Judaism discovered

From Kabbalah to Aggadah: A Sexual Progression

The terminal judgement on the depraved ends to which rabbinic nullification descends is found in Judaism's understanding of the process of Aggadah. Though the rabbinic exegesis which forms the basis of the abrogation of scripture is often likened to lawyer's loopholes, the sexual dimension is also strongly present. What does sex have to do with the interpretation of religious texts? In the rabbinic universe, everything. For example, the word "Aggadah" stands for the allegorical meaning of the Bible. Aggadah is derived from the Aramaic root word nagad, meaning to stretch, draw or pull. In Judaism, this process is likened unto the penis, for as it is pulled, it goes from small to erect and becomes fully visible. But only in the hands of a Judaic. The rabbis use the penis analogy to teach that what is a diminutive understanding of sacred texts in the hands of gentile exegetes is only rendered fully visible by the exposition of the rabbis. ²¹³

The penis analogy is a powerful under-current in Orthodox Judaism. A saintly Judiac mystic is known as a "Zaddik." In the Kabbalah, the sefirah of Yesod is likened unto both a Zaddik and a divine penis. Rabbi Moses Cordovero taught that the Judaic saint was a kind of human penis; that the Zaddik's body, while on earth, was literally and physically a type of penis, "the lower extremity of the supernal membrum virile." ^2U

One sees in Orthodox Judaism during the male-only Friday evening gatherings around the rabbinic table, the rubbing up against and close contact with such men, suggestive of "the strong emphasis upon the body of the Zaddik as transmitter," ²¹⁵ understandable in this sexualized context. Like all Babylonian religions, Judaism practices magica sexualis, (sex magic). These practices are found in the India of the Hindus and the Egypt of the Pharaohs: "Statues and bas-reliefs depict the self-begotten Supreme Being (Amun-Ra) clutching a prodigious phallus erectus and receiving the homage of Pharaohs, whom he embraces and infuses with the vital fluid {ka)." ²¹⁶

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Much is made in Orthodox Judaism of the fluid or "influx" which the Zaddik distributes: "...the earthly Zaddik was conceived...as being the locus that both receives the influx and distributes it....According to other statements in the circle of Rabbi Elimelekh, 'The Zaddik is like a channel, which draws liquids downward." ²¹⁷ What then is this all-important holy liquid "influx" that the Judaic holy man is divinely charged with distributing?

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Sex Magic

For the answer we turn to the standard three volume English reference work, The Wisdom of the Zohar by the Hungarian Khazar, Sandor Schwartz (alias "Isaiah Tishby"), of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who cites: "The actual physiological process of the flow of semen from its higher source in the brain, according to traditional medieval (rabbinic) theory..." ²¹⁸ This is akin to the belief of the Hindus, that the semen of the holy man rises up his spine through the power of Kundalini and is then wrapped around his brain. This is traditional medieval theory, but it is traditional medieval Hindu theory. This is apropos in Judaism, in light of the fact that the Judaic saint or Zaddik "intends to be a 'classical' magician... These practices achieve their greatest efficacy... only when performed by the ideal righteous... enhanced to the degree that it transforms the Zaddik into a cosmic magician... central to the nature of the Hasidic righteous man is, therefore... his capacity to bring down and distribute divine power, or influx...and also in many instances, to perform miracles."²¹⁹

The sex magic central to this power is enhanced by the use of "oral techniques—incantations of divine names... which could be misinterpreted by larger circles...The emphasis on the mouth is symptomatic of the bodily

nature of the attraction of the divine influx in Hasidism " ²²⁰ But how could

a religious holy man, representative of one of the "three great monotheistic religions" engage in sexual perversion under pious auspices? "Zoharic Kabbalah... is centered on a blatantly erotic interpretation of the Godhead, dividing the functions of the sefirot into male and female sides. The Zohar includes multiple interpretations built around a concept of God's 'gentials.' Using a phrase in Isaiah, 'behold the King in his beauty,' (33:17) as its springboard, the Zohar interprets the word for yofi, 'beauty' as a euphemism for a divine member. Tikkuni Zohar explicitly claims the 'divine image' that God bestowed upon man (but not upon woman) was the penis (I: 62b, 94b). The Zohar also interprets a passage from Job, 'In my flesh I see God,' as a reference to the human penis being in 'the image of God'... this supernal

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phallus is manifest in one or the other of two other sefirot, Tifferet...and Yesod..." ²²¹

Redemption through Evil

Judaism secretly teaches, as have the occult secret societies throughout the ages (in our time, Hindu Tantrism and the Ordo Ternpli Orientis or OTO), that the mystic can find redemption through a heroic willingness to do evil for the sake of a subsequent redemptive ascent to the highest spiritual good; immersion in the lowest of the low thus becomes a path to redemption: "...the concept of the descent of the Zaddiq, which is better known by the Hebrew phrase, Yeridah zorekh Aliyah, namely the descent for the sake of the ascent, the transgression for the sake of repentance...Much attention has been paid to this model because of its essential affinities with Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalah... this model was a very important one in Hasidic thought..." ²²²

In other words, the rabbinic doctrine that evil can be redeemed by embracing it, was in circulation in early Hasidism until it threatened to expose the whole truth about the rabbinic religion, after which damage control was instituted through the familiar deception system of permissible dissimulation through dispensational revelation. In Hasidic Judaism's first dispensation, the founding era of the Baal Shem Tov (early to mid-eighteenth century) and the disciples who came immediately in his wake, the grossest superstitions and the darkest dimensions of Babylonian Judaism were popularized among the Judaic masses, including the teaching that the "Jew" was to redeem the 288 "holy sparks" that exist in wicked thoughts (mahashavot zarot) and actions, by meditating upon them and implementing them, with the ostensible goal of "elevating" them.

There was a sustained outcry, however, against this teaching from the rabbis of the non-Hasidic, "Mithnagdim" school, who complained bitterly that the Hasidim were "...popularizing mystical concepts that hitherto had zealously been kept concealed by the rabbis." The complaint by the Mithnagdim has been represented to the outside world as a principled protest against excessive mysticism which "distorts" the austere Mosaic purity of rabbinic Judaism.

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Various forms of black magic (what Moshe Idel is pleased to call "the ancient Jewish mystical ascent as performed by the 'descenders to the Merkavah"), superstition, goddess-worship, reincarnation and idolatry incontrovertibly comprise the under-publicized, formative core of Judaism's oral traditions, and have exerted a profound influence on the rabbis since their sojourn in Babylon eighteen hundred years ago.²²³ One of the oldest repositories of Babylonian magic in Judaism are the texts, Sifrei ha-Iyyun, the Sefer ha-Bahir and the Hilkoth Yesirah (also known as the Sefer Yetzirah), circa 200 A.D.; the earliest extant copy of the latter is the Genizah ms., tenth century, "...the practice associated with this school of thought is magical/theurgic, even including the attempt to make a golem." ²²⁴ The "strand of earlier tradition is that of Merkavah mysticism. Merkavah designates a form of visionary mystical praxis that reaches back into the Hellenistic era but was still alive as late as tenth-century Babylonia... the old Merkavah and magical literature was preserved among the earliest Ashkenazic Jews..." ²²⁵

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Pagan Reincarnation Dogma Alive in Orthodox Judaism

The seven ascents of shamanism penetrated Judaism through Merkavah mysticism (cf. Aryeh Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, 1982). The shamanic ascents are predicated on the existence of the soul which transmigrates within shamanic and subsidiary systems, including all systems of Liberation Theology such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Reincarnation (also known as "transmigration" of the soul or psyche, and in later accounts — "metempsychosis"), is the doctrine of New Age religions and is a doctrine in Orthodox Judaism:

"The sages of the true wisdom teach that every Jewish soul must reincarnate many times until it has fulfilled all the 613 mitzvos in action, speech and thought."

-Shulchan Aruch HaRav: Hilchos Talmud Torah 1:4 ²²⁶

This is an essential teaching of Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism. The Hindu sacred doctrine holds that the soul reincarnates through births and deaths time and again until it reaches a state of perfection (Bhagavad-Gita, 2:22). Reincarnation can also be traced to the Orphic religion of ancient Thrace (present-day Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece), from whose ritual hymns or "theogonies" the Renaissance Catholic Neoplatonists derived much inspiration, including esoteric instructions on magic, soothsaying, initiation and the paths by which the human soul can attain the supreme stage of reincarnation. This doctrine of reincarnation influenced the Bacchic cults, the Eleusinian mysteries and in particular, Pythagoras, the sixth-century B.C. mathematician and philosopher for whom it was a defining dogma. "Pythagoras is said to have introduced the transmigration of souls into Greece and his religious influence is reflected in the cult organization of the Pythagorean society, with periods of initiation, secret doctrines and

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passwords, special dietary restrictions and burial rites. Pythagoras seems to have become a legendary figure in his own lifetime... His supernatural status was confirmed by a... capacity to recall his previous incarnations... Aristotle reports that for the Pythagoreans all things are numbers or imitate numbers... Plato was deeply influenced by the Pythagorean tradition... Plato .offers repeated arguments for the immortality of the psyche, which he combines with the (originally Pythagorean) idea that it transmigrates, after the death of the person, into another body, human or animal... In the 1st century B.C., P. Nigidius Figulus (putative founder of Neoplatonism according to Cicero, and learned astrologer and magician) revived the Pythagorean tradition in Rome... It continued into the related Neoplatonic movement; prominent Neoplatonists such as Porpyhry and his pupil Iamblichus wrote on Pythagoreanism (De vita Pythagorica)"²²⁷

Inter alia, Julius Caesar reported in his Bellum Gallicum ("Conquest of Gaul") that the belief in reincarnation existed among the Celtic Druids. While Herodotus claimed an Egyptian root for it, this has since been disputed by British classicists and archaeologists. Reincarnation would seem to be affirmed by Herman Melville in the last two paragraphs of chapter 98 of Moby Dick, where it is rendered analogous to the whale hunt and, in a recollection, a reincarnated Pythagoras turns up as a young apprentice seaman.

The ancient Orphic creed "is no isolated religious phenomenon but is in various ways related to the mystic movements and beliefs of the archaic age which it took up and synthesized." ²²⁸ The belief in reincarnation was part of the synthesis of superstition that comprises the perpetual and universal pagan psychodrama, of which Biblical Christian-Israel, alone among all the religions of the world, is separate and distinct. Biblical Christianity is not infected by the recrudescence of this persistent pagan superstition and teaches against it (Hebrews 9:27).

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Egypt and the "Ten Measures of Witchcraft"

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The Pythagorean tetractys

The "sages" of the Talmud and Kabbalah were conscious of what it was they were inheriting and reanimating: "Ten measures of witchcraft descended to the world: nine were taken by Egypt and one by the rest of the world." (BT Kiddushin 49b). With regard to these "measures," the Talmud is presumably making an analogy with the ten-figured Greek tetractys, sacred to the Pythagoreans (a symbol which survives in our modern world in the form in which bowling pins are arranged and pool balls are racked, each of these comprising the arrangement of a tetractys).

"Many of the rabbis believed in the transmigration of souls or revolution of souls, an immemorial doctrine of the East, and developed it into the most ludicrous and marvelous details... Borrowing some Persian modes of thinking and adding them to their own inordinate national pride, the rabbis soon began to fancy that the observance or non-observance of the Pharisaic ritual, and kindred particulars, must exert a great effect in determining the destination of souls and their condition in the underworld. Observe the following quotations from the Talmud. 'Abraham sits at the gate of hell to see that no Israelite enters.' 'Circumcision is so agreeable to God, that he swore

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to Abraham that no one who was circumcised would go to hell.' 'What does Abraham (do for)...those circumcised who have sinned too much? He takes the foreskins from Gentile boys who died without circumcision, and places them on those Jews who were circumcised but have become godless and then kicks them (the Gentile boys) into hell." ²²⁹

"Anyone familiar with the Persian theology will at once notice a striking resemblance between many of its dogmas and those, first, of Phariseeism... The conception of an underworld... was known centuries before Zoroaster; but probably he was the first to add to the old belief the idea that the underworld was a place of purification, wherein souls were purged of all traces of sin. Of this belief in a subterranean purgatory ²³⁰ there are numerous unmistakable evidence and examples in the Rabbinic writings. These notions and others the Pharisees early adopted and wrought into the texture of what they called the 'Oral Law,' that body of verbally-transmitted legends, precepts and dogmas, afterwards written out and collected in the Mishna, to which Christ repeatedly alluded with such severity... The correspondences between the Persian and the Pharisaic faith, in regard to doctrines, are of too arbitrary and peculiar a character to allow us for a moment to suppose them to have been an independent product spontaneously developed in the two nations; though even in that case the doctrines in question have no sanction or authority, not being Mosaic or Prophetic, but rabbinic. One must have received from the other. Which was the bestower and which the recipient is quite plain. There is not a whit of evidence to show, but, on the contrary, ample presumption to disprove, that a certain cycle of notions were known among the Jews previous to a period of most

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intimate and constant intercourse between them and the Persians. But before that period those notions were an integral part of the Persian theology. Even Prideaux admits that the first Zoroaster lived and Magianism flourished at least a thousand years before Christ. And the dogmas we refer to are fundamental features of the religion. These dogmas of the Persians, not derived from the Old Testament nor known among the Jews before the captivity, soon after that time began to show themselves in their literature and before the opening of the New Testament were prominent elements of Pharisaic belief. The inference is unavoidable that the confluence of Persian thought and feeling with Hebrew thought and feeling, joined with the materials and flowing in the channels of the subsequent experience of the Jews, formed a mingled deposit about the age of Christ, which deposit was Pharisaism... the doctrines common to Zoroastrianism and Pharisaism, in the former seem to be prime sources, in the latter to be late products. In the former they compose an organic, complete, inseparable system; in the latter, they are disconnected, mixed piecemeal and, to a certain extent, historically traceable to an origin beyond the naive, national mind.... In the pure gospel's pristine day...from the lips of God's Annointed Son repeatedly fell the earnest warning, 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.' There is far more need to have this warning intelligently heeded now, coming with redoubled emphasis from the Master's own mouth, 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees,' For as the gospel is now generally set forth and received, that leaven has leavened well-nigh the whole lump." ²³¹

A comprehensive synthesis of this superstition can be traced to the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance, marked by extremely well-educated and cultured spokesmen fronting a sophisticated ideology with marked appeal to Catholic and Protestant intellectuals and Judaic rabbis, including the "Great Maggid" whose style, Moshe Idel informs us "was closer to the Neoplatonic mode of expression... This mode would also influence Hasidic masters..." ²³² Idel, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor of Jewish Thought, is indulging in serious revelation of the method by citing the influence of the notorious Renaissance gentile- Kabbalist Giordano Bruno on rabbinic magical techniques for placing followers in bondage through hypnotic mind control. If

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that strikes the reader as a too emphatic or overly lurid description, we can only say, read on, Idel's text will bear our emphasis:

"...as we learn from some early descriptions of the relationship between the Zaddik and his adherents, we must allow room for an additional type of magic... namely the quasi-hypnotic interaction between the magician and his audience, especially as understood by Giordano Bruno..." ²³³

Idel's invocation of Bruno in this context is electrifying. Bruno was the synthesizer par excellence of Hermetic-Egyptian and Pythagorean superstition and sorcery. Like Pythagoras, he put enormous emphasis on the alleged reality of reincarnation (what he called "quel profetico dogma" i.e. "that perfect dogma"), and was heir to the occult teaching that the Sadducees rejected the resurrection of the body because they believed rather in the transmigration of the soul. Neoplatonists like Bruno took the same attitude toward the early Church as the rabbis did toward the Old Testament: that its canonical texts and narratives were a coded simulacra of an occult reality known only to those initiated into the secret gnosis. Our early twenty-first century Da Vinci Code mythos ²³⁴ has roots deep in the Kabbalistic and Neoplatonic tradition which propagated the notion among the intelligentsia — who itched for knowledge of "esoteric arts" — that Christianity had secretly evolved out of the Egyptian religious mystery tradition, which is what the Talmud says about Jesus (that he was an Egyptian-inspired sorcerer), and is also what the Kabbalah (Tikkunei Zohar 1:27b) suggests with regard to Moses.

Bruno parrots the tale "that Moses learned the occulta philosophia during his years in Egypt and revealed these things to the Jews." ²³⁵ While this lie was twisted in one direction by philo-Judaics, it was twisted in the other by the western secret societies when they sought to control their opposition. Thus was born Dietrich Eckart's pamphlet, Bolshevism from

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Moses to Lenin, ²³⁶ associating the Biblical patriarch with the horrors of Bolshevik Communism, i.e. with the weaponization of the Talmud in national, secular politics. The irony of this development would not have been lost on Hell-Fire Club jesters. The disinformation that had been fed to Eckart was eventually disseminated throughout the circles of classical European "Jew-hating" societies in the twentieth century, beginning with a young friend of Eckart's, a certain obscure street agitator named Adolf Hitler, who would go on to champion Giordano Bruno and forever regard the Old Testament as the exclusive property of Talmudic rabbis. We have already noted that the Neoplatonist infiltrators of the Catholic Church in Italy: Marsilio Ficino of Florence, Bruno, Mirandola and Agrippa, were close students of the proto-Kabbalist, black magic text, Sefer ha-Bahir.^2Z7

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The Protestant and Catholic Synthesis of Humanism and Magic

The Neoplatonic cause was significantly advanced by the Medici Pope Leo X, the nemesis of Martin Luther. Ficino's patron was the Medici family. Ficino's enigmatic and signal influence over the papacy in the grand conspiracy, has yet to be fully chronicled. But some inkling of the depth of that conspiracy can be gleaned from the mysterium coniunctionis Ficino helped to forge, viz. the bridge for the synthesis of occult Protestantism and occult Catholicism. For example, the 1567 reprint of his Divini Platonis Opera Omnia Marsilio Ficino Interprete ("Marsilio Ficinio's Translation and Commentary on the Complete Works of the Divine Plato") was edited by Simon Grynaeus, an illustrious German Protestant theologian, and a friend of Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and Desederius Erasmus of Rotterdam. The "reformer" of the University of Tubingen in 1534, he participated with Luther in the colloquy at Worms in 1540 and then twenty-seven years later edited and helped to publish the work of one of the Renaissance papacy's leading Catholic occultists. Protestants have been bamboozled into imagining that paganism infected Rome alone, while Protestantism was its antidote. But Ficino's synthesis influenced both branches of Christendom. In Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queen with its identification of Anglican Queen Elizabeth I with the Egyptian goddess Isis, and in the concept that pagan works like the Talmud and the Kabbalah are sources for better comprehension of the Bible, certain leading Protestants also absorbed the Neo-Platonic poison of Ficino and his ilk. Anthony T. Grafton in the New York Review of Books writes, "Ficino set out to show that the ancient Neoplatonic philosophy embodied a 'gentile theological tradition,' one that complemented the Mosaic revelation to the Jews and prepared its devotees for the final truths of Christianity." In the view of Ficino, the "Mosaic revelation" encompassed the Talmud and Kabbalah. Consequently, the "gentile tradition" that "complemented" Moses was paganism, the root of both rabbinic halacha and Renaissance, Neo-Platonic humanism. Ficino, writing in his Theologica Platonica ("Platonic Theology") states: "What is the soul's status...? With regard to these matters six theologians...were in mutual accord. The first is said to have been Zoroaster...and the second Mercurius Trismegistus, the prince of the Egyptian priests. Succeeding him was Orpheus, and then Aglaophemus was initiated into the sacred mysteries of Orpheus. In theology, Pythagoras came

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after Aglaophemus; and after Pythagoras came Plato, who embraced the

universal wisdom of them all." ²³⁸

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Moshe Idel ties these threads together into a grand occult Judeo-Churchian synthesis which would fatefully serve as the basis for the dawn of masonic gnosis in the modern age (notwithstanding the irony that the gnosis first gained firm purchase inside the Vatican and that Freemasonry advertises itself as an alternative to religious fanaticism of any kind):

"The magical theory of language in Jewish mysticism is reminiscent of views expressed by such Renaissance thinkers as Marsilio Ficino...In other words, in addition to the Neoplatonic theory of magic, which substantially informed the Renaissance view of the magus, the Kabbalistic one— gravitating around the mystical theory of language— also contributed to the emergence during the same era of the magical universe.

"Hasidism brought...extreme Kabbalistic assumptions concerning language as the spiritual underpinning of reality. This emphasis was consonant with the emergence of a magical universe and with the paramount role of liturgical texts and the study of the Torah as producing talismatic entities.... the magical-talismatic interpretations of Jewish ritual and liturgy, which were formulated long before Hasidism, opened the way to the gradual acceptance of magical world views..."²³⁹

"Talismatic entities" is a discrete euphemism for demons. These entities are summoned by language, in the form of physical objects inscribed with magical formulae, such as amulets.

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