The Shekinah: Image of the Divine Feminine
The Divine Feminine
Exploring the Feminine Face of God throughout the World
Godsfield Press UK and Conari Press USA 1996
Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey
The Shekinah: Image of the Divine Feminine
The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the feminine face
of God as it was conceived in the mystical tradition of Judaism,
originating perhaps in the rabbinic schools of Babylon and transmitted orally
for a thousand years until it flowered in the writings of the Jewish Kabbalists
of medieval Spain and southwestern France. In Kabbalah, religion ceases to be a
matter of worship and collective belief. It becomes a direct path of communion
between the individual and the Divine. In the imagery of the Shekinah, Kabbalah
gives us the cosmology of the soul and the relationship between the two aspects
of the godhead that has been lost or hidden for millennia. The mythology of the
Kabbalah is so gloriously rich, so broad in its imaginative and revelatory
reach, and so intensely nourishing to a world that lacks any awareness of the
Divine Feminine, that to discover this tradition is immensely exciting. The
Shekinah reveals the missing imagery of God-as-Mother that has been lost or
obscured in both Judaism and Christianity.
Whereas the Old Testament is the written tradition of Judaism, Kabbalah offers
the hidden oral tradition, wonderfully named as "The Voice of the Turtle"
(turtledove). This mystic knowledge or mystic tradition of the direct path to
God was described as the Jewels of the Heavenly Bride. The Bronze Age imagery of
the Great Goddess returns to life in the extraordinary beauty of the Kabbalistic
description of the Shekinah and in the gender endings of nouns that describe the
feminine dimension of the godhead. But the Divine Feminine is now understood as
cosmic soul, the intermediary between the godhead and life in this dimension
who, as the Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human
in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship.
The mythology of this tradition restores the image of the sacred marriage in the
union of the Divine Father-Mother in the ground of being. There is not a Mother
and a Father but a Mother-Father who are one in their eternal embrace: one in
their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continuous act
of creation through all the invisible dimensions they bring into being and
sustain. No other tradition offers the same breathtaking vision, in such
exquisite poetic imagery, of the union of male and female energies in the One
that is both. The Song of Songs was the text most used by Kabbalists for their
contemplation of the mystery of this divine union. Yet one has the feeling that
this way to union with the Divine may descend from some unknown source that
nourished Egypt, Sumer, and India.
The Kabbalistic tradition describes the feminine image of the godhead as Mother,
Daughter, Sister, and Holy Spirit, giving woman what she has lacked throughout
the last two and a half thousand years in Judeo-Christian culture - an image of
the Divine Feminine in the godhead that is reflected at the human level in
herself. The Shekinah is Divine Motherhood, Mother of All Living. Women can know
themselves, in their role as mothers, in their care and concern for the
well-being of their loved ones, as the instinctive custodians of her creation.
The thirteenth-century "Zohar, The Book of Radiance or Splendor" that was the
principal text of Kabbalah, contemplates the mystery of the relationship between
the female and male aspects of the godhead expressed as Mother and Father, and
their emanation through all levels of creation as Daughter and Son. The
essential conception of this mystical tradition expresses itself as an image of
worlds within worlds. Divine Spirit (Ain Soph or Ein Sof) beyond form or
conception is the light at the center, the heart, and moves outward as creative
sound (word), thought and energy, bringing into being successive spheres,
realms, veils, or dimensions imagined as veils or robes that clothe and hide the
hidden source yet at the same time transmit its radiant light.
The transmission of light from source to the outer, manifest level is also
imagined as an inverted tree, the Tree of Life, whose branches grow from its
root in the divine ground and extend through the worlds of emanation. The primal
center or root is the innermost light, of an unimaginable luminosity and
translucence. The inner point expands or is sown as a ray of light into a
dimension described in some texts as a sea of glory, in others as a palace that
acts as an enclosure for the light; from this womb it emanates as a radiant
cascade, a fountain of living water, pouring forth light to sustain and permeate
all the worlds or dimensions it brings into being. All life on earth, all
consciousness, is that light and is therefore utterly sacred. The Zohar
[principal text of Kabbalah] describes nature as the garment of God.
Andrew Harvey & Anne Baring, The Divine Feminine
Conari Press Berkeley, CA
ISBN 1-57324-035-4 (hardcover)
Pgs. 86, 88-89
NOTE: If this page was accessed during a web search you may wish to browse the sites listed below where this topic or related issues are discussed in detail to promote global peace, religious harmony, and spiritual development of humanity:
www.adishakti.org/www.al-qiyamah.org/
www.adi-shakti.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Hinduism)
www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Christianity)
www.ruach-elohim.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Judaism)
www.ruh-allah.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Islam)
www.tao-mother.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Native Traditions)
