The Fall of Sophia

The Fall of Sophia

   








For I am thy power and thy light… For the Light is with me, and I myself am with the Light
Pistis Sophia

The Gnostic Fall of Sophia is an elaborate mythologizing on the lifecycle of the soul and journey of creation from the preexistent unity of the Godhead and into the multiplicity of the cosmic collective, who, by completing the course of their predestination, remerge into the ancestral wholeness of the Pleroma upon the advent of the Savior who emerges on the inner horizon of their cooperative spiritual awakening in the final Apokatastasis.

The story succinctly illustrates the ontological descent and following redemption of the wayfarer by following the separation of the soul through the perilous crossing of cosmic exile and onto the repentance of Sophia that sparks the metanoia that is her celestial ascent back through the heavenly spheres and into the Unio-Mystica of the Bridal Chamber.  The myth encapsulates the protological and soteriological metaphysics of Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy within mythopoetical climate of Judeo-Christian apocalypticism.

The tale begins in the Garden of Paradise where the Aeon Sophia is overcome with the overwhelming urge to procreate without her partner Christos or the sanction of the Most High Invisible Spirit. The creative presumption of Sophia’s audacity symbolizes the irrepressible compulsion of the divine desire for the substantiation of creation, mythicizing the ahistorical origin to the Wound of Separation by narrating the ontological split caused by the multiplying power of the Dyad which sunders the Edenic State of the Monad to produce the procreative labor of the cosmos. 

The passion of Sophia demonstrates the Substantial Motion of the soul who descends the World Axis of the Holy Mountain to incarnate within the mortal condition of generation, a primeval event which explains the resulting disconnection from the spirit which induces the mortal sicknesses of ignorance, forgetfulness and heedlessness. In some version of the Valentinian Gnosis, Sophia is driven by the outrageous desire for unmediated contact with the ineffable essence of the One itself, and steps out from her post in the Eighth Sphere bewildered and enamored by the rapturous glory shining from the empyreal treasury of the Throne. In both cases, the mythologem signifies the precosmic impulse of the spirit towards individuation.

The fissure wrought by the displacement of Sophia elucidates the source of irrationality which causes the emergence of nature from the divine order, as the psychophysical consciousness of the World Soul is projected out from the hypostasis of the Pleroma. The Fall represents a loss of paradise to explain the inherent deficiency of the human condition, as the imprisoned mortal is inflicted with the diseases of amnesia, confusion and fear.

It is at this point that the integral being of Sophia is ruptured into the higher and lower aspects of Heaven and Earth, a polarization through which the downward tilt of her irrational passion assumes the form of the blind god Yaldabaoeth, while her angelic countenance remains in the Pleroma as the Maiden of Light Barbelo, the First Intellect of the Word who, as the eternal Fountain of Life and Mother of the Book, merciful pours the Water of Life for the perpetual conception of the universe.

Barbelo also represents the preexistent spirit of the Christ Consciousness and Muhammadan Reality, the Solar Deity who becomes exemplified as Sophia’s consort Christos from whom she is divorced to lament in a fallen state, suffering the cruel torment of separation from her Beloved upon the drawing of the cosmic veil.

The severance also symbolizes the duality of Avidya-Maya and Vidya-Maya, the twin serpents of the Caduceus who cosmogonically manifest as the Lunar and Solar tides of Tamas and Sattva moving out and back into the transcendent unity of the Good. Within the microcosm, the syzygy personifies the tutelary partnership between the partial soul and the Celestial Twin, as the vessel of the Incarnate Entity embarks out from the Abode of Light to perform the sojourn that is her divine service to the Guardian Angel through the alchemical rite of creation.

Sophia must taste the existential polarity from the Tree of Knowledge in order to know Good and Evil, for to realize the entirety of the divine she must leave the Garden of Paradise and directly experience the physical shackles of mortality. The Goddess thus plummets into the depths of oblivion as the Existential Light of Knowledge and Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters. As the serpent of the Kundalini, she slithers into the Saturnian lead of the Muladhara to hibernate until the rousing call of the Angel’s horn.

Trapped in a pit of fiery blackness, her life force is drained by devilish minions of the Demiurge, the Archons who ravage the Virgin of Light with the plagues of fear, grief and doubt, stripping Sophia of her faith by the exploiting the insecurities and instabilities induced by her absence from the Pleroma. Thus isolated in sorrow, Sophia succumbs to the servile devouring of her own sacral irradiance, seemingly abandoned by the Invisible Spirit to waste away in the phantom prison of her own disunity.

The Pearl of Wisdom that is the divine substance of Sophia signifies the Lost Elixir of Immortality that is stolen by the Demiurge Yaldabaoeth and hidden under the dark veil of materiality, as the birth of the dragon of darkness is conceived from the irrationality of her base desire to symbolize the emergence of the Cosmic Soul emanating from the hypostasis of eternity. The Archons embody the daemonic passions of Sophia that drive the extension of consciousness into generation, as the downward thrust of the Lunar current analogically transposes the monadic paradigm of the Intellectual Principle into the indefinite multiplicity of the cosmic projection.

The existential being of Sophia is thereby sundered while her consort Christos remains in the undefiled fullness of Pleroma. Christ remaining in the Abode of Light alludes to the ontological split between the spiritual and psychophysical natures of the Self, as the partial soul is driven by her passion towards incarnation while the Guardian Angel stays in her native dwelling within the celestial paradise. The severance symbolizes to the creational movement from unity to multiplicity as well as its ultimate reconvergence, as the divisive split of consciousness from the integral unity of the First Intellect is ultimately compensated by the advent of the Savior, who, as the avataric expression of the divine compassion, performs the redemptive act to incite the resurrection of Spiritual Sun within the embodied coffin of the soul.

As Sophia plummets into the shadowy tomb of nonexistence, her consort Christos remains in the Pleroma as the preexistent spirit of the Word, also identified with both the Virgin Mother and the Morning Star of Venus. Her predestined advent as the Savior and Angel of Revelation Vidya-Maya is foretold by the sages as a medicinal cleansing that will replenish and heal the deficiency of the World Soul in the Last Judgment of the Apokatastasis.  These higher and lower aspects of Sophia denote the varying degrees, levels and intensities of consciousness spanning the great hierarchy of being between Heaven and Earth, denoting the processional planes and heavenly spheres of existence that were personified by the Gnostics as separate deities representing a nested series of hypostases and parallel realms to have been constituted by the projectional fall of the Goddess.

Abjectly horrified, Sophia cries above to the Blessed Ones of the Empyrean, supplicating the providential trust of Mercy to liberate her from the ghastly fate of her entombment. The torment of separation from her Beloved has germinated the burning seed of desire that is the implanted longing of Sophia for the Unio-Mystica of the Bridal Chamber, a spiritual imperative that becomes energetically substantiated as the awakening of the Sakina.

An aspect of Sophia also inhabits a divine/spiritual space… one which triggers a divine longing in the human person, a divine eros. The heavenly Sophia stands in a synergistic relationship to the creaturely Sophia, the latter acting as a kind of enzyme or activating agent that is drawn to God through the heavenly Sophia… the human soul’s desire for Sophia is correlative to Sophia’s desire for the human soul.

Michael Martin

The Repentance of Sophia identifies the turning point of the creational arc as the theomorphic cycle of the cosmos revolves upon the starting inhalation of consciousness drawn in by the Breath of the Merciful. This point marks the onset of spiritual awakening and remembrance, the metanoia of conversion that ignites the theotic processes of the alchemical transformation, as the latent necessity for spiritual reclamation begins to actualize itself through the Substantial Motion that is the transfiguration of the soul climbing towards the angelic likeness of her heavenly benefactor through her ontological deepening into divine proximity.

The wayfarer thus mystically reorients herself through the act of repentance in order to find the polar direction that is the predestination of her divine purpose leading to the celestial Star of the North, signifying the spiritual axis of the divine center upon which revolves the cosmic mill of creation. It is through the internal compass of her faith and intuition that the soul is able to recognize God in the midst of creation and thus reintegrate her embodied nature into the essential unity of the Pleroma through the baptismal rites of the celestial ascent.

All of the divine realms heard her repentant prayer

They sought blessing for her from the Invisible Virgin Spirit.

The Spirit consented.

He poured the Holy Spirit over her

Brought forth from the whole full realm.

The Secret Book of John

The Archangelic Lights of the Aeons hearken the pleas of the fallen Goddess, mediating as the divine sympathy by which the compassion of the Deity is evoked to catalyze the reharmonization of the cosmos, divinely inciting the soteriological operation of the solar return. The Paraclete thereby emerges as the combined fruit of the Most Beautiful Names, through which the Angelic Intelligences of the Aeons synthesize the ideal qualities of their archetypal collective into the avatar of the Christ, who descends from the Holy Cross of the Pleroma for the redemption of humankind.

The advent of the Savior germinates the spiritual seed of the Most Beautiful Names abiding in potentia within the microcosm, thereby activating the dormant enzyme of the Sakina to conduct the process of salvation.  In some renditions, it is the deeply-seated spark of the divine desire that is stirred within Sophia to rise unto the Pleroma and fill with the ambrosial fruit of the Aeons before descending once more as the Angel of Knowledge who sounds the horn of revelation to perform the ritual cleansing of redemption within the temple of the soul.

The baptismal rite signifies the descent of the Jesus into the River Jordan in order to defeat the dragon of darkness, the liturgical significance of which allegorizes the incarnation and ultimate liberation of the soul through the lifecycle of the cosmic voyage.

The mission of the Paraclete is to deliver the message of the Word to an estranged humankind, applying the Medicinal Sapience of the Love Divine as the earthly ambassador of the Virgin Mother Barbelo who reveals herself within the sanctified receptacle of the soul as the Madonna Intelligence. The emergence of the Messenger within the budding consciousness of the wayfarer thereby bestows the Light of Grace and discloses the divine Name of the Immortal Entity as it has been preexistently inscribed in the Holy Book of the Pleroma. This parable is equivalent to the Sakina who descends into the Temple of Solomon as a luminous river of compassion flowing from the Ark of the Covenant, itself symbolizing the spiritual heart at the innermost adytum of essential being.

The Logos is the activity of the Divine Mind or Nous transpiring within the embodied locus of the soul, signifying the guiding intelligence of the reason-principle operating within the sphere of nature. It is the lost Pearl of Wisdom hidden deep within the cloak of materiality that acts as the catalytic enzyme that awakens the soul to her own angelic identity through self-identification with the One.

The repentance of Sophia mythicizes the baptismal rite of salvation as the fallen Goddess is filled with the Water of Life to heal the Wound of Separation, thereby curing the spiritual sicknesses of ignorance, heedlessness and forgetfulness. Lost and alone, Sophia preservers through her trust and faith in the Good before completely surrendering to God and filling with the One Love of the Good, thereby exorcising the Archontic infestation from her subtle anatomy through her spiritual assimilation to the Light of Truth.

Thus gifted with the Food of the Gods by her Beloved Christos, Sophia utilizes the compassion of the Aeons to purify her ethereal vessel, thereby emancipating her soul from the dissevering chains of damnation imposed by the demiurgic repercussions of her own audacity. The Eucharistic Meal of the Gnosis signifies a spiritual initiation through a series of purifications and theotic ritual on route to a mystical union with the Invisible Spirit of the Most High. This series of baptismal rites represents the celestial assent of the soul through higher orders of reality by which her immersion into the spiritual dwelling of each plane absorbs the proliferation of spiritual energies emitted by their angelic inhabitants.

Singing praises to the Divine Mother, Sophia is lifted upon the wings of grace by her companion Christos as she metaphysically rises through the thirteen stages of the redemption and on to her full restoration within the sanctity of the Pleroma. This sequence demonstrates the intensification of consciousness that is the Substantial Motion of the soul climbing the Ladder of Jacob, analogous to the spiritual flight of the sage up through the Seven Heavens of the Cosmic Ziggurat.

Sophia is lightened by the solar cherubs of light, the angelic equivalents to the Lunar forces of the Archons who counterbalance the ontological extension towards generation by fructifying the alchemical conversion of the embodied creature to the essential wholeness of the Intellectual Principle, a teaching through which the soul drinks from the stream of Mnemosyne to remember her place in the celestial order. The transfiguration is accomplished through a series of ritual ablutions alluding to the assimilation of the soul consciousness to increasingly higher and deeper states of divine communion, a process by which psychophysical structure of the subtle anatomy is gradually replaced with the luminous nectar of the Pleroma, amounting to a transubstantiation of nature unto its eternal prototype through a mystical bathing of the initiate in the Living Wates of the Light.

Thus placing her trust in the creative life of the Logos, Sophia is healed by the Celestial River of divine Mercy. Her faith restored, the soul is granted the nurturance of the gnosis which bears her ever higher into the Ninth Sphere where she sings open the Gates of Heaven to enter the Treasury of Light.  Sophia finds salvation in the Word through at-one-ment with the Divine Mind of the Spiritual Sun, who, as her own higher aspect Barbelo, projects her image below to rescue the imprisoned soul as the avatar of the Savior Christ. The redemptive act represents the awakening dawn of the transcendental consciousness within the individuated locus of the Incarnate Entity, who is thereby resurrected from the tomb of spiritual blindness through her mystical initiation into the City of God within the center of the heart.

The Midnight Sun is... the brilliance of dawn rising in the orient-origin of the soul... The Sun of the Heart, the sun of the spirit...typifies the inner light… of the exiled Gnostic, the stranger who refuses the yoke of the oppressors because he has been sent to this world for a purpose which they cannot recognize.

Henry Corbin

Thereby exalted through the hallowing rite of the Five Seals, Sophia chants the hymns of redemption to receive the Baptism of the Spirit, as the inrush of the celestial soma crowns the fallen Goddess in the starry wreathe of the Living Light. The halo symbolizes the aureole vesture of the wayfarer’s own Perfect Nature, opening a channel through which the medicinal milk of the Divine Mother pours down through her earthly surrogates to emit the fragrance of the Beautiful, thereby signing the soul with her own divine Name through the Mark of the Sakina.

The anointing of the seal occurs through the consolation of the Holy Ghost who guides wayfarer to the remembrance of her own angelic nature, as the wayfarer learns the hymns of the Seraphic Choir to perform her own celestial verse from the Holy Book of the Empyrean.

In their heart, the living book of the living was manifest, the book that was written in the thought and in the mind of the father and, from before the foundation of all, is in that incomprehensible part of him.

The Gospel of Truth

Sophia thus receives the gnostic meal of the Eucharist, feasting upon the Food of the Gods that is the living abundance of the Deity itself. The sealing of the Chrism occurs in the Nuptial Chamber of the Eighth Sphere where Sophia dons the wedding garments of the Pleroma, deifying her deficient physiology into the luminous body of the Christ through the embrace of divine intimacy with her Beloved.  

The epic demonstrates the alchemical transformation as the Operation of the Sun following the theomorphic transmit of the soul through the exile of her fall from paradise and onto the soteriological exodus of the solar return, through which the Agent of Intelligence is invocated within the budding intellect of the wayfarer to perform the ritual acts of redemption and restore the creature to the wholeness of the Ancestral Condition and freedom of the Borderless World.

The story of Sophia is reflected in all our journeys from the bitter sorrows of our anguishing defeats to the revelatory moments of divine intervention, where the hidden hand extends out from beyond to gently guide us back onto the path of compassionate wellbeing. The most serene kiss of our Beloved consummates the mortal torment of the divine yearning, enlightening the soul to blindly take that leap of faith and once more spread her wings in the company of the angels.

Yet to remember we must first turn towards the light, admitting our spiritual poverty and essential reliance upon the charity of the divine beneficence to re-include ourselves in the central cause and collective agency of the Godhead. Every individual thus wages a spiritual battle for the heart of her soul, and ultimately perseveres through defeating the moral deficits of heedlessness and ignorance to once again abide in the Kingdom of Light.

Desirous to intimately experience the full breadth and depth of the Most High, the soul wanders out into the periphery of nonexistence, tasting from the Tree of Knowledge to know both Good and Evil through the harrowing trials of the cosmic pilgrimage, the beleaguering exploit of which imparts the precious lessons of a mortal life for the final perfection of divinity.

The separation from source precipitates a harrowing adventure through the murky haze of a spiritual myopia, the distressing trials of which ultimately incite a heartfelt repentance from the vices of material desire which finally detaches the soul from the exclusivity of physical perception by restoring the supersensual faculties of intuition and imagination. The myth elaborates the numerological sequence of the Pythagorean Tetrackys through tracing the journey of the soul from the wholeness of the transcendent unity onto her extension into multiplicity and final conversion in the final Apokatastasis of the divine reclamation.

The Substantial Motion of the soul’s journey is fueled by the complementary forces of passion and compassion, the Empedoclean principles of Strife and Love which execute the Lunar and Solar forces of the Yin/Yang paradigm through their oscillation between the Monad and the Dyad upon the Holy Cross of the Celestial Anthropos, through which the crucifixion of the Deity itself demands the resurrection of the Solar Child through the revelation of the Holy Ghost.

 The higher and lower aspects of Sophia thus refer to the creative and salvific juxtaposition of these two great powers whose sublime embrace drives the movement of the soul upon the World Axis through the coagulating salt of Tamas and the quickening mercury of Sattva.

Sophia personifies the divine will of the Sakina who accompanies the soul to partake in all her joys and sufferings through the course of cosmic circuit, exemplifying the Heavenly Witness who ferments the alchemical enzyme of resurrection by descending as the dove of the Virgin Mother to bestow the Kiss of Peace. For God remains by the side of the soul to participate in all that she experiences, empathically feeling and consubstantially tasting the torment of separation to distill the wine of grace from the very tears of the Holy Ghost.

For it is the creative presumption and outrageous excitation of Sophia that sets the stage for the divine plan through directing the course and continued sustenance of creation, identifying the preexistent tension within the essence itself that compels the substantiation of the archetypal ideas within the ritual dance of the cosmic theatre.

In Hellenistic Jewish thought, Sophia is identified with the divine name, with the divine Shekinah and the revelation of the divine will in the form of the Torah. Here, Sophia was conceived as a radiant light, the effulgence of the most high, who provided enlightenment for all who would seek her instruction. She is the fountain or spring from which comes the Word like a river, the Mother of the Word through whom the universe came to be. She was the overflowing source of light and life, making her instruction shine forth like the dawn. Her human mouthpieces, the sages, are like a canal of water flowing into a river flowing into a sea. She made her throne in a pillar of cloud, and she covered the earth like a mist, and those who thirsted for her could drink of her.

John D Turner

Sophia is the sacral presence of sheer being through which the creature both exists and returns to God. As the Angel of Knowledge and Revelation, she is the harbinger of the Name as the very dispensation of grace who performs the transformative rite of salvation as the perfecting agent of the divine plan. She is the Song of the Living Light who fills the impoverished chalice of the wayfarer with the ambrosial wine of the wise, dwelling as the Sakina in the Ark of the Covenant at the very heart and center of all existence. Her emanative activity is the perception of God regarding Herself through the sojourn of soul consciousness moving between Heaven and Earth, frolicking as the living reflection of the Invisible Spirit presenting the eternal wisdom of the Deity through the evolution of sentience from potentiality to actuality.

The audacity of the individual towards autonomy is thus analogous to the outrageousness of the Deity itself who wills forth to accompany the cultivation of its plan from inception to fruition, sharing in the suffering of the divine children as the unperceivable Friend on the way of the return.

I am the Providence of everything.

I became like my own human children.

I existed from the first.

I walked down every possible road.

I am the wealth of the light.

I am the remembering of the fullness.

The Secret Book of John

The Pronoia of Sophia takes on the earthly bodies of the sages in order to deliver the message of salvation to the sleeping flock of the spiritual seed who have been led astray by the phantasmal vices of the Archontic passions. They are the fallen angels of Sophia who have been imprisoned under the dark hexes of ignorance imposed by the Demiurge. The friends of God are awakened by the descent of Barbelo to receive the Epinoia of the Light upon the imaginal planes of the Emerald Cities, indicating the mythical sanctuaries of gnosis that dot the snowy peak of the Holy Mountain.

These celestial cathedrals operate as open channels of wisdom to disseminate the Water of Life through the underworld initiations of the visionary recital. Through the course of her descent, Sophia assumes a garment appropriate to the energetic climate of each level and creature subsisting within the cosmic hierarchy, and thereby assimilates the great tapestry of being to the perfect image of the Pleroma.

For unbeknownst the Yaldaboeth, the catalytic synergists of salvation have been implanted within the very fields of the cosmic deficiency as the spiritual knights of Sophia whose prophecy will be fulfilled in the final Apokatastasis that is the return of humanity to the Garden of Eden. The Voice was another epithet for the Goddess Sophia for the inspired sage speaks the Language of the Birds through indwelling whisper of the Sakina.

As  Sophia rises, the spiritual seed remember their veritable identities as choral members in the Angelical Harmony, reconstituting the Temple Body of the Holy Spirit as the Community Saints and hidden fellowship of the Rose-Cross. The Maiden of Light must descend a total of three times in order to perform the final rite of the Five Seals where the Most Beautiful Names of the Immortal Entities are fully disclosed from the celestial Book of Life in the anointment of the chrism, wherein the Sakina enters the tabernacle the soul to fill the chalice of the heart with the lifeblood of the Christ and thus sacramentally transform their psychophysical natures into the resurrectional Body of Light.

Sophia is the fragrant mist of the Beloved, the perfume of the active imagination flowing between Heaven and Earth to tinder the lamp of the Sakina with the revelatory inspirations of divine grace. She symbolizes the divine love and longing between creature and Creator by descending as a blessed rainbow or a holy pillar of flame to seal the Covenant between mortal and divinity.

The ultimate message underlying the Fall of Sophia is that we ourselves, as the angelic children of the Divine Mother, are predestined to rebuild the Temple of Solomon by remembering the divine heritage that is our essential unity. In hosting the glorious return of the Sakina within the vessels of our open hearts, we will reestablish the Kingdom of Light here on Earth.

The Sophia herself bleeds with the pain caused by the Wound of Separation, the dissonance, nihilism and spiritual/empathic blindness wrought by the apathetic sickness infecting her children, yet it is this secretion of divine sympathy that brews the medicinal wine of grace that activates the curative enzyme within a diseased creation.

For Our Lady is both the Invisible Church of the Holy Grail and Ark of the Covenant who offers the branch of peace and the feast of gnosis to all who would hear her splendid music, filling those who would heed the Language of the Birds to reenter the Courts of Love where the immortal muses hymn the living romance of the Beautiful.

I am the way which seeks travelers

Saint Augustine