HINENI Podcast | Episode 2 | A Gnostic Divine Feminine Trinity
What if the Divine Feminine meets us not in one form, but three?
In this episode of HINENI: Conversations for Awakening Your Living Wisdom, Lisa Moriah explores a feminine “Holy Family” emerging from ancient Jewish and Gnostic wisdom traditions:
- Parthenos (ⲡⲁⲣⲑⲉⲛⲟⲥ) Betulta (בתולתא), the fertile Silence from which all things emerge.
- Chochmah (חכמה) or Chokhmetha (חכמתא), Living Wisdom who descends, speaks, and calls to us.
- Maryam (מרים), Mary Magdalene, who offers an image of Wisdom embodied in a fully human life.
Drawing from the Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary, Pistis Sophia, Proverbs, and traditions surrounding the Divine Feminine in ancient Israel, we explore the movement from Silence → Wisdom → Embodiment and ask what these ancient traditions might reveal about awakening our own Embodied Gnōsis.
What happens when we stop approaching Wisdom only as something to study and begin encountering Her as something living, calling, and capable of taking form within a human life?
The episode closes by moving from historical inquiry and creative synthesis into embodied practice through a simple devotional chant:
Betulah, Chochmah, Maryam. Hi Echat. V’hineni imah.
The Virgin, Living Wisdom, Maryam. She is One. And I am here with Her.
Amen. Selah.
Continue the Journey
🎙 HINENI Podcast
Listen to more conversations exploring Embodied Gnōsis, ancient wisdom, sacred sound, and lived practice.
https://houseofdivineradiance.com/podcast
✍️ Magdalene Merkabah
Historically grounded writing, creative synthesis, and embodied gnōsis inspired by Maryam Magdalene.
https://magdalenemerkabah.substack.com/
🌹 Divine Radiance YouTube
Explore the full episode transcript, complimentary HINENI guide, upcoming immersions, practices, and more:
https://www.youtube.com/@houseofdivineradiance
🏛 House of Divine Radiance
Explore the full episode transcript, complimentary HINENI guide, upcoming immersions, practices, and more:
https://houseofdivineradiance.com
Hineni. Here I am.
- - -
Transcript
HINENI: Conversations on the Path of Embodied Gnōsis
Episode 2
A Gnostic Divine Feminine Trinity:
Three Feminine Guides to Awaken Your Embodied Gnōsis
Welcome back to HINENI: Conversations on the Path of Embodied Gnōsis. I’m delighted that you’ve joined me for this very special episode.
The topic of the Divine Feminine is very near and dear to my heart, because having been raised religious, meeting Her was a huge turning point in my spiritual awakening. Of course, it unfolded over years, because I was very suspicious of Her in the beginning! But as She does, She called me with patience and mercy—rachmé, the womb of compassion.
When I finally felt safe enough to connect with Her, my Embodied Gnōsis flowed as never before. I came to believe that without connection to the Divine Feminine, we cannot walk in the fullness of our Living Wisdom. There are aspects of ourselves we simply cannot touch without Her.
In this episode of HINENI, I’d like to walk us through three faces of the Divine Feminine that meet us on the gnostic path: the formless Virgin Spirit, the Divine Mother who comes to us as Wisdom, and finally, Wisdom embodied in human life. Together they form what I think of as a kind of feminine “Holy Family”—an intriguing echo of Father, Son, and Spirit.
But… feminine. ;)
HINENI. Let’s begin.
PART 1: PARTHENOS / BETULTAH
Pristine, unmanifested Source, birthgiver
When most people think of the Divine Feminine in anything remotely labeled Christianity, they think of Mary or Maryam the Virgin, understood in the Catholic and Orthodox churches as the Queen of Heaven and an intercessor with her son, Jesus or Yeshua.
But did you know that in some Gnostic traditions, “the Virgin” could symbolize fertile darkness—the unformed space of potential, the womb at the heart of the universe before creation, and within the Holy of Holies of each of us? Our task in this lifetime and beyond it is to return to that place, sometimes called Silence, Repose, or the Kingdom. Imagine—the original kingdom as a wombspace! Perhaps this is why, much later, in Jewish Kabbalah, the Shekhinah is associated with Malkhut—the Kingdom and the earthly realm.
In some of these Coptic texts, the word ⲡⲁⲣⲑⲉⲛⲟⲥ parthenos—a loan word from Greek that is usually translated “virgin”—takes on this deeper symbolic meaning. And if we reach back toward the Aramaic world from which some of these traditions may have emerged, we encounter the related word בְּתוּלְתָּא Betulta.
To learn more about this Parthenos or Virgin Spirit, let’s look at a passage from the Gospel of Philip:
Some say that Mary was impregnated by the grace of the Holy Spirit, but they do not know what they say. How could the Feminine impregnate the feminine?
Mary is the virgin silence [parthenos] which no evil power defiles or distracts; she abides as the immaculate silence, incomprehensible to the Hebrews, to the apostles, and to all those who claim to be sent.
The Teacher would not have said: “My Father who is in heaven,” if he had not been engendered by another Paternity than the one he had from his earthly father.
Gospel of Philip, Page 57, Plate 103, Section 17
Now, by way of context, the Gospel of Philip is generally associated with Valentinian Christianity, whose cosmology includes a supreme, unknowable Divine Source and a feminine principle called Sige—Silence. Here, virginity becomes something much larger than a biological condition: an image of an undefiled or uncorrupted state.
Notice how this allows us to hear Genesis 1:1–3 in a new light:
When God began to create heaven and earth— the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—
God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
In the Hebrew Bible’s creation narrative there is an unformed void. Darkness. Deep. And then…the wind from God sweeps over it and calls forth light. To me, this is extraordinary seeding and birthing imagery: the cosmic seed moving over the womb from which creation emerges.
Perhaps, then, we might say that to be a parthenos is to return to that primordial, unpolluted stillness.
By linking Mary to parthenos in this way, the author of the text isn't praising her physical chastity, but presenting her as an image of the immaculate, silent consciousness from which the Divine—or our Embodied Gnōsis—can be born within us.
The Gospel of Maryam Magdalene also brings us into this Silence.
Jean-Yves Leloup explores this connection in the following terms:
“In the Gospel of Mary, the Kingdom is also called Repose and Silence. Visionary experience is a necessary stage between words and the Silence— but words, vision, and silence are only particular steps in this great voyage from matter toward light, which is also known as a human being. Or better yet, the human being is the memory and storytelling of this voyage.” —Jean-Yves Leloup on The Gospel of Mary
Let’s hear the story in Maryam’s own words, as recorded in the text:
Page 16
The soul answered: ‘That which oppressed me has been slain; that which encircled me has vanished; my craving has faded, and I am freed from my ignorance.
Page 17
‘I left the world with the aid of another world; a design was erased, by virtue of a higher design. Henceforth I travel toward Repose, where time rests in the Eternity of time; I go now into Silence.’
Having said all this, Mary became silent, for it was in silence that the Teacher spoke to her.
So what does this journey of return look like today?
Perhaps it looks like making space for that unpolluted stillness—even in small pockets of time.
Or perhaps it looks like distancing yourself from voices that attempt, however lovingly, to call you onto paths or into beliefs and practices you know are not yours.
Perhaps it looks like stepping away from habits or behaviors that are not serving your full becoming—even jobs, communities, or hobbies—and asking what within you truly wants to come forth.
The point is: on this path, there is Parthenos—Virgin Spirit—within you. Perhaps the journey to unite with Her is not, as in the Gospel of Mary, a perilous journey through the aeons, but rather your willingness to do something that’s almost more terrifying:
HINENI. Undivided presence.
Sitting with yourself, no matter what comes up. Letting the demons rage, the inner child cry, or surprising joy meet you and invite you to dance.
Discovering what is truly within you when all the noise is gone.
PART 2: CHOCHMAH
Descending, Wisdom as a bridge between Heaven and Earth
If Parthenos is the deep, virgin silence within us—the inner womb from which all things are born—then Chochmah is perhaps the closest thing we have to an embodied goddess.
Though later Kabbalah understood Chochmah as masculine and placed many explicitly feminine qualities within Binah, the Hebrew Bible gives us a vividly feminine, personified Chochmah as “Lady Wisdom” in the book of Proverbs.
Wisdom cries aloud in the streets, Raises her voice in the squares.
At the head of the busy streets she calls; At the entrance of the gates, in the city, she speaks out. Proverbs 1:20–21
Unlike Parthenos or Betulta, Wisdom has a voice. She goes to where the people are and calls to them. She does not simply require a return through the perilous aeonic journey, or through facing our own inner threshold monsters. She comes to us.
Lady Wisdom—חָכְמָה Chochmah in Hebrew, or חָכְמְתָא Chokhmetha in Aramaic—is, to me, far more than a literary device. Margaret Barker has proposed that the biblical figure of Wisdom may preserve a memory of the female divine presence once associated with the First Temple, before the religious reforms that rejected Asherah and other elements of older Israelite worship.
Barker goes further, suggesting that this female divine figure may have been imagined not simply as YHWH’s consort, but as his Mother—drawing on the powerful role of the Queen Mother in the ancient Near Eastern royal world. In this way, we might imagine Chochmah as the Mother who births the Divine.
And suddenly we have a bridge back to Parthenos: what if Wisdom crying in the streets is a more manifest form of that primordial, fertile Silence?
To understand why Barker believes this older Divine Feminine disappeared from Israelite religion, we need to encounter one striking passage from 2 Kings 23, describing King Josiah’s religious reforms.
The king stood by the pillar and solemnized the covenant before GOD: that they would follow GOD and observe God’s commandments, injunctions, and laws with all their heart and soul; that they would fulfill all the terms of this covenant as inscribed upon the scroll. And all the people entered into the covenant.
Then the king ordered the high priest Hilkiah, the priests of the second rank, and the guards of the threshold to bring out of the Temple of GOD all the objects made for Baal and Asherah and all the host of heaven.
He brought out the [image of] Asherah from the House of GOD to the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem, and burned it in the Kidron Valley; he beat it to dust and scattered its dust over the burial ground of the common people.
He tore down the cubicles of the consecrated workers in the House of GOD, at the place where the women wove coverings for Asherah.
Whatever reconstruction we place around this event, the text itself preserves something remarkable: Asherah was present in the Temple, women were making sacred textiles for her, and Josiah’s reform deliberately removed her.
Barker reads this reform as part of a profound rupture with an older form of Israelite temple religion—one in which the Divine Feminine may once have held an honored place.
You might wonder what Chochmah, the Lady Wisdom of Proverbs, has to do with Asherah the Divine Feminine figure cast out of the First temple. But as Barker points out, Asherah’s name is related to a Hebrew root Aleph, Shin, Resh, which is related to the word for happy or happiness. Now notice this text from Proverbs, about Wisdom:
אַשְׁרֵ֣י אָ֭דָם מָצָ֣א חׇכְמָ֑ה וְ֝אָדָ֗ם יָפִ֥יק תְּבוּנָֽה׃
Happy is the one who finds wisdom,
The one who attains understanding.
Proverbs 3:13
Ashrei Adam matza Chochmah… You hear that? Ashrei. Happy. Barker theorizes that the name Asherah—or possible Ashratah—was not so much the name of a neighboring Canaanite goddess, as typically supposed, but a designation of the results of devoting oneself to Lady Wisdom. Wisdom made one happy, delighted, and blessed.
If Barker is right, then Lady Wisdom in Proverbs may preserve something of what survived after that rupture of Asherah’s removal from the temple: the memory of a feminine Divine Presence who still calls, still teaches, still offers life to those willing to hear Her.
And this memory does not disappear. Centuries later, Wisdom appears again in early Christian and Gnostic traditions under her Greek name: Sophia. Her stories change, but the great themes remain—the descent of Wisdom, the loss or violation of Wisdom, and ultimately her restoration.
We’ll return to those deeper connections when we explore Enoch, Melchizedek, and the older temple traditions in future episodes.
For now, I invite you to contemplate:
What if the Divine Feminine was never truly absent from this wisdom stream? What if Chochmah—the Wisdom who cries to us from the streets—is the surviving voice of a Presence once encountered far more explicitly? And what if She is still calling?
What might happen if we answered?
PART 3: MARYAM MAGDALENE
The Physical, Fully Realized Embodiment
All this leads us to Maryam Magdalene. If you’ve noticed, this episode began with the formless Divine Feminine, Parthenos, or in Aramaic, Betulta (בְּתוּלְתָּא).
We moved from there to the more manifest Divine Feminine, remembered as the personified Lady Wisdom: Chochmah in Hebrew, or Chokhmetha (חָכְמְתָא) in Aramaic. She has a voice. She enters the world and calls to us. Finally, we arrive at the question of what this Divine Feminine might look like fully embodied in a human life. For me, and apparently for many Gnostic Christians who preserved traditions about her, that embodiment is Maryam Magdalene.
Across the canonical Gospels and many of the later texts associated with Gnostic Christianity, Maryam Magdalene emerges as a seeker, visionary, disciple, and recipient of wisdom.
Consider this passage from Pistis Sophia, Book 1, Chapter 17:
It came to pass then, when Mary had heard the Saviour say these words, that she gazed fixedly into the air for the space of an hour. She said: "My Lord, give commandment unto me to speak in openness."
And Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said unto Mary: "Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the kingdom of heaven more than all thy brethren.”
Elsewhere, in a recently translated text from the Oxyrhynchus papyri called P.Oxy.5577—Yeshua imparts wisdom only to Maryam Magdalene:
“Therefore I say to you, Mary: seek to co[mbine] water and fire and you will no longer ap[pear] as an image of flesh, but as an image of the ete[rnal] incorruptible light, [brin]ging together from two intert[wined] and dissolved eleme[nts]…”
Sarah Parkhouse has recently proposed that this fragment might even belong to the lost pages of the Gospel of Mary. Whether or not that identification ultimately holds, the image is extraordinary: Maryam receives a teaching about uniting opposites—water and fire, flesh and incorruptible light.
For me, Maryam embodies this very sacred union of opposites: the earthy and present Chochmah or Sophia joined with the fertile darkness of Betulta or Parthenos. In my reading of these Gnostic traditions, Maryam becomes an image of the Fully Human: one who has integrated cosmic Wisdom and returned to Source.
I also like to remark at this point that Maryam Magdalene is a wonderful guide for us because she lived before the boundaries we now draw between Judaism and Christianity. She was a Judaean woman following a Jewish teacher within the rich apocalyptic and mystical world of her time.
Whatever later traditions made of them, neither Maryam nor Yeshua lived inside the religious categories we would eventually inherit. For me, that makes her an especially spacious guide: she belongs to a wisdom stream older than the boxes we might try to put her in.
This might seem like a small historical note, but I believe the implications are powerful. Maryam Magdalene is not a guide merely for Christians, or for people interested in early Gnostic thought. She is available to anyone who wishes to approach this transformative wisdom with reverence and curiosity—not to push the agenda of any Abrahamic religion, but to help awaken the gnōsis within us, and especially that beautiful, pure seeking nature she herself embodies.
And perhaps that kind of devotion to Wisdom—the yearning to birth what is within us—is itself something Maryam can awaken in us.
So on this note of openness and trust… perhaps it’s time we cultivated them within ourselves through chant. I know of no tool so powerful as vibration to open us in ways that make connection, and eventually trust, possible.
To return again to where we began, this was what made my own Divine Feminine journey possible. Chanting the names of the Divine Feminine, in all Her many forms, had the seductively invisible effect of opening me to Her.
When I feared Her, when I was still deeply separated from Her, She found me anyway. And though She was calling to me in my spirit, somehow it was my call back to Her—the vibrations flooding my body through chant—that made reunion possible when the time was right.
In that spirit, I’d like to teach you a simple chant. It’s one we’ll be using often in upcoming immersions, gatherings, and other content from House of Divine Radiance:
Betulah, Chochmah, Maryam.
Hi Echat.
V’hineni imah.
The Virgin, Living Wisdom, Maryam
She is One.
And I am here with Her.
Amen. Selah.