Gnostic Christianity granted women religious roles orthodox churches denied them
Evidence
Some of the early gnostic Christians who described God as androgynous prayed to both the father and the mother and interpreted the account of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis to mean that a male-female God created men and women in its image. In these interpretations God was a dyad of opposites existing in harmony in one being. The divine mother was named Wisdom, or Sophia, a Greek translation of the Hebrew hokhmah. Wisdom was the creative power, “self-generating, self-discovering its own mother, its own father, its own sister, its own son: father, mother, unity, root of all things.” Her wisdom was bestowed on men and women. Human nature, like God, consisted of a unity of equal male-female principles. Evidence for the appeal of gnostic androgyny to women is indicated by their attraction to these heretical groups during the period A.D. 150–200, when Christianity was struggling to gain its stature as a world religion. Here they could play important roles from which they had been excluded by orthodox churches, including healer, evangelist, priest, prophet, and teacher. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 116
Categorization
- QUESTION: The Sophia-as-androgynous-God thread would bear following into later mystical traditions.
- XREF: connects to: Gnosticism offered an egalitarian male-female cosmology marginalized by Christian orthodoxy — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 114; Pantheistic sects granted women religious freedoms orthodox churches denied — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 531; Radical Protestant sects offered women greater religious participation than orthodox churches — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 601 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Radical Protestant sects offered women greater religious participation than orthodox churches
#corroborates(0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 601 - Pantheistic sects granted women religious freedoms orthodox churches denied
#corroborates(0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 531 - Early women scientists acted through egalitarian religious sects and domestic-role constriction
#corroborates(0.72) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1017