Summer Harvest

I am really interested in knowing more about Sophia and Mary Madgelene. This is what is attracting me to gnostic thought. I know they are archtypes for wisdom and holy union respectively. Whatever you have to clarify these “ideas” would be helpful to me.

Well, I’m not sure how clear I can make the subject, but I’d be glad to jot down some thoughts. This is a HUGE subject. It’s like asking someone to explain the biology and functionality of the right hemisphere of the brain! That said, I’d be glad to summarize my own personal thoughts on the subject. As always, this is my own understanding, and may or may not be shared by other individual Gnostics.

It’s pretty common knowledge by now that the Gnostics held the feminine aspect of the God in extremely high regard. I don’t want to go into the differences between Canonical Christianity (which, in many cases, does actually acknowledge a feminine aspect of the God, though they don’t like to talk about it); suffice to say that within Gnosticism the Divine Feminine had equal footing theoretically *and* mythologically, and, in modern Ecclesiastical Gnosticism, liturgically.

This is a VAST oversimplification of Gnostic myth, but I want to provide a little background. The Female aspect of divinity comes into most Gnostic myths almost immediately, proceeded only by the undifferentiated, indescribable Limitless Light. When this Light desired experience of itself, it basically needed to split apart and create Observers. It split itself into two separate but equal aspects: the Father, the first masculine aspect of the Limitless Light (now limited within its own masculinity) and Barbelo, the feminine aspect of the Limitless Light. As says in the Secret Book of John:

This is the first power which was before all of them (and) which came forth from his mind, She is the forethought of the All - her light shines like his light - the perfect power which is the image of the invisible, virginal Spirit who is perfect. The first power, the glory of Barbelo, the perfect glory in the aeons, the glory of the revelation, she glorified the virginal Spirit and it was she who praised him, because thanks to him she had come forth. This is the first thought, his image; she became the womb of everything, for it is she who is prior to them all, the Mother-Father, the first man, the holy Spirit, the thrice-male, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one, and the eternal aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth.

Without running down the entire process of creation within Gnostic myth, I’ll note that the process of division and emanation from the original Limitless Light continues through a series of emanated pairs. In order for each pair to manifest the next, the feminine and masculine aspects needed to unite; Barbelo needed to “return to the Father.”

So, you’ve got this “masculine” aspect and this “feminine” aspect pouring down through creation, resulting in two parallel but balanced streams originating in the Father and Barbelo. Eventually, they emerge as the Logos (male) and Sophia (female). Through an error resulting from the distance between the original Limitless Light and its farthest emanations, the Materia springs forth from Sophia, an imperfect realm, ruled by the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth.

So, the Father, acting through the Logos, and Barbelo, acting through Sophia, set forth to redeem the fallen world of Creation, PKD’s Black Iron Prison. In Gnostic myth, Sophia and the Logos descend into the World of Limitations as our twin saviours, without whom the divine spirit would be trapped in imperfect matter. Thus, we say that Sophia is our mother and our saviour, our creatrix and our matrix because she represents the utter near perfection of Barbelo, just as the Logos represents the utter near perfection of the Father. Salvation cannot occur through the medium of the masculine alone. Sophia also represents the fallen and redeemed who is saved through the medium of the descent of the Logos. The Pistis Sophia details her fall and resurrection through the heavens.

The Logos requires Sophia to awaken the divine spark within matter, and vice-versa. Now, in a system as blatantly Platonic as Gnosticism, it helps to think of things in terms of patterns. The Father and Barbelo are the pattern for The Logos and Sophia, who are, in turn the pattern for the Christos and the Holy Spirit. The Christos is the indwelling light (masculine) that descended through the medium of the Holy Spirit (feminine) into the person of Jesus at his baptism on the River Jordan. Now, the Christos is the mythic pattern for the person of Jesus the man, and the Holy Spirit becomes the mythic pattern for Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s “Most beloved disciple.”

Here’s a little diagram (in no way intended to do anything other than illustrate the emanation patterns– this is *not* how these figures would be arranged on the Tree of Life):

This is the importance, to me, anyhow, of the figures of Sophia and the Magdalene within Gnostic myth. They’re essentially different steps on the same Cosmic ladder. This is why Magdalene is so important; without her present to ask what are basically the toughest questions to Jesus, the feminine Holy Spirit and thus Sophia would not effectively be “activated” in the presence of the masculine Christos and thus Logos. As a “prostitute” (she’s never *really* described as one in the Canon, but became one within myth, an echo of Gnostic thought imho), she requries redemption from her prostitution in the same way that, according to the Exegesis on the Soul, the soul itself needs redemption from its acts of prostitution. As Jesus the Man represents humanity’s salvation through the redemption of the spirit, so Magdalene the Prostitute represents humanity’s salvation through the redemption of the soul.

This is also why I see the whole “bloodline of Christ” thing as kinda silly. Were they historical characters? Did Jesus and Mary Magdalene sleep with one another? Did she take the kids and head off to France/Scotland/Japan/The New World and go underground? Well, who knows?

The biggest question I’d like to ask people who are so convinced in the Bloodline thing is . . . what happens if it’s true? What happens if someone is found to be the *de facto* descendent of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene? Would you set that person up as a king? Would that make that person “holier” than everyone else? Would everyone suddenly agree that there’s some truth to Christianity, or that Christianity is actually a lot of bunk? Sure, it’s fun to speculate, but instead of useless speculation, try to learn from the idea! What does this mean for you and yours?

The fact is, no matter how much blather there is from people who claim to have discovered the TRUTH behind the Magdelene, there is no Truth but what is contained within the myth of error and redemption, through the marriage of the spirit and the soul.

If you feel drawn to Sophia and the Magdalene, I encourage you to check out The Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum, a Sophianic Gnostic Church. They’ve got lots of great thoughts and material on the subject, and a really neat website.