Eve Christoph comes across as equal parts down-to-earth and dreamy, practical and philosophical. Born in 1964, Christoph’s upbringing as a “wild child” in Berkeley, California gave her a window on the world during a time of radical transformation.
Today, the Shelburne Falls resident shares lessons she learned as the only child of a free-spirited single mom, Rosemary, who kept body and soul together while pursuing creativity and curiosity. Rosemary Christoph eventually obtained a Ph. D. and, at age 82, maintains her psychotherapy practice and is delighted that her daughter is now a published author.
Writing under the pen name Soéva Sophia, Eve Christoph recently launched the first in her trilogy of books and will share stories and engage in discussion at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 8 at Raven Used Books in Shelburne Falls.
“It’s a Magical Feminism memoir,” said Christoph of the work, titled “Eve’s Eden: Her Pillars of Existence.”
A longtime illustrator and muralist, Christoph’s book also contains 20 drawings. “I learned early on that my ability to make art was a ticket to survival,” said Christoph, 61.
She struggled in school due to profound dyslexia, and discovered that she could trade her drawings for schoolwork answers from other students. Years later, she founded the Art Bridge homeschooling center in Shelburne Falls (not to be confused with the Art Garden), and directed it for five years.
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Well into adulthood, Christoph was functionally illiterate. “Everything on the page would jump around,” she said. “This made it hard to maintain employment. I gave each job my best effort, but it always came down to something like being fired for not being able to follow a simple recipe while working as a home health care attendant.”
She tried waitressing, “but the stress and excitement would lead to me getting everything backward. I was routinely fired from jobs within two weeks, so I had to move into what I can do well.”
Christoph became known for her ability to paint stunning murals. “One of my first public murals was a tree of life image in Amherst when I was 19,” she said. “I’ve done big projects, including at Buddhist temples, and in Mexico I created embellishments for adobe castles with round windows, or temples with domed ceilings.”
Christoph’s visual art seemed one of the few avenues open to her, given her dyslexia, until a remarkable thing happened when she was 28: “I had a vivid dream in which I was having brain surgery. I’ve heard that humans don’t generally experience pain in dreams, but this dream was intensely painful,” she said. “My brain was literally cut open, and those performing the operation were poised to cut a cord that connected my brain to my heart. I knew this would kill me, so I requested that, instead, they connect the places in my brain that weren’t connected. They charged my brain with a car charger and sewed my brain back together. The pain I experienced was indescribable.”
Christoph awoke with a splitting headache, “but after that, I found I could read. I know this sounds implausible, but it really happened. I still have dyslexia, but following the revolutionary dream, it was different.”
Writing by hand is difficult for Christoph, but she found that typing “felt like a brain massage because the activity goes back and forth between two hands. Another thing that healed my brain was African dance, thanks to the polyrhythms.”
Once she discovered the ease of typing, “stories poured out … magical stories to open people to mystical intuition, the part that gets silenced. It’s very different from the logical, linear side of ourselves.” Christoph explained her pen name: “My first name being Eve, and my books having the name Eve in their titles … I wanted it to be more than just about myself.” She noted that the name Sophia has deep meanings in various cultures.
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Her goal is to “move away from the war between male and female. In every religion, society, and culture, the feminine is suppressed, and that affects both females and males.”
She envisions entirely different societies and lifestyles with healthier priorities. “My manifesto focuses on the fact that our many crises, including climate and political situations, result from having left out feminine energy for thousands of years,” she said.
There’s a difference between masculine feminism and feminine feminism, according to Christoph. “We had to start with masculine feminism,” she said, “because first we had to gain the right to vote, own property, and open bank accounts. Those were important, but we must now acknowledge that all problems on earth come down to one basic problem: the systematic oppression and eradication of the feminine half of beingness and the demonization of core values and ways of flourishing.”
It sounds like heady stuff, but the beauty of Christoph’s writing is that she puts forth life stories, “full of gritty, wild, mystical, true accounts of feminine magic, and how the Goddess in her many forms as God the Mother, as well as my own dear mama, have guided my life.”
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Book two will be “Eve’s Paradise: Her Primary Elements,” followed by book three, “Eve’s Heaven: Her Forms of Love.” Christoph advises readers to take them in order.
“The first book will be hard for some people to believe, despite being completely true,” she said. “Yet, book two has even wilder stuff. The third book will be more grounding, in terms of how to integrate practices in our lives.”
Eve Christoph welcomes inquiries from those interested in divine feminism, having a mural painted, or inviting her to speak in public: Evesedenarts@gmail.com.
Eveline MacDougall is the author of “Fiery Hope” and can be contacted at eveline@amandlachorus.org.