The Book of Ezekiel sits among the wildest precincts of Sacred scripture; a temple of riddles, a furnace of vision, a monument to the soul’s estrangement and the anguish of the city. Every line carries the scent of exile and fire; the prophet speaks from the shattered threshold, when nothing of the old world remains except memory, shame, and a relentless hunger for restoration. Within this cauldron, chapter twenty-three erupts as scandal and parable; the tale of Oholah and Oholibah, two sisters, draped in the language of prostitution and shame, summoned before the divine tribunal as symbols of betrayal.
The reader recoils from the violence of the imagery, the cruelty of the accusation, the spectacle of the Feminine body rendered into theatre for the wounds of a people. The text is, by any honest measure, misogynistic in its form and legacy. Yet to stop at outrage is to cede the field to the violence of the past. The work of the Hermetic, the redeemer of symbols, is neither to excuse nor to erase, but to transmute; to uncover in the midst of harm the possibility of healing; to seek, through the ruins, the seed of the hidden altar.
I. The Historical Veil: Misogyny, Anxiety, and Collective Wound
To enter Ezekiel 23 is to encounter the full weight of a patriarchal imagination in crisis. The Feminine appears as both city and culprit; Oholah and Oholibah become allegories for Samaria and Jerusalem, vessels for a collective panic about borders, purity, and survival. The prophet’s language is explicit, at times almost voyeuristic; the sisters are accused of whoredom with foreign lovers, alliances with the great powers of Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon. Every act of alliance becomes a wound upon the body of the city; every embrace a violation of covenant. The text is merciless in its portrayal of female transgression, and relentless in its allocation of blame. Nowhere is there a whisper of the failings of kings, priests, or patriarchs; the shame is scripted onto the bodies of women, as though the loss of centre, the temptation of the Other, and the collapse of sacred order could be carried only by the Feminine.
Such misogyny is neither accidental nor isolated; it is the logic of an age terrified of liminality, threatened by the porousness of borders, haunted by the risk of mixture. In this lexicon, the woman becomes the symbol of the permeable, the open, the ever-risking contamination; the city, as wife and mother, can redeem or damn the people through her conduct. This logic, inherited by centuries of reading, has served to justify not only suspicion toward women, but also repression of body, desire, and difference. To acknowledge this historical violence is not to resign the symbol; it is to name the wound so the work of healing may begin. The city’s exile is written on the skin of her daughters; to redeem the Feminine, one must pass through the fire of the text with eyes unclouded.
II. The Allegory Reconsidered: Soul, City, and the Drama of Exile
Within the bruised metaphor of Oholah and Oholibah, there unfolds a deeper drama than the surface theatre of shame. The city as woman, the soul as wife, the body as vessel: these are the oldest images in the Hermetic, Gnostic, and mystical traditions. Ezekiel, though a child of his age, works in a language that can never be entirely reduced to polemic; within his poetry shimmers the outline of a mystery not fully grasped by his own hand. The sisters, in their fall, become mirrors for the soul’s exile. Their “prostitution” is not simply lust or betrayal, but the soul’s hunger for the Other, the dangerous longing to be seen, embraced, or protected by powers beyond the centre. The city, seduced by empire, seeks security in the arms of strangers, trading the slow fidelity of covenant for the intoxicating thrill of foreign alliance. The body, estranged from its own altar, pours out its sacred oil upon the altars of empire.
However, within this pattern, allegory does its silent work. The sin is never only sexual; it is existential. The horror is not only the embrace of the stranger, but the forgetting of the self, the abandonment of the wellspring within for the mirage of fulfilment without. The Feminine in the text is punished, exposed, humiliated, yet the drama is not hers alone. It is the drama of every soul, every city, every seeker who loses their way and, in seeking home in the arms of another, discovers only deeper estrangement. The allegory, in this light, is a map of exile; the scandal is the cost of separation from the source. In the theatre of judgment, the Feminine bears the wound of the whole.
III. The Alchemy of Return: Redemption of the Feminine
No healing comes without passing through the wound. The Hermetic and Gnostic traditions have always understood that the surface of a text may conceal as much as it reveals. The violence done to the Feminine in Ezekiel 23 is real, but so is the possibility of its transmutation. To read the text mystically is not to deny its harm, but to ask how the symbol might be turned, how the curse might be made into a path of return. The sisters, far from being only victims, become, in the hands of the redeemer, figures for the soul’s tragic journey: from unity, through exile, into the long work of remembering the altar. The city, in losing her centre, discovers the cost of amnesia; in suffering, the hunger for return is awakened. The wound becomes a doorway; the humiliation, a secret key. The Feminine is not simply to be restored to innocence, but to be recognised as the bearer of the deepest mysteries of longing, separation, and the hope of reconciliation.
In the mystical and Hermetic register, the body is never only a site of shame. The temple is lost, but the possibility of new sanctuary glimmers within the exile. The sacred prostitute, remembered in older strata of myth, was mediator, healer, bridge between the visible and the invisible; her “fall” in the biblical imagination masks an older reverence for the body as altar, for desire as vehicle of the sacred. The redemption of Oholah and Oholibah is not a return to naïveté, but an ascent through knowledge: the wisdom that recognises every exile as opportunity for gnosis, every wound as site for the descent of Presence. The violence of the text does not dissolve, but is held within the greater vessel of the soul’s transmutation.
Epilogue: The Mirror Gathered and the Work Continued
Ezekiel’s text remains a dangerous mirror. To look into it is to risk the repetition of old harms, the re-inscription of the wounds it so brutally names. But the Work is to hold the gaze steady, to refuse both denial and despair. The misogyny of the text is real; it has wounded centuries; it is part of the inheritance the mystic is called to transmute. To redeem the Feminine in Ezekiel 23 is to recognise both the harm and the hope, the exile and the promise. The city will wander, the soul will forget, the altar will fall into shadow; yet, in the very midst of exile, a seed of return waits, a promise not made by the hand of men, but whispered in the silence where the Divine Feminine remembers herself.
The body becomes vessel again; the wound turns into an opening; the shame is a memory that can be transformed. Every reading that redeems, every ritual that heals, every act of remembering restores a little of the lost altar, a little of the city’s heart. The mirror does not lie, but it can be cleansed. In the work of the Hermetic, the long misused Feminine becomes once again the keeper of the threshold, the mother of return, the priestess whose hands mend the city stone by stone. In this reading, exile is not the end, and the violence of the text is not the last word. The altar is rebuilt in secret, and the Feminine walks the city at dawn, carrying the lamp of what can yet be healed.