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Download the free 40-page illustrated guide to Wisdom’s older biblical world.

Your guide includes a chant to "open the gates" of your body, heart, and mind to this lost visionary biblical tradition.

Meet Living Wisdom

Before Wisdom became an abstraction or a metaphor, biblical tradition remembered Her as a Lady.

Her Hebrew name is חָכְמָה Chokmah: Wisdom.

We are told in the Hebrew Bible that Wisdom is a Tree of Life. She was present and active in the creation of the world.

She builds Her own House, prepares a feast, and sends Her female servants to summon guests. She also stands at the gate calling people to listen, and enters holy souls to make them prophets.

Her imagery overlaps with other Divine Ladies of Israel: the goddess Asherah, the ancestral mother Sarah, and Abraham's "God of Breasts," El Shaddai.

Chokmah's name became associated later with the masculine. Yet somehow, Her voice survives.

Wisdom's Women

In the Jerusalem temple, Wisdom's female devotees were know as qadoshot.

We are told in the II Kings 23 that these holy women worked in the temple and wove fabric for Her. As Proverbs 9 suggests, they may also have led Her feasts.

The title of qadosha was likely revered by the people of Israel who visited the temple with offerings. It is also possible that these women helped staff the "high places" or devotional spaces that were maintained on hilltops and in sacred groves of trees around the land.

I believe Wisdom now seeks a new generation, who can reweave Her teachings, rituals, and practices from history's scattered threads.

Then in 623–622 BCE, disaster struck.

The Judaean king Josiah reformed the temple worship, tearing the Lady from Her own holy place.

Her image and vessels were burned, Her sacred personnel expelled, and the women who wove for Her driven from their chambers.

This rupture opened the path toward the Mosaic covenant narrative and monotheism as we know it today—but Wisdom did not disappear.

How Wisdom Survived

As empires rose and fell, Wisdom's mysteries spread among traditions.

Her themes, stories, and symbols show up around the Mediterranean, as people of Israelite heritage moved with their Jewish, Christian, or Gnostic practices.

To find the Chokmah, we must travel from the Holy Land, up to Anatolia (now Türkiye and the Syrian borderlands) where Gnostic Christians penned Her stories in Syriac.

Those stories moved down the Levant into Egypt, where they were translated into Coptic and later buried around places like Nag Hammadi and Thebes.

Meanwhile strands of Her old ascent mysticism moved with the rabbinic tradition to Babylon (modern Iraq), where they flowered into Merkavah and Hekhalot mysticism.

Others were woven into the Marian devotion of medieval Christianity or Shekhinah's rise in the Kabbalah.

Wisdom's Sound

Wisdom inspires vibrational healing that unites heaven and earth in the body.

The Hebrew Bible remembers the Jerusalem temple as filled with skilled singers, chanters, and musicians.

Many texts also picture Heaven itself as being full of sound, with angels and heavenly creatures singing around God's throne. Some scholars suggest that early temple music was meant to echo this Divine throne room.

After the Lady disappeared from the temple, Her music lived on in Gnostic, Christian, and Jewish mystical sound.

Today I still use active sound healing descended from these traditions to help people unite Heaven and Earth in themselves.

Your Guide Through Wisdom's Gate

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A field guide to encountering Chochmah as Living Wisdom, and finding your way into the older biblical tradition She invites us to inhabit.

Download your illustrated free book—plus a short practice to "open the gate" of your body, heart, and mind.