Fall+of+Sophia

July 11, 2010 I will be writing about the "fall of sophia". Check back soon for updates.

Eager to see what you come up with! Here's something I just ran across in Elaine Pagels's book __Beyond Belief:__ The Gnostic Gospels often refer to "sophia" because early Christians had many exchanges with Jews. Many of the early Christians were in fact Jews, like Paul of Tarsus. The Hebrew scriptures include Psalms, Proverbs, and Isaiah the Prophet. These three sacred writings make many references to the feminine wisdom of God, __sophia__. The Hebrew word for "spirit" (breath) is __ruah__ which is a feminine noun. So "Holy Spirit" has a feminine gender in Hebrew. The early Christian gospels show strong influences from these visionary Hebrew passages that explore the divine aspects within the gender differencea. The later consolidators avoided - to put it mildly - these visionary explorations in favor of a more literal collection of gospels about the man-messiah who appears in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, deemed the visionary elements to be "spawn of Satan."

I know that if you type in the books for our class you will see a book on Sophia. This if you search through amazon.com. I thought of your project when I saw the book suggested to me. Sorry I didn't write the title down. I thought it might help you. Leonor

Thank you Leonor! This is really helpful. I will try it out. Thank you Dr. Heim. This adds to the theories that I've been trying to hash though. I'm going to work on a new thesis paragraph since the other paragraph has been inadvertently deleted. Thank you for all the helpful tidbits.

__July 26, 2010__ Okay, let's try this again. I typed up a new draft of my thesis (which is nothing like the first) and I'm posting it for feedback. I still feel like it's missing something or that I'm not tying ideas together very well. Here it is:

====Generally, especially in ancient times, society was male-driven. Even so, most ancient mystery religions practiced a balanced doctrine of male and female deities. One such feminine deity is Sophia, also known as the goddess of wisdom. When it came time to establish one religion under Constantine in Rome, choices had to be made about the inclusion of the varying divinities. The patriarchal church leaders chose to eliminate the idea of the divine feminine aspect primarily because woman was the ultimate “other” in a time of uncertainty and rebellion. ==== ==== The church fathers had to establish a method of control and submission in order to avoid further chaos and disorder. This meant defining the groups of people that were not included in this new religion. The way to increase your following was to pick apart the opposing groups. Women were one part of this; the other part of this was limiting access to the holy so that only those select elite—priests, bishops, etc.—could give you a doorway to the divine. Salvation could not be accessed except through them and the feminine could certainly not be explained by men and they were the only ones allowed to be leaders of the church. How could men explain the feminine divine; something that to them was the ultimate mystery? ====

﻿The role of women in ancient Greece and Asia Minor (Middle East, Egypt, Turkey) was constricted to the home. There are exceptions like the priestess of temples like Apollo at Delphi, the Sibyl oracle, the women leaders in early Christianity (Gnostic Gospels), That's why the worship of Dionysos formed an interesting exception. The Bacchus cult prescribed that women ("maenads" or wild women) go up to a mountain top and dance in the woods under moon light. This worship of Dionysos was about "personality disturbances" or the social "escape valves." Lecture 6 at next meeting will focus on these dances ("orgiai") as they spread from earliest times from the wilds of Asia and Thrace later to cities like Athens.