CHAPTER THREE

The Tree of Life

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

My visionary dream had led me to the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The word Kabbalah means ‘to receive’. Legend says that when Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, the angel Razael gave them a book to help them find their way back into it. In the words of a modern kabbalist, Z‘ev ben Shimon Halevi (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.”(1) Through some four thousand years, it has been imparted by revelation to men who devoted their lives to contemplation.
           Beginning with its remote origins in Babylon and Egypt, a revered chain of teachers passed on the teachings orally until the 13th century when a book called the Zohar or Book of Splendor was written in northern Spain. It flourished most prolifically in Hellenistic Alexandria, where many Jews had fled for refuge at the time of the Babylonian Captivity (586-539 BC) and later, after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 when a new influx of refugees joined the older community long established there. Still later, it moved to Spain, at the other end of the Mediterranean. Then, with the abrupt expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century, Kabbalism was taken back to Safed, in Palestine. It was also established in northern Europe, in particular, England (where Shakespeare undoubtedly knew of it), Poland and Bohemia. It flourished in Renaissance Italy, where the brilliant young Pico della Mirandola hoped to create a fusion of Kabbalistic and Christian theology until his early and untimely death (possibly his murder instigated by the Papacy) cut short his vision.
           I discovered that one of the oldest and most important images of Kabbalah is the Tree of Life. I felt that through my visionary dream I had been led to this tradition to which the early messages had seemed to refer: “Find the Stone at the foot of the Tree,” they had said. As I uncovered more about this tradition, it seemed to me that the Tree of Life was a clear and wonderful template 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 unknowable divine ground; at the outermost the physical forms we call nature and matter. These two worlds continually interact with each other. All is one life, one energy, one spirit. We participate in the energy which informs all these mysterious levels of reality.
            I came across a sentence in a book called The Ladder of Lights by William Gray which described the Tree of Life as “a symbolic representation of the relationships believed to exist between the most abstract Divinity and the most concrete humanity...a family Tree linking God and Man together with Angels and other Beings as a complete conscious creation.”(2) I found myself drawn to this contemplative tradition which emphasized the path to God as a process of awakening through gradual illumination rather than adherence to a specific belief or faith. I also liked the fact that, unlike evangelical Christianity, it did not proselytize or attempt to convert, instead waiting for people to seek it out and discover its treasures. Its emphasis was 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 experience. I found it striking and important that it did not split apart matter and spirit. It did not reject the body nor was it obsessed with sin.
           Imagine a Muslim culture in Europe which welcomed both Christian and Jew, where there was no anathematizing of the infidel or the apostate such as exists today in Iran and other Islamic countries. From the ninth to the twelfth centuries, such a tolerant and advanced culture existed in Moorish Spain and south-western France. From Cordoba, Seville and Granada in the south to Toledo, Girona, Toulouse and Narbonne further north, in courtyards filled with the scent of jasmine and the sound of water trickling from fountains on summer evenings, scholars and philosophers from three religious traditions met in small groups to exchange insights, explore mysteries, and transmit their knowledge and experience to the next generation. This was the golden Age of Islam when science, mathematics and philosophy flourished and the great Arab scientist Averroes taught in Cordoba and wrote innumerable treatises on Aristotle.
            This nurturing atmosphere produced an extraordinary flowering, not only of Islamic, but also of Jewish and Christian culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a flowering that coincided with the diffusion of the Grail legends and the haunting songs of the troubadours. People travelled from all over Europe to renowned centres of learning such as Toledo to sit at the feet of the Muslim and Jewish scholars who presided there. The rich mixture of learning and artistic genius in Moorish Spain reflected in the sublime beauty of the Alhambra, initiated a powerful cultural impulse carried by a relatively small number of individuals over a wide area of Europe, but particularly and most brilliantly, in the highly developed culture of south-western France.
           Then, abruptly and tragically within three centuries, the harmonious relationship between Muslim, Christian and Jew was destroyed by Christian fanaticism. There were three strands to this fanaticism. One strand was the Crusades against the Muslims who had occupied the city of Jerusalem (the First Crusade was launched in France in 1095). A second strand was the Albigensian Crusade initiated in 1208 by Pope Innocent III, which let loose an army led by Simon de Montfort on south-western France and utterly destroyed its magnificent, tolerant and flourishing culture. The third was the decision by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, under the influence of the Spanish Inquisition, to expel both Jews and Moors from Spain in the late fifteenth century, although persecution had begun earlier as Christian Spain sought to reclaim the territory that had been held by the Moors.
            These were the three fateful and fatal elements which were to give rise to centuries of enmity and persecution between Christians, Jews and Muslims and which have led inexorably to the tragic events in which we are embroiled today. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims were brutally expelled from Spain, many of them murdered, their property expropriated. Thousands of priceless manuscripts and sacred artefacts were destroyed as they were in Sarajevo during the recent war in Bosnia. The great mosque at Cordoba had its heart gouged out and replaced by a Christian cathedral. How different the history of European culture and relations between these three religious traditions might have been if a tolerant rather than a fanatical Christianity intent on supremacy had prevailed in Spain. Christians apparently never questioned the rightness of what they were doing in the name of God. Their faith provided the justification for the most abominable cruelty and oppression that was later carried from Europe to the New World, all in the name of Christ.

The Teaching of Kabbalah
           The fundamental teaching of Kabbalah was the doctrine of emanation and, because of this, the oneness or unity of all cosmic dimensions of reality. God or Divine Creative Spirit (Ain Soph) was regarded not only as transcendent and unknowable but also, through emanation, present in every particle of the visible, created world as well as in the many hidden dimensions of reality veiled from normal sight. The aim of the kabbalist was to unite the two worlds, the Above with the Below, the invisible divine world with the manifest world. Unlike other religious traditions, Kabbalism did not reject this world but saw it irradiated by the light of divinity. It taught that whatever we do in this world affects the invisible dimensions or worlds and vice-versa because everything visible and invisible is inextricably connected. 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. If she is not fulfilled both above and below, she is not complete. Before descending to this world, the soul is emanated from the mystery of the highest level. While in this world, she is completed and fulfilled by this lower world. Departing this world, she is filled with the fullness of all the worlds, the world above and the world below. At first, before descending to this world, the soul is imperfect; she is lacking something. By descending to this world, she is perfected in every dimension. (3)

           Like someone emerging from a darkened prison, we cannot bear the radiant light of the divine ground all at once. As our relationship with the divine deepens, so does our consciousness expand to include awareness of the deeper, unseen dimensions of being until we begin to radiate the light and love of this hidden ground. It seemed to me that this tradition found its way into Dante’s great vision of the soul’s ascent to the Celestial Spheres as well as into the Interior Castles of St. Teresa of Avila, yet neither could have risked acknowledging such an heretical influence.

Worlds within Worlds
           Rather than presenting an image of an hierarchical descent from the invisible to the visible, Kabbalah presented the image of worlds nesting within worlds, dimensions within dimensions expanding and manifesting, as it were, from within. It was, I thought, a wonderfully illuminating template of the relationships which connect invisible spirit with the visible fabric of life. 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 entity. We are, I discovered, each one of us, that life, that energy, that spirit. Quintessentially, there is only one life. We are, all of us, participants in the life of the cosmos, atoms in the Being and Body of God.
           I realized that the levels or dimensions of this hidden ground of cosmic soul are what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God—worlds or dimensions which are invisible to us yet which underlie and “contain” the physical world and which, if we could only see them, are spread out before us. These dimensions could gradually become accessible to our own limited consciousness. I realized too that Jesus as well as other great teachers must have taught from deep knowledge and experience of these worlds. I also began to see that the image of an invisible dimension of reality lies behind many images of the quest, in particular the medieval quest for the Holy Grail – image of a boundless source of nourishment. My visionary dream, more powerfully and immediately—and less fearfully than my early experience at the age of eleven—had opened a door to the existence of a dimension of reality which holds our own in its embrace.
As Warren Kenton, a modern teacher of Kabbalah writes:

 To be acquainted with Kabbalah is one matter, but to do its Work quite another…Only those who do the  Work for its own sake are initiated. Only the individual who wants to make manifest what Kabbalah reveals  can be an initiate. This process is nothing less than to integrate the body, soul and spirit, and so become a finer  instrument whereby the inner and outer worlds can come into communion…Each time this is done, the  Universe comes increasingly into focus as a reflection of the Absolute. (4)

           Kabbalah is a living tradition, still in the process of evolution through the experiences of the individuals exploring and living it today. It offers the tradition and the method of developing a direct path of communion between the individual and the divine ground—mediated by a teacher transmitting an oral tradition most probably descended from ancient shamanic experience that was developed and added to by a lineage of contemplatives extending through millennia. What attracted me to this tradition is that it celebrates the indissoluble relationship between the feminine and masculine aspects of the god-head which other traditions had either lost or repressed for centuries. If we want to understand the deep roots of our present ecological 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 mystical experience, and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine.

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 the mystical tradition of Judaism, originaing perhaps in the Rabbinic Schools of Babylon, and transmitted orally for a thousand years until it flowers in the writings of the Jewish kabbalists of medieval Spain and south-western France. In the imagery and mythology of the Shekinah, we encounter the most complete description of cosmic soul and the indissoluble relationship between the two primary aspects of the god-head that has been lost or hidden for centuries.
           It became increasingly clear to me that the repression of the image of the Goddess or the feminine aspect of the divine was the principle reason for the loss of the idea that all of nature was ensouled with spirit and therefore sacred. It was the eradication of spirit from nature and the fear of animism that ultimately removed from the people living through the millennia of patriarchal religions their age-old sense of participation in a Sacred Order.
           Why did I find the image of the Shekinah of Kabbalah so broad in its imaginative and revelatory reach, so significant, so nourishing to my soul? Because it gave me a different image of spirit. Here was an image of the divine that is the actual ground of the phenomenal world, that has brought this world into being and lives within it. The Shekinah as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom—divinity present and active in the world—supplies the missing imagery of immanence which has been lost or obscured in the orthodox traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but which exists in Hinduism and Taoism as well as in Tibetan Buddhism. And this tradition of divine immanence brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human, in a coherent and seamless vision of their essential unity.
           Here indeed, was the imagery and tradition of the Divine Feminine that was missing in the three patriarchal religions. Whereas the Old Testament is the written tradition of Judaism, Kabbalah offers the hidden oral tradition, wonderfully named “The Voice of the Dove” as well as “The Jewels of the Heavenly Bride”. The Bronze Age imagery of the Great Goddess returns to life in the extraordinary beauty 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 cosmic soul, the intermediary between the unknowable god-head and life in this dimension. The Shekinah as cosmic soul brings together heaven and earth, the invisible and visible dimensions of reality in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship and union.
           The Shekinah reveals the feminine aspect of the god-head as Mother, Beloved and Bride that has been lost or obscured in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that could, if recovered and honoured, transform our image both 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, an 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 was once given to Eve in Genesis. Now I could see, even more clearly than when writing The Myth of the Goddess, that the story of the Fall in Genesis was a successful attempt by the priesthood of that time to demythologize the feminine aspect of deity and effectively banish Asherah, the hated Canaanite goddess, demoting her into the figure of Eve. Yet the ancient tradition of the Divine Feminine somehow survived in this mystical tradition of Judaism. Gershom Scholem 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.”(5)
           The Zohar or The Book of Radiance or Splendour that appeared in Spain in 1290 was the principal text of medieval Kabbalah—the work of many individuals but authored in the name of Moses de Laon. It speaks of the Shekinah as 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 mythology 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 dwells hidden within it and has brought it into being.

The Imagery of the Sacred Marriage and the Transmission of Light
           Secondly, the mythology of this tradition preserves the ancient Bronze Age image of the sacred marriage, reflected in the union of the Divine Father-Mother in the ground of being. There is not a Mother and a Father God but a Mother-Father who are one in their eternal embrace, one in their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continuous act of creation through all the dimensions they bring into being and sustain. From the perspective of divine immanence, there is no essential separation between spirit and nature. No other tradition offers the same breathtaking vision in such exquisite poetic imagery of the union of male and female energies in the One that is both. The Song of Songs was the text most used by kabbalists for their contemplation of the mystery of this divine union.
           The Zohar contemplates the mystery of the relationship between the female and male aspects of the Divine Spirit expressed as Mother and Father, and their emanation through all dimensions of creation as Daughter and Son. The essential concept of this mystical tradition expresses itself in an image of worlds within worlds rather than as a hierarchy of descent. Divine Spirit (Ain Soph or Ein Sof) beyond form or conception is the Light at the root, the Source. Emanating as creative Sound (Word), Intelligence and Love, it brings into being successive spheres, realms, or dimensions named as veils or robes which clothe and hide the hidden source, yet at the same time transmit its radiant light.
            The transmission of Light from the source to the outer manifest level is also described as an inverted tree, the Tree of Life, whose branches grow from its root in the divine ground and extend through invisible worlds or dimensions of being of which we are no longer aware because our minds have become closed to the possibility of their existence. As I absorbed these images, I recognized their relation to certain Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi. I was also struck by the similarity between this imagery of light as the ground of being and the Tibetan concept of the luminous light of the Void.
           The primal centre or root is the innermost Light, of an unimaginable luminosity and translucence. This centre expands or is sown as a ray of light into what is described in some texts as a sea of glory, in others as a palace or womb which acts as an enclosure for the light. From here it emanates as a radiant cascade, a fountain of living water, pouring forth light to permeate and sustain all the worlds or dimensions it brings into being. All life on earth, all consciousness, is that Light and is therefore utterly sacred. The Zohar describes nature as the garment of God. This cascade of light emanates through the ten Vessels, Powers or Attributes of the Divine (Sefiroth) which are connected by the 22 paths of the Tree of Life. The first Vessel (Kether) is a state of perfect equilibrium and contains all that was, is and will be. The divine impulse towards emanation moves the energy to expand beyond the first Vessel to the second; it is then received and contained by the third Vessel. This process of expansion and containment is repeated three times until this Tree is complete and the emanating energy balanced. The process of emanation then proceeds through further worlds, and the laws or archetypes which govern each world or level of creation come into being until they manifest as our own.

The Feminine Face of the God-head
           The feminine face of the god-head is named as Cosmic Womb, Palace, Enclosure, Fountain, Apple Orchard and Mystical Garden of Eden. She is named as the architect of worlds, source or foundation of our world, and also as the Radiance, Word or Glory of the unknowable ground or godhead. Text after text uses sexual imagery and the imagery of light to describe how the ray which emanates from the Void enters into the womb—the Great Sea of Light—of the Celestial Mother and how she brings forth the male and female creative energies which, as two branches of the Tree of Life, are symbolically, King and Queen, Son and Daughter. A third branch of the Tree descends directly down the centre, unifying and connecting the energies on either side.
            The Shekinah is named as the Divine Spouse, the indwelling and active Holy Spirit and the divine guide and immanent presence who delivers the world from bondage to beliefs that separate it from its source, restoring it ultimately to union with the divine ground. She brings into being all spheres or dimensions of manifestation which are ensouled by the ineffable source until, through them, she generates the manifest world we know. Once again, I was struck by the similarity between this imagery of the Shekinah and the Tibetan image of Tara. I wondered whether these two traditions, Kabbalah and Mahayana Buddhism, had perhaps encountered each other in Hellenistic Alexandria, the meeting place of East and West or was it perhaps that the same archetypal imagery of the Feminine manifests in different cultures? Many Jews had, at different times, fled persecution in Palestine to settle in Alexandria, bringing with them traditions which might have originated with the First Temple in Jerusalem.
           The kabbalists call this last, tenth sphere Malkuth, the Kingdom, where the divine Mother-Father image is expressed as the male and female of all species. Humanity, female and male, is therefore the expression of the duality-in-unity of the god-head. The Shekinah is forever united with her beloved Spouse in the divine ground or heart of being and it is their union in the god-head that holds life in a constant state of coming into being. The sexual attraction between man and woman and the expression of true love between them is the enactment or reflection at this level of creation of the divine embrace at its heart that is enshrined in the cherished words in the Song of Songs: “I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.” (6:3) Human sexual relationship, enacted with love, mutual respect and joy, is a sacred ritual that is believed to maintain the ecstatic union of the divine pair.
             Because she brings all worlds into existence as her robes or veils, and dwells in them as divine presence, nothing is outside spirit. In the radiance of that invisible cosmic sea of light, everything is connected to everything else as through a luminous circulatory system. Moreover, the Shekinah is deeply devoted to what she has brought into being, as a mother is devoted to the well-being of her child. All life on earth, all levels and degrees of consciousness, all forms of matter, are the creation of that primal fountain of light and are, therefore, an expression of divinity.
           Blue and gold are the colours associated with the Shekinah. As cosmic soul, She is the radiant ground or “light body” of the human soul — at once its deepest, essential ground, its outer “garment”, the physical body, and its animating spirit or consciousness. She is the holy presence of the “glory of God” within everyone. All of us, moving from unconsciousness and ignorance of this radiant ground to awareness of and relationship with it, live in her being and grow under her guidance until we are reunited with the source, discovering ourselves to be what in essence we always were but did not know ourselves to be—sons and daughters of God or divine spirit.
           There were different schools within Kabbalah. Some saw the Shekinah as separated from the god-head, in voluntary exile on earth, describing her as a Daughter cut off from her Mother, or as a Widow, until she is able to return to the divine ground, having gathered to herself all the elements or sparks (scintillae) of her being which had been scattered during the process of emanation. The blackness of the Shekinah's robe, comparable perhaps to the black robe or veil of Isis — who was also called ‘The Widow’ during her search for Osiris — signifies the darkness of the mystery which hides the glory of her Light.
           I was amazed to discover that the Shekinah was called ‘The Precious Stone’, and ‘The Stone of Exile’ which at once connects her to the image of the Grail, described as both vessel — source of boundless nourishment — and stone. She was also called the ‘Pearl’, and ‘The Burning Coal’. To the opening eyes of my imagination, she appeared as the glowing gold of the hidden treasure at the heart of life, the jewelled rainbow of light thrown between the divine and human worlds, the seamless robe which unites the manifest and unmanifest dimensions of life. Here, at last, was the crucial missing piece of the puzzle that I had sought for over fifty years. The channelled messages had told us to find “the Stone at the foot of the Tree”, and here was the Shekinah described as ‘The Precious Stone’ at the foot of the Tree of Life. I was overwhelmed by this realization, yet I knew it was important to not cling to the literal imagery but to look beyond it, into the poetic heart of the teaching.
           It suddenly occurred to me that kabbalistic imagery is woven into the fabric of many well-known fairy tales. In the story of Cinderella, for example, the Shekinah can be recognized as the fairy god-mother who presides over her daughter's transformation from soot-blackened drudge to royal bride. Harold Bayley, who wrote an extraordinary book called The Lost Language of Symbolism at the beginning of the last century, showed me that the figure of Cinderella could be understood to represent the human soul as she moves from ‘rags to riches’. (6) Cinderella’s three splendid dresses, which could be equated with the ‘robe of glory’ of certain kabbalistic and gnostic texts, are the soul’s luminous sheaths or subtle bodies—as dazzling as the light of the sun, moon and stars. Just as the soot-blackened girl in the fairy tale puts on her three glorious dresses to reveal herself as she truly is, so does the human soul don these ‘robes of glory’ as she moves from the darkness of ignorance into the revelation of her true nature and parentage.
           To reconnect with the tradition of the Divine Feminine that has been fragmented, obscured and almost lost over some two and a half thousand years, I turned to the magnificent passages in the Book of Proverbs and Books of Ben Sirah (Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon. If I had not by chance been given a Bible by my mother when I was nine years old that contained the Apocrypha, I would not have known of the existence of the last two Books since the Apocrypha is not included in the Protestant Bible and I was brought up as a Protestant. (7)  I had spent nine long months in hospital at that age and during that time read my Bible from cover to cover, understanding very little of it, yet absorbing as much as I could of its stories and imagery.
           In the Apocrypha I found evidence of a feminine being, identified with Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit, who comes to life in certain of its passages. Here, Wisdom tells us that she is immanent in our world, with us in the streets of our cities, calling to us to awaken to her presence, to obey her laws, to listen to her wisdom, promising her blessing if we can only hear her voice and respond to her teaching. In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom tells us that she is the Beloved of God, with Him from the beginning, before the foundation of the world. She speaks from the deep ground of life as the hidden law which orders it and as the craftswoman of creation. With their vivid imagery, these passages transform the idea of the Holy Spirit, speaking as Divine Wisdom, from abstract idea into Living Presence. She speaks as if she were here, in this dimension, dwelling with us in the midst of her kingdom, accessible to those who seek her out. She is unknown and unrecognised, yet working within the depths of life, striving to open our understanding to the divine reality of her being, the sacredness of her creation, and her justice, wisdom, love and truth.
           Here was the language of the immanence of the Divine Feminine in the world. Who wrote these magnificent verses and the ones to follow? Was it a high-priest of the First Temple whose words were secretly preserved and taken with the exiles who found sanctuary in Alexndria? Did he hear a voice speaking to him or did he have a vision of a great feminine being, as Apuleius did of the goddess Isis? The verses reveal this feminine Presence - named as Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit – as the intelligence of the cosmos, rooted in tree, vine, earth and water and active in the habitations of humanity. She is the principal of justice that inspires human laws. She is invisible spirit guiding human consciousness - a hidden presence longing to be known, calling out to the world for recognition and relationship. To those who, like Solomon, prized her more highly than rubies, Divine Wisdom was their wise and luminous guide.
            Wisdom was always associated with the image of a goddess in the pre-Christian world, with Inanna in Sumer, Maat and Isis in Egypt and Athena in Greece. But as we move into the Christian era, there is a profound shift in archetypal imagery as Wisdom becomes associated with Christ as the Logos, the Divine Word. The Christian image of the deity as a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit becomes wholly identified with the masculine archetype (most probably because of process of translation from the Hebrew into Greek and Latin) and the connection with the ancient imagery of the Divine Feminine is irrevocably lost.           

The Gnostic Imagery of the Divine Mother
Yet another strand in this extraordinary story is the Gnostic imagery of the Divine Mother who was known to the early Christians in the first two centuries of the Christian era (most probably the descendants of the Jewish Christians who had taken refuge in Alexandria and who had preserved the tradition of the Queen of Heaven from the First Temple in Jerusalem). Were it not for the discoveries of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945, this part of the story would have been lost to us, perhaps forever.
            By the year 200, as Elaine Pagels tells us in Chapter III of her book The Gnostic Gospels, “Every one of the secret texts which gnostic groups revered was omitted from the canonical collection, and branded as heretical by those who called themselves orthodox Christians. By the time the process of sorting the various writings ended...virtually all the feminine imagery for God had disappeared from the orthodox Christian tradition.”(8) Until 1977 when the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 were finally published, no-one knew that some groups of early Christians had an image of the Divine Mother whom they had named “The Invisible within the All”. Some texts speak of how, as the Eternal Silence, the Divine Mother received the seed of Light from the ineffable source and how, from this womb, she brought forth all the emanations of Light, ranged in related pairs of feminine and masculine energies. They saw her as the womb of life, not only of human life, but the life of the whole cosmos. They knew this Divine Mother as the Holy Spirit and saw the dove as her emissary. The Jewish Christians believed that, at the baptism of Jesus, it was the Divine Mother, the Holy Spirit, who spoke to her son saying “This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” (9)
            I find it fascinating that the imagery and mythology of the Divine Mother in Gnosticism is so similar to the imagery of the Shekinah in Kabbalah that they seem to belong to one and the same tradition. In a gnostic text called the Trimorphic Protennoia, the speaker describes herself as the intangible Womb that gives shape to the All, the life that moves in every creature. Other texts name her as the Mother of the Universe but also speak of the androgyny of the divine source in imagery similar to the later kabbalistic texts.
            Who treasured this tradition and kept it alive for later generations? Who took the tradition of Divine Wisdom as the Holy Spirit guiding human evolution from Palestine to Spain and thence to medieval France and the rest of Europe, possibly inspiring the imagery of the Holy Grail and preserving it as a precious legacy to us today, when the world is crying out for reconnection with the soul and for Wisdom, Justice and Compassion?

The Holy Spirit Today
How could we imagine the Holy Spirit today? Perhaps as the light that manifests as both wave and particle, as the deep unexplored “sea” of cosmic space and the invisible light particles which are the ground of all physical reality including the extraordinary complex structure and organisation of energy that we name as matter, a word which comes from the Latin word for mother — mater. After so many billions of years the energy of life has evolved a form, the planet Earth, and a consciousness, our own, which is slowly growing towards the recognition of its ground and source. Yet, because of the loss of the tradition of the Divine Feminine, we do not know that what physicists, cosmologists and biologists are exploring in the finer and finer gradations of matter they are discovering is what the awe-struck explorers of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah named the Face and the Glory of God, nor that the universe we explore with the Hubble telescope is the outer covering or veil of a unimaginably fine web of luminous and invisible relationships. If only these images of the Shekinah could be restored to us, how differently we might see matter, with what respect and awe we might treat it.
           What comment would she pass on the pathological effects of our ignorance—the pollution of her earth, her seas, her air, the abysmal and wanton sacrifice of animals and the contamination with toxins and pesticides of the food and water that is her gift of life to us? And what of the manufacture and sale of weapons — including the horrific reserve of nuclear weapons — the torture, murder and rape of men and women in war, the use of explosives to destroy flesh and bone, the agony of orphaned, abandoned, murdered or maimed children? To hear her answer, we would have to attune ourselves to her being. We would have to listen with her ear to the voice of the suffering we bring into being by our ignorance of the unity and divinity of life. We would have radically to change our habits of behaviour and become more consciously aware that the suffering we inflict on others is actually suffering that we are inflicting on the ‘body’ of spirit and that spirit suffers through that suffering.
           If we could hear her voice, surely we would awaken to the sacredness and divinity of life. We would begin to see matter and our own bodies in a different light. We would treat them with greater respect. If we could awaken to that voice, we could bring matter and spirit, body and soul together, healing the deep wounds inflicted by the beliefs and concepts which have separated them. Even as we accomplish this, we will begin to transmit the light and love flowing to us and all creation from the Holy Spirit.
          While I was writing about the Shekinah, these images came to me:

I stand on the shore of the world and look intently at the sea of stars, at their great patterns spread out before me. As I look, I see a ship approaching, in the shape of an ark, its prow curved back like the wings of a great bird. Closer it comes, weaving between the constellations, growing larger as it approaches me. I see that it is translucent, as if made of glass, and that it has the iridescence of an opal. Yet also, it is richly adorned with jewels that are themselves stars. Closer still it comes, and now I see that the ship casts a radiance upon the sea of space and shows me that this sea is a great web made of gossamer filaments of light; they sparkle like a spider’s web in the sun. At the jewelled points where these filaments meet there are vortices of swirling energy. I perceive the web as a being of unimaginable dimensions who is speaking to me, saying:

“This is what I am. This is the hidden glory of My Being. This is the life you belong to. The Sea of My Being is at once ‘greater than the great’ and ‘smaller than the small’, co-inherent with the greatest galaxies of cosmic space and with the tiniest particle of matter. Once I was named Soul or Spirit or Cosmic Consciousness or Great Mother and Father – the greater psychic reality to which your own life belongs and of which, for the most part, you are tragically unaware. Once, people imagined themselves living within My Being. Then I became distant, remote, forgotten. Now, for so many, I am lost altogether. This causes me grief for I am in exile from My people. For both of us there is great suffering and loneliness. My dream, the Dream of the Cosmos, is for you to know Me again, to realize that you live within My Being, My Light and My Love.”

           Notes:
           1. Z‘ev ben Shimon Halevi (Warren Kenton)
           2. William G. Gray, The Ladder of Lights, Helios Book Service Ltd., Cheltenham, 1968
           3. Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah, The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995, p.148
           4. Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, The Work of the Kabbalist, preface. Samuel Weiser Inc, Maine, 1986
           5. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Schocken Books Inc., New York, 1954 and 1961            (paperback edition), p. 229
           6. Harold Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism, Vol.1, Williams and Norgate, London, 1912
           7. Proverbs 8: 23-31; Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 24: 3-6, 9-11, 13-21, 28-34; Wisdom of Solomon 7: 7, 10,            21-7, 29; 8:1-2
           8. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., London, 1980, p. 57
       
           See seminar 13 (main page under Seminars) for more historical detail on the Shekinah, Divine Wisdom and the            Holy Spirit.
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