Gnosticism and the universal mother

[Plus audio version]

“The birthing of humans by the Earth is a universally widespread belief. In numerous languages, we are said to be ‘born of the Earth'”. [1]

So writes Mircea Eliade in Le sacré et le profane, a book to which I referred in ‘Our sacred belonging’. [2]

On the surface there would seem to be no connection between this earthy and rooted outlook and the mystic, even ascetic, Gnostic tradition which is generally regarded as an early phase of Christianity proposing a somewhat negative view of our physical, material, being.

However, American scholar John Lamb Lash takes a different perspective in his 2006 book Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, declaring: “Gnostic cosmology is deeply rooted in indigenous wisdom and reflects a sophisticated version of the native sense for life on earth”. [3]

“The possibility that Gnostic knowledge and practices were the final flowering of millennial experience in ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy’ (Eliade’s famous term for shamanism) has yet to be recognized or explored.

“The work of the earliest scholars (usually German, such as Richard Reitzenstein) clearly supported this path of inquiry, but their work is no longer cited.

“The pioneers of the field regarded the Gnostic movement in the broad sense as a monumental spiritual phenomenon of central Asiatic origins, predating Christianity by centuries, if not millennia”. [4]

American poet and culture critic Kenneth Rexroth argues that Gnosticism grew from the prehistoric matrix of Goddess worship in Europe, “Neolithic and even earlier”.

The emphasis on “the descent of the redeemer goddess” would therefore account for “the strong matriarchal or at least anti-patriarchal emphasis of most Gnostic sects”. [5]

An important connection between what appear to be two very different spiritual traditions – the pagan Mother Earth cult and Christian mysto-ascetism – comes in the form of Sophia.

She is, as I set out in ‘The Spirit of Sophia’, “a religious character or metaphysical metaphor broadly representing divine wisdom and the presence and beauty of that wisdom in our world and in our hearts”. [6]

Lash writes: “Gnostics taught that Sophia is a goddess, a divine being embodied in the earth. The wisdom unique to her is the living intelligence of the planet.

“All the Mysteries were dedicated to this divinity, the Magna Mater, the Great Mother whom I propose to correlate to Gaia.

“Initiation in the Mysteries involved a direct encounter with the Sophianic intelligence, that is, ‘earth wisdom’ in New Age parlance.

“Gnostics preserved a sacred story about the origin of humanity, how the earth evolved, and how we as a species are uniquely involved with the planetary intelligence”. [7]

He adds that the role of the Mysteries is usually ignored or underplayed by scholars specialising in Gnosticism, who also tend to treat these rites as being confined to the Near East, Egypt, and Greece, in the Hellenistic era (320–30 BCE).

Lash argues that they in fact amounted to “a network extending from the northernmost isles of Britain down to the northern coast of Africa and deep into Asia, a network of extremely ancient provenance”. [8]

Again we see intriguing pointers towards a universal nature-based human gnosis hidden from our sight by the restrictive mental walls of ‘modern’ thinking.

In The Golden Ass, a novel written in the second century AD, the Berber Latin-language writer Apulieus gives a fascinating account of initiation into the Mysteries of Isis.

At the key moment of revelation, a sublime female voice addresses him, announcing:

“I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all the gods and goddesses that are known to you on earth”. [9]

An important proponent and teacher of the old human religion of life was Hypatia of Alexandria, Egypt, the great philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who was murdered by a mob of Christian extremists in 415.

Canadian-born writer Manley Palmer Hall says that when it came to debating ideas about the divine, “Hypatia eclipsed in argument every proponent of the Christian doctrines in Northern Egypt”. [10]

And Lash maintains that her expertise in theology typified the pagan intellectual class of Gnostics, gnostikoi, “those who understand divine matters, knowing as the gods know”. [11]

He makes the important point that ancient learning was multidisciplinary and eclectic, contrasting strongly to the narrow specialization of higher education and the sciences in our time.

One might even think that the narrow specialization has been brought in specifically to prevent any broader and deeper understanding.

The word philosophy means, of course, “love (philo) of wisdom (sophia)” and for Gnostics, says Lash, “Sophia was a revered divinity, the goddess whose story they recounted in their sacred cosmology”. [12]

Lash adds with regard to the martyred gnostic philosopher: “To the people of her time and setting, Hypatia would have been wisdom incarnate”. [13]

But what is meant by “paganism”, which still has a bad name among many Christians 1,600 years after the death of Hypatia and is often seen by them as representing dark, even Satanic, forces.

Lash states: “Paganism may be defined as the primary orientation of society to the natural world and habitat, where both are perceived holistically”. [14]

“In the Pagan sense of life, culture is organically situated in nature… Pagans were by definition people rooted in the place they inhabit”. [15]

British historian Garth Fowden notes that pagans were immersed in “that distinctive understanding of divinity that comes through dwelling together with the gods in a certain place, a precise local knowledge that no distant prophet could or would ever make into a scripture”. [16]

The Celtic pagan tradition is represented by the Druids who, according to Diogenes Laertius and other ancient sources, “taught that the ideal for people was to live in harmony with nature and themselves, accepting that pain and death were not evils but essential… and that the only evil was moral weakness”.

Their message to the common people was: “Revere the gods, do not do evil to each other, and exercise courage”. [17]

As Lash points out, the word “druid” comes from an archaic root term meaning tree (and, I would add, often specifically associated with oaks) which is also the source of the English word “truth”. [18]

Truth is therefore about trees, or rather about the divine beauty that manifests itself in trees as in rivers, mountains, lakes, seas, plants, animals and even – if we allow it to do so – in human beings.

The old – and now forbidden – spirituality of our ancestors was about their withness to community, to nature, to the universe.

All the various forms that it took across the world were rooted in a recognition of the sacredness of the living world, the truth of the divine presence in this world.

As Canadian anthropologist Jeremy Narby puts it: “How could nature not be conscious if our own consciousness is produced by nature?” [19]

[Audio version]

[1] Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 121.
[2] Paul Cudenec, ‘Our sacred belonging’. https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/06/27/our-sacred-belonging/
[3] John Lamb Lash, Not In His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2006), pdf version, p. 179.
[4] Lash, p. 132.
[5] Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Introduction’, G.R.S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960) p. xiii, cit. Lash, pp. 31-32.
[6] Paul Cudenec, ‘The Spirit of Sophia’, The Global Gang Running Our World and Ruining Our Lives, 2025, p. 40.
https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/the-global-gang-web.pdf
[7] Lash, p. 34.
[8] Lash, p. 130.
[9] Apulieus, The Golden Ass, translated by Robert Graves (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1983), p. 264, cit. Lash, p. 133.
[10] Manley Palmer Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Foundation, n.d.), p. 197, cit. Lash, p. 26.
[11] Lash, pp. 26-27.
[12] Lash, p. 27.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Lash, p. 46.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Garth Fowden, ‘Religious Communities’, Late Antiquity, ed. Bowerstock et al. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 82–106, cit. Lash, p. 46.
[17] Lash, p. 65.
[18] Lash, p. 225.
[18] Lash, p. 225.
[19] Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998), p. 138, cit. Lash, p. 318.