Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

Easter Sunday, according to the Western calendar established by Pope Gregory, falls two days from today on the 8^th.  Of course other Christian religions slate different days for the big event, including the Eastern Orthodox and Coptic churches.  For some reason, because of this variation in days and dates, I tend to think of the very early Christian church at this time of year.  Such thoughts always wander to the highly thoughtful, highly heretical Gnostic faith and the wonderful story of their Pistis Sophia, the greatest of God’s angels.  Or perhaps the very progenitor of God.

The story of Pistis Sophia (which is translated from the Greek as “Faith-Wisdom”) begins with the Old Testament.  In the Books of Proverbs and Wisdom she is mentioned as Yahweh’s companion, created with or just after him and constantly at his side.  At first, she is no more than a balancing metaphor but gradually in the popular faith she, like Shekhina with whom she is often confused, takes on an actual personality.  She is written of in Kabalistic literature as gently contentious, interceding for man with Yahweh in the same way that Christians imagine the Virgin Mary halting her Son’s righteous hand.

Gnosticism picked this template up and ran with it.  In their Dark vs. Light gospel that was so influenced by Persian Zoroastrianism, Sophia became the female originating force.  She was born of Silence and in turn gave birth to God the Son who she then took as lover.  The two created the Angels (known as Aeons) who, in their turn, became the lovers of Sophia.  It is she who led these Angel lovers away from God the Son – the Light – toward Yahweh/Satan – the Dark.  In Gnostic belief, all things physical were created by evil ergo anything that existed prior to God the Son was evil.  In an overarching religious embrace of the new vs. the old, the Gnostic prophets threw out the “old God” and associated him with Satan.

This rejection of the Light, along with an insatiable curiosity, caused Sophia to fall from grace.  She became a physical being in the Gnostic Hell, which is our tangible world.  Perhaps not surprisingly she became debased, offering her new physical body to anyone who would pay.  She experienced all the worst parts of life on Earth and is therefore sometimes called “our sister” in Gnostic prayers.

All this degradation taught Sophia wisdom and a new appreciation for the Light.  She returned to the presence of God the Son and was installed beside him as Pistis Sophia, the angel who will champion man.

Despite the eventual rejection of Gnostic teaching as heretical, the Roman Catholic Church retained some vestige of respect for Sophia as a metaphor not only for divine wisdom, but for the outcast returned to the fold.  She reappears in Revelations as the apocryphal Bride of Christ, and icons of Pistis Sophia are not uncommon in the Russian and Greek Orthodox Churches.

Perhaps the best end note to the unusual and contentious history of “our sister” Sophia is a passage from the Dead Sea scrolls of Nag Hammaddi, discovered in the 20^th century.  The script paraphrases the much more ancient words of the Egyptian goddess Au-set/Isis and puts them into the mouth of Sophia:

I am the first and the last, the honored and the despised, the whore and the holy one, wife and virgin, barren and fertile.  

Happy Easter/Joyeuses Pâques

Header:  Pistis Sophia icon from the wonderful (G)Nostic Nunnery where you can find this lovely prayer to Sophia

Jeudi: Great Spirits

Saturday is the first day of Passover, the holiday that celebrates the Israelites freedom from bondage in Egypt.  So today, an offering that remembers the mothers and midwives of the Israelites in Egypt.  The story of Golden Cloud Woman, Yocheved, the mother of Moses, Aaron and Miriam as told by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb:

A new pharaoh who did not know Yosef arose over Mitzryim.  He said to his people, “Look, the Israelites are too numerous and too strong for us.  We must deal cleverly with them now before their numbers increase even more and they join forces with our enemies and drive us from our own land.”

So they appointed taskmasters over us to crush our spirits with hard labor.  We were forced to build the storage sites of Pithom and Ramses as supply centers for Pharaoh.

But the more they oppressed us, the more we increased.

They came to dread us.

They forced us to do labor designed to break our bodies.

They made our lives miserable with harsh work involving mortar and brick as well as all kinds of toil in the field.

Pharaoh summoned the head midwives of the Evreem to his court.  That is the name they called us, Evreem: vagabonds and wayfarers.

My mother was one of the midwives.  The people called her Shifra: Horn of Freedom Woman.  She turned each birth into a celebration.  Somehow she collected wine and bread, shells and beads, goat hair blankets, and baskets woven from the tall grass by the river.  We would gather and rejoice in the new child and renew our hope.

Pharaoh could not sleep.  On the nights the Israelite women gave birth he dreamt of grasshoppers, swarming insects, and frogs crawling over his face and hands.  While the women groaned with labor he screamed his midnight fears into the darkness of Mitzryim.

He summoned my mother, Shifra, saying, “When you deliver a Hebrew infant, if it is a boy, smash its head on the birth stone; if it is a girl, let it live.”

My mother did not do as Pharaoh commanded.

One day they came for her and hanged her from a tree.  I watched as they buried my mother’s body, and I planted a cedar twig over her grave.  Every day I would visit her and weep.  Because I came so often and cried so much the twig quickly grew into a tree.

One day a white dove nested in the tree, and I took it as a sign.  Soon the bird ate from my hand and cooed a welcome when I came.

One evening under a full moon sky I embraced the tree and felt the warmth of my mother’s light rising, her spirit ascending, and the bird flew about us, cooing, and a voice spoke to me saying, “I am the Presence that sustained your mothers and fathers and promised them freedom.  I am Shekhina, who will lead the people from darkness to light, from sorrow to joy, from slavery to redemption.  From this time onward you shall be called Golden Cloud Woman, for you have seen the light of Shekhina.  Let My light become a sign of hope among the people.”

My tears watered the tree once again, and I returned home.

From that time onward the people called me Yocheved for the golden cloud that surrounded me.  It was a great sign of hope.  The days of deliverance were at hand.

~ from the book Goddess: A Celebration in Art and Literature edited by Jalaja Bonheim

Header:  Israel in Egypt by Sir Edward John Poynter c 1860