A poetic description of Goddess Dawn

Dawn (1881)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

“Glorious to behold, she wakes the world of men,

Riding ahead, opening the way

In her lofty car, majestic, delighting all,

Spreading light at the break of day.

As though proud of the loveliness of her body,

Freshly bathed, the young Dawn stands upright,

To be seen. Darkness, the Enemy, is expelled

When Heaven's Child appears, spreading light.

Heaven's Daughter, like a fair bride, lets fall the veil

From her breast: reveals brilliant delight

To him who adores her. As of old she came, so

The young Dawn stands again, spreading light."

-Rig Veda V. 80. 2, 5, 6.

The Goddess in her form as Tridevi; Parvarti, Lakshmi and Saraswati.

“Brahma and others know not Her essence; so is she called the Unknowable. She has no end; so is she called the Endless. She is not grasped and so is she called the Incomprehensible. Her birth is not known and so is she called the Unborn. She alone is present everywhere, and so is she called the One. She alone wears all forms, and so is she called the Many. For these reasons is she called the Unknowable, the Endless, the Incomprehensible, the Unknown, the One and the Many."

-Devi Upanishad

Artwork © Jonathon Earl Bowser - www.JonathonArt.com

- Sophia -
The Holy Spirit

For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty: therefore can no defiled thing fall into her. For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.
-Book of Wisdom 7:25-26

Sophia, the missing part in contemporary christianity...

The catholics and the orthodox christians have a long tradition for venerating the Virgin Mary. According to this tradition, Mary is the most important of all the saints and intercedes on our behalf before God in heaven. She is a symbol of faith, purity and obedience, she is seen as the mother of the church, and she is believed to have been exalted as the Queen of Heaven (at least in the catholic tradition). She has also come to express the feminine aspects of faith, and in the relationship with God, she symbolizes motherly love and tenderness. Mary can function as a representation of the feminine attributes of God. And I think that this is why she is so popular in christianity.

So here is the core of the matter. I think we have a need and a longing for the feminine in relation to God. We have a spiritual longing for the divine feminine. In the christian ideas about God and in the language used to refer to "him", we are missing the feminine. And then the devotion to Mary has become the substitute. I believe that God must have both feminine and masculine aspects to him, since both woman and man are created in the image of God. He is of course not to be considered as a man or a woman, in our sense of the words. But christians do not spend much time talking about God in feminine terms. They refer to God as our heavenly father, but forget that the Holy One is also our heavenly mother.

We are in general missing something in contemporary christianity, namely the divine feminine. But we do not have to go to the Virgin Mary to find that. We just have to turn to the Holy Spirit, if one still wants to use familiar terms from the christian tradition. I believe that the Holy Spirit can be interpreted as the feminine aspect of the Trinity, and that the Holy Spirit can be understood to be Sophia, divine wisdom. In Proverbs we read about a divine feminine being called Wisdom (in greek: Sophia). It is stated that She exists from eternity and was present during the creation of the world. She is revealed in even more detail in the deuterocanonical books (also referred to as the apocryphical books), especially in the Book of Wisdom (Sapientia Salomonis) and Sirach. These books is a part of the Septuaginta, the bible of the first christians. There is many wonderful descriptions of Sophia in the Bible, and because of the sheer amount of these passages, I will not begin quoting them here in this post. You should read them for yourself. On this blog you can find scriptural references concerning Sophia.

Sophia's characteristics is the same as the Holy Spirit, and their role is the same- one of the things is that Sophia is also described as a spirit which is holy. Sophia was present at the creation in the same way as the Spirit of God was present, as narrated in Genesis. And there's a lot more descriptions, which makes it evident that Sophia and the Holy Spirit is the same. Sophia is also spoken of in the New Testament. Jesus says in Matthew 11,18-19: "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds." Almost the same speech is recorded in Luke 7,33-35 and ends with the words: "Yet wisdom is justified by all her children." Later on, Jesus says in Luke 11,49: "Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,' " We can also note a passage in Acts 7,51-53, which has the same motif as this last quote, but showing the Holy Spirit in the same role as the "Wisdom of God", making it possible to conceive them as the same being.

In christian mythology it is the Holy Spirit who inspired the prophets in the Old Testament, and also John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit. The conceiving of Jesus Christ was due to the Holy Spirit, and at the baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove. So the Spirit has worked through the prophets, of whom John was the last, and also brought forth Christ into the world and came upon him at the baptism. In the quotations above we see that Jesus identifies the being, who is "behind" the prophets and Jesus himself, to be Wisdom, thereby possibly implicating that the Holy Spirit and Sophia is the same being.

In Revelation 12, we read about a woman, who is clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and she has a crown of twelve stars on her head. She is giving birth to Jesus Christ, who will rule all the nations. When we read this together with the birth narratives of the Gospels, it is clear that the Holy Spirit must be understood as this heavenly woman, because the Spirit brings Christ into the world, as does this heavenly woman. Some would think of the possibility that this woman should be identified as Virgin Mary. But then we would have to ascribe the divine characteristics associated with the heavenly woman to Mary. But Mary is just a human being and should not be elevated to divinity. The most reasonable thing, in my opinion, is to identify the woman in Revelation with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit stands forth as a divine female being in heavenly splendour and glory, and in this way the passage reminds us of the figure of Sophia.

So the figure of Sophia is present in the Bible. But She is not alien to the early church either. Irenaeus (born 2nd century, died ca. 200) clearly stated that the Holy Spirit should be identified with Sophia. And there is also an early christian text called "the Gospel of the Hebrews", which is only known in fragments to us today, in quotations by church fathers. This text, probably written between the middle of the 1st century and the middle of the 2nd century, explicitly states that the Holy Spirit is the mother of Jesus. We also find christian writings in the Nag Hammadi library, which portrays Sophia as an emanation from the highest god, and they give her a very active role in the salvation of humankind.

I think that many christians are longing for the divine feminine, but they need not look any further than their own tradition. This divine feminine is the Holy Spirit, and also referred to as Sophia. A lot of christians have already embraced this belief, but the christian church of today, in general, lacks it. Being aware of the feminine aspects of God has been a great joy in my own life.

A prayer to Sophia

Heavenly Sophia, Holy Spirit
Divine Wisdom, hallowed be your name
Proceeded from the Divine Source
The wisdom, beauty and motherly love of the divine
From eternity you exist, in all eternity You will reign
You most holy Queen of Heaven

Holy Sophia, I am a temple for You
You are in the depths of my soul and spirit
Lead me everyday deeper into fellowship with You
And let me always walk on the path of truth and wisdom
AMEN