The incorporation of Aristotelian thought into the dogma of Catholicism was not the first attempt to have alchemy co-opted or hermeneutically imbued into the whole system of thought. The fact that Aquinas did this under the tutelage of a Dominican Bishop who is regarded as the forbear of Goethe and Illuminized thought has not escaped me. Frater Albertus Magnus is a name still to be reckoned with in the present day as a person by that name heads the International Alchemical group in Salt Lake City. The fact that Melchizedek and Solomon or others in the family of Jesus are adept esotericists and alchemists should not surprise any real scholar. But let us assume Jesus had good intentions and later scriptural or priestly manipulators sought to bring his real and deep understanding more completely into the Christian model of spiritual growth. Here is a report from Pelikan about a fraud or attempt to do this which was accepted as church dogma for a millennium until the Thomist ideologues made the great furtherance of this under the Jesuit teaching system. ... can all be traced to Proclus, the great systematizer of Neoplatonism in the fifth century C.E.; and through him much of it goes back to Plotinus, and ultimately even to Plato himself. Although both Plotinus and Proclus were critics of Christianity, they also owed much to it; {Which might have to do with Christianity having borrowed much from the school of thought they were part of.} and, in turn, their Christian opponents shared much of their Neoplatonism with them, especially these very elements of the mystical vision. Therefore it did not come as a shock when, in the sixth century, there appeared a corpus of Greek writings that seemed to have blended Christian and Neoplatonic elements almost indiscriminately and that bore the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. This Dionysius was, in the report of the Acts of the Apostles, the only man named together with the women who joined and believed {Thus it is likely that the Dianistic or people who saw what was happening to women in the behemoth of Constantinism were motivated to try to correct things a little.} at Athens in response to the preaching of the apostle Paul; {Today there are many scholars who say the Epistles to Timothy once thought to be the work of Paul are not the work of Paul.} by the second century he seems to have been known as the first bishop of the Christian church at Athens; in the sixth century he suddenly produced this massive collection of Christian Neoplatonic speculations; and in the ninth century he came to be identified with Saint Denis, patron saint of France and third-century bishop of Paris.(5) {Eusebius is mentioned in his Biblio. Eusebius is a merchant and purchaser of the bishopric of Paris, I believe. The matter of intrigue from far away Turkey and the Basilidae there who are part of the Semites like Sargon requires more research on my part but I suspect this is another example of the Benjaminite/Maccobean/Elephantine/Rothschild/De Medicis continuum and their desires at work.} Certified as it was with such impressive and all-but-apostolic credentials, the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius was accepted as authentic almost without dissent in the sixth century, and it retained its authoritative position, again almost without dissent, for an entire millennium, not being seriously challenged until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (6) There is no question as to Plato being a noble and an alchemist. The matter of his connection to the Sargon lineage and Hyksos in Egypt where his relative Critias was a priest is a matter of suspicion I continue to track and wonder about. For a certainty I do find the esoteric precursor to Hegelian dialectic by these alchemists does exist. I would refer a serious researcher to the chortling done by Fulcanelli about the inculcation of alchemic rituals and symbols into Christendom that can be found in his book on the Cathedrals which the Templars did build atop Druidic or pagan sites. Although Pseudo-Dionysius was undoubtedly the source for much of it, a major inspiration of Christ-mysticism was the interpretation of the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon{Key to study by Masons today}) as a Christian allegory. As most scholars would agree today, be they Jewish or Roman Catholic or Protestant, the Song was originally a poem celebrating the love between man and woman. But throughout its history it has in fact been read allegorically, and it may even be that it came into the Jewish canon that way. Defending its canonicity at the council of Jamnia in 90 C.E., which stabilized the canon of the Hebrew Bible, the celebrated Rabbi Aqiba declared: The whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies. From this interpretation comes the rule promulgated by the rabbis: He who trills his voice in chanting the Song of Songs in the banquet house and treats it as a sort of song has no part in the world to come. (7) Such is the nature of exclusionary elitism so prevalent in this foul cultus along with its fellow Judaeo/Christian/Islamic kin that continue to breed Armageddon and Rapture end games and wars, as if that is somehow what God might want. The Occultation or Usurpation of Religion and the Zohar: An English version of the Zohar, a guiding text of Jewish mysticism, offers new insights.
- By David van Biema
- TIME Magazine: April 19, 2004 issue
The road winds like a Talmudic discourse, first one way and then another, up toward Daniel Matt's home in the Berkeley, California, hills. There's a more direct route that my wife likes, admits Matt, 53. But I find this one more interesting. That's not surprising. Matt is embarked on a solo journey through one of the most influential and maddeningly difficult works in the history of religious literature. After six years of his labor, Stanford University Press has published the first two books of his translation of the Zohar, the wellspring of Jewish mysticism, or Cabala. He will do nine more volumes, all rendered from the Zohar's original Aramaic. The work has received ecstatic advance reviews (A superbly fashioned translation and a commentary that opens up the Zohar to the English-speaking world, blurbed lit-crit colossus Harold Bloom), and two weeks ago it won a $10,000 Koret Jewish Book Award for monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought. Beneath the praise runs an undercurrent of awe that someone was crazy enough to take on the job. The Zohar's elusiveness dates to its appearance in the Spanish region of Castile around 1280. Written in Aramaic, a language Jews had not composed in for centuries, the book was attributed to a great rabbi of a millennium earlier. But in fact, in the 1930s scholars determined that it was penned by one Moses de Leon and his associates in the 13th century. De Leon had every reason to fake his work's pedigree: the Zohar was far too radical to be accepted without a fabricated imprimatur. An utterly original 1,800-page mix of Torah commentary, parody, erotic poetry, numerology and experimental narrative devices, it crams some 400 subplots into a Chaucer-like {Chaucer is an alchemist too.} tale of a band of traveling sages. The book's form alone, says Matt, is a challenge to the normal workings of consciousness. Its theology is wilder still nothing less than the division of God's personality, which Judaism had always seen as a unity, into 10 interacting emanations, two of them female. One of these, the Shekhinah, was the Zohar's obsession, the portal through which it pulled believers willy-nilly into the divine drama. Only their prayer and good deeds could save her from hordes of demons and effect her mystic marriage to God's male aspect, a reunion described in sometimes erotic detail. Without arousal below, de Leon noted, there is no arousal above. Remarkably, his book caught on. By 1600 the Jewish world saw the Zohar as its third holiest text, preceded only by the Bible and the Talmud. Cabalistic study and meditation flourished, and zoharic principles formed the basis of Hasidic Judaism. The Zohar's use faded as Judaism absorbed the just-the-facts influence of the European Enlightenment, but it left behind dramatic mementos such as the Bar Mitzvah coming-of-age celebration and the gorgeous Friday-evening song welcoming God's "Sabbath bride". The Zohar also informs the current Cabalistic resurgence, so fascinating to Jews and spiritual adventurers like Madonna. And this created new demand for an authoritative English version. Enter Matt. By 1995 he had taught Jewish mysticism at the university level, written a book comparing Cabala and scientific cosmology, and translated some Zohar excerpts. Nevertheless he was stunned when Margot Pritzker, wife of the chairman of the Hyatt Corp., who was studying the book, offered to bankroll a full translation. I told her, optimistically, that it might take 18 years, Matt says. And she said, 'You're not scaring me.' The result is not for everybody. From its opening, an extended discourse on the image of a rose in the Song of Songs ("Just as a rose has 13 petals, so Assembly of Israel has 13 qualities of compassion on every side"), the first volume only plunges further into esoterica. Matt's commentary, which offers tidbits about ancient water clocks and the silkworm's arrival in Spain, along with his exegesis of mystical concepts, is often twice as long as his translation. Yet there are those eager to use it. Says Samuel Cohon, a Tucson, Arizona, rabbi who has ordered 40 copies at his congregants' request: I thought; 'It'll be too hard'. But there's a great desire to get at the source. If this is a profound text, then let's see why. Matt still has the slightly dazed look of an Ahab whose white whale has arrived un-hunted. He hopes to finish his task by age 70. It's not time that he will regret. When I wake up, it's all I want to do, he says. I feel like I'm inside De Leon's mind now. I know the tricks he's up to. And he's a genius. This is the most astounding book in Judaism. It is a judgment his own work makes even clearer. (7) I am open to the possibility that the knowledge or tricks he finds are in the Zohar and De Leons mind are long-standing knowledge systems which had been kept secret by the likes of the Tartessians of Spain and Southern France in a line of schools going back to pre-Christian eras. I have many inter-connections which have been made in other books and we have again touched a few of them in regards to the Templars and Rennes-le-Chateau in this book. |
Home
