The Female side
of God is a well known, but well hidden, aspect of many major faiths,
Christianity
being no exception. This aspect however ,was hidden in plain sight
almost from the
start of Christianity, as we currently know it.
I
am not even remotely trying to Christian bash here, so please no nasty
letters, it's just that some
Christians
are major bombastors of our faith for this reason, among others
.
And
this is my attempt to clear up a few misconceptions and present a few truths
about the matter
the
" facts" and details, behind this missive, are there for anyone to find
,who cares to study the matter.
Christanity
is not the only faith to have supressed the feminne of God, but its the
one I can best research
So
it is used here for my example.
The suppression
of the Female side of the Divine is many fold, starting with translations.
The Feminine
side of God is Shopia, or the Holy Spirit. Taken that way the Trinity of
Father, Son and
Holy Spirit takes on a whole new light and a lot more sense from a human
perspective,
as it's a family
unit Mother, Father and child.
According to the
Rabbinic Skekhinah is the Bride of God
The Creator,
Matrona ... the Middle Pillar of Benignity,
between Mercy
and Severity .. of the Cabala
which is just
another word for the aspect of Shopia or wisdom
This has been
supposed by many, to be a Greek word meaning Wisdom personified,
but in fact ,
the original meaning was very Literal ! Shopia is said to have been
the spirit who
led the peoples of Israel, out of the bondage of Egypt , in the form of
Skekhinah .
This According
to the Rabbinic again.
This problem of
translations started with the original texts of law and lore
which were written
in Aramaic. These texts where not shared with the population
until some 200
years after the death of the Christ. In fact, a great many scholars say,
they were not even written down at all,
till some 100
years after his death. So some 10 generations or more passed between events
and the formulation
of the " law " and when they were recorded.
By this time the
language was no longer spoken in its original form, nor could many folk
of the day could read anyway.
So, the priests
of the day had to translate the texts to the population. And in doing so
, changed its meaning on a lot of levels ,
as they had to
interpret them at the same time. I believe I can safely assume this, as
it tends to happen with any translation,
this would be
no exception .
But, the profound
change in this case, was the suppression of the female principal of the
Divine
through mainly
..language changes. And believe it or not, the advent of written forms.
Writing requires the logic of the mind
Not the intuitive
sense, the ways of the Mother were much more common when we used Art to
convey meaning
As you had to
really think about art to understand it.
Now was any of
this deliberate ? We have no way to know, but given the status of women
at the time
I would suspect
it was an unconscious mis-translation, it would not occur to a priest to
give a Female any creditability.
It literally
would not occur to him to ascribe any of the aspects of a lowly woman to
a God !
So anything that
seemed to say that ,would be mis-translated as a matter of course, as its
interpretation
would be distorted
by the priests own thoughts on the subject.
Now in the Torah
the female aspect of God as Skekhinah is still noted,
for the simple
reason the texts in question were NOT translated again out of the Hebrew,
but have been
studied in their original form from then to now so have not suffered
as much distortion.
But the Main texts
of the Bible, as it's currently known, were translations not once but twice
once from Aramaic
to Hebrew, then again to Greek. And the Greek version is all that survived.
Unless one counts
the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. ( more on them later in another page
)
Now its translation
to the Greek is where things really get messed up.
They were translated
into Greek, some 400 years after the Death of the Christ.
The reasons where
very simple, there was a large conclave of
Christians in
Greece. The problem arose when they would require certain days off from
work
for religious
reasons, or would not eat certain foods etc. for the same reasons. Now
the Greeks allowed
any to practice whatever faiths they pleased, but the Christians
where an unknown,
as to what was really " their" Law.
I mean, even today
if you told your boss, " Hey I'm not coming into work on Saturday
it's a religious
holiday " he would want to be sure it was legit. So, at Greek insistence,
the Laws of Israel
were translated into Greek, for any official to read, if this became an
issue.
However the Greek
word for Wisdom ( Shopia ) is Logos ( Logic ), which is masculine...
so again the
Female Aspect was made masculine, due simply to the translation being done
word for word, without
I assume, the
allegorical meanings inferred. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption,
as the children of Israel themselves
had done much
the same thing, translating from the original Aramaic.
The Greeks where
not trying to understand the religion of Israel, they just wanted it written
up
to make sure
if someone demanded something and sited his laws as a reason,
they could look
it up for themselves. So no one could pull the wool over the eyes of any
official.
It has since been
translated again and again with the meanings changed a bit with each translation.
Since such translations are
based almost
entirely on the Greek translation, the mistake of the Feminine suppression,
has been repeated over and over .
Often made more
so, according to the prejudice of the times. For example: the King James
version.
By the time of
King James, women, were so unregarded, that any reference that might have
been left that referred to them
or the Female
aspect of God would have been suppressed deliberately. As is very apparent
by whole Books of the bible that got left Out of
that version.
All of them refer to the power of women and the Female aspect of God in
general.
And who, in the
time of King James,
would want women
getting ideas above themselves ? And so it goes ..
A mistake ..
sometimes accidental, sometimes deliberate.
So where does
this leave your average Pagan in terms of how we practice the faith of
the Mother ?
It means that
we practice religion in the form as the originators ( re: pre Christian
)
intended, balanced
and whole with all aspects revered and honored.
That we call
on the old ones is nothing more than their due of respect
and respect for
principals of balance, accepted thurout history.
Until the advent
of a very simple mistake, on the part of many faiths
nealy
all of mankind held the Mother in Respect..
The current followers
of the Christian faith, and others, are not to
blame for this
omission, as they did not create it. My personal opinion is ,
they have been
misled, by well meaning leaders, who do not know there own roots.
If one chooses
to ignore one's own roots in this fashion, so be it.
I hold no quarrel
with any honest heart. As the basic
tenants of Christianity
are really no different than my own, in fact, if not in practice.
However, it behooves
any reasonable person to do a little
double checking
of the " facts" before one accepts a principal , any principal,
especially for
something as important as the worship of the Divine. And it wouldn't hurt
to assume
that one who
has
done
the investigations I speak of, could just, maybe, be right :)
And then do your
own research, and Withhold judgment, in order to make an informed
choice.
But live and let
live say I .. but it is meet to know that the Female Aspect of the Divine
is as old as
man and we .. the Pagans .. will honor the ways of our ancestors.
For we have looked
beyond the prejudice and mistakes of some translators
and not a few
self serving persons who dictated religion texts and widened our scope
of understanding
to include the
faiths of all mankind. And once one does this, the Great Mother
and all her works
becomes very
apparent to one with open eyes.
All Hail and Glory to the Great Mother of us all
Blessings Be
Starwind