The Lineage of Wisdom: From the Neolithic Era to the Middle Ages

Monthly Newsletter | Australia, February 2024

Sophia of the Sacred Wisdom, St. Nicholas Mokry Church, Yaroslavl Russia, 1670.

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Having just moved through the Celtic Wheel marking Imbolc, or St Brigid’s Day and the coming of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, I’m thinking about that early goddess.

This time last year, I was writing about her from the furs and blankets of my winter den in Devon (full piece here). Today, I’m riding the peek of Australian summer out in the remote wilds of the bush. How life can change from one year to the next.

I am very much a seasonal creature, and used to the Northern Hemisphere’s turn of the wheel. So I’ve found being on the opposite side of that rather confusing and discombobulating.

Nonetheless, on Imbolc eve I hung out my cloth overnight for Brigid to bless, as is the custom. I find continuing the practices of my heritage keeps a part of me fed, while the rest of me feasts on the newness of this place.

And so for this Sunday’s Substack, I would like to expand the fires that Brigid casts and follow them backward, as is the nature of most my inquiries! Back to the before before before…

The gods are polyvalent, and stand for a thousand and one things. But they each have currents that run stronger than others, and one of the currents that animates Brigid is that of wisdom.

If we locate ourselves within an animistic worldview, whereby all things are alive and have their own distinctive intelligence, be it river, deer or star, then wisdom, too, is alive and has an intelligence.

In the ancient world, Wisdom was often seen as a Goddess. Pre-dynastic Egypt called her Neith, for the Libyans and the Greeks she was owl-eyed Athena, the Romans called her Minerva, and throughout the Islamic Middle East she is Al-Hakim. Though she has been for the most part exiled within the Judeo-Christian traditions, in both the Kabbala and Gnosticism - the mystical branches of Judaism and Christianity respectively - she is celebrated as Sophia, the female counterpart, or wisdom, of God. Sophia, quite literally meaning “wisdom” in Greek.

While researching the ancient world’s approach to wisdom as feminine, I discovered what I’m going to loosely call a Wisdom Tradition that can be traced all the way back to the Bronze Age. The academic and Jungian analyst Jules Cashford contextualises this notion of Wisdom as a Goddess by tracing her roots all the way back to the Neolithic era. Much like archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, she discovered that the Goddess was seen as the Whole from which life emerged and returned, and that she was conceived as ‘the door or gateway to a hidden dimension of being that was her womb, the eternal source and regenerator of life.’¹

Cashord chronologically traced the appearance of the Mother Goddess and her association with Wisdom from the Mesopotamian Bronze Age in her forms of Nammu and Inanna in Sumeria, Maat and Isis in Egypt, later Demeter and Athena in Greece, and finally, Sophia in the Old Testament. Some scholars argue that the Biblical body of literature often called “wisdom literature” went as far as placing the goddess of Wisdom, Sophia, as its mythic representative.

However, we come to a profound shift in the Christian era when this archetypal image of the Goddess as Wisdom becomes replaced with Christ as Logos, the Word of God, and the old relationship between wisdom and the Goddess was lost.²

Much of the wisdom literature that was once in the sacred texts of the old world has been lost, destroyed by various invasions, enforced monolithic conversion, and the later crusades that brought with them an epoch of brutal persecution.

Fortunately, after an interlude, the notion of Sophia reappeared in the medieval period with the emergence of the Grail legends, the Knights Templar, Alchemy, the ways of the troubadours and troubiaritz, the Order of the Cathars, the Jewish Kabbalists and the Islamic philosophers, poets and mystics of Andalusian Spain.

For the most part, these gnostic ideas were spread by the travelling troubadours. Their chivalric ideal made woman into the personification of Sophia and displayed a devotion to her in a language of longing reminiscent to that of the Song of Songs.

These concepts were also dispersed by the medieval legends of the quest for the Holy Grail. Once more, Sophia - or Wisdom - became the inspiration and purpose for the spiritual quest.

The motif that wisdom has to be earned – be it through a quest or an exchange of some kind – is a core principle within many spiritual traditions. In the Nordic-Germanic myth, the price that the wandering truth-seeker Odin has to pay for wisdom, divination and poetry is one of his eyes. Only then does he get to drink from the Well of Remembrance at the foot of the great Tree of Worlds.

Similarly, in one version of the Greek myth, the seer Teiresias is blinded by Athena when she catches him watching her bathing. In compensation, she sends her serpent to clear out his ears so he can understand the prophetic language of birds.³ This inner vision is known as the “second sight” within Celtic tradition, and alludes to the ability to orient attention inwardly and outwardly simultaneously. The notion of “inner vision” is beautifully illustrated by the symbolism of Odin’s one missing eye, and one open eye, observing and so engaging with both the internal and external worlds at the same time - a useful image, I find!

This form of Wisdom was known by the Irish as imbas forasnai, meaning “knowledge that illuminates” and was understood to be a type of specialized power stemming from intuitive knowledge. The attainment of such knowledge would have perhaps engendered a form of self-transformation.

The theosopher Henry Corbin saw the Hagia Sophia great mosque in Turkey as a living symbol of the attainment of Sophia at the end of the philosopher’s quest. He wrote: ‘The Temple of Holy Sophia was for me the temple of the Grail, at least an exemplification of its archetype anticipated by many seekers of gnosis.’⁴ The city of Istanbul provided the perfect place for him to fulfil his lifelong search for wisdom through the teachings of mystical Islam.

In Celtic lore, Sophia was known as Sovereignty. Often, she consorted with a hero on a quest. This may reveal an attempt to restore balance between the masculine and the feminine, and allude to the sacred marriage of opposites apparent in spiritual traditions cross-culturally. This inner union, or “sacred marriage” between the inner masculine and inner feminine, known in Greek as hieros gamos, can be understood as the ultimate experience of Wisdom.

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Seraphim Angel, Hagia Sophia, Turkey.

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Poetry Offering

How to Disappear
Amanda Dalton

First rehearse the easy things.
Lose your words in a high wind,
walk in the dark on an unlit road,
observe how other people mislay keys,
their diaries, new umbrellas.
See what it takes to go unnoticed
in a crowded room. Tell lies:
I love you. I'll be back in half an hour.
I'm fine.

Then childish things.
Stand very still behind a tree,
become a cowboy, say you've died,
climb into wardrobes, breathe on a mirror
until there's no one there, and practise magic,
tricks with smoke and fire –
a flick of the wrist and the victim's lost
his watch, his wife, his ten pound note. Perfect it.
Hold your breath a little longer every time.

The hardest things.
Eat less, much less, and take a vow of silence.
Learn the point of vanishing, the moment
embers turn to ash, the sun falls down,
the sudden white-out comes.
And when it comes again – it will –
just walk at it, walk into it, and walk,
until you know that you're no longer
anywhere.

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Announcements - Upcoming Online Events

All the upcoming online events can be attended live or via recording. Please follow the links for all the details.

9 FEBRUARY | Monthly Rite | Women’s New Moon | More details

21 FEBRUARY | New Online Lecture Series: When Women Were the Shamans | More details

25 FEBRUARY | Monthly Rite | Dismemberment Ceremony | More details

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1. Jules Cashford (1993) Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, p. 610

2. Ibid., p. 611

3. Ralph Metzner (1994) The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe, p. 223

4. Quoted in Hadi Fakhoury (2003) Henry Corbin and Russian Religious Thought. Montreal: McGill University, p. 53