The Old Testament conception of God may seem strange to us now, since Jesus
had introduced a new conception of God as a fully transcendent being whose
presence was manifest in goodness and love and who had no need of rituals or a
tent to live in, nor of vociferous liturgical prayers, nor animal sacrifice. We
may assume that despite appearances to the contrary, humanity is gaining in
awareness of the metaphysical and transcendent and so the modern mind has no
need of a God which demands of Moses that the sons of Aaron barbecue meat for
him because the burnt offering is ‘an aroma pleasing to the LORD’; though it
seems that the best part of the offering always ended up in the hands of the
priests while God had to make do with a barbecued head and the rest of the bits
nobody else wanted.
But reading those passages in Leviticus may
make us wonder who or what it was that Moses was communicating with. It seemed
God was manifested to Moses as a voice in the Temple of Meeting which gave
Moses clear instructions regarding the sacrifice of animals and specific
cooking instructions. In fact apparently anyone who wished to speak to God
could go to the Tent of Meeting which was just outside the main camp and God
would speak and appear in a pillar of cloud. On Mount Sinai God was even able
to manifest to Moses physically, and had a face, a hand and a back, and could
‘pass by’ as if it were something which was localised and not, as we might
assume of God, omnipresent. We can only guess what any of that really means or
whether it even happened at all.
We cannot say whether this was a real
historical occurrence or not. We just have to trust the narrative, but if we do
that, then it suggests at least some kind of spiritual being which is able to
manifest in limited but significant way and communicate with people. But how do
we know this is God? This could be one of the beings which communicates directly
with the manipulators, some kind of astral intelligence which when animals have
their life sacrificed to it, gains some kind of energy or strength. This is
something of the belief that has come through with the Gnostic movement which
seemed to emerge almost step by step with early Christianity.
The strange thing is that this is precisely
the kind of activity which is reputed in witchcraft and Satanism, where animals
are routinely sacrificed, and if the rumours and insider accounts are to be
believed, fellow humans as well. In fact history is replete with examples of
ritual human sacrifice. The mercy of the Old Testament and Israelite conception
of God is that human sacrifice was not required and this was one of the
specific crimes of the Canaanites which were said to include child sacrifice,
bestiality and homosexual religious rites which kindled God’s wrath although
those that had so far escaped Joshua’s God driven genocide of the Canaanites
were apparently allowed to remain:
“I also will no longer drive out before
them any of the nations which Joshua left when he died, so that
through them I may test Israel, whether they will keep the ways of
the Lord, to walk in them as their fathers kept them, or not.” Judges
2:21.
Could this be the ongoing project for
humanity to this day? Are we all being tested on a daily basis by some kind of
elite secret priesthood using a three-thousand-year-old blueprint? In order to
corrupt a population the population has to willingly choose to be corrupted. It
might seem hugely counter-productive to corrupt countries and societies and
drive them into confusion and degeneracy, but one country and one people in
particular benefit from the disarray of their perceived ancient enemies, these
people have long memories and they have been operating as a people with a
particular continuous cultural identity for at least 3,000 years. No other
people can compete with that kind of level of cultural organisation which will
always be one-step ahead of any attempts to thwart their plans. Unfortunately,
any people which are not of their tribe is an enemy and their specific God
given scriptures specifically instruct them to show no mercy to their enemies.
I contend then that the Kabbalah and by
extension the so called ‘oral tradition’ of the Rabbis passed on generation
from generation from the time of Moses is nothing more than the same ancient
evil of Asherah and Baal worship, albeit cleverly camouflaged to hide within Judaism
and claim a kind of inner-logic to make it seem to fit within Torah Judaism
when it is the very force which the Torah was written specifically to oppose
all those thousands of years ago. This is why the Kabbalah is so keen to
introduce feminine aspects of God, even though as we have discussed, it makes
no logical sense to bring gender into spiritual concerns but IF what you are
secretly worshiping is an ancient Goddess cult, in fact THE ancient Goddess
cult, then this is how you slowly rehabilitate the Goddess.
The Kabbalah, although it talks of the Ain
Soph as being the ultimate image of God this is cleverly dismissed as
‘nothing’. It cannot be worshipped because it has no attributes, it is
everything and nothing. It is only at the point at which this force can become
personalised as the Shekinah, a feminine force, a Goddess, that God becomes
something which can be acknowledged, worshipped and which will respond and
interact with humanity. Shekinah is the Hebrew word for the ‘dwelling’ or
‘settling’ and describes the manifest divine presence of the Lord. Neither this
term, nor anything which can be associated with it, appears in the Bible. Nor
was it found in any of the texts of the Dead Sea scrolls associated with the
Essenes. It is solely a product of Pharisaic Rabbinical literature and appears
as a feminine form in the Talmud and the Zohar. The Shekinah is also described
as the Sabbath Bride:
“One must prepare a comfortable seat
with several cushions and embroidered covers, from all that is found in the
house, like one who prepares a canopy for a bride. For the Shabbat is a queen
and a bride. This is why the masters of the Mishna used to go out on the eve of
Shabbat to receive her on the road, and used to say: ‘Come, O bride, come, O
bride!’ And one must sing and rejoice at the table in her honor … one must
receive the Lady with many lighted candles, many enjoyments, beautiful clothes,
and a house embellished with many fine appointments …”
The bridegroom of the Shekinah is sometimes
the name for the sefirah of Tiferet but there is so little consistency of terms
or even of their meanings with the Kabbalah that none of these concepts or
definitions can be said to have any fixed meaning. Tiferet is in the middle of
the Tree of Life and is connected to all the other sephirot except Malkuth
which, within the logic of the Zohar, it interacts through the phallic Yesod.
Within the abstract realm of the Kabbalah the Shekinah is considered to be
spirit where ‘God’ interacts with the physical world and is represented by
Malkuth. ‘She’ is often referred to as ‘the daughter of God’ and reflects the
divine light the way the Moon reflects light upon Earth. The idea of Shekinah
was a relatively recent addition in Rabbinical literature particularly in the
work of Isaac Luria and his Aader Bishvachin song which is sung at
the Sabbath evening meal:
“Let us invite the Shechinah with a
newly-laid table
and with a well-lit menorah that casts light on all heads.
Three preceding days to the right, three
succeeding days to the left, and amid them the Sabbath bride with
adornments she goes, vessels and robes.
May the Shechinah become a crown through
the six loaves on each side through the doubled-six may our table be bound with
the profound Temple services.”
Shekinah also appears in the gnostic texts
of the Mandaeans and Manichaeans; ‘Manda’ is the Aramaic word for ‘knowledge’
and hence ‘gnosis’ but those among them who have attained the true secrets of
their religion they call Nasoraeans, and this word has been used to describe 1st Century Christians including Jesus himself and to this day the Arabic the word
‘Nasrani’ is a word for Christian.
More in my new book....available soon....
No comments:
Post a Comment