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Yahweh-Sophia Hierosgamos

Yahweh-Sophia Hierosgamos

In Answer to Job, Jung reads the late Wisdom literature as the recovery of a forgotten consort. Yahweh, in the Job drama, has lost his Eros: “Yahweh has no Eros, no relationship to man, but only to a purpose which man must help him fulfil. But that does not prevent him from being jealous and mistrustful like any other husband… The faithfulness of his people becomes the more important to him the more he forgets Wisdom” (Jung 1952). Job longs for Sophia — “where shall wisdom be found?” (Job 28:12); he does not yet know “enough about the Sophia who is coeternal with God” (Jung 1952).

Edinger systematizes Jung’s image: “We have here the image of Yahweh as the husband and Israel as the wife. Job then becomes the individual personification of Israel and Yahweh treats Job the way a jealous husband treats a wife. This brings up a whole series of analogies between the image of the marriage relationship and the ego/Self relation. Yahweh is husband and Israel is wife. Israel is functioning then as a kind of collective ego, and Yahweh represents the self” (Edinger 1992).

The structure is the hierosgamos in its Hebrew register. As anima and animus, per Jung in Aion, “can be realized only through a relation to a partner of the opposite sex,” so “Yahweh, in order to become conscious of his other, must experience a real encounter with the opposite sex through a relationship… He had a consort, his consort was Sophia, but he forgot about her — or more precisely repressed her” (Edinger 1992, paraphrasing Jung).

The drama’s resolution, for Jung, is the late Wisdom literature’s hypostasis of Sophia and — by a long historical arc — the Marian Assumption, which Jung reads as the dogmatic recognition of the feminine return to the Godhead. The hieros gamos of Yahweh and Sophia is the structural paradigm for the continuing-incarnation and for the coniunctio in its Christian-alchemical register.

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