Theos-Talk Archives (March 2004 Message tt00416)

Steve,
A little more about Sophia Prunicus that might augment the thread:

Mead:ChapterXVII Concerning the Book of Elxai
http://www.didjesusexist.com/mead/ch18.html

(scroll down to # 376 of the text in that paragraph ending is stated the 
following)

376

 

"has two daughters, whose birth the orthodox Ephraem, the most bitter 
opponent of the Bardesanian Gnosis, writing more than a century later, declines to 
explain, and who were, in the poetical nomenclature of Bardaisan, called 
respectively "Shame of the Dry" and "Image of the Water."[1] The Mother Sophia thus 
addresses the elder of them: 

"Let her who comes after thee 

To me be a daughter, 

A sister to thee." 

Ephraem makes a great to-do about the mystery of their conception, which he 
says he is ashamed to relate. It appears, however, to have been nothing more 
than the conception of the Mother first without her Syzygy or Divine Consort, 
and subsequently with Him; the bringing forth of the "Abortion" and of the 
"Perfect Æon "—the fruit of the "impure womb" above when the mother disobeyed the 
"law of pairing" of the Pleroma, and desired to imitate the Father over alland 
create without a Syzygy, and the child of the "virgin womb," in the spiritual 
economy of the world process; all of which is set forth with much elaboration 
in several forms of the Sophia-mythus which have come down to us in the 
quotations of the haeresiological Fathers. In the microcosm of man, these daughters 
are presumably two aspects of the human soul, the Sophia below, or sorrowing 
one; tending downward she is regarded as the "lustful one" (Prunicus), the 
harlot; tending upward she becomes the spouse of the Christos."



So here is a plausible explanation of a means of the ascription of "Harlot"

as a glossed metaphor in regard to Mary Magdalene as well possibly to

the usage on the Apocalypse Of John.



John   

    

    





   






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