The Creative Feminine

The anamnesis, or recollection, of Sophia eaterna, will start from an intuition set forth with the utmost clarity in our authors, namely, that the Feminine is not opposed to the Masculine as the 'patiens' to the 'agens', but encompasses and combines the two aspects, receptive and active, whereas the Masculine possesses only one of the two. This intuition is clearly expressed in a distich of Jalaluddin Rumi:



Woman is a beam of the divine Light.

She is not the being whom sensual desire 
takes as its object.

She is Creator, it should be said.

She is not a Creature.





And this sophianic intuition is perfectly in keeping with that of the extreme Shi'ites, the Ismailians and Nusayris, who in the person of Fatima, considered as "Virgin-Mother" giving birth to the line of the Holy Imams, perceive a theophany of Sophia aeterna, the mediatrix of Creation celebrated in the books of wisdom, and attach to her name the demiurgic qualification in the masculine (Fatima fatir) : Fatima-Creator.

~Henry Corbin
[Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi]