The Kabbalah is commonly referred to as a collection of works which comprise a form of Jewish mysticism. QBLH meaning ‘tradition’ as in ‘Oral Tradition’ is principally comprised of three books: The Sefir Yetsira (Book of Formation), the Sefir ha-Bahir (Book of Illumination) and The Zohar (Splendour); the earliest of these - the Sefir Yetsira is attributed to Rabbi Akiva Ben Joseph who died, probably murdered by the Romans during the Third Jewish Revolt lead by the self-styled Messiah: Bar Kokhba. Although these key texts of the Kabbalah generally appeared in the 12th century onwards the attribution of these texts is much earlier, generally to the historically critical post Second Temple period though such attribution may be an artifice of mediaeval writers seeking perhaps a false authority for their writings and there is much ongoing debate among Jewish and mainstream scholars as to who really wrote these texts and when.
Interestingly we can observe at least two major breaks from Jewish orthodoxy in the Sefir ha-Bahir and this will very much become a theme I wish to focus on since this attempt to subvert Judaism from within by a secondary force which seems antagonistic to the Torah and wishing to destroy it despite claiming the contrary, is a key part of my thesis. The following excerpt shows the promulgation of a belief in reincarnation, an idea alien to conventional Judaism but which was a fundamental belief of the Pharisees who would later become the core of Rabbinical Judaism after the fall of the Second Temple and it is worth noting that the majority of Pharisees themselves were not of the lineage of Israel but were actually Edomites. Reincarnation has historically been more commonly associated with Hinduism, Buddhism, and probably more pertinently here, the mystery religions of Ancient Greece:
“Why is there a righteous person who has good, and [another] righteous person who has evil? This is because the [second] righteous person was wicked previously, and is now being punished. Is one then punished for his childhood deeds? Did not Rabbi Simon say that in the Tribunal on high, no punishment is meted out until one is twenty years or older. He said: I am not speaking of his present lifetime. I am speaking about what he has already been, previously.”
This isn’t to dismiss reincarnation as a concept, merely to point out that it is inconsistent with Jewish religious tradition and to see that it is adapted by the key writers or compilers of the Kabbalah, shows that something which is alien to the Jewish tradition entered their religion and transformed it, I would say a whole package of alien traditions entered Judaism and turned it into something infinitely dangerous: a religion with an acquired arsenal of techniques from the Greek mystery religion to transform consciousness; if such techniques are used, out of context or within a framework which is not properly adapted to them, then the consequences can be extremely grave and such techniques can become extremely destructive to the people undergoing them and to the society as a whole which also becomes transformed. If additionally, these techniques are used as a weapon to actually subjugate and conquer a perceived enemy, which I believe to ultimately be the case, then whoever holds the key to these transformative techniques can dictate not only the physical reality which is experienced by those who are dominated by the secret esoteric machinery of the secret society’s mystery religion but can also dictate their spiritual reality, which is infinitely more insidious.
It would seem therefore that the doctrines of the Eleusinian mystery school, which taught reincarnation within the context of the Orphic religion, spread throughout Greek society and the ancient world of the Gentiles and was promulgated by luminaries such as Pythagoras and Socrates. The Orphic religion teaches that in order to achieve salvation or detachment from the wheel of birth and rebirth it is necessary to undergo a ritual purification called ‘telete’ while the uninitiated ‘amuetos’ must reincarnate indefinitely.
We can only guess what might have transpired during these ancient rites suffice it to say that with a combination of psychoactive compounds, extreme emotions and a sense of fear for one’s life, combined with witnessing extraordinary events being manifested with a variety of special effects and scientific knowledge known to the priesthood but not the initiate, then all sorts of illusions can be drawn on to strongly influence the mind of the initiate and no doubt, some real kind of revelation truly brought to bear.
An example from the Christian era of the priesthood having special knowledge which gave them power over people would be the case of the monks of the 11th Century order of Saint Anthony. They were primarily based in France and would treat those who were suffering from Saint Anthony’s Fire or ergotism, that is the presumably accidental ingestion of the highly toxic ergot fungus as a result of its contamination with the local grain crop from which ergotised bread was made. It is surmised that the efficacy of the Order of Saint Anthony lay solely in their knowledge of what caused ergotism and that they simply cured their patients by removing them from the source of ergot in their diet by giving them bread which either grew in areas without an ergot infestation of by using grain which had been previously screened. The knowledge of ergot was something we have conjectured may have been known to the priesthood of the Eleusinian mysteries who may have deliberately used this agent as a psychoticant. Additionally, knowledge of the effects of ergot must have been known to early Iron Age societies in Europe since it has been found in the stomachs of those ritually murdered and placed in bogs. Drugging prior to ritual death was also common in South America where coca leaves and alcohol were used as a sedative in the transition of life to death, the purpose of their death being that they would then become ‘ancestors’ to spiritually watch over their people.
Another unusual and one might say heretical extract from the Sefer ha-Bahir, relates to the Biblical fall of man and this material has actually become somewhat accepted amongst certain circles of esoteric Christianity:
“The soul of the female comes from the Female, and the soul of the male comes from the Male. This is the reason why the Serpent followed Eve. He said, “Her soul comes from the north, and I will therefore quickly seduce her.” And how did he seduce her? He had intercourse with her.”
It is probably a stretch to consider the story of the Garden of Eden as anything more than an allegory for some other key events which may have taken place in the remote history of mankind in the area in which he seems to have developed all of the arts and from where human civilisation emerged. It is in the Middle-East and the area specifically between the Euphrates and Tigris which is where Eden was said to have been situated. But why the keenness to sexualise this story and introduce an element which had not previously been suspected? And why the need to claim that gender is something which also exists in the spiritual realm? What need would spirits have of being gendered since they presumably do not reproduce. This is a theme we will also see develop greatly: the overt sexualisation of the Torah and of spiritual matters in general.
Founder of the international Kabbalah foundation: Bnei Baruch, Michael Laitman claims that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai wrote the Zohar in the 2nd century. Known as Rashbi, he was the most eminent disciple of Rabbi Akiva and was said to have compiled 3,000 years of Kabbalah and many of his sayings are found in the Talmud, although modern scholars doubt this.
Rabbi Akiva is renowned as one of the great Jewish sages or ‘tanna’ and the Sefir Yetsira is attributed to him although there are scholastic doubts as to this, although it is more plausible that he was the creator of the early divisions of the Mishnah. It was Akiva who gave the ill-fated Jewish military leader of the third and final Jewish revolt against the Romans Simon ben Kosevah the sobriquet Simon bar Kokhba, (son of the star: a reference to the messianic prophecy of an Israelite military leader referred to in Numbers 24:17) and considered him to be the long-awaited Messiah.
The revolt ended in 135AD with the wholesale slaughter of the Jews (with as many as half a million killed) and the razing of their towns and villages. It is probable that this event became the catalyst for their long-term programme of world domination and total subjugation of gentiles. Subsequent Talmudic opinion of Simon bar Kokhba considers him to be a ‘false-messiah’.
The Zohar appeared in 13th century Spain and was published by Moses de Leon who ascribed it to Rashbi in mythical and unlikely terms. It is Rashbi who is credited with saying:
“The best of the gentiles merit death; the best of serpents should have its head crushed; and the most pious of women is prone to sorcery.”
There is also criticism of the Kabbalah, specifically the Zohar as being evidently written from a post Talmudic perspective and also some of the references in the text firmly place it in a 13th century context.
For instance, the Zohar predicted the arrival of the Jewish Messiah in the 70th year of the 6th millennium: the 14th Century, and that he would be caught up in the wars between the Muslims and Christians. But since there were no Muslims in the 2nd century it cannot have been written by Rashbi but clearly by someone contemporaneous with the activities of the crusading Christians. The crusader wars between Christians and Muslims had been waged for 200 years and were ongoing during the lifetime of Moses de Leon so it might have seemed a safe bet that they would continue into the future.
Unfortunately for the writer of the Zohar, whoever he was, but it was probably de Leon, the Crusader presence in the Holy Land effectively ended in 1291 with the Fall of Acre, so this constitutes a failed prediction and rebuffs any suggestion of the text being divinely inspired. These passages are generally not included with published versions of the Zohar (for obvious reasons) but they do make up the corpus of the written texts, but such failed predictions serve both to date the writing of the Zohar to sometime in the 13th century prior to 1291 and also to discredit it as having any prophetic or revelatory value.
