"The story of the Fallen Goddess is only found in Gnostic materials, and even there it only survives in fragmentary form.
(Technically, this story is a cosmogony - a description of how a world system or cosmos originates - but it is more easily treated as a cosmology, the description of how a world system operates, based on how it originated.)
Fortunately, the slim evidence for Gnostic cosmology is supported by an array of classical lore, cross-cultural mythology, and indigenous wisdom.
In Greco-Roman mythology, for instance, the theme of "the marriage of Ouranos and Gaia" asserts a special link between the celestial realm and Gaia, the living earth. Ouranos, the Greek word for "heaven," refers to the Pleroma, the realm of the gods, or, in astronomical terms, the galactic core.
The mythic "marriage" of the Pleroma and Earth is consistent with the Gnostic scenario of the Aeon Sophia who plunges from the galactic core to be metamorphosed into the planet we inhabit. Sophia is exiled from the Pleroma and "grounded" in the terrestrial domain, but precisely because of the unique conditions under which earth was formed, our planet remains intimately linked to the cosmic center, the galactic core itself.
I have argued elsewhere in this site that a great deal of mythology can be read as astronomy. (This can be done without going as far as Santillana and von Dechend who propose in Hamlet's Mill that myth is nothing but encoded astronomy.) The transposition of myth into astronomy is, of course, a creative act that requires the use of imagination - hence, an exercise of mythopoesis, intentional myth-making.
The Gnostic creation myth provides a unique set-up for such an exercise because it presents just enough enticing clues to whet the imagination and make us try to picture what happened to the Pleromic Goddess, Sophia. What we know today about the large-scale structure of the galaxy, the birth of the sun, the formation of the planets, and the current position of the solar system in the galactic limbs, presents a unique opportunity to re-evolve Gnostic cosmology into a visionary model of our own making.
Doing so, we come to participate empathically in the experience of the Earth Goddess, Gaia-Sophia.
As suggested in Sharing the Gaia Mythos, the purpose of humanity in Gaia's life-process may reside in on our capacity to remember Her Story. Metahistory involves not only a critique of history and the beliefs encoded in it, but also a creative recalling of the mythic dimension of our own species story.
In this respect it should be clear that the reason for converting the mythico-mystical language of Gnosticism into the concepts of modern astronomy is not to use science to legitimate Gnostic vision, but to link our current picture of the cosmos to an ancient seminal visionary experience whose slight traces can be discovered in Gnostic writings.
Even with clear correlations, however, it is extremely difficult to construct a coherent version of the Fallen Goddess scenario. Considered strictly on the basis of surviving texts, there is no "Gnostic cosmology," or almost none. The textual material is in some instances - in most instances, it must be said - corrupt and unreliable.
The Nag Hammadi "library" is a pitiful heap of remnants, like a handful of glass shards from a shattered stained-glass dome.
These documents were translated into Coptic from "Greek originals," scholars say, but there is no way to know if the Greek texts themselves were actually first-hand Gnostic writings. After countless readings, I am inclined to see these texts as study notes, and in rough and incomplete form. The Coptic reads like a slapdash translation made by scribes who did not altogether understand what they were translating.
Fifty fragmentary documents whose content is largely incoherent and maddeningly inconsistent - this is all that remains of what once was countless thousands of parchments and codices, including many works on geology, astronomy, and mathematics, known to have been written by initiates of the Mystery Schools.
To fill in what is missing or badly preserved in the Coptic treatises from Nag Hammadi, we must turn to paraphrases found in the polemics of the so-called Church Fathers who opposed the Gnostics. For the scenario of Sophia's fall and subsequent embodiment as Gaia, for instance, we have to rely on Irenaeus, a Christian bishop who wrote Against Heresies around 180 CE.
A full-scale narrative describing how Sophia becomes Gaia cannot be developed without making huge inferences.
The Fallen Goddess scenario relies at key points on extrapolating broadly - and, one might say, boldly - from the slim evidence on hand."
Source
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/gaia/esp_gaia20.htm
