WHO IS DIVINE SOPHIA?

About Gaia and Sophia

The planet Earth is a living being, and just as we have a body, a soul and a higher potentiality we call spirit, so does the Earth.

When we say Mother Earth or Mother Nature, we are acknowledging that the planet’s beingness involves being ‘mother’ to all that dwell upon her and undergo the physical processes of birth, death and regeneration. This is the ‘wisdom of nature’ where natural laws of life operate. In a real sense Mother Earth enfolds all life in her mighty arms. And more, she also undergoes like processes but on a vastly longer cosmic scale.

The names we attribute to her, and especially when people call her Gaia after the primordial Greek Goddess, point to an inherent feeling that she is more than physical, more than matter. She is indeed. Gaia is known esoterically as the World Soul that lives within the physical, and without which the physical earth would be a dead planet.

Complementary to Gaia, Sophia is the spirit. Sophia is Greek for Wisdom, and she is a divine being who exists in the eternal realms. Yet she was active in creation itself. Known as Hokhmah by the Hebrews we find her working with the Creator. She speaks in the Book of Proverbs, ‘When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was with him like a master builder, and I was daily his delight.’ (v. 29-30)

With her heavenly fingers this awesome spirit being worked from the higher realms upon Mother Earth through the World Soul in countless ways. Here she is continuing to order and vitalize creation in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon (7:27; 8:1), written in the second century in Alexandria, Egypt.

And while remaining in herself, she renews all things ...

She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other

And orders all things well ...

Getting to Know Wisdom-Sophia

Human beings have developed a consciousness with a unique sense of ‘I’ through which we can come to know ourselves. And we can personally discover Wisdom because she lives in our souls as a potential.

How did Wisdom make her home in us? How can we find a divine being in our soul? To explore her we need to follow the evolution of consciousness and our changing experience of the goddess.

In very ancient ages humanity lived within the world soul, absorbed in nature and the spirit active there. It was experienced but was not known in the manner we know. Awareness of soul life had not awakened. Consciousness existed only in a dim dream-like state closer to spirit than the physical. People lived an eternal now.

Esoteric teaching tells us that consciousness shifted with the first glimmerings of soul life. The interweaving of spirit and matter in all life on earth was now perceived spatially as well as clairvoyantly. Spatial perception brought with it an awareness of differentiation in nature and in the spirits active within its forms, and of cyclic rhythms. This enabled people to depict what they experienced in images through art and story. We are looking at the emergence of animistic and shamanistic spirituality.

The Wise Goddess

The human soul functions in three ways, through sentience, thinking and willing. Soul consciousness has continued to evolve over the ages as we learnt to express each of the three functions.

Rudolf Steiner[1] traced this development through different ages. Sentient soul development reached a high point in what he named the Egypto-Chaldean cultural period, 2907-747 BCE, centred on the great empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt and extending widely. The key development was the ability to inwardly know sense experience, including about self, in relation to spirit. Logical thinking and grasping the world through reason did not exist.

Activity through the sentient soul involved a remnant of a more ancient innate clairvoyance. This meant people could come to Sophia, to divine Wisdom, directly through an inner process that linked them with the supersensible. They would perceive something, and the necessary concept just appeared in their souls – that is, the experience of the world of the senses aligned with parallel non-sensory realities, and this kind of knowing emerged from within the soul. It was expressed in a new way through the creation of complex symbols.

The rich complexity of experience led to diverse encounters with spiritual activity. Divine Wisdom was known in a range of guises in different cultures and through many functions. Consequently, she differentiated into many goddesses.

Yet in an age marked by the beginnings of time-based history as a world framework, there was always a role for Wisdom as first-born goddess-queen (along with her masculine counterpart). As with Hokhmah, we have this tribute to supreme Sumerian goddess Ninhursag, mother of all, midwife of heaven and earth. It is by Enheduanna, first known poet, daughter of the mighty King Sargon, high priestess at Ur in the Temple of Inanna in the 23rd century BCE:

Princess of silence

Unfailing great lady of heaven

When she speaks heaven shakes.