PART ONE: WHO IS SOPHIA, REALLY?
3.1 Who is Sophia really? After we had chased her down the rabbit warrens looking for her presence in the occulted symbols of popular media and somewhat finding it, but always it was darkened and distorted into a Lilithic-type mania and narcissism. Maybe this divine goddess started out pure, but when she fell, she couldn’t return and that is where in the olden days I would believe in the Fallen Hostage Myth that there was a remnant of humanity who can only be the Christ Savior and rescue the Mother out of her insanity, but now I see this as a gross literalization.
We’ll see how Sophia is neither this higher being stuck in matter and speaking to us in Illuminati-intercepted code and riddle, but that she’s part of the living astral substrate behind all of human consciousness and soul life. And preparing for this memoir, I happened upon a Steiner lecture (Gospel of John, lecture 6) where he talks about what happened to the mother of Jesus at the moment of baptism when the Christ being enters Jesus and he becomes Christ Jesus, for he usually doesn’t talk about what happened to his mother, but here he describes how she undergoes a change, she becomes enlightened and is lit up by the purified soul of the other Mary (and will get into the two Marys later) and in the state she became a vessel for divine wisdom or what in the mysteries is called Sophia.
Here I was still struggling to understand then is she just a symbol, a metaphor for wisdom or if she’s an actual higher being like the Christ. I took this question to ChatGPT who I’ve been having an ongoing dialogue with along these matters and he pointed out that in Steiner terms Sophia is not a godlike being like the Christ, nor is she a symbol. She is what happens to each human soul when it becomes a purified vessel where the I presence shines through it in a one-to-one ratio you could say. This I presence – which is a gift from the Christ – when it works through the lower bodies, the astral body in particular without interference or distortion than that astral body has been purified, or it has become a virgin Mary or a virgin Sophia.
This living astral substance, which is behind our dreams, our symbol making, even our intuitions, drives and feeling life is not identical with divine wisdom or Sophia, although both can have this quality of being living or responsive.
But this astral substance, this raw imaginal substrate is alive, but not yet necessarily wise. It can become feverish or Lilithic, or it can become clarified and Sophianic. And here I finally intuited a deep truth that was muddy before because this question was getting to the heart of it, it was too flat a question or too much in the head to ask, “is she a being or is she just metaphor?”
Because what gives both the living astral substance and divine wisdom it’s living character is God or Divinity itself. Perhaps, in the language of the Western mysteries, Sophia-Isis can be understood as the feminine face of the Godhead: the divine aliveness that warms through the imaginal world and makes it responsive to human beings through dreams, art, altered states, stepwork, meditation, and even prefiguration in media. She is that being warming through it, but she is so vast and all encompassing that it’s almost a moot point trying to say whether or not divine wisdom is a real being, if she was the mother of Jesus, etc.
The reason why it is interesting to use a name and a female name, and a character embodiment for divine wisdom is because when you clothe her, when you clothe this livingness this spiritual intelligent presence, felt presence, when you clothe that as a being even if it’s symbolically, then you enter into a deeper archetypal state of consciousness. because your subconscious does the same thing, it’s constantly embodying principles in characters through your dreams, through projections onto other people, through popular figures in media systems, through your lover, through your family and kids, etc.
So when you begin to symbolize divine wisdom in this way, and you use that as a vehicle or a map for studying inspired literature and songs, then basically your whole deeper soul programming comes through, comes to the light and you see yourself as the I presence that steps into or recognizes divine wisdom, Sophia, so she’s really a mirror for yourself. that’s the highest pursuit here. It is to know thy self, to know what is this I presence that was given to me by Christ? It is that which recognizes Sophia within his own being. Recognizes and affirms.
