Their Virgin

From G Scholem’s Redemption Through Sin

She who is called Rachel in the biblical stories about Jacob and is elsewhere known as “the beautiful maiden who has no eyes.” She it is who is the real Messiah (who cannot, contrary to Traditional opinion, be a man) and to her “all the king’s weapons are surrendered,” For she is also the much sought-after “Divine Wisdom” or Sophia who is destined to take “Death’s” place as one of the three “Rulers of the World.”

For the present, however, she is hidden in a castle and kept from the sight of all living creatures; all strange acts, in comparison with which the “strange fire” offered before the Lord by Aaron’s two sons (Lev. 10) was but a trifle, are committed for the sole purpose of reaching her. She is the “holy serpent” who guards the garden, and he who asks what the serpent was doing in Paradise is simply betraying his ignorance.

As of yet, the place of Esau, the home of the Virgin and or true salvation, has not been attained by anyone, but its hidden light will first be revealed to the believers, who will have the distinction of being its soldiers and fighting on its behalf ... [the militant Jesuit ethic].

It is hard not to associate this last novelty—a female Messiah, referred to by Jacob Frank as “the Virgin,” who was yet to be revealed and whose task it would be to complete the work of redemption with the influence of certain mystical Christian sects prevalent at about this time in Eastern Europe that believed in a triad of saviors corresponding to the threefold nature of God, and in a feminine incarnation of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom Of Holy Spirit. With one of these groups, the Philipovicites in Rumania and Ukraine, Frankists were in such close contact that one of its former leaders publicly defended them before the Catholic authorities of Poland.