I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

You know, this will probably land me in a lot of hot water.

But I am the type always to beg forgiveness after rather than ask permission before, so consider yourself warned.

So here we go.

I find tremendous resonance with the Gnostic texts on the subject of Sophia. According the Gnosticism, Yaweh descended from Sophia, who is Wisdom. Yaweh, Jehovah, God, or Allah didn't know it wasn't alone in the Universe, but thought it was, and proceeded to gain knowledge of itself via creation.

And according to this view, this Earth and all of us on it are all part of Yaweh's learning about himself, as he is ignorant, as are we, of Sophia.

Gnosticism is a sect of Christianity that died out around 400 AD. Many people purport that Jesus belonged to the Gnostics, and there is actually a gospel of Jesus in the Gnostic texts found at Naj Hammadi in the 1940's.

Whether or not you believe in this version of Christianity, the basic ideas are twofold:

1. The only way to know God is to experience God directly. Thus gnosis, or Greek for knowing.
2. The creative principle is masculine, and like Yaweh, unaware of the true nature of itself. The wisdom that informs creation, and also of which the masculine is often unaware, is feminine.

Think about that for a moment, especially you chauvinists out there (and I am thinking of one in particular here who shall remain nameless) who don't believe a woman has a lot to offer on the knowledge or wisdom front.

The story, by the way, is repeated in Adam and Eve.

Side note - when certain motifs show up over and over in religion, you have to get at the archetypal pattern underneath.

So in Adam and Eve, here they are, eating fruit, making love, wandering around in the garden, pretty much happy and unaware (like most men in the beginning of relationship), and God visits them often.

But God wants to keep knowledge of himself to himself.

So this can't last, or we wouldn't have a story here.

Who comes to call? Why, the serpent, traditionally also associated with the feminine, and with the wisdom that bites.

And who listens to the call of wisdom?

Woman. She takes the wisdom offered in the apple, which God wasn't interested in sharing with his creations, and she gives it to the man so that he might now know what she has learned.

Again, we have the feminine principle guiding the masculine. The receiver of the wisdom guides the creative principle.

Now at this point, you are probably mentally throwing up, and saying "BUT Sharonella! They got thrown out! It was bad bad bad! This was a terrible thing! And it was that bitch's fault! Man was happy being ignorant until woman came along and showed him the light."

That's the chauvinist version of the story, written by men who still didn't get how women receive the wisdom. They hadn't received, obviously!

Read on:

There is an old Jewish legend that says that in order to get to the Tree of Eternal Life in the Garden of Eden, you have to eat entirely through the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which surrounds the Tree of Life.

That's a hard image to digest literally, but for the imaginative or symbolically minded - it's a snap. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil must be entirely consumed before you can attain Eternal Life. How many lifetimes do you suppose this might take? You must have the knowledge of God, the knowledge that God withheld except from those who would seek it, so that your soul might be free from endless rebirth to experience yet another facet of human existence. And, just so you know, all the major religions of the world have paths for you to attain this. So, if yours isn't working for you, shop around.

Once you have attained this freedom from needing to understand the many faces of god, you would experience Zen, or enlightenment, or Nirvana, or understanding (all the religions have words for this - it's a universal construct) and you would have eternal life.

Not in the literal sense, of living forever, but in the symbolic sense of being free of the cycles of illusion, death, and rebirth.

And who ate from this tree so that they might gain knowledge in the first place?

Eve.

So who was going after wisdom first in order to get to the Tree of Eternal Life?

The woman.

And who was resisting, and resists still?

The man.

Just so you know, I am not a feminist. But I am a humanist, and I can't stand it when men shut down women because they fear to know the truth, which is often what the woman has on offer. The human race grows by valuing the differences in the sexes and embracing them. Shutting one side off leads to alienation and loneliness, creation without wisdom (think pollution, cloning, arms races, and stripping the world of resources), and doncha' think we have got enough of that??? Haven't you had your fill of that?

So on Halloween today, hug a man if you're a woman! Or a woman if you're a man! Or something in between! Introduce your masculine side to your feminine, or vice versa,

And realize that we need both the masculine and the feminine to be whole.

Happy Halloween!