The Fall

of

the

Wisdom

Goddess

Here in a nine-part synopsis is one version of the sacred myth of Sophia, the "fallen goddess" of the Pagan Mysteries. The fallen goddess scenario (FGS) is not the invention of this author, John Lash. It is his reconstruction of a mythic narrative developed by ancient seers who applied it as a vision story for guiding humanity to evolve interactively with the living planet, Gaia. I consider this complex narrative to be the singular and paramount explanation of cosmic purpose produced by human imagination, truly a myth to guide the species.
- JLL, October 2010

NOTE (May 2011): My recovery and reconstruction of the FGS is the only full and coherent version of the Sophianic vision story of the Mysteries to be presented by any scholar, yet it is still not complete. Three key elements of the myth are missing: the creation of the moon, the separation of the sexes of the Anthropos (human genome), and the arrival of the hunters from Orion, the first men to inhabit the earth which was at that time exclusively populated by women.

In its received form, the Sophianic vision story falls into the genre of "astral theogony," an account of celestial events, including the intentions, feelings, and actions of cosmic forces conceived as gods and goddesses. The version below demonstrates one possible way to render the myth: namely, by placing it in an astronomical framework. Thus, perhaps, making it more accessible to the modern mindset. This is not the only way to tell the myth, but after long consideration I am convinced it may be the optimal way to introduce the Sophianic vision of the Mysteries to the 21st century.

This sacred narrative is the sole planetary myth in the world that describes the origin of the solar system, the earth, and the human species, and situates all this in a galactic perspective. Be it understood that a myth need not be fantasy or falsity, but a veracious way of describing events of cosmic scope, including the galaxy where the earth is located. "Sophia" is the astro-theological term for a power surge from the galactic core that impacted the rotating arms: the "fall" of the goddess is an eruption from that core. This is an animistic myth, attributing the equivalent of emotion, ideation, and intention to the cosmic energies of the galaxy, imaginatively realized as gods and goddesses. I address the predictable objections to cosmic animism in a related essay.

Not in His Image contains both a short synopsis and (in another rendering) a full expansion of the nine episodes. "Or Ever the Earth Was" will be helpful in orientation to the unique significance of this myth. Readers may also benefit from looking at the Overview. The Gaia Mythos an attempt to render the narrative in mythopoetic form as a prose poem, but incomplete with 11 episodes of 16 on line. The commentaries on the prose poem contain a considerable amount of astronomical detail with correlations to the myth.

The Sophia Myth in Astronomical Idiom

One - In the Galactic Core

At a certain moment in eternal becoming, a singularity arises in the core of one galaxy among countless galaxies in the Universe. This singularity is a spontaneous rush of new potential, totally unconditioned and undefined. It emerges from that one universal source which is the eternal dwellpoint of every galaxy, but in each galaxy standing unique so that originality can manifest through the Universe. In each galaxy, the Originator is the all-pervading presence greater than any god, any single divine entity. It stands beyond time and space and matter, yet it comes to expression time and time again through the Pleroma, the central vortex of a particular galaxy.

Within the Pleroma dwell the aggregate of cosmic gods, energy waves of the galactic dimension. They circulate around the core, massive currents of living luminosity thriving with sound, odor, even taste. Their form is a serpentine, torrential streaming, their substance, a nougat-like mass of self-generating luminosity. These Pleromic currents receive the singularity of pure potential from the Originator and spin it into expression. They convert the formless seed of originality into a standing wave design that can eventually appear in space, time, and matter beyond the galactic core. The Originator imposes nothing on these cosmic designing powers, the Generators or Aeons. The singularity it releases to them is an undefined potential for novelty, without signature, non-encoded. It has no predesigned structure. It is pure, unconditioned possibility. The singularity is like a vast but infinitely soft tremor that erupts from the galactic core and spreads through the choral waves of the Pleroma, the aggregate of Aeonic torrents.

In every case when a singularity emerges in the galactic core, it comes to be designed differently by the Aeons of each galaxy who are infinitely creative, innovative, and playful. Once designed, the singularity can be projected from the core into the outlying region of the limbs, the spiral arms circulating around the core. This region is the realm of finite potential, the Kenoma, contrasted to the infinite potential of the Pleroma, matrix of the Generators.

The spiral arms are regions of constant activity. Like a mill wheel, they grind out stars, planets, comets, and asteroids from the grist remaining of previous galaxies. The dema, the dense elementary matter arrays of the spiral arms, are chaotic and inorganic, consisting of atomic matter and even finer substances, mere quantum foam. Yet the dema has self-organizing powers of a sort, so that it can form and reform itself plastically into the scaffolding and groundwork of many world-systems. The endless reworking of matter in the spiral arms is subject to the mill-like mechanism of involution, including mass-bound attraction-repulsion and differential rotation, forces that are entirely absent in the galactic core.

Typical form of a lenticular spiral galaxy seen edge-on.

Two - A Singularity Encoded

The nougat-like mass of the galactic core pulses with the dance of alternating currents, gendered energies. The male currents stream through the Pleromic mass with an encoring action, like filaments extruding from a sieve. The female currents stream with an expulsive power that hollows out the way before them. Encoring and decoring are the constant gender expressions of the Generators.

In one particular galaxy, a singularity from the Originator is received by two Aeons with the equivalent of gender, female and male: the Aeon Sophia and her counterpart, the Aeon Thelete. This name means "the intended" or "free will." In a tandem activity, these two balance the singularity between them and dance it into a particular design.

Each Generator is an energetic wave with inherent properties and characteristics. As a current moving along optical fibers can carry signals, so do these wave-forms carry vast arrays of configurated impulses. The receiving Aeons impart to the singularity a select combination of their attributes, making a unique design, never before manifested. By their combined activity, they imbue the singularity with a set of inherent properties derived from their own impulses. They encode its pure potential with definite properties that can unfold in a distinctive way when provided with a world-system as a setting for those properties. In this instance, Sophia and Thelete design a life-form, the template of a species, the Anthropos. The specific configuration of the Anthropos is an expression of the creative vision of the cosmic dyad, the pair of Generators. The human genome originates in a dance of cosmic energies in the galactic core.

Buddhist yab-yum: iconographic image of mating gods, which may be compared to the coupling of Aeons in the galactic core. However, Aeons dance, they are energetically and emotively in motion, whereas the yab-yum is a static image. Nevertheless, the same archetypal idea of divine union is expressed in both cases. It must be noted, however, that the designing gods or Pleromic Generators do not propagate by analogy to biological reproduction; rather by analogy to play, an act of pleasure. The Gnostic vision story follows the narrative norm of Hindu Tantra according to which Shiva and Shakti, the gendered energies, produce the world from the vibrations of pleasure generated by their intercourse, not by insemination and conception due to intercourse. This distinction illustrates the difference between emanationist (non-reproductive) and creationist (reproductive) cosmology.

Three - Projecting the Anthropos

With creative dance of Sophia and Christos completed, the singularity is configured and ready to be released. In a collective act of emanation, all the Aeons circulating the galactic core merge their currents to form a lattice, like a holographic plate. Using the lattice as a lens, the Pleromic Aeons in their entirety project the Anthropos into the outer realm beyond the bounding membrane of the galactic nucleus. Out there is the Kenoma, the zone of dark elementary matter arrays (dema) swirling in the immense carousel of the spiral arms. The encoded singularity will be seeded in the dema where new worlds are constantly arising, so that the Anthropos can have a habitat, a world of its own in which to unfold its singular potential. Many strains of humanity can emerge from the template so projected, and there are many world-systems rising and dissolving in the galactic limbs, providing ample opportunity for these strains to take root and develop.

Imagine a hollow stalk of light in the form of an immense opalescent shaft with the genomic design within it. The genomic template of humanity is a stereomorphic projection into the outer regions of the galaxy. Remaining within the boundary of the galactic core, the Aeons inject the predesigned genome into the outer realms of the galaxy as if through a glass tube or pipette. Acting in unison, the Generators implant the potential novelty of the human species in the carousel arms, like a fertilized ovum implanted in the wall of the uterus. For the Aeons, the projection of the anthropic template designed by Sophia and Thelete is the first moment of a divine experiment. From the galactic center, they will observe how the human strain propagates and unfolds its novel potential in many worlds. Their act of projection may be compared to dreaming rather than to biological reproduction of offspring by two parents, or artifactual creation, like a potter spinning a pot. It is a process of emanation, not creation.

Humanity is not the progeny of divine beings, made in their image, but the expression of the divine imagination of the Generators who design and project cosmic singularities into free-form manifestation in a myriad worlds.

The Pleromic Aeons project the Anthropos into the galactic limbs wiht a precise, target intention of location. They embed the template for incubation in a molecular cloud or galactic nebula in the third spiral arm, counting outwards. The fertile moisture of the nebula is the ideal medium for nesting the new life-complex. This done, the Generators withdraw their projective action pull back to observe in detachment what happens next. Energetically, Generators do not exceed the boundaries of the Pleroma, the matrix of infinite potential. They remain within the boundary of the nucleus, yet they observe and sense what lies beyond it in the Kenoma, the matrix of finite potential. The delight of the Aeons is to behold the spontaneous arising and dissolving of myriad worlds, and to divine the adventures of the creatures that emerge in those worlds. To do this they use a kind of cosmic empathy that does not require that they enter or intervene in the worlds they witness. Aeons are sentient, feeling intensively, and responding to what they observe, yet remaining detached. The cosmic gods are impartial: they do not impose their intention for an outcome on any experiment unfolding in the galactic limbs. Above all, they do not enter directly into the experiments they have designed and set in motion by externalization in the spiral arms. Not usually, anyway.

But at a certain moment, one Generator in the aggregate of this particular galaxy responds more keenly than the others to the sight of the Anthropos template nesting in the molecular cloud of Orion. While the other Aeons hold back, the one called Sophia senses an unusual stirring of her currents. The cosmic equivalent of desire draws here right up to the boundary of the Pleroma, where she lingers.The Aeon Sophia feels a profound, unsettling attraction to what she beholds. She is captured by total fascination for how the Anthropos will evolve and manifest its unique potential. Drawing her currents away from the general aggregation, Sophia muses about a world to come where the human singularity will emerge and thrive. She empathizes intensely with the human creature that will appear in the divine experiment now underway. As one of the Aeons who configured the genome, she takes an unusual interest in its future development, and she do does unilaterally, without consulting with her counterpart, Thelete. This is unusual behavior for a Generator, transgressing the norm, but is within the freedom allowed by the Originator that such developments can arise.

The Aeon Sophia now formulates her own act of projective dreaming, centered on the glittering template suspended in the spiral arms. Independent of the other Aeons, this torrential wave-form dreams on her own about what might happen to a strain of the Anthropos. In her freedom, Sophia is impetuous, daring. She goes much farther than Aeons usually do to anticipate how a certain experiment might play out. She idealizes the situation, picturing a three-body system, star-planet-moon, where a strain of the Anthropos would have optimal opportunity to discover and develop its encoded talents, even to achieve works of genius. Sophia is tremendously excited by these prospects of the divine experiment that has only now been seeded in the Kenoma, the matrix of finite potential.

Four - Cosmic Power-Surge

Totally enthralled in her solitary view, and ever more detached from the other Generators in the Pleroma, Sophia previsions a world yet to be, where humanity will emerge to live, learn, and love. The sight of the Anthropos nested in the nebular cloud engages her divine powers of dreaming in an unusual way, with exceptionally intense involvement. Rather than leave this cosmic novelty to mature and unfold on its own, according to the instructions encoded within it, the Pleromic current who signature is wisdom succumbs to a strange attraction. Sophia is deeply compelled to get involved in an experiment with a strain of the Anthropos.

With exquisite slowness, Sophia’s longing pulls her precariously close to the porous bounding membrane of the Pleroma, the outer rim of the galactic core. Her desire follows the path taken by the Anthropos, out into the dema, the chaotic flux of elementary matter in the spiral arms. Compelled by the excitement of what might happen out there, this Aeon is gradually pulled away from the core—until the moment she plunges, out and away. Like a slow-motion waterfall twisted into a torrential braid, the Aeon Sophia spirals downward toward the object of her own desire. The currents that compose her energetic form distend into massive power spike, a tongue of pearl-white luminosity leaping from the Pleroma, shooting light-years into the exterior regions.

The wisdom goddess falls out of the galactic center.

The composite luminosity of an Aeon, a Pleromic god or goddess, may be called Organic Light because it is organically responsive and capable of intention, like an animal. This divine luminosity has two specific but oddly contrasting properties: it is mass-free and infinite in density. Sophia's fall produces a plume of Organic Light extending from the galactic core in the third limb of the carousel arms, where the Orion Nebula is located. There it reaches the place where the genomic template of the human species is nested, like a pattern of dewpoints on a spider's wed.

Episode Five - Archontic Cosmos

When the Aeons Sophia plunges from the galactic core, the immense surge of high-density, zero-mass energy composing her wave-form impacts the dema in a totally unforeseen manner. The dema is quantum foam composed of subatomic elements not yet formed into discrete elements. It is pure chaos, but it is not blind, dead matter. The chaotic flux of elemental matter is a residue from previous worlds and the raw material of worlds to come. Even the dema has the potential for life, if not organic life. The dema glitters and crackles with a kind of phantom life.

In the residual dust of dissolved worlds, vast fields of particles surge with attractions and repulsions, potentials consisting of impulses that remain from things seen and done in previous worlds, but left incomplete when those worlds dissolved. Out of this residuum other worlds continually arise. In the Kenoma, many worlds are in the making, and some will become the habitats of organic species like the Anthropos.

But the plunge of this Generator perturbs the usual order of cosmic evolution is the Kenoma. The impact of Sophia's power-surge upon the dema is anomalous, producing wierd conditions. The subatomic residuum of dense elementary matter arrays does not usually receive such a direct influx of Aeonic energies, straight from the core. The consequences of this anomaly are bizarre and far-reaching. Hitting the dema, the torrential wave of this female Aeon makes an enormous circular splash, like the ripple pattern of a stone thrown into a pond. But in this case, the impacting body has no mass and the material impacted has the mass of elementary substance. Oddly, the splash pattern is more like a fracture in an ice pond. The splashing of the dema immediately gels and congeals like molten metal hardening as it splatters outward in a circular pattern.

Sophia's torrential current carries the Aeonic power of animation and imparts it to the dema. This action is anomalous, for normally an Aeon does not act directly upon the physics of the spiral arms. But now this Generator engages the dema energetically, and Sophia watches her dreaming power trigger a series of events she cannot resist or impede. Like all Generators, the wisdom goddess commands superanimating intent. For such a cosmic entity, the mere act of attending spontaneously causes form and activity to arise. As if gazing at a rose-bud you could make it blossom, or by looking into a tide pool, you could cause the microscopic life-forms floating there to grow, mutate, combine, and aggregate into colonies. Just by the power inherent to your attention.

In just this way, wherever Sophia directs her attention the dema springs into life and acquires form. To her horror and amazement, the Aeon finds herself surrounded by bizarre creatures, a phantom species spwaned of elementary matter: archons. These entities are legion, like a swarm of locusts. Having no place to alight, they mass around Sophia, sucked into her currents and blown out again. They swarm like bees or locusts in a circling mass, but not entirely in a chaotic way. Due to the innate designing powers of cosmic intent, the archons emerge in a kind of parade, a pattern of fractal iterations. The archon species is inert, inorganic, yet it immediately acquires a shadowy kind of life from the superanimation of the dreaming powers of the Aeon.

Generation of quasi-embryonic fractal "sea horses" at high iteration of the Mandelbrot Set, useful to visualize the fracture effect of Sophia on the elementary matter of the dema, producing the pre-terrestrial archon species. Fractalization is the signature of an Aeon or Generator, the expression of "the innate designing powers of cosmic intent." In Gnostic terms, intent is ennoia and the designing capacity of divine intent is autogenes, "self-generating, autopoetic." Complexity theory (formerly, chaos theory of stochastics) now recognizes in autopoesis the signature of organic life on earth and intelligent self-organization elsewhere in the cosmos. Complexity theory derives from speculations initially triggered by fractal iterations such as the Mandelbrot Set.

As she beholds this monstrous side effect of her divine powers, the Aeon Sophia sees a distinct shape in the fracture pattern she makes in the dema: something like an aborted fetus, a human form born prematurely with an oversized head and spindly limbs. The head and body of this creature are slick, streamlined. This is not the Anthropos she designed with Thelete, but a grotesque distortion of it. This neonate form multiplies itself fractally to millions of entities arrayed in cascading waves across the circular impact zone where her energy-plume hovers. The forces churning in the spiral arms begin to sieze upon the Aeon with excessive intensity, contracting her wave-form. Under the high compression of elementary matter in the galactic limbs, Sophia's plume of Organic Light swirls into a knot, curling on itself in something like a fetal contraction. The circular fracture in the dema gathers into a tightening vortex, surrounding the Aeon, blocking the free streaming of her composite currents.

To her astonishment, Sophia realizes that she is now the mother of a bizarre species that has emerged from the dema due to the impact of her divine currents, but without her divine intention. Such is the weird consequence of her precipitious plunge from the cosmic center. But now something even more odd occurs. Sophia sees a distinct mutation in the archon swarm: an aggressive figure appears, a dragon-body with the head of a lion that rages and roars. This reptile-like mutation of the archon horde rapidly dominates the embryonic creatures and assumes the role of overlord. The entire archon colony comes alive with the reptilian overlord assuming a god-like stance over the rest of the species.

The overlord of the archon species rapidly becomes conscious of himself and his surroundings. He prances and preens before the swarming horde that has arisen from the fracture pattern of Sophia's impact. He is blind arrogance embodied, and he is truly blind. Looking around, the chief archon does not see the Pleroma or the Anthropos, nor does he even see the Aeon Sophia. This monster, the Demiurge, takes the impact zone for the entire cosmos, and declares himself to be lord of all he surveys. “I am the only god, let there be no others before me.” The archon overlord is delusional, believing that he has created the elementary cosmos in which he finds himself along with the countless minions of the embryonic archons.

Sophia realizes that something terribly odd is underway. Here she beholds a cosmic species propagated by mistake so that it does not have a proper habitat for itself. Unlike the Anthropos, which is a production of divine imagination intentionally projected from within the galactic core, archons arise unintentionally outside the core, in the encircling limbs. Witnessing this bizarre spectacle, the Aeon is constantly aware of the presence of the Anthropos embedded in a galactic nebula close to where she has impacted the limb, the third of the spiral arms of the galaxy, counting outwards.

The archons cannot swirl around in the dema vortex forever. A more stable environment must be provided for them. And besides, the chief archon wants a kingdom to reflect his false omnipotence and his arrogant impulses. He wishes to organize fantastic celestial mansions for himself, but since he has no intentionality, no will of his own, he can create nothing. Archons are not the product of divine intentionality like the Anthropos, the genomic template of humanity. They are a cyborg species of inorganic make-up. In the manner of robots programmed for repetitive tasks, they can imitate, but they cannot originate. They can copy or simulate life but they cannot demonstrate the intimate dynamics of the living. The archons are a mimic species that borrows what powers and faculties it has from the divine energy of the Aeon, the fallen goddess, their unwitting mother.

Fiddlehead fern: the elegant shape of this plant suggests the curling involution of the plume of Organic Light, the natural contraction of a living energy system in a hostile, non-living environment. In nature, the fiddlehead ferm unfurls from the point outward, but in her anomalous situation, the fallen goddess may be imagined as confurling her plume to a terminal point or enclosed node. Yet even in this involuting process, the luminosity of Organic Light retains its fractal organizing power, the quintessential mark of Aeons in the galactic core. In Gnostic cosmology this power is called autogenes, "self-generating," calling to mind the autopoesis of modern complexity theory and Gaian biophysics.

Six - A Star Is Born

Sophia feels something like compassion for the plight of the archons and their overlord, the demiurge. They are, in a sense, her offspring and she is responsible for their survival, if not their ultimate fate. But they are a blind, rabid species, swarming without sense or intention. They do not even have a proper domain to inhabit! Sophia imparts a portion of her dreaming power to the chief archon so that he sees the Pleroma, even though he does not realize what he is seeing. To him, the living energies in the galactic core appear as a kaliedoscopic array of colored rays in regular patterns. The demiurge commands his legion of celestial drones to imitate these living fractal designs. From the fracture zone of Sophia's impact now arises the protoplanetary disk, the groundwork of a stable world-system where the archons can construct a system of celestial mansions that mimic the divine designs of the Generators in the Pleroma. But the archontic heaven is a simulation of Pleromic design, the mere scaffolding of a clockwork mechanism, majestic on its own terms, but rigid and lifeless.

The inorganic world system of the archons is subject to the influence of other cosmic forces in the region of the galactic limb where it arises. It first takes shape as a protoplanetary disk with distinct bands, rather than a fully orchestrated system of rotating planets. As long as the archontic cosmos has no central focus, it remains inchoate and unstable. Then something happens in the immediate region of the dema that will radically affect archontic activity. From the Orion Nebula, the molecular cloud where the Anthropos template is deposited, a newborn star emerges, as stars often do in the galactic limbs. Galactic nebulae are cradles of star-birth. Stars are continually being born in the depths of M42, the Orion Nebula, and expulsed like flaming cannonballs into the galactic arms. The forces involved in starbirth are independent of the archons, and superior to them, though involving the same raw materials of atomic and elementary matter.

Due to the mass-free status of the Organic Light, the Aeon Sophia is unable to provide a dwellpoint for the archon cosmos. Her streaming energies are increasingly constricted by the massive pressures churning in the carousel limbs, conditions totally absent in the galactic core. Sophia whirls upon herself, the expulsion plume curling into a knot as the dema closes upon her in a dense, darkening cloud. Her shrinking plume hovers uncertainly in the galactic limb as the forces of that region run their own course. Sophia watches the archontic cosmos taking form. At the same time, she is keenly aware of the presence of the Anthropos, a gleaming maze embedded in the Orion Nebula.

The "fall" of the Wisdom Goddess: a power-surge from the galactic center (gold) forms an immense plume that impacts the elementary matter of the galactic limb (bounded by blue lines). This impact precipitates the conditions for a protoplanetary disc (PPD), a standing vortex of elementary matter (dema). Initially, the disk consists of undulant waves in a fracture pattern—but bizarrely, this pattern comes to life due to Sophia's animating power of intention. Archons emerge in fractal cascades and circulate madly like a swarm of bees or locusts, a species without a fixed habitat. The protoplanetary disk has no stable center, but then a newborn star erupts from the Orion Nebula (O.N.) where the Anthropos template (grid design) is nested. The enormous mass of this star constellates the unstable disk into a planetary system with regular orbital paths, with the star fixed at its center. The earth, however, is not formed in this manner. It eventually congeals from the involuting point of the expulsion plume from the galactic center. The divine luminosity of the goddess (Organic Light) morphs into a range of material elements that become englobed into an organic planet. The earth is then captured in the celestial clockworks of the archons, the inorganic planetary system.

The archon overlord, the demiurge, desires to control the copy-cat heaven he has constructed, but the center of the protoplanetary disk will not hold due to lack of sufficient mass to balance against the overall mass of the composite elements. A stable planetary system must be supported by a central sun, a star. Fortunately for the demiurge, the star that has precipitated from the Orion Nebula possesses the required mass. And it is composed of inorganic elements comparable to those in the archontic realm of elementary matter, the dema.: the physcs of the star and the protoplanetary disk are compatible.

Responding equally to the laws of elemental matter, the archon vortex and the newborn sun merge. Gradually, the turbulent flat whorl of the ipact zone assumes the form of a multibanded disc with the newborn sun at its center a bright, throbbing nucleus. Planetary globes forming in the dema and the incandescent metals forged inside the newborn star produce a single-star cosmos, a solar system with circulating planets. The archons now have a habitat of sorts. They gather around the demiurge, who falsely believes he is the creator of this clockwork mechanism. The demented archon deity rules over his kingdom, the planetary system exclusive of the earth, sun, and moon.

The earth does not belong to this planetary system engineered and inhabited by archons. The earth has not been formed yet and it will not arise in the same manner as the inorganic planetary system. The archons receive their name from the root archai, "first, from the beginning," because they were present before the earth appeared.

Seven - The Living Planet

Slowly, with increasing disorientation, the Aeon Sophia shifts from the natural state of a torrent of living light to something else, something like a mottled globe of thickening curd. The expulsion plume curls upon itself at its end and the long stream trailing toward the Pleroma dissipates. But despire this deformation, the Aeon is still endowed with perception and intention. The powerful attraction that pulled Sophia from the galactic center is still operating. The attention of the wisdom goddess keeps returning to the source of her difficulties, the genomic template nested in the Orion Nebula.

The appearance of the Anthropos template nested in the Orion Nebula can be imagined as the pattern of dew on a spider's web, but on close examination, the gleaming nodes of the pattern are dense clusters of filament like fungal mesh or mycelium. Milkweed fluff provides a good visual analogue.

Beholding the planetary system constructed by the archon hive, Sophia is stunned by what she has unwittingly produced, but when her attention goes to the Anthropos, she remembers how she got into this situation in the first place. As her currents of Organic Light convolve more and more toward a dwellpoint in the dema, the Aeon undergoes a massive metamorphosis. The planets of the archontic system are inorganic, unable to support life, but Sophia now senses herself becoming a planet—but of a very different sort, a different genesis.

This torrent of Organic Light morphs into a planetary body that does not belong to the realm of the archons, yet comes to be captured in it. Sophia morphs into a planet that is organic, sentient and self-aware. But the life she acquires by this transformation is different from the life she enjoyed among the Pleromic Aeons. It is not a life singular and whole, seamless, integral, autonomous, but a life of dependence and interrelation, a vast web of precarious complexity.

Eight - Pleromic Intercession

As Sophia loses her Aeonic form, her emotions transform into the physical elements of the earth The terrestrial globe solidifies, a fetal planet captured in the clockwork heavens of the demiurge and his minions. The mother star at the center of that system bestows a stream of the nurturing warmth on the emergent planet. At the same time, the planetary clockwork exerts its blind forces, subjecting Sophia to conditions that do not exist in the Pleroma.

Over many eons the fallen goddess produces an atmosphere and oceans. The Generator veils herself demurely in the cloudy marbled vapors of the biosphere. Upon her planetary body life arises in rampant forms. Creatures great and small appear in such abundance that Sophia is unable to manage her progeny. Looking on from the galactic core, the Generators see her plight. By communal assent they send the Aeon Christos, to bring order to the biological diversity teeming in Sophia’s world. Due to the unique power it commands, the Aeon Christos can induce the cosmic process of gemmation, or nucleation, thus setting boundaries on all life processes, for nucleated bodies have membranes that define their properties and actions. Nucleation entails the swelling of bud-like nodules that exude moisture and fragrance, like a chrism. Because this Aeon carries the chrismatic action, Christos is called "the Anointing."

In an action that reflects intentionally what Sophia committed without intention, Christos crosses the Pleromic boundary and intercedes in the experiment unfolding in the spiral arms. The Generator organizes the life-forms burgeoning upon the planet and then recedes, withdrawing to the galactic center.

Nine - Sophia’s Correction

Totally identified with the life-processes of the planet she has become, the fallen goddess now enbodies the world she dreamed, where the human species now emerges and proceeds to live out a divine experiment, the unfolding of a cosmic singularity. But not quite as she dreamed it. The organic planet is captured in an inorganic system.

Sophia embodied is the living planet, all the way from its molten core out to the limits of the biosphere. Her passions have become the physical elements, solid, watery, aerial, fiery. In and through the elements Sophia experiences joy and anguish like every sentient being, and her emotional field encompasses the array of planetary sentience, entire. Having become a planetary body, Gaia, she does not forget what it is to be an Aeon, a dancing torrent of Organic Light, alive and aware, autopoetic, super-animating. She both the torrential stream of Organic Light and the material planetary body: she is is Gaia-Sophia.

But Gaia’s memory of her own divine condition is dependent upon what unfolds under the conditions of the terrestrial experiment. And in some mysterious way, the fallen goddess depends for self-recollection upon one species among all the other—that singularity, the human strain.

Even before her plunge, Sophia was intimately engaged with the novelties that were to emerge on Earth through the Anthropos. This species does not decide the fate of life on Earth, nor does it ultimately determine the Aeon’s reconnection to the Pleroma. But does it somehow play a key role in how Sophia realigns to the Pleroma while she is still entrained in the cycles of nature, undergoing the cyclic metamorphoses of planetary life? The message of the telestai, those trained seers who were aimed by this vision story, strongly suggests that to be so. The teachings that survive from the Mysteries present us with a consummate mystery to solve: Sophia's correction.

Over billions of years, the Aeon Sophia shows that she is fully able to recover her life force after massive traumas and extinctions. The continuity of her life-cycles is shared by all creatures whom she selects for resurrection, but it is lived out by humankind in a special way, because humans have a narrative skill more advanced than other animals. It may be that humanity, with its story-telling capacity, serves as a memory-circuit for Gaia-Sophia. In imagination, through the medium of language, the human species can recall and recount the entire trajectory of her metamorphosis.

Alchemical image of the Divine Sophia as a Tree of Learning and source of the Elixir of Life. As such, she was known to alchemists as Sapientia, Lady Wisdom, Lady Nature, Alkimia. The multi-walled enclosure around her may suggest the multi-banded cosmos of the archons. Metaphorically, it represents the alcove of learning, then the exoteric, mesoteric, and esoteric chambers of divine instruction.

But can the human species see itself in such a lofty role? Can it see itself as divinely imagined species at all? Can it design its proper course of evolution within the frame of Sophia's cosmic biography? Can it live up to the challenge to complete some aspect of divine imagination and contribute to the correction of the fallen goddess?

Although not the most precious species – all her progeny are precious to the planetary animal mother – humankind has the rare privilege to participate intimately in Sophia’s correction, her realignment to the cosmic source, the Pleroma. But to do this the Anthropos must first correct itself. It must realize its own true potential, and face and master the deviance represented by the archons. How humankind meets this challenge, and how the correction of Gaia’s cosmic trajectory will be accomplished, belong to the present and future, unwritten part of Sophia’s story.

Nature performeth her operations gradually; and indeed I would have thee do the same: let thy imagination be guided wholly by nature. And observe according to nature, through whom the substances regenerate themselves in the bowels of the earth. And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination.

Artis Auriferae, “The Art of Goldmaking” (Compiled 1610 AD)

jll: March 2006 Flanders
Revised October 2010 Andalucia