Recovering the Feminine Gender of the Holy Spirit (Part 1)
The Shekinah-Sophia
Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit
[Author’s Note: This essay was a webinar I gave on August 13th this year to the online ‘Madonna Rising’ Chartres Community week organized by Ubiquity University. The title formed the first part of a trilogy of webinars on the overall subject of the Divine Feminine.]
I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light for the light that cometh from her never goeth out. — Wisdom of Solomon
In the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, beautifully named ‘The Voice of the Dove’ and ‘The Jewels of the Heavenly Bride’, the Shekinah is the co-creator of the world and dwells within it as divine presence. The word Kabbalah means ‘to receive’. In the words of a modern kabbalist, Warren Kenton, “Kabbalism is the inner and mystical aspect of Judaism. It is the Perennial Teaching about the Attributes of the Divine, the nature of the universe and the destiny of man.”
The fundamental teaching of Kabbalism is the doctrine of emanation. Divine Spirit is both beyond creation and also within it, accessible to us in this dimension through ritual, prayer and contemplation. The aim of the kabbalist was and is to unite the Above with the Below, the invisible divine world with our manifest world, understanding that there is no essential separation between them.
Developing possibly from remote origins, a revered chain of contemplatives passed on the teaching of Kabbalism orally until the thirteenth century CE when a book called the Zohar or Book of Splendor was written in northern Spain, thought to be in the town of Girona which was then a centre of kabbalist studies. Many centuries before that, it had flourished prolifically in Hellenistic Alexandria. Still later, it moved to Spain, at the other end of the Mediterranean.[1] Then, with the brutal expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century, Kabbalism moved to Safed, in Palestine, where one of its greatest teachers, Moses Cordovero (1522–1570), lived and wrote his famous work, The Orchard of Pomegranates (Pardes Rimmonim). Kabbalism flourished briefly in Renaissance Italy, where the brilliant young Pico della Mirandola hoped to create a fusion of Kabbalism and Christianity until his untimely death cut short the possibility of realizing his vision. It also took root in early seventeenth century Europe in the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
However, I believe that to trace the distant origins of Kabbalism we need to go back to the First Temple in Jerusalem built by Solomon, and to the events that took place there in 621 BCE. Originally, Israel and this great Temple had an ancient, shamanic, visionary tradition. But in 621 BCE, in the reign of King Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took control of the Temple. They banished the ancient shamanic rituals of the High Priest and imposed their own rule. They removed everything to do with the Queen of Heaven, whose other titles were The Holy Spirit and Divine Wisdom. In this First Temple, she was worshipped as the Goddess Asherah, the consort of Yahweh and, with him, the co-creator of the world.
The Deuteronomists had the statue of the Goddess Asherah and the great bronze Serpent – image of her power to regenerate life – removed from the Temple and destroyed. Her Sacred Groves were cut down. All images of her were broken. The ancient shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honored and communed with the Queen of Heaven as Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit were banished and replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s Law. The vital communion with the inner dimensions of reality was lost; the making of images was forbidden.
This is the crucially important time when I think it is possible to say that the whole foundation of Jewish and later Christian civilization became unbalanced. The Deuteronomists ensured that Yahweh was the sole Creator God. The Feminine co-creator, the Goddess Asherah, was eliminated. Henceforth, the Divine Feminine aspect of the god-head was banished from orthodox Judaism and, until a Papal Bull of 1950, from Christianity. The Deuteronomists went further: they demoted the Queen of Heaven, whose title was ‘Mother of All Living’, into the human figure of Eve, bestowing this title upon her. They created the Myth of the Fall in the Book of Genesis (2 & 3), with its message of sin, guilt, punishment and banishment from the Garden of Eden, severing the Tree of Life from its ancient association with the Queen of Heaven. According to the Old Testament scholar, Margaret Barker, in the First Temple tradition, the Tree of Life was associated with Divine Wisdom, the Queen of Heaven.[2]
I would suggest that Kabbalism is the surviving teaching of the First Temple prior to the Deuteronomists’ purge.[3] I would also suggest that this teaching was passed down secretly by Jews for hundreds of years. Many Jews chose to leave Palestine and settle in Egypt, in the city of Alexandria, in three successive waves: at the time of the Deuteronomist takeover of the Temple in 621 BCE, at the time of the Babylonian Captivity in 586 BCE and after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. It may be that Alexandria was one of the places where Kabbalism was able to take root and flourish.
It seems highly significant that one of the most important images of Kabbalism is the Tree of Life, which is a clear and wonderful concept describing the web of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the fabric of life in this world. At the innermost level or dimension of reality is the unmanifest, unknowable Divine Ground; at the outermost the physical forms we call nature, body and matter. Linking the two is the archetypal template of the Tree of Life – an inverted tree – whose branches grow from its roots in the divine ground and extend through many invisible worlds or dimensions until they reach this one. In this cosmology, the nature and properties of the different dimensions or levels of reality and their relationships with each other are described and defined. Every aspect of creation, both visible and invisible, is interconnected or interwoven with every other aspect. All is one life, one cosmic symphony, one integrated whole. We participate, at this material level of creation, in the divine life which informs all these myriad levels of reality. Our human lives are therefore inseparable from the inner life of the Cosmos.
The Tree of Life is an image of the Soul of the Cosmos: Soul as a great web of life — the matrix or vehicle of spirit. There is no essential separation between the energy of the source, the web that is the expression and vehicle of the source, and its final manifestation as the world we know.
This contemplative tradition emphasizes the path to God as a process of awakening through gradual illumination and experience rather than adherence to a specific doctrine or faith. Its emphasis is on the growth of insight and wisdom through contemplation and a deepening relationship with the divine ground while not neglecting life and relationships in this dimension of reality. It does not separate matter from spirit. It does not reject the body nor is it obsessed with sin, as was the case with Christianity.
The fundamental teaching of Kabbalah is the doctrine of emanation and, because of this, the oneness or unity of all cosmic dimensions of reality. Divine Creative Spirit, named as the unmanifest god-head Ain Soph or Ain Soph Aur – the Limitless Light – is regarded not only as totally transcendent and unknowable but also, through emanation, as present in every particle of the visible, created world as well as in the intermediary dimensions of reality veiled from our sight. The zig-zag path taken by the Divine Emanation down the Tree of Life is called the Lightning Flash. The aim of the kabbalist was and is, to unite the two worlds, the Above with the Below, the invisible divine world with the manifest world we inhabit, which is impregnated with Divinity. Kabbalism did not regard this world as fallen, as in Christianity, or deceptive (Maya), as in Hinduism, but saw it sustained and permeated by the light of the divine ground. It taught that whatever we do in this world affects the invisible worlds and vice-versa because everything, visible and invisible, is connected. The concept of reincarnation was intrinsic to this path to God. The soul becomes enlightened over many lives, at first through attraction to, then contemplation of, and finally communion with the invisible worlds. Moses de Laon, a renowned thirteenth century kabbalist living in Spain wrote these memorable words:
The purpose of the soul entering this body is to display her powers and actions in this world, for she needs an instrument. By descending to this world, she increases the flow of her power to guide the human being through the world. Thereby she perfects herself above and below, attaining a higher state by being fulfilled in all dimensions.[4]
Rather than defining a hierarchical descent from the invisible to the visible, Kabbalism presents the image of worlds nesting within worlds, dimensions within dimensions emanating, as it were, from within outwards. It is a wonderfully illuminating template of the tapestry of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the visible fabric of this world. At the innermost level is the unknowable source or god-head, at the outermost the physical forms of matter. All is one unified web of life: one energy; one spirit, one single cosmic entity. According to this Tradition, we are, each one of us, that life, that energy, that spirit. Quintessentially, there is no duality; there is only one life. We are all participants in the life of the cosmos, atoms in the being and body of God. In our essence, we are all one. Listen to the clarity of a kabbalist text which summarises this vision of the unity of life:
The essence of divinity is found in every single thing – nothing but it exists… Do not attribute duality to God. Let God be solely God. If you suppose that Ein Sof [God] emanates until a certain point, and that from that point on is outside of it, you have dualized. God forbid! Realize, rather, that Ein Sof [God] exists in each existent. Do not say, “This is a stone and not God.” God forbid! Rather, all existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity.[5]
The levels or dimensions of this hidden ground of the cosmos are what Jesus might have meant by the kingdom of heaven—worlds or dimensions which are invisible to us yet which underlie and ‘permeate’ the physical world and which, if we could only see them, are spread out before us.[6] These dimensions can gradually become accessible to our limited consciousness as it develops and expands. Jesus must surely have taught from deep knowledge and experience of these worlds.
Why is this tradition so vitally important? Because it is the only cosmology I am aware of, with the possible exception of Daoism, that celebrates in the greatest detail the indissoluble relationship and union between the feminine and masculine aspects of the god-head—a sacred union which the three Patriarchal religions have ignored or deliberately rejected. If we want to understand the deep roots of our present environmental and spiritual crisis, we can find them in the loss of three important elements: the feminine image of spirit, the direct shamanic path of communion with spirit through visionary and shamanic experience, and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine aspects of the God-head and the Divine Ground. Each of these was an intrinsic aspect of the lost traditions and practices of the First Temple.[7]
The Shekinah and Divine Immanence
The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the Feminine Face of God as it was conceived in this mystical tradition of Judaism. In the imagery and cosmology of the Shekinah, we encounter the most complete description of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit as well as the indissoluble relationship between the two primary aspects of the god-head that have been lost or hidden for centuries.
The Shekinah – the feminine co-creator – is the Voice or Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Glory of God, the Compassion of God, the Active Presence of God: intermediary between the mystery of the unknowable source or ground and this world of its ultimate manifestation. The concept of the Shekinah as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit offers one of the most incandescent, vivid and powerful images of the immanence of the divine in this dimension. It transmutes all creation, including the apparent insignificance and ordinariness of everyday life, into something to be loved, embraced, honoured and celebrated because it is the epiphany or shining forth of the divine intelligence and love that has brought it into being and dwells hidden within it.
It is now evident that the elimination of the image of the Great Mother or Great Goddess was the principle reason for the loss of the idea that the whole of nature was ensouled with spirit and therefore sacred. It was the eradication of spirit from the natural world that ultimately removed from the people living through the millennia of the Patriarchal religions their age-old sense of participation in a Sacred Order.[8]
The Shekinah, named as Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit – divinity present and active in the world – supplies the missing imagery of divine immanence which is absent from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And this mystical tradition brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human, in a coherent and seamless vision of their essential relationship.
The Shekinah as the feminine aspect of the god-head is Mother, Beloved, Sister and Bride—imagery that vanished from these religions. If recovered and honoured, it could transform our image of God and Nature, not to mention ourselves. The Shekinah gives woman what she has lacked throughout the last two thousand years in western civilization — a sacred image of the Divine Feminine that is reflected at the human level in herself. The Shekinah is Divine Motherhood, named as ‘Mother of All Living’ — the title that once belonged to the Queen of Heaven in the First Temple and that the Deuteronomists bestowed on Eve in the Myth of the Fall.
The ancient tradition of the Divine Feminine somehow survived in Kabbalism. Gershom Scholem, the great authority on Kabbalism, writes that the introduction of the idea of the feminine element in God “was one of the most important and lasting innovations of Kabbalism. The fact that it obtained recognition in spite of the obvious difficulty of reconciling it with the conception of the absolute unity of God, and that no other element of Kabbalism won such a degree of popular approval, is proof that it responded to a deep-seated religious need.”[9] We may perhaps conjecture that it had never been lost.
Wisdom was always associated with the image of a Goddess in the ancient world: with Inanna in Sumer, Maat and Isis in Egypt and Athena in Greece. The Bronze Age imagery of the Great Goddesses returns to life in the extraordinary beauty and power of the descriptions of the Shekinah, and in the gender endings of nouns which describe the feminine dimension of the divine. But the Divine Feminine is now defined as a limitless connecting web of life, as the invisible Soul of the Cosmos, as the intermediary between the unknowable god-head and life in this dimension. The Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, the invisible and visible dimensions of reality in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship and union.
(To be continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Anne Baring
[1] Scholem, Gershom, Origins of Kabbalah, English Translation, The Jewish Publication Society 1987
[2] Barker, Margaret, The Great Angel, A Study of Israel’s Second God, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, p. 58
[3] Barker, Margaret, Temple Theology, an Introduction, SPCK, London, 2004, Chapter 4, Wisdom
and Kovacs, Betty C, Merchants of Light, The Kamlak Center, Claremont CA 2019, pp.149-154
[4] Matt, Daniel, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, p.148
[5] Matt, p. 24
[6] The kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it. The Gospel of Thomas, logion 113
[7] Kovacs, Betty C, Merchants of Light, The Kamlak Center, Claremont CA 2019
[8] See Baring, Anne, The Dream of the Cosmos, A Quest for the Soul, Archive Publishing, Dorset 2019, Chapter 4
[9] Scholem, Gershom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Schocken Books, New York, 1954 & 1961, p. 229