Dear A. J. Lopp,

Thanks for your insightful comment. The Goddess of Wisdom is definitely a powerful entity in Judaic tradition, and Sophia did indeed slip into the earliest Christian tradition through the Gnostics. One of the greatest churches, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was built to celebrate Her.

Unfortunately for Christians today, the decision was made, by a faction that took over the Christian movement in the early centuries, to ditch any and all traditions relating to female equality and power, no matter where they came from -- Greek, Roman, Jewish, Egyptian. Which is why we're stuck with the situation we have today.

Patricia

Bil,

And that book has already been written...several books, in fact. In my opinion, the best scholar on the subject of "what happened to screw up early Christianity" is Scottish historian Laurence Gardner. He makes the most sense, and digs the deepest, and gives the most telling detail, on that take-over faction I mention. The faction was galvanized by a persistent question that has dogged official Christianity for 2000 years -- namely, what if Jesus was 100 percent human, and had a wife and children?

The question of Jesus's humanity, and his wife Mary Magdalene, is the central one in church history, and it reveals to us why the Church did away with everything related to female power, whether it was female clergy or Goddesses. The power-hungry elite who run the Catholic Church have been trying to make this question go away for many centuries. So have the main-line Protestants. Why? Because both religions have accepted the belief that "Christ is God" as the basis for their authority and everything they teach. It's their position that a divine Christ gave them that authority. He supposedly gives it to Catholics through the line of Popes, and he supposedly gives it to Protestants directly through Scripture.

If Jesus was just a human being (albeit a wise and powerful one), then all these Churches have no podium to stand on. They have none of the absolute authority that they claim to have over people's lives and minds.

Gardner has written a whole cycle of books documenting how this all came about, and why. BLOODLINE OF THE HOLY GRAIL and the others are all available on Amazon in paperback. I've read them all, and found that I got a clearer understanding of Western and American history than before...and the question of why the ultraconservative American Protestants want to plaster the word "God" everywhere in our public life.

Patricia

Mary is actually the prime example of how the Church did away with female power.

When Catholicism created itself in its early centuries, it borrowed heavily from pagan Roman institutions -- the Roman priesthood, Roman temples, Roman law and government. These churchmen were trying to convert large populations of pagan people who had been accustomed for centuries to pray to pantheons of gods and goddesses, where the goddesses enjoyed equality of power with their divine mates -- like Juno with Jupiter. So the church was smart enough to know that their own "pantheon" had to throw the people a female bone. There had to be some female Christian figure for them to love, emphathize with and go to for help, the way they had gone to the pagan goddesses.

So the figure of Mary Queen of Heaven that they created is actually a watered-down version of various goddesses -- Isis and others -- who were actually portrayed holding their own child in the ancient pagan arts, just as Mary is portrayed in church art. BUT there was a catch. Even as the Church surrounded Mary with all the ancient goddess windowdressing that had appealed so heavily to peoples of the Western world for long centuries, they emphasized that "Mary is only a human being, albeit a very special human being."

By ripping the divine aspect out of Mary's nature, the Church effectively struck a blow at equality issues for all human females. From there to saying that women should have no role in the Catholic priesthood and church governance was just the next step.

This move was consistent with the Church's monotheistic belief, that there is only one deity, and that deity is male. Here, too, the Church was bent on doing away with all religions and spiritual ways where the supreme deity was seen as being both male and female, or where a god-goddess pair ruled.

Patricia

Yes, humans can't avoid nibbling all around this question. Basically we wonder how living things -- which mostly have two genders, male and female -- reflect the nature of the Deity, since we figure the Creator wouldn't create anything that isn't already contained in the divine nature in some vaster way.

It's also interesting that the root of the word "deity" is the word two, or duo. Check it out in American Heritage Dictionary of the English language. Traditional Christianity has insisted that "monotheism" (meaning there is only one God, not many gods) is the right way to look at creation.

But anciently the concept of "deity" meant two, meaning female and male. Isis-Osiris, Hera-Zeus, Juno-Jupiter, Freya-Thor, Lakhshmi-Vishnu, etc. The real history of evolution of "monotheism" in the West was the effort by patriarchal institutions (not all of them Christian) to impose the idea that God's nature is "one" (and they meant the male part), not "two." I.e. the female part of deity was no longer recognized. It's pretty clear that both Judaism and Islam went this route along with Christianity.

Patricia Nell Warren