Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God

Author: Anne Baring

Illustrators: Various

This book is a celebration of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit, the forgotten feminine face of God. In this interlude between the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius, the long-lost image of the Divine Feminine is returning. She, the Corner Stone that the builders rejected during the Age of Pisces, is initiating a crucial new phase in our evolution, urging us to discover a new ethic of responsibility towards the planet, bringing us a new vision of the sacredness and unity of life. Wisdom, justice, beauty, harmony, love and compassion and the impulse to help and to heal are the qualities that have traditionally been identified with the Divine Feminine, yet she is also the irresistible power that destroys old forms and brings new ones into being, the inspiration of the love-in-action that is needed to transform a culture that is radically out of touch with its soul.

Contents:

Contents ix

Preface xvii

Introduction xxxv

Chapter One Primordial Trauma: Two Great Cataclysms

The Younger Dryas Period 2

The Disappearance of Lemuria or Mu 3

When the Earth nearly Died 4

A Second Cataclysm 5

Atlantis Destroyed 5

Göbekli Tepe 8

The Evidence of Advanced Civilizations 9

Message from the Mother 12

Chapter Two The Separation of Nature from Spirit

Three Phases in the Evolution of Consciousness 18

The Palaeolithic Era 19

The Neolithic Great Mother 20

The Great Goddesses of the Bronze Age 22

The Solar Era – The Separation from Nature 24

The Dualism of Spirit and Nature 26

Severing the Umbilical Cord joining Nature with Spirit 27

Territorial Conquest 28

Chapter Three The Final Loss of the Divine Feminine

The Creation of The Myth of the Fall 34

The Negative Legacy of this Myth — the Persecution of Women 35

A New Saviour Myth 36

The Arian Heresy and The Council of Nicaea 325 CE 37

Loss of the Feminine Image of the Holy Spirit in Christianity 38

Mythic Inflation 40

The Imbalance between the Masculine and the Feminine 40

The Edict of the Emperor Theodosius 1 and Heresy 42

The Destruction of the Legacy of the Pagan World and the Forcible Conversion of Conquered Peoples 42

Nuclear Weapons and the Rape of Nature 44

The Effects of the Loss of the Feminine Value 45

Chapter Four The Shekinah of Kabbalah: Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit

The Origins of Kabbalah 50

The Tree of Life 52

The Doctrine of Emanation 54

Worlds within Worlds 55

The Sacred Marriage and the Transmission of Light 55

The Shekinah or Feminine Face of the God-head 57

The Shekinah: Divinity Active and Present in the World 58

Chapter Five The Wisdom Texts: Holy Spirit, Divine Wisdom, Sophia

The Wisdom Texts 64

The Jewish Community in Alexandria 67

The Removal and Destruction of many Gospels 68

The Reformation and the Final Phase of the Loss of the Divine Feminine 70

The Wisdom Texts 73

The Aurora Consurgens 78

The Sacred Marriage of the Mother-Father of the Cosmos 79

Chapter Six The Gnostics: Part One

The Importance of the City of Alexandria 84

The Origins of Gnosticism: The Mysteries 85

The Discoveries at Nag Hammadi 88

The Primary Message of the Gnostics 89

The Gnostic View of the World 92

The Visionary Experience of the Gnostics: The Mysteries 92

The Eight-petalled Rosette at the Temple of Eleusis 92

The Encounter with the Divine Light 94

The Use of White Barley to Induce a Visionary State 94

The Organization of the Christian Gnostic Communities 95

The Resurrection 97 The Gnostic Imagery of the Divine Mother 97

Women as Disciples and Teachers of Gnosis 99

Hypatia 99

The Confrontation with Christianity 101

Jung’s Encounter with the Gnostics 103

The Christian Confrontation with the Gnostics 106

The Closing of the Western Mind 106

The Christian Refuters of Gnosticism 106

The Gnostics’ Rejection of the Salvationist Ideology of the Christian Myth 107

The Gnostics as Knowers of the Way 109

The Transmission of the Wisdom Tradition 110

Chapter Six The Gnostics: Part Two

The Wisdom Texts and the Banished Goddess 115

Reincarnation 116

The Pistis Sophia 117

The Voice of the Feminine in Gnosticism 118

The Divine Source: The Ineffable One 119

The Third Element of the Great Emanation: The Son and Daughter 120

An Overview of the Pistis Sophia 120

Echoes of the Greek Myth of Demeter and Persephone 122

The Meaning of the Word ‘Metanoia’ 122

The Inner Meaning of Pistis Sophia 123

The Transfiguration of Jesus 125

Mary Magdalene 129

The Antagonism of Peter 129

The Archons and the Demiurge 130

The Sacred Marriage of Soul and Spirit 135

The Hymn of the Pearl or The Hymn of the Robe of Glory 137

Chapter Seven The Essenes

The Essenes 146

The Essene Communities 148

The Libraries and the Precious Scrolls Stored in Them 149

The Soul of the Child 150

The Cultivation of Skills 151

Healing Illness 151

Harmony of the Heart 152

Daniel’s Definition of God 153

Reverence for the Angels 154

Preparations for the Coming of a Great Teacher 154

The Presence and Teaching of Jesus 156

His Central Theme 157

The Misunderstanding of His Teaching 161

Ascension 161

The River of Consciousness Uniting All Essenes Through Time 163

Chapter Eight Mary Magdalene or Miryam of Bethany

The First Temple in Jerusalem 170

Mary Magdalene as the Penitent Whore 171

The Essene Communities 172

The Nag Hammadi Library 172

The Power of the Magdalene 173

The Balance of Female and Male Disciples 175

The Role of the Female Disciples 176

The Mother of Jeshua 177

Mary Magdalene 178

The Rift Between Peter and Mary Magdalene 179

The Gospel of the Beloved Companion 181

Mary Magdalene Unveiled 182

The Wedding at Cana 183

The Meeting in the Sepulchre Garden 185

The Joint Mission of Yeshua and Mary Magdalene 189

The Church’s Efforts to Efface the Evidence of Mary Magdalene 191

The Christian Church and the Denigration of Mary Magdalene 192

The Importance of the Partnership of Jeshua and Mary Magdalene 193

The Sea-Journey to Gaul 194

Interlude The Continuity of the Wisdom Tradition

The Black Madonna 201

The Extraordinary Twelfth Century 202

The Significance of the Grail 203

The Quest for the Grail as a Spiritual Journey 203

Chartres Cathedral 206

The Troubadours 211

The Knights Templar 212

Chapter Nine Esclarmonde de Foix and the Cathar Church of the Holy Spirit

The History of the Region 217

The Courts of Love 220

Esclarmonde 223

The Training of a Cathar Ancient 224

The Cathar Church of the Holy Spirit 225

Persecution 228

The Papal Crusade 228

The Siege of Monségur 230

Chapter Ten Cinderella: an Interpretation

Chapter Eleven The Sacred Way of the Rose

The Association of the Rose with Venus 248

The Rose as the Primary Symbol of the Divine Feminine 248

The Sacred Way of the Rose 252

The Rose in the Christian Era 253

Angels and the Scent of the Rose 253

The Rose Arbour of the Heart 254

Chapter Twelve Healing the Heart

The Myth of the Fall 263

The Loss of Soul 265

Healing this Pathology 267

The Child 269

Healing the Heart 271

Transgender Issues in Sport 276

Chapter Thirteen The Abuse of Power: Part One Covid and the Crime Against Humanity

A Personal Story 278

Finding a Cure 279

A Window of Opportunity 281

The Influence of Scientific Materialism 282

The Deaths and Injuries Caused by the “Vaccines” 283

NATO as Puppet Master 285

‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ 286

Further Examples of Totalitarian Control 288

Mis-placed Trust 289 Conspiracy Theories and Anti-Vaxxers 291

The Paralyzing Power of Fear 292

Shocking Revelation of the Vaccine Injuries 293

The Power of Survival Instincts 294

The Confrontation with Evil and the Fight with the Dragon 294

The Plan 295

The mRNA Vaccination Injuries 299

Addendum Presentation to the Irish Parliament

Dr Mike Yeadon 305

Address to the Irish Parliament 306

The Bio-Weapons 308

Chapter Thirteen The Abuse of Power: Part Two Transhumanism

Transhumanism as a New Version of Naziism 314

Transhumanism 316

The Covid Dossier and the Control by the Military 320

Do We Still Have a Choice? 322

Transhumanism, Klaus Schwab and the Great Reset 324

The Alliance of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum 325

The Launching of the WEF’s Great Reset 326

The Warning of Gregg Braden 331

Replacing Our Biology with Technocracy 333

Climate Change 334

Attack on Agriculture 339

Chapter Fourteen The Sacred Marriage: an Evolutionary Imperative

Scientific Materialism and its Denial of the Soul 347

The Return of the Divine Feminine 349

An Annunciation 350

Birthing a New Story 352

The Great Awakening 354

The Old Image of God is undergoing an Alchemical Transformation 354

New Wine in New Bottles: The New Spirituality 355

Cosmic Consciousness 357

The Near-Death Experience 358

Four Questions 359

The New Visionaries 363

The Discoveries of Nassim Haramein 365

Conclusion 366

The Sacred Marriage 369

Messages from a Transcendent Dimension 373

Credits 379

Bibliography 382

Index 387

Pages: 450 printed pages

Illustrations: 70 (mainly in colour)

Dimensions: 245mm x 172mm x 28mm

REVIEWS

Anne Baring’s Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God is a luminous,

visionary offering—soulful, discerning, and deeply timely. As one of our foremost voices, Baring writes with the gravitas, grace, and urgency of a lifelong scholar, teacher, and healer. She restores the Sophia tradition and its deep resonance with the Holy Spirit, weaving scripture, cross-cultural mysticism, depth psychology, the arts, global consciousness, and the sacredness of Nature into a clear, restorative whole. Her meticulous research is matched by seasoned, compassionate insight and palpable passion, inviting readers into contemplative practice, ecological reverence, and ethical renewal. This beautifully written book moved me to my core. A profound reminder of the sacredness of life, it shines with Baring’s

unwavering devotion to building a kinder, more balanced world for all beings -- nourishing seekers,

educators, social activists, healing professionals, spiritual practitioners, artists, and all who wish to

restore wisdom, love, dignity, vibrant community, and the health of our beautiful, suffering planet. Highly recommended—this work is a prayer, a feast, and a potent, necessary call to action for our time.

Tina Stromstead

Anne Baring has devoted her long life to the central theme of this book, subtitled ‘The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.’ This is her third and final major work, beginning with The Myth of the Goddess (1993, co-authored with Jules Cashford), then The Dream of the Cosmos (2013 & 2020) and now this masterwork published in her 90s. Anne has become an indomitable spiritual warrior on behalf of our spiritual nature and the divine feminine, whose fundamental role is to nurture and protect. In some

essential ways and with the same sense of urgency, this book builds on Messages from a Transcendent Dimension reviewed in these pages two years ago in calling for a fundamental shift of orientation to bring our culture back into balance. The thematic and historical scope of the book is quite remarkable. It begins with the primordial trauma of two great civilisational cataclysms, and the gradual separation of nature from spirit, leading to the final loss of the divine feminine. It is important to stress that the Holy Spirit as Sophia has traditionally been feminine, as in the Shekinah in Kabbalah and Asherah as the consort of Yahweh, whose presence was obliterated by the Deuteronomists in 623 BC, an act which split nature from spirit and led to the rise of monotheism. She (the Holy Spirit) is also present in the Wisdom Texts and constitutes a necessary partner in the sacred marriage of the mother – father of the cosmos representing soul and spirit. Two major chapters are devoted to the Mysteries and the Gnostics, highlighting the cultural role of Alexandria as a nexus of esoteric traditions. Women were teachers of gnosis, and there is a section on the extraordinary figure of Hypatia. Crucially, gnostics

rejected the image of Jesus as a saviour, regarding him instead as a wisdom teacher showing the way of awakening the light within, through metanoia and ultimately transfiguration and ascension. The text Pistis Sophia is one inspiring example of gnostic cosmology (pp. 118 ff). Anne draws on channelled

material both in her extraordinary chapter on the Essenes and on Mary Magdalene, who represents the gnostic spirit based on direct experience, as opposed to doctrinal correctness of the letter represented by Peter. The legal and institutional aspects triumphed politically with the establishment of the Catholic Church as the official religion of the Roman Empire after 325 AD. Our evolutionary destiny is reunion with the Light of the divine ground (p. 133), profoundly expressed in such texts as The Hymn of the Pearl and The Trimorphic Protennoia. (p. 141) Running through the historical exposition of these

various marginalised groups is the rejection of such communities devoted to the inner life of the soul and seeking peace, harmony, love, and truth. Again, the core message is beautifully expressed in

channelled material maintaining that ‘Light is our source, our goal, and our destiny.’ (p. 153) Jesus is presented as one whose whole being was a focus of the great cosmic energy of unconditional love working through the heart and maintaining that the nature of the Spirit is Truth and Love and Freedom. This is surely a perennial message and one that speaks so clearly to our time. To know ourselves at the deepest level is also to know God and that we are one another. The next major section is devoted to Mary Magdalene/Myriam of Bethany, characterised by the Catholic Church as a penitent whore,

especially since the intervention of Gregory the Great. This is an unconscionable travesty and deep

affront to the divine feminine that is only now being rescinded. Mary became a bearer of shame and guilt, carrying the unhealed wound of western civilisation that split nature from spirit and banished the goddess. The Gospel of the Beloved Companion reviewed some years ago in these pages and only

published in 2010 by a community descended from the original Cathars is an eyewitness account written by Mary Magdalene herself, key passages of which correspond to a text recognised by scholars, namely The Gospel of Mary. Annine van der Meer has provided a masterly commentary on this text in Mary Magdalene Unveiled (her new book is reviewed in this section). The joint mission of Yeshua and Mary was to anchor the cosmic energy of Love and to exemplify the sacred marriage. Adding to the

cultural impact of the Cathars in the 13th century was the cult of the Black Madonna, the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral, the quest for the Grail, the Troubadours and courtly love bringing in a new image of the feminine, and the work of the Knights Templar whose patron was Mary Magdalene. There is also an important chapter on Esclarmonde de Foix as a leading teacher in the Cathar Church of the Holy Spirit. Again, we find this essential experience of awakening to the light of wisdom within. A beautiful chapter reinterpreting the story of Cinderella embodies the sacred marriage, where the separated masculine and feminine must seek each other: ‘dark and light, earth and heaven, moon and sun, mother and

father, sister and brother, bride and bridegroom. All these relationships form the tapestry of human

experience which is the foundation of myth, fairy tale and religion.’ (p. 239) The Sacred Way of the Rose ‘symbolises the hidden feminine Wisdom Tradition and the Way of the Heart.’ As such, ‘The rose is the greatest mystic symbol of the West, just as the lotus is for the East.’ It is also associated with Venus, and is the primary symbol of the divine feminine. Here we reach the essence of the book’s spiritual message as the Sacred Way of the Rose: ‘The Path of Longing that connects us to the invisible ground of the soul. It is the Path of Wisdom that fills the rose garden of our heart with the power of love and connects us with each other, with the soul of nature and the soul of the cosmos.’ This is the visionary way of the heart ‘which connects us to deeper levels of reality and opens our soul to awareness of our divinity and immortality and to the realisation that Love is our origin, our guide and our destiny.’ (p. 252) This is what we have tragically forgotten and must urgently recover if humanity and the Earth are not only to survive, but to thrive. An essential precondition, to which a chapter is devoted, is the healing of the heart and the recovery of the soul. The narrative now takes an unexpected and more controversial turn in looking at Covid-19 and Transhumanism as examples of abuse of power. The philosophical starting point is the ideology of scientific materialism that denies any transcendent meaning or purpose, and ‘offers an open invitation to totalitarianism and transhumanism.’ Anne’s motive is to warn and protect humanity, and her analysis begins with a personal story where her housekeeper suffered severe side-effects from her first AstraZeneca vaccination, leading to two years of debilitation that was finally cured by a nicotine treatment recommended by Dr Bryan Ardis and whose modality was to bind the Covid-19 spike protein as the pathogenic agent present in both Covid-19 and the mRNA vaccination. There is no space to summarise the detail of this part of the argument, which is thoroughly researched and draws on the testimony of patent specialist Dr David Martin (p. 297) and former pharmaceutical executive Dr Mike Yeadon (p. 305 ff.). As readers will have experienced, governments put enormous psychological pressure on people to comply and conform. The startling and disturbing context revealed by these two men is one of bio-terrorism and bio-weapon development, which will come as a shock to many readers, and which was also articulated at official presentations to the European Parliament in 2023. See also my earlier review of RFK Jr’s The Wuhan Cover-Up. The chapter on Transhumanism presents the worldview behind these developments and its connection with the emergence of a centrally digitally-controlled authority involving the controlled demolition of liberal democracy and the institution of global technocracy, a novel, biodigital form of totalitarianism, according to Dr David Hughes. Such a

society was already envisaged in the 1970s by Zbigniew Brzezinski – ‘dominated by an elite whose claim to political power will rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how.’ I have discussed this in detail in reviews of the work of Patrick Wood in previous issues, and the transformation of Covid-19 from a

public health emergency to an authoritarian bio-defence policy in my review of Debbie Lerman above. These developments involving NBIC (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and

cognitive science) are being coordinated by, among others, the World Economic Forum and the UN. Harald Walach’s recent report on Transhumanism and Gregg Braden’s book Pure Human reviewed in the previous issue provide further background for interested readers. The bottom line is that ‘we now need to to come together to create a new kind of civilisation, based on beliefs and behaviour that

respect Nature’s wisdom, the miraculous immune system of our bodies and our evolutionary destiny on this planet.’ (p. 340) The final chapter highlights the sacred marriage as an evolutionary imperative, ‘reconnecting the Great Above with the Great Below, orienting our lives to the Light and Love of the Divine Ground.’ (p. 345) Only this ‘will serve the deepest longing of our heart, the deepest wisdom of our soul.’ Our modern technological culture ‘has banished the heart, love, and the whole feeling aspect of life. It has banished wisdom, and philosophy as the love of wisdom’ - we have become one-eyed, left-hemisphere centric, living in a decadent culture promoting lies, deception, and corruption. Instead, we must return to and prioritise the traditional values of the Feminine Principle: wisdom, compassion, love, justice, truth, harmony, and beauty. The new story is grounded in the oneness of life revealed in

quantum physics, ecosystems, and collective consciousness in a unified field of awareness, returning to the core of our being. This is Anne’s prayer and vision, our collective awakening to the revelation of

cosmic life as a divine unity. Her final book is an essential tract for our troubled times as a balm for the famished soul, the parched mind and the wounded heart.

David Lorrimer

Paradigm Explorer

Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network