Barbelo

The Mother of Creation (Art by Nicholas Roerich)

### Siblings

God, Khaos, The Darkness Ayin, Death, Life, Father Time, Ouroboros, Vitriol, Therion

### Offspring

Aeons:* Autogenes
* Ennoea
* Horos
* Kalyptos
* Protophanes
* Thelesis

Avatars of God:

* Holy Spirit
* Jehovah
* Jesus Christ

Avatars:

* Heavenly Mother

**Barbelo**, also known as the **Goddess of Ineffability**, the **Father-Mother**, **Goddess of Love and Creation**, **Mother Goddess**, and the **Triple Androgynes Name**, is the supreme Goddess of Creation and the co-creator of the Megaverse alongside God.

Barbelo is, represents and personifies the limitless and boundless silence that existed before the first sound was sounded by the voice of the Creator, waking up the void and bringing creation to awakening. The silence of the void has become the Aeon entity that governs silence and existence alongside her husband and co-being.

Barbelo is the Goddess responsible for the Creation of the Universe and was worshiped as the wife of God by the antediluvian peoples. She accompanied Yesh for billions of years by his side since the Creation of the universe, with some claiming that when God created Eve he was based on the person of Barbelo to create Adam's wife.

Barbelo's whereabouts ended up being quite unknown among humans, because after the fall of Lucifer, Barbelo was tired of seeing the discord between his family, and went to her husband and said goodbye to him. After saying goodbye to Yesh, Barbelo ascended to the highest point of the seventh Heaven, where she dissipated her divine essence, disintegrating and returning his spirit to its unconscious and silent primordial state.

Although some might think that Barbelo died, in fact, she still exists within every mortal heart of mankind, for the spirit of God dwells within every mortal, the temple of the Holy Spirit, with the kingdom of heaven being within each one. In short, the spirit of each human is, in reality, an emanation of Barbelo, since Eve, the progenitor of humans, received her soul from Sophia, the last emanation of the Ineffable Mother.

Myths and lLegends roam Creation, claiming that at the end of time, Barbelo will return, and again with Yesh, the two will defeat the forces of darkness and will judge evil people for their crimes and bring order to the multiverse, and she will reign together with God for all eternity.

## Overview

Barbelo is often depicted as a supreme female principle, the single passive antecedent of creation in its manifoldness. This figure is also variously referred to as 'Mother-Father' (hinting at her apparent androgyny), 'First Human Being', 'The Triple Androgynous Name', or 'Eternal Aeon'. After God, she’s the foremost inhabitant of the Pleroma, the Gnostic name for Heaven. God didn’t create Barbelo; instead, she came into existence as an opposite in appearance to God.

God the Father, Barbelo the Mother, and Christ the Son form a three-member divine family. The Gnostics thought of this as the divine model of which all earthly families are an imperfect, corrupted reflection.

If that heavenly family sounds a lot like the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that’s probably no coincidence. To be sure, the idea that Barbelo, the divine mother of Christ, is identical to the Holy Spirit is seldom. We should therefore be careful about categorically claiming that this was a view held by all or even most Gnostics. But the extant Gnostic texts certainly seem to assume such a view in their mentions of Barbelo, such that we can indeed tentatively ascribe that view to most if not all of the Gnostics.

Barbelo is portrayed as the mother of Jesus Christ. Barbelo is described as "the first power, the glory, Barbelo, the perfect glory in the aeons, the glory of the revelation". All subsequent acts of creation within the divine sphere (save, crucially, that of the lowest Aeon Sophia) occurs through her co-action with God.

Barbelo is the primordial goddess of all existence and everything that is part of the concept of "being". She is the Father, Mother and Parent of reality itself, being equal to God and at the same time distinct from Him. Barbelo is the original Mother, not an Earth Mother Goddess, but the Mother Goddess of the Universe. It is the uncaused cause, being the gray screen that exists between the duality of Is and Not-Is, being neither acceptance nor negation, but a gray and pale maybe. She is the Supreme Goddess of the Abrahamic religions, known by many names and titles, manifesting through countless shadows of her incomparable being, such as the Holy Spirit in Christianity, Jibreel in Islam, Shiva in Hinduism, or through Her beloved Son Jesus Christ.

Due to her role as Wife of God, she was called by the gods of other Pantheons as the **Goddess of the Bible** or **Abrahamic Goddess**. Among humans and mortals, she is relatively unknown to post-Flood peoples, as Yesh and His wife disappeared after the flood, with all of the two's interactions with biblical figures being through their alter egos. However, Virgo and Maria mentions that Barbelo in pre-Flood times was a goddess much worshiped by ancient peoples, being equally important as the Creator God.

## Appearance

As an ineffable primordial entity that exists before Creation, whose true form (if any) transcends comprehension, Barbelo must use physical forms in lesser planes of existence. Whenever appearing in front of an Archon, she appears incredibly beautiful in an attempt to enchant the Archon to her side. Other times, however, she will change her appearance depending on her mood. Their appearance in Heaven is usually hermaphrodite, which has made them known as "Father-Mother" or "Triple Androgynous".

During Yeshua's baptism, Barbelo manifested as a white dove, similar to God who manifested as the Holy Dove through the Holy Spirit. It can be said that the pair of pigeons was literally representing the divine couple present at the baptism of Their Son.

When through an avatar, Barbelo manifests as a being of both genders, possessing both male and female characteristics, but at an extraordinarily high level of beauty, that is, supernatural. In their physical form, Barbelo has a white face, white hair, and a thin body, with a delicate face described by John as a man and woman face. In this form, the goddess of creation looks like their alter ego, God, with their Voice and light being so powerful that one would easily mistake Barbelo for the Christian God.

## Personality

Barbelo is often inactive in earthly affairs, as God is always in control of the situation, she then only intrudes when needed. Whenever humanity is in danger or heading towards chaos, she will always send a Messiah to guide humanity from darkness to light. Like the time she (along with God) sent her son beloved, Jesus Christ, to rid mankind of Satan and Yaldabaoth, and bring Sophia back to the Pleroma. Despite this, most of the time, she prefers to sleep for countless years until they need her help. Your sleep is not a literal "sleep", she just distributes its essence throughout creation in a state of omnipresence, without emotions, desires, wants or words, existing as a concept, still and quiet, in total silence.

Some beings are secretly trying to get more followers for Barbelo in order to get her attention to wake her up and make her go back to Heaven and assume leadership in God's place, since in theory the world was much better governed when she was beside of God in heaven, and after she disappeared, that's when tragedies began to happen.

## Powers and Abilities

Barbelo is one of the most powerful beings in creation, her powers being extraordinarily greater than those of Yaldabaoth, Satan and Trihexa, seeing them as nothing more than mere rats. She is more powerful than all aeons, including her Firstborn, who she claims can destroy Trihexa with a mere word. As a Pre-existential entity that embodies ineffability and impenetrability, Barbelo's power is so great that calling her "powerful" would be an understatement.

* **Nigh-Omnipotence**: Barbelo is an entity of almost unlimited power, being able to create an infinite amount of universes, each one possessing a heaven and a hell, and at the same time, she could destroy them all with the simple snap of her fingers. She is the progenitor of all the aeons and is therefore more powerful than all of them, including Sophia, Abraxas, Satanael and Yaldabaoth. The latter being considered the "shadow of God" or the "The God-Eater". She is also the opposite of Therion, who is said to be the more monstrous and primal side of God, an entity so dangerous that God could not destroy it completely, and had to split it into multiple parts. As an entity that personifies the ineffable and the impenetrable, it is a deity that cannot be described verbally, with attributes of beauty and perfection so superior to terrestrial levels that they cannot be expressed in human words, transcending everything in the universe, including good and evil, light and darkness, creation and destruction, and so on. Being totally ineffable, unthinkable and indescribable. Although not as powerful as her brothers, she is comparable to Ayin and God, with the latter being a member of the Three Great Titans, that is, she is comparable to the three most powerful gods of creation.
	+ **Ultipotence**: Barbelo possesses truly ultimate/endless power and potential dwarfing everyone else in their setting. Allowing one to potentially achieve anything and everything without any limit depending on how much knowledge and control she has over there power.
	+ **Multiversal Manipulation**: Barbelo can manipulate the entire multiverse and everything within. She may be limited to controlling her own multiverse or the multiverse of a particular universe, just as she has the power to manipulate multiple or all of the multiverses, if she wants.
	+ **Reality Warping**: She can create, shape and manipulate reality, the sum or aggregation of everything that is real or existing within a system, just by thinking about it; while true archangels are limited to what is already considered "real", she can make changes from nothing. She has the power of distorting reality, she can change something as tangible as physics and the universe to something inconceivable like logic.
	+ **Nigh-Absolute Immortality**: She possesses near-complete immortality: don't age, can rapidly heal from wounds, and will essentially live forever. However, there are exceptions to their immortality, with some being able hurt her or kill her, for example; Azathoth and Khaos.
* **Nigh-Omniscience**: She is aware of almost every event in the universe. Jesus stated that when Sophia tried to hide Yaldabaoth, she just couldn't hide from Barbelo, showing that nothing could escape her eyes.
* **Nigh-Omnipresence**: As the primordial entity that personifies motherhood and Stasis, Barbelo is present in several places of creation.
* **Ineffability Embodiment**: Barbelo is ineffability itself. With this ability, Barbelo is transcendent to literally anything or concept, including the dualism of light and darkness, order and chaos, she is not limited by space or time because such concepts were not made for her, rather, they don't exist in relation to she. She is indescribable, unnameable, incomprehensible, she is majestic perfection.
* **Primordial Entity Physiology**: It is a primordial entity, it precedes time and space and all universal laws, existing in the primeval void before all things alongside God and the primordial others.
* **Mother Goddess Physiology**: It is the very pre-existing entity of motherhood and also the mother of all aeons. If God gained the name of metaphorical "Father" due to his role as creator, Barbelo, as his wife, is the "Mother", not only of the aeons, but of all Creation. The Gnostics even referred to her as the "Perfect Mother".
* **Femininity Aspect Manifestation**: She is called the female counterpart of God and Mother of the living, so she embodies all the feminine attributes in her.
* **Gender Transcendence**: Despite being called “Mother” and referred to by feminine pronouns, she is also called “Father-Mother” or “three times male", showing that she is not limited to gender. Her ineffability also reinforces this.
* **Transcendent Physiology**: As an entity that personifies ineffability, and before the first spark of light, Barbelo transcends everything in the universe, multiverse and megaverse including dualism, neutrality, male and female, space or time.
* **Avatar Creation**: She can, like other primordials and deities, create avatars to appear on earth.
* **Nigh-Absolute Invulnerability**: As she is a formless entity, being neither corporeal nor incorporeal like her husband, she is near-totally invulnerable. She can be harmed and destroyed only by beings of same or superior power than her.
* **Supernatural Beauty**: She can take on a variety of avatars with different appearances, either male, female or neutral, all of which are so beautiful as to be considered the "peak of human beauty".
* **Gnostic Deity Physiology**: She is the progenitor of all Gnostic deities, this includes the aeons, the demiurge, and the archons.
* **Spiritual Perfection**: Described as Perfect Mother and Holy Spirit, in addition to being the image of God who is a perfect spiritual entity.
* **Imperceptibility**: As she is an Aeon, she is often laid out as incorruptible and impeccable.
* **SHEKHINAH**: Barbelo gathers a massive amount of energy and unleash it as a deadly pulse of light.

## History

In the beginning there was nothing. An infinite nothing, and the universe was ravaged and empty. There were only chaotic oceans covering the void, and darkness covering the Abyss, and then God came into being. When God looked at his reflection in the Aquatic Abyss an entity appeared that was Sige, and Sige seeing the beauty of his co-being walked out of the waters towards God, when Sige came out of the waters a shadow was left by her, a shadow that would come to be called Therion. Both Sige and Therion are considered Gods equal and opposite, being opposite in appearance and gender.

The role of the Goddess of Creation is unknown during the primeval war, all that is known is that she was God's helper during the war, having always been by his side. After defeating the agents of chaos and imprisoning them, the Lord breathed into the abyss and said "let there be light" and there was light. And as the universe expanded, new worlds were created, including the Heaven that was found by God and he decided to make that place His home.

God then named Sige of Barbelo, and they both got married and had a son, the personification of the Word, the firstborn of creation, the Autogenes, God proud when contemplating his son said: Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Barbelo then decided to create a new species of beings, the aeons, and when she did, they praised the Invisible Father, saying: "It is because of you that everything exists and everything will return to you. I will praise and glorify you and the Autogenes and to the three aeons: the Father, the Mother and the Son, the perfect power."

After the fall of Lucifer, the fall of humanity and the coming of sin into the world, Barbelo was terribly saddened by what happened to his spiritual and earthly children. There was still the matter involving Sophia who had fallen and become an ordinary human who suffered in the human realm with hunger, alone, unprotected against wild animals. Barbelo felt powerless and unable to help her creations. In deep sadness, she no longer wanted to see so much pain from them and decided to sleep for thousands of years.

The Goddess however, was awakened in the last decade before the beginning of the Common Era by Gabriel, when the Scribe was asked by his mother why he woke her, he replied that God had created a plan to bring humanity back to the light, and bringing Sophia back to Paradise as well, and that would involve the descent of a God into the realm of mortals, namely, Jesus, who knew that evil must be destroyed, no matter how high the price to pay.

## Myths and Legends

So prominent was her place amongst some Gnostics that some schools were designated as Barbeliotae, Barbelo worshippers or Barbēlōgnostics.

In some Gnostic texts, God’s inexhaustible profusion of thought overflows, and a new being, Barbelo, emerges from that intellectual flood. Elsewhere, it’s said that Barbelo arose when God stared down into the primal waters and saw his luminous reflection, which then became a new being.

We don’t know what the name “Barbelo” means, but it might be related to the Coptic verb berber, “to overflow” or “to boil over.” That connection would be fitting in light of Barbelo having been born from the overflowing thought of God in some Gnostic scriptures.

The word for “spirit” in Hebrew and other Semitic languages is feminine, so to the ears of people who spoke those languages, the name “Holy Spirit” would have almost automatically connoted a feminine being. This seems to be a conception that was actively cultivated in at least some early Christian circles. For example, the Jewish Christian Gospel of the Hebrews has Jesus refer to the Holy Spirit as his mother.

The same view is attested in Gnostic literature, too. In the words of the Valentinian Gnostic Gospel of Philip, “Some said Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. They are wrong and do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever get pregnant by a woman?”

### Pistis Sophia

In the Pistis Sophia Barbelo is named often, but her place is not clearly defined. She is one of the gods, "a great power of the Invisible God", joined with Him and the three "Thrice-powerful deities", the mother of Pistis Sophilight" or heavenly body; the earth apparently is the "matter kishan choure of Barbēlō" or the "place of Barbēlō".

### In patristic texts

She is obscurely described by Irenaeus as "a never-aging aeon in a virginal spirit", to whom, according to certain "Gnostici", the Innominable Father wished to manifest Himself, and who, when four successive beings, whose names express thought and life, had come forth from Him, was quickened with joy at the sight, and herself gave birth to three (or four) other like beings.

She is noticed in several neighboring passages of Epiphanius, who in part must be following the Compendium of Hippolytus, as is shown by comparison with Philaster , but also speaks from personal knowledge of the Ophitic sects specially called "Gnostici". The first passage is in the article on the Nicolaitans, but is apparently an anticipatory reference to their alleged descendants the "Gnostici". According to their view Barbelo lives "above in the eighth heaven"; she had been 'put forth' "of the Father"; she was mother of Yaldabaoth (some said, of Sabaoth), who insolently took possession of the seventh heaven, and proclaimed himself to be the only God; and when she heard this word she lamented.

Others, Epiphanius further seems to say, told a similar tale of Prunikos, substituting Caulacau for Yaldabaoth. In his next article, on the "Gnostici", or Borborites, the idea of the recovery of the scattered powers of Barbelo recurs as set forth in an apocryphal Book of Noria, Noah's legendary wife.

In both places Epiphanius represents the doctrine as giving rise to sexual libertinism. Mircea Eliade has compared these Borborite beliefs and practices involving Barbelo to Tantric rituals and beliefs, noting that both systems have a common goal of attaining primordial spiritual unity through erotic bliss and the consumption of menses and semen.

In a third passage, enumerating the Archons said to have their seat in each heaven, Epiphanius mentions as the inhabitants of the eighth or highest heaven "her who is called Barbēlō", and the self-gendered Father and Lord of all things, and the virgin-born Christ (evidently as her son, for according to Irenaeus her first progeny, "the Light", was called Christ); and similarly he tells how the ascent of souls through the different heavens terminated in the upper region, "where Barbēro or Barbēlō is, the Mother of the Living".

Theodoret merely paraphrases Irenaeus, with a few words from Epiphanius. Jerome several times includes Barbelo in lists of portentous names current in Spanish heresy, that is, among Priscillianists; Balsamus and Leusibora being three times associated with it.

#### Babel

Babel, in the book of "Baruch" of the Gnostic Justin, the name of the first of the twelve "maternal angels" born to Elohim and Edem. She is identical with Aphrodite, and is enjoined by her 'mother' to cause adulteries and desertions among men, in revenge for Edem's desertion by Elohim. When Heracles is sent by Elohim as "a prophet of the uncircumcision" to overcome "the twelve evil angels of the creation," i. e. the maternal angels, Babel, now identical with Omphale, beguiles and enfeebles him. She may possibly be the Baalti or female Baal of various Semitic nations, though the intrusive β is not easily explained. But it is on the whole possible to take *Babel*, "confusion", as a form of Barbelo, which may have the same meaning. The eclecticism of Justin would account for his deposition of Barbelo from the first to the second place, where she is still above Hachamoth.

### Writings

Barbelo is found in other Nag Hammadi writings:

* Allogenes makes reference to a Double Powerful Invisible Spirit, a masculine female virgin, who is the Barbelo.
* The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit refers to a divine emanation called 'Mother', who is also identified as the Barbelo.
* The Gospel of Judas—Judas Iscariot says to Jesus that he knows that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.
* Marsanes—several places.
* Melchizedek—twice, the second time in a prayer of Melchizedek: "Holy are you, Holy are you, Holy are you, Mother of the aeons, Barbelo, for ever and ever, Amen."
* The Three Steles of Seth offers a description of "the first aeon, male virginal Barbelo, the first glory of the invisible Father, she who is called 'perfect'."
* Trimorphic Protennoia ('First Thought in Three Forms'), even in the first person: "He perpetuated the Father of all Aeons, who am I, the Thought of the Father, Protennoia, that is, Barbelo, the perfect Glory, and the immeasurable Invisible One who is hidden. I am the Image of the Invisible Spirit, and it is through me that the All took shape, and (I am) the Mother (as well as) the Light which she appointed as Virgin, she who is called 'Meirothea', the incomprehensible Womb, the unrestrainable and immeasurable Voice."
* Zostrianos—the aeon Barbelo is referred to in many places.

## Trivia

* Certain Gnostic sects interpreted God as the abyss, that is, the void before creation, and Barbelo as the eternal silence with the abyss, so the Abyss and Silence would coexist and are related generating life. Thus, it can be said that Barbelo is the "silence of void".
* For many, it was inevitable to think of the idea that God has a wife since as He created mankind to love one another, it means that God knew love before creating the world.
* Barbelo, like many gods and goddesses, was demonized by Abrahamic religions, as well as Abraxas. That is, the Church began to consider her a Demon, something that for many Gnostics only emphasizes the ignorance of Christians, since Barbelo is the feminine side of God, the Church managed to demonize their own God.
* Some people think that Barbelo is the mother of the angels.