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The Zohar says, "In heaven above, that surrounds the universe, are signs in which the deepest mysteries are concealed. These signs are constellations and stars, which are studied and deciphered by the wise." And it continues, "He who has to start on a journey very early, should rise at daybreak, look carefully towards the east, and he will perceive certain signs resembling letters which pierce through the sky and appear above the horizon. These shining forms are those of the letters wherewith God created heaven and earth. Now, if a man knows the secret meaning of the sacred Name consisting of forty-two letters and meditates on it with becoming devotion and enthusiasm, he will perceive six Yods in the pure sky, three to the right and three to the left, as well as three Vaus, which hover about in the heavenly arch. These are the letters of the priestly benediction ... In the bright morning he will perceive a pillar towards the west, hanging perpendicularly over the. earthly paradise, and another pillar hanging over the center of paradise. This luminous pillar has the three colors of a purple web; three birds stand on it, singing . . "
The secret philosophy of the Kabbalah is more ancient than historians and scholars usually recognize; it goes back to the astronomy of 'the Babylonians, in which the patriarch Abraham was already versed when he left Ur of the Chaldees. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet were taken from the shape of constellations on the ecliptic and were thus letters of flame, and the letter Yod remains as a witness to their creation from fire. Each individual letter of the Hebrew alphabet is a flame, or combination of flames, similar to Yod, which is for this reason called the Workman of Deity.
Yod signifies the number 10, which is the perfect number, the number of the Sephiroth on the Tree of Life, who in their turn symbolize the forces of Spirit in operation. It has the conventional form of the free flame, the tips of which are sometimes called "jots." Every letter is really made up of Yods, or modified Yods, together with enlarged or diminished "jots" and connecting lines. In very careful writing this symbolic flame detail can be detected, and sometimes even in poor script or printing it is still evident. That the flames also point to the starry heavens is shown in the tradition that the twenty-two letters really imitate certain small asterisms of the zodiac which they picture in miniature. Thus the alphabet as a whole symbolized Light, but only a few of the letters reveal this in their present form, while the symbolic meaning still in our day lies under the veil of the Mysteries.
The Book of Ezra in the Bible shows us how the documents were collected together in Babylon, and it is believed that modern Hebrew derives mainly from what the rabbins made of Ezra's manuscripts, which were handed down from the Field of Ardath. Scholars believe that the original Hebrew in which the Bible was written was the tongue of the Jebusites of Jerusalem and possibly in that of other Ibri tribes and in the sacred script of the Babylonian temples. (Obri, ebree, ibri. The term signifies those from beyond the Euphrates river. It includes all the Semites who migrated into North Arabia, Syria, Palestine, as a general appellation, with their spoken dialects of the same tongue, who worshipped Baal and Astoreth and ancestral gods, and some of whom became the "Hebrews" of history. Some Canaanite tribes were also lbri, whose ancestors had been spreading westward from Mesopotamia for three thousand years.) With Ezra's return to Jerusalem, Aramaic became the official tongue of the scribes, as it was the language of commerce in the western Persian Empire; but Hebrew was also still used and continued to be the sacred tongue. The Bible was now read to the populace in the common speech, Aramaic; and this was still the common speech in the time of Christ.
A kabbalist writes, "Kabbalistic philosophy is then the Hermetic philosophy in its Babylonian form, mystically expressed in one language by means of letters belonging to an already archaic and dead one, in which some of the secrets of the past were still preserved for the private use of an initiated priesthood."
The rabbin ignored the old vowels, retaining but a tradition that some of the letters at one time had the force of vowels. In the course of time they found it needful to clarify the inconvenient old style of the Bible by dividing the strings of consonants. Five of these have two forms, one of which is termed "final." The final form is used when it occurs as the last letter of the word, and it would appear that the only definite clues possessed by the rabbin as to the dividing of the Ezraic text into words was the placement of these finals. What is called "Rabbinic Judaism" dates from the downfall of the Temple at Jerusalem 70 A.D. With Temple and national freedom and identity lost, the teachers ("rabbin") took over the task of saving their Mysteries for the future, in the vicissitudes of the Dispersion.
Aleph alone, the letter A, is named as a vowel among the twenty-two consonants, for it is the root-sound of the entire alphabet, descending from the high place of Kether. The addition of H to A was characteristic of the early change from Hebrew to Aramaic. When Sara left Chaldea with Abram to dwell in the west country, she became Sarah and Abram became Abraham.
It is said that vowel points were introduced by Rabbi Mocha of Palestine in the sixth century A.D. to help his disciples in reading the Scriptures. Knowledge of the Scriptures was the secret of the priestcraft in ancient Israel; only when it was realized that every Jew must be himself the guardian of Scripture did it become necessary to make the Scriptures more easily read and understood.
Yet ancient Hebrew did once possess vowels, some scholars believe, as evidenced in the "conduit inscription" discovered by archeologists; and it also divided its words by points, but it used no "finals."
The vowel points are dots which are placed beside or below the consonants to indicate what vowel sound was to be used in reading the text, and this method of pointing the text was introduced by the school of the Masoretes, following the Rabbi Mocha. Their work was not completed until the middle of the tenth century, and although Rabbi Mocha is credited with having begun this method, it may actually have been started some centuries earlier. It was not until 1526 A.D. that an Old Testament printed in the Masoretic style first appeared, and so it is plain that it required many centuries of effort to convert the original documents into the form adopted by orthodox exoteric Judaism. This is a very long time in which to fix tradition, so one realizes how and by what means the Secret Doctrine of Israel was eliminated from modem Judaism.
Yet the Hebrew scholars were intensely zealous, endeavoring in all good faith to preserve Hebrew tradition in the utmost purity, and after a great deal of editing and amending and secreting of esoteric matters, the remainder was in fact preserved almost intact into our present time. It is true that many hundred small grammatical changes have been made necessary in the Masoretic text by the Dead Sea discovery, and these small changes would be immensely important to any cipher the documents may still contain, but so far as the surface meaning of the Bible is concerned, there have been remarkably few serious changes.
Running parallel with orthodox Judaism and orthodox Christianity and the traditional texts of the Bible is the Secret Doctrine of Israel, as we have to a small degree revealed it in these pages. Modem kabbalism refers continually to the book called the Zohar, written by the Jew of Granada, Moses de Leon, in the thirteenth century. This Spanish Jew was stimulated by the brilliant Arabic civilization, with its Greek and Indian overtones, for it is said that although the Arabs gave the so-called Arabic numerals to the West, the Arabs had found them in India. This new discovery must have stimulated the development of Biblical numerology, for Arabic and ancient Sanscrit also had their numerologies, and Arabic is a language which is very close to Hebrew, as we have mentioned.
Although the Zohar is proved to be a collection from all sources of Hebrew knowledge and tradition, Moses de Leon claimed that he had found in a jar in a cavern in Galilee the book of the Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai. This is the sage persecuted by Titus, whose period was from about 70 A.D. to 110 A.D., when he gathered his son and disciples together and taught them the Splendors of Wisdom, perpetuating the codes and ciphers which had been handed down by the Wise Men of Israel from the most ancient times. We have, seen that these teachings included the Mystery of the Fiery Chariot as well as the inner essence of the forces of creation (Yetsirah) as symbolized in the Hebrew alphabet.
The claim of de Leon of having discovered Simeon's book in a jar in a Galilean cave no longer seems incredible, for we have seen greater finds in the Dead Sea caves and in the Egyptian cemetery at Nag Hammadi. But he added to this find, if he did truly make the find himself, the entire body of kabbalistic knowledge as it existed in his own century. This he wrote in his great eclectic work, the Zohar. Zohar means Splendor, or Light; but as we have said, its author attributed it to the Rabbi Simeon in the end of the first century A.D., and we think there is a germ of truth to his claims. He writes:
"When they assembled to compose the Sohar (or Zohar), permission was granted to the prophet Elias (Elijah), to all the members of the celestial college (Mystery School on the inner planes), to all angels, spirits and superior souls to assist them, and the ten spiritual substances (Sephiroth) were charged to disclose to them their profound mysteries, which were reserved for the days of the Messiah."
These Hebrews had rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, but the picture still holds for the followers of Christ Jesus. Some Hebrew mystics undoubtedly beheld the Christ in the heavens when they attained illumination, whether before or after death, and it is at any rate true that many kabbalists in the Middle Ages were self-converted to Christianity.
The Rabbi Simeon, according to this tradition, did for his era the same stupendous service that Ezra had rendered for the Hebrews during the Exile. During a time of catastrophe, when the people, their nation, their language and their religion were threatened with extinction, the Rabbi Simeon gathered the books together and imparted by word of mouth the Mysteries secreted in the very text itself. The Zohar is written in Aramaic, and it is significant that the Persian Master, Mani, also wrote in Aramaic. Moses de Leon has much to say of the mystical meanings of the vowel points.
Speaking of the verse from the Book of Daniel, "And the Intelligent shall shine," the Zohar explains, "This shining corresponds to the movement given by the accents and notes to the letters and vowel points which pay obeisance to them and march after them like troops behind their kings. The letters being the body and the vowel-points the animating spirit, together they keep step with the notes and come to a halt with them. When the chanting of the notes marches forward, the letters with their vowel-points march behind them, and when it stops they also stop. So here the intelligent correspond to the letters and vowel-points, the brightness to the notes, the firmament to the flow of the chant through the succession of notes, while they that turn to righteousness correspond to the pausal notes which stop the march of the words and bring out clearly the sense. These cause to shine letters and vowels, so that they all flow together in their own mystical manner through secret paths."
It would seem that the manipulation of the Scriptures began with the reconstruction of the Temple after the Babylonian Exile, for this was the time when Ezra brought back to Palestine from Babylon the collected Scriptures which he and his school of scribes deemed authoritative. Already at this time some of the ancient texts were eliminated and the rest pieced together to form a consecutive narrative without too many contradictions and inconsistencies, and oriented to the coming of the Messiah. The entire Old Testament was dedicated to the concept of the Davidic Kingdom with its world center at Jerusalem. The prophets of the exile and Restoration were leading spirits in this enterprise. This was the root and source of all future Christian Utopias down to and including the innermost ideal of Esoteric Masonry today.
When the written text had been established, contemporary prophecy and prophets were repudiated, and this gave rise to apocryphal and pseudonymous books and secret schools hidden away in wilderness and deserts or existing undercover in the cities. If any man claimed to be a prophet, it was decreed his own parents ought to put him to death.
At the Council of Jamnia in 90 A.D. — about twenty years after the Romans had destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem-modem Judaism was born in the body of Scriptures then deemed canonical by the assembled rabbin and sages. This was the beginning of rabbinic Judaism, while paralleling it Simeon ben Jochai transmitted Esoteric Judaism in the seclusion of his Galilean cave, and still later the Masoretes began their age-long work on the Old Testament. Today the Masoretic text is still the official Bible of orthodox Judaism as the King James is the official Bible of Protestant Christianity, but the Dead Sea discoveries have made many changes necessary in both. Masorete means traditional.
Kabbalism arose among the Jews of Europe in the centuries which say the beginning of the Crusades and the earliest epics of the Holy Grail. Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), a celebrated Jewish philosopher of Cairo 1135-1204 A.D., tells us that the kabbalists used every device of language known to men to conceal and reveal the meaning of the Scriptures. This is what we mean when we say that the Bible is a sublime book of occultism. It is not a mere haphazard collection of primitive and obscure Hebrew texts. The entire history and culture of the Hebrew people, from the beginning, were taken by a band of mystics and Initiates and converted into symbol and allegory of the most amazing complexity. It has been said that the Bible was written by kabbalists for kabbalists of the future, the methods of reading being handed down to pious and worthy men as secrets of secrets.
Thus the Rabbi Simeon instructed the Companions "not to read so, but so." He wrote, though under a veil, the sacred mysteries of the Hebrew alphabet in the Book called Yetsirah, or Book of Creation (or Formation), and it is this book which Moses de Leon claimed to have found in the jar in the Galilean cave. Since Rabbi Simeon taught and wrote in his cavern for twelve years it might seem reasonable that a jar like those found at the Dead Sea might have been hidden there.
Certain rules attributed to Philo Judeus show that esoteric elements were already being incorporated into the Bible text in the first century A.D. and had been there at that time for an undetermined period, which esotericists trace back to Babylon.
We give here a few of the rules laid down by Philo Judeus, who was a great philosopher of the liberal Hellenistic school of Judaism in Egypt. He lived contemporaneously with Christ and the Apostles. His work is therefore earlier than that of Simeon ben Jochai and the Sepher Yetsirah or Book of Creation, but not as old as the Book of Jubilees ("Microgenesis").
A general rule. Passages in Scripture which seem to say semething unworthy of God, or are senseless and contradictory, are inadmissible; allegorical sentences which are used in a passage to cast doubt on the literal sense render the whole verse suspect. This would seem to mean that Philo would set some verses in the Bible aside as being of questionable value.
Special rules. There are hints or pointers which call attention to special esoteric mysteries in the verses of the Bible. Such hints are the doubling of a phrase, the apparent doubling of a phrase, the repeating of something already said, and a change in phraseology. An entirely different meaning may be found by combining the words in another way, and to do this it is permissible to disregard the commonly accepted way of dividing the sentence into phrase and clause. Synonyms should be carefully considered and evaluated. A play upon words points to a hidden meaning other than that which lies on the surface of the text. Sometimes a passage may be taken allegorically, and even when an allegory is not at once visible, such a meaning may be assumed from certain parts of speech and parts of words used in a challenging way. Every word must be examined in all of its meanings in order to uncover the different layers of thought. A skillful interpreter may make small changes in a word according to the rule "read not so, but so." Philo therefore did not hesitate to change breathings and accents, even in Greek words. Any peculiarity in a phrase justified the assumption that a special meaning was intended. The number of a word-that is, its numerological or letter-number-might spell out a mystery; peculiarities in forms of words, singular or plural, verb tense, gender of nouns, presence or absence of an article were not to be taken arbitrarily as errors in the text but to be examined to see if they pointed to something hidden. All kinds of ciphers were possible from the interchangeability of letters and numbers.
The importance of all this lies in the material which it gives for meditation and contemplation, for the human mind is yet in its infancy and most neophytes quickly run out of ideas when they first start to learn the art of meditation. The Kabbalah gives to the Bible student an endless array of mysteries upon which to meditate, and thus to discipline the intellect and soul, and lead them to the use of spiritual intuition and vision.
Basic to all such Bible mysteries and meanings are the 22 letters and the unwritten vowels, the letters of flame which are breathed out upon the Word of God. They are the fiery ideograms of the Word Made Flesh, not in the name and person of one man only, but in the entire living universe with its host of Star Angels.
The alphabet of flames which constitutes the starry universe is a veil which hangs before the Holy of Holies where God alone IS. Into that hidden sanctuary the bright and burning letters conduct the human soul in meditation on the Mysteries.
— Corinne Heline
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