Sophia

So a couple of years ago, I read a book called The Shack.  It was fiction, albeit religious fiction, and it mentioned, among other things, a person called Sophia.  In the context of the book, Sophia was not a goddess but rather the personification of God's wisdom.  The whole thing seemed like a very strange concept to me and now I've decided to do a bit of research on it.  The Sophia tradition arises from verses such as Proverbs 8:1, which goes as follows: "Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice?"  In the original languages, the word for wisdom was a feminine noun.  The implication (personification) that wisdom and understanding are female eventually led to the creation of Sophia.  Apparently, Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom.  There are also apparent references to her in other wisdom books such as the apocryphal books of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon.  She is sometimes seen as the wife of Solomon (who was himself given the gift of wisdom by God), has been accepted as the goddess of wisdom by many different traditions throughout history (including the Greeks, who know her as Athena, and Eastern Christians), was known as an actual physical representation of wisdom itself, and today is venerated by the Gnostics.  The Gnostics, a sect devoted to finding secret meanings in the scriptures, see her as a sort of "quasi-deity" and, according to the website below, even believe that she is possibly the Holy Spirit part of a female trinity, one that also includes the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene.  Interesting...sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel.  Da Vinci Code, anyone?  Anyway, here's the website where I got most of this information, but there's definitely a lot more out there about the mysterious Sophia.
http://www.northernway.org/sophia.html