Sophia (Gnosticism)

The Demiurge proceeds to create the physical world in which we live, ignorant of Sophia, who nevertheless manages to infuse some spiritual spark or pneuma into his creation.

[5] Jewish Alexandrine religious philosophy was much occupied with the concept of the Divine Sophia, as the revelation of God's inward thought, and assigned to her not only the formation and ordering of the natural universe (comp.

She shapes this mundane universe after the heavenly prototypes, and forms the seven star-circles with their Archons under whose dominion are placed, according to the astrological conceptions of antiquity, the fates of all earthly things, and more especially of man.

It was taught that the souls of the Pneumatici, having lost the remembrance of their heavenly derivation, required to become once more partakers of Gnosis, or knowledge of their own pneumatic essence, in order to make a return to the realm of light.

But the various fortunes of such souls were wont to be contemplated in those of Sophia, and so it was taught that the Sophia also needed the redemption wrought by Christ, by whom she is delivered from her agnoia and her pathe, and will, at the end of the world's development, be again brought back to her long lost home, the Upper Pleroma, into which this mother will find an entrance along with all pneumatic souls her children, and there, in the heavenly bridal chamber, celebrate the marriage feast of eternity.

The oldest, the Syrian Gnosis, referred to the Sophia the formation of the lower world and the production of its rulers the Archons; and along with this they also ascribed to her the preservation and propagation of the spiritual seed.

As described by Irenaeus, the great Mother-principle of the universe appears as the first woman, the Holy Spirit (rūha d'qudshā) moving over the waters, and is also called the mother of all living.

Bound to the body which she has assumed and weighed down thereby, she seeks in vain to make her escape from the lower waters, and hasten upwards to rejoin her heavenly mother.

Not succeeding in this endeavour, she seeks to preserve, at least, her light-spark from being injured by the lower elements, raises herself by its power to the realm of the upper region, and there spreading herself out she forms out of her own bodily part, the dividing wall of the visible firmament, but still retains the aquatilis corporis typus.

These cosmogonic theories have their precedent in the Thalatth or Tiamat of Syrian mythology, the life-mother of whom Berossus has so much to relate, or in the world-egg out of which when cloven asunder heaven and earth and all things proceed.

This mythos of the soul and her descent into this lower world, with her various sufferings and changing fortunes until her final deliverance, recurs in the Simonian system under the form of the All-Mother who issues as its first thought from the Hestōs or highest power of God.

According to one representation she suffers all manner of insult from the angels and archangels bound and forced again and again into fresh earthly bodies, and compelled for centuries to wander in ever new corporeal forms.

The Hestōs himself at length comes down from the highest heaven in a phantasmal body in order to deliver the suffering Ennoia, and redeem the souls held in captivity by imparting gnosis to them.

Sophia or Mētēr is in the doctrine of Valentinus the last, i.e. the thirtieth Aeon in the Pleroma, from which having fallen out, she now in remembrance of the better world which she has thus forsaken, gives birth to the Christus "with a shadow" (meta skias tinos).

The motive for the Sophia's fall was defined according to the Anatolian school to have lain therein, that by her desire to know what lay beyond the limits of the knowable she had brought herself into a state of ignorance and formlessness.

But whereas this is confirmed thereby in fresh strength, the Sophia is separated from it and gives birth outside it (by means of her ennoia, her recollections of the higher world), to the Christus who at once ascends into the Pleroma, and after this she produces an ousia amorphos, the image of her suffering, out of which the Demiurge and the lower world come into existence; last of all looking upwards in her helpless condition, and imploring light, she finally gives birth to the spermata tēs ekklēsias, the pneumatic souls.

Her enthymēsis, on the other hand, the desire which has obtained the mastery over her and the consequent suffering becomes an amorphos kai aneideos ousia, which is also called an ektrōma, is separated from her and is assigned a place beyond the limits of the Pleroma.

From her dwelling-place above the Hebdomad, in the place of the Midst, she is also called Ogdoad (Ὀγδοάς), and further entitled Mētēr, Sophia also, and he Hierousalēm, Pneuma hagion, and (arsenikōs) Kyrios.

Now descends the son as the common fruit of the Pleroma, gives her the morphōsis kata gnōsin, and forms out of her various affections the Demiurge and the various constituents of this lower world.

August Hahn (1819) debated whether the name Achamōth (Ἀχαμώθ) is originally derived from the Hebrew Chokmah (חָכְמָ֑ה), in Aramaic Ḥachmūth or whether it signifies 'She that brings forth'—'Mother.

The creation of the world is brought to pass through the son of the living one and the Rūha d' Qudshā, the Holy Spirit, with whom Ḥachmūth is identical, but in combination with "creatures", i.e. subordinate beings which co-operate with them (Ephraim, Hymn 3).

It is not expressly so said, and yet at the same time is the most probable assumption, that as was the case with the father and mother so also their offspring the son of the Living One, and the Rūha d' Qudshā or Ḥachmūth, are to be regarded as a Syzygy.

This last (the Ḥachmūth) brings forth the two daughters, the "Shame of the Dry Land" i.e. the mētra, and the "Image of the Waters" i.e. the Aquatilis Corporis typus, which is mentioned in connection with the Ophitic Sophia (Ephraim, Hymn 55).

Of the other hymns which are preserved in the Greek version more faithfully than in the Syriac text which has undergone Catholic revision, the first deserving of notice is the Ode to the Sophia[15][16] which describes the marriage of the "maiden" with her heavenly bridegroom and her introduction into the Upper Realm of Light.

She has by the ordinance of higher powers obtained an insight into the dwelling-place appropriated to her in the spiritual world, namely, the thēsauros lucis which lies beyond the XIIIth Aeon.

According to Karl Reinhold von Köstlin (1854), Sophia is here not merely, as with Valentinus, the representative of the longing which the finite spirit feels for the knowledge of the infinite, but at the same time a type or pattern of faith, of repentance, and of hope.

From the place of the parthenos lucis comes the sun-dragon, which is daily borne along by four light-powers in the shape of white horses, and so makes his circuit round the earth (p. 183, cf.

This light-maiden (parthenos tou phōtos) encounters us also among the Manichaeans as exciting the impure desires of the Daemons, and thereby setting free the light which has hitherto been held down by the power of darkness (Dispuiat.

[22][23][24] On the other hand, the place of the Gnostic Sophia is among Manichaeans taken by the "Mother of Life" (mētēr tēs zōēs), and by the World-Soul (psychē hapantōn), which on occasions is distinguished from the Life-Mother, and is regarded as diffused through all living creatures, whose deliverance from the realm of darkness constitutes the whole of the world's history (Titus of Bostra, adv.

For example, Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz interpreted fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty as symbolizing the 'rescue' or reintegration of the anima, the more 'feminine' part of a man's unconscious, but not wisdom or sophia per se.