Román Leão

Tag: spirituality

  • Philosophical Musings: On Sophia

    The gnostic concept of Sophia, or God’s wisdom, as a separate, distinct—female—entity was not something I was familiar with before embarking on this journey. Reading up on the different manifestations of the divine goddess, whether it be the pre-Christian Isis, Ishtar, and Inanna; the Black Madonna; or even Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and destruction, the symbology that, for me, best exemplifies an amorphous, but all-pervading force just might come from the Kabbalists who imbued the Shekinah, or the cloud that always seemed to accompany the presence of Yahweh in the Holiest of Holies, with the perspicuity of the creator.

    Rather than merely prescribe the force with gender-specific attributes to balance out the patriarchal heavy-hitters of Father and Son, we can look to the balance of other archetypical pairings to get to a better understanding of Sophia. Whereas Yahweh is a man of action, Sophia is the knowledge to help bring about creativity. As Kali, she balances out the perennial life-giving force of Yahweh with the concepts of time, entropy, and death, and as she does so, maybe gets a bad rap.

    If in the beginning there was the Word, the Logos, wouldn’t there also have to be the understanding of that word? Language without knowledge, without wisdom, is just noise. Tinder waiting to catch fire.

    One thing that I have noticed about beginning this work is that you open yourself up to signs and portends that may have gone unnoticed otherwise. After beginning to distill this particular meditation, I took a break to go see some music with a friend of mine. As we usually have dinner before the show, we were shown to our table and were catching up when our waitress came and introduced herself. As my companion and I had been engaged in conversation, I hadn’t heard her clearly and repeated her name back to make sure that I had it right.

    “Sophie?” I asked.

    “No,” she uncharacteristically (for a server just going about doing her job) caught me with a meaningful stare. “It’s Sophia.”

    So, one of the many manifestations of the sacred feminine is a waitress at Yoshi’s jazz club in Oakland. Duly noted.

    I really should have guessed.

  • Philosophical Musings: On The Goddess

    As a seeker, I consider myself first and foremost, a Jungian, especially once I dove into his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. As a novelist, the idea of the Hero’s Journey is always front of mind. His theory of the human psyche being made up of pairs of diametrically opposed states certainly jibes with good character building, both on the page and in real life. When building a robust personality, I try to figure out what would be the last thing they would ever do—then have them do it, driven either by fate, outside actors, or their shadow self coming to the fore.

    The sacred writings of all cultures reflect the thought patterns inherent in human experience, and in many ways form the hidden architecture that even modern society is built upon. That said, it is easy to look around and see how the feminine anima has been suppressed in a drive to dominate; be it a landscape, an indigenous population, the twined worlds of commerce and politics, or even the hearts and minds of apostles and acolytes alike.

    What is lost when one side of the story is missing, is a richness that can only be experienced through the energy created by opposing polarities. Whereas the traditionally understood masculine ego provides an analytical mindset for problem solving and world building, one misses the opportunity to access the subconscious when the opposing feminine aspect is subdued. This is certainly a shame as that is where the magic lives.

    As a young person, being introduced to scripture from a patriarchal Catholic perspective, it never dawned on me that anything preceded it. The books carried over from the Torah, especially, have a dignity and gravity that would lead one to believe that they had been around forever. To learn that the Canaanites, from whom the early Israelites broke off, were polytheistic, including the goddess Asherah, who, in some circles, was considered a consort of Yahweh, was an eye-opener. Why was the feminine aspect cut out of the story?

    In Genesis, a God—to paraphrase Whitman, containing multitudes, or in its own words, “the alpha and omega”—creates a human in its own image, a being containing both male and female, at least until divided in what today would be considered an upgrade, or patch: Mankind 2.0. Even that appellation, however, denotes a patriarchal dominance. Control of the narrative leading to control of the population, is surely the underlying drive.

    When we imagine the story of Eve bringing the fruit from the tree of knowledge to her counterpart who had his original feminine side, his anima, removed to create her, we should think of it as a reintegration rather than a fall; a graduation rather than a banishment.