By the year 200, as Elaine Pagels tells us in Chapter III of her book The Gnostic Gospels, “Every one of the secret texts which Gnostic groups revered was omitted from the canonical collection, and branded as heretical by those who called themselves orthodox Christians. By the time the process of sorting the various writings ended...virtually all the feminine imagery for God had disappeared from the orthodox Christian tradition.” Until 1977 when the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 were finally published, no-one knew that some groups of early Christians had an image of the Divine Mother whom they had named ‘The Invisible within the All’. Some texts speak of how, as the Eternal Silence, the Divine Mother received the seed of Light from the ineffable source and how, from this womb, she brought forth all the emanations of Light, ranged in related pairs of feminine and masculine entities or energies. They saw her as the womb of life, not only of human life, but the life of the whole cosmos known at that time. They knew this Divine Mother as the Holy Spirit and saw the dove as her emissary. This Gnostic cosmology is so similar to the descriptions of the emanation of Light in Kabbalism, that they may both have been developed by the community of the Jewish exiles in Alexandria. In the Gospel of the Hebrews, one of the gospels destroyed during this time of suppression and persecution and known only from quotations in the work of the early Christian Fathers, Origen and Jerome, the Holy Spirit is described as the mother of Jesus, who spoke to him at his baptism saying, “My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for Thee.” “Here,” writes Professor Gilles Quispel (one of the great authorities on the Gnostic Gospels), “we come to a very simple realization: just as the birth requires a mother, so rebirth requires a spiritual mother. Originally, the Christian term “rebirth” must therefore have been associated with the concept of the spirit as a feminine hypostasis.” I find it fascinating that in Gnosticism, the imagery and mythology of the Divine Mother, the Holy Spirit, is so similar to the imagery of the Shekinah in Kabbalah that they seem to belong to one and the same tradition. Certain texts name her as the Mother of the Universe but also speak of the androgyny of the divine source in imagery similar to the later kabbalistic texts. In one Gnostic text called the Trimorphic Protennoia, the speaker describes herself as the intangible Womb that gives shape to the All, the life that moves in every creature: I am the voice speaking softly. I exist from the first. I dwell within the Silence, Within the immeasurable Silence. I descended to the midst of the underworld And I shone down upon the darkness. It is I who poured forth the Water. I am the one hidden within Radiant Waters... I am the Image of the Invisible Spirit. I am the Womb that gives shape to the All By giving birth to the Light that shines in splendour. - Anne Baring, The Gnostic Imagery of the Divine Mother (The Dream of the Cosmos)
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 13:53:13 +0000
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