Chapter from my book: Demons of Eleusis.
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.
William Wynn Westcott co-founder of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, celebrated Freemason and ‘ceremonial magician’ authored a translation and commentary on the Sefir Yetsira for members of the Theosophical Society, The Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucians and it would become a major source for the Golden Dawn’s initiation ceremonies. Westcott encapsulates the Sefir Yetsira as: “..a most curious philosophical scheme of creation, drawing a parallel between the origin of the world, the sun, the planets, the elements, seasons, man and the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.” Eliphas Levi, the man who popularised the inverted Satanic pentagram, said of it: "The Sepher Jezirah and the Apocalypse are the masterpieces of Occultism”.
From Schuchard:
“This mystical capacity to visualize the architectural and pictorial expression of complex mathematical and geometrical speculation became associated with the practical expertise of the architect and master mason. In the schools of Merkabah mysticism, Jewish adepts increasingly portrayed Solomon as an architectural magus and his master mason Bezalel as a craftsman magus, initiated in the secrets of the Sepher Yetzirah. Thus, ‘Bezalel knew how to combine the letters by which heavens and earth were formed," while he and his Merkabah heirs could visualize and manipulate the ‘measure of the body’ of God (called the Shi'ur Komah).’
The Sefir Yetsira is perhaps the foundation text of the Kabbalah where many of the key concepts such as the ten Sefirot and the 32 paths to God are first elucidated although at this early stage in the mythos of Kabbalah no names have yet been attributed to the Sefirot, only that there are ten of them: “Ten is the number of the ineffable Sefirot, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven” just to be sure. In terms of historical critical textual analysis this very much creates the impression that the Kabbalah was something which aggregated and not something which emerged as a complete and self-contained work. The 32 paths of wisdom, according to Jewish tradition, are apparently derived from the 32 times the name ‘Elohim’ is mentioned in Genesis. This in addition to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet being added to the 10 Sefirot to make 32 combinations.
The 10 Sefirot are first named in the Sefir ha-Bahir and the names of the first seven are taken from the Old Testament book of Chronicles (although there are technically 11 Sefirot on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life including Da’at but this is seen as all the Sefirot simultaneously so it can be viewed as a state rather than a distinct Sefirot):
“Yours, O Lord, is the greatness (chesed/gedullah), power (gevurah), the glory (tiferet), the victory (netzach), the splendour (hod) for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom (malchut) and you are exalted as head over all.” Chronicles 29:11.
The idea became developed in the Talmud that God created the universe specifically using these attributes which would later become the stations or the Sefirot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life:
“By ten things was the world created, by wisdom and by understanding, and by reason and by strength by rebuke and by might, by righteousness and by judgment, by loving kindness and compassion." Talmud, Tractata Hagiga 12a.
The ten Sefirot in descending order are: Crown (Keter), Wisdom (Chokmah), Understanding (Binah), Kindness (Chesed), Discipline (Gevurah), Glory (Tiferet), Victory (Netzach), Splendour (Hod), Foundation (Yesod) and Kingdom (Malkuth).
The logic of the ten Sefirot and even of the Ain Soph is an internal one which has no observable independent reality, even in metaphysical terms and cannot really be validated. It seems to be and perhaps it might be more useful and charitable to see this system as an idealised from of spiritual self-discipline but the very fact that the Kabbalah was built on such shifting sands and from the very beginning seemed to be more a series of word and number games being stacked up on top of each other through the centuries by successive Rabbis, might lead one to the conclusion that any deeper meaning and spiritual insight which can be derived from the Kabbalah might be entirely accidental.
It is worth noting that according to William Westcot:
“Many Kabalists have shown how the Ten Sefirot are symbolised by the zig-zag lightning flash.”
This could perhaps be the reason for David Bowie’s, and later Lady Gaga’s adoption of this style motif. Bowie’s interest in the Kabbalah and Crowley are generally well-known by now.
On the subject of Crowley, this evidently opportunistic approach to Jewish mysticism led by people like Aleister Crowley, who himself probably knew full well what a sham the Kabbalah was, adopting the terminology and structures to suit his own nefarious purposes. So while Da’at supposedly represents the idealised state of all 10 Sefirot acting in perfection, for Crowley it represents ‘The Night of Pan’. No doubt some kind of unsavoury experiment in frenzy and practised abominations, and as expected Crowley writes:
“The truly magical operations of Love are therefore the Trances, more especially those of Understanding; as will readily have been appreciated by those who have made a careful Qabalistic study of the nature of Binah. For she is omniform as Love and as Death, the Great Sea whence all Life springs, and whose black womb reabsorbs all. She thus resumes in herself the duplex process of the Formula of Love under Will; for is not Pan the All-Begetter in the heart of the Groves at high noon, and is not Her 'hair the trees of Eternity' the filaments of All-Devouring Godhead 'under the Night of Pan?'”
He furthermore adds that:
“Night is that time of symbolic death where the adept experiences unification with the All through the ecstatic destruction of the ego-self.”
Such things are not made quite so plain in the texts of the Kabbalah though they are hinted at in the metaphor of the Alchemical ‘Great Work’ (which is incidentally a term used by the Freemasons) and the psychological transformations and how they might be achieved are fleshed out in the Rosicrucian Chymical Wedding text.
Beyond Crowley’s sordid self-serving sexual agenda, he reveals the same hidden purpose which we have seen exposed time and time again in this work, through the centuries, whether of the UFO contact cults, or Revolutionary agents and assassins or mystical Scientific societies of the middle-ages, Crowley writes:
“There are many magical teachers but in recorded history we have scarcely had a dozen Magi in the technical sense of the word. They may be recognized by the fact that their message may be formulated as a single word, which word must be such that it overturns all existing beliefs and codes.”
Crowley, the Rosicrucians, the Italian bankers and their change agents, the French and the Russian revolutionaries, the UFO cults, all controlled by the same force throughout time and space all dedicated to one theme: ‘overturning all existing beliefs’. We now live in the world where their programme is about to achieve its final goals bereft of the idealism which would have sustained those meddling and wrong-headed do-gooders of the past.
I found this quote during my research though I have forgotten the attribution and the internet search results being now so strictly filtered it is presently impossible for me to find out, but it perfectly encapsulates what has happened to the world and how everything has been subverted from within by the secret societies enacting this millennial old agenda, emerging slowly in the mediaeval period, informed by and secretly perpetuating Jewish mysticism amongst the elite of the West:
“To destroy Western society it is not necessary to teach evil in place of Christianity, it is just necessary to teach Judaism.”
Although Crowley was no doubt a most unpleasant man obsessed with his own pleasure at any cost, even to the lives and sanity of others, by sexualising the Kabbalah he was only exaggerating what was already implicit in the original texts. The fundamental problem with the Kabbalah is that it is obsessed with male and female forces and sees these as spiritual forces rather than merely physical ones. I suppose it is a matter of opinion but I do not see the spiritual world as having any gender.
It ought to be evident that gender is a requirement of physical procreation in the physical world and can serve no purpose once physicality ends in the spiritual world. But according to the Kabbalah it persists and is primordial, emerging from the very point of contact from the great Ain Soph to the Kether. With the third Sefira Binah as being the ‘reflection’ of God, that is God seeing itself, then Binah is receptive and hence a feminine principle and is known in Kabbalah as the ‘mother’ archetype. Confusingly however each successive Sefira has an androgynous nature of both receiving and transmitting, receiving being a supposedly feminine principle and transmitting being a masculine one.
The opening tractate of the Zohar is entitled The Rose and it could possibly be the true origin of the term Rosicrucian. In the Zohar the rose is revealed to be a symbol for Israel, would this make Rosicrucianism, that is, the rose and cross the first society of Christian Zionism? This analysis would make perfect sense.
“Rabbi Hizkiyah opened, ‘It is written, as a rose among thorns.’ That a rose is the Assembly of Israel. Because there is a rose and there is a rose, just as a rose among thorns is tinged with red and white, the Assembly of Israel consists of judgment and mercy. Just as a rose has thirteen petals, the Assembly of Israel is surrounded on all sides by the thirteen attributes of mercy.”
In the Zohar the masculine energies Chokmah (wisdom) impregnated Binah (understanding) with light to produce Tiferet or Beauty. To the Kabbalist the spiritual realm seems to be held together with constant repetitions of sexual energies, it is hardly any wonder then that we hear rumours of Freemasonry being little more than a cleverly disguised cult of the phallus in the style of the ancient Egyptian fertility mystery schools such as the allegory of the search for the poor Osiris’ lost penis.
In his 2008 book Essential Judaism, George Robinson writes:
“Hokhmah is the “sperm” that will impregnate Binah (Understanding) as the first step in the Creative process.”
“..it is the means by which Tiferet, the male principle of the Divine, impregnates Shekhinah or Malkhut, the female embodiment of the Divine. Yesod is the way in which Divine Creativity and Fertility are visited upon all creation. Yesod is associated with the phallus…”
The other danger is the insistence of the Zohar of literally embodying the fundamental spiritual powers of God in the human body. In the Zohar this is called the Microprospus or Damuth Adam, the primordial man, and might be more familiar as the pentagram which in reality is a stylised representation of the human body. So the various Sefirot are said to manifest at different points in or near the human body. I wonder if you can see where this is heading? The problem is that again, sex does not seem to be something merely physical but also primordial, in this belief system then, one can justify all kinds of sexual rites in the delusion that these are spiritual forces and therefore they escape any kind of ideas of modesty or morality, and these are precisely the errors the Ancient World fell into. Where the Gods of the Ancient World were merely expressions of man’s own nature, it was at least to Judaism’s credit that they insisted that God created Man in his own image and not the other way around. But the Kabbalah precisely does that, it takes the physical world and all its desires, emotions and polarities and thrusts them into the spiritual domain, up to the very highest levels until it reaches Ain Soph and ends in nothingness.
Master Mason and Rosicrucian, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers who co-founded the Golden Dawn along with William Westcott also authored a translation of some of the tracts of the Zohar which he translated from the Latin version of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth.
In his ‘Confessions’ Aleister Crowley wrote of the decline of the Golden Dawn and of Mathers himself and makes an intriguing allusion:
“…Mathers, of course, carried on; but he had fallen. The Secret Chiefs cast him off; he fell into deplorable abjection; even his scholarship deserted him. He published nothing new and lived in sodden intoxication till death put an end to his long misery."
According to one-time personal secretary to Aleister Crowley and populariser of the occult in the 1960’s Israel Regardie, the Kabbalah was handed down to Adam after the fall of Man and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
Regardie is particularly scathing of religions, however he claims that Kabbalah does not belong to any religious traditions, and also has a soft-spot for Witchcraft. In his book he mentions Crowley, for whom he has ‘a tremendous respect’ unfortunately this respect would not last once Crowley accused Regardie of ‘pure theft’ when he edited a 4 volume work on The Golden Dawn and in a bitter feud revealed to the world that Regardie had once visited a prostitute in France and contracted gonorrhoea, neglecting to mention that it was Crowley who had ordered him to visit the prostitute in order to lose his virginity and overcome his inhibitions.
Although Crowley in his Confessions depicts Mathers as the true source of spiritual contact between Crowley and the entities he served:
"As far as I was concerned, Mathers was my only link with the Secret Chiefs to whom I was pledged. I wrote to him offering to place myself and my fortune unreservedly at his disposal; if that meant giving up the Abra-Melin Operation for the present, all right."
Mathers it seemed was in full psychic contact with various spiritual entities; Crowley reports how he would play chess against pagan Gods, the moves apparently being communicated to him and the opponents’ pieces he would move on their behalf. One could still ascribe this to an over-active imagination I suppose, but is it likely that merely an overactive imagination is enough to influence the world on such a phenomenal cross-cultural and global scale, taking control of the highest echelons of the ruling secret societies and being the hidden hand behind the façade of our society?
A similar end awaited Crowley himself whose last words were reported to have been either: "I am perplexed, Satan get out!" or "Sometimes I hate myself" but Crowley’s reference to ‘Secret Chiefs’ having deserted Mathers is intriguing and possibly hints at some kind of ongoing psychic contact with a disembodied spiritual force.
In her book about occult societies Talking to Gods Susan Johnston Graf states that The Golden Dawn was: “…the most important and influential Western organisation of its kind”. She gives a good summary of the general purpose and aim of the group:
“For a Golden Dawn initiate the work at hand was to make contact with the divine spark that was thought to reside in all humans…The Golden Dawn initiate was wanted to raise his or her consciousness to attain what is termed conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. The practise of ritual magic in the Order of the Golden Dawn was an attempt to change consciousness and to control the imagination by active participation in psychic events.’
If the aim of the Golden Dawn is to establish contact or ‘conversation’ with a so-called Holy Guardian Angel then in theory, the whole human initiatory apparatus might be wholly unnecessary. It might therefore be possible to directly contact this force using only a pro-forma set of directions to express intent and the sense of required ceremony. Such an approach was attempted by a blogger at the following website: https://www.llewellyn.com/journal/article/365
“You might think that having achieved my goal I would stop, but just the opposite was true. After all, the word "initiate" means "to begin," not end. Self-Initiation into the Golden Dawn Tradition continued with what I need to learn to go into the next degree of the tradition, and even included a self-test to make sure I knew the material and was ready to go on. I'm working on that now.
I felt like I was in a trance as I continued with the initiation:
I am the inheritor of a dying world, arisen and entered into Darkness. The Mother of Darkness hath blinded me with her hair. The Father of Darkness hath hidden me under his wings. My limbs are still weary from the wars which were in Heaven.
Unpurified and unconsecrated, thou canst not enter our Sacred Hall.
And I was purified with water and consecrated with fire and finally, kneeling, I was ready to take the oath.
...in the Presence of the Lord of the Universe, who works in silence and whom naught but silence can express, and in this Hall of the Neophytes of the current of the Golden Dawn, do, of my own free will, hereby and hereon, most solemnly promise...to dedicate my life to the pursuit of the mysteries of the Golden Dawn tradition of magic and to the completion of the Great Work. I solemnly promise to persevere with courage and determination in the labors of the Divine Science, even as I shall persevere with courage and determination through this ceremony which is their image...
I was trembling as I said the next words:
Rise Neophyte of the 0 = 0 grade of the Golden Dawn. (p. 31)
Before anybody asks, I don't think I'm a member of the Golden Dawn group, but I know that I am initiated as a true neophyte into the tradition of the Golden Dawn.”
Intriguingly the next part reminds us of the experience of Barbara O’Brien communicating with that ‘something’ in the casino:
“In Atlantic City, for the first time ever, I went to the casinos came back a winner. I would move from one slot machine to another just in time to get another big reward.”
He also mentions several other apparent benefits which although we may surmise the cause we cannot be sure except perhaps that he had connected with that ‘something’ which has a remarkable power to provide beneficial coincidences. As to what that ‘something’ is, that is perhaps the life-work of the reader to discover it for themselves and decide whether this is a positive or negative force:
“I drive to various locations, I end up with parking places very close to the entrances. The pain in my knee has vanished. I need sixty–ninety minutes less sleep nightly than before. I no longer have a need for coffee in the morning in order to get going. My minimal artistic skills have improved. My reading speed and retention of what I read has vastly improved.”
But according to Susan Johnston Graf being a member of the Golden Dawn, was apparently not without a certain danger and she and hints about the reasons for the group’s secretive nature:
‘The beliefs are hidden or secret because of the perceived danger to the practitioners... the danger from within comes in the form of psychic disintegration’
The Golden Dawn has 10 grades which correspond to the ten Sefirot of the Kabbalah as first outlines in the Sefir Yetsira and Golden Dawn member WB Yeats wrote on these degrees and their attainment:
“It matters nothing whether the Degrees about us are in the body or out of the body.
In 1901 Yeats wrote to a fellow Golden Dawn member hinting at some kind if implicit social-change agenda involving the organisation:
“We have set before us a certain work that may be of incalculable importance in the change of thought that is coming upon the world.”
A super elect group was formed within the Golden Dawn which claimed to have even more advanced secrets, the group was called The Red Rose and the Cross of Gold.
Dion Fortune, an occultist who established psychic contacts with ‘Ascended Masters’ and "the Shemesh of the Aquarian Age" describes the character of the initiate in the following, alchemical terms:
“He is tried in the furnace of sorrow and suffering until his nature undergoes the flux of the soul and can be remade. Then he is forged on the anvil of discipline by the hammer of danger.”
Susan Johnston Graf states:
“Yeats, Fortune and Blackwood all believed that humans possessed latent power which resided in the subconscious mind, and each of them spent their lives trying to tap that reservoir for the good of the human race.”
Christian Knorr von Rosenroth was a very early 17th Century Theosophist who mistakenly believed he might find some insight into Christianity in the Kabbalah and ultimately, he gave a somewhat balanced view of the Kabbalah which confirms some of my own criticisms:
“I entered the path, worn by few, traversed by no one I knew, and, furthermore, filled with so many hard stones, uneven places, chasms, precipices, and such mud that it is not surprising that so many, filled with dread abandoned it with disgust.. I shall sketch for you in a few words what gold and whatever gems I have thus far dug out of this dirt and what hope leads me further.”
I can readily agree with the feelings of disgust with the constant sexualising of the finer things of the spirit world and of the nature of God, along with the chasms of meaningless gematria drivel which shrivel the mind. The feeling of studying the Zohar is thinking you may have stumbled on something valuable, something shines and sparkles because it is a phrase which actually makes sense, perhaps a phrase like:
“Tepheret is the path to beauty..” you read on and it continues: “which equals the letter V” then talk about Queens and things flowing, and then Hebrew consonants and silly gematria conceits and more numbers and then a snatch of the Torah and a reference to Jacob. This is the sum total of the Zohar, an endless permutation of meaninglessness, almost fractal in its complexity reaching out deeply into precisely nowhere. A kind of procedurally generated cerebral noise from minds perhaps, estranged from God and so far from understanding that they had to invent a whole bizarre theosophy of their own in order to populate their minds with something they think resembles spirituality.
But the overt repeated sexual imagery used in the Zohar leads me to the strong suspicion that this is the origin of the Satanic themed sex cults which occasionally make the news or more frequently, are exposed by former insiders and victims of the cult, communicating through the alternative media. Groups such as Crowley’s Order of the Oriental Temple were a surface resurgence of this ancient current which had previously surfaced in the form of the Duke of Wharton’s and later Sir Frances Dashwood’s Hellfire Club of the 18th Century. The Duke of Wharton was hugely indebted to banking interests as a result of the collapse in the share price of the South Sea company in which he had heavily invested. In 1723 after the dissolution of the Hellfire Club he became the Grand Master of the first Freemasonic Grand Lodge of England. One wonders, like so many other pawns of the manipulators whether Wharton’s debts forced him to act for that financial power which sought to use him to exercise its covert social agenda which we have seen either hinted at or historically emerge from cover and unleash its furious agenda usually ending in the destruction of Christian institutions and mass bloodshed and butchery.
Intriguingly Sir Frances Dashwood served, for a short time at least, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite, like Winston Churchill, being dubiously qualified:
"Of financial knowledge he did not possess the rudiments, and his ignorance was all the more conspicuous from the great financial ability of his predecessor Legge. His budget speech was so confused and incapable that it was received with shouts of laughter.” Pollard, (1901) 'Dashwood, Francis’.
From the Lesser Holy Assembly, a book of the Zohah, we find references which recall the lexicon and iconography of the Rosicrucian ‘Alchemical’ process: the talk of ‘brides’ and the union of Kings and Queen, not to mention references which are markedly less guarded and ambiguous than the ostensibly Christian Rosicrucian literature:
“The second association of Yesod with the genitals arises from the union of the Microprosopus and his Bride…When the male is joined with the female, they both constitute one complete body, and all the universe is in a state of happiness because all things receive blessings from their perfect body. And this is an arcanum (secret).”
And a strangely profane, almost sacrilegious reference to the Bride:
“And she is mitigated, and receiveth blessing in that place which is called the holy of holies below.” Referring to the female genitals in terms of the holy sanctuary of the great Temple of Jerusalem would certainly not meet with approval with what one conceives as the Torah studying conservative Jewish mind and one cannot help but feel that such sexual rites and imagery was the very thing the Levite priests were so critical of in Leviticus.
So too the masculine sexual energies are unambiguously referred to and put in spiritual terms and given a specific Sefira in the Tree of Life and the male member too as Yesod is referred to as ‘most holy’. One can just imagine what kind of excesses and perversions of spirituality could emerge from a cult which reveres sexuality and specifically the sex organs as holy objects worthy of reverence:
“And that which floweth down into that place where it is congregated, and which is emitted through that most holy Yesod, foundation is entirely white, and therefore is it called Chesed.”
And how “Chesed entereth into the Holy of Holies”.
Yesod is mirrored on the Tree of Death by the Qlippoth Gamaliel, or the ‘obscene one’, this is when the sexual energy is repressed and builds up in the conscious mind leading to more and more obscene sexual visions and the demon Lilith is the ruler of this domain. The problem is if a mythology is created then invariably cults and worshippers will arise who will choose to follow this ‘path’. So by creating the mythos of a ‘Tree of Death’ ruled over by various evil spirits and entities, they also invariably unleash these forces into the world as a kind of contrary ‘spiritual’ tradition, it is all the more tragic that such followers commit real evil acts and atrocities which daily degrade life on Earth and whatever forces of chaos are unleashed by wanton evil, are all based on nothing but the most irrational and very silliest form of absolute nonsense.
For instance, it is rather a sad and awful satire to hear genitals and semen referred to as holy, and the genitals as ‘they holy of holies’ and surely must constitute sure and certain direct evidence of the inner corruption of the Judaism of the patriarchs. So much of the Zohar follows this template. A Sefira is referenced, then a quote from the Torah, then something sexually suggestive about mothers, queens or brides. Then a suggestive remark like ‘the holiness of the male enters’ or ‘beautiful path into the queen’ or ‘the influx of pleasure’ or ‘marital conjunction’; make a reference to Hebrew consonants then refer to a Biblical patriarch and you have your Kabbalah mysticism. This is the seed in order to procedurally generate the Kabbalah.
Something like the following is typical:
“The husband hath dominion over the wife.. combination with the female, the letter I or Yod is the fundamental member by which the world is preserved.. The father illuminating the mother.”
In fact, some passages were considered so ‘off colour’ that Samuel Mathers did not translate them into English but kept the original Latin of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. We can’t be sure about what is being discussed but there seems to be a reference to semen and fertility:
“For everything that is the oil, and the declaration of, and in the power of these men also, is gathered together out of the whole body; for they are all of the army, which is produced from them, and come forth, and all pour in the openings of the genital organs.”
This next excerpt refers to the action of the penis entering inside the uterus of a woman:
“Through the Yesod, he goes into the woman in a place called Zion and Jerusalem. For here is the wife’s secret feminine place and it is called the uterus.”
It is possible that the Zohar is partially a kind of text based marital aid for inexperienced couples, or a form of sex education. In the Lesser Holy Assembly, the so-called Star of David or Seal of Solomon, according to the Zohar, is a symbol of sexual congress:
“Chokmah is the fire: I, and Binah is the water: H, the Father and Mother who, conjoined, produce the Son. Now the fire is symbolized by a triangle with the apex uppermost , and water by a triangle with the apex downmost , these two together united form the sign of the Macrocosm, the external symbol of Vau: V, Microprosopus.”
Judaism is pretty clear when it comes to sexual license and such things, all though not strictly considered shameful are certainly not considered holy, they are most assuredly ‘things of the flesh that perisheth,” though notably this is a New Testament reference. In fact I had assumed that the Bible was globally censorious regarding ‘the sins of the flesh’ but to my surprise I found that it was largely the New Testament, not the Old Testament, which exhorts the mind to think on spiritual things.
This distinction is hardly made in the Old Testament and leads one to the suspicion of a certain unreformed carnality in the Jewish mind which the Christian mind rejects and sets itself with a view on higher and better things. The Old Testament however is full of sexual immorality, often committed by the Israelites themselves. King David having sex with Bathsheba, then murdering her husband to cover up his immorality for example. The major sexual crimes in the Old Testament tend to refer to homosexuality or of Israelite women sleeping with non-Israelite men. Gross sexual license and carnality seems to be common in the Old Testament and indeed is most often the behaviour of Israel’s Kings for which they are chastised by the prophets and punished by God.
The book of Deuteronomy warns the children of Israel:
“Do not set up any wooden Asherah pole beside the altar you build to the LORD your God, and do not erect a sacred stone, for these the LORD your God hates.”
Ahab King of Judea set up an altar to Baal and an Asherah pole. It is possible that The Tree of Life comes from a time predating monotheism in Judaism, when Jahweh was said to have had a wife: Asherah, who was represented by a stylised tree or wooden pole. Asherah was an Ugaritic mother Goddess and the role of Asherah was said to be the mediation of opposites, which is exactly what we see with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and is said to be part of the alchemical process. The result of mediation of the opposites which we have seen has been such a key theme of the so called Western mystical current since the middle-ages is quite startling.
According to the Jewish Encyclopaedia:
“… the "Sefer Yeẓirah" draws the important conclusion that "good and evil" have no real existence, for since everything in nature can exist only by means of its contrast, a thing may be called good or evil according to its influence over man by the natural course of the contrast.”
What’s more it is my belief that the Biblical Tree of Knowledge in the garden of Eden from which God commanded Adam not to eat, was a reference to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and was an injunction not to follow Asherah worship and the associated rites. This also makes sense of the word for serpent which supposedly tempted Eve to eat of the fruit. The Hebrew word for serpent is Nachash which also means the occult.
Mexican occultist and creator of the Universal Christian Gnostic Movement: Samael Aun Weor followed in Aleister Crowley’s footsteps in capitalising on the sexual nature of the Zohar by deconstructing the whole Zohar and the Torah in sexual terms and then creating his own bizarre cult on the back of it which judging by several accounts on the internet, was quite good at destroying people’s lives:
“During my near decade going through the various gnostic movements, I watched as people wept while they gave up their assets and hobbies (even their jobs) in order to ‘sacrifice themselves for humanity.’ I myself wept as I did things like destroy my video game consoles and movies (or give them away) and even destroyed a huge collection of books I had because they didn’t fit in with the ideas of the Samael gnostic movements. I stopped in the middle of my bachelor’s degree program because I was persuaded by gnostic leaders to not ‘damage my intellect.’ I was lucky to be welcomed back to the program by my professors after years of abandonment. I was lucky to have a lot of support after I left the movements.”
Despite this there are clues that Weor’s dubious movement had discovered, or had access, to some fundamentally ancient, quasi magical knowledge, the kind of knowledge such groups can use to manipulate and control society around them and allow them to operate way beyond the understanding and envisioning of normal people:
“As I understood it, the Astral is this sort of ‘place’ that is actually inside you, and all your demons live there. It's where you go when you dream. It's very hard for a beginner to navigate because you have to learn to ‘see through’ your dreams: the complexes/demons/egos (whatever you call them) which have a pretty large amount of control over you in waking life have pretty much total control over you in the astral realm, hence the typical total inability to control ourselves in dreams and the instability of the environment and instability of logic in dreams.
According to the teaching as I understand it, you are supposed to get more and more conscious in your waking life, then more and more conscious in your dream life. As all your dreams become lucid, you will start to ‘see through’ them, in the sense of having greater insight into what they mean. This gives you a huge edge in battling your egos. In waking life you are just meditating and trying not to let your desires, etc. get the best of you. But in the astral (dream) realm, you can actually see your egos at work weaving the dream picture, and see your egos in personified form interacting with you in the dreams.
Eventually, as you become an adept at this work, you see through the egos at work in your dreams so well that your dreams start to actually stabilize. This is really where the phrase ‘astral realm’ comes into play. The dream world now becomes this sort of other world that you can explore in a more or less rational fashion. You learn to enter and exit the astral realm at will, meaning you don't have to be tired and fall asleep per se, you can just lie down and whisk yourself off whenever you want to.
Although it is ‘internal’, since we are all connected you can actually meet and work with other adepts in the astral realm. It really starts to become this other world. You can visit the ‘Great White Lodge’ (or something like that) where all the best saints working for the salvation of humanity are hard at work.
The goal is to destroy the egos to achieve complete and total consciousness. The whole reason you play around in the astral realm is to take the fight to them. Apparently it gets perilous as you start to clear up the astral realm: your demons see the threat and work extra hard to destroy you. There are all kinds of defensive prayers and mantras and stuff you are supposed to be prepared with before you start doing this stuff in earnest.
Some of the guys at the retreat were talking about being in the astral together. It made me a little envious and wanting to strive to reach that point. From personal experience I can attest to meditation and waking awareness exercises contributing to an increase in lucid dreams. So there is at least something to that part, that much I can say for sure..”
There seems to be some ambiguity about the Weor’s cult. Outer members are apparently told to abstain from ejaculation, smoking, drinking alcohol and indeed, most kinds of physical pleasure. No doubt however the ‘inner circle’ have a very different experience.
Initially Weor had planned to die and reincarnate in his own body but a few years before his eventual death he prepared an Egyptian mummy in which to physically return. The man could have been an honest lunatic but I suspect the truth is that he, like Crowley, had manufactured his very own cult with him as the high priest. Such high-office demands the promise of miracles and Weor was merely playing along with his part, while no doubt enjoying it immensely. I can only hope that such an impious old fraud is now enjoying his just rewards for those who waylay and betray other people’s credulity. Though it has to be said, that without the mass of simple-minded sheep souls so ready and willing to be waylaid by these predatory and evilly inclined people, they would not be able to profit quite so well here on Earth as they seem to do and it does seem to be something of a dance of the polarities: the timeless partnership of eternal limitless stupidity with eternal limitless evil.
Without stupidity, evil would not be able to manifest long on Earth and attain its goals, but the fact that it has done so for so long is a testimony to the presence of that silent dance-partner, the dim-witted, brainless victim who always seems to be so plentiful here, like fields of wheat waiting to be reaped. I don’t want to waste any more time on this unpleasant charlatan, I will just let his analyses speak for themselves and move on, but the following passage culminates in a direct Rabbinical-style reversal of the Biblical injunction from Genesis 2:17 ‘you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ here we will see the ‘Gnostic’ Samael Aun Weor in the role of a literal Satan:
“And when the woman [sexual organ] saw that the tree was good for food she took of the fruit of it and did eat.” – Genesis 3: 6.
This indicate that hitherto their love had been angelic and pure, but was now changed into sexual desire first arising in [their physicality made of bones and flesh] the woman [Malkuth] and leading them to conjugal relationship, for a woman [Eve, symbol of the sexual organ] is the inspirer of love whilst man [Adam, symbol of the brain] is the receptacle of it and in this resembles angelic beings whose actions are determined by pure love unblended and unmingled with sexual desire.
“And the serpent was wiser than any animal of the field which Jehovah Elohim had made.” – Genesis 3: 7
In the moment that Adam and Eve became thus associated, the lower soul [נפש Nephesh] became excited and aroused by sexual desire in which it delights, as scripture said: ‘mayest freely eat' to the prohibition from ejaculating the living manna [semen].
Thus, in saying, 'Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat' indicates that Adam is permitted to eat even from the tree of knowledge, but together with God [Shaddai-El-Chai].”
Samael Aun Weor was a member of the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua (F.R.A.) and apparently learned the ‘Great Arcanum’ or white ‘sexual magic’. In 1964 he published a book called Cosmic Ships in which he promulgates the doctrine that alien spaceships from other planets are present on Earth. He mentions that sometimes these vessels crash or explode in flight (funny that they travelled all that distance through space only to arrive here and explode) In the book he states that he doesn’t seek to check the authenticity of these alien spaceships because for him it is beyond all doubt. He claims these cosmic vessels were created by the angels, archangels, and seraphim, all flesh and blood being apparently, including a flesh and blood angel called Saint Venon from the planet Soort. Saint Vernon’s spaceships are apparently powered by gravity, but Weor writes that he doesn’t want to tire the reader with technical details. When humanity arrives at its maturity it will have the right to access and use these spaceships and we will receive education from superior humans from space. Some people from Mexico were apparently taken to Venus and one person from Brazil was taken to Mars and he mentions that we are on the verge of a cosmic cataclysm but our space brothers will try to help us.
It is worth noting that a group of Tibetan Lamas possess several spaceships hidden deep under the Himalayas and the inhabitants from other planets walk in our towns and cities unnoticed. Mars, Venus and Mercury are all inhabited by these aliens and Venus has a fantastic civilisation where there is no money and everyone works only two hours per day and receives everything they want. Weor reveals that we can all share in this utopia if we can learn to get rid of our ego, then we will be able to psychically communicate with these benevolent space-brothers.
It all seems like tragic nonsense of course but a lot of people take this stuff very seriously, but beyond all of the nonsense is something real. Namely that there are processes which can destroy the individual sense of self and ‘ego’ which then does indeed lead to the possibility of telepathic communication with some kind of discarnate beings. We have seen some examples of these beings and their interactions in the story of Barbara O’Brien. I suggest this is not something which we ought to encourage but this seems to be part of the worldwide Rosicrucian agenda, and hopefully by now we can start to see what the agenda, its aims and the final result might be.
