In her latest of many books, "Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation" (Viking), famed religious historian Elaine Pagels quotes the following astonishingly modern, feminist poem, discovered in 1945 among the Gnostic Nag Hamadi scriptures, described in a "New Yorker" review as "what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, ... "Thunder, Perfect Mind"""a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song. In a series of riddling antitheses, a divine feminine principle is celebrated as transcending all principles (the divine woman is both whore and sibyl) and opening the way toward a true revelation of the hidden, embracing goddess of perfect being who lies behind all things:
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom . . .
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
