"The discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in the Egyptian Desert in 1945 and the work of scholars in this century, in particular Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels, have revolutionized our knowledge of the Gnostic Christian groups that were systematically suppressed at the beginning of the third century. Thanks to Pagels (and to the work of her great predecessor G.W.M. Mead), we are no longer forced to rely on the condemnatory distortions of their philosophy by Orthodox theologians like Irenaeus of Lyons and Tertullian. We can now see that Gnostic Christianity — centered in Alexandria but flourishing all over the Hellenistic world and Asia Minor — was the fountainhead of an overwhelmingly varied, brilliant, and radical mystic exploration of the nature of God and of the Christ-consciousness, an exploration whose openness to the Sacred Feminine in particular contemporary Christian seekers urgently need to understand and learn from.

"It is now clear that the main reasons for the suppression of the Gnostic Christian groups was that they encouraged direct access to the divine, without any need of mediation. They discouraged all forms of 'fixed' and 'inherited' religious hierarchy, in the name of Christ himself, and — just as we know Jesus had done — embraced the spiritual equality of women and celebrated them as prophets, healers, teachers, and priests. Such radical freedoms fundamentally threatened the philosophy and practice of those Christian groups that formed around the legacy of Peter and Paul. As these gained power, their vision of the necessity of hierarchy, of the exclusive claim of men to be priests and 'mediators' of the divine, and of an overridingly 'masculine' view of the Godhead — enshrined later in the 'male' trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — gained ascendancy, until, in the early third century, the wonderful vitality and wisdom of Gnosticism was attacked from all sides as 'heretical,' the books of the Gnostic mystics, such as Valentinus and Marcion were burned, and their contribution to the understanding of the revolution of Christ obscured for almost two thousand years. With Gnostic vision and creativity silenced, God, in Christian practice, became exclusively male: Christ was 'separated' from the human race and declared at the council of Chalcedon in 451 the 'only' Son of God; women and the feminine were increasingly denounced and demonized, and the split between nature and spirit that Jesus had striven with all his powers to heal was celebrated as wisdom. The door of direct communion between the human soul and God that Jesus had given his life to open was slammed shut in the name of 'mediation' and hierarchical control. In other words, all of the revolutionary aspects of Jesus' mission — and so of the Christ-consciousness that it engenders — were muted or distorted. Reclaiming the insights of Gnostic mysticism, especially those that explore and celebrate the Sacred Feminine, is essential for the future of Christian mysticism, and so to the 'return' of the authentic mystic Christ.

"In the large library of 'lost' Gnostic Gospels restored to us at Nag Hammadi, we discover a very fecund and powerful vision of God as Mother as well as Father. Members of a group that claimed to have received a secret tradition from Jesus through James and through Mary Magdalene prayed openly to God as a dyad, who embraces both 'masculine' and 'feminine' elements. 'From thee, Father, and through thee, Mother, the two immortal names, parents of the divine being, and thou, dweller in heaven, humanity, of the mighty name' (quoted in Hippolytus' Refutation of All Heresies). Pagels describes the Gnostic texts that we now possess as characterizing the Mother aspect of God in three ways: as 'part' of an 'original couple,' as the Holy Spirit, and as the creative and endlessly fertile Wisdom-Sophia of God."