
Such knowledge, to be sure, is suitable only for contemplatives who are minded to understand the purpose of existence, for those who are Gnostics by temperament and therefore believe in a savior who, like the savior of the Mandaeans, is called "knowledge of life" (Manda d'Hayye). Perhaps it is not granted to many of us to see the world as something "given."
A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as "given" by the very nature of the psyche. It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see
all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen. Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances.
That is why attempts of this kind were always the object of secret initiations, culminating as a rule in a figurative death which symbolized the total character of this reversal. And, in point of fact, the instruction given in the Bardo Thodol serves to recall to the dead man the experiences of his initiation and the teachings of his guru, for the instruction is, at bottom, nothing less than an initiation of the dead into the Bardo life, just as the initiation of the living was a preparation for the Beyond.
Such was the case, at least, with all the mystery cults in ancient civilizations from the time of the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries. In the initiation of the living, however, this "Beyond" is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a psychological "Beyond" or, in Christian terms, a "redemption" from the trammels of the world and of sin.
Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything "given."
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Psychological Commentary on the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, Pages 513-514, Paragraphs 839-842.
This 15th Century painting of the assumption of Mary into heaven is quite lovely. Notice that Mary rises from her tomb on a crescent moon. The moon image is also associated with the earth mother. Carl Jung says, “The Earth Mother is always chthonic and is occasionally related to the moon.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 312) This relationship between the moon and the mother is preserved in this image of the Virgin. Michael Sittow, Assumption of Mary-15th Century. National Gallery of Art. US Public Domain wikimedia.
Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder,
Nature and Her Followers or Nature Adorning the Three Graces, circa 1615. US Public Domain.
“The Earth Mother plays an important part in the woman’s unconscious, for all her manifestations are described as “powerful.” This shows that in such cases the Earth Mother element in the conscious mind is abnormally weak and requires strengthening.”
(Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 212)
Nature and Her Followers or Nature Adorning the Three Graces, circa 1615. US Public Domain.
“The Earth Mother plays an important part in the woman’s unconscious, for all her manifestations are described as “powerful.” This shows that in such cases the Earth Mother element in the conscious mind is abnormally weak and requires strengthening.”
(Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 212)
Isis, Rose of the World Isis, Rosa Mundi
Linda Iles, ArchDrs., Prs.H., GDC, SA Part I.
http://mirrorofisis.freeyellow.com/id125.html
Isis and the Rose in the Ancient World
“…Behold, she is like Sothis …” Papyrus Chester Beatty 31, “The Stroll,” New Kingdom
Of all the flowers, the rose is a singular example of a natural form that has been included in the symbolism of many cultures, spiritual traditions and folklore throughout the centuries. This flower has been intricately connected to our ideas of love and beauty and as such has enjoyed an association with several Goddesses, among them are Inanna, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus, Lakshmi, Chloris, Cybele, Flora, Demeter, Astarte, Aurora, and Hecate. The rose also has associations with a few Gods, Cupid, Dionysius, Eros, Mars and Bacchus.
There is one other Deity who came to have a deep connection to the symbolism of the rose, and that is the Goddess Isis. Many of the Gods and Goddesses mentioned above came to have an association with Her eventually, as Her worship spread throughout the Mediterranean region and the Roman empire. In Her role as She of Ten Thousand Names, Isis was corresponded to many other Goddesses, taking on their attributes, both in and outside of Egypt. By the Greco-Roman period, when the rose had become a popular addition to religious festivals and secular feasts of the Romans and the Greeks, this flower had become intricately associated with Isis, and the association would only deepen over time.
In Sumeria, Babylon and Assyria
“A rose, bent by the wind and pricked by thorns, yet has its heart turned upwards” - Huna of Babylon
The oldest known use of a rose as the basis for a stylized design come from Sumeria. One is a Sumerian seal showing two scorpions protecting the rosette of the Goddess Inanna, dating to the Early Bronze Age or Uruk period, circa 3300 BC. The rosette was a sacred symbol of this Goddess. Seals dating to Early Dynastic I (2900-2800 BC) in the Sumerian city of Ur, combined the rosette symbol of Inanna with those of several other cities of the period. Scholars believe these were originally used for the purpose of sealing store room doors to preserve the materials and contributions made to the great temple of Inanna.
Roses were included in the Hanging Gardens of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Historians record that the gardens were built by Nebuchadnezzar for one of his wives, Amyitis. Part of the gardens are believed to have been located near the Gate of Ishtar.
The earliest known written reference to roses exists on clay tablets from the royal library at Nineveh (modern day Mosul) of King Ashurbanipal. They contain the word “amurdinnu” or “murdinnu” which scholars believe refers to the ‘bramble rose’ or ‘wild rose’. Use of this word has also been cited in the Epic of Gilgamesh (Kuyundjik Tablet 2252). The Epic of Gilgamesh (also referred to as the Epic of Ishtar and Gilgamesh) as translated by Hamilton (1901) contains the following passage:
" ... Oh, could we hear those whispering roses sweet,
Three beauties bending till their petals meet,
And blushing, mingling their sweet fragrance there
In language yet unknown to mortal ear ..."
The author and scholar Joseph Campbell, along with many others, has pointed out the strong parallels between the myths of Inanna, Ishtar and Isis. Their consorts have been equated with the cycles of vegetation. All three of these Goddesses held the title “Queen of Heaven”, they were associated with love, loss, death and eventual restoration. Their stories echo a cycle of love, loss and rebirth that has been intimately connected to the symbolism of the rose.
In Crete
“Each common bush shall Syrian roses wear.” - Virgil, “The Eclogues,” IV, (Dryden translation)
Isis certainly had a presence in Crete by the Greco-Roman period. A sanctuary of Isis and Serapis existed near the city of Gortyna in southern central Crete. Gortyna was a major Roman settlement and the chief city of Crete during this time period. A life sized statue of Isis found in Crete is now in the Herakleion Museum (item no. 314). Evidence for an earlier presence may be indicated by a passage from “The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass,” by Lucius Apuleius. In it the Goddess Isis speaks these words: “… for the archers of Crete I am Dictynna …”. Dictynna is an ancient Goddess of Cretan origin, who had many attributes. She is considered to be Patroness of Fisherman, Lawgiver, and possibly the Minoan Mother Goddess, whose sanctuaries were believed to be situated on mountaintops.
Diodorus Siculus wrote that the Cretans originally received their mysteries from Egypt. He equates the mysteries of Isis with those of Demeter and the mysteries of Osiris with those of Dionysus. Crete, due to it’s geographic location in the Mediterranean, would surely have had contact with both the Egyptians and the Greeks, and other seafaring peoples, from an early period.
The oldest known visual evidence of roses is preserved in a fresco from the palace of Knossos on Crete. This piece of art dates from around 1600 BC. The fresco was partially destroyed during the earthquake of 1500 BC which brought down the palace. Portions of the fresco, though broken, vividly depict animals and flowers - among them are several examples of roses.
Roses may have originally been introduced to Syria and Palestine from northern Persia (modern day Iran), and later introduced from these regions into Greece, Italy and eventually into Egypt. Scholars believe the roses of Knossos may have been brought to Crete through trade with Syria. Whatever the route taken by the rose, the worship of Isis spread throughout the same region in much the same manner, if by a slightly different route. Barbara Watterson writes in her book “The Gods of Ancient Egypt” that the worship of Isis spread from dynastic Egypt “northwards to Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine; to Asia Minor; to Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Samos and other islands in the Aegean.” Perhaps it was the ancient Syrian roses of Crete that were first introduced into the worship and temples of Isis in Egypt.
In Egypt
“The buds from Hatti are ripe … all the meadow blossoms with burgeoning buds.” - Cairo Love Song 21e, “Seven Wishes”, New Kingdom
In Egypt during the Greco-Roman period, wall paintings within Egyptian tombs included roses as a part of their subject matter, objects were decorated with rose motifs, and roses were used in funerary wreaths. Attar of roses was one of the oils used in the later periods during mummification. Roses and rose oil were used in ancient Egyptian medicine. Private and temple gardens included roses in their flower beds.
Hair ornaments of Senebtisy in the form of gold rosettes, 12th Dynasty Evidence of two types of roses used in pharaonic Egypt have survived. One is the "Rosa Gallica" which was widely cultivated in parts of Europe, in Rome and Greece, and still survives today. The other is "Rosa Ricardii", which became extinct in Egypt by Islamic times. It was “Rosa Ricardii” also known as “Rosa Sancta” that was identified as the type of rose included in the funerary wreaths found in tombs of Hawara by Egyptologist William M. Flinders Petrie in the later part of the nineteenth century. These wreaths have been dated to 170 AD.
Some recipes for Kyphi, an incense used in ancient Egyptian temples called for the use of rose oil. The ancient Egyptians believed that perfume exuded from the bodies of their Deities, and that to breathe in the scent of the sacred Kyphi incense brought communication with the divine. It is not surprising then, that from the time of it’s introduction into Egypt (possibly sixth to seventh century BC), the fragrant and beautiful rose became one of the most sought after flowers, eventually associated with Isis, whose popularity and worship became so widespread.
Throughout the classical world, Egypt was renowned for it’s perfumes. One of these was called “Rhodinon” (‘rose perfume’). It is mentioned by Pliny, Theophrastus and Dioscorides. Theophrastus in his work titled “On Odours” writes of this perfume: “… being very delicate and acceptable to the sense of smell, by reason of its lightness it penetrates as no other can …” To better enhance the color to a more rose like hue, alkanet (a plant used to make dye) was sometimes added.
Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt had coinage issued during her reign that titled her “The New Goddess”, identifying her with Isis. She was not the first Ptolemaic Queen to be identified with Isis, but she was certainly the most famous. It may have been her association to Isis that first drew the displeasure of Roman politicians. The Cult of Isis in Rome was very popular during this time period. Cleopatra’s proclamation of herself as the living personification of Isis on earth would not have been recognized in Rome.
She was said to have a passion for roses. Cleopatra regularly enjoyed fountains filled with rosewater at her palace. In “The Deipnosophists” Athenaeus wrote the following about her: “On the fourth day she distributed fees, amounting to a talent, for the purchase of roses, and the floors of the dining-rooms were strewn with them to the depth of a cubit, in net-like festoons spread over all.” Legend has it that she even had the sails of her barge soaked in rosewater. Shakespeare refers to this in "Anthony and Cleopatra:” "Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that the winds were lovesick with them …” This "New Goddess," has been identified with love, queenship and the rose in art and literature down through the ages.
In Greece
“Venus … anointed him with ambrosial oil of roses …” Homer, “The Iliad,” Book XXIII
The Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt contain a story of the origin of roses which is based on an ancient Greek myth: “But the first Psyche (Soul) loved Eros who was with her, and poured her blood upon him and upon the earth. Then from that blood the rose first sprouted upon the earth out of the thorn bush, for a joy in the light which was to appear in the bramble.” - (Robinson, “The Nag Hammadi Library” pp. 169 - 170)
The ancient Greeks cultivated a form of the Gallica rose. The name ‘rose’ comes from Latin ‘rosa’ which derives from the ancient Greek ‘rhoden’ meaning ‘red’. The rose was eventually brought to southern Italy by Greek colonists. Both the Greeks and the Romans used roses for perfume, medicine, festivals and temple rituals.
The ancient Greeks developed a system of corresponding specific plants and flowers to specific Deities, and then subsequently allocating certain plants and flowers for wreaths, to adorn the statues of Deities and the heads of persons of renown. Followers of Isis used roses in the Greco-Roman period to create 'Wreaths of Justification' for the righteous dead, as a sign the deceased had successfully passed through the Judgement Hall of Her husband, Osiris.
It was the poetess Sappho who first named the rose ‘Queen of Flowers’ in her poem “Ode to the Rose.” It became the flower of the Greek Goddess Aphrodite, and in Rome the rose was dedicated to the Goddess Venus. When the worship of Isis spread into Greece and Rome, the rose was considered the most sacred of floral offerings to Her.
A temple dedicated to Isis located near Mikro Elos in Brexiza on the borders of the Marathon and Nea Makri is under excavation. This area is located in Attica in southern Greece. Statues of Osiris and Isis have been recovered from the area, the originals are in the Marathon Museum, copies have been situated on the excavation site for tourists. Since the discovery of the first two Egyptian-style statues on the site in 1968, six statues have been found, including an intact marble sphinx, a gray stone sphinx in two pieces and a portrait of Polydeuces. One of the most striking of these statues depicts Isis holding a rose in each hand.
There were several established centers for the Cult of Isis in ancient Greece, particularly in Attica. One of these was in Athens. Isis was also established just east of Athens in Corinth, in Cenchreae (Kenchreai), Eleusius, Piraeus, and notably on the island of Delos. In Athens, evidence suggests that a Cult of Isis existed during or before the last third of the 4th century BC, officially recognized in the early part of the 2nd century BC and continued to flourish until the 2nd half of the 3rd century AD. The surviving physical evidence amply corresponds Isis with the rose in ancient Greece. Some scholars feel that the rose may have had a deep connection to Demeter and it was through the association of Isis with Demeter that the rose first became corresponded with Isis.
Diodorus Siculus writes an account which may demonstrate how this ancient introduction of Isis of Egypt into the Mysteries of Eleusis and into Attica of Greece first took place: “Erechtheus also, who was by birth an Egyptian, became king of Athens, and in proof of this they offer the following considerations. Once when there was a great drought, as is generally agreed, which extended over practically all the inhabited earth except Egypt because of the peculiar character of that country, and there followed a destruction both of crops and men in great numbers, Erechtheus, through his racial connection with Egypt, brought from there to Athens a great supply of grain, and in return those who had enjoyed this aid made their benefactor king. After he had secured the throne he instituted the initiatory rites of Demeter in Eleusis and established the mysteries, transferring their ritual from Egypt. And the tradition that an advent of the goddess into Attica also took place at that time is reasonable, since it was then that the fruits which are named after her were brought to Athens, and this is why it was thought that the discovery of the seed had been made again, as though Demeter had bestowed the gift … their ancient ceremonies are observed by the Athenians in the same way as by the Egyptians … they are the only Greeks who swear by Isis, and they closely resemble the Egyptians in both their appearance and manners.”
Reliefs from graves dating to this period in Athens and other areas of Attica show women wearing garlands that alternate laurel leaves and roses. They are also represented wearing rose wreaths. A late Hellenistic Hymn from Andros describes “the flower laden locks of Isis”. The women in these reliefs are shown wearing a kind of knotted mantle, whose knot in some depictions closely resembles the open flower of a rose.
The reasons for these women to be depicted wearing roses in a funerary context are known. The exact reason for these women to be dressed in the manner of the Hellenistic Isis is a matter of debate amongst scholars, due to lack of conclusive physical evidence. They suggest that the women could be representative of Isis Herself, priestesses of the Cult of Isis, or women who have been participants in Her worship. Whether as a personification of the Goddess, as Her priestess or as Her devotee, by assuming the dress and bearing the symbols of Isis, these women hoped to be protected by the Goddess in a final act of salvation - life renewed in the Kingdom of Her husband Osiris.
In Rome
“As she talks, her lips breathe spring roses” - Ovid, “Fasti,” Book V: May 2
In the time period when the temple of Isis in Attica was built, the rose was already sacred to Isis in ancient Greece and in Rome. A famous correspondence of the rose with the worship of Isis occurs in passages from “The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass,” in which the Goddess Isis appears to Lucius when he has reached a state of total despair. Isis gives him the following instructions on a way to escape his condition: “I shall order the High Priest to carry a garland of roses in my procession, tied to the rattle which he carries in his right hand. Do not hesitate, push the crowd aside, join the procession with confidence in my grace. Then come close up to the High Priest as if you wished to kiss his hand, gently pluck the roses with your mouth and you will immediately slough off the hide …”
Strength - Rider Waite tarot deck After Lucius was transformed back to his human self, he underwent a period of study and training within the temple of Isis and became an initiate of Her Mysteries. The act of eating the roses in this novel is symbolic, of taking on and absorbing the mysteries of Isis into his person. Leaving behind the dross side of his nature and becoming aware, attuned to his higher self. (Note: interesting that the Strength card of the tarot, shows a woman gentling a raging lion, and she is crowned with roses and wearing a trailing garland of roses at her waist.)
This novel was written during a time period when the demand for roses throughout the Roman Empire had been very high, turning the growing of roses into an important industry. The type of rose that has come down to us from the flower breeders of ancient Greece and Rome is called the “Gallica”. When Classical writers referred to the rose (rosa) they meant the Gallica, the wildrose or briar rose was termed Cynorrodon, the Dog Rose.
Statue of a woman with draped hands, 2nd century BC. Found in the Villa Adriana, Tivoli Objects sacred to the worship of Isis, such as the urnula, the type of pitcher used for Isian and Osirian mysteries in Her temples, were held by the draped hands of the priestesses. Often these objects were adorned with roses. Wreaths and garlands of roses were placed within the temple. So synonymous did the rose become with the Goddess Isis as Healer and Protector to the people of Rome, rose amulets were worn in Her Name as protection against the evil eye.
It was through Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, that we find the origin of the term ‘sub rosa’. Horus was incorporated into the cult of Isis and Serapis which flourished in Greco-Roman Alexandria in particular, and in Rome, where he became known by the Greek version of his name, 'Harpocrates'. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic sign used for a child was a seated boy with his fingers to his mouth, actually in the pose of a young child about to suck his finger, a way of designating extreme youth. This pose was interpreted by the Greeks as a sign of silence and secrecy. By the time of Caligula in the first century AD, Horus had reached a great height of popularity among the Romans. A story circulating at that time told of Cupid, son of Venus, who gave a rose to Horus/Harpocrates. The rose was a gratuity for the silence of Harpocrates about the affairs of Cupid’s mother. Through this story, the rose became the symbol of keeping a confidence. The practice of hanging a rose hung from the ceiling served as a reminder that anything said in the room was to be considered ’sub rosa’ (under the rose) and therefore completely private.
Isidis Navigium and the Star of the Sea
"Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World" - W.B. Yeats, “The Rose of Battle”
During the Greco-Roman period, Isis was patroness of sailors and ships. The Romans credited Her as the inventor of the sail. One of Her many titles, Isis Pharia, grew from this patronage. As the protectress Deity of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, She guided ships to safe harbor. The use of female figureheads on the prows of ships is thought to derive from this ancient association of Isis as Protectress of mariners.
A famous Isian festival in the classical period was the Isidis Navigium (known as the Ploiaphesia in ancient Greece). It was celebrated in the ports of ancient Greece near Corinth, Cenchreae and Piraeus, the harbors of Rome, the shores of Greco-Roman Egypt and to far reaches of the Roman Empire, where it was held on the Seine. Imagery of the Navigium was incorporated into the Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris. Robert Eisler writes in “The Royal Art of Astrology” of the main porch of the cathedral which contains a depiction of the Zodiac: “Still further left (i.e. of January) Aquarius and Isis launching a ship. The ship is Navis seen just opposite Aquarius. Over this figure we see Pisces.” The Isidis Navigium is still celebrated today by Fellowship of Isis members in California and in London.
Traditionally the Isidis Navigium is celebrated on March 5th. Apuleius writes in his work “The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass,” these words of the Goddess Isis: “Devote to my worship the day born of this night … for at this season, the storms of winter lose their force, the leaping waves subside and the sea becomes navigable once more.” Participants in the festival were known to carry garlands and bouquets of flowers and to sprinkle the ground with perfumed oils. Among the flowers used were roses.
Isis was titled “Star of the Sea” (Stella Maris) by this period, the star in question being the North Star, which was used by sailors to guide their vessels at night. When ancient mariners followed the light of Stella Maris, they knew they were on the right path, steering true. The petals of the sacred rose of Isis, Patroness of sailors and ships, may have lent their name to other means of steering sailors safely through the seas. In the classical period, before the use of the Compass Rose, which dates to around the 13th century on charts and maps, mariners used the Wind Rose. The names of the eight winds were used instead of names of directions on these charts.
There is a Tower of Winds in Athens, built around 100 BC, which is still standing today. Inscribed in the stone walls of this tower are the names of the eight winds. This edifice may have been employed as an observation tower, it did serve as a clock tower with a water clock, or clepsydra, a time keeping device that was used in ancient Egypt, especially in the temples. (The water clock is not the same thing as a Nilometer which was also used in ancient Egyptian temples to gauge the level of the Nile River.) The oldest known example of a clepsydra in Egypt dates to 1400 BC. Archimedes is credited with learning the technology of the water clock in the city of Alexandria in Egypt and bringing it to Athens.
Linda Iles, ArchDrs., Prs.H., GDC, SA Part I.
http://mirrorofisis.freeyellow.com/id125.html
Isis and the Rose in the Ancient World
“…Behold, she is like Sothis …” Papyrus Chester Beatty 31, “The Stroll,” New Kingdom
Of all the flowers, the rose is a singular example of a natural form that has been included in the symbolism of many cultures, spiritual traditions and folklore throughout the centuries. This flower has been intricately connected to our ideas of love and beauty and as such has enjoyed an association with several Goddesses, among them are Inanna, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus, Lakshmi, Chloris, Cybele, Flora, Demeter, Astarte, Aurora, and Hecate. The rose also has associations with a few Gods, Cupid, Dionysius, Eros, Mars and Bacchus.
There is one other Deity who came to have a deep connection to the symbolism of the rose, and that is the Goddess Isis. Many of the Gods and Goddesses mentioned above came to have an association with Her eventually, as Her worship spread throughout the Mediterranean region and the Roman empire. In Her role as She of Ten Thousand Names, Isis was corresponded to many other Goddesses, taking on their attributes, both in and outside of Egypt. By the Greco-Roman period, when the rose had become a popular addition to religious festivals and secular feasts of the Romans and the Greeks, this flower had become intricately associated with Isis, and the association would only deepen over time.
In Sumeria, Babylon and Assyria
“A rose, bent by the wind and pricked by thorns, yet has its heart turned upwards” - Huna of Babylon
The oldest known use of a rose as the basis for a stylized design come from Sumeria. One is a Sumerian seal showing two scorpions protecting the rosette of the Goddess Inanna, dating to the Early Bronze Age or Uruk period, circa 3300 BC. The rosette was a sacred symbol of this Goddess. Seals dating to Early Dynastic I (2900-2800 BC) in the Sumerian city of Ur, combined the rosette symbol of Inanna with those of several other cities of the period. Scholars believe these were originally used for the purpose of sealing store room doors to preserve the materials and contributions made to the great temple of Inanna.
Roses were included in the Hanging Gardens of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Historians record that the gardens were built by Nebuchadnezzar for one of his wives, Amyitis. Part of the gardens are believed to have been located near the Gate of Ishtar.
The earliest known written reference to roses exists on clay tablets from the royal library at Nineveh (modern day Mosul) of King Ashurbanipal. They contain the word “amurdinnu” or “murdinnu” which scholars believe refers to the ‘bramble rose’ or ‘wild rose’. Use of this word has also been cited in the Epic of Gilgamesh (Kuyundjik Tablet 2252). The Epic of Gilgamesh (also referred to as the Epic of Ishtar and Gilgamesh) as translated by Hamilton (1901) contains the following passage:
" ... Oh, could we hear those whispering roses sweet,
Three beauties bending till their petals meet,
And blushing, mingling their sweet fragrance there
In language yet unknown to mortal ear ..."
The author and scholar Joseph Campbell, along with many others, has pointed out the strong parallels between the myths of Inanna, Ishtar and Isis. Their consorts have been equated with the cycles of vegetation. All three of these Goddesses held the title “Queen of Heaven”, they were associated with love, loss, death and eventual restoration. Their stories echo a cycle of love, loss and rebirth that has been intimately connected to the symbolism of the rose.
In Crete
“Each common bush shall Syrian roses wear.” - Virgil, “The Eclogues,” IV, (Dryden translation)
Isis certainly had a presence in Crete by the Greco-Roman period. A sanctuary of Isis and Serapis existed near the city of Gortyna in southern central Crete. Gortyna was a major Roman settlement and the chief city of Crete during this time period. A life sized statue of Isis found in Crete is now in the Herakleion Museum (item no. 314). Evidence for an earlier presence may be indicated by a passage from “The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass,” by Lucius Apuleius. In it the Goddess Isis speaks these words: “… for the archers of Crete I am Dictynna …”. Dictynna is an ancient Goddess of Cretan origin, who had many attributes. She is considered to be Patroness of Fisherman, Lawgiver, and possibly the Minoan Mother Goddess, whose sanctuaries were believed to be situated on mountaintops.
Diodorus Siculus wrote that the Cretans originally received their mysteries from Egypt. He equates the mysteries of Isis with those of Demeter and the mysteries of Osiris with those of Dionysus. Crete, due to it’s geographic location in the Mediterranean, would surely have had contact with both the Egyptians and the Greeks, and other seafaring peoples, from an early period.
The oldest known visual evidence of roses is preserved in a fresco from the palace of Knossos on Crete. This piece of art dates from around 1600 BC. The fresco was partially destroyed during the earthquake of 1500 BC which brought down the palace. Portions of the fresco, though broken, vividly depict animals and flowers - among them are several examples of roses.
Roses may have originally been introduced to Syria and Palestine from northern Persia (modern day Iran), and later introduced from these regions into Greece, Italy and eventually into Egypt. Scholars believe the roses of Knossos may have been brought to Crete through trade with Syria. Whatever the route taken by the rose, the worship of Isis spread throughout the same region in much the same manner, if by a slightly different route. Barbara Watterson writes in her book “The Gods of Ancient Egypt” that the worship of Isis spread from dynastic Egypt “northwards to Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine; to Asia Minor; to Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Samos and other islands in the Aegean.” Perhaps it was the ancient Syrian roses of Crete that were first introduced into the worship and temples of Isis in Egypt.
In Egypt
“The buds from Hatti are ripe … all the meadow blossoms with burgeoning buds.” - Cairo Love Song 21e, “Seven Wishes”, New Kingdom
In Egypt during the Greco-Roman period, wall paintings within Egyptian tombs included roses as a part of their subject matter, objects were decorated with rose motifs, and roses were used in funerary wreaths. Attar of roses was one of the oils used in the later periods during mummification. Roses and rose oil were used in ancient Egyptian medicine. Private and temple gardens included roses in their flower beds.
Hair ornaments of Senebtisy in the form of gold rosettes, 12th Dynasty Evidence of two types of roses used in pharaonic Egypt have survived. One is the "Rosa Gallica" which was widely cultivated in parts of Europe, in Rome and Greece, and still survives today. The other is "Rosa Ricardii", which became extinct in Egypt by Islamic times. It was “Rosa Ricardii” also known as “Rosa Sancta” that was identified as the type of rose included in the funerary wreaths found in tombs of Hawara by Egyptologist William M. Flinders Petrie in the later part of the nineteenth century. These wreaths have been dated to 170 AD.
Some recipes for Kyphi, an incense used in ancient Egyptian temples called for the use of rose oil. The ancient Egyptians believed that perfume exuded from the bodies of their Deities, and that to breathe in the scent of the sacred Kyphi incense brought communication with the divine. It is not surprising then, that from the time of it’s introduction into Egypt (possibly sixth to seventh century BC), the fragrant and beautiful rose became one of the most sought after flowers, eventually associated with Isis, whose popularity and worship became so widespread.
Throughout the classical world, Egypt was renowned for it’s perfumes. One of these was called “Rhodinon” (‘rose perfume’). It is mentioned by Pliny, Theophrastus and Dioscorides. Theophrastus in his work titled “On Odours” writes of this perfume: “… being very delicate and acceptable to the sense of smell, by reason of its lightness it penetrates as no other can …” To better enhance the color to a more rose like hue, alkanet (a plant used to make dye) was sometimes added.
Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egypt had coinage issued during her reign that titled her “The New Goddess”, identifying her with Isis. She was not the first Ptolemaic Queen to be identified with Isis, but she was certainly the most famous. It may have been her association to Isis that first drew the displeasure of Roman politicians. The Cult of Isis in Rome was very popular during this time period. Cleopatra’s proclamation of herself as the living personification of Isis on earth would not have been recognized in Rome.
She was said to have a passion for roses. Cleopatra regularly enjoyed fountains filled with rosewater at her palace. In “The Deipnosophists” Athenaeus wrote the following about her: “On the fourth day she distributed fees, amounting to a talent, for the purchase of roses, and the floors of the dining-rooms were strewn with them to the depth of a cubit, in net-like festoons spread over all.” Legend has it that she even had the sails of her barge soaked in rosewater. Shakespeare refers to this in "Anthony and Cleopatra:” "Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that the winds were lovesick with them …” This "New Goddess," has been identified with love, queenship and the rose in art and literature down through the ages.
In Greece
“Venus … anointed him with ambrosial oil of roses …” Homer, “The Iliad,” Book XXIII
The Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt contain a story of the origin of roses which is based on an ancient Greek myth: “But the first Psyche (Soul) loved Eros who was with her, and poured her blood upon him and upon the earth. Then from that blood the rose first sprouted upon the earth out of the thorn bush, for a joy in the light which was to appear in the bramble.” - (Robinson, “The Nag Hammadi Library” pp. 169 - 170)
The ancient Greeks cultivated a form of the Gallica rose. The name ‘rose’ comes from Latin ‘rosa’ which derives from the ancient Greek ‘rhoden’ meaning ‘red’. The rose was eventually brought to southern Italy by Greek colonists. Both the Greeks and the Romans used roses for perfume, medicine, festivals and temple rituals.
The ancient Greeks developed a system of corresponding specific plants and flowers to specific Deities, and then subsequently allocating certain plants and flowers for wreaths, to adorn the statues of Deities and the heads of persons of renown. Followers of Isis used roses in the Greco-Roman period to create 'Wreaths of Justification' for the righteous dead, as a sign the deceased had successfully passed through the Judgement Hall of Her husband, Osiris.
It was the poetess Sappho who first named the rose ‘Queen of Flowers’ in her poem “Ode to the Rose.” It became the flower of the Greek Goddess Aphrodite, and in Rome the rose was dedicated to the Goddess Venus. When the worship of Isis spread into Greece and Rome, the rose was considered the most sacred of floral offerings to Her.
A temple dedicated to Isis located near Mikro Elos in Brexiza on the borders of the Marathon and Nea Makri is under excavation. This area is located in Attica in southern Greece. Statues of Osiris and Isis have been recovered from the area, the originals are in the Marathon Museum, copies have been situated on the excavation site for tourists. Since the discovery of the first two Egyptian-style statues on the site in 1968, six statues have been found, including an intact marble sphinx, a gray stone sphinx in two pieces and a portrait of Polydeuces. One of the most striking of these statues depicts Isis holding a rose in each hand.
There were several established centers for the Cult of Isis in ancient Greece, particularly in Attica. One of these was in Athens. Isis was also established just east of Athens in Corinth, in Cenchreae (Kenchreai), Eleusius, Piraeus, and notably on the island of Delos. In Athens, evidence suggests that a Cult of Isis existed during or before the last third of the 4th century BC, officially recognized in the early part of the 2nd century BC and continued to flourish until the 2nd half of the 3rd century AD. The surviving physical evidence amply corresponds Isis with the rose in ancient Greece. Some scholars feel that the rose may have had a deep connection to Demeter and it was through the association of Isis with Demeter that the rose first became corresponded with Isis.
Diodorus Siculus writes an account which may demonstrate how this ancient introduction of Isis of Egypt into the Mysteries of Eleusis and into Attica of Greece first took place: “Erechtheus also, who was by birth an Egyptian, became king of Athens, and in proof of this they offer the following considerations. Once when there was a great drought, as is generally agreed, which extended over practically all the inhabited earth except Egypt because of the peculiar character of that country, and there followed a destruction both of crops and men in great numbers, Erechtheus, through his racial connection with Egypt, brought from there to Athens a great supply of grain, and in return those who had enjoyed this aid made their benefactor king. After he had secured the throne he instituted the initiatory rites of Demeter in Eleusis and established the mysteries, transferring their ritual from Egypt. And the tradition that an advent of the goddess into Attica also took place at that time is reasonable, since it was then that the fruits which are named after her were brought to Athens, and this is why it was thought that the discovery of the seed had been made again, as though Demeter had bestowed the gift … their ancient ceremonies are observed by the Athenians in the same way as by the Egyptians … they are the only Greeks who swear by Isis, and they closely resemble the Egyptians in both their appearance and manners.”
Reliefs from graves dating to this period in Athens and other areas of Attica show women wearing garlands that alternate laurel leaves and roses. They are also represented wearing rose wreaths. A late Hellenistic Hymn from Andros describes “the flower laden locks of Isis”. The women in these reliefs are shown wearing a kind of knotted mantle, whose knot in some depictions closely resembles the open flower of a rose.
The reasons for these women to be depicted wearing roses in a funerary context are known. The exact reason for these women to be dressed in the manner of the Hellenistic Isis is a matter of debate amongst scholars, due to lack of conclusive physical evidence. They suggest that the women could be representative of Isis Herself, priestesses of the Cult of Isis, or women who have been participants in Her worship. Whether as a personification of the Goddess, as Her priestess or as Her devotee, by assuming the dress and bearing the symbols of Isis, these women hoped to be protected by the Goddess in a final act of salvation - life renewed in the Kingdom of Her husband Osiris.
In Rome
“As she talks, her lips breathe spring roses” - Ovid, “Fasti,” Book V: May 2
In the time period when the temple of Isis in Attica was built, the rose was already sacred to Isis in ancient Greece and in Rome. A famous correspondence of the rose with the worship of Isis occurs in passages from “The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass,” in which the Goddess Isis appears to Lucius when he has reached a state of total despair. Isis gives him the following instructions on a way to escape his condition: “I shall order the High Priest to carry a garland of roses in my procession, tied to the rattle which he carries in his right hand. Do not hesitate, push the crowd aside, join the procession with confidence in my grace. Then come close up to the High Priest as if you wished to kiss his hand, gently pluck the roses with your mouth and you will immediately slough off the hide …”
Strength - Rider Waite tarot deck After Lucius was transformed back to his human self, he underwent a period of study and training within the temple of Isis and became an initiate of Her Mysteries. The act of eating the roses in this novel is symbolic, of taking on and absorbing the mysteries of Isis into his person. Leaving behind the dross side of his nature and becoming aware, attuned to his higher self. (Note: interesting that the Strength card of the tarot, shows a woman gentling a raging lion, and she is crowned with roses and wearing a trailing garland of roses at her waist.)
This novel was written during a time period when the demand for roses throughout the Roman Empire had been very high, turning the growing of roses into an important industry. The type of rose that has come down to us from the flower breeders of ancient Greece and Rome is called the “Gallica”. When Classical writers referred to the rose (rosa) they meant the Gallica, the wildrose or briar rose was termed Cynorrodon, the Dog Rose.
Statue of a woman with draped hands, 2nd century BC. Found in the Villa Adriana, Tivoli Objects sacred to the worship of Isis, such as the urnula, the type of pitcher used for Isian and Osirian mysteries in Her temples, were held by the draped hands of the priestesses. Often these objects were adorned with roses. Wreaths and garlands of roses were placed within the temple. So synonymous did the rose become with the Goddess Isis as Healer and Protector to the people of Rome, rose amulets were worn in Her Name as protection against the evil eye.
It was through Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, that we find the origin of the term ‘sub rosa’. Horus was incorporated into the cult of Isis and Serapis which flourished in Greco-Roman Alexandria in particular, and in Rome, where he became known by the Greek version of his name, 'Harpocrates'. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic sign used for a child was a seated boy with his fingers to his mouth, actually in the pose of a young child about to suck his finger, a way of designating extreme youth. This pose was interpreted by the Greeks as a sign of silence and secrecy. By the time of Caligula in the first century AD, Horus had reached a great height of popularity among the Romans. A story circulating at that time told of Cupid, son of Venus, who gave a rose to Horus/Harpocrates. The rose was a gratuity for the silence of Harpocrates about the affairs of Cupid’s mother. Through this story, the rose became the symbol of keeping a confidence. The practice of hanging a rose hung from the ceiling served as a reminder that anything said in the room was to be considered ’sub rosa’ (under the rose) and therefore completely private.
Isidis Navigium and the Star of the Sea
"Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World" - W.B. Yeats, “The Rose of Battle”
During the Greco-Roman period, Isis was patroness of sailors and ships. The Romans credited Her as the inventor of the sail. One of Her many titles, Isis Pharia, grew from this patronage. As the protectress Deity of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, She guided ships to safe harbor. The use of female figureheads on the prows of ships is thought to derive from this ancient association of Isis as Protectress of mariners.
A famous Isian festival in the classical period was the Isidis Navigium (known as the Ploiaphesia in ancient Greece). It was celebrated in the ports of ancient Greece near Corinth, Cenchreae and Piraeus, the harbors of Rome, the shores of Greco-Roman Egypt and to far reaches of the Roman Empire, where it was held on the Seine. Imagery of the Navigium was incorporated into the Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris. Robert Eisler writes in “The Royal Art of Astrology” of the main porch of the cathedral which contains a depiction of the Zodiac: “Still further left (i.e. of January) Aquarius and Isis launching a ship. The ship is Navis seen just opposite Aquarius. Over this figure we see Pisces.” The Isidis Navigium is still celebrated today by Fellowship of Isis members in California and in London.
Traditionally the Isidis Navigium is celebrated on March 5th. Apuleius writes in his work “The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as the Golden Ass,” these words of the Goddess Isis: “Devote to my worship the day born of this night … for at this season, the storms of winter lose their force, the leaping waves subside and the sea becomes navigable once more.” Participants in the festival were known to carry garlands and bouquets of flowers and to sprinkle the ground with perfumed oils. Among the flowers used were roses.
Isis was titled “Star of the Sea” (Stella Maris) by this period, the star in question being the North Star, which was used by sailors to guide their vessels at night. When ancient mariners followed the light of Stella Maris, they knew they were on the right path, steering true. The petals of the sacred rose of Isis, Patroness of sailors and ships, may have lent their name to other means of steering sailors safely through the seas. In the classical period, before the use of the Compass Rose, which dates to around the 13th century on charts and maps, mariners used the Wind Rose. The names of the eight winds were used instead of names of directions on these charts.
There is a Tower of Winds in Athens, built around 100 BC, which is still standing today. Inscribed in the stone walls of this tower are the names of the eight winds. This edifice may have been employed as an observation tower, it did serve as a clock tower with a water clock, or clepsydra, a time keeping device that was used in ancient Egypt, especially in the temples. (The water clock is not the same thing as a Nilometer which was also used in ancient Egyptian temples to gauge the level of the Nile River.) The oldest known example of a clepsydra in Egypt dates to 1400 BC. Archimedes is credited with learning the technology of the water clock in the city of Alexandria in Egypt and bringing it to Athens.
Jung on “Sapientia” (Wisdom)
Lecture VII 13th June, 1941
We finished the excerpts from the writings of the alchemists on the scientia in the last lecture, and come today to an almost synonymous idea, that of the sapientia (wisdom).
IX. Sapientia
You saw that the alchemists used the term "scientia" in a very wide sense, and that they regarded it as something exceedingly mysterious.
The same is true of the "sapientia", which even appears personified as a highly mysterious figure.
Wisdom is personified as early as the book of the "Wisdom of Solomon" (Apocrypha].
In Gnosticism wisdom appears as the famous Sophia, sometimes represented as the youngest daughter of the creator of the world, or as the feminine counterpart of Christ, and sometimes as
the virgin of light.
The sapientia appears in a very substantial form in alchemy.
Wisdom is attained, so the alchemists say, through the union of chemistry and theosophy.
Of course one must not understand the latter as modern theosophy (Madame Blavatzky], or anthroposophy (Herr Steiner], although it is possible to compare these movements with earlier movements.
In the Middle Ages, however, the term "theosophia" meant the wisdom or knowledge of God, in a much more restricted Christian sense than in theosophy or anthroposophy.
These modern movements are syncretistic phenomena, mosaics put together from the literature of all times and places; and for this reason they can be compared with the Hellenistic mystery religions
of the first and second centuries.
That age has much in common with our present epoch; for our age also is a time when the Weltanschauung of the last two thousand years is decaying.
We hate to admit this, but we must face the facts; and it is undoubtedly a fact that a large part of Europe has somehow slipped out of the Christian Weltanschauung.
Our first passage comes from the "Aurora Consurgens'', l which I have often quoted before.
The Sapientia plays a leading role in this text, it appears personified in action and conversation.
In this excerpt it speaks as the "sapientia austri" (the wisdom of the South]:
"The wisdom of the south wind says: Come ye sons, hearken unto me, and I will teach you the science of the Lord."
Again here "scientia Domini" could mean the wisdom which God possesses, or the wisdom which man possesses about God.
But in this case we can be pretty sure that the "sapientia austri, as in Gnosticism, is either the daughter of God or his feminine counterpart, for she transmits the scientia, the knowledge.
The “scientia", of which we spoke in the last lecture, originates in the sapientia, which is the mother, the old Sophia.
But why is it "sapientia austri", the wisdom of the South, or, translated more exactly, "the wisdom of the south wind"?
The author of this treatise was, as you know, a cleric, he speaks mainly in quotations and knew the Vulgate by heart.
He refers here to Job IX. 9: "Which maketh Arcturus, Orion and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south. Which doeth great things past finding out; yea and wonders without number."
The idea which must have attracted our author in this text is the "chambers of the south", this expression suggests that God hid his secrets inside the south wind.
It is not expressly stated in the text, but the chambers of the south wind probably suggested to our author the idea of a vase or vessel in which the secrets of God were hidden.
The curious thing is that the south wind is also a demon, it is to be met with in other passages in the alchemistic literature as the demon of the south.
This idea again originates in the Old Testament, where the South wind is a wind which parches, and is a danger to all cultivation because it brings the heat of the desert.
And it is this most dangerous and dreaded demon, which contains the secrets of God hidden in its innermost.
I will say no more about this at present, for we shall come to another passage later where it is explained more clearly.
Dorneus says about wisdom:
"Water gushes forth from the fountain of wisdom, which brings about reconciliation when enemies drink therefrom."
Wisdom is compared to a spring or fountain in this passage.
This is an old metaphor which is already to be met with in the Old Testament.
This water unites all hostile elements or factors, and, when it is a matter of people, enemies are reconciled.
So this water has a reconciling effect.
It is the "aqua divina" which equals the "prima materia", the primal substance of the beginning which contains all the opposites and which at the same time is beyond the opposites.
When the alchemists apply this water to their substances it has the miraculous effect of reconciling all hostile elements and uniting them finally in the indivisible substance of the philosophers' stone.
But, at the same time, it is to be understood morally, in that wisdom is essentially conciliatory.
Wisdom does not bring about quarrels, but reconciles all conflicts.
The same author says:
"0 wonderful wisdom which, by the mere word, can ultimately bring forth, from a point so small that it is almost impossible to conceive, everything in this enormous machine and in this
powerful and weighty mass."
This means that it is the sapientia, wisdom, which has brought forth the whole machinery of the world, and the immense mass of the universe through the mere word and from an almost
inconceivably small point.
We see here that the sapientia is identified with the world creating word, with the logos.
We find the same idea in its Christian aspect in the opening words of the Gospel of St. John
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made
that was made."
Mylius gives us another insight into the nature of the sapientia.
He says:
"There are three principles of all things: God, wisdom and the materia."
This is an alchemistic confession of faith.
Like the Christian creed it speaks of a trinity or rather of a triad, for it is a purely Gnostic triad: God, Sophia and the Hyle, the substance of the world. We shall speak of this triad later.
There is a passage in the "Rosarium Philosophorum" where the Sapientia is again personified.
You will remember that this anonymous treatise comes from the fifteenth century, and was first printed in 1550.
The Sapientia says:
"I am the only daughter of the wise, entirely unknown to the stupid."
The author identifies the sapientia with the secret of the philosophers; and here she is not represented as the mother but as the daughter.
Perhaps you know that the Gnostics often represented wisdom as the youngest daughter or as the dark daughter of Bythos (the abyss).
You will find the legend of Sophia and her peculiar love story in the writings of Irenaeus, one of the Fathers of the Church.
Sophia was consumed with passionate love for her ancient ancestor Bythos, the primordial abyss, because she had slipped down into the Hyle and could no longer find the father in the
darkness of the materia.
Here again we find the idea of a spark or emanation of God which is lost in the darkness of matter, or which has been planted there as a seed by God.
We find a passage in the Liber Quartorum which is interesting in the same connection.
The Liber Quartorum is a very ancient text and probably originated mainly in Alexandrian philosophy.
It says:
"The philosopher finds the spirit of the wise (ingenium sapientum) in nature."
We are told here that wisdom is to be found in nature. This "ingenium" is exactly Sophia, who has lost herself in matter (hyle), in nature.
The sapientia is very often connected in a mysterious way with mercury, and one alchemistic author says:
"It is impossible to win the treasure of the wise from ordinary mercury."
It is not a matter of ordinary mercury, the treasure cannot be won from this, but of course only from the "mercury of the philosophers."
This is another secret name for the substance which the alchemists searched for or prepared, and which always remained unknown.
We read in another text:
"The fire, with which it is sublimated, is called the fire of wisdom and also a steaming fire."
A steaming fire is obviously not an ordinary fire [which would only produce smoke), but must be a mixture of fire and water, that is a mixture of the opposites.
One could express the same thing by saying that wisdom is produced through the conflict of the opposites.
We read in the same treatise:
"In the process it is necessary to use the salt of wisdom which is blood red inside."
Obviously it is no ordinary salt which is meant, but again a symbol.
You remember the well-known words of Christ: "Ye are the salt of the earth", that is, the salt of wisdom.
Our text tells us that this salt is blood red inwardly.
This means that it has a soul, for blood and soul were identical in the ancient conception.
Therefore the trans-substantiated wine, which becomes the blood of Christ in the Mass, is the anima, that is the soul, of Christ.
Wisdom is also often represented as a liquid, as we have already seen, therefore the alchemists speak of it in connection with the transformation of their substances.
The Aurora Consurgens says:
"And he shall be called redeemed when the Lord washes away the filth of the daughters of Sian through the spirit of wisdom and mind."
The spirit is made identical with water in this ablution.
The same text calls the sapientia "red gold ", "the tincture of wisdom " and the "fire of the dyers".
Dyers use such liquids.
These again are paradoxical figures of speech which are used to characterise this mysterious substance.
It is also called the "terra sapientiae" (earth of wisdom”) and is thus synonymous with lead, which is also referred to as the "earth of wisdom", because it is different inside and out.
Outside it is grey and uncouth, whereas inside it is white.
There are other passages where we hear that a white dove lives in the lead, or that it is red inside.
The underlying idea always is that, in a mysterious way, the lead possesses a soul.
It plays the same role as the quicksilver in early alchemy, because it is easily liquefied.
Therefore Mylius says that the earth of wisdom equals lead and that: "The liquid second part of lead is called the water of wisdom."
The water of wisdom is in the lead, as this passage says.
This is incomprehensible to us, but we must remember that substances, bodies, even dead bodies, were always animated for our forefathers, therefore it was natural for them to look
for the water of wisdom in substances.
And moreover the idea, that wisdom was a water, played a very important role in early Christianity and in pre-Christian days, and also in Gnosticism.
The baptismal water, for instance, is such a water of wisdom, a divine water which possesses miraculous, transforming qualities.
This was the reason for the water Eucharist in early Christianity.
Originally the chalice was not always filled with wine, but often with water.
Hippolytus, who died at the beginning of the third century, interpreted this later chalice as a sort of piscina, a font filled with baptismal water.
The water of this chalice had the same effect on the soul as the baptismal water had on the body.
Baptism was understood as a sort of ablution, a washing of the body; and the water in the chalice was understood as a means of bathing the soul.
From this point of view the chalice corresponds in Christianity to the hermetic vase in alchemy.
And both are parallels to the Gnostic idea of the vessel filled with Nous, which I spoke of in commenting on the advice of Zosimos, to his friend Theosebeia, to go down to the Poimandres and plunge
herself in the krater.
The importance of knowing what we do, of consciousness, which is emphasised in this Gnostic legend of the bath of Nous, also appears in the New Testament and still more clearly in the
extra-canonical sayings of Christ.
There is a story (which was formerly in St. Luke's Gospel), in which Christ, when walking with his disciples on the Sabbath, met a man who was working on his land.
Christ spoke to him and said: "If thou knowest what thou art doing thou art blest, but if thou knowest not, then thou art cursed."
It is the arch-sin, to do something unconscious!
If, because the condition of unconsciousness is a condition of abysmal darkness, in crying need of redemption.
It is mainly from unconsciousness that all sins and evil arise; this fact was already realised in antiquity.
There is a Gnostic collection of poems, belonging to the second century, A. D . called the "Odes of Solomon".
The sixth ode is called "The Water of the Lord" and shows clearly the veneration in which the Divine Water was held in Gnostic circles:
"As the breath of the wind bloweth through the harp
awakening song in every string,
so doth the breath of the Lord’s spirit pass through my limbs,
that in his love I als o sing.
All that is false he destroyeth,
and everything which is malignant;
for thus it was in the beginning,
and thus it will be till the end.
Nothing will stand against him,
and nothing will oppose him.
The Lord hath increased his understanding
and hath revealed his gracious gifts to us.
So we give praise unto his name;
our spirits sing praises to his Holy Spirit.
For a little stream hath sprung up,
and hath become a broad and mighty river;
for everything hath it torn away and ground to powder,
and it hath swept away the Temple.
Nothing could restrain it, no dam nor building,
nor the art of any dyke builder.
For it hath flowed over the face of the whole earth,
And hath filled up everything.
All those that thirsted have drunk from it,
and their thirst was quenched and relieved,
for the drink was the gift of the Most High.
Blessed therefore are the servants of this drink,
His water was entrusted to them,
for refreshment have they brought to the dry lips,
and awakening to the will which had grown weak, I
the souls, which had almost departed, have they rescued from death,
and the members, which had fallen, have they set up again.
They have given strength to their weakness,
and light to their eyes;
for they all knew themselves in the Lord
and were redeemed by the eternal, immortal water.
Hallelujah."
This text shows you plainly that the eternal water, the hydor theion, was a general idea at that time and only receded into the background in the course of history.
The Roman Catholic order of the Mass, which abolished the water chalice, was not the least among the reasons for the disappearance of the symbol of the water.
In the Mass, the water is only retained in the commixtio, where a little water is mixed with the wine, which is a last remnant of the water Eucharist.
The significance of the water Eucharist shows us that the Mass is really a purely symbolic procedure, though some of the sacramental words which are used seem to give it the character of a memorial.
Another alchemist, Khunrath, says of the Sapientia:
"The s alt of wisdom is a fire, yea, a fire of salt."
As you see the synonyms pile up, o n e could almost say that the idea is becoming hybrid.
Fire is a well-known symbol for the Holy Ghost, in the miracle of the day of Pentecost, for instance, the Holy Ghost became visible as the cloven tongues of fire which came down from Heaven (Acts II.1.).
One of the old Greek authors describes the way that mercury reaches the " condition of wisdom" through sublimation.
This is naturally very difficult for us to understand, because we consider wisdom as an essentially human quality.
But it is understood in this passage as a quality of the substance.
This means that, according to the old alchemistic idea, mercury can be transformed through the torture of the fire.
A natural spirit participates in the darkness of nature, or is imprisoned in it; and when this spirit is purified or sublimated, by means of the fire, it becomes the spirit of wisdom.
The alchemist, therefore, strove to attain wisdom through the transformation of nature, which he subjected for this purpose to torture by the fire.
Another very old treatise shows us another aspect of the Sapientia.
It mentions the place where wisdom is to be found, where its home is, so to speak.
The text says:
"The house stands in the belly of the earth. It can only be perfected through the fire and this is the perfecting of our wisdom."
Wisdom is represented as a house in some of the texts, in the "Aurora Consurgens" for instance (a text which I have often mentioned) it is spoken of as a house with many doors.
But it is a very curious idea that this house should be perfected by fire.
f a house catches fire it is destroyed, so this again is a paradox: it is the great destroyer of houses, fire, which brings this substance, this house, to its most perfect flowering, in exact contradiction
to outer reality.
Or we could also say: it is by means of the fire that wisdom, lying concealed in an uncouth shell (described as a house in this text), is brought forth.
We come now to an excerpt from the German treatise of the medieval alchemist, Khunrath, who wrote at the end of the sixteenth century.
He says: "The centre of the great edifice of the whole world is wisdom. For it is not only the bond, but als o the destroyer of all destructible things - yes, it is the central point of salt, Tartarus
mundi maioris = Sal sapientiae."
This needs some explanation.
We must remember that the earth was regarded as the centre of the universe at that time, and that the alchemists speak from that point of view.
You remember the excerpt from the "Allegoriae Spientum", which I have just mentioned, where the "house of wisdom" was in the "belly of the earth”.
We find exactly the same idea in this passage from Khunrath, only it is expressed here as a point, the so-called "central point of salt".
This point is also called "Tartarus mundi maioris".
Tartarus is the underworld, hell, and our forefathers located it as inside the world.
"Tartarus mundi maioris" means the underworld of the whole world.
And it is in this dark abyss that the whole universe is centred, and it is here that the salt of wisdom is to be found.
In other words the salt of wisdom equals hell.
This is an almost unthinkable paradox.
The salt of wisdom is the most desirable and marvellous thing which exists, which we strive for all our lives, and at the same time it is hell.
This is the same paradoxical idea that we found in the lead, the heaviest and most uncouth substance and at the as me thing the great treasure of the Holy Ghost, represented as the white dove or
the holy fire.
You see what strange ideas the teaching of alchemy contains.
Another sixteenth century author, Dorneus, speaks of the centre as one, and of manifold things as the periphery which surrounds this one mysterious paradoxical thing.
He says: "Here [in the one) is the centre of natural wisdom. Its circumference, closed in itself, represents a circle, an order which stretches into infinity."
In other words: the whole world is ruled and ordered from this centre.
It is as if the controlling forces radiated from it, it is a point with a circle round it.
We shall find another parallel later which belongs to the same idea.
This point, centre or darkness, the lead as most of the alchemists call it, is also Saturn, for Saturn is the planet which belongs to lead.
Saturn and lead are simply synonyms.
And in another text it is Saturn himself that speaks and says: "I declare unto all, ye wise ones, that unless you kill me, your intellect will never be perfected."
Saturn, the lead, recommends the alchemists or philosophers to kill him, in order to gain possession of the soul which he contains and then he adds:
"And the grace of your wisdom grows in my sister, the moon."
The moon is a light giving planet, one of our two sources of light.
It is the light which lightens the darkness, for it shines when the sun has gone down.
So the moon is the symbol for the wisdom and illumination which comes to man in the darkness.
This light is invisible in the day, we need the night in order to recognise it.
The moon, as the white goddess, represents the white soul of the lead; and if . we kill Saturn, the spirit of heaviness, in ourselves, this moon will be able to rise, and the grade of human wisdom grows
in it, because it is the soul of Saturn, the light buried in the depths of matter.
These are ideas which are clearly formulated in the writings of Paracelsus.
He says directly that man has two lights: the one is the spirit and the other the light of nature.
Man has a spirit in order to be able to understand the divine revelation, and a soul in order to recognise the world in the light of nature.
And this light of nature originates in the dark abyss.
The dark abyss is man's innermost secret, the darkness which lies behind ego-consciousness and which we feel dimly.
When we ask: "What is the ego?" or wonder what we mean when we say "I", we are still only on the surface, in space and time.
Our ordinary consciousness is surface consciousness and does not touch the darkness which lies behind it.
We feel, however, very distinctly that such a darkness does exist, for everything which we call psychical comes from it.
Our whole psychical life originates in this darkness, just as a child's consciousness rises from the dark, unknown mists of the past.
We can see this in certain turns of speech, such as: "It dawned on me".
It is as if the sun rose when we realise something, usually through a good intuition, a spontaneous movement of the mind which is not our own activity.
If we are deprived of all the hunches and ideas which flow to us from the unconscious we are completely lamed.
Yet we seldom realise that this flow is not our own activity, but the activity of the unconscious.
You see now that in the alchemists' teaching about the sapientia we meet a detailed description of the unconscious.
The unconscious is a wholly paradoxical being, on one side it resembles the Holy Ghost, or a fountain which springs from the darkness like a river of Einfiille [hunches).
Psychical activity flows into our consciousness, but we cannot make it do so.
We are entirely dependent on whether it flows or not.
If it stops we feel ill, "rotten" as we call it. We even go to the doctor to ask him what can be wrong, for we are so used to the functioning of the unconscious that we are naturally amazed when it stops.
It is like the water supply, we take it for granted and never think of it till it fails us.
On the other side, this source of life is identical with the dark Tartarus or hell, a dangerous place where the soul is tormented, the land of the departed where there is no life, where everything is so
to speak dead.
If we could visualise it, it would look like lead, and indeed when the flow from the unconscious stops, we are apt to say: "I feel heavy a s lead. "
A Chinese alchemistic text, "The Secret of the Golden Flower", says: "Whoever is dull and moody on waking, and chained to his bodily form, is fettered by the anima."
This anima is the female soul, the Sapientia, and therefore the alchemists connect her with the moon, and call her the white goddess or the daughter of the philosophers.
The philosophers, who practise this art, endeavour to free this white shining goddess from the darkness of Tartarus, from the blackness of the lead and therefore they are, so to speak, the fathers of
this daughter.
In summing up, I should like to point out that the sapientia is above all a world creating principle for the philosophers.
They compare it with the logos which created the world from an unimaginably small point through the pure word.
The sapientia is concealed in matter as a divine emanation which is lost in the darkness.
Therefore it is compared to the myth of Sophia or Nous falling in love with the Physis and being devoured by her.
And the sapientia is also the daughter of the wise, inasmuch as it is redeemed from the darkness of the materia through the activity of the philosophers.
It is called fire, water or salt, and is also described as a point and a circle and thus equals 0, the sign for gold, which was widely used by the alchemists.
This sign depicts a fundamental symbol for the centre of the unconscious.
There is a picture, in the "Rosarium Philosophorum" (1550), which represents the whole problem (see sketch p. 195).
It is drawn, as you see, on the pattern of the Coronation or Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Mary was taken up into Heaven after her death with her body.
She is depicted, so to speak, as the representative of the sinful hyle, as the mediastress of all sinners; because she has taken the sinful body up to Heaven, though of course in a glorified form,
for the materia has been purified and sanctified.
In our picture she is crowned and surrounded by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
Only in that case, God the Son should be young, whereas both the male figures are old men.
It is definitely an alchemistic picture and not orthodox, we see this moreover from the inscriptions.
They are: "Cuius que pater est Sol. Luna mater Et Filius." (And whose father is the sun. Moon the mother. And the son.)
"Vera luna est mater " (Verily the moon is the mother).
"Et ex patre fit filius" (And out of the father the son proceeds).
"Draco non moritur, Et non per Unum tantum abs que fratre et sorore sua sed per ambo simul" (The dragon does not die, and not by means of only one, without his brother and sister, but only
Through both at once).
And above the head of the female figure "Tria" (three) and "Unum" (one) are written.
The dragon must be sacrificed and with his brother and sister.
This is Saturn or the mercurial dragon which has a soul, namely the moon, and it is necessary to kill this dragon, in order that the son may appear.
The son is depicted here as the spirit, the bird hovering over the head of Mary, in union with her, so to speak.
She represents the Hyle, the material body.
The old man, on Mary’s right, is Hermes, the god of wisdom, and the one on the left may be God the Father in the Christian sense, but he is flanked by wisdom.
Wisdom is masculine in this picture, because the feminine is representing the materia.
The Holy Ghost, the white dove, is masculine and the Hyle feminine, for this picture represents a coniunctio, the union of the heavenly spirit with matter.
This is the secret of the coniunctio, the chemical marriage; it is a union of spirit and body.
So you see that a principle is represented here which is missing in Christianity.
This picture does not represent a trinity but a quaternity, four principles are brought into harmony.
So the centre of the whole picture is the coronation, the so-called diadem; the spirit is hovering over the point in the centre of the crown.
This spirit and the three figures are the four aspects of this one point.
So we come back to the diagram that I have often drawn for you, as the symbol of the Self. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 186-195.
Lecture VII 13th June, 1941
We finished the excerpts from the writings of the alchemists on the scientia in the last lecture, and come today to an almost synonymous idea, that of the sapientia (wisdom).
IX. Sapientia
You saw that the alchemists used the term "scientia" in a very wide sense, and that they regarded it as something exceedingly mysterious.
The same is true of the "sapientia", which even appears personified as a highly mysterious figure.
Wisdom is personified as early as the book of the "Wisdom of Solomon" (Apocrypha].
In Gnosticism wisdom appears as the famous Sophia, sometimes represented as the youngest daughter of the creator of the world, or as the feminine counterpart of Christ, and sometimes as
the virgin of light.
The sapientia appears in a very substantial form in alchemy.
Wisdom is attained, so the alchemists say, through the union of chemistry and theosophy.
Of course one must not understand the latter as modern theosophy (Madame Blavatzky], or anthroposophy (Herr Steiner], although it is possible to compare these movements with earlier movements.
In the Middle Ages, however, the term "theosophia" meant the wisdom or knowledge of God, in a much more restricted Christian sense than in theosophy or anthroposophy.
These modern movements are syncretistic phenomena, mosaics put together from the literature of all times and places; and for this reason they can be compared with the Hellenistic mystery religions
of the first and second centuries.
That age has much in common with our present epoch; for our age also is a time when the Weltanschauung of the last two thousand years is decaying.
We hate to admit this, but we must face the facts; and it is undoubtedly a fact that a large part of Europe has somehow slipped out of the Christian Weltanschauung.
Our first passage comes from the "Aurora Consurgens'', l which I have often quoted before.
The Sapientia plays a leading role in this text, it appears personified in action and conversation.
In this excerpt it speaks as the "sapientia austri" (the wisdom of the South]:
"The wisdom of the south wind says: Come ye sons, hearken unto me, and I will teach you the science of the Lord."
Again here "scientia Domini" could mean the wisdom which God possesses, or the wisdom which man possesses about God.
But in this case we can be pretty sure that the "sapientia austri, as in Gnosticism, is either the daughter of God or his feminine counterpart, for she transmits the scientia, the knowledge.
The “scientia", of which we spoke in the last lecture, originates in the sapientia, which is the mother, the old Sophia.
But why is it "sapientia austri", the wisdom of the South, or, translated more exactly, "the wisdom of the south wind"?
The author of this treatise was, as you know, a cleric, he speaks mainly in quotations and knew the Vulgate by heart.
He refers here to Job IX. 9: "Which maketh Arcturus, Orion and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south. Which doeth great things past finding out; yea and wonders without number."
The idea which must have attracted our author in this text is the "chambers of the south", this expression suggests that God hid his secrets inside the south wind.
It is not expressly stated in the text, but the chambers of the south wind probably suggested to our author the idea of a vase or vessel in which the secrets of God were hidden.
The curious thing is that the south wind is also a demon, it is to be met with in other passages in the alchemistic literature as the demon of the south.
This idea again originates in the Old Testament, where the South wind is a wind which parches, and is a danger to all cultivation because it brings the heat of the desert.
And it is this most dangerous and dreaded demon, which contains the secrets of God hidden in its innermost.
I will say no more about this at present, for we shall come to another passage later where it is explained more clearly.
Dorneus says about wisdom:
"Water gushes forth from the fountain of wisdom, which brings about reconciliation when enemies drink therefrom."
Wisdom is compared to a spring or fountain in this passage.
This is an old metaphor which is already to be met with in the Old Testament.
This water unites all hostile elements or factors, and, when it is a matter of people, enemies are reconciled.
So this water has a reconciling effect.
It is the "aqua divina" which equals the "prima materia", the primal substance of the beginning which contains all the opposites and which at the same time is beyond the opposites.
When the alchemists apply this water to their substances it has the miraculous effect of reconciling all hostile elements and uniting them finally in the indivisible substance of the philosophers' stone.
But, at the same time, it is to be understood morally, in that wisdom is essentially conciliatory.
Wisdom does not bring about quarrels, but reconciles all conflicts.
The same author says:
"0 wonderful wisdom which, by the mere word, can ultimately bring forth, from a point so small that it is almost impossible to conceive, everything in this enormous machine and in this
powerful and weighty mass."
This means that it is the sapientia, wisdom, which has brought forth the whole machinery of the world, and the immense mass of the universe through the mere word and from an almost
inconceivably small point.
We see here that the sapientia is identified with the world creating word, with the logos.
We find the same idea in its Christian aspect in the opening words of the Gospel of St. John
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made
that was made."
Mylius gives us another insight into the nature of the sapientia.
He says:
"There are three principles of all things: God, wisdom and the materia."
This is an alchemistic confession of faith.
Like the Christian creed it speaks of a trinity or rather of a triad, for it is a purely Gnostic triad: God, Sophia and the Hyle, the substance of the world. We shall speak of this triad later.
There is a passage in the "Rosarium Philosophorum" where the Sapientia is again personified.
You will remember that this anonymous treatise comes from the fifteenth century, and was first printed in 1550.
The Sapientia says:
"I am the only daughter of the wise, entirely unknown to the stupid."
The author identifies the sapientia with the secret of the philosophers; and here she is not represented as the mother but as the daughter.
Perhaps you know that the Gnostics often represented wisdom as the youngest daughter or as the dark daughter of Bythos (the abyss).
You will find the legend of Sophia and her peculiar love story in the writings of Irenaeus, one of the Fathers of the Church.
Sophia was consumed with passionate love for her ancient ancestor Bythos, the primordial abyss, because she had slipped down into the Hyle and could no longer find the father in the
darkness of the materia.
Here again we find the idea of a spark or emanation of God which is lost in the darkness of matter, or which has been planted there as a seed by God.
We find a passage in the Liber Quartorum which is interesting in the same connection.
The Liber Quartorum is a very ancient text and probably originated mainly in Alexandrian philosophy.
It says:
"The philosopher finds the spirit of the wise (ingenium sapientum) in nature."
We are told here that wisdom is to be found in nature. This "ingenium" is exactly Sophia, who has lost herself in matter (hyle), in nature.
The sapientia is very often connected in a mysterious way with mercury, and one alchemistic author says:
"It is impossible to win the treasure of the wise from ordinary mercury."
It is not a matter of ordinary mercury, the treasure cannot be won from this, but of course only from the "mercury of the philosophers."
This is another secret name for the substance which the alchemists searched for or prepared, and which always remained unknown.
We read in another text:
"The fire, with which it is sublimated, is called the fire of wisdom and also a steaming fire."
A steaming fire is obviously not an ordinary fire [which would only produce smoke), but must be a mixture of fire and water, that is a mixture of the opposites.
One could express the same thing by saying that wisdom is produced through the conflict of the opposites.
We read in the same treatise:
"In the process it is necessary to use the salt of wisdom which is blood red inside."
Obviously it is no ordinary salt which is meant, but again a symbol.
You remember the well-known words of Christ: "Ye are the salt of the earth", that is, the salt of wisdom.
Our text tells us that this salt is blood red inwardly.
This means that it has a soul, for blood and soul were identical in the ancient conception.
Therefore the trans-substantiated wine, which becomes the blood of Christ in the Mass, is the anima, that is the soul, of Christ.
Wisdom is also often represented as a liquid, as we have already seen, therefore the alchemists speak of it in connection with the transformation of their substances.
The Aurora Consurgens says:
"And he shall be called redeemed when the Lord washes away the filth of the daughters of Sian through the spirit of wisdom and mind."
The spirit is made identical with water in this ablution.
The same text calls the sapientia "red gold ", "the tincture of wisdom " and the "fire of the dyers".
Dyers use such liquids.
These again are paradoxical figures of speech which are used to characterise this mysterious substance.
It is also called the "terra sapientiae" (earth of wisdom”) and is thus synonymous with lead, which is also referred to as the "earth of wisdom", because it is different inside and out.
Outside it is grey and uncouth, whereas inside it is white.
There are other passages where we hear that a white dove lives in the lead, or that it is red inside.
The underlying idea always is that, in a mysterious way, the lead possesses a soul.
It plays the same role as the quicksilver in early alchemy, because it is easily liquefied.
Therefore Mylius says that the earth of wisdom equals lead and that: "The liquid second part of lead is called the water of wisdom."
The water of wisdom is in the lead, as this passage says.
This is incomprehensible to us, but we must remember that substances, bodies, even dead bodies, were always animated for our forefathers, therefore it was natural for them to look
for the water of wisdom in substances.
And moreover the idea, that wisdom was a water, played a very important role in early Christianity and in pre-Christian days, and also in Gnosticism.
The baptismal water, for instance, is such a water of wisdom, a divine water which possesses miraculous, transforming qualities.
This was the reason for the water Eucharist in early Christianity.
Originally the chalice was not always filled with wine, but often with water.
Hippolytus, who died at the beginning of the third century, interpreted this later chalice as a sort of piscina, a font filled with baptismal water.
The water of this chalice had the same effect on the soul as the baptismal water had on the body.
Baptism was understood as a sort of ablution, a washing of the body; and the water in the chalice was understood as a means of bathing the soul.
From this point of view the chalice corresponds in Christianity to the hermetic vase in alchemy.
And both are parallels to the Gnostic idea of the vessel filled with Nous, which I spoke of in commenting on the advice of Zosimos, to his friend Theosebeia, to go down to the Poimandres and plunge
herself in the krater.
The importance of knowing what we do, of consciousness, which is emphasised in this Gnostic legend of the bath of Nous, also appears in the New Testament and still more clearly in the
extra-canonical sayings of Christ.
There is a story (which was formerly in St. Luke's Gospel), in which Christ, when walking with his disciples on the Sabbath, met a man who was working on his land.
Christ spoke to him and said: "If thou knowest what thou art doing thou art blest, but if thou knowest not, then thou art cursed."
It is the arch-sin, to do something unconscious!
If, because the condition of unconsciousness is a condition of abysmal darkness, in crying need of redemption.
It is mainly from unconsciousness that all sins and evil arise; this fact was already realised in antiquity.
There is a Gnostic collection of poems, belonging to the second century, A. D . called the "Odes of Solomon".
The sixth ode is called "The Water of the Lord" and shows clearly the veneration in which the Divine Water was held in Gnostic circles:
"As the breath of the wind bloweth through the harp
awakening song in every string,
so doth the breath of the Lord’s spirit pass through my limbs,
that in his love I als o sing.
All that is false he destroyeth,
and everything which is malignant;
for thus it was in the beginning,
and thus it will be till the end.
Nothing will stand against him,
and nothing will oppose him.
The Lord hath increased his understanding
and hath revealed his gracious gifts to us.
So we give praise unto his name;
our spirits sing praises to his Holy Spirit.
For a little stream hath sprung up,
and hath become a broad and mighty river;
for everything hath it torn away and ground to powder,
and it hath swept away the Temple.
Nothing could restrain it, no dam nor building,
nor the art of any dyke builder.
For it hath flowed over the face of the whole earth,
And hath filled up everything.
All those that thirsted have drunk from it,
and their thirst was quenched and relieved,
for the drink was the gift of the Most High.
Blessed therefore are the servants of this drink,
His water was entrusted to them,
for refreshment have they brought to the dry lips,
and awakening to the will which had grown weak, I
the souls, which had almost departed, have they rescued from death,
and the members, which had fallen, have they set up again.
They have given strength to their weakness,
and light to their eyes;
for they all knew themselves in the Lord
and were redeemed by the eternal, immortal water.
Hallelujah."
This text shows you plainly that the eternal water, the hydor theion, was a general idea at that time and only receded into the background in the course of history.
The Roman Catholic order of the Mass, which abolished the water chalice, was not the least among the reasons for the disappearance of the symbol of the water.
In the Mass, the water is only retained in the commixtio, where a little water is mixed with the wine, which is a last remnant of the water Eucharist.
The significance of the water Eucharist shows us that the Mass is really a purely symbolic procedure, though some of the sacramental words which are used seem to give it the character of a memorial.
Another alchemist, Khunrath, says of the Sapientia:
"The s alt of wisdom is a fire, yea, a fire of salt."
As you see the synonyms pile up, o n e could almost say that the idea is becoming hybrid.
Fire is a well-known symbol for the Holy Ghost, in the miracle of the day of Pentecost, for instance, the Holy Ghost became visible as the cloven tongues of fire which came down from Heaven (Acts II.1.).
One of the old Greek authors describes the way that mercury reaches the " condition of wisdom" through sublimation.
This is naturally very difficult for us to understand, because we consider wisdom as an essentially human quality.
But it is understood in this passage as a quality of the substance.
This means that, according to the old alchemistic idea, mercury can be transformed through the torture of the fire.
A natural spirit participates in the darkness of nature, or is imprisoned in it; and when this spirit is purified or sublimated, by means of the fire, it becomes the spirit of wisdom.
The alchemist, therefore, strove to attain wisdom through the transformation of nature, which he subjected for this purpose to torture by the fire.
Another very old treatise shows us another aspect of the Sapientia.
It mentions the place where wisdom is to be found, where its home is, so to speak.
The text says:
"The house stands in the belly of the earth. It can only be perfected through the fire and this is the perfecting of our wisdom."
Wisdom is represented as a house in some of the texts, in the "Aurora Consurgens" for instance (a text which I have often mentioned) it is spoken of as a house with many doors.
But it is a very curious idea that this house should be perfected by fire.
f a house catches fire it is destroyed, so this again is a paradox: it is the great destroyer of houses, fire, which brings this substance, this house, to its most perfect flowering, in exact contradiction
to outer reality.
Or we could also say: it is by means of the fire that wisdom, lying concealed in an uncouth shell (described as a house in this text), is brought forth.
We come now to an excerpt from the German treatise of the medieval alchemist, Khunrath, who wrote at the end of the sixteenth century.
He says: "The centre of the great edifice of the whole world is wisdom. For it is not only the bond, but als o the destroyer of all destructible things - yes, it is the central point of salt, Tartarus
mundi maioris = Sal sapientiae."
This needs some explanation.
We must remember that the earth was regarded as the centre of the universe at that time, and that the alchemists speak from that point of view.
You remember the excerpt from the "Allegoriae Spientum", which I have just mentioned, where the "house of wisdom" was in the "belly of the earth”.
We find exactly the same idea in this passage from Khunrath, only it is expressed here as a point, the so-called "central point of salt".
This point is also called "Tartarus mundi maioris".
Tartarus is the underworld, hell, and our forefathers located it as inside the world.
"Tartarus mundi maioris" means the underworld of the whole world.
And it is in this dark abyss that the whole universe is centred, and it is here that the salt of wisdom is to be found.
In other words the salt of wisdom equals hell.
This is an almost unthinkable paradox.
The salt of wisdom is the most desirable and marvellous thing which exists, which we strive for all our lives, and at the same time it is hell.
This is the same paradoxical idea that we found in the lead, the heaviest and most uncouth substance and at the as me thing the great treasure of the Holy Ghost, represented as the white dove or
the holy fire.
You see what strange ideas the teaching of alchemy contains.
Another sixteenth century author, Dorneus, speaks of the centre as one, and of manifold things as the periphery which surrounds this one mysterious paradoxical thing.
He says: "Here [in the one) is the centre of natural wisdom. Its circumference, closed in itself, represents a circle, an order which stretches into infinity."
In other words: the whole world is ruled and ordered from this centre.
It is as if the controlling forces radiated from it, it is a point with a circle round it.
We shall find another parallel later which belongs to the same idea.
This point, centre or darkness, the lead as most of the alchemists call it, is also Saturn, for Saturn is the planet which belongs to lead.
Saturn and lead are simply synonyms.
And in another text it is Saturn himself that speaks and says: "I declare unto all, ye wise ones, that unless you kill me, your intellect will never be perfected."
Saturn, the lead, recommends the alchemists or philosophers to kill him, in order to gain possession of the soul which he contains and then he adds:
"And the grace of your wisdom grows in my sister, the moon."
The moon is a light giving planet, one of our two sources of light.
It is the light which lightens the darkness, for it shines when the sun has gone down.
So the moon is the symbol for the wisdom and illumination which comes to man in the darkness.
This light is invisible in the day, we need the night in order to recognise it.
The moon, as the white goddess, represents the white soul of the lead; and if . we kill Saturn, the spirit of heaviness, in ourselves, this moon will be able to rise, and the grade of human wisdom grows
in it, because it is the soul of Saturn, the light buried in the depths of matter.
These are ideas which are clearly formulated in the writings of Paracelsus.
He says directly that man has two lights: the one is the spirit and the other the light of nature.
Man has a spirit in order to be able to understand the divine revelation, and a soul in order to recognise the world in the light of nature.
And this light of nature originates in the dark abyss.
The dark abyss is man's innermost secret, the darkness which lies behind ego-consciousness and which we feel dimly.
When we ask: "What is the ego?" or wonder what we mean when we say "I", we are still only on the surface, in space and time.
Our ordinary consciousness is surface consciousness and does not touch the darkness which lies behind it.
We feel, however, very distinctly that such a darkness does exist, for everything which we call psychical comes from it.
Our whole psychical life originates in this darkness, just as a child's consciousness rises from the dark, unknown mists of the past.
We can see this in certain turns of speech, such as: "It dawned on me".
It is as if the sun rose when we realise something, usually through a good intuition, a spontaneous movement of the mind which is not our own activity.
If we are deprived of all the hunches and ideas which flow to us from the unconscious we are completely lamed.
Yet we seldom realise that this flow is not our own activity, but the activity of the unconscious.
You see now that in the alchemists' teaching about the sapientia we meet a detailed description of the unconscious.
The unconscious is a wholly paradoxical being, on one side it resembles the Holy Ghost, or a fountain which springs from the darkness like a river of Einfiille [hunches).
Psychical activity flows into our consciousness, but we cannot make it do so.
We are entirely dependent on whether it flows or not.
If it stops we feel ill, "rotten" as we call it. We even go to the doctor to ask him what can be wrong, for we are so used to the functioning of the unconscious that we are naturally amazed when it stops.
It is like the water supply, we take it for granted and never think of it till it fails us.
On the other side, this source of life is identical with the dark Tartarus or hell, a dangerous place where the soul is tormented, the land of the departed where there is no life, where everything is so
to speak dead.
If we could visualise it, it would look like lead, and indeed when the flow from the unconscious stops, we are apt to say: "I feel heavy a s lead. "
A Chinese alchemistic text, "The Secret of the Golden Flower", says: "Whoever is dull and moody on waking, and chained to his bodily form, is fettered by the anima."
This anima is the female soul, the Sapientia, and therefore the alchemists connect her with the moon, and call her the white goddess or the daughter of the philosophers.
The philosophers, who practise this art, endeavour to free this white shining goddess from the darkness of Tartarus, from the blackness of the lead and therefore they are, so to speak, the fathers of
this daughter.
In summing up, I should like to point out that the sapientia is above all a world creating principle for the philosophers.
They compare it with the logos which created the world from an unimaginably small point through the pure word.
The sapientia is concealed in matter as a divine emanation which is lost in the darkness.
Therefore it is compared to the myth of Sophia or Nous falling in love with the Physis and being devoured by her.
And the sapientia is also the daughter of the wise, inasmuch as it is redeemed from the darkness of the materia through the activity of the philosophers.
It is called fire, water or salt, and is also described as a point and a circle and thus equals 0, the sign for gold, which was widely used by the alchemists.
This sign depicts a fundamental symbol for the centre of the unconscious.
There is a picture, in the "Rosarium Philosophorum" (1550), which represents the whole problem (see sketch p. 195).
It is drawn, as you see, on the pattern of the Coronation or Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Mary was taken up into Heaven after her death with her body.
She is depicted, so to speak, as the representative of the sinful hyle, as the mediastress of all sinners; because she has taken the sinful body up to Heaven, though of course in a glorified form,
for the materia has been purified and sanctified.
In our picture she is crowned and surrounded by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
Only in that case, God the Son should be young, whereas both the male figures are old men.
It is definitely an alchemistic picture and not orthodox, we see this moreover from the inscriptions.
They are: "Cuius que pater est Sol. Luna mater Et Filius." (And whose father is the sun. Moon the mother. And the son.)
"Vera luna est mater " (Verily the moon is the mother).
"Et ex patre fit filius" (And out of the father the son proceeds).
"Draco non moritur, Et non per Unum tantum abs que fratre et sorore sua sed per ambo simul" (The dragon does not die, and not by means of only one, without his brother and sister, but only
Through both at once).
And above the head of the female figure "Tria" (three) and "Unum" (one) are written.
The dragon must be sacrificed and with his brother and sister.
This is Saturn or the mercurial dragon which has a soul, namely the moon, and it is necessary to kill this dragon, in order that the son may appear.
The son is depicted here as the spirit, the bird hovering over the head of Mary, in union with her, so to speak.
She represents the Hyle, the material body.
The old man, on Mary’s right, is Hermes, the god of wisdom, and the one on the left may be God the Father in the Christian sense, but he is flanked by wisdom.
Wisdom is masculine in this picture, because the feminine is representing the materia.
The Holy Ghost, the white dove, is masculine and the Hyle feminine, for this picture represents a coniunctio, the union of the heavenly spirit with matter.
This is the secret of the coniunctio, the chemical marriage; it is a union of spirit and body.
So you see that a principle is represented here which is missing in Christianity.
This picture does not represent a trinity but a quaternity, four principles are brought into harmony.
So the centre of the whole picture is the coronation, the so-called diadem; the spirit is hovering over the point in the centre of the crown.
This spirit and the three figures are the four aspects of this one point.
So we come back to the diagram that I have often drawn for you, as the symbol of the Self. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 186-195.
(c)2015; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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