The Revelation of the Threefold Sophia: As Key to Meeting Christ in the Etheric

THE REVELATION OF THE THREEFOLD DIVINE SOPHIA AS KEY TO MEETING CHRIST IN THE ETHERIC By Bill Trusiewicz The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way... When he prepared the Heavens I was there When he gave the sea his decree, that it should not pass his commandment: When he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was with him... Wisdom’s Speech Old Testament: Proverbs 8 I N THIS ESSAY WE WILL BEGIN to explore the Threefold Divine Sophia, a topic that seems to us to have an unlimited scope for exploration, as a key to meeting Christ in the etheric sphere of the Earth where human beings in our time can find their most intrinsic nature mirrored—as illumination from above alights on the virgin soul within. In an earlier article1 we looked at the revelation of the divine feminine being of Isis/Sophia “hidden behind” Rudolf Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation, the text of which speaks ostensibly of the spiritual foundations of the human being discoverable in the masculine Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In that study we hinted at the threefold nature of Sophia when we looked at one of the fundamental edicts of ancient Egyptian mystery schools inscribed beneath the veiled statue of Isis at Sais: “I am the All: I am the Past, Present and Future, no mortal can lift my veil.” We also considered the “Great Portent” revealed to St. John, recorded in chapter twelve of his Revelations, a woman who has a threefold constitution: the moon under her feet, the sun illuminating her body and her head crowned with twelve stars. In this essay we will explicitly address ourselves to the threefold nature of the Divine Sophia as a basis for a direct experience with her and the Christ as they appear in our time, in the life-body of the Earth. Preliminary to our examination of the threefold Divine Sophia and essential to it, let something be understood, which needs to be addressed in our time. We can no longer expect to arrive at truth without recognizing that nothing in life can be addressed properly without taking duality into account. One-sidedness will not do. There is a duality that exists in nature and in every 1 That article is titled: The Foundation Stone Meditation as the Being of Isis/Sophia: Some Results from Working with The Foundation Stone Meditation. It can be found in an earlier issue of Starlight and at: https://independent.academia.edu/BillTrusiewicz 2 aspect of life that can no longer be ignored. Everything that has existence necessarily has a counterpart. Nothing exists in itself by itself. Rudolf Steiner said it like this: “Everywhere in life we find duality[...]The pupil must make it his duty to think in terms of these dualities[...]never think in terms of single aspects only[...]When humanity learns to think in dualities, thinking will be factually correct and in accordance with reality.”2 We mention this here noting that this is a subject that deserves more attention, at very least an article dedicated to it, but more, because we want in this study—to think “in accordance with reality.” To think in accordance with reality we must, of all things, think of the reality of duality when dealing with divine spiritual beings. One duality that we would do well to take into account is the relationship between masculine and feminine Divine beings. For instance, the divine beings of the hierarchies and the Godhead have counterparts; they have what we might call consorts. The early Christians who became known as Gnostics, who wrote the so-called Gnostic Gospels, were among those who recognized this reality and used this terminology. With the recognition of this truth we can ascertain that the Threefold Divine Sophia, properly deserves to be placed alongside the Holy Trinity—or more, as a triangle, united with the triangle of the Trinity (see figure 1). This is not a new idea but one that we will emphasize here. When we put the two triangles together we get the Divine “Six in One” or “Hexadity” also referred to as the “Luminous Holy Trinity,” to borrow Father terms from the Russian mystic/philosopher/hermeticist Valentin Tomberg. What we thus Daughter create is a picture of the unity of the Holy Masculine Holy Trinity of Father, Soul Son and Holy Spirit, with the Feminine Holy Trinity of Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul. The consort of the Father is the Mother, the consort of Christ is Sophia, the consort of the Holy Spirit is the Holy Holy Soul. These two trinity’s act as One; Son Spirit all of their activity is cooperative. It is imperative that we begin to think in these terms, to observe and recognize this higher reality. If we Figure 1. Luminous Holy Trinity or ourselves are to meet Christ in the Six-in-One Divine Hexadity, etheric, to be united with him, we must know what it means to become “the bride of Christ:” we must become his consort. And meeting Christ in the etheric means we meet Sophia. Besides this we connect with the Father and the Holy Spirit.3 And consequently we also are united with the Mother and the Holy Soul. These are not abstractions or metaphors. They are actual beings with whom we can enjoy a relationship—we can know in reality. Mother 2 GA 89 Berlin, April 3, 1905 For more see Rudolf Steiner’s: three meetings each person can have with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses, Rudolf Steiner, Blauvert, NY; Spiritual Research Editions, 1989, pp. 25-28 3 3 Our time is a particularly spiritual time, a period under the Rulership of the Archangel Michael. We are also in the Age of Pisces, the Fishes, Ichthyos being the symbol of Christ and water representing the etheric world in which humanity “swims.” The possibility for human beings in our time to connect to the spiritual world in full consciousness is unprecedented. And a threshold experience, a spiritual initiation, is becoming more and more a possibility but also more a necessity to overcome the evils of our time. Not just those seeking the spirit but humanity as a whole is being drawn further and further across the threshold of the spiritual world. For those who are wholly given up to external life, in which a conscious meeting with Christ hasn’t occurred, the human connection to external life, to the sense perceptible physical world, is changing. External life used to be ordered according to spiritual laws, which no longer hold. As a result more chaotic conditions are rapidly approaching. This is the result of the fact that, as a person crosses the threshold, the three members of his or her soul, the thinking, feeling and willing faculties become independent since they are no longer bound to the physical body. Spiritual science calls this the “splitting of the personality.” We are in a transitional period, in which the physical body is losing its ability to bind the human soul together in such a way that patterns of behavior are predictable and orderly (though not without a chaotic character) that results from a largely uncultivated soul life. The new natural clairvoyance one sees more and more today is the result of an expansion of the etheric body beyond conformity to the physical body. This condition of expanded etheric form, which in the past was the result of either atavistically lagging behind in development, or advanced spiritual development, is beginning to become a normal state for human souls with the result that, especially in those who have not awakened their higher I, a more chaotic condition ensues than when the etheric body remained in conformity with the physical body. This is what it means when we say that humanity in general is crossing the threshold in our time. Briefly, to reiterate: today the three members of soul, thinking, feeling and willing, are no longer exclusively under the influence of our bodily organization with the limited modicum of order that condition provides. Spiritual forces and beings can now inhabit the human etheric body and gain control of it. Therefore one sees an increase of activity in an unconscious flow of will impulses, emotions and thoughts, which is one of the reasons we see such bizarre behavior every day in the news. In keeping with our commitment to “think in dualities,” we note here also that while the dark unconscious forces are at work in humanity other forces in the Earth, good, pure forces from Shambhala, the Mother Lodge, are also becoming available to those who find the grace to gain access to them. Fortunately, the good powers who guide the spiritual evolution of humanity have provided what is necessary to meet the chaos coming into the world. For a problem that is threefold, the “splitting of the personality” into three distinct and disordered members, the remedy is found in the Threefold Divine Sophia whose aptitude, if I may use a prosaic term, is precisely in harmonizing and uniting disparate parts. While the Archangel Michael, through the Christ Power, illuminates each of the soul members individually through the Spirit, the work of harmonizing and unifying the soul is the work of the Divine Sophia. Just as the human male provides the seed to bring forth three children, for instance, it is the female that gives birth to, 4 and is the primary care-giver who is specially equipped to provide nourishment and the motherly qualities that are essential for a healthy unified family life. To further this discourse, it will serve us well to begin by examining this article’s epigraph, which was taken from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, which is referred to by Christians as the Old Testament, in an effort to awaken memories deep within us. We are seeking that inner resonance to confirm the subtle inner wisdom imprinted in our souls. Wisdom (Sophia) is speaking here: When He prepared the heavens, I was there... When He set for the sea its boundary... When He marked out the foundation of the earth... Then I was beside Him...4 Sophia was there when God “prepared the heavens...set forth the sea its boundary...marked out the foundation of the earth...” Here we can take the wisdom of the writer (King Solomon) as a step in confirming our Divine Hexadity, our Luminous Holy Trinity, seeing how this work was done collaboratively with both the divine masculine and feminine taking part. Beyond this basic recognition of cooperation, in order to understand this text in any significant way, we need to forget our usual way of thinking. We need to enter into the original writer’s thoughts, which despite modern criticisms of the mode of consciousness of those times, were luminous with deep wisdom of nature and humanity. If we review what we know of human consciousness during this period and into later times, we will recognize that, to people of that era, the sky, the sea and the earth were not merely physical bodies with different properties as they are generally thought to be today—they were populated by spiritual beings. In other words, to the Greek, for instance Uranus was the “sky god” who fathered Zeus whose outstanding characteristic was intelligence—thinking. The sea was ruled by Oceanus the oldest son of Uranus and Gaia while the later generation brought forth Poseidon, known as Neptune by the Romans, whose power was as the sea surges with passion. And the Earth goddess was Gaia or Demeter—stalwart givers of life and promoters of growth. And Hades, god of the underworld was perceived as the darker side of earth. To perceive these mythological personages as realities, in the primeval past, was only “logical” or “common sense,” as we would say today. In later times, when it was no longer common knowledge, the memory of former times was imparted by initiates in the form of the mythology we know today. Notable here is the difference between Solomon’s account of Wisdom (Sophia) working beside God and that of the other world religions, that is from a non-Semitic world view. From the Hebrew/Judaic perspective it was of the highest significance that the Godhead be recognized as a unitary being—what became known as a “mono-theistic” point of view. If this were not the case and did not prevail into modern times the possibility of humanity uniting with higher worlds to achieve god-manhood through the god-man Christ Jesus, would have been prevented. The independence and discord seen between the three categories of gods mentioned would never have resolved the division and conflict in the human soul between thinking, feeling and willing. The disharmony seen between the pantheon of gods was a dramatic picture of the disharmony between the three members of the human soul. From the Judaic perspective there was no 4 Holy Bible, Proverbs 8:27-30 5 plurality of Zeus, Poseidon and Demeter, for instance. There was simply God and his consort Sophia, but preeminently the masculine Father God with a threefold nature—not yet explicitly delineated but presented as a unitary being with different attributes and roles, the explication of which would fall eventually to theological exegesis. This development of the idea of the unitary godhead was coincident with the shrinking of the etheric body into conformity with the human head beginning with Abraham, the father of the Semitic peoples, where thought as an independent human faculty commenced development— where what we now call atavistic clairvoyance was eclipsed. This condition in Abraham was far in advance of the rest of humanity. One result, of great consequence, was that the feminine divine was subsequently submerged, for the most part, with feminine attributes subsumed in the masculine Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This was necessary for a time to develop human individuality and to master the physical world. The salient point here is that a TRIPLE UNITY was established in the preeminence of the Father God and Wisdom his consort. Returning to our Old Testament verses we quoted, what we want to see here is: Sophia “was beside Him” as an active participant in the foundation and continuation of the natural world in a threefold way—that relates directly to us. How this relates to us has to do with our ability in modern times, with different faculties than our ancestors, to perceive again, as the initiates of old—the soul of nature. When we say that Christ is present “in the etheric” we mean in nature— in the living natural world around us, within which “we live and move and have our being,” to echo St. Paul. It is important to realize that the forces that were developed after Father Abraham, the forces to perceive unity in the cosmos, were the same forces that caused the Divine Feminine to be submerged and hidden with consciousness of the spiritual world eclipsed by intellectuality. These forces concentrated in the head of the human being also make it possible for human beings, independently and in freedom, to re-gain a clear and fully-conscious connection to the spiritual world. An outer masculine approach to life that over-emphasizes knowledge of the material world over the spiritual world had to prevail for a time over a feminine and inward consciousness, which was a clairvoyant consciousness. So clairvoyance grew dimmer and dimmer until it was expunged. Today these forces have now achieved enough strength to penetrate the inner nature of things, no longer by instinctive means, given by the spiritual world as a dimmed shadowy clairvoyance, but out of the strength of the inner being of a humanity that is rising to a clarified I consciousness through the Christ impulse. The old clairvoyance has given way to clear, waking consciousness of the spiritual world. How will this manifest? And how does it relate to our meeting Christ in the etheric? We need to know how it will manifest since we need an outer mirror so that we can become conscious of our inner experience, which otherwise remains as a willing-feeling experience that is dimly felt as faith—being largely unconscious. We need to raise our faith to gnosis or living knowledge. The new natural clairvoyance that we can experience is made possible with two requirements: the etheric body must expand beyond the confines of the human head and secondly, the strengthened I forces must enter the etheric sphere surrounding the body. Not to worry that one’s etheric body may not reach out beyond the head, one need only practice brain-free thinking. 6 Brain free thinking occurs when we think spiritual thoughts, that is thoughts that mirror the structure of the spiritual world, if I may say it so, and are not just a mirror of the ordinary, physical, sense perceptible world. We can only truly think spiritual thoughts outside of the physical apparatus of the brain so brain-free thinking actually expands the etheric body. It is possible today to move one’s attention, which is to say one’s higher I consciousness, back and forth between the brain and the etheric world uniting the above and the below, the inner and the outer, the masculine and the feminine. This is what Jesus of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas said one must do in order to enter the Kingdom of God. When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female...then you will enter [the Kingdom]. 5 Before we directly address the question of meeting Christ in the etheric it will serve us well to anchor our discussion of the Divine Sophia in her threefoldness with a further elaboration from tradition, from Art and from the Foundation Stone Meditation of Rudolf Steiner. Figure 2. The Three Marys at the Tomb, by Mikolaj Haberschrack. 5 There is very interesting and telling tradition among Catholic Christians mostly of Spanish origin, which is observed in Good Friday parades called Penitencia celebrating the three Mary’s (Tres Marias) present at the tomb of Jesus. In these Good Friday processions the first Mary is holding a broom, the second Mary is holding a censer or thurible and the third is holding an alabaster jar. In this we see folk wisdom at its best, the kind of wisdom seen in the shepherds in the Gospel of Luke who heard the angelic choir and the announcement of the birth of the Messiah. The three Marys express the three aspects of the Triune Divine Feminine. The broom represents the earthly; the thurible with burning incense rising stands for the heavenly; and the alabaster jar symbolizes that which mediates between the heavenly and the earthly, constituted as it is, of Alabaster, a translucent stone from the earth and ointment representing the Christ, who is both the “balm of Gilead” and the Messiah or “anointed One.” We are speaking here of the Mother and the Daughter, and the Holy Soul that mediates between the two. Gospel of Thomas, 22, p. 129, The Nag Hammadi Library, Edited by James M. Robinson, Third revised edition, HarperSanFrancisco. copyright 1978 7 Countless representations of The Three Marys exist in early Christian art such as the one painted by Mikolaj Haberschrack. (See figure 1.) But, I would like to present to my readers something more unusual and enigmatic, that will lead us into a deeper consideration. The painting, Pythagoras Venus (see figure 3) was painted by an artist who devoted most of his life to figurative studies, largely of women, by themselves and in social settings, who was intensely interested in what we might call the “power of the feminine,” which often exhibits in nakedness, purity, authenticity and vulnerability—all without effort. The painting is by deceased Portland Oregon based artist Mike Russo (1909-2004). The artist was not religious or spiritual in any ordinary sense but sustained an intense intellectual interest full of questions, in what he keenly observed in the external world of the feminine and the power it yields, has yielded and will yield in the world, to which he brought a great deal of warmth. A word about Pythagoras before we begin. Pythagoras was known to be more than just sympathetic to women it seems that he venerated women. He is also credited with discovering the planet Venus identifying it with what was formerly thought to be two different stars—one a morning and the other an evening star. He called Venus the “Sol alter” the other Sun and he took for the symbol of his order the five pointed star which is called “The Pentagram of Venus” since Venus inscribes such a pentagram every eight earthyears in its journeys around the Sun. In the painting Pythagoras Venus are five women, easily placed in a pentagram or pentagon shape—already very significant. In the upper left is what appears to be a woman Figure 3. Pythagoras Venus, by Michele (Mike) Russo from pre-industrial times, perhaps even ancient times, carrying a pot on her head and dressed as of old. The dark background, from which she appears to be emerging speaks of an obscure past, as if she is lingering on the threshold of a new world that opens up around her. And she alone is leaning toward and perhaps reaching to the past (the left) while the other four women are leaning or moving to the right (the future). The left-right, past-future orientation will be further substantiated as we continue. Three of the four other women are modern, one wearing pants and two others skirts. The fifth, central and largest figure, 8 naked and with an arm missing (suggestive of the wounding of the Divine Feminine?), appears to be a statue, evoking timelessness (the Eternal Feminine), with a large globe on her shoulder reminiscent of Atlas holding the globe of the world on his shoulder—hardly mistakable as “The Universal Woman.” The picture plane appears as something of a tableaux when read from left to right: a progression of time—out of the past—into the future. The rightmost figure has a Vesica Pisces resting on top of her head (again a Pythagorean motif), replete with the fishes tail on a blue, perhaps water background. Are we here rendering the Piscean Age emerging out of a remote past with the Ichthyus—reaching into the future? The topmost quarter of the painting (delineated by the black and blue backgrounds) contains three heads from left to right. The first, the female representative of antiquity, has a funnel shaped vessel on her head—perhaps I am stretching the simile but it is hard to resist the observation that it depicts the atavistic streaming in of spiritual content that was experienced in earlier ages. This leading to the right (and out of the past) brings us to the second head—that of the universal woman, which leads further into the future with the modern/future head (far right). This third woman is depicted, not with the “funneling in” of forces of thinking from above, but with the Ichthyus on her head, the possibility of thinking that has been freed from the physical body by the Heavenly Christ—the “fisher of men.” The Vesica Pisces (see Man figure 3), also called Ichthyus, (for its fish shape) is a (Christ) figure that is made when two circles overlap. This lens-shaped figure symbolizes the coming together of the heavenly sphere and the earthly sphere, aptly describing a consciousness derived from the Vesica Pisces incarnation of the god-man Christ Jesus. The abstract background in our painting is divided horizontally opening up to the right, coming forward toward us. In it one finds three vessels—one carried Earthly on the head of the figure from antiquity and what Man looks like an ancient bowl at her feet. We see also in (Jesus) the foreground what looks like a pail—vessels being symbols of the feminine. The furthest back space (black background) seems to intimate an obscure past, as mentioned, but now we notice the Earth Figure 4. The Vesica Pisces as the Globe emerging, as it were, out of the past into the union of the heavenly and earthly present. And what of this globe—on the shoulder of man. the central figure? Is Earth somehow in transition as seems to be indicated by the black left-half and blue right-half background of the globe? And is that transition somehow on the shoulder(s) of women or should we say the Feminine, the timeless or universal female, intimated in the painting’s title with the word Venus? We have examined this painting to evoke, through artistic feeling, the central place of the Feminine Divine in the arc of history going back into antiquity and reaching forward beyond our 9 own era. In it we find something that calls to mind both the old and the new mysteries. “I am the All, I am the Past, Present and Future, no mortal can lift my veil.” And the modern: “I am the Human Being, I am the Past, Present and Future, every mortal should lift my veil.” This, the central dictum of the mysteries, spoken by Isis/Sophia, was made known in Sais of ancient Egypt. Our considerations should give us a richer feeling for the metamorphosis of human consciousness through pictorial means—and a sense of the progression of time from past, to present, to future, which we will now consider further as a means to deepen our understanding of the Divine Sophia in connection with nature. This consideration of time, the panorama or tableaux of time, is not something we can glance over lightly as we might recall it is among the first things that appear when crossing the threshold of the spiritual world. We must stand before this tableaux if we would be initiated into the mysteries of our time. Did you ever wonder why it is that time alone is mentioned as a description of “the All?” As if Time, the Past, Present and Future could be considered “The All?” We mentioned above that containers are symbolic or representative of the feminine. So for Isis/Sophia to speak of Time as a means to encompass or contain “The All,” is quite appropriate to her nature. But let us further consider this threefoldness of time. Within the threefold past, present and future the great epochs of development of the human being take place. Through Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon and Earth, the last of which is incomplete, the four members of the human being come into being: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the as yet not fully developed ego. What emerged during the Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon and Earth periods is: fire, air, water and earth. What also emerged during those epochs was the mineral Kingdom, the plant Kingdom, the animal Kingdom and the Human Kingdom. During those same periods the foundations for willing, feeling and thinking were laid; where also the foundations for our limbs system, rhythmic system and nervous system were formed. And when we gaze out into the universe on a dark night we can see in the Moon encircling the Earth, the Sun with her planets, and further still the circle of the Zodiac around us—if we can take it all in we will be seeing the actual being of Sophia. We recount all this to bring to mind the manifold world of nature in which we live every day, which we cannot but take for granted. All this that is spread out before us has taken eons of time to unfold in its complexity and beauty. This “All” contained within Time, and discernible in the world around us, is explored in a unique and powerful way through the mantric verses of the Foundation Stone Meditation of Rudolf Steiner. Beyond the obvious allusion to past, present and future in the first three stanzas, with references to “spirit recollecting,” (the past) “spirit awareness” (the present) and “spirit beholding” (the future), there are other subtle references to Sophia in her threefoldness. Immediately following each “spirit” activity is mentioned a “soul” grounding: “In depths of soul,” “In balance of soul,” and “In stillness of thought.” These three describe Sophianic spheres of activity, which are further elaborated three verses below in each stanza with: “In Depths of Worlds Begetting Being,” In Rhythms of Worlds Bestowing Grace,” and “In Beings of Worlds Beseeching Light.” Meditating on these words in their context will clearly reveal the activity and power of the feminine divine working in Soul in a threefold manner—in collaboration WITH the threefold masculine Spirit. 10 In the modern mysteries we are able to see, not only the past incarnations of the Earth (Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, but the future stretching out into the sixth and seventh cultural epochs of Earth existence, following our present fifth. We can see three greater epochs following and beyond that a period of rest (called pralaya) and then the greater planetary stages (reincarnations of Earth) called Jupiter and Venus, with all of their own interims or pralayas, and finally Vulcan. These each play out with their ramifications in 343 (7x7x7) epochs of time. Seeing this as an initiate we engage with those vast ages of time, not as a remote and hardly relevant past or as a dark and uncertain future, but as a present reality—knowing the substance (in seed form) of each of those great epochs, which are further reincarnations of Earth. With etheric vision we become partakers in the eternal—we lift the veil of “The Past, The Present and The Future.” We have thus far mentioned the pantheon of gods seen in Mythology for instance who are often at odds with one another but we have concentrated, for the most part, on the various aspects of the unitary Divine Sophia as they express themselves in the spiritual, soul and physical worlds seen from the etheric world—from the Abrahamic perspective we might say. We should examine what Goethe, the German writer, scientist-phenomenologist and statesman can contribute to our study of the Threefold Sophia, in his literary representations of “Mother” manifestations in the astral world. Well known is his reference to “The Mothers” in Faust II, in which Faust stamps on the ground gripping a magical key in hand and sinks to “the Mothers,” where he finds three Mothers seated on golden tripods. Here is what Rudolf Steiner says about Faust’s Three Mothers: “Out of the trinity of thinking, feeling and willing, which is still astral, the humanity portrayed in Faust is striving upward toward the threefoldness of the Ever-Feminine.”6 And from an historically earlier period than Faust, again from the perspective of the astral world, he tells us, as well, that there are not one but three Mothers represented in Egyptian religious art: the first is the figure of Isis with the Horus child at her breast; the second, of greater antiquity, bears on her head two horns and the wings of a hawk; the third, of the greatest antiquity, is Isis bearing a lions head. These three in fact represent the threefold nature of the human being, Steiner says, “our human soul bears in it three natures—a will nature at the inmost depths of the being, a feeling nature, and a wisdom nature. These are the three soul Mothers we meet in the three figures of the Egyptian Isis.”7 Thus far we have focused on identifying the divisions that can be found in various wisdom streams in order to better understand the trinitary nature of the Divine Sophia and show how manifold and intimate are the threads being woven into us and the world we live in through her. In so doing we have also identified the disjointed nature, the chaotic elements, that exist as a result of these divisions of soul. We have only hinted at the solution that can come in our time from the Divine Feminine—“who unites all,” to borrow a phrase from the Russian polymath Pavel Florensky. Let us attempt now to put all the divergent elements into a unity. Reviewing all that we have brought before our souls we can realize that all the divisions, which are the cause of strife and chaos in the world and the human soul, have their origin and 6 p. 207, Anthroposophy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust, from the collected works of Rudolf Steiner, SteinerBooks, 2014 7 p. 99, Isis Mary Sophia Her Mission and Ours, Rudolf Steiner, SteinerBooks, copyright 2003, Great Barrington Massachusetts. 11 expression in and through the divisions in the human soul, between thought, sense and volition. This division, as we have seen, is particularly striking in the way it is expressed in pre-Christian, non-Judaic cultures—through the various disputing and warring gods. The reason for this can be shown to be that the primary source of guidance from the spiritual world, of these particular cultures, was from the astral world. The spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner has shown, for instance, that Hermes, the great inspirer to Egyptian culture received the highly developed astral body of Zarathustra, while Moses received his etheric body. We know that Polytheism was dominant in the non-Semitic worlds (largely through Hermes) while Monotheism grew out of the Judaic tradition of Moses. We know that picture consciousness dominated in those cultures that developed out of what could be derived from of the astral body of Zarathustra. And that through Moses the Jews were forbidden to make images; they needed to cultivate a more abstract, intellectual consciousness inspired from the etheric—from the Sun Sphere, the realm of the Spirits of Form. The Egyptians and those who followed were guided through imagination from the Moon Sphere—the sphere of the angels. We have here a picture, in the Judaic tradition, of a unitary Godhead as opposed to a divided, plurality of gods resulting from different spheres of influence in the spiritual world. Out of the unitary inspiration came the concept of God as a tri-unity; and Wisdom, having three constituents, appeared also as one being. The leading thought here is: “What direction or fulfillment was to be transmitted by the Hebrew stream guided from the Sun Sphere—the realm of the etheric” The simple answer is: Mary and Jesus. The Mystery of Golgotha gave us an incarnated soul that was perfectly integrated—a perfect unity—in Mary. And in Jesus the world received the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and the Mother the Daughter and the Holy Soul—the Hexadity in the spirit messenger, Christ. In Mary, who also contained the Divine Hexadity, the Six-in-One, was primarily a messenger of soul. In the event of Golgotha the three Mothers became the One Mother—the Mater Gloriosa—in Mary. And the Holy Trinity appeared as one in Christ. Concerning the uniting of the Three Mothers into One Mother at the Mystery of Golgotha Mary Rudolf Steiner said: “...don’t they [the three Mothers and the one Mother) show us with their overwhelming poetic splendor what the Mystery of Golgotha has brought us.”8 The Mystery of Golgotha made it possible for the Son of God to be born out of the Theotokos, the Mother of God—in every human being. This means that the human I, which previously was bound to the physical body, as a slave to its ideas and appetites, could be reborn through death and resurrection. The New Testament calls the newborn I “the New Human.9” The Father and Mother of the “new I” are Christ and Sophia. It is this new I alone that can harmonize and unite the three soul members, the mind, emotions and will. The seed of the new I comes from Christ, “the Logos who was with God from the beginning,”10 and who illumines the individual soul members, while the soul itself with its need for nurturing and unifying is the domain of The Holy Soul, playing her part in the Divine Trini-Sophia, who was beside Him when he set the bounds for the heavens, the earth and sea.11 The harmony and beauty of the “new I” is perfectly exemplified in Mary, the Mater Gloriosa. 8 p. 207, Lecture 10, Anthroposophy in the Light of Goethe’s Faust, Rudolf Steiner, SteinerBooks, 2014 Usually rendered: “New Man.” 10 Holy Bible, Gospel of John, 1: 1-2 11 See: Holy Bible, Proverbs 8: 22-31 9 12 The sublime event we call “The Mystery of Golgotha” and its implications needs to be expressed in more capacious language. How can we do justice in words to such a profound mystery event? What occurs through our meeting Christ and Sophia is a microcosmic repeat of the Mystery of Golgotha, which not only illuminates and conveys unspeakable harmony to the soul, its rays go out to the ends of the earth warming and calling to life from every corner of creation. How can we make an adequate account of this? We cannot with our normal faculties do it justice. To see it and to express it calls to mind what Rudolf Steiner said: ...we must again learn to perceive a spiritual reality behind stones, plants, animals, human beings, behind clouds, stars, behind the Sun. If through what is material we again find the spirit in all its reality, we also open our soul to the voice of Christ, who wants to speak to us if we would but listen to Him.12 Developing the faculty of sight referred to here—to “meet Christ in the Etheric” has been the object of this study. With this in mind we have sought through these preceding pages to bring before our spiritual vision a rich palate of colors to illustrate how the Threefold Divine Sophia weaves through our world in a complex and beautiful way as co-creator with the Holy Trinity. We sought to show how majestic and intimate is the architecture of weft and warp in which we live and which lives in us through the working together of the Father and Mother, Son and Daughter, Holy Spirit and Holy Soul. Through these, all we have come to know of the trinity— of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, has come to us. Through these reflections, may we dwell more richly and more fully in the living knowledge of The Divine Hexadity. For a poetic closing, Vladimir Solovyov, a great exponent of the Divine Sophia, who himself was gifted with supersensible meetings with Sophia, has some words that he used to introduce an excerpt from a poem by Aleksey K. Tolstoy reproduced below; both the introduction and the poem speak eloquently to our considerations in this article and deserve to be savored for their luminous beauty. This is taken from Lecture Seven of a series of lectures he gave in St. Petersburg, which began on January 29th, 1878. [T]he actuality of this divine world, which is necessarily infinitely richer than our visible world, can be fully accessible only to one who actually belongs to that world. But since our natural world also is necessarily closely connected with this divine world...and since there is not and cannot be any impassable gulf between them, the individual rays and glimmerings of the divine world must penetrate into our actual world, constituting all the ideal content, all the beauty and truth that we find in it. And man, who belongs to both worlds, can and must touch the divine world by an act of mental contemplation. And though living in the world of conflict and muffled disquiet, he enter into relations with the clear images of the kingdom of glory and eternal beauty. This positive, although incomplete knowledge of, or penetration into the reality of the divine world is particularly characteristic of poetic creation. Every true poet must necessarily penetrate ‘into the fatherland of flame and sword’ in order to take from there the primal images of his creation and together with them, that internal lucidity that is called inspiration and through which we, in our natural reality, can find the sounds and colors for the incarnation of ideal types, as one of our poets says— 12 GA 226 13 And my dark glance brightened, And the unseen world became visible, And since that time my ear hears What others cannot catch, And I came down from the mountain heights, Fully penetrated by her rays, And on the agitated dale I gaze with new eyes And I hear an incessant talk Rings everywhere, As the stone heart of the mountains Beats with love in the dark depths; And slow clouds curl With love in the sky-blue firmament, And under the bark of trees The living juice in the leaves Rises up with love as a singing stream. And I understood with a prophetic heart That all that is born from the Word, Pouring out the rays of love, Thirsts to return to Him again. And every stream of life, Submissive to the law of love, Rushes irrepressibly to God’s loins With all the strength of being. And sound and light are everywhere, And there is only one principle for all the worlds, And there is nothing in nature That would not breathe with love. 13 13 p.178-179, Divine Sophia, The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London.