LIBRARY OF ST SOPHIA & JOHN OF WISDOM III - JUDGEMENT & NOTES - PRESENTATIONS 1
THE SOPHIA OF ALL SOPHIA OF WISDOMS
AKA
CAROLINE E. KENNEDY

NOVEMBER 11, 2006

RE: SOPHIA'S EXILE AND RETURN
by


Help - Help for Webmasters
« back to results for "SOPHIA OF WISDOM III"
Below is a cache of http://wisdomsgoldenrod.org/publications/kdamiani/kdsop112.pdf. It's a snapshot of the page taken as our search engine crawled the Web. We've highlighted the words: sophia wisdom iii
The web site itself may have changed. You can check the current page (without highlighting) or check for previous versions at the Internet Archive.

Yahoo! is not affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible for its content.


THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNION INSTITUTE 440 EAST MCMILLAN STREET CINCINNATI, OHIO 45206-1947 THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN WRITTEN TO SATISFY THE REQUIREMENTS OF MY PROJECT DEMONSTRATING EXCELLENCE by Kathleen Granville Damiani SOPHIA: EXILE AND RETURN Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Interdisciplinary Humanities with a Specialization in Philosophy October 12, 1997

Sophia: Exile and Return by Kathleen Damiani 2

Sophia: Exile and Return

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction

Why Sophia? Wisdom--Light and Dark The Theme of Exile: Glyphs and Definitions Historical Context Beginning the Sophianic Journey

Part I: Sophia's Historical Exile

Chapter 1: The Path of Crumbs
Sophia's Trail The Dual Energy of Sophia Finding the Crumbs

Chapter 2: Who is Sophia? Historical Context
Sophia in the History of Religion Sophia's Relation to Other Goddesses

Chapter 3: Sophia's Other Face: Hecate and Lilith
Importance of the Dark Sophia Hecate
Lilith

Part. II: Individual Exile and the Vital Soul

Chapter 4: The Counterfeit Vital: A Box of Our Own Making

Chapter 5: Sophia's Exile: Historical, Collective, Individual
Historical Exile of Sophia and Modern One-Sidedness Individual Exile Collective Exile

Chapter 6: Who or What Is Cast Out?--An Examination of the Vital Soul
Vital Soul as Individual Descriptions of the Vital
Part III: The Return of Sophia Sophia: Exile and Return by Kathleen Damiani 3

Chapter 7: Demeter and Kore and the Mysteries of Eleusis
The Myth and the Mysteries Mysteries Interpreted as Sophia's Return Myth and Meaning

Chapter 8: Weaving Sophia: The Circuit of Sophia
Circuit of Sophia Weaving Sophia's Girdle: Ties That Bind Sophia: Ogdoad, Spiral Circle, and World Symbol Food for Thought Sophia's Circuit and the Alchemy of

Relationship Chapter 9: Woman's Role in the Millennium
Our Own Exile Is the Path to Sophia Eve, Lilith, and the Serpent Eve as the Scapegoat of Western Civilization The Metaphorical World Bringing Humanity into Existence Who is "Woman" and What Is Her Role in the Millennium? Chapter 10: Wisdom Thunder Power Magic
Logos, the Speaking Out from the Place of Experience Speaking Sophia, Doing Sophia, Magic Sophia Bride of the Bladed Thunder Chapter 11: The Power of Friendship
Turning, Turning, We Dance the Circuit of Sophia Where is Sophia? --The Crossroads Freedom to Respond Becoming Aware of Our Own Exile Genius and Friendship
Epilogue: Image and Inquiry

Illustrations
Selected Bibliography Sophia: Exile and Return by Kathleen Damiani 4 INTRODUCTION This is a portrait of a phenomenon that is at once embedded in the raw stuff of life--death, fate, groups, violence, body, sex--yet elusive and mysterious as the unseen object of the longing of the soul. I named it Sophia--or rather, she named herself in and through my experience as it deepened. Following my husband's death, a number of synchronistic events arose in conjunction with trying to fathom this tragic web of circumstance. The more I poked around, the more I was helped by myths, stories, symbols that pointed to a reality beyond consensus reality. I found that while many people are helped by religion, it is possible to get help from the very circumstances in your life: they become sources of information, requiring only a slight shift of attention or interest. In fact, it is the delivery of information by events, via one's emotions, interest, or repulsion, that formulates itself into a different kind of knowledge, evoking the figure of Sophia. This knowledge is available to each person who is open to the possibility that their life is much much more than cultural conditioning would have us believe. My world collapsed when my husband Paul at the age of 32 died in an explosion and fire. I felt abandoned by even my way of life--a way of life that acknowledged soul through daily meditation and ongoing classes at his father's spiritual philosophy center. This philosophy center could not provide the container that I needed for my grief and confusion, for the relentless urgency to understand. So here I was, a wife, a mother, a spiritual seeker typical of millions in my generation, studying and meditating, thinking that I was living a non-collective, soul-saturated life. I was suddenly catapulted out of this illusion. Within 24 hours of Paul's death, I was sitting alone in a relative's cottage in a stupor. An image appeared in my imagination. It was a boat speeding through the water. Following it was a huge wake. A message arose that the boat was his father, Anthony, a Sophia: Exile and Return by Kathleen Damiani 5 philosopher and teacher whose spiritual genius had been noticed by his friend and advisor, the Dalai Lama. Another message drifted into my mind and settled there: it was Anthony's "wake" that killed Paul. (I think of such messages as being like dream motifs: some images can convey meanings that point out what the conscious mind misses.) Anthony being a yogi--one who intensifies his consciousness to a great degree, much more so than us ordinary folk--his "boat" or psychic energy would be travelling faster than other people's. The wake is an unintended effect generated by the power of good intentions and yogic discipline. Although to this day, more than ten years later, I do not fully understand the meaning of these messages, the effect of them (what Jung would call active imagination) was profound. It gave me a life raft. My future, my identity, my belief system, my entire way of life, slowly dissolved with Paul's passing. I was being swallowed by the abyss that had yawned beside me during the nine days of unspeakable, agonizing horror that he had to endure following the fire, in which he sustained 95% third degree burns. While some people might say that such messages were the intellect's way of compensating for a meaningless tragedy, I would say the reverse--that the refusal to allow for meaning or interior guidance is itself an intellectual construction, one which demarcates self-constructed boundaries over what life should include and what it should reject. That such a message might indeed be a compensation for my own incapacity to entertain the notion of brute chance--a "random accident" that statistically will happen to a few people (as several relatives assured me)--did occur to me. I felt that it was important--maybe not to me, maybe it was for the sake of my dead Paul--to find out why he died. On the other hand, there are limits to the human capacity to see clearly into the soul's reasons, to see what is veiled from ordinary human understanding, despite the claims of mediums, channelers, and visionaries. That is not to disclaim their experience of other dimensions, but rather that interpretation of that experience remains dependent upon their level of understanding, their cultural conditioning, and their belief system. I felt that either to believe the message uncritically or to capitulate to consensus reality was to shut down the very real living quality of my need to understand more of the complexity of life than I currently was able to. Sophia: Exile and Return by Kathleen Damiani 6 I think now that most of me was pulled into Hades, into the abyss, with Paul. The life raft that kept me afloat was constructed of these messages that arose spontaneously and those that came from reading about myths and stories that resonated with my feeling of being abandoned, of being exiled from every satisfaction, comfort, and love that most people seemed to enjoy. Rather than just believe the message that came up that day following Paul's death--even though it did carry with it a calm certainty--I decided to check it out, to investigate it and to find someone to talk to about it. Looking back, I think this was healthy, to retain both the doubt and belief in its reality at the same time. The message was like a little beacon of light in the abyss: it simply spoke, but what it was saying was beyond my capacity to understand. I went to New York City to the Jung Institute Library where the most remarkable librarian, Doris Albrecht, took all of five minutes to find an article when I asked her where I could find information on the meaning of wakes. This article (Schwartz et al, "On the Coupling of Psychic Entropy and Negentropy") was a psychological analysis of wakes as entropy. Thus began my underworld journey. It began with an urgent need to see the forces that erupted in my husband's death, forces that unfolded as this drama in which I was the actor as well as the audience, with my past issues and interpretations the script. I stayed in our home one year, unable to sleep at night, feeling the lurid horror surrounding our home. Inundated by synchronistic events and images but unable to decipher their deeper scheme or meaning, I despaired of making sense of it there. One day, quickly, I decided to leave. I took my two little boys, aged three and four, rented the house, and moved to Virginia to be near my mother. A number of vivid dreams punctuated decisive turning points that led me to return to graduate school. Everywhere I turned in an effort to heal, to not let myself become consumed and obsessed by the necessity to understand the daemonic terror that had devoured Paul and destroyed our lives, I confronted fire. I entered a graduate program in Humanities with a specialization in Jungian thought. Everything I studied in the graduate program brought up images, information, and synchronistic events that led me deeper and Sophia: Exile and Return by Kathleen Damiani 7 deeper into the mystery of fire and its relation to the vital spark within the person, equivalent to and source of, according to the Greeks, genius and sexuality. The fire path pointed to a knowledge rooted in life and guarded by the dragon--the image of inertia, collective opinion that holds in its claws the radiant jewel of human vitality. I received the M.A. in Humanities with a certificate in Jung Studies in 1991, from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. My thesis was entitled, "'But Where Shall Understanding Be Found?' Searching for Sophia, Personified Wisdom." Doing the research was the high point of my life: all the "otherness" of being woman in the misogynist world of philosophy and theology, of feeling inferior and marginalized, gradually went away, as the redistribution of power began to circulate. There were reasons why the feminine was so threatening to these desiccated male theologians! Everything turned around, as it dawned on me that what was truly worthwhile would never be welcomed by the status quo. Dogma and agendas are inimical to wisdom. WHY SOPHIA? When I first heard about Sophia, she meant little or nothing. I was not moved to investigate her. I was in graduate school and taking a philosophy course on nineteenth-century philosophers. I had to do a term paper on any thinker covered that semester. With great reluctance and inertia I plodded to the library to gather material on Kierkergaard. I got to the section and tried to overcome waves of nausea and fatigue. I had to leave and went to the reference section. I decided to put off the assignment until the next day. I relaxed and began to poke around the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. I was randomly thumbing through, stopped and read the entry under "abzu" (the deep): here was the abode of Wisdom and Ea, father of arts and creativity. All of a sudden, lots of connections were instantly made: Sophia was wisdom; abzu was the unconscious; and Sophia was related to the source of creative inspiration, poetry and art. Wisdom and creativity paired! I changed the topic of my paper: never mind Kierkergaard, I'd do Sophia: Exile and Return by Kathleen Damiani 8 Nietzsche's question "What if Truth was a woman?"--truth being Sophia, personified wisdom. Her abode, abzu would correspond to Nietzsche's Dionysian realm. The emotional part of this experience--the reason why it pulled me into it--I think was because not only were creativity and inspiration interesting but their association with the feminine Sophia drew me right into my inferiority about being a woman. Here was a place (the abzu quote) that associated all these things inside: my desire for understanding personified as this feminine deity Sophia, my attraction to the unconscious, to creativity. I copied the quote, went home, spent the next two weeks on the paper. The energy was abundant; I was "in the flow." What I discovered while doing the research on Sophia was this: all the feelings I had had all my life of being different, of not fitting in anywhere, of an inability to fit into groups, of the humiliation from hearing the cultural message of woman's inferiority and stupidity, all of these feelings were stirred up into consciousness. The ejection from my lifestyle following Paul's death was not so unfamiliar, after all. What the history of Sophia revealed was that she herself was exiled, pushed out, was neutered or masculinized by theologians. The feeling of not being alone anymore, that out here in the trash bin was such a powerful, feminine presence was intriguing. Imperceptibly, a shift began to happen in my own soul. I began to realize that the forces of exclusion and oppression were the same ones that banished Sophia from the mainstream. I was in good company in exile! The path through Hades led me into the academic world, but what I found in the research led me into mythology and symbols. It is this back and forth from personal experience to study, from myth and symbol to the struggle to understand, that carved a "twisting circuit of Sophia" through my life. Here's an example: Our entire Western civilization is based upon Homer's story of the battle of Troy. Throughout history, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon, generals and scholars and ordinary people have visited Troy and sung eloquently about the heroism and battles that gave birth in Homer's epic poems to our Western consciousness. But what few people notice (except mythologists and archetypal psychologists) is that the ten-year battle fought over Helen originated in a beauty contest between the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodit