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Video Description
At the top of one strand of early Christian thought sat a mother, not a father. This video from the Conscious Radical channel tells the lost story of Barbelo, the divine presence whose followers were condemned by name by the late second century, and whose texts spent sixteen hundred years buried in the desert.
When the books were finally recovered, the feminine face of the divine had been all but erased from the story. The video asks how the erasure happened and who benefited, and it suggests the same quiet architecture of control is still at work wherever one voice in a tradition is made to disappear.
Full Video Transcript
At the top of the original Christian cosmology was a mother. She was the source of every aeon
that followed. But by 180 CE a bishop in Lyon was writing letters to have her followers condemned.
The divine feminine isn’t where they tell you to look. You grow up in finding her in other
traditions, in goddesses that people mention, but in the Bible they are usually mothers, servants,
prostitutes the mother the divine feminine at the top was removed before
any of us were born the bishops name was Arrhenius he was the Bishop of Lyon in
what was then Roman Gaul and around the year 180 CE he sat down to write a five
volume book called against heresies this entire project was dedicated to
cataloging the christian sects he wanted to destroy and he explained in detail why each one
needed to go he was writing for the orthodox bishops who were trying in the late second century
to consolidate christianity into a single institution under their authority there were
dozens of competing communities back then each with their own texts their own cosmologies and
their own teachers against heresies was the field manual for shutting the alternatives down in book
1 chapter 29 iranius describes the sect he calls the barbelo gnostics named for the figure at the
top of their cosmology and what he does by describing these sects he wants to destroy
actually preserves them for us he records far more than her name and gives us the whole structure he
tells us that stood around this mother goddess were full knowledge incorruptibility eternal life
and truth he tells us about these five androgynous beings which includes her the pentad of the father
he tells us the invisible spirit gazed into her and she conceived a spark of light the spirit
anointed that spark and the spark became christ the only begotten son from the sun came mind
from the spirit came will from will came word the eons paired off into conjunctions
masculine and feminine principles in relationship with each other eternal life with will mind with
foreknowledge word with forethought which is barbello herself the structure of the divine
emerged through pairing iranius names the four great luminaries that surround the perfect being
Amadounine, Ruggiol, David and Elaleth. He goes on to name the four virtues that serve them,
grace, will, understanding, prudence, and he records the names of beings that the Orthodox
church would spend the next three centuries trying to erase. Section four is where he records the part
he was actually trying to stop. He tells us about the moment one of the lower aeons, Sophia, acts
alone without her consort and in her impatience she emanates without him the being she produces
is malformed ignorant audacious its name is protocontes meaning first ruler the demiurge
the being who in the gnostic account made the material world and iranius records what the
demiurge said in this barbello gnostic teaching i am a jealous god and beside me there is no one
it recognized the line because it features in the old testament it’s the god of exodus speaking the
god of sinai the god who gave us the commandments in the barbello gnostic cosmology the god whom
the orthodox worshipped was a lower being a confused emanation that was several layers below
the mother the product of Sophia acting without her pair that’s the teaching
Arrhenius needed to destroy not a small heresy about Christ’s body or the nature
of the resurrection but a cosmology that placed the entire Old Testament Godhead
beneath a feminine principle and caught him jealous ignorant and lost this is
what historians call admission against interest the strongest evidence that
that something existed is the testimony of the people who wanted to destroy it. And it
was their condemnations that preserved it for us. The irony.
His project shaped what came next. By the year 200, heresy was a category in Orthodox
writing that had hardened. By 313, with Constantine’s Edict of Milan, the church the Orthodox bishops
had built was no longer a persecuted minority it now had state backing and by
the late fourth century possession of the text Barbello belonged to was a
crime against the Empire for 17 centuries after that nearly all we had
was Arrhenius and the other heretiologists writing in his tradition
Tertullian Hippolytus Epiphanius all of them describing and refuting a body of
texts the church had spent 300 years removing from circulation and then in december 1945
the naghamadi texts were unearthed and among those texts were three separate copies of a document
called the apocryphon of john the secret book of john the scholars translating the text found
a cosmology that matched in fine-grained detail what Arrhenius had described 1765 years earlier.
Okay, so the match wasn’t perfect because the recovered text actually gives us more detail
than Arrhenius reported and other texts in the same library, the Trimorphic Protonoia,
the three steles of seth zostrianos allogenes show further variations on the same cosmology
this indicates it was a tradition across multiple schools and texts like any developed religious
tradition it had its own internal debates but what was unmistakable was the structure
there was a mother and her name was barbello the apocryphon of john opens with john the disciple
morning after jesus’s death the risen christ appears to him and tells him a cosmology nobody
had told him before it begins with the invisible spirit the unknowable source the spirit looks into
the water of light surrounding it and sees its own reflection that reflection becomes a being
and she emerges from the act of god recognizing god that being is barbello she predates the greek
goddesses we have names for she’s older than athena and older than the temple cults in a
sethian text she is called mother father because she contains both in some she is the triple
powered one the womb of the all the forethought of everything that came after her she is the first
move of being itself she’s not the female half of a pair at the top she’s the unified principle
from which the pairs emerge later further down the emanation at the source in the sethian text
the divine is past gender the invisible spirit above her cannot be predicated at all
the pairing structure the masculine and feminine eons in relationship comes later as the divine
moves further from the source whereas closer to the source gender dissolves into something that
holds both. Part of what we lose in translation is harder to see than a missing word. It’s the
way each language offered the translators options and the option chosen often tracked with what the
translators already believed. Sanskrit had a neuter or non-binary option for the divine and
they used it. Brahman. Ultimate reality in the Upanishads is grammatically neuter. The language
allowed the philosophy to think past the binary. Greek had a neuter too. When the Hebrew Bible was
translated into Greek, the spirit of God, Ruach, grammatically feminine in Hebrew, became pneuma.
Again, neuter. The Greek translators chose neuter from the options available. It was only when Latin
translated pneuma as spiritus that it became grammatically masculine. By the time the text
reached English where grammar no longer forces a choice at all the translator was free to pick
a pronoun and they picked he. So historically the grammar offered options but the theology
made the choice. By the end of the chain the spirit who had been her in Hebrew was he in
English. The cognitive scientist Lira Boroditsky has spent two decades demonstrating that grammar
shapes cognition in ways that speakers don’t even notice. Her bridge study is the clearest example.
So the German word for bridge is die Brücke. I apologize for my pronunciation and die Brücke
is grammatically feminine. The Spanish el puente is masculine. German speakers describe
bridges as elegant, slender, beautiful. Spanish speakers describe them as strong,
sturdy and towering. So the same bridge using different grammar creates a
different image in the mind. If grammatical gender can change what a
German and a Spanish speaker see when they look at the same piece of
architecture, the four language journey from Ruach to he did something to the
figure being described. And we don’t have to settle exactly what, we only have to notice
that something happened. Wisdom went the same way. Chokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, both
grammatically feminine, both personified as a woman in Proverbs 8 who was with God at the
creation of the world. In the Gnostic cosmology, she is one of the great eons. In the canon,
in translation in centuries of commentary she gets flattened from being a figure to a concept
the Gnostics were trying to describe a source past gender in any language that would hold
the description so they use paradox mother father the triple powered one the womb that is also the
seed in that cosmology before the change she was the doorway to God you couldn’t get to the father
without passing through her. The sun emerged from her, the eons emerged from her, the whole structure
of the divine emerged from her receptive function. The masculine principle existed because the
feminine principle made it possible and this is the figure the church needed to erase. You can’t
build a hierarchy of male bishops on a cosmology where the source of being is a mother. You can’t
run apostolic succession through 12 men if the first principle is feminine and so the christianity
that won was the version that could be administered bishops councils canon law parishes and tithes
to administer it they needed a god whose authority moved through male lineage a mother at the top
would break that whole structure so she had to go the cosmology that contained her was sophisticated
and internally consistent but it was also impossible for the future institution being built.
The church needed a male godhead to authorise male governance and the existence of Barbello
would have made that governance unjustifiable. Once you see her deliberate erasure you start to
see the operation that erased her and others everywhere else. Softness was written out of
masculinity by the same logic. A male godhead can’t be receptive so men can’t be receptive.
Female labour was written out of the economic record by the same logic. The economist Marilyn
Waring documented this in the 1980s. The global accounting systems that decide what counts as work
were built on the premise that the labour of sustaining human life, the labour done mostly
by women, was not productive and it still doesn’t count towards GDP. If the source of life isn’t
divine. The work of sustaining life isn’t real work. The goddess traditions of pre-Christian
Europe were written out of the religious record by the same logic. If there is no female principal
at the top there could be no female principal at the spring, at the harvest or the hearth. The women
who held those traditions in living memory were rebranded as witches and executed in numbers that
historians still argue about. Tens of thousands were persecuted and prosecuted between 1450 and
1750, the majority of whom were women, poor, widowed or held knowledge that others went to
them for. The architecture also created its own signature when moving against a group. It accused
them of sexual depravity first. The Barbello Gnostics were accused by Epiphanius and others
of orgiastic rituals and ritual cannibalism. The Nag Hammadi texts themselves contained
sophisticated cosmology and zero orgies. The accusations were a fabrication or a deliberate
misreading of a symbolic ritual and this pattern repeats. The Romans accused early Christians of
incest and infant sacrifice. Medieval Europe accused Jews of ritual murder and the desecration
of the host early modern europe accused witches of copulating with the devil when the suppression
needed moral cover the architecture reached for the same tool every time sexual depravity because
it makes elimination feel like protection the female figures who survived inside the canon
were rewritten mary magdalene became a prostitute an identity pope gregory the great assigned her
in 591 CE by conflating her with three different unnamed women in the gospels. Junia, named by Paul
as outstanding among the apostles, was retroactively renamed Junius because no woman could have held
that title. Phoebe, who Paul calls a deacon, gets translated into English Bibles as a servant. The
female figures who couldn’t be removed were renamed or rewritten until they fit. By the late
19th century there was a clinical name for all of this, hysteria. The word comes from the Greek word
hysteria meaning womb. The diagnosis held that women’s unexplained physical or emotional symptoms
come from a malfunctioning uterus and for 2,000 years it was the medical category for any female
experience that the male physician couldn’t interpret if what women were experiencing
didn’t match what was in the textbooks then it was distress with no acceptable cause and treatments
included pelvic massage forced rest marriage and hysterectomy in severe cases institutionalization
and that catch-all stayed in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders until 1980
that’s only 45 years ago that the word came out of the textbook but the architecture has stayed
endometriosis affects roughly one in ten women and the average diagnostic delay is ten years
and seven appointments women report cardiac symptoms and are sent home with anxiety
prescriptions autoimmune disease lupus multiple sclerosis adhd fibromyalgia and chronic pain
these conditions disproportionately affect women and they show the longest diagnostic gaps in the
medical literature the pattern is so consistent now that it’s even got its own name medical gas
lighting the clinical version of the same operation that called the witch is mad and
the heretics deluded if a woman walks into a room with knowledge of her own body she is told she is
mistaken. The architecture has been making that move for 2,000 years. Barbello’s
name and story were taken and rewritten. But all I ask of you is to notice what
gets called heresy now. Notice what gets called fringe. What gets called hysteria.
What gets called unhinged. Notice who’s pointing where and what would have to
stay hidden for them to be wrong. The architecture that tried to erase her is
still operational but today the same instinct is called woo conspiracy theories identity politics
hysteria or just unwell before i close i want to say thank you to everyone who comments who likes
who subscribes who shares their own thinking and who recommends a book i haven’t read yet
none of this work happens without you and i don’t know what i don’t know and this community keeps
showing me every book recommended every angle offered every disagreement works through in the
comments is the conversation and i’m not here to move you from one belief system to another
i’m here because you have access to more information than the architecture ever wanted
you to have and so do i and we can think out loud together about what we want to do with it
Your thinking belongs to you, including the part of it that the architecture would prefer stayed buried.
Source: The Conscious Radical