Sophia, again

and some apostasy

Let’s pick up where we left off last time. Here’s the bit of Henry Corbin’s text that Hillman left out, with me playing gender police again:

We recall that in Valentinian gnosis enthymesis is the intention conceived by the thirtieth Eon, Sophia, in her aspiration to understand the greatness of Uncreated Being. This intention detaches itself from Sophia, takes on a separate existence; it is the Sophia external to the pleroma, but of pneumatic substance. The force of an Intention so powerful as to project and realize “essentiate" a being external to the being who conceives the intention, corresponds perfectly to the character of the mysterious power that Ibn 'Arabi designates as himma. Accordingly, himma is creative, but in the specifically “epiphanic" sense attaching to every idea of creation in the theosophy of Ibn 'Arabi. In practice its function presents two aspects. The first governs a large group of phenomena, many of which are today the concern of parapsychology. The second applies to the mystic perception known as Intimate taste (dhawq), or touch. But since this too is an unveiling, an epiphany, of the heart, it is also an aspect of the gnostic's creativity.

I’m at a point in my life where I have to question everything I thought I knew. And I am pretty sure that I have not been thinking of creative imagination as a feminine attribute. Maybe sometimes. But mostly I suppose I was imagining “ it” as gender-neutral, as a “power.” That seems so absurdly abstract and fleshless now. Of course she’s a person! That’s the whole point of Corbin’s mythological psychocosmology. “Himma is Sophia external to the Pleroma.” Ok!

I’m kind of thinking that the rest of my life is going to be “about subtle bodies” and they will not be gender-neutral, I am pretty sure. Imagining creative imagination, himma, as a feminine presence, a Person, makes me utterly happy. Maybe for others it will be more real if She’s a He, or androgynous, or another gender altogether (this being a cosmology that can accommodate ambiguities), but this real-ization brings me to the edge of that moment in the forest of Brazil when I felt the positive energy of the feminine so palpably as a cosmological presence. Of course himma is feminine, she is the Mother of everything.

And, if Corbin and Hillman and Kripal are collectively right about what hermeneutics is and does, then hermeneutics is a feminine art and an enactment of himma, and is engendered out of the actions and passions of a fundamental ontological relationality at the roots of all things. And yes, the feminine is not a fixed or static category, but neither is the masculine, and I would much rather imagine my divinity in a cloud of Mother words than of Father epithets. It’s only power politics and several thousand years of habits that have so many people wedded to the idea of God the Father. And yes I am very well aware that I am poking quite ignorantly at several decades of feminist theology here and leaving out all the nuances and subtleties. I have followed some of that conversation. But I read Mary Daly too many years ago, and I’m kind of feeling as pissed off now as she was then. I’m so over the whole God the Father thing. I’ve never been able to be a Christian, or a Sufi, though I did try fairly seriously. Maybe that’s why. I don’t know. My relation with my father was really good. Better than with my mother, really. Still, he’d have made a kind of lousy God, you know?

So I’ll return to an idea I floated in my 10 Minutes on Sophia a few weeks ago. Let’s imagine the male attributes as offshoots of the feminine. Make Her the central figure of … religion? Maybe, but not literalizing religion where we worship a Being. Henry Corbin and many others have tried to explain to people that God isn’t a being, either a little one or a really really big one. Actually, once you accept the relational, hermeneutic approach to life, you realize that nothing is actually a being in the sense of the kind of literal, stable object that we used to hold dear. Even David Hume knew that for heaven’s sake. In any case case God isn’t a Being. So you don’t get to “believe” in Him/Her/It at all. What you have to do is himma her! You gotta Imagine! Essentiate the hell out of Her.

And actual scientists are kind of getting in the act. This isn’t Goddess worship, but it is himma-esque in the recognition of the power of participation. Here’s something from the New York Times today:

An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe. (Dr. Wheeler, working to understand the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, conceived of a “participatory universe” in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.) [The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel]

As the poet Robert Creeley said in 1972, “that himma shit, man, that's really my kind of people. Heart-felt...”

This is kind of fun you know, this Substack thing. It’s not a Book where I’m supposed to tell you what I Really Think. It’s more like poetry, where everybody knows it’s just Imagining. Yes: It is much more like play. Playing with ideas. The experimental imagination. Pragmatics. It will eventually get me into trouble probably, but only the embarrassing kind, not real trouble. And it’s also prep for the 10 Lectures coming up. Where I’ll try to connect more of the dots. With luck. The point really is to help people (by which I generally mean “me”) get freed from ideas they don’t know they have which are keeping them from living as they have the right to live - gracefully in the beauty of the world.