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A
Mytho-Psychological Study of the Biblical Legacy
Based on
Parallels between Jewish Mysticism and Alchemic Art
(published in: Journal of Jungian Theory and
Practice, New York, 2005, 1)
Micha Ankori
Dr' Micha Ankori studied physics and
mathematics at the Haifa Technion, and studied psychology at Tel Aviv
University. He is a
member of the New Israeli Jungian Association.
His books on Jewish mysticism
and analytical psychology were published by Ramot, the Tel Aviv University
Press. His book The Psychology of the
Dream (in Hebrew) was published by Prologue. He translated into
Hebrew C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams,
Reflections (Tel-Aviv: Ramot, 1993). He is the chairman of the School of Jungian Psychotherapy
at the Tel Aviv Kibbutzim Seminar.
This paper was translated by Batya Stein.
Abstruct:
Both C.G. Jung and Gerschom
Scholem thought that the symbol
is a garb for deep truths inaccessible to the conscious mind, which can only
be discovered through symbolic language. Symbolic language is the vehicle
through which the soul expresses itself in dreams and esoteric doctrines
convey their messages. Although both Scholem and Jung used almost identical
formulations about the essence and contents of the occult, their paths never
crossed. Scholem denied any connection between Kabbalah or Hasidism and
psychology. Whenever Scholem mentions depth psychology in his writings, he is
highly critical and distant, and largely misconstrues it. For his part, Jung
acknowledged the value of Jewish mysticism and even suggested to his students
they should delve into the study of the Jewish myth, although he himself
never pursued this topic deeply.
The parallels between Gerschom Scholem and C. G.
Jung encourage further study of the hidden threads linking Jewish and
Christian mysticism, granting new insights into the attitude of the Bible and
its legacy toward the myth.
A Mytho-Psychological Study of the Biblical Legacy
Based
on Parallels between Jewish Mysticism and Alchemic Art
In 1921, Carl Gustav Jung suggested a surprising interpretation for
one of his dreams, which represented a crucial contribution to the
formulation of his theory:
Beside my house stood another, that is to say, another wing or
annex, which was strange to me. Each time I would wonder in my dream why I
did not know this house, although it had apparently always been there.
Finally came a dream in which I reached the other wing. I discovered there a
wonderful library, dating largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Large, fat folio volumes, bound in pigskin, stood along the walls.
Among them were a number of books embellished with copper engravings of a
strange character, and illustrations containing curious symbols such as I had
never seen before.(
Jung, 1979, p. 202).
According to the psychoanalytic
outlook to which Jung was then a partner, he understood that the back of his
house symbolized the “back wing” of his soul—the unconscious. The contents of
this storeroom, however, did not fit the Freudian conception of the
unconscious. The Freudian unconscious contains elements rejected by the “ego”
because they are immoral, dirty, and disgusting, whereas here, in the dream,
the contents symbolize knowledge and wisdom.
After reading the books of
Herbert Silberer, the scholar of religions, and following an exchange of
letters between them, Jung came to understand the symbols that had appeared
in his dream. These were the symbols of alchemy, the mystical doctrine that
had flourished in Europe during the sixteenth
century and had been marginalized during the Enlightenment. From then on,
Jung devoted time and efforts to the rediscovery and decoding of alchemy.
The existence of such a
valuable “library” in the “back storeroom” symbolized for Jung the presence of
a deeply hidden wisdom, expressing the collective spirit that also pulsates
within the individual soul. The “library” is the knowledge accumulated over
countless generations that past thinkers, with profound intuition, recorded
in their writings and paintings.
At the very time Jung was
studying alchemy, Gershom Scholem embarked on his research of Jewish
mysticism. Like Jung, he too began his studies in the field of the exact
sciences (mathematics), and then made his way into the mystical realm by
following a strange path. In a lecture about the journey he had pursued in
the study of Kabbalah, Scholem recounts:
At the beginning of this journey, when I arrived in Berlin in 1922, I
discovered that the only scholar of Kabbalah in the
generation before me had moved to the town of my birth. I went to visit him.
I found an old, vibrant man of eighty-two who had been made professor by
Kaiser Wilhelm and had served in the past as the rabbi of Poznan. He welcomed me warmly and said:
“You and I, we are the only madmen concerned with these matters.” He showed
me his library. At the time, he was the only person in.
Germany who owned a reasonably
large collection of kabbalistic works, among them a large manuscript from the
Lurianic school.[i] In
my youthful enthusiasm at the sight of the treasures before me, I said: “How
wonderful, Herr Professor, that you have read and studied all this!” The old
man then said: “What, must I also read all this nonsense?” (Scholem, G. 1975,
p. 64)
Is the coincidence in any way
significant? Was this an historical irony? In any event, although these two
men—the psychiatrist and the Kabbalah scholar—dealt with different theories
of the occult and out of different motivations, the parallel is fascinating.
Scholem mentions a book of Luria’s school that developed in the sixteenth
century, the period to which the writings Jung found in his dream also date
back. Both Jung and Scholem were concerned with forgotten materials stored
away in attics. The Christian mysticism that Jung discovered had been
dismissed in the modern era by scientific thinking. The Kabbalah, which had
been a living doctrine and its writings part of every Jewish home, had been
forgotten during the Enlightenment and
no one any longer understood the meaning of its complex symbols. Scholem and
Jung invented the research domain that became their life’s work. Their
motives differed, but the feeling and the experience that accompanied their
discoveries were amazingly similar. Jung mentions in his memoirs that, after
many years of exploring alchemy, he had an alchemic library in his home no
less impressive than the one he had seen in his dream. When Scholem died, he
bequeathed a treasure trove of nineteen thousand volumes to the National
Library in Jerusalem,
mostly on Jewish mysticism and its offshoots.
In his memoirs, Jung ponders
the value of the soul’s wisdom, which he had discovered in the alchemic texts
and notes that, had Silberer known how to apply to his life the psychological
knowledge hidden in alchemy, he might have coped with the anguish of his soul
and might have refrained from taking his own life.
Scholem also found that
mystical doctrines expressed the dark depths of the soul and its
torments:
At that time, my heart opened up and I understood many bodies of
knowledge in Jewish history—new fountains of inspiration and truth
perspectives opened up for us. This perspective ensures a way to both the
heights and the depths—from the stutterings of symbols, the very soul of an
entire era spoke to us, and from odd practices and ways of life we learned to
understand the terrors of life and the terrors of death in the lives of pious
Jews.( Scholem,
1975, p. 64).
Yet, unfortunately, Scholem’s wondrous formulations did not draw
him any closer to psychology.
Jung and Scholem concluded that
the symbol is a garb for deep truths inaccessible to the conscious mind,
which can only be discovered through symbolic language. Symbolic language is
the vehicle through which the soul expresses itself in dreams and esoteric
doctrines convey their messages. Although both Scholem and Jung used almost
identical formulations about the essence and contents of the occult, their
paths never crossed. Scholem denied any connection between Kabbalah or
Hasidism and psychology. Whenever Scholem mentions depth psychology in his
writings, he is highly critical and distant, and largely misconstrues it. For
his part, Jung acknowledged the value of Jewish mysticism and even suggested
to his students they should delve into the study of the Jewish myth, although
he himself never pursued this topic deeply.
The parallels between Gerschom Scholem and C. G.
Jung encourage further study of the hidden threads linking Jewish and
Christian mysticism, granting new insights into the attitude of the Bible and
its legacy toward the myth.
.
Judaism and Myth
When Jung launched into his unique psychological journey and
discovered the broad parallels between the language of the dream and the
language of myth, he immediately grasped that the thought mechanisms of
classical science would not serve him in this endeavor. As a doctor, however,
he tried to find a way of validating his ideas, and one of the most important
methods for this purpose was cross-cultural research. The attempt to find
universal foundations in different mythologies contributed to an
understanding of the universalism of the soul. Following the general question
as to whether every culture had a myth, a particular question emerged,
bearing on our present concern: What is the Jewish myth?
This is a controversial
question to this day. Psychologists and philosophers who are fond of mythical
thinking and love the Bible tend to join the two and assume that the Bible is
the myth of Judaism. (Martin Buber is a prime representative of this
approach. (Buber Martin, 1967, p. 95-107) . So is Franz Rosenzweig, whose
profound connection with myth almost led him to leave Judaism, until he
discovered myth within Judaism itself (Idel Moshe, 1988). At present, Yehuda
Liebes endorses this approach (Liebes Yehuda, 1993)). Other
thinkers (Yehezkel Kaufmann (Kaufmann Yehezkel, 1972) and Gershom Scholem
(Scholem Gershom, 1952)[ii])
claim that the Bible had expunged all myth and fought against it
uncompromisingly. They held that the Bible had associated myth with idolatry
and, as part of its struggle to impose monotheism, had removed all traces of
idolatry and its related myth.
This academic dispute is not
yet settled and the Jungian perspective can add new dimensions to it by
contributing its own understanding of myth. My conclusion, which rests on a
psycho-mythologycal approach, is that the Bible is not the Jewish myth and is
not really a myth at all. The Bible contains elements that are obviously
mythological, but these were included in the text either to object to them or
to serve the Bible’s aims: allegiance to the divine ethical message.
According to the criteria that the psycho-mythological perspective claims are
necessary for the existence of myth, the Bible has no myth. For instance,
creation in the Bible is the work of a male God, who creates the world alone.
But no such myth exists. In every myth, a male and a female god create the
world or, at least, male and female elements are partners in the act of
creation.
The conventional argument
states that the Bible killed the goddesses, whereas we know of no other myth
excluding goddesses altogether. The Bible, however, also killed the gods. The
God of the Bible is not a god in the mythical sense. He is not a superman,
like the gods, and despite the many anthropomorphic expressions spread
throughout the Bible, the recurrent emphasis is on statements stressing
divine transcendence: “For
as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your
ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).
The Bible did not provide the
Jewish people the “psychological therapy” that myths provided in other
ancient cultures. I will not expand on this issue here,[iii]
beyond stating that the Jewish myth should not be sought in the Bible. A
longing for myth is indeed present in the Bible throughout, in a different
way: whereas the priests, who represent the biblical outlook, preach faith in
the supreme God, among the people idolatry was rampant: “nevertheless, the
high places were not taken away; for the people still offered and burnt
incense in the high places” (1 Kings, 22:44). A legitimate expression of the
myth’s appeal will emerge only a thousand years later in the Kabbalah, in the
occult Jewish literature that preceded the Kabbalah, in aggadic midrashim,
and in talmudic legends. Here we can find all the mythical and psychological
elements that were excluded in the Bible.
Kabbalah and Alchemy
Gershom Scholem argues when discussing the question what is the
essence of Kabbalah:
Despite all the changes and transmigrations affecting the various
trends of the Kabbalah movement, all
share a common denominator… Throughout its methods and forms, we find the
same longings for the soul’s return to its source, the same passion for
“motherhood,” for the concealed wellsprings of our life, the same yearning
for the mystery of our existence (Scholem Gershom, 1975, Vol. 1. p. 226).
Academic scholars of the Kabbalah tend to express reservations
about psychological interpretations of mysticism. Scholem’s comments,
however, invite us to find within the depths of the human soul the unity
hiding behind various forms of Jewish mysticism. In their writings,
kabbalists urged us to discover in the recesses of the individual soul the
mysterious reality they had contemplated. Joseph Gikatila, a
thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist who some assume was one of the authors
of the Zohar, wrote:
Contemplate the mystery of repentance, which the Torah tells us is
the mystery of the soul’s return to the place from which it was uprooted and
to which it returns to rest, as if saying “Return to thy rest, O my soul”
(Psalms 116: 7)… in the mystery of the sefirah of binah [understanding], the soul can return and cleave to
the place from which it was uprooted (R. Joseph Gikatila, 1985, Part 6, sefirah 5).
The following discussion of the
relationship between Kabbalah and alchemy will focus on an analysis comparing
pictures painted by alchemists and kabbalistic texts. All the pictures were
painted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Most are from the British Museum and some from other
collections.
“The Blossoms Appear on the Earth” (Song
of Songs 2:12)
One of the most accurate definitions of the essence of the Kabbalah
found in the kabbalistic texts themselves and particularly in the Book of the
Zohar, states that the  Kabbalah
is an attempt to unveil the mystery of creation. The Kabbalah is an attempt
to plunge into the sources of the universe and of existence to uncover their
mystery. The biblical story of the creation certainly lends itself to this
exploration. The Zohar contains numerous interpretations of the opening
verses in Genesis, and a vast inventory of images surrounds the account of
Creation. One way of discerning how revolutionary the Zohar exegeses actually
are is to confront them with the original biblical text. As noted, the Bible
describes creation as the work of a male God who creates the world alone, and
thus exclusively from a male perspective. The opening verse, “In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” is male to begin with, in
that it is a creation of doing rather than of being. The entire story is
pervaded by the verb “made,” as well as by a critical and scrupulous “quality
control”: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very
good” (Genesis 1:31). At the very opening of the Zohar, a work representing
the fullest and most mature product of early kabbalistic thinking, we find
that the story of the creation opens with verses from Song of Songs: “Rabbi
Hizkiah opened his discourse with the text, ‘As a lily among thorns’ (Song of
Songs 2:2).” (The Zohar. I: 1a, 3).
This is a female opening. The very
term “opened,” which is pervasive in the Zohar, implies an open attitude—open
to study, to dialogue, to the worlds of feeling. The extremely female opening
makes room for a balanced approach, in which the male and female aspects will
enjoy equal status and the symbol of copulation will play a crucial role.
Further on, the text of the Zohar returns to the secret of creation: “‘In the
beginning,’ Rabbi Simeon opened his discourse with the text: “The blossoms
appeared on the earth”…. ‘In our land’ implies the day of the Sabbath, which
is a copy of the ‘land of the living’ (…the world of souls).” (The Zohar, I:1b, 3-4).
The text then winds around
verses from Song of Songs, suggesting many wondrous interpretations of the
creation. Many of the symbols mentioned in the text hint at the mysteries of
creation (like the symbol of the blossoms), intimating that the reference is
to the human soul (“the world of souls”). One of the homilies states: “‘In
the beginning’: Rabbi Elazar opened, ‘lift up your eyes on high, and behold
who has created these things.’”( Ibid). The verse (Isaiah 40:26) serves
the Zohar’s author to teach us an important lesson about the mystery of
creation. The text alters the role of the word “who” in the sentence, turning
it from a question into the subject of the sentence, clarifying the identity
of the creator. In other words, not only is the creation a riddle, but the
riddle creates a riddle. Elazar, Simeon Bar Yohai’s son, teaches that both
the universe and the creator are riddles, and the Book of the Zohar is the
riddle dealing with these riddles. The word “these” [eleh], together with the word “who” [mi], form the word Elohim, one of the Hebrew names of
God.
Let us return now to the symbol
of the blossoms, which appears at the opening of the kabbalistic
interpretation of Genesis, and consider the alchemic painting. The immediate
impression is that the painter of this strange picture had not intended to
paint a laboratory, and may never have seen a laboratory in his life. Since
the picture is not accompanied by an explanatory text, its symbols are open
to interpretations. This is definitely a symbolic language, linking the
painting on one hand to the Kabbalah, which also resorts to symbolic
language, and on the other hand, to dreams.
We cannot assume that the
picture speaks of a chemical process, although it is permeated with symbols
of “process,” and perhaps entirely concerned with “process”: the blossoms are
a potential for change and renewal, copulation is a symbol of the creative
process, the womb-shaped container symbolizes incubation, and the waters are
the amniotic fluid, the “first waters,” the source of life. The wings
symbolize spiritual potential, and the winged infant represents the result
and the purpose of the entire process. The painter was certainly thinking
about creation when he did this work—its sources, its mystery, and its
purpose.
Was the alchemist thinking
about the creative processes unfolding in his own soul? Was he thinking about
the human process of creation and its laws? We cannot know. From our
knowledge about the world of mystics, we may venture that the alchemist would
not have agreed to our distinction between these realms of reality, and would
view his painting as a description of the creative process prevalent
everywhere, from his own personal creation up to the cosmic creation, God’s
work.
Turning from here to the realm
of the Kabbalah, we will find that the mystics did view creativity as the
most primary and widely prevalent motivation. Kabbalistic descriptions of the
Creation are rife with symbols referring to human creative prowess, and the
Zohar, not coincidentally, opens with the blossoms in Song of Songs. The
wonder of divine creation is embodied in the Kabbalah in the wonder of human
creation, which also invariably contains an element of creation ex nihilo. All the materials, all the
colors, all the shades, and all the letters will never come together into a
new whole unless they include something that had never been there before.
That is the riddle of creativity, that is creation ex nihilo. A midrash on Genesis in the Zohar reads:
“In the beginning” (Genesis
1:1): At the very beginning the king made engravings in the supernal purity.
A spark of blackness emerged in the sealed within the sealed, from the
mystery of En-Sof, a mist
within matter, implanted in a ring, no white, no black, no red, no yellow, no
color at all. When he measured with the standard of measure, he made colors
to provide light. Within the spark, in the innermost part, emerged a source,
from which the colors are painted below, and it is sealed among the sealed
things of the mystery of En-Sof
(Tishby, Y. 1989,
I:15a, 309)
God himself is described here
as a sculptor, carving his world as an artist carves his work. The homily
then continues and cites: “And they who are wise shall shine like the
brightness of the firmament; and they who turn many to righteousness like the
stars for ever and ever” (Daniel 12: 3). The Zohar’s use of the biblical
source is interesting in the present context. The “wise” become, in the
Zohar, the disciples of R. Simeon bar Yohai. They are the circle embodying
the soul of God and the soul of the universe. The parallel between the
description of God and the description of the circle of disciples shows that
they, through their studies, create new worlds: their study is their
creation, emerging from them as brightness. The image of God in man is
presented here as the creative power—the power of divine creation manifest in
the human being (Liebes
Yehuda, 1994, 9, 70).
Furthermore, this could be
claimed to be an interesting psychological theory about human nature. Freud
saw sexuality as the primary motivating force. Would kabbalists and
alchemists have suggested that the primary motivating force is creativity and
sexuality merely one of its manifestations or symbols? If so, it is no wonder
that sexual mating is such a recurrent symbol both in alchemy and in
Kabbalah. The kabbalistic union between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Shekhinah, is the alchemic union between
Sol and Luna (sun and moon). The act of intercourse at the center of the
picture is the symbol of the “process,” the source of creativity. The act of
creation takes place within the vase
hermeticum, the motherly womb. So in alchemy, as shown in the
picture, and so in the Kabbalah, which describes the creation of the universe
as taking place in the sefirah
of malkhut [kingdom], the lower
mother. The act of tikkun
[restoration] described in Lurianic Kabbalah takes place in the “womb of
understanding” [binah], which
is the third sefirah, the supernal
mother. The vessel that contains the process in the picture would be
described in the Kabbalah as the “womb of understanding.”
The Holy Union [Ziwuga Kaddisha]
 A
familiar yet not well-understood characteristic of Kabbalah is the striking frequency
of sexual and erotic symbols in its writings. Despite the criticism that has
been levelled at the Kabbalah on this count, kabbalists never tried to
conceal or minimize the value of this symbol. Against the background of a
spiritual and moralistic perception that played down sexual matters and the
body in general, kabbalists viewed even the relationship between the human
and the divine as erotic. Eroticism, then, touches upon the holiest of
experiences. According to the Kabbalah, the entire world is suffused with
erotic relationships, and even the dynamics that characterizes godliness as
such is the perpetual union between the divine male (the sefirah of tif’eret [beauty]) and the divine female (malkhut). The Kabbalah introduced a
blessing to be recited before all positive commandments: “Behold I perform
this commandment for the sake of the yihud
[unity] between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Shekhinah”—every human act serves to
advance the communion within the divine.
When we take into account the
kabbalists’ psychology, their frequent references to sexual symbols become
somewhat clearer. The all-encompassing quality of the kabbalistic conception
leads to a discovery of the divinity precisely at the sensual, instinctual
levels, in the sense of “but while I am still in my flesh… I would see God”
(Job 19:26). No other experience is as total as the sexual experience,
involving every human element, as Nietzsche (1973) wrote: “The degree and kind of
a man’s sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.” (p. 75).
The kabbalists discovered this much before him and, in
our picture, the process is described through the transformation into the
winged couple, whose mating brings out the spirituality.
A significant contribution
toward our understanding of the Kabbalah’s erotic nature emerges from the
parallels with other mystical doctrines. Surprisingly, mystical schools
evolving in distant and quite dissimilar symbolic contexts share the very
same symbol, and disregard of this finding will preclude understanding of the
symbol and its complex meanings. When Jung suggested viewing sexuality as
largely a symbol, Freud countered that Jung was repressing his sexuality.
This argument, however, could not be raised against the mystics. They viewed sex
as an important and multifaceted symbol but, as their paintings show, they
were certainly not afraid of contemplating sexuality per se. The paintings we see here are
extremely sensual, yet the couple and copulation are clearly symbolic as
evident, for instance, in the sun and the moon accompanying the king and
queen (in the upper painting), who lie in a womb-like pool.
An additional motif linked to
copulation is the motif of death. Expressions such as “kiss of death,” or
“death marriage” are well known in all cultures and identify death as union
with the source, as a return to the womb, as communion with God.[iv]
Intercourse as birth and intercourse as death symbolize the life span and the
entire spiritual course. The famous Eleusinian mysteries are tied to the
story of Persephone’s descent into Hades and her rebirth. The story of
Dionysus (who features in the mysteries as well) is also connected to birth
and death. Not fortuitously, the Eleusinian mysteries are also linked to the
Moerae, the Fates: Clotho spun the thread, Lachesis measured it, and Atropos
cut it. This is the law of the thread of life, which binds even the gods. The
mysteries connect the span of life with the symbol of death and renewal.
This association of death with
holiness, however, is alien to the biblical spirit. The Bible (Numbers 19:14)
indicates that any contact with the dead makes one impure. The biblical text
views pure and impure as a dichotomy, and describes a complex procedure
enabling release from impurity resulting from contact with the dead and
return to a state of purity.[v]
This intensifies even further the subversiveness of the mythical elements
discussed here ascribing holiness to death, which appear in the Zohar in
connection with the story about the death of R. Simeon Bar Yohai.
According to kabbalistic
tradition, the Idra Zutta is
the climax of the entire book. The Idra
is part of the Zohar’s exegesis on the biblical portion of Ha`azinu (Deuteronomy 31-32), where
Moses is told: “Go up into this mount Avarim…and die in the mount into which
thou goest up, and be gathered to thy people…” (Deuteronomy 32:48-50).
As usual, the Zohar uses the
biblical contents symbolically. It devotes scanty attention to Moses’ death,
shifting the entire exegesis to the death of R. Simeon Bar Yohai. His death
assumes mythical proportions, and includes the rich symbolism of the death
motif in ancestral mythologies and in folklore rituals. The Idra Zutta is the encounter (Idra [encounter] Zutta [small]) of a group of disciples,
who gathered together to be told hidden secrets before their rabbi’s death.
In the first section of the Idra, R. Simeon Bar Yohai expounds his
symbolic approach to the concept of death:
Rabbi Simeon wrapped himself in his cloak and sat down. He began by
quoting: “The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that descend to silence
(Dumah)” (Psalm 115:17). “The
dead do not praise the Lord.” This is certainly true of those who are called
“dead,” for the Holy One, blessed be He, is called “living”; and He dwells
among those who are called “living” and not with those who are called “dead.” (Tishby, Y, 1989, p.163).
R. Simeon Bar Yohai draws a
distinction here between “dead” and “living” based on a symbolic
understanding of the terms: the living are the mystics and the dead are those
whose souls are closed to the spiritual message arising from within them.
Hence, he only addresses the “living,” who are those worthy of hearing hidden
mysteries. The text continues:
And
this is the secret: “therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed
it” (Exodus, 20, 11) for then all is one complete body, for the queen cleaved
to the king and they became one body, and that is why the day is blessed.
Hence, whoever lives without a male or female is called a half-body, for no
blessing descends upon the blemished and flawed, but upon a place that is
whole, upon a thing that is whole and not upon a half-body, and a half-body
never prevails, and is never blessed.
After the text presented the
basic principles of existence and creation and introduced the symbolism of
the king and queen, which fits the alchemic symbolism discussed above, it
expands upon sexual metaphors based on these principles:
The male’s phallus is the tip of the whole body. And it is called yesod, and it is that which delights the
woman. All the man’s desires for the woman are in this yesod, which enters the woman at a place
called Zion,
for that is the woman’s
cover, the place of the woman’s womb…
It
is written: “For the Lord has chosen Zion;
he has desired it for his habitation” (Psalms 132:13)—after the mistress
departed and joined the king face to face, on the eve of the Sabbath, all
became one body.
… no license is given to enter the holy of holies, only to the High
Priest who comes from the realm of hesed,
since no one is allowed to enter that place on high, but he who is called hesed and enters the holy of holies.
This rich and lush description
of intercourse in all its aspects and at all levels, portraying “Zion” as a
divine vagina, “the holy of holies,” and the High Priest as the divine
phallus, is followed by the description of R Simeon Bar Yohai’s death. This
description, the end of the Idra Zutta,[vi] is
pervaded by conflicting emotions: mourning for his departure
while also celebrating the “hilullah
of R. Simeon.” The feast is the wedding, the holy union, the hierosgamos.[vii] In
his death he returns to the cave, to the womb of the earth, and reunites with
the source of his mystical doctrine that was written while he had been in a
cave with his son Elazar.[viii]
This suggests that his exit from the cave after a delay (incubation) was his
second birth—a motif frequent in the world of mystics.[ix]
This is the description of his death at the end of the Idra: “When the bier came out of the
house, it went up into the air and fire flared out in front of it. They heard
a voice saying: Come and assemble for the feast of Rabbi Simeon: ‘He enters
in peace. They rest on their beds’ (Isaiah, 57,2).” (Tishby, Y., 1989, 165).
The Account of the Chariot [Ma`aseh Merkavah]
The term ma`aseh merkavah
assumed prominent status in Jewish tradition, especially among mystics.
Although the term pertains to the vision revealed to Ezekiel, the word merkavah never appears in his prophecy:
The
appearance of the wheels and their work was like the color of an emerald: and
they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it
were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went toward their
four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rims, they were
so high that they were dreadful, and their rims were full of eyes round about
them four. And when the living creatures moved, the wheels went by them: and
when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were
lifted up. (Ezekiel, 1:16-19.)
Over time, the compound ma`aseh merkavah assumed two different,
mutually related meanings: merkavah
in the sense of a complex system, and in the sense of a horse and chariot.
The mystery concealed in the ma`aseh merkavah was considered highly
significant already in the Mishnah, in the well-known saying:
Forbidden
relations may not be expounded before three persons, nor the story of
creation before two, nor the chariot before one, unless he is a sage that
understands of his own knowledge. Whosoever gives his mind to four things, it
were better for him if he had not come into the world—What is above? What is
beneath, what was before time? And what will be hereafter? And whosoever
takes no thought of the honor of his maker, it were better for him if he had
not come into the world (The Mishnah,
1933, M. Hagigah 2:1.).
In this saying we find one of
the few and earliest allusions to occult doctrines in talmudic literature,
and even then with a warning not to dabble in it. The saying bundles together
issues of incest, the creation, and the account of the Chariot. The intention
in combining the three together is altogether unclear (in contemporary terms,
incest is perhaps a Freudian issue, the mystery of ma`aseh merkavah is a Jungian issue, and the mystery of
Creation touches on Relational Psychology…). The text, however, suggests an
escalating, increasingly deeper mystery, from incest up to the merkavah. In other words, issues related
to ma`aseh merkavah are even
deeper and more unfathomable than Creation, and their discussion is more
dangerous than discussions of the other two.
Mystic sects living in the
Judean desert toward the end of the Second Temple
period made the merkavah symbol
central to their doctrine. They sensed they were living at an historical
turning point, when the Jewish people were about to lose their religious
freedom and their political autonomy (they themselves, as a separatist group,
had already been banned from priestly positions in the Temple). This experience hung heavily upon
them and greatly influenced their thinking. Does this move to the heavenly
temple, to the chariot lifting the believer to heaven, hint at the beginning
of a profound interest in the human soul, an interest that had been alien to
the author of the Bible and to halakhic thought?
Although the merkavah symbol features frequently in
the Midrash and particularly in mystical writings,[x] it
is still unclear how and why Ezekiel’s vision of holy beasts and the wheels
turning within each other became a chariot harnessed to horses. The first locum of this change is apparently the Septuaginta, the Greek translation of
the Bible, where the verse “And the appearance of the vision [mar’eh] which I saw” (Ezekiel 43:3) is
translated as “And the appearance of the chariot [merkavah] which I saw.”[xi]
Attempts to trace the sources
of the merkavah symbol will
lead us to another Greek source, of vast importance: Plato’s Phaedrus (we can
safely assume that Plato was well known to the translators of the Bible into
Greek). In this dialogue, Plato deals at length with the nature of the soul,
and particularly with the attempt to prove it is immortal. After a long and
persuasive (to those already persuaded, of course) discussion that indeed
proves this, a brief passage follows where Plato answers the obvious
question: What is the soul? His answer is most interesting. He states that
the nature of the soul cannot be defined in simple human language, but can be
described through a figure:
Let me speak briefly and in a figure. And let the figure be a composite—a
pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the
charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those
of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one
of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble
breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to
him (Plato,1924,
vol. 1, Phaedrus, p. 246)
Plato
’s “definition” of the soul appears
to be the most concise and to the point so far. Unquestionably, this
definition hovers above many descriptions of the soul and of the merkavah that have since appeared in
philosophical thought and, as I will show below, also in alchemy. In the figure,
Plato presents what we would today call “ego” in the shape of the charioteer,
the “id” in the shape of the horses, and the statement about “a great deal of
trouble” to suggest that suffering is the human lot. All have parallels both
in the Kabbalah and in alchemy, and now provide a key to the understanding of
the merkavah symbol in Judaism.
The mystical sect of the priesthood that draws away from Judaism at the end
of the Second Temple period when sensing the
precariousness of the surrounding reality may have shifted their focus of
interest to their soul, finding encouragement and consolation in
mystical-psychological explorations. They were the first to turn redemption
into an individual process, and the motif of freedom into an inner experience
of the soul. The beginnings of Jewish mysticism can be traced back to their
doctrines. In their wake came the literature whose writers referred to
themselves as yordei ha-merkavah [descenders
of the chariot], a term hinting at the descent into the inner soul (even
though the merkavah vision
describes an ascent). The term yordei
ha-merkavah appears to be derived from the verse in Song of
Solomon 6:2 “My beloved
is gone down into his garden,” and from the subsequent mystical
literature, when the descent into the garden is the descent into the hidden
depths. We will now go down in a different chariot, the chariot of alchemy.
 This
picture portrays a vision in three scenes. We will read the story from the
top anti-clockwise. The upper picture depicts a most dramatic situation: the
king, who is trying to drive his chariot, discovers that the reins are not in
his hands—a black demon has grabbed them and immobilized the vehicle. On the
assumption that the alchemists were versed in contemporary philosophical
traditions (they even used to call themselves “philosophers”), we can
identify the picture as describing psychic situations and processes. The king
driving the chariot is a symbolic representation of the conscious “self” who,
with his powers and his logic, is trying to control the course of the soul
and the instinctual drives and failing in the attempt: a dark entity with
roots in the unconscious has taken over the soul and paralyzed it. In our
terminology we would speak of a depressive state, when spiritual energies are
unavailable and everything is pulled downward.
The story continues in the
picture at the bottom left: the king has already lost his crown, the symbol
of rule and government, and is being placed in a coffin by a woman. The
female appears here linked to one of its most distinctive symbols: the symbol
of death. Because the woman knows the secrets of birth, the ancients ascribed
to her knowledge of the secrets of life and, by implication, knowledge of the
secret of death. The sense of death, the fixed escort of depression, is not
the end of the story; its continuation, according to our painting, suggests
that when death symbols appear, they may be only part of a full course, part
of a “process.” The process does indeed continue on the right: the king is
reborn—again through a woman.
The picture, then, describes an
entire cycle of death and rebirth. If it is indeed describing one of the
basic processes in the human soul, several interesting conclusions emerge, in
two directions: when symbols of death appear in our dreams, our fantasies,
and our fears, an underlying process of renewal and development could be at
work, which we do not know how to interpret and understand. The second
direction that interests us here touches on the kabbalistic interpretation.
If the process that the alchemists painted was correctly interpreted here as
a psychic process, we should expect symbols of death and rebirth to appear in
every mystical theory. The process of death and rebirth indeed emerges as a
crucial kabbalistic element; more than that, renewal processes of this type
are one of the most important and daring innovations of the Kabbalah. The
idea of transmigration first appears in Jewish tradition in the Kabbalah. The
interpretation of this idea in the Kabbalah is far beyond the scope of this
paper, but a brief comment is in place: popular interpretations of
transmigration are a complete distortion of the kabbalistic idea. Populist
interpretations merely concerned with ensuring the continuity of life do not
rest on knowledge of psychic processes but on the fear of death familiar to
all of us.
In Sefer ha-Bahir [The Book of “Bright”], the first
kabbalistic text,[xii] the
idea appears as an exegesis of the talmudic expression “a generation goes and
a generation comes.”
The Sefer ha-Bahir states: “Rabbi Akiva said: What does this
mean? A generation goes and a generation comes means a generation that has
already come,” namely, the generation that goes is the one that comes. The
same souls depart and return.[xiii]
As noted, the Bible never hints
at the idea of transmigration (Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones is a
metaphor of life out of death, but makes no allusion to the eternity of the
soul and to the idea of transmigration). By contrast, in the Kabbalah the
idea appears in various forms and could be viewed as a longing for the myth
of transmigration, which the soul knows well from within and from which
biblical monotheism had been estranged. We thus find the full continuum of
death and birth as a central motif in the myth of Lurianic Kabbalah. The
central symbol of the “process” is described there as the creation of the
world, its destruction and restoration. The leading symbols are: “tsimtsum [contraction], shvirah [breaking], berur [inquiry], and tikkun [restoration].” This is the basic
framework of Lurianic theory.[xiv]
The alchemic chariot painting,
then, which highlights the complexity of a change process requiring descent
into and return from Hades and a renunciation of the old—“death”—in order to
enable rebirth, appears in the Kabbalah with its own symbols.[xv] We
see that the essence of the idea of transmigration is not, as in other
mystical doctrines, the promise of immortality but rather the link to the
infinite stream of existence. The mystic renounces immortality and thereby
touches eternity.
“The First Light That Is Wisdom”
 The
best-known woman in alchemical tradition is the Jewess Maria Prophetissa.
Many alchemic inventions are ascribed to her, including some that became part
of chemistry (such as a device for holding vessels in order to boil liquids,
and even the discovery of hydrochloric acid). Some viewed her as a prophet
and hence her name.
The picture shows Maria when
pointing to the dynamic relationship between heaven and earth. Kabbalistic
texts portraying the relationship between the upper and nether realms could
serve as a detailed description and an apt interpretation of the painting.
One such text appears in the Sefer ha-Bahir. The disciples are asked
a question addressed to their rabbi: “From up downwards we understand, but from
down upwards we do not understand.” The discussion that follows clarifies
that the topic is the creation of the world and its order. The disciples tell
the teacher that the order from up downwards is known and clear to them
(since this is how creation is described in the Bible), according to the
familiar pattern: the Creator conceives the world and creation unrolls
downwards, and God also coerces his creatures to accept the Torah. The
question, however, shows that the teacher had thought of another move that is
no less significant, rising upwards—and this move they do not understand.
They are therefore asking a question concerning the existence of a
bi-directional flow between the divinity and the nether worlds, a new issue
that is introduced and discussed at length in the Kabbalah. The rabbi’s
answer is both interesting and surprising:
“R. Amorai explained that
the Shekhinah is down below
just as it is up above. And what is this Shekhinah?
It is the light emanating from the first light, which is wisdom, and
surrounds everything, as is written, ‘the whole earth is full of his glory.’”
The teacher explains to them
that the link between the upper and nether worlds is maintained through the
female element, the Shekhinah,
which is found both in the upper realms, in the divinity, and in the nether
realms, the world. Furthermore, he tells them that the source of the female
is in the first light, the light of “and there was light,” which is the light
of wisdom in Jewish tradition. The light of wisdom is confined here to the
female principle—to the Shekhinah.
Only in our time did a radical feminist outlook of this type develop outside
mystic schools.
The alchemic drawing describes
the flow between the upper and lower vessels, and the vessel depicted in the
painting is female. In kabbalistic tradition, the flow of the divine light
and the vessels containing it are a symbol of the world order and the pattern
of creation; the relationship between the vessels and the flow contains the
secret of existence and extinction. According to the Lurianic myth, when the
vessels are too narrow to contain the divine light they break, but without
the divine light there would be no vessels, which indeed generate and contain
the flow but are also created by it. If we ask what else follows a similar
pattern, we will find that this is how feeling works. Feeling is contained
within the psychic structures, but also creates them. Expressions of feeling
between human beings not only articulate what is but also create it,
clarifying why this flow moves within a female system of symbols.
We see that in both mystical
systems the flow of the divine light, symbolizing the flow of feeling and of
emotional understanding (“emotional intelligence”) belongs to the female
principle. According to the passage above, the order of up and down in the
female mystery is the source of the kabbalistic principle “and the whole
earth is full of his glory.” The presence of God in the world is a female
principle; this is the symbolic essence of the Shekhinah. Whereas the male does and creates (doing), the
female is present, senses, and feels (being). Parallel to the kabbalistic
principle of “up and down,” the Shekhinah,
responsible for the presence of the God and the flow of divine light, dwells
both in the upper and nether worlds.
“God Has Made the One as well as the
Other” (Ecclesiastes 7:14)
In the picture we see a space shaped as an opening receptacle,
intended to represent the inner part. The obvious question is: the inner part
of what?
The mystic will say that
everything has an inner part, and the inner discovery is the discovery of
everything in the world, including the human soul. The picture expresses a
dialectical outlook dominated by polarity, and the dialogue between the poles
is the source of power and creativity. On the left side we see a group of
sages. The philosophers. The alchemists viewed themselves as philosophers in
the deep sense of the word. Study and inquiry stemmed from the love of wisdom
(philo-sophia) and from the spiritual urge to discover and understand the
mystery of creation.
 If
we shift to the Kabbalah, we will find that the Zohar is often presented as a
description of the life and discussions of a group of R. Simeon Bar Yohai’s disciples.
This group, through its way of life and mutual relationships, symbolizes the
world and all that is in it.[xvi] Bar
Yohai’s biography is extremely important in the Zohar. Although he is the
hero of the Zohar, at times the disciples appear to be the protagonists. No
contradiction is thereby involved: Bar Yohai’s soul is incorporated into the
souls of his disciples, and the concern with the disciples’ group is thus
tantamount to the concern with the soul of R. Simeon bar Yohai and its
history, which is actually tantamount to discussing the essence and history
of the universe’s soul.[xvii] All
these kabbalistic symbols emerge as associations to the group of disciples in
the alchemic picture.
Whoever finds that this
picture resonates with the “spiritual” trends of the “new age” prevalent
today and evident in the popularity of study courses on the Kabbalah will be
gravely mistaken. The spiritual is only part of the picture. On the right, a
man is working, describing physicality and sensuality. On the left is the
realm of contemplation, on the right the realm of action and, according to
the mystical outlook, everything in the world must include both elements.
That has been the view of alchemy and the view of the kabbalists throughout
history. Idlers in “search of the self” in the garb of a kabbalistic concern
distort the Kabbalah. In a well-known story, Luria is said to have been
impressed by a disciple arriving at dawn at the house of study. When Luria
found out as they were talking that his student had forgotten to feed the
chickens in his eagerness to study, he sent him away. According to the
principles of mysticism, we cannot ascend the rungs of holiness unless we go
down the steps of the real world. The dialectic dialogue between the poles,
the physical and the spiritual, is the source of divine light; it is the
alchemic “work” (the opus). The
kabbalistic parallel is the verse “But whilst I am still in my flesh… I would
see God” (Job 19:26), attesting to the open and tolerant attitude of the
Kabbalah to the body and its functions.
In our picture, the melting
takes place at the center, in a furnace catching the fire, which is the
cleansing, melding, refining, purifying force. In the center of the picture
is the alchemic process—out of the dialectic relationship between the
physical and the spiritual. The verse “truth will spring out of the earth”
(Psalms 85:12) recurs very often in the Kabbalah. Truth grows precisely from
physical, earthy existence (see Zohar 1:25b). One of the kabbalists’ favorite
biblical stories is that of Jacob’s ladder: “And he dreamed, and behold a
ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold
the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12).
Freud held that the human
foundation is in the instinctual realm. Even the spiritual dimension,
according to Freud, derives from the instinctual through sublimation. By
contrast, Jung concluded that the spiritual principle has deep roots in the
human soul, just like the instincts, and making everything contingent on one
of these two poles is therefore wrong. Studies of alchemy and other mystical
theories supported this dualistic view of the soul.
The Shadow and the Nigredo
One of Jung’s most significant
contributions was his identification of the dark side of the personality as
an ontological reality. The term “shadow” shed much light upon the dark
recesses of the soul. When the starting point is consciousness, as in
Freudian theory that places the “ego” at the center, the dark part of the
personality is defined in negative terms: that which is not conscious. Jung,
however, was uncompromising in his view of evil as an ontological entity
rather than as an “accident” or a malfunction of the “good.” The dark side
generates the contrasts, prompts action, and is connected to the primary
sources, the alchemical prima materia.[xviii]
 In
the mystical outlook that Jung adopted, the unknown is the source of all
sources; correspondingly, the dark becomes the source of growth and renewal.
From this position, Jung came to discover “the illuminated sides” of the
darkness, the creative forces hidden within them, and hence the imperative of
a constant dialogue with this part of the personality. This revelation
explains the continuous search of mystics in all cultures for the link with
the dark side, the shadow. In alchemic writings, the shadow is the healing
power, the antidote to disease. As the epitome of opposition, it is also
symbolized by figures whose essence is “the other,” such as the woman to the
man and the man to the woman.[xix]
 Jung’s
understanding of the symbolic meanings of the “shadow” led him to a profound
interpretation of a wide range of alchemic symbols. The shadow appears in the
shape of animals such as the wolf or the snake. It is symbolized by
everything that is strange, threatening, and exciting (such as the dragon in
the picture.)
This
discussion will help us to understand the appearance of evil in the Kabbalah.
Striving to expose evil’s deeper roots, kabbalists did not look for them in
human deeds but in higher spheres, to the point of ascribing evil, albeit
very cautiously, to the divinity itself. In the Kabbalah, the devil becomes sitra ahra [the other side]. The term sitra ahra legitimizes evil as a
dimension in the revelation of the divine. The Sefer ha-Bahir reads: “It teaches us that the Holy One,
blessed be He, has a quality known as bad, and it is to the north of the Holy
One… and it has many offshoots, all named “bad bad,” and they are big and
small and they destroy the world.” Given the biblical description of
creation, which assumes that the world is fundamentally and generally
good—“and God saw that it was good”—this kabbalistic attitude attains further
significance.
In alchemy, the black or nigredo is symbolized by sulphur. It is
the odorous, the stranger, the dark, the putrid and decaying, the prima materia. Every alchemic process
has to pass through the nigredo
stage. Everything has to return to its source in order to regenerate. The old
rots away and disintegrates in order to make room for the new. Out of the
black the couple will emerge, the union, the newborn child, as we see in the
painting (which belongs to the same series as the first one in this chapter).
And in the Kabbalah we read:
Come and see, the thing above does not awaken until the thing below
awakens first, in order to then be ruled by the thing above. And the mystery
of this is that the black light does not grasp the white light before it
awakens first. After it awakens, the white light immediately prevails (Zohar I:77a)
Tsaddik Yesod Olam
 The
sefirah of yesod [foundation]
is linked in kabbalistic tradition to
the figure of the tsaddik
[righteous leader] according to the verse in Proverbs 10:25: “The righteous is the foundation of the
univers.” The sefirah of yesod
in the Kabbalah embodies the male principle symbolized by the channel of
divine light—this is God’s organ (as noted in the passage from the Zohar
quoted above: “The male’s phallus is the tip of the whole body. And it is
called yesod”). The male organ
symbolizes both physical and spiritual vitality. The tsaddik as the male organ is the one who
implements the divine light, as a beautiful homily in the Zohar explains:
The
Holy One, blessed be he, sowed this light in the Garden of Eden, and He
arranged it in rows with the help of the Righteous One, who is the gardener
in the Garden. And he took this light, and sowed it as a seed of truth, and
arranged it in rows in the Garden, and it sprouted and grew and produced
fruit, by which the world is nourished. This is the meaning of the verse
“Light is sown for the righteous…” (Tishby, Y., 1989). P. 442)
The sexual symbolism connected
to the tsaddik is taken in the
Kabbalah to the point of equating the hiddenness of the tsaddik with the hiddenness of the
sexual organ.
This open and blatant
appearance of a sexual symbol in Judaism is surprising and, quite expectedly,
evoked strong resistance in rabbinic circles. But the comparison with alchemy
clarifies that this matter is not purely sexual. Parallel mystical texts
reveal deep facets of the phallic symbol, from the physical to the most
spiritual, widening understanding of the broad and profound meanings of sex,
which are not exhausted by physical sexuality. One isolated remnant of this
symbolism in Judaism remains in the rite of circumcision, where the most
spiritual covenant is enacted with the sexual organ (the “organ of the
covenant”).
In the picture we see the
growth of a tree as a phallus out of a dead body. The phallus is the symbol
of renewal, as we also saw in the Zohar passage. Perhaps the hand in the
upper left corner of the picture originates in Jewish symbolism. In Judaism,
this hand symbolizes the binding of Isaac and the intervention of God’s hand
in preventing Isaac’s sacrifice, which is in fact his rebirth out of his
death.
In concluding this discussion
of the parallels between alchemy and the Kabbalah, I will quote an
interesting homily on the word “gold.” Anyone seeking a relationship between
any theory and alchemy will obviously search for the gold, which is the most
important symbol of the alchemical opus—the
aim of the process. And indeed, even gold did we find in the Kabbalah,
interestingly connected to the symbolism of the coniunctio, the symbol of the
union. We read in the Sefer ha-Bahir:
And why is its name gold [zahav]?
Because it includes three qualities: Male in the zayin [the first letter in the word zahav as well as the male organ], the
soul in the hey [the second
letter]…and beth [the third
letter], which is their existence, as it is written, “Bereshith bara” [In the beginning God
created].”
This passage, then, finds in
the three letters of the word zahav
the perfect union: the zayin is
the male, the hey the female,
and the beth the union between
them.
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Notes
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