Isis Mary Sophia: Her Mission and Ours

by Rudolf Steiner, Christopher Bamford (Introduction)

The rebirth of the feminine surrounds us in many forms--from the global movement for women's rights to a renewed interest in feminine spirituality, the Goddess, and the Divine Mother. What is the spiritual meaning of this rebirth? What is the feminine divine? Who is she?

The feminine divine has had many names in many cultures: Ishtar in Babylon, Inanna in Sumeria, Athena, Hera, Demeter, and Persephone in Greece, Isis in Egypt, Durga, Kali, and Lakshmi in India. She is the Shekinah of the Cabalists, and the Sophia of the Gnostics. To Steiner, she is Anthroposophia (or Divine Wisdom), who descended from the spiritual world and passed through humanity to become now the goal and archetype of human wisdom in the cosmos.

This book contains most of Steiner's statements on Sophia. We see him "midwifing" the birth of the Sophia, the new Isis, and divine feminine wisdom, in human hearts on earth. Each chapter explores the mystery of the various relationships of Sophia: Sophia and Isis, Sophia and the Holy Spirit, Sophia and Mary, the mother of Jesus (and Mary Magdalene), Sophia and the Gnostic Achamod, and Sophia and the New Isis.

Above all, in a remarkable way, Steiner makes clear the relationship of Christ and Sophia.

Contents:


Introduction by Christopher Bamford
Prologue: Living Thinking
Thinking Is an Organ of Percpetion
Thinking Unites Us with the Cosmos
The Holy Spirit and the Christ in Us
Sophia, the Holy Spirit, Mary, and Mary Magdalene
The Virgin Sophia and the Holy Spirit
Mary and Mary Magdalene
Sophia Is the Gospel Itself
Wisdom and Health
The Nature of the Virgin Sophia and of the Holy Spirit
Isis and Madonna
Wisdom and Love in Cosmic and Human Evolution
The Being Anthroposophia
The Gifts of Isis
From the Fifth Gospel
Sophia and Achamoth
The Legend of the New Isis
The Search for the New Isis
Sophia and Pistis
Michael, Sophia, and Marduk
A Christmas Study: The Mystery of the Logos

Genres: Nonfiction, Theology, Spirituality

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.

Reviews

[Cathryn Mahoney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting but lots of metaphysical jargon.

[Rosie · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was way more towards the goofy end of the goofy<—->interesting spectrum than I hoped it would be

[Roger Buck]

For reasons indicated here: http://corjesusacratissimum.org/2011/... ...

I do not even want to rate this book. My views on Steiner are so complex and so likely to be misunderstood that I would rather not reduce them to soundbites.

I simply want to say I have read this book and that whilst Steiner served to free me from Eastern Theosophy and the New Age scene I found at Findhorn, Valentin Tomberg, in turn, provided me with a very different hermeneutic with which to engage Steiner.

I hope the above link however can contribute a little to the tangled issues involving Steiner and Tomberg - and why I believe this "very different hermeneutic" is necessary for a world plunging into a cold-as-steel mechanised society ...