The Christianity Which Lost Had a Feminine God

Or, Why People Vote Against Their Own Interests

About thirty years ago, I wanted more than anything to be an enlightened spiritual teacher. I became a licensed practitioner of a new age religion, a license not recognized by anybody, and certainly not the state of California. From within Pastoral Care, I worked in Transition Support, which is a new-agey way to say death and dying. And I founded Crisis Support because the significant losses we suffer, like the loss of a marriage, a job, our health, or a host of other crises, are mini-deaths, probably softening us up for the main event.

I longed to be an enlightened spiritual teacher so much that sometimes it doubled me over in tears. One day, I opened my heart and offered my complete willingness for the universe to take my life and use it. I was well aware that this meant that I would have experiences... in the real world of my circumstances. That gave me pause.

For someone who has been homeless, that loss of the illusion of control is terrifying. Also, once offered, willingness can not be taken back, no matter how horrible being out of control becomes in the shift from projection to actual seeing. In the throes of those experiences, I changed my mind. I begged for my old life back. But the universe doesn’t listen to whinging. When the dust settled, what I lost was the desire to be a spiritual teacher.

That new-age church is where I met Martin, the lovely man who has been cutting my hair for thirty years. Since the pandemic, this ritual takes place on my own back porch. I love that because we can talk about anything without being overheard. Martin is deep, so our conversations become satsang. This week, because we live in Los Angeles and are in a fast-moving coup, we had political satsang.

At one point, because I do have neighbors, Martin leaned in and whispered, “You’d think, in the salon, everyone would come from the left. It’s amazing how even people who are targeted, good people, can support what our government is doing.” He sighed. “I don’t get it.”

And suddenly, I felt an answer blow through my nerve endings. This, at its core, is about the fear of death.

After satsang with Martin, I read a piece by a Substack friend, Thea Zimmer, at All the Other Writers, Artists and Composers, who had posted about Gnosticism and asked me to weigh in because of my background in mythology. I restacked it with a note: The Christianity that lost had a feminine god. Now, I know that even the Gnostics were patriarchal, and I admit to being a little provocative there. But I was having fun.

And sure enough, the first person I heard from was a spiritual teacher selling enlightenment—Gnosis 101, Kundalini activation, and much, much more! He set about gently correcting my understanding of Gnosticism while still trying to engage me as a client—a move I call The Tightrope.

He said, “Sophia,” (a primary figure in Gnosticism), “fell into the material universe because she created a being without the permission of her husband.”

Husband? Sigh. I went to bed. Better, I thought, to let this rest for a while before I respond. I didn’t want to go to war in one of those “I know more than you do” conversations, which I am quite prone to, because I can be so overly proud of all I think I know.

And I had just fallen into that trap a week ago with someone who responded to a pretty vulnerable note I’d posted about facing my own fear of death, yet again. Seems I can never be done with something that morphs and comes back around cyclically, like most healing does. She responded to all that with: Well, I don’t have any fear of death.

We ended up in a long conversation where we each gave our death-facing resumes. I claimed that as long as we are alive, there’s more work to be uncovered, while she insisted she was completely over it. Honestly, I have a hard time trusting someone who claims they have no fear of death unless they are like my friend Lionel, a PhD Jungian and a medical doctor, in his 80s, with late-stage cancer, dealing with his fourth round of chemo. Even then, Lionel only said, “I have accepted my death.” The conversation with this Substack death-denier made me disappointed in myself. I rose and took the bait when I should have just said, “How nice for you.”

In the exchange with my Substack spiritual teacher, I never questioned his experience of awakening. It’s entirely possible. The ego melts, you experience awakening, and then the ego reforms. Experiencing universal love can actually strengthen your belief system, especially if mythology was the gateway. The ego thinks: I’ve found it! Jesus died for my sins! Right? Except that no mythology is true. This is why the early Buddhists said, The finger that points to the moon is not the moon.

The next morning, I found several posts from my spiritual teacher asking me to respond. He asked what sect I followed because he was a Sethian. I told him I was not part of any specific Gnostic tradition (there are several with differing views), but that I was coming from an overview of the mythology. However, I added that any tradition working to awaken people to their true natures can be “beautiful to the point of gorgeous.”

But, I continued, as a woman and a feminist, I have problems with any creation myth that makes the divine feminine the Fall Girl. In these stories, she is literally the reason we fell into the evil world, which we need to wake up from, transcend, or otherwise escape. I didn’t say this part, but it’s true. The Fall from Grace is the story of the formation of our ego. When we are born, we don’t have one. Ever look into the eyes of a newborn? Blamo! Universal love. Then our ego forms, first individually and then collectively. Ah, that first day of school, our religious indoctrination, that first day of Freshman Political Science, the news…

But if I could design a T-shirt, it would say: IT’S A METAPHOR. Sophia falling to earth… Jesus dying on the cross… metaphor. We all must surrender on the cross. You can do it while you live or wait for your last breath. As someone who frequently sits bedside, I can tell you it makes a difference.

“Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns”. Rilke The Man Watching

Mythologies about the world, our sexuality, and our bodies being evil make us terrified. The more patriarchal the culture, the more we think we need a horrible authoritarian who will dominate everyone and everything, but is on our tribal side. What we trust least of all is the thing that will actually save us—the surrender of our worldview. A Course in Miracles (a more benign mythology) says the world is a projection of our egoic fear. The real world is the exact opposite of the world we see with our eyes. All our stories about the world —personal, religious, or secular —are mythology, but the truth is no story at all.

Then my Substack spiritual teacher said, “Christ is Sophia’s husband.”

I am truly amazed when a mythology twists itself into knots to make Jesus superior to a pre-existing Sophia, and people don’t see through it. Alchemical stories about the wedding of Sophia are about the human Jesus becoming perfected by marriage to the divine feminine within himself. The reason many early Christian sects were targeted as heretical is that they didn’t see Jesus as God; they saw him as only human. What he realized is available to all of us. Now that is dangerous.

Then my spiritual teacher said that Gnostics did not see Sophia as a god.

But Sophia is a god, older than any form of Christianity. That should tell my new friend that his story is mythological—perhaps better than the dominant Christian mythology, but a story nevertheless. I never, and still don’t, doubt his experience of awakening. I said, “My hope is that we can transcend all forms of duality and the need to impose domination over anyone or anything, which I see as the fear of death, which is, consequently, what the ego is made of: the need to dominate because we are afraid.” Here I should have added: to die. We are afraid to die. That’s why we dominate—it’s the combination of our ego structure and our terrifying worldview.

Of course, you know what happened next. This awakened spiritual teacher melted. He stopped trying to convert me and settled into his experience of enlightenment. He let go of every story, even the ones that made him his living, and joined me there. He understood that the stories are helpful, useful, and even necessary. They point the way. They provide the all-important metaphors for an experience that defies logic and resists being put into words. In his business, he was already blending and combining various mythologies, including Gnosticism, Kundalini Yoga, Brahmanism, and what appeared to be Jewish numerology and astrology. Surely he could let it all go and rest in deep realization without any story. Even if it changed the ground of his assumptions, he’d be better off, cleaner, truer, a better teacher who could use stories rather than be used by them. He was dedicated to awakening. Surely, he would join me in that.

Nope. He blocked me.

Some of us, a good one-third as it turns out, would rather die than give up our worldview. And for those people, the need for a strong daddy in charge is essential, regardless of the cost. They understand that it would suck horribly to be on the wrong side and are only glad to be on the right side.

I see the FAFO people online laughing at farmers who have lost everything, snickering at people who plead with Trump to give them back their wives, kidnapped in a raid because they voted for him three times. I’m beginning to think schadenfreude is one of the ugliest of human emotions.

We have not reached the bottom yet, but after we do, we must weave the MAGA crowd back into the fabric of society because they have been lied to by the right-wing media projection machine, sure, but also by their own minds, which are projection machines, too, and the patriarchal worldview they were born into.

It turns out, the worship of a dominator god creates a dominator culture not worth living in. What’s it going to take to instill in all of us the necessary willingness to accept surrender? Now, that gives me pause.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.