Mary Sophia, Mother Mary
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The Flaming Door: The Mission Of The Celtic Folk-Soul (1983) by Eleanor C. Merry
gives us the following vision of “some heart’s deep brooding, born of
the sea-foam and the far horizons of the Western Isles.” The origins of
the story are unknown. It begins with a “certain solitary, whose
dwelling place was on a hillside of the mainland, not very far from
Iona, sat one day in meditation gazing over the calm sea. Presently he
saw, rising up majestically in the airy clouds, the glorified golden
hued form of St. Columba. The Saint too was in meditation, and created
in his thoughts a picture which by reason of the holy power in him that
sent it forth, became endowed with immortality and purpose. It was a
picture of the Virgin with the Christ-Child in her arms. It floated
away from the islands, came toward the mainland, and spread in lovely
colors far and wide over the world. Yet it was more than a picture for
it seemed to utter its meaning: ‘I am Mary Sophia, sent forth in this
image over all the Earth to bring healing to men who will lose the
power to see me as I really am. I will live in their Art till their
thoughts raise me again to the Kingdom of the Heavens which are within
them on Earth.’”
In
her book materials, Merry continues, telling us that esoteric
Christianity sank under the burden of the power of Rome. Many devoted
themselves to the strengthening of this Imagination; but it grew
gradually weaker in proportion as the sublime figure of the Virgin
became “popularized” in Art. But then a wonderful thing happened.
Rafael, above all other painters, received the vision in the purest
form, and his Sistine Madonna still has the power to heal. He painted
it, this greatest of all pictures, within a few years of the European
discovery of America. He placed on record, as it were, the counteracting force to the forces of the Double.
Novalis, in the Disciple of Sais, says of great works of Art: “It is as
though they might show me the path to a place where, slumbering, lies
the Virgin for whom my spirit yearns.”
She
continues asking the question “Can we in this age whose mission it is
to come to grips with the problem of evil, find the divine and pure
Wisdom, Mary Sophia? Where is she to be found? Has she been banished so
far and so irrevocable in our laboratories, and in the abstract
mathematical calculations of Space? Has her voice been stifled by our
ideas that man’s body is a mechanical contrivance, doomed to an unfree
existence upon a dying Earth?” She ends the chapter asking if we can
today “find that faith of the old Celtic peoples, expressed in the
lovely Sheiling Hymn, allowing it to become a living reality once again
for a humanity of the twentieth( and, I might add, into our present
twenty-first) century.”
“Thou Father! Thou Son! Thou Spirit Holy!
“Be the Three-One with us day and night,
And on the crested wave, or on the mountain side,
Our Mother is there, and her arm is under our head.
Our Mother is there, and Her arm is under our head.”
Eleanor Merry tells us in The Flaming Door: The Mission Of The Celtic Folk-Soul (1983),“One
of the greatest of the Druid centers was where the Cathedral of
Chartres now stands. The original church was raised above a crypt where
rested an ancient pre-Christian Druid statue of the Virgin with the
Child in her arms. Her eyes were closed. Prophetically, the mother of
the world was represented as having already passed into her long sleep,
waiting, like the old heroes of the West, to be awakened by the touch
of a new Initiate, and Isis-Sophia would come again and kindle the
light of cosmic wisdom once more in the eyes of men. ‘Notre dame de sous-terre,’ the ‘Virgin of the under-earth.’”
“But also, this figure was a prophecy for a nearer future. A
tradition tells how many centuries before the Incarnation the Druids in
Chartres received a revelation that a Virgin would appear who would
bear a Child, and this Child would bring salvation to the world. So
they built an altar in her honor, and wrote upon it Virgini pariture,
‘the Virgin who will give birth.’ On the altar they placed a statue of
her with the Child on her lap, founded a cult and offered sacrifices to
her. Similar temples consecrated to the Virgin arose in many parts of
Gaul. Tradition tells us further that when at last the Druids found
that many strange wonders were taking place—they knew that the Savior
had been born; they made a hymn Gloriosa Domina, and publicly
worshipped the Virgin in the Grotto where the Cathedral of Chartres now
stands. The statue has long since disappeared we read “but the
inspiration of her presence remained; and for hundreds of years
Chartres was perhaps the greatest center of culture, learning, and
spiritual life in the world. Chartres was a place above all others
where the last echoes of the Mystery-wisdom of the Greeks lingered on
in the Christianity of the great Platonists, until the end of the
twelfth century.