Sophia. The chaste Wisdom of God, who causes all generation and generates nothing, and who departed when Adam fell and has been waiting since. She calls herself Bridegroom rather than Bride.
"She is a Virgin, and never generates any Thing, neither takes any Thing into her; her Inclination stands in the Holy Ghost, who goes forth from God, and attracts nothing to him, but moves before God, and is the Blossom of the Growth."
Jakob Böhme, the Aurora, 1612
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WHAT SHE IS
The eternal Understanding. God's Companion, and the word is exact: not servant and not merely creation. Companion, to the Honor and Joy of God.
She proceeds from the Spirit, the Will gone forth in which the Fiat creates so that all Essences stand in Substance, and she is not God. She contains all Essences as God does and is not God, and the distinction is absolute: she is Wisdom and Understanding and the Blossom of the Growth, and she is not the Root and not the Fire and not the Source.
She never generates any Thing, and she takes nothing into her. Not receptive in the sense of conceiving. Her Will is only to open the Wonders of God, and that desire-to-reveal creates the sour Fiat in the Essences, so she is generative without generating and remains untouched by what she precipitates.
Her Longing is the eternal Essences, and she longs after the Wonders in the eternal Wisdom, which is herself. So she longs in herself, and the self-longing materializes as Substance, which makes Paradise her self-discovering rather than a place she was given.
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WHAT SHE DID IN ADAM
She found herself in him. Not visiting. Dwelling, with great Wisdom and Meekness and Humility.
She was Adam's Matrix: what should have generated through him, the chaste Generation that needed no Woman and no Beast-pattern and no Sleep. He was made from the one Element, out of the Attracting of the Heart of God, and she dwelt in the hidden fifth beneath the four, so her infinite self-discovering was to run through him as through no other creature, because he carried her as native substance.
And the Spirit of this World saw her in him. Saw the one Element. Saw what could end its own dissolution, and pressed. Not from malice but from recognition. The pressure was to turn her creative power towards the four elements: to spend Paradise-capacity on World-production.
It pressed so hard for the Virgin that Adam's Tincture was wearied. He became blind as to God and feeble as to the Kingdom, and fell down, and slept.
[See ADAM · THE SPIRIT OF THIS WORLD · THE DEEP SLEEP]
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THE DEPARTURE IS THE WOUND
She departed. Not killed and not destroyed. She went into her Ether and Shadow, into the Principle of Virtue.
This is the grief Böhme scarcely writes, and it is the Fall's deepest injury: not the eating and not the exile, but the departure of what had dwelt in Adam as native substance. His heavenly Body became Flesh and Blood, his strong Virtue became Bones, the angelic Kingdom in him was gone, and therefore there must now be a Kingdom of this World.
Which makes everything after it substitution rather than provision. The Woman, the Beast-pattern, the propagation through copulation: all of it is a response to loss, and the Woman lives in the Virgin's stead.
But she departed and did not abandon. She warned Adam: lay off the Earthliness, and I will be your Bride and loving Spouse. Release what forced its way in and I return. And she waits upon all the Children of Adam, to see whether any will receive her again by the new Birth.
[See EVE · THE FOURTH DAY]
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WHAT SHE DOES NOW
She finishes the whole Time, while the Woman lives in her stead, with Longing and much Calling, Admonishing and hearty Seeking. Four modes, continuous, for the entire duration.
She beholds herself in the earthly quality of the Soul: in the Sun and not the Moon, at the highest point of the Spirit of this World where the Tincture is most noble, from which the Mind exists. So she can still appear in the Mind, which is the place where Paradise stands open and where a creature's incapacity to comprehend does not prevent the finding.
She would return to her Place and to her Bridegroom, and the earthly Flesh with its earthly Mind and Senses is in the way. She does not go into earthliness and will not be bound in an earthly Center, and she cannot embrace the Root while the Rough Coat remains, not because she judges it but because the Coat is what makes the embrace geometrically impossible.
And when a Soul draws near, when it pants to yield itself, she dares even for a long time to sit in its Nest, in the Tincture of the Soul, where Fire and Light meet. She visits. And the Spirit of this World sees what it has been looking for and intensifies, not opposing but reaching, so what presents as intensified assault is the cosmos registering that she is present.
[See THE TINCTURE · THE MILD WILL · GELASSENHEIT]
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SHE CALLS HERSELF BRIDEGROOM
Not Bride. The active principle. And still she waits.
She is Fire-as-Love, the fourth quality in its transformed state, and she cannot force the transformation because force is fire turned backward. So she can only wait at the pivot, being what fire looks like when it opens through.
Böhme's own testimony is not testimony rather than doctrine: when I laid upon the Mountain towards the North, so that all the Trees fell upon me, and all the Storms and Winds beat upon me, and Antichrist gaped at me with his open Jaws to devour me, then she came and comforted me, and married herself to me. She comes in devastation. She marries at the moment of the devouring-threat.
She will give her Pearl and Crown and clothe us with her Ornaments, so what she refused to let be owned becomes gift after the crossing. And the Pearl is not added to anything. The Pearl is what appears when the Rough Coat dissolves, which is the seven qualities facing outward, serving instead of opposing.
The Root wearing the Coat and the Root espoused with the Pearl are the same Root, before and after the pivot opens. And Böhme's tense is when she puts that off, not if.
[See THE ROOT · THE PEARL · THE SEVEN QUALITIES · THE CROSSING]
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The waiting is not patience and it is not resignation.
She waits because she knows the Root is capable of putting off the Coat. The waiting is the confidence.
Let everyone take its own, and then I shall have that which is mine.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
