The Hebrew Goddess is in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. She is the woman praised in the Psalms and Song of Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs and Job. She has been translated as ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ in both the Old and New Testaments and so people have no idea that our Mother the Holy Spirit is who is being referred to. Our ancestors considered the Cosmic Mother to be the executive power of the Divine, who gives body to life. In the Wisdom literature she is the Mother, Bride and Consort (royal spouse) of the Father God. She is the image of Light, Truth, Law, Insight, Understanding, Compassion and Justice.
At first it seemed unnatural to pray to God as Father-Mother. But once I realized the truth and importance of the feminine aspect of God it just made me sad to think how she has been – and still is – ignored and denied. Our ancestors not only worshiped her – they adored her. We can look all around us today and see what a world is like without its Mother. We can see it in the veiled and abused women in the Middle East. We can see it in the denigrated sexuality and views of women as sex objects in the West. This is a world that doesn’t value its women. If, for the last several thousand years, the feminine side of God had been respected and celebrated, this Earth would be a much kinder and loving place. Wherever I studied our ancestors, whether it was the Quakers in Pennsylvania, or the Knights Templars, or the Cathars, or the Essenes, women were treated equally with men in all ways – including spiritually. In the early Christian church, women were apostles, deacons, prophets, missionaries and healers. There was no office that was closed to them.
Our family has always been the preservers of our Mother’s worship. Well, not in recent history with my direct family, but historically. John the Baptist and Jesus were both instrumental in trying to bring a new understanding of our Mother as the Goddess of Wisdom. Unfortunately that Light of Truth was only to surface for a short time. However, it has been perpetuated by a hidden lineage that has never failed since their day and before. The age of Patriarchy was necessary in order for humanity’s intellect to develop. Many believe that the next age will be that of the Goddess. If so, we can expect humanity’s quality of life will improve considerably.
Jesus and the Goddess: The Secret Teachings Of the Original Christians
By Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
The Myth of Sophia
“There are many versions of the Christian Sophia myth, but the essence is the story of her fall from her Father’s house into the world, where she loses her way, looks for love in all the wrong places, becomes abused by many false lovers, and eventually falls into prostitution. Eventually she repents and calls out for help, whereupon her Father sends down her lover-brother Christ to rescue her. Sophia represents the soul of each initiate and the myth is an allegory for the fall of the soul into incarnation in a human body, where it becomes lost in the world, until its eventual spiritual liberation through contacting the Christ within, representing the Consciousness of God at the heart of all beings.
The Christians often picture Sophia as having two aspects. The higher Sophia is symbolized by a virgin mother and represents the pristine purity of the soul, from which our bodily self materializes. The fallen Sophia is symbolized by a prostitute who is redeemed, representing the soul fallen into incarnation, lost in the world and in need of spiritual enlightenment. The myth of the Christian God man Jesus can only be properly understood alongside the myth of the Christian Goddess Sophia. In the myth of Sophia, the Goddess is the central figure, whilst her brother-lover is an incidental character. In the Jesus myth it is the opposite. The God man is the central character. Yet the myth of the lost Goddess forms an important subtext to the Jesus story, which would have been obvious to Christian initiates familiar with both allegories.
In the gospels the two Mary’s represent the higher Sophia and the fallen Sophia. They are both called by the same name to emphasize the fact that they are mythologically aspects of the same figure. As in the Sophia myth, the first Mary is a virgin mother, like Sophia with the Father, and the second is a prostitute lover who is redeemed by Jesus, like Sophia lost in the world. Like her son/brother/lover Jesus, the Christian Goddess is a syncretic figure created from both Pagan and Jewish sources. The Gnostic Christians themselves trace the sources of their Sophia myth back to Jewish texts, such as Genesis, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Proverbs, and various Pagan myths. For example, essentially the same story of the fallen and redeemed Goddess, often pictured in two aspects as virgin lover and prostitute lover, can be found in the Pagan myths of Aphrodite, Helen, Eros and Psyche, and most famously Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, all of which Pagan writers tell us are allegories for the descent of the soul into incarnation and its eventual redemption.
The figures of Demeter and Persephone were developed by the Greeks from ancient Egyptian mythology. The Pagan philosopher Porphyry tells us that the Egyptian Goddess Isis is equivalent to both the Greek Goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Just as the Egyptian myth of the dying and resurrecting God man Osiris is the earliest source of the myth of Jesus, so the myths of Isis is the earliest sources of the Christian myth of Sophia the lost and redeemed Goddess. Sophia, whose name means ‘Wisdom’, had been the Goddess of the Pagan philosophers for centuries. Indeed, the name ‘philosopher’, first used by Pythagoras, means ‘lover of Sophia’. Although often pictured today as dry academics, these brilliant intellectuals were actually mystics and devotees of the Goddess. Sophia was also an important mythical figure for Jewish Gnostic philosophers, such as Philo the Pythagorean.
……. The Jewish Sophia literature talks of a mythical ‘Good Man’ – no one in particular – who is the Goddess’ envoy on Earth. Moses was pictured as such an envoy. According to the Exodus myth, when he passes on his authority to Joshua (Jesus) he also receives ‘the Spirit of Sophia’. For the Christian Gnostics, their mythical hero Joshua/Jesus is likewise Sophia’s envoy who comes to reveal her Wisdom which leads to Gnosis. Hence ‘the secret’ that Paul proclaims in his Letter to the Colossians is ‘Christ in whom is hid the treasures of Sophia and Gnosis.’
In our view the evidence clearly suggests that Christianity was originally a synthesis of pre-existing Jewish and Pagan spiritual philosophy and allegorical mythology, and that central to that tradition was the myth of the Goddess Sophia. The eradication of the Christian Goddess by the patriarchal Roman Church has left us all motherless children. Women have been denied a sympathetic rapport with the Divine Feminine. Men have been denied a love-affair with a female face of Deity. Spirituality has become part of the battleground which separates the sexes, when it should be the sanctuary of eternal fellowship. The original Christians, however, practiced ‘partnership spirituality’. They were noted for valuing men and women equally, as expressions of God and Goddess. They saw the division of the sexes as a correlate of that primal polarity which is the basis of life. A duality which when made one, as in the act of love, brings the bliss of mystical union that they called ‘Gnosis’.”
Timothy Freke has an honors degree in philosophy and is an authority on world spirituality and the author of more than twenty books. Peter Gandy has an MA in Classical Civilization. For more information about the authors, their books, lectures and seminars, visit; www.jesusmysteries.demon.co.uk
From the author of Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes;
“The text of the Naassenes Sermon confirms that this new awareness of the Divine Mother was absorbed into Gnostic Christianity. The Sermon actually quotes a hymn honoring the Mother as the companion to the Father; “From thee (comes) Father and through thee (comes) Mother, two names immortal, progenitors of Aeons.” …We also know from a scripture called the Gospel according to the Hebrews that Jesus made another extraordinary contribution to the Wisdom dialogue. Though this gospel was suppressed and thus did not survive, from the descriptions of early writers it seems to have closely followed the Gospel of Matthew, except that it was written in Hebrew or Aramaic instead of Greek – hence its name. The scripture was apparently so popular that it was referred to as the ‘fifth gospel’. Most important, it included the following key passage quoting Jesus, which fortunately is preserved in two separate places in the writings of Origen and also in the writings of Saint Jerome: ‘Even now did my Mother the Holy Spirit take me by one of my hairs, and carry me away to the great Mountain of Tabor.’
…The idea that the Spirit flows from the Divine Mother was unprecedented in Judaism, and thus was a momentous development in the West. But the idea had long been understood in the East. In the Hindu traditions the same Divine Mother who brings the world into existence and sustains it also makes available a very special form of her own divine Self; a divine grace that is the Eastern equivalent of the Holy Spirit. Hindus believe that by means of this extremely subtle energy, known as the Chitti Kundalini or the Shakti Kundalini, the Divine Mother brings about the dramatic reversal of flow that leads to the heavenly source and today, the living traditions of Hinduism describe the concept of the reversal of flow in almost exactly the same language the Gnostics used in the first centuries of Christianity. The only difference is that Hindus usually describe the Gnostic Christian ‘descent’ of Spirit as an awakening from within. From our discussion of immanence, it should be obvious that both are equivalent. Either way, it is the decisive turning point in the spiritual life of the disciple.”
Our Mother’s devotees believed she was the Serpent on the Tree in the Garden of Eden who brought knowledge to Adam and Eve. If this is confusing to you because as we understand it, Satan brought that knowledge, and it was a ‘bad’ thing; here is the key to understanding it; The Holy Spirit is sometimes represented as two sons with opposite characteristics. Originally there was only one son with both characteristics. When one is only recognizing the ‘bad’ son one is not acknowledging ‘good’ son. One is, in fact, judging God. I have tried to get this across at many points throughout my writings, because I know from experience, it’s very hard to wrap your head around. Especially since we have been taught a corrupted version of the Eden allegory. The Mother and her two sons are the same. Knowledge is a good thing. Access to the Tree of Life is a good thing. The Power of the Holy Spirit is a Great Thing.
Our Mother wields three powers; that of creation, preservation and destruction. She’s the life-force that creates the universe and sustains it and at the end of a period of time, she destroys it and turns it back into pure energy. The author of Guardians of the Holy Grail says; “It is the destructive power of the Goddess that gives a Holy Grail the power to transform a human into a god or goddess, a process it accomplishes by destroying the physical and emotional impurities, as well as the false notions that keep him or her from knowing their true self.” The black Madonna’s of the European cathedrals are most likely representative of this aspect of our Mother. To the Templars she was Baphomet which looks hideous, if you don’t understand her purpose. The destructive Life Force is what accomplishes the Christening that leads to the Sacred Marriage of our soul and spirit – so this gives you an idea of why the destructive side of her was so important to our ancestors. What most Christians look at as evil, they saw as constructive and beneficent.
We learned earlier that we are a star race and that God was said to send his/her power through a central Sun that traveled through other Suns. This power is the Life Force. It’s the true Holy Grail, the subtle, etheric energy that surrounds and interpenetrates an object and has the power to transform those who come into contact with it. This Life Force is the Goddess. The ancients believed that God and Goddess were locked in an eternal embrace and it was that embrace that sustained life. This was said to be represented by the two angels locked in an embrace that adorned the top of the Ark of the Covenant. The Israelites called their Goddess the Shekinah, the royal Consort of the God Yahweh.
The Pyramids of Egypt were built to be conductors of the Holy Spirit power, which is why initiations took place in them. The Templars built all the beautiful cathedrals of Europe and made them conducive to accumulating the Life Force for their initiations. To learn about the Divine Feminine, a great source is the author Margaret Starbird. She has dedicated her life’s work to further the understanding and acceptance of the feminine aspect of God. She has this to say about the loss of the Sacred Feminine in our world. From her book; The Woman with the Alabaster Jar;
“Our worship of an exclusively male image of God is both distorted and dangerous. According to the principle ‘As in Heaven, so on Earth,’ male preferences and male domination cause society to form institutions based on a male model, with power concentrated at the top and the exploited masses imprisoned at the bottom. This is the model for dictatorship and oppression. In a society where the feminine is given equal time, children are nurtured and widows are consoled; arts, letters, music and dance are encouraged; childhood is joyful; work is productive and people live in harmony.”
In her book, Margaret informs us that the dove, which is a sign of the Holy Spirit, wasn’t considered masculine until it was translated into the Latin spiritus sanctus. She says that the original Hebrew word for Spirit is feminine. Don’t think for a minute that this was inadvertently done by the Catholics. They eventually succumbed to their parishioner’s wishes and brought the Divine Feminine back in the guise of the Virgin Mary. Ironically, or sadly, Southern Baptists, and myself until recently, cannot fathom the reason the Catholics deify the Virgin Mary as they do. The author of Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes has this to say about the loss of the Divine Mother in Christianity;
“The Wisdom dialogue inspired by the Book of Job reached its culmination in the teachings of Jesus – yet those same teachings never found their way into orthodox Christianity. The church aggressively resisted the Divine Mother and succeeded in erasing every trace of her from its official doctrines. In Christianity’s earliest days, of course, things were very different. The first Christian churches were loosely organized communities in which a spirit of gender equality often prevailed. We know that women participated in discussions, taught alongside men, and sometimes even led services. ….During the second century a male hierarchy of deacons, priests, and bishops emerged. By 200 CE women had been relegated to subservience.”
That author fills us in on the role of the Holy Spirit. He says that she controls all human activity via the power of the planets and stars. I know many Christians will object to this, but the truth is that destiny and fate are part of the plan put in place by God. The Essenes – and in fact all of our ancestors, were involved with astrology and the keeping of time through the movements of the heavens. The planets and stars were intended to guide us in more ways than just navigation! The cosmic powers are benign. They are neither good nor evil. They serve both purposes, depending on what is called for by the choices and actions of the people concerned.
Our ancestors believed that every star and planet was the body of a soul. In fact, we humans are made from the ‘stuff of the stars’, which is a scientific fact. Since I was young I have believed that the twelve signs of the Zodiac were the system put in place by God to insure that there are twelve types of personalities or sets of characteristics needed to fulfill all the functions of earthly life. There’s a science behind it. It’s one of the laws of the universe put in place by God to insure proper functioning of this creation.
The Goddess lives within us as our inner Wisdom and Guidance. She is that ‘still small voice’ that I have audibly heard. She gives us the gifts of understanding and discernment, which is something I fervently pray for day after day. The Goddess, our beloved Holy Spirit, is my best friend, and my constant companion. The Bible and Wisdom texts have this to say about our Mother;
“I am Wisdom, I bestow shrewdness and show the way to knowledge and discretion.” Proverbs 8:12
“From me come advice and ability; understanding and power are mine.” Proverbs 8:14
“Through me kings hold sway and governors enact laws.” Proverbs 8:15
“Whoever listens to me will live without a care, undisturbed by fear of misfortune.” Proverbs 1:33
“I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the Earth was.” Proverbs 8:23
King Solomon showed his love for her in saying;
“She knows and understands all things; she will guide me prudently in whatever I do, and guard me with her glory.” Wisdom 8: 9.11
“I called for help and there came to me the Spirit of Wisdom. I valued her more than health and beauty. I preferred her to the light of day, for her radiance is unsleeping.” Wisdom 7:7-8
“She is an inexhaustible treasure for mortals and those who profit by it become God’s friends.” Wisdom 7:14
“I was taught by Wisdom, by her whose skill made all things.” Wisdom 7:22
“She is quick to make herself known to all who desire knowledge of her, he who rises early in search of her will not grow weary in the quest, for he will find her seated at his door.” Wisdom 6: 13-14
“She herself searches far and wide for those who are worthy of her, and on their daily path she appears to them with kindly intent, meeting them half way in all their purposes.” Wisdom 6:16
“Wisdom working through a holy prophet, gave them success in all they did.” Wisdom 11:5
I mentioned earlier that the word Elohim was a plural word. If it was singular it would be El. According to Richard Smoley; “This word is a feminine noun and a masculine plural, implying Goddess and God and yet more, the One become many – hence singularity and multiplicity as a simultaneous truth. In effect, it alludes to all creatures and specifically, to human beings, as quantum manifestations of the One, the Holy Father-Mother.” To simplify the term quantum manifestations, just think of us as individual sparks of God living on planet Earth in this incarnation, most of whom are unaware that we are in actuality temples of God him/herself. Of course, Light workers already know this.
He is absolutely correct. Elohim stands for everything that is God. That includes gods, goddesses, lords, elfs, fairies, humans, extra-terrestrials, animals, plants, you name it – it’s all Elohim! Without the Spirit of God in it – nothing would have life.
The Dictionary of Common Era Gnosticism tells us that; “The Holy Spirit is the heavenly partner with whom a union, a marriage, is formed. The Holy Spirit delivers its human partner from death and seals that soul so that it will no longer be capturable by the lower powers (Archons). Holy Baptism, a ritual much older than Christianity, is a purification by fire and by water to assist one to receive the heavenly partner, the Spirit.”
And from the brilliant author of Mysteries of the Bridechamber;
“The Mother principle is synonymous with the heart systems, and as such a peerless organizer of groups, of societies, but prone to a deficiency in individualism. Unlike the Father, she values peace and longs for bliss. Mistress of the psyche, gateway of the soul, she is subtle and intuitive in her dealings, but also given to inertia and materialism. She is therefore at her best in tandem with the Father. If robbed of dignity, if excluded from her rightful place of authority at his side at the helm of creation, the Mother will turn to the sensory satisfactions of the physical realm and become licentious, or else hide herself in the black burka of Puritanism.
…The foundational laws, the moral guidelines of society, and the means to their ends, both secular and religious, are worked out only by men, and the only ruling deity is male. Every vital decision concerning foreign and economic policies, every law concerning the family, criminal justice, racial attitudes, moral boundaries, and the sexual or scientific ethos is driven and controlled by men. As a result, our civilization is in the grip of a faster and faster demon of productivity, driven by a phantom called progress, overworked, out of balance, suffering vertigo and despair. The sickening of the Earth, vast populations starving or perishing by genocide; crime, suicide, drug addiction, the rape of childhood, and the death of joy – all these are the inevitable consequences of rampant patriarchy and a repressed mother archetype.
…Above all, the Christian religion needs to renew its ancient tryst with prophecy. But the prophetic vocation is born only in the marriage chamber, where the male and female principles must be equally honored if they are to unite. This is a fact that the history of the prophets, of whatever nation, has confirmed again and again. Where either gender is degraded, the heart of religion dies. The Gnosis withers; the evolution of the human spirit cannot go forward and the civilization dies. Yet it was for this evolution, indeed, that Christianity was brought into existence. And perhaps for this same reason it is already beginning to renew itself in the hidden mystical schools of the Far East, where the oceanic Mother principle has always held sway. …We can be certain that one day, if not tomorrow as projected, the Renaissance prophecies of a coming world order based on a united brotherhood of world religions will be fulfilled. The One Primal Spirit will eventually prevail.”
The most important thing I can bring you regarding our Mother, the Holy Spirit, are these words from Jesus spoken in The Gospel of the Holy Twelve – Lection 45;
For I say unto you, whosoever blasphemeth the Son of Man,
it shall be forgiven them; but whoso blasphemeth the Holy Spirit
it shall not be forgiven them either in this age, or in the next,
for they resist the Light of God, by the false traditions of men.