Yes.
 
While they may be archetypally distinct,
the archetypes are within one person,
the divine feminine, experienced and unfolding
at progressive stages:

Persephone is Kore,
the young maiden who encounters
Hades in the Underworld.

Ariadne is at a more mature
stage of her progression within 
The Ancient Mysteries rite
when encountering
Dionysus Zagreus in the Upper World.












 

According to The Myth of the Goddess by Ann Baring and Jules Cashford, "the Greek's called 'Ariadne's thread' referred to the priestess's knot, which was unraveled at various ceremonies with a particular ritual meaning. The beauty and elegance of Minoan women is evident in the frescoes of Knossos, and is reiterated in the seals of the goddess, . . ."

"As Platon observes women participated actively in every sphere of Minoan society, and there is no evidence of dominance of either sex by the other. In fact, where men and women appear together in Minoan art, it is partners in relationship, most strikingly in the bull-vaulting seals and frescoes, where they entrust their lives to each other"
(page 121)

"Ariadne, originally Ariagne meant 'holy and pure,' a superlative form of Hagne, which was an appellation of Persephone in her role as Queen of the Underworld, . . . Ariadne's other name was Aridela, the 'one visible from afar', a name that referred to her transformation into a wreath of stars in heaven beside her husband, Dionysos, the bull." (page 143)

However, in modern epic versions of the myth experienced by me in the Villa of Mysteries,
as explicated by Patricia Reis in her 
Through the Goddess and later addressed by Susan Rowland in her Remembering Dionysus, Persephone/Ariadne is betrayed and abandoned, unlike in earlier versions when she was entrusted.

Ancient history had a more reverent attitude toward the goddesses, while contemporary culture is more characterized and defensively patriarchal, where the male gods are permitted and promoted to subjugate, sacrifice, then dominate her. 
Most relevantly explicated by Patricia Reis, I was "overtaken" and "wiped out" by Dionysian power resulting in a break down when collapsing in uncontrollable tears prior to being sacrificed.





Yes and No.  
It is not an Either/Or situation.
 
If the Jesus Mystery and/or Eleusinian Mystery rite is inherent to my inner self and spiritual heritage according to the Gnostic Bible's interpretation of the spiritual relation of Kore, Dionysus, and Demeter and my existential destiny, then
I believe society needs to honor and protect the Divine Feminine without forcing her into alienated silence. 

When the Divine Feminine is only overtaken and set up: subjugated, sacrificed into demise,
then abandoned
by those who had operated against her,
including Lonergan theologians who invoke a
Dionysian initiation into her consciousness
through masonic methodologies 
for their building a cosmopolis or empire,
making Dionysus into a "god"---
without protecting her---then it becomes a
violation of her sovereignty. 
Sister Elizabeth Johnson at Fordham University
in New York wrote in her She Who Is, that
Lonergan’s methodology promised for me
an outcome not at all liberating. 
In March 2007, fifteen years after the demise,
an employment representative came forward to
admit their betrayal only thereafter to
unwelcome me in the future, remarking
"You cannot come here now all frustrated." 

Answers are relatively contingent upon yet
not fully dependent upon the 
treatment of the Divine Feminine. 
Women should not be commodified
by the state for empire- or formal world building,
then only scapegoated and abandoned after
achieving their goal of a Dionysian cosmopolis
with the Creation of Patriarchy---wherein
Sophia is sought after only
to be sacrificed to the gods. 

A tragic spiritual apocalypse without and
profound suffering within resulted on
April 2, 1994. 

Apocalypse and Metamorphosis:  Dionysus in the 1990's
by Norman O. Brown elaborates the loss.

















Some say that Sophia (Persephone/Ariadne)  
made evolutionary "life bearable for us"---
like Dr. Susan Rowland in her
Remembering Dionysus---
a positive acknowledgement sincerely appreciated---
especially if her acknowledgment brings
humanity and myself redeeming grace. 

Areas that are unaddressed or not inevitable
may call upon exploring the transformative possibility of a healthier, vital lifestyle for both men and women as well as humanity's future:
when a Reconciliation and Reformation are due. 

Already the Sophia Institute has gratefully embarked upon providing courses for our hopeful futures. 

I provide historical background
proceeded by an invitation to your participation
in mapping our healthier futures together.




Yes.  

First, I appreciatively discovered that one Pope in the Catholic Church is against freemasonry,
warning that it is not right and dangerous.
Paul A. Fisher in his Their God is the Devil: A Study
of Papal Encyclicals and Freemasonry warns:

Traditi Humilitati - Papal Encyclicals
 

In 1829, Pope Pius VIII, in his Encyclical Traditi Humilitate, applied to Freemasonry and to other clandestine sects the characteristics Pope Leo the Great applied to the Manichees
in the fifth century. He said of the Freemasons:

"Their law is untruth; their god is the devil; and their cult is turpitude. . . . the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church gives the appearance of changing its centuries old view of the international secret fraternity.  It does so by seeming to accommodate elements within the church who are furiously working to reinfest the mystical body of Christ with the
philosophy of the pagan Ancient Mysteries, embodied in the philosophy of Freemasonry (pages 5 – 6)."

On December 22, to the episcopacy of Bavaria, he addressed Officio Sanctissimo, in which he explicitly condemned Freemasonry.  He reminded the Bavarian prelates of his earlier encyclical Humanum Genus and cautioned them about the Craft’s endemic deceit and hypocrisy.  He said, 

"The faithful can never be sufficiently warned against this wicked faction . . . but more often exercises itself in an underhand and hypocritical way, especially among the young, who inexperienced and wanting in wisdom, are sadly ensnared by its deceits often concealed by appearances of piety and charity.'(p. 25) . . ."

Then the Pope listed the following as serious moral problems caused by Masonry:

'"Naturalism is substituted for Christianity; the worship of reason for the worship of faith; so-called independent morality for Catholic morality; and material progress for spiritual progress. (p. 28) . . ." 


Secondly, after Pope VIII respectfully spoke against it, why did the Catholic Jesuits in future generations like Bernard Lonergan, S.J. not care to ever be required to listen to the Pope's authority so as to not mislead me by Lonergan priests being given the authority to teach the Ancient Mystery rite to me, where the method of his metaphysics employs symbols of freemasonry (double-edged scissors) to gain material progress at the expense of spiritual progress, ushering humanity into an apocalypse? 

Authorities knew in college that Lonergan's seemingly positive and brilliant efforts to build a cosmopolis would as an awful side effect only usher in demise---for the sake of building a monoculture:  Culture and World Praxis, as well as knew that a young female student following the principles at men's academic gatherings would position her to gradually "fall a prey to the negative animus who will easily disguise himself as the true logos"---while permitting such a phenomena to be realized? 

My own question remains:
Why did the current Pope and those who knew it was dangerous permit academics to practice freemasonry?  After the demise, my Lonergan priest remarked without remorse:  
"Now that you are totally selfless you cannot even defend yourself!" only to de-soul me?  

Fortunately, by November 2023, Pope Francis has prohibited Catholics to practice freemasonry:  Vatican confirms ban on Catholics becoming Freemasons | Reuters.

Professor Anne Carpenter recognized the impracticality of some aspects of Lonergan theology in contemporary history yet she does not directly ascertain as I had that his effort to build a cosmopolis led to an apocalyptic world, a World on Fire for which he asks only us to take full responsibility for in our actions yet for which he himself in his Culture and World Praxis in invoking the Ancient Mysteries and Creation of Patriarchy effected himself.

Please see:  Lonergan on a World on Fire | Church Life Journal | University of Notre Dame (nd.edu).



1.  By carefully examining our
     various beliefs, practices, and
     values that denigrate the divine
     feminine and the earth.

2.  By selectively choosing those
     paths leading to wholeness, growth        and joy.

3.  By steadfastly believing in our own
     authority and interiority in God,
     without blind allegiance to principles
     that do not honor our unique ways         of being, archetypes, or profiles.
 

Western Philosophy---if grounded
only in our senses, rationalism, and dualism---
can prevent full mental health and spiritual progress by uprooting our interiority and higher spiritual awareness.
 

Stephen A. Hoeller recognized in his
Prologue of Jung and the Lost Gospels:
Insights into the Dead Sea Scrolls and 
Nag Hammadi Library:

​

Jung believed that the endorsement of the Aristotelian position in philosophy on the part of St. Thomas Aquinas, and subsequently by Western Christendom, had contributed greatly to the uprooting of spiritual interiority.  He repeatedly stated that the sense of the reality of the psyche vanished in proportion to the adopting by Western religion and culture of the Aristotelian slogan:  

'"Nothing is the intellect except through the senses."  

On this point Jung agrees with Paul Tillich, who was wont to say that the Aristotelian orientation of theology after Aquinas was the single greatest factor that made atheism possible.  When people cease to experience God, they are forced to believe in implied Tillich—and belief is a commodity subject to loss.  The inner sense of God is a quality of the deeper psyche and not of reason.  With transcendency of reason over the psychological awareness of archetypal truth, the way for rationalism and ultimately for materialism and atheism, became wide open.  Thus, says Jung, and agrees Tillich, the West was lost."  (pages 4 – 5)

The West may be retrieved and renewed in its rightful vitality when other men and women, such as Lynne Twist, are honoring the equality and ways of being of women all across the world bent on peace, nurturance, and collaboration in action.  She calls the 21st Century the Sophia Century:

The Sophia Century: When Women Come Into Co-Equal Partnership | Osprey Orielle-Lake, Leila Sa... by Bioneers (soundcloud.com)








Possibly Yes and partially No. 

They are possibly inherently related. My experience reveals a form of relatedness within the progression.  Yet each have their distinct phases as well as emanating originations.

The Jesus Mystery may be invested in credibly or unjustifiably by invoking the Ancient Mysteries, with one attempting to encapsulate the other with esoteric means such as freemasonry.  Whether it is a healthy practice of theologians to attempt combining the two may be discussed. 

Mystery religion - Mystery religions and Christianity | Britannica

According to scholars cited with Britannica online:

"The simultaneousness of the propagation of the mystery religions and of Christianity and the striking similarities between them, however, demand some explanation of their relationship. The hypothesis of a mutual dependence has been proposed by scholars—especially a dependence of Christianity upon the mysteries—but such theories have been discarded. The similarities must rather be explained by parallel developments from similar origins. In both cases, national religions of a ritualistic type were transformed, and the transformation followed similar lines: from national to ecumenical religion, from ritualistic ceremonies and taboos to spiritual doctrines set down in books, from the idea of inherited tradition to the idea of revelation."


It disconcerts me that "theories"---and perhaps even honoring women's experience of the sacred within the context of the Jesus Mysteries---had been "discarded."  

What has been discarded needs recollection alongside the required "similarities explained by parallel developments from similar origins."  Parallel development can be respectfully discovered in similar origins explored as well as diverse heritages and origins.
 
Discarding evaluation theoretically of each mystery rite could overlook critical elements by:

* limiting studies to what is obviously similar;

* declining respect of both similarities and rich diversity existent within the Middle Eastern gnostic traditions; or 

* withholding care to unravel the complex efficacy of the mysteries being re-invoked by Western theologians without inclusive honor of Sophia and the earth goddesses' sacred souls protected.


Sophia is not a controlling investigator in her teachings yet honors other's modes of thought.  My understanding of The Jesus Mysteries by Freke and Gandy, who distinguish between a Literalist Christianity and the Jesus Mysteries,
while reflecting on my experience that Jesus gratefully healed me---reminds us of the need for reconciliatory retrieval of what has been lost.  Dr. Susan Rowland wrote compassionately in her brilliantly noteworthy book:  Remembering Dionysus, that the divine feminine is "lost and lost to us."  Jesus' subsequent healing is a saving grace for Sophia's revitalization, where the Jesus Mystery generated belongs to His holy jurisdiction and emanating grace, distinct from other aspects of the Eleusinian or the Dionysian mystery emanating from Demeter and Persephone/Ariadne and Dionysus respectively. 

It is our imaginations that set us free.  Discarding the need for postulating differences in theorizing by focusing only on similarities may have misled Freke and Gandy in their Jesus Mysteries to believe that Dionysus Osirus is the same as Jesus when they were predisposed to find similarities.

1 - Dionysus is a reborn male god, having both creatively generative and dangerously destructive qualities.

2 - Jesus is healing without negative qualities yet has perfect holiness, everlasting grace, love, and eternal presence.

The Dionysian mysteries should not supplant or be more important than the Jesus Mysteries, elevating the godman Dionysus above God in existential priority or constitutionality. 

The Ancient Mystery rite---if left to only investigating similar and parallel conditions---could overlook the ancient rite having happened in very diverse conditions spread out over centuries, first thousands of years ago in ancient civilizations where Dionysian initiations began, then later repeated in modern corporations within America, as Patricia Reis explicates in her works about the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. One would not assume that similar parallel meanings exist in such widely diverse settings centuries apart.

Realizing the real meaning of each mystery may arise from our open-ended inquiry.  Literalist Christianity is more a worship and practice based on the mission and purpose of Jesus' salvation for all of humanity, while the Jesus Mystery is more of an interventional healing for Sophia after her demise that proceeds the Ancient Mystery rite.  

Jacob Boehme's The Way to Christ may elucidate the path of becoming ChristoSophia. One current study of Sophia is happening at Harvard Divinity School where the exceptional YouTube on "Sophia and Sophiology:  from Boehme to Schelling" offers a comprehensive historical perspective:  https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/sophia-sophiology/2021/11/15.  One purpose of Sophia is she who cares to bring peace and unity to the world, as depicted in the art of Nicholas Roerich's Madonna Oriflamma.




No historical period is exactly the same despite similarities, such as Lonergan's theological principles that are not genuine to his uniquely developed Age yet are partially a recapitulation of the Hellenic Eros Doctrine of Salvation with a disrespectful ploy with female spirituality within Robert Doran's Subject and Psyche.

Freemasonry would be unquestionably evil at invoking the Ancient Mysteries to create patriarchy to force not only humanity to face demise yet Jesus to intervene on behalf of a wounded Sophia, century after century, perhaps exhausting His need to heal Sophia or the divine feminine such as when Robert Doran, S.J. writes after their Subject (Dionysus) obtains his blessing to become whole through Psyche (Sophia),

"Any reconciliation with psyche (Sophia) is just a regression."

Reconciliation is open to God's reconciling nature--not to be determined solely by himself.

If the Jesus Mystery is meant to be a purifying resurrection after a Dionysian initiation to heal Persephone/Ariadne (Sophia) willingly by Jesus' compassion, then the Ancient Mysteries---culminating in the Jesus Mystery---may be more credible with grace rather than only rightfully condemnable by the Pope in the 1800's. 

Eastern traditions may shed light:  The "inner teachings of Gnostic Christianity with the tenets of the Mysteries--Phrygian, Eleusinian, Dionysian, Samothracian, Egyptian, Assyrian" can be found in the Gnostic Bible best edited by Marvin Meyer as well as remarks below may be considered:

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Gnosis According to its Foes: The Naasseni


Britannica scholars attribute historically the Eleusinian mystery rite with Demeter/Kore and Dionysus as having happened only in Greece, yet my mother like Demeter is Assyrian. In the original Gnostic Bible both the Eleusinian and the Christian Mysteries were that which were related to and emanated contiguously and substantially between Demeter and Kore in Assyria according to Assyrian literature.  Perhaps since genocide in the Middle East displaced Assyrian lands and literature, and then the language of Jesus, Aramaic, was dissipating in the regions, leaving the Christian rites within the Aramaic tradition less available. 

Quoted below is what I share from the Gnostic Bible and their attributes of Demeter/Kore/Dionysus and the Assyrian's consideration of Dionysus who they called "Adonis":
 

Naassene Sermon of The Gnostic Bible:

​

Like many Gnostics, the Naassenes apparently sought spiritual truths from a variety of sources. … they were especially attracted to the mystery religions of antiquity and late antiquity, which typically stressed mystical experience in the context of the dying and rising deity and which Naassenes interpreted in such a way as to elucidate their own beliefs.

These were alternative forms of religion in a post-Olympian world. When the Olympian gods and goddesses no longer captured the hearts and minds of People, many turned for their religious experience to the mysteries of Demeter and Kore, or Dionysus; or the Great Mother and Attis, the Phrygian fertility God; or Isis and Osiris; or Mithras—or Jesus Christ, whom people like Clement of Alexandria understood to be a deity of Christian mysteries. 
(page 482, emphasis added)  
 

THE NAASSENE SERMON

​

Whether you are the offspring of Kronos,

Or the blessed child of Zeus, or great Rhea,

Hail to you, Attis, at whose name Rhea looks down.

Assyrians call you thrice-lamented Adonis;
All Egypt, Osiris; Greek wisdom, the heavenly crescent moon; Samothracians, venerable Adamas;

People of Haimos, corybant; Phrygians, sometime Papas, sometimes corpse or god or sterile
Or goatherd or harvested green sheaf.
Or flute player whom the fertile almond brought forth. (pages 483-484, emphasis added)

Faith in our participation examining the experiences of the goddesses and the holy resides deep within that propels us inevitably forward in God's loving grace--with or without our recognition of the holy in the mysteries, we are a continuous evolving mystery who God and your Earth Mother loves unconditionally.









No.  Mostly yet not solely.


The Divine Feminine has unique wisdom to share.

I have faith and discernment having learned compassion.

I am an engaging speaker and kind listener.

Other divine goddesses will be explored where women from diverse heritages will be honored. 
I support courses that protect all women from those androcentric religions who potentially have practices that mistreat women, such as those listed on this attached syllabus.  

Until we meet again, you may listen to how Sophia's relation to the mother Demeter and daughter Persephone/Ariadne and the holy soul with the three aspects between them are having humanity awake to the divinity of the earth mother
It is the Sophia Teachings by Robert Powell that I appreciatively recommend for your enjoyment:

Robert Powell - The Significance of Divine Sophia - YouTube  

Whether you represent yourself, a professional institution,or a specific community in your participation, I look forward to sharing and exploring paths for collaborative growth.
 

Thank you for your time and consideration.


 

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