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Video Description
Wisdom was once pictured as a woman present at creation, then written out, and yet she keeps resurfacing. This video from the Conscious Radical channel traces a four-thousand-year journey from a priestess in Sumer to Carl Jung, where the same figure is discovered, removed, and discovered again.
It works through the archaeology and the texts rather than asking the viewer to take the story on faith. The enduring question is why this figure must keep being erased, and the video leaves it open: some presences return precisely because the attempt to bury them keeps their memory alive.
Full Video Transcript
In around 2300 BCE an Akkadian princess named Enheduanna composed sacred hymns
and put her name to them. She lived in the Sumerian city of Ur which is now in Iraq and this
broke the tradition of authors at the time because it made her the first author known by name in
human history. Now her poetry focused on cosmic power, on her own personal trauma and on the
fusion of different gods in an attempt to unite a divided empire she wrote about a goddess and
four thousand years later in 1952 young published answer to job in it he argued that rather than the
trinity there was a missing fourth element and that element represented the feminine principle
earth and physical matter and huada united the arcadian goddess ishta with the sumerian goddess
in anna and by doing so she created a super deity in anna was already a goddess of love and war
and ishtar has started out as a separate deity altogether and huada’s hymns were copied for
centuries after her death but they are widely credited with fusing the two goddesses into one
and by doing this she raised that fused goddess to the top of the mesopotamian pantheon
and made her more powerful than the traditional male gods now is this goddess the same goddess
that we see throughout history but just changes her name if you’ve followed my channel over the
past few months you’ll know that i do have a bit of a love and fascination for gnostic material
if you’ve also read my book the awakening you’ll note again that i love the goddess archetype and
how i believe that goddesses take similar forms across religions and there is an essence of divine
feminine throughout religions and scriptures we see goddesses in suma we see her as yahweh’s divine
wife ashura she features in proverbs in alexandria in the kabbalah in the largest church in christendom
in yakub boomer’s vision in blake in russian sociology and in young and although i haven’t
featured a video specifically about her yet because that is coming she sits at the center
of the gnostic texts as the fallen eon the one whose desperate need to create produces the flawed
world that we’re living in and the false god but why if the goddess archetype is such an integral
part of ancient religion is she removed or buried and that’s what i’m here to talk about today
because yes she’s existed in a lot of places and her essence flows through every text which is a
great observation but i think it’s more than that because she’s repeatedly demoted and then written
out completely by different people in different centuries why is that in 1975 in 1976 archaeologists
excavated a site called kuntilet ajrud in the north eastern sinai in the 8th century bce this
was a one-way station on a desert road archaeologists found blessings inscribed in early
hebrew on large storage jars and on the plastered walls and there were three or possibly four
depending on how you count them which say something similar says i bless you yahweh of samaria and by
his ashura i bless you yahweh of tayman and by his ashura and there is a second site which is
now people argue about what this phrase means now ashura is a known canaanite goddess a mother
goddess and consort of the high god el so the obvious reading would be that yahweh had a wife
and William Dever has argued this for years. However, there is a counter-argument where
grammar comes into play. So Hebrew doesn’t normally attach a possessive suffix to a proper
name. So his Asherah may mean the wooden cult object that carried her name, which was a sacred
pole, rather than the goddess herself. And again, this is an argument that hasn’t been settled.
But regardless, the Hebrew Bible recorded her removal. In 2 Kings chapter 23, under King
isaiah’s reform ashura is removed from the temple in jerusalem the ashura poles were systemically
purged to enforce strict monotheism the poles were chopped down and taken to kidron valley
there they were smashed into small pieces burned into ashes ground down to make a fine dust
and scattered over graves to desecrate them now these methods used went far beyond simple
destruction because each action carried a deep symbolic meaning designed to strip the goddess
of her power and to ensure she could never return ashura was a goddess of fertility of nature and
eternal life she was symbolized by living trees chopping her down symbolized cutting off her life
force it turned a symbol of growth and vitality into dead wood by burning the fire completely
consumed the physical manifestation of the goddess it reversed her role as a creator of life and
reduced her power to smoke and nothingness ancient near eastern people believed that
deity’s essence could reside within the physical idols or symbols so grinding her into dust
ensured that the object could never be reassembled and scattering the dust into the rivers or wind
symbolized the total dissolution of her presence scattering her memory so she could never be
gathered or worshipped again and the final step involved treating the remains of the sacred
objects with the ultimate ritual impurities in ancient israelite culture human corpses and graves
were the ultimate sources of ritual defilement so casting ashura’s dust onto the graves of the
common people permanently defiled her it effectively killed her divinity it rendered
her richly dead and permanently unclean now that does seem to be quite a lot of effort to remove
and eradicate something that doesn’t hold any power, doesn’t it? And this is a pattern that
repeats and what I’m going to share with you now shows how this pattern takes shape in other
centuries too. So let’s go back to Ur and Enheduanna. She was the daughter of King Sargon of
Arkad, founder of the first empire. Now her father installed her as high priestess of the moon god
Nana. Whether Enheduanna personally composed the hymns attributed to her is still argued about,
you’ll notice there’s a lot of arguments in this elena robson has made the case that the sumerian
is stylistically too late and that old babylonian scribes could have attached her name to older
material others accept the attribution including the curators who put her exhibition on at the
morgan library also inanna is not wisdom she is power she’s desire she’s descent in return
but what is important is that in hedwana is the first named human who writes about a goddess in
the first person and who also shares what her relationship with the goddess costs her now let’s
move west and forward in time to asherah in canaan and israel where king josiah’s men desecrate the
goddess she all but disappears but then she reappears in poetry in proverbs chapter 8 wisdom
is personified as a woman who stands in public spaces to offer guidance authority and divine
truth to all humanity in hebrew hochma stands at the crossroads and at the city gates and she
shouts she says she was there at the beginning before the mountains were shaped before the
springs were filled when he laid the foundations she was beside him she’s rejoicing in the inhabited
world and her delight is focused on human beings delighting in mankind she deliberately stands in
a public place proving that divine wisdom is accessible to human beings in everyday life
in the wisdom of solomon which was written in greek in alexandria and specifically in chapter
7 she is a breath of the power of god a pure emanation of his glory a spotless mirror now
that book incidentally sits in catholic and orthodox bibles but it was left out of the
jewish and protestant canons which is its own small removal but to give context when the hebrew
biblical canon was later formalized by rabbinic judaism books that were not originally written
in hebrew or deemed too late in history were excluded centuries later during the reformation
martin luther and other protestant reformers chose to align their old testament strictly with the
hebrew canon and consequently they removed the wisdom of solomon and they placed it into the
apocrypha before it was eventually dropped from most standard protestant printings hochma
transforms into sophia which is the greek word for wisdom in proverbs and the wisdom of solomon
wisdom is a universal cosmic figure accessible to all humanity at the crossroads and then in
cyrac chapter 24 the cosmic wandering sophia is suddenly grounded she is specifically anchored
to a single geographic location and to a specific group of people she goes looking for somewhere to
live and the creator tells her to go to jacob in israel 350 years on sophia is featured within the
gnostic text but they don’t fully agree about her the apocryphon of john is a sethian gnostic text
Irenaeus is the bishop of Leon and he was writing against a closely related version of this myth
around 180 CE in Against Heresies which puts the material behind our text earlier than that.
He doesn’t quote the text that we have because we didn’t get to read the full Coptic text until 1945
when the Nacomadi codices were unearthed. In the Apocryphon of John Sophia starts at the 12th
aeon she sits in the outermost sphere and the lowest of the twelve and she conceives a thought
from herself and brings it forth without the consent of the spirit and without her consort
and when you read the text you’ll see that it’s clear that she didn’t have permission
she created yaldabove a lion-faced god who thinks he made everything and thinks he’s alone
in this she hasn’t been deceived she’s acted on her own and the monster she’s created is hers
but she doesn’t stay there she repents and the spirit consents and she’s taken up but she’s not
returned to her original place she’s moved to the ninth above her son until her deficiency
is corrected now let’s have a look at the pista sophia the askew codex is a fourth century
parchment again written in coptic and the british museum bought it in 1785 and then it moved with
the rest of the manuscript collections to the british library in 1973. here sophia lives in
the 13th eon and she is above the 12 not below them so we’re getting loads of numbers we’ve got
12 9th and 13th but every community that picked her up seems to have moved her in this version
she looks up she sees the light of the height on the veil of the treasury of light and she sings
praise to it however an arrogant power called orthodes hates her for exactly that and he
emanates a lion face power out of himself and puts it in the darkness below where she’ll see it
and sophia looks down and she sees it and she doesn’t know what it is so she thinks it’s the
light that she saw at the beginning from the veil of the treasury of light and so she goes down
after it, believing it to be real. She’s stripped of her light and left in chaos. And her matter
is cast down into the chaos where it becomes a lion-faced ruler. One half of him fire,
the other darkness. That is Yaldabaoth. So there are two lion-faced things which sit one page
apart. Author D’s emanated the first one to bait Sophia, but the second one is made out of Sophia’s
own extracted matter and that means that in the Apocrypha she gives birth to him and in Pista
Sophia her matter creates him and she sings her way back up in 13 repentances. So one text says
she’s overreached without permission and created Yadav and through him the world that we now live
in and the other says she was punished for her devotion deceived by a counterfeit light which
looked exactly like the thing that she loved in one version she’s culpable and she originates from
the lowest eon and creates a lion-faced monster and in the other she is a victim she sits above
she’s brought down and the lion-faced monster is her attacker these texts come from two different
communities within the same movement and they’re written roughly a century apart so although she’s
revered in both they have a very different perspective on her fall but why would they
diverge like that well there is a speculative reading the apocryphon of john needs to explain
where a badly made world came from and that needs a sophia who made a mistake but pistis sophia’s
purpose is different large parts of it are hymns sung with mary magdalene reading them back and
interpreting them and that gives us a congregation singing 13 laments of sophia being wronged
the opening text of the gospel of john known as prologue begins with the very famous declaration
in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god all things were
made through him then go back to proverbs 8 and wisdom of solomon 7 and read what is said about
her wisdom personified as a woman often called lady wisdom who existed before the creation of
of the world and was actively present with God at the beginning. Scholars of the New
Testament call this wisdom Christology and it isn’t a fringe position. However, Chokmah
is feminine in Hebrew, Sophia is feminine in Greek and yet her figure is swapped for
Logos which is masculine and then for Verbum which is neuter in Latin but permanently personified
as masculine through Christ. In Rabbinic Judaism there’s a term for God’s presence dwelling
among people, Shekinah, from the verb Shekan, to dwell. This noun is grammatically feminine.
In the medieval Kabbalah in Spain in the 13th century, the Shekinah becomes the tenth Sefirah
in the Kabbalistic tree of life, the feminine aspect of the divine, in exile with her people
waiting to be reunited. Gershom Scholem famously argued in On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism and
in the Origins of the Kabbalah that the emergence of a fully personified mythic feminine Shekinah
in the 12th century Sefer Ha-Bahir was a radical explosive rupture within rabbinic Judaism.
Scholem believed this was a structural innovation. However, treating the connection between Lady
wisdom Gnostic Sophia and Kabbalistic Malkuth as a striking structural resemblance is possibly a
more palatable concept than a clean unbroken family descent they are independent variations
on a deep psychological and theological motive the feminine face of the transcendent divine
now moving on to Constantinople in December 537 Emperor Justinian I built the third church
on the site and he dedicated it to the Logos, the masculine word of John’s prologue. But it
retains the feminine name Sophia, Haya Sophia, holy wisdom. The dedication is to the wisdom of God
and by the 6th century the wisdom of God is understood as the Logos, the second person of
the Trinity, Christ. So the greatest church in Christendom is named for her but dedicated to him.
In Gerlitz in Upper Lusatia, Jacob Boomer, a shoemaker, has a vision and starts writing.
Sophia appears in his work as the divine virgin, the mirror in which God sees himself. Now he was
ordered by the town’s chief pastor and by the council to stop writing. Boomer’s writings were
then picked up by William Blake who highly rated his work and the female emanations that run through
Blake’s prophetic books come partly out of that reading. In Russia Vladimir Solovyov is a Russian
philosopher and mystic and he chronicled three encounters with the divine Sophia. His first
encounter was when he was nine years old. He was sitting in church. As the choir sang the church
around him suddenly dissolved. The priests, the crowds and earthly matter all vanished. His soul
filled with a brilliant supernatural light of azure and gold. He saw a woman of indescribable
beauty holding otherworldly flowers and she smiled at him. She nodded and then she vanished
into the light. Now this permanently altered his perception of reality. The second encounter was
when he was 22. He was sitting in the reading room of the British Museum and surrounded by books
and she appeared to him again but only partially this time she spoke directly to his consciousness
she told him to leave his books to pack his bags immediately and to travel to Egypt promising that
she would reveal her full self to him there and he left London the very next day and his third
encounter occurred when he arrived in Cairo and he walked out into the desert alone at night
bizarrely he was still wearing his heavy european winter coat and top hat and he was nearly killed
and robbed by a group of bedouins who mistook him for a desert imp he was left alone on the freezing
sand and he fell asleep at dawn the absolute pinnacle of his mystical life occurred the desert
darkness cracked open sofia appeared in a sea of violet and royal purple light her eyes were
burning with azure fire but this time he didn’t just see her face he saw the entirety of the
cosmos united through her he wrote that in her gaze seas rivers distant woods and snow-capped
peaks were all held in a single image of womanly beauty after him pavel florensky and sergey
bulgakov built a whole sophiology on her and that gets them into quite a bit of trouble
bolgakov’s teachings on sophia was formally condemned by the russian church authorities
in the 1930s and florensky was shot in 1937 and then on to the very eminent carl jung
so on the 1st of november 1950 the pope made a final official and unchangeable rule for all
Catholics he declared that when Mary the mother of Jesus died her physical body
was taken straight up into the heavens by making this official the church did
something huge they took the idea of a female face of God an idea that had been
hidden changed or pushed aside for centuries and they placed her right at
the highest most important position in heaven right next to God it was the
final step in a very long history of trying to put a woman back into the story of the divine
in 1952 young publishes answer to job and he calls that the most significant religious event
since the reformation because what he sees in it is the feminine being readmitted to the divine
after a very long absence okay so everything up to this point is one figure traveling along a
documented road. Sumer, Canaan, Jerusalem, Alexandria, the Gnostics, the Kabbalah, Byzantium,
Gerlitz, Moscow, Zurich. But there is more. Buddhism has Prajnaparamita, the perfection
of wisdom. In Mahayana Buddhism, Prajnaparamita is not just a philosophy. She is personified as
a radiant golden goddess who was universally called the mother of all buddhas prajna is
feminine in sanskrit the same way that khatma and sofia are feminine in their languages now edward
cons spent his life on this material and in his 1967 essay buddhism and gnosis and its companion
piece prajna and sofia cons mapped out eight structural parallels between the mediterranean
Sophia and the Indian Prajnaparamita. He thought that contact between them was
entirely possible. Hinduism has Sarasvati, goddess of knowledge and speech and
Shakti, the feminine power whose descent animates the whole world. The
Neoplatonists have the world soul in Plotinus descending into matter. Egypt
has Isis and Maat who is cosmic order and truth as a woman. Alexandra is a
documented contact zone where isis and sophia were genuinely fused in late antiquity so while
the connection to india stays a bit of a speculative parallel that one does actually
sit closer to home and some scholars argue that isis’s imagery particularly isis nursing horus
shaped the early imagery of mary and again another argument that hasn’t been settled
the hermetic poem entries is the foundational text of the hermetica and it was written in egypt
around the second century c.e in it anthropos the primordial divine archetypal man breaks through
and descends the seven heavenly spheres to plunge into material reality and that i think is where a
great many people’s instinct about the seven heavens or seven levels comes from but all of
these different traditions offer a woman when they need a figure for the wisdom that was there before
the creation of the world but as always it’s up to you how you want to hold this information
perhaps it’s evidence of something universal in human beings or evidence of something universal
outside of them so these are parallels rather than lineage and that brings me to a number of things
that I just want to keep at arm’s length. The Sumerian god Enki is often connected to John
the Baptist because it’s based on the sounds in the names. The Anunnaki material, the humans made
by gene editing material, comes almost entirely from Sikaria Sitchin who was writing in the 1970s.
It isn’t a direct translation of the tablets but I’m not dissing these ideas. We naturally hunt
for threads. We weave together the connections and I’m doing exactly the same thing in this
presentation because our minds crave that continuity yet we must learn to sit comfortably
with uncertainty. So whenever I think, write or share these ideas with you I try to apply a strict
filter and that filter is, is there an actual road connecting these two worlds or do they simply
look alike from where we stand. Now I just want to mention a great comment under the Apocryphon
video that I posted. That person said they can’t stand the chosen ones framing because we’re all
part of the one and I wholeheartedly agree. In Proverbs 8 she is shouting at the city gates
to every person walking past. You don’t need to hold a membership card or have an intermediary
yet quite a bit of the gnostic material does divide humanity into those with the
spark and those without and that’s elitism and that’s elitism that
continues today but what I do want to come back to is that wisdom is a woman
present before the world available to anybody who wants her but then she is
scattered on graves swapped from Sophia to logos there is a clear consistent
theme for this divine feminine in that she is either removed or she’s buried but she always resurfaces
Source: The Conscious Radical