Upside Down Eden
Colette’s Credo: Part One
I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been engrossed in schoolwork, which involves a whole lot of writing on its own. I’ve also been working on my greenhouse again now that the snow has melted and there’s decent weather to work outside! It’s May 20th and I’m looking through my window at four inches of snow. It comes and goes this time of year.
I took a Tech Literacy class in the spring semester and one assignment was to produce a video, so I decided to formulate my Credo. I was inspired to do this after writing a paper for my Religion, Culture and Public Life about the author Neil Gaiman and included his Credo which he wrote after he lost a friend in a terrorist attack in Paris.
You can watch the video here on my newly formed YouTube channel. Also, a product of my Tech Literacy class!
I’ve decided to break my Credo into sections and blog about each part of it. The first few lines are:
I believe that humanity was created with a mortal body and an immortal spirit. Loving my mortal body and knowing my spiritual self is my redemption.
What if I give up the idea that our beginning started in a perfect paradise with a perfect god? What if I give up the idea that a perfect man and woman disobeyed God, fell from grace and was expelled from paradise?
As I study other religions, I resonate more with the stories of chaotic beginnings. It makes more sense to me that our beginnings were messy, and that our purpose is to help each other clean it up. One messy story about how humans came to be is found in the Nag Hammadi Library in a text titled The Apocryphon of John (also known as The Secret Book of John). The Apostle John is distraught about someone attacking his faith and while in prayer, the resurrected Jesus visits him and explains our beginnings to him which turns the story of Eden on its head.
In the heavenly beginnings (rather than the earthly beginnings), the Father and his consort, the Mother had a daughter named Sophia. They also had a son named Autogenes. Now before getting defensive about which gender does the bad deed, there’s also a version where the son does the bad deed. Apparently, there’s no sibling rivalry in heaven. In this collection of texts, all these spirit beings float from gender to gender, so it really doesn’t matter in the end. The Apocryphon of John tells the story of Sophia.
Sophia, went off on her own, without the participation of her consort, and created a spirit being. It turned out to be a monster that had the body of a serpent and the head of a lion with eyes like lightning. In his arrogance, he thought that he was THE unbegotten god and that there was no higher god than him. She was horrified and realized that this creature was deficient since he was created outside of the combined power of her and her consort. She hid him in a luminous cloud and called him Yaltabaoth. He, in turn, created many other spirit beings and assigned them territories to reign over in the seven heavens and the underworld. He was the most powerful, was lord over all of them, and proclaimed, “I am a jealous God, and there is no other God beside me.”
Little did he know that he had a Mother, and she had a Mother, and there was the One, the All, the Unbegotten above him that was so luminous and perfect that they can’t even be referred to as a god. Many of us refer to this power as The Universe. His mother, Sophia, was keeping tabs on him from the ninth heaven, where she was repenting for creating a deficient being and taking some R & R to regenerate the part of her power that was transferred to Yaltabaoth when she created him.
The Mother-Father spoke from heaven that “Man exists and the son of Man” and Yaltabaoth heard the voice and looked up. He saw the image of the Mother-Father in human form illuminated through the water that separated the heavens. It was a ‘come to Jesus’ moment for him, because the aeon and the abyss shook and the light was intense on the underside of heaven. He and all his underlings saw the image. Then he said, “Come, let us create a man according to the image of God and according to our likeness, that his image may become a light for us.”
They all got together to create the psychical and material Adam. Each one of them was responsible for forming one of the body parts; head, skull, brain, eyes, the vertebrae, the right buttock, the womb, the left penis (???)...the list is VERY extensive and gives credit by name to each archon. When the body was done, it lay there like a corpse for a long time. It had no life in it. Yaltabaoth and his archons were perplexed and didn’t know what to do. The mother of Yaltabaoth, Sophia, saw what was done and felt compelled to help so she appealed to her Mother-Father. They sent five lights to Yaltabaoth to bring forth her power in the human. They told him “Blow into his face something of your spirit, and his body will arise.” Since he dwells in ignorance, he doesn’t know it was his mother’s power and, of course, thinks it is his own. Trickster luminaries...love it!
When Adam came to life, Yaltabaoth and his cohorts realized that he was more intelligent and luminous than they were. Sophia now had the child she at first desired, with the help of her Mother-Father and the luminaries. This child was an intelligent, luminous, powerful one. Yaltabaoth immediately became jealous and got his underlings together to devise an evil plan. At first, they “took him and threw him into the lowest region of all matter.”
The Mother-Father saw Adam’s predicament and sent luminous Epinoia and hid her inside of Adam to help him. She is also called Life or Zoe. She, as his teacher (Epinoia means power of thought, inventiveness, purpose and design), enlightened him to his true self, which was the power he received from his mother. Because of Epinoia’s enlightenment, Adam’s thinking was restored to being more superior than his creators’.
This infuriated them, so they ganged up on him to entomb him in a mortal physical body.
“And the man came forth because of the shadow of the light which is in him. And his thinking was superior to all those who had made him. When they looked up they saw that his thinking was superior. And they took counsel with the whole array of archons and angels. They took fire and earth and water and mixed them together with the four fiery winds. And they wrought them together and caused a great disturbance. And they brought him (Adam) into the shadow of death in order that they might form (him) again from earth and water and fire and the spirit which originates in matter, which is the ignorance of darkness and desire, and their counterfeit spirit. This is the tomb of the newly-formed body with which the robbers had clothed the man, the bond of forgetfulness; and he became a mortal man. This is the first one who came down and the first separation. But the Epinoia of the light which was in him, she is the one who was to awaken his thinking.”
Wisse, F. (1996). The Apocryphon of John (II, 1, III, 1, IV, 1, and BG 8502, 2). In J. M. Robinson (Ed.), The Nag Hammadi library in English (4th rev. ed., pp. 116–117). Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill.
They placed him in paradise, but this paradise was a deceitful illusion. Their tree of ‘life’ was full of deception, bitterness, and poison, which yielded deathly fruit and blossomed in darkness. This is where the story really gets turned on its head. The archons of Yaltabaoth encouraged Adam to eat from the tree of life but guarded the tree of knowledge (you know, the one with the apple?) so that Adam couldn’t get to it.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil was Epinoia or Life. Jesus breaks off from the storyline to tell John that he was the one, not the serpent, that gave them the fruit of the tree of knowledge to eat in order to save them from Yaltabaoth’s power. In fact, the serpent (remember that Yaltabaoth has the body of a serpent) was feeding Adam from the poisonous ‘tree of life’ to control him and keep him under his deception, but Epinoia, who was hidden in Adam, helped him think clearly in spite of his surroundings.
Mind blowing.
“Then the Epinoia of the light hid herself in him (Adam). And the chief archon wanted to bring her out of his rib. But the Epinoia of the light cannot be grasped. Although darkness pursued her, it did not catch her. And he brought a part of his power out of him. And he made another creature in the form of a woman according to the likeness of the Epinoia which had appeared to him. And he brought the part which he had taken from the power of the man into the female creature, and not as Moses said, ‘his rib-borne.’
“And he (Adam) saw the woman beside him. And in that moment the luminous Epinoia appeared, and she lifted the veil which lay over his mind. And he became sober from the drunkenness of darkness. And he recognized his counter-image, and he said, ‘This is indeed bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.’ Therefore the man will leave his father and his mother and he will cleave to his wife and they will both be one flesh. For they will send him his consort, and he will leave his father and his mother. {.…}
Wisse, F. (1996). The Apocryphon of John (II, 1, III, 1, IV, 1, and BG 8502, 2). In J. M. Robinson (Ed.), The Nag Hammadi library in English (4th rev. ed., pp. 117–118). Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill.
While Eve is being formed by Yaltabaoth, Autogenes (the only begotten Son of the Mother-Father) was in the form of an eagle perched on the tree of knowledge (i.e. Epinoia) watching all of this so that when it was done he would lift the deep sleep that Yaltabaoth placed on Adam and Eve so that Epinoia could lift the veil of forgetfulness and awaken them. Teamwork!
Adam sees Eve as his equal, his counter-image, that was sent from his Mother-Father to complete him. They are equally one flesh.
Yaltabaoth sees what happens and realizes that he’s been duped yet again. He curses the earth, throws Adam and Eve out of his ‘paradise’ and clothes them in gloomy darkness.
Why do I love this story so much? First of all, Jesus is telling the story of his Mother and Father. He also tells the story of himself and Epinoia (an eagle and life) working together to save and enlighten Adam. Also, Epinoia is hidden in Adam to protect him and teach him and is transformed into the body of Eve, the Mother of all living.
The early church fathers from the first few centuries loved to butt heads with the Sethians, or Gnostics, (they go by many names). It was like the first Christian family feud. The early church fathers embraced the patriarchy, and the Gnostics embraced gender equality. Hmmmm, interesting that we find these Coptic texts buried in Egypt in a clay jar, since the early church fathers joined forces with the Roman Empire a few centuries later and formed the Roman Catholic Church. I’m telling you...our spiritual mother was buried! At least her stories were! She is more powerful than words though, and lives as intuition in all of our hearts. I love to finally read about her and get to know her from an early Christian point of view. It feels so balanced and grounding, and I’m OK with bad beginnings. It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?
What if our mortality has nothing to do with guilt and sin? I don’t prescribe to victimization probably because I was raised a good Roman Catholic, so my default is usually guilt. However, in this version of the garden of Eden, humanity in its present form was clearly victimized by the forces of Yaltabaoth. The moral of the story is that the mother lives in all of us as Epinoia, Life, Zoe. Her spirit is our true self entombed in this glorious but still deficient clay body that we need to love and take care of. She is our intuition, the light that illumines our lives and ignites our superior intelligence.
Damn, you gotta love it!
Colette Letourneau is a student of Religious Studies at Arizona State University and is focused on reconstructing the divine feminine in religion, culture, and public life.
