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SOPHIA OF WISDOM III - COCO DE MER - SOPHIA
LIBRARY OF SOPHIA OF WISDOM III
SOPHIA OF ALL SOPHIA OF WISDOMS
AKA
CAROLINE E. KENNEDY - CAROLINA KENNEDIA
JUN 15, 2008
RE: SOPHIA
Part One:
The Human Role in Gaia's Dreaming
The icon for the Gaia Mythos is a coco de mer with cosmic detailing: sun and moon motifs with the emergent earth indicated by a cross. There is a story that goes with this image, a story crucial to our understanding of what it means to inhabit this planet, Earth.
The Gaia Mythos, an evolutionary myth of Earth, encodes some closely guarded secrets of the Pagan Mysteries. Yet this story is no elite affair, and the "secrets" it contains are open to anyone with the will and capacity to comprehend it.
To love to know, and to love what you know, is the Gnostic way.
Gnostic Cosmology
The story of the Fallen Goddess is only found in Gnostic materials, and even there it only survives in fragmentary form. (Technically, this story is a cosmogony - a description of how a world system or cosmos originates - but it is more easily treated as a cosmology, the description of how a world system operates, based on how it originated.) Fortunately, the slim evidence for Gnostic cosmology is supported by an array of classical lore, cross-cultural mythology, and indigenous wisdom.
In Greco-Roman mythology, for instance, the theme of "the marriage of Ouranos and Gaia" asserts a special link between the celestial realm and Gaia, the living earth. Ouranos, the Greek word for "heaven," refers to the Pleroma, the realm of the gods, or, in astronomical terms, the galactic core.
The mythic "marriage" of the Pleroma and Earth is consistent with the Gnostic scenario of the Aeon Sophia who plunges from the galactic core to be metamorphosed into the planet we inhabit. Sophia is exiled from the Pleroma and "grounded" in the terrestrial domain, but precisely because of the unique conditions under which earth was formed, our planet remains intimately linked to the cosmic center, the galactic core itself.
I have argued elsewhere in this site that a great deal of mythology can be read as astronomy. (This can be done without going as far as Santillana and von Dechend who propose in Hamlet's Mill that myth is nothing but encoded astronomy.) The transposition of myth into astronomy is, of course, a creative act that requires the use of imagination - hence, an exercise of mythopoesis, intentional myth-making.
The Gnostic creation myth provides a unique set-up for such an exercise because it presents just enough enticing clues to whet the imagination and make us try to picture what happened to the Pleromic Goddess, Sophia. What we know today about the large-scale structure of the galaxy, the birth of the sun, the formation of the planets, and the current position of the solar system in the galactic limbs, presents a unique opportunity to re-evolve Gnostic cosmology into a visionary model of our own making.
Doing so, we come to participate empathically in the experience of the Earth Goddess, Gaia-Sophia.
As suggested in Sharing the Gaia Mythos, the purpose of humanity in Gaia's life-process may reside in on our capacity to remember Her Story. Metahistory involves not only a critique of history and the beliefs encoded in it, but also a creative recalling of the mythic dimension of our own species story. In this respect it should be clear that the reason for converting the mythico-mystical language of Gnosticism into the concepts of modern astronomy is not to use science to legitimate Gnostic vision, but to link our current picture of the cosmos to an ancient seminal visionary experience whose slight traces can be discovered in Gnostic writings.
Even with clear correlations, however, it is extremely difficult to construct a coherent version of the Fallen Goddess scenario. Considered strictly on the basis of surviving texts, there is no "Gnostic cosmology," or almost none. The textual material is in some instances - in most instances, it must be said - corrupt and unreliable.
The Nag Hammadi "library" is a pitiful heap of remnants, like a handful of glass shards from a shattered stained-glass dome.
These documents were translated into Coptic from "Greek originals," scholars say, but there is no way to know if the Greek texts themselves were actually first-hand Gnostic writings. After countless readings, I am inclined to see these texts as study notes, and in rough and incomplete form. The Coptic reads like a slapdash translation made by scribes who did not altogether understand what they were translating.
Fifty fragmentary documents whose content is largely incoherent and maddeningly inconsistent - this is all that remains of what once was countless thousands of parchments and codices, including many works on geology, astronomy, and mathematics, known to have been written by initiates of the Mystery Schools.
To fill in what is missing or badly preserved in the Coptic treatises from Nag Hammadi, we must turn to paraphrases found in the polemics of the so-called Church Fathers who opposed the Gnostics. For the scenario of Sophia's fall and subsequent embodiment as Gaia, for instance, we have to rely on Irenaeus, a Christian bishop who wrote Against Heresies around 180 CE.
A full-scale narrative describing how Sophia becomes Gaia cannot be developed without making huge inferences. The Fallen Goddess scenario relies at key points on extrapolating broadly - and, one might say, boldly - from the slim evidence on hand.
Lucky Thirteen
The thirteenth packet of the Nag Hammadi library consists of eight papyrus leaves, a mere sixteen pages. It is the only codex (book of bound leaves) found without a leather cover, and uniquely, but for one other codex (II), its pages are not numbered. The texts are incomplete, and the first two leaves appear to have almost been burnt. They are not charred around the edges, but smoke-damaged.
The Arab family whose sons found the codices in a cliffside cave in December, 1945 are known to have burned some leaves to heat water for tea. During the 4th century CE when the cache was buried, fanatic ideologues called the "Church Fathers" demanded that all Pagan and Gnostic writings be burned. The first pages of codex XIII seem to have quite literally been snatched from the flames.
Gnosis is the knowledge that frees. Because this knowledge is precarious, so is freedom.
The sole complete text in codex XIII is Trimorphic Protennoia, a title rather grandiosely rendered as "The Threefold Divine First Thought." The scribal hand that copied it resembles that of codex II, but is a more rapid, cursive version, as if it were written in a rush. The experts suggest that it may have been written by two hands, that of student and instructor. (CGL5V, V, B2, p. 362. For my system of references see Gnostic Materials.)
This opinion accords with my own (non-expert) view that the Coptic treatises are student notes, or notes dictated by masters to novices. The materials found under the cliff of Jabal al Tarif may indeed be "Cliff Notes" (the trade name in England for study guides to classic works, such as those of Homer and Shakespeare).
The structure of Trimorphic Protennoia is distinctive. It builds like a fugue in two voices, first-person and third-person. The longer, dominant passages are called "first-person aretologies."
These declarations use "I" for a supernatural agency that declares its traits and actions:
I am the thought that dwells in the light,
the movement that underlies all that endures,
She in whom everything resides, the first-born of all those
who exist in the presence of the All.
I dwell in those who came to be.
I move in everyone and I delve into them all.
I walk uprightly and those who sleep, I awaken.
I am the sight of those who dwell in sleep.
I am the invisible one within the all.
It is I who counsel those who are hidden...
(Trim. Prot. 35: 1-25)
The character of the aretologies is lofty and poetical. The content is visionary, so this kind of text is called a "revelation discourse."
Alternating with the aretologies are passages in the third-person, apparently intended to indicate the student's comprehension of the discourse, or perhaps they are the master's notes interpolated to help the student comprehend. The subject of Trim. Prot. is the central theme of Gnostic cosmology: the descent of the Aeon Sophia into the chaotic realm beyond the bounding membrane of the Pleroma.
Her plunge is described in three distinct stages or increments:
First - Protennoia is the voice of the First Thought who descends first as light into darkness to give shape to her fallen members.
Second - Protennoia is the Speech of the Thought who descends to empower her fallen members by giving them spirit or breath.
Third - Protennoia is the Word or Logos of the Thought who descends in the likeness of the powers, assumes a human appearance, introduces the illuminatory baptismal light of the Five Seals and restores her members into the light.
(NHLE 1996, p. 511, commentary by John D. Turner)
Protennoia means "primary mind intention," or First Thought, as the scholars have it. This word is packed with uniquely Gnostic nuances. "Proto" means both "first, primal or primary" and "generative."
Protoplasm is the biological basis of all life-forms.
A prototype generates all later and subsequent types. Ennoia is a compound of en-, "intent, will," and noia, a variant of nous, "intelligence, mind, consciousness." The Greek word nous defines in all Gnostic teachings the special endowment that Sophia and the Pleromic gods confer upon humanity. Our wisdom endowment is nous, a dose of divine intelligence, the power to know what gods know. Nous is a faculty, not a mark of identity. Granted, whoever cultivates nous becomes in a sense "god-like," but in no sense is nous a "divine self," the possession of which allows us to consider ourselves to be gods.
The object of Gnostic spiritual practice is not to see ourselves as gods but to see as gods see.
A World-Changing Message
Scholars working in teams over decades apply meticulous care to eke out the meaning of obscure texts such as Trimorphic Protennoia. They endlessly scrutinize the variations of grammar, spelling, handwriting. They write papers and sometimes entire books on a single treatise. They hold symposia to discuss the historical and philosophical background of the Gnostic materials, usually with the aim to learn more about the origins of Christianity, rather than to understand what the Gnostics had to say in their own terms.
The result of all this work on the literal meaning of Gnostic texts is that the message they contain is overlooked, if not entirely lost. No scholar today regards the original message of Gnosticism as valid subject matter. This is the strange impasse into which Gnostic studies have led over the last fifty years. About one third of the writing in Metahistory.org is devoted to recovery of the original message.
To recover and reconstruct the story of Gaia-Sophia, we must consider what the Gnostics may actually have known about cosmic matters. The assumption that Pleroma, meaning "fullness, plenum," refers to the core of any galaxy, is the first step in allowing that Gnostics had real-world astronomical knowledge.
In short, we infer that Pleroma means galactic core (but not only that), so that we can develop certain imaginative clues in the Coptic material. (It could be argued that Pleroma is purely a metaphysical locus outside time and space which ought not to be "reified," made into a concrete thing. For my response to this objection, see 'reality' in below insert.)
Reality:
.
Is not necessarily what you believe it to be, although what you believe ought to reflect your reality, the truth of your experience as it really is, rather than as you would like to believe it is.
As explained in Sources of the Gaia Mythos, I draw upon Asian metaphysics, especially emanation theory, to develop the narrative and commentaries. The key principle of emanaton theory is that all being and things exist through other beings and things. Even if the Pleroma is a locus outside time and space, it can still be a galactic core because in emanation theory whatever transcends time and space still manifests through the features of time and space.
Philosophically, this view is called radical immanence.
In Tibetan Buddhism, it is called noumenalism. It must not be confused with the Platonic duality of the Eidos (Ideal Forms) and their inferior and illusory appearances, shadows on the wall of the cave. In this view the appearance of the Real, Ultimate Reality, is ultimately real. Only the operations of the perceiving mind, apt to mistake itself, cause the Real to be regarded as unreal.
Scholars do not make such inferences because the limits of their discipline do not allow them to suppose that genuine astronomical knowledge could be encoded in mystical writings. Obliged to stick to the textual evidence, they ignore the question of what kind of evidence might be provided by direct mystical experimentation, the practice of Gnosis, transcendent insight.
Yet if scholars today do not have experience comparable to that of the Gnostic seers, how can they discover what these obscure texts might be indicating? Lacking the evidence of experience, the experts are constantly forced into omissions. For fear of making false inferences, they make none that cannot be textually supported.
No scholar would do what I am here attempting with the Gnostics materials. But for that matter, no scholar could do what I am attempting. If there is a profound world-changing message in Gnosticism, as I believe there is, it has little chance of reaching the world at large through the filters of scholarly exegesis. Discerning the message Gnostics were trying to give is my overriding concern.
Thus I extrapolate, as best I can. I extrapolate carefully but vastly, because the scope of Gnostic visionary wisdom was vast, as far as I can tell. My inferences are based on a lifetime of experimental mysticism, as well as thirty years' study of the materials and an equivalent period of involvement with mythic cosmologies, modern astronomy, astrophysics, and naked-eye sky-watching.
I am not alone in attributing profound astronomical knowledge to the Gnostics. Jacques Lacarriere, a comparative mythologist and cultural historian, has written the single most accessible book on Gnosticism, demonstrating a complete departure from the usual dismissive treatment. Granted, the book The Gnostics is a poetic meditation, rather than a scholarly exegesis such as one finds in Pagels and King.
Yet Lacarriere presents brilliant insights th
COCO DE MER
LIBRARY OF SOPHIA OF WISDOM III
GUEST BOOK - SOPHIA OF WISDOM III - CAROLINE E. KENNEDY
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