The Year of Jubilee

 

Chapter Four:

A Season in Hell

 

And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah’s great Rainbow,

She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row.

Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

 

Poets have imagined the path to Hell in many different ways.  Dante’s approach to the Inferno took him through a dark, impenetrable forest where he was menaced by the bestial incarnations of his own untamed passions.  For Dante’s mentor, the Latin poet Virgil, the passport to the Underworld was the Golden Bough of a mythical oak tree.  Virgil's Golden Bough was, perhaps, a reminder of the branch of the forbidden Tree of Eden — the one keepsake that Adam was permitted to take with him from the Garden.

It’s worth considering why Hell has been the defining theme of visionary poetry, from Homer and Apollonius to Virgil and Dante, from Milton and Blake to Rimbaud and Eliot.  The realm of such poetry is the human Imagination, and so this must be the realm in which Hell exists.  This is not to say that Hell is not Real, though it certainly is a vulgar misconception to think of it within the framework of the temporal, physical Reality we encounter in our everyday lives.

 

Infernal Reality

Above the entrance to his Inferno, Dante posted the following inscription:

Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

    se non etterne, e io etterna duro.

 

Before me nothing was created that

    was not eternal, and I endure eternally.[1]

 

According to Dante, Hell was the last of all the Eternal things to be created by the Divine Power, the Divine Justice, and the Divine Love.  Before we consider the “last-born” of God’s Eternal creations, let’s review what we know about the “first-born”.  In Chapter One, we discovered that the first of all created things was the Quintessence, the imperishable ethereal Light.  Before beginning to create the Universe, God withdrew this Quintessence from the super-symmetrical Vessels, aka Sephirot, which He/She had shaped to receive the Light.  This withdrawal or constriction of the Divine Essence was a metaphysical event called the Tzimtzum.

The Tzimtzum was actually the first phase of a two-step process by which the Quintessence was first withdrawn and then reintroduced once an array of suitable Vessels/Sephirot had been formed.  This network of interdependent Vessels is traditionally depicted as a great Tree.  In order that the Tree might receive the influx of ethereal Light, however, it had to have an “opening” through which to admit the Light.  In other words, the array of Sephirot could not be self-contained, but rather had to remain, in a certain sense, incomplete and imperfect until its Vessels were filled with Light.

Drawing once more on our discussion in the first chapter, we know that the withdrawn Quintessence was reintroduced to the Tree from below, which is to say, from the Abyss wherein its roots lay.  While the Abyss is the metaphysical “locale” of Hell, we should be aware that the two are not synonymous.  Since the Abyss could offer no resistance to the inflow of Quintessence, it had to remain totally void — a quality described by the Hebrew term Bohu.  We’ve learned that the emptiness of Bohu is always accompanied by the Chaos of Tohu.  And Chaos, we should remind ourselves, is not a condition of “disorder”, but rather is a state of affairs so highly ordered and intricately structured as to defy rational comprehension.

With our diminished consciousness, we tend to think of “order” as a pattern in which things or events are extrinsically linked to one another.  We consider a pattern to be orderly if we can figure out how to “connect the dots”, so to speak.  But Chaos is a type of order based on internal connections, comprised of “dots within dots” — or, better said, “patterns within patterns”.  Such “patterns within patterns” are known as fractals, and they have two traits that make them uniquely suited to the transmission of the Quintessence.  First, since a fractal can be viewed on an infinite number of levels, it lends itself to the inexhaustible layers of meaning embodied in the quintessential Light.  Second, because a fractal may be endlessly extended without disrupting its intricate pattern, it alone can accommodate the Quintessence’s capacity for unlimited expansion without any diminution of intensity.

When the sublime Light was reintroduced, therefore, it had to transform the original “point-to-point” network of the Sephirotic Tree into a system of interlocked fractal patterns.  During this transition, the Female and Male sides of the Tree momentarily lost contact with one another.  Going back to Dante’s terminology, we could say that the hand of the Divine Justice became detached, if only for an inconceivably brief instant, from the hand of the Divine Love.  As a result, Lady Justice became an avenging Nemesis, whose terrible sword of Judgment strikes with unmitigated harshness and severity.  In the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, Divine Love corresponds to the Sephirah Chesed, while Divine Justice applies to the Sephira Gevurah.  It was at this level of the Tree, therefore, that the primordial breakdown know as the “Shattering of the Vessels” or Shevirah occurred.  As we learned in Chapter Two, the Shevirah was a dissociation of the Male-Subjective and Female-Objective poles of Consciousness.  Preceding the dawn of Time, this event is known to us as the Fall of the Angels.  It precipitated the breakup of the World Soul (aka the Pleroma) and the creation of Hell.

But before God would create Hell, She/He created a penultimate Eternal entity as a sort of prophylaxis against it.  What He/She created was the Torah, which was the embodiment of the ethereal Light in a form that could be assimilated by fallen Consciousness.  God began by fashioning the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet from the debris of the Shattered Vessels.  This bears witness to the fact that, in the Mind of God, there is no such thing as catastrophe or misfortune.  All events are made to serve the Divine purpose, and all creatures are to be redeemed in the final end.  God’s economy is the height of frugality, for She/He will permit absolutely nothing to be wasted.  When the spot of severe Judgment fell upon the perfect page of Eternity, it appeared like a stain, like a black dot on a completely white page.  The Lord seized upon this dot and grew it to become the Hebrew letter Yod י, the first letter in His Holy Name יהוה .   Being the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Yod represented the ten Vessels that comprise the Tree of Life, and it foreshadowed the ten utterances by which God-Elohim would create our Universe.

The spot of severe Judgment continued to spread like an ink-drop across the erstwhile spotless page of Eternity.  As it spread, its shape successively assumed the forms of the 22 letters from Aleph א to Tau ת .  Together the first and last letters spelled the word את , a Hebrew preposition signifying proximity.  Nearness is a relationship in Space, and so the completion of the Hebrew alphabet gave rise to the idea of Space.  Before there could be actual Space, there had to be the concept of Space in the Supreme Consciousness.  Which is to say that, before a Thing takes on a material form, it must first arise as an idea in the Mind of the Holy One.  This, after all, is the gist St. John’s teaching: “In the Beginning was the Word.”

Space, then, was the first of the non-Eternal things.  Only after the opening of a Space in the fabric of Eternity could Time come into Being.  When we think about it, we can understand why Time could never possibly have been the first of things.  After all, must there not always be two moments to determine an interval of Time?  At least two ticks of the Clock to confirm that “Time has passed”?  Therefore, the perception of Time always assumes a precedent event.

When Time came into being, it completed the writing of the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet Tau, which depicts the sign of the Cross.  The Cross is the sign of the Messiah whose coming signals the end of Time.  Therefore, the moment at the end of Time was already enclosed and hidden in the very first instant of Time.  This is why we speak of the end of Time as an “uncovering” (apokalypsis in Greek) of something that has always been there, yet still remains to be seen.

Now, the emergence of Space and Time required of the Creatrix various acts of separation.  For there to be Space, there must be four directions — indeed, even four dimensions, according to Einstein’s General Relativity.  For there to be Time, there must be two directions — Past and Future — and perhaps even two temporal dimensions, if physicist Stephen Hawking’s theories are correct.  This gives us a six-dimensional Reality, in which are manifested the Eternal Forms, or what the Hebrews called the Elohim.  We should recall, from our discussion in Chapter Two,  that the six-fold Symmetry of the Elohim generates 26 or 64 Eternal Forms, through which the Divine Similitude is imprinted on the Soul.

Previously, we have spoken of the Elohim as a multifarious Female aspect of the Godhead, corresponding to the Sephirah Binah.  But we must beware of regarding the Elohim as an autonomous Female deity.  The word Elohim — typically translated into English as “God” — is an odd construction in the Hebrew language, because it is formed from the feminine singular Eloah with the masculine plural ending ’im.[2]   Perhaps this anomaly occurs because the word Elohim has evolved from earlier form Elohayim,[3]  which is not the generic plural, but instead has the “dual” suffix, signifying an inseparable pair.  Into this “dual” category of plural nouns in Hebrew fall such things as matching body parts like eyes, ears, hands, and feet.  Male and female couples are also designated by the dual ending — as, for example, in the word shenayim used to describe the pairs of animals which Noah was instructed to bring into the Ark.[4]

So the Elohim are the integral and inseparable components of a bipolar Godhead which encompasses both the Male and the Female principles.  This is why, when God-Elohim made Man in His/Her own Image, He/She initially created him to be a Spiritual hermaphrodite, like the Angels.  When it came time to clothe the letters and words of Creation in matter and in flesh, however, the poles of Male and Female had to be drawn apart.  That’s why we have the wonderful metaphor, in Genesis= second chapter, of Eve being extracted from Adam’s loins.   When Male and Female drew apart as separate and distinguishable poles in the Upper World, the same process of sexual differentiation also took place in the Lower Worlds.

It is the emergence of distinct sexual polarities in God-Elohim that allows Him/Her to procreate.  Thus, it is a decidedly pregnant Elohim who broods upon the face of the great Ocean of chaotic emptiness in the first chapter of Genesis.  Birth is a process of separation, and the first division that God-Elohim decreed was a separation between Light and Darkness, between Day and Night.  By segregating Day and Night, Elohim established the cyclical character of Time, which renews itself in days, weeks, months, years, centuries, millennia and Ages.

Darkness, however, doesn’t necessarily imply the absence of Light.  From a scientific standpoint, we know that the oxymoron “invisible Light” describes an actual type of energy.  There are species of Light whose waves are too short, too finely divided for our mortal eyes to detect them.  “Ultra-violet” light is an example of such “invisible Light”.  In fact, according to the laws of classical thermodynamics, all energy in the Universe should have transformed itself into “invisible Light” in less than a nanosecond after the Big Bang.  To prevent that from happening, the Creatrix had to set a lower limit to the separation of Light and Darkness.  She had to establish a “floor”, below which the division of Light could not proceed.  This floor or Foundation is something which modern physics describes as the “quantum limit”, while William Blake calls it the “Limit of Opacity”.[5]

It follows that physical Reality, as we know it, only becomes possible after the quantum limit, aka the Limit of Opacity, is established.  Furthermore, the unique genre of physical Reality capable of supporting Self-Conscious beings like ourselves is so highly improbable that it demands that the quantum limit be set with inconceivable exactness.  The actual value of this physical limit in our Universe can be expressed in a dimensionless constant, known as Alpha, bearing an integer value of 137.  It happens that 137 is the 33rd prime number, the significance of which will become clearer as we proceed in this inquiry.  Before the quantum limit adjusted itself to this precise figure, however, there were myriad worlds coming into existence and passing into extinction.   None of these failed worlds could sustain themselves, because the dividing line between Light and Darkness had not been properly drawn so as to establish Equilibrium.  In the absence of such Equilibrium, over the course of Time the Darkness would overcome the Light, or the converse would occur.

Consequently, the physical Universe, the Universe of temporal, non-Eternal things, began to manifest itself only after the Limit of Opacity has been set, i.e. only after the Light had been separated from the Darkness.   Therefore, the last of the Eternal things to be created was the Limit itself.  But, as we noted earlier, sacred tradition tells us the Inferno was created last of all things Eternal.  We are thus obliged to conclude that the Underworld came into being when the Darkness became separated from the Light, and that it had to be created before our World could appear.

We can infer, therefore, that Hell is the portion of Eternity closest to our temporal Reality.  Hence, it’s the aspect of Eternity that’s most accessible from our World.  Not only is Hell the precinct of Eternity most accessible to us, it’s the only gate into Eternity through which we are permitted to pass in the Flesh.   This explains why the heroes of epic poetry must always harrow Hell on their way to Elysium — and why the Messiah Himself must first descend into the Abyss in order to consummate His Resurrection from the Dead.

The origin of the wide and well-paved road between our World and Hell is, in fact, one of Milton’s themes in his Paradise Lost.  Early in the poem, he describes Lucifer’s flight from the gate of Hell to our then-newly-created World.  Satan’s journey traverses the Abyss, a desolate region consisting of the chaotic wreckage of the myriad doomed universes that preceded our own.[6]  This wreckage of aborted worlds was known to the Hebrew mystics as the Qlippot, which means the “Shells” or “Husks”.  After the Fall of Adam and Eve and their Exile from Eden, Milton describes how Satan’s son Death follows his father’s track and constructs a “passage broad, smooth, easy, inoffensive down to Hell”.  Death performs this feat by congealing the fluid turbulence of Chaos into stone, just as the mythic Medusa petrifies living things with her evil eye.  In a transparent allusion to the Papacy, Milton refers to this “highway to Hell” as a Bridge, “Pontifical, a ridge of pendent Rock/ Over the vast Abyss”.[7]   The nexus between the Papacy and the Inferno — also a central theme of Dante’s Divine Comedy — is something we’ll consider in a subsequent chapter.  But, for now, let’s focus on Milton’s image of Death, whose power lies in the sting of his lethal weapon — the Arrow.[8]

 

The Arrow of Death

To understand the symbolism of the Arrow, we need to go back to the origin from whence it points.  So let’s retrace our steps to “the Beginning”, when Elohim created the Earth.  Since the Elohim comprise the feminine side of a Godhead having two distinct sexual polarities, it’s natural that She would have chosen to begin the Creation of our World with the letter Bet ב.  Bet is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the character representing the number two.  Accordingly, the first word of the Torah is Beresheet, meaning “in the Beginning”.  It’s important to know, however, that the original text of the Torah transcribed by Moses on Mt. Sinai contained only consonants, with no vowel markings.  Consequently, there are many alternative ways — in fact, an infinite variety of ways — in which the text of the original Torah can be interpreted.

By way of illustration, consider the English phrase, “heat red beans”.  If we leave out the vowels, we have, “ht rd bns”, which can be rendered as “hate arid bones”, or “hit road bins”, or “hot rod bonus”, or even “hat raid bans”.  String together tens of thousands of vowel-less words this way, and the number of possibilities becomes truly limitless.  In ordinary prose, as in our “heat red beans” example, the variant meanings become increasingly awkward and nonsensical.  In the Torah, however, all of the possible variant meanings of a passage shed new light on its meaning.  This is why the Kabbalists say that each new interpretation of a Torah passage “creates a new Heaven and a new Earth”.[9]

Just as the World had to be left “incomplete” to allow for an opening through which the divine Light could be infused, the same is true of the Torah.  The written Torah was left “open” by design so that its deepest levels of meaning could be uncovered by the studies of righteous men and women.  In this manner, there has accumulated over the ages a body of Oral Tradition, which is the indispensable complement of the written text.  While there is an accepted literal meaning to the text, based on the so-called Masoretic vowel markings added by Jewish scribes of the 1st Century CE, this literal meaning is only the surface of an infinitely deep “well” of sacred Wisdom.  Each individual human Soul has the innate ability to draw from this well some unique insight which is not accessible to others.  To draw this “living Water” from the Scriptures is actually the highest mission in the life of each person.  Only by doing so can each of us satisfy the “thirst” to become a whole Being, a complete Self.  It’s just as Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well of Sychar: Whosoever drinks of this Water shall never thirst again.

Throughout the course of this book, we’ve been exploring the teachings of the Kabbalah, yet it’s only now that we’ve reached the point where we can understand what the Kabbalah actually is.  Let’s start by trying to comprehend what it is not.  It’s not a body of esoteric knowledge developed by a few ancient sages and passed down to us intact through the ages.  It’s not a compilation of established Truths to be passively assimilated by its students.  Instead, the Kabbalah resembles a metaphysical “toolbox”, providing us with the implements with which each of us can construct for ourselves a spiritual edifice from the words of the Holy Writ.  The purpose of this edifice is to attract the Presence of God, the feminine Shechinah.  The Shechinah is the aspect of the Elohim that becomes manifest in Space/Time.  Only through intimate communion with Shechinah can the Soul be conformed to the Image of the Supernal Man and thus embrace its true transcendent identity.

When our innermost Soul is in the ecstatic embrace of the Shechinah, She imprints there the fractal pattern of Elohim’s Eternal Forms.  This pattern is infinitely detailed, infinitely “deep”.  Within it there is a unique dwelling place for each Soul.  That’s why the meaning of the word Shechinah in Hebrew — “dwelling place” — so perfectly expresses its relationship with the individual Soul.  Settling into its to its own special “niche” in the intricate fractal pattern, the Soul is said to be “sheltered under the wings of the Shechinah”.

The Jewish Festival of Booths, Succoth, is a ritual enactment of this “sheltering”.  It’s an ecstatic celebration in which all members of the Community put aside their everyday activities, leave their homes and dwell for eight days in makeshift huts constructed of palm fronds.  These crude booths are intentionally left incomplete, with gaps between the palm fronds affording a opening to the heavens.  Here again we see repeated the archetypal motif of a structure — like the Sephirotic Tree and the Torah — purposely left unfinished so that the missing details can appear in the Light of Vision.  Succoth’s communal celebration of visionary experience was not restricted to poets, priests and prophets, but extended to all God’s people.  John’s Gospel recites that, on the last day of Succoth, Christ had an ecstatic vision of a river of Living Water connecting all of the celebrants from within.[10]  While we’ve already established that Succoth is a festival of Vision, we can now go beyond that to assert that it’s a celebration of the commonality of Vision.

It’s precisely this communal dimension of Vision which the Kabbalah is intended to enable.  The Kabbalah’s tools are made to be utilized by each of us to draw our own particular visions from the infinite weave of the revealed Word of God.  When we learn to wield these tools, each of us can erect our own edifice of dreams, wherein we may entertain the divine companion of our Soul.  If we are to attract the Shechinah to us and find shelter beneath Her fractal “wings”, however, what we construct cannot be a snare, a trap, or a prison.  The sweet bird of inspiration may alight upon the perch of a birdhouse, but She will not willingly fly into a cage.  If within our Heart we wish to exalt our own visions above those of our brothers and sisters, if we aspire to delineate some version of “absolute Truth” to be imposed upon others, then the divine bird will flee from us, as an ordinary bird would from a hunter.

... how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?  For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart.  If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?[11]

 

This passage from the Book of Psalms uses the Arrow as a symbol of the “one-way” one-dimensional State of Mind that’s so inimical to Vision.  In his allegorical poem, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge employs this same imagery inasmuch as his Mariner slays the mystical bird of inspiration, the Albatross, with an arrow from his crossbow.  The Arrow often appears in Scripture as an emblem of the mentality that professes the absolute dichotomy of Truth and Falsehood, the mindset that is irrevocably closed to the coexistence of contrary Truths.  This mindset, which is quite dominant in our modern pseudo-scientific culture, allows that only one set of “facts” can really be true, and arrogantly writes off everything else to “ignorance”.  From this perspective, Consciousness has nothing to do with creating Reality, because what’s truly Real has an “objective” existence totally independent of the Mind.  Taken in this context, therefore, the symbolic Arrow stands in stark contrast to the fractal Tree of Life, insofar as the former proclaims that there is only one “correct” path, only one “true” reading of the Eternal verities.  This is the metaphysical upshot of Milton’s Death wielding his Arrow to whittle the chaotic turbulence of the Abyss down to a bridge of solid rock.

The Arrow of Death is, therefore, an emblem of the monolithic version of Reality that William Blake associates with the great stone megaliths of Druidism.  He often refers to this doctrine as “Demonstration”.  It represents Truth reduced to a lifeless abstraction:

Everything in Eternity shines by its own Internal light: but thou

Darkenest every Internal light with the arrows of thy quiver

Bound up in the horns of Jealousy to a deadly fading Moon ...

That every thing is fixed Opake without Internal light[12]

 

Blake also invokes the imagery of Druidism for its connotations of Idolatry and human sacrifice.  The doctrine of a demonstrable “objective” Truth is not only inherently idolatrous, it’s the delusion underlying all idolatries.  If we assume, as all but atheists must, that God embodies the ultimate Truth, then this doctrine necessarily implies that God may be conceived in a purely objective sense — a concept which is the essence of idolatry.  Since there is not room in the Universe for more than one “absolute”, the belief in an absolute Space/Time Reality makes God subject to that Reality and thus reduces Him/Her to an object.

What is especially pernicious about the doctrine of Demonstration is its self-fulfilling quality.  The belief that the mind is but a passive receptor of external Reality causes it to function as such.  As a result, in Blake’s words, we “become what we behold”.  If the World around us is filled with death and suffering, then passive perception leads us to believe that the god of “objective” Reality demands his fill of these things.  This explains historical nexus between the ancient idolatries, such as Druidism, and ritual human sacrifice.  The prevalent modern version of Demonstration, on the other hand, appeases the appetite of its cruel god with a far more bloody ritual called warfare.  Blake’s poetry indignantly cries out against this gross degradation of divine Humanity, as personified by his mythic hero Albion:

Where Albion slept beneath the Fatal Tree

And the Druids’ golden Knife,

Rioted in human gore,

In Offerings of Human Life.

 

Albion’s Spectre from his Loins

Tore forth in all the pomp of War!

Satan his name: in flames of fire

He stretched the Druid Pillars far.[13]

 

Just as Milton’s Death opens the road to Hell by petrifying the chaotic fractal order of the Abyss, Blake’s fallen Albion shuts off the visionary dimensions of Space and Time.  In so doing, he binds the human Spirit to the Tree of Moral Virtue:

All these hills & valleys are accursed witnesses of Sin

I therefore condense them into solid rocks, stedfast!

A foundation and certainty and demonstrative truth:

That Man be separate from Man, & here I plant my seat.

 

Cold snows drifted around him: ice coverd his loins around

He sat by Tyburns brook, and underneath his heel shot up

A deadly Tree, he nam’d it Moral Virtue, and the Law

Of God who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight.[14]

 

Ultimately, the universal acceptance of a uniform Reality of absolute Space/Time becomes a matter of coercion and imposition by the hierarchy of individual ego-personas.  Blake himself felt the withering affect of this monstrous oppression:

The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions,

Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death;

Till deep dissimulation is the only defence an honest man has left.

O Polypus of Death, O Spectre over Europe and Asia

Withering the Human Form by Laws of Sacrifice for Sin

By Laws of Chastity & Abhorrence I am witherd up.

Striving to Create a Heaven in which all shall be pure & holy

In their Own Selfhoods, in Natural Selfish Chastity to banish Pity

And dear Mutual Forgiveness; & to become One Great Satan

Inslavd to the most powerful Selfhood: to murder the Divine Humanity[15]

 

This hierarchic monolith of “demonstrative truth” is associated with many of the emblems of Idolatry.  The usual venue of idolatrous altars, for example, is on a mountain-top, the symbolic apex of power and social influence from which “conventional” attitudes are handed down.  In our modern culture of media-imposed mental conformity, the broadcast antenna aptly fits into the same symbolic mold.  It’s especially fitting that such antennae are technically defined as “monopoles”, because that term precisely describes the function which their broadcasts perform — reducing Truth to “information”. 

Truth arises out of the interaction of the two poles of Consciousness, the “Male” Subjective and the “Female” Objective.  Thus, antithetical forces — or, as Blake puts it, “Contraries” — are an inseparable part of the essential nature of Truth.  Indeed, it’s the tension of antitheses that endows Truth with energy and makes it dynamic.  “Information”, on the other hand, is a static rendering of Truth, with all of its internal contradictions erased.  It represents the “objective” monopole, inimical to the living energy of the Mind and Soul.  Whereas Truth has infinite depth, revealing progressively more profound layers of meaning as one goes deeper and deeper, “information” has only a surface of so-called “facts”, only an empty shell devoid of real meaning.  It is pure superficiality unilluminated by any inner Light.

The monopole of objectivism expresses itself in many of the other archetypes of Idolatry, such as the ceremonial pillar and the oak tree from which it’s typically carved.   In fact, the Hebrew name for El  אל, the tyrannical god of monolithic Reality, is an abbreviated form of ’ayil  איל, which signifies an oak tree or column.  The feminine form of  ’ayil is ’elah  אלה, which has the double meaning of and oak tree or a god.  It was of this genre of false gods that Jeremiah wrote:

For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the ax...  But the Lord is the true God [Elohim], he is the living God [Elohim], and an everlasting king... 

Thus shall ye say unto them: The gods [’elahayya] that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth [’arqa], and from under these heavens.[16]

 

What’s especially noteworthy about this passage is the word ’Arqa that is translated into English as “the earth”.  In Hebrew the Earth is most often denoted by ’Eretz, but there’s also the name ’Arqa, which refers to one of the six “lower earths” or Underworlds.  These may be thought of as a series of “prototype” earths, each lacking one or more of the qualities needed to support human Consciousness.  According to the Oral Tradition, these Underworlds comprise the various levels of the Abyss, where they serve as places of exile for certain past generations of men who are permanently cut off from the Tree of Life.  On the first level below the inhabited Earth, for example, is Tziah, a domain of abundant wealth, but without water.  Inhabiting the fourth level Ge is the generation of the Tower of Babel, while the fifth level =Arqa was originally allotted to Cain and his descendants.  ’Arqa corresponds to the region of the Abyss commonly known as Hell, and it contains within it seven subregions, of which the most familiar are named Gehenna, Sheol, Abbadon, and Tophet.[17]

The Hebrew meaning of Cain’s name Qayin is “spear”, which resonates with the other symbols of the one-dimensional egocentric State of Mind we’ve been talking about, such as the Arrow and the monopole.  Those who enter this State of Mind are damned insofar as their experiences become utterly meaningless, and there’s no apparent exit from this existential void.  Jeremiah uses the Hebrew verb karath, meaning “cut off”, to describe this infernal State.  In the passage quoted above, he speaks of the solitary oak tree of Idolatry “cut off” from the rest of the forest.  Elsewhere, the Prophet indicates that this condition of being “cut off” is a veritable disease of Consciousness, leading to spiritual Death:

For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, How are we spoiled! we are greatly confounded, because we have forsaken the land [’eretz], because our dwellings have cast us out... teach your daughters wailing, and every one her neighbor lamentation.  For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without ...  Even the carcases of men shall fall as dung upon the open field, and as the handful after the harvestman, and none shall gather them.[18]    

 

This passage is packed with Kabbalistic symbolism, some of which jumps out at us right away.  The abandoned “dwellings” mishkanot are the fractal niches “under the wings” of the Shechinah, whose name is derived from the same root shakan for “dwelling”.  The “window” that Death is portrayed as entering is Malkuth, the opening into the Womb of Space/Time through which Shechinah’s quintessential Light shines.  It’s apparent, therefore, that Death blocks this “window”, obscuring the supernal Light and cutting Consciousness off from its visionary dimensions.  With the opening to the Womb blocked, the “children” of Imagination are stillborn, and the divine human Form is reduced to a profane “carcase”.   There are several Hebrew words for “carcase”, but Jeremiah specifically chooses  nebelah, which literally signifies an unburied corpse, to be consumed by carrion birds and dogs.  In a figurative sense, nebelah can also denote an idol, which neatly connects the source of the “disease” and its end result, Eternal Death.

A carrion corpse, such as that of the wicked King Ahab or his consort Jezebel, makes an excellent metaphor for Eternal Death because it is “cut off” from the hope of bodily Resurrection.  It represents the false persona of Man that kills its own progeny and destroys the emanations of its higher Selfhood, thereby cutting itself off from the Life of the World to Come.  By opting for the delusive pursuit of its own immortality, the ego-persona sacrifices its “children”, which is to say, the Eternal elements of the Self.  William Blake presents a poetic allegory of this “sacrifice of innocents” carried out by the ego-self, as personified by his villain Hand:

In the Wars of Babel & Shinar, all their Emanations were

Condensed.  Hand has absorbed all his Brethren in his might

And the infant Loves & Graces were lost, for the mighty Hand

Condens’d his Emanations into hard opake substances;

And his infant thoughts and desires, into cold, dark, cliffs of death.

... He seiz’d the bars of condens’d thoughts, to forge them:

Into the sword of war: into the bow and arrow:

... I saw the limbs form’d for exercise contemn’d: & the beauty of

Eternity look’d upon as deformity & loveliness as a dry tree:

I saw disease forming a Body of Death around the Lamb

Of God, to destroy Jerusalem, & devour the body of Albion

... Every Emanative joy is forbidden as a Crime:

And the Emanations buried in the earth with pomp of religion:

Inspiration deny’d; Genius forbidden by laws of punishment![19]

 

The “disease” of which Blake speaks is Shame.  It’s the feeling of Shame that came upon our first Parents when they fell from Grace.  It’s the Shame that we all inherit as a symptom of what Christians call Original Sin.  We’re not born with it, mind you, but it’s imposed upon us by mankind’s false collective persona, which hides behind innocuous-sounding labels like “society”.  From day one of our lives in this World until the day we die, we are all forced constantly to conceal our true feelings, to suppress our outpourings of spontaneous joy, to eschew the entire realm of ecstatic experience.  We dutifully enact these cruel betrayals of our inner Selfhood because we fear that “society” will shun us.  But this “society” to which we pay such abject obeisance is better described as Moloch, the idol who feeds on the flesh of innocents.

Jeremiah uses the “pottet’s vessel” as his image of our true inward identity that’s shaped by the hand of God.  He speaks allegorically of the vessel becoming marred on the wheel so that the potter had to remold it into another vessel.[20]  The aborted vessels here have the same significance in the Prophet’s imagery as the carrion carcasses of which we were just speaking.  Both are exemplars of creations consigned to the trash heap of Eternal annihilation, of beings who have become worthless (one of the alternate meanings of the Hebrew nebelah for “corpse”) because their “inner Light” has been extinguished.  Once again, Jeremiah chooses his words carefully to create multiple layers of meaning.  For “vessel” he uses the word keliy, the feminine plural form of which is kilyah, with the literal meaning of “kidneys” or, in King James= English, “reins”.   In a sacrificial animal, the kidneys were considered the choicest part, because their high fat content made them very combustible.  For that reason, kilyah figuratively came to signify the part of Man that’s most prized by God.  It’s the “interior Self”, the most vital and sensitive aspect of the psyche, the seat of the emotions and affections.  Our “reins” are the part of each one of us that makes us who we truly are in God’s eyes.  They are the inner source of illumination that lights our path to everlasting Life.

All of that being said, one would think that our “reins” would be our most cherished possession in this World, the proverbial “pearl of great price” for which we would sacrifice everything else we have.  But, alas, each of us, in varying degrees, has cast aside this “pearl” as if it were a thing of no value.  And this is why Hell has an outpost in each of our Souls.  The pathological process — popularly known as “socialization” — that prepares us to enact this great betrayal of ourselves unfolds in three steps.  First, we are induced to doubt the worth of our deepest feelings and intuitions.  We are taught to dismiss them as irrational, taught to distrust them, taught to suspect that our “inner voices” mean to do us harm.

The next step in the progress of the disease is to make us ashamed to even acknowledge that we have this inner dimension to our being.  As the Apostle Peter repeatedly denied knowing Jesus, so each of us repeatedly denies knowing the Christ within us.  Ironically, many people who consider themselves religious come to believe that the presence of this Savior within themselves is “sinful”, and that His voice is the voice of the “devil”.  Shame leads us to think that others do not share this interior psychic realm, and that its existence in us is a personal defect that we must keep hidden from others at all costs.  In this way, our shame compels us to cover our inward Light, to present ourselves to the World as spiritually opaque.  And this becomes the habitual mode of our “socially acceptable” behavior, with its daily tedium of insipid superficiality.

At some point, however, try as we might to lock the person who we really are up in the attic of our psyche, we come to fear that our dissimulation is not good enough.  The obsessive fear that we will be “discovered” haunts us all.  This fear comes through in our dreams constantly.  Which of us has not dreamt, more than once, that we are out in public, or at some social gathering, and realize to our shame that we were partially or totally undressed?   In our society ... which is, for all its ludicrous pretensions of personal “freedom”, certainly the most rigidly conformist in the annals of history ...  In our society, the ubiquitous terror of being Aexposed@ for what we are is the source of the greatest pandemic of anxiety disorders that mankind has ever known.

And so, fear is the final stage of this disease, the terminal stage that leads to the Eternal Death of Hell.  It is fear that makes us prisoners within ourselves and makes of us our own jailers.  Our inner voice, to the extent it’s heard at all, is heard only as the voice of lamentation.  We are transported to the desolate anguish of Dante’s Inferno:

Here sighs, laments and loud wailings

   resounded through the starless air,

  so that at first it made me weep.

Strange tongues, horrible outcries,

   woeful utterances, wrathful accents,

   voices shrill and hoarse, mingled with the

sound of hands beating together

Making a tumult that swirls unceasingly

    in that dark and timeless air,

Like sand that in a whirlwind spirals.[21]

 

We will have more to say later on about the image of the spiraling whirlwind.  For now, however, we note that the ancient mystics pictured the solar system as a sort of “whirlpool”, with the planets circling around the central Sun.[22]   As Carl Jung has observed, the Sun is an archetype representing the dominant principle of the human personality.  As the “center” of the psyche’s varied components, the archetypal Sun serves a necessary and life-enabling function, as the actual Sun does in our planetary system.  But if the central Sun becomes oppressively dominant, it ceases to sustain its planetary “children” and begins to consume them.  When that occurs, the planets are pulled from their stable orbits about the center and begin to spiral into the Sun.  We have the astronomical examples of other planetary systems where the central star is so massive as to gradually pull everything into itself.

  With the Fall of Man, the balance was lost between the dominant center of the human psyche and its subordinate constituents.  An egocentric Sun emerged and the planetary system began to resemble the all-consuming whirlpool.  Since the path which the planets are observed to travel through the sky is known as the “ecliptic”, this condition of psychic disequilibrium was described allegorically as the ecliptic becoming “unhinged”.  This metaphysical disorientation was thought to be manifested in the oblique angle (roughly 23.5˚) which the ecliptic makes to the celestial equator.  Since the Sun follows this same oblique path, we have seasons of oppressive heat and bitter cold, in contrast to the perpetual springtime of Eden.  In Paradise Lost, Milton ascribes this solar misalignment to the degradation of the natural World that accompanied the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden:

Some say he [God] bid his Angels turns askance

The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more

From the Sun’s Axle; they with labor push’d

Oblique the Centric Globe: Some say the Sun

Was bid to turn Reins from th’ Equinoctial Road

... to bring in change

Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring

Perpetual smil’d on Earth with vernant Flow’rs ...

The Sun, as from Thyestean Banquet, turn’d

His course intended; else how had the World

Inhabited, though sinless more than now,

Avoided pinching cold and scorching heat?[23] 

 

Milton suggests that the Sun’s deviant course was provoked by his revulsion at the sight of the “Thyestean Banquet”.  This is an allusion to one of a series of interrelated Greek myths, the common theme of which is child sacrifice.  According to these tales, Thyestes unwittingly ate the flesh of his five sons at a banquet prepared by his brother Atreus.  Thyestes and Atreus were, in turn, grandsons of Tantalus, who served the Olympian gods and goddesses a stew containing the body of his own son Pelops.  Some of my readers may recollect the eternal torment suffered by Tantalus for his crime, from which we get the word “tantalize”:   He hangs in the Netherworld from the bough of a tree suspended over a lake, the waters of which recede from his mouth whenever he attempts to quench his thirst.  Allegorically speaking, therefore, the crime of Tantalus forever excludes him from drinking of the Living Water which restores the Soul to its Eternal dwelling place.  After punishing Tantalus, Zeus ordered that the dismembered body of Pelops be reassembled.  Since the left shoulder was missing, however, an ivory shoulder was inserted in its place and Pelops was revived.

Pelop’s role in the myth is relevant to our discussion in several respects.  Although he is restored to life, a part of him remains missing; he’s not a complete being.  In a manner of speaking, he’s the Greek counterpart of Frankenstein, lacking that ineffable something that makes one truly human.  Shortly, we’ll speak more to this theme in terms of the Jewish golem and modern cloning.  But for now we can intuit that Pelop’s missing shoulder represents something akin to the “reins”of which we’ve been speaking.  It's an emblem of the innermost Self, sacrificed for the sake of the ego-persona.

It’s also noteworthy, however, that the myth specifies that Pelop’s “missing part” is his left shoulder.  We’ve already seen the important role that archery played in the metaphysical symbolism of the ancient world.  Anyone who has ever used a bow knows that the quiver of arrows hangs on the left shoulder.  In archaic mysticism, the “quiver” was associated with the ecliptic plane, envisioned as being suspended from a fulcrum in the cosmos in the same way as a quiver of arrows hangs from the shoulder.   This esoteric connotation is reflected in the Hebrew word Teli, which literally means “quiver”, but also signifies the invisible axis about which the firmament revolves.  In Chapter Three we learned that Teli is portrayed as a huge Serpent, which sustains the material Universe in equilibrium with the Pleroma.  We also said that Teli embodies the 12 diagonal paths of the Tree of Life, the so-called “Arms of the World” that enclose the Tree and protect it from infestation by the Qlippot.  The number 12 also identifies Teli with the ecliptic plane, since the latter is divided into 12 segments corresponding to the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

In our last chapter, we also discovered that the counterpart of Teli in Greek mythology is the serpent Python.  Python was the nemesis of the Sun god Apollo, who was a renowned archer.  Apollo, whose name means “Destroyer”, is the apotheosis of the ego’s destructive domination of the  human persona.  Thus, his weapon is the Arrow of monolithic “Truth”, of Reason without Vision.  We’ve associated this Arrow with a spiritual pathology leading to the Hell of Eternal Death.  In a figurative sense, the shooting of Arrows often represents the propagation of a plague, whose victims are struck as if by invisible darts.  Before he was “promoted” to Sun god, Apollo was worshiped in the form of a mouse.  Apollo’s mouse-cult originated among the blacksmiths of the land of Tubal Cain.[24]  Mice are underground creatures and are known to spread plague.  Serpents, on the other hand, help prevent the propagation of plague by consuming rodents.  Accordingly, in the myth we find Python initially pursuing the “mouse” Apollo, but ultimately being slain by one of his arrows.

If we put all this together, the Greek story of Apollo slaying Python appears to be an allegory for the catastrophic de-coupling of the two “axes” of Consciousness — the Subjective and Objective.  We can think, in metaphorical terms, of the Subjective Axis as forming the “axle” of the Earth=s equatorial “wheel”, while the Objective Axis serves as the “axle” of the larger “wheel” of the ecliptic plane.  When the two “axles” are aligned, we have the configuration of a “wheel within a wheel”, which is the hallmark fractal pattern of the Elohim’s Eternal Forms.  When the “axles” are misaligned, however, the wheels only meet at two points and are constrained to move with the clockwork compulsion of mechanical cogs.

When Apollo slays Python with the strait Arrow of rationalism, the Objective Axis of the Serpent Teli falls out of sync with its Subjective counterpart, and a great breach opens in the fabric of Reality.  In keeping with the Sun god’s rodent pedigree, his Arrows are vectors of a pestilence afflicting mankind’s collective Consciousness.  One of the symptoms of this plague is a pervasive amnesia that has wiped away our memory of the symbolic language underlying the sacred texts of the ancient world.  Inquiries like the ones we’re pursuing in this book are merely the amnesiacs’ pitiful gropings in the dark for clues to who they really are.

Before we leave our foray into Greek myth, let’s tie up the loose ends we left in the Tantalus-Pelops story.  What Pelops lost was his left shoulder, the support from which the “quiver” Teli hangs.  Teli stands for the axis of the ecliptic plane, in the cosmic sense, and for the Objective Axis of the psyche.   In addition to meaning “quiver”, Teli also denotes a “hinge”.  So we might say that Pelop’s plight represents the “unhinging” of the Objective side of Consciousness.  Instead of a living shoulder of flesh and blood, Pelops is left with an inanimate chunk of ivory, the bone of a dead animal.  Allegorically speaking, his Objective experience — that is, his perception of things outside himself — has been “ossified”, pathologically hardened into a rigid pattern of absolutes.  It’s not surprising, therefore, that the myth goes on to tell how, after Pelop’s death, his ossified shoulder becomes a cult-object fought over by the warring empires of Troy, Greece and Rome.  Known as the Palladium, it’s location has always marked the apex of the World’s ruling elite, whose power flows from the hierarchal ordering of Consciousness exemplified by the Arrow.

Ironically, the Arrow is itself a prime example of an image in which contradictory realities are superimposed on one another.  It’s yet another of those bipolar complementary concepts that we’ve encountered throughout our inquiries.  On the one hand, it characterizes the complete dissociation of the Subjective and Objective modes of perception.  This dissociation was the immediate cause of the Shevirah, the primeval catastrophe in which egocentric self-love shattered the unity of the World Soul.  In this sense, the Arrow corresponds to the one that the Psalmist’s wicked archer makes ready to shoot at the upright in Heart.

... the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart.  If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?[25]

 

In this instance, the Arrow is said to be shot “privily”, which actually translates in Hebrew as “during the dark phase of the Moon”.  The darkness of the Moon represents the infernal State of spiritual Opacity, in which the Shechinah finds Herself widowed and in exile. 

On the other hand, however, the Arrow can also be the Arrow of Righteousness, the phallus with which the supernal Bridegroom penetrates His Bride and restores the sexual Equilibrium of the Upper and Lower Worlds.  The Psalmist apparently understood this antithesis quite well, since he juxtaposes the image of the Arrow of Death with that of the Foundation of the Righteous.  The latter is, of course, an attribute of the SephirahYesod.  Yesod represents the Chai, the active Life-force of the Spiritual Body.  Blake characterizes Yesod as the Harrow of Shaddai, which is to say, the means by which the Eternity penetrates Space/Time and provides its background.  If deprived of a visionary perception of that Eternal background, however, the Mind instead harrows the barren soil of Hell, and Life appears as nothing more than a painful march toward Death.  Trudging along under the tyranny of Death’s Arrow, our spontaneous experiences — the cherished “children” our Imagination — are stillborn, sacrificed at the alter of Baal.  Revisiting Jeremiah’s parable of the potter’s warped “vessel”, we find him describing precisely this abominable negation of our inner Light:

Thus saith the Lord, Go and get a potter’s earthen bottle... And go forth into the valley of the son of Hinnom ... And say, ... Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God [Elohim] of Israel; Behold, I will bring evil upon this place ... Because they have forsaken me, ... and have filled this place with the blood of innocents;

They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal ...

Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that this place shall no more be called Tophet ... but the valley of slaughter ... and their carcases will I give to be meat for the fowls of heaven and the beasts of the earth.

And I will make this city desolate ... every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss because of the plagues thereof.

... Then shalt thou break the bottle... And shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Even so will I break the people and this city, as one breaketh a potter’s vessel, that cannot be made whole again: and they shall bury them in Tophet, till there be no place to bury.[26]

 

 

 

The Soul in the Wilderness

Further exploration of the antithetical symbolism of the Arrow provides us with an excellent opportunity to illustrate the methodology of Kabbalism.  If we return again to the first word of Genesis, “in the Beginning” Beresheet, it can also be read as Bara sheet, which means “created Six”.  This reveals that Elohim’s work was preconceived from “the Beginning” as spanning Six Days.  It also expresses the idea that, “In the Beginning, Elohim created Six”.  The Six referred to here are the Six Sephirot from Mercy Chesed to the Foundation Yesod, which together comprise the supernal Body of the Divine Man, Zer Anpin.  Reflecting the distinctly masculine character of the Six, the Sephirah Yesod is often represented by a phallic Arrow.  But the figure of the Arrow describes Yesod in another sense, as well.  As the ordinary arrow splits the wood of the mundane tree, so Yesod, the Arrow of Righteousness, “splits” the Tree of Life.  Yesod “splits” the Tree in the sense of completing its great Middle Axis.  This Middle Pillar of the Tree consists of five levels: the Crown/Keter, Equilibrium/Daat, Symmetry/Tipheret, the Foundation/Yesod, and the Garden/Malkut.  These five levels, in turn, correspond to the five strata of the World Soul or Pleroma.  (See the Tree of Life, Figure 1)

 The Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life constitutes its Axis of Symmetry.   Symmetry, we remember, is the principle by which things are divided in the most harmonious and beautiful manner.  Symmetry was a principle very much at work in Elohim’s process of creating the Universe in which we live and breath.  But our Universe, we must always remind ourselves, is but the latest of a nigh-infinite series of Worlds which have hitherto come and gone.  And the reason these other extinct Universes have extinguished themselves is their lack of Symmetry.  Even an extinguished fire leaves its embers, however, and so the “afterglow” of the failed Worlds persists in the form of what the Jewish mystics call the “Other Side”, of which we will speak more presently.

But before we do that, let’s make a few more observations concerning the concept of Symmetry.  One of the most enchanting characteristics of living organisms is their remarkably intricate Symmetry.  Living Symmetry exceeds that of inanimate matter insofar as it extends inwardly as well as outwardly.  Consider, for example, the individual human Body.  It has the obvious outward plane of Symmetry which splits it into right and left halves.  But, as an organism that unfolds in four-dimensional Space/Time, the Body retains within itself the imprints of the forms it has assumed in the past, as well as the intimations of the forms it will assume in the future.  This thought was most felicitously expressed in the words of poet William Woodsworth: “The Child is father of the Man.”

When we think about it, it’s the inward Symmetry of living creatures that enables them to replicate themselves.  Organisms grow outward in a process driven by the splitting of DNA along its axis of Symmetry.  Modern science has learned to apply this principle in a process we know as “cloning”, by which the DNA of an organism is induced to divide and replicate itself.  Some scientists, in fact, see in the cloning process the potential realization of the age-old dream of human immortality.  The Oral Tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, however, informs us that quasi-human specimens were fashioned by the holy sages of past eras, including the Prophet Jeremiah.  The Oral Tradition (of which the books of the Kabbalah are a part) refers to these beings as golem, and even goes so far as to suggest that Adam himself was initially such a creature.  This interpretation relies upon a passage from the Psalms in which Adam addresses Yahweh, saying: “Thine eyes beheld my golem, being yet unformed.” [27]   The esoteric teaching goes on to say that Adam did not remain a golem, but became truly human when God-Elohim breathed into him the Breath of Life.

The Breath of Life is nothing that can be replicated in a scientific laboratory.  Yet the Imagination of Michaelangelo somehow managed to capture it on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  This Spirit wind Ruach, as the Hebrews style it, proceeds from a universal inward Symmetry that is not directly accessible to our scientific instruments — nor, indeed, to any purely physical probing.  This inward Symmetry is something we call the Soul.  Again, the traditional lore of the Hebrew Midrashim explains that the Soul has five “levels”, which we may interpret as five planes of Symmetry.  The upper two of these levels or planes do not extend into this World, but are reserved for the Righteous in the World to Come.

Accordingly, the three lower planes of the Soul constitute the inward Symmetry of our earthly Body.  First, we have a “vital” Soul Nephesh, which keeps us alive.  Every living thing is endowed in some measure with this “vital” Soul.  Next, we have an “articulate” Soul, which allows us to speak and communicate our Thoughts.  This is the Spirit breath Ruach of which we have already spoken.  Lastly, we have something best described as a “collective” Soul, which the Hebrews named Neshamah.  Neshamah has a distinctly feminine character and is considered to be an aspect of Shechinah, the Divine Presence of the Female side of the Godhead.  It follows that, when we are endowed with the inward Symmetry of Neshamah, we are Beings capable of entering God’s immediate Presence, as the Prophets have done.

The Kabbalah’s Zohar leads us to understand that, while the vital and articulate spirits Nephesh and Ruach are with us as long as we are alive and aware, the Neshamah comes and goes pretty much as She pleases.  Just like a woman, She would be pursued and courted.  At times, She flys into the desert so that the Poet and the Prophet may seek Her there and speak loving words to Her Heart.

Behold, I will allure Her, and lead Her into the Wilderness, and speak comfortably unto Her.[28]

 

In Hebrew, the word for Wilderness is Midbar, and it has a rich metaphorical significance in the Holy Scriptures.  Midbar represents a landscape of desolation, which, we recall, is a signature trait of utter Symmetry.  Such total Symmetry demands that All-That-Is-Above be faithfully reflected in All-That-Is-Below.  In Midbar, therefore, the image of the Divine Man in the upper world is matched by His equally Divine Similtude in the lower realm.  This correspondence is implicit in the derivation of the word Midbar from the Hebrew root bar, which means “son” and is related to the verb bara “to create”.  We have just spoken of the word-play in the opening passage of Genesis between the phrase “In the Beginning” Beresheet and “created Six” Bara sheet.  The six-day process of Creation is accomplished by ten utterances from the mouth of the Elohim.  And so we’re not surprised to find that Midbar is also related to the verb dabar “to speak”.

Recalling again that the Jewish Scriptures were originally written without vowel markings, we find the word Midbar frequently used as a device to produce multiple layers of meaning in the same text.  Perhaps the most “multi-layered” book of the Bible is Solomon’s Shir Hasshirim, the Song of Songs.  The Beloved to whom Solomon addresses his mystical Songs is, of course, none other than God’s Female Emanation, the Shechinah:

Who is this coming up out of the Wilderness, like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense?[29]

 

In the foregoing passage, the phrase “coming up out the Wilderness” also lends itself to the reading “from the Word uttered by the Mouth”.[30]  The “Mouth”, as we discussed in Chapter One, is a symbol for Malkut, the lowest Vessel of the Tree of Life and the metaphysical Womb in which the World Soul gestates.  Malkut represents the lower aspect of the Shechinah, i.e., the form She assumes when She descends into the World of Space and Time.   The higher aspect of Shekinah resides in the Sephirah Binah, where She serves as the font of Wisdom and the Divine Mother of all Souls.  We can see a clear parallel here between the Shechinah’s nature and that of the Blessed Mother in Christian theology.  Indeed, the blessed Womb of the Virgin Mary is the “Mouth” which “utters the Word”, in the sense of issuing forth the human embodiment of the sublime Logos.  And it’s no accident that the attendants to the Nativity brought gifts of frankincense and myrrh, the scents which King Solomon attributes to the Shechinah in the passage quoted above.

In the Introduction to this book, we spoke of how Jesus began his Messianic mission with a journey into the Wilderness, where he was led by the Shechinah in the shape of a Dove.  There he encountered the Devil, who we have learned to associate with the unconscious Shadow of the ego-persona.  It appears that Jesus had to confront and overcome this Adversary before he could begin to aspire to the identity of a true Messiah.  The three tests that Satan put to Christ reveal the three great illusions of fallen Consciousness.[31]  First is the illusion of an absolute “objective” Reality, as epitomized by the stones which Satan would have Jesus transform into loaves of bread.  The answer that Christ gives him is that the immutable perception of these things as either stones or loaves is incompatible with everlasting Life.  Rather, their manifestation as stones or bread or whatever is a process of spontaneous Creation from moment to moment, with a new Reality flowing out of each Word uttered by the Mouth of the High Holy One.  This thought was expressed quite beautifully in one of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics:

For the Holy One dreams of a Letter,

              and He dreams of a Letter’s breath;

Oh, bless the continuous stutter

              of the Word being made into Flesh![32]

 

From the illusion of an “objective” Time/Space Reality, Satan next offers the illusion of an objective deity.  He bids Jesus give a demonstration of His Father’s power by having His angels bear Him down to the ground from the parapet of the Temple.  By way of answer to this challenge, Christ refers to an incident from Exodus that occurred in the Wilderness of Sin.  Here the children of Israel murmured against Moses and were about to stone him beca