Project Zoeurgy

A Mythopoetic Synthesis (§197-203)

(§1-7; §8-14; §15-21; §22-28; §29-35, §36-42; §43-49; §50-56; §57-63, §64-70; §71-77; §78-84, §85-91, §92-98, §99-105; §106-112; §113-119, §120-126; §127-133; §134-140, §141-147; §148-154; §155-161; §162-168, §169-175; §176-182, §183-189, §190-196)

§197. Daughter of the Dove

We suppose that even in Heaven, Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost (whatever that verb means up there), before the Annunciation repeated the pattern upon the Earth. And if a Woman who’s His Soul is slumbering in Heaven, then presumably She wouldn’t be any less conceived by the Holy Ghost than Jesus Himself; we may regard Her as the Daughter of the Dove. We envision a sophianic triad of Mother and Daughter and Holy Soul. For the sake of simplicity, though, we can reframe this picture into the duo of Queen on the one hand and Soul on the other. Queen Sophia is Mary the Mother, and Soul Sophia is Zoe the Daughter in tandem with Her own Holy Soul. Mary’s union with God is an established ontological fact, and She is the Sophia who knows God whether we humans recognize it or not. Zoe’s union with God, on the other hand, is a phenomenological work in progress, for She is the Sophia who is restored to God to the extent that we humans make the Kingdom incarnate within our clay realm. And what some among us have taken to calling “enchantment”—that is simply what happens when the Holy Ghost breathes upon Zoe’s Soul, and She ascends into the quickened embrace.

§198. His Creative Projection

No one down here has ever seen the Father—which is to say, it is misguided to imagine that the Old Testament prophets were dealing with the Father prior to the Incarnation of the Son. Instead, we posit that it is none other than Jesus Himself, the preincarnate Logos, whom the ancient Hebrews came to know as Yahweh; and that it was Jesus who encountered Ezekiel in the Merkabah, who spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush, who uttered the original fiat lux and generated the explosion of light that brought the cosmos into being at the very start of the biblical saga. But creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, is probably something of a figure of speech. Or rather, the Nothing surely is involved as the vacuum into which the new light must expand, with the dark contributing both final freedom and the possibility of sin into the novel mix. But the actual Stuff out of which Jesus made the cosmos—that Stuff is the Soul of Zoe, the anima mundi and life divine. Zoe and Jesus were previously fused within each other in the heavenly unity of the Syzygy, but then She was sent outward by His creative projection, presenting Our Lord with an experience of genuine alterity, and all that could go wrong with that.

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§199. Her Play by the Waters

Solomon suggests that a Woman was there with God from the very start of the Creation, playing and delighting by the waters of the deep and becoming fond in particular of Eve and Adam and their progeny. It sounds to our ears like this Woman is Zoe in Her original state, Soul Sophia so pure that She is in perfect harmony with Queen Sophia, the triad of Mother and Daughter and Holy Soul suffering from no disturbance whatsoever. (Needless to say, we ignore the traditional take that Solomon is speaking here of the Father and the Son, affirming instead that the relation is between Jesus and Sophia.) But such a unity of light playing on perfectly tranluscent water—it could not endure, not when the light itself was pushing outward into the Abyss and gradually becoming infected by the latter in turn. At some point Zoe fell, resulting in the sleep of the Daughter and the degradation of the Holy Soul. Jesus, of course, could not abide by the persistence of such a scenario; and realizing that talking with the old prophets wasn’t helping matters much in the long run, He began to think outside of the box. And so it was that the contours of the Gospel took shape within the divine mind.

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§200. The Heavenly Prototype

The Father and the Queen form a Syzygy in a sort of meta-dimension relative to our Creation—the place on the far side of the wormhole at the center of reality’s circle, the place called the Empyrean. There never has been any disturbance in their union (or at least nothing within the horizon of our aeon, the only one that we could know from our current standpoint). Queen Sophia is the heavenly prototype of what God means to do with His Creation. There is a catch, however. This prototype exists only within a realm of pure light, having nothing to do with our complicated triadic realm that’s composed of clay and water in addition to light. And when we humans aspire to pure light, sans the weight of the other elements, we invariably become spectral as a result of this hubristic sin against the Real. A crucial question of translation thus emerges, having to do with how the heavenly prototype of the Queen should be made incarnate within the fallen realm of the Soul. By a unique magic, Queen Sophia became real down here as the precursor of the Incarnation; but Soul Sophia is still in the process of becoming Her crystal mirror, duplicating upon Earth what is always already the case in Heaven.

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§201. The Earthly Praxis

Outside of the Empyrean, in our dimension, is the perpetual threat of the Abyss, with the clay circumference of the circle—and of our flesh—representing the outer limit of the Creation’s push against that zone of oblivion. When Jesus projected Zoe’s Soul outward to make the cosmos, it was inevitable that She would become caught up with nothingness and freedom: there is simply no other way. And as such, to compare our earthly condition directly to the heavenly condition is largely a matter of confusing oranges with apples. One state of affairs was and always is real in Heaven, but that specific state has never yet existed upon Earth. The Fall, then, was a descent into a completely new possibility, one that had not been tried before. The Fall and the Creation were the same event, for to create in the realm of clay and water is also to immediately lay that realm open to the siege of the Nothing upon the light. And the Nothing will win the first round. The earthly praxis is a long process of evolution to fight to pneumatic translucency within the parameters of clay flesh itself, irradiating the latter with the energies of God and thereby rendering it immortal on the far side of death’s chrysalis. But such a necessity is simply in the nature of Our Lord’s creative project, not any concession of some antecedent failure, either by Him or by us.

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§202. The Celestial Bridge

The concept of theurgy refers to practices meant to encourage the deity’s manifestation, with the Liturgy and Christ’s presence in the Eucharist providing the Catholic exemplar. From the standpoint of our Christian tantra, though, we may also speak of Zoeurgy, the project of rendering present the Goddess. Soul Sophia in the process of becoming a mirror of the Queen of Heaven, growing in translucency over time: She finds Her avatar in Magdalene, who was once possessed by seven demons but then served as first witness to the Resurrection. We will maintain a suggestive silence about exactly how closely and in what manner Magdalene is connected to the Daughter, content to observe that the powerful poetic resonance is there for anyone who cares to see it. What’s clear, anyway, is that the endgame of the Gospel is to establish the celestial bridge, such that Soul Sophia becomes one at heart with Queen Sophia, the Daughter as united in essence to the Mother as the Son already is to the Father, and the Mother and Father already are to each other—and so on, big happy Family without end. The gambit of the Creation generated an imbalance in the Six-Pointed Star, then, which will be remedied at the Apocalypse when Soul Sophia is raised in full to harmonious resonance with the Queen.

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§203. White Magic Days

It is possible already to live within the circle of the Syzygy, drifting improbably in a little bubble of light across the stormy seas, repelling every shark and other predator without even meaning to do so. Even misfortune might not disturb such a man, for he is incapable of perceiving anything as misfortune—only as another chapter or section or sentence in the great and enigmatic Plot. Such are the effects of harmonizing with the Holy Ghost, participating in His perennial romance with Zoe’s Soul. Indeed, it is unclear whether such a man would even subjectively notice when he becomes unclayed and crosses the threshold of earthly death, given that he has already been living the white magic days of the everlasting life divine. To be “enchanted” typically has the connotation of falling under a black magic spell, becoming spectral, drifting away from the Real. If we wished to put a positive spin on the matter, however, we might suggest that to “en-chant” is to sing the Real into being. And such is the nature of Zoeurgy, the venture to bring Zoe into syzygy with Jesus and thereby pitch into the illuminated redemption of everything, starting with our own souls and then creatively projecting outward, rather akin to what someone we know did long ago.