It is a common complaint among pagans, Buddhists, Hindus and New Agers that whenever the U.S. media mentions "religion" it always refers to Christianity as though that's all there is. Even the existence of other religions has been erased from much of the public mind unless you count Muslim extremists, as a religious group.
Similarly when someone says "God" everybody thinks they know what is meant. But if you said "Goddess," those who weren't freaked out would say "Which goddess?" The existence of Goddess has been erased from the public mind. So when Dar' Shem, for example, is described as the "Reiki of Sophia" it is, to many people, a case of two unknowns in the same sentence.
Today the Classical languages such as Greek, from which her name came are neglected. We cannot take it for granted that the meaning of Her Name, Sophia, is understood. Samuel Johnson is famous as being the compiler of the first great dictionary of the English language. His definition of an illiterate was as someone who didn’t know Latin and Greek. How times have changed! We have illiterates in our government.
Sophia is not just a goddess, like Her major divine aspects as Isis, Hathor, Ila, Shakti, Demeter, Hecate, Kali, Gaia, Cerridwen and others who have recently been re-entering public consciousness because of the 60's crowd. With the possible exception of Tara of the Tibetans and Lallita of the Hindus who may be Her with a different name, Sophia is the Goddess, not a goddess. She is behind all the goddesses of every age and every religion. Her name means Wisdom.
Originally the word "philosophy" meant "Lover of Wisdom." Then it meant wisdom with a capital W. Now it seems to mean "lover of wisdom, which is clever debate," and Wisdom has been eclipsed by the more dangerous cleverness. Witness the income of American lawyers. The West, for centuries, has hidden the goddess, either by deliberate persecution of Her followers by the patriarchal religions, or by delegating Her to roles as minor as those played by women in the same societies.
Goddess nowadays is being revealed in many aspects as the feminine aspects of the human psyche, and psychologists such as Carl Jung, and poets such as Goethe, have been in the forefront of those insisting that the survival of mankind depends on a re-evaluation of the feminine psyche and its aspects of Divinity, particularly Sophia. It is clear that if we keep going down the insane, patriarchal path of continuous competition for diminishing resources, then humanity is doomed. The patriarchal concept of controlling and manipulating Nature as merely a collection of resources has produced pollution of our earth, air, and water and degredation of our environment, as many articles in recent publications make clear. The insanity of making things that do not biodegrade is becoming obvious to all. Everything in Nature's cycles is used.
There was nothing wasted on Spaceship Earth, until human chemists began making things that are useless to the Earth because they do not decay, and cannot be used even by micro-organisms. That is the way of the patriarchal "control, compete, and use" philosophy that entails only cleverness, no common-sense, no wisdom. It turns major human activities into forms of mining, in which nothing is returned to the Earth, except useless materials or poisons.
Sophia-Wisdom entails cooperation in the cycles of Nature, of living in a way that goes with the natural flow, using Wisdom to look ahead, as the Native Americans did. Any action would be considered on its merits over seven generations, to ensure that short term benefits did not swamp long term gains. Now our politicians see no further ahead than the next election, or the next payout from a corporate lobbyist. Our clever scientists do whatever can be done, without regard for whether it should be done. Wisdom is denied, or derided by the PR specialists of those who are destroying the planet for the sake of temporary personal gain.
The solution to our problems is found in the feminineWisdom side of life. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. The cleverness side has been tried for centuries and has failed because every benefit of cleverness is turned into a disadvantage or danger by the clever people who don't know when to stop what they're at, and go beyond all sense.
The commonsense of the nurturing feminine is very much needed today, and the goddess energy is popping up all over the place even as the unregulated male energy is leading everyone down the path to destruction. Westerners have become largely orphaned from the feminine energy, in the words of Caitlin Matthews, and need to learn a great deal that used to be taken for granted by all. Read her book “Sophia.”
As the Women's Movement developed over the past several decades, and technology and contraception began to free women from the slave drudgery of the last century, several great advances were made. In most branches of Christianity woman were considered inferior because of the neurotic ideas of Paul of Tarsus, and the mythology of the Fall of Man as being due to Eve. My own view of the myth is that Eve chose consciousness. Adam was dense in comparison.
Women for centuries were expected to take the advice of the so spiritually superior, celibate, male priests as actually having authority over their married lives as mothers and wives. Authority figures such as St. Augustine relegated women to an inferior, or even despicable state in the most debasing terms. Here is an example of his thought, if it can be thus described:
"What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman- I fail to see what use women can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children."
The man who said that is considered a founder of the theology of Christendom, and it shows. How many women priests are there in the Catholic Church after 17 centuries? Augustine is an authority, a Saint, and honored among the theological greats. As a piece of historical trivia, he also had an illegitimate daughter who doesn’t get much publicity. As far as I am concerned, I don’t care how clever he was. He was pretty much devoid of wisdom. A more direct description is fool.
The modern Wiccan movement, for all its excesses, did society the service of beginning to make dents in the Augustine/Paul anti-women combination. What added to its impact was the finding of the second century Christian scriptures at Nag Hammadi in 1945. These scriptures included the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of the Hebrews, and many others that had been suppressed by the patriarchal Church leaders after the Council of Nicaea in the 4th century. Their own doctored and heavily edited, politically correct versions became the current New Testament, and their anti-women attitude the norm of the theology.
Many educated people have recently begun to realize the deceit that had been practiced for close to 2000 years by religious authorities. These gospels indicated that women were of major importance in Early Christianity, and that if Jesus existed He was not a celibate monk, the great exception, but a Jewish, married man, with children, the great example.
The feminine aspect of Divinity was of major importance to Him and all Jewish mystics, who called it the Shekinah, and located it in the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies, until Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. To the early followers of the Jesus teachings, the Nazorean Gnostics, who were not Christians, any more than Jesus was, the Holy Spirit was feminine. The Gnostics knew her as Sophia. In the Aramaic and Hebrew the word for spirit is feminine. In Latin it is masculine, and in Greek it is neutral.
The political actions of the Early Church took advantage of this fact to mislead future generations in their translations into the two languages that removed femininity from the Holy Spirit, and left an unbalanced set of Divine energies until the Blessed Mother began to make some inroads theologically.
In Proverbs and the Wisdom literature, some of which was removed from the Protestant Bible by Martin Luther during the Protestant revolt against Catholicism, She is called Wisdom, and bears the same relationship to God as Shakti does to Shiva. She is the creative power of the god and is now beginning to access Her former powers as an antidote to the arid cleverness that is destroying Her planet, in the name of short term profits whatever the long term damage.
I am not advocating female tyranny instead of male tyranny. I am trying to point out that women are different from men and we need both sets of skills for survival at the moment. Women represent half the human race and it is insane to exclude them from the council chambers or the pantheon. I place on the Catholic Church the accusation that their methods and attitudes towards women have for centuries deliberately cut out from society half of its members as resources.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s America had a stunning lesson on how another country had used the resources we ignore or marginalize. And that country was officially atheistic.
Every October 4th I think of Sputnik and every June 16th I think about the cosmonaut Valentina Tereskova. On that day in 1963 she orbited the Earth 48 times and steered her spacecraft to within about a mile of the cosmonaut who had been put into orbit the day before.
At that time I was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, a group of mathematicians and scientists who were considered weird by the rest of the scientific community because they believed long before Sputnik, that the ultimate destiny of mankind was in Space. The Society invited Valentina to a banquet in her honour in London. She came. It was one of the most impressive moments of my life up to that time. The hall where she was to be presented was filled with scientists…all of them men as far as I could see. When she came in, emanating radiant energy and perfect health and confidence, every man in the place stood up as one, in silence, in honour of the first woman in space.
There was also a cosmic first in that she married the cosmonaut with whom she had made the first space rendezvous, and Nikita Khrushchev himself gave the toast at the wedding and mentioned for the first time, by name, the man who had designed the enormously powerful rockets that gave Russia the many firsts into space. This had been a state secret since Sputnik in case he was assassinated by the CIA to interfere with the Russian space program.
While we are here let’s quickly review what happened when Sputnik, the first ever earth satellite began to orbit the Earth on October 4th 1957. It was emitting beeps on two frequencies that ham radios could pick up, a smart piece of propaganda ensuring publicity from all around the world. At the right time of day you could see it with binoculars as it went through the sky at 18,000 miles an hour.
The Russians gave its trajectory and times of visibility, not forgetting to mention that it could be seen from Little Rock, Arkansas where America at that time was being treated to the sight of a little black girl being escorted into a high school with a guard of soldiers to protect her from the freedom loving segregationists.
America had agreed to the proposal to create an artificial satellite during the International Geophysical Year, and was working on the Vanguard, which weighed a few pounds. Eisenhower wanted to keep the military out of the picture so the military missile rockets were not to be used to put Vanguard into space. Every stage of the work was made public except some of the problems.
The Russians said nothing whatever about what they were doing. Russian scientists could read everything the West had available about rockets, but none of the Western scientists bothered to read anything in Russian. Few of them indeed knew any Russian. Even wanting to learn it could cause suspicions.
Both Americans and Russians had taken everything about the German V2 rockets that they could lay their hands on as the War came to an end. And the Americans had managed to keep Von Braun the German rocket scientist, and a few hundred V2 rockets and trainloads of spare parts. So it came as a stunning blow to America prestige when Sputnik, which weighed 184 pounds was there in space and visible in American skies. To get a payload of that weight into space was not even considered possible by the Americans. It was a stunning technological achievement of rocketry brute force, and only a few disagreed with that, mainly some sour grapes American military people.
Scientists all over realized that October 4th was the day on which we entered the Space Age. As I said, the British Interplanetary Society was considered weird by ‘orthodox ‘ scientists. Six months before Sputnik went up the Astronomer Royal, an orthodox scientist for sure, said flatly “Space travel is bilge.”
People like Arthur Clarke the science fiction writer, had been certain all along that eventually it would happen. But America was chagrined to find that they were not the first or the best, a matter of great importance to the American media and politicians. So complacent were the U.S. authorities that America would be first in space that Sputnik had passed over America twice without being detected before the authorities knew about it from the London Associated Press report.
There was tremendous fallout from the incident. The dog Laika orbited the Earth shortly after Sputnik. The main focus in the Western press was that the dog could not be brought back alive, not the fact that it was alive for a long time in outer space. Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in 1961, a young man in his twenties, and then Valentina.
The obvious conclusion made by the media in many countries was that the science education system of the Soviets was superior to those of the capitalists. And it finally dawned on Americans that they were ignoring half the human race when it was discovered that half of Russian qualified engineers were women. Valentina had a doctorate in aeronautical engineering. Engineering and science at high levels was a totally acceptable career path for girls in Russia.
American engineering at the time was male dominated and seemed to be focused on trivia like the tail fins of cars. And finally America began to consider raising the educational standard of its students, a matter always previously considered dangerous by its politicians.
We woke up for a short time but now we have been going backwards again because of religious fundamentalism. People are advocating using the Bible as a science text. Such stupidity does not merit the word wisdom no matter how clever the arguments and deceptions being used. The same fundamentalists regard women as inferior to men, advocate original sin, are paranoid about sex, and consider humans as separate from Nature and appointed master of the planet Earth by some supernatural authority. They are the enemy of planetary and human survival.
Let’s stop backing away every time they wave the Bible at us. There’s no chance of a goddess emphasis arising from these people, or a regard for the planet as anything but a resource to mine for raw materials. We can see where that is leading us. Completely verified scientific data is now denied and ignored unless it fits into a current anti survival political and religious dogma.
In my health articles I have often said, “If you don’t take care of your body, where are you going to live?” The same thing applies to the planet. Too much cleverness, too much absurd and counter survival dogma, and too little wisdom. No thought for future generations, only the next election and quick profits.
It doesn’t work, and hasn’t ever worked. Women automatically think of future generations. It’s time to access their wisdom, even if they have black skins and needed military protection just to go to school in this country while in others they were encouraged to reach their full potential. As the old proverb goes: “Cherish your enemy, and contemplate him. He holds the secrets of your success.”
Our enemy is a hydra with many heads, patriarchy, paternalism, corruption in government, money as God, competition without cooperation, might is right and the profit motive as the only motives for action. And let’s also remember religiously inspired and deliberately cultivated ignorance. Contemplating these will show the way out of our dilemma. I suggest the Wisdom represented by Sophia and the disregarded half of the human race as a good start.
Douglas Buchanan
