Wisdom - Sophia - Divine Feminine - Holy Spirit -

God the Mother - the Goddess - the Life Force

Divine Wisdom as found in the Book of Proverbs show a feminine side unlike anything else in the Old Testament.
	Proverbs  8   "Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? ...  The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.  Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.  When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.  Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth - when he had not yet made the fields, or the world’s first bit of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, ... when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was his daily delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race."
Wisdom, about 1170 AD, J. Paul Getty Museum

   
Wisdom is clearly portrayed as feminine.  She supports God the Creator, and is in the arc of heaven.
   Wisdom was with Yahweh during creation.  She was created and then was co-creator.  Why have we not learned about this in Sunday School lessons?  Seeing the Wisdom of Proverbs as part of the “us” in Genesis 1: 26 should change our religion and our world.  But countless millions must have read the above passage and have not made the connection with “her”.  The paternal, patriarch system is strongly ingrained and unperceptive.    
Paul and the Church tried to make Christ the Wisdom of God and maybe the Holy Spirit and Christ are all one and the same.
1 Corinthians 1:30  "He is the source of your life Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God."
   

Egyptian Goddess Ma'at, painting on sandstone, Museo Archaelogico, Florence, Italy. Even older wisdom traditions existed in ancient Egypt, before 3500 B.C.  Maat is a name of a goddess or concept symbolizing divine order, harmony, truth and justice.   Isis, famous Egyptian goddess, known by many names derived from Maat. Her symbols were a feather and the anhk, a looped cross, and symbol of life.
	This ankh-shaped, gold-sheathed mirror case was taken from the tomb of Tutankhamun in southern Egypt's Valley of the Kings.
Plant life regrowing on Mount St. Helen's volcanic ash. Life Force is part of the Holy Spirit and Divine Wisdom.  It can not be stopped, it has a will or force of its own.  Life will appear given the proper set of conditions, by evolution or by design.  Once in place, it strives unrelentlessly.
Sumerian statue of the goddess Ishtar Sumer was one of the earliest known civilizations ~ 3000 BC.  They lived in Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq. They developed cuniform writing on clay tablets.

Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and fertility, was revered by the Phoenicians from at least 3200 BC, where she was associated with Adonis. Aphrodite appeared in many of the Greek epics and legends.  Later she also appeared in the epics of the Romans, who called her Venus.
The Birth of Venus, by Sandro Botticelli, 1485, Galleria degli Uffizi. Florence, Italy.

Wisdom was also known by the Greeks as Sophia and by others as God the Mother, the Feminine Principle, the goddess, and as the Holy Ghost.  She is the consort or companion to God the Father, as made clear in Proverbs.  But somewhere, somehow, She was lost to the Church.Sophia comes to us in words such as philosophy - meaning love of wisdom.  Sophia is not to be confused with St. Sophia, a widow of Rome canonized as a saint by the Church. 
A balance of male and female, and positive and negative, is necessary in creation and in life.  The Anhk symbol includes the female and male part.  And this opens the possibility to look at the Logos, or the Word in terms of Divine Wisdom and Sophia.

Wisdom of Solomon 7:7-8  "Therefore I prayed, and understanding was given me; I called on God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.  I preferred her to sceptors and thrones, I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her." Icon of the Divine Wisdom, 16th Century, Novgorodian School, Russia.  God’s Wisdom and Spirit is clearly shown as female.  However, in other representations, Wisdom is portrayed as Christ and as Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Wisdom of Solomon is one of the Apocryphal Books, not in the Old or New Testaments, but included in some bibles.  Apocryphal refers to hidden or unknown.  According to the Illustrated Companion to the Bible, the Wisdom of Solomon was written probably written by Greek speaking Jews in Alexandria, Egypt around the 1st century B.C.  This could have been the same type of community that the young Jesus and his family escaped to as described in Matthew 2. 

Ostara by Johannes Gehrts, 1884 The Easter Goddess Coming At Springtime

And Easter was her name. 
The exact arrival of spring is marked by the Spring Equinox, the date when day and night are equal lengths. Depending on the year and time zones, this equinox falls between March 20 and 23.   German and Norse pagans named their Spring Equinox festival after Ostara, the goddess of spring, fertility, and rebirth. In England, among the Anglo-Saxon tribes, Ostara was known as Eostre.   
According to these myths, Eostre was a playful goddess whose reign over the earth began in the spring when the Sun King journeyed across the sky in his chariot, bringing the end of winter. Eostre came down to earth then, appearing as a beautiful maiden with a basket of bright colorful eggs.     
But what happened to the Easter Goddess cults?  They were completely obliterated by the Roman Catholic Church as the Church spread west through the Roman empire.  There is more evidence of the ancient Mesopotamian and Babylonian cults of the goddesses Ishtar and Astarte than we have of the Easter Goddess.  Much was lost during the Dark Ages. The rebirth concepts were adapted to fit the Christian resurrection story.  And most of us were none the wiser and completely ignorant of the connection. 

The Next Reformation needs to know about the Easter legend. 
What was it like, where did it come from, what happened to it?

Spiritual Evolution ~