Shekinah

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Who is Sakina or Shekinah.

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CONTENTS

The Holy Spirit-Shekinah
Shekinah: The Voice of Wisdom
The Shekinah is the Cosmic Womb
The Shekinah: Image of the Divine Feminine
Gnostic Imagery of Divine Mother Sophia

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# The Holy Spirit-Shekinah

The Holy Spirit/Shekinah is frequently described as some mysterious, creative power of God. But when we actually turn to that ‘Spirit of God that dwells in us’, She is mysterious no longer, for She is the One that is present within us to give us that Second Birth...

# Shekinah: The Voice of Wisdom

There were different schools of Kabbalah. Some saw the Shekinah as separated from the godhead, in voluntary exile on earth, describing her as a daughter cut off from her mother, and as a widow, until she is able to return to the divine ground, having gathered to herself all the elements or sparks of her light that had been scattered throughout creation during the process of emanation. The blackness of the Shekinah's robe, inherited perhaps from the black robe or veil of Isis (who was also called "The Widow" during her search for Osiris), is the darkness of the mystery that hides the hidden glory of her Light.

Another strand in this tapestry of the Divine Feminine in the Hebrew tradition are the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament (of which the greater part were mysteriously lost), written down from the fourth to the first centuries B.C., after the end of the Captivity in Babylon. The Shekinah comes to life in the passages where Wisdom (called Hokhmah in Hebrew, or Sophia in Greek) speaks as the Holy Spirit calling to humanity. She tells us that she is immanent in our world, with us in the streets of our cities, calling to us to awaken to her presence, to obey her laws, to listen to her wisdom, promising her blessing if we can only hear her voice and respond to her teaching. These magnificent passages transform the voice of the Shekinah, speaking as Divine Wisdom, from abstract idea into presence, friend, and guide. She speaks as if she were here, in this dimension, dwelling in the midst of her kingdom, accessible to those who seek her out. Widowed because of her voluntary separation from her spouse, she is unknown and unrecognised, yet working within the depths of life, striving to open humanity's understanding to her justice, her wisdom, and her truth.

She says that she is with her beloved from the beginning, before the foundation of the world, speaking from the deep ground of life as the hidden law that orders it, the craftswoman of creation. She is the intelligence within nature, the animating energy of the cosmos; rooted in tree, vine, earth, and water and active in the habitations of humanity. She is the principle of justice that inspires all human laws. She is the invisible spirit guiding human consciousness; a hidden presence longing to be known, calling out to the world for recognition and response. To those like Solomon, who prized her more highly than rubies, she becomes their wise and luminous guide.

# The Shekinah is the Cosmic Womb

The Shekinah or feminine face of the godhead is the Cosmic Womb, the Palace, the Enclosure, the Fountain, Apple Orchard, and Mystical Garden of Eden and, at the same time, the radiance that becomes the successive robes or veils that are the spheres of consciousness or dimensions of created life. She is named as Mother, Sister, and Daughter, Beloved and Bride, the architect of worlds, the source or foundation of our world, who is the Radiance, Word, or Glory of the unknowable ground or godhead; she brings into being all the creative powers and entities, both female and male (the ten sephiroth), all the spheres or dimensions of manifestation that are ensouled by the godhead until she generates the manifest world we know.

The Kabbalists called this last sphere Malkuth, the Kingdom, where the divine Mother-Father image is expressed as the male and female of all species. Humanity, female and male, is made in the image of God, the reflection of the duality-in-unity of the godhead. The Shekinah is forever united with her beloved spouse in the divine ground or heart of being, and it is their union in the godhead that holds life in a constant state of coming into being. The sexual attraction between man and woman and the expression of true love between them is the enactment or reflection at this level of creation of the divine embrace at its heart enshrined in the words: "I am my Beloved's and my Beloved is mine." Human sexual relationship, enacted with love, mutual respect, and joy, is a holy ritual that helps to maintain the ecstatic union of the divine pair.

Text after text uses sexual imagery and the imagery of light to describe how the ray that emerges from nothing is sown into the womb - the Great Sea of Light - of the celestial Mother and how she brings forth from this womb the male and female creative energies, which, as two branches of the Tree of Life, are King and Queen, Son and Daughter. A third branch of the Tree descends directly down the center, unifying the energies on either side. Surely a long visionary tradition, meditated on for centuries, must lie behind these images. The Shekinah is the waters above and below the firmament, the Divine Spouse, the indwelling and active Holy Spirit, and the divine guide or immanent presence who delivers the world from bondage and restores it ultimately to the heavenly spheres. Wisdom, compassion, justice, and mercy are four intrinsic qualities of her being; yet, like the goddesses of Egypt and Sumer, she can also be terrible in her power to destroy and in her fury at the wanton desecration of her life.

Because she brings all worlds into existence as her robes or veils, and dwells in them as Divine Presence, nothing is outside God, nothing excluded. Everything is connected to everything else as through a luminous circulatory system, a seamless robe of light. Moreover, the Shekinah is deeply devoted to what she has brought into being, as a mother is devoted to the well-being of her child and, in particular, to the mystic community of Israel.

In the last chapter of the Book of Revelation (Rev.21:2), written by a Jewish Christian hand, the imagery of Shekinah can be recognised in the description of the Heavenly City, "descending from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" with pearls and gold and precious jewels, having no need of sun or moon for light, for she is the Light, the Glory of God. Christians, knowing nothing of this lost tradition, cannot make the connection between the Shekinah as Bride and the Holy Spirit, the feminine aspect of the divine.

# The Shekinah: Image of the Divine Feminine

The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the feminine face of God as it was conceived in the mystical tradition of Judaism, originating perhaps in the rabbinic schools of Babylon and transmitted orally for a thousand years until it flowered in the writings of the Jewish Kabbalists of medieval Spain and southwestern France. In Kabbalah, religion ceases to be a matter of worship and collective belief. It becomes a direct path of communion between the individual and the Divine. In the imagery of the Shekinah, Kabbalah gives us the cosmology of the soul and the relationship between the two aspects of the godhead that has been lost or hidden for millennia. The mythology of the Kabbalah is so gloriously rich, so broad in its imaginative and revelatory reach, and so intensely nourishing to a world that lacks any awareness of the Divine Feminine, that to discover this tradition is immensely exciting. The Shekinah reveals the missing imagery of God-as-Mother that has been lost or obscured in both Judaism and Christianity.

Whereas the Old Testament is the written tradition of Judaism, Kabbalah offers the hidden oral tradition, wonderfully named as "The Voice of the Turtle" (turtledove). This mystic knowledge or mystic tradition of the direct path to God was described as the Jewels of the Heavenly Bride. The Bronze Age imagery of the Great Goddess returns to life in the extraordinary beauty of the Kabbalistic description of the Shekinah and in the gender endings of nouns that describe the feminine dimension of the godhead. But the Divine Feminine is now understood as cosmic soul, the intermediary between the godhead and life in this dimension who, as the Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship.

The mythology of this tradition restores the image of the sacred marriage in the union of the Divine Father-Mother in the ground of being. There is not a Mother and a Father but a Mother-Father who are one in their eternal embrace: one in their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continuous act of creation through all the invisible dimensions they bring into being and sustain. No other tradition offers the same breathtaking vision, in such exquisite poetic imagery, of the union of male and female energies in the One that is both. The Song of Songs was the text most used by Kabbalists for their contemplation of the mystery of this divine union. Yet one has the feeling that this way to union with the Divine may descend from some unknown source that nourished Egypt, Sumer, and India.

The Kabbalistic tradition describes the feminine image of the godhead as Mother, Daughter, Sister, and Holy Spirit, giving woman what she has lacked throughout the last two and a half thousand years in Judeo-Christian culture - an image of the Divine Feminine in the godhead that is reflected at the human level in herself. The Shekinah is Divine Motherhood, Mother of All Living. Women can know themselves, in their role as mothers, in their care and concern for the well-being of their loved ones, as the instinctive custodians of her creation.

The thirteenth-century "Zohar, The Book of Radiance or Splendor" that was the principal text of Kabbalah, contemplates the mystery of the relationship between the female and male aspects of the godhead expressed as Mother and Father, and their emanation through all levels of creation as Daughter and Son. The essential conception of this mystical tradition expresses itself as an image of worlds within worlds. Divine Spirit (Ain Soph or Ein Sof) beyond form or conception is the light at the center, the heart, and moves outward as creative sound (word), thought and energy, bringing into being successive spheres, realms, veils, or dimensions imagined as veils or robes that clothe and hide the hidden source yet at the same time transmit its radiant light.

The transmission of light from source to the outer, manifest level is also imagined as an inverted tree, the Tree of Life, whose branches grow from its root in the divine ground and extend through the worlds of emanation. The primal center or root is the innermost light, of an unimaginable luminosity and translucence. The inner point expands or is sown as a ray of light into a dimension described in some texts as a sea of glory, in others as a palace that acts as an enclosure for the light; from this womb it emanates as a radiant cascade, a fountain of living water, pouring forth light to sustain and permeate all the worlds or dimensions it brings into being. All life on earth, all consciousness, is that light and is therefore utterly sacred. The Zohar [principal text of Kabbalah] describes nature as the garment of God.

# Gnostic Imagery of Divine Mother Sophia

Yet another strand to this story [of the Shekinah of Judaism] is the Gnostic imagery of the Divine Mother Sophia. Reading the Kabbalistic texts, it is almost as if they are the voice of this lost tradition. By the year 200, all the feminine imagery of God that was part of the Gnostic tradition had been excised from the orthodox canon of Christian teaching so that, until very recently in this century, no one knew that some groups of early Christians had an image of the Divine Mother. They named her the "Invisible within the All." They spoke of how, as the Eternal Silence, she received the seed of light from the ineffable source and how, from this womb, she brought forth all the emanations of light, ranged in harmonious pairs of feminine and masculine energies. They saw her as the womb of life, not only of human life, but the life of the whole cosmos. They named this Divine Mother as Holy Spirit and saw the dove as her emissary: at the baptism of Jesus, it was the Divine Mother who spoke to her son.

The imagery and mythology of the Divine Mother in Gnosticism is so similar to her later imagery as the Shekinah of Kabbalah that they seem to belong to one and the same tradition. In a Gnostic text called the "Trimorphic Protennoia" the speaker describes herself as the intangible Womb that gives shape to the All, the life that moves in every creature. Other texts name her as the Mother of the Universe but also speak of the androgyny of the divine source in imagery similar to the later Kabbalistic texts.

Today we might imagine the Shekinah as the light that manifests as both wave and particle, as the deep unexplored "sea" of cosmic space, and as the extraordinary complex structure and organization of energy manifested as matter - a word that comes from the Latin word for mother: "mater". After so many billions of years the energy of life has evolved a form - the planet earth - and a consciousness - our own - which is slowly helping us to explore the mystery of what we are. Yet, because of the loss of the tradition of the Divine Feminine, we do not know that what we are exploring in the finer and finer gradations of matter we discover, is what the Jewish mystics called the face and the glory of God, nor that the universe we explore with our technology is the outer covering or veil of an unimaginable web of luminous interconnecting pathways. If only these images of the Shekinah could be restored to us, how differently we might see matter, with what respect and awe we might treat it.

In the magnificent passages from the Apocrypha, it seems as if the Shekinah is telling us her story:

I came out of the mouth of the most high,
and covered the earth as a cloud.
I dwelt in high places,
and my throne is in a cloudy pillar.
I alone compassed the circuit of heaven,
and walked in the bottom of the deep.
I had power over the waves of the sea,
and over all the earth,
and over every people and nation...

He created me from the beginning
before the world, and I shall never fail.
In the holy tabernacle I served before him;
and so was I established in Sion.
Likewise in the beloved city he gave me rest,
and in Jerusalem was my power...

I am the mother of fair love, and fear,
and knowledge and holy hope...
I therefore, being eternal, am given to
all my children which are named of him.
Come unto me, all ye that be desirous of me,
and fill yourselves with my fruits.
For my memorial is sweeter than honey,
and mine inheritance than the honeycomb...

Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach
24:3-6, 9-11, 18-20

["The Divine Feminine" , Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey]

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