Sophia

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Sophia

Sophia is the preeminent female spiritual being in Gnostic mythology. Her character is complex and contradictory, encompassing ambivalence toward the feminine that simultaneously casts women as cherished helpmates and evil sexual predators.

Sophia is the Greek translation of the Hebrew term Hokhmah, both of which mean "wisdom." Sophia is the feminine personification of wisdom. She first appears in Hebrew literature from the first centuries before and after the common era. Sophia appears most prominently in the apocryphal (noncanonical) books but also is found in the poetic writings of the Hebrew Bible such as Proverbs. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Jewish Sophia is a remnant of a pre-Hebraic Mediterranean great mother goddess. She often appears as a companion to the Jewish god. A notable noncanonical writing, The Thunder, Perfect Intellect, describes Sophia as a series of positive and negative paradoxes. It claims that she is the harlot and the holy, the mother and the virgin, the root of sin and free from sin. This poem reveals a classical ambivalence about the good and evil nature of the feminine.

The image of Sophia as a powerful but contradictory being is integrated into the Gnostic traditions that involve her. In the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, Sophia appears as the last in a series of paired spiritual beings. She disrupts the idyllic spiritual realm by defying tradition and creating without the help of her male partner. In addition to breaking with the normal pattern of creation, Sophia is described as being motivated by excessive feelings of lust and sexual desire. Her transgressions lead to the creation of the monstrously imperfect Ialdabaoth, the evil false god of Gnosticism. Ialdabaoth then produces the human realm, which is hideously flawed because of the taint of Sophia's unnatural act of creation. Her contravention of tradition has the further negative consequence of casting Sophia and Ialdabaoth out of the spiritual realm as fallen beings. Sophia, however, is redeemed in later Gnostic myths and becomes a paradigm for human salvation.

The lessons encoded in Gnostic depictions of Sophia seem to include a warning about the dire consequences of the creative power of the feminine. Sophia's independent act of creation mirrors the solo creation of the unknown god, except that her lust-based creation results in error and corruption. The myth suggests that when attempted alone, the feminine power to create only achieves imperfection. The myth also sets up a normative model for gender relations, implying that in the ideal setting of the spiritual realm the masculine and feminine always work in pairs and that deviation from that pattern produces disaster.

In modern times practitioners of New Age religions and some feminist theologians have pointed to Sophia as evidence of a powerful but suppressed feminine aspect of the divine.