Isis Mary Sophia Selected lectures and writings by Rudolf Steiner Introduced by Christopher Bamford Over the past centuries, the being of Sophia, or feminine Divine Wisdom, has been emerging from the mists of ancient history, like Venus from the waters, to become a sign and mystery of our times. Though it is difficult to say who she is, wherever we turn, we see traces of her coming–-as if tracking the fringes of her mantle as it brushed aside the tangled, sclerotic cobwebs of centuries of cerebration. As she draws near, much that was forgotten is reentering consciousness, not only as memory but also from the future, as possibility. It demands that we rethink who we are, whence we have come, and whither we are going. We see her in the crumbling of the old social order and in the dawn light breaking through the night of patriarchal dominance in ways of knowing. Feminist philosophers of science have shown us that a magical, holistic, and participatory “Hermetic” alternative to reductive, mechanistic science–-post- modern before the fact–contested the rise of modern science from the start. At the same time, scientists are turning from a manipulative, control-oriented science to a more loving, phenomenological approach to nature. No less pioneering, historians and medievalists have uncovered whole lineages of women philosophers, mystics, and theologians whose work is forcing us to rethink the whole meaning of Christianity and Western civilization. Mention could be made too of the efflorescence of feminine spiritualities and of the recovery of the women of the Gospel who sustained Jesus with their own substance. Then there are the Marian apparitions which, since the 1840s, have accompanied the end of modernism.
Isis Mary Sophia< Her Mission and Ours Rudolf Steiner, Edited and introduced by Christopher Bamford