Hokmah/Sophia/Wisdom, the Wisdom still known to Solomon and for whom he sung his epic Songs, was finally, ignominiously, thrown down in Revelations and branded ‘the Whore of Babylon’. All this has had more than repercussions in our age. It has moulded them.
We think all this ancient stuff isn’t important forgetting that its ancient us.
We can be entirely agnostic in faith yet these ancient stories are deep in our hindbrain, cornerstones of Western culture, the templates for our perceptions and relationships.
Why Babylon?
Because that’s where Her church was exiled to when Nebuchadnezzar seiged Jerusalem back in 425BCE.
ok
Our perception of ourselves changed forever. Mostly we think of this ‘transition’ (repression and persecution) from Matriarchal religions as being in terms of increases, the ‘price we paid’ for emergent consciousness and tout the advent of writing and building skills as proof.
Leaving aside for a moment the other 75,000 years of homo sapiens history in which nothing can possibly have happened, a less remarkable change in consciousness occured with king Gilgamesh chopping down the sacred grove of the Great Mother, something so pervasive and common place we no longer notice it unless its in the form of ecological disasters or environmental devastation.
It is change, not in terms of what consciousness has gained, but in what it has lost,
Belonging. Belonging born of Relatedness.
Home is where de heart is………
And you wonder, ‘how necessary was that?’
How is consciousness being increased if the whole template for our relationships is predicated upon inner division, symbolised by the repeating motif of the dark brother’s demise, acted out in perpetuity all the way from Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the war on Islam, which, of course, is just coming up to its thousandth birthday..?
In fact we have regressed.
If the divine feminine can’t be acknowledged and mothering have no sacred context, bonding is messed with and we get to be special rather than loved. It looks great but its not, like kids with the hugs scrubbed off.
Its not consciousness that has increased but persona, an ever more flambuoyant and self-confident image at the level of mere personality that requires the dark brother to be killed off in every generation…..
Bling!
and war
…culminating in the cult of personality and projection of Self onto…the special, the celebrated, in whose glow we can then bask and get just a little bit of the good stuff for ourselves, just by way of association.
Being is impoverished and not just in terms of our relationships in which the dark brother takes refuge, nor in our substitute preoccupations with mater(iality), but in our inner cohesion.
Without the Principle of Relatedness, we hang together less well. The different parts of the psyche have their capacity to talk to one another restricted.
Cholesterol of the Soul.
You become less internally agile, less able to pool resources, make decisions, think on your feet, stay in touch with your body. When its really bad the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
And its the absence of something really quite ordinary that creates such disturbance, rather than the presence of something exotic.
Give me Napoleon any day.
