Sappho, Teresa, and Rabia — three women who reinvented love

Three women, one undercurrent

Imagine: three women at a table.

One wears a simple dress of rough Greek linen, her hair in a knot, her hand on a lyre. She lived around 600 BCE on the island of Lesbos. Her name was Sappho.

The second wears a heavy black habit, her hands quietly folded, her eyes closed. She lived in Spain in the sixteenth century. Her name was Teresa of Avila.

The third sits on the floor in a small room somewhere in Basra, Iraq. She wears a worn cloak. She was born a slave and bought her own freedom with a life of extreme simple devotion. She lived in the eighth century. Her name was Rabia al-Adawiyya.

Thirteen centuries. Three religions. Three languages. Three geographic worlds that barely knew each other.

And yet: when you place their texts side by side, they speak of the same undercurrent. Love not as connection with an object — a man, a beloved, a god outside you — but as a way of being present in your own body, your own consciousness, your own presence here.

These three women are just as important to Luminous as the tantric and Taoist sources. More strongly: they are often the entry point for women who struggle with Sanskrit and the exotic. They speak European languages, they know Christianity or Islam from the inside, they are recognizable in a way the old Indian texts sometimes are not.

In this article, we meet them one by one. And at the end, we place their words side by side, so you can see what they truly shared.

Sappho — the first voice of feminine desire

We know little about Sappho. She lived on Lesbos. She had a circle of young women who learned from her — poetry, music, dance, probably philosophy as well. She wrote in the Aeolic dialect, in multiple meters later named after her (Sapphic stanza).

Her work was famous in her own time and the centuries after. Plato called her "the tenth muse." The Library of Alexandria preserved nine books of her work. Those books are all lost — some to library fires, some to Christian burning in the fourth century, some to simple forgetfulness.

What we have of her now are fragments. Papyrus scraps from Egyptian rubbish heaps. Quotes in the works of later authors who cited her. One fragment is nearly complete; the other hundred or so are sometimes only one sentence, one word, one syllable.

But listen to what has been preserved:

He seems to me equal to the gods, the man who sits facing you, close by, and listens to your voice, speaking softly,

and your enchanting laugh — which — I swear it — makes my heart stop in my breast; for when I look at you even briefly,

there is no voice, my tongue breaks, subtle fire runs beneath my skin, my eyes see nothing, my ears ring,

sweat overcomes me, a trembling seizes me, I am paler than grass, and I seem almost dead.

Fragment 31. It describes what we would now call "falling in love," but with a precision that only returned centuries later. Note: the subject is not the man. The subject is what happens in Sappho's body when she sees the woman sitting across from him.

This is feminine desire captured by a woman — not as later male writers would fill it in, but as it is actually experienced: as a takeover of the body, a heat, a trembling, a near-death.

And even more important: the object of her desire is another woman. Not shocking in her time — Greek culture knew all kinds of same-sex intimacy without the later Western shame. But still a confirmation, already 2,600 years ago, that what we now call "bi-attraction" or "fluid sexuality" has always existed.

Her other fragments are about weddings, about friendship between women, about the goddess Aphrodite, about grief, about flowers in her, about young women who left her circle to marry. It is never dry. It is always embodied.

What Sappho gives us: that your body is the place where desire begins and ends, and that the experience of desire in itself can already be a whole story — separate from what happens with the other.

Teresa of Avila — the woman who met God in her body

Teresa was born in 1515 in Spain, in a family of marranos (forcibly converted Jews) on her father's side. She entered a Carmelite convent at twenty, and from her forties she began a reform — she founded a new, stricter, intensely contemplative branch of the order (the Discalced Carmelites) in which she established fifteen convents, often against the will of church authority.

Her writings — especially The Interior Castle (1577), Life (her autobiography), and The Way of Perfection — are masterpieces of mystical psychology. What she describes is not abstract faith, but an extremely concrete journey through what she called the "seven mansions" of the soul.

What interests us here: Teresa's description of the divine encounter is physical. Not metaphorical. Physical. She writes about a piercing of her heart, a hot pain that is at the same time the deepest ecstasy, a sudden buckling of her knees, a state in which she could not speak for minutes.

Her most famous passage is about the Transverberation — the moments when she, in her own words, was pierced by an angel with a golden spear with fire at its tip. Hear what she writes:

I saw in his hand a long golden spear and at the tip there seemed to be a little flame. This he seemed to thrust into my heart several times and to press through to my inward parts. When he drew it out, he left me wholly inflamed with a great love for God.

The pain was so sharp that I groaned; and yet the sweetness of this extreme pain was so great that there is no wishing it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything less than God.

Read that again.

Later commentators have argued over what Teresa is describing here. Some read it as sexual ecstasy with spiritual overlay. Others read it as purely mystical. But that is a false opposition. What Teresa says is that in her experience the distinction between "physical" and "spiritual" does not exist at all. There is one reality that carries both the pain and the ecstasy, both the fire-heat and the peace, both the desire and the satisfaction.

Hundreds of years later, in the Shakta tradition, mystics describe the same thing about Kundalini — an energy flowing through the body in which we distinguish between sense and consciousness, but which itself makes no distinction.

What Teresa gives us: that the deepest spiritual does not stand apart from the body but goes precisely through it. That love for the sacred feels physical, not despite but because those two were never truly separate.

Rabia al-Adawiyya — love beyond hope and fear

Rabia was born in 717 in Basra, in present-day Iraq. Her family was poor. According to traditional stories, she was kidnapped as a child and sold as a slave. Her owner made her work hard, but when he discovered one night that she was praying in her small cell in a halo of light that could not be explained, he set her free.

She chose a life of extreme simplicity. She did not marry. She held no possessions. She lived on what people gave her and what she did not need she gave away immediately. She was a Sufi — the mystical stream within Islam — in a time when Sufism as such barely existed yet.

What makes Rabia special is that she stands at the origin of the concept al-hubb al-ilahi — divine love — that would define all of Sufism afterward. But more than that: she introduced an idea that was radical at the time and still, twelve hundred years later, surprises many.

Most religious people in her time — and now too, for that matter — approach the divine with two motivations: hope for paradise and fear of hell. Rabia said: both are beside the point. It is about love itself.

Her most famous words:

O my God, if I worship You out of fear of hell, burn me in hell. If I worship You in hope of paradise, exclude me from paradise. But if I worship You for Yourself alone, withhold me not from Your eternal beauty.

Read that again. She asks to be punished if her love is calculated. That is not humility. That is a radical refusal to reduce divine reality to a transaction.

Rabia had another famous line — one preserved in multiple translations — about which side of herself she saw as most worthy:

I carry a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. With the torch I want to set heaven on fire. With the water I want to extinguish hell. So that we may love God without waiting for a reward and without fearing punishment.

This image has become iconic in Sufism. And it has deep implications for the rest of us — not only for religious people.

What Rabia gives us: that every love mixed with hoping for something or avoiding something is not yet real love. That real love is something that flows through you of its own accord, not because you want something back. That applies to divine love. That also applies — and this is the bridge we make — to love in relationships, to love for yourself, to love for your children, to love for life itself.

What these three women say together

Read these three fragments side by side now:

Sappho:

my tongue breaks, subtle fire runs beneath my skin, my eyes see nothing, my ears ring.

Teresa:

A little flame... he thrust into my heart and through to my inward parts... the sweetness was so great.

Rabia:

With the torch I want to set heaven on fire, with the water I want to extinguish hell — so that we may love without waiting for a reward.

Do you notice something?

All three work with fire.

Sappho feels it beneath her skin when she sees a woman she loves. Teresa feels it in her heart when divine love enters her. Rabia carries it in her hand to extinguish what separates us from true love.

That is no coincidence. In most wisdom traditions, fire is the metaphor for the life force flowing through us — Kundalini, ch'i, prana, the Holy Spirit, Shakti. These three women — without knowing each other, across thirteen centuries — all describe the same experience from their own context.

And what they say about love is related:

• Sappho: love is physical. It takes over your body and teaches you what you are.
• Teresa: love is physical. It pierces your heart and connects you with what is greater than you.
• Rabia: love beyond fear and hope is love itself. Everything before that is still trade.

Put that together and you have a philosophy of love our culture does not yet have. Not the romantic love of Hollywood. Not the utilitarian love of relationship books. Not the distant love of spiritual bypassing.

A love that is: embodied, receptive, fiery, fearless, not-hungry, and at the same time radically present.

Why female mystics stayed invisible for so long

There is a reason you heard nothing about Sappho, Teresa, and Rabia in most Dutch literature classes — or at most a footnote.

Sappho's books were burned, censored, and reduced to fragments. Only in the 20th century did serious research begin, especially by female scholars.

Teresa's writings were preserved — the church could not ignore her, her influence was too great — but they were carefully neutralized. Her physical language was reinterpreted as "merely metaphorical." Her political and organizational genius was reduced to "obedient nun." She was canonized — which is actually a way of making a woman so unreachable that she can no longer be imitated.

Rabia was nearly forgotten in the centuries after her death, and only restored by male Sufi masters (Attar, Rumi) who cited her as a source. That means what we read of her now is largely passed down through later male interpreters — not through her own words directly.

It is no coincidence that all three of these women were reduced in different ways in their transmission. Female mystical voices are carefully managed in virtually all great traditions — admired from a distance, used where useful, but not fully released as what they were: teachers.

We bring them back not to imitate them. We bring them back to hear their line. So we do not think we are the first to seek this.

Their line to us

If today, in your own life, you experience something that does not fit the language of our culture — a desire that feels too large, a love that finds no form, a grief that seems sacred, a fire beneath your skin that does not come from a person — know that there were women before you who experienced the same.

They had other words. Sappho called it Eros. Teresa called it God. Rabia called it the Friend. You may call it what you want. The reality beneath is the same.

And that is what Luminous fundamentally does: connect you with the line you belong to, even if you never consciously felt it that way. You are not alone. You are not unauthorized. What lives in you also lived in Sappho, in Teresa, in Rabia.

And in all the women in between whom we will never know by name.

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Going deeper

In Module IV — Schaduw & Schaamte, we work extensively with Teresa's passages on woundings of love and Rabia's lessons on love beyond fear. Especially her radical idea that fear and hope both keep us from true presence is useful in work with our own shame zones. This module is trauma-informed and guided by Jeanette and Mary together.

In Trede 2, all three of these women return as source texts. Their fragments are not only mentioned but read aloud and brought into practice. See opleiding for the full week structure.