The Creation

Many Christians in America believe that everything in the universe was created in six calendar days of twenty-four hours each. There is also a group within this group (and maybe outside this group, I don't know) who believe that the Earth (and by extension, the universe) is only 6,000 years old. That's six-thousand years of 365.25 days each, with each day being only 24 hours in length. For a deity who is infinite in every sense of the word, this has been a blink for Him. Existential questions aside, it doesn't stand up to the fossil record very well, or the presence of modern homo sapiens thousands of years before the Earth was supposedly created.

This belief structure speaks of a certain level of arrogance on the part of its adherents. Be they Young-Earth Creationists, or just regular Literal Creationists, this arrogance stems from the logical end result of Sola Scriptura. What is this arrogance? It is the arrogance that an infinite God would not only create an entire universe within a specified period, but that He would also test the creation he put there by going the extra mile and creating millions of years' worth of fossils, and natural physical processes that require millions of years, give humanity the rationalism and intelligence to decode these things, and then expect us to believe that all of it is a lie. The Gnostics had a term for a deity that behaved this way. They called Him the Demiurge.

At this point I must insist that I do not adhere to the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge. I do not view the Old Testament God as some demonic, corrupt, jealous creature. My point is that the God envisioned by these Creationists embodies the qualities of the Demiurge. This image of God violates the God described in the Gospels. This was one reason why the Gnostics viewed the Old Testament God and the New Testament God as different beings. This worked for their worldview and comprehension of God, but for Evangelical Christianity wherein there is only the one God, it is problematic.

How, then, should a Collyridian interpret Creation? Well, I earlier blogged about the Annunciation and the idea that the Indwelling of Mary's divinity began at that moment, and the Trinitarian God and Sophiatic Goddess were reunited in the person of Mary for the gestation of the Christ. This idea stems from a particular passage in Genesis wherein God is described in the plural (Elohim, El Elohim) and a story that I call God in a Box (if anyone knows where this story originates, please let me know. I don't want to plagiarize). The story goes like this:


Imagine a hypothetical hyper-cube. A multi-dimensional box without limitation in time or space. All that has ever been, is now, and ever will be exists within this box at this very moment and in every moment. Now, imagine that the sum totality of all of creation is expressed as a solitary, uniform expression. This is God, but not just the Trinitarian God or Mary, this is the Unified God. Let's imagine this uniform expression of everything is represented by light. It fills the box. It is everywhere and every-when. But, because there is only light, this light cannot be understood as light. It just is. At some indeterminate point, this light became self aware. How? It receded a part of itself and created darkness. This is principally an allegory, but at this moment, the Unified God was not unified. God and Goddess were separated, and through further separation, and further distancing from the unified whole, all of material creation came into being. Because light and dark differentiated each other in different ways, and all material creation is defined because of the interplay of light and shadow, when man was created and imbued with intelligence, we were made "in our image". We have the qualities of both. As Our Lady of Guadalupe is wreathed in the sun, so is the light associated with the Goddess. Because God (darkness) can only exist so long as there is a lack of light, Collyridian cosmology accepts that the Goddess withdrew from this metaphorical box and existed beyond it. So it was the task of God to instruct man and teach him to utilize his intelligence responsibly. And this is where the biblical story of creation comes from, and why God became jealous; He believed Himself to be the only deity in existence, the only deity worthy of worship. This is why the book of Jeremiah condemns the offering of sacrifice to the Goddess. And upon the Indwelling, the Goddess re-entered the metaphorical box. She was reunited with her Consort. Wisdom was returned to the Masculine Divine. This is why the message of Christ and the message of the New Testament God is love instead of wrath. Patience instead of jealousy. The schism between God and Goddess was reunited in Christ and Mary.


Now, it is the goal of all of creation to recede back to its primal state when the box was filled solely with light and nothing else. All of our collective experiences, our consciousness, our love and life will be unified with the light, and it really doesn't matter if God created the universe in six days or six eons.

The Collyridian Meaning of the Annunciation

The Annunciation is found in Luke 1:26-38 and details the appearance of Gabriel to the Virgin Mary announcing the conception of the Christ. The resultant feast day is held on March 25, near the Vernal Equinox, nine months before Christmas and the celebration of the birth of Christ. For Collyridians, this event should be understood as something very momentous. It is the same moment that Mary's divinity was assured and the indwelling of Mary would have begun.

Before we break this down, it is important to understand two things: 1. in the Gnostic tradition and in my own personal theology, Mary-as-Goddess is the subsequent identification of the Goddess who existed before time and before the God of the Old Testament, and 2. the Greek word for "Holy Spirit" pneumia is feminine. These two things will be important soon. Read on.

Gabriel descends and announces to Mary: "Hail, highly favored one, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are you among women." This is the source of the salutation that opens the Hail Mary (which was translated from Latin, which is why it sounds slightly different). In the resultant confusion, Mary is told that she will conceive by the Holy Ghost. Matthew, in his annunciation to Joseph (1:18-21), confirms this: "The angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary they wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." Phillip takes umbrage with this when he says "Some said, "Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit." They are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever conceive by a woman?" Here he is not simply being ignorant. Grammatical gender does not mean a feminine noun cannot perform a masculine act. What he is implying is that, as the Goddess (Sophia in Gnostic tradition) predates the God (which I do not associate with the Gnostic Demiurge), and brought all things into being according to her own self-understanding (that's an entirely separate blog post), so too would the feminine indwelling of Mary have brought forth the Christ on her own terms. And this fits with the canonical Gospel as well. Mary was not inseminated by the Spirit. She was filled with the Grace at birth that was rightfully hers to not only prepare her as a vessel for Christ, but as a vessel for her own divine indwelling. She did conceive by the Holy Spirit because she was not pregnant prior. But what is important is to understand the proper way by which she conceived. She was made Goddess-on-Earth to prepare the way for the birth of Jesus Christ, the avatar of God-on-Earth.


Let us go back to what Gabriel said to Mary. "Hail, highly favored one, the Lord is with thee." If Sophia created of herself everything that exists, the separation of the material from the intelligent (physical from spiritual) resulted in the creation of God. This God proceeded to create the material world. Because this material world was made imperfect (lacking the wisdom of His Progenitrix), sin was permitted to enter. After the fall of Adam and the fall of Eve, the world became darker and darker until finally the indwelling of Mary could occur at the same time that the conception of the Lord occurred. The Annunciation, when Mary is told that the Lord is with her, is more than just an announcement that the Messiah has arrived. The Goddess and the God have been reunited and the world is now able to move back towards a perfect, sacred, and holy state.


So, even though the Annunciation was four months ago, I thought it would be nice to discuss what the event means for the deeper theology of Marian tradition that holds to Mary's place as the renewal of the divine feminine. And we'll end it with the Ave Maria just because.


Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in ora moritis nostrae. Amen.