ANCIENT ASTRONAUT THEORY: ALIEN INTERVENTION #7

ON THE ORIGIN OF
THE KABBALAH - PART I

Divine revelation shatters traditional beliefs

Judaic scholars are now some four centuries removed from the time when a treasure house of knowledge, orally transmitted among the Jews for a millennium, came to an abrupt end. Only bits and pieces of obscure writings remain. For their part, contemporary scholars have no great secret to protect, and they are unlikely to be burned at the stake regardless of what they write. With no need to write cryptically themselves, they find themselves unable to recognized cryptic writing when they encounter it. Nonetheless, out of respect for antiquity, they tend to refrain from referring to generations of their ancestors as lunatics or madmen; instead, they use the polite term "mystic." I too shall use the term "mystic" but only as a matter of convenience.

Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) begins with the first sentence of book called the Sefer Yetzirah or Book of Creation (at times it was more widely known as the Book of Abraham in mystic circles). Scholars say that the Sefer Yetzirah is the oldest known text related to Jewish mysticism and they say that after the Bible, it is the most commented book in Jewish history. As we shall see, there is a lot to comment on. The first sentence of this book reads as follows:

"Into thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom did (he/it) engrave Yah, Lord of the Legions, God of Israel, God of Life, King of Ages, Almighty God, Creator of Good, Dwelling in the Heights, Dwelling in Eternity, Holy Be His Name, and create (his/its) world with three books: written, numerical, and verbal."

This is an example of cryptic writing at its very best: something that cannot be fully understood without possession of information that is not provided. To this day, the identity of the thirty-two paths of wisdom, that is, what they really constitute or relate to, is a complete unknown for nearly everybody, and the same can be said of the three books mentioned toward the end (I referred to those books in an earlier article). To add to the suspense, neither the engraver nor the creator is identified in the Hebrew text. The result is quagmire for contemporary translators who have struggled endlessly with this sentence and it is not surprising to find almost as many different translations as there are translators. The sentence also leads to a crisis of faith. After all, the God is Israel is the Eternal Being, the Prime Mover, the Creator of everything, but here someone or something else is engraving His Name and someone or something else is creating a world.

It was a crisis of faith not only for contemporary translators but also for the medieval mystics. Unfortunately for the mystics, they could not simply discard the Sefer Yetzirah. It was widely known is mystic circles that the book was of divine origin, hand delivered to the Jews by the prophet Elijah himself on a return descent to Earth. For better or worse, this divine revelation was something that had to be confronted and dealt with.

The mystic solution to this enigma was to postulate the existence of a primordial substance that preceded all else, a white matter or white light. They called this substance Ein Sof, and out of this substance emanated the creation of a spiritual "world" (legions of good and bad angels battling for power) that preceded the material world, and out of this substance emanated the God of Israel, who in turn became the Creator and Ruler of the material world. Problem resolved: the Sefer Yetzirah now comes a little closer to the beliefs of traditional Judaism.

The first sentence of the Sefer Yetzirah also informs us that the ten Names of God were engraved. It is only natural to ask: Into what were they engraved? The Sefer Yetzirah is explicit in answering that question. The ten Names of God were engraved into (each of) thirty two paths of wisdom. So clearly these are "paths of wisdom," not "paths to wisdom." In other words, these paths had to have physical existence, and just as the Names of God are represented by letters, one can assume that the paths contain letters. Here the Hebrew word for "engrave" has the sense of "carved out," like letters carved out of a substance such as wood or stone.

Into what substance were the thirty-paths engraved? This was extremely easy for the mystics to figure out since they were also in direct physical possession of the paths (another deliverance of the prophet Elijah). It turns out that it was not by sheer accident that the mystics came up with the idea of Ein Sof. That was exactly the material into which the Names of God were engraved, that is to say, into a small piece of the glowing white matter of the primordial universe. It was a material seemingly composed of eternal fire and light (the mystics indicate that it continued to glow for centuries). So it is not really a question of "carved out of" but rather "burned into," like black fire burning into white fire.

At this point, the mystics were still far from resolving all the mysteries of the first sentence of the Sefer Yetzirah. Among other things, it seemed no more likely that Ein Sof would engrave into itself than God would engrave His own Names. So perhaps the "he/it" was not Ein Sof after all, but someone or something else? I will deal with that issue (and an even greater quagmire facing the early mystics) in On the Origin of Jewish Mysticism - Part II.

 NOTE: The Origin of the Kabbalah articles include speculations.

Proceed to Origins of the Kabbalah - Part II

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