Sophia
mythological figure · 3 works · 5 mentions · 9 anchored passages
Achamoth · Enthymesis · Mother Earth · mother Sophia · the Holy Spirit (surname)
in the texts
Adversus Valentinianos
The youngest Aeon whose illicit desire to know the Father causes her fall; her expelled passion becomes Achamoth, mother of the Demiurge and source of the material world
For out of those twelve Aeons whom Anthropos and Ecclesia had produced, the youngest by birth—let the solecism look to itself, for Sophia is the name—through incontinence of herself, without the fellowship of her consort Theletus, bursts forth to inquire into the Father, and contracts a kind of vice which had indeed begun in those others about Nus, but had flowed down into this one, that is, into …
Meanwhile it must be held that Sophia is surnamed both Earth and Mother—Mother Earth, as it were—and, what you may laugh at the more, even the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, after the banished Enthymesis and her mother Sophia had been brought back to her consort, that Monogenes again, that Nus—at leisure now, plainly, from the care and prospect of the Father—for the solidifying of things and the fortifying of the Pleroma, and now the fixing of it, lest any such shaking should again strike it, brings forth a new coupling, Christ and the Holy Spirit.
De Anima
Gnostic divine figure ('Mother Sophia') from whom heretics claim a spiritual seed is conferred on the soul.
Nor need we dwell longer on this, except on account of the heretics who stuff into the soul some spiritual seed I know not what, conferred out of the hidden bounty of their mother Sophia, without the Maker's knowledge — whereas Scripture, more conscious of its Maker, who is its own God, has promulgated nothing further than that God breathed into the face of man the breath of life, and that man bec …
The school of Valentinus stuffs into the soul the seed of Sophia, through which they recognize the histories and Milesian tales of their Aeons out of the images of visible things.
Stromata
The Valentinian aeon Wisdom, described as the 'painter' of the created image.
For the Demiurge, called god and father, he addressed as image of the true God and as prophet, but Sophia as painter, of whom the moulded thing is the image, unto the glory of the invisible—since whatever comes forth from a conjugal pairing is fullnesses, but whatever from a single one is images.