NUR
2009-04-03 06:22:56 UTC
http://www.iranian.com/main/blog/nur/god-satan-adam-eve-and-kabbalah
Amongst some of the pre-Zoharic schools of the Kabbalah the symbol of
the Tree of Knowledge (etz ha-da’at) – i.e. the Tree from which in the
Book of Genesis God forbad Adam and Eve to eat – and the Tree of Life
(etz ha-chayyim) are held to be the same Tree and thus the same linked
symbol looked at from differing perspectives. An anonymous Kabbalistic
treatise probably written in the twelfth century, entitled the Secret
of the Tree of Knowledge (sod etz ha-da’at), outright asserts that the
two trees are “fundamentally one: they grow from a common root, in
which masculine and feminine, the giving and the receiving, the
creative and the reflective, are one” (G. Scholem “Sitra Ahra: Good
and Evil in the Kabbalah” in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, New
York, 1991, p. 70). Within the model of the sephirotic Tree of Life –
i.e. the symbolic Kabbalistic representation of the universe – two
divisions bifurcate the Tree into two pillars: the pillar of Mercy
(chesed) on the right-hand side and the pillar of Severity (din) on
the left-hand side. Similarly in mystical Islam this is held as the
dual attributes of Beauty (jamal) and Majesty (jalal), which manifest
as the divine attributes of Mercy (rahma) and Wrath (qahr).
Boldly disclosing a secret that other Kabbalists have only cryptically
indicated, the author of the anonymous treatise then asserts that the
Tree of Knowledge represents the Pillar of Severity, or the left-hand
side of the Tree of Life, which by itself (when separated or divided
from its other side) projects the satanic image of God. Now the Tree
of Life is the model of the emanations, as well as the stages of the
inner life, of the Godhead from Its station of total concealment,
transcendence, hiddeness and unknowability into the stages of the
creative manifestation of the world. When our anonymous Kabbalist
author holds to the position he does, much like Mansur al-Hallaj in
Islamic Sufism (as set-out in his Kitâb al-Tawâsîn), he is also
simultaneously asserting the fundamental unity of God and the Devil.
In other words, in this perspective, Satan is no more than a theophany
(tajallî), or a specifically projected (or fragmented, maybe even
broken) image, of the Divine Itself – nothing more.
That stated, the author goes on to say that so long as the two trees
are connected as a single Tree, the Tree of Life (mercy) predominates
over the power of severity (wrath), i.e. the Tree of Knowledge, which
is the harsh and critical power within the Godhead, that the author
conceives as the image of the Devil. Contraction (what the Sufis call
‘qabz’) is therefore complemented by expansion (‘bast’), both of which
are the dual processes of the Godhead’s inhalation and exhalation of
existence into being and then into destruction and annihilation. Now
severity (din), as a restrictive quality, tends to seek independent
existence. However, this tendency is constantly overwhelmed by the
flow of divine life and divine grace, so that it remains a mere
possibility – the great fire of the “Holy One blessed be He that only
consumes when it is no longer confined within the framework of its
original harmony” (ibid).
Satan’s independent being is thus, symbolically, a consequence of the
decision of Adam who, by his improper contemplation of the Divine,
caused a separation within the Godhead that had a baleful effect on
all creation. In other words, it was Adam who created the Devil by his
contemplation, not God. Looked at another way, the Serpent of the Tree
of Knowledge only becomes the Serpent as Devil in the erroneous and
fragmented contemplation of Adam himself. This is quite similar to a
position held by the Sethian Gnostics in antiquity who held the
Serpent of the Tree in the story of Genesis to actually be the True
Divinity while Yahweh (whom they dubbed Ialdoboath), who expelled Adam
and Eve from the Garden, the real villian. In this novel Kabbalistic
re-interpretation of the Sethian Gnostic allegory the villian is
actually created, or birthed, by the conception of Adam himself, and
not by the Godhead in its elevated Unity.
We can also infer from the perspective of the Qur’an and suggest that
the Iblis who refuses God’s command to bow down to Adam in pre-
creation is in fact, cipherically speaking, a facet of Adam himself,
or the concupiscent aspect of the human ego that witnesses the world
through fragments, wilfully misperceives the Truth in its whole, and
so refuses the Truth, as it were. Hallaj, on the other hand, also
suggests that the Devil’s disobedience of God in pre-eternity was
actually the act of the perfect lover refusing to love any other (or
to even conceive of an ‘Other’) but the Beloved (mahbûb) even if the
Beloved commands it so. Disobedience here thus becomes a symbol for
initiatic passage and apotheosis with Hallaj that now suggests as a
corrolary the role of the Devil as the gatekeeper par excellence to
the Godhead’s Tawhid (unicity) through whom all the true gnostics
(‘urafa) must eventually pass in order to attain perfect union with
the Divine (wisâl).
Returning to the Kabbalah: Our anonymous Kabbalist goes on to say that
when Adam plucked and ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he
allowed the power acting in the Tree of Knowledge (i.e. the principle
of Severity) to operate upon it in isolation. This power was thereby
removed from its position within the spheres of the Tree of Life and
now gained control over Adam as the satanic principle of evil. The
nature of evil is therefore the separation and isolation of those
things that should be united – and, conversly, the separation of the
false unities which should be isolated because they are in reality
negation. As should be noted, the language, argumentation and
symbolism here is thoroughly alchemical – and this in itself is
instructive because it suggests the stages of the Great Work of
alchemy as symbolic microcosmic instances of the greater creative
Divine process itself.
Given this, the point is made that so long as humanity absorbs this
separation between severity and mercy, the Tree of Knowledge and the
Tree of Life – this being here the meaning of the ‘eating of the
fruit,’ which belongs to the fruits of the soul – it creates
inauthentic, false systems of reality, productive of evil – i.e. that
which is separated from the Divine. Both humanity’s experience of
reality and its moral nature are thus damaged by this misguided
contemplation. Only through the acts of righteousness and the acts of
prophets and saints – even when such acts may appear to contravene
standards and appear as their opposite – annul this separation of the
Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. And through such annulment a
person can become reconnected to the original world of unity, which is
authentically beyond mundane notions of good and evil, in which evil
as evil will no longer be evil because it will have been restored to
its proper station of holiness. Meaning, whatever the evil, once
marshalled in the totality of its struggle to restore the pristine
unity, thereby loses its exclusively satanic element and itself serves
the good by being reabsorbed into the Good in its root. Among other
reasons, this is why several readings of the Book of Job have Satan-
Lucifer in the position of accuser standing on the right hand of God
Himself, in fact as an Archangel. Suggestions as to the connection
between the symbolism of Lucifer-Satan and the Chief Archangel
Metatron are legion in the more radical interpretations of the
Kabbalah.
In the related Kabbalistic doctrine of the Tikkunim Olam (the
restoration of the world) it is held that acts of righteousness will
restore the sparks of divinity trapped in matter from the beginning of
creation and elevate them back to their spiritual realities. This
doctrine is also connected to the doctrine of the coming of the
Messiah and the final, complete Redemption of the World through Him.
Note there are symbolic connections between Messiah, Metatron and
Shekinah. Without getting into further details of messianic
speculation, one interesting point that several Kabbalistic texts
assert, including the Zohar, is that whereas at the beginning of
creation Adam was unprepared to eat of the ‘fruit’, and his eating
thereof became the cause of his banishment and separation from the
Garden of Eden; in the End Times, on the other hand, Adam will have
truly become ready to eat of the fruit of the Tree – and by rejoining
the two trees as One Tree - thereby worthy of re-entry back into the
Garden of Eden. In the Kabbalah and throughout much of the non-
Christian gnostic and esoteric systems of the Abrahamic Tradition
(especially in Mandaean Gnosis) the symbolism of Adam is often seen as
a cipher linked to the symbol of the Messiah Himself - with all the
prophets and saints being mere christophanies of Adam, as it were,
with the final one of this universal cycle of hierophanies being Adam
himself come as the Redeemer: i.e. the one fallen at the beginning
being the savior rising at the end of time, i.e. the saved savior, the
redeemed redeemer; descent is complemented by ascent!
And what of the meaning of the ‘fruit’, the ‘One Tree’ and the re-
entry back into the Garden of Eden? All of these symbols denote the
same thing from various loci of perception or waystations of
realization, and that is, gnosis (‘irfân). But the key to this
realization, the important element, as several more radical Kabbalists
have repeatedly suggested, cryptically lies in the passage of Genesis
3:20 and the name of Eve (Hebrew cHava חוה, Arabic Hawâ’ حوأ) which
is shorthand for “the Mother of All-Living” (em koll hayy חי כל אמ).
Etymologically, the name ‘Eve’ (חוה) and the Aramaic words
‘life’ (חיה) and ‘serpent’ (חויא) derive from the same root. But the
title “the Mother of All-Living” is also as well held by some as a
title of the Shekinah (the feminine presence of the Godhead) – i.e.
the Arabic ‘Sakina’ that also means here the Divine ‘Dwelling’ (from
the root s-k-n سكن). When now the symbolism of ‘Serpent’, ‘Tree’ and
‘Woman’ are juxtaposed we are through biblical myth and symbology
actually deciphering an Abrahamic version of the symbolism of the
Kundalini well known in Tantric Yoga. Put another way, and this is
the explicit position of the Great Andalusian Sufi Master Muhyiddin
Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), perhaps God manifests through woman in order for
man to realize and unite with God – and vice versa. This is because
the most sacred temple or mosque of divine worship is when sex -
reclaimed both from the clutches of contemporary materialist
degradation as well as fundamentalist religious narratives of shame -
becomes the highest and truest of holy sacraments.
Let me now quote a passage from Siyyid ‘Alî Muhammad Shîrazî, the
Bâb, from his very first extensive work, the Commentary on the Surah
of the Cow (al-baqara),
“And a thing may not draw nigh to [anything] beyond its origin. So
when Adam drew nigh to the Tree of Reality (shajarat’ul-haqîqa)
shining forth from Fatima [i.e. the transfiguration of Eve] by means
of the drawing nigh of existence, he disobeyed his Lord, because God
commanded him not to approach it, except through ecstasy (al-wijdân).
Because at the time of ecstasy the “thing drawn nigh unto” is the Tree
and nothing other than it.”
(Trans. Todd Lawson, “The Authority of the Feminine and Fatima’s Place
in an Early Work by the Bab,” 2001, p. 113).
To close, a deep meditation and complete re-appraisal of the symbolism
of the Tarot trump card known as the ‘Devil’ is now in order.
Solvé et coagula!
Wahîd Azal
Amongst some of the pre-Zoharic schools of the Kabbalah the symbol of
the Tree of Knowledge (etz ha-da’at) – i.e. the Tree from which in the
Book of Genesis God forbad Adam and Eve to eat – and the Tree of Life
(etz ha-chayyim) are held to be the same Tree and thus the same linked
symbol looked at from differing perspectives. An anonymous Kabbalistic
treatise probably written in the twelfth century, entitled the Secret
of the Tree of Knowledge (sod etz ha-da’at), outright asserts that the
two trees are “fundamentally one: they grow from a common root, in
which masculine and feminine, the giving and the receiving, the
creative and the reflective, are one” (G. Scholem “Sitra Ahra: Good
and Evil in the Kabbalah” in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, New
York, 1991, p. 70). Within the model of the sephirotic Tree of Life –
i.e. the symbolic Kabbalistic representation of the universe – two
divisions bifurcate the Tree into two pillars: the pillar of Mercy
(chesed) on the right-hand side and the pillar of Severity (din) on
the left-hand side. Similarly in mystical Islam this is held as the
dual attributes of Beauty (jamal) and Majesty (jalal), which manifest
as the divine attributes of Mercy (rahma) and Wrath (qahr).
Boldly disclosing a secret that other Kabbalists have only cryptically
indicated, the author of the anonymous treatise then asserts that the
Tree of Knowledge represents the Pillar of Severity, or the left-hand
side of the Tree of Life, which by itself (when separated or divided
from its other side) projects the satanic image of God. Now the Tree
of Life is the model of the emanations, as well as the stages of the
inner life, of the Godhead from Its station of total concealment,
transcendence, hiddeness and unknowability into the stages of the
creative manifestation of the world. When our anonymous Kabbalist
author holds to the position he does, much like Mansur al-Hallaj in
Islamic Sufism (as set-out in his Kitâb al-Tawâsîn), he is also
simultaneously asserting the fundamental unity of God and the Devil.
In other words, in this perspective, Satan is no more than a theophany
(tajallî), or a specifically projected (or fragmented, maybe even
broken) image, of the Divine Itself – nothing more.
That stated, the author goes on to say that so long as the two trees
are connected as a single Tree, the Tree of Life (mercy) predominates
over the power of severity (wrath), i.e. the Tree of Knowledge, which
is the harsh and critical power within the Godhead, that the author
conceives as the image of the Devil. Contraction (what the Sufis call
‘qabz’) is therefore complemented by expansion (‘bast’), both of which
are the dual processes of the Godhead’s inhalation and exhalation of
existence into being and then into destruction and annihilation. Now
severity (din), as a restrictive quality, tends to seek independent
existence. However, this tendency is constantly overwhelmed by the
flow of divine life and divine grace, so that it remains a mere
possibility – the great fire of the “Holy One blessed be He that only
consumes when it is no longer confined within the framework of its
original harmony” (ibid).
Satan’s independent being is thus, symbolically, a consequence of the
decision of Adam who, by his improper contemplation of the Divine,
caused a separation within the Godhead that had a baleful effect on
all creation. In other words, it was Adam who created the Devil by his
contemplation, not God. Looked at another way, the Serpent of the Tree
of Knowledge only becomes the Serpent as Devil in the erroneous and
fragmented contemplation of Adam himself. This is quite similar to a
position held by the Sethian Gnostics in antiquity who held the
Serpent of the Tree in the story of Genesis to actually be the True
Divinity while Yahweh (whom they dubbed Ialdoboath), who expelled Adam
and Eve from the Garden, the real villian. In this novel Kabbalistic
re-interpretation of the Sethian Gnostic allegory the villian is
actually created, or birthed, by the conception of Adam himself, and
not by the Godhead in its elevated Unity.
We can also infer from the perspective of the Qur’an and suggest that
the Iblis who refuses God’s command to bow down to Adam in pre-
creation is in fact, cipherically speaking, a facet of Adam himself,
or the concupiscent aspect of the human ego that witnesses the world
through fragments, wilfully misperceives the Truth in its whole, and
so refuses the Truth, as it were. Hallaj, on the other hand, also
suggests that the Devil’s disobedience of God in pre-eternity was
actually the act of the perfect lover refusing to love any other (or
to even conceive of an ‘Other’) but the Beloved (mahbûb) even if the
Beloved commands it so. Disobedience here thus becomes a symbol for
initiatic passage and apotheosis with Hallaj that now suggests as a
corrolary the role of the Devil as the gatekeeper par excellence to
the Godhead’s Tawhid (unicity) through whom all the true gnostics
(‘urafa) must eventually pass in order to attain perfect union with
the Divine (wisâl).
Returning to the Kabbalah: Our anonymous Kabbalist goes on to say that
when Adam plucked and ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, he
allowed the power acting in the Tree of Knowledge (i.e. the principle
of Severity) to operate upon it in isolation. This power was thereby
removed from its position within the spheres of the Tree of Life and
now gained control over Adam as the satanic principle of evil. The
nature of evil is therefore the separation and isolation of those
things that should be united – and, conversly, the separation of the
false unities which should be isolated because they are in reality
negation. As should be noted, the language, argumentation and
symbolism here is thoroughly alchemical – and this in itself is
instructive because it suggests the stages of the Great Work of
alchemy as symbolic microcosmic instances of the greater creative
Divine process itself.
Given this, the point is made that so long as humanity absorbs this
separation between severity and mercy, the Tree of Knowledge and the
Tree of Life – this being here the meaning of the ‘eating of the
fruit,’ which belongs to the fruits of the soul – it creates
inauthentic, false systems of reality, productive of evil – i.e. that
which is separated from the Divine. Both humanity’s experience of
reality and its moral nature are thus damaged by this misguided
contemplation. Only through the acts of righteousness and the acts of
prophets and saints – even when such acts may appear to contravene
standards and appear as their opposite – annul this separation of the
Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. And through such annulment a
person can become reconnected to the original world of unity, which is
authentically beyond mundane notions of good and evil, in which evil
as evil will no longer be evil because it will have been restored to
its proper station of holiness. Meaning, whatever the evil, once
marshalled in the totality of its struggle to restore the pristine
unity, thereby loses its exclusively satanic element and itself serves
the good by being reabsorbed into the Good in its root. Among other
reasons, this is why several readings of the Book of Job have Satan-
Lucifer in the position of accuser standing on the right hand of God
Himself, in fact as an Archangel. Suggestions as to the connection
between the symbolism of Lucifer-Satan and the Chief Archangel
Metatron are legion in the more radical interpretations of the
Kabbalah.
In the related Kabbalistic doctrine of the Tikkunim Olam (the
restoration of the world) it is held that acts of righteousness will
restore the sparks of divinity trapped in matter from the beginning of
creation and elevate them back to their spiritual realities. This
doctrine is also connected to the doctrine of the coming of the
Messiah and the final, complete Redemption of the World through Him.
Note there are symbolic connections between Messiah, Metatron and
Shekinah. Without getting into further details of messianic
speculation, one interesting point that several Kabbalistic texts
assert, including the Zohar, is that whereas at the beginning of
creation Adam was unprepared to eat of the ‘fruit’, and his eating
thereof became the cause of his banishment and separation from the
Garden of Eden; in the End Times, on the other hand, Adam will have
truly become ready to eat of the fruit of the Tree – and by rejoining
the two trees as One Tree - thereby worthy of re-entry back into the
Garden of Eden. In the Kabbalah and throughout much of the non-
Christian gnostic and esoteric systems of the Abrahamic Tradition
(especially in Mandaean Gnosis) the symbolism of Adam is often seen as
a cipher linked to the symbol of the Messiah Himself - with all the
prophets and saints being mere christophanies of Adam, as it were,
with the final one of this universal cycle of hierophanies being Adam
himself come as the Redeemer: i.e. the one fallen at the beginning
being the savior rising at the end of time, i.e. the saved savior, the
redeemed redeemer; descent is complemented by ascent!
And what of the meaning of the ‘fruit’, the ‘One Tree’ and the re-
entry back into the Garden of Eden? All of these symbols denote the
same thing from various loci of perception or waystations of
realization, and that is, gnosis (‘irfân). But the key to this
realization, the important element, as several more radical Kabbalists
have repeatedly suggested, cryptically lies in the passage of Genesis
3:20 and the name of Eve (Hebrew cHava חוה, Arabic Hawâ’ حوأ) which
is shorthand for “the Mother of All-Living” (em koll hayy חי כל אמ).
Etymologically, the name ‘Eve’ (חוה) and the Aramaic words
‘life’ (חיה) and ‘serpent’ (חויא) derive from the same root. But the
title “the Mother of All-Living” is also as well held by some as a
title of the Shekinah (the feminine presence of the Godhead) – i.e.
the Arabic ‘Sakina’ that also means here the Divine ‘Dwelling’ (from
the root s-k-n سكن). When now the symbolism of ‘Serpent’, ‘Tree’ and
‘Woman’ are juxtaposed we are through biblical myth and symbology
actually deciphering an Abrahamic version of the symbolism of the
Kundalini well known in Tantric Yoga. Put another way, and this is
the explicit position of the Great Andalusian Sufi Master Muhyiddin
Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), perhaps God manifests through woman in order for
man to realize and unite with God – and vice versa. This is because
the most sacred temple or mosque of divine worship is when sex -
reclaimed both from the clutches of contemporary materialist
degradation as well as fundamentalist religious narratives of shame -
becomes the highest and truest of holy sacraments.
Let me now quote a passage from Siyyid ‘Alî Muhammad Shîrazî, the
Bâb, from his very first extensive work, the Commentary on the Surah
of the Cow (al-baqara),
“And a thing may not draw nigh to [anything] beyond its origin. So
when Adam drew nigh to the Tree of Reality (shajarat’ul-haqîqa)
shining forth from Fatima [i.e. the transfiguration of Eve] by means
of the drawing nigh of existence, he disobeyed his Lord, because God
commanded him not to approach it, except through ecstasy (al-wijdân).
Because at the time of ecstasy the “thing drawn nigh unto” is the Tree
and nothing other than it.”
(Trans. Todd Lawson, “The Authority of the Feminine and Fatima’s Place
in an Early Work by the Bab,” 2001, p. 113).
To close, a deep meditation and complete re-appraisal of the symbolism
of the Tarot trump card known as the ‘Devil’ is now in order.
Solvé et coagula!
Wahîd Azal