A Great Mystery: The Secret of the Jerusalem Temple (Deities and Angels of the Ancient World) 9781593338404, 2008002115, 1593338406

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A GREAT MYSTERY: THE SECRET OF THE JERUSALEM TEMPLE

THE REBIS (“Two-in-One”) From Jamsthaler’s Vlatorium spagyricum, 1625 The Medieval Alchemist's Version of the “Great Mystery” in the Temple For this reason shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife; and they two shall be one flesh. This is a Great Mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. Nevertheless, let every man love his own wife as himself (Eph 5:30-33) In der Liebesnächte Kühlung, Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest, Überfällt dich fremde Fühlung, Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet. Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen In der Finsternis Beschattung, Und dich reisset neu Verlangen Auf zu höherer Begattung. -Goethe

DEITIES AND ANGELS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

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A Great Mystery: The Secret of the Jerusalem Temple The Embracing Cherubim and At-One-Ment with the Divine

EUGENE SEAICH

GORGIAS PRESS 2008

First Gorgias Press Edition, 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey ISBN 978-1-59333-840-4 ISSN 1935-4136

GORGIAS PRESS 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA www.gorgiaspress.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seaich, Eugene, 1925A great mystery : the secret of the Jerusalem Temple : the embracing cherubim and at-one-ment with the Divine / Eugene Seaich. -- 1st Gorgias Press ed. p. cm. -- (Deities and angels of the ancient world ; 1) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-59333-840-4 (alk. paper) 1. Mystical union--History of doctrines. 2. Mystery--History of doctrines. 3. Temple of Jerusalem (Jerusalem) 4. Atonement-History of doctrines. I. Title. BT767.7.S43 2008 296.4'91--dc22 2008002115

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standards. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents....................................................................................................v Foreword .................................................................................................................ix INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................1 1 The Embracing Cherubim..................................................................................5 Introduction ....................................................................................................5 The Cherubim as God’s “Face”...................................................................9 The Cherubim as Symbols of God’s Male-Female Image.....................13 The Cherubim as Symbols of God’s Redemptive Marriage to Israel ..17 The Cherubim as Paradigms of Human Marriage ..................................19 2 The Wisdom Mystery ........................................................................................23 Who Was Wisdom?......................................................................................23 Israel as God’s Bride ....................................................................................28 The Bride Wisdom .......................................................................................33 Philo’s Account of the Wisdom Mystery..................................................38 Theoretical Basis of the Mystery................................................................50 The Temple as a Source of Power.............................................................65 The Tripartite Temple Scheme ..................................................................82 3 Christian Wisdom and the Marriage Mystery ................................................85 Christology as Sophiology...........................................................................85 The Gospel of Thomas and the Christian Wisdom Mystery ......................94 The New Testament Wisdom Mystery ...................................................104 Baptism and the Mystery...........................................................................124 A Multiplication of Hieros Gamos Symbols .............................................128 The Ephesian “Great Mystery” ..............................................................130 Deification ...................................................................................................139 4 The Great Mystery and the Preexistent Church..........................................141 Christ and the Church as the Preexistent Male and Female................141 The Hexaemeron ...........................................................................................143 The Heavenly Man and the Heavenly Community...............................151 Jesus as the Restorer of the Divine Image to Fallen Man ...................156 The “Great Mystery” and the Cosmic Body of Christ.........................161

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5 The Post-New Testament Wisdom Mystery ...............................................167 The “Great Mystery” as Ritual .................................................................167 Joseph and Aseneth .........................................................................................172 The Odes of Solomon ......................................................................................178 The Sacred Marriage of the “Powers” in the Odes of Solomon ..............188 The Holy of Holies as a “Garden of Fruitfulness” in the Odes...........191 Christ as the Mirror of Wisdom and Image of God in the Odes.........195 A “Worldly Mystery of the Church” in the Didache ..............................201 Licentious Agape Feasts and the Didache................................................204 Virgines Subintroductae and the Didache......................................................205 Direct “Marriage” to Christ in the Didache? ...........................................207 The Great Mystery in the Writings of Clement and Origen................212 The Cherubim as “Seraphim” ..................................................................224 Secrecy in the “True Gnosis” of Clement and Origen.........................232 Ebionite Syzygies and the Symbolism of the Cherubim ......................235 Late Developments of the Temple Mystery in “Orthodox” Circles..240 6 Gnosticism and the Wisdom Mystery...........................................................245 Introduction ................................................................................................245 Gnosticism and the Hexaemeron................................................................248 The Origin of the Gnostic Demiurge .....................................................249 The Fall of Sophia ......................................................................................259 The Gnostic Pleroma.................................................................................263 The Gnostic Bridal Chamber ...................................................................274 The Mystery of the Bridal Chamber........................................................281 The Mirrored Bridal Chamber..................................................................285 The Hierogramic Image of the Father .......................................................291 Gnostic Reversal of the Law of Marriage...............................................298 Gnosticism as a Development of the Light-Stream .............................320 7 The Great Mystery in the Middle Ages ........................................................325 The Kabbalistic Great Mystery ................................................................325 The Kabbalistic Sacred Marriage .............................................................332 The Secret of a King ..................................................................................338 Catholic Mysticism and the Sacred Marriage .........................................342 The Sacred Embrace and the Stigmata ...................................................348 The Virgin Mary as a Wisdom Figure in the Sacred Marriage ............353 The Wisdom Mystery in Medieval Gnosticism .....................................359 Sexual Rites amongst the Cathars? ..........................................................369 Templar Gnosticism?.................................................................................372 The Intellectual Wisdom Mystery of Dante Alighieri ..........................375 The Perfect Man as Rebis .........................................................................378

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Yin and Yang, the Rebis, and Alchemy....................................................385 The Alchemical Sacred Marriage .............................................................393 The Wisdom Mystery and the Holy Grail ..............................................397 The Gnostic Character of Wolfram’s Grail Christianity.....................405 The Grail-Maiden as Wisdom and Guardian of the Ark .....................411 The Grail as Temple ..................................................................................413 The Ritual Theory of the Holy Grail.......................................................414 Survivals of the Wisdom Mystery in Freemasonry ...............................420 Possible Survivals of the Wisdom Mystery in the Far East.................434 The Tantric Sacred Marriage and the Taoist “Golden Flower” .........443 8 Summary and Conclusion...............................................................................451 The Heavenly Pattern of the Sexes in the Great Mystery....................455 The Light-Stream and the Gnostic Pleroma ..........................................458 Bibliography .........................................................................................................461 Index......................................................................................................................489

FOREWORD One of the most salient points to emerge in Post-Modernism is the concept that the “meaning” of a text involves both the reader and the writer. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of a deceased author who cannot be asked questions about his own work. It is a somber privilege to copy-edit the work of a departed colleague. In this particular case, I never had the opportunity to know Eugene Seaich. I was introduced to his work in my role of acquisitions editor, and, upon reading it immediately realized its value. When Bryan Thomas sent the manuscript to me, he also forwarded letters of support from the late Raphael Patai, an author whose works I have engaged in my own research. I was struck by the level of enthusiasm offered by Patai, and upon reading the document I realized why he found the work to be so engaging. Ambitious, insightful, almost Frazerian in its scope, even daring at points, amazing cognitive leaps were made by the author. However, as a student of ancient West Asian material I found many of his ideas fertile ground for further study and I saw that he had developed a coherent account of a most fascinating subject. I knew that his manuscript deserved publication. Even in this age of high technology, there are limits as to what can be done with electronic texts. Dr. Seaich’s manuscript had to be reconstituted from PDF format, and that meant that as an editor I had to compare, constantly, the work I was doing against the original submission. It has been my intention throughout to change nothing submitted by the author except in cases of clear, factual error (mostly typographical mistakes). At a few places in the text the author had highlighted words that he apparently wished to revisit before submitting a final form for publication. These I have treated with the utmost care, always erring on the side of leaving the original manuscript intact if there was any possibility of a loss of direction based on my own misreading. The places where this occurs are few and should not detract from the overall contribution of the author. Futher to the process of editing the work, Drs. Shirley and Stephen Ricks went over the manuscript for issues of style and consistency, as well ix

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as the integrity of the typeset version against the original submission. At this juncture references and citation styles were standardized, and stylistic issues were ironed out. The final product would have suffered considerably had it not been for their thorough and conscientious efforts. A bibliography has also been added to the original submission. This I compiled from the footnotes in the original submission and additional material submitted to me by Bryan Thomas. In reconstructing the bibliography a few educated guesses about works with incomplete citations were required. As a matter of practicality I have included in the bibliography only those sources that date from after the Medieval Period. Multiple editions exist of many of the works from the periods predating the printing press, and I have no way of knowing which editions the author originally used. Abbreviations were generally avoided in the original, but the “industry standard” ABD for Anchor Bible Dictionary, IDB for Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, TDOT for Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, and TDNT for Theological Dictionary of the New Testament have been utilized in this version. I do not presume to speak for the author, but as both acquisitions and copy-editor for this book, I would feel remiss should I not thank Bryan Thomas for bringing the manuscript to me and coaching me through the process of how to get suitable details worked out in these circumstances. His encouragement during the process was always appreciated. Also, I would like to thank Catherine Haas, the daughter of the author in whose purview his estate rests. She kindly granted permission for Gorgias Press to produce her father’s work, thus making this book a reality. Shirely Ricks and her keen eye and unfailing humor greatly improved the results. The material contained herein will likely be taken as controversial. It is my firm opinion, however, as a scholar of the Bible and the religious world of ancient West Asia, which this is a profound contribution to an intractable issue in the history of both iconography and ancient religion. The work is thoroughly researched and presented with a keen scholarly analysis, despite its surprises. It has been a privilege for me to have been included, in a small way, in its production.

Steve. A. Wiggins January 2008

INTRODUCTION This book is the story of the Sacred Embrace which anciently united Man and God in the Jerusalem Temple. Long forgotten by the “orthodox” of both Judaism and Christianity, it once enjoyed a supreme place at the very heart of the Mystery of Salvation, described by Hebrew prophets as Yahweh’s “Espousal” to Israel, and by Paul as the “Great Mystery” of Christ’s “Marriage” to the Church. And the Holy of Holies where this all-important union took place was appropriately referred to as the “Bridal Chamber” (Matt 9:15). After the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, Gnostic Christians continued to construct “Bridal Chambers” of their own, patterned after the lost Holy of Holies, in which the “Great Mystery” was enacted for several more centuries. The Gentile Church, however, lacking official access to the Temple, transferred the symbolism of union exclusively to the rites of Baptism and the Eucharist, thus concealing from future generations an important function of the Sanctuary, where the initiate had once come to be “wedded” to God’s Light and Wisdom. This redemptive Sacred Marriage is faintly remembered even today with uncertain references to Yahweh as the “Husband” of Israel, or to Christ as the “Bridegroom” of the Church. Yet these obscure epithets hardly suggest to the modern mind the enormous significance of what R. A. Batey terms “a widespread nuptial myth” once common to Judaism, early Christianity, the Mysteries, and the Gnostic systems,1 or what J. Paul Sampley calls “a popular speculation that may have been much more pervasive than the extant Christian literature indicates.”2 Unfortunately, as Claude Chavasse laments, “the loss of (this) Nuptial Idea was the loss of that system in which the other great symbols find their place,” for it was through his “marital” fusion with Man that God became incarnate in the midst of his People, creating the Mystical Community of Israel, otherwise known as

“Jewish Gnosticism and the ‘Hieros Gamos’ of Eph V:21–33,” New Testament Studies 10 (1963–4): 121–27. 2 And the Two Shall Be One Flesh (Cambridge, 1971), 42–43. 1

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the “Body” or “Temple” of God’s earthly Presence.3 In this way, there occurred “a transfusion of divine energy into the world,” for by “uniting himself to humanity,” the Bridegroom “might raise humanity to the heaven from which he came.”4 Most importantly, the Nuptial Idea explained Salvation by Grace, where the Heavenly redeems the Earthly by uniting itself directly to her, thus sharing the Divine Nature unearned, save for the Bride’s humble willingness to remain loyal and obedient to her Spouse. The use of sexual metaphor to portray God’s redemption of Man— though offensive to modern sensibilities—was clearly based on Old Testament precedent: And I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou becamest mine (Ezek 16:8).

New Testament authors continued to employ this traditional imagery to describe “the Redeemer uniting himself to the unholy, in order to make it holy.”5 In their opinion, the Sacred Embrace was an act of spiritual fusion (1 Cor 6:16–17; Eph 5:31–32)—happily rendered by the thirteenth-century English word, “Atonement,” or “At-One-Ment” with the Divine—during which the Greater Partner shared his divine power with the Lesser, thus saving her from the corruptibility of the world: Through this might and splendor, he has given us his promises, great beyond all price, and through them you may escape the corruption with which lust has infected the world, and come to share in the very being of God (2 Pet 1:4, NEB; italics added).

Though the book of Hosea (ca. 750 B.C.) had already referred to Yahweh as the “Husband” of Israel, our earliest information concerning the actual Nuptial in the Temple appears in the Wisdom literature and the allegories of Philo. Both saw behind the outward sacrifices of the Sanctuary a spiritual “pilgrimage” through the cultic wilderness in search of the Divine, climaxed by a Sacred Marriage to God’s Wisdom. This was symbolically consummated when symbols of their union were shown, enabling the initiate who stood in the Forecourt to “behold the Face of God”—a process described by contemporary scholars as thea theou, or “seeing God”—during The Bride of Christ (London, 1940), 17. Ibid., 14, 17. 5 F. Andersen and D. N. Freedman, Hosea, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1980), 165. 3 4

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which the Light flowing down from above penetrated and united with the Light in man, “begetting” royal “virtues” and “sonship” in him. Unfortunately, the expression “behold the Face of God” was deliberately altered by the Masoretes to read “appear before God,” effectively veiling from later students the central importance of this forgotten rite. Yet the idea of thea theou was derived strictly from the Pentateuch and Jewish tradition. Even E. R. Goodenough—whose By Light, Light is the classic study of Philo’s Temple Mystery—misunderstood the subordinate role of Greek learning in Philo’s exegesis of the Temple. Rather than using Jewish parallels to justify the existence of a contemporary “Hellenistic” Mystery, Philo had employed the Hellenism of his day to explain a Jewish Mystery whose basic pattern was already well-established. We have characterized this Jewish tradition as a “Wisdom Mystery,” since it was not the Father with whom the initiate came in contact in the Temple, but his mediating Presence, variously called “Wisdom” (Hokhmah, Sophia), the “Word” (Logos), God’s “Unique Son” (monogenes huios), the “Shekhinah,” the “Holy Spirit,” “God’s Glory” (kavod), etc. “Wisdom’s” gender thus alternated between masculine and feminine—even bisexual— since the memory of Israel’s recent polytheism still colored the traditions which went into the creation of this late “hypostatic” intermediary. The resulting “personification” vacillated between the idea of a virile, young creator-god and the recollection of a goddess (herself called “Wisdom” by the early Semites), appearing at times as God’s “Bride,” a “Heavenly Mother,” or as God’s “Son,” who was “begotten (genna) before the hills.” The first Christians eventually recognized Jesus as God’s “Son” and masculine “Wisdom,” and the “Mediator” who engenders divine sonship in his brethren—even their deification. Modern Judaism and Christianity have largely forgotten these ancient roots of their belief. Deprived of the Temple in A.D. 70, both were obliged to develop new methods of worship to replace the sacred symbolism in the Holy of Holies. Yet thanks to certain recent discoveries—which we shall attempt to describe in this study—we are able once again to recognize the supreme importance of the Nuptial Mystery in early Jewish and Christian theology, significantly augmenting our older concept of the Sanctuary as a place devoted exclusively to the offering of sacrifices. Even more importantly, Christians will be able to understand for the first time in nearly two millennia the meaning of Paul’s expression, a “Great Mystery”—meaning the redemptive union of Man and God in the Temple, and the sharing of the latter’s power with the initiate, even the Divine Nature itself.

1 THE EMBRACING CHERUBIM INTRODUCTION The ninth chapter of Hebrews, which begins with a detailed account of the Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple, has long puzzled commentators because of the author’s sudden reticence in verse 5 to tell us anything specific about the Ark and its two Cherubim: And above (the Ark) are Cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat, concerning which things this is not the (proper) time to speak in detail (peri on ouk estin nun legein kata meros).1

Typical of modern comments on this passage are the following: What our author would have had to say about the parabolic significance of the Cherubim … we can only imagine … He leaves us with the impression that he could have enlarged at some length on their symbolism if he had chosen to do so.2 We do not know how to account for this failure to describe them, especially as all other articles connected with the tabernacle are minutely described. Whether the form of the Cherubim was so generally known as to make the description unnecessary, or whether the description was purposely concealed, as among the secrets of Jehovah, cannot now be known.3

Earlier authors who lived while the Temple was still standing were even more reticent to speak of the contents of the Holy of Holies. Philo, for example (ca. 20 B.C.–A.D. 40), maintained that “all inside is unseen, except by the High Priest alone, and indeed, he … gets no view of anything. For he takes with him a brazier full of lighted coals and incense, and the great Translation by G. W. Buchanan, Hebrews, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1972), 89. 2 F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids, 1964), 191. 3 James M. Freeman, Manners and Customs of the Bible (Plainfield, NJ, 1972). 1

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quantities of vapor which this gives forth becloud the sight and prevent it from being able to penetrate to any distance” (On the Special Laws, 1.13). Orthodox commentators in fact insisted that the Holy of Holies in the Second Temple was completely empty. According to a prophecy in Jeremiah (3:16–17), the Ark from the destroyed First Temple was never to be replaced, since a soon-to-be-redeemed Jerusalem would herself become Yahweh’s “Throne.” Lamentations 2:1 was also understood to mean that Yahweh had completely abandoned his Ark, thanks to the continuing sins of Israel. Yet 2 Maccabees 2:4 records a legend that the prophet Jeremiah had actually hidden the Ark in a cave, and that God was shielding it from the world until it could return to the Temple in the Messianic Days. R. Samuel thus concluded in the Talmud that five things were lacking in the Second Temple: the Shekhinah, the Spirit of Prophecy, the fire, the Urim and Thummim, and the Ark—with its famous Cherubim standing above the Mercy Seat. Somewhat more uncertainly, however, he then went on to opine that even “those things were present, though they were not as helpful (as before)” (b. Yoma 21b). Julian Morgenstern was similarly convinced that “a second Ark, built more or less in imitation of the first … replaced this in the Second Temple.”4 Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, writing in the 1972 Encyclopedia Judaica, likewise acknowledged certain haggadic legends which still attributed the Cherubic statues to the Second Temple, though he personally believed that they had been present in the First Temple only (5:399). We also have the above-mentioned witness of Philo, who left us an entire book devoted to the two Cherubim, with which he appears to have been personally acquainted. There is also the ambiguous testimony of Josephus, who in his Wars (5.5.5) declared that there was nothing at all inside of the Holy of Holies, while in his Contra Apion he admitted that after Jerusalem was conquered in 70 A.D. the Romans found “that which was agreeable to piety,” though “what they found we are not at liberty to reveal to other nations” (2:7–8). What the Romans actually “found” has remained a matter of intense speculation and rumor for many centuries. The few who were able to read the medieval book Zohar, for instance, encountered cryptic memories of male and female nuptial symbols which were said to have resided in the former Temple. A handful of modern writers have perpetuated these Zoharic hints pertaining to the mysterious objects. Madame Blavatsky thus 4

“The Cultic Setting,” HUCA 35 (1964): 34–35, n.71.

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theorizes in her Secret Doctrine that the two Cherubim were placed over the Ark of the Covenant “so that their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect yoni,” or that the yod in God’s Name (YHWH) indicated the membrum virile, and the he the womb, “the whole forming the perfect bisexual emblem or symbol.”5 B. Z. Goldberg also supposed that the two pillars in front of the Temple were signs of the male generative principle. He even detected amongst the prophecies of Ezekiel “a suggestion of a large image of the lingam in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. And round about the graven images of lions, palm trees, and Cherubim were figures of the lingam and yoni in union.”6 Manly P. Hall likewise believed that “Solomon engraved on the walls of his Temple likenesses of the male and female principles to adumbrate this mystery; such, it is said, were the figures of the cherubim.”7 Louis Ginzberg, drawing on Talmudic materials, was more specific and suggested that “the heads of the Cherubim were slightly turned back, like that of a scholar bidding his master farewell; but as a token of God’s delight in his people Israel, the faces of the Cherubim, by a miracle, ‘looked one to another’ whenever Israel were devoted to their Lord, yea, even clasped one another like a loving couple.”8 Other Jewish and Christian writings of the period spoke of the Holy of Holies as a “Bridal Chamber” (Gospel of Philip 69:24–25), or hinted in a cleverly disguised pun that Song of Songs—itself an erotic poem glorifying sexual love—“WAS the Holy of Holies” (Rabbi Akiba, in the Mishnah, Yadayim, 3:5). In 1967, in a very important book, Raphael Patai brought together much detailed evidence from rabbinical sources which revealed that the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies had at some unknown time in the early history of the Second Temple been refashioned to portray the sexual act itself!9 “In their last version,” he writes, “the Cherubim depicted a man and a woman in sexual embrace—an erotic representation which was considered

The Secret Doctrine, (London, 1888), 2:460. The Sacred Fire (New York, 1930), 176. 7 An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosacrucian Symbolic Philosophy (Los Angeles, 1957), 176. 8 Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1909), 3:159. 9 The Hebrew Goddess, 1st ed. (New York, 1967); 3rd enlarged ed. (Detroit, 1990). All of our citations are drawn from the first edition, except where noted otherwise. See especially pp. 101 and 300–310 of the first edition. 5 6

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obscene by the pagans when they at last had a chance to glimpse it.”10 Furthermore, the embracing statues were shown to pilgrims assembled beyond the Holy Place during the three major feasts of Passover, Weeks, and Tabernacles. According to Rab Qetina (late third century), as recorded in the Talmud, “When Israel used to make the Pilgrimage, (the priests) would roll up for them the veil before the Holy of Holies, and show them the Cherubim, which were intertwined with one another” (b. Yoma 54b). Rashi, writing in the eleventh century, recalled that they were “joined together and were clinging to, and embracing each other like a male who embraces a female.” Rabbi Shimeon ben Laqish added that when strangers finally entered the Sanctuary, “they saw the Cherubim intertwined with each other; they took them out into the market place and said, Israel, whose blessing is a blessing and whose curse is a curse, should occupy themselves with such things! And they despised her because they had seen her nakedness” (b. Yoma 54b). These scattered materials suggest that symbols of God’s union with Israel actually survived in the Temple until its destruction in A.D. 70. Certain midrashim in fact reveal that outsiders caught a glimpse of such symbols when they invaded Jerusalem11 and paraded them in the streets for all to see: When the sins caused that the gentiles should enter Jerusalem, Ammonites and Moabites came together with them, and they entered the House of the Holy of Holies, and found there the two Cherubim, and they took them and put them in a cage and went around with them in all the streets of Jerusalem and said: “You used to say that this nation was not serving idols. Now see what we found and what they were worshipping” (in Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 123).

Patai’s work has for understandable reasons received little attention from biblical scholars,12 mainly because “orthodoxy” insists that there was 10 Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 101. Rabbi Rabinowitz, while acknowledging their sexual embrace, believed that the Cherubim in the Second Temple were merely carved on the walls (Encyclopedia Judaica, 5:399). 11 This cannot have been at the time of the First Temple’s destruction in 586 B.C., since all of the Amoras quoted in these midrashim were specifically discussing events which took place in the Second Temple. See Patai’s discussion on this invasion in Hebrew Goddess, 306–8. 12 A notable exception is Marvin H. Pope, who draws “most of (his) sketch” of Jewish mysticism, the Shekhinah, and the Shekhinah-Matronit in the Kabbalah from Patai’s Hebrew Goddess; cf. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1977), 153–79.

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nothing present inside of the Holy of Holies during the Second Temple period and because the sexual nature of the Embracing Cherubim undoubtedly kept them a secret from the rest of the world. Yet it is most important to note that it makes little difference whether or not there were actual statues surviving in the Second Temple or whether they were but a fabled memory left over from the time of the First Temple, for their enduring symbolism is so well documented that there can be little doubt as to their former importance in Israel’s sacred iconography. And though the existence of erotic imagery in the Temple inevitably invites emotional resistance from some, our passage in Hebrews (9:5) suggests that even Christianity still had a guarded reverence for the venerable statues. We shall later examine the literature of the early Church to see if this was indeed the case. Not only would a positive answer provide supporting evidence for Patai’s reconstruction, but it would throw important light on Christian conceptions of the Temple during the early years of the Common Era. Before we consider the Christian evidence, however, we need to determine as far as possible the meanings of the Cherubim in their late Second Temple setting. These, as we shall hope to show, were basically fourfold: (a) the “Face of God”; (b) symbols of God’s Male-Female Image (Gen 1:26–27); (c) symbols of God’s redemptive marriage to Israel; and (d) the paradigm for human marriages, patterned after God’s Male-Female Image.

THE CHERUBIM AS GOD’S “FACE” There was a well-known law in the Pentateuch that every male Israelite “Appear thrice yearly before the Face (panim) of Yahweh” (Exod 23:24; Deut 16:16; etc.), a technical expression meaning to “visit the Temple.” It is now generally recognized that this originally read “Behold the Face of Yahweh” (ra’ah [et]-pene yhwh), suggesting that Israelites once came to the Temple to see something. The Masoretes, however, by vocalizing the verb ra’ah as a niph‘al (“be seen”) instead of a qal (“see”), altered the original meaning to conceal the fact that something had been shown there to represent God’s “Face” or “Presence” (both KJV translations for panim).13 And 13 Friederich Nötscher, “Das Angesicht Gottes Schauen” (Würzburg, 1924), 90–93. Abraham Geiger (Urschrift und Übersetzung der Bibel, Breslau, 1857, 337ff) long ago demonstrated this fact by pointing out that although verbal forms of r’h could be altered from qal to niph‘al without detection—simply by changing the vowels—the infinitive form lir’ot (Exod 34:24; Deut 31:11; Isa 1:12) could never have been anything but qal, since the niph‘al should have been l ehera’oh (Judg 13:21; 1 Sam 3:21),

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when we consider that the three feast days on which the Cherubim were shown to pilgrims in front of the veil were the exact same days when Israel was commanded to “Behold the Face of Yahweh,” it becomes apparent that the Cherubim themselves must have represented the divine panim during the late period of the Second Temple. Philo in fact claimed that the contents of the Holy of Holies had been designed specifically as an “incorruptible facie” (“face,” “vision,” Questions on Exodus, 2.52), so that the race of mortals could behold and comprehend the “incorporeal and archetypal things” (ibid.). Those who are “worthily initiated and consecrated to God” will therefore see in the symbols of the Shrine “the First Cause … Then will appear to them that manifest One, who causes incorporeal rays to shine for them, and grants visions of the unambiguous and indescribable things of nature … For the beginning and end of happiness is to ‘be able to see God’” (ibid., 2:51), and to have “a correct apprehension of the invisible” (ibid., 2.52). R. Abaye, writing around the end of the third century, specifically designated the two Cherubim as the “large face” and the “small face” (b. Sukkah 5b), and “in a context mentioning the face or faces of God and the supernal faces.”14 One of these two “faces” was probably the precursor of the “Small Face” which appears in the Kabbalistic hieros gamos of God and Israel (see p. 348, below), and the two together almost certainly inspired the statement that “Adam and Eve were created … du-parzifum” (from the Greek loan-word, di-prosopa, “two faces”), “intertwined with one another— as symbolized by the form of the cherubim.”15 Some time in the first century, the term “Shekhinah” began to appear in Jewish writings to represent the divine Presence. Derived from the root š-k-n (“to dwell”), this name was first mentioned in the Targum Onqelos (based on a version already extant in the first century). In rabbinic literature or l ehera’ot (1 Kgs 18:2; Ezek 21:29)—in both cases with an added “h.” Furthermore, the niph‘al could not have been connected to p’ne (“Face”) with the particle ’et, as the Masoretes attempted to do in Exodus 23:17; 34:23; Isaiah 1:12; Psalm 42:2. The Syriac versions in fact still read Psalm 42:2 as qal; and in Exodus 34:23f; Deuteronomy 16:16; 31:11, the particle ’et makes it certain that pene was to be read as the accusative object of “behold.” This obfuscation probably began with the translators of the Septuagint, who regularly gave ophthanai (“appear”) in place of “see,” as well as replaced “seeing God” with “seeing the place where God stood” (Exod 24:10). 14 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: A New Perspective (New Haven, 1988), 134. 15 Baddei ha’Aron, 6a (thirteenth century); quoted in Idel, Kabbalah, 331.

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the expression “Face of Shekhinah” soon replaced the older “Face of Yahweh,” perhaps because the latter had somehow become offensive.16 Thus one often finds “Body of Shekhinah” as the form assumed by God’s “Presence” in mystical visions based on Ezekiel 1, where God’s glory is depicted as a human figure. Indeed, as late as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, German Hasidics still referred to the Throne-figure as the “Special Cherub” (keruv meyuhad), which was said to be an “emanation of God’s Shekhinah.”17 They also explained Ezekiel 10:4 (“the glory of the Lord went up from the Cherubim”) as meaning that the “Special Cherub” was identical with God’s invisible Presence, the glory, or Shekhinah.18 The same Hasidics identified the Shekhinah with the Philonic logos, or God’s male-female image, by which he brought about creation, and whose human form was the model for the sexes.19 The close connection between a feminine “Shekhinah” and God’s panim may stem from the fact that the goddess Anath—the wife of the Canaanite Baal—had long been known in Palestine as the pene Ba‘al (“Face of Baal”), at Ascalon as Phanebalos, and at Carthage as tennit pene-Ba‘al (“Glory of the Face of Baal”).20 Though the god himself was generally invisible to his worshippers, his wife could be easily seen and approached at the shrines. In a Carthaginian votive tablet to Anath and Baal, for example, she is described as Baal’s “manifestation,” through whom he drew near to men. Thus, “whoever sees her sees the face of Baal.”21 William Albright also observed that “in a very ancient Psalm, Ps 18:36 = 2 Sam. 22:36, we find the word ‘anath or ‘anoth used as a surrogate for YHWH.”22 It therefore appears that a goddess may have anciently represented her divine Husband as his “Face” or “Presence” in Israelite iconography.

Helmer Ringgren, Israelite Religion (Philadelphia, 1966), 163. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1961), 113 (hereafter cited as MTJM); see also his Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974), 40. 18 Scholem, MTJM, 113. 19 Ibid., 114. 20 William F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (Garden City, NY, 1969) (hereafter, YGC), 135, 129. 21 Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (Philadelphia, 1967), 2:39. 22 From the Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore, 1957) (hereafter, FSAC), 373fn. He also suggests that the name of Anath at Elephantine, “Anath-Bethel,” would mean “Presence of God’s House” (ibid., 373), i.e., Yahweh’s “Face.” 16 17

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Since many of Baal’s attributes were taken over by the Israelite Yahweh,23 it is likely that the idea of a wife as the “Face” of the god also became part of the Israelite cultus, as indeed Anath herself did at one time, 23 According to Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God, San Francisco, 1990). Hosea’s play on Ba‘al as a title of Yahweh (Hos 2:16) indicates that some northern Israelites did not distinguish between Yahweh and Baal. The verse declares, “And in that day, says Yahweh, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My ba‘al’” (46). Bearers of the Baal-names “Eshbaal” and “Meribbaal,” belonged to the clan of Saul, in which Yahwistic names are also attested, such as Jonathan, the son of Saul. Yet “why would a Yahwistic family give Baal names,” asks Smith, “if Baal were a god inimical to Yahweh? The answer is perhaps implicit in the name of another family member provided in the genealogy of Saul’s clan in 1 Chr 8:30 and 9:36. In this verse, Ba‘al is the name of Saul’s uncle … Direct analogies are provided by the name be‘alyah, ‘Yah is lord’ (1 Chr 12:6) and ywb‘l, ‘Yaw is lord,’ attested in a seal inscription. These names point to three possibilities. In Saul’s family, either ba‘al was a title for Yahweh, or Baal was acceptable in royal, Yahwistic circles, or both. The same range of possible interpretations underlies the names of Eshbaal and Meribbaal; both were possibly Yahwistic names, later understood as anti-Yahwistic in import. The later defensiveness over these names points to the fact that the language of Baal, though criticized during the monarchy, was used during the Judges period. The proper names containing the element ba‘al are historically ambiguous, possibly reflecting either the name of Baal or the title ‘lord,’ which would have been an appropriate epithet of Yahweh” (14). Helmer Ringgren also writes that “Obviously both Yahweh and Baal were divinities associated with atmospheric phenomena like lightning and thunder. The question naturally could arise whether the Israelite conception of a theophany shows Canaanite influence … It would have been difficult to apply an epithet to Yahweh if a certain similarity between him and Baal had not already been present, (thus) we must assume that the Canaanite ‘baal of the sky’ and Yahweh both belonged to the same phenomenological type” (Israelite Religion, 43–44). Gary A. Anderson, writing similarly, notes that “Elijah … constantly chastises his fellow Israelites for confusing the power of Baal for that of YHWH. Because this confusing of YHWH and Baal was so widespread in ancient Israel, it is important to understand why such an identification would have suggested itself in the first place. The most obvious explanation is the similar natures of YHWH and Baal … These similarities would have led many Israelites to presume that YHWH (the more ‘recent’ figure in the history of ancient Canaan) was not a unique god but rather just an alternative local title for an older pan-Canaanite deity. From the perspective of the common Israelite, it was not so much a matter of rejecting YHWH in preference for Baal, but of seeing the two as equitable or interchangeable in certain fundamental ways” (“Introduction to Israelite Religion,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Nashville, 1994, 1:275).

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probably under the name of “Queen of Heaven.”24 But with her came the traditional belief that the divine consists of male and female in intimate connection, as stated originally in Genesis 1:26–7. It is perhaps significant that the word panim is itself plural, though always used as a singular noun.

THE CHERUBIM AS SYMBOLS OF GOD’S MALE-FEMALE IMAGE Though Judaism was during most of the Second Temple period officially a monotheism, it is most significant that during the centuries immediately preceding Christ, the “One God” was frequently associated with a second “Power in Heaven,” an “angelic” or “hypostatic” figure who shared and mediated his influence to the earth, and who eventually gave rise to the development of the Church’s christology and the rise of Gnosticism.25 24 Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 63ff. As the “Queen of Heaven,” she was worshipped at least to the time of the Babylonian Captivity (Jer 7:17–18; 44:17–19). Hugo Gressman believed that the two stones in the Ark originally represented Yahweh and his wife, Anath (Die Lade Jahves, Berlin, 1920, 65), and that the plural “gods” in 1 Samuel 4:7 (when the Ark came into the Philistine camp) shows that there was actually more than one deity within the box, namely, Yahweh/Baal and his female consort (ibid., 65). Julian Morgenstern (“The Ark, the Ephod, and the ‘Tent of Meeting,’” HUCA 17 (1942–43): 246–47) compares these stones with the pairs of betyls or sacred stones worshipped by various other Semitic tribes, such as the Syrians and Nabataeans, who also kept them in a Kubbe, or Ark-like box. He also saw them as related to the two Cherubim: “Perhaps in the figures of the two Cherubim, so intimately and seemingly indispensibly associated with the ark … we may see a reminiscence of the two sacred stones or betyls or divine images … In some, and on the whole rather striking, respects, they do remind us not a little of the two goddesses in the Syrian palenquin” (ibid., 247fn). 25 See Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven (Leiden, 1977); Margaret Barker, The Great Angel (Louisville, KY, 1992). According to the original version of Deuteronomy 32:8–9, as well as Psalm 82, Israel’s godhead consisted of the Father El (= Elyon, Elohim) and and his Son Yahweh. The memory of these two gods survived for many years in the racial memory of the Jews, and scholars like J. A. Emerton, “The Origins of the Son of Man Imagery,” Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1950): 242; H. S. Nyberg, “Studien zum Religionskampf im Alten Testament,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 35 (1938): 329ff; Geo Widengren, The Accadian and Hebrew Psalms of Lamentation in Religious Documents (Uppsala, 1937), 78; Sakrales Königtum im Alten Testament (Stuttgart, 1955), 11, 85, have suggested that as late as the Exile, Yahweh was still subordinated to Elyon in parts of the Jerusalem cultus. Even after Judaism declared that Elohim and Yahweh were merely different names for the “One God” (Deut 6:4), the memory of a second deity survived as a “manifestation” of God’s

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According to Philo, the two Cherubim represented just such a heavenly duo, consisting of God’s creative and beneficent “power,” called “God” (i.e., Theos, or El), and God’s kingly and punitive “power,” called “Lord” (i.e., kyrios, or Yahweh).26 But in several passages of Scripture, the “One God” was also said to possess both male and female attributes.27 Thus Philo was the first to inform us that the two Cherubim represented a male and a female, symbolizing the “One God’s” masculine and feminine “powers,” as they united sexually within himself: While God is indeed One, his highest and chiefest Powers are two … Of these two potencies … the Cherubim are symbols … These unmixed potencies are mingled and united (On the Cherubim, 27–29).

This explanation was obviously derived from an earlier belief in literal male and female deities, whose memory somehow survived into an age of monotheistic worship. In fact, the immemorial image of a hieros gamos between a god and goddess at the time of creation can still be clearly seen in Philo’s description of God’s two “Powers” in connubial union: The Architect who made the universe was at the same time the Father of what was then born, whilst the Mother was the Knowledge possessed by its maker. With his Knowledge God had union, not as men have it, and begot created things. And Knowledge, having received the divine seed, when her travail was consummated, bore the only beloved Son who is apprehended by the senses, the world which we see (Philo, On Drunkenness, 30).

The author has of course demythologized the union of “Father” and “Mother” in this passage and given it a “spiritual” meaning (“not as men have it”). Nevertheless, the sexual imagery clearly persists, and we should bear in mind that the worship of actual male and female deities had only ceased in certain parts of Israel as recently as 419 or 400 B.C.28 This passage mediating “power,” described variously as his “angel” (Exod 23:20), or as a “personification” of his creative “word” and “wisdom” (Ps 33:6; 136:4). See also the discussion of the Danielic “Son of Man,” who may originally have been second in power to the “Ancient of Days” (p. 87 and note 17, p. 91, below). 26 On the Life of Moses, 2:97–100; Questions on Genesis, 1:57. 27 For example, Jeremiah 31:20; Hosea 8:14; Psalm 131:2; etc. See Phyllis Trible’s article in Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 5:368. 28 For example, in the Jewish garrison at Elephantine, Upper Egypt, where the goddess was worshipped along side of Yaho (YHWH). See James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, 1969), 490; Jeremiah (7:18; 44:17) and Ezekiel

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from On Drunkenness in fact preserves the exact same divine Triad of Father-Mother-Son which scholars like Ditlef Nielsen,29 William Albright,30 Maria Höfner,31 and Julian Morgenstern32 have found to be generally protoSemitic. In Albright’s words, the godhead of early popular Hebrew religion consisted of “a father, El, and mother, whose specific name or names must remain obscure (perhaps Elat or Anath), and a Son, who appears as the Storm-god.”33 By the time of Philo, however, this basic godhead of three had been reduced to “internal features” within the “One God” of monotheism. But as we shall see later on, it reappeared in the “pantheons” of Gnostic Christians, whose systems of heavenly Aeons were descended from a similar pattern of Father-Mother-and-Divine-Son.34 Most Eastern Mediterranean cultures, however, generally expanded this divine Triad into a Tetrad by the addition of the Son’s wife (often his own sister), resulting in a “Father-Mother-Son-and-Daughter.”35 This ancient Tetrad remained of extreme importance to Jewish Kabbalists, where the pattern of hierogamy surfaced once again in the spiritualized unions of the Sephiroth in medieval Kabbalism, where we still “dimly … perceive … the male and female gods of antiquity … anathema as they were to the pious kabbalist.”36 This is particularly significant because it is the nuptials of the younger pair that were usually the subject of Sacred Marriages in the Near East,37 possibly because the Father and Mother tended to be otiose and because it was the Son who was generally responsible for organizing (8:14) in the early sixth century B.C. still had to speak out against widespread polytheism in Israel, even in the Temple itself. 29 Die altarabische Mondreligion (Strassburg, 1944), Der dreieinige Gott in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung (Copenhagen, 1922); “Die altsemitische Muttergöttin,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 17 (1938): 526–50. 30 FSAC, 247, 173. 31 “Die vorislamitische Religionen Arabiens” (Stuttgart, 1970), 245–46. 32 Some Significant Antecedents of Christianity (Leiden, 1966), 82ff, 96. 33 FSAC, 247. 34 H.-M. Schenke, “Nag Hamadi Studien III,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 14 (1962): 351–61. 35 Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 164–70. 36 MTJM, 227. 37 Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 177–80. In the Ras Shamra texts there is a description of the love-making of the Father, El (The Birth of the Fair and Gracious Gods), but it is the relationship of younger pairs, such as Baal-Anath, Dumuzi-Innana, TammuzIshtar, Osiris-Isis, etc., which forms the traditional material for Near Eastern Sacred Marriages of the type we are considering.

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chaos and providing fertility at the time of creation. Their pattern of hierogamy also reappeared in the allegorical “marriage” of Yahweh and Israel, after prophets like Hosea and Isaiah condemned the immemorial rites of polytheism, and replaced them with the sanitized image of God’s “Nuptial Covenant” with his people. The figure of the Son’s Wife in these Sacred Marriages is particularly important to our study. The memory of the young goddess who became a symbol of Baal/Yahweh’s panim (pp. 11–12, above) can also be seen in other personae who grew out of the feminine “debris” left over from Israel’s polytheistic past. Especially revealing is the Shekhinah, originally the name of God’s “Spirit” or “Presence” in the world, but one who would reemerge as a virtual goddess in Kabbalism, much like her ancient predecessor. The literature which grew up around the figure of Shekhinah shows that she was closely associated with connubial matters, such as the symbolism of the Embracing Cherubim. Exodus 25:22 thus suggests that Shekhinah (God’s Presence) would have been present between the two statues: “There will I meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from between the two Cherubim.” Thus the statues themselves came to represent the place where the invisible Shekhinah resided and could therefore be looked upon as her symbolic “Face.” Yet the intertwining statues were found by some of the rabbis to be objectionable. Rab Nabman, however, answered that a bride who is still in her father’s house is bashful towards her groom; once she lives in her husband’s house, she is no longer bashful toward him (b. Yoma 54b).

The meaning of this, as Patai explains, is that “the children of Israel, while they were in the desert, were bashful and would not look at the Shekhinah,” since Shekhinah was by definition the visible “Presence” (panim) of God, i.e., the Embracing Cherubim.38 “Once settled in their land,” however, “they could feast their eyes upon her” (b. Yoma 54a), thus legitimizing the otherwise shocking spectacle. The connection between Shekhinah and the connubial symbolism of the Cherubim also survived in the Zohar, the great thirteenth-century classic of Kabbalism, which modern research has shown to be a treasure-house of mystical lore inherited from the period of the Second Temple.39 There it is Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 304. Gershom Scholem has found the roots of the Kabbalists in the esoteric doctrines of the Second Temple Pharisees dealing with the events of Creation, visions 38 39

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recalled that “before Shekhinah was espoused” (i.e., united sexually), “no one could speak to God face to face” (II:22b). But those who would gaze upon her must themselves be married, for God’s “righteousness and equity” (Ps 98:9) consist of the fact that he is both male and female, “as were the Cherubim” (III:59a).

THE CHERUBIM AS SYMBOLS OF GOD’S REDEMPTIVE MARRIAGE TO ISRAEL The most direct evidence which we have for this interpretation is found in the Babylonian Talmud, which explains that when “the Cherubim, whose bodies were intertwisted with one another,” were shown to the pilgrims assembled in the Forecourt of the Temple, the priests addressed them as follows: Look! You are beloved of God as the love between man and woman (b. Yoma 54a).

This again reminds us of the image of God’s covenant-marriage to Israel in Ezekiel 16:8: Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine.

The consummation of this covenant-marriage would later take place in the Holy of Holies, where the Cherubim were displayed in their connubial embrace. Talmudic legend in fact suggests that the Cherubim in the Second Temple may have been moveable. Rabbis Johanan and Eleazar, in b. Baba Batra 99a, for example, in attempting to reconcile Exodus 25:20 (“And the Cherubim … with their faces one to another”) with 2 Chronicles 3:13 (“these Cherubim … their faces were toward the house”), concluded that this change took place according to whether or not Israel was righteous at the time:

of God’s Cherubic Throne, and the angelic hierarchies of the Celestial Court, much of which was already found in books like 1 Enoch. “Subterranean but effective, and occasionally still traceable, connections exist between these later writers and the groups which produced a large proportion of the pseudepigrapha and apocalypses of the first centuries before and after Christ” (MTJM, 42–43).

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A GREAT MYSTERY As for him who says that the faces of the Cherubim turned toward one another, the verse which says And their faces were toward the house presents no problem, because the one was at a time when Israel did the will of the Place (i.e., God’s will), and the other was at a time when Israel did not do the will of the Place.

Since the passage from 2 Chronicles 3:13 is merely a description of how Solomon constructed his Temple, and contains no reference to Israel’s sinfulness, we must conclude that the rabbis had an independent reason for assuming that changes in the posture of the Cherubim might be linked to Israel’s behavior. Thus there is a statement in b. Baba Batra 99a which suggests that the standing position of the Cherubim was itself some kind of “miracle.” This suggests that a secret duty of the High Priest may have included the bringing of the free-standing statues together, in order to effect a symbolic marriage between Yahweh and Israel. Louis Ginzberg, combining the foregoing statements with the one from b. Yoma 54a, concluded that “as a token of God’s delight in His people, Israel, the faces of the Cherubim, by a miracle, ‘looked one to another’ whenever Israel were devoted to their Lord, yea even clasped one another like a loving couple.”40 “When all was linked together, all faces were illumined. Then all fell on their faces and trembled, and said, ‘Blessed be the Name of his glorious kingdom for ever and ever,’ to which the High Priest responded, ‘Be ye clean’” (Zohar III:66b–67a), for the right to gaze on the Embracing Statues was granted only to those who were “pure in heart.” It is immediately obvious that the reported change of the Cherubim from a “facing” to an “opposing” position (b. Baba Batra 99)—if it indeed occurred—could only have been caused by the one person who entered the Holy of Holies, namely the High Priest. If this was in fact the case, then we have the description of a duty formerly performed on the Day of Atonement, but now quite forgotten, namely, the uniting of the Cherubim in a kind of hieros gamos reflecting the marriage of God and Israel—or the “Bridegroom” and his “Bride” (Isa 62:5). Such a marriage rite is indeed hinted at in the Zohar, which declares that the High Priest had gone in “to unify the Holy Name and to join the King with the Matrona” (III:66b), i.e., the “Bridegroom” and the “Bride Israel.” This may have referred simply to the bringing about of the soteriological union in heaven, or it may have included the uniting of their symbols—the Cherubim—though this is presently impossible to determine. 40

Legends of the Jews, 3:159.

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Nevertheless, the Heavenly Union (literally “copulation”) “depends on the priest,” and no man shall be in the tent of meeting “when he goes in to unite them,” thereby “making atonement for himself and his house” (III:66a)—meaning the reestablishing of the “wedded” relationship between Yahweh and Israel. The Tanhuma Numbers also recalls that the Holy of Holies was a “Nuptial Couch … because just as the couch serves fruitfulness and multiplication, even so the Sanctuary,” since everything therein “was fruitful and multiplied.” The medieval Zohar Hadash also remembered the Holy of Holies as a “Wedding Chamber” for God and the exiled Community of Israel, now unfortunately abandoned and despoiled. But God’s former Bride still enters mournfully into the ruin where the Holy of Holies once stood, lamenting, “In here came unto me the Lord of the World, my Husband, and would lie in my arms and all that I wished he would give me. At this time he used to come unto me and left his dwelling place and played between my breasts.”41 “Unification of the Holy Name” is further explained in the Zohar by the statement that “marriage is the union of the Sacred Name here below” (III:7a). Thus when we recall that Philo also referred to the Embracing Cherubim as “Father” and “Mother,”42 it becomes apparent that their embrace indeed constituted a symbolic hieros gamos, whether their “miraculous” coming together was still a cultic reality or merely a pious legend inherited from Israel’s polytheistic past.

THE CHERUBIM AS PARADIGMS OF HUMAN MARRIAGE Though there is no surviving document which states unequivocally that the Embracing Cherubim were viewed as prototypes for human union, there are sufficient statements relating the male-female image in the Temple to its antitypes in earthly marriages to conclude that this was in fact the case. Indeed, it cannot have been mere coincidence that visitors to the Festivals, when the loving statues were displayed, were said to have come to the Temple in pairs, i.e., as married couples,43 intent on being instructed in the Quoted in Patai, Man and Temple (London, 1947), 92. Also called “Reason and Wisdom,” “Goodness and Sovereignty,” “Beneficial and Correcting,” even “Elohim” and “Yahweh,” etc. See the complete list in Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 115. 43 Josephus (Antiquities, 15.11.5) mentions a gate “on the east quarter (of the Court of Women) towards the sunrising … through which such as were pure came in together with their wives.” The same tradition is mentioned by the medieval 41 42

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ways of the Lord. Thus we note that in Genesis 1:26–28, the creation of Adam and Eve by an ’Elohim—whose “image” was both “male and female”—is immediately followed by the commandment to “multiply and replenish the earth,” i.e., to similarly bring the sexes together and beget children. This pattern is actually followed in Genesis 5:3, where the exact same language which had been used to describe the “creation” of the Primal Adam is used to describe the “begetting” of Seth: Adam … begat (Seth) in his own likeness, after his own image (Gen 5:3). Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen 1:26).

William Albright thus concluded that the latter passage contains “an interesting case of demythologizing … where God speaks in the plural,” referring to the gods in the Heavenly Council (sôd),44 as they plan the creation of man.” This, he added, was usually carried out in Near Eastern theogonies by the “outpouring of semen,” or “creation by sexual act.”45 Thus we are justified in viewing Genesis 1:26 as a direct model for the begetting of Seth. We therefore find in the early rabbinic literature the very important dictum that “He who does not marry thereby diminishes the Image of God” (Tosefta, Yebamot, 8:4).

This again shows that marriage and the divine Image were considered at the time to be identical. Furthermore, since marriage was the “union of the Holy Name here below” (Zohar III:7a), it followed that human compliance with the Sacred Embrace was required of all believers. Thus the Zohar defined the “spreading of the radiance of the Sacred Name” as the command to “multiply and replenish the earth,” and the four letters of God’s Name (YHWH) came to stand for the primal Tetrad of “Father-Mother-Son-andDaughter,”46 or the ongoing process by which life emerges from God, passes to his female counterpart, and is then “begotten” into male and female offspring, who are commanded to repeat the procedure (Zohar III:65b; Jewish traveller, Estori ben Moses (1322), who said that it also could be found in the writings of R. Eliezer b. Hyrkanus, who claimed that Solomon had built two gates, one for mourners and those under the ban, and one for married couples. See Julian Morgenstern, “The Gates of Righteousness,” HUCA 6 (1929), 27–28 and fn. 44 YGC, 191–92. 45 FSAC, 369. 46 Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 162ff.

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III:290a–b). This again explains why one had to be married before being allowed to see the “Shekhinah’s Face” (III:59a), for only when Israel obeyed God’s will would the Cherubim unite (b. Baba Batra 99a). The “Face of Shekhinah,” moreover, was a late euphemism for the “Face of God”—as symbolized by the Embracing Cherubim (pp. 9–10, above)—while “God’s will” was that men marry and beget children (Gen 1:28; 2:24). Indeed, the Zohar claimed that until Shekhinah was married (i.e., united sexually), no one could speak to God “face to face” (II:59a), and only those who were themselves married were allowed to gaze on her, for “God is both male and female, as were the Cherubim” (III:59a). Talmudic and Torah scholars accordingly performed marital intercourse at precisely midnight on the Sabbath as a symbolic reference to the heavenly marriage (b. Ketubbot 62b).47 In this way, the Shekhinah was made to rest between the deserving husband and his wife (b. Sotah 17a). Kabbalists further taught that the human couple must have a conscious “intent” (kawwanah) to emulate the divine pattern. In this way, they themselves became Cherubim, or a “living chariot” (merkabah) for God’s Presence, just like the “Holy Beasts” in the Temple.48 Then the Shekhinah would dwell between the loving couple, as it had done between the Cherubim (Exod 25:22). As a consequence, the Zohar promised that the Shekhinah would be present during the sexual act, “cleaving to the man, but thanks only to his union with his wife” (I:50a). More important still was the warning that unless a man married in conformity to this divine pattern he would never attain eternal life: And when he dies and his soul leaves him, it does not unite with him at all because he has diminished the Image of his Maker (III:7a). He who remains without a wife, so that he is not both male and female is considered only half a body. No blessing rests on anything that is blemished or lacking; it is found only in that which is complete, in something whole and undivided. A thing which is divided cannot endure forever, nor will it ever receive blessing (III:296a).49

In both of these passages, the union of the man and wife is again patterned after the Image of God (Gen 1:26–27), which is why the human sexes were Scholem, On the Kabbalah (New York, 1965), 140. Y’hiel Mikhael Epstein, Seder T’fillah Derekh Y’share (Offenbach, 1791), 10b, 23b, 24b; cited in Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 3rd ed., 186. 49 Most of the Zoharic translations used in this book are by Raphael Patai, either via personal communication, or taken from The Hebrew Goddess. 47 48

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A GREAT MYSTERY

also commanded to become “one” by means of legitimate marriage (Gen 2:24). Indeed, so important was this heavenly pattern that it served as the model for God’s own union with Israel, as well as for Christ’s union with the Church (Eph 5:31–32). Conversely, the heavenly union which Paul would call “a Great Mystery” (v. 32) also applied to the marriage of men and women (v. 33), while at the same time it explained why Paul chose Adam, at the time of his marriage (Gen 2:24), as the “figure of him who was to come” (Rom 5:14), i.e., Christ. We shall in fact discover that the imagery of the Embracing Cherubim was mentioned for several more centuries in the writings of the early Church, primarily as a symbol of the soteriological union of man and God, though the Gnostics always made sure that the “Great Mystery” included husbands and wives. For this reason, they frequently used human unions in their so-called “Bridal Chamber rites” to “catalyze” the heavenly union of the soul with Christ, and to bring about its salvation (see “The Gnostic Bridal Chamber,” below).

2 THE WISDOM MYSTERY WHO WAS WISDOM? We must now investigate Wisdom’s role in this important marriage symbolism. We already saw that the Talmud explains the loving embrace of the Cherubim as a metaphor of God’s redemptive covenant with Israel (b. Yoma 54a), an exegesis obviously related to Ezekiel’s description of God’s “marriage” to Israel (Ezek 16:8). It will be immediately noted, however, that most of the literature which comes from the centuries immediately before Christ describes this “marriage” as taking place through the agency of a divine surrogate, such as God’s “Wisdom” or “Word,”1 rather than through direct union with the Father. We also learn from the Ras Shamra Tablets that one of El’s most characteristic attributes was his hkm (“Wisdom”).2 Sirach (ca. 180 B.C.) therefore informs us that those who sought God came to the Temple in search of his “Wisdom,” rather than El himself: When I was young, before I wandered about, I desired Wisdom, and sought her out. I prayed for her before the Temple,3 And will seek her out even to the end (51:13–14).

This is because Wisdom was the emissary and embodiment of El’s creative power and knowledge, and the one who ministered between the world of the Most High and his people, Israel: Amongst Alexandrian Jews “Wisdom was normally equated with God’s ‘Word’” (e.g., Philo, Allegorical Interpretation, 1.65; That the Worse Attacks the Better, 116–19; Questions on Genesis, 4.92; etc.). 2 “The Ugaritic root hkm … is associated with the high God El in all of its occasions.” H.-P. Müller, “chākham; wisdom” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (hereafter TDOT), 4:366). 3 The G version has enanti naou (“before the Temple”), which may have originally read en neoteti mou (“in my youth”). In any case, G was the form in which Sirach was officially received into the Church, i.e., as part of the Greek Septuagint. 1

23

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A GREAT MYSTERY From the mouth of the Most High I came forth, and mist-like covered the earth. In the heights of heaven I dwelt, my throne on a pillar of cloud. The vault of heaven I compassed alone, through the deep abyss I took my course. Over waves of the sea, over all the land, over every people and nation I held sway. In the holy Tent I ministered before him, and then in Zion I took up my post. In the city he loves as he does me, he gave me rest; in Jerusalem is my domain” (24:1–12, trans. by Skehan and DiLella).

Like the “angel” who acted as God’s satrap over “Jacob” (LXX Deut 32:8– 9), Wisdom “serve(d) a liturgical and priestly function,” especially as “an intermediary between God and human beings.”4 Thus it was she who regulated the flow of power between the upper and lower worlds. Like the Cherubim who guarded the entrance to Paradise—and whom Philo likened to the Logos (On the Cherubim, 28)—she stood at the “limit” (horos) separating Man from God, which in the Jerusalem Temple was the space between the two statues, where God’s “Presence” promised to commune with Israel (Exod 25:22). Cherubs in fact appear throughout the ancient Near East as traditional guardians of the portals leading into heaven, just as the Egyptian Sphinx (which is also a Cherub, or a lion with human head) guarded the entrance into the Pyramids, where the souls of the dead resided. And since she “compassed the vault of heaven” with the Father’s power, she further resembled the Stoic Logos, who was also widely viewed as the controller and the mediator of God’s creative influence to the world: She is an exhalation from the power of God, a pure effluence from the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing tainted insinuates itself into her. She is an effulgence of everlasting light, an unblemished mirror of the active power of God, and an image of his goodness. Though but one she can do everything, and abiding in herself she renews all things; generation by generation she enters into holy souls and renders them friends of God and prophets, 4 P. W. Skehan and A. di Lella, The Wisdom of Ben Sira, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1987), 335.

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for nothing is pleasing to God but the man who lives with Wisdom. She is fairer than the sun and surpasses every constellation; compared to the light of day she is found more radiant; for day is superseded by night, but over Wisdom no evil can prevail. She stretches in might from pole to pole and effectively orders all things (Wisdom of Solomon 7:25–8:1, trans. by David Winston)

Unfortunately, most Israelites refused to accept her, and the now “Homeless Wisdom” was obliged to return to heaven (Sir, 24:7; 1 Enoch 42). Nevertheless, there were Jews who still spoke of a mysterious second power who “mediated” the “One God’s” influence to the world. This “Second God” has recently been investigated by scholars like Alan Segal5 and Margaret Barker,6 who showed that memories of Israel’s former polytheism had survived in the racial consciousness right down to the advent of Christianity, in spite of Judaism’s official monotheism.7 Even Philo called Wisdom either “the firstborn (protogonos) Son” (On Agriculture, 51; Confusion of Tongues, 146), or “the only beloved Son” (On Drunkenness, 30); and the LXX of Proverbs 8:22 said that God “begets (genna) Wisdom” as the “beginning” of his ways—a title which became “the firstborn (prototokos) of all creatures” in Colossians (1:15). Wisdom was thus said to be monogenes (literally “unique,” Wis 7:22), though this adjective was understood by Jerome to mean “only begotten” (unigenitus) when he translated John 1:14. This helps to explain why the Christian “Wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24) was again accepted as the literal “Son of God”; and it further explains why the Jews crucified Jesus for blasphemy when he claimed to be a “Son of God” (John 19:7), for contemporary rabbis had condemned the Christians as minim (“heretics”) for imagining that God has offspring.8 Yet even the strictly monotheistic Jews had long maintained that God did not create the world directly, but through an “agent” of his power, one whom the Old Testament had called “Wisdom” (“By wisdom he made the heavens,” Ps 136:5) or “Word” (“By the word of the LORD were the heavTwo Powers in Heaven (Leiden, 1977; see p. 14, above). The Great Angel (Louisville, KY, 1992; see p. 14 above). 7 Compare note 29, page 15, above. 8 Segal, Two Powers, 3–7. According to Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths, (Garden City, NY, 1963), 104, rabbis during the second century still felt obliged to curse those who read “sons of God” in the literal sense, and reinterpreted the expression to mean “judges,” instead of true deities in Psalm 82:6. 5 6

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A GREAT MYSTERY

ens made,” Ps 33:6). But the ultimate prototype of this “mediating agent” can only have been one or more of the lesser gods of the Israelite pantheon, especially the Father’s “executive Son,”9 or even a number of assorted female deities,10 especially the “Daughter” who acted as the Son’s “Face” in the shrines (pp. 10–11, above).11 She may even have been a form of the ancient Mother Goddess, Asherah, who was originally the wife of El.12 Significantly, after monotheism declared that all of these deities except for the lone “Yahweh-Elohim” were non-existent (Deut 6:4; Isa 45:5), their ancient “executive” or “mediating” functions still played a leading role in the Temple cultus, though they were by now reduced to mere “hypostasis” or “personification” of the Father’s internal “powers” or “attributes.” Yet as in previous polytheistic ages, they continued to be described in strikingly “personal” terms, just as the numerous gods and goddesses of prehistory had been. But in addition to God’s mysterious “Word” or “Wisdom,” God also worked through his all-important Shekhinah (pp. 10–11, above), who was generally understood to be a form of God’s Spirit. Since her name was derived from the verb š-k-n (“to dwell”), she obviously had a great deal in common with the Wisdom who “dwelt” in Israel’s Tent and “ministered” in the Assembly of the Most High. Shekhinah, too, was frequently personified as a discrete persona, like the gods and goddesses of old, and who could therefore be described by Rabbi Aha as a discrete “woman” who stood and 9 An expression used by Conrad L’Heureux, Rank among the Canaanite Gods (Missoula, 1979), 5; and by J. J. M. Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon (Baltimore, 1972), 148. Walther Eichrodt uses the expression “Heavenly Vizier” in Theology of the Old Testament (Philadelphia, 1967), 2:197–99. 10 Thus Helmer Ringgren writes that the Jewish Wisdom was “a superior counterpart to a mother goddess, or goddess of love.” Israelite Religion (Philadelphia, 1966), 310, and that her figure was formed under the influence of various older deities, including a Mother and Daughter, Word and Wisdom (Lund, 1947). 11 Albright was of the opinion that “Wisdom” was “a Canaanite goddess associated with Baal, and similar to the Mesopotamian Siduri Sabitu … called ‘goddess of wisdom, giver of life’” (From the Stone Age to Christianity, Baltimore, 1957; hereafter FSAC, 368–69). As Baal’s associate, she would have been one of El’s daughters. 12 El’s wife also appeared in Qatabanian inscriptions under the name Hukm, “Wisdom” (= Heb. hokmah), along with her own name, “Ashirat.” (= Heb. Asherah). “‘Wisdom’ is a standing title of the ancient Semitic Mother Goddess. This name takes us back to a very primitive stratum of Semitic mythology.” Ditlef Nielson, “Die Altsemitische Muttergöttin,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 17 (1938): 550.

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witnessed before God on Israel’s behalf.13 In the Midrash Mishle (ca. A.D. 1030) she is again referred to as a virtual goddess, one completely separate and distinct from God. The Kabbalistic literature would even speak of Shekhinah as God’s “Bride”—one of the Mother Goddess’s ancient titles. Hence, while technically distinct from Wisdom,14 Shekhinah appears to have likewise inherited many of the traits of a prehistoric goddess, either the Father’s own wife, or the wife of his Son, she who traditionally served as the Son’s “Face.”15 “Wisdom/Word’s” ancestry thus consisted of several male and female elements, inherited from the age of Israelite polytheism. One of her more important prototypes, however, may have been El’s Son, Baal—the husband of Anath, and the Canaanite equivalent of Yahweh—whose resurrection made possible the continuation of all natural life, and of whom the Ras Shamra texts report, “The wise El has attributed to thee wisdom (hkmt), together with eternity of life” (II AB iv–v 41–42).16 As the creative Logos, Wisdom would therefore emerge in Christianity as a masculine figure (John 1:1), while in rabbinic Judaism she was often spoken of as the feminine “To-

Leviticus Rabbah, 6:1 (ca. A.D. 300). “Shekhinah” was perhaps originally related to the Pillar of Fire that attended the Ark in the wilderness (Exod 33:14). Scholem notes that the older rabbinic sources never identified Shekhinah with Wisdom (“Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der kabbalistischen Konzeption der Schechinah,” Eranos Jahrbuch 21 (1953): 56), though he has demonstrated convincingly that Wisdom’s role as a divine “Bride” was definitely part of her “prehistory” (ibid., 46). It is only in Kabbalism that their “essential relationship” becomes explicit once again. See O. S. Rankin, Israel’s Wisdom Literature (Lund, 1947), 259, where Shekhinah is also described as “a kindred figure to Wisdom.” 15 In recent years, archeological discoveries in tenth and ninth century Israel (mainly at Kuntillat ‘Ajrud in the Sinai desert, and at Khirbet el-Qom, near Hebron) have shown that Yahweh had a consort, the Asherah. See especially John Day, “Asherah in the Hebrew Bible and Northwestern Semitic Literature, JBL 105 (1986): 385–408; Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, Atlanta, 1988. The name “Asherah” was eventually translated in the LXX and in modern versions as “grove” or “tree” (her cult symbols), thus concealing her true identity from the new monotheists. While the Asherah was originally the wife of the Father, El, once the monotheists had declared Yahweh to be identical with El, she ended up as the consort of Yahweh. Thus some of Asherah’s attributes may have colored the figure of “Wisdom,” or Yahweh’s mediating Presence in the Temple. 16 FSAC, 368; translation of William Albright. 13 14

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rah,”17 or the “Law” by which the universe was governed. In Christianity, however, she became the masculine “New Torah,” i.e., Jesus Christ, the New Testament “Wisdom” (1 Cor 1:24). Like the Jewish “Wisdom,” he too mediated to his disciples the powers which his Father had “begotten” in him, for as the Father’s Spirit dwelt in him (John 14:10), he would cause it to dwell in his followers. But in Gnosticism, we will again encounter Wisdom as a female, or even as a male-female syzygy—the “Logos-Sophia”— who bridges the spiritual and the earthly as a bisexual unity, recalling the malefemale Cherubim, whose male-female embrace depicted the reunion of God and Man in the Temple.

ISRAEL AS GOD’S BRIDE In rabbinic Judaism, Wisdom, and/or the Shekhinah, came to be described as “the Community of Israel,” suggesting her origin with God and her destiny to return to him again.18 As the spiritual substance within God’s Old Testament “Bride” (Hos 2:14–20; Isa 54:4–10; 62:4–5), she was not merely the earthly race of Israel, but the restored and renewed “soul” of the spiritual Israel who first came down from the heavens.19 Later mystics therefore looked forward to God’s “marriage” to his Shekhinah as the Golden Age when the Preexistent Community of “Adam Kadmon” would be reconstituted above, and the preexistent world, from which human souls had fallen when they broke away from their primordial oneness with the Divine, restored.20 17

etc.

Wisdom 1:7; 7:17–21; 8:1ff; 9:17; 10; 11:20; 16:24; etc. Sirach 24:23ff; 26–33;

In Gnostic Christianity “Shekhinah/Wisdom” would also be viewed as the personification of the preexistent ekklesia (e.g., Tripartite Tractate, 58:29–59:1), which was in turn the spiritual counterpart of the earthly church. 19 As late as 1930, when Albert Schweitzer first called attention to the important connection between the Jewish “Preexistent Community” and the Christian “Preexistent Church,” it was still widely supposed that both doctrines belonged to the fringes of heterodoxy. Today, it is evident that such beliefs were accepted by the majority of contemporaty rabbis, whose apocalyptic views were the product of ordinary Pharisaic Judaism; see W. D. Davies’ summary in Paul and Rabbinic Judaism 4th ed. (Philadelphia, 1980), 9–10. For the Talmudic doctrine of the Preexistent Community, see Ferdinand Weber’s Jüdische Theologie auf Grund des Talmud und verwandter Schriften (New York, 1975), 196–225. 20 As we shall show later on, the Kabbalists viewed the Shekhinah as the “lost” spirit-substance of God, which fell from the heavens at the time of the Fall, and 18

THE WISDOM MYSTERY

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A “sexual” bond between God and Man appears to have been widely recognized in ancient Semitic cultures, where there was a widespread concept that cult-cities and their peoples were directly “married” to their deities.21 This survived in more or less demythologized forms as late as the time of Christ, and it is not unreasonable to assume that such a belief already lay behind Israel’s Exodus into the desert, where Israel fled to be “married” to her God. Indeed, it is not essentially different from the motivation expressed by Moslem pilgrims even today, as they approach the Ka‘ba at Mecca, chanting the so-called talbiya: “Here we come, O Allah, no partner hast thou,” suggesting that some kind of communal “espousal” to the god was once part of the ritual. Even the present redacted account of the Exodus appears to be a conscious readaptation of a former hieros gamos between God and Man in the desert. It will be recalled that the original reason for Israel’s release from Egypt was to allow her to make a “three-day journey” into the wilderness to “sacrifice to Yahweh” (Exod 3:18). But as Wellhausen observed many years ago, “the exodus is not the occasion of the festival, but the festival the occasion of the exodus.”22 And though it is no longer possible to ascertain the exact nature of the intended “sacrifice,” it is clear that the desert festival which was supposedly introduced to commemorate the flight out of Egypt had actually existed prior to that event. The Passover, for example, was an ancient rite connected with the spring parturition rites of the shepherds and herdsmen, and was probably connected to the Canaanite feast of mazzoth (“Unleavend Bread”) once the Israelites had settled in Canaan.23 It is even introduced into Exodus 12:21 as which (because of its natural consanguinity with the Divine) can guide men back to their Source. 21 Julius Lewy, “The Old West Semitic Sun-God Hammu,” HUCA 18 (1944): 436–43. 22 Quoted in J. C. Rylaarsdam, “Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread,” in Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 3:664. 23 Roland de Vaux, The History of Early Israel (Philadelphia, 1978), reconstructs the events as follows: “One spring, when the feast assuring the well-being of the flocks and herds before they were taken to their summer pasture was being celebrated, at a time when the scourge was laying Egypt waste, the Israelites left Egypt, led by Moses in the name of their God, Yahweh” (370). The unleavened bread which they ate was the unleavened bread of the Passover, later assimilated to the unleavened bread of the Canaanite mazzoth feast, after Israel settled in Canaan (369).

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a feast already known, though additional statements claim that it was “invented” de novo to memorialize the night when Yahweh “passed over” the houses of the Israelites as they prepared to leave Egypt (Exod 12:13, 23, 27). The Feast of Tabernacles—also rationalized as a “memorial” to the time when Yahweh caused the fleeing Israelites “to dwell in the desert in booths” (Lev 23:41–43)—had equally ancient roots, though it took place in the fall (Lev 23:41), i.e., at the time immediately preceding the Solomonic New Year (1 Kgs 8:2). The riotous nature of this autumnal feast, with its use of green boughs, and the custom of searching for brides in the vineyards, has been variously connected with practices going back to Sumerian hierogamy,24 the Canaanite hillulim (“jubilation”) which was associated with the season of harvest and vintage (Lev 19:24; Judg 9:27; cf. Ps 126:6),25 an ancient pilgrimage hag in the desert26 (perhaps domesticated in later years as an annual feast of pilgrimage to Shiloh, where the daughters of the country danced in the vineyards, Judg 21:19–21),27 or even the Babylonian New Year Festival (Akitu), which concluded with the Sacred Marriage of Marduk and Sarpanit.28 It is in any case virtually certain that many of the elements which were combined to create this most important of all early feasts— originally called simply “the Feast” (hehag; 1 Kgs 8:2)—were already old when Israel fled into the wilderness, just as in the case of the ancient Passover. It is especially important to note that one of the preparations for the intended sacrifice in the desert (Exod 3:18) consisted of “borrowing” precious ornaments and clothing from the Egyptians with which to decorate the men and women of Israel:

24 Samuel N. Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Bloomington, 1969), 49–106. In this case, however, the pertinent events largely took place in the spring. 25 See, for example, E. G. Kraeling, “The Real Religion of Ancient Israel,” JBL 47 (1928): 148; de Vaux, History of Early Israel, 708. 26 Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East (Oxford, 1967), 156ff; Julian Morgenstern, “The Despoiling of the Egyptians,” JBL 68 (1949), 18– 19. 27 de Vaux, History of Early Israel, 708. 28 See H. J. Kraus, Gottesdienst in Israel, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1962), 17–21, for historical background. This theory got its main impetus from Paul Volz, Das Neujahrsfest Jahwes, which appeared in 1912 (Tübingen).

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But every woman shall borrow of her neighbor, and her that sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment, and ye shall put them on your sons and upon your daughters (Exod 3:22).

Exodus 11:1–2 again repeats this important instruction, but with the following significant addition: I will bring one more plague upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt; afterwards he will let you go hence; when he sends you away completely, he shall surely thrust you away. Speak now in the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor jewels of silver and jewels of gold.

J. Coppens and Van Hoonaker have both noted that the MT of verse 1 can be emended without the slightest consonantal change from “when he sends you away completely” (keshilleho kalah) to “just as they send away a bride” (keshillehu kallah).29 Since “completely” (kalah) adds very little to the meaning of the passage, it has been suggested by modern translators that “as a bride” (kallah) better suits the argument, as, for example, the authors of the NEB, who render this passage “as a man dismisses a rejected bride” (though the word “rejected” is surely unwarranted here, since Israel was never the “bride” of Pharaoh!).30 Julian Morgenstern, in his classic paper, “The Despoiling of the Egyptians,” thus concludes that the Israelite women, “when going forth from Egypt, were to be garbed as brides,’’31 explaining the need for borrowed garments. In short, the feast to which Israel was hurrying had a pronounced bridal character. Yet according to the account in Exodus, the command to “borrow jewels of gold and silver” came from the mouth of Yahweh himself. Thus we may assume that they were intended from the very start to be part of the sacred festival planned in the wilderness (3:18). It is doubly significant, then, that we next encounter the borrowed jewels in the episode of the Golden Calf:

“Miscellanées Bibliques,” Bulletin d’Histoire et d’Exegese de l’Ancien Testament 23 (1947): 178. Quoted in Morgenstern, “The Despoiling of the Egyptians,” 1. Coppens notes that shilluhim also occurs as “bridal gifts bestowed as on a dowry” in 1 Kings 9:11. 30 The word “rejected” has probably been inferred from the juridical use of shillah as to “repudiate” a wife (Deut 22:19, 29; 24:1, 3–4). See de Vaux, History of Early Israel, 371. 31 Morgenstern, “The Despoiling of the Egyptians,” 3. 29

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A GREAT MYSTERY And Aaron said unto them, Break off all the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, and your sons, and your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand and fashioned them with a graving tool, after he had made it a golden calf, and they said, These be the gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt (Exod 32:2–4).

Obviously, Aaron believed that this was going to be the fulfillment of Yahweh’s commandment that Israel go into the wilderness to “hold a feast unto the Lord” (Exod 32:5). Accordingly, on the morrow, everyone “ate and drank” and “rose up to play,” an obvious euphemism for sexual abandon (compare v. 25, where the people are naked as they dance). They also “sacrificed” (v. 8), just as Yahweh had commanded (3:18). Finally, the dance itself took place around the statue of a bull-god (32:19), which was one of the symbols associated with Yahweh from very early times (“These be the gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of Egypt,” v. 4).32 This, then, must have been the original hag, or “feast,” which Israel wished to hold in the wilderness. This reconstruction has the advantage of being the simplest explanation for the original data describing the institution of the Passover and the “Exodus” out of Egypt. Nevertheless, since most of the present account was redacted during the Deuteronomic Reform, it no longer mentions the sort of gods and goddesses who might have been involved and focuses solely on Israel’s covenant relationship with Yahweh. It also attempts to make the construction of a golden bull-image appear as an afterthought, when Moses failed to return from the top of Sinai (Exod 32:1). In the end, the whole event was recast as the “marriage” of Yahweh and Israel, or the “love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness” (Jer. 2:2). Nevertheless, its original hierogamic character is still clearly visible, though the licentious behavior that customarily accompanied such events is explained as a “defection” on the part of Aaron and the people. The same attempt to rationalize the sexually oriented wilderness feast as a “marriage” between Yahweh and Israel is still faintly visible—though 32 Morgenstern (ibid., 26) calls attention to the similarities between this dance and the dancing of Miriam and her maidens, “arranged like brides, in the garments and jewels which they had borrowed from the Egyptian women” (Exod 15:20–21); cf. also the “virginal” (i.e., bridal) dances of the maidens of Samaria (Jer 31:3–4) and Jerusalem (m. Ta‘anit 4:8; Josephus, Antiqities, 5.2.12), or the dancing “lovers” of Baal, condemned by Hosea (2:13).

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long after the fact—in the rabbinic exegesis of Exod 31:18: “And he gave to Moses, when he had made an end (kekallotho) of speaking with him on Mt. Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony.” But by changing the vocalization slightly, kekallotho (“when he had made an end”) was altered to kekallatho (“as his bride”). Thus, “when Yahweh had made (Israel) his bride, while speaking to Moses on Mt. Sinai, he gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony.”33 This view of Moses as the “marriage broker” between Israel and the Lord closely parallels the role which Paul assumes in 2 Corinthians 11:2: “I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.”

THE BRIDE WISDOM As we have already seen, the Israelite who went to the Temple during intertestamental times was “married” to God through his surrogate, “Wisdom,” rather than to God directly (pp. 23–24, above). Thus she functioned as an Intermediate between both parties, having previously been married to God in order to receive his divine attributes. And since the noun “Wisdom” is feminine in both Greek and Hebrew,34 she most often took on a female aspect during the years immediately preceding Christ. Thus the book of Proverbs (probably committed to writing in the fifth century B.C.) primarily speaks of her as God’s feminine “companion”: The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When [there were] no depths, I was brought forth; when [there were] no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by him, [as] one brought up [with him]: and I was daily [his] delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights [were] with the sons of men (8:22–31).

But the Wisdom of Sirach also speaks of “Wisdom” as if she were a deity whom the Temple pilgrim could “embrace”: 33 34

Richard A. Batey, New Testament Nuptial Imagery (Leiden, 1972), 26–27. Greek sophia, and Hebrew hokmah.

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A GREAT MYSTERY Mother-like she will meet him, like a young bride she will embrace him (15:2).

Hence in most of these intertestamental documents, Wisdom appears both as the “bride” of the Temple pilgrim and the “bride” of God. In the Wisdom of Solomon, for example (written sometime between 220 B.C. and A.D. 50),35 she is described as one who “enjoys intimacy with God,” and is subsequently able to pass the riches of his knowledge to her own lovers (8:2–6). But as Philo explained, Wisdom must first be impregnated by God before she can impregnate those who “marry” her (Questions on Genesis, 4:129–146).36 Thus she is sometimes said to be both female and male, one who is “sown” and who “sows,” and can therefore act as an intermediary between the Father and Man. The “Bride” Wisdom accordingly appears in Philo’s On Flight and Finding (50) as “an allegorical and archetypal image of the daughter of God (called Bathuel), who is eternally virgin and renewing,” like her putative prototype, Anath.37 But the same passage goes on to say that God’s Wisdom is in reality masculine, because she “contains the Father” (cf. John 14:10), and is therefore able to “sow” knowledge and virtue in souls to whom she is joined.38 Thus, as Wisdom was once the “Bride” of God (Wis 8:3), so she will be the “bride” and “wife” of the one who seeks after her (Sir 15:2; 51:13– 30; Wis 8:2; 9:10). By loving and embracing her (Prov 4:6, 9), he persuades her to give herself to him (Wis 6:12–14). Yet this is possible only because of man’s prior kinship with her, since he originally came forth from God “like a stream from a river … as a conduit into a garden” (Sir 24:30). The Wisdom of Solomon therefore stresses man’s preexistence and divine potential: “I was, indeed, a child well-endowed, having had a noble soul fall to my lot, or rather, being noble, I entered an undefiled body” (8:19–20). Now, however, this “perishable body weighs down the soul, and this tent of clay encumbers a mind full of cares” (9:15). David Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1974), 20. 36 See Goodenough’s exegesis in By Light, Light (New Haven, 1935), 160: “Now Isaac is consoled for the loss of his mother (= Sophia), for in Rebecca he has found Sophia (Wisdom) again,” she who is “virgin” because she had earlier become “one with God.” This concept may have been the original of the Kabbalist’s “household hieros gamos,” in which marital intercourse catalyzed the union of the couple and God’s Shekhinah. 37 Scholem, “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte,” 50. 38 Ibid., 51–52. 35

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But Wisdom still “pervades and permeates all things” (Wis 7:24; 8:1), including the spirit of man (7:23), which is therefore rational and wise.39 Since man was created in God’s Image to be immortal (2:23), he can truly be counted among the sons of God (5:5), as long as he is careful not to stray from the light (5:6). Just as Wisdom’s innate nobility (eugeneia) was increased by her union with God (8:3), so she can give her virtue to those of like birth (suggeneia, 8:17). And since all initially came from Wisdom (God’s feminine aspect), and have a spark of Wisdom within, all have a natural ability to seek out Wisdom, if they will make use of it. Wisdom will then lead them back to God, since man’s union with Wisdom corresponds closely to Wisdom’s union with God. “This undoubtedly implies that man’s ultimate goal is union with God, which may, however, be achieved only through union with Wisdom, which is but one of His aspects.”40 “Union with Wisdom” is in fact “the mystical repetition of the union with her as the expression of a special, heavenly knowledge or revelation.”41 But not only does she who possesses God’s secret knowledge (Wis 8:4, 8) pass it on to her lovers (7:17–22), she also “imparts (to them) her immediacy to God,” i.e., her incorruptible nature (aphtharsia, 8:17).42 In this way she makes them immortal (6:18–19; 8:13), “friends of God” and prophets (7:27), and saves them from the world (9:18). This union with Wisdom is described as the revelation of a “mystery.” Just as Wisdom received her knowledge as an “initiate” (mustis) into God’s knowledge by means of intimacy with him (8:3–4), so initiation into her knowledge is through a sort of hieros gamos with her.43 This mystical hieros gamos is described in frankly sexual terms in Sirach 51:13–30, though the text as it has come down to us is rather corrupt. We therefore turn to a Hebrew version of this passage, recently discovered at Qumran (11QV, 21), in which the pilgrim’s “embrace” with Wisdom is described in blatantly erotic terms:

39 Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, 41. Compare Ecclesiastes 12:7: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” 40 Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, 41. 41 U. Wilckens, “sophia,” in TDNT, 7:499. 42 Ibid. 43 Günther Bornkam, “mystārion, myeō,” in TDNT, 4:814; see also note 109, in the same article.

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A GREAT MYSTERY Already in early childhood, ere I had roved astray, I used to seek-her-and-find-her in games of childish play; But I read her lines to the limit whenever she came my way. Came the time when the buds turned to berries, when the grapes grew luscious and round; Due to our childhood friendship, I kept my feet on the ground. Even when only lightly my ear unto her I inclined, charm and learning a-plenty readily did I find. Feverishly what she gave me like mother’s milk I drank, and never was I unmindful my tutor to honor and thank. Gripped by a passion for pleasure at last, ‘I will take my fun,’ thought I, ‘and never turn backward when once I have begun.’ Heated like fire I became; my face never turned away: I grew busy, and on the uplands lolled not the livelong day. [Kept shut though they were,] I forced open her gates, having only in mind to set my eyes on the treasures which surely lay hidden behind. [Lusty enough was my ardor,] yet clean did I keep my hands.44

44 Translated by T. H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures, 3rd edition (Garden City, NY, 1976), 481–91. The translation of Florentino García Martínez, in The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated (Leiden, 1996), 306–7, gives: “Although still young, before going astray, I searched for her. Beautiful she came to me when at last I found her. As falls the flower when grapes are ripening, making the heart happy, directly walked my foot, for since my youth I have known her. Hardly my ear I bent and found

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Yet even Proverbs had spoken of “embracing” Wisdom (4:8), using the Hebrew verb, habaq, which generally has a physical or erotic sense.45 In fact, one of the chief characteristics of the Old Testament Wisdom was that she sat like a prostitute at the crossroads by the city gates, inviting men to herself.46 During the intertestamental period, this idea of “marriage” to God

great allure. Wet-nurse was she for me. On my mistress I conferred my honour. Zealous for good, I decided to enjoy myself ceaselessly. Charred was my soul for her. I did not give in. Torrid my desire for her, and on her heights I was not serene. Yes, ‘my hand’ opened [her doors] and I inspected her nakedness. Cleansed then ‘my hand’ […].” 45 In 2 Kgs 4:16 it is used to describe embracing a son; in Proverbs 5:20, the reader is asked rhetorically whether or not he should consort with prostitutes, and “embrace the bosom of a stranger.” Ecclesiastes 3:3 speaks of a “time to embrace” (i.e., make love), while Song of Songs says of the Bridegroom that “his hand doth embrace me” (2:6; 8:3). 46 Proverbs 1:20–22; 8:1–4. Compare the behavior of Tamar in Genesis 38:14, 21. The cult of sacred prostitutes (qedeshim) in Israel’s “Old Religion” has been denied by some, chiefly by radical feminists, who propose that sexual activities in the Temple precincts were only the attempts of down-trodden women to earn money with which to pay their oppressive debts to the priests. See, for example, Karel van der Toorn, in Anchor Bible Dictionary, 5:510–11; also Elaine Adler Goodfriend, “Prostitution (OT),” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, 5:507. Others have amply demonstrated that the shrines and temples were supplied with qedeshoth (female hierodules); Deut 23:17–18; Hos 4:14; etc.), qadashim (KJV “sodomites”; 1 Kgs 14:24; 15:12; 22:46; 23:7) and zonoth (female whores; Jer 2:20; Ezek 16:33; 23:40; Hos 1:2; 2:3; 4:14; etc.). These received a payment (ethnan) for their services (Ezek 16:33; Hos 2:9; etc.), which they turned over to the Temple for revenue (Deut 23:18). See Susan Ackerman, Under Every Green Tree, Harvard Semitic Monographs 46 (Atlanta, 1992); Beatrice A. Brooks, “Fertility Cult Functionaries in the Old Testament,” JBL 60 (1941): 227–53; H. G. May, “The Fertility Cult in Hosea,” American Journal of Semitic Literature 48 (1932): 73–78; Andersen and Freedman, Amos, Anchor Bible (New York, 1989), 829. We should also take note of the sacred prostitutes who “assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation” in 1 Samuel 2:22—a memory, perhaps, of the “women who assembled at the door of the Tabernacle” in Exodus 38:8. The passage in 1 Samuel 2:22 is believed to be an interpolation, not found in 4QSam, though the LXX (L) and Josephus (Antiquities 5.339) both mention it. See P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., 1 Samuel, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1980), 81. It is also significant that the Egyptian goddess Isis—whom Plutarch tells us was likewise called “Wisdom”—was said to have served as a prostitute at Tyre (De lside, 3), for the sexual act with a deity’s cultic surrogate was anciently considered to be a

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through the intermediacy of his “Wisdom” had become one of the standard metaphors for the spiritual union of God and Man, and would later serve as the basis for the “Great Mystery” of henosis between God and the Church in the early Christian Gospel of Thomas and the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians.

PHILO’S ACCOUNT OF THE WISDOM MYSTERY We have already seen that Philo and the Wisdom writers pictured the “marriage” between the candidate in the Temple and God as a “mystery.” E. R. Goodenough, some sixty years ago, characterized this as the mystery of the holy of holies, the mystery of the sacred marriage with Sophia.47

Goodenough at first suspected that this was an independent Hellenistic mystery, complete with a “thing made manifest to the sight” (no doubt a reference to the Cherubim, though Goodenough seems not to have been aware of their embrace),48 and something which Philo sought to explicate by adducing parallels drawn from Jewish tradition.49 Later, however, he was forced to admit that its rites were none other than the ordinary rites of the Jewish Temple, “rites … externally as unchanged as Philo’s Pentateuch.”50 At the same time, however, Philo’s exegesis reflected a “higher understanding” of these “ordinary rites,” an understanding doubtless current amongst certain “advanced” or intellectual Jews, and which Goodenough believed constituted a “Melchizedec Mystery,” as opposed to the every-day “Aaronic Mystery.”51 Ulrich Wilckens likewise believed that this was part of “a complete wisdom mystery,” a mystery already known to Philo, being a “special conmethod of establishing direct contact with the powers of the god or goddess, thus releasing them for the communal or personal good. 47 By Light, Light, 256. 48 An Introduction to Philo Judaeus (Oxford, 1940), 69. 49 By Light, Light, 9, 262. For a time Goodenough believed that the thirdcentury Jewish synagogue at Dura Europos was an outpost of this secret sect. 50 An Introduction to Philo Judaeus, 206. 51 See By Light, Light, 151. Elsewhere, he calls it a “Mosaic” Mystery, which taught the fulness of the truth as it was before being diluted by the ordinary cult of Aaron (ibid., 115). In On the Cherubim, Philo claims that he was initiated by Moses himself into God’s “greater mysteries,” i.e., direct intercourse with God through his Wisdom (49–50).

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secration” which enabled “the Wise” to rise “beyond the level of the cosmos to a direct proximity with God” and to his own personal vision of the Divine: The goal is none other than God Himself, He who is, surrounded by His “powers.” To reach Him in the gnosis and episteme theou52 is the goal of the way. Sophia, however, is not just God’s sphere. It is also the way thereto, the teleia hodos he pros theon.53 The identity of way, guide and goal points to the mystical character of Wisdom as the mediator of revelation, a constitutive feature in Wisdom of Solomon, 6–9, but also in Gnosticism. Hence there is in fact a series of texts from which may be deduced a complete Wisdom Mystery which was obviously known to Philo … On Flight and Finding, 108–112 describes how the high priest, as the devotee of God his father and Wisdom his mother, is born again to the logos,54 putting on his radiant garment, which beams the four elements as a symbol of his dominion over the cosmos. Wisdom as his mother is also God’s consort by whom He begat the world (On Drunkenness, 30f). In the same way, i.e., on a level with the cosmos, the regeneration of the devotee takes place. Hence this is not supracosmic (On Flight and Finding, 108; On Drunkenness, 30). In a special consecration, however, the wise man can be led beyond the level of the cosmos to the direct proximity of God. This takes place through union with Wisdom, which corresponds mystically to God’s union with her (On Flight and Finding, 49–52; On the Cherubim, 42–50). Thus the wise man is like Wisdom, entering into the union with God which as knowledge of God is also the vision of God (Allegorical Interpretation, 1.43) and even divinisation (Questions on Exodus, 2.40). This complex of ideas in Philo is remarkably similar to that in Wisdom of Solomon 6–10 … In Philo, too, the content and the means of knowledge are identical: “By Wisdom what is wise is seen; but unlike light Wisdom is not just the instrument of seeing, it also sees itself” (On the Migration of Abraham, 391). Heavenly Wisdom thus transports into nephousa mephe55 (On Flight and Finding, 166, cf. 137). To this degree it is identical with the divine pneuma, or pneuma Sophias56 (in TDNT, 7:501–2; our capitalization of “Wisdom”).

The “secret knowledge” and the “knowledge of God,” respectively. “The perfect way which leads to God.” 54 “The Word.” 55 “Sacred intoxication.” 56 “Holy Spirit” or the “Spirit of Wisdom.” See Wisdom 7:7; 22–23; 9:17; On the Giants, 47. 52 53

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Indeed, Goodenough was convinced that this was the general goal of all mystically enlightened Jews: I strongly suspect this was the hope of Mystic Judaism, as it expressed itself in terms of the Sophia formulation … Here one becomes identified with God, the Spouse of Sophia (“Wisdom”). And the mystic intercourse as male, with Sophia as female, is the sweet token of one’s ultimate deification.57

Yet the most remarkable description of the “Sacred Marriage to Sophia” is to be found in Philo’s On the Cherubim: O then, my mind, admit the image unalloyed of the two Cherubim, that having learnt its clear lesson … thou mayest reap the fruits of a happy lot. For straightway thou shalt understand how these unmixed potencies are mingled and united … thus thou mayest gain the virtues begotten of these potencies … This is a divine mystery and its lesson is for the initiated who are worthy to receive the holiest secret … Then must the sacred instruction begin. Man and Woman, male and female of the human race, in the course of nature come together to hold intercourse for the procreation of children. But virtues whose offspring are so many and so perfect may not have to do with mortal man, yet if they receive not seed of generation from another they will never of themselves conceive. Who then is he that sows in them the good seed save the Father of all, that is God unbegotten and begetter of all things? He then sows, but the fruit of his sowing, the fruit which is His own, He bestows as a gift … Thus virtue (i.e., Wisdom) receives the divine seed from the Creator, but brings forth to one of her own lovers … (God) is the father of all things, for He begat them, and the husband of Wisdom, dropping the seed of happiness for the race of mortals into good and virgin soil … But when God begins to consort with the soul, He makes what before was a woman into a virgin again … the idea of which is unchangeable and eternal (29–51).

It is especially significant that Philo spoke of this “mystery” as a “commonplace” to his readers,58 suggesting that it was readily available to the average Jew. Yet at the same time, Rendel Harris quotes a passage supposedly belonging to Philo’s Questions on Exodus which warns that “it is not permitted to speak out the sacred Mysteries to the uninitiated until they shall have been purified with the proper purification … To declare the By Light, Light, 202. Sophia thus serves as proxy for God in the traditional Jewish “marriage” between himself and his “Bride,” Israel. 58 Ibid., 236. 57

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Mysteries to the uninitiated would mean the destruction of the laws of the most sacred Mystery.”59 Taken together, these two statements suggest that the “Mystery” was well-known to the Jewish people, but that it was something which they were cautioned to keep to themselves. Such a “Mystery” can only have belonged to the Temple and its policy of ethnic exclusiveness. The fragment then goes on to say that the greatest danger of disclosure was that the ignorant might be “deceived by the thing which is made manifest to the sight” (p. 38, above), and thus be led to “cast reproach upon the irreproachable.”60 Furthermore, when we learn that Philo’s chief purpose was to explain the “Sacred Marriage with Wisdom,”61 it again becomes likely that the Embracing Cherubim and their potentially shocking hieros gamos were indeed the very “thing made manifest” to the eyes of the Temple pilgrims. Indeed, Philo tells us elsewhere that the embarrassing statues were expressly designed as “mirrors” of Wisdom and her role of “divine surrogate” during the soul’s “consorting” with God (Questions on Genesis, 1.57; On the Cherubim, 50). Thus it would appear that Philo’s “mystery” was simply an enlightened explanation of the pilgrim’s visit to the Temple and his covenant “marriage to God,” but couched in the familiar language of the Wisdom literature, and using the learning of contemporary Hellenism to further clarify the theological truths which were expressed on that solemn occasion. Indeed, the “highly charged language” in the Wisdom of Solomon already presupposes “an important movement along the road to mysticism,” when it describes “the pursuit of Wisdom and her promised gifts,” the most startling of which was the individual’s “union with Deity.”62 Such a mystical tradition (the so-called “Merkabah Mysticism”) is now known to have existed amongst Pharisaic circles during the late period of the Second Temple, perhaps as early as the first century B.C, a tradition which would survive with set practices and a developed system of belief for more than a thousand years.63 But we are doubtless correct in assuming that general knowledge of it was protected by cultic restrictions, for example, the limiting of Fragments of Philo Judaeus (Cambridge, 1886), 69. Ibid., 69. 61 Goodenough, By Light, Light., 256. 62 Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, 42. 63 See Scholem, MTJM, 40–43, who traces the beginnings of this important movement back to the Pharisaic Judaism of the Second Temple. 59 60

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entry into the Temple to married couples.64 In such ways, it could be verified that those who attended were “pure in heart” (Ps 24). An overall view of the Mystery is contained in Philo’s On the Migration of Abraham, which describes the great Patriarch as the very first Temple pilgrim, one who was called a “Hebrew” because he was a “Migrant” on a pilgrimage through the cultic wilderness in search of God (20–23).65 It is interesting to note that Abraham’s spiritual “seed” in the New Testament (Gal 3:29; Heb 2:16; 11:18) were likewise addressed as “Hebrews” (as in the title of the “Epistle to the Hebrews”), again suggesting “pilgrims” in search of a heavenly goal (Heb 11:13). Thus the so-called “Hebrews” from whom the New Testament epistle took its name were probably ordinary Jews with a spiritual understanding of the Temple cult, who saw themselves as Abraham’s religious heirs, reliving Israel’s cultic journey towards the “promised land” (cf. Exod 13:8).66 This special understanding of the word “Hebrew” appears to have been widely current in Hellenistic Judaism even prior to Philo, since “Hebrew” is conspicuously translated several times in the Septuagint with Greek expressions describing “wanderers,” “sojourners,” and “strangers,” etc., i.e., pilgrims passing thrugh the wilderness in search of God. Thus, Genesis 14:13, originally reading “Abram the Hebrew,” became Abram ho perates, “Abram the Passer-Through,” or “Wanderer” (from perao, “to pass through”); and in 1 Samuel 13:7, “Hebrews” became hoi diabainontes diebesan, “They who crossed over.” This symbolic meaning was noticed some time ago by the German author Carl Siegfried,67 who wrote in 1875 that for Philo, “the universal symbol for the elevation of the sensuous into the spiritual is the Ebraeus (perates). He is the pilgrim who turns from earthly to heavenly things, and becomes part of the heavenly Race.”68 At the conclusion of his search, he receives a gift of the “promised land,” which was

See Josephus’ remarks in his Antiquities, p. 19, note 42, above. This very likely became the basis for the title of the New Testament Epistle to the “Hebrews,” according to Ernst Käsemann (Das wandernde Gottesvolk, Göttingen, 1961). See especially his pp. 27–32 and 156, notes. 66 Friederich Schiele, “Harnack’s ‘Probabilia’ Concerning the Address and the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,” American Journal of Theology 9 (1910): 305; Robert M. Grant, A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (New York, 1972), 218–19. 67 Philo von Alexandrien; quoted by Schiele, “Harnack’s ‘Probabilia’,” 306. 68 Philo, On the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel, 6–7. 64 65

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Wisdom herself (On the Migration of Abraham, 28), i.e., “seeing the Divine Light,” which is “knowledge that opens up the soul’s eye” (ibid., 39). Philo’s cultic “migrant” further belonged to what E. R. Goodenough has called the “Mystery of Moses,” in contrast to the “Mystery of Aaron,” or the ordinary Temple cult, with its animal sacrifices and its “letter of the Law.”69 And at the conclusion of On the Special Laws, Philo tells us that the “outer meaning” of the Aaronic Mystery was simply to promote piety by means of commands and prohibitions. But he now desires to inform us of its inner meaning, or the “Mystery of Moses,” which is the “Mystery of God and his incorporeal Powers” (1.229–30), being no less than intercourse with Wisdom herself (On the Cherubim, 49). Goodenough suspected that the “Mystery of Moses” was also a “Melchizedec Mystery,” as opposed to the lower, or “Aaronic Mystery,” though the appropriate passages from Questions on Genesis which would have described Abraham’s “coming to Melchizedec for … spiritual development” are presently missing.70 The significance of Melchizedec may nevertheless be inferred from widely scattered hints in both Philonic and non-Philonic writings of the time, including the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews,71 which show that speculation on a “higher priesthood” bearing the name of this mysterious figure were already rife in Hellenistic circles prior to the time of Christ, and that they were shared by writers in the early Church. The “Mosaic” mystery was also thought of by Philo in terms of a group of initiates traveling a “Royal Road” through the wilderness in search of God. When they arrived at Sinai, they were divided into three groups, according to their various abilities and attainments:

By Light, Light, 115. Ibid., 151. 71 See, for example, Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 1.23 (discussed by Goodenough, in By Light, Light, 292–93); the Apostolic Constitutions (quoted by Goodenough, ibid., 323, 326, 330–31), both of which reflected a growing feeling during the years just prior to Christianity that Melchizedec represented a heavenly figure superior to Levi and Aaron, in fact, a being who does not die (11QMelch). For general views on the importance of Melchizedec in theological speculations during the intertestamental period and early Christianity, see Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, “Now this Melchizedec,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25 (1963): 305–21; and “Further Light on Melchizedec from the Qumran Cave 11,” JBL 86 (1967): 25–41; also Schiele, “Harnack’s ‘Probabilia’.” 69 70

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A GREAT MYSTERY At the top, Moses, then those who are capable of traversing the path to higher knowledge, and at the bottom the mass, which is entirely unorganized and must remain at the foot of the mountain, only a few of whom will catch even a glimpse … of the path to higher regions.72

These three stages correspond to (1) the earthly level of humanity, (2) the “Immaterial Stage,” and (3) to On, God’s “Transcendent Nature.” As an example of the highest stage, Moses was able to have direct communion with to On (Exod 24:2), by being filled with God’s power, thus becoming like a “monad,” i.e., one with God, hence beyond the duality of mortal concerns (Questions on Exodus, 2.29). Thus it was said that Moses was impregnated with the seeds of Wisdom by divine inspiration (The Preliminary Studies, 130–35), and the Zohar would claim that Moses had direct intercourse with God’s Shekhinah—the Kabbalistic version of Wisdom.73 The result, Philo informs us, was that Moses was “changed into divinity, so that he might be made akin to God and truly divine” (Questions on Exodus, 2.29).74 This is the same sort of spiritual procreation by which God begat the great patriarchs, as when he visited Sarah (Gen 21:1), and brought forth issue to her husband, Abraham, or when Rebecca became pregnant “through the power of him who was besought” (Gen 25:21). It also explains how Moses’ wife, Zipporah, was found to be “pregnant through no mortal agency” (On the Cherubim, 46–47). Because he was the “most pure and perfect mind,” who had been initiated by God into the great mysteries (Allegorical Interpretation, 3.100), Moses was able to teach lesser men like Bezaleel, Aaron, and Miriam (ibid., 3.1–3), after their own minds were sufficiently purified to hear the great truths (On Giants, 54ff). The whole Exodus was in fact—says Philo—an allegory on how Moses led men’s souls out of their lower natures toward a vision of Deity,75 for even those lower down on the mountain at Sinai “saw God” (Exod 24:11), i.e., “attained to the Face of the Father” (Questions on Exodus, 2.39). Thus “Israel” was for him “the Race which sees God” (Allegorical Interpretation, 2.43; On the Migration of Abraham, 113, 125; etc.), just as Jacob was “the man who sees God” (’ysh r’ah ’el)—a folk etymology appearing some 49 times in his works. It thus joins “Hebrews” as a “code name” for Reinhardt Wagner, Die Gnosis von Alexandrien (Stuttgart, n.d. [1968]), 23. Scholem, MTJM, 200. 74 See also On the Posterity of Cain, 28ff; On the Giants, 47ff; That God Is Unchangeable, 23; On the Confusion of Tongues, 30–31. 75 Goodenough, By Light, Light, 205, 206. 72 73

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those engaged in a spiritualizing Temple cult, and whose object was to “Behold God’s Face” and have his divine attributes “begotten” in them. But whereas ordinary birth makes us one of the masses, it is spiritual procreation by God which makes us one of “the Race,” or those who belong to “the One on the Heights” (Sacrifices of Cain and Abel, 61). According to Reinhardt Wagner, Philo viewed this divine begetting as an “initiation,” not merely as an “instruction in a secret doctrine.” Those who received it became virtually supernatural beings, i.e., “sons of God,” a belief that would influence the first Christians, who similarly believed that Jesus had been begotten by God through the agency of the Holy Spirit.76 But Philo not only argued that God may beget “divine attributes” in others, but that “man himself can become a divine being, that he is a ‘son of God,’ that man himself can become a god.’’77 Philo could have quoted Psalm 82 as “proof” of this belief (as did Jesus in John 10:34–36); instead, he cited three similar passages which Wagner says “have the same content”:78 They who use knowledge (epistēmē) are with right spoken of as sons of God. This Moses acknowledges when he says, “Ye are the children of the Lord God” (Deut 14:1), and, “Of the God that begat thee” (Deut 32:18), and “Is he not himself your father?” (Deut 32:6) (On the Confusion of Tongues, 145).

The possibility of miraculous procreation through divine agency is also reflected in other early portions of the Old Testament. “When Boaz took Ruth … she became his wife. When he had intercourse with her, the Lord caused her to conceive and she bore a son” (Ruth 4:13). This was even more significant since the woman was beyond the capability of bearing children. “The Lord visited Sarah, and did to Sarah as he had promised. And Sarah conceived and bare Abraham a son in his old age” (Gen 21:1– 2).79 This divine intervention has been called the doctrine of “dual paternity,”80 and the Talmud explains that “there are three partners in the production of any human being—the Holy One, blessed be He, his father, and his mother” (Kiddushin 30b). Thus “man will not be able to come into exisDie Gnosis von Alexandrien, 30–31. Ibid., 56–57. 78 Ibid., 58. Epistēmē is knowledge gained through Logos/Wisdom. 79 Translations from William E. Phipps, The Sexuality of Jesus (New York, 1973), 76 77

23.

80

Phipps, Sexuality of Jesus, 21–36.

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tence without woman, nor woman without man, nor both without the Shekhinah” (Genesis Rabbah 8:9)—who in Talmudic times was synonymous with God’s Spirit. Indeed, as we saw already, the Shekhinah is always present during legitimate sexual relations as a divine “partner” in the conjugal relationship (Zohar I:50a; cf. b. Sotah 17a). This idea is further expressed in On the Special Laws (2.2.225), where it is said that Isaac was both the son of Abraham and Sarah, and a “son of God,” because he was “begotten by God” (Allegorical Interpretation, 3.218; On the Change of Names, 131, 137). Indeed, one of God’s chief characteristics, according to the early Semitic literature, was his universal paternity. In the Canaanite epics, for example, Father El was called both ’ab bn ’il, “father of the gods,” and ’ab ’adm, “father of men,” and the gods in the aggregate were represented as his literal family.81 At the same time, he is said in the Keret Epic to be responsible for the birth of human children.82 In Mesopotamia, “Il” (the Akkadian form of his name) was specifically connected with the giving of children,83 as can be seen in the numerous theophoric name compounds commemorating his role in the formation of the child.84 These ancient traditions came together once again in Philo’s discussion of the two Cherubim, whose loving embrace suggested to him the great event which took place in the Holy of Holies, where men secretly “consorted with God” and were filled with his divine “seed.” Philo especially indicates that this sacred union—also prefigured by the marriages of the Patriarchs and their wives—resulted in the rebirth and restoration of the rational soul (the heavenly nous), as based on the Divine Image (Gen 1:27) before the sexes were divided. This restoration was metaphorically described by him as becoming “male” or “virgin” again. Philo’s assessment of “woman,” on the other hand, in keeping with the language of contemporary Hellenism, was extremely disparaging, being equated with the divided and sense-perceptible world of the “feminine” soul, while the rational nous was “masculine” and undivided.85 The “masculine” nous, moreover, was patterned after the Divine Image, or the Logos/

M. H. Pope, El in the Ugaritic Texts (Leiden, 1955), 48. A, 37. See J. J. M. Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon (Baltimore, 1972), 33. 83 Ibid., 32–33. 84 Ibid., 32, 31. He adds that there needs to be a thorough study of Hebrew personal names, to see if any of the theophoric compounds reflect a similar belief. 85 Richard A. Baer, Jr., Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden, 1970), 46–48. 81 82

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Wisdom (Creation of the World, 69), while the “feminine” senses represent a departure from God’s perfection and the unity of the sexes.86 In Questions on Exodus, Philo prescribes the remedy for this “fallen” condition, i.e., the restoration of man’s primal “maleness.” “Progress,” in fact, “is nothing else than giving up the female gender by changing into the male, since the female gender is material, passive, corporeal, and senseperceptible, while the male is active, rational, incorporeal, and more akin to mind and thought” (2.8). In Questions on Genesis, he even suggests that when the time for the soul’s cleansing arrives, “man should join with man, i.e., the sovereign mind, like a father, should join with its particular thoughts as with its sons, but not join any of the female sex, i.e., what belongs to sense” (2.49). This, of course, means union with the Divine, where “like returns to like” and man “comes near to God in a kind of family relationship,” being again resolved into the nature of unity” (Questions on Exodus, 2.29). The reason why this can take place is that man’s higher nature has a natural affinity for God, having originated as a “fragment of the Divine Mind” (Creation of the World, 145–46).87 Furthermore, whatever is divine by nature remains essentially undivided (Allegorical Interpretation, 2.203; On the Change of Names, 183ff), just as God is undivided. In fact, man’s mind has never really “cut itself off and become separate” from God, but has only “extended itself” (That the Worse Attacks the Better, 90), leaving open the possibility that it can be reunited with its source, becoming “filled with God” and made “truly divine” (Questions on Exodus, 2.29).88 Philo also describes the restoration of “maleness”—or unity with God—as “virgin.” Here we are especially dealing with the “Mystery of the Holy of Holies,” i.e., the “sacred marriage with Sophia” (to use Goodenough’s phraseology),89 during which God, the husband of Wisdom, “begins to consort with the soul,” making that which “before was as a woman into a virgin again” (On the Cherubim, 50). Indeed, the aim of “marrying” the soul to God is to restore it to its primal “oneness” and incorruptibility, so that it will no longer be “defiled by the licentious passions” (51); for while Ibid., 14–35. “It is clear that Philo here employs Gen 1:27 not to refer to the idea of man, but to the higher nous in empirical man. That ‘the nous in each of us’ was created ‘after the image of God’ means that man’s higher nature is essentially like the divine nature” (ibid., 23). 87 Compare man’s suggeneia with Wisdom, i.e., God’s surrogate, pp. 35–36, above. 88 Ibid., 48–50 [uncertain reference, ed. note]. 89 By Light, Light, 256. 86

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lustful intercourse turns virgins into women, union with God turns woman back into “virgins.’’90 There is some inconsistency, however, in Philo’s understanding of the man created “in God’s image” (Gen 1:27): Throughout most of his writings, Philo emphasizes the oneness and indivisibility of God. God is by nature simple, not compound. He is free from all mixture, and is himself the sole standard for the monad, “for like time, all number is subsequent to the universe, and God is prior to the universe and is its maker” (Alleg. Int., 2.13). Likewise, the divine Wisdom is pure and unmixed, for “incorporeal and divine forms of knowledge cannot be divided into warring opposites” (Who Is the Heir? 132). The divine Spirit is susceptible of neither severance nor divisions and thus, even “though it be shared with others or added to others, suffers no diminution in understanding and knowledge and Wisdom” (On Giants, 27). Here, Philo employs the learning of the Greek schools— including Platonism, the philosophy of Stoicism, and above all, NeoPythagoreanism—to explain what he has received from the Jewish Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.”91

What this implies, as far as the “mystery” was concerned, is that God was not “male and female,” but “asexual,” since he cannot be subdivided in any way. Thus the man formed “in his own image” would likewise be “neither male nor female” (out arsen oute thelu) (On the Creation of the World, 134). Elsewhere, however, he reflects a more Scriptural view that God’s Image was “androgynous”—not “asexual”—for it says that when male and female behold each other, “love supervenes, brings them together, and fits into one the divided halves, as it were, of a single living creature” (On the Creation of the World, 151–52). Moreover, in the Allegorical Interpretation, Philo adds that the original work of creation included “the genera and kinds and the originals of the passions,” among which must be counted the sexes; for “having first fashioned man as a genus, in which (Moses) says that there is the male and the female genus, God afterward makes Adam, the finished form, a species” (2.13). Most authorities thus conclude that Philo’s “first man” was not “asexual” at all, but “bisexual,” or “androgynous.” C. H. Dodd, for instance, states that “Philo understood the LXX of Gen. 1:27 … to mean, ‘God created men like Himself, bisexual,’ i.e., bisexuality (or asexuality) is a part of the image of God.”92 This is also the view held by Baer, Philo’s Use, 51. lbid., 16–17. 92 The Bible and the Greeks (London, 1935), 151; quoted in Baer, Philo’s Use, 21. 90 91

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J. Jervell, in his widely admired study Imago Dei, as well as by other leading authorities on Philo.93 But what is ultimately important for our study is the fact that as long as the two “halves” of this “bisexual” being were “part of one and the same being,” they were not tempted by desire for each other. The first man, “androgynous” by nature, was therefore able to give himself fully to God, and was not distracted by the attractions of the material world, chief of which is sexual desire for his missing half (Allegorical Interpretation, 2.74; On the Special Laws, 1.9; Questions on Genesis, 3.48).94 This, then, is what Philo appears to have meant by “asexual”: male and female in such perfect union as to approximate the Divine Nature itself, complete, harmonious, and free from inner distractions. Philo was in fact much too Jewish to repudiate the sexuality implicit in Scripture (Gen 1:27– 28), though too much the monotheist to deny the oneness of God, which he continually sought to explain with the language of Hellenism. Thus God could be for him either “bisexual” or “asexual,” according to the context, though if we take Scripture at its face value, we would have to conclude that the “oneness” of God was really a sexual unity—a married unity—rather than sexlessness. This interpretation of the Genesis account, as we will later discover, remained determinative for Gnostic Christians, who viewed the union of man and woman as a return to “the original androgynous unity of man,” hence “an archetype of salvation.”95 It was also the interpretation which most Jews preferred, as we saw earlier in passages from both Talmudic and Zoharic literature (“He who remains without a wife, so that he is not both male and female, is considered only half a body … The thing which is divided cannot endure forever” (Zohar III:296a).96 93 64ff; quoted in Baer, Philo’s Use, 21. Baer’s recognition of the asexual image in On the Creation of the World, 134, follows that of B. Stegmann, made in 1927 (Christ, the Man from Heaven, Washington, 1927, 19–48). This is repeated by Robin Scroggs, The Last Adam (Oxford, 1966), 115–17, who notes that Stegmann was for long the “one lone dissenting judgment” amongst scholars who are “almost unanimously in agreement that Philo uses the two accounts of creation in Gen. 1 and 2 to speak of the creation of the heavenly man and of the earthly Adam, respectively” (ibid., 116). 94 Baer, Philo’s Use, 38. 95 Ibid., 73. 96 Unlike the Gnostics, however, Philo never makes direct use of Genesis 1:24 to show how married union restores the “androgynous” unity of Primal Man. He does, however, indicate that union with God—as symbolized by the marriage of

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THEORETICAL BASIS OF THE MYSTERY As Philo understood it, the Wisdom Mystery was first and foremost a means of reestablishing fallen man’s primordial relationship with the world of Light, from which he originated. We already saw (pp. 24–26, above) that Wisdom’s depiction in Wisdom 7:25ff contained ancient solar elements (“a pure effluence from the glory of the Almighty, an effulgence of everlasting light”). This solar terminology had already been employed to describe God’s kavod (“glory”) in early Israelite Scripture, though it survives in Scripture mainly as linguistic “fossils,” such as Malachi 4:7, which describes Yahweh as a “sun of righteousness,” Psalm 84:11, a “sun and a shield,” or even Psalm 19:45, which many scholars hold to be a remnant of an earlier hieros gamos myth: “In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.”97 A cognate Babylonian belief was that after crossing the sky, the Sun-god entered a tent in the Western Sea, where his Bride dwelt. (It is possible that the first words of the Hebrew version originally read “in the sea,” but were later changed to a phonetically similar “in them” to obscure their solar background).98 Other relics of solar-worship abound in the Old Testament, though we must unfortunately pass over them here.99

the Patriarchs and their wives—results in restoration of the divine Image, metaphorically described as “becoming male,” or “becoming virgin” again. 97 A well-known Babylonian poem to the sun-god, Shamash, describes the deity in similar terms: “O Shamash! On the horizon of heaven thou ridest forth, the bars of the shining heavens thou openest! ... O Shamash! Over the world thou liftest thy head … With the glory of the heavens hast thou covered the lands, thy course through the world thou takest.” See Pritchard, ANET, 387–89. 98 G. W. Anderson, “The Psalms,” in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (London, 1963), 417. 99 See, for example, place-names like Beth-Shemesh, “House of the Sun” (Josh 15:10; 1 Sam 6:9; 1 Kgs 4:9) and En-Shemesh, “Spring of the Sun” (Josh 15:7; 18:17). Sun-worship had to be specifically forbidden by the Yahwist reformers (Deut 4:19; 17:3); but before that, we read of Sun-images (hamman) in the shrines (Isa 17:8; 27:9; 2 Chr 34:4; Ezek 6:4, 6), as well as sun-worship associated with the Temple (2 Kgs 23:5, 11; 2 Chr 33:3; Ezek 8:16; Jer 8:2). There were also “horses and chariots of the sun” at the entrance of the Temple (2 Kgs 23:11). These and many more important evidences of Israelite solar-worship have been brought together in J. Glen Taylor’s Yahweh and the Sun (Sheffield, 1993).

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It is important to note, however, that the Temple itself was from the beginning very closely connected with Yahweh’s theophany as a solar deity. Solomon’s deliberate adoption of a solar-calendar suggests that his national god shared the characteristics of other sun-gods, like Baal-Shamen-Melcarth of Tyre, or Marduk of Babylon.100 Solomon’s great Temple was in fact deliberately fashioned by Tyrian workmen after the solar temple of Melcarth101 and other Palestinian sanctuaries which have been recently excavated.102 It is significant in this respect that solar discs representing the male deity have been found in the “Holies of Holies” of three closely related Canaanite temples uncovered at Hazor, dating from ca. 1550 to 1150 B.C.103 It has even been suggested that the two pillars (“Yakin” and “Boaz”), standing at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, had a solar significance,104 so that the light of the rising sun on days of equinox would pass directly between them as it penetrated the depths of the Holy of Holies at the far western end.105 Whatever the true significance of these pillars, there appears to have once been a special ritual celebrating the entry of Yahweh’s kavod into his Temple on the autumnal day of equinox, i.e., the day of the original New Year: In the folk-lore of Jerusalem, as the place of exit from the netherworld, the top of the Mount of Olives was the natural place of resurrection of the dead. It was there upon the summit of the mountain that Yahweh, now, for the time being a solar god in the fullest sense of the word, was 100 Julian Morgenstern, “The Cultic Setting of the ‘Enthronement Psalms’,” HUCA 35 (1964): 7. 101 H. G. May, “Some Aspects of Solar Worship,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 55 (1937): 269. 102 T. H. Vriezen, Religion of Ancient Israel (Philadelphia, 1967), 53–54; Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel (New York, 1961), 2:314–5; William F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (hereafter ARI) (Baltimore, 1953), 142–43. 103 Vriezen, Religion of Ancient Israel, 55. 104 They were perhaps large examples of the male massebah and the Asherahpole, which symbolized the god and goddess on the “high places” (De Vaux, Ancient Israel., 2:284). Herodotus (History, Book 11.44) stated that one of the pillars of Melcarth’s temple at Tyre was made of “refined gold” and the other of “emerald.” Albright suggests that fires—the solar element par excellence— were traditionally burned on them (ARI, 144, 148). 105 Albright, ARI, 146; Morgenstern, “The Cultic Setting,” 9. The best general discussion of this equinoctial event is Morgenstern’s The Fire upon the Altar (Leiden, 1963), which tells how the incoming kavod and its powerful light ignited the fire on the Altar of Burnt Offering, which was to be kept burning perpetually (Lev 24:1–4).

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A GREAT MYSTERY thought to rise from the netherworld, from the realm of the dead, upon the day of the autumnal equinox, to be restored to life and to return from there in the fiery, radiant form of the first rays of the risen sun upon this equinoctial day, the kebod Yahweh, “the radiance of Yahweh,” to His new sanctuary. This He entered through the eastern gate, the socalled “Golden Gate,” the “Gates of Righteousness.” Then He advanced on a straight line over the altar in the courtyard of the Temple in front of the Porch, rekindling as He did so, in some manner not yet known with any certainty, the sacred fire thereon, which in anticipation of this sacred day and this all-important ceremony had been previously extinguished. Then He moved onward through the open Gate of the Porch, down the long axis of the Temple building into the d ebir (Holy of Holies) at its western end, where stood the golden throne (the Ark and the Cherubim). Upon this He would settle, still in radiant form, and proceed, so it was thought, to judge Israel, and, insofar as they had relations with Israel, the other nations as well. Then, as the sun rose in the heavens higher and higher, and the solar rays within the Temple building slowly shortened and receded, Yahweh, the solar deity, was thought to withdraw from the Temple and to resume His normal abode in the heavens, there to function throughout the new year beneficently in behalf of His people. The doors and gates of the Temple were solemnly closed, and within the Temple building, so it seems, darkness reigned for the remainder of the year, until the next equinoctial New Year’s Day. But upon the altar in the courtyard in front of the Temple porch the new sacred fire burned brightly and was carefully kept alive by the priests …106

Evidence has indeed been offered to show that the Jerusalem Temple was laid out so that the long axis of the building was more or less aligned with the sun on these dates.107 Solomon even dedicated his Temple during “the Feast,” i.e., Asif, the traditional harvest celebration, which had been moved Fire upon the Altar, 90. Julian Morgenstern, “The Gates of Righteousness,” HUCA 6 (1929): 18 and notes, quoting Charlier, “Ein astronomischer Beitrag zur Exegese des Alten Testaments,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 58 (1904): 386–94. Yet H. van Dyke Parunak, “Was Solomon’s Temple Aligned to the Sun?” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 110 (1978): 29–33, offers astronomical calculations to show that the sun could not have penetrated the Holy of Holies in a straight line from the Mount of Olives, though precise geometrical alignment was hardly necessary for the assumed entrance of Yahweh’s kavod, nor is it possible today to know exactly where the Temple formerly stood. See also Taylor (Yahweh and the Sun, 84–86), who offers a conclusion similar to ours. 106 107

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to the last seven days of Ethanim, just before the New Year.108 The Temple was thus prepared on the following day to receive Yahweh, whose “going forth from end to end in the heavens” (his “yearly circuit”)109 marked the seasonal decline and renewal of the sun.110 Thus it was said that on the New Year itself, Yahweh’s kavod could be visibly seen entering his Temple as the sun rose in the East: And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy [place], that the cloud filled the house of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glow of the LORD had filled the house of the LORD (1 Kgs 8:10–11).

Ezekiel, nearly 400 years later, still described the same solar spectacle, as God’ s glory penetrated and filled the Temple. He also recalled that on a similar occasion twenty-five priests had “their backs to the Temple of the Lord, and their faces to the east” as they “worshipped the sun” (8:16). We also know from the Mishnah that this took place during the festival of AsifSukkoth, for it states that as part of that celebration, the priests of the Second Temple advanced towards the eastern gates with the sound of trumpets, but prostrated themselves in the opposite direction (towards the Holy of Holies), proclaiming, Our fathers who were in this place had their backs toward the Temple and their faces toward the east, toward the sun; but for us, our eyes are toward Yahweh (Ezek 8:16; compare 2 Chr 29:6–7) (m. Sukkah 5:4).

It was also recorded that Solomon finished his preparations for the dedication of the First Temple by bringing the two Cherubim into the Holy of Holies. Then, “the two staves that were attached to the Ark extended until they touched the curtain, so that two protuberances like a woman’s breasts became visible at the back of it.’’111 Thus the Sanctuary assumed a kind of numinous feminine character, ready to receive her Bridegroom (cf. Ps 19:5) as he returned from his circuit of the heavens, suggesting that this was 1 Kgs 8:2. See Morgenstern, “The Cultic Setting,” 11. “End” (tequpah) is cognate with Ugaritic uqpt, “year.” See Mitchell Dahood, The Psalms, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1966), 1:123. 110 Compare Hosea 6:1–3, where Yahweh’s gift of renewal is likened to that of the sun-god, Shahar: “Like Shahar, is his going forth established; and he comes like the winter rain to us, like the spring rain that waters the land” (H. G. May, “Solar Worship,” 273). 111 Meleket ha-Mishkan 7; Tosefta Yoma 2(3).7; and Babli 64a. From Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 3:159; 6:65. 108 109

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the time when the sort of worship for which Solomon and his successors were later condemned took place,112 and that an actual female deity (Asherah, later called “the Grove” to conceal her identity) had once dwelt in his Temple (2 Kgs 21:7; 2 Chr 33:15; compare 33:3; also Isa 17:8; Mic 5:13– 14; etc.). But to symbolize the Bridegroom’s presence in the otherwise dark interior (1 Kgs 8:12), the sacred surfaces were completely plated with gold (1 Kgs 6:21–22). According to the Qumran Temple Scroll, the staircase leading to the roof of the restored Temple—where the “horses of the Sun” had formerly stood113—were also to be covered with gold (Column XXXI). This is consistent with the statement in Column XXIX that God would again “consecrate his Temple by (his) glory.” Even the outer doors, which had to be opened on the morning of the New Year to admit the light of the rising sun from the East, had been plated with polished Corinthian bronze, so that its rays were blindingly reflected off of them to the eyes of the pilgrims in the Forecourt: The first rising rays of the sun reflected back a very fiery splendor, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun’s own rays (Josephus, Wars, 5.5.6).

Ezekiel, too, beheld this spectacular descent of Yahweh’s glory from the heavens, though at the time he had been carried off with the rest of Israel’ s leading citizens to the banks of the Chebar, in Babylon (Ezek 1). Again, he describes a great cloud of fire, having the “color of amber” (v. 4),114 and filled with “living creatures” (hayyoth, i.e., Cherubim), who darted about “like coals of fire” (vv. 13–14), and whose forms were those of “a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle” (v. 10). Their great activity suggests that they represented the all-pervading power of God’s Spirit (v. 20), the Compare, for instance, 1 Kgs 3:3, which shows that Solomon worshipped on the “high places,” where the goddess was venerated (Albright, YGC, 205). However, the goddess actually found her way into the Temple itself (2 Kgs 21:7; see Deut 16:21; Ezek 8:3). Since it was the worship on the “high places” that was later described as “whoring” or “whoredoms” (2 Chr 21:11–13), we must suppose that the same sort of worship (v. 11) could take place on occasion in the Temple as well (Deut 23:18; 1 Sam 2:22; 2 Kgs 23:7; Ezek 23:39–44; etc.). 113 Note 99, p. 50, above. 114 Actually, hashmal, the bright substance which was adopted as the word for “electricity,” in modern Hebrew. 112

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voice of which was heard “like the sound of great waters” echoing through the firmament (vv. 24–5). Finally, from out of the effluence of light and flame there materialized “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD,” sitting upon his heavenly throne (vv. 26–28). His form was that of a man (v. 26), and he was enveloped in a fiery radiance (vv. 27–28). As Ezekiel gazed on the sacred spectacle, God’s Spirit “entered” him, and set him apart to be a prophet to Israel (2:2ff). Ezekiel’s famous vision in turn became the starting point for a further series of images of God’s luminous glory. Daniel, for instance, saw the “brightness” issuing forth from the Throne of God as a “fiery stream” (Dan 7:10). The author of 1 Enoch, however, beheld God’s glory not as a single “stream,” but as multiple “rivers of running fire,” which issued forth from beneath the seat of God’ s glory (14:19–20). 3 Enoch numbered these rivers as seven (33:4–5), because tradition had it that they gave rise to the “seven heavens” and the “seven planets” (Pirke R. Eleazer, 3). In other writings of the period, the “river of light” was composed of God’s Wisdom, which eventually took on the form of Wisdom’s “seven pillars” (Prov 9:1), or the planetary bodies and their governing “powers” (cf. Rom 8:38). But we already saw in the Wisdom of Solomon that Wisdom was no less than a form of the divine glory, “an exhalation from the power of God, a pure effluence (aporroia) of the glory of the Almighty … an effluence of everlasting light” (7:25–26). Sirach said that she originated from God’s mouth, “like a spirit” (24:3), becoming a mighty “stream” like the Nile, and “shining forth” on the land “like the dawn” (24:30–33). The Jewish writer Aristobulus also wrote that this “River of Wisdom” was sevenfold, giving rise to the “sevenfold Logos,” or the Divine Reason (4.22; 2.40).115

115 Quoted in Eusebius, Preparation of the Gospel, 8.10 and 13.12. Aristobulus wrote around 160 B.C. The same “Light-Stream” was characterized in still other ways in various Jewish traditions. In apocalyptic Judaism, for example, God’s “glory” was seen as his divine “garment,” out of which there emerged a complex system of “angels,” through which he mediated his power to the earth. These later gave rise to the Gnostic aeons and the Kabbalistic sephiroth, both comprising a “river of light” which contained God’s attributes, and through which the Transcendent entered and sustained the material world. Talmudic and Midrashic commentators also spoke of angelic “rivers of light,” which comprised the radiant “garment” of God’s glory. G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, (New York, 1960), 56–64.

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Philo also described this seven-fold Light-Stream as a “tide which streams forth from the Almighty” (On Dreams, 2:221), or a “faculty streaming forth” from a “fountain of reason” (That the Worse Attacks the Better, 83). In On Dreams, he tells how this “fountain” became the source of the “Logos-River” (2.242); but in his On Flight and Finding, the Logos is said to be the source of the “River of Wisdom” (47, 97), which he likens to an “effluence of the sun’s rays” as they emerge from God (Creation of the World, 140). Significantly, when he speaks of cultic matters, Philo still pictures the “River of Wisdom” as a sevenfold “Light-Stream,” which flowed down from above to fill the Temple, and which finally emerged as the seven objects in the Holy of Holies. By taking the sun as a figure for God, he thus pictures a “Self-existent Existence,” which projects itself outward from the center, diminishing in strength the farther it is removed from the Source. While it is actually One, it is refracted into various rays, whose seven parts give it contrast and dynamic power. As it enters the Temple from the east, the Light-Stream then penetrates the dark recesses of the Holy of Holies, where it divides into the seven articles within the sacred enclosure: the Ark, the Law within the Ark, the mercy seat, the two Cherubim, the voice that spoke to Moses from the Ark, and the Presence, or the God who spoke.116 It is significant that the passage from Hebrews 9:1–5, which we quoted at the beginning of this study, also enumerates seven articles as constituting the contents of the Holy of Holies: the golden censer, the Ark, the golden pot of manna, Aaron’s rod, the Tablets of the Covenant, and the two Cherubim. Using more “theological” language, Philo goes on to explain that the “Presence” in the Holy of Holies is none other than the Highest God, “He who is Older than the Beginning.” From him radiates the Logos/Wisdom, or the “voice” heard by Moses. From the Logos then come the two Cherubim, or God’s Creative and Ruling “Powers.” The Creative Power in turn sends forth a Merciful Power (the Mercy Seat), while the Ruling Power sends forth a Legislative Power (the Law in the Ark) (Questions on Exodus, 2.68). The Ark itself is the world of the senses.117 These seven articles in

116 Goodenough, By Light, Light, 23. This description is summarized mainly from Philo’s Questions on Exodus, 2.68, and from Rendel Harris, Fragments of Philo Judaeus (Cambridge, 1886), 63–68. Goodenough reproduces all of the pertinent material in his By Light, Light, 25–27, which is too long to be reproduced here. 117 Goodenough, By Light, Light, 23–25.

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fact comprise the mystic “Seven” which created and controls all of nature (Allegorical Interpretation, 1.8–16).118 Goodenough refers to these seven components of the Light-Stream as a “pleroma,”119 though the term as he employs it more properly belongs to the Gnostic schools. Nevertheless, it appears that Philo himself had a primitive conception similar to that of the Gnostic “Aeons,” which were likewise conceived as a hierarchy of devolving emanations from a Divine Source.120 Again, their cosmic significance seems to have been derived from Wisdom’s “seven pillars” (Prov 9:1), or the planetary structure of the universe, as it was laid out by her at the time of Creation. Her contribution to these cosmic hierarchies remained visible as the Kabbalistic Sephiroth, which Scholem describes as “the garments of the Divinity,” or “the beams of light which he sends out,” and through which “God descends from the inmost recesses down to his revelation in the Shekhinah.”121 Still, Philo’s Light-Stream lacks both the complex angelology which apocalyptic Judaism employed to describe the mediation of God’s influence to the world and the intricate relationships within the Sephiroth, as they interact and flow into creation. In this respect, Philo’s Light-Stream seems closer to the original conception of Yahweh’s kavod, as it entered the Holy of Holies from the east, or even the fiery “rivers” which emanated from Ezekiel’s Throne of God. In fact, the only “angelic” forms which Philo mentions are the Logos As we shall show later on (pp. 153ff), these correspond roughtly to the seven archangels who comprise the Primitive Christian Hexaemeron, or Christ (“the Beginning”) plus the six “days of Creation.” 119 By Light, Light, 23, 28. 120 Goodenough noted this basic similarity of the Philonic Light-Stream to that of the Kabbalistic Sephiroth, though the differences are duly acknowledged as well: “Both the Kabbalah and Philo have fundamentally the identical conception that the Absolute and Unrelated God is related to the lower world or worlds through a series of emanations which are as a whole to be conceived by the figure of a single Stream of Light from the Source” (ibid., 360). According to the Zohar, “When (the Unknown) first assumed the form” (i.e., the first Sephirah, or the Philonic Logos), “He caused nine splendid lights” (the other Sephiroth) “to emanate from it, which, shining through it, diffused a bright light in all directions. Imagine an elevated light sending forth its rays in all directions. Now if we approach it and examine its rays, we understand no more that that they emanate from said light. So is the Holy Aged an absolute light, but in Himself concealed and incomprehensible. We can only comprehend him through those luminous emanations” (Sephiroth) “which again are partly visible and partly concealed” (III:288a). 121 Scholem, MTJM, 214. 118

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and the Cherubim at the very end of the Stream, where the divine malefemale Image at last becomes perceptible to the beholder. In still another formulation, the two Cherubim represent all seven components of the Light-Stream. In On the Cherubim, 22, for example, they are described as the two spheres which constitute the cosmos—the immovable outer sphere (the fixed sphere) and the seven planets (the moveable inner spheres), the latter rotating within the former. As parts of a “universal harmony,” they appear to be separate; but the soul who is “in full accordance with the truth … holds the One to be the same as the Seven” (That God Is Unchangeable, 11). Another time, he suggests that the outer sphere represents the rational nous, which is undivided, while the inner sphere symbolizes the irrational mind, which is divided according to the weakness of the senses. Nevertheless, both are ultimately part of a single divine harmony: Our mind is indivisible in its nature. But the irrational part of the soul underwent a sixfold division, and thus the Creator formed seven parts: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, voice, and the reproductive faculty. But the rational part, which was named mind, he left undivided, after the likeness of the entire heaven. For there, it is said, the outer, fixed sphere is kept undivided, whereas the inner sphere underwent a sixfold division, thus completing the seven circles of what are called the wandering stars or planets. For I regard the soul in man as being what the heaven is in the universe. Therefore, the two thinking and rational natures, the one in man and the other in the universe, prove to be complete and indivisible” (Who Is the Heir? 232–33).

This mystical harmony is expressed in yet another way. In On the Decalogue, Philo explains that the two Cherubim symbolized the “undivided” and the “divided” aspects of the universe, or “that which is closest to the initial Unit, the Idea of the planets,” as opposed to the planets themselves (102). Yet even the planets “preserve their unity unbroken,” without “swerving or alteration” (ibid., 104), for it is the function of the Logos to unite them as a Whole (Who Is the Heir? 201–22). Thus, the Seven—who are in reality One—become a “mirror” and a “vision of God … creating the world and controlling all that is” (On the Decalogue, 104–5). To do this, God further unites within himself a creative and beneficent Power—which is called “God” (theos, “Elohim”) and a legislative and punitive Power—which is called “Lord” (kyrios, “Yahweh”). These two Powers were represented by the two Cherubim, which Philo describes as “mirrors” of Wisdom, or Wisdom as “a mirror of the Powers of God, in accordance with which … the universe is governed and managed” (Questions on Genesis,

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1.57). Thus the statues served as an “incorruptible Face” through which mortals were able to see the Maker of the Universe and have “a correct apprehension of the invisible” (Questions on Exodus, 2.41, 52). Philo’s picture of the Light-Stream, however, differs in one important respect from Ezekiel’s: he no longer mentions the “form of a man” sitting on the Throne. But instead of eliminating the “form of a man” from the Light-Stream altogether, Philo places him invisibly among the articles in the Holy of Holies, where he gives rise to the “voice which Moses heard” (the Logos), and to his visible Powers, the Embracing Cherubim. Yet Ezekiel’s vision of God on his Throne was itself a kind of circumlocution (“the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord”; 1:28), and thus no closer to the essential being of God than Philo’s symbolic articles in the Holy of Holies. As Ezekiel was careful to point out, the “figure” on the Throne was merely a “likeness” (d emuth) in the “appearance” (mar’eh) of a man, i.e., God three times hidden behind the “likeness” of an “appearance” of the “glory” of his actual self. It is significant in this regard that the word mar’eh can also be vocalized to give mar’ah (“mirror”), which suggests that we have here the source of those Wisdom traditions which were wont to describe these anthropomorphisms as “mirrors” of the Divine.122 Ezekiel’s “form in the likeness of a man” (1:26), and Philo’s visible “Powers,” then, were roughly equivalent, that is to say, they both made apprehensible to the senses what was essentially beyond apprehension. This generally agrees with the Priestly doctrine that while God is invisible, he descended between the two Cherubim to communicate with men (Exod 25:22). Thus when one saw the Cherubim, one knew that the divine Presence was there, which further explains how these symbolic objects could have functioned as his visible surrogates. Yet it was not claimed that these represented the invisible God in person, but only his “Powers,” which again were but “indications” of his essence, i.e., a “sense perceptible typeform” which served as an “image of the incorporeal” (Questions on Exodus, 2.37). Even the “glory” which Israel beheld on Sinai (Exod 24:16) is said to have been “not the essence of God” but only his two-fold “Powers” (Questions on Exodus, 2.45). Modern readers may perhaps find it difficult to understand how a “vision of God’s Face” could produce tangible results in the beholder. Yet 122 Compare again Wisdom 7:26: “She is an unblemished mirror of the active power of God, and an image of his goodness.”

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even today, travelers occasionally meet primitive people who refuse to allow their photographs to be taken, for fear of “losing their image” to the camera. This is the same kind of awe with which early men generally viewed their shadows, reflections, and pictorial representations. Like a “name,” such images were thought to contain part of the individual’s nature, and to convey something of his power. To gaze upon them could even rob one of that power, just as viewing someone’s “nakedness” was perceived as a tangible intrusion upon one’s person (cf. Lev 18:9–16). One therefore believed that something real was derived from the act of seeing, which was no doubt synonymous with making personal contact with God’s holiness.123 Thus, when Ezekiel beheld the vision of God, he reported that “the Spirit entered me” (Ezek 2:2), and he heard a “Voice” from amongst the Cherubim.124 Such a vision described by Philo as “attaining the Face of the Father”— then became“beholding God’s Face”—a rite “food of the soul” and “the cause of a life of immortality” (Questions on Exodus, 2.39). Philo further explains this vision of God’ s Face as a form of the Hellenistic thea theou (“seeing God”). The Cherubim had thus been designed to function as “mirrors” of Wisdom, whose task it was to reflect God’s “glory” to the beholder, so that it might penetrate his senses “as through orifices,” filling the mind with its “multitudinous light” and its “luminous clarity,” and enlightening as “by the flash of the sun’s beams” (On the Cherubim, 61–62). Such is the “one and only fruit which feeds the soul of him whose quest is the Vision” (85). In this way, “through reciprocity and combination, even as a lyre is formed of unlike strings,” God provides that “virtue-loving souls” shall have “sown within themselves the nature of happiness” (110, 106), so that they shall “come to fellowship and concord, and form a single harmony … that this whole, of which each is a part, might be that perfect work worthy of its Architect” (110, 112). This is of course possible, as Philo reminds us, only because of man’s prior kinship with Wisdom. As we saw earlier, “every man, in respect of his mind, is allied to the divine Reason, having come into being as a copy or fragment or ray of that blessed nature” (On the Creation of the World, 146). 123 Visualized symbols are generally “substitutes or ways of entering into relationship with sacred objects of some sort or other.” Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York, 1958), 446. They “tend to become one with the Whole, just as the hierophany tends to embody all of the sacred, to include in itself all of the manifestation of sacred power” (ibid., 452). 124 See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York, 1948), 266–97, for a general description of the unio mystica which involves sensory images.

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Now we are told that the same Wisdom which resides in men perceives itself as the primordial Image within the Light-Stream: “But Wisdom is not only, after the manner of light, an instrument of sight, but is able to see its own self … Wisdom is God’s archetypal luminary, and the sun is a copy and image of it” (Allegorical Interpretation, 1.40). Another way of saying the same thing is that “by Wisdom what is wise is seen” (Allegorical Interpretation, 1.40), or that “God can be grasped only through God, and light through light” (On Rewards and Punishments, 40). Philo also speaks of the “all-pervading Logos”—another of Wisdom’s names—which reaches into men’s minds, effectively converting them into extensions of the Divine Mind, though of a lesser sort, thus capable of comprehending the light (That the Worse Attacks the Better, 90; On Giants, 47; Allegorical Interpretation, 1.37–38). The presence of the heavenly Wisdom is even said to induce “sober drunkenness” (On Flight and Finding, 166), i.e., “possession” by the Holy Spirit (On Giants, 47; On Dreams, 11.12; Who Is the Heir? 264ff; On the Migration of Abraham, 37–38), which in turn reveals the unseen things of God (cf. 1 Cor 2:10–11). There is even a more basic reason, however, for this mutual affinity between men’s souls and the Light-Stream. According to the Wisdom of Solomon, the soul had originated in the heights, from whence it came down to take up residence in a body (8:19–20). We also saw (pp. 47–48, above) that Philo referred to the soul’s heavenly origin and preexistence by describing the human mind as a “divine fragment” (apospasma theion), which has but “extended itself from God” (That the Worse Attacks the Better, 90). He then went on to describe its descent and passage through the world as a kind of “pilgrimage” through an alien land: “Each of us has come into the world as into a foreign city, in which before birth we had no part, and in this city does but sojourn, until he has exhausted his appointed span of life” (On the Cherubim, 120; cf. also On Dreams, 135; On Planting, 12; On Giants, 6; Who Is the Heir? 240). But this takes place, he adds, “by a law of necessity,” so that the soul might “inspect terrestrial things” and gain a share in their wisdom, thus participate in a better existence (Questions on Genesis, 4.74). To assist us in attaining this noble goal, Wisdom—or the divine Logos—becomes our constant “helper and comrade,” ever quickening us with its new life (On Dreams, 1.147). Thus filled by the Logos with its heavenly light, earthly man can at last become divine, truly a “son of God” (ibid., 1.92, 99), and a “firstbegotten of the One who is without beginning” (On the Posterity of Cain, 63). Moses himself was begotten as a “divine Logos” in this way. By the action of “God his Father and Wisdom his Mother” he was made incorrupti-

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ble and immune from material defilement (On Flight and Finding, 108–12). This took place, we are told, at the top of Mount Sinai, i.e., in the prototype of the Holy of Holies, where Moses was instructed by God to “stand here with me” (Exod 33:21), meaning that Moses was given a share of God’s own nature (On the Posterity of Cain, 28ff; On Giants, 47ff), changed into divinity, and made “akin to God” (Questions on Exodus, 2.29). Philo addresses his readers as mystae (“initiates”) when he describes this procreation of godhood in men: Open your ears, mystae, and hear the holiest of mysteries. “Laughing” means joy, “creation” means procreation; the words “God hath made me to laugh” (Gen 21:6) mean, therefore, The Lord fathered Isaac, he is the father of all Perfect Beings, the One who sows joy in souls and who procreates (Allegorical Interpretation, 3.219).

As supporting passages, Philo refers in his On the Confusion of Tongues to Deut 14:1 (“Ye are the children of the Lord God”), 32:18 (“of the God who begot thee”), and 32:6 (“is he not himself your father?”) to show that divine sonship can indeed be sown in men by their union with the Logos (ibid., 145–46), i.e., God’s “invisible Image” (ibid., 147). Presumably, this was the hope of all those who gathered in the Forecourt of the Temple, when the High Priest, acting for Moses, revealed the “secondary splendor” of God’s procreative Powers to the “pure in heart,” and who came away with a light of their own, just as Moses came down from the Mount with an illuminated countenance (Exod 34:29–30). Thus it was recalled over a millennium later that When all was linked together, all faces were illumined. Then all fell on their faces and trembled, and said, Blessed be the Name of his kingdom for ever (Zohar III:66b–67a).

Now men were restored to the Tree of Life. In On the Cherubim, Philo had begun his description of the embracing statues by giving his exegesis of Gen 3:24: “And he cast forth Adam and set over against the Garden of Pleasure the Cherubim and the sword of flame which turns every way.” This appears at first glance to be a pretext for introducing the subject of the Temple-Cherubim, because Philo quickly abandons the story of man’s expulsion from Eden and turns his attention to the significance of the statues in the Holy of Holies. But it is obvious that he had an even deeper reason for beginning his exegesis with an account of the Cherubim in the Garden, for he quickly points out that they were not only set there to guard the Tree of Life, but also to lead men back to it.

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According to the earlier Wisdom books, Wisdom is none other than the Tree of Life (Prov 3:18; 1 Enoch 32:3–6). In Questions on Genesis, he adds that the Cherubim are her “mirrors” (1.57). The Cherubim are therefore “mirrors” of the Tree of Life, and he who receives their reflection partakes again from its branches, feasting of Wisdom’s fruit, “eating her berries,” and “drinking her wine” (Sir 24:19; Prov 9:5). In short, mankind experiences through a vision of the Cherubim what he had lost in the Garden of Eden, being restored to the Tree of Life and the companionship of God’s Presence. One cannot doubt that this is also the idea which is expressed in John 15, where Jesus-Wisdom is described as the “True Vine,” i.e., the divine Reality in whose branches man is invited to “abide,” as man is invited to “lodge” in the branches of Wisdom (Sir 14:26). This interpretation is supported by Philo himself, when he tells us that man’s expulsion from the Garden was equivalent to “going forth from the vision of God” (On the Cherubim, 13). But the Cherubim were not placed there solely to “guard the Tree of Life,” or to ban him forever from the “dwelling place of virtue” (10), but rather to promote “closer intimacy” between those who “seek … to draw nigh to each other” (18). Thus, man is assured that “he is not far from divine happiness” (19) when he beholds the Cherubim. “It is with this thought that (God) assigns to the Cherubim and the flaming sword the abode in front of Paradise.” Indeed, “the ‘Powers,’ ever gazing at each other in unbroken contemplation, acquire a mutual yearning, even that winged and heavenly love, wherewith God the bountiful Giver inspires them” (20). Such is the love which unites even the spheres of heaven, like the two Cherubim, revolving one within the other (22). This, Philo explains, is the “allegory of the Cherubim” (On the Cherubim, 25), or the union of God’s chief “Powers” (27–28). From it the initiate not only learns the “lesson” of God’s beneficence, but receives for himself the “virtues” begotten by their connubial “mingling,” and reaps the “fruits” of a happy lot (29). It is the “divine mystery” of God’s intercourse with the soul, Wisdom being the intermediary through whom he “consorts” with his human lovers (42–44, 50). As Wisdom’s “Husband,” God “drops the seed of happiness for the race of mortals into good and virgin soil” (50). But wanting nothing for himself, he freely bestows the fruit of this union upon those who have not the power to conceive by themselves (44). This is why the barren wombs of Sarah, Leah, and Rebecca were “opened” by the Lord for their husbands (Gen 21:1; 29:31; 25: 21; On the Cherubim, 45–47). In this, we detect an early form of the Pauline doctrine of grace. Finally, we should not ignore the didactic value of “beholding the divine Image” as a model for human behavior. Philo referred to this as a vi-

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sion of the “river of Wisdom,” or the Light-Stream and Logos (Allegorical Interpretation, 1.65; Questions on Exodus, 2.68), hence the true essence of Torah. This was accompanied by an admonition to obey the “verbs and nouns” with which the Torah clothed herself.125 At the same time, the truth-seeker was to search out her higher doctrine, which for Philo was that the righteous person could eventually be deified by perfect harmony with God’s revelation of himself (Questions on Exodus, 2.39–40). For Christians, this would imply the restructuring of one’s life in the “likeness” of God, i.e., the exemplary life of his Logos, Jesus Christ. Thus we have reason to suppose that pilgrims came to the Temple for moral instruction, which they somehow obtained through beholding the divine symbols in the Holy of Holies. This was already hinted at in Sirach, where the author tells us that he sought Wisdom “before the Temple” (51:14). After describing his hieros gamos with her (vv. 19–21), he refers to the place where he “looked upon her” as a “house of instruction” (v. 23), an expression sometimes used by rabbis to characterize the Holy Shrine (called the Beth ha-Midrash ha-gadol, the “Great House of Instruction”).126 Indeed, Wisdom tells us that the Temple is her own special dwelling, having been brought down with her from on high: “The Creator caused my tabernacle to rest with Israel … He created me from the beginning, before the world … In the holy tabernacle I served him and so was established in Zion” (ibid., 24:8–10). Philo adds that the Temple was itself an image of Wisdom or divine Virtue: “When God willed to send down the image of divine excellence from heaven to earth in pity for our race, that it should not lose its share in the better lot, he constructs as a symbol of the truth the holy tabernacle and its contents to be a representation and a copy of Wisdom” (Who Is The Heir? 112; also see That the Worse Attacks the Better, 160– 61; On the Preliminary Studies, 111). The Temple, in short, was the place of instruction where the mysteries of the truth were revealed as types and symbols, and where one could receive images of God’s Wisdom. In this way, the “First Cause” himself appeared, enlightening mortals with knowledge of the Invisible, and enabling them to attain their own visions of God’s Face.

Goodenough, By Light, Light, 8. See, for example, Tanna debe Eliyahu R., 9, 10, 16; reference in R. H. Charles, Apocrypha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1971), 516. Compare also Matthew 21:23; 26:55; Luke 2: 46; 20:1; 21:37; and John 18:20, where Jesus teaches in the Temple. 125 126

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THE TEMPLE AS A SOURCE OF POWER The Temple, however, was not only a house of instruction, but a place where one hoped to come into contact with tangible, life-giving power. Earlier we saw that Ezekiel described the fiery river of light which issued from the Throne of God as “amber” (hashmal), the word which modern Hebrew uses for “electricity” (p. 56, above). Its enormous physical potency is suggested by the fact that it was thought to be both holy and dangerous, as in the story of the child who was burned by fire while speaking about hashmal (b. Hagigah 13a).127 We must also try to picture the numinous quality of the Holy of Holies, which as the successor to the Ark of the Covenant must have retained some of the awesome power which it anciently possessed, for example, when Uzzah put forth his hand to “steady the Ark” and was immediately struck dead (2 Sam 6:6–7), or when the Levites—who were obliged to transport the holy things from place to place in the wilderness— were not allowed to see them uncovered, lest they die (Num 4:20). It was even rumored that the High Priest burned incense in the Holy of Holies in order that the smoke would conceal its contents from his view, lest he too be killed (Lev 16:13). We already suggested that “seeing the Face of God” within the context of the Wisdom Mystery was thought to be a way to establish contact with God’s holiness (p. 60, above). Ancient Judaism looked upon this “holiness” as an actual, tangible “substance,” one that could readily be passed from various sancta to whomever touched them. As Jacob Milgrom points out, the earliest traditions of the Bible show that the sancta communicated holiness to persons by sight (if uncovered), or by touch, even if the contact was accidental. The general formula for this “sancta contagion” was “kolhannegea‘ b- (on some sacred object) yiqdaš,” i.e., “everything touching (on said object) will be made holy”:128 According to the early narratives, this power can be deadly; note the stories about the Ark (1 Sam 6:19; 2 Sam 6:6–7), Mount Sinai (Exod 19:12– 127

51.

Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1983),

128 For example, “bahammizbeah” (“on the altar”), or “bahem” (“on them [the sacred objects]”). Yiqdaš, however, is limited to pi‘el and hithpa‘el stems (i.e., “to make holy, to become holy”), and never used for qal stems (“to be holy”). This is further shown by a parallel formula (e.g., Lev 11:24): “kol-hannegea‘ b- (some object) yitma” (“everything touching on (said object) will become impure”). See Milgrom’s Leviticus 1–16, Anchor Bible (New York, 1991), 443–56.

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A GREAT MYSTERY 13), and the divine fire (Lev 10:1–2). In P a major change has occurred. This fatal power is restricted to the rare moment in which the Tabernacle is dismantled (Num 4:15, 20), but otherwise the sancta can no longer infect persons, even if touched. Clearly, this drastic reduction in the contagious power of the sancta was not accepted by all Priestly schools. Ezekiel holds out for the older view that sancta (in his example, the priestly clothing, 44:19; 46:20) are contagious to persons (contrary to P).129

The late P-tradents, on the other hand, began to teach that God’s holiness stood for the forces of life and that only when approached in an unauthorized way (e.g.,, Num 10:1–2) would it bring death. But an even more practical reason might have encouraged this new attitude toward the sancta in the Temple, namely dissatisfaction with the anarchic institution of altar asylum. Precisely because the altar sanctified those who touched it, it thereby automatically gave them asylum regardless of whether they were murderers, bandits, or other assorted criminals. By taking the radical step of declaring that the sancta, in particular the altar, were no longer contagious to persons, the priests ended, once and for all, the institution of altar asylum. In this matter they were undoubtedly abetted by the king and his bureaucracy, who earnestly wanted to terminate the veto power of the sanctuary over their jurisdiction.130

Ezekiel, however, “invokes the viewpoint posited by the oldest biblical narratives that the sancta are contagious to persons. This simple postulate is all that is needed to explain Ezekiel’s severer code for the priests whereby he both elevates their holy status and distances them more from the laity, even to the point of preventing the laity from direct contact with the priestly clothing and the sacrifices … Thus Ezekiel is a religious conservative whose view represents a continuing polemic against the prevailing practice of the Jerusalem Temple.”131 Ezekiel in fact preserves a much older tradition (e.g., Exod 30:26–30), according to which persons may still be consecrated (or harmed) by contact with the sacra (Ezek 46:20; 46:3), including cast-off priestly garments (Ezek 44:19; 42:14). Ezekiel’s visionary Temple would even prohibit the laity from approaching the gates to the Inner Court (Ezek 46:3), and would restrict all slaughter to the Levites (40:39–42).

Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 45. Ibid., 45. 131 Ibid., 453. 129 130

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The holy contagion of the sancta would appear to derive from the fact that the blood which was spilled upon the altar by the sacrifice of “the Lord’s goat” (Lev 16:8) contained life—God’s special power—for “the life (nephesh) of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls” (17:11). The blood of a bullock was added, and both were sprinkled on the horns of the altar (16:18), thereby transforming the Temple into a genuine source of quickening power. This ancient view of sancta contagion also appears to have survived in the Wisdom Mystery, where beholding the sacred objects visually in the Temple transmitted holiness to the beholder. This is most clearly embodied in the traditional expression, ra’ah ’et-pene YHWH¸ “Behold the face of Yahweh,” by which act the beholder was filled with God’s light and sanctified, even made divine (Wis 7:25–27; Philo, On the Cherubim, 61–62, 84): What is the meaning of the words, “They appeared to God in that place and they ate and drank”? Having attained to the face of the Father, they do not remain in any mortal place at all, for all such places are profane and polluted, but they send and make a migration to a holy a divine place, which is called by another name, Logos. Being in this place through the steward, they see the Master in a lofty and clear manner, envisioning God with the keen-sighted eyes of the mind. But this vision is the food of the soul, and true partaking is the case of a life of immortality. Wherefore it is said, “they ate and drank.” What is the meaning of the words, “Come up to Me in the mountain and be there”? This signifies that a holy soul is divinized by ascending not to the air or to the ether or to heaven (which is) higher than all but to (a region) above the heavens. And beyond the world there is no place but God (Philo, Questions on Exodus, 2:39–40).

Philo is of course speaking of those who ascended the Temple Mount—the new “Sinai”—and who contacted God through a vision of his Logos/ Wisdom, whose “mirrors” were the Embracing Cherubim. Such contact was much more than mere “instruction,” for it provided the beholder with luminous power, mediated to the senses by God’s “steward,” i.e., his “Word.” Indeed, as Isaiah proclaimed as he stood before the Ark, “mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts” (Isa 6:5), because the Lord promised to commune with Israel from between the two Cherubim (Exod 25:22). Thus it has been suggested that nearly every one of the 225 times that the expression, “Before the Lord,” appears in the Old Testament—

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especially in the Psalms—it has a reference to standing before the Ark and its invisible Deity, a cultic situation being presupposed.132 According to Gerhard von Rad, the words, “With thee is the fountain of light, and in thy light we see light” (Ps 36:9) describe the “almost mystical” sense of “spiritual communion” which the worshipper experienced with God in the Temple,133 a communion which even death could not break:134 For thou wilt not abandon my life to the realm of the dead, Thou wilt not let thy godly one see the pit. Thou shewest me the way to life, fulness of joy even before my face, pleasure is in thy right hand for ever (Ps 16:10–11). But I am ever with thee, thou hast taken hold of my right hand; According to thy counsel wilt thou lead me and hereafter carry me to glory. Whom have I in heaven? Besides thee I desire naught on earth. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God remains at all times my rock and my part. Yea, those who forsake thee perish, But my possession is to draw near to God; I have put my refuge in Yahweh (Ps 73:23–28). God is my chief possession for ever … They who are far from thee are lost … But my chief good is to be near to thee, O God (Ps 73:26).

Walter Eichrodt likewise sees in the Temple experience an opportunity to “overcome death” through “fellowship with God.”135 Von Rad in fact considered such “fellowship” to be the source of shalom, or the state of peace and equilibrium which the devout worshipper hopes to establish between himself and God.136 Isaiah likewise considered this communion to be a “covenant of peace (shalom)” which covenant promised to last beyond the destruction of earth (Isa 54:10).

132 G. Henton Davies, “Ark of the Covenant,” in IDB, 1:225–26. This would also include such expressions as “Before God,” the “glory” of God, and the “Name” of God, all referring to his cultic presence. 133 Old Testament Theology (New York, 1962), 1:401–3. 134 Ibid, 1:406. 135 Theology of the Old Testament, quoted by von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 1:407. 136 Old Testament Theology, 1:130.

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The finest study of this mystical communion with God in the Temple has been written by H. J. Franken,137 who believes that the shalom of which von Rad speaks came about through a cleaving together of God’s Spirit with that of the believer to create an “extension of personality,” so that both partners could think and feel as one.138 J. Pedersen likewise opined that during the process “self-consciousness is lost and the soul is filled with a power that is divine … Therefore the mystic may say that his soul is God.”139 Aubrey R. Johnson adds that “for the time being (the beholder) was an active “extension” of Yahweh’s Personality and as such, was Yahweh.”140 We shall encounter this important principle again in the New Testament, when John speaks of the “spiritual indwelling” which creates oneness with the Divine (John 10:30; 14:10; 17:20–23), or when Paul speaks of the “spiritual cleavage” which unites two spirits as one (1 Cor 6:17; 12:13). Such “communion” and “fellowship” with the Divine thus led to a single pneumatic “circuit” which transmitted the energy of the Whole to its parts, providing access to the Heavenly Council (sôd),141 at whose center stood the Throne of God—or the Source of power which enabled the cosmos to operate as a “grand synthesis” and an integrative “harmony.”142 Franken has performed a particularly valuable service in analyzing the language of the Psalter, showing how the Psalms expressed this mystical sense of communion with Yahweh in the Temple. He begins with the verb damah (“to be silent”), and its substantive demahmah (“stillness, quiet”),143 expressing a sense of expectation (“My soul, ‘wait upon’ [dami] God, for my hope is from him,” Ps 62:5). This, of course, was not “quiet” of an ordinary sort, but the breathless sense of awe which silences one in the presence of a mysterious numen or energy:144 Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discover the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes, there was silence … (Job 4:14–16).

The Mystical Communion with JHWH in the Book of Psalms (Leiden, 1954). Ibid., 1, notes. 139 Israel, Its Life and Culture (Copenhagen, 1940), iii–iv; our emphasis. 140 The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God (Cardiff, 1961), 33. 141 Franken, Israel, Its Life and Culture, 63. 142 Ibid., 66–69. 143 Ibid., 13–18. 144 Ibid., 17–18. 137 138

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Inevitably, it produced in the beholder a response which the Psalms designated as syah (KJV “meditation,” Ps 104:34), or an “audible expression of the soul’s absorption in God,”145 the same kind of “absorption” or “drunkenness” which is encapsulated in the word meshuga (“insane, mad”). Thus, when Hannah behaved like a “drunken” woman in the Temple, she was merely expressing “the fulness of her siah” (1 Sam 1:15–16). Franken also refers to Psalms 102:1 and 119:97–99, where the pilgrim’s “absorption” in God emerges as an audible “meditation,” as he is “filled as a jar with the substance of the Torah.”146 The word hasah (KJV “place trust in”) is also used repeatedly to show how one “takes refuge” in God’s “shelter” by being “transplanted into a sacred spiritual element” (Pss 25:20; 31:1; 71:1; etc.). Finding safety in this “spiritual element” is also referred to as “taking shelter under God’s ‘wing’ or ‘skirt’” (both translations of kenaphim), as in Psalm 91:1–4 and Ruth 2:12. It especially reminds us of God’s marriage to Israel, when their union is described as the spreading of his “skirt” over his Bride (Ezek 16:8). Some would even connect this metaphor with the “wings” of the Cherubim, whose embrace symbolized God’s union with Israel (b. Yoma 54a), for Psalm 61:4 goes on to liken the worshipper’s communion with Yahweh to “taking refuge under God’s wings,” while Psalm 28:1–2 shows that this “refuge” is none other than the security of the Holy of Holies (the d ebir, KJV “oracle”).147 One also “waited” (qawa) on the Lord” (Ps 25:5) with an urgent sense of “reaching out” to God” (Isa 21:9, 21). The pi‘el of this verb in fact means “to be tense,” as when a string is drawn tight between two points (2 Kgs 21:13).148 The original meaning of qawa is thus thought to have been “to tie together, to bind,” i.e., an act of persistent longing for actual communion with God.149 The derived noun, tiqwa (KJV “expectation”) likewise has “more substance than the word in translation can denote,” for in Psalm 9:18 it suggests that one has received a sure hope and claim on God’s promise.150 All of these Hebrew expressions denoting some palpably felt “reaching out” to God for communion with his awesome power came to a climax in the verb Ibid., 18. Ibid., 20–21. 147 Ibid., 29–30. 148 See also Strong’s Concordance, Hebrew Dictionary, #6960. 149 Franken, Old Testament Theology, 32. 150 Ibid., 32. 145 146

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dabaq (“to glue, to fasten together”), which though it appears but twice in the Psalter with obviously mystical import would in time become the most widely used of all Judaeo-Christian terms indicating spiritual henosis (“union”) with God. According to Franken, dabaq means the sticking together of two elements that are considered as whole in themselves … These parts form a unity, but they can easily be distinguished one from the other … The word denotes mostly the cleaving together of heterogeneous elements … The two different beings become entirely one, each of them keeping (its) own nature and yet forming a new unity.151

This is not the same as Far Eastern “absorption” in God, where one loses his identity in some greater personality, but a “fastening together,” as when electronic components are joined and attuned to each other to function as a single electrical circuit. Thus it can denote “attachment” to God’s precepts by “hearing his voice” and keeping his commandments (Deut 13:4). But in Psalms 63:8 and 119:31 it suggests that the individual literally “cleaves” to God and his laws, and thereby receives vitalizing power from his transcendent holiness: My soul cleaves to thee (Ps 63:8). I have cleaved to thy principles … I have longed after thy precepts … Quicken me in thy righteousness (Ps 119:31, 40).

This explains why the Psalms could speak of God’s righteousness as something tangible that can be transferred from one individual to another: He shall receive righteousness from the God of his salvation (Ps 24:6). Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness (Ps 132:9).

This direct sharing of God’s righteousness, however, was determined solely by the will of the stronger party, i.e., by the one who laid out the covenant terms of the unifying relationship.152 The same meaning is expressed is still other Psalms by the verb hasaq (“attach”), with its sense of “strong unity,” or a “cleaving together” to form a bond of a “mystical nature.”153 In Ps 91:14, for example, it is said that Ibid., 34–35. Compare 2 Chronicles 3:12, which tells how the metallic wing tips of the Cherubim in the First Temple were “joined” (dabaq) together. 152 Ibid., 35–36. 153 Ibid., 36. 151

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God will rescue those to whom he has “attached his love,” thereby providing them with the safety of an intimate connection to himself. The numinous quality of this mystical bond is further indicated by the use of the word tob (“goodness”), referring to a palpable divine righteousness, as in Psalm 23:6, where “goodness and mercy” are treated as spiritual substances.154 Psalm 34:8, 12 thus speaks of tob as something that can actually be “tasted” and “seen,” something that was specifically to be found in the Temple (Pss 27:13 and 65:4). Moses was also shown this “good righteousness” when he beheld God’s “glory” (Exod 33:18–19), a statement which Franken believes to be the hidden meaning behind the expression, “To see the Face of God,” i.e., to behold substantial evidence of his divine power.155 Judging from these statements, we are probably right to conclude that biblical “righteousness” was not merely “correct behavior,” but the divine energy that makes such behavior possible. The Psalms also describe the Temple as the special place where one might encounter God’s “glory” (kabod), a word whose palpable nature is again thought to have been expressed by an original meaning of “weight” or “abundance,” i.e., by an overwhelming sense of God’s powerful presence (“I have seen thy power and glory in the Sanctuary” (Ps 63:2). This tangible “weight” could be felt as an actual “heaviness” in times of distress (Ps 32:4); yet to experience it in a positive way was the ultimate purpose of one’s visit to the Temple. Hence, as Moses had experienced the divine “glory” on the old Sinai, the pilgrim came to the new Sinai (Ps 68:17), where God’s kabod would “rise” (zarah) upon him and make him a “bearer” of its light (Isa 60:1–3), just as Moses had “borne” it when he returned from the top of the Holy Mountain (Exod 34:29–35).156 Franken explains man’s preternatural affinity for union with God’s “light” and “glory” in much the same way that Philo had done (pp. 35–36, 47–49, above), namely as a matter of “light apprehending light,” or of “like seeking like”:

154 Compare Keil and Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, 1969), 5:331: “As good spirits Jahve sends forth tob and hesed to overtake David’s enemies, and to protect him against them to their shame.” 155 Franken, Old Testament Theology, 38–39. 156 Ibid., 45–46.

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The light of God meets light … He who meets the light of God knows that there is light within him … there is light of God in the light of men.157

This resulting “unbroken unity of godly light” caused the pilgrim himself to “shine” (nogah, Ps 18:28), purifying his heart with its glow (Pss 18:30; 26:1– 3), and revealing God’s word as a “radiant unity” subsuming both subject and object (Ps 12:6–7).158 This all-important light was God’s own “garment” (Ps 104:2), something that had originated “with God” (Ps 139:11–12). More than mere “brightness,” however, it was the “light of life” (Ps 56:13; Job 33:28–30), which “lightened” man’s intellect and senses (Pss 13:3; 1:28; 19:8). The light of earth could not in fact exist without the light of heaven, and statements that God will “light my candle” or “enlighten my darkness” prove that God’s luminous power could be readily received here below in an “intense fashion” (Ps 18:28).159 F. Delitzsch called the resulting fusion of “the light of the soul and the light of God” (Ps 36:9) a “holy mysticism” and a “vital godliness,” adding that when the pilgrim became “immersed in God’s sea of light (he was) illumined by divine knowledge and lighted up with spiritual joy.”160 Access to God’s “light” was another way of saying that one could come into communion with the raz or sôd (both synonyms for the “Heavenly Council”). Talmudic mystics especially saw a connection between the raz and God’s “light” (’or), since both words had a numerical value of 207.161 Reaching God’s “light” thus meant that one could mystically reach the raz or sôd, and have communion with the beings around the Throne of God (the merkabah). The result was “the ecstasy of the Sanctuary, the perfect peace (shalom) with the world of God … the lifting up of the hands and blessings, and finally the experience of seeing God.”162 Its overall effect on the pilgrim was that he was enveloped by the Divine Presence and felt that God had literally descended and entered into spiritual contact with him,163 thus making him a part of the heavenly sôd. Ezekiel likewise believed that Ibid., 46, 49. Ibid., 47–48. 159 Ibid., 49. 160 Commentary on the Old Testament, 5:7. 161 According to the rules of gematria, both Hebrew rz (r = 200, z = 7), and Hebrew ’yr (’ = 1, y = 6, r = 200), equal 207. 162 Ibid., 92 [uncertain reference, ed. note]. 163 Ibid., 74. 157 158

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Israel merged with the sôd when united in obedience to God’s will (Ezek 13:9). We shall also learn from writings of Qumran that the sectaries who composed the Dead Sea Scrolls continued to believe that when they prayed together, they become united with the angels around God’s Throne to form a single Heavenly Community (Angelic Liturgy, 4QS 1:40, 24). Significantly, the traditional number of these “angels” (formerly the “Sons of God”)164 was 70, and the rabbis found it meaningful that the numerical value of the sôd was also 70.165 The Temple pilgrim thus believed that he stood in the midst of an angelic host, at whose center was Yahweh himself, seated upon the merkabah: In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the Temple. Above it stood the Seraphim … One cried unto the other, and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is filled with his glory … And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I, send me (Isa 6:1–8). And above the firmament that was over (the Cherubim’s) heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it … This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard the voice of one that spoke. And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. And the Spirit entered into me (Ezek 1:26–2:2).

Job also spoke of the sôd, where God’s Wisdom (hokmah) is to be found (Job 15:8), hence the notion that Wisdom was communicated in a “mystery” (1 Cor 2:7)—the New Testament equivalent of sôd 166—and whose earthly focus was the Temple. Thus Psalm 55:14 says, “Together we made sweet the sôd in Elohim’s Temple,” and Proverbs adds that God’s sôd is “with the upright … in the habitation of the just” (3:32–33). Even after the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, the tradition of seeking Wisdom 164 Compare the Hebrew original of Deuteronomy 32:8, which reads “sons of God,” with the LXX version, which reads “angels of God.” 165 Spelled swd (s = 60, w = 6, d = 4). 166 The New Testament word mysterion has been traced directly back to the Hebrew words sôd and raz, meaning “God’s Heavenly Council and its sercets,” and by extension, all other kinds of “secrecy.” See Raymond E. Brown, The Semitic Background of the Term “Mystery” in the New Testament (Philadelphia, 1968).

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through a vision of the world about God’s Throne survived as one of the chief goals of Jewish Kabbalism. It also became the hope of the Christian Temple cult, as we shall see later on in the case of Paul’s vision of the “Third Heaven” (2 Cor 12:1–4). Finally, the Temple pilgrim felt that he was being re-created, as he listened to the story of Israel’s “Birth,” when she was “baptized” in the Red Sea, and the forces of chaos were defeated. Now, that act of re-creation was applied specifically to himself: Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he (God) was wroth. There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens also and came down: and darkness was under his feet. And he rode upon a cherub and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire. The Lord also thundered from the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice; hail stones and coals of fire. Yea, he sent out his arrows and scattered them; and he shook out lightnings, and discomfited them. Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered at thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils. He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters. He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them which hated me: for they were too strong for me. He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me. The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me (Ps 18:7–20).

This caused his heart to become “light,” the very light which had been transformed into the “words” of the Bible. Thus God’s commandments were “pure and enlightening” (Ps 19:8) and would serve forever as “a light unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Ps 119:105).167 After the Qumran community withdrew from the Temple at Jerusalem, believing that it had been corrupted by the official priesthood, its members continued to practice a form of the Temple mysteries in their desert seclusion, claiming that they could still “atone for the earth and pay the wicked their reward” (1QS VIII, 1–10). Although they left no precise description of these desert “mysteries”—which were to serve as Israel’s “in167

Franken, Old Testament Theology, 77.

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terim cultus” until a new Temple could be built—we do know that communion with the sôd by means of the afore-mentioned “Angelic Liturgy” was one of their central features. Originally consisting of a pair of short fragments, published by John Strugnell in 1960,168 the “Angelic Liturgy” has more recently been augmented by the discovery of additional versions of the same material, including one from Masada, so that we can piece together a more complete picture of the Sabbath mysteries as they were held at Qumran.169 We are now able to see an emerging picture of the “angelic” light-world which mediated between God and the world, governed by a heptad of “Chief Princes.” This closely approximates the sevenfold “River of Light” which we encountered in the apocryphal literature and the writings of Philo (pp. 56–59, above). But now, the “Seven Princes” have already come close to the Primitive Christian doctrine of the Hexaemeron (“Six Days”), which understood the story of Creation in Genesis 1 to be a picture of the preexistent realities which first emerged from the Light-Stream, and then served as the basis for the physical creation in Genesis 2.170 Though the six hēmera were ostensibly the “six days” of Creation, to which must be added the “day of rest,” they actually stood for the six ruling “Powers,” whose chief was the seventh “Power,” i.e., Christ, making seven in all. In some formulations these were known as the Preexistent Church.171 In Revelation these seven “chief angels” would become the “Spirits of the Church” (Rev 1:4, 20; 3:1; 4:5; 8:2, 6). But in the Sabbath Songs they were especially designated as “Dispensers of “Knowledge”; and in the Qumran Hymns they are spoken of as “Spirits of Knowledge” (1QH III, 22), showing that they were an integral part of the “Wisdom Mystery.”172 Indeed, the Qumran text of the Sirach 51:13–20 was specifically interpreted by the sectaries as the worshipper’s “marriage” to Wisdom in a Temple setting (p. 36, above). And though there is no specific mention of the seven planets in the Qumran Liturgy, it is clear that these “The Angelic Liturgy at Qumran (4q serak šhirot ‘olat haššabbat),” in Congress Volume, Oxford, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum vii (Leiden, 1960), 318– 45. 169 Carol Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Edition, Harvard Semitic Studies (Atlanta, 1985). 170 See the section on “The Hexaemeron,” below. 171 Jean Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christianity (London, 1964), 300–310. 172 One of the sapiential works from Cave 4 admonishes the faithful to “consider the mystery of existence and take the offering of salvation and know who will inherit glory and injustice” (4Q417). 168

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“Spirits of Knowledge” reflected the same sevenfold cosmic structure which mediated Wisdom’s influence to the world in Proverbs 9:1.173 Thus we read in the Community Rule (1QS X) how God unlocks the heavenly “lights” at the time of worship, specifically identified by A. Dupont-Sommer174 and Geza Vermes175 as the “Liturgy of the Sabbath”: When the heavenly lights shine out from the dwelling place of Holiness … their renewal is a great day for the Holy of Holies, and a sign for the unlocking of everlasting mercies at the beginning of seasons in all times to come (1QS X, 1–3, trans. Vermes).

Though we are now in the desert, the cultic setting is still that of an idealized Temple, and its ultimate purpose is to dispense divine righteousness to men and cleanse them from sin: I will declare His judgment concerning my sins, and my transgressions shall be before my eyes as an engraved Precept. I will say to God, “My Righteousness,” and “Author of my Goodness” to the Most High, “Fountain of Knowledge” and “Source of Holiness …” (1QS X, 11– 12).

Especially significant is the fact that this “idealized Temple” is a source of literal power, a power which comes in the form or God’s awesome holiness: May the holy ones of God make holy the king of glory, who makes holy with his holiness all the holy ones (4Q404 [4Q Shir Shabbd 31], our emphasis).176

This special form of “sancta contagion,” through which the worshipper drew “holiness” from God’s dynamic Presence in the Temple, would remain the basis for the Christian doctrine of grace, where it was also God’s righteousness—not man’s—which saves (Rom 10:3; Phil 3:9–10). This we saw described in certain Psalms which spoke of “receiving righteousness Compare Tobit 12:15: “I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels that offer the prayers of the saints and stand before the glory of the Holy One.” Also Testament of Levi 8:1–2; 1 Enoch 81:5; 87:2; 90:21; 2 Enoch 8. One should also note that the seven branches of the Menorah in the Temple have been associated with these seven “lights” or “angels,” who correspond to the “eyes of the Lord which run to and fro through the whole earth” (Zech 4:10). 174 I.e., the “Angelic Liturgy” or “Songs of the Sabbath Service.” See his The Essene Writings from Qumran (Oxford, 1961), 97, n. 3. 175 The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Harmondsworth, 1969), 210. 176 In García Martínez, Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, 422. 173

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from God,” and of “clothing God’s priests with righteousness” (p. 71, above). But even more important is the fact that those who received God’s holiness and attributes believed that they would actually become gods—just as Philo had claimed in his Questions on Exodus (2:29, 40):177 [El Elyon gave me a seat among] those perfect forever a mighty throne in the congregation of the gods (elohim). None of the kings of the earth shall sit in it and their nobles shall not [come near it.] No Edomite shall be like me in glory. And none shall be exalted save me, nor shall come against me. For I have taken my seat in the [congregation] in the heavens, and none [find fault with me]. I shall be reckoned with gods and established in the holy congregation (4QMa).178

The Qumran Hymns and Community Rule also suggest that these righteous priests would be counted one day among the “heavenly beings” (’elohim) and the “Holy Ones” (qedoshim): You have purified a perverse spirit of great sin so that it may stand in assembly with the host of the holy ones, and enter into community with the congregation of heavenly beings (1QH III, 21–22); For the sake of Your glory You have purified man of sin in order to be made holy for You without abominable uncleanness or faithless guilt, to be united [with] the children of Your truth and share in the lot of Your holy ones … to stand in the appointed place before You with the everlasting host and with [Your holy] spirits (1QH XI, 10–13). God has given them to the ones He has chosen as an everlasting possession, and has given them an inheritance in the lot of the holy ones. He has joined their assembly with the heavenly beings to be a council of the community … (1QS XI, 7–8).

This is also true of the priests described in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: O you godlike ones (’elohim) among all the holiest of the holy ones (qedoshim); and in the divinity [of His reign rejoice, for He has estab-

Page 61, above. Translated by Morton Smith; quoted in Alan Segal, Paul the Convert (New Haven, 1990), 319. 177 178

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lished] among the eternally holy the holiest of the holy ones (qedoshim), and they have become for him priests (4Q400, column 1:2–3).179

Indeed, all are now in the presence of the mighty ’elohim, who worship with the earthly Community as a single body around the merkabah, each member directly sharing God’s glory: [ … the minis]ters of the glorious Face in the Abo[de of the God] of knowledge fall do[wn] before the [Cheru]bim and utter b[less]ings while the sound of the divine wind rises[…] and there is a tumult of shouting while their wings cause the sound of the divine [win]d to rise. The Cherubim above the heavens bless the likeness of the Throne of the Merkabah [and] acclaim the [majes]ty of the firmament of light beneath the seat of His glory. And when the wheels turn, angels of holiness come and go between His glorious wheels like visions of fire. Spirits of supreme holiness surround them, visions of streams of fires similar to scarlet; and [sh]ining creatures clothed in glorious brocades, many colored marvelous garments, more (brilliant) than pure salt, spirits of the living [G]od, unceasingly accompany the glory [of] the marvelous Merkabah. And the sound of the wind of blessing (is mingled) with the tumult of their marching, and they praise Holiness while they return on their steps. When they rise, they rise marvelously; and when they alight [and are s]till, the sound of joyous shouting ceases in all the camp of God and also the win[d] of [d]ivine blessing, [and] a voice of praise […] from the midst of all their battalions in [ … and] all the numbered ones cry out, e[ach], each , in his pla[ce…] (trans. Vermes, based on Strugnell, 4Q400).180

The worshippers on earth were thus commingled with the Heavenly Community to become an eternal race of priests, even an “assembly of deities”:181 179 Newsom writes that “It is difficult to find appropriate translation values for the various terms for angelic beings which occur in the Sabbath Shirot. In general, I have translated ’elohim as ‘angels,’ and simply rendered ’elim as ‘elim’ or ‘angelic elim.’ Since ’elohim is such an unusual term for the angels, I have tried to translate it in ways that underscore its aura of divinity (‘godlike beings,’ ‘godlike ones,’ etc.)” (Songs of the Sabbath, 97). She further notes that it was only “priests” who would attain to this high calling, though she leaves open the question of whether or not the entire Qumran Community (thanks to its rigid qualifications for membership) considered itself to be composed of worthy priests (ibid., 62–63). 180 In Dupont-Sommer, Essene Writers, 333–34. 181 As Carol Newsom observes, the songs begin with a “stronger consciousness of the human worshipping community,” and then become increasingly

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A GREAT MYSTERY Praise [the God of … ,] you, the gods, among the holy of holies; and in the divinity [of his kingdom, rejoice. Because he has established] the holy of holies among the eternal holy ones, so that for him they can be priests [who approach the temple of his kingship,] the servants of the Presence in the sanctuary of his glory. In the assembly of all the deities [of knowledge, and in the council of all the spirits] of God, he has engraved his ordinances for all spiritual works, and his [glorious] precepts [for those who establish] knowledge of the people of the intelligence of his glory, the gods who approach knowledge. Eternal […]. And from the holy source of the sanctuaries of the holy of [holies…] priests who approach, to serve in the presence of the holy king of [the holy ones …] of his glory. (4Q400 [4QShirShabba 1–9]).

In this way, the visions of Ezekiel (chap. 1 and 9:2) opened up onto a grand conception of God’s “Primal Light” as it emanated from the merkabah and then flowed down to earth in the form of mediating “angels” and “spirits,” each bearing some divine attribute and power as a blessing to mankind. In Christianity and Gnosticism this rich effluence of God’s luminous power and characteristics would be called the pleroma (the “fulness”), being the totality of God’s energy and attributes as they might be bestowed on others, deifying them in the process. In Jewish Kabbalah, the seven “spirits” would eventually become the seven lower sephiroth182—which initially emanated from a Ruling Triad of God’s three highest “attributes” (kether, binah and hokmah),183 thus giving a total of ten sephiroth, or the ten preexistent characteristics of “Adam Kadmon,” the god intermediate between the transcendent Ein Sof and man. It “submerged in the concentration on the heavenly sanctuary” (Songs of the Sabbath, 14). “During the course of this thirteen week cycle, the community which recites the compositions is led through a lengthy preparation. The mysteries of the angelic priesthood are recounted, a hypnotic celebration of the sabbatical number seven produces an anticipatory climax at the center of the work, and the community is then gradually led through the spiritually animate heavenly temple until the worshippers experience the holiness of the merkabah and of the sabbath sacrifice as it is conducted by the high priests of the angels” (ibid., 19). 182 According to Gershom Scholem, sephira (sing.) is related to the Hebrew sappir (“sapphire”), being a part of God’s “radiance.” In Kabbalistic use, it generally referred to the preexistent “numbers” or “ideas” from which all things were created; also the structural “sayings,” “names,” “lights,” “stages,” “sources,” etc., which went into the Creation. See his Kabbalah, 99–100. 183 Compare Albright’s proto-Semitic Triad of Father, Mother, and Son (p. 15, above).

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was Adam Kadmon’s primordial characteristics that would serve as a blueprint for the material world. Gershom Scholem believes that this mystical world of God’s Light was one of the leading themes of both early Judaism and Christianity; indeed, it remained determinative for Jewish Kabbalah throughout the Middle Ages: The throne-world is to the Jewish mystic what the pleroma, the “fulness,” the bright sphere of divinity with its potencies, aeons, archons and dominions is to the Hellenistic and early Christian mystics of the period who appear in the history of religion under the names of Gnostics and Hermetics. The Jewish mystic, though guided by motives similar to theirs, nevertheless expresses his vision in terms of his own religious background. God’s pre-existing throne, which embodies and exemplifies all forms of creation, is at once the goal and the theme of his mystical vision (MTJM, 44).

Professor Scholem for a time suspected that the beginnings of this “Merkabah mysticism” went back to Qumran,184 but we have seen that it was already well established in the Wisdom literature, which held man’s deification through union with God’s Presence in the Temple to be its ultimate goal. It is strange, however, that the Embracing Cherubim are not mentioned specifically in the Qumran literature, though the idea of man’s “marriage to God”185 was as important to its authors as it was to those Jews who left us the Talmudic and Midrashic writings. This may offer a clue as to why the Qumran sectaries looked on the Jerusalem Temple as “defiled,” perhaps because of the blatant sexuality of its cherubic symbols. Indeed, as Patai has theorized, the Cherubim had been redesigned in their late erotic form sometime during the first half of the third century B.C., when Hellenistic art-forms and literary conventions were first accepted into Jewish worship.186 It was not long after this (mid-second century B.C.) that the Qumran covenanters broke altogether with the “Hellenized” priests in Jerusalem. To summarize, we have seen that the Jews of the Second Temple considered the Sanctuary to be much more than a place of sacrifice, or even of instruction in God’s Torah, for it was a place where literal power flowed down from Heaven as a stream of light-energy and was made available to Scholem, MTJM, 43. Compare the Qumran version of the Wisdom of Sirach, pp. 36–37, above. 186 See The Hebrew Goddess, 130–32. This “Hellenization” also included the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek. 184 185

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men. By having direct contact with this “light-energy”—generally mediated in the form of God’s “Wisdom” or “Word”—the worshipper could be “impregnated” with divine qualities and attributes, and filled with God’s Divine Nature, metaphorically described as a “Sacred Marriage” between the individual and the awesome Presence in the Holy of Holies. In some writings, it was even said that the individual was divinized, and would take his place one day amongst the gods. This was in fact a continuation of the idea of “sancta contagion,” which filled the recipient directly with God’s holiness and clothed him with divine righteousness, thus giving him supernatural knowledge and power. Thus we have an incipient form of the Christian doctrine of “grace,” as well as an understanding of the “Great Mystery” which Paul would enunciate in his Epistle to the Ephesians, and which John would explain in his doctrine of “Spiritual Indwelling.” Both, indeed, were developments of the Jewish “Wisdom Mystery” and would in time be associated with a theory of Atonement through spiritual oneness with God (“At-OneMent with the Divine”) and the begetting of “new lives in Christ.” Of this, the Embracing Cherubim would continue to be special symbols, though (as Josephus indicated), they would remain a secret from the world at large.

THE TRIPARTITE TEMPLE SCHEME When the Israelites encamped at Mt. Sinai—which served as the legendary prototype for the Jerusalem Temple (Ps 68:15–17)—they were granted access to its holy precincts according to three graduated degrees: the people standing beyond the mountain’s base (Exod 19:12, 23); Aaron, his sons, and the Seventy part way up (24:1); and Moses alone ascending into God’s presence at the top (19:20; 24:1), where he went to make atonement for Israel’s sins (32:20). This scheme later served as the pattern for the Temple, which was looked upon as a reenactment of the great Sinai experience, with the people again standing in the Forecourt, outside of the inner precincts; the ordinary priests operating in the Holy Place; and the High Priest alone entering the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur to atone for Israel’s sins. We already saw how Philo viewed this tripartite scheme as a “three-stage journey” along the “Royal Road,” as the pilgrims sought God according to their individual abilities and attainments (p. 43, above). Significantly, P. W. Skehan saw the structure of the book of Proverbs as a three-part journey through the “House of Wisdom,” again corresponding to the three parts of the Temple

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(Prov 1:1–9:18; 10:1–22:16; 22:17–31:31).187 Thus Philo believed that God had caused the Temple to be constructed as a “symbol of the truth” and a “copy of Wisdom” (Who Is the Heir? 112), i.e., as an image of Wisdom’s “light-stream” and its various degrees of radiance as it penetrated the depths of the Sanctuary. At the same time, these gradations would serve as an invitation to men to work their way back toward the Source of the Light, as medieval Kabbalists would do when seeking to attain God’s Throne. Thus it was believed that God’s “glory” came to earth by degrees, corresponding to a general belief in three heavens. As Jean Daniélou has shown, the Jews had a “heaven of God,” a “heaven of stars,” and a “heaven of meteors.”188 The Apocalypse of Moses also speaks of three heavens (37:5), the Testament of Levi adding that the lowest was “gloomy” (characterized by “water”), the second holding the “armies of heaven,” and the highest being the place where the “Great Glory” dwells (2:1–10; 3:1–4). It was also in the highest of these three heavens that Paul claimed to hear “secret doctrines” which he was not to reveal to others (2 Cor 12:4). The same three heavens entered Christianity as an “abode in heaven,” “the delights of paradise,” and “the splendor of the city,” all granted to men “as each is or shall be worthy.”189 Jesus also taught that the saved would bring forth fruit “some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold” (Matt 13:8, 23), corresponding to Paul’s three degrees of glory, these being “like the sun, the moon, and the stars” (1 Cor 15:41). The Church Fathers continued for many years to believe in three heavens, for example Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 5.36.2), Clement of Alexandria (Miscellanies, 6.13, 14), and Tertullian (On Monogamy, 4.67), showing that the layout of the Jerusalem Temple was an important link between the Jewish Wisdom Mystery and the Christian “Great Mystery,” to which we now turn.

187 Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom (Washington, DC, 1971), 27–45. Skehan also believes that the collection was deliberately arranged into 930 lines, numerically equivalent to the mystical values of the names “Solomon,” “David,” and “Israel,” thus corresponding to the legendary wisdom attained by various heroes and pilgrims in the Temple. 188 Theology of Jewish Christianity, 174. 189 Papias, Relics of the Elders, 5.

3 CHRISTIAN WISDOM AND THE MARRIAGE MYSTERY CHRISTOLOGY AS SOPHIOLOGY History records a wide diversity of opinions in the early Church concerning the exact nature and mission of Jesus. Our study, however, is concerned chiefly with his creative and redemptive activity as “Wisdom” or “Light” (John 8:12), first revealed to the apostles during the Feast of Tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration (7:37–39; Matt 17:1–9; Mark 9:2–10; Luke 9:28–36). Most of all, we are interested in the effects which the Jewish “Wisdom” tradition had on developing Christian doctrine.1 The significance of the Temple to the Jews of Jesus’ day appears to have been expressed in two broadly contrasting ways: (1) as a place where sacrifices could expiate guilt; and (2) as a place where the divine Presence could infuse and transform men. Not surprisingly, the Church from the very start viewed Christ’s mission in two similarly contrasting ways: (1) as a cultically inspired Latin soteriology, which viewed God and Christ as “lawgivers” and “judges,” anxious to punish the guilty and provide the faithful with a “forensic” solution to the problem of sin; and (2) as a Wisdominspired Greek soteriology, which viewed them as the Eternal Reality with which men must be united in order to be re-created and divinized as “sons of God.”2 We have already seen how certain Jews viewed the Temple as a source of transforming power, a concept which found its best expression in the 1 Pp. 50–55, above. Jesus’ appearance on a “mountain apart” instead of the Temple was undoubtedly necessitated because he was not yet able to claim the Temple as his own, nor would he have been allowed by the temporal authorities who controlled the Jerusalem Sanctuary. Recall that the Temple was merely a model of the “mountain” of the Lord, i.e., Sinai (Pss 24:3; 68:17). 2 W. Adams Brown, “Expiation and Atonement,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York, 1925), 5:641–50.

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“Wisdom Mystery,” or man’s spiritual “marriage” to God through the mediation of the “Logos/Wisdom.” In Christianity, this gave rise to Paul’s “Great Mystery,” with its idea of becoming “one flesh” with “Christ/ Wisdom,” as well as the Johannine mystery of man’s henosis3 with God through his mediating “Word.” As we shall show later on, the Embracing Cherubim would be remembered as one of the chief symbols of this allimportant spiritual communion, later epitomized by English writers as man’s “at-one-ment” with the Divine. At the same time, however, their extreme sacredness precluded their being widely written about, a situation not unlike that of the Eleusinian Mysteries, of which most people were also well aware, though no one left us any details concerning their exact nature. The precise meaning of the many titles ascribed to Jesus during the formative stages of Christian theology, especially that of “Son of God,” has not yet been thoroughly worked out. Among the first Christians there were still Jews who believed that Jesus had been “adopted” and “elevated” as God’s “son” (cf. 2 Sam 7:14); this supposedly occurred at the time of his baptism, as reflected in Mark’s early account (1:9–11), as well as in the Codex Bezae and the Old Latin Versions of Luke 3:22. Both of these retain the adoptionist formula of Ps 2:7 to describe his special anointing: “You are my son, this day I have begotten you.”4 Others understood that this “adoption” or “elevation” took place at the time of his Resurrection, as stated in Acts 13:32–33: “What God promised to the fathers, he has fulfilled for us their children by raising Jesus, as it is written in Psalm Two: ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you.”5 Later on, the idea that the Holy Spirit had somehow entered into the process was additionally recognized: “Born of the seed of David according to the flesh; designated Son of God in power according to a spirit of holiness, as of resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:3–4). Thus there was “a growth in awareness … that what Jesus was recognized to be after the resurrection he must have been still earlier.” Luke and Matthew therefore claimed that “Jesus was the Son of God, not only at his

3 Literally “becoming one” (based on the Greek numerical adjective, hen, i.e., “one”). See John 17:20–23. 4 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible (New York, 1981), 485; Richard Longenecker, The Christology of Early Jewish Christianity (Grand Rapids, 1981), 71– 72. 5 Quoted from Mary in the New Testament, by Raymond E. Brown and Paul J. Achtemeier (Philadelphia, 1978), 89.

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conception, but through his conception.”6 Accordingly, we read in their nativity accounts that the child was begotten through the Holy Spirit (Matt 1:20): “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cast a shadow over you. Therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Finally, the Johannine and Pauline writings stated explicitly for the first time that Jesus was the incarnation of a preexistent divine Being—the “Logos/Wisdom” (John 1:1, 14; 17:5; Phil 2:6–8). John even goes so far as to identity him as “God” (John 1:1; 20:28), and Paul possibly does the same in Romans 9:8. This is significant because there are statements throughout the Gospels and the Epistles suggesting that Christ was none other than the Old Testament Yahweh (compare, for example, Isa 40:3 with Matt 3:3; Mark 1:3; Luke 3:4; John 1:23; and Isa 45:23 with Phil 2:10–11). Certainly, by ascribing the title “Lord” (kyrios) to him (1 Cor 8:6; 16:22; Jas 5:7–8; Acts 11:20; Rom 10:9; Phil 2:9–11), it would have been inferred that he was the one whom the Septuagint called kyrios, the Greek translation for Hebrew adonai, “My Lord.” Mark, for example, begins his account by identifying Christ as the “Son of God” (1:1), whose advent in the desert was announced by the Baptist (v. 3), though the words which he quotes allude clearly to Yahweh (Isa 40:3). Later, however, he again tells us that Jesus was baptized, filled with the Holy Spirit, and declared to be God’s “beloved Son” (1:10–11). This in fact parallels the famous Ebionite fragment from the Gospel of the Hebrews, as preserved in Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah: And it came to pass that when the Lord was come up out of the water, the whole fount of the Holy Spirit descended upon him and rested upon him and said to him, My Son, in all the prophets I was waiting for thee that thou shouldest come and I might rest in thee (cf. Sir 24:7 and Wis 7:27–8). For thou art my rest, thou art my first-begotten Son, that reignest forever.7

Here we are in the presence of a well-developed Ebionite Christology, based on the figure of Wisdom as the “True Prophet,” or the divine “Power” which descended in various degrees on Israel’s greatest heroes, beginning with Adam, making them “prophets and friends of God” (Wis 7:27). But it finally came to rest in its full and complete form in Jesus Fitzmeyer, Luke I–IX, 340. Italics added. In Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia, 1963), I: 163–4. 6 7

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(Clementine Homilies, 3.20). We shall also see later on that the “True Prophet” preexisted with a female companion, “Female Prophecy,” who separated from him in order to create the material world, becoming in the process the source of the “lesser” Old Testament revelation (the “False Pericopes”). By reuniting with her Husband, their redeemed offspring would provide the bodies for Wisdom’s “spiritual seed” (Clementine Recognitions, 1.45). Yet we also note that Mark goes on to demonstrate that Jesus “knew himself to be and referred to himself as the divine Heavenly Man (or ‘Son of Man’)” who is apparently to be “identified with the celestial figure of Daniel’s vision” (Dan 7:13; Mark 8:31, 38; 9:9, 12, 31; 10:33, 45; 13:26; 14:21, 42, 62).8 R. G. Hamerton-Kelly therefore concludes that Mark contains a Christology “which uses both the Wisdom myth and the Son of Man and then relinquishes the former in favor of the latter.”9 8 Frederick C. Grant, Mark, Interpreter’s Bible, 7:642. See Mark 8:31, 38; 9:9, 12, 31; 10:33, 45; 13:26; 14:21, 41, 62. 9 Pre-Existence (Cambridge, 1973), 56; italics added. As far as the mysterious identification of Jesus and Yahweh (Mark 1:3) is concerned, Daniel’s identification of the Son of Man as the younger of two gods (Dan 7:13) closely resembles Ugaritic and Tyrian myths of the father-god, El, and his son, where the latter derives his power and authority from the older figure (see ibid., 39–40). This would agree with an early distinction between El and Yahweh in Israelite religion, making the Danielic “Son of Man” correspond to Yahweh, and the “Ancient of Days” to El. Yahweh further corresponded to Baal (the son of El) in early Israelite syncretism, where Yahweh has “Baal” as “either an alternative name or a co-god.” Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Hosea, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1980), 49. This is significant because Yahweh was generally assimilated to Baal (the Son) in the Monarchic or pre-Monarchic period (cf. Hos 2:16: “She shall no more call me ‘My Baal’”), suggesting to a number of scholars that Yahweh was originally separate from El, the Father. Otto Eissfeldt, for instance, writes that El once “enjoyed a monarchic status … superior to that of the other gods and among them Yahweh.” “El and Yahweh,” Journal of Semitic Studies 1 (1956): 29, a view also held by Helmer Ringgren in Israelite Religion (Philadelphia, 1966), 44. T. J. Meek sees this distinction preserved in Deuteronomy 32:8–9, where El Elyon assigns the leadership of the various nations to the bene ha ‘El, including Yahweh, who is given Israel as “his portion.” University of Toronto Quarterly 7 (1939): 196. See also Cyrus Gordon (addendum to Before Columbus, 4th printing, NY, 1973, 163), who claims that Yahweh-Elohim is Elohim’s son; also J. A. Emerton, “The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery,” Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1950): 242, who raises the possibility that “as late as the exile, Yahweh was subordinated to Elyon in parts of the Jerusalem cultus,” since El (or El Elyon) “was recognized as formally superior to—though not necessarily more prominent—than Yahweh” (ibid., 240). Compare also the

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The so-called “Q” source, however, apparently reconciled these two positions from the start, for it not only calls Jesus the “Son of Man,” but describes him as the special one in whom Wisdom dwells, or even as Wisdom herself. James M. Robinson thus speaks of “Q” as “a book of the Acts of Sophia,”10 and he shows that she was associated with the Son of Man “in the highest degree,” making him the “Wise Man.” Indeed, as the “Son of Man,” Jesus/Wisdom still called men to repentance, was rejected, and returned to heaven, having found no earthly dwelling place. Luke 9:58 (= Matt 8:20) likewise stresses the Son of Man’s homelessness on earth, like that of the earlier Wisdom figure (see p. 26, above). In Luke 7:33–35 (= Matt 11:18–19), Jesus and John the Baptist are both depicted as rejected envoys of Wisdom, though Jesus is on a much higher level, being also the “Son of Man.” Luke 11:31–32 (= Matt 12:38–47; cf. Luke 11:29–30) directly describes the Son of Man as the “Wise Man” and the “Prophet” who is greater than Solomon or Jonah; and Luke 13:34–35 (= Matt 23:37–39) laments over a Jerusalem which stones the “prophets,” still another reference to Wisdom and her envoys. Luke 12:10 (= Mark 12:32), on the other hand, emphasizes the “hiddenness” of the Son of Man’s authority, an authority which he ultimately derived from the Spirit—the latter being commonly identified by the rabbis with Wisdom. In short, it was possible to identify Jesus as both the one who was “filled with Wisdom” at the time of his baptism, and a preexistent heavenly being, either “Wisdom” herself or the “Son of Man,” one personally possessing the power of life and resurrection. This ability he finally demonstrated when he fulfilled his mission and was “set at the right hand of God,” and given a “name above all other names” (Heb 1). views of H. S. Nyberg and Geo Widengren, who point to Genesis 14:18–24 as evidence that early Yahwist kings recognized Melchizedec’s god, El Elyon, as superior to their own Yahweh. In time, of course, “the traits of the Father-god and El were attached to Yahweh;” Theodore Vriezen, The Religion of Ancient Israel, (London, 1967), 165, and “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in spite of the differences in the names, was identified in his essence with Yahweh” (Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh,” 28). El henceforth came to be thought of as “a revelation in the past of the God who manifested himself later by his real name of Yahweh” (Exod 6:3; see ibid., 36). Thus, whereas “El” still presides over the pantheon of bene ha ‘Elyon (Ps 82), he is now officially understood to be identical with Yahweh (Deut 6:4)—who originally had no pantheon of his own. 10 “Basic Shifts in German Theology,” Interpretation 16 (1962): 76–97, 83. In Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-existence, 24.

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Hamerton-Kelly therefore interprets the above passages as showing that “Q” in some sense already identified Wisdom with the Son of Man, “a title which probably suggested a heavenly origin for its designee,” particularly “in connection with his rejection by men.”11 Many recent scholars agree with him that both Mark and “Q” understood the “Son of Man” to be a transcendent, preexistent Being,12 a title already connected by “Q” with familiar motifs from the Wisdom tradition. Whether or not Mark began with a similar view, or subsequently brought together disparate sources describing Jesus as either “Wisdom” or the “Son of Man,” is of course impossible to answer at present, though he appears to have at least started out with an identification of Jesus and the figure of Wisdom. Other traces of a preexistence Christology (which never mention conception or birth)13 can be found in both the incarnation-Christology of John (1:1–14, 18) and the Pauline letters (Phil 2:5–7; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:15–17). Yet it is significant that these are again associated mostly with the Wisdom tradition. The Johannine passages, for example, clearly derive from descriptions of Wisdom as “Creator” and “Logos,” as does the Colossian statement that “all things” are “by him” (“What is richer than Wisdom, maker of all things?” Wis 8:5). The Philippian passage, on the other hand, merely states that Jesus was once “in the form of God” and “equal to God,” though he “emptied” himself (ekenose) of this “equality” before undertaking his earthly mission (2:6–7). Whether this is to be understood in terms of the indwelling Wisdom (Wis 3–4; 18:13),14 or some other preexistent redeemerfigure (e.g., the Son of Man, who eventually receives homage as the “Lord of spirits” and “Lord of Kings,” 1 Enoch 63),15 or even as Yahweh himself, is not clear, though it has been pointed out that the phrase “in the form of God” (en morphe theou) commonly meant in the “image of God” (eikon theou) in contemporary Hellenism (e.g., Corpus Hermeticum 1.12–14), and would Ibid., 46–47. See his general discussion of “Q,” pp. 22–47. Ibid., 34–47, summarizing the work of H. E. Tödt, The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition (Philadelphia, 1965); Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York, 1967); F. H. Borsch, The Son of Man (Philadelphia, 1967); and Morna Hooker, The Son of Man in Mark (Montreal, 1967). See also Frederick Grant, “Mark,” 642. 13 Mary in the New Testament, 90, notes. 14 See, for example, D. Georgi, “Der vorpaulinische Hymnus Phil. 2:6–11,” in Zeit und Geschichte, ed. E. Dinkler (Tübingen, 1964). In Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-existence, 165–66. 15 Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-existence, 167–68. 11 12

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probably have caused one to think of the traditional Wisdom-figure, who was God’s “mirror” and “image” (Wis 7:26), as he is in Hebrews 1:3 (“in the brightness of his glory, the express image [eikon] of his nature”; cf. Wis 7:25ff). Thus there was a great diversity of opinions concerning the exact nature of Jesus, even as they are preserved in the Church’s surviving Canon. Taking the basic fact of the Resurrection as a starting point, there was a gradual discussion and analysis of the various stages of Jesus’ life, until each was revealed as a link in the miraculous chain of events which culminated in his victory over death. In their book, Mary and the New Testament, Catholic scholars have described this evolving awareness of Christ’s true nature as “a chronological sequence in which a moment of christological understanding is moved back from the resurrection (early preaching) to the baptism and ministry (Mark) and finally to the conception (Matthew, Luke).”16 Even before that, Christ must have been the incarnation of a preexistent heavenly being (John and Paul), one whom most New Testament writers identified in some way with the Wisdom/Logos. We must therefore conclude that the earliest explanations of Jesus’ divine nature came directly from the Wisdom tradition, as in Jesus’ baptismal adoption and anointing by the “Spirit/ Wisdom.” The same tradition was also associated with the first claims of his divine preexistence, either as Yahweh, Yahweh’s “Logos-Word,” or the “Son of Man,” he who was second in command under the mysterious “Ancient of Days.”17 In all cases, however, this preexistent being was not God Page 475. See note 5, above, for reference. J. A. Emerton has argued that the Danielic “Son of Man” can have been none other than Yahweh, and that the “Ancient of Days” must have been El, the Father-god of the Canaanite/Israelite pantheon (“The Origins of the Son of Man Imagery,” 225–42). But Judaism had already begun to conflate El and Yahweh into a single “Yahweh-Elohim” (Deut 6:4), or simply “Yahweh.” N. Schmidt, “The Son of Man in the Book of Daniel,” JBL 19 (1900): 22ff, believed that one of the “One God’s” roles as “dragon-slayer” (cf. Rev 12:7ff) must have been transferred during the intertestamental period to a second divine being, the archangel Michael, while Yahweh himself remained God. Thus “(Schmidt) seems to think that Yahwe [sic] was, as it were, split into two. Yahwe proper remained God, and sat, somewhat silently, in the background, while Yahwe the slayer of the dragon was reduced to angelic status and identified with Michael” (summarized by Emerton, “Son of Man,” 239). But Emerton goes on to point out that these two new figures (Yahweh as the “Ancient of Days,” and Michael as the “Son of Man”) were not modifications of Jewish monotheism—both derived from a single “Yahweh-Elohim”—but the original form of the myth, reflecting a much older Canaanite/Israelite theology 16 17

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the Father—who never appeared directly to men—but his mediator, appearing chiefly as his agent in the Temple. Basically, then, each of the Wisdomfigures whom we have inspected so far was a mediator-figure, which helps us to explain why they were so often used as synonyms for each other.18 of a separate El and Yahweh. John J. Collins, starting from the late Maccabean account in Daniel 7, agrees with Emerton and Schmidt that during the second century B.C. the “Ancient of Days” was indeed identified as the lone “YahwehElohim,” while the “Son of Man” was thought of his “archangel” Michael. “The Son of Man and the Saints of the Most High in the Book of Daniel,” JBL 93 (1979): 50–66. Nevertheless, he too acknowledges that there must have been an earlier “Canaanite” version of the myth (ibid., 53)—presumably similar to the myth proposed by Emerton, and in which the “Son of Man” would have been the “Son of El.” His true identity was in fact verified in Acts 7:56, when Stephen saw the “Son of Man” standing at the right hand of the Father. Significantly, Paul’s theology of “One God the Father, and One Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 8:6) also marks a return to the original “Father-Son” paradigm of the Canaanites and Israelites, as does John’s “God” (ho theos, with the article) and “the Word who was God” (theos, without the article), as we read in John 1:1. Compare also Philo’s distinction between ho theos, “the God,” and his Logos, who is simply theos, “a God” (On Dreams, 1. 228). Origen makes the same distinction in his Commentary on John (7.2). 18 Other titles which were applied to Jesus included “Prophet,” either the “Spirit-filled prophet” predicted in Isaiah 61:1–2 (= Luke 4:18–19; 11:49), an unnamed prophet (Mark 6:15; 8:28; John 6:14; 7:40, 52), or the “Prophet like unto Moses” (Deut 18:15, 18 = Acts 3:22), again denoting one in whom Wisdom resided, making him a “friend of God and a prophet” (Wis 7:27), i.e., an “envoy” of Wisdom (Matt 7:24–27; Luke 7:31–35; 11:49), or Wisdom’s “teacher” (didaskalos, Greek for rabboni, “Master,” Mark 5:35; John 1:38; 20:16), all of which would have made Jesus a manifestation of some mediating figure. Yet 14 times in the Synoptic Gospels he claimed to be no less than God’s “Son” by calling him “Father,” or even “Abba” (Aramaic for “Daddy,” Mark 14:36), and he taught the disciples to do the same (Matt 6:9; Luke 11:2; Rom 8:15–16; Gal 4:6). This went beyond the figurative idea of “adoption” (cf. Exod 4:22; 2 Sam 7:14), because it brought with it an accusation of blasphemy and led to Jesus’ death (Matt 26:65–66; John 19:7). And though he was initially reticent to accept the title “Messiah”—until his true nature was vindicated (Mark 8:29–31)—he eventually admitted to being the “Anointed One” (christos = mašiah, Matt 16:16), a title which he then equated with both “Son of God” and “Son of Man” (Matt 26:63–64). Joseph A. Fitzmyer sees these last identifications as the “springboard” to the entire messianic tradition in the New Testament. “Son of David in Mt. 22:41–46,” in Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament (Missoula, 1978), 125. This was especially significant because the Jews had never expected the Messiah to be a “Son of God” in the literal sense,

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A scriptural bridge between the Jewish Wisdom tradition and Christian sophiology was the Gospel of Thomas, a work which describes Jesus in the traditional Wisdom-categories, but never as “Christ,” “Lord,” or “Son of God.”19 Stevan L. Davies has in fact made a good case for believing that this important work was actually written before the canonical Gospels, probably as early as A.D. 50–70,20 making it roughly contemporary with the Epistles of Paul. Based on extensive comparisons between Thomas and the Wisdom literature—both within and without the Church—he now argues persuasively that this important tractate, discovered in Upper Egypt around 1946, was not a “gnostic reworking” of earlier Gospel materials, as many at first supposed, but a compilation containing an independent nucleus of original material which “may be as old or even older than Q,” the source used by Synoptic Gospel writers.21 Other researchers, such as Helmut Koester, claimed as early as 1968 that Thomas was a “sayings collection … more primitive

there being no “Second God” in the monotheist’s heaven. The title “King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26–32) was also a reflection of this messianic identification, because it had widely been expected that the Messiah would be a Davidic King (2 Sam 7:13; Isa 11:1–5; John 6:15). Jesus finally connected these titles with the “Melchizedec priest” and “Son of Man” who would return “in glory” to be “seated on the right hand of God” (Matt 26:64; Mark 14:62; Luke 22:69), a prophecy which drew on Psalm 110:1–4 (“The LORD said to my Lord, sit thou on my right hand … Thou are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedec”). In Acts 7:55, the “Son of Man” is once more shown to be “Wisdom,” or God’s “glory” (cf. Wis 7:25), just as John identifies the “Son” as God’s “glory” (John 1:14; 1:41; 3:16; 3:35; 4:25; 5:26; 9:35; 11:4; 14:13; 17:1; 19:7; 20:31). Thus the Christian “Messiah/Son” is again seen to be a variation of the Jewish “Wisdom/Word.” But the Son is also said to be “Lord” (kyrios, 20:28; 1 Cor 8:6), this time pointing to Yahweh, the Old Testament kyrios. Yet all of these titles make Jesus second to the Father in importance (John 10:39; 13:16; 15:13), being the Father’s “Mediator” (14:6; 1 Tim 2:5; Heb 8:6; 9:15; 12:25). The Arians, during the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century, in fact continued to see Christ as a created being who was begotten by the Father (cf. LXX Prov 8:22–24). See also pp. 14, 26–27, above, and note 24, concerning Christ as a “Second Power” in heaven. 19 Stevan L. Davies, The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (New York, 1983), 81, 98–99. 20 Ibid., 146–47. 21 Ibid., 17.

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than the Gospels.”22 Gilles Quispel, a year later, demonstrated that it was written independently of the canonical Gospels, rather than as a Gnostic modification thereof,23 a conclusion with which Davies’ feels “most scholars now agree.”24 Finally, Kendrick Grobel has shown that little, if anything, in Thomas is Gnostic at all.25 Some who would still list Thomas among the texts of “Gnosticism” (mainly because it was discovered bound together with predominantly Gnostic works) have even theorized that its admitted lack of definite Gnostic characteristics was probably “an instrument of Gnostic propaganda designed to lure the unsuspecting away from orthodoxy and into the ranks of heresy.”26

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS AND THE CHRISTIAN WISDOM MYSTERY The genuineness of the Gospel of Thomas as an early Christian document becomes especially apparent when we compare it with elements from the Wisdom tradition which are contained in the oldest portions of the canonical New Testament. But that it is pre-Gnostic becomes evident when we compare it with the Old Testament Wisdom tradition, whose themes it perpetuates and develops in a manner consistent with the teachings of the canonical New Testament. Thomas is therefore a link between Jewish Wisdom traditions—especially those connected with the Temple—and the Christianity of the New Testament. We shall also discover that it is an important link leading to the Gnostic “Bridal Chamber” rite, as described some eighty or so years later in the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Philip and in subsequent Gnostic texts.

In James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia, 1971), 186. 23 “Gnosis and the New Sayings of Jesus,” Eranos Jahrbuch 38 (1969): 271. 24 Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 4. 25 “How Gnostic Is the Gospel of Thomas?” New Testament Studies 8 (1962): 367–73. 26 R. McLain Wilson, Studies in the Gospel of Thomas (London, 1960), 13. See also H. E. W. Turner and Hugh Montifiore, Thomas and the Evangelists (Naperville, IL, 1962), in which it is noted that “the problem … remains of a document probably compiled and obviously used by gnostics in which many of the distinctive gnostic ideas are either completely absent or left on the level of inference” (83). H. J. Schoeps also claims that Thomas goes back to the “milieu and thought-circle of ancient Jewish Christianity,” and is therefore actually anti-gnostic. “Judenchristentum und Gnosis,” in Origini dello Gnosticismo, ed. U. Bianchi (Leiden, 1967), 528. 22

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We have already noted that Stevan L. Davies has attempted to show that Thomas was written between A.D. 50 and 70. Helmut Koester, however, suggests that the basis of Thomas must have been an even earlier collection of Jesus’ sayings which taught that “the kingdom is uniquely present in Jesus’ eschatological preaching, and that eternal wisdom about man’s true self is disclosed in his words.”27 This, he concludes, must have been a “very primitive” version of “Q,” one “in which Jesus’ radicalized eschatology of the kingdom and his revelation of divine wisdom in his own words were dominant motifs.”28 In fact, he suggests that “Q” itself was a “secondary version” of this sayings collection, making Thomas the older of the two, since “Q” adds certain “apocalyptic expectations concerning the Son of Man” which are missing from Thomas.29 The inclusion of these virtually unaltered Wisdom-sayings in Thomas takes us back to the very oldest layers of Christian history, just after the death of Philo (ca. A.D. 40), who was himself a witness to the continuing existence of these Wisdom-themes in the contemporary world of Jesus (ca. A.D. 30). Davies’ careful analysis of the relationship between Thomas and the Wisdom tradition is too detailed to repeat in its entirety, but the following general points should be noted, showing how closely Thomas fits into the historical developments which we have been considering. Both the Wisdom books and Thomas begin with the premise that God’s “Wisdom” or “Word” created everything which we see, and is therefore to be found in all things, including the self. The Wisdom of Solomon declares that Wisdom “stretches in might from pole to pole and effectively orders things” (8:1). This includes the soul of man, who is a subsidiary “stream” derived from her “river” (Sir 24:30), and a “copy, fragment or ray” of her light (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 146). Deuteronomy 30:10–15 had also taught that God’s word is within us, sufficient to guide us if we will but hearken to it. Job 28:20–27, commenting on this same passage, identifies this indwelling word as “Wisdom,” but cautions that she remains hidden from most of us (cf. Prov 1:28). Baruch 3:29–4:1 adds that she descended to earth as a special gift to Jacob and admonishes his descendants to seek her diligently and to “walk toward the shining of her light.” Thomas continually speaks of this vital search for Wisdom’s hidden but ubiquitous light. Jesus, identified as Wisdom, therefore says in Logion 77: “I In Trajectories, 186. Ibid., 186; italics added. 29 Ibid., 187. 27 28

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am the Light which is above them all, I am in all things;30 all things came forth from me, and all things reached me. Cleave a piece of wood I am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there.” In a later passage, he adds that “whosoever is near me is near to the fire” (Log. 82), and he scolds the disciples for failing to recognize him: “You test the face of the sky and of the earth, and him who is before your face you have not known” (Log. 91). He therefore encourages them to diligently “Seek, and you will find” (Log. 92), for “whosoever seeks will find, and whoever knocks, it will be opened unto him” (Log. 94). By comparing the various contexts in which it appears, Davies has shown that Thomas frequently uses the word “Kingdom,” where other authors use the words “light” or “Wisdom.” “Kingdom” is therefore a synonym for the omnipresent Wisdom and her power. We accordingly read that “the Kingdom is within you and it is without you.” In fact, if you say “The Kingdom is in heaven, then the birds in heaven will precede you there” (Log. 3). In another saying, the disciples want to know when the “new world” (= Kingdom) will come; Jesus’ answer is that “What you expect has come, but you know it not” (Log. 51). Those who are unaware of it are like the woman carrying a jar full of meal. “While she was walking, the handle of the jar broke. The meal streamed out behind her on the road. She did not know it, she noticed no accident. After she came to her home, she put the jar down and found it empty” (Log. 97). The Kingdom is therefore like a “treasure hidden in a field,” unknown to its owner (Log. 109), and spread upon the earth, though unseen by men (Log. 113). The significance of these statements is twofold. First of all, men are ignorant of the omnipresent Kingdom because of their blindness—a blindness which came upon them through the Fall. This “blindness” amounts to a kind of “dualism” (not to be confused with “Gnostic dualism”) because it failed to comprehend the light which Wisdom has dispersed throughout all things (compare the Gospel of John: “And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not … He was in the world, and the world knew him not,” 1:5, 9–10). This was in fact another example of the “Homeless Wisdom,” who remained unrecognized by Israel and an “alien” in the world (p. 89, above).

See Davies’ note, Gospel of Thomas, 157, and 167, for the emendation of “the All” (a later Gnostic term) to “all things,” which is closer to the language of the Wisdom tradition. 30

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Secondly, men are unaware of their divine potential: “Adam came into existence from a great Power (dynamis), and a great wealth, but he did not become worthy of you. For if he had been worthy, he would not have tasted death” (Log. 85). Since men first came from Wisdom (cf. Wis 7:21– 29), they should realize that both the self and the world outside contain the “Kingdom,” if they would but look for it (Thomas, Log. 3, 24). One of the chief objectives of Jesus’ teaching in Thomas is therefore that of recognition. “Discovery of the light or Kingdom is made through the discovery of one’s own nature and the nature of all creation. This discovery collapses time into a unity; the present is both the beginning and end.”31 Ernst Käsemann detected a similar scheme in the Gospel of John, where the author’s Prologue “places the community … in the situation of the beginning where the Word of God came forth and called the world out of darkness into light and life. This beginning is not a past occurrence in saving history which is lost forever. It is instead a new reality eschatologically revealed … The community under the Word exists because of the place granted it in the presence of the Creator from its ever new experience of the first day of Creation in its own life.”32 Thomas further correlates this “restored paradise” and the rediscovery of one’s divine potential with the doctrine of man’s preexistence and heavenly origin (“Blessed is he who was before he came into being”; Log. 19). Thus, a “new creation” should reveal once again the original light and “images” which God transmitted to things at the time of the world’s foundation. In particular, Man’s own light still contains “the image of the light of the Father” (Log. 83). This he received through God’s creative Wisdom as a copy of the Father’s personal likeness. In fact, the whole of creation is but a copy of the heavenly world,33 as Philo had earlier explained: “If the part is an image of an image, then it is obvious that the whole is too” (On the Creation of the World, 25). This naturally includes the individual soul, within whose heavenly radiance there lies concealed the Divine Image: “If they ask you, ‘From whence have you originated?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the Light, where the Light has originated through itself. It stood and it Ibid., 78. The Testament of Jesus (Philadelphia, 1968), 53. Quoted in Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 107. 33 Compare Wis 9:8, where the author shows that the Temple was created according to a preexistent image; also Philo, On Flight and Finding, 101, which says that Wisdom (= the Logos) is herself an image of God; and On the Confusion of Tongues, 101. See Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, 187, 203–5. 31 32

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revealed itself in their image” (Log. 50).34 Rediscovery of this “image” within the radiance of the soul is tantamount to restoring men to the Kingdom as it existed at the beginning: “You shall find the Kingdom because you came from there, and you shall go there again” (Log. 49). Recognition of this hidden “treasure” (Log. 109) is of utmost importance for gaining salvation: “If they say to you, ‘Who are you?,’ say to them, ‘We are the sons and we are the elect of the Living Father” (Log. 50). This is identical to learning that “the Kingdom is within” (Log. 3), for the author adds that “If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty.” Stated in another way, one must discover the “man of light” within himself, which contains the same light which “lights up the world” (Log. 24), i.e., the “image of the Father’s light” (Log. 83)—which for Thomas is also the light of Wisdom which permeates and sustains all things (Log. 77). If one does not recognize its presence, “there is darkness.” The Wisdom of Solomon had already taught that one can become a “son of the Living Father” by discovering one’s divine origin and essential kinship with Wisdom (7:24; 8:1, 3),35 being guided in the “way of truth” by her “lamp of righteousness” (5:56).36 Such a one was said to be a “son of God” (5:5), and a “child of the Lord” (2:13), whose Father is God (2:16).37 But such a claim also depends on the fact that one was already derived from God’s Wisdom (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 146), or (as Thomas says), “as a son of God, (he) came forth from the light.”38 This realization of divine potential is also expressed in a number of other ways in Thomas. He speaks of “coming from the light” (Log. 50), of “having light within” (Log. 24), and thus of “coming to the light” (“When you come into the light, what will you do?” Log. 11). He also speaks of “coming from the Kingdom” (Log. 49), “having the Kingdom within” (Log. 3), or of “returning to the Kingdom” (Log. 49).39 Yet all such statements adhere closely to the basic theory of the Wisdom books, namely that “all persons come from Wisdom, have Wisdom within, which will allow Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 66–67. Ibid., 54–55, quoting Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, 38. 36 Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 55, 48. 37 Ibid., 48. 38 Ibid., 55; italics in the original. 39 Ibid., 56. 34 35

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them, if they utilize it, to find Wisdom,”40 who will then make them “sons of God.” (Here the parallel to the New Testament doctrine of being “begotten” as “sons of God” by the Holy Spirit—the rabbinic version of Wisdom—is clear.) Yet in Thomas one does not gain salvation solely by “knowing oneself,” or by discovering that one is “inherently divine.” Finding “light” or “Kingdom” within is in fact but the start, being a recognition of one’s potential, and the means whereby one may be led into contact with God’s divinity. We already learned that Wisdom “pervades and penetrates all things” (Wis 7:24), and that it is this inner light that enables one to find further light—even the light of God (“God can be grasped only through God, and light through light,” Philo, On Rewards and Punishments, 40). The wise man therefore begins his quest by discovering that the “Kingdom” is already within, and, guided by that, discovers the greater Kingdom which is “spread out on earth.” Thus, the first stage in Thomas is synonymous with the Old Testament tradition which von Rad calls “the self-revelation of creation,”41 in which we are constantly reminded that “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth forth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge” (Ps 19:1–2). In short, the present created world reveals to the enlightened person the presence of God’s creative Wisdom in all things, including himself: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the elohim, and hast crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps 8:3–5). This is quite different from the Gnostic idea of an evil creation, from which one withdraws after recognizing ones’s own superior nature. Instead, Thomas teaches that to “utilize one’s given internal capacity,”42 one must be led outside of the self, as well as within; then a “new world” will become visible in the midst of the old (Log. 51): “Know what is in thy sight, and what is hidden from thee will be revealed to thee. For there is nothing which will not be manifest” (Log. 5). If one is wise enough, one will even look for and find Jesus, the Author of the Kingdom, for there is but limited time in one’s short life to “search and find” (Log. 38). Indeed, the ultimate Ibid., 56. Wisdom in Israel (Nashville, 1972), 148. Quoted in Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 47. See also ibid., 46–47. 42 Ibid., 46. 40 41

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stage in Thomas is to find and have decisive union with the Source of the Kingdom in its original completeness and purity, i.e., “Jesus-Wisdom.” The initial intent of God at the time of Creation will then have been realized, and all things will be reunited with the One who “lights up the world” (Log. 22–24).43 This reunion with one’s true “Source” is what most elevates the message of Thomas above a mere philosophical accommodation to Wisdom’s “presence in all things.” In Logion 18, for instance, Jesus asks the following question, which contains a cleverly guarded reference to himself: “Have you then discovered the beginning (archē),44 so that you inquire about the end?” He then goes on to explain that “where the beginning is, there shall be the end. Blessed is he who shall stand at the beginning, and he shall not taste death.” It is significant that the Coptic translator has throughout retained the well-known Septuagint word for “beginning,” rather than using a Coptic equivalent (as he does in the case of “end”). Thus, it would appear that he wishes to emphasize not merely a return to the individual’s own beginning, but to the traditional Old Testament “Source of all things”—the preexistent Wisdom—who was God’s own companion, and the archē of his ways (Prov 8:22 LXX). Reunion with him will then be a “non-verbal, ritual experience of transformation,”45 which brings about a restoration of man’s “prelapsarian Paradise”46 and the conditions of a “new creation”: They said to Him: Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female … then shall you enter the Kingdom (Log. 22).

This is perhaps the oldest known example in the Christian literature of a statement which we shall also encounter in 2 Clement (written ca. A.D. 140):

43 Compare Ephesians 1:10 and Colossians 1:19–20, where all must be gathered into “one” so that Christ can reign within all. 44 We shall later take up the tradtion of Jesus as the First Day of Creation (archē) according to the Hexaemeron doctrine. See “The Great Mystery and the Preexistent Church,” below. 45 Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 61. 46 Ibid., 59.

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“When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female, neither male nor female” (ch. 12).47

This appears to be a restatement of Philo’s becoming “neither male nor female” (On the Creation of the World, 134), or the restoration of man’s archetypal “maleness” through union with Wisdom (pp. 47–48, above). In Logion 114, the author further refers to the Philonic doctrine of “becoming male,” when he says, “See, I shall lead her, so that I will make her male, that she too may become a living Spirit (pneuma), resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” According to the last passage, the initiate who becomes “one” with Jesus actually becomes what Jesus is, namely, a “living Spirit” (cf. 1 Cor 15:45; Rom 8:9–11). Thus we are informed that those who become “the same” will “be filled with light,” while those who remain “divided” will be “filled with darkness” (Log. 61). In Logia 16 and 75, “the same” are also called “Unitaries” (monachoi), i.e., those who “stand as a single One” (Log. 23), thus sharing the light that “lights up the whole world” (Log. 24). Union with Jesus further “begets” divine sonship, through the sharing of Jesus’ miraculous power: “When you make the two one, you shall be sons of Man, and when you say, ‘Mountain, be moved,’ it will be moved” (Log. 106, our emphasis). Behind this divine “begetting” we recognize once again what E. R. Goodenough called the “Sacred Marriage with Wisdom,” or the “Mystery of the Holy of Holies” (p. 38, above), for Thomas describes the event as a nuptial union in a “Bridal Chamber” (numphon), with Jesus as the “Bridegroom” (numphios). While the “Bridegroom” is yet with the disciples, there is reason for rejoicing; “but when the Bridegroom comes out of the Bridal Chamber, then let us fast and pray” (Log. 104). The same Logion occurs in Matt 9:14–15 (= Mark 2:18–20 = Luke 5:33–35), where the disciples are referred to as “sons of the Bridal Chamber” (huioi tou numphonos), an obvious Semiticism whose ordinary meaning is “affiliation” or “cultic association.”48 The only possible explanation for this This explains why Clement says that “the Books” already contained this information (14), implying that the idea was considered to have been “canonical” by him. 48 “Sons of” in Semitic expresses “origin” or “formal terms of relationship.” Eduard Lohse, “huios, huiothesia,” in TDNT, 8:345, 365, defines it as a reference to “the member of a society, group or fellowship.” It also describes those having a common origin, or those “sharing a nature, or quality or fate” (ibid., 346). Thus, “sons of the Bridal Chamber” indicates that the disciples owe their peculiar status vis-à-vis Jesus to the Bridal Chamber. 47

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cryptic expression in the present context is that of the unique relationship which exists between Jesus and the disciples, and which originated in a “Bridal Chamber.” Commentators have long puzzled over the meaning of huioi tou numphonos,49 but in light of what we now know about the mystery of man’s union with Wisdom in the Temple, it appears that the “Bridal Chamber” to which Jesus referred was none other than the Jerusalem Holy of Holies, and that the cultic action which was imagined to take place there was the source of the disciples’ “sonship” or “cultic affiliation” with him. We have already seen that Philo described those having union with Wisdom in the Temple as mystae, i.e., “initiates into the holiest of mysteries” (p. 62, above). It is therefore significant that Jesus refers to his relationship with the disciples as a “mystery” (Log. 62), one which is to be kept from the ears of the profane: “Jesus said, I tell my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries.” He further cautions them to “Give not what is holy to the dogs, lest they cast it upon the dung-heap” (Log. 93). This sacred “mystery” obviously possessed sacramental or redemptive value, as we learn from Jesus’ added reference to a heavenly Bridal Chamber, whose access will be closed to all but those who become “Solitaries” or “Unitaries” in the present Bridal Chamber (cf. Log. 104): “Many are standing at the door, but the Solitaries are the ones who will enter into the Bridal Chamber” (i.e., the one above; Log. 75). That the earthly Holy of Holies was indeed thought to be a “figure” of a heavenly “Bridal Chamber” is clearly stated in Heb 9:24: “For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true, but into heaven itself.” (Compare also 8:5, which refers to the priests who presently “serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things.”) Thus, we must conclude that what was hoped for in the world to come needed to be performed symbolically in the earthly cult-center before it could become a reality in the eternal (cf. Matt 16:19). Specific details of the ritual in the earthly “Bridal Chamber” are few, but Thomas gives us the following glimpse of how the “male and the female” were made into a “single One”:

49 The translation of huioi tou numphonos as “Wedding Guests” (RSV) is evidently based on its use in b. Sukka 25b; but it makes no sense when used of those being married to the Savior. “Groomsmen” (Interpreter’s Bible, 8:l–3), or “close friends of the bridegroom” (ibid., 7:675–76), are mere guesses, and fit even less within the context of the Christian nuptial myth.

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When you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image (eikon) in the place of an image, then shall you enter the Kingdom (Log. 22).

This bringing together of the various members of the body “eye to eye” and “hand to hand,” etc., appears to have been a kind of ritual embrace, patterned after the “face to face” embrace of the Cherubim (p. 17, above). Its purpose was to cause the image within the initiate to merge with the Image borne by Jesus-Wisdom—God’s own Image. Thus the Divine Image which God bestowed on the Primal Adam (Gen 1:27) was restored in its completeness and perfection to the initiate. This would have been especially meaningful to those early Christians who in some sense identified the “Bridegroom” Jesus with Yahweh, the original Creator of Man (John 1:3; 1 Cor 8:6; 2 Cor 4:6; Eph 3:9; Heb 1:2–3).50 The Christianized version of this embrace seems to have included a ritual kiss, as we learn from the following saying of Jesus: “Whosoever drinks from my mouth shall become as I am, and I myself shall become he, and the hidden things shall be revealed to him” (Log. 108). Such a “ceremonial kiss” may have been the original model for the “agape-kiss” which Primitive Christians exchanged as a sign of solidarity and brotherly esteem (1 Thess 5:26; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; Rom 16:16; 1 Pet 5:14). The Odes of Solomon—which James H. Charlesworth has recently identified as a JewishChristian “hymn-book” from between A.D. 70 and 10051—specifically mentions such a kiss which the worshipper is said to have received from Jesus: “And Immortal Life embraced me and kissed me. From that is the Most commentators admit that the source of the New Testament nuptial myth are Old Testament passages describing the marriage of Yahweh and Israel. R. A. Batey, for example, begins his New Testament Nuptial Imagery (Leiden, 1972) by stating that “the New Testament writers build upon the Old Testament and rabbinic figure of Israel as the wife of Yahweh” (1). Paul’s “betrothal figure,” he adds, was an apocalyptic “modification of the Old Testament image of Israel as the wife of Yahweh” (15). R. M. Grant also believes that “Christ has taken the place of God at Sinai, (and) the apostle (Paul) has assumed the role of Moses (as ‘marriage broker’).” “The Mystery of Marriage in the Gospel of Philip,” VC 15 (1961): 130. Christ’s title of “Bridegroom” (Matt 25; John 3:29: etc.) must also have been drawn from Old Testament passages such as Isaiah 61:10 and 62:5, which describe Yahweh’s marital relationship with Israel as that of “Bridegroom” and “Bride,” or numerous others describing him as the “Husband” of his People. 51 “The Odes of Solomon—Not Gnostic,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 31 (1969): 369. 50

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Spirit which is within me” (28:7–8). The Nag Hammadi Gospel of Philip further informs us that the Savior’s kiss was passed from mouth to mouth amongst the members of the Congregation, thus spreading his grace and “begetting” power in all: “Those who are begotten by Him … are nourished … from the mouth, because if the word had gone out from the mouth it would be nourished from the mouth and it would become perfect. For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth. For that reason, we also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace which is in each other” (58:28–59:6). The Tripartite Tractate from the same library makes the similar statement that “His offspring … like kisses came forth from the Son and the Father … because of the multitude of those who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity” (58:19–20).

THE NEW TESTAMENT WISDOM MYSTERY We have already seen how various New Testament writers depicted Jesus as the “envoy” of Wisdom, or even as “Wisdom” herself (pp. 85–94, above). Paul thus refers to Christ as the “Wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24), a figure whom Luke and Matthew would also identify with Jesus, when he prophesied concerning his approaching death (Luke 11:49; Matt 23:34). The intertestamentel figure of “Wisdom,” moreover, had been a “Companion” and “Bride” of God (Prov 8:22–31; Wis 8:3), hence was “initiate in his Wisdom” (8:4), and the one who reflected God’s glory to her “wooers” (Sir 51:13–30; Wis 7:25–28; 8:13–16). In the same way, Jesus/Wisdom was empowered preexistently with the Father’s glory (John 17:5; Phil 2:6), a glory which “he”52 now offered to share with his disciples through a “Sacred Marriage”:

52 This “sex-change” need not disturb us, since we know that the memory of various lesser gods from the ancient Israelite pantheon went into the personification of “Wisdom,” chiefly that of God’s “Executive Son,” but also that of certain goddesses who were called “Wisdom” (pp. 26–28, above). “Wisdom,” moreover, was a feminine noun in both Hebrew and Greek; therefore it was natural to refer to “her” as a feminine hypostasis, whereas dabar and logos (Hebrew and Greek for “Word”) were both masculine nouns. It should further be recalled that the Danielic “Son of Man” was probably El’s satrap, Yahweh (note 17, p. 91 above). Thus Jesus/Yahweh (as either “Word” or “Son of Man”) would have been a masculine figure, who appeared directly as the Church’s “Bridegroom,” rather than his surrogate, the feminine “Wisdom.”

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My brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God (Rom 7:4). For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ (2 Cor 11:2). Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church (Eph 5:26–32).

The latter quotation from Ephesians (written ca. A.D. 62, if it is genuinely Pauline, and between 70–90, if it is not) is still very close to the passage from the Gospel of Thomas (p. 103, above), describing the unifying embrace of Jesus and the disciples, just prior to the latters’ entry into the Kingdom: Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These children who are being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom. They said to Him: Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female (not) be female, when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image (eikon) in the place of an image (eikon), then shall you enter the Kingdom (Log. 22).53 53 This appears to be similar to the life-giving sacred embraces which Elijah and Elisha bestowed on a “Widow’s Son” in 1 and 2 Kings: “And he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him again. And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived” (1 Kgs 17:20–21); “And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and he stretched himself

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Thomas’s “making the two one” is equivalent to Paul’s “becoming one flesh” in the Ephesian “Great Mystery.” Paul elsewhere explains the real meaning of becoming “one flesh” as follows: Know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit (1 Cor 6:16–17; our emphasis).

This short passage is one of the major keys to a correct understanding of New Testament soteriology, yet one which is frequently overlooked by those who are interested solely in homiletics. But it is also the gist of John’s important process of spiritual henosis (“becoming one): Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me (John 17:20–21).

For as John goes on to explain, the chief purpose for establishing a state of spiritual oneness between God and Man is so that God’s perfection and attributes might be shared directly with his disciples: And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me (John 17:22–23).

Such oneness was often referred to by Peter and Paul as koinonia (“fellowship, coparticipation”) with the Divine (1 Cor 1:9; 2 Cor 13:14; Phil 2:1; upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm” (2 Kgs 4:34). It is significant that the LXX later added the fact that Elijah “breathed into the boy,” just as God “breathed the breath of life into man’s nostrils” at the time of creation (Gen 2:7). Paul also used such an embrace to revive the dead Eutychus in Acts 20:9–10: “And Paul went down, and fell upon him, and embracing him said, Trouble not yourselves, for his life is in him.” It is very likely that a memory of this ancient embrace survived in the Masonic “Third Degree” and its life-giving “Five Points of Fellowship”: “Foot to foot teaches that we will not hesitate to go on foot and aid and succor a needy brother. Knee to knee teaches that we will ever remember a Brother’s welfare … Breast to breast that we will ever keep a Brother’s secrets ... Hand to hand that we will ever be ready to stretch forth our hand and support a falling brother. Cheek to cheek, or mouth to mouth, that we will ever whisper good counsel in the ear of a Brother.” Robert Morris, The Poetry of Freemasonry (Chicago, 1895); our italics. See also the Sacred Embrace in Joseph and Aseneth, pp. 179–80, below.

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2 Pet 1:4)—even koinonia with the divine suffering (1 Cor 10:16; Phil 3:10). Indeed, this is how Jesus explained the source of his divine power, a power which he received by means of perfect henosis with the Father: The Father and I are one ( John 10:30). Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me (John 14:10–11).

This is, of course, utterly different than the fourth century theory of Trinitarianism, which asserts that the Father and Son consist of one and the same substance (homoousios). Scripture instead teaches that a “fulness of the Father’s Godhood” came to dwell in the Son by means of the Father’s Spirit: For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead (plērōma tēs theotetos) bodily (somatikos,54 Col 2:9). For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God, so measureless is the gift of the Spirit to him (John 3:34, partly NEB).

This important difference, which separates the Church’s original Christology from its later Trinitarian theology, is further emphasized by the fact that this same divine presence may come to dwell in men: And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter … even the Spirit of truth … At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you (John 14:16–17, 20). That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us (John 17:21).

Indeed, it is through the Holy Spirit that men too can be “indwelt” by the Father (1 John 4:2; Phil 2:13). Their resulting spiritual oneness is frequently referred to by Paul as being “in the Spirit” (Rom 8:9; Gal 5:25; etc.), and by means of the Spirit, “in Christ” (“in the Lord,” “in him,” etc.). But he who is “in the Spirit” and “in Christ” is also “in the Father” (en theo), i.e., part of an ontic corporeity, created by pneumatic participation in the Father’s Divine Nature: Ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father. (1 John 1:24). 54 somatikos, i.e., “in reality, not symbolically” (Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich, Greek-English Lexikon, s.v.).

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Sharing the Father’s Divine Nature thus creates a spiritual continuum which links its many members together as one and bestows the attributes of the Whole upon the Parts: For the fullness of godhood lives in Christ … and you have been given full life in union with him (Col 2:9–10, partly Good News Bible). Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature (“the very being of God,” theas physeos, NEB), having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust (2 Pet 1:4).

There is in fact but one “Divine Nature” or “Fulness of Godhood,” which is pneumatically bestowed by the Father on his divine Sons. This is undoubtedly how Christ became the “Creator of all things” (John 1:1–3), having been made “like God” (en morphe theou) and “equal to God” (isa theo, Phil 2:6). And just before the Crucifixion, the man Jesus prayed that the Father would reinvest him with this divine authority and power, “reenveloping” him, as it were, “in the Father’s own presence” (KJV, “with thine own self”): Father, glorify thou me with thine own self (para seauto)55 with the glory which I had with thee before the world was (John 17:5).

Yet Jesus still confessed that “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), for his divine qualities were derived solely from the indwelling presence of the Father (John 14:10), though they were “perfected” in him through strict obedience to the Father’s will: And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God (Matt 19:17; Mark 10:18). Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him (Heb 5:8–9).

55 Actually “in thy own presence” (NEB). Para implies “spatial proximity,” as was the case in Philo’s Questions on Exodus, 2.40: “Come up to me … where there is no place but God,” and “become divinized.” This reminds us again of Philo’s claim in the same book (2:39–40) that one who is enveloped in God’s presence may also be filled with God, and made one with him—even divinized (pp. 61–62, 67, above).

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Luke’s Gospel in fact claims that everything Jesus was had resulted from his becoming endowed with God’s Spirit, just as Isaiah had prophesied: And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:17–19). The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified (Isa 61:1–3).

Luke in fact believed that Jesus’ “endowment of Spirit” came upon him at the time of his begetting, just as man’s “rebirth” comes upon him through the “begetting” of the Spirit: And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God (Luke 1:35; cf. Matt 1:18). Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (John 3:5–6).

According to Paul, this “spiritual endowment” would eventually include all of the Father’s fulness: And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God (pan to plērōma to theou, Eph 3:19).

In the process, the Spirit would fill the believer with God’s own glory, transforming him step by step into the “image of the Lord”: But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor 3:18).

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These “steps” in glorification became known in Patristic writings as the “Three Degrees of Glory” (Papias, Relics of the Elders, 5; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.36.2; Clement, Miscellanies, 6.14; etc.), supported by New Testament passages like 1 Cor 14:41 and Matt 13:8, 23. The language of the Jewish Wisdom mystery is also still much in evidence, for the expression, “as in a glass,” again refers to Wisdom’s traditional function as the “mirror” (mar’ah) who reflects God’s glory to the recipient (pp. 59–60, above). That Paul employed this “mystery” language deliberately was suggested by Richard Reitzenstein, who pointed out that the expression metamorphoumetha (“we are transformed into his Image”) was widely used by contemporary mystery writers, who believed that the essential substance of the soul contains the same light as God’s glory56 and that a vision of God would transfer a fulness of that glory to the beholder, thereby effecting his “transfiguration.” Paul elsewhere describes this “transfiguration” as being “fashioned like (summorphon) unto his glorious body” (Phil 3:21), or being “conformed (summorphon) to the image of his Son (eikonos tou huiou theou)” (Rom 8:29),57 meaning that God was preparing a heavenly body for the initiate, which he would receive when he rose in the Resurrection (1 Cor 15:44): And yet that celestial body already exists in him in a certain sense, because he has received the earnest of the Spirit.58 Since he has seen reflected with unveiled face the Face of God, he experiences that “bodiless body” (soma asomatou)—as the Hellenistic mysteries called this mirror image of the heavenly in the earthly—or the transfiguration (metamorphosis) from one glorification to another; the Spirit (pneuma) accomplishes that.59

Again, the “beholding of God” (thea theou) is said to impart the Spirit and to produce its mystical effect on the recipient,60 with the result that the soul “partakes” of the visible “effluence of God” (aporroiai theou; Wis 7:25). The soul thus takes on the “form of God” (morphe theou), because God himself has pneumatically entered the person.61 This is tantamount to mystical “knowledge” (gnosis), during which one is filled with and becomes one with Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen (Leipzig, 1927), 264. Ibid., 357. 58 Cf. Ephesians 1:13–14; 4:30. 59 Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterireligion, 77. 60 Ibid., 358. 61 Ibid., 358. 56 57

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the very “Spirit” or “Soul” (nous) that animates Creation,62 as Plato himself once observed: Then bursts upon him the wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for … subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same inevitable whole (Symposium 210e–211b).63

Just where this mystical experience took place we are never told, though its Philonic analogs were specifically connected with the Jerusalem Temple. It will of course be obvious that Jesus could hardly have introduced new forms of worship into that edifice while it was still controlled by the Jews. Nor is there any evidence that a personal embrace or kiss—such as we described earlier (pp. 103–4, above)—was ever part of Jewish Temple ritual.64 Both must therefore have been instituted and practiced away from the Temple as Christian innovations, probably by Jesus himself (Matt 17:1 = Mark 9:2). There is in fact a mysterious incident recorded near the end of

Ibid., 290. Reitzenstein offers a parallel account from the mystery of Apuleius: “Apuleius enters in hand with the High Priest into the Holy of Holies, into the actual consecration, of which he betrays only this, that he has passed over the threshold of the world of the dead, and has returned home to the light, having borne (or wandered through) all of the physical elements. Out of the midnight darkness, the blazing sun has burst through; he has beheld the gods of the underworld and of heaven, and has petitioned the latter in their actual presence … When morning comes, he is clothed in the Garment of Heaven … and placed on a pedestal before the goddess as an embodiment of the Sun-god, and honored by the reassembled congregation as a god” (ibid., 42). 64 Robert M. Grant, in attempting to find a Jewish precedent for the kiss, writes as follows: “Should we wish to trace this practice back behind Christianity we should encounter a great deal of difficulty. Many later commentators cite passages in Philo’s Questions on Exodus which in their opinion proved that it came from the synagogue. Now that we have seen Ralph Marcus’s translations of these passages, we can see that they have nothing to do with the subject. There is no evidence for a Jewish origin of the practice. Perhaps, as Hoffmann suggests, it was a unique contribution made by the Christian Church itself” (“The Mystery of Marriage,” 139. On the other hand, the pattern for the “embrace” described in Logion 22 of Thomas was already to be found in the embrace of the Cherubim in the Temple. 62 63

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Mark which may actually depict his methods of working, as he practiced the “mystery of the Kingdom” with the disciples in private: And there followed him a certain young man having a linen cloth cast about his naked body, and the young men (who had come to arrest Jesus) laid hold of him, and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked (Mark 14:51–52).

Morton Smith, a well-known historian dealing with the period, has attempted to connect this episode with a recently discovered fragment of a letter written by Clement of Alexandria, containing additional verses which are alleged to have once followed Mark 10:34 as part of an “expanded version” of Mark, describing the raising of Lazarus in the following manner: And going hence, Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him, and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came to the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus told him what to do, and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God.65

Though most scholars reject Smith’s speculation as to what the mystery itself might have been,66 it is generally agreed that the fragment was actually written by Clement (A.D. 150–215), and that it is a part of an apocryphal version of Mark which circulated during the early second century. Thus it may contain genuine recollections of Jesus’ methods of working with his disciples, especially since it adds nothing of dubious value to what is already contained in Mark 14. 65 Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel (New York, 1973), 16–17. His scholarly arguments are laid out in much greater detail in Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA, 1973). 66 He argues that it describes the “esoteric baptism of certain disciples, singly and at night, perhaps with erotic aspects” (V. P. Furnish, “Mark, Secret Gospel of,” in IDB, 5:573). Smith himself speculates that the mystery involved “ancient erotic magic, by which (Jesus’) followers were enabled … to eat his body and drink his blood and be joined with him, not only because possessed by his Spirit, but also in physical union” (The Secret Gospel, 140). Though the suggested homosexual activity is highly suspect, Smith may just have caught a glimpse of the truth, namely, that Jesus’ union with his disciples was a nuptial union of sorts.

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Nevertheless, the disciples “continued daily in the Temple,” even after the Resurrection (Luke 24:53; Acts 2:46; 3:1–3); Paul likewise attended the ordinary Temple feasts (Acts 20:16; 26:21) and performed the necessary purifications in preparation for them (Acts 21:26). Thus it must be concluded that the Temple still held its traditional significance for the first Christians, except that its promises of union with God’s Wisdom were about to be fulfilled by the “Lord of the Temple” in person (Mal 3:1; Matt 9:2). Indeed, he had just disclosed his identity to the apostles on a “mountain apart” (Matt 17:1; Mark 9:2), an act which was necessary until such time as he could physically claim his House from the Jews. But its Holy of Holies was still the promised “Bridechamber” in which the “Bridegroom” of Israel would claim his “Bride” (John 3:29; Matt 9:15). The anticipated “Wedding Feast” (Matt 22:1–14; Luke 12:36; 14:7–11) was in fact still adumbrated there by the Embracing Cherubim (Heb 9:5. cf. b. Yoma 54a), and the “Marriage of the Lamb” to which they referred would soon take place in its heavenly counterpart (Rev 19:7–9; 21:2). Just how the disciples understood the everyday rites of the Jewish Temple67 is further hinted at in various of Paul’s epistles. In 2 Corinthians, for example, he speaks of having “ascended” to the third of the Three Heavens,68 where he heard words which he was forbidden to repeat (12:1– 4). Alan Segal has recently demonstrated that this is early evidence of a rite which medieval Kabbalists would call the “ascent to the Merkabah” (Throne of God), recapturing Isaiah’s experience in the Temple (Isa 6).69 This is undoubtedly where Paul believed that he too had been spiritually “transformed into the image of the Lord” while “beholding God’s glory” (2 Cor 3:18), and where believers would one day receive a totality of God’s fulness (Eph 3:19; Col 2:9–10). Even Jesus had promised that those of his disciples who were “pure in heart” would “see God” (Matt 5:8), a vision which traditionally belonged to the Temple (Ps 24:3–6).70 The most complete New Testament conception of the Christian Temple cultus is found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which for years was ascribed to Paul, but which is now considered to be the product of some 67 Compare Philo’s “higher” understanding of the “everyday rites” of the Temple, pp. 51–52, above. 68 Jean Daniélou, Theology of Jewish Christianity (London, 1964), 15, 174–79. 69 Paul the Convert (New Haven, 1990), 34–71. 70 The Masoretic reading, “Face (or Presence, panim) of Jacob” in fact refers to “the Face of the God of Jacob,” as the LXX translation verifies. See Mitchell Dahood, Psalms I, Anchor Bible (Garden City, 1965), 152.

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“Deutero-Pauline” author or school. Yet its considerable differences from the authenticated writings of Paul may possibly be explained by the fact that its author is discussing a very limited subject, one concerned with providing a context for Christianity’s continuing belief in the authority of the Temple, rather than with the usual Pauline problems of faith and the Law. Significantly, in the letter to the Hebrews we are immediately plunged into a Wisdom milieu, for it begins by describing Jesus as “the brightness of (God’s) glory and the express image of his person.” This of course reminds us that the Jewish “Wisdom” was also an “unblemished mirror of the active power of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wis 7:26). But the author also recognizes the mysterious Cherubim in the Holy of Holies, “concerning which things,” he says. “this is not the proper time to speak in detail” (Heb 9:5; see p. 5, above). The sevenfold contents of the Adyton (pp. 56–58, above) are again enumerated, this time including the golden censer, the ark, the pot of manna, Aaron’s rod, the tables of the law, and the two Cherubim. The continuing prohibition against “speaking out the sacred mysteries to the uninitiated” (Philo) is still apparent, explaining why the New Testament never discusses these ritual objects with any specificity. We will in fact read little more about them in any source until after the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jews, which seems to have released later commentators from their punctilious observance of secrecy. Nevertheless, the veiled reference in Hebrews to what the Talmudists would speak of openly (b. Yoma 54a; Baba Batra 99a) indicates the kind of reverence which our Christian author still felt for the Temple and its secret symbols. It has thus far been impossible to determine the real author of Hebrews, but he appears to have been a second generation Christian (Heb 2:3), and one well acquainted with the allegorical language of Hellenism. In fact, the whole epistle is a commentary in “Philonic” fashion on the Temple Cult, with special emphasis on the ancient priesthood of Melchizedec and its new High Priest, Jesus (Ps 110; Gen 14). In contrast to the “carnal ordinances” of the Aaronic priesthood (Heb 9:10), he alone has restored the priesthood which brings eternal life to the world (7:17). The dating of Hebrews has been fixed anywhere between the years just prior to the destruction of the Temple (A.D. 70) and the year 95, when Clement of Rome quoted from it. Reminiscent of Stephen’s view of the Jewish cult’s obsolescence (Acts 7:44–50), it suggests that the older sacrifices were now in question, since they could never open the veil (Heb 9:8) or allow the Israelites to pass through to their “heavenly Rest” (3:18). But Jesus had now entered “into heaven itself” (9:24), and he would take his

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followers with him (10:19–20), giving the Temple a newly “spiritualized” and “cosmic” value. Nevertheless, the traditional address of the Epistle, “To the Hebrews” (dating from at least the last quarter of the second century), indicates that its readers were still thought of as “Temple pilgrims,” for the best explanation of the enigmatic title is still the one advanced by Carl Siegfried over a century ago,71 i.e., participants in a spiritualizing Temple-cult, who saw themselves as Abraham’s heirs, and who were engaging in a cultic “journey” through the wilderness in search of God.72 This is in fact how the Epistle views its See p. 42 above. Ernst Käsemann, Das wandernde Gottesvolk (Göttingen, 1961), 27, explains that “cultic thought plays a greater role in Hebrews than an any other New Testament writing.” As it moves towards 12:18ff, the entire action is conceived as a “cultic assembly” approaching Mt. Sinai to receive a living theophany (cf. Philo, On the Decalogue, 44). “Ye are come unto (proseleluthate) Mt. Sion” (Heb 11:22) indicates that the entire “cultic assembly” is drawing near (proserchesthai), just “as the High Priest approaches the altar, to perform the sacrifice” (30–31). The verb proserchomai has the same cultic meaning throughout Hebrews (10:1, 22; 11:6; 4:16; 7:25) (ibid., 31). The word “proselyte” (from the perfect form of proserchomai) has the equivalent cultic force in contemporary Hellenism. It occurs in the Isis-cult, for instance, as a technical expression for those forming an association with the Temple (Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 11:26); the Latin translation, advena (= religiosus, therepeutes), means “one who has crossed over, approached” and become a “pious worshipper” (see Reitzenstein, Hellenistische Mysterienreligionen, 19, 193–94). A synonym for “Hebrew” is Proselutos; Abraham was considered such before the completion of his migration to a new existence to be “suckled by the breasts of Sarah” (Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 5:291; 1:263), i.e., Philo’s symbol for “Wisdom” (Questions on Genesis, 4.110– 46). (Compare the Odes of Solomon, 19, which speaks of being fed with milk from the “breasts of God.”) The Zohar considered the gerim (= proselutoi) to be “wanderers” approaching Mt. Sinai to participate in the mystery of Shekhinah, i.e., the Sacred Marriage. The proselutoi in LXX Leviticus 19:34 (“you were strangers in the land of Egypt”) were also wanderers lost in the material world, who had yet to be circumcised and enter the covenant ceremony on Sinai (quoted in M. H. Pope, “Proselyte,” in Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 3:927–8). These were indeed identical with the “cultic wanderers” which Hellenistic Jews appear to have understood by the term Hebraioi (see p. 43, above). Philo (On the Migration of Abraham, 20–23) explains that Abraham was the first “Hebrew” because he was the first “pilgrim” in search of the true God, and the prototype of all true “Hebrews” in the Hellenistic Temple Mystery. His spiritual seed in the Epistle to the Hebrews (2:10; 11:18) are still called “aliens and pilgrims” (xenoi kai parepidēmoi) in search of a heavenly goal (11:13). First Peter 1:1 also uses the term parepidēmoi (KJV “strangers”) to refer to the whole 71 72

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readers, who as the New Israel had “progressed” as far as the veil of the Temple, and are now ready to follow Jesus, the new High Priest, into the Holy of Holies and the presence of God (9:8; 10:19–20; 12:22–24). In the words of R. M. Grant, the writer sees the Church as “the new people of God … on a pilgrimage towards the promised land … a heavenly abode into which Jesus, after offering himself once and for all, had entered.”73 It would be wrong, however, to suppose that a “spiritual” exegesis such as this invalidated the need for a literal Temple, any more than Philo’s “allegories” invalidated the Temple cultus during his own lifetime. Indeed, the author acknowledges that there were still “priests who offer gifts according to the Law, and who serve as the copies (hypodeigmati) and shadows (skia) of the heavenly reality” (Heb 8:4–5), for they continued to enter the “holy places made with hands,” which “are antitypes (antitypa) of the true” (9:24; cf. 8:4). Thus for him, the Jerusalem Temple appears to have remained a functioning symbol of the heavenly Holy of Holies,74 hence service therein was a living metaphor for the service which Christ was performing in the actual presence of God. Christians could now enter heaven together with Christ, i.e., “through the veil, that is, his flesh (dia tou katapetesmatos, tout’ esti, tes sarkos)” (Heb 10:20). This point is very crucial. Traditionally, no one had been allowed to enter the Holy of Holies except the High Priest. The author of Hebrews, however, in order to preserve as much of the existing Temple symbolism as possible, seized upon the ingenious device of allegorizing the “veil” as Christ’s own flesh, so that the initiate who “puts on Christ” (cf. 2 Cor 6:15; Gal 3:28) penetrates the curtain in union with him. This is essentially the same argument advanced by Paul in Romans (3:25), where Christ is the “place” where man and God are “reconciled,” i.e., the new hilasterion (“mercy seat”).75

Church as it was dispersed through Asia Minor; Eusebius resubstitutes Hebraioi for parepidēmoi when he describes this Petrine epistle (Church History, 111.4.2). 73 A Historic Introduction to the New Testament (New York, 1972), 219. 74 Compare Matthew 16:19: “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven.” 75 T. W. Manson notes that for Paul, Jesus personally became the new “Mercy Seat” (“whom God hath set forth to be a hilasterion through faith in his blood”), i.e., “the place where God shows mercy to men.” “HILASTERION,” Journal of Theological Studies 46 (1945): 1–10. This undoubtedly refers to Jesus’ own body, in which Christians claim to have union with God.

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In the present case, however, the hilasterion is replaced by the “veil,” which (like Wisdom’s “limit” or horos), regulates all movement between the upper and lower worlds.76 A variation of the same idea can also be seen in the early third century Excerpta ex Theodoto, 26:1–2, which states that one must put on the “Name of the Son,” who is “the Door,” before entering the Holy of Holies. Since the “Door” was Christ’s “flesh,” it would appear that the “Name” was a symbol of sacrifice and the candidate’s willingness to emulate it, which is why Paul insisted that he bore the marks of the Crucifixion on his own body: If we suffer with him … we may also be glorified together (Rom 8:17). I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live (Gal 2:20). That I might have the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to is death … that I might attain the resurrection of the dead (Phil 3:10–11). Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body (2 Cor 4:10). From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus. (Gal 6:17).

The author of Hebrews—whoever he was—repeats essentially the same explanation: It was clearly fitting that God … in bringing many sons to glory, make the leader who delivers them perfect through suffering … For since he himself has passed the test of suffering, he is able to help them who are meeting their test now (Heb 2:10, 18, NEB).

Thus, to enter the Holy of Holies “by the blood of Jesus … by his flesh” meant that one must “die” with Christ in order to live with him (cf. Rom 6:8). In this way, the Embracing Cherubim might also have symbolized

76 As “wife” and “receptive principle,” Wisdom is the one who receives and passes on the flow of divine “images” from above. Like the Cherubim—to which Philo likens her—she stands at the “limit” (horos) between the divine world and the cosmos, “regulating” (dioikei) all movement between the upper and lower worlds. Compare Wisdom 7:24; 8:1, 3; see David Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, 60, 190; also E. R. Goodenough, By Light, Light (New Haven, 1935), 25.

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God’s selfless love for Israel, or the sacrificial devotion that unites the whole membership of Christ’s “Flesh,” i.e., the Church.77 The idea that Christ is the “Door” through which one enters heaven had widespread currency in the early Church. Strack and Billerbeck (Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 1:458) see a reference to it already in Matthew 7:7 (“Knock, and it shall be opened unto you”). John 10:7–9 also claims that Christ is the “Door of the sheep”; and Matthew 7:13–14 directs the believer to “enter in at the strait gate which leads unto life.” Carsten Colpe (in TDNT, 8:473) and Joachim Jeremias (in ibid., 3:179) both see Psalm 118:19–20 as the ultimate source of these images: “Open to me the gates of righteousness; I will go in there, and I will praise the Lord; the gate of the Lord into which the righteous shall enter.” Modern commentators understand this to refer specifically to the Eastern Gate of the Temple (cf. Ezek 43:1–5), i.e., the one which was opened to admit the procession of Temple pilgrims into the Holy Place on feast days (Ps 24:3, 7–9). Thus we are again dealing with a traditional rite of the Temple and the Christian’s newly won access into the once-forbidden Sanctuary.78 But passage through the veil in union with Jesus, goes back to an even more fundamental precedent in the Jewish Temple itself. As we already learned from Philo, when the High Priest put on his cosmic robes and entered the Holy of Holies, the whole world went in with him (On the Life of Moses, 2.133–35). This explains why the individual’s passage through the veil is never described as a solitary act, for the Church is Christ’s flesh—that which he “wears” when he enters the Adyton—just as Philo’s Logos “wore” the cosmos, and the High Priest “wore” the world. Thus, individuals who comprised the Church were indistinguishable from their Bridegroom and High Priest, who took them through the veil as part of his own body. Most writers therefore stipulated that “if some are of the tribe of the priesthood (cf. Heb 7), they will be able to go within the veil with the High Priest” (Gospel of Philip 85:1–5). Indeed, the initiate must be “one” with Jesus before he can pass into the Kingdom: “When you make the two one … 77 “The body of Christ … is the point from which the dying and rising again, which began with Christ, passes over to the elect who are united with him.” Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul (New York, 1931), 118. 78 An alternative reading of Hebrews 10:20 has been suggested by G. W. Buchanan, which takes tout’ estin, tēs sarkos (“that is, his flesh”) to refer to the “way” through the veil, rather than the “veil” itself. In either case, the initiate’s solidarity with the sacrifice of Christ’s flesh is still required (Hebrews, Anchor Bible, 168).

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when you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot … when you make the male and the female into a single one … then shall you enter the Kingdom” (Gospel of Thomas, Log. 22). We are also reminded that one must have put on the “Wedding Garment” which is Christ (cf. Gal 3:28) before being allowed into the Wedding Feast (Matt 22:11–14), for the participant could never hope to enter the Holy of Holies alone. Here, then, the writer has brought together an extraordinary range of symbols with which to describe the Christian’s passage through the veil of the Temple. Christ’s “flesh,” first of all, is the sacrifice that opens the way into the Holy of Holies and cleanses the participants, and participation in that “flesh” means the sharing of Christ’s sacrifice. His “flesh” is also the site of unification, either as the “veil,” the “door,” or the “mercy seat.” Other “Pauline” works describe marriage to Christ as the way in which the Bridegroom and the Bride are able to pass through as one. This was characterized by God’s redeeming love, as depicted by the embrace of the sacred Cherubim (cf. Heb 9:5). The similarity between this “spiritualizing” exegesis of the Temple cult and the older Wisdom Mystery is obvious. In both, the “Hebrew” pilgrim is seen as a “wanderer and exile” in search of a heavenly home. The Sacred Marriage with Wisdom, which was Philo’s ultimate goal (On the Cherubim), now became union with the “veil” of Christ’s “flesh,” followed by entry into God’s presence (Heb 12:22) and the sharing of his glory (2:10). “Sanctification” and divine “sonship” are the result, according to the pattern set by God’s Son (vv. 10–11), who, like Wisdom, is the “brightness of God’s glory and the image of his person” (1:3). Led by a new “Joshua” (4:8), the “Hebrew” wanderers (2:7–4:8) are once again “strangers and pilgrims” seeking a heavenly city (11:13–16), just as Philo’s “Hebrews” were “seekers after heavenly things” and the gifts of the “Promised Land” (On the Migration of Abraham, 28). “Each of us,” he explained in the latter work, “has come into the world as into a foreign city, in which before birth he had no part, and in this city does but sojourn until he has exhausted his appointed span of life” (On the Cherubim, 120). Upon these “sojourners” God will bestow “eternal fountains of free bounties” (123), and become a Source of joy to them that unite with him through the “descent of the divine Powers,” i.e., the Embracing Cherubim (106). The author of Hebrews, in turn, promises Christian sojourners the kind of blessings that God bestowed upon “even Sarah,” who, being “past the age to conceive,” became the source of a line of “descendants as numerous as the stars, or as the countless grains of sand on the seashore” (Heb 11:11–12).

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This “spiritualized” version of the traditional pilgrimage to the Temple was said by both Philo and the author of Hebrews to belong to the “Mosaic” or “Melchizedec” level of the Mystery, in contrast to the ordinary, or “Aaronic” level.79 Where the ordinary Temple visitor saw only animal sacrifices and outward acts of piety, the “Melchizedec” initiate saw a symbolic quest for a heavenly “rest,” and (in the Wisdom Mystery) deification. The Christian initiate was therefore promised that he would receive what Christ himself received. This is indicated by the author’s descriptions of Jesus as the archēgos (2:10) and prodromos of salvation (6:20). Archegos means literally the “founder” or “originator” of a process, thus the “first of a series” (KJV “leader” or “captain”).80 Similarly, the prodromos is the “forerunner”—the one who precedes his followers and imitators.81 Ernst Käsemann has demonstrated in some detail that these epithets were chosen to characterize Jesus as the corporate representative of mankind, in whom perfection is both begun and completed, just as in Col 1:18 he is the “beginning and firstborn from the dead,” and in Rev 1:8 the alpha and omega, i.e., the “start” and the “goal” itself.82 The dependence of these expressions on Philo’s archegetes neas anthropon sporas (“the one who establishes the seed of a new humanity,” On the Migration of Abraham, 46), is also obvious, for each describes “the relationship of the forebear to his posterity,” i.e., the one who shows the way to those who are to come after.83 This means that they too will become perfected as “sons,” just as he was perfected as “the Son” (2:10). Furthermore, their close relationship is derived from the fact that “both he who saves and they who are saved” are descended “from One (ex henos, masc.),” i.e., from God himself.84 Here again, the primal relationship of man and Wisdom, which made possible their reunion in the Philonic Mystery, is the basis for the intimate communion of “Son” and the other “sons,” who are thereby to be exalted together.

See pp. 38 and 42–43, above. Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 112. 81 Ibid., 711. 82 Das wandernde Gottesvolk, 80. 83 Ibid., 81. 84 Ibid., 90. “It is entirely beside the point to think of this ‘One’ as Adam or Abraham, who are not even under discussion. The relationship of ‘Son’ and ‘sons’ in vs. 11 depends simply on the fact that their descent is from God, who alone is the Father of Jesus.” (ibid.) 79 80

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We have already seen this “intimate communion” described as a kind of “Sacred Marriage,” based on the “marriage” of Wisdom and Israel: For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church (Eph 5:31–32).

This Ephesian hieros gamos is also clearly based on the same basic pattern which we found in the Gospel of Thomas: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female … then shall you enter the Kingdom (Log. 22).

The literalness of this intimate spiritual union is emphasized by Paul’s use of the verb kollaō, which means “to cleave” in both a figurative and a physical sense. Here he closely follows the concrete Old Testament usage of the Hebrew verb dabaq, “to cling to, stick to, cleave” (e.g., the “soldering” of the scales to a breastplate, 1 Kgs 22:34 = 2 Chr 18:33; or the “joining together” of the wings of the Cherubim over the lid of the Ark, 2 Chr. 3:12),85 as well as its established cultic use in the Psalms to indicate man’s “adhering” to Yahweh and his divine love (hesed).86 Thus, Psalm 63 employs dabaq to depict the “remarkably high esteem” of the writer for “communion with God.”87 Later Hebrew authors would also continue to interpret dabaq as a state of unio mystica, i.e., “adhesion,” or “being joined unto God.”88 Yet this mystical doctrine, which the Kabbalists referred to as devequth, appears to have been well-developed by the Second Temple priesthood and its vision of the Merkabah,89 an ecstatic technique whose aim was already to “ascend” to God’s Throne and be “intimately” joined to Deity.90 In fact, the Genesis Rabbah (compiled during the fifth or sixth centuries) describes devequth in terms of which both Philo and Thomas would have approved: “Great is the strength of the Prophets who assimilate the form to Him who formed it,”91 G. Wallis, “dābhaq,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, 3:80. Ibid., 83. 87 H. J. Kraus cited in ibid., 83. 88 Scholem, MTJM, 123. 89 Ibid., 42–43. 90 Ibid., 140–42. 91 Theodor edition, p. 256; quoted in Scholem, MTJM, 142. Compare Thomas, Log. 22: “When an image is joined to an image.” 85 86

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or as the Kabbalists of Abulafia’s school would explain, the human self, being of divine nature, reunites during mystical communion with the Divine Nature of God.92 Intertestamental literature shows that the same concrete—even blatantly sexual—understanding of the word kollaō was shared by contemporary Jewish and Christian writers. Tobit 6:18, for example, describes Tobias’ wedding with Sarah with the words, “In his heart he clave (ekollethē) to her.” Sirach 19:2, says, “The man who cleaves (ho kollomenos) to a prostitute is reckless”; but also, “Cleave (kolletheti) to him (the Lord)” (2:3). In like manner, Paul describes both connection with a woman and oneness with the Lord with the verb kollaō: “Know ye not that he who is joined (ho kollomenos) to a harlot is one body” (1 Cor 6:16), and “he that is joined (ho kollomenos) to the Lord is one Spirit” (v. 17). Spiritual bonds are therefore of the same nature as sexual union, so much so that there is danger of combining them illegitimately: “Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them the members of a harlot?” (1 Cor 1:15). In fact, the verb kollaō (with the prefix pros) is again used by Paul in Ephesians 5:31–32 when quoting the LXX of Gen 2:24 to describe both sexual and spiritual unions: “For this cause shall a man … be joined (proskollethesetai) unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.” This same literal meaning of intimate union was also used in Galatians 3:27–28, to describe the baptismal unification of Christ and the disciple: For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Perhaps even more significant is that the Ephesian “Great Mystery” also applies to the human husband and wife, whose marriage follows the pattern of God’s personal image (Gen 1:27–28), as well as the pattern of Christ’s “marriage” to the Church: Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband (Eph 5:33).

The Catholic scholar, Quentin Quesnell, has summarized this reenactment of the mystery of Christ’s marriage to the Church in human marriages as follows:

92

Scholem, MTJM, 142.

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The Church is Christ’s flesh, Christ’s body: the woman is the man’s flesh, the man’s body … The Genesis text is presented as a conclusion from this analogy: “Therefore (it is said), a man will leave the father and the mother and will cleave to his wife, and the two will be ‘into one flesh’—that is, I say, into Christ and into the Church.” If man and woman live together according to what this analogy suggests, then the relationship of Christ and the Church as one flesh … is dramatized, concretized, sacramentalized into their relationship. The man and woman enter into (become?) Christ and the Church (his parenthetical insertion).93

In the same way, we recall that various Jewish commentators had viewed the Embracing Cherubim not only as symbols of Yahweh’s marriage to Israel, but as a paradigm of human marriage (pp. 19–21, above). Paul could therefore write in 1 Corinthians that Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord (11:11),

for being “in the Lord” required becoming “man and wife” (Gen 2:24 = Eph 5:31–33). John expressed this traditional nuptial imagery in yet another special way, i.e., by means of a “grafting” simile: I am the true vine (ampelos alēthinē) … Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit (John 15:1–8).

Here Jesus is again pictured as Wisdom’s “vine,” inviting all to “build in her foliage … lodge in her branches” (Sir 14:26) and be “filled with her produce” (v. 19).94 This metaphor no doubt incorporated other symbolism as

“‘Made Themselves Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’ (Mt. 19,12),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 30 (1968): 354. Quesnell adds: “As the Christian man enters into this relationship with his wife … he is entering into, growing up into the one flesh which is the living body of Christ, the whole Christ—head and members” (ibid., 355). Finally, he suggests that this is “a step toward inaugurating a world where all men will love perfectly and fully,” so that the man can “express that fidelity forever” (ibid., 358). Compare 1 Peter 3:7. 94 Compare also Proverbs 9:5, “eat her bread” and “drink her wine.” John 15 may therefore contain a veiled reference to the Eucharist. 93

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well, for example, Wisdom’s “Tree of Life” (Prov 3:18), or the image of Israel as a “Tree” or “Vine.”95 But in the present case, the “Vine” consists of ultimate “Truth” (alethēia), the word used by Plato and the Greek philosophers to represent the Divine Reality. In short, it is the supernatural reality and power which Wisdom brings down from above so that men can be incorporated into it and share its eternal life, thus “bring forth fruit” (John 15:5), just as in the Pauline metaphor of the Sacred Marriage: So you, my friends, have died to the law by becoming identified with the body of Christ, and accordingly you have found another husband in him who rose from the dead, so that we may bear fruit for God (Rom 7:4, NEB).

Paul and John never abandoned this primary nuptial imagery, even when they developed other forms of union (baptism, Eucharist), for both referred to Christ as the “Bridegroom” or “Husband” of the Church (Rom 7:4; 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:31–32; John 3:29). Even the writers of the Synoptic Gospels, who came chronologically after most of Paul’s epistles, and who never spoke of baptism or the Eucharist as methods of unifying Jesus and the communicant, referred to Jesus as the “Bridegroom” of the Church (Matt 9:15 = Mark 2:19 = Luke 5:34; Matt 25:1–13), an image which remained central even in the dénouement of Revelation (19:7–9; 21:2).96 Ephesians 5, moreover, treats baptism as separate from and prior to the nuptial union, a scheme which was also preserved in most Gnostic works.97 And as we just saw, the idea of Christ’s marriage to the Church was itself singled out as the divine model for human married behavior. So important was this last point that the whole pericope describing the Sacred Marriage (5:22–33) was conceived as a Haustafel (“rule of conduct”) for human nuptials, showing that Marriage, not baptism, was its real subject.

BAPTISM AND THE MYSTERY Unfortunately, many recent commentators continue to interpret Paul’s “marriage metaphor” as a symbol of baptism, and nothing more. It is well R. E. Brown, John XIII–XXI, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1970), 670. See more on the “Marriage of the Lamb,” p. 137, below. 97 This is still the case in the Gospel of Philip, where baptism precedes the rite of the Bridal Chamber (69:14–29). See Eric Segelberg, “The Coptic Gnostic Gospel According to Philip and Its Sacramental System,” Numen 7 (1960): 189–200. See “Gnosticism and the Wisdom Mystery,” below. 95 96

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known that even Paul occasionally made “becoming neither Jew nor Greek … neither bond nor free … neither male nor female” a synonym for being “baptized into Christ” (Gal 3:27–28). Moreover, he spoke unambiguously of “being baptized into one body” in 1 Corinthians 12:13. It is therefore clear that Paul considered baptism to be an initial step in the overall process of becoming united to Jesus, and thus of sharing his death, resurrection, and glorification (Rom 6:3–4). Even the Gospel of Thomas appears to contain certain motifs which would be traditionally associated with baptism in the later Church. In Logion 37, for example, Jesus says, “When you undress without being ashamed, and when you take your clothes and put them under your feet as little children and tramp on them, then you will see the Son of the Living One and you will not fear.” Logion 21 similarly mentions those who “like little children” settle in a field and “take off their clothes” in order to “release and give back” the field to its owner. Stevan L. Davies, following Johnathan Z. Smith,98 believes that these passages referred specifically to the undressing and “trampling” of one’s clothes prior to baptism, when the candidate lays aside the old “garments of skin” which God placed on Adam at the time of the Fall: Both the Western and the Eastern Churches associated ritual disrobing with the primal nudity of Adam and Eve … Old garments were shed as symbolic of “old” and sinful life and trampled underfoot, an action performed in allusion to Gen. 3:15 when the serpent, sin, is trampled upon.99

Rabbinical doctrine also held that “before their expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve had bodies or garments of light, but that after their expulsion they received bodies of flesh, or coverings of skin.”100 Davies therefore concludes that the “trampling” of one’s clothes (Log. 37) must have been practiced at the time of baptism as a reversal of the Fall, so that the primal light could be “begotten” anew (Log. 70) and the original body of light restored (Log. 24), symbolized by the “new clothing.”101

98 The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (New York, 1983), 117–18, quoting “The Garments of Shame,” History of Religions 5 (1965): 218–22. 99 S. Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 118. 100 Johnathan Smith, “Garments of Shame,” in S. Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 118; italics added. 101 Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 126.

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Finally, Davies sees the mention of “little children” (Log. 21; cf. Logg. 4, 22 and 42) as references to baptismal rebirth. He particularly reads Logion 4 (“The man old in his days will not hesitate to ask a boy of seven days about the place of life, and he will live”) as a Christian adaptation of Jewish proselyte baptism, which took place seven days after circumcision. Since the circumcision was considered to be the time of “rebirth,” the “newborn child” would have been seven days old at the time of baptism.102 This idea, he feels, was somehow translated into Thomasine baptismal practice.103 And because of these scattered references to “ritual nudity” and “rebirth,” Davies concludes that Logion 22—with its description of making Jesus and the disciples one—must also have had baptismal union as its subject.104 Yet if “becoming children” (Log. 22a) referred primarily to a baptismal unification with Jesus, then it would appear that the disciples had already received the rite, for they speak of themselves in the present tense as “being children” (“They say to Him, Shall we, being children, enter the Kingdom?”). Jesus, however, reminds them that they have yet to “make the two one … the male with the female,” an answer which makes little sense if the final unification has already taken place. However, the language of Thomas is sufficiently vague that we cannot say with confidence whether Logion 22b refers to something the disciples have yet to do, or is an explanatory comment regarding what they have already accomplished. Nevertheless, the simplest and most natural reading of the passage is that baptism precedes the Bridal Chamber, as it does in the Gospel of Philip,105 supposing that baptism was not originally a central feature of the mystery, as it appears to be in Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 12:13. Nor does Davies’ exclusively baptismal exegesis adequately explain the peculiar language of Logion 22b, which speaks of “making eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot,” nor does it address the metaphor of “drinking from Jesus’ mouth” in Logion 108. Davies assumes, for example, that 22b must deal with baptism simply because baptism would result in a “new or restored body” no Ibid., 121. Ibid., 129–30. 104 Ibid., 120–32. 105 “Baptism is the Holy building. Redemption is the Holy of the Holy. The Holy of the Holies is the Bridal Chamber” (67:22–30). We shall discuss this later on in the section on “Gnosticism and the Wisdom Mystery.” 102 103

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different than “the new or restored image … of the androgynous Adam.”106 This, however, ignores the fundamental importance of the male-female union, which Paul always recognized as primary: For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church (Eph 5:31–32).

Nor does he take into consideration the fact that Jesus considered himself to be the “Bridegroom” of the Church, and his relationship with her to be that of a “Wedding” (Matt 25; cf. also Thomas, Log. 75 and 104). Logion 108 Davies likewise assumes to be a metaphor of baptism, because Paul rather ambiguously appears to do so in 1 Corinthians 12:13 (“We are all baptized into one body … and have been made to drink unto one Spirit”).107 But while Paul’s first clause undoubtedly describes baptism, commentators have long wondered whether the second was synonymous with it, or if it were a description of something else, for example, the drinking of the Eucharist. We believe that both passages can most easily be explained by the image of the Embracing Cherubim and the “Sacred Marriage with Wisdom,” and that baptism—whose primary meaning was originally a cleansing from sin (Exod 29:4; 40:12; Lev 14:8–9; 15:5–10; 16:4, 24–28; Num 19:7; Ezek 36:25)—was only later reinterpreted (possibly on the analogy of Jewish proselyte baptism) as a rite of union, or more specifically, as a rite preparatory to full union with the Savior. Wayne Meeks, on whose work Davies relies heavily in his chapter entitled “Thomas and Baptism,” also concluded that early Christians in the area of the Pauline mission “adapted the Adam-Androgyne myth” (cf. Eph 5:31–32) “to the eschatological Sacrament of baptism.”108 But he further concluded that where baptism is mentioned in connection with the nuptial myth (“that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water,” Eph 5:26), it was only as a preparatory ritual for the forthcoming nuptial (“that he might present her to himself,” v. 27):

Davies, Gospel of Thomas, 130. Ibid., 130, 133–36. 108 “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity,” History of Religions 13 (1974): 207. 106 107

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Behind baptism, then, Meeks suspects the existence of an even earlier and more basic hieros gamos tradition, though he hesitates to confirm his suspicion: Whether that implies a ritual hieros gamos, of which baptism was only the preliminary purification, was actually enacted in the Asian congregation is a question which can hardly be answered by the evidence at hand.110

Significantly, however, he refers to Ezekiel 16:8 as a possible precursor of this suspected hieros gamos, as well as to Song of Songs, with its Sacred Marriage between Yahweh and Israel.111 Again, the Cherubim in the Temple would have provided an even more direct and obvious source (had Meeks been aware of them). Finally, the references to “shameless nudity,” which both Meeks and Davies see as indicative of baptism, relate not primarily to baptism, but to the state of innocence before the Fall, when “Adam” and “Eve” were still one and unashamed, and which the union of “Christ” and the “Church” would restore: Therefore shall a man … cleave to his wife and they shall be one flesh, and they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Gen 2:24–25; Eph 5:31) … But I speak concerning (the marriage of) Christ and the Church (Eph 5:32).

Thus we see that “shameless nudity” fits the hieros gamos myth even better than it does baptism; in fact, since there is not a single unambiguous reference to baptism anywhere in Thomas, we may conclude that its range of thought was still primarily that of a Sacred Marriage to Wisdom, and only secondarily (if at all) that of baptism. By analogy, the same would most likely be true of the Ephesian “Great Mystery.”

A MULTIPLICATION OF HIEROS GAMOS SYMBOLS It thus appears that at least three methods of ritual union with the Divine were recognized in the early Church: first, an older one prefigured by the Ibid., 205–6. Ibid., 206. 111 Ibid., 206, notes. 109 110

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Embracing Cherubim in the Temple, which was obviously a kind of “nuptial” union (Eph 5:32; Thomas 22b); second, a baptismal one, which originally reflected the Jewish practice of ritual bathing for cleansing from sin (1QS III, 4–9) and for proselyte initiation (b. Yebamoth 46a–b).112 Thus by cleansing the candidate from sin, baptism symbolized the start of a oneness with Christ (Gal 3:25) and membership in his Body (1 Cor 12:13). A third symbol of union was that of the communal meal (the Eucharist),113 which went back to the institution of the Last Supper (Matt 26:26f; Mark 14:22f; Luke 22:19ff) and the discourse on the Heavenly Bread (John 6),114 though it had more to do with maintaining the believer’s solidarity with Christ’s sacrifice in his own life of service (1 Cor 10:16). This multiplication of symbols signifying oneness with Christ was particularly needed if one were to take the blessings of the Gospel to the Gentiles, who had no access to the Temple, and whose “marriage” to the Savior could only be completed after death. We might especially detect an attempt on the part of Paul—now laboring in the Gentile mission—to demythologize the “nuptial mystery” in the Temple to suit the needs of non-Jews who had never been in the Sanctuary, or had never heard of Israel’s “marriage” to Yahweh. Indeed, he did the same with the rite of circumcision, which he now sought to understand in a purely spiritual sense (“circumcise the foreskin of your heart”; Deut 10:16; cf. Phil 3:3). The same was also true of Paul’s view of the sacrificial cult, which even in Jewish tradition availed nothing unless it was morally conditioned by works of repentance.115 Indeed, as early as 1 Samuel, enlightened Israelites had recognized that “to obey” was better than “to sacrifice,” and “to hearken” better than the “fat of rams” (15:22). The Qumran Community (ca. 200 B.C.—A.D. 70), also 112 “Some have … disputed whether this rite was practiced early enough to have influenced the origin of Christian baptism. It is now generally agreed however, that the references in Epictetus, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Mishnah enable us, with some confidence, to date the beginnings of the practice not later than the first century A.D.” W. F. Flemington, “Baptism,” in IDB, 1:348. 113 The communal meal, which Paul calls koinonia, was itself a “participation or sharing” in the flesh and blood of Christ: “The cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not the koinonia of the blood of Christ; the bread which we break, is it not the koinonia of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread,” 1 Cor 10:16–17). See also pp. 106–7, above. 114 “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” 115 W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia, 1980), 257.

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believed that through works of “truth, righteousness, justice, lovingkindness and humility” it could “atone for sin by the practice of justice, and by suffering the sorrows of affliction,” without the use of the Temple (1QS VIII, lff)—though it steadfastly looked forward to its eventual restoration (cf. the Qumran “Temple Scroll”). Paul’s attempt to “spiritualize” the Jewish Temple-cult was thus clearly anticipated by Judaism itself, and it quite naturally appears to have conditioned his baptismal adaptation of the nuptial mystery, which even Jesus had been obliged to practice outside of the Temple, and thus could have been entered into anywhere where Jesus happened to be. And since baptismal purification was already considered to be necessary for new converts to the Church (Matt 28:19), it is only logical that this preliminary step eventually came to be looked on as a part of the mystery of union itself. Indeed, if the mystery of baptism were the sole meaning of Ephesians 5:22–33, then the attempt to make of it a model for human marriages would make little sense. As Wayne Meeks points out, “the marriage of Christ and the Church can hardly have been made simultaneously the prototype for both marriage and baptism.”116 We therefore reject the suggestion of Morton Smith that the subject of the mystery described in Ephesians 5:32, and as practiced in secret by Jesus and the disciples, was simply baptism.117

THE EPHESIAN “GREAT MYSTERY” Other commentators, however, have recognized that Paul’s real object in Ephesians 5:22–33 was to demonstrate the fact that Christ’s marriage to the Church and human marriages follow the same heavenly pattern, and are subject to the same rules of behavior. In particular, he viewed the earthly union as a symbol of the heavenly, even a necessary step towards realizing it. “Here the ‘mystery’ is the revelation of the nature of human marriage, the union of two persons into one flesh, as declared in the story of its institution. And the writer tells us that in his view it is realized fully and perfectly only in the union of Christ and the Church. This is the hieros gamos … the transcendental bridal, of which marriage is a shadow and an allegory.’’118 This important relationship between type and antitype was also the source of the Gnostic theology of the Bridal Chamber, where human marMeeks, “Image of the Androgyne,” 205; our emphasis. Clement of Alexandria and the Secret Gospel of Mark, 178. 118 Francis W. Beare, in Interpreter’s Bible, 10:726. 116 117

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riages were celebrated as the “lesser mystery” which activated the “greater mystery” of union with Christ; for as Paul understood it, “the mystery of the union of man and wife into one flesh is of far reaching importance, and clearly points beyond itself toward some transcendental, eternal reality. ‘I for my part take it to be a symbol of the union of Christ and the Church.’”119 J. Paul Sampley, in his detailed study of Ephesians 5:22–33, also makes a strong case for believing that Paul’s “Great Mystery” was indeed a nuptial mystery, and one which involved many of the elements of which we have already spoken. He refers, for instance, to the striking dependence of Paul’s language on the description of the marriage of Adam and Eve in LXX Genesis 2:24. The entire conception of Christ’s union with the Church to form a single “body” (sōma, Eph 5:30) is in fact derived from the image of Adam and Eve “cleaving together” (proskollethesetai) to form one “flesh” (v. 32); this explains why Paul can say that “no man ever hated his own flesh” (v. 29), for Christ’s love of the Church is also the love of his own body (v. 30).120 Since this imagery appears elsewhere in the writings of Paul—even where there is a different context—Sampley concludes that the language must have been drawn from “a convention in the early Church,” which at one time was widely understood, but which orthodoxy had since forgotten.121 In 1 Corinthians 6:15–17, for example, when discussing the sin of fornication, the author likens a man and a woman who unite sexually to the “Body of Christ.” To establish his parallel, he simply remarks that “he who is joined (ho kollomenos) to a harlot is one body … but he who is joined (ho kollomenos) to the Lord is one Spirit.” As his authority, he notes that God himself (speaking of Adam and Eve’s first intercourse) commanded that “Two shall become one flesh” (v. 16; cf. Gen 2:24). The terse and laconic argument suggests that Paul took for granted his reader’s prior acquaintance with the tradition of applying Genesis 2:24 to both human copulation and the “marriage” of Christ to the Church, and that no further elaboration was required. Other evidence of a “linguistic convention” dealing with hierogamy appears to be the special use which Paul makes of the verb paristēmi (“present”) in Ephesians 5:27, when he speaks of Christ “cleansing” the bride, so that he might “present her to himself a glorious Church, without spot.” Ibid., 727. “And the Two Shall Become One Flesh” (Cambridge, 1971), 90. 121 Ibid., 79. 119 120

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Several passages from Paul’s other epistles (Col 1:21–22; 2 Cor 11:2) precede the mystery of union with the same verb, combined with similar adjectives of purity and holiness. This again suggests that “the early Church had a widespread convention in which the verb paristēmi functioned as a hieros gamos of Christ and the Church”:122 You he hath reconciled in the body of his flesh through death to present you holy and unblameable and unreproachable in his sight (Col 1:21– 22). For I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ (2 Cor 11:2).

“The similarities in each of the three letters,” as Sampley observes, “are clear enough to indicate that the common tradition is shared by all three.123 Paul employed a variety of other Old Testament marriage-traditions, as well, with which to describe Christ’s union with the Church. The bride’s “purification” in the above passages, for example, recalls the long segment in Ezekiel 16:8–14, describing Yahweh’s hieros gamos with Israel, in which he cleanses and washes his intended spouse before the wedding. S. N. Kramer has recently collected a number of Mesopotamian and Sumerian hieros gamos texts, which prove that these “washing and adornment” procedures traditionally preceded Sacred Marriages throughout the Near East.124 Israelite law especially required that the bride be without “spot” or “blemish” (amomos; Eph 5:27); momos ouk estin en soi; LXX Song of Songs 4:7), for such an imperfection would preclude the possibility of even approaching the veil or the altar (Lev 21:23; m. Ketuboth, 7:7). Thus Eph 1:4 informs us that the Church was preexistently destined to be made “holy and spotless” (amomos) as a prerequisite for union with her Bridegroom. This requirement is especially important, because it again shows that purification traditionally preceded the nuptial mystery, and was originally separate from it, as in the case of baptism, which Gentile Christians later assimilated to the Sacred Marriage itself (pp. 129–30, above). Being rendered “spotless” was in fact part of a whole complex of ideas associated with “sanctification by marriage.” Rabbinic tradition especially understood the word kadesh (“sanctify”) to mean “marriage to a wife”—i.e., Ibid., 137. Ibid., 137. 124 From The Sacred Marriage Rite, quoted in Sampley, “And the Two Shall Become One,” 44. 122 123

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“separate her to oneself”—thereby making her a “consecrated object” in the eyes of other men. Paul’s use of hagiazō in Ephesians 5:26, according to Sampley, also means both “betroth” and “consecrate,” again signifying “to set apart as wife,” i.e., as a portion of one’s own flesh (vv. 28–29).125 Here we are again reminded of Hosea’s imagery of “the Redeemer, uniting himself to what is unholy to make it holy.”126 Other Old Testament motifs relating to Yahweh’s marriage to Israel, which Paul now applies to Christ and the Church, include the following: 1. An admonition in v. 33 that “every man love his wife as himself.” This appears at first glance to be simply drawn from Leviticus 19:18 (“love thy neighbor as thyself”). But the LXX of Song of Songs (1:9, 15; 2:2, 10, 13; 4:1, 7; 5:2; 6:4) shows that a bride was commonly known as hē plēsion mou, “my neighbor,” a nuptial convention which also found its way into several Tannaitic writings.127 Since writers as early as 4 Ezra had begun to relate Song of Songs to Yahweh’s espousal to Israel, Paul’s use of the phrase (“so ought men to love their wives as their own bodies; he that loves his wife loves himself”) takes on special meaning, particularly when applied to Christ’s love for the Church (v. 29). 2. The pointed reference in Ephesians 5:25–27 to the “gloriousness” (endoxos) of the Bride. Paul’s language in this case is derived from the Royal Epithalamion which is contained in Psalm 45 (LXX 44). Verse 11 depicts her great beauty, while verses 13–14 call attention to her rich attire. Her “glory” (kavod) in verse 13 is translated by the LXX as pasa hē doxa (“all her glory”); similarly, Ephesians 5:27 says that the Church shall be endoxos (“glorious”).128 It is most important to note, however, that (as in Ezekiel 16:14), this “splendor” is bestowed—and solely by the Husband.129 Psalm 45:11 thus commands her to recognize the King as her “Lord” (cf. Eph 5:21–22). The Midrash on Psalms, on the other hand, identifies Israel as his “Queen,” though canonical Psalm 45 lacks such a declaration. Thus we see that Paul’s “Great Mystery” in Ephesians 5 includes a number of specific hieros gamos and marriage traditions drawn from Genesis 2, Song of Songs, Ezekiel, and the LXX of Psalm 45, showing clearly that 125 126

165.

Sampley, “And the Two Shall Become One,” 42–43. Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1980),

Sampley, “And the Two Shall Become One,” 30–31. Ibid., 51. 129 Ibid., 40–41. 127 128

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the intended subject is Christ’s Sacred Marriage to the Church, and not baptism. Many of the esoteric traditions concerning “Adam” and “Eve” as heavenly partners in a hieros gamos were doubtless suppressed by the later Church during its controversies with Gnosticism.130 Nevertheless, writers like the author of 2 Clement were obviously aware of them, since they likewise interpreted the language of Genesis 1 and 2 as referring to the “spiritual” marriage of Christ and the Church. The remarkable book Baruch, written by Justin (or Justinus),131 also knew a tradition in which the nuptials of “Adam” and “Eve” symbolized the union of the Demiurge (“Elohim”) and his feminine counterpart (“Eden”), from which the “mystery of creativity and reproduction” was derived.132 For Justin, the love of the human Adam and Eve served as “a kind of seal and memorial of their love, and an eternal symbol of the marriage of Elohim and Eden” (Hippolytus, Refutations, 5.26; our emphasis). Nothing is known of Justin himself, though Cleveland Coxe believed that he was “contemporary with St. Peter and St. Paul,”133 while Hans Jonas claims simply that Baruch is “older” than the Gospel of Truth (ca. A.D. 140),134 i.e., roughly contemporary with 2 Clement. In any case, the symbolism in Baruch suggests that the relationship of Adam and Eve in Gen 2:24 was already employed near the end of the first century to represent the marital union of heavenly entities—even that of the Creator and his “female counterpart.” But since this never occurs in the Old Testament,135 many scholars feel that the use of Genesis 2:24 to symbolize Christ’s marriage to the Church was a creation of Paul himself:136 Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come (Rom 5:14).

But arguments which we shall present when we discuss the Church’s Hexaemeron doctrine (see “The Great Mystery and the Preexistent Church,” Compare Sampley, ibid., 52. In Hippolytus, Refutations, 5.26–27. 132 R. M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (London, 1959), 18. 133 In Ante-Nicene Fathers (Roberts and Donaldson, editors), 5:69. 134 The Gnostic Religion (Boston, 1963), 191 notes. 135 M. Barth quotes H. Schlier (Christus und die Kirche im Epheserbrief, 1930, 107) as observing that the Old Testament never applies Genesis 2:24 to Yahweh and his People. Ephesians, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1974), 4–6, 728, notes. 136 Ibid., 728, notes. 130 131

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below) suggest that Paul received his idea of an archetypal relationship between human and divine marriages ready-made. Markus Barth, as late as 1974, still argued that the available sources are “somewhat murky from which other scholars have reconstructed a fullblown allegorical ‘tradition’ that is supposedly recognizable ‘behind’ Eph. 5.”137 We believe, however, that the situation has changed dramatically with the rediscovery of the Embracing Cherubim and the various meanings which were attached to them, for we now have a common symbol which ties together a number of previously independent ideas in a relationship which can hardly have escaped the attention of early Jews and Christians: a. God’s own Image is “male and female” (Gen 1:27). b. The First Pair, Adam and Eve, were created in God’s Image, and united in marriage according to the same pattern (Gen 1:28; 2:24). c. The covenant between Yahweh and Israel is also described as that of a “male” and a “female,” i.e., a “Husband” and a “Wife” (Hos 2:16, 20; Isa 54:5; Jer. 2:2; Ezek 16:8; etc.). d. Yahweh’s surrogate—his mediating “Wisdom”—and her “lovers” were also related by means of a “sexual” union (Sir 51:13–30; Wis 8:2, 9, 16; Philo, On the Cherubim, 40–51, 106; Gospel of Thomas, Logg. 22, 104). e. A common symbol for all of these unions was the Embracing Cherubim (Philo, On the Cherubim, 27–29; Questions on Genesis, 1.57; Questions on Exodus, 2.62; On Drunkenness, 30; b. Yoma 54a; b. Baba Batra 99a; Tosefta, Yebamoth 8:4; Zohar III:7a; 296a). f. Christ and the Church were also united in “marriage” (Matt 25; Rom 7:4; 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:31–32; Rev 19:7–9; 21:2). Since Christ replaced Yahweh as Israel’s “Husband,” and the Church replaced Israel as his “Bride,” the symbolism of the Embracing Cherubim must also have been applied to them. This helps to explain why Paul could speak of Adam’s marriage to Eve, Christ’s marriage to the Church, and man’s marriage to a wife as forms of the same “Great Mystery” (Eph 5:31–33), for all follow the same heavenly pattern, and all became equivalent through their common denominator, the symbolism of the Embracing Cherubim. This is also why the Temple Mystery in Hebrews 9:5 was still presided over by the statues in the Holy of Holies, and why the Church Fathers would continued to apply their meaning to the wedding of Christ and the Church (see “The Post-New Testament Wisdom Mystery,” below). 137

Ibid., 728.

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But perhaps most illuminating of all is the way in which the entire New Testament culminates in a heavenly vision of the Feast of Tabernacles and a revelation of the Sacred Marriage, which is taking place behind the opened veil. In John 7, we saw Jesus as the traditional source of “Water” and “Spirit,” which issued forth on the Feast of Tabernacles (vv. 2, 37–39); and in John 8 we saw him revealed as the traditional “Light of the world,” or the divine “glory” which entered from the Mount of Olives in the east (cf. 1:14 with 8:1–2, 23). The new Johannine Feast of Tabernacles, as described in the Book of Revelation, now takes place in seven magnificent scenes (Rev 4:2–11; 5:8–14; 7:9–17; 11:15–19; 14:1–5; 15:2–4; 19:1–8).138 In the first three, we see the Throne of God, just as Ezekiel had seen it (Ezek 1), and also the numerous angelic figures and Saints engaged in worship (Dan 7). But in the fourth scene, the veil of the heavenly Temple is suddenly removed, so that we (like the pilgrims assembled in the ancient forecourt) are able to behold the mysterious Ark of the Covenant: And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of the testament (Rev 11:19).

Finally, in the last scene of all, we see the marriage of Christ and the Church, corresponding to the marriage of Yahweh and Israel, symbolized in the Jerusalem Temple by the Embracing Cherubim: And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready (Rev 19:6–7). And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev 21:2).

The new Temple would henceforth consist solely of God and his people, now made one by their Sacred Marriage (Rev 3:12 and 21:22), thereby “collapsing” the heavenly and the earthly into a single reality, as we read in the Gospel of Thomas.139 For here, too, as Henri Corbin explains,

R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple, the Church, in the New Testament (Oxford, 1969), 162–70; following the analysis of Alfred Edersheim, The Temple (Grand Rapids, 1978), 140–41. 139 Compare Stevan L. Davies’ statement, pp. 98–99, above. 138

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The temporal boundaries between the present and future are abolished, and the glories of the future eschatological state, conceived as a restoration of the primitive paradisal condition, “are experienced as a reality in the present.” In the same way that the Jewish mystics wished to experience a visio Dei by way of anticipation, the Johannine community experienced a visio Christi in its celebration of the liturgical mystery.140

This new exegesis gave a greatly expanded meaning to the ordinary Temple cult, for salvation was now concerned not only with the annual cleansing the Temple-sancta from pollution, but with bringing the heavenly world together with the earthly world, thereby transcending the “carnal ordinances” of the Aaronic cultus (Heb 7:15–17). In particular, it offered a “Melchizedec” priesthood gift of eternal life (v. 16) through “At-OneMent” (henosis) with the Divine (pp. 3 and 82–83, above), a theme which was central to both John’s doctrine of “spiritual indwelling” and Paul’s doctrine of “spiritual cleavage” (pp. 108–9, above). Nothing could better explain how the death of one—even Christ— could bring about the salvation of others. There have been many attempts in Scripture, as well as in the popular literature, to explain the mechanism of Christ’s sacrifice by using the imagery of the Aaronic “blood sacrifices” and “scapegoats.” This language was doubtless retained by early evangelists in order to appeal to the comprehension of Christ’s Jewish audience. Thus the crucified Christ was variously described as a “ransom” for captive men (Matt 20:28; 1 Tim 2:6), an “advocate” arguing man’s case before the Father (1 John 2:1), a sacrificial “victim” whose blood “washes” sin from the wicked (Heb 9:13–14), a “propitiation” satisfying God’s demand for justice (KJV Rom 3:25), a “Paschal Lamb” offered for Israel’s Passover (John 1:29), a “penal substitute” who is punished in place of the guilty (Luther, Calvin), or a “commercial transaction” designed to “buy” humanity from Satan’s grasp (Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa). Even the Savior occasionally accommodated the understanding of his Jewish listeners by declaring that he would “shed his blood” for the sins of mankind (Matt 26:28). Yet if these explanations were to be understood literally, his crucifixion would have been little more than a continuation of the old “carnal” sacrifices (Heb 7:16).

140 Temple and Contemplation (London, 1986), 336, quoting D. E. Aune, The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity (Leiden, 1972), 102.

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Yet as Jesus himself took great pains to explain, he was no “sacrificial victim” at all, but one who voluntarily laid down his life and took it up again, in order to show that he possessed the power of resurrection and eternal life: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matt 12:40). I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again (John 10:17–18).

Thus he could prove that it was he who had created life (John 1:3–4), hence the one who could re-create it: “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25). And by performing this great miracle, he would “draw men unto him,” and offer them his eternal life (12:32), again, not by “penal substitution,” or by ritual “blood-letting,” but by sharing his resurrection with his partners. Indeed, Christ now looked upon his Bride as “his own body” (Eph 5:28–30), which was made “holy and without blemish” (v. 27). John further explained that the glory which the Father had given to the Son would be shared directly with the disciples, thanks to the Father’s “pneumatic indwelling” in them, and their spiritual oneness with him (John 17:5, 22). But the greatest advance of Christ’s teaching over the old sacrificial cultus was that it no longer relied on the offering of “substitute victims,” but on the sacrifice of self (John 10:17–18), for the believer’s baptism “into Christ” demanded that he too be willing to participate in Christ’s crucifixion (Matt 10:38; Rom 6:3–6), i.e., to emulate his gift of self in the service of others. Indeed, by participating in Christ’s Eternal Sacrifice—which had originated in the heavens (Rev 13:8)—the disciple was promised that he might be glorified with Christ (Rom 6:5; 8:17; 2 Cor 1:5; Phil 3:10–11; Matt 16:24), and have a share in the superabundant life which increases the more it is given to others (John 6:5–14; cf. 4:31–34). This gift of what science would call “negative entropy” lay at the very heart of the “Theopathetic Mystery,” or the disciple’s willingness to participate in the Divine Suffering which turns into Life, and is never depleted. W. D. Davies thus believed that the center of Paul’s theology lay in the disciple’s “participation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ;”141 and Albert Schweitzer defined the true “Body of Christ” as “the point at which the dying and rising again, which began

141

Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, xxvii.

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with Christ, passes over to the elect.”142 The British Theosophist, Annie Besant, likewise agreed that “there is no substitution of Him for them, but the taking of their lives into His, and the passing of His life into them.”143 John’s Jesus therefore demanded that each true believer “eat his flesh and drink his blood,” i.e., internalize his sacrifice, in order that he might become fully one with him (John 6:56). This alone would make henosis with Christ a living reality and make proper use of the gift of grace in order to qualify for a satisfactory judgment and reward (Matt 16:27; Rom 2:6; 1 Cor 3:11–15; 2 Cor 5:10; etc.).

DEIFICATION The earliest Christians went on to teach that the ultimate result of becoming fully one with Christ was that one became “Christ’s own flesh” (Eph 5:28–32), and received “all of the divine fulness” which dwelt in him (Eph 3:19; Col 2:9–10). This made him a “sharer (koinonos)” of the “very being of God (theas physeos)” (2 Pet 1:4, NEB) and transformed him into the very “image of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:19). When Christ returns, we shall therefore be “like him” (1 John 3:2) and have “bodies like his glorious body” (Phil 3:21). Many early writers in fact used John 10:34 (“You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High”) as a proof-text to show that believers would be deified (Irenaeus, Theophilus of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, etc.),144 just as the Jewish writer, Philo, had said (pp. 63, 68, above) Thus originated the widely attested patristic saying, “God became man so that man could become god” (Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Basil of Cesaria, Gregory of Nazianzus, PseudoDionysus, St. Augustine, and many others). This, however. could only be achieved by the grace of God, when “Christ pours out the Spirit of the Father to unite and bring into union God and man, bringing down God to man through the Spirit, and taking up man to God through his Incarnation, and bestowing incorruptibility on us through union with himself (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.1.1). Hippolytus, the Bishop of Portus in the third century, summarized this “Great Mystery” of union with the divine by promising that

The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul, 118. Esoteric Christianity, 152–53. 144 G. W. H. Lampe, quoted in H. Cunliffe-Jones, A History of Christian Doctrines (Philadelphia, 1980), 150. 142 143

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A GREAT MYSTERY Thou shalt be a companion of the Deity, and a co-heir with Christ, no longer endowed by lusts or passions, and never again wasted by disease, for thou hast become God … Whatever it is consistent with God to impart, these God has promised to bestow upon thee, because thou hast been deified, and begotten unto immortality … And provided thou obeyest his solemn injunctions, and becomest a faithful follower of Him who is good, then shalt thou resemble Him, insomuch as thou shalt have honor conferred upon thee by Him. For the Deity by condescension does not diminish aught of the dignity of His divine perfection, having made thee even God to his glory (Refutation of Heresies, 10.30).

One of the recently discovered texts from Nag Hammadi describes the resulting oneness with God and deification as “a process of extension, as the Father extends himself to those whom he loves, so that those who came from him might become him as well” (Tripartite Tractate, 73.23–28). Origen therefore admonished that “men should escape from being men, and hasten to become gods” (Commentary on John, 29.27, 29), though he cautioned that this was always the work of God, never of man, being a process through which “human and divine nature begin to be woven together, so that by fellowship with divinity human nature might become divine” (Against Celsus, 3.28).

4 THE GREAT MYSTERY AND THE PREEXISTENT CHURCH CHRIST AND THE CHURCH AS THE PREEXISTENT MALE AND FEMALE We must now examine the New Testament “Great Mystery” in light of the Adam speculations which were connected with Christ’s preexistent “marriage” to the Church (pp. 134–35, above). Here again, the Cherubim may have helped to shape the Church’s perception of a universal marriage paradigm by tying together the divine male-female pattern of Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 with the pattern of syzygies (married pairs) which were believed to govern the sexes throughout nature. These included the patterns of God’s own “bisexuality” (Gen 1:27), the unified sexuality of the original Adam and Eve, and the divine order of human marriage which men and women were required to take upon themselves. But it also included Yahweh’s “marriage” to Israel, Christ’s “marriage” to the Church, the preexistent love of the Heavenly Man for his “Bride,” the Heavenly Community, and sexual relationships within the angelic world, a now-forgotten aspect of early JudaeoChristian tradition which was once revered and perpetuated by the Gnostics and the Kabbalists. Inevitably, a number of early writers and thinkers would see behind these various syzygetic symbols a cosmic sexuality whose archetypal examples were Christ and the Church, whose love for each other was a manifestation of the divine and universal passion which drives the worlds at all levels, both earthly and heavenly. One of Jesus’ special “Wisdom” titles was archē, “the Beginning” (see pp. 99–100, above). Jean Daniélou has carefully examined the history of this expression in early Christian writings and shown that it was a genuine teaching of the primitive Community.1 Clement of Alexandria, writing near the end of the second century, records at least twice that “the Son is archē,”2 i.e.,

1 2

Theology of Jewish Christianity (London, 1964, hereafter TJC), 166–72. Prophetic Fragments, 4.1 (in Daniélou, TJC, 166).

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the “First-begotten,” or “the Beginning” of God’s creations.3 The same, he notes, was “also called ‘Wisdom’ by the prophets,” as well as “Torah” and “Logos.”4 As his source, he mentions the Kerygmata Petrou (“Preaching of Peter”), a missing work from around A.D. 100,5 not to be confused with an Ebionite work of the same title. This one identifies Wisdom as the “True Prophet” and contains an original, non-Gnostic “male-female” syzygytheory.6 Theophilus of Antioch, around 150, repeated the claim that the Word was archē, “emitted by God with his own Wisdom before all things,”7 as did Justin Martyr, who stated clearly that “Wisdom was begotten as archē, before all his creatures,”8 being “an angel,” a “rational Power,” “the Son Wisdom,” the “Logos,” and the “Glory.”9 This identification of the Word as the “Beginning” of God’s creations dominated the early patristic period, and was summed up by Origen at the start of the third century, as follows: “’In the beginning, God made heaven and earth.’ What is the Beginning (archē), if not our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ, the first-born of all creatures?”10 “He is called ‘the Beginning’ in so far as he is Wisdom. 11 This is the same “angelomorphic” Christology12 that Miscellanies, 6.7. Ibid. 5 Ibid., 6.5 and 7 6 The latter work is found In Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia, 1963), 2:102–27. See H. J. Schoeps’ remarks in Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, U. Bianchi, ed. (Leiden, 1967), 532–33, where he explains his reasons for believing that Ebionism was an anti-Gnostic, rather than a Gnostic, movement. 7 Theophilus to Autolycus, 2.10. 8 Dialogue with Trypho, 61 and 62. 9 Ibid., 61. 10 Homily on Genesis, 1.1. 11 Commentary on John, 1.19 (designated “22” in vol. 10 of Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Buffalo, 1885–96). 12 Daniélou has demonstrated in great detail that Christians applied terminology derived from the Jewish concept of “angels” to Christ and the Spirit right up to the fourth century, though mostly in Jewish-Christian circles (TJC, 116–46). But Justin, too, in his Dialogue with Trypho, refers to Jesus as “the Angel of Great Counsel” (126:1–2), as well as “the Angel of the Lord” (ibid., 55:10; 126:4–5). An excellent summary of this “angelomorphic Christology” can be found in Richard Longenecker’s The Christology of Early Jewish Christianity (Grand Rapids, 1981), 26–32. See also Margaret Barker, The Great Angel (Louisville, 1992), especially pp. 194–207; also Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven (Leiden, 1977), 220–233, where he describes the 3 4

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exerted such a powerful influence on the Arians, who opposed the doctrine of Trinitarianism at the Council of Nicaea in 325.13 Yet, as we have already seen, it was derived from Old Testament Wisdom traditions which divided the sevenfold Light-Stream into various classes of “angels.”14 Thus it appears to have been an important ingredient of Christian Sophiology from the very start. We find another example of this “angelomorphic” Wisdom Christology in the Church’s early Hexaemeron doctrine, in which Christ is called hēmera (“Day”)—another way of saying that he was the “Beginning,” i.e., the “First Day” of God’s creations (Gen 1:1). It then described the members of the preexistent Church as the hexaēmerai (“Six Days”) which followed. A special form of this would appear in 2 Clement (p. 152, below), where Christ is described as the preexistent “Male” and the Church as the preexistent “Female” who comprised a heavenly syzygy before Creation and were destined to be reunited in the eschaton.15

THE HEXAEMERON Daniélou finds the ultimate source of Christ’s title “Day” in the use of Old Testament prophecies concerning the “Day of Yahweh” to describe the advent of Jesus. He also refers to Old Testament passages which equate “light” and “day” (e.g., Gen 1:5). Eusebius also quotes a certain Marcellus of Ancyra (4th cent.), who claimed to have preserved a logion of Jesus announcing himself as both “the Day” and the “Morning Star.”16 This is similar to the tradition contained in John 8:12 and 9:5, where Jesus says, “I am the light of the world”17—“Light” being the equivalent of “Day.” Further evidence that the “Word” and “Beginning” was called “Day” comes from Clement, who in his Miscellanies interpreted Genesis 2:4 (“This is the book of the generations of the heavens and the earth, when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens”) as a reference to the Word and his creative activity. Thus he argued that “angelic christology” of the Church Fathers which made Christ the “Second Power.” 13 Compare Daniélou, TJC, 129. 14 See the Jewish “angelology” which was frequently associated with the LightStream, pp. 58–59, above. 15 Compare Daniélou, TJC, 121–23, 166–72, 299–301, 303–4. 16 Eusebius, Against Marcellus, 1.2. 17 Danielou, TJC, 169.

144

A GREAT MYSTERY “In the day which God made,” i.e., in and by which God made “all things,” and “without which not even one thing was made” (John 1:3), denotes the operation of the Son … who is called “Day” (6.16; our emphasis).

This apparently derives from Philo’s statement in the Allegorical Interpretation that the phrase, “This is the ‘day’ (hēmera),” refers to the “book” or “reason” (logos) “by which God made heaven and earth” (1.19–21). Sources for the notion that the hexaēmerai (“Six Days”) of Genesis 1 referred to the creation of the preexistent Church are several. First of all, Christianity adapted the late Jewish belief in a heptad of seven archangels, whose leader was either Raphael or Michael (1 Enoch 20; T. Levi 8:1–2; Tob 12:15; 4QS1 38–40; compare also Rev 1:4, 20; 3:1; 4:5; 8:2, 6), to describe the six archangels who were led by the Logos-Christ, making seven archangels in all. Hippolytus, for example, understood Ezekiel’s vision of the six men and “the man clothed in linen”—who marked the righteous with a tau (Ezek 9:2–4)—to be a description of these six archangels plus the Word (Commentary on Daniel, 4.57). Their total number of seven is again related to the tradition of Wisdom’s “seven pillars” (Prov 9:1), or Philo’s seven-fold Light-Stream, though in the latter’s simplified “angelology” only the Logos and the Embracing Cherubim are specifically described as “angels.” Nevertheless, it was a widespread belief at the time that the seven archangels were fashioned out of the fire of God’s Garment, thus relating them directly to the components of the seven “fiery rivers” which emanated from God’s Throne (see pp. 55–58, above). Such an idea may even have contributed to the subsequent development of the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation. The best-known Christianized version of these seven archangels— now presided over by the Logos-Christ—is found in the Shepherd of Hermas, perhaps the most widely read book in the entire Church between the second and fourth centuries, having found its way even into the Codex Sinaiticus as “scripture”: Didst thou see the six men and the glorious and mighty man in the midst of them that walked about the Tower (the Church) and rejected the stones from the building?... The glorious man is the Son of God, and those six men are the glorious angels who guard him on the right and on the left (S.9.12:7–8).

In another passage, they are described as the six “holy angels of God that were created first of all (protoi ktisthentes), and to whom the Lord delivered all his Creation to increase and build it” (V.3.4:1–2). For this reason they have been called the “Protoctist (first created) Angels.” Clement of Alexandria also spoke of these “protoctist angels,” but they are seven in number,

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and the Logos is not specifically named as being among them (Fragments, 56:6). Pseudo-Cyprian, on the other hand, in a very ancient document entitled On the Hundredfold, Sixtyfold and Thirtyfold, simply makes the Son one of the seven “protoctists”: When the Lord created the angels from fire to the number of seven, he determined to make one of them his Son. He it is whom Isaiah declares to be the Lord Sabaoth. We see that there remained then six angels who had been created with the Son” (216).18

Since these protoctists were the first created of all God’s works, it was inevitable that a parallel be drawn between them and the first creationaccount in Genesis. Pseudo-Cyprian thus goes on to relate his account of the six protoctist angels to the six days of Creation (Gen 1), and telling us that God ceased to create thereafter. This is in fact the earliest surviving identification of the six angels with the Hexaemeron, and it agrees essentially with the witness of Papias (of whom we shall speak presently), though Papias preferred to describe the Hexaemeron as “Christ and the Church,” instead of “protoctist angels.” Pseudo-Cyprian then tells us that God “blessed” the seventh day (Gen 2:2–3)—the day to be imitated by all who would cease from sin— suggesting that he was extending his understanding of the “days of Creation” to agree with yet another tradition, this one identifying Christ as the “Sabbath Day” or “Day of Rest.”19 Thus, we read that “the Seventh Day is ‘the Rest,’ which prepares us by the cessation of sin for the Primordial Day, which is truly Repose, which is also the creation of the true light and the gnosis which shines upon us” (Clement, Miscellanies, 6.16). Actually, there would be no contradiction in calling Christ both “Beginning” and “Sabbath,” for as the “Sabbath Day” he was also uniquely qualified to be the “Primordial Day.” In fact, the Christians soon decided that the true “Primordial Day” was not the Jewish Sabbath, but the “Lord’s Day,” the eighth day of the week (Rev 1:10; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:l–2)—which is a repetition of the first—hence the return of the original “Primordial Day.” From Genesis 2:2–3, then, it would have been natural to go on and read verse 4 as a description of the “operation of the Son … who is called 18 Quoted by Daniélou (TJC, 122–3) from Richard Reitzenstein, “Eine frühchristliche Schrift von den dreierlei Früchten,” Zeitschrift für Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 15 (1914): 82. Daniélou claims that this is the earliest of all references to the Protoctists. 19 Ibid., 122–23.

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‘Day,’” just as Clement stated. Such speculation was in fact the source of the Gnostic idea that the Hebdomad (“The Seven”) referred to solely as the realm of the “powers and principalities”—i.e., the “angels” who rule over the planetary “seven heavens”—whereas the Ogdoad (“The Eighth”) was the realm of the truly Divine. Yet we still need to ask just how these “protoctist angels”—including “the Word”—became so closely identified with the Preexistent Church and the Savior. That the Hexaemeron was indeed understood in this fashion is not only affirmed by Pseudo-Cyprian, but also by the ancient Fragments of Papias, who tells us that “the work of the Six Days (the Hexaemeron) referred specifically to Christ and the Church.”20 This information he claimed to have received directly from the Elders, i.e., from those who had personally spoken with the Apostles: I will not hesitate to set down for thy benefit, along with the interpretations, all that I have carefully learnt and carefully recalled from the Elders, guaranteeing its truth … If anyone chanced to come who had actually been a follower of the Elders, I would inquire as to the discourses of the Elders, what Andrew or what Peter said, or what Philip, or what Thomas or James, or what John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples … For I did not think that things out of books could profit me so much as the utterances of a voice that liveth and abideth.21

Anastasius Sinaites affirms that the same view had been held by Philo, “the contemporary of the Apostles,” as well as by men like Pantaenus and Ammonius, and indeed, by “the more ancient expositors of the Churches” in general. So that there be no mistake, he too affirmed that the “sayings about Paradise (Gen. 1)” referred to the “Church and Christ.”22 These “ancient expositors,” says Anastasius, also included Clement of Alexandria. Of him, we further read in Eusebius’ Church History that “in the 20 Papias, Fragments, 9 (in Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1:155); Fragments, 12, in J. B. Lightfoot, ed., The Apostolic Fathers (Grand Rapids, 1956), 269. This is also quoted in Daniélou, TJC, 299. 21 Papias, Fragments, 1 (Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1:153), 3 (Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, 263–64); Danielou, TJC, 47. Later commentators have tended to discount the claim that Papias was actually a “hearer of John” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., loc. cit.), though his “nearness in spirit to the actual Christianity of the subapostolic age” should be taken more seriously than Eusebius did, for Eusebius had already had begun to doubt what Papias reported concerning the earlier apostolic traditions (ibid.). 22 Papias, Fragments 12 and 13 (in Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, 269).

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first book of the Miscellanies (1.1.11) he shows … that he himself is very close to the traditions of the Apostles; and he promises to write a commentary on Genesis” (5.13:8–9). As fulfillment of that promise, his Fragments “do indeed consist largely of commentaries on Genesis.” The “heavens and the waters” stood for the “pure powers,” while the “heavens and the earth” signified the heavenly and earthly things, that is, the spiritual and carnal realities (3:1–3). Finally, the “Beginning” (archē) is the Son (4:1).23 Clement also includes a discussion of the “protoctist angels” (51:2; 56:7; 57:1),24 i.e., the angels “who are called days” (56:1). Since Anastasius especially listed Clement as one who understood the “six days” to be a description of the preexistent Church, we have yet another witness that the latter was somehow considered to be synonymous with the protoctist angels. We should note that Jewish apocalyptic already viewed the angels above and the congregation on earth as parts of a single, eternal Community. In the Qumran fragment known as the “Angelic Liturgy” we thus learn that the angels surrounding God’s Throne pronounced their celestial liturgy together with the earthly covenanters as they recited their benedictions in the desert (cf. Num 6:24–27). This agrees with a belief in Jewish folklore that whenever Israel performs sacred worship, her devotions are accompanied by a divine service on the part of the angels.25 The basis of such belief was the doctrine of the Qumran Community’s preexistence and common lot with the angels, which were established together before the world began: If mortal men keep faith with Thee, behold Thou crownest their heads with glory everlasting. All of these things Thou didst establish in Thy wisdom. Thou didst appoint all Thy works before creating them: the host of Thy Spirits and the Congregation of Thy Holy Ones, the heavens and all their hosts and the earth and all it brings forth … For Thou hast established them from before eternity (1QH 13:7–10).

The earthly Congregation is therefore but the visible part of an Eternal Planting, whose roots are in the heavens: Thou hast set me beside a fountain in an arid land, beside a spring; in the desert, beside an oasis; like one of those evergreen trees—fir or pine or cypress—planted together to Thy glory, which, hidden ’midst other trees—trees that stand beside water—are fed by a secret spring, and Daniélou, TJC, 300. Ibid., 300. 25 See T. H. Gaster, The Dead Sea Scriptures (Garden City, NY, 1976), 285–86. 23 24

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Thus it was the destiny of the righteous from before Creation to share the lot of Thy Holy Ones, that he may watch before Thee with the everlasting Host, together with Thy Spirits of Holiness, and be renewed with all that is, and with all that know, in a common rejoicing” (1QH 11:11–14).

“In a common rejoicing” is rendered by T. H. Gaster as “with … the choir invisible” and explained as yet another reference to the belief that the earthly “sons of God” pray in concert with their spiritual counterparts, the angels (bene ha’el), “emulating what their heavenly archetypes did at the first dayspring,” when the “Sons of God” and the “Morning Stars” burst into song (Job 38:7).26 It is well known that these heavenly bene ha’el numbered seventy in Canaanite myth; hence seventy was undoubtedly the number of the bene ha’el amongst the original Hebrews. This number further influenced the Hebrew concept of the Ideal Community, which also numbered seventy (cf. Exod 1:5). There were also seventy nations, ruled over by seventy “Sons of God,” according to immemorial Israelite belief (cf. Gen 10; Clementine Homilies 18:4; also the statement in the Jewish Passover Haggadah). Nevertheless, the number seventy-two sometimes appears in later traditions, especially those influenced by Babylonian culture. Thus, the Clementine Recognitions states that God “divided the nations into seventy-two parts, and over these hath appointed angels as princes” (2:4). One even finds the number seventy-one in the Mul Apin, the classical Babylonian treatise on the constellations.27 Finally, the number seven, to which we have extensively referred, is closely related to the seventy stars or constellations, being the number of the moveable planets which govern the rest. The idea that the “seventy (or seventy-two) bene ha’el” are somehow related to the earthly “sons of God”—and are in fact their celestial archetypes—can still be detected in the Jewish legend of the Thirty-Six Righteous Tzaddikim, i.e., Jews created by God to wander over the face of the earth to succor mankind. This is of course half of the total number of seventy-two, Ibid., 187, 250, 130. See Eric Burrows, “The Number Seventy in Semitic,” Orientalia 5 (1936): 389–408. 26 27

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and is obviously part of a larger legend, which states that God created an equal number of men and angels: “He created seventy-two saints; thirty-six He placed in heaven to always be beside Him to plead for their erring brothers on earth, and thirty-six He scattered over the earth.”28 There is, in short, a Heavenly Race, part of which remains above, and which corresponds to the race on earth, or the fleshly embodiments of its angelic brethren. This close connection between angels and men was taken for granted in the Old Testament, where visiting angels always have anthropomorphic appearances (Gen 18:2; 19:1; 32:23; Judg 13:10; etc.). They are even capable of having sexual intercourse with humans and of impregnating them (Gen 6:1–4). First Enoch in fact claims that “men were created exactly like the angels to the intent that they should continue pure and righteous, and death, which destroys everything, could not have taken hold of them” (69:10–11). Philo also taught that the souls of men and the angels were identical, save that the angels have not yet “fallen” and become entangled in matter: But there were other souls, called demons in philosophy and angels in Scripture, who, dwelling in the higher parts, were never entangled by love of the earthly (On Dreams, 1:22).

“Joseph’s Prayer” (preserved in Origen’s Commentary on John, 2.25) accordingly identifies Jacob as “an angel of God and a primeval spirit, the firstborn of all creations; and like me were Abraham and Isaac created before any other works of God.” Here, at last, we have a precise statement of the belief that the souls of the pious were to be counted among the protoctist angels. “Joseph’s Prayer,” Origen further informs us, was an “apocryphal work … current among the Hebrews” (i.e., prior to A.D. 231), and one of which he obviously approved. Hence, it undoubtedly reflects the same kind of thinking which had enabled the students of the Hexaemeron to identify the “first-created angels” with the preexistent Church. It is also significant in this connection that the Ascension of Isaiah speaks of the descent of the “Angel of the Christian Church” (3:15), who was a preexistent form of the ekklesia. This is similar to the “Old Woman” who is described as the “Angel” of the preexistent Church in Hermas. In fact, if we were to return to this latter work for a closer examination, we should find that the protoctist “angels” are themselves identified with the Church in 28

In Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 5:23.

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several important ways. To begin with, the preexistent Son—who is one of the angels (S.9.12:7–8)—is identified with the Holy Spirit (S.5.6:2); but the Church is also identified with the Spirit (“the Holy Spirit which spoke with thee in the form of the Church”; S.9.1:1). What these surprising correspondences suggest is that there was already a spiritual corporeity between Christ and his Church before the earth was created, held together by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Next, the angels are predestined to become parts of Christ here on earth, for they cannot enter into the Church without first “putting on” the Son (S.9.12:7–8). The same is true of men, who without the angels (and therefore without the Son) cannot be integrated into a heavenly Church (V.2.2:7). But those who enter in “with the angels” will eventually be incorporated into her timeless fabric (S.9.25, 27). This reminds us of Paul’s statement that Christ is the “chief cornerstone” of the Church, to which the apostles and members also belong (Eph 2:20–22). To these male angels must also be added the seven “virtues” (female angels), an expression obviously borrowed from Philo’s circle of thought (pp. 47–49, above). The Shepherd’s night with virgines subintroductae (“secret virgins,” S.9.10:6–11:8) symbolized his union with these seven “virtues,” hence with the Spirit,29 for being “clothed” in a “garment of the Holy Spirit” (whose divided portions were represented severally by the maidens)30 was necessary for entrance into the angelic church (S.9.24–25). Both of these groups of angels stood along side of Christ in the primordial structure of the Church (cf. “the six young men that came with the Church,” V.3.2:5). That the “first created angels” (V.3.4) were in fact identical to the Church is further emphasized by a parallel statement that it was the Church who was “created before all things” (V.2.4); it was in fact for her alone that all else was later framed (ibid.). Though there is lack of precision in Hermas as to what was “first created” (i.e., preexistent) and what was “presently” being incorporated into the Church, the picture of her timeless, eternal edifice—existing from before Creation, and whose “chief cornerstone” was the Word—is quite clear. It is likewise clear that the “angels” were part of the preexistent Church Heinrich Schlier, Der Brief an die Epheser (Düsseldorf, 1957), 270. See pp. 205–6, below. These “virgins” were undoubtedly related to the Valentinian “angels,” i.e., those individual portions of the Holy Spirit which were destined to reunite with the “images” or “souls” of the devout (Irenaeus, Against Hersies, 1.4.5). We shall discuss the “angels” and “images” in more detail later on (see “Gnosticism and the Wisdom Mystery,” below). 29 30

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from the very “beginning,” Christ, “the archē,” being one of the “protoctist angels,” according to the Church’s early Wisdom Christology. Finally, another parallel with the Hexaemeron’s interpretation of Genesis 1 is brought out in Hermas by the reference to the Church “built upon the waters,” as at the time of Creation (Gen 1:2, 6–10), and being sustained by the “Word of the Almighty and Glorious Name,” i.e., Christ. Here, “the waters” represent both the waters of baptism and the power of the Spirit (cf. John 7:38–39). Again, Christ is accompanied by the “six young men” who are “the holy angels of God, who were first created, and to whom the Lord handed over his whole creation, that they might build up and rule over it” (V.3.3:3–4:1), namely the Church.

THE HEAVENLY MAN AND THE HEAVENLY COMMUNITY The identification of the “Six Days” of Creation with the spiritual creation of the preexistent Church was further supported by the widespread apocalyptic belief in two spiritual entities, the Heavenly Man and the Heavenly Community, who had known each other from before the physical Creation. R. G. Hamerton-Kelly has recently demonstrated in great detail that the entire New Testament generally rests upon this basic assumption. Paul’s theology (the earliest of the canonical record), for instance, is based throughout on the belief that Christ and the Church preexisted together before Creation: The passages we have examined have shown that Paul believed in two pre-existent entities, Christ and the Church. The forms in which he expressed this belief were taken from Jewish apocalyptic, Jewish Wisdom speculation, and a Hellenistic-Jewish mysticism which is present in the writings of Philo … The eschatologically pre-existent entities were identified with items that were believed, in the traditions from which they came, to have existed before the world.31

Christians in fact already belonged to this heavenly Church (Gal 4:26; 1 Cor 3:5–17) because they were “chosen” ante-mortally and foreordained to membership in it (Rom 8:28–30; Eph 1:4; 2 Tim 1:9). Though HamertonKelly is cautious in defining just what constituted “preexistence” in the mind of early Christians, he is forced to admit that passages like Romans 8:30 (“those whom he foreordained he also called”) imply that “the elect 31 Pre-Existence, Wisdom, and the Son of Man; a Study of the Idea of Pre-existence in the New Testament (Cambridge, 1973), 152.

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really existed when the choice was made.32 This literal understanding of preexistence was in fact part of the general apocalyptic understanding, as it occurs, for example, in 1 Enoch 38:1–5, or 62:7–8, 14–15, where “the idea of the solidarity of the redeemer with his own is expressed as the pre-existence [sic] of the community of the righteous with the Son of Man”:33 For the Son of Man was concealed from the beginning, and the Most High preserved him in the presence of his power. Then he revealed him to the holy and elect ones. The congregation of the holy ones shall be planted, and all the elect ones shall stand before him on that day (1 Enoch 62:7–8).

Jesus also alluded to this preexistent, heavenly Community when he declared, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), since it originated “out of the world … before the world was” (17:5–6). The disciples, too, “are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (v. 16), having been “chosen in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4; 2 Thess 2:13). Hamerton-Kelly sums up this early Christian view of preexistence by concluding that “Jewish apocalyptic (was) the dominant conceptual framework of earliest Christianity,” and that “apocalyptic teaches the real preexistence [sic] of entities to be revealed in the end,” i.e., “Christ and the Church.”34 Transformed into the esoteric symbolism of the Hexaemeron tradition, the “days” of the Creation-account were “no longer interpreted in their literal sense, but in a hidden one,” and made to stand for these preexistent realities, “which in a mysterious way existed before the material world.”35 Perhaps the most explicit description of the Preexistent Church and man’s descent from it is to be found in the Ephesian “Great Mystery” itself. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church … for we are members of his body, formed of his flesh and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a Great Mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church (Eph 5:25, 30–32).

Ibid., 155; our emphasis. Ibid., 222. The author always spells “pre-existence” with a hyphen. 34 Ibid., 276, 278, 271. 35 Adapted from Daniélou, TJC, 299. 32 33

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What is particularly significant here is the fact that most early manuscripts of verse 30 contain the added words, “from his flesh and from his bones,” showing that Christ and the Church already comprised a single corporeity in the preexistence.36 Second Clement, a work from the early second century, also shows that Genesis 1:27 was understood to be a reference to the preexistent creation of Christ and the Church, making “Adam” a symbol for Christ, and “Eve” a symbol for the Church: If we will do the will of our Father God, we shall be members of the first Church, the spiritual … that which was created before the sun and moon … I think not that ye are ignorant that the living Church is the body of Christ, for the Scripture says, “God created man, male and female.” The male is Christ, the female the Church. And the Books and the Apostles plainly declare that the Church existeth not now for the first time but hath been from the beginning; for she was spiritual, as our Jesus also was spiritual, but was manifested in the last days that He might save us. Now the Church, being spiritual, was manifested in the flesh of Christ, thereby showing that if any of us guard her in the flesh and defile her not, he shall receive her again in the Holy Spirit” (14).

This enabled exponents of the Hexaemeron doctrine to describe the subsequent verses in Genesis 2:22–24 as the “marital” reunion of “Adam and Eve,” i.e., as an event of “recognition and reunion based on a preexistent oneness.” This, again, referred secretly to Christ and the Church, whose soteriological “marriage” was in fact the “reunion of originally consubstantial beings.”37 Hamerton-Kelly finds further evidences of Paul’s belief in the preexistent association of Christ and the Church in Romans 8:28–30; 1 Corinthians 3:5–17; Galatians 4:26; Ephesians 1:4; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; 2 Timithy 1:9; etc.,38 culminating in Christ’s present “marriage” to the Church (Eph 5:31–32; Rom 7:4; 2 Cor 11:2). This Pauline doctrine of Christ’s preexistent “espousal” to the Church belongs to what R. A. Batey calls “a widespread nuptial myth,” once “common to early Christianity, Judaism and the Mysteries,” and which served as a “central core” around which “gnostic accretions later gath-

36 E.g., Codices Sinaiticus, Claramontanus, Boernerianus, Porfirianus, PseudoAthos, most Antioch mss., the Latin and Syriac Versions; Irenaeus, Jerome, etc. See Markus Barth, Ephesians, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1974), 721. 37 Ibid., 724. 38 Q.v. in Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-existence.

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ered.”39 J. Paul Sampley has also pointed out that Paul’s language presupposes the reader’s acquaintance with this common marriage myth. Thus, “in 2 Cor 11 and Eph 5 the historian is allowed a glimpse into a popular speculation that may have been much more pervasive than the extant early Christian literature indicates.”40 This agrees fully with the general apocalyptic belief that “the chosen One, the Son of Man, is inseparable from the community of Saints … (B)oth are hidden in God, and both are manifest eschatalogically.’’41 But for the Christian, they have appeared on earth as Christ and the Church, and their relationship is described in terms of the “marriage” of “Adam and Eve,” according to a traditional Hexaemeron exegesis of Genesis. But how did Christians first come to view the “Adam” and “Eve” of Genesis 1:27 and 2:23–24 as descriptions of the preexistent Christ and the Church? W. D. Davies has demonstrated at some length that the early rabbis were acquainted with a closely related concept, which taught that the future generations of mankind were already contained in Adam.42 We already noted that Clement of Alexandria understood Genesis 2:4 to refer to the creative work of Christ, “the Day” (“in the Day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens”). Certain rabbis, however, understood the same passage to refer to the generations of Adam’s future posterity (“these are the generations of the heavens and of the earth”).43 This showed that all men were included within a single common ancestor, and were already one in him, for “all belong to each and each belongs to all.”44 The Mishnah further teaches that “only one man was created in the world, to teach that if any man has caused a single soul to perish from Israel, Scripture imputes it to him as though he had caused a whole world to perish; and if any man saves a single soul alive for Israel, Scripture imputes it to him as though he had saved alive a whole world” (m. Sanhedrin 4:5).

“Jewish Gnosticism and the ‘Hieros Gamos’ of Eph. V, 21–33,” New Testament Studies 10 (1963–64): 121–27. 40 “And the Two Shall Become One Flesh”; A Study of Traditions in Ephesians 5:21–33 (Cambridge, 1971), 83. 41 Daniélou, TJC, 310; our emphasis. 42 Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia, 1980), 44–57. 43 Genesis Rabbah, 24:1ff; Aboth d. R. Nathan I (in W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia, 1980), 54, notes); see also Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament (Munich, 1924), 2:174. 44 Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 53. 39

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We further note that Adam was created out of dust gathered from all parts of the earth,45 which may be another way of asserting the universality and equality of man, he having been formed without regional bias or prejudice.46 “Because of this cosmopolitan physical structure of Adam, it follows that a man from the East and a man from the West were of the same material formation and therefore one.”47 Thus, Adam “stands for the real unity of mankind in virtue of his creation,” making him “the basis for love, equality and peace among men.”48 According to these rabbinical theories, then, the First Man represented an entire Community; and it is interesting to note that this Urmensch was said to have possessed gigantic size, so that his limbs extended from one end of the world to the other.49 But we have not yet answered our question completely, for 2 Clement represents the Church not as a gigantic “male,” but as a “woman” (14). We must therefore recall that the divided sexes pertain only to the separated Christ and his Church, as they presently exist on earth (see pp. 46–48 above). Preexistently, they were a single corporeity, a malefemale unity (“neither male nor female”), in whose image the prelapsarian Adam was created (Philo, On the Creation of the World, 134). Second Clement then describes the restoration of the pre-Fall Adam: “When the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside … neither male nor female, then the Kingdom of God will arrive” (12). But the Gospel of Thomas explains that being “neither male nor female” (Log. 22) actually means being male (Log. 114). This restored “maleness,” however, is not an earthly “maleness”—which is actually female—but a reconstitution of the Heavenly Adam, who was one with the Savior, and therefore male in a divine sense. This distinction between the fallen “Adam” (who is female) and the restored “Adam” (who is male) also occurs in Gnostic texts, which reflect a growing anti-Jewish bias in parts of the Church. In one of them we read that “when we were Hebrews we were orphans, and had only our mother, but when we became Christians we had both father and mother” (Gospel of B. Sanhedrin 38a; Genesis Rabba 8; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, 3.19; see also Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament (Munich, 1926), 3:479; Davies, op. cit., 53. 46 Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 53. There were naturally some who claimed that Adam’s “head” came from Israel, “the most exalted of all lands” (ibid., 54). 47 Ibid., 54. 48 Ibid., 55. 49 Beginning with R. Eliezer (A.D. 100), in the Pesiqta Rabbati, 115a. See Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 45; Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar, 3:325. 45

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Philip 52:21–24). Such texts accordingly describe earthly generation (Gen 1:28) as the “work of the female,” as opposed to being newly begotten as a “perfect Man” through union with Christ (Eph 4:13). (We shall again have occasion to return to this “male-vs.-female” imagery when we discuss the Gnostic Bridal chamber and its nuptial mystery.) These, then, were some of the historical influences that went into the designation of Christ and the Church as the preexistent “Male” and “Female,” and who were said to have enjoyed a close relationship before the time of Creation. This is most important for our study because their consubstantiality, separation, and reunion constituted the basic pattern which governed early Christian soteriology, far more than most commentators have hitherto recognized. To summarize: Christianity’s early conception of the Logos as one of the seven “protoctist” angels who comprised the preexistent ekklesia appears to have been derived from a Jewish heptad of archangels (reduced by Philo to a sevenfold Light-Stream), as well as from apocalyptic traditions of a preexistent Heavenly Man and his Heavenly Community. These were identified in the Christian Hexaemeron as the “Primal Adam” of Genesis 1. Genesis 1:27 therefore referred to the spiritual creation of Christ and the Church—perfectly united as the archetypal “Adam” and “Eve”—whereas Genesis 2:22–24 referred to their separation and subsequent reunion, the latter being the decisive event in man’s salvation. This is even now becoming manifest in history, and will only be completed when the preexistent partners are eternally reunited in the eschaton. Subsidiary contributions to this Hexaemeron tradition were the identification of the “angels” with the preexistent souls, and the rabbinic idea of a Primal Adam, in whom all future men were contained at the time of Creation. We must now return to the last-mentioned speculation, to show just how Jesus—the Wisdom-Logos—came to possess the necessary divine Image which would restore man to his prelapsarian perfection, thus giving him the divine stature which God intended him to possess at the time of his creation.

JESUS AS THE RESTORER OF THE DIVINE IMAGE TO FALLEN MAN At the time of Paul, as we just saw, both rabbis and early Christians shared a belief that the initial Creation had inaugurated a time of harmony and perfection, when Adam received the divine Image and enjoyed the peace and happiness that God intended for him (cf. Philo, On the Creation of the World, 139). The rabbis further taught that six things were subsequently lost becase

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of Adam’s Fall: the earth’s fruitfulness, the fruit fulness of the trees, the clarity of the atmosphere, the glory of Adam’s appearance, his immortality, and the magnitude of his form.50 The Messianic Age, however, would restore these things to their pristine blessedness. Fourth Ezra accordingly opined that “the world shall return to its first silence seven days, as it was at the beginning, so that no man is left,” after which “the age that is not yet awake shall be aroused, and that which is corruptible shall perish” (7:30–32; cf. 2 Baruch 3:7). The Messianic Age, in short, would be a return to the beginning (“Endzeit = Urzeit”).51 C. F. Burney has argued that the Gospelwriters saw the beginning of this restoration already in the events of Christ’s birth. Note, for example, Luke 1:35, where the Spirit repeats its original creative act (Gen 1:2) by “overshadowing” Mary; also the Prologue to John, with its obvious parallels to Genesis 1.52 Davies also sees similar parallels in the writings of Paul between the creation of the original Adam and the new creation in Christ: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision availeth, but a new creation” (Gal 6:15). Thus, “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new” (2 Cor 5:17; cf. also Rom 8:22f).53 Since the advent of Christ was to be a repetition of the original Creation, it was inevitable that Paul should come to look upon Jesus as the “Second” or “Last Adam,” replacing the “First Adam,” in whom all men had fallen (1 Cor 15:22, 45; Rom 5:12–13). Developing these rabbinic speculations still further, Paul suggested that those who already enjoyed a natural unity in Adam can look forward to a spiritual unity in Christ. But instead of being animated by a natural spirit (the nephesh), they would henceforth be animated by the Holy Spirit, or the principle of supernatural life (Rom 8:11; 1 Cor 12:6–13).54 In union with the “Last” or “New Adam,” then, men will be able to attain the true humanity which God had intended from the very beginning. Thus, we read in Romans 8:28–30 of man’s preexistent choosing and foreordination to be “conformed to the image of (God’s) son” (v. 29). This was God’s plan at the time of Creation, when he created the Heavenly Adam in his own Image—an Image which was unfortunately diminished and com50 Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 39. See Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar, 3:250, for examples. 51 Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 39. “Endtime = Beginning Time.” 52 The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel (Oxford, 1922), 43–44. 53 Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 40. 54 Ibid., 57.

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promised by the Fall.55 Now Christ—as the Logos-Wisdom and divine eikōn—has made this original, pristine Image available once more. He is in fact the True Adam, i.e., the restored, resurrected Man.56 Significantly, however, he was “Man” both before and after his Resurrection, proving his essential Humanity, as well as his Divinity, which are identical in Paul’s eschatological anthropology. Hints of this Pauline doctrine appeared in the Priestly account in Genesis, with its exalted view of God’s original design for man (“In the Old Testament, the theomorphic understanding of man is more important than the anthropomorphic view of God.”).57 But to realize this divine potential, fallen man needs to be reunited with the intended Image in its purity. Paul therefore transferred traditional Jewish ascriptions of Adam’s excellence before the Fall to Christ, in whom mankind would at last reclaim his true nature,58 promising that “we all, with open face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, shall be changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:18). This early conception of Christ as the prelapsarian “Image of God” had also appeared in the Wisdom books, further informed by the preexistence doctrine of Jewish apocalyptic. In Job 15:7–8, for instance, there is a reference to the widespread myth of a preexistent Urmensch (Primal Man), who was a kind of demi-god, and who had enjoyed an ante-mortal access to the Council in Heaven. Philo developed this theme when he described the spiritual “First Adam”—or Adam prior to the Fall—who had no part in corruptible things, and who bore the image of God (Allegorical Interpretation, 1.31). Christ’s titles, “prototokos (First Born) of many brethren” (Rom 8:29), and “prototokos (First Born) from the dead” (Col 1:18), likewise appear to have been based on Wisdom expressions meaning the “First Created” (LXX Prov 8:22; Wis 7:22; Philo, On Agriculture, 51; On the Confusion of 55 Gerhard von Rad suggests that although the divine Image was transmitted to Seth (Gen 5:3), the “steady decline from the long lives of the earliest patriarchs (P) has the theological implication of a degeneration of man’s original powers and divinely given habitus” (in TDNT, 2:392). 56 Robin Scroggs, The Last Adam (Oxford, 1966), 101. 57 Ibid., 101–2; our emphasis. The quotation is from J. Behm, “morphē, morphō, morphōsis, metamorphō,” in TDNT, 4:749. Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory (p. 60, above) was also seen by Philo as a “mirror” of the divine image, which was also clearly “anthropomorphic,” and which von Rad calls the “locus classicus for the imago doctrine in Gen 1:26.” Old Testament Theology (New York, 1962), 1:146. 58 Scroggs, Last Adam, 100.

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Tongues, 146).59 For this reason, he would logically serve as the “New Adam” (Rom 5:15–19; 1 Cor 15:21, 47), or the “first man” to be re-created after death. And since it was his image after which the First Adam had been formed (On the Creation of the World, 134; Col 3:10),60 it would be his image after which the redeemed would be reformed (Rom 8:29). Thus Paul could say, “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Cor 15:49), for he was both the “image of God” (Wis 7:26; 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15; Heb 1:3), and the “glory of God” (Wis 7:25; 2 Cor 3:7–4:6; Phil 3:21), as well as the “Spirit of Life” (1 Cor 15:45), who—like Wisdom—creates and renews (Wis 6:18–19; 7:22; 8:1, 13; 9:1–2, 17–19; Rom 8:11; 1 Cor 15:45). But this rapprochement would not be possible were it not for man’s primal kinship with this vital Spirit. This preternatural kinship was already referred to in the Wisdom of Solomon: There is immortality in kinship (syngeneia) with Wisdom … I was, indeed, a child well-endowed, having a noble soul fall to my lot; or rather, being born noble, I entered an undefiled body (8:17, 19–20).

It was also found in the writings of Philo, who wrote that man’s soul originated as a “fragment” or “ray” of Wisdom (On the Creation of the World, 146).61 This further helps us to see how Jesus—the New Testament “Wisdom”—could stand in an intimate relationship to both Man and God, for he was depicted as consubstantial with man before Creation (Eph 1:4), as well as divine (John 1:1; Phil 2:6). Thus we read in most of the earliest manuscripts of Ephesians 5:30 the additional words that We are members of his body, and of his flesh, and of his bones, from his flesh and from his bones,

suggesting that we were once part of Christ’s preexistent Body (see pp. 155–56, above). Some scholars hold that the additional words in verse 30 are part of the original text,62 while others claim on philological grounds that they are an interpolation.63 “In any case,” Martin Dibelius observed, “they represent See p 13, above. See pp. 46–47 above. See also Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism,47–48. 61 See p. 46, above. 62 E.g., Bengel, Holzhauser, Harless, Bisping, Hofmann, Klöpper, Wohlenberg, Haupt, Dibelius, etc. See Schlier, Brief an die Epheser, 261, notes. 63 Schlier, Brief an die Epheser, 261; Barth, Ephesians, 724. 59 60

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the opinion, if not the words, of the author.’’64 That “opinion,” according to Heinrich Schlier, was that there once preexisted “a syzygy consisting of Christ and the Church,” which was followed by “the effective realization of that heavenly syzygy in an earthly syzygy.”65 The ultimate reality behind the Ephesian Sacred Marriage was therefore a spiritual corporeity, allegorically described in Genesis 1:27 as the heavenly “Male-Female” (the “Primal Adam”), the “male” being the preexistent Christ, and the “female” being the preexistent Church. Furthermore, the preexistent Church was the “Body (soma) of the preexistent Christ,” as we read in 2 Clement.66 This preexistent syzygy then appeared in the world as an earthly syzygy, consisting of the Holy Spirit (“the Male”) which animates the present “Body of Christ” (“the Female”). Its copy, the “Adam” of Genesis 1:27, was likewise created as a syzygy—male and female in perfect unity—adumbrating the future oneness of Christ and his Church. Finally, these divine syzygies were replicated in human individuals, each being a syzygy consisting of a “portion” of the Holy Spirit67 and a physical body (1 Cor 6:19), and coming into existence when incorporated into the Church of Life.68 Thus we arrive at the following scheme, which Schlier believes to be the basis of the Ephesian Sacred Marriage:69 1-THE PREEXISTENT BODY OF CHRIST (Eph 5:30) The Preexistent Christ plus the Preexistent Church ↓ 2-THE MANIFEST BODY OF CHRIST (1 Cor 12:13) The Holy Spirit plus the Church ↓ 3-THE INDIVIDUAL (1 Cor 6:19) A portion of the Holy Spirit plus an Individual Body

Quoted in Schlier, Brief an die Epheser, 261, notes. Schlier, Brief an die Epheser, 269. 66 See p. 152, above. This primal couple was sometimes referred to as an arsenothelys (“man-woman”), because of their ideal unity. Paul’s “Primal Adam” was likewise created “neither male nor female,” but a perfect harmony. 67 Compare the Gnostic “angels,” which were individualized portions of the Holy Spirit (p. 150, above, and note 30; also pp. 273, 302–3, below). 68 Schlier, Brief an die Epheser, 268 and notes. 69 Ibid., 268–69. 64 65

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This scheme was evidently meant to be understood in “onion” fashion— where peeling away the outer layer (the human individual) reveals another syzygy within (the “Manifest Body of Christ”), and still deeper within that, the “Preexistent Body of Christ.” In any case, Paul certainly believed that each syzygy had a preexistent counterpart, which in time gave rise to the Gnostic idea that material reality is but a foreign “encrustation” around an earlier, more fundamental spiritual reality, each with a heavenly syzygy at its heart.70 The relationship between the “Preexistent Christ” and the “Holy Spirit” was probably based on Paul’s statement that “the Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:17), or others which functionally identify the Holy Spirit with the Spirit of Christ (1 Cor 12:3; Rom 8:9; Gal 4:6; Phil 1:19; Rom 1:4; 1 Cor 15:45).71 Otherwise, the New Testament has little to say concerning the ontological relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Christ. In some sense, however, Christ is generally thought to be acting through the Holy Spirit: “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you” (John 14:18). Thus, Paul can say that it is the Holy Spirit who animates the Body of Christ, and who effectively represents Christ’s personal immanence in the world (1 Cor 12).

THE “GREAT MYSTERY” AND THE COSMIC BODY OF CHRIST This notion of the Church as Christ’s “flesh” is also found in the Colossian picture of the cosmos as a form and extension of the Church (“He is before all things … the head of the body, the Church,” Col 1:17–18). It is also his goal in the fulness of times to regather “all things in one, in Christ” (Eph 1:20). Here, according to Hamerton-Kelly, the author conceives of the entire cosmos as “the mythological body of the preexistent Church.”72 It was of course understood that the Church had a preexistent state, for which a pristine, harmonious world had been created.73 That harmony, according to Compare Gershom Scholem’s statement that “the hieros gamos, the ‘sacred union’ of the King and Queen, the Celestial Bridegroom and the Celestial Bride, to name a few of the symbols, is the central fact in the whole chain of divine manifestations in the hidden world. In God there is a union of the active and the passive, procreation and conception, from which all mundane life and bliss are derived” (MTJM, 227). 71 Donald Guthrie, New Testament Theology (Downer’s Grove, IL, 1981), 570–71. 72 Schlier, Brief an die Epheser, 195. 73 The Semitic nations generally believed that the original models of earthly things preexisted in heaven. William Albright, FSAC, 177; Mircea Eliade, The Myth 70

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Hellenistic thought, was fractured at the time of the Fall. The redemption of the cosmos was an attempt to restore that harmony by virtue of the unifying power of the Sacred Marriage: Having made peace through the blood of his Cross, by him to reconcile all things to himself … whether they be things in earth or things in heaven. And you, that were sometimes alienated and enemies … he hath now reconciled in the body of his flesh … to present (paristēmi)74 you holy and unblameable and unreproachable in his sight (vv. 20–22).

Modern form-criticism suggests that this Colossian passage contains an interpolation of an earlier Hymn or “liturgical piece”75 based on the Hellenistic-Jewish idea that the Logos was the omnipresent spirit-medium in which creation took place, and that the matter with which he clothed himself was to be thought of as his cosmic “body.” It also agrees with the rabbinic doctrine that important spiritual entities preexisted before Creation, including the Garden of Eden, the original state of the world before the Fall,76 but which is presently clothed in material substance. The Wisdom literature, which we have already examined, further taught that the Wisdom/Logos was coextensive with the universe which he created: “Alone, I compassed the circuit of heaven. And in the depths of the abyss I walked. Over the waves of the sea, and over all the earth” (Sir 24:5–6). “For the Spirit of the Lord fills the world, and holds all things together” (Wis 1:7). Thus Wisdom “stretches in might from pole to pole and effectively orders all things” (8:1), pervading the Cosmos through and of the Eternal Return (Princeton, 1954), 7–8. The Prophets taught that the heavenly world contained the preexistent things, which chosen seers were able to see it and observe (Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-existence, 16). Even Exodus describes a heavenly Temple, whose pattern Moses was to copy for the Tabernacle in the Wilderness (25:9; cf. 2 Baruch 4:2–7). In short, “according to the theory held by the ancient Jews and by the whole of the Semitic nations, everything of real value that from time to time appears on earth has its existence in heaven … Its manifestation on earth is merely a transition from concealment to publicity.” Adolph von Harnack, History of Dogma (New York, 1961), 1:318. 74 See p. 131, above, for the hierogamic significance of paristēmi. 75 Compare James M. Robinson, “A Form-Analysis of Colossians 1:15–20,” JBL 76 (1957): 220–87. 76 The Jewish Encyclopedia (1905 edition of Funk and Wagnells), 10:183. Also, the idea that certain things in particular had a prior existence out of the world “has a long history in the Biblical and early Christian tradition” (Hamerton-Kelly, Preexistence, 15). See also Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar, 2:353.

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through (Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 136; On Planting, 9; On the Migration of Abraham, 181; On the Change of Names, 28; That God Is Unchangeable, 35– 36; That the Worse Attacks the Better, 90). At the same time, the preexistent Wisdom-Logos was the paradigmatic pattern for all things (Wis 9:8–9).77 Philo could therefore write that the Logos was both the “place of the archetypal ideas and the mediator of Creation,”78 i.e., the “container of the noetic world,”79 as well as its eikōn or “image” (On the Creation of the World, 20; On Dreams, 1.62; On the Special Laws, 1.81; 1.96–9; 3.96; On the Cherubim, 27–28; On Flight and Finding, 12–14; Questions on Exodus, 2.18, 30; Confusion of Tongues, 62–3). Most scholars find it probable that these ideas—which also found their way into the Corpus Hermeticum as the cosmic “Aion-Body” of the Primal Man (“an entity which includes all existing things within itself, and is coextensive and, in fact, identical with the cosmos”)80—were assimilated by the thinkers of contemporary Judaism and had an important influence on Paul’s idea of Christ’s “Cosmic Body,” which was both the “Body of the Church” (Col 1:24) and its “head” (kephalē) or “organizer” (vv. 16–18). As the corporate representative of “Adamic Humanity,” Christ was also the “head” of the entire Community (Eph 1:22).81 In this connection we recall “Adam’s” gigantic size (2 Enoch 30:8–9; Sibylline Oracles, 3:24f; Apostolic Constitutions, 8, 12, 17).82 Philo likewise connected the Primal Man, the Logos and Adam with a heavenly race of “pneumatics” (On the Confusion of Tongues, 46; Questions on Genesis, 1.18; On Planting, 32ff),83 all possessing Adam’s cosmic dimensions (On the Special Laws, 1.210ff). Taking advantage of the metaphorical sense of kephalē (“head”) and soma (“body”)—which had already been used in the Septuagint to depict a leader and his group (Judg 10:18; 11:8–11; 2 Sam 22:44; 1 Kgs 20:12; Isa 7:8–9; Dan 2:38)—he could speak of the universe as the “body” of the Logos, and the latter is the D. Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1974), 59. Hamerton-Kelly, Pre-existence, 175, notes; our emphasis. 79 Ibid., 173; our emphasis. 80 Ibid., 173. According to Ernst Käsemann, Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen (Göttingen, 1964), 40–42, the idea of the “Primal-Man-Redeemer” (UrmenschErlöser) appears here in its Hellenistic-Jewish form, in which Wisdom, Logos and Anthropos (Primal Man) are identified. 81 Schlier, Brief an die Epheser, 92. 82 See pp. 154–55, above. 83 This undoubtedly forshadowed the Gnostic concept of a “Sethian” race of spiritual men. 77 78

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“head,” the two comprising a pleroma or “fulness” (Questions on Genesis, 117). Thus, when the High Priest put on his robes, covered with cosmic symbols, Philo said that he was like the Logos, who clothed himself with the material creation. As a result, when he went into the Holy of Holies to sacrifice, the whole world went in with him (On the Life of Moses, 2,133–5).84 Here we undoubtedly have the foundation for the notion that Christ “bore” the burden of the world and its sins when he made his final sacrifice, taking it with him when he penetrated the Holy of Holies and entered the celestial realms. But when Christ and the Church are made fully one, both partners will share the same attributes and the same divine fulness:85 For in him dwells all the fulness of Godhood (plērōma tēs theotetos) literally, and you are filled (peplērōmenoi) in him (Col 2:9–10).

John would also make this the basis for his doctrine of glorification through union with Christ: For we have received his fulness, grace for grace (John 1:16). That they may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee … And the glory which thou gavest me, I have given them (John 17:21–22).

This act of spiritual union (henosis) was also described by Paul, who stated that “he who cleaves (ho kollemenos)86 to the Lord is one spirit” (1 Cor 6:17), and that the “Male” and “Female” who “cleave together” (proskollethesetai) are “one flesh” (Eph 5:31). In this way, whatever the “Male” was, the “Female” would be, “with the inner as the outer, and the above as the below” (Gospel of Thomas, Logg. 108, 22). At the time when these important passages were written, the Embracing Cherubim in the Holy of Holies (Heb 9:5) still served as the official symbols of the “Great Mystery,” or God’s soteriological “marriage” to Israel (b. Yoma 54a). Thus they prefigured the ultimate meaning of the Pauline and Johannine concepts of “spiritual cleavage” and “unification,” which English writers of the thirteenth century would serendipitously describe as “Atonement” or “At-One-Ment” with Christ.87 And when the world beSee p. 118, above. Compare pp. 107–10, above. 86 Compare the use of the Hebrew verb dabaq and the Greek verb kollaō, pp. 70–71, 121–22 and 130, above. 87 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “atonement” could mean either “to reconcile” or “to make physically and spiritually one” (see the articles on “At One” and “Atone”). Its only use in the KJV New Testament occurs in Romans 84 85

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came one with the Divine, there would be “no place but God” (Philo, Questions on Exodus, 2.40), for the entire world would be divinized.88 This was the chief goal of the Temple, whose Logos/High Priest used to “wear” the cosmos as his robe, and where believers still went to be “married” to the Logos/Wisdom. Christians of course now recognized the Logos/ Wisdom to be Jesus, finally come in his original identity as Yahweh, El’s mediating Son and Satrap, and the God of the Old Testament.89 Yet the “Great Mystery” of henosis with Christ/Yahweh would continue to be described in terms of the Jewish Wisdom Mystery—which insisted that the Father communicated with the earth through Mediators—showing how important its underlying premises were for the development of Christian soteriology, and how consistently these premises endured throughout the early centuries of the Church. We now need to examine other writings of the early Church to see how the memory of this Temple Mystery was preserved after the time of the Apostles, and how the symbolism of the Embracing Cherubim survived as one of its central images.

5:11, “by whom we have now received the atonement ” (for katallagē, or “reconciliation”), although the Pauline and Johannine ideas of “making spiritually one” were also suggested by “at-one-ment.” Unfortunately, “atonement” was also used to translate the Hebrew verb kipper (as in Yom Kippur, “Day of Atonement”), which literally means “to cleanse,” or “to purify” (i.e., with shed blood). Thus “atone” eventually came to have the modern meaning of “to pay a penalty” or “to make amends,” thereby concealing the real value of Christ’s sacrifice, which was to make available to the disciples the power of his resurrection through spiritual henosis with himself. 88 Ephesians 1:10; Colossians 1:20. For “divinization,” see also pp. 39, 44, 78– 79, above. 89 Deuteronomy 32:8–9, original version. See Margaret Barker, The Great Angel, 4–10; also our pp. 26 and 88, above.

5 THE POST-NEW TESTAMENT WISDOM MYSTERY THE “GREAT MYSTERY” AS RITUAL Was Paul’s “Great Mystery” a literal “mystery,” which was formally enacted, or simply a figure of speech referring to man’s salvation? The popular “Mithraic Liturgy” of the day was widely described as a “mystery” (476), meaning “an initiation involving one’s “co-initiate” (synmystēs).1 The Latin Church also translated the word “mystery” as sacramentum, i.e., as a ritual act. And as Morton Smith has recently shown, the word mystērion widely meant a “secret process” or “rite” in the contemporary Judaism of Paul.2 Though Paul also used mysterion to mean simply a “divine secret,” there are instances when he clearly did not. In 2 Thessalonians 2:7, for instance, he refers to the “mystery” as a hidden process, “working” to bring about the coming of the Evil One. Similarly, in Colossians 1:26f, “the mystery is not a secret, but a process, christos en humin, i.e., the indwelling and working of Christ in the baptized.”3 Thus, in 1 Corinthians 4:1, Paul speaks of himself as a “steward” (oikonomous) of the mysteries, especially in connection with the “work” of unifying Christ and the Church (3:23). Even the words raz and sôd, which the LXX interpreted as mystērion, were commonly used by Jewish authors to refer to an actual rite, especially circumcision. The Tanhuma Hayye Sarah, 4, for example, puns on Proverbs 31:24, “she makes sadyn” (linen garments), with the words, “this is the circumcision of which it is said, “The mystery (sôd) of the Lord is given to those who fear him” (Ps 25:14). A contributing element, Smith believes,

Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and the Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 181. 2 Ibid., 180. 3 Ibid. 1

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was the fact that sadyn were especially initiation garments.4 More importantly, both sôd and raz appear in the Hekalot Rabbati as the magical technique by which one is prepared to ascend to the Merkabah (27:1; 28:3; 29:1, 2, 4; etc.).5 Here, we are obviously back in the milieu of the Temple and Isaiah’s vision of God’s throne (Isa 6). Similarly, the Christian’s ascent and session with Christ on the right hand of God are described by Paul as the potential climax and consequence of the “mystery” which is “Christ in you” (Col 1:27; 3:l–4).6 Judaism itself was considered by the Greeks to be a “mystery religion” (Plutarch, Questiones Conviviales, 17.6), because of its perceived similarity to the Eleusinian mysteries.7 Philo, in fact used the word “mystery” to refer to the traditional ceremonies of Judaism.8 The Wayyikra Rabbah, for example, identifies the secret name of Yahweh as the “mystery of Israel” with which Moses killed the Egyptian (32:4). The Shemot Rabbah similarly defines the whole magical praxis with which Elisha worked: “You practiced the mysteries of God when you gave me a son, so now practice the mysteries of God and raise him from the dead” (19:1).9 The rabbis also understood the word “mystery” to refer to a rite of “covenant” or “initiation,” based on Psalm 25:14: “The secret of the Lord (sôd yhwh) is with them that fear him, and he will show them his covenant.” Aquila in turn translated sôd as aporrēton (something officially kept secret); but Theodotion gave mystērion for it, thus equating the “covenant” (circumcision) with the “mystery.” Rabbinic literature in fact took Psalm 25:14 to refer specifically to the Jewish rite of circumcision.10 A sermon on Genesis 17:1–2 in the Tanhuma (Lek, 20–27) declares that the “mystery” of circumcision is necessary for eternal happiness. A parallel Ibid. Ibid., 181. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 E. R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (New York, 1956), 6:206–16; H. A. Wolfson, Philo (Cambridge, MA, 1947), 1:43; Smith, Clement of Alexandria, 181. 9 Smith, Clement of Alexandria, 181. 10 Ibid., 181–82. See also Tanhuma on Genesis 17:2: “What is this mystery which he revealed to those who fear him? This is the rite of circumcision” (Lek 19). Aquila changed the homily beginning with verse 1 (“do what I say and you shall be perfect”) to “you shall be telios,” the technical term for those who have been initiated into a mystery. 4 5

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version (ed. Buber) says that it was given in order that Abraham might be made like God, and that its performance is all that prevents the world from returning to chaos.11 The Shemot Rabbah 19:5–7 adds that none who lack the “seal” of circumcision will be admitted into the Kingdom. For this reason, the rabbis spoke of entry into Judaism via circumcision both as a “mystery” and as an “initiation” into the world to come.12 This also found its way into the New Testament, where baptism replaced circumcision, and became the new form of the “seal” (sphragida, Rom 4:11; Rev 7:2; 9:4), though the “seal” for a time alternated between circumcision and baptism.13 These examples all show that in the language of the day mysterion was indeed understood to be a rite, as well as a divine secret. The Pauline mission even came to interpret the rite of baptism as an anticipatory form of the Mystery itself, which proleptically united the “male” and the “female” as one (Gal 3:28), even though baptism was originally an act of cleansing, designed to prepare the sinner for the coming nuptial.14 Now, however, Paul suggested that an assurance of the promised “mystery of Christ in you” (Col 1:27) could be experienced already through the preliminary rite of baptism:15 Ye are complete in him … in whom ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; buried with him in baptism, wherein ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God who hath raised him from the dead (Col 2:10–12).

Yet even after the destruction of the Temple, when baptism survived as the sole rite of union, the original idea of “marriage to Christ” persisted, and found its way into the Bridal Chamber rites of certain later Christians.16 Smith himself notes that Mark 4:11 speaks of Christians to whom the mystery has been “taught” (edideske), rather than “given” (edōken), showing that the writer did not automatically think of their baptism as the sole form of Ibid., 182. Ibid., 183. 13 Compare Matthew 22:11–13, where the lack of the “wedding garment” precludes entry into the Kingdom, pp. 163–64 above. 14 See pp. 124–28, above. 15 Compare Smith, Clement of Alexandria, 179: “To this mystery” (of baptism) “the writer compares the spiritual union effected by physical intercourse in marriage, and he finds a reference to both of these mysteries in Gen. 2:24.” 16 See “Gnosticism and the Wisdom Mystery,” below. 11 12

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the mystery.17 Thus his suggestion that baptism finally became such a “commonplace” that “there was a corresponding growth of secret teachings which professed to reveal something more,”18 seems unnecessary and contrived. Indeed, the practice of keeping secret the real Temple Mystery had long existed throughout Jewish Wisdom circles: This is a divine mystery, and its lesson is for the initiated who are worthy to receive the holiest secret … The sacred revelation is not for others (Philo, On the Cherubim, 42). It is not permitted to speak out the sacred mysteries to the uninitiated until after they have been purified with the proper purification … To declare the Mysteries to the uninitiated would mean the destruction of the laws of the most sacred mystery (Fragments of Philo Judaeus, 69).

Its concealment of the Cherubic Mystery was therefore an ancient tradition, and not the result of imagining possible “secret teachings” beyond the “commonplace” of baptism. As a matter of fact, it would be difficult to find anything in the New Testament which indicates that baptism was ever hidden by the early Church. Indeed, such secrecy did not occur until the third century, when catechumens began to be instructed and baptized in private,19 perhaps in imitation of the Hellenistic Mysteries, but more likely to protect them against persecution during those dangerous years. One should especially note that the words of Philo which we just quoted demand that the “mysteries” be kept from the uninitiated “until after they have been purified with the proper purification.” This is consistent with the Jewish custom of placing a seven-day waiting period between circumcision and participation in the Passover Meal, which became a Christian symbol of union with Christ, namely a meal of Communion.20 Once again it appears that purification preceded the true mystery: “That he might sanctify and

Ibid., 183. Thus he is obliged to suppose that edideske was a “scribal error” for edōken. 18 Ibid., 183–4. 19 See Hugo Rahner, “The Christian Mystery and the Pagan Mysteries,” Eranos Jahrbuch 1944, in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Princeton, 1955), 365. 20 Pesahim 8.8, ’Eduyyot 5.2 (in Smith, Clement of Alexandria, 1845). Compare also Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (Philadelphia, 1977), for the most definitive modern discussion of the relationship between Passover and the ritual meal of Communion (1 Cor 10:16–17). 17

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cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious Church” (Eph 5:26–27). Clearer still is the stipulation in Matthew that acceptance into the Wedding Feast must be prefaced by the obtaining a Wedding Garment: And when the King came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a Wedding Garment. And he said to him, Friend, how comest thou in hither not having a Wedding Garment? ... Then said the King to the servants, Bind him hand and foot and take him away and cast him into outer darkness (22:11–13).

The way to obtain a “Wedding Garment,” according to Paul, was by being baptized: “Baptized into union with him, you have all put on Christ as a garment (enēdusasthē)” (Gal 3:27–28). We have already commented on the assimilation of baptism to the nuptial union in the Galatian passage: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ … (are) neither male nor female.”21 But in the Matthean version, obtaining the “garment” comes before being made “neither male nor female.” The most reasonable explanation for this apparent contradiction is that Paul came to understand the “mystery” of Christ as the entire soteriological process, beginning with baptism, and ending with nuptial unification. Baptism would thus have stood on the pars pro toto principle for the finished mystery, just as “justification by faith” stood for the entire sequence of “faith, repentance, baptism and receipt of the Spirit,” or the traditional requirements for “Being-in-Christ.”22 Using the first step of a series to signify the rest thus appears to have been characteristic of Paul’s homiletic methods, and in the present case, it agrees perfectly with the sacramental sequence leading from “baptism” to the “Bridal Chamber” which the Gnostics claimed to have received ready-made from the Jerusalem Church (Gospel of Philip 69:14–29).23 See pp. 124–27, above. Compare Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul (New York, 1931), 206–7: “That righteousness comes directly from faith cannot be meant by Paul in the strictest sense … All the blessings of redemption which the believer possesses flow from the being-in-Christ … beginning at baptism … The complete expression, ‘Righteousness, in consequence of faith, through the being-in-Christ’ is too awkward to be constantly employed in the course of an argument … Thus the expression ‘righteousness by faith’” (our emphasis). “Faith,” in short, is a shorthand “motto” which stands for an entire process, and which must be carried to its completion in the mystery of “being-in-Christ.” 23 This was still the case in the Gospel of Philip, where baptism precedes the rite of the Bridal Chamber (69:14–29). 21 22

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What further evidence do we have of a literal mystery which was practiced by the early Christians to bring about their soteriological “marriage to Christ?” We have already examined several hints which are contained in the New Testament concerning such a rite. But the writers who followed the authors of canonical Scripture also managed to document and verify this “Great Mystery” in some detail, and it is to them that we now turn.

JOSEPH AND ASENETH Before tuning to the post-New Testament Mystery itself, however, we should take a brief look at the Jewish romance entitled Joseph and Aseneth. This was once thought to be a Christian work, because of its references to such matters as the “bread of life,” the “cup of immortality,” and the “ointment of incorruption”24 Today, it is believed that its origins lay somewhere in the Jewish colonies of northern Egypt, sometime between 100 B.C. and A.D. 117.25 In any case, it doubtless reflects the ideas of certain Jews who would eventually join the Church, bringing with them points of view which would in time be considered “Jewish Christian.” Nor is it considered any longer to a be a “Gnostic” work, but rather a Jewish “Wisdom” book,26 which nevertheless illustrates an important “mystical trajectory” leading from Jewish apocalyptic to “proto-Gnosticism.”27 At the same time, it connects the light-mysticism of both the Temple and the Qumran Hymns to the thought-world behind the Johannine doctrines of “Light,” the “Water of Life” and the “Heavenly Bread”—all themes which agreed with the intellectual milieu of the Jewish-Christian Odes of Solomon. These we shall examine shortly. Best of all, Joseph and Aseneth gives us a contemporary picture of the way in which the Great Mystery had been viewed by certain Jewish converts 24 Randall D. Chesnutt, “Joseph and Aseneth,” in ABD, 3:971. Specifically, he cites the following passages: 8:5–7, 9; 15:5; 16:16; 19:5; 21:21. 25 Chr. Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. Charlesworth, 2:187–88. 26 According to Marc Philenenko, Joseph et Aséneth, texts critique et notes (Leiden, 1968), 89–90, and Dietrich Sänger, Antikes Judentum und die Mysterien (Tübingen, 1980), 149–90, this work was based on a Jewish mystery in which the Logos (= Wisdom) saves men by uniting them to himself. See Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 193. Burchard likewise acknowledges that the author of this work “may have been an addict to sapiential theology or mysticism or both” (ibid., 194, his emphasis). 27 J. H. Charlesworth, “Odes of Solomon,” in IDB, 5:638.

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to the Church. Here we see a romantic hero, who represents the LogosWisdom, “embracing” and “marrying” a penitent sinner, thereby filling her with the gift of eternal life; this was symbolized by a meal of “honey-comb” representing “heavenly manna.” Significantly, this “heavenly manna” was kept in the Ark of the Covenant directly beneath the Embracing Cherubim, who traditionally typified man’s union with the Divine, as exemplified by the Wisdom Mystery: … the Holy of Holies, which contained the golden censer, and the ark of the covenant … in which was the golden pot of manna … and over it the cherubim of glory (Heb 9:3–5).

Honey-comb was also a traditional gift of Wisdom (Philo, Who Is the Heir? 191), symbolizing her supernatural power (Sir 24:20). Thus it was filled with the “spirit of life” (Jos. Asen., 16:14), and was synonymous with the “bread of life” (16:16), which Philo equated with “heavenly manna” (On the Change of Names, 259–60). The close relationship between “manna” and Joseph’s “honey-comb” is further suggested by the fact that the manna which Israel had received in the wilderness was “white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey” (Exod 16:31). John, however, like the author of Joseph and Aseneth, claimed that the Logos-Wisdom had provided a new and indestructible kind of manna, which (like the manna supernaturally preserved over the Sabbath)28 was everlasting and filled with the power of immortality: This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever (John 6:58).

For us, perhaps, the most striking feature of Joseph and Aseneth is the soteriological embrace which again unites the protagonists, just like the embrace of the Cherubim in the Temple: And Joseph put his arms around (Aseneth), and Aseneth (put hers) around Joseph, and they kissed (aspazomai) each other for a long time, and both came to life in the spirit. And Joseph kissed Aseneth and gave her the spirit of life, and kissed her the second time and gave her the spirit of wisdom, and he kissed her the third time and gave her the spirit of truth (19:10–11; trans. Chr. Burchard).

28

Exodus 16:22–24.

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In this example, Joseph appears to represent the same type of Wisdomfigure whom we found earlier in the Gospel of Thomas.29 Philonenko at one time believed that the work had been based on “a mythological pattern of Gnostic extraction, in which Aseneth represented the mythic figure of Wisdom, falling into error, and Joseph the divine Logos who comes to ransom her by uniting himself with her.”30 But Aseneth’s “fall” and Joseph’s “Logos” character can be just as easily understood as features derived from the Wisdom tradition, for the premise that man is an isolated “fragment” or “ray” broken off from the Light—who needs to be rejoined to the Light in order to be saved—was common to both Gnosticism and Sophiology. The figure of Aseneth, of course, belongs to an earlier stage of the tradition than the Gnostic “Sophia,” hence appears in the present work chiefly as a symbol of the the Old Testament “Bride” (Jos. Asen., 4:1), who is destined to rejoin her “Bridegroom” in the Last Days: Courage, Aseneth, chaste virgin. For behold, your name was written in the book of the living in heaven; in the beginning of the book, as the very first of all, your name was written by my finger, and it will not be erased forever. Behold, from today, you will be renewed and formed anew and made alive again … Behold, I have given you today to Joseph for a bride, and he himself will be your bridegroom for ever (15:5–6).

Dieter Sänger thus sees the kiss which Joseph and Aseneth exchange in 19:10–11 as a traditional “Wisdom-Kiss,”31 which bestows the same gifts described in the Gospel of Thomas (Log. 108), and which are equivalent to eating the honey-comb and receiving Wisdom’s power in the present work.32 Sometimes it is impossible to decide whether aspazomai (which generally means “to proffer a greeting”) should be translated as “kiss,” or “embrace,” or both. In the Gospel of Truth (43:34), for example, it has been rendered either as “the kiss” (McRae) or “the embrace(s)” (Grobel).33 Both belong to the same ritual context, however, and are therefore frequently See Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 194; also Sänger, Antikes Judentum und die Mysterien, 191–208. 30 Quoted in Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 189. 31 Sänger, Antikes Judentum, 205ff. 32 Ibid., 181, 208, n.75: “She already has obtained life, wisdom and truth from the eating of the heavenly manna in 16:15; but in 19:11 this is said openly for the first time (so to say, systematized).” 33 See “Gnosticism and the Great Mystery,” below. 29

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combined in works of the period, e.g.,, “Embrace one another with a holy kiss” (philēma hagion; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; etc.). The idea that a kiss could transfer pneumatic power was widespread in antiquity. As Gustav Stählin points out in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, kissing was thought to “convey the soul,” and thus establish “inward living fellow-ship … by the transferring and intermingling of psychai.”34 It therefore enjoyed wide cultic use as a method of spiritual healing, receiving a new member into a sacred brotherhood, or “sharing the sanctity and mana of the deities with whom one was brought into contact,” either symbolically or realistically.35 We also find the sacred kiss employed this way in the Old Testament, where God “breathes” the breath of life into the nostrils of lifeless man (Gen 2:7), or in 2 Kings 4:34, where Elisha put his mouth upon the mouth of a dead boy in order to restore him to life. The LXX of 1 Kings 17:2 also added to Elijah’s life-giving embrace a sacred kiss (“he breathed into the boy”).36 The same thing is hinted at in Ezekiel 37:9: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” And we note that Jesus likewise “breathed” on his disciples, as a means of imparting the Holy Ghost to them (John 20:22). Paradoxically, Jewish tradition sometimes attributed the opposite result to the divine kiss, for it was by such that God. received back the souls of various well-known heroes. According to legend, God took Moses’ life with a kiss on the mouth (Deut. Rabbah, 11:10). Similar traditions say the same thing about Aaron, Miriam, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.37 Yet these late accounts are probably variations of the more general belief that the righteous would be granted immortal life by God’s kiss. Thus, the Seder Eliyyahu Rabbah, 17 (ed. M. Friedmann)38 states that “God will embrace (the Israelites) and kiss them and bring them into the life of the world to come.” It will thus be seen that the embrace and kiss which Joseph and Aseneth exchange in our Jewish romance belonged to a widespread tradition attributing miraculous results to the sacred embrace between human beings and the Divine, as prefigured by the Embracing Cherubim. During the years preceding A.D. 70, and while the Temple was still standing, it was undoubtedly known to all Temple-going Jews, though they managed to “phileō,” in TDNT, 9:l19. Ibid., 122–24. 36 See footnote 53, pp. 105–6, above. 37 References in TDNT, 9:127. 38 In Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich, 1926), 3:847. 34 35

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keep it a secret from the world. Joseph and Aseneth in fact appears to be yet another example of communion with the Divine as experienced generally in the Sanctuary, though cast in figurative language which most educated Jews would have understood as veiled references to events in the Holy of Holies. Communion with the Divine—which was in fact the basic premise of the Wisdom Mystery—also took a special form of its own in Joseph and Aseneth, where the conversion of a Gentile to Judaism bestowed a communal type of holiness on the initiate. Here, again, we see a kind of mystical “sancta contagion” (pp. 66–68, 79, above), where Israel as a whole is said to enjoy direct communion with God and to be able to impart her resulting holiness to others who commune with her. The same idea may have influenced Paul’s advice to the wives of unbelievers, who were told that they should remain with their spouses because of their edifying influence: Let her not leave him. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband (1 Cor 7:13– 14).

There are, of course, the traditional warnings that no one will be welcomed into the faith without first renouncing his old gods (Jos. Asen., 10:12–13; 11:7–9; 12:4–5; etc.). And true repentance, together with a perfect commitment to the God of Israel, is thereafter expected (11:10–11; 11:18; 15:7–8; etc.). But once these requirements have been met, the candidate is ready to be accepted into the Community of Israel and to share its common legacy of light and eternal life: Lord God of my father Israel, the Most High, the Powerful One of Jacob, who gave life to all (things) and called (them) from the darkness to the light, and from the error to the truth, and from the death to the life; you, Lord, bless this virgin, and renew her by your spirit: and form her anew by your bidden hand, and make her alive again by your life, and let her eat your bread of life, and drink your cup of blessing, and number her among your people that you have chosen before all (things) came into being, and let her enter your rest which you have prepared for your chosen ones, and live in your eternal life for ever (and) ever (Jos. Asen., 8:9).

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Thus the Jews shared a life which was inherently divine, just as the Qumran sectaries believed that they worshipped in common with the angels (see pp. 81–82, above): So Jews live in close relationship with God, and with the angels, whose life they share; but they remain apart from non-Jews, with whom they may coexist but must not mingle … Relationship with God implies that Jews enjoy all the privileges that come with divine childhood, leading some sort of angelic existence. Practically, as the example of Aseneth shows, that means fullness of life, supernatural beauty, wisdom, comfortable living, and divine protection … It assures supernatural insight into things divine … A similar thing is the “inner light” which gives supernatural eyesight to Joseph (6:6).39

In analogy with the biblical Creation account, which the Israelites experienced regularly in the Temple (see pp. 74–75, above), the convert who had joined with them could also pass from chaos into order, and from death into life (12:1–2; 15:12; 27:10). Aseneth, moreover, is promised that her hieros gamos with the Logos-Joseph will produce a special race of men, in whom “many nations will take refuge with the Lord God, the Most High” (19:5). Having been visited by one who was a “first-born son of God” (6:3; 13:13; 18:11; 21:4; 23:10)—even “a god” (18:9)—she had herself become a “daughter of the Most High” (21:4), suggesting that she had been “newly begotten” by the same kind of soteriological “marriage” to the Divine which John and Paul describe in the New Testament. But at the same time, she had become Joseph’s personal wife for all eternity: By his power he confirmed me and brought me to the God of the ages and to the chief of the house of the Most High, and gave me to eat of bread of life, and to drink a cup of wisdom, and I became his bride for ever and ever (Jos. Asen., 21:21).

And though some have denied that Joseph’s epithet, “a firstborn son of God,” means anything more than “one who has been saved,”40 there are others who see it as a typical designation for a “Redeemer” figure.41 This would agree with Joseph’s role as God’s Logos, as well as with the general idea—which survived in Ebionite Christianity—that Wisdom had dwelt 39.

Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 191. So ibid. 41 Ibid. 40

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many times in various Old Testament heroes and was indeed the same Wisdom who would eventually appear as Jesus Christ (see p. 90, above). Such men had been made “prophets and friends of God” by the “indwelling” of God’s Wisdom (Wis 7:27), and were certainly seen as much more than ordinary men who had received a few of Wisdom’s supernatural qualities.42 Though the immediate reason for writing Joseph and Aseneth may have been an attempt to deal with the problems of Jews living in Egypt, especially the questions of table-fellowship and conversion,43 it more generally reflects the Temple-based concept of man’s henosis with the Divine and how the mundane could be transformed into the heavenly through by means of a hieros gamos with God’s mediating Logos. For this reason, Joseph and Aseneth provides valuable documentation concerning the mystical soteriology of certain influential Jews who were roughly contemporaneous with Jesus. In the present case, seeing God’s Logos/Wisdom embodied in a figure like Joseph—who had actually saved many ancient Egyptians from death— would have had special relevance for later Egyptian Jews. But in the next section we will see how Jewish converts to the Church in Jerusalem and Syria viewed the Wisdom/Logos, whom they believed to be embodied in the figure of Jesus Christ, and who enacted the same rite of henosis with his disciples in a Christianized version of the Wisdom Mystery.

THE ODES OF SOLOMON These important early Christian poems were first discovered in 1812 and published in an editio princeps by Rendell Harris in 1909. Various initial opinions as to their character include a “first-century Christian hymn book” (Harris), a “Jewish psalter,” later redacted by Christians (Harnack), and a work which both antedated and helped to inspire the Gospel of John (Bultmann). Others have claimed that they were a “second century Gnostic work” (K. Rudolph), a “collection of songs” for a Christian baptismal service (Bernard), or the composition of a first-century Essene (M. Testuz).44 Most today would probably agree that the work is of Jewish-Christian provenance, composed by Jewish converts to the Church,45 who brought with them the the same range of ideas which we saw in Joseph and Aseneth and in the Gospel of Thomas. Ibid. Chesnutt, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 970. 44 All discussed in Charlesworth, “Solomon, Odes of,” in ABD, 6:114. 45 Ibid. 42 43

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Nevertheless, J. H. Charlesworth, one of the leading contemporary authorities on the Odes of Solomon, has concluded that this beautiful collection of poetry served as a “tributary to Gnosticism which flow(ed) from Jewish apocalyptical mysticism … to the full-blown Gnosticism of the second century. The Odes are not ‘heretical’—such a word is anachronistic at this time in the development of Christian thought—but rather a Jewish Christian hymn-book of the first century.”46 Thus they were definitely not Gnostic, and were in fact very close to the Johannine literature, though they contained elements of early Christian thought which would provide favorite themes for Gnostic speculation.47 The striking similarity of the language in the Odes to that of the Qumran Hodayoth (1QH, “Hymn-Scroll”) is also very noticeable (“God’s planting,” “living water,” “light” versus “darkness,” “crowns,” “the sun,” etc.), as well as the manner of praising God (“I thank thee, O Lord, because thou hast…,” etc.). We will also discover important links with the Wisdom literature (Wisdom’s “River,” “Wisdom’s Light,” the mystery of “union,” “im46

362.

“The Odes of Solomon—Not Gnostic,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 31 (1969):

47 These assessments have also caused other scholars to find evidence in the Odes of an important doctrinal “trajectory”—to use the expression of Robinson and Koester in their Trajectories Through Early Christianity (Philadelphia, 1971), 7–14— which led from the Jewish-inspired milieu of Primitive Christianity towards eventual Gnosticism. These included the apocalyptic categories of preexistence, man’s search for his heavenly home, eschatology = protology, deification, and the basic pattern of the Wisdom Mystery. At the same time, as Robinson and Koester point out, another “bifurcating trajectory” was taking shape which would lead out of Christianity’s originally “amorphous milieu” towards an “orthodoxy” consisting of “dialectic theology” and “Constantine Christianity.” This involved the decline of eschatology, the delay of the parousia, and the general replacement of Semitic cultural values by the culture of the antique world (ibid., 16). This largely “Gentile” movement would in time completely eliminate apocalyptic values from Western Christianity and establish itself as the only legitimate “orthodoxy.” Yet modern research has uncovered enough of the original literary production of the early Church to show that this retrospective forcing of history into the Procrustean Bed of “orthodoxy” has greatly distorted the truth. “Orthodoxy’s” notion of a single “straight-line development” from the New Testament to modern Christianity, in particular, has only produced “an apology for the history of the Church, freed from the implications of defection implicit in the critical reconstructions” (ibid., 16), and it shows that we must consider the documents and values of apocalyptic Christianity if we would gain an accurate picture of the original Church.

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ages,” “faces,” “illumination,” etc.), and with the Temple, all showing that the author still venerated the Sanctuary at Jerusalem. The Odes of Solomon have turned out to be a particularly valuable witness for the continuing concern of Jewish Christians for the rites of the Temple. In this, they remain very close to the Gospel of Thomas, which dealt largely with a Christianized version of the Wisdom Mystery.48 The Odes have been dated by Charlesworth anywhere between A.D. 30 and 150, most probably around A.D. 100.49 Rendel Harris would place them even earlier, “soon after A.D. 70.”50 Now that we have read Stevan Davies’ important study of the Gospel of Thomas and his reasons for dating that work between A.D. 50 and 70, we are inclined to accept Harris’ earlier date for the Odes, especially because they make use of the identical Wisdom-themes. Even more importantly, the Odes speak as if the Temple had just been destroyed, and they express the author’s concern over the immanent prospect of restoring it somewhere outside of Jerusalem: No man, O God, changes thy holy place; and it is not possible that he should change it and put it in another place, because he has no power over it. For thy Sanctuary was designed before thou didst make special places. The old one should not be changed by those which are inferior to it (Ode 4).

Here, according to Harris, “some change in the value of the Sanctuary at Jerusalem is threatened at the hands of men.”51 This does not refer to the physical destruction of the building by the Romans, however, for if the building itself was temporarily missing, it was only because God himself had willed it (cf. 2 Baruch 7:1–8:5; Josephus, Wars, 5.1.3).52 More likely, our Ode refers to a suggestion within the Community that the Temple be rebuilt in a new place, as in the cases of the Samaritan Temple at Gerizim, the Egyptian Temple at Aswan, and most particularly, the Temple of Onias at Leontopolis, which von Harnack saw as the precipitating factor in the eventual decen-

The Gospel of Thomas directs that “wherever you have come, you will go to James the Righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being” (Log. 12). This has been understood as an indication that the source of Thomas was the Jewish-Christian Community which was led by James the Just (Acts 21:18). 49 See his “Odes of Solomon” in the IDB, 5:637. 50 Odes and Psalms of Solomon (Cambridge, 1909), 58. 51 Ibid., 54. 52 Ibid., 55. 48

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tralization of Jewish religion.53 The author of the Odes thus expresses his indignation at the very thought, and declares his allegiance to the old Jerusalem Temple and its traditional location. The Odist’s firm conviction was that the Temple had come from heaven and would always be necessary and valid. This is quite different from the opinion expressed in the Epistle of Barnabas, which suggests that the Temple has already been done away with by the “new law of our Lord Jesus” (ch. 2). In chapter 16 he further criticizes certain “wretched men” who had placed their trust in an earthly Temple, rather than in the “spiritual Temple” which is “within us.” The Odist, of course, is quite willing to “spiritualize” the Temple sacrifices (Ode 20), or (like Paul) to see a “higher” meaning for the rite of circumcision (Ode 11:3). But “he is not prepared to say that the old Sanctuary was to pass away.”54 Indeed, like the Qumran Community (which was also deprived temporarily of its physical Temple), he looks forward to a time when the Sanctuary will be restored in its preexistent glory, and in Jerusalem, where God had always intended it to be. This agrees with the Ebionite view that Jerusalem was the only true “house of God” on the earth,55 being the eternal Mount Zion, or navel of the earth, and the primal site where even the heavenly Temple will eventually become visible on earth.56 Moreover, the Temple is the place where man is meant to receive fellowship with God. The same Ode which established the primacy of the Temple at Jerusalem goes on to explain that

History of Dogma, 1:69; quoted in Harris, Odes and Psalms, 58. Ibid., 59. 55 Quoted in ibid., 58. 56 See, for example, Bereshith Rabbah, 20: “Seven things were created before the world: Torah, Gehenna, Eden, the Merkabah Throne, the Temple, Repentence, and the Name of Messiah.” Rabbi Meir, in Pirqe Avot, 6:10, also says that God’s “five possessions” are Torah, Heaven and Earth, Abraham, Israel, and the Temple. He proves the case of the Temple from Exodus 15:17 (“The place, O Lord, which thou hast made for Thee to dwell in”) and Psalm 78:54 (“And he brought them to the border of his Sanctuary, even to this mountain, which his right hand possessed”). In these passages, the Temple is seen as an eternal entity, manifest in both heaven and earth. 53 54

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A GREAT MYSTERY Thou hast given us thy fellowship. It is not that thou wast in need of us, but that we were in need of thee (Ode 4, Harris).57

The author of 2 Maccabees makes the same point, i.e., that while God needs no earthly house, the Temple was provided for the sake of man’s “fellowship” with him, or (in the words of Harris) “communion by means of a Holy Place”:58 Thou, O Lord of the Universe, who in thyself hast need of nothing, wast well pleased that a Sanctuary of thy habitation be set up among us (14:35).

The theme of fellowship with God in the Temple is very important in the Odes of Solomon. Here the probable influence of the Embracing Cherubim as traditional symbols of “Yahweh’s love for Israel” (b. Yoma 54a) becomes especially evident, for the method of gaining “communion by means of a “Holy Place” is also by an embrace and a kiss, precisely as it was in Joseph and Aseneth, and in the Gospel of Thomas: And Immortal Life59 embraced me, And kissed me. And from that is the Spirit which is within me. And it cannot die because it is life (Ode 28:7–8). Like the arm of the bridegroom over the bride, So is my yoke over those who know me (42:8).

The last Ode begins by saying that “I extended (peshtet) my hands and approached my Lord, For the extension (mutkha, meaning properly “grasp” or “clasp”) of my hands is his sign … And I shall hide myself from those who possessed (ekhidin, “grasp by the hand”) me not” (vv. 1–3). Ode 3 adds that “His members are with Him” (i.e., united to Him). “On them do I hang, and He loves (hbb, the Semitic root for “hug” or “embrace”) me” (Harris, v. 2).60 Thus, soteriological “fellowship” with Christ is established, with a concomitant sharing of power:

57 All quotations from this point on are from the Charlesworth translation, unless noted otherwise: The Odes of Solomon (Missoula, MT, 1977). 58 Harris, Odes and Psalms, 83. 59 Charlesworth’s “immortal life” should obviously be emended to “Immortal Life.” 60 The Syriac interpretations were made by Dr. Hugh Nibley, of Brigham Young University.

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I have been united to Him, because the lover has found the Beloved; Because I love Him that is the Son, I shall become a son (Harris: the Son). Indeed, he who is joined to Him who is immortal Truly shall become immortal (3:7–8).

The theme of “fellowship” with the Lord is again taken up on Ode 21, together with the motifs of oneness with Christ (“I myself acquired members”), union with the light, and regeneration: And I put off darkness And put on Light. And even I myself acquired members. In them there was no sickness or affliction or suffering. And abundantly helpful to me was the thought of the Lord, And His everlasting fellowship (21:3–5).

The initiate’s hieros gamos with light is one of the major themes of the Odes: The Lord … possessed me by His light (11:11). And He has caused His knowledge to abound in me, Because the mouth of the Lord is the True Word (cf. Gospel of Thomas, Log. 108). And the entrance of his light (Ode 12:3).

Elsewhere, the Odist says that the Lord “penetrated me by the Word” (12:9, Harris); in Ode 33, the “Perfect Virgin” (= Wisdom) says, “I will enter into you … and make you wise in the ways of truth” (v. 8; cf. Wis 7:27–28). Odes 7:14; 10:1, 6; 11:19; 12:3, 7; 36:1; 40:4; 41:4, 6, further deal with the general theme of the unio mystica with light and its effect on the recipient. As Moses’ face was filled with light when he descended from the top of Sinai (= Holy of Holies), so the faces of the initiated shine with God’s reflected glory: And let our faces shine in His light (41:6). My face rejoices in His exaltation, And my spirit exults in his love, And my nature shines in Him (40:4).

The beholder in fact becomes light (21:3, 6), for those begotten of light emerge as “shining fruit”: Their branches were sprouting,

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A GREAT MYSTERY And their fruits were shining (11:16c).

That this all took place in the Temple is further indicated by a reference to the bridal pair’s “House”: As the bridal feast is spread out by the bridal pair’s house, So is my love by those who believe in me (Ode 42:9).

This is in fact what the righteous will experience in the restored Temple in the last days, according to the Life of Adam and Eve: And again they will build the house of God; and in the last times the house of God will be exalted greater than of old … And thereafter God will dwell with men on earth in visible form; and the righteous will begin to shine … and the just shall shine like the sun of old (29:7, 9).

This union of the worshipper with the Light further connects the Odes of Solomon with the milieus of the Gospel of Thomas and the Wisdom Mystery, where the “River of Wisdom” or “Light Stream” flowed specifically into the Temple to be made accessible to the initiate, who came to receive God’s shining “effluence” (aporroia; cf. Wis 7:25). Those united with the Light will then “be raised from darkness into light” (Testament of Abraham, B7), just as Joseph was sent to “deliver his bride from darkness and lead her into the light” in Joseph and Aseneth (15:13).61 The effluence of Light was of course Wisdom herself, who in the Christian Odes has been recognized as Jesus Christ, the “Word of God”: To the blessed ones the joy is from the heart, And light from Him who dwells in them; And the Word from the truth who is self-originate (32:1–2).

Like Wisdom in the Old Testament Wisdom-books, he stands at the wayside, inviting all to come and unite with him: O you sons of men, return, And you their daughters, come. And learn the ways of that Corrupter, And approach me. And I will enter into you… And make you wise in the ways of truth (33:6–8).

61

Charlesworth, Odes, 57.

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At long last, God “has allowed Him to appear to them that are His own” (7:12; cf. John 1:11), so that they might recognize the One who created all things: It is he who made the earth broad, And placed the waters in the sea. He expanded the heavens, And fixed the stars. And He fixed the Creation and set it up, Then He rested from His works. And created things run according to their courses And work their works, For they can neither cease nor fail (16:10–13).

As the power who made the Sun (16:16), and the “reservoir of light” which illuminates the day (v. 15), he is himself an “effulgence of everlasting light … fairer than the sun … compared to the light of day, more radiant” (Wis 7:26, 29): As the sun is joy to them who seek its daybreak, So is my joy in the Lord. Because He is my Sun, And His rays have lifted me up; And His light has dismissed all darkness from my face (15:1–3). For a Great Day has shined upon us, And wonderful is He who has given to us of His glory … And let our faces shine in His light (41:4, 6).

In these passages we are reminded of the “watchers for the morning” (Ps 130:6), whose practice may also be reflected in the newly translated Qumran “Temple Scroll” (columns 30–31).62 Another name for Wisdom’s “effluence” (aporroia) was the “Holy Spirit”: Our spirits praise the Holy Spirit.

62 See Morton Smith, “The Case of the Gilded Staircase,” Biblical Archeology Review 10 (Sept./Oct. 1984): 5, 50–55. This deals with God’s commandment that a staircase to the roof of the Temple be built and covered with gold, presumably to symbolize the presence of Yahweh, indicated by the light of the rising sun (cf. Ezek 8:16). See pp. 51–58, above.

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A GREAT MYSTERY For there went forth a stream (aporroia even in the Coptic version) and it became a river great and broad. Indeed it carried away everything, and it shattered and brought it to the Temple… Then all the thirsty upon the earth drank, And thirst was relieved and quenched. For from the Most High the drink was given (6:7–12).

These verses appropriately combine the image of Ezekiel’s Temple— with its flow of life-giving waters (Ezek 47)—and the “River of Wisdom” (Sir 24:25ff), which arises with God and “waters” the Temple, explaining why the author of the latter work began his search for Wisdom “in front of the Temple” (51:13–14). As in Philo’s Wisdom Mystery, the “stream” of the Holy Spirit originated above, but was dispensed to men from the earthly Sanctuary by means of their hieros gamos with the Light: And the Lord renewed me with His garment, And possessed me with His light. And from above He gives me immortal rest, And I become like the land that blossoms and rejoices in its fruits (11:11–12).

Once again we encounter the basic theme of “bearing fruit” through “marriage” to the Savior (Rom 7:4). The image of “fruitfulness” in fact dominates many of the Odes of Solomon (1:5; 4:4; 7:1; 8:7; 11:16, 23; 14:6–7; 11:2; 38:17–18): And I gave my knowledge generously And my resurrection through my love. And I sowed my fruits in hearts, And transformed them through myself. And they received my blessing and lived, And they were gathered to me and were saved, Because they became my members, And I was their Head (17:13–16).

All of the traditional Sacred Marriage themes are here: becoming One with Jesus; the “sowing” of virtues and divine “fruits” by means of “sexual” union; the sharing of immortal life; and the imparting of light and knowledge. But these end-results are usually summed up by the Odist with the characteristic expression “rest” (26:3; 28:3; 35:1; etc.):

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From above He gives me immortal rest (11:12). I love the Beloved and I myself love Him, And where His rest is, there also am I (3:5). Recline upon His rest (20:8). And come all you thirsty and take a drink, And rest beside the fountain of the Lord (30:2). And He went with me and caused me to rest (38:4).

The idea of “rest” derives ultimately from Exodus 33:11ff, when the Lord spoke to Moses “face to face” and promised that “My Presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest” (v. 14). This odd expression (whatever its original meaning) had a definite cultic significance by the time of Late Judaism and Christianity. In Hebrews, for example, the whole action moves towards katapausis (3:7ff), or the “rest” which the Israelites were denied because of their sinfulness (Ps 95:11). As the text makes clear, this “rest” was also synonymous with the “heavenly city” which lay at the end of the journey (Heb 11:13–16), a journey which led (cultically speaking) through the veil into the Holy of Holies (10:19–20), or the Bridal Chamber. There it was that the Israelites saw the Embracing Cherubim as a sign of God’s “Face” (pp. 9–10, above). As we shall see later on, the Gospel of Truth (ca. A.D. 140) still referred to the “partaking of God’s Face by means of the embraces,” and again describes it as a “rest” (41:28–34). In Clement’s Excerpta ex Theodoto, the union with Jesus in the Holy of Holies is likewise called a “fulness and joy” and a “rest” (65:2); and Günther Bornkam has shown that the Sacred Marriage of the Church to the “True Man” in the Acts of Thomas is characterized as “joy and peace,” as the Bridegroom “rests” upon the head of the Bride, and her steady “gazing” at him symbolizes the “completion of the initiation” and the “mystery of the hieros gamos.”63 Thus it will be seen that the word “rest” had a distinctly sexual connotation in the literature of the period, as it undoubtedly does in the Odes of Solomon, having become virtually synonymous with the consummation of the hieros gamos and the cessation of desire which follows.

In Hennecke-Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, (Philadelphia, 1964; hereafter NTAp), 2:432. In the same way, “beholding the Face of God” (thea theou) had been the means of uniting with God in the Hellenized Jewish mystery. See pp. 60–62 and 113–14, above. 63

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THE SACRED MARRIAGE OF THE “POWERS” IN THE ODES OF SOLOMON

The same embracing “powers,” which “unite” and “bring forth fruit” in Philo’s On the Cherubim (27) also appear to stand behind passages in the Odes of Solomon. Philo’s “Powers” had included the Logos/Son, who passed through a feminine intermediary called “Knowledge,” and eventually gave rise to the world (On Drunkenness, 30; pp. 14–15, above). The Odist, however, describes the Logos as if it were “milk” from the “breasts of God” (Ode 19). J. H. Bernard has gathered evidence showing that the representation of the Logos in this manner was quite common in the writings of the early Church,64 and we encounter it in several other Odes as well (4:10; 8:14; 9:1–4; 35:5). The image of the Father’s “breasts” goes back to Old Testament passages such as Hosea 9:14 and Psalm 131:2, in which scholars have detected memories of Israel’s former belief in feminine deities.65 Even the memory of their sacred marriages is preserved, for in Ode 19, the Virgin acquires “great power” by receiving the Father’s “milk” and “bearing the Son”: A cup of milk was offered to me, And I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord’s kindness. The Son is the cup, And the Father is He who is milked; And the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him. Because His breasts were full, And it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released, The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom And mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father. Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, And those who received it are in the perfection of the right hand. The womb of the Virgin took it 64 Quoted in Charlesworth, Odes, 44. Clement of Alexandria (Paedegogus, 1.6), for example, says that the Logos is the “milk” by which Christ’s “babes” are nourished (in Harris, Odes and Psalms, 145). 65 See Phyllis Trible, “God, Nature of, in the OT,” in IDB, 5:368–69. According to Ginzberg (Legends of the Jews, 1:263; 5:291), Abraham migrated to his new home in order to be “suckled by the breasts of Sarah,” i.e., Philo’s symbol for Wisdom.

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And she received the conception and gave birth… And she labored and bore the Son but without pain… She brought forth like a strong man with desire And she bore according to the manifestation, And she acquired according to the Great Power (19:1–10).66

Here, the “milk” of the “Lord’s kindness” is the same Logos-Wisdom whom the Wisdom writers called the “River of Wisdom.” Both flowed from the Father through the Mother, who is Philo’s “Knowledge,” or the Odist’s “Holy Spirit.” Because God’s “breasts are full,” she “opened her bosom” and “milked Him,” i.e., received his effluence. Then her earthly surrogate—the Virgin Mary—bore the son “according to the manifestation” (i.e., “the flesh”), her travail being “according to the Great Power” who operated within her. These figures correspond generally to the traditional marriage of the “powers” in the Philonic Mystery. The Odist’s “Holy Spirit” is the feminine aspect of the Divine, corresponding to Philo’s “Knowledge” (On Drunkenness, 8:30); but the “milk-Logos” is the “Invisible Presence” in the LightStream, i.e., the seminal Logos, appropriately referred to by Hellenistic writers as the logos spermatikos,67 or the “causative” aspect of the Light-Stream. What is sown in her from above was then placed into earthly wombs (Ode 19:6; Philo, On the Cherubim, 42–50), for the Mother must be impregnated by God before she can impregnate those who seek after her.68 The title “Power” appears commonly in Jewish and early Christian writings as a “surrogate for God,”69 for example, the “Glory” who is seated 66

Odes.

This last line is Charlesworth’s alternative translation, given on p. 84 of his

67 Zeno’s famous expression, well-known to Stoicism, corresponds to the regulatory role of Wisdom (“She stretches in might from pole to pole and effectively orders things,” Wis 8:1). Because of its causative effect, the logos spermatikos was honored in Hermetic writings under the image of the phallus; Hermes, its embodiment, was therefore represented ithyphallically in Greek art (H. Kleinknecht, “legō,” in TDNT, 4:85, 87). See also Philo, On Dreams, 1.200, which notes the erotic character of the creative Logos. The Gnostics made frequent use of the concept of the logos spermatikos. 68 See pp. 43, 54, above. Philo developed this theme in his Questions on Genesis (4.110–46), where Isaac marries Rebecca as a surrogate for Wisdom and receives the blessings of union with Wisdom through her. 69 Charlesworth, Odes, 84.

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on the heavenly Throne (Mark 14:62; Acts 8:10),70 or the Embracing Cherubim who “mirror” God’s active influence in the world (Philo, On the Decalogue, 104–5). It is in fact the kind of heavenly union which they symbolize that enables the Virgin to acquire her offspring “according to the Great Power” (Ode 19:10). The uniting of the Embracing Cherubim also seems to stand behind the cooperative alliance of the “reservoir of light” and the “reservoir of darkness,” which “by their acceptance one for another … complete the beauty of God” (Ode 16:14–16). For Philo, the union of the Cherubim had suggested the “revolutions of the whole heaven,” rotating harmoniously as a Unity (Philo, On the Cherubim, 21–26).71 This, and several references to the connubial oneness of the Lord’s members as a “harp” (Odes 6:1–2; 14:8; 26:3), resemble Philo’s vision of Wisdom’s lovers united in “fellowship and concord,” like a “lyre formed of unlike strings” by “reciprocity and combination” (On the Cherubim, 110): As the wind moves through the harp And the strings speak, So the Spirit of the Lord speaks through my members And I speak through His love. And He destroys whatever is alien, And everything is of the Lord (Ode 6:1–3).

The Odist’s description of the Holy Spirit as a “Mother” appears to have been of Jewish-Christian provenance (cf. the Gospel of the Hebrews: “My Mother, the Holy Spirit, took me by one of my hairs and carried me away on to the great mountain, Tabor”).72 This is another link with the Wisdom tradition, where Wisdom is said to be both “Bride” (Wis 8:3) and “Mother” (On Dreams, 1.92, 99; On the Posterity of Cain, 63), as well as with the Embracing Cherubim, who are “Father” and “Mother” in conjugal union (On “Power” (dynamis) was a synonym for God’s Glory in contemporary Jewish sources. The apocalyptists made geburah or dynamis an “appelation or metonym of the ‘Divine Glory’.” G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism (New York, 1960), 67. The “Dynamis” was also the Divine Glory in the Hekhaloth tracts. In the Visions of Ezekiel, for example, the “Dynamis” is what one sees when one ascends to the highest heaven and has a vision of God’s “Appearance on the Throne” (ibid., 68). “Metatron,” the “Second Power” in heaven, was also a secret name for the “Dynamis” (ibid., 69). 71 Compare Charlesworth, Odes, 72–73. 72 In Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 1:164. 70

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Drunkenness, 30). It also provides the starting point for the Gnostic view of Wisdom as the “Mother” of angels and the souls of men.73

THE HOLY OF HOLIES AS A “GARDEN OF FRUITFULNESS” IN THE

ODES

The result of man’s union with Jesus-Wisdom, as we have already seen, is the “bringing forth of much fruit” (Rom 7:4): As is the course of anger over wickedness, So is the course of joy over the Beloved; And brings in of its fruit unhindered (Ode 7:1).

The traditional place for “bringing forth fruit” was the Temple. Thus in Ode 11 the writer draws attention to the special location where “the Lord possessed me by His light” (v. 11), after which “my eyes were enlightened … and (the Lord) took me to his Paradise” (v. 16): And I beheld blooming and fruit-bearing trees, And self-grown was their crown. Their branches were sprouting And their fruits were shining. From an immortal land were their roots. And a river of gladness was irrigating them. And round about them is the land of eternal life. Then I worshipped the Lord because of His magnificence (vv. 16a–17).

The “river of gladness” which waters the “trees of eternity” was of course in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:10). But in contemporary writings, “the Garden of Eden is the Holy of Holies and the dwelling of the Lord” (Jubilees 8:19).74 There it is that everything is once again filled with fruitfulness and fertility: Indeed, there is much room in Thy Paradise. And there is nothing in it which is barren, But everything is filled with fruit (Ode 11:23).

This agrees with rabbinic descriptions of the Holy of Holies as the “couch” where the Shekhinah was married to the Lord, producing fruitfulness in the earth (p. 19, above): First Apocalypse of James 34:3–8; Teaching of Sylvanus 91:14–20; Gospel of Philip 52:21–24; 63:30–32; etc. See our chapter 6, “Gnosticism and the Great Mystery,” below. 74 Charlesworth, Odes, 23. 73

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The idea that the interior of the Sanctuary symbolized Paradise, complete with exuberant greenery, was also reflected in the traditional practice of decorating the altar with green boughs during the annual rite of Water Libation,76 and the use of lavish botanical decoration on items like the Table of the Shewbread77 and the bases of the layers,78 all of which was said to have contributed an almost tropical sense of fertility to the place. Theodore Reik has made the penetrating suggestion that the leafy booths in which the faithful dwelt during the autumn Temple Pilgrimage were also a cultic “stage-setting” inherited from prehistoric times, whose original Sitz im Leben was the primal “forest,” where men were initiated into the mysteries of death and resurrection.79 The Temple itself was even said to be like a forest (1 Kgs 7:2), again, because “everything in it … was fruitful and multiplied.80 Talmudic legend had it that these decorations miraculously brought forth fruit, which provided nourishment for the priests.81 All of this agrees with the Eden-like greenery which is invariably connected with the hieros gamos in Sumerian and Akkadian texts82 and is even suggested in Canaanite accounts of Baal’s nuptials with Anath, which made “the rain to fall and the wadis to flow with honey” (I AB iii:3ff). The fact that this takes place in a place where “the Most High … uncovered my innermost being towards Him,” and was “possessed … by His light” (Ode 11:2, 11), strongly suggests that here too we are speaking of a hieros gamos in the Temple, where the Lord appears “like the sun” and “enlightens” the Odist’s eyes (vv. 13–14), filling him with a “vision of the invisible,” and giving him “instruction” in the knowledge of God (Philo, Questions on Exodus, 2.41, 52). 75 This expression commonly meant procreation. See R. Patai, Man and Temple (London, 1947), 90. 76 Ibid., 25–26. 77 R. Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York, 1967), 308–9. 78 Ibid., 305. 79 Pagan Rites in Judaism (New York, 1964), 21. 80 Tanhuma Numbers, 33; Numbers Rabbah, 11:3; b. Yoma 39b (in Patai, Man and Temple, 90). 81 Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 309. 82 See S. N. Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Bloomington, 1969), esp. 49–84, 100–103.

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The language of Ode 11 is also close to that of the Qumran Hymns, (compare the Odist’s description of the Saints as a pre-existent Community of “fruitbearing trees,” whose crown is “self-grown,” and whose “roots are from an immortal land,” with 1QH 8:4–11, which speaks of the Community as “a Mystery … a tree fed from a secret spring”). Also note Ode 13:7– 10, which tells us that the “Congregation of Thy Holy Ones has been established from before eternity.” This fruitfulness is especially connected with the Abrahamic promise of posterity (Gen 12:2; 15:5), as we read in the scroll known as the “Damascus Document”: Before they were established, He knew their works … And He knows the years of their existence and the number and exact epoch of all of them that come into being in eternity … And in all of them He raised for Himself men called by name in order to leave a remnant for the land and to fill the universe with their seed (CD 2:7ff; translated by Chaim Rabin).

This is the same promise made by Paul in Galatians, where he connects the fruitfulness which comes from the baptismal hieros gamos with the spiritual “seed” of Abraham: Baptized into union with Christ Jesus, you have all put on Christ as a garment … There is no … male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you thus belong to Christ, you are the issue of Abraham, and so heirs by promise (Gal 3:27–29).

The Odist, for his part, remembers that the promise of the Abrahamic covenant to the seed of Israel has now been fulfilled in Christ: And that I might not nullify the promises to the posterity of the patriarchs, To whom I was promised for the salvation of their offspring (Ode 31:13).

As in Galatians, this is accomplished by union with Christ, i.e., by “putting on” Christ as a “garment of light”: And the Lord renewed me with his garment, And possessed me by his light (Ode 11: 11).

Yet we are undoubtedly to think here of the original form of the hieros gamos in the Temple, rather than of its later, baptismal form (Gal 3:28), for the Odes make no mention anywhere of the usual Christian sacraments. As Rendel Harris points out, “of sacraments, the Odes do not seem to know

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much. The only direction in which we could look for a reference to Baptism would be (i) the Living Water, (ii) the allusions to the Seal.”83 Yet the “Living Water,” in his opinion, yields no legitimate comparison with baptism because of its general connection in the Odes with a general “outpouring” of God’s spiritual Presence. Indeed, as we have seen, this is roughly synonymous in the Odes with the entire “effluence” (aporroia) of Wisdom which flows into the Temple. As for the “Seal,” we have several references in the Odes to a kind of sign, with which the Lord’s Holy Ones have been specially marked: Because Thy seal is known And Thy creatures are known to it. And Thy hosts possess it, And the elect archangels are clothed with it (4:7–8).

That this does not refer to baptism is clearly evident from the fact that Ode 23 speaks of a mysterious “letter” from heaven which is marked with the Seal, and which causes the angelic powers to let it pass by unmolested (“But it escaped from their fingers; and they were afraid of it and of the seal which was upon it;” v. 8). Ode 8 even says that the Lord set his “seal” upon the faces of His people before Creation: And before they existed, I recognized them; And imprinted a seal on their faces (v. 13).

Harris therefore concludes that “there does not seem to be any definite allusion to Baptism” in the Odes of Solomon.84 Charlesworth concurs that the “Living Water” (especially in its “milk” or “milk and honey” form) should not be understood baptismally.85 Harris further cautions us concerning the bread and wine: “As to the Eucharist, I can find no allusion whatever; there are no references to the religious use of bread and wine; the writers of the Odes seem to prefer milk and honey; but they are not spoken of sacramentally, but mystically and allegorically.”86 These last two characterizations, of course, fall entirely within the provenance of the Wisdom Mystery, where one receives from the Temple the “milk and honey” anticipated in the “Promised Land,” namely Wisdom Odes and Psalms, 77. Ibid. 85 Odes, 24–25, esp. n. 18. 86 Odes and Psalms, 79; our emphasis. 83 84

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(On the Migration of Abraham, 28; cf. Heb 11:10, 13–16; 12:22–24). Indeed, the same Ode which extols the Jerusalem Temple (4:1–3) goes on to invite all to come and receive from “Thy bountiful springs which abundantly supply us with milk and honey” (v. 10); the same are described in Ode 30 as a fountain of water “sweeter than honey”: Fill for yourselves water from the living fountain of the Lord, Because it has been opened for you. And come all you thirsty and take a drink, And rest beside the fountain of the Lord. Because it is pleasing and sparkling, And perpetually refreshes the self. For much sweeter is its water than honey (vv. 1–4).

Here again the fructifying source is “the lips of the Lord” (30:5), just as it was in the Gospel of Thomas (“whoever drinks from my mouth”):87 And speaking waters touched my lips From the fountain of the Lord generously. And so I drank and became intoxicated, From the living water that does not die (11:6–7).

As part of the hieros gamos with Wisdom (vv. 11–12), this “water” produces “divine drunkenness,” or “possession by the Spirit” (Philo, On Flight and Finding, 166; On Giants, 47; etc.). Without doubt, the Odist would also have included within this symbol of “Living Water” the Gospel itself.

CHRIST AS THE MIRROR OF WISDOM AND IMAGE OF GOD IN THE

ODES

One of the most striking and characteristic metaphors of the Wisdom Mystery, and one which the Odist was undoubtedly acquainted with, is the description of Christ (Wisdom) as a “Mirror”: Behold, the Lord is our mirror. Open your eyes and see them in Him. And learn the manner of your face… And wipe the paint from your face And love His holiness and put it on (13:13).

87

Logion 108.

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This important fragment already contains one of the main elements of the Gnostic Bridal Chamber rite, namely, beholding God “as in a mirror” (2 Cor 3:18), and being conformed to the image which one finds there. Again, it is a form of hieros gamos (“love his holiness and put it on”) and shows an unmistakable dependence on the Wisdom literature, where Wisdom is the “unblemished mirror of the active Power of God” (Wis 7:26)— or “Powers of God” (Questions on Genesis, 1.57)88—designed to reflect the divine Image to the soul of the Temple pilgrim. We also saw that the roughly contemporary 2 Clement spoke of Jesus as the “mirror” of God’s Face (36). Second Corinthians likewise tells us that God’s glory shines in the “face of Jesus Christ” (4:6); in fact, the Excerpta ex Theodoto—a full century later—would still refer to Jesus as the “Face of the Father” (cf. Ode 25:4). Such examples show that the concept of JesusWisdom as the “mirror” or “face” of God was widespread in the early Church and that it preserved still older notions from the Wisdom Mystery, teaching that Wisdom herself was the “mirror” in which one could behold a vision of the invisible God. Pseudo-Cyprian’s treatise, De Montibus Sina et Sion (i.e., the Temple) similarly describes Christ as the “Unspotted Mirror of the Father.”89 In the same book, we are told that the same idea could be found in an “Epistle of John” (presently lost), and that it was also described “by Solomon” in the Wisdom of Solomon. Pseudo-Cyprian then explains that the Father and the Son see each other by reflection and that we too may observe Jesus “in ourselves,” as one sees himself in water or in a mirror: And even we who believe in Him see Christ in us as in a mirror, as He Himself instructs and advises us in the Epistle of His disciple John to the people: “See me in yourselves in the same way as any one of you sees himself in water or in a mirror”; and so he confirmed the saying of Solomon about Himself, that “he is the unspotted mirror of the Father.”90

In the present Ode, the initiate is instructed to behold the image of the Lord “as in a mirror” and thereby “learn the manner” of his own face, at the same time wiping the “paint” (Harris: the “filth”) from it, putting on in its place the Lord’s holiness. This agrees with Paul’s statement that “beholdSee pp. 59–60, above. Quoted in Harris, Odes and Psalms, 107. “On Mt. Sinai and Mr. Zion” obviously refers to the Temple. 90 Ibid. 88 89

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ing as in a glass the glory of the Lord we are changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18). James, in a more homiletic mood, condemns the foolish man who “beholds his natural image in a glass” but “goes his way and immediately forgets what he saw” (1:23–24), i.e., makes no attempt to conform his life to Christ. The apocryphal Acts of John (second or third century) describes a similar process. Thus, in chapters 28 and 29, we read how the Apostle compares his newly painted portrait with his image in a mirror, saying that (it is) Jesus who paints us all from life for himself, who knows the shapes and forms and figures and dispositions and types of our souls. And those are the colors which I tell you to paint with: faith in God, knowledge, reverence, kindness, fellowship, mildness, goodness, brotherly love, purity, sincerity, tranquility, fearlessness, cheerfulness, dignity, and the whole band of colors which portray your soul and raise up your members … In brief, when a full set of mixtures of such colors has come together into your soul, it will present it to our Lord Jesus Christ undismayed and undamaged and rounded in form.91

Clearly, the intended idea is that the individual must consciously strive to conform his own image to the image of God, which he sees reflected in the “mirror” of Jesus/Wisdom—he who is the Image of the Father (Heb 1:3; John 14:9). God‘s own Image was in fact sent in the form of the Son so that we should have a divine “likeness” which we can “put on”: He became like me that I might receive Him. In form He was considered like me that I might put Him on (Ode 7:4).

These striking references to Jesus as Wisdom’s “mirror” are yet another important link between the Wisdom Mystery—in which Philo saw the articles in the Holy of Holies as a means of moral instruction and fellowship with the Divine—and the Gnostic Bridal Chamber rite, where “the mysteries of the truth are revealed as types and images” (Gospel of Philip, 84:20–21). Indeed, all three are based on the identical principle that The likeness of that which is below Is that which is above (Ode 34:4).

As we shall see later on, the Gnostics for this very reason constructed “mirrored Bridal Chambers” in which the initiate might receive the earthly

91

In Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 2:221.

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reflections of Wisdom’s Light, just as the Philonic initiate had done in the former Temple (see “Gnosticism and the Wisdom Mystery,” below). The special Temple-provenance of this mirror symbolism is further indicated by the Odist’s reference to his readers as mystery-initiates (mystaie), clearly based on Philo’s description of the initiates in his own TempleMystery (“Open your ears, mystaie, and hear the holiest of mysteries,” Allegorical Interpretation, 3.219): Open your ears, And I shall speak to you (9:1). Keep my Mystery, you who are kept by it; Keep my Faith, you who are kept by it (8:10).

J. H. Bernard believed that this verse reflected the disciplina arcani of the Primitive Church and cited a possible connection with a warning contained in Cyril of Jerusalem’s Mystagogic Lectures: “Guard the mystery for Him who gives the reward.”92 Charlesworth rejected this suggestion on the grounds that Cyril’s fifth-century lectures deal only with baptism, as well as the fact that the Odes frequently admonish the reader to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world (e.g., Ode 7:26).93 Yet we have seen that the Temple Mystery had finally been coalesced with baptism in the Gentile Church, and that the kind of secrecy associated with the Temple and the Embracing Cherubim became widespread in the form of baptism in third-century Christianity. The Gospel kerygma, on the other hand, was never to be kept secret. Jesus could therefore caution his disciples that “I tell my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries” (Gospel of Thomas, Log. 62), as well as admonish them that “What thou shalt hear in thine ears … that preach from your housetops” (Log. 33). In the same manner, the New Testament Synoptics at first warn, “Give not that which is holy to the dogs” (Matt 7:6), and then command, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations” (28:19). Also connected with the Temple in a general way are the Odist’s references to sacrifice, though in a “spiritualized” form (Ode 20:1–5). His allusions to the “wheel” (Ode 23:11) and the “chariot” (38:1) are probably derived from Merkabah mysticism,94 early descriptions of which can also be found in the Qumran “Angelic Liturgy” (4QS 1), and in 1 Enoch 14:8–25.95 In Charlesworth, Odes, 43. Ibid. 94 Ibid., 96. 95 G. Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974), 11, 13. 92 93

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These kinds of speculation on the Throne-Vision (Ezek 1:26) date back to the period of the Second Temple96 and have obvious connections with the Sanctuary, for example, the ubiquitous concern with the “pargod” (= parokhet), or veil, which generally separates the “One who sits on the Throne” from other parts of the Merkabah.97 Obviously, this is an idealized version of the veil in the earthly Temple. Mention of the priesthood (“I am a priest of the Lord, and Him I serve as a priest”; Ode. 20:1) also establishes the provenance of the Temple. The motif of being crowned, on the other hand (1:1–2; 5:12; 9:8; 17:1; 20:7–8; etc.), appears to be closer to the New Testament “victor’s crown” or “wreath” than to the priestly nezer of the Old Testament. Charlesworth connects it with the Qumran doctrine that the reward of the “sons of light” is a crown of glory and a garment of majesty in eternal light” (1QS 4:7–8).98 Jean Daniélou, however, believes that the “wreathed-crown” was a JewishChristian adaptation of the crown worn by Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles, and therefore directly connected with the Temple: It was laid down that they should celebrate the Feast dwelling in booths, wearing crowns on their heads, and holding leafy branches and boughs of willow (Jubilees 16:30).99

Finally, the putting on of a holy garment (Odes 11:11; 23:1–3; 25:8) seems to reflect the rabbinic doctrine that Adam and Eve were given an integument of skin when they lost their original bodies of light during the Fall; now their pristine light-body is restored through union with Christ in the form of a white or luminous “garment”: I stripped off (folly) and cast it from me, and the Lord renewed me with his raiment … And possessed me by His light (Ode 11:9–11).100

This is very close to the doctrine contained in the “Hymn of the Pearl” (Acts of Thomas), which says that the heavenly soul leaves its “Robe” behind when it comes to earth, but receives it again after the successful completion

Scholem, MTJM, 42. Scholem, Kabbalah, 18. 98 Odes, 103. 99 Theology of Jewish Christianity (London, 1964; hereafter TJC), 328. 100 Quoted in ibid., 326. See also Harris, Odes, 66–70. 96 97

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of its earthly mission.101 In the latter case, the “Robe” is additionally described as a mirror-reflection of the individual’s true nature: Suddenly when I saw myself over against it, the (splendid robe) became like me, as my reflection in a mirror (112:76).

This suggests that “the Robe” was widely regarded as a symbol of the divine nature which the initiate attains through conformity to the divine Image; Hamerton-Kelly sees it as a development of the thought expressed in 2 Corinthians 3:18, which says that “we … beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are changed into the same image,” i.e., the “image of the high God.”102 The foregoing features of the Jewish Christian Odes of Solomon clearly demonstrate a derivation from the Old Testament Wisdom Mystery and the symbolism of the Temple, still dominated by the theme of Wisdom’s hieros gamos with the initiate. As in the Gospel of Thomas, the imagery of the embrace within the veil is applied to the relationship of Jesus and the Christian, but on a direct and personal level (“And Immortal Life embraced me, and kissed me. And from that is the Spirit which is within me”). Again, Sonship and immortality are the result (“I have been united to Him, because the lover has found the Beloved. Because I love Him that is a Son, I shall become a son. Indeed, he who is joined to Him who is immortal truly shall become immortal”). As in the Gospel of Thomas, the divine Image and the image of the individual are merged together as One (“He became like me that I might receive Him. In form He was considered like me that I might put Him on”). As in the Wisdom of Solomon, this is accomplished by means of a “divine reflection” in Wisdom’s “mirror” (“Behold, the Lord is our mirror. Open your eyes and see them in Him, and learn the manner of your face”). We are of course left to conjecture just how much of the Odes consists of anachronistic symbolism surviving from earlier practices, and how much reflects contemporary cultic observances in the early Church. We will, however, discover that other important groups in second-century Christianity performed actual rites of the very same sort, suggesting the possibility that the Odes of Solomon do in fact describe an extant liturgical worship, still based on the Jewish Temple, albeit in a Christianized form. Behind it we indeed perceive the memory of a “Fellowship Embrace” involving someone representing the Lord and the initiate (“And I put off darkness, and put on light 101 102

In Hennecke-Schneemetcher-Wilson, NTAp, 2:498–504. Pre-Existence (Cambridge, 1973), 146 and notes.

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… And His everlasting fellowship”). What does appear certain is that the Odes come from a Jewish-Christian writer who still looked upon the Temple as a necessary institution, and one which was still valid in his eyes. For that reason, we feel that they are an important witness to the survival of the Jerusalem Temple cult in certain segments of Christianity and one which would contribute significantly to the Gnostic “Bridal Chamber” rites, or even to the mysterious ritual described in the late first century Didache, to which we now turn.

A “WORLDLY MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH” IN THE DIDACHE The full title of this short treatise, discovered by Philotheos Bryennios in 1873, is “The Teaching (Didache) of the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles.” The main bulk of the work has been dated from around the end of the first century, or even (by J. P. Andet and S. Giet) from before A.D. 70, since specific sections on the “Two Ways,” including the eschatological teaching, the prayers, and the “Short Apocalypse” at the end probably go back to the early days of the Jerusalem Church.103 Undoubtedly, it was subjected to further internal development before it reached its present form, perhaps sometime in the mid-second century.104 Generally speaking, it is a compendium of moral and practical instruction, dealing with the opposing paths leading to life or death, baptism, prayer, fasting, the Eucharist, the agape-meal, and the treatment of various offices in the Church, such as apostles, prophets, bishops, and deacons. In spite of its name, most scholars are agreed that the provenance of the Didache was the original community of Jewish Christians, i.e., those Jews who were first converted to Christianity, prior to the growth of the “Gentile” movement which led to Latin “orthodoxy.”105 This “Jewish Christianity” had not yet evolved into the Ebionism which is documented in the Kerygmata Petrou and the Clementine literature; instead, it remains characterized by a continuing use of Semitic thought-forms, such as the doctrine of R. A. Kraft, “Apostolic Fathers,” in IDB, 5:36. Jean Daniélou, TJC, 30. “In its original form,” he concludes, “it dates back to the first community at Jerusalem, though it was no doubt developed after A.D. 70 in a Syrian community. Finally, the extant version has undergone some touching up later than the second century.” J. R. Michaels, “Apostolic Fathers,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, (Grand Rapids, 1979), 1:207, suggests “a date of composition in the 2nd cent.” 105 Daniélou, TJC, 28–30. Compare also 2–5. 103 104

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the Two Ways (reminiscent of the Qumran doctrine of Light and Darkness), the use of living water for baptism, prayer thrice daily, the “tabernacling” of the Name, the Aramaic expression, Maran atha, and the belief in prophets, all of which are found liberally in the Didache. This suggests a possible affinity between the present work and the Essenes, who according to Josephus also practiced prophetism in the first century A.D. 106 According to P. D. Scott-Moncrieff, bishops and deacons were originally subordinate to apostles and prophets, though “the ‘prophet’ alone was allowed to have a fixed abode … The first fruits of the community were his by right. He spoke in ecstasy, and presided at the agape.”107 Yet we are never quite sure just what is meant by the word “prophet” in the Didache, which seems generally to refer to itinerant preachers or ministers. Indeed, we also read in the nearly contemporary Shepherd of Hermas (M. 11:7ff) that “prophets” often traveled about providing spiritual counsel: When the man who hath the divine Spirit cometh unto an assembly of righteous men, who have faith in a divine Spirit, and intercession is made to God by the gathering of those men, then the angel of the prophetic Spirit, who is attached to him, filleth the man, and the man, being filled with the Holy Spirit, speaketh to the multitude, according as the Lord willeth.” (See also Hermas, S.9.25:2; 15:4; V.3.5:1.).

The Didache similarly notes that the prophet is one who “increases righteousness and knowledge of the Lord” (11:2). Some have argued that the designation “prophet” referred to the charismatic gift possessed by such individuals, rather than to a ministerial calling. Jean Daniélou, however, was convinced that prophets, elders, teachers, deacons, and bishops were both ministerial and charismatic callings in the Primitive Church, and were ordained at the hand of the apostles.108 Yet neither the Didache nor the Shepherd of Hermas ever gives us a more exact definition of the word “prophet.” In chapter 11, the Didache tells us how to distinguish a true prophet from a false: “Let every apostle that cometh unto you be received as of the Lord … But if he remain three days, he is a false prophet” (vv. 4–5). This cautionary note was probably added to guard against unscrupulous representatives of the Church living off the hospitality of its members. (See also vv. 6 and 12, which warn against “prophets” who ask for money.) 106 107

7:114. 108

Ibid., 29–30. “Coptic Church,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (New York, 1912), Daniélou, TCJ, 350, notes.

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Chapter 15:1 further indicates that “prophets” could be bishops: “Appoint for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord … for they perform unto you the services of prophets and teachers.” However, it adds that “prophets” functioned in some sort of priestly capacity (“Every first fruit, therefore … thou shalt give to the prophets, for they are your High Priests”; 15:3). Rendel Harris therefore concluded that the “prophet’s” actions “were only justified because they were done to expound some mystery.”109 This suggests that we must search for some precedent associated with the “mystery” in the Temple for the origin and explanation of the “prophetic” calling in the Didache: Every prophet proved true, if he performs unto a worldly mystery of the Church (poion eis mystērion kosmikon ekklēsias), and yet teaches you not to do all that he himself does, shall not be judged by you. He has his judgment in the presence of God, for in the same way did the prophets of old (11:11).

Certainly, the “prophet’s” right to receive “first-fruits” (13:3) was originally a right associated with the Temple. Yet the enigmatic passage in 11:11 raises more questions than it answers, for when we read that the “worldly mystery of the Church” resembled a “mystery” performed by “prophets of old,” we are obliged to ask just which prophets the author means. Does he mean prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, or Jeremiah? If so, we are unaware of any “mystery” which might have been performed by these individuals. Or is it more likely that he refers to prophets who in some way had come to typify the Wisdom Mystery, e.g., Hosea, whose marriage to a prostitute prefigured Yahweh’s love for Israel, or the various Patriarchs, whom Philo depicted as “Hebrews” in search of God’s Sophia, or even Moses, the archetypal High Priest, who went to the top of Mt. Sinai to “unite” God and Israel, and who was said in the Zohar to have had intercourse with the Shekhinah?110 The statement in 13:3, “for they are your High Priests,” would appear to favor the latter alternative, and suggests that the cryptic “mystery” referred to in Didache 11:11 was some form of the Wisdom Mystery and that it still involved behavior which was prefigured by the Embracing Cherubim in the Sanctuary. Indeed, it is clear that its performance by certain undisciplined “prophets” had become the occasion for moral criticism, since the members of the Church are enjoined not to judge them: “For in the same way did the prophets of old.” In short, our “prophet” was known to have 109 110

The Teaching of the Apostles (London, 1887), 72; our emphasis. Scholem, MTJM, 200.

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taken part in some kind of ritual, which by ordinary moral standards could appear questionable, yet might be excused when properly performed, because it expressed a great truth.

LICENTIOUS AGAPE FEASTS AND THE DIDACHE A. Cleveland Coxe, the editor of the American edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers,111 suggests that this questionable behavior had something to do with the agape-feasts of the early Church (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20; 2 Cor 13:12; 1 Thess 5:26; 1 Pet 2:4–22), which are also discussed in the Didache (9–10). These ancient communion-meals (koinōnia) appear to have followed the pattern of the Jewish Passover as a means of gaining fellowship and sharing one’s goods with the poor (Acts 1:14; 2:1, 44; 4:32; 6:lff). Jude 12 calls them agapai, (KJV “feasts of charity”; RSV, NEB, i.e., “Love-feasts”), and they were at first associated with the celebration of the Eucharist (Acts 2:44, 46; Didache 10:lff). Unfortunately, certain abuses had begun to creep into the agape-meals, as Paul and Jude indicate (1 Cor 11:21–22; Jude 12). Peter likewise refers to the “blots” (spiloi) and “blemishes” (mōmoi) who desecrated these feasts (2 Pet 2:13); Peter and Jude more specifically hint at the sexual nature of their transgressions (Jude 8–16; 1 Pet 2:4–22). Since the embrace and kiss exchanged between Jesus and the initiate in the original Wisdom Mystery was the probable source of the well-known agape-kiss (Gospel of Thomas, Log. 22, 108; Ode 28:7),112 there would indeed have been occasion for dishonest persons to interject licentious behavior into some of its later forms. The Gospel of Philip explains that the Savior’s kiss was passed between the members of the community in order to share his grace: Those who are begotten by Him … are nourished … from the mouth … For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth. For that reason, we also kiss one another. We receive the conception from the grace which is in each other (58:28–59:6).

Marvin H. Pope, on the other hand, associates the suspected licentious behavior with the widespread “mortuary-meals” of the antique world, including the Canaanite marzeah and the Greek thiasos or symposion, during which “wake-like” carousing and sexual activity were supposed to have a sympa-

111 112

Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, 1885–96, hereafter ANF) 7:380–81. See pp. 103–4, above.

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thetic effect on the revival of the dead.113 While we believe that the Jewish traditions already mentioned provide adequate precedents for the agape-feast and whatever abuses it may have suffered, it is nevertheless true that second- and third-century writers frequently reported the kind of wholesale licentiousness at Christian “meals” which were associated with pagan mortuary-celebrations (Tertullian, Apology, 7, 8; Minucius Felix, Octavius, 337– 38). The latter included nocturnal drinking bouts and rioting, reminiscent of the old Semitic *Marzih,114 and the sort of orgies hinted at in Song of Songs 2:4–5 and 5:1.115 The Christian agape-feasts during these later years may of course have simply decayed from within and succumbed to the dissolute influence of pagan counterparts, for example, the notorious Mayureafestival (cf. the warnings in Genesis Rabbah 20:8; Leviticus Rabbah 5:3; Numbers Rabbah 10:3), which even featured wife-swapping.116 In any case, such abuses suggest that a susceptibility to promiscuous behavior plagued the agape-feast from the start, and the author of the Didache may have been trying to avoid this when he cautioned against the sins of the flesh (chs. 2–3).

VIRGINES SUBINTRODUCTAE AND THE DIDACHE Günther Bornkam117 and Jean Daniélou118 have both suggested that the “worldly mystery of the Church” was a kind of “spiritual marriage” representing “in an earthly copy the heavenly mystery of the marriage between Christ and the Church (Eph 5:32).119 Daniélou sees this as an allusion to “spiritual unions which existed in Jewish Christianity between prophetapostles and a sister.”120 These are briefly described in the Shepherd of Hermas (S.9.10:6–11:8), and possibly even in 1 Cor 7:36ff,121 and they were generally 113

29.

Song of Songs, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1977), 226–27; see also 210–

Ibid., 210–21. Ibid., 221–23. 116 Ibid., 217–18. 117 “mystārion, myeō,” in TDNT, 4:824–25. 118 TJC, 351–52. 119 Bornkam, “mystārion, myeō,” 825. 120 Daniélou, TJC, 351. See also A. Adam, “Erwägungen zur Herkunft der Didache,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 68 (1957): 1–47. 121 Some commentators believe that “Paul is describing a kind of ‘spiritual marriage’ in which a couple lives together without sex relations.” Wm. Orr and James Walther, 1 Corinthians, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1976), 223. J. C. 114 115

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supposed to symbolize the Great Mystery of which Paul speaks in Ephesians 5. In the first-mentioned work (from the middle of the second century), the writer tells us how he was left by the Shepherd to spend the night with twelve beautiful virgins. Asking where he might sleep, he receives the following answer: With us thou shalt sleep, like a brother, not like a man, for thou art our brother and in the future we shall serve thee, for we love thee dearly.

He then goes on to describe how she who seemed to be their leader began to kiss and embrace me; and the others seeing her embrace me, they too began to kiss me, and to lead me around the tower (= the Church), and to sport with me … And I stayed the night with them, and I slept by the side of the tower. For the virgins spread their linen on the ground, and made me lie down in the midst of them, and they did nothing else but pray; and I prayed with them without ceasing … Then the Shepherd appeared and said, “Thou hast not done anything ignominious?” “Ask him thyself,” they replied. I said to him, “I was glad to spend the night with them.” “On what did you sup?” he said. “Sir, I supped on the words of the Lord the whole night through,” said I (Shepherd of Hermas, S.9.11).

Such “sisters” were traditionally called virgines subintroductae (“secret virgins”), though it has been suggested that some sort of coitus reservatus may have been engaged in with some of them,122 as in the case of the Manichaeans, who called the practice karezza.123 The rationale given in Hermas for this strange relationship was that the candidate for salvation needed to enter into “marriage” with the Holy Spirit, whose “garment” was subdivided into individual portions—called Christ’s “angels”—and who were thought of as individualized “holy spirits” or divine “powers” (S.9.13). The virgines subintroductae were the earthly symbols of these “holy spirits,” and a spiritual “marriage” to one of them was the individual’s method of receiving his own portion of the “holy spirit” or “angel.” “Marriage” between the individual’s flesh and an individual “holy spirit” was the believer’s personal contribution toward the Church’s collecHurd, Jr. (The Origin of 1 Corinthians, New York, 1965, 169–82) gives a detailed account of this ancient practice. 122 Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman (New York, 1958), 145. 123 Ibid., 145–46.

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tive “marriage” to Christ.124 In this way, the Church as a whole was progressively reunited with the “Spirit of the Preexistent Christ” or “Holy Spirit” (S.5.5:2; 6:5; 9.1:1). Hermas’s “angels” were also described as “virtues” (as in the writings of Philo), or divine “names,” meaning the individualized “attributes” of the Savior.125 This remarkable explanation was in reality a magnified view of the general process by which the spiritual marriage of Christ and the Church was enacted one couple at a time, symbolized in the Shepherd of Hermas by “spiritual” syzygies between the men and virgins of the local community, and it corresponded in principle to Quentin Quesnell’s explanation of how men and women become Christ and the Church when they unite in marriage (pp. 122–23, above). The theoretical basis for such relationships was once again the fact that heavenly and earthly marriages both follow the same eternal pattern and exemplify the same “Great Mystery.” This principle would also govern the Gnostic Bridal Chamber rite, of which we shall have more to say shortly. Thus, the Marcosians were said to “prepare a nuptial couch and perform a mystic rite … affirming that what they do is a spiritual marriage after the likeness of unions above” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.21.3), and which acted as their ritual “catalyst.”

DIRECT “MARRIAGE” TO CHRIST IN THE DIDACHE? There are of course other possible explanations for the enigmatic “mystery” referred to in Didache 11. The bestowal of purity through direct marriage to the Divine, for instance, was well-known in Judaism, even before the time of Philo: According to a tradition found most clearly in Ezekiel 16 and 23, Israel was defiled … before Yahweh took her. The wilderness was the courtship period or honeymoon, the crossing of the Sea of Reeds was the cleansing bath before marriage. The covenant was an undeserved gift of Yahweh from the outset, its aim the purification of the sullied bride by love in marriage. So Hosea is said to be an image of the Redeemer, uniting himself to what was unholy, in order to make it holy.126

See pp. 149–50 and 160–61, above. See detailed analysis in H. Schlier, Der Brief an die Epheser (Düsseldorf, 1957), 270; also pp. 163–64, above. 126 Francis I. Anderson and David Noel Freedman, Hosea, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1980), 165. 124 125

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Thus began a series of divine Redeemer-figures, who symbolically wedded “fallen” women in order to provide them with their saving grace. Hosea and Gomer (Hos 1–3), Simon Magus and Helen,127 Jesus and Mary Magdalene (whom the Western Church traditionally claimed was a prostitute),128 Thomas and the Hebrew flute-player;129 even Sabbatai Zevi and his prostitute wife, Sarah,130 all fit into this ancient pattern. As a “Redeemer” and “Prophet” (Acts 4:22), Jesus’ relationship with the “fallen” Mary Magdalene may therefore have been the basis for the “mystery of the Church” in Didache.131 We cannot doubt that the Primitive Church was well aware of Christ’s paradigmatic relationship with Mary Magdalene, because their intimate association was tacitly acknowledged in the New Testament (e.g., John 20:14– 18).132 In the same way, the early Gospel of Thomas (ca. A.D. 50–70) depicted Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1:23. E. P. Blair, “Mary,” in IDB, 3:289. Scripture gives no warrant for this assumption, hence her reputation may have been blackened simply to make her conform to this tradition. According to several apocryphal books, Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene; see the Gospel of Philip 59:8–11; 63:34–36; The Gospel According to Mary, in NTAp, ed. Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, 1:344. 129 Acts of Thomas, 4–16. See the comments of Günther Bornkam, in Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 2:432. 130 See Scholem, Kabbalah, 249. 131 The Gospel of Peter, 50, says that Mary came to the tomb on Easter morning “because she had not done what women customarily did for their beloved departed.” Western tradition identified Mary with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha, at whose home Jesus spent so much time (Luke 10:38–42; John 11:1–12:8). The Gospel of Philip twice says that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (his koinonos, or wife; 59:8–9; 63:32–33) and kissed her often on the mouth (63:35–36). The Gospel According to Mary (in Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 1:343– 44) makes her his favorite of all womankind. In the Pistis Sophia, Peter complains because Mary gets more attention from the Savior than the disciples; she is promised a heavenly throne higher than those of the apostles (ch. 96), told that she is blessed above all women on earth (ch. 19), called “Mary the Beautiful” (ch. 24), and in ch. 138 she kisses Jesus. The same preference of Jesus for Mary Magdalene is reflected in various Nag Hammadi treatises, such as the Sophia of Jesus Christ and the Dialogue of the Redeemer. The last of these names three woman-followers of Jesus, but they are all well-known variants of Mary (Maria, Mariham and Marihamme). 132 Both Mark 16:9–11 and John 20:14–18 make Mary the first person to whom the risen Lord appeared after his crucifixion. Matthew 28:9–10 includes the “other Mary,” as well. Luke 24:16 says that she and several other women were the first to hear of the Resurrection from an angel. 127 128

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Jesus as preparing to “wed” Mary in order to make her “male,” i.e., to restore her fallen and incomplete “femaleness” to a perfect and complete state of “maleness”: Since Peter said to them, Let Mary go out from among us, because women are not worthy of the Life, Jesus said, See, I shall lead her, so that I will make her male, that she too may become a living Spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom (Log. 114; cf. Log. 22).

“Becoming male,” of course, depended on becoming “one” with the Redeemer, as we have already learned.133 Generally, this rite was thought of as a purely spiritual kind of union, as reflected in the symbolic “embrace” of Logion 22 and the Odes of Solomon (28:7–8). That some Christians, however, often reenacted the embrace in literal fashion, is shown by the fragment known as the Greater Questions of Mary, preserved in the fourth century Panarion of Epiphanius: They assert that he (Jesus) gave her (Mary Magdalene) a revelation, taking her aside to a mountain and praying; and he brought forth from his side a woman and began to unite with her, and so, foresooth, swallowing his effluent, he showed that “we must so do, that we may live” and how when Mary fell to the ground abashed, he raised her up and said to her, “Why didst thou doubt, O thou of little faith?”134

Epiphanius adds that the sect which produced this surprising tale had depicted Jesus as the revealer of “obscene practices” (aischrourgia), which constituted their mystery of redemption (Panarion, 26.8.1).135 We cannot tell how old these rites might have been, or when their embrace came to be represented as a blatantly sexual act.136 Nevertheless, the Greater Questions of Mary appears be another witness to a tradition which began much earlier, as suggested by Irenaeus’ statement concerning the Marcosians (Against Heresies, 1.21:3). Thus it is entirely possible that an early form of Epiphanius’s See pp. 67–68 above. In Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 1:339. The act of “taking a woman from his side” refers to Genesis 2:24 and the consubstantiality of Christ and the Church before their mortal separation. By sexually reuniting with the woman, their consubstantiality will be reestablished. 135 See ibid., 338. 136 The “swallowing of effluent,” on the other hand, indicates the attempt to “spiritualize” the sexual act by defeating the work of the Demiurge through avoidance of procreation. 133 134

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sexual rite coincided with the “mystery” alluded to in Didache 11. Markus, a late second-century disciple of Valentinus, and the founder of the Marcosians, was in fact said to have personally bestowed the gifts of prophecy upon his female followers by similar means:137 It appears probable enough that this man possesses a demon as his familiar spirit, by means of whom he seems able to prophesy, and enables as many as he counts worthy to be partakers of his grace themselves to prophesy … “I am eager to make thee a partaker of my grace, since the Father of all doth continually behold thy angel before His face. Now the place of thy mightiness is among us; it behooves us to become one. Receive fruit from me and by me the gift of grace. Adorn thyself as a bride who is expecting her bridegroom, that thou mayest be what I am and I what thou art. Establish the germ of light in thy Bridal Chamber. Receive from me a spouse, and become receptive of him, while thou art received by him. Behold grace has descended upon thee, open thy mouth and prophesy” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.13.3).

Here we again encounter the theme of “becoming one” with a Redeemerfigure138 and the theme of the “prophetic” calling combined in a single individual, who employed literal ritual union as a means of bestowing the “germ of light” upon woman initiates. As in the Gospel of Thomas and the “Declaring that he alone was the matrix and receptacle of the Sige” (the female counterpart of the highest God), “inasmuch as he was ‘only-begotten’” (1.14.1). Sige (“Silence”), or Ennoia, was in the Valentinian system the female aspect of the “perfect, preexistent Aeon,” or the eternal, unbegotten Source of all things. She was also called “Grace,” and was said to have descended upon Markus “in the form of a woman” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.14.1), making him a divine embodiment of what we have come to recognize as a form of “Wisdom.” This was of course similar to the New Testament claim that Jesus was the “Wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). There may also be some connection between the idea that Markus received Sige in the “form of a woman” and the Zoharic legend that Moses had intercourse with Shekhinah, resulting in his illumination and deification (see Scholem, MTJM, 200). 138 Compare this censorious opinion of Irenaeus about a “familiar spirit by means of whom he seems able to prophesy” with the Shepherd of Hermas, M.11:7ff: “Then the angel of the prophetic Spirit, who is attached to him, filleth this man, and the man speaketh.” Obviously, this explanation of the prophetic gift (based on Wis 7:27: “She (Wisdom) enters into holy souls and renders them friends of God and prophets”) was known to both the Valentinians and the writer of Hermas, and may have been an important element in the “worldly mystery” of the prophets in Didache 11. 137

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Questions of Mary, this mystic fusion made the recipient “the same” as the Redeemer, and bestowed “light” or “life” upon the candidate. One of the gifts of the “light” was “prophecy” (Wis 7:27), suggesting that we have in Markus’ overtly sexual rite the same kind of mystery which is referred to in Didache 11: “For in the same way did the prophets of old.” Unfortunately, we have no further details with which to provide a definitive answer. That the “mystery,” however, involved some “questionable” sort of behavior, which modern Christians have long-since repressed, seems beyond dispute. As Rendel Harris reminds us in his edition of this work, The contingency which the Teaching contemplates is the recurrence of similar eccentric conduct on the part of new prophets … The gift of prophecy had passed over from the Jews to the Christians. Many symbolic actions must have been performed in the early days of the Church of which no record has come down to us.139

As possible further examples he cites Justin Martyr, who in his Dialogue with Trypho (134) reproaches “polygamy,” saying that Jacob’s conduct—as well as that of the other Patriarchs—was justified solely because it was part of a “great mystery” (megalon mystērion).140 Justin further explains that the nuptial of Jacob was a type of action which would be consummated by Christ, Leah being the “Synagogue” and Rachel the “Gentile Church.” Irenaeus also claims that Hosea’s intercourse with the prostitute Gomer was justified as “a worldly mystery of Christ and the Church. Indeed, he argues, “the same thing holds true of the marriage of Moses”: For this reason did Hosea the prophet take “a wife of whoredoms.” And from men of this stamp it will be God’s good pleasure to take out a Church which shall be sanctified by fellowship with his Son, just as the woman was sanctified by intercourse with the prophet. And for this reason, Paul declares that the wife is sanctified by the believing husband (l Cor 7:14) … Thus too did Moses also take to wife an Ethiopian woman, whom he thus made an Israelitish one … For this reason, by means of the marriage of Moses, was shown forth the marriage of the Word, and by means of the Ethiopian bride, the Church taken from among the Gentiles was made manifest (Against Heresies, 4.20.12)

The Teaching of the Apostles, 73. The same term used by Paul to describe the union of male and female as a symbol of Christ’s marriage to the Church (Eph 5:32). 139 140

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Justin’s Dialogue (94) even justifies Moses’ “graven image” of the serpent, though there was a law prohibiting it, because it was constructed as a lesson of salvation (John 3:14). He then suggests that the same allowance be made concerning “a further mystery,”141 though he does not tell us what this might be. From his words, however, it is clear that there was once a tradition in the early Church that certain otherwise “illegitimate” actions might be justified if they expounded the mystery of Christ’s marriage to the Church. Such was apparently the “worldly mystery” of the Didache, which was designed to portray the “heavenly mystery” of redemption—just as the Gnostic “lesser mystery” of carnal union portrayed the “greater mystery” of union with Christ. Indeed, the Apostle Paul laid down the same principle when he said that “a man shall … be joined to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh … but I speak concerning Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:30– 31). We must leave our discussion of the “worldly mystery”142 in Didache 11:11 on this tentative note. Suggested interpretations have included the licentious behavior that took place during agape-feasts, “spiritual” cohabitation with virgines subintroductae, ritual “polygamy” (perhaps congress with a woman other than one’s legal wife?), ritual “embraces” and “kisses,” or even sexual unions between a hierophant and initiate. Behind them all, however, we still perceive the central symbolism of the Embracing Cherubim, representing the union of Wisdom/Christ and the worshipper, going all the way back to Ezekiel’s image of Yahweh “spreading his skirt” over Israel and “covering her nakedness” in order to bind her to him in a redemptive covenant.

THE GREAT MYSTERY IN THE WRITINGS OF CLEMENT AND ORIGEN Writing around A.D. 200, the very “orthodox” Clement of Alexandria— who was head of the local school of catechumens—left us some vivid recollections of the Christian Temple-cultus and its “Great Mystery,” save that Harris’ words; in The Teaching of the Apostles, 72. Harris adds that “worldly” or “cosmic mystery” was also a rabbinic expression. b. Hagigah 13 thus deals with the secret knowledge of the Beginning (cf. also m. Hagiga 2:1) and the need to keep Ezekiel’s Merkabah mysteries secret: “Rabbi Abuhu says from this, ‘The lambs are for thy clothing’ (Prov 27:26). Do not read it ‘lambs’ but the ‘secret things,’ meaning the things that are the Mystery of the Cosmos, let them be as a garment unto them.” Maimonides (Hilkuth yesod ha-torah, 2.18) also says of this, “keep it a secret (‘let them be as a garment to them’), and do not discuss it before many people.” 141 142

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the true Temple is now the human soul (Miscellanies, 7.6), and “passage through the veil” is the journey of the soul after death, as it leaves the world of the senses and enters the world of the intellect (ibid., 5.6).143 In contrast to the Gnostics—some of whom continued to construct “Bridal Chambers” or “Holies of Holies” of their own—Clement represented the Christian Temple as Man himself (especially the Community of the Church). Accordingly, he described the layout of the old Temple, with its symbolic furniture and fittings, solely in order to direct men’s minds to the “spiritual” world into which they now hoped to enter. But the basic pattern of this new interpretation was still the ancient Wisdom Mystery, where union with the Logos/Wisdom was the ultimate goal, and man’s deification through illumination by the Heavenly Light was the central theme: Hail, O light! For in us, buried in darkness, shut up in the shadow of death, light has shone forth from heaven, purer than the sun, sweeter than life here below. That light is eternal life; and whatever partakes of it lives. But night fears the light, and hiding itself in terror, gives place to the day of the Lord. Sleepless light is now over all, and the west has given credence to the east. For this was the meaning of the new creation. For “the Sun of Righteousness” who drives His chariot over all, pervades equally all humanity, like “His Father, who makes His sun rise on all men” and distills on them the dew of the truth. He has changed sunset into sunrise, and through the cross brought death to life; and having wrenched man from destruction, He has raised him to the skies, transplanting mortality into immortality and translating earth to heaven, He, the husbandman of God, having bestowed on us the truly great, divine, and inalienable inheritance of the Father, deifying man by heavenly teaching, putting His laws into our minds and writing on our hearts (Protrepticus 2.88.114; in Johannes Quasten, Patrology, 2.23).

Clement in fact gave this “authentic” Temple teaching the title “True Gnosis,” to distinguish it from what he considered the “False Gnosis” (Misc., 6.7), and which he describes in some detail in the third book of his Miscellanies. But he affirmed that he received the “True Gnosis” from the Apostles themselves: And the gnosis itself is that which has descended by transmission to a few, having been imparted unwritten by the apostles (Misc., 6.7).

Clement and Origen both say that the real Christian bōmos (“altar”) is the human heart. H. Leonard Pass, “Altar (Christian),” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 1:338. 143

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This “True Gnosis” had especially to do with God’s “first-begotten Son,” who “is called Wisdom by all the prophets” (6.7), and whose role in salvation (like that of the Philonic Wisdom) was set forth symbolically by the “mystic meaning of the Tabernacle and its furniture” (5.6). Before proceeding further, however, he quotes a line from Plato as a note of caution: “Cast your eyes around, and see that none of the uninitiated listen.” Then he goes on to explain that knowledge of God, though inaccessible to the minds of ordinary people, is revealed through the “Son” (Wisdom), who “is said to be the Father’s Face” (5.6), i.e., the one who makes visible the Father’s character to those who “walk in the Spirit.” For this purpose, he adds, “the sacerdotal service is concealed within the veil” (5.6). In short, the contents of the Holy of Holies were provided in order that those who had faith might have a means of instruction in the nature of God, just as we learned earlier from Philo (p. 64, above). Turning now to the Cherubim, he reminds us that certain commentators held the fabled pair to represent the interaction of the “two hemispheres” (cf. Philo, On the Cherubim, 27; On the Decalogue, 104), united as one by “the repose which dwells wth the adoring spirits” (Misc., 5.6). Though God generally forbade the making of such images, their “face” symbolically represented the “rational soul” (i.e., the unitary state); their wings signifying “the Powers of the Right and the Left,”144 while the “voice” issuing from between the two was the “delightsome glory” which they continuously contemplate (ibid.). But Clement suddenly interrupts himself: “Let it suffice that the mystic interpretation has advanced so far,” evidently thinking it best to conceal further information from outsiders (5.6). The reason is that “my Mystery is to me and the sons of my house,” as it says in a certain “gospel” (5.10). This Mystery is in fact equivalent to “uncovering the lid of the Ark” (5.10), which implies that something ordinarily hidden in the Temple was revealed to the initiated, just as it was in the Philonic Mystery, with its “secret objects made manifest to the sight” (p. 38, above). Actually, however, this was no different than the regular feasts of Pilgrimage, when the Embracing Cherubim had been shown to all worthy Temple worshippers (b. Yoma, 54a). 144 Compare Irenaeus, Against Heresies: The Demiurge created all hylic and psychic substances, “for it was he who discriminated these two kinds of existence hitherto confused, and made corporeal from incorporeal substances, fashioned things heavenly and earthly, and became the Framer of things material and animal, of those of the right and those on the left, of the light and the heavy, of those tending upward as well as tending downward” (1.5.2).

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Yet such objects, according to Clement, were really “enigmas” and “symbols of Christ,” (Misc., 5.6), who is none other than “the monogenes and Wisdom-Logos” (7.2; Excerpta ex Theodoto, 7),145 i.e., the one who reveals the “Face of the Father” to both angels (ibid.,10–12) and the “pure in heart” (Misc., 7.3). Now, in spite of his hesitation to discuss this mystery any further, he goes on to describe how those who entered the Holy of Holies with the Savior had affixed to their persons the name of YHWH, showing that they and YHWH/Christ had become spiritually one: I am the Door, which means that you who are the superior seed will come up to the boundary where I am. And when (I) enter in, the seed also enters in with (me), brought in together through the Door (Excerpta ex Theodoto, 26.2–7).

For Clement, this referred to both the “Levite” (the High Priest) and the “True Gnostic” (5.6). The “Levite,” he explains, used to put on a special tunic before entering the Adyton; the “Gnostic” instead puts on the tunic of the “Gnostic Word”—i.e., Christ—that “bright array of glory” and the “ineffable inheritance of that spiritual and perfect man ‘which eye hath not seen nor ear heard’.” This now permits him to “distinguish the objects of the intellect from the things of sense” (5.6); and he is rewarded with direct contemplation of the “true Only Begotten, the express image of the glory of the universal King and Almighty Father” (7.3). Thus “replenished with insatiable contemplation, face to face” (5.6), he is counted among the blessed “who have seen the Lord” (4.22), for the goal of the “True Gnostic” is to become “one who saw and understood.”146 Furthermore, this was accomplished by means of embracing the divine vision, not in mirrors or by means of mirrors, but in the transcendentally clear and absolutely pure insatiable vision which is the privilege of intensely loving souls. Such is the vision attainable by the “pure in heart” (Matt 5:8). This is the function of the true Gnostic, who has been perfected, to have converse with the Great High Priest (Jesus), being made like the Lord (2 Cor 3:18) up to the measure of his capacity (7.3).

145 All quotations from Clement’s Excerpta ex Theodoto are drawn from one of its “traditional” sections, reflecting Clement’s own knowledge of the Temple, not from those which reflect Theodotion’s views. See Robert P. Casey, The Excerpta ex Theodoto of Clement of Alexandria, Studies and Documents 1 (London, 1943), 30. 146 R. Wagner, Die Gnosis von Alexandrien (Stuttgart, n.d. [1968]), 121–23.

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Thus it seems that Clement was aware of certain Christians who employed real mirrors in their Bridal Chamber rites (the Valentinians?). His “Gnostic,” by contrast, was “impressed by the seal of perfect contemplation, according to God’s own Image,” i.e., his Only-begotten (7.3). Such a vision “surpasses in grandeur of contemplation all ordinary mysteries” (7.3), because one who has made the “service of God” his “soul’s continual study” has already begun to be “assimilated to God” (7.l), becoming filled with “Gnostic power” and the ability to perceive the “secrets veiled in the Truth.” Indeed, he can say that he has directly learned the divine mysteries from God’s Only-begotten Son (7.l): This is the Teacher who trains the Gnostic by mysteries, and the believer in good hopes, and the hard of heart by corrective disciplines (7.2).147

These “True Gnostics,” who obeyed the injunction to “behold God and his secrets” (4.26), and who had been trained in the Mysteries by Christ himself, were the first disciples, especially Thomas, Philip, and Matthias.148 As evidence of the Savior’s special revelation to Thomas, Clement quotes John 20:27: “Place your fingers on the nail points.” And to document the Lord’s special confidence in Philip, he quotes John 1:45; 6:5; 12:21; and 14:8, the latter passage specifically mentioning Philip’s desire to be shown the Father. Yet Christ’s answer to him had been, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (v. 9). Concerning Matthias, however, canonical Scripture says very little, except that he was chosen to fill the vacancy in the Twelve left by Judas (Acts 1:23). Nevertheless, there was a widespread “occult tradition” in the early Church that Matthias was the source of most of the so-called “Gnostic” wisdom, though there was in fact “only one doctrine of all the apostles”:

147 These distinctions probably corresponded to both the well-known division of men into pneumatic, psychic, and hylic natures, as well as to Clement’s distinction between the three grades of Christians, whose “degrees of glory in Heaven correspond to the dignities of the Church below” (6.13). 148 Wagner, Die Gnosis, 109.

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So far as the sects are concerned, they are named after the names of their founders … although they also boast that they present the views of Matthias.149

These, then, were the first “True Gnostics,” who had seen and comprehended everything. Clement elsewhere lists them as “James, Peter, John, Paul, and the rest of the apostles” (6.8). He also says of them that, thanks to their vision of God, they were destined to become divine (theoi) (7.l), or even that they had already become “gods” in their own right: “God stood in the congregation of the gods; he judgeth in the midst of the gods” (Ps 82:1). Who are they? Those that are superior to pleasure, who rise above the passions, who know what they do—the Gnostics, who are greater than the world. “I said, Ye are gods; and all sons of the Most High.” To whom speaks the Lord? To those who reject as far as possible all that is of man (2.20). On this wise it is possible for the Gnostic already to have become God … In the contemplative life, then, one in worshipping God attends to himself, and through his own spotless purification beholds the holy God holily; for self-control being present, surveying and contemplating itself uninterruptedly, is as far as possible assimilated to God (4.23).

As in the Philonic Mystery, this “assimilation to God” depended on one’s prior kinship with the Divine. This is based on the fact that the Logos is essentially related to man, being the very principle of the life within each individual: In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and that which came into existence in him was life, and life is the Lord (Excerpta ex Theodoto, 19.2).

Man therefore has the “seed of election” within himself, placed there by the Logos, which is therefore able to “unite in faith the genera which appear to be divided” (Excerpta ex Theodoto, 1.3). When the Savior came to reveal himself and the Truth, he thus needed only to rouse and activate the spark, rendering active the divine principle—the “seed”—which was already latent in elect souls (ibid., 2–3).150 Speaking of the Logos, Clement now says that he differs from God only “by circumspection, and not in essence (kata perigraphēn kai ou K. Rudolph and R. Wilson, Gnosis (San Francisco, 1983), 17. Quoting O. Stählin, Clemens von Alexandrien, Gesammelte Werke, 5:11, who cites Clement himself. 150 Casey, The Excerpta ex Theodoto of Clement of Alexandria, 25–26. 149

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kat’ousian,” 19.1), that is to say that the “ultimate reality is capable of ‘rational’ distinction (perigraphēn), but not of ‘substantial’ distinction.”151 This would also appear to include man, who may become truly one with the Son and the Father (cf. John 17:20–23). In short, the Logos serves as a unifying and mediating link between the Divine and man. “This is entirely consistent with Clement’s tendency to cover as much ground as possible with his doctrine of the Logos, describing by it not only the constitution of the Godhead but the whole relationship of God and man.’’152 Thus, Clement regarded the individualities, God, Christ, and man, as images reflected from a glass darkly, and in the last analysis there was room in his philosophy for but one Mind, variously exhibited in man, in the incarnation, in the inspired utterances of the prophets, in the rational connection of things, and in the vision of God.153

Clement explicates this spiritual continuum between God, the Logos, and man by means of the following “angelology”: At the top is the Father, upon whose face the angels gaze; but not even they are permitted a direct vision of God; the “face” of God is the Son (Exc. 10–12). Next to him come seven angels, hoi prototoktistoi (the Protoctists) … (who) stand at the border154 of the Godhead (Exc. 10.3– 4). Below them are the archangels and angels having their own spheres of activity, and after them mankind.155

Thus, the angels who inspire the prophets (Exc. 5.2; 24.1) were influenced by the “Protoctists,” who in turn received their vision directly from the Logos, or the “Face of God.” In this fashion, the “’Light” is dispensed through a descending hierarchy of angelic beings to man, who is instructed and inspired to advance back up through the ascending ranks, until he finally joins the “Protoctists” in the contemplation of God’s “Face.”156 This

Ibid., 30. Ibid., 29. 153 Ibid., 30; punctuation and italics added. 154 See p. 136, above, and n. 23, p. 29, concerning Wisdom’s function as the “limit” and the “control” separating the worldly from the divine regions. 155 Casey, Excerpta ex Theodoto, 30. 156 As we shall see later on, when we discuss Kabbalism and the Great Mystery, this doctrine of Clement remarkably anticipates the ascent of the mystic through the descending “rungs” of the “Sephirotic Ladder.” 151 152

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results in an “approximation of the divine Mind” and a direct “vision of God” (Fragments, 57).157 This, according to Clement, is the “mystic meaning of the Tabernacle and its furniture” (Miscellanies, 5.6), in whose mystery the “True Gnostic” replaces the Levite, and who gains personal access to the Logos and his Light by means of the hidden “enigmas” and “symbols of Christ.” At the same time, the Lord and Logos has descended “by his sufferings” into the world of thought (kosmos noetos), represented by the “sacerdotal service concealed within the veil” (5.6). In this way, what is “known” conveys knowledge to the “knower,” whose senses have been sufficiently purified to apprehend it. In short, the Light from above is made available to those of like nature by means of the symbols in the Holy of Holies, including the Embracing Cherubim, whose very etymology signifies (in Clement’s mind) direct and complete cognition of the Divine: And the things recorded of the sacred Ark signify the properties of the world of thought, which is hidden and closed to many … And the name Cherubim meant “fulness of knowledge” (episteme polle) (5.6).

Thus (as in the Wisdom Mystery), “mind is drawn to Mind,” since “the essence of an intelligible being results in an uninterrupted process of admixture”: For assimilation to God, as far as we can, is preserving the mind in its relation to the same things. And this is the relation of mind as mind … Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light (4.22).

Clement calls this “the restoration of what is the truly perfect nobleness of relationship to the fulness of Christ, and that which perfectly depends on our perfection” (4.21). Thanks to this unobstructed assimilation of like natures, the “True Gnostic” becomes a “temple of God” (4.21), and is “renewed through the Covenant” (4.23). Now “recreated” and “harmonized,” he returns into that undivided state of “mind” and “tranquillity of soul” which is no longer distraught by conflicting desires and perturbations: Accordingly, that Pythagorean saying was mystically uttered respecting us, “that man ought to become one,” for the High Priest himself is one, God being one in the immutable state of the perpetual flow … And man, when deified purely into a passionless state, becomes a unit … And those who, according to the Gnostic life, draw God towards them, 157

Ibid., 30.

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Thus Clement unmistakeably takes us back into the provenance of the Philonic Mystery, with its goal of restoring the divine unitary state. The role played by the Temple in initiating this Mystery is also evident both from his use of the Embracing Cherubim as symbols of divine oneness (“the repose that dwells within the adoring spirits158 … [and] the harmony of the “two hemispheres”),159 as well as from his reference to the traditional “renewal of the Covenant.” His debt to Philo is further suggested by his drawing again upon the image of Rebecca as a symbol of God’s “glory” and “virgin incorruptibility”: That purity in body and soul which the Gnostic partakes of, the all-wise Moses indicated by employing repetition in describing the incorruptibility of body and soul in the person of Rebecca, thus: “Now the virgin was fair, and man had not known her” (Gen 24: 16). And Rebecca interpreted means “glory of God,” and the glory of God is immortality (4.25).

Rebecca, of course, was one of Philo’s favorite symbols for Wisdom, and the Embracing Cherubim depicted the soul’s “consorting” with her, according to his treatise, On the Cherubim (49–50). Another reference to the Temple is Clement’s application of the imagery of Hebrews 11 to the “True Gnostic.” Like a “pilgrim” passing through the veil into the Heavenly City and God’s Presence (Heb 10:19–20; 11:16; 12:22–24), the “True Gnostic” is “a stranger and sojourner on earth” looking for his celestial home (Miscellanies, 4. 26; Gen 23:4; Ps 39:12; Heb 11:13). Finally, though Clement rigorously avoids discussing the mystery of the Cherubim in any detail (“let it suffice that the mystic interpretation has advanced so far”), he allows us one fleeting glimpse of another possible meaning which might be attached to them: Marriage, then, as a sacred image, must be kept pure from those things which defile it (Miscellanies, 2.23).

But what does he mean by “marriage … as a sacred image”? We immediately think of the statement in the Tosefta which says that “He who does not marry thereby diminishes the image of God” (Yebamoth 8:4). Though Clement appears to be speaking about the practical moral issues 158 159

An obvious reference to their “loving” or “embracing” attitude. See Philo, On the Cherubim, 21–24.

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which are inevitably encountered in marriage (as Paul does in the “Haustafel” of Eph 5:22–33), he too is aware of some higher meaning which must be attached to the nuptial union, and which the reader is presumed to understand. Indeed, the whole next book of the Miscellanies (which follows immediately) deals with various “false” meanings attached to marriage by such groups as the Valentinians, which proves that he is cognizant of the kind of mystical import which others have been applying to the nuptial relationship. One of these “false” interpretations of marriage was the growing practice of celibacy, which many were justifying by quoting Matthew 19:12 (“and some have made eunuchs of themselves for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake”). In reply, he unhesitatingly explains that this reference to “eunuchs” has been taken out of context, for Jesus meant only that one shall not remarry after losing a wife (Miscellanies, 3:6). Quentin Quesnel thus suggests that the original meaning of the Matthean passage was that “the word about the eternal fidelity of marriage, as enumerated in verse 9 and as given as background in vv. 3–8 is mysterious, beyond human power to understand, intelligible only to those to whom God will reveal it; only to those ‘to whom it is given’.”160 This true meaning, Quesnell argues, was given by Paul in Ephesians 5:22–31, where marriage is said to be a “Great Mystery” uniting both man and wife and Christ and the Church, according to the same heavenly paradigm.161 Within this larger context, the saying about the “eunuch” does not enjoin celibacy at all, but indicates that man must remain true to a wife forever, even after she has been temporarily removed from him.162 If Quesnell’s analysis is correct (and the context of the Matthean pericope supports him), Clement may also have had some similar regard for marriage as a “sacred symbol” of future unions that will embody 160 Quesnell, “‘Made Themselves Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven,’ (Mt. 19,12),” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 30 (1968): 346. 161 Ibid., 353–57. 162 “Such a man must in marriage take the risk of staking all he has and is on one person, becoming one flesh with her. And this means that in his fidelity and determination to continue to express that fidelity forever, he also takes the risk that if he and his wife have to separate, he will be left with the rest of his life pledged with loyalty to the one who is not even there. To continue this loyal and perfect love, even when the love is not returned, is effectively to make oneself a eunuch, a person incapable of marriage for the rest of one’s life. The world will not understand this. And it cannot make any sense except as a step toward inaugurating a world where all men will love perfectly and fully” (ibid., 358).

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full and perfect love. Unfortunately, Clement personally tended to show an almost encratic distaste for the physical side of marriage: A man who marries for the sake of begetting children must practice continence so that it is not desire he feels for his wife, whom he ought to love, and that he may beget children with a chaste and controlled will (Miscellanies, 3.7).

Thus one ought, he says, even in marriage, to live as if “a stranger and pilgrim” on earth (3.14), “seeking above all to unite in spirit and soul with the Logos,” so that “there is neither male nor female among you” (Gal 3:28). “For the soul leaves this physical form in which male and female are distinguished, and being neither the one nor the other changes into Unity” (3.13). This, of course (as Philo had also declared), was the central object of the traditional Wisdom Mystery, where God “consorts with the soul” in order to turn it back to a “virgin” again. In any event, it would appear that Clement’s “uncompromising Platonism’’163 tended to see the ultimate significance of marriage not in the physical union (though he gives it grudging recognition) but in the union of the couple with God through their sacramental “marriage” to the LogosWisdom: In the Christian Platonism of Clement, man shared in the divine life by his possession of a mind akin to the divine Logos. The way to this union was through intellectual and moral discipline, confirmed and strengthened by the sacraments.164

As in the Philonic Mystery, this “intellectual” union was achieved through thea theou, or seeing God: Just as the different orders of angels interact, so man is influenced by the Logos and his advance involves both a refinement of nature and an increase of knowledge and perception. The result is an approximation of the divine mind, an understanding of the universe, and a share in the vision of God.165

As Clement suggested in the section of the Miscellanies dealing with the “mystic meaning of the Tabernacle” (5.6), the display of the Cherubim was one of the “secrets” which confirmed and strengthened this vision of God, and helped to “approximate” the mind of God (Fragments, 57). As a result, Casey, Excerpta ex Theodoto, 10. Ibid., 37–38. 165 Ibid., 30. 163 164

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While all “gaze on” the supreme Administrator of the universe … he pilots all in safety according to the Father’s will … till in the end the great High Priest is reached … As, then, the remotest particle of iron is drawn by the influence of the magnet … so also through the attraction of the Holy Spirit the virtuous are adapted to the highest mansion, and others in their order even to the last mansion, but they that are wicked from weakness … neither keep hold themselves nor are held by another, but collapse and fall to the ground.166

Thus Clement gave a cosmic meaning to the “beholding of God” in the Tabernacle, and applied it to the soul’s becoming one with him through the Logos, as it penetrated the “second veil of the universe,” i.e., the intelligible world (kosmos noētos), or the veil of the Holy of Holies (Heb 9:3): Now the soul, stripped by the power of him who has knowledge, as if it had become a body of the Power (sōma tēs dynameos),167 passes into the spiritual realm and becomes now truly rational and high-priestly, so that it might now be animated, so to speak, directly by the Logos … But where is then a right judgment of Scripture and doctrine for that soul which has become pure, and where it is granted to see God “face to face”? Thus, having transcended the angelic teaching168 and the Name taught in Scripture, it comes to knowledge and comprehension of the facts. It is no longer a bride but has become a Logos and rests with the bridegroom, together with the First-Called and First-Created169 … The work of power is that man becomes the bearer of God, being controlled directly by the Lord and becoming, as it were, his Body (Excerpta ex Theodoto, 27.36).

Clement thus places the meaning of the Sacred Marriage or “sacerdotal service concealed within the veil” higher than the “angelic teaching” contained in the Old Testament, since it leads to becoming one with the Logos. This, of course, was scarcely different than Philo’s mystery of God’s “concourse with the soul” through Wisdom, which also strove to reunite the soul with the Wisdom-Logos in its pristine, unitary state. It further agrees with the traditional Wisdom Mystery, in which the Wisdom-Logos “enters into holy From the Miscellanies; quoted from Casey, Excerpta ex Theodoto, 31. “From one point of view the human soul can be regarded as the body of the divine Power, the Logos, but from another the soul is vitalized through contact with the Logos and becomes high-priestly through its association with him, the great high priest” (Casey, Excerpta ex Theodoto, 125). 168 Cf. Galatians 3:19–20. 169 The Protoctists. 166 167

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souls and makes them friends of God and prophets” (Wis 7:27). Thus we see that Clement’s entire conception of the “True Gnosis” was grounded in the fundamentals of the Great Mystery, though he refuses, in the end, to give us additional details concerning its more intimate aspects: Now I pass over other things in silence (Miscellanies, 7.3).

THE CHERUBIM AS “SERAPHIM” According to Clement’s description of the Cherubim, the two “golden figures” were said to have had “each six wings” (Miscellanies, 5.6). This is very curious, for Ezekiel’s “living creatures” (hayyoth) had “each four wings” (Ezek 1:6), while the Cherubim in Solomon’s Temple had only two (1 Kgs 6:24, 27). It therefore appears that Clement was actually thinking of the passage in Isaiah which describes the Seraphim above God’s Throne (“Above it stood the Seraphim, each one had six wings … And one cried to the other, and said, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts,” 6:2–3). This would be an easy mistake to make, however, since the Cherubim and Seraphim were both familiar orders of angels (Cherubim, Seraphim and Ophanim, 1 Enoch 61:10), and might have been considered as a single category by second and third century Christians, who were already somewhat removed from the angelology of apocalyptic Judaism. In any case, Clement’s pupil, Origen (A.D. 185–242), seems to have made the same mistake, for in his De principiis, he declares that “these beings which, according to the prophets, are called either ‘living things’ or ‘lives’ (hayyoth) are the two Seraphim of Isaiah, “which are described as having each six wings, and calling to one another, and saying, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts” (1.3.4). Moreover, in apparent agreement with contemporary Elkasaite and Valentinian syzygy-theory, he indicates that My Hebrew master used to say that these two Seraphim … were to be understood of the only-begotten Son of God and the Holy Spirit (ibid).

Thus, he takes the two “Seraphim” to be members of the Trinity (1.3.5), which is a significant advance over the angelic “Powers” who merely flank the invisible Logos in the writings of Philo (Questions on Exodus, 2.68). This interpretation (which also figured in the Arian controversy at Nicaea) was nevertheless found by Jerome to be “detestable” and in conflict with Trinitarian ideas of the Godhead, since the Seraphim were traditionally known as created beings (Commentary on Isaiah, 3.6.2). That Origen’s symbolism, however, did in fact pertain to the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies, and not to the Seraphim, is further indicated by the fact that he applies the Septuagint version of Habakkuk 3:2 to them:

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Thou shalt be known between the two living creatures.

In this form, the passage becomes a perfect parallel to Exodus 25:22, which says that I will commune with thee from … between the two Cherubim,

Thus God would be found between the two “living creatures”—the hayyoth or Cherubim—in the Holy of Holies. Yet even Philo once referred to the “Seraphim” as “Powers” (dynameis; That God Is Unchangeable, 9), a term ordinarily applied to the Cherubim, whose full name he gives as the “Royal and Creative Powers” (On the Life of Moses, 2.99; Questions on Exodus, 2.62).170 Origen seems to confirm this identification when he says in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans171 that the Cherubim “also” represent the Son and the Holy Spirit, just as the Seraphim do in De principiis. Hence we must conclude that these two classes of angels had become equivalent in the minds of second- and third-century Christians, such as Clement and Origen. In fact, Irenaeus (in the Demonstratio) used both titles, “Cherubim” and “Seraphim,” together to represent the Word and Wisdom, respectively.172 Origen, by making the created “Powers” represent members of the Trinity, shows that he had one foot in the old Wisdom tradition and another in the evolving Trinitarianism of the Catholic Church. Thus, though he did not hesitate to affirm that the Son was eternally generated from the Father, and in this respect equal to him in divine nature (ousia),173 he nevertheless claimed that the Son had a substantial reality (hypokeimenon) of his own,174 consisting of the identical incorporeal substance (“thought, will, hypostatic Word”),175 but with an “individual” (perigraphē)176 existence as a “Power”:

See Daniélou, TJC, 137. Quoted in ibid., 136. 172 Quoted in ibid., 138. 173 Jean Daniélou, Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture (London, 1973), 376. This is the second volume of his three-volume “History of Early Christianity Before the Council of Nicaea,” of which the previously quoted Theology of Jewish Christianity is the first. 174 Daniélou, Gospel Message, 377. 175 Ibid., 378–79. 176 I.e., “self-contained” and “circumscribed” within himself. Compare Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, 1940), 1370. 170 171

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Thus we have an incipient kind of “Trinitarianism,” which sought to confirm the full and eternal co-existence of Father and Son, while acknowledging (in the old Wisdom language) the “self-contained” and personal nature of the “Power” (dynamis), who was still referred to as “Word” or “Wisdom”: We must say that the Power of God is delimited (peperasmenē ), and acknowledge a perigraphe in him. If the divine Power were infinite, it could not be known, for the infinite is by nature incomprehensible (De principiis, 2.9.1).179

Origen therefore maintains a distinction between God the Father, who is “God in himself” (autotheos), and the “First-born of all creation,” who is the Son (Col 1:15), and who cannot be called ho theos, but only theos (“not the God but only god”):180 The Word was with God (ho logos en pros TON THEON) and the Word was god (kai THEOS en ho logos) (John 1:1).

Origen in fact adduces Ps 50:1 to show that there were many who could be called “gods”: (Christ) is more honorable than the rest of the gods beside him (of whom God is the God, as it is said: “The Lord, the God of gods, has spoken, and called the world”) … Thus God is true God, and the gods are modeled after him as images (eikones) of the prototype. But again, of these many images the Archetypal Image is the Logos who is with God (Commentary on John, 2.2. our emphasis).181

Because of his mediating position with God, the Logos communicates “divinization” to all other theoi,182 whom Origen refers to as logikoi (“rational This time used as a noun, i.e., “an individuality.” Quoted in ibid., 380. 179 Quoted in ibid., 381. 180 Ibid., 382. 181 Quoted in ibid. 182 Ibid., 382–3. 177 178

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beings”), because of their sharing of the Logos-nature. Origen, in those works which affirm the preexistence of man (De principiis, 1.8.3; Homily on Genesis, 15.5; Against Celsus, 5.29),183 states that human souls are also logikoi (De principiis, 2.9.6) and therefore capable of being restored to a divine condition at the final “consummation” (apokatastasis), even of becoming gods in their own right. Yet since the Logos is an intermediary between the Primal Unity and these multiple beings, he is necessarily “both One and Many,”184 a fact which Clement had also proposed a generation or so earlier: The Son is not absolutely one as a monad, nor is he many as a number of parts, but he is one as being all things … That is why he is called the Alpha and Omega (Miscellanies, 4.25).

This of course was a restatement of the principle already found in Philo that God, “though indeed One, has two Powers,” whose symbols were the Cherubim (On the Cherubim, 27). This kind of “multiplicity within unity” also accords with the pluralistic creative role of Wisdom in the Wisdom books: This kind of unity belongs to the Son in his role as Wisdom: “Everything has been created in accordance with Wisdom and with the archetypes of the system of the thoughts that are in him (Commentary on John, 1.12.)

We must also assume that Origen was acquainted with Philo’s statements concerning the male-female nature of the Cherubim and the two “Powers,” though he makes no specific mention of it. Daniélou, however, feels justified in relating both authors’ concepts of the two “Powers” to the malefemale pair, “Christ-and-the-Holy-Spirit,” which we encounter in an Elkasaite myth of the giant angels.185 He even sees a generic relationship between the “Powers” and the Valentinian syzygy of “Christ-and-the-HolySpirit,” which was likewise male and female, and whose “common fruit” descended into the earthly Jesus (Hippolytus, Refutations, 6.31).186 In all of these examples, the Holy Spirit is feminine, a doctrine which, as Daniélou says, “has a Semitic stamp. The Spirit is regarded as a feminine being, because ruah in Hebrew is feminine, a feature which recurs in the Gospel of the Hebrews, also a Jewish Christian work … But these different schemes” Ibid., 418. See also his 415–25 for a general discussion. Ibid., 385. 185 Recorded by Hippolytus, in his Elenchos, 9.13. 186 In Daniélou, TJC, 140. 183 184

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(involving the “two Seraphim and the two Cherubim”) “are all only variations on the same basic theme, of which the Elkasaite teaching is probably the oldest surviving evidence.”187 “Oldest,” that is, if we ignore the malefemale Cherubim in the Temple, which (as Philo informs us) were the original model in the Second Temple of God’s dual “Powers,” and doubtless the source of all representations of divine syzygies in the Church. Origen goes on to suggest that the same Logos-Wisdom that descended into the earthly Jesus can also dwell in human logikoi, so that they too can become logoi (“Logoses”), or “seeds of Christ’s body.” Christ in fact “has the entire human race, indeed, the whole of Creation, as his body, and each of us is a member thereof, each according to his title.”188 Thus, Origen arrives at something analogous to Schlier’s picture of the Ephesian Sacred Marriage, where the heavenly syzygy, “Christ (or Holy Spirit) plus Preexistent Church,” also dwells in each individual,189 except that the male-female roles have been reversed. As in the Wisdom Mystery, deification results. Origen can therefore refer to the individual logoi as “Christs” (christoi), formed after God’s own Image (Commentary on John, 6.3). Origen also speaks of a Sacred Marriage between Christ and the Church (Commentary on Matthew, 14.17). The Bridegroom is described by him as “Light,” an attribution already popularized by the Wisdom literature: According to John, “God is Light.” The only-begotten Son, therefore, is the glory of this Light, proceeding inseparably from God himself, as brightness does from light, and illuminating the whole of creation (De Principiis, 1.2.7).

Since the principle Light of the universe is the sun, it was only natural for Origen to characterize Christ in this manner, i.e., as the One from whom all other heavenly bodies derive their light. Thus, The Church, the Bride, (presents) an analogy to the moon and stars; and the disciples have a light, which is their own or borrowed from the true Sun (Commentary on John, 1.24).

187 Ibid., 140. We must bear in mind here that Daniélou uses the term “Jewish Christianity” to designate the original Semitic character of the first Christianity, which is quite distinct from the usual meaning of “Jewish Christian” (as employed, for example, by H. J. Schoeps) to designate Ebionism. 188 Quoted in Wagner, Die Gnosis, 168–69. 189 See pp. 180–81, above.

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Those who “are irradiated by Christ and receive his beams” are made “disciples of the first-born Light.” By becoming one with him, they are delivered from bondage to corruption, and are made “lights of the world” (1.24), with a share in the “true Life”: It is clear that the principle of that Life which is pure and unmixed with any other element, resides in Him who is the first-born of all Creation, taking from which those who have a share in Christ live the life which is the true Life (1.27).

Those who possess the “true Life” are permanently illuminated by the spiritual “Light of the world, which is the genuine Light, as distinguished from the light of sense” (1.27, 24). This “true Light” illuminates “not bodies, but the incorporeal intellect, to the end that each of us, enlightened as by the sun, may be able to distinguish the rest of the things of the mind” (1.24). The result (as in Philo’s version of the Wisdom Mystery) is that “mind apprehends mind,” for a “fragment” or “ray” of Wisdom lives in every soul, or (as Origen puts is), “the soul of the sun” exists in every body (1.17).190 Thus, the disciple is drawn back through Christ to the spiritual realms of Light from whence he came,191 beholding in vision what only the True Light, the purified intellect, can perceive. As in Clement’s “True Gnosis,” Origen sees that this lofty spiritual vision was symbolized by the furnishings of the Holy of Holies: There were two Cherubim in the Holy of Holies (d ebir), a word which the translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek failed to render satisfactorily. Some, failing to do justice to the language, render it “the Temple”; but it is more sacred than the Temple. Now, everything about the house was made golden, for a sign that the mind which is made perfect estimates accurately the things perceived by the intellect … In this Temple are also windows, placed obliquely and out of sight, so that the illumination of the divine light may enter for salvation, and—why should I go into particulars?—that the body of Christ, the Church, may be found having the plan of the spiritual house and Temple of God. As I said before, we require that Wisdom which is hidden in a mystery, and which he alone can apprehend who is able to say, “But we have the mind of Christ” … To enter into these details is not in accordance with our present subject. What has been said may suffice to let us understand how “He spake about the Temple of his Body” (Commentary on John, 10.25). 190 191

Quoted in Wagner, Die Gnosis, 165. Ibid., 166.

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In the following section, Origen makes it clear that this “spiritual house,” in which the “perfected mind” receives the “divine Light,” is the same House prophesied by Isaiah for the Last Days (Isa 60): I will glorify the house of my glory … Thy gates shall open continually; they shall not be shut day or night … The glory of Lebanon shall come into them with cypress, and pine, and cedar, along with those who will glorify my Holy Place … Thy walls shall be called salvation, and thy gates sculpture. And the sun shall no longer be to them for light by day, nor shall the rising of the moon give light to them by night, but Christ shall be to thee an everlasting light and thy God thy glory (Commentary on John, 10.26).

The Isaianic eschatological Temple has in fact become the Body of Christ, i.e., the united flesh of Christ and the Church, and the veil of the Holy of Holies is where the embrace of fusion and entry takes place.192 The laconic reference to the Cherubim and the Holy of Holies—which are “more sacred than the Temple” (10.25)—suggests that the divine illumination (symbolized by the ubiquitous gold) occurs as a kind of Sacred Marriage between the Bridegroom of Light and the Beholder, which the Greeks called thea theou, or pure intellectual perception of the Divine. In this radically spiritualized version of the old Temple Mystery, salvation is still equivalent to union with the Light, as perceived by those who have the “mind of Christ,” and which alone reveals the true meaning of the cult-symbols. Thus, Origen promises, “when that which is perfect is come, then the faith which is in part will be done away with. As with knowledge, so with faith, that which is through sight is much better, if I may say so, than that which is through a glass and in an enigma” (Commentary on John, 10.27).193 This unobstructed vision, enjoyed by both Clement’s “True Gnostic” and Origen’s “purified intellect,” has all the elements of what the medieval Church would call the “Beatific Vision.” In mystical Christianity this was also generally accompanied by some form of henosis (fusion) or theosis (deification), technical terms which entered the literature of the Middle Ages 192 Compare also the Excerpta ex Theodoto (26.1–2), where Christ is called the “Door” to the spiritual Temple. 193 Is this reference to seeing “through a glass” related to Clement’s disparaging remark about “embracing the divine vision in mirrors or by means of mirrors” (Miscellanies, 7.3)? If so, it would seem to indicate that both men had in mind a spiritual mystery which had its physical counterpart in related practices amongst their contemporaries.

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through the writings of Dionysius Areopagiticus in the late fifth century.194 But as we have repeatedly seen, the roots of this unio mystica were already present in the Wisdom Mystery, as understood by writers like Philo and the author of the Gospel of Thomas, describing their own experiences in the Temple. Just as the latter taught the initiate to say we are “sons of the Light and of the Living Father” (Log. 50), Origen taught that the truly enlightened soul would take its place among the angelic ranks as bearers of Christ’s Light: In place of the angels who “fell,” you will rise up, and the mystery which we revealed to them will be revealed to you … You have become “light of the world.” You will take the place of that other one and become “Lucifer” (Light Bearer). One of the stars who fell from heaven was Lucifer. You, however, if you are of “Abraham’s Seed” will be counted amongst the stars of heaven (Ezekiel Homily, 13.2).

This was always the destiny of those who belonged to Christ, and were therefore inheritors of the Abrahamic covenant (Gal 3:29). In this way, the promise to Abraham that his posterity would be “numberless as the stars” was turned into actual deification as stars, as stated two or three centuries earlier in 1 Enoch: Ye shall shine as the lights of heaven, ye shall shine and ye shall be seen, and the portals of heaven shall be opened to you … Ye shall become companions of the host of heaven (104:2, 6).195

But even more precisely, Origen says in his Commentary on John, For whom one is no longer a liar, but is in fact in the Truth, he is no longer a man; but to him and to those like him God speaks: “I have said you are gods and all sons of the Highest,” and to these the words will not apply: “You will, however, die like men.”196

See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York, n.d [1948]), 96; also Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., article, “Mysticism” (esp. the section on “Dionysius Areopagiticus”). 195 See also 4 Ezra: “Their face is destined to shine as the sun … and they are destined to be made like the light of the stars” (7:97). But this also depends upon their prior divine endowment; thus 1 Enoch 43:2–4 indicates that the stars are the prototypes of the “Holy Ones who dwell in earth” (translated by E. Isaac, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. Charlesworth, 33). 196 Quoted in Wagner, Die Gnosis, 174. Origen also dares to say that “when we are perfect in becoming ‘sons of God,’ that partial becoming ‘sons of God’ will be 194

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SECRECY IN THE “TRUE GNOSIS” OF CLEMENT AND ORIGEN It is obvious from the writings of both Clement and Origen that the traditional symbolism of the Cherubim and passage through the veil had continued to exert an enormous influence on early Christians. At the same time, it is fairly clear that both writers attached an increasingly “spiritual” meaning to the subject of the Temple. According to Jean Daniélou, Clement now interprets the “ascent of the Gnostic soul in terms of exegesis of the High Priest’s entry into the Holy of Holies … The High Priest is the Gnostic... The Gnostic in his turn puts off (his) body in the course of his ascent, when ‘he enters within the second veil, that is, through the intelligible world…’ The ‘naked soul’ can then penetrate into the spiritual world, and be moved directly by the Logos.”197 Origen likewise makes the mystery of the Cherubim and the Holy of Holies an allegory of the Beatific Vision as achieved by the “purified intellect.” The usual conclusion drawn from all of this is that the original Wisdom Mystery had simply become a description of the soul’s progress through the worlds—a poetic metaphor—and that nothing remains of the original cultic practices or liturgical observances. It is indeed true that the Jerusalem Temple had disappeared from history in A.D. 70 and that whatever recollection people had of its rites had to be transformed into new cultic dress, as we saw in the case of baptism. This, even while the Temple was still standing, had become for Gentile converts a substitute means of “marriage to Christ” (Gal 3:28), as well as a “cleansing bath” given prior to the Wedding (Eph 5:26–27). And when baptismal union became a secret rite during the third and fourth centuries, Syriac catechumens were given special lamps inscribed in Greek (written from right to left): “Light of Christ, which shines for all,”198 reminding us of the Parable of the Ten Virgins, and the lamps which they brought to the Wedding Feast (Matt 25). Such lamps undoubtedly symbolized the light that was engendered in the candidate through his union with the Divine,199 making him a “son of the Light,” one of the code-names given to those proficient in the Christian Mysteries.

done away with,” i.e., we shall in actual fact become fully “sons of God,” deified beings (in ibid., 174). 197 Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, 452. 198 Eugenia Nitowski, lecture at the Middle East Center, University of Utah, March 4, 1981. 199 Cf. Exodus 34:29, 35; Revelation 21:23.

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Yet we must not forget that even while the Second Temple was still standing, its rites had already been given a “higher meaning” by Philo, who perceived a “Melchizedec” or “Mosaic” Mystery behind the ordinary “Aaronic” Mystery. Thus, the writing of highly allegorical exegeses—such as those proposed by Clement and Origen—does not automatically mean that there was no real mystery behind them, as there most certainly was in the case of the Gnostics and their “Bridal Chamber” rites. One also thinks of contemporary Jewish Merkabah-mystics who still practiced ritual ascents to the Throne of God, even after the Temple was gone.200 Origen in fact is known of have been aware of esoteric practices in Judaism during his own lifetime, practices which dealt with this very subject.201 Furthermore, it was about the same time that the Church began to interpret Song of Songs in the same manner as the Jews.202 Thus, many literal methods of enacting the Sacred Marriage between Wisdom and the Church may still have existed during both Clement’s and Origen’s careers, though we have admittedly no proof that these men were personally involved with any of them. Still, it is significant that both Clement and Origen maintained a deliberate cloak of secrecy when speaking of the symbols in the former Temple, as if they were still venerated in the same way. Thus we might recall the following statements from our foregoing discussion: And the gnosis itself is that which has descended by transmission to a few, having been imparted unwritten by the Apostles (Clement, Miscellanies, 6.7). Cast your eyes around and see that none of the uninitiated listen (6.6). The sacerdotal service is concealed within the veil (6.6). Let it suffice that the mystic interpretation has advanced so far (6.6). My mystery is to me and to the sons of my house (5.10). This is the Teacher who trains the Gnostic by mysteries … Thence is his providence in private (7.2). Now, I pass over other things in silence (7.3). Why should I go into particulars (Origen, Commentary on John, 10.25).

200

dition. 201 202

See Scholem’s MTJM, 40–79, for a historical overview of the Merkabah traScholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition, 36–42. Ibid., 39.

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Daniélou in fact devotes an entire section in his Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture to “The Secret Doctrines” of Origen. “Hard work and application,” he tells us, “are necessary in order to discover the ‘secret things’ (aporrēta).”203 Similarly, there is an extensive “concealment of secret mysteries (apporēta mystēria)” in even the New Testament, according to Origen. Such secrets, which were transmitted by Christ to the Apostles, can only be passed to the “sons of Light” (Commentary on John, 2.28),204 i.e., to those adequately schooled in the mysteries. Often, Origen interrupts some discourse or other to observe that “there are many mysterious (mustka, ‘concealed’) things which one might say on the subject, but to which the saying applies: ‘It is good to conceal the treasures of a King’.”205 The “Exodus” out of “Egypt” (which Philo saw as the heart of the Mosaic Temple pilgrimage), and the soul’s journey through the veil (which the Church saw as the culmination of the Temple-experience), were especially singled out as secret doctrines by Origen, symbolizing for him the initiate’s release from material bondage and passage into Heaven: Who can be found sufficiently advanced, sufficiently initiated into the divine secrets, to enumerate the stopping-places on this journey, this ascent of the soul? (Homily on Numbers, 27.4).206

Such teaching, Daniélou concluded, was “esoteric in character, not to be communicated to all Christians; it is contained in Scripture, but it constituted a special dimension of the sacred writings, accessible only to him who has the key.”207 But where, we might ask, did those advanced enough to receive these esoteric doctrines learn of them? And in what way? Was there any “cultic” performance connected with them, as it definitely was at the time of Philo? Unfortunately, we cannot answer these questions to our complete satisfaction, though it is remarkable that both Clement and Origen kept referring back to the Embracing Cherubim in the Holy of Holies (b. Yoma 54a) as symbols of their “True Gnosis.” This “True Gnosis,” however, was now Ibid., 465. Ibid., 466. 205 Ibid., 467. The quote is from Tobit 12:7. 206 Ibid., 468. 207 Ibid., 469. 203 204

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unfolding for most believers in the “spiritual Temple” of Christ’s Body, i.e., within the united flesh of Christ and the Church. There it was that the “pure in heart saw God” in a “transcendentally clear and absolutely pure insatiable vision,” and were filled with Divine Light, and were thereby “assimilated to God,” i.e., deified (Clement of Alexandria).208

EBIONITE SYZYGIES AND THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CHERUBIM Just how pervasive and persistent this male-female symbolism was, even in the Primitive Church, may be further seen from the fact that the very conservative Ebionites—those Christian “Judaizers” who remained in Jerusalem until the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70209—had a similar view of God’s bisexual Powers (syzygies), which agrees with both Philo’s “maleSee p. 216, above. In the Gentile wing of the Church, inspiration from the Holy Ghost was necessarily left to charismatic means; “as the original Hellenists and Paul after them began to ‘witness,’ their witness found acceptance, and the fact of the matter was that communities of believers came to exist without benefit of the Twelve … To account for this fact, an adjustment in the concept of apostleship was necessary.” Lucetta Mowry, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Early Church (Notre Dame, 1962), 70. This also included a religion which was deprived of access to the Jewish Temple (pp. 132–33, above). Peter, on the other hand, though he accepted Paul’s universalism, broke with Paul when James pressed his special claims for respecting their ancestral Jewish faith (F.V. Filson, “Peter,” in IDB, 3:756). His loyalty to both Jews and Gentiles who were “called by the Lord” nevertheless enabled him to bridge whatever differences existed between Aramaic and Greek-speaking Christians in the Jerusalem Community, though James finally succeeded him as leader there (Acts 21:18; Gal 2:12). The Jewish-Christian Clementine writings are partly based on traditions handed down by James, the first “bishop” of Jerusalem, and the defender of the conservative Jewish values already in retreat before the spreading influence of Paul’s Gentile Church. The James-group ultimately fled to Pella during the Jewish revolt, where it eventually disappeared from view. The influence of this socalled “Judaizing” wing of the Church, however, continued for many years. We should not, therefore, dismiss it out of hand as irrelevant or innately “foreign” to the values of authentic Christianity. In fact, as late as the second Fall of Jerusalem in 135, most Christians still considered themselves to be simply “non-conformist Jews.” Even at the end of the second century there survived an active JewishChristianity which claimed that Matthew’s Gospel was the only true Gospel, and which was bitterly critical of Paul’'s “Gentile Christianity.” The writings of Hegesippus, Theophilus, and Irenaeus were still permeated by the continuing attitudes of the synagogue. 208 209

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female Cherubim” and the later Gnostic doctrine of the divine “malefemale Aeons” through whom God carries out the work of Creation. These we shall discuss more fully in the next section of our study. H. J. Schoeps, during the Messina Colloquium on Gnostic Origins, quoted from an early theory of A. Hilgenfeld (formulated already in the middle of the last century), which suggested that the aim of this Ebionite syzygy-doctrine was to reconcile the “Gnostic” view of God’s male-female nature with the “orthodox” monism of Judaism and Christianity: The truth of gnostic dualism is supposed to be subsumed in JewishChristian monism … The contradiction in the physical-ethical world, like the contrast between right and wrong in human life, which gnosticism associates with two divine, primordial principles, is traced back by the syzygy-theory to God himself, who in spite of his unity, brought forth all created things in opposites, and ordained dualism, and caused the world-law of syzygies to unfold as historical personalities.210

Schoeps then demonstrated how this syzygy-doctrine dominated the Kerygmata Petrou and the pseudo-Clementine writings—those important JewishChristian productions which date from the second and early third centuries. Wisdom, whose name in the Clementina is the “True Prophet,” is thus described as a heavenly entity who dwells in holy men, enabling them to prophesy, and who, together with his feminine counterpart, “Female Prophecy,” forms a male-female syzygy: But a companion was created along with him, a female nature, much differing from him as quality from substance, as the moon from the sun, as fire from light. She, as the Female ruling the present world as his like,211 was entrusted to be the first prophetess … But the other, as the Son of Man, prophesies better things to the world to come as a male (Clementine Homilies, 3.22).

As the “ruling Female” presiding over the present world, “Female Prophecy” appears to be related to the fallen “Wisdom” of Valentinian myth. In fact, she performs the same task of providing bodies for the “seed” of the Male which Sophia’s son, the Jewish Demiurge, does in the teachings of the Valentinians: 210 “Judenchristentum und Gnosis,” in Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, ed. Ugo Bianchi (Leiden, 1967), 533–34. 211 Compare the Valentinian-Gnostic Gospel of Philip 52:21–24: “When we were Hebrews, we were orphans, and had only our mother, but when we became Christians, we had both father and mother.”

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The Male is wholly truth, the Female is wholly falsehood … For the Female, surrounding the white seed of the Male with her own blood, as with red fire, sustains her own weakness with the extraneous supports of bones, and, pleased with the temporary flower of the flesh, and sporting the strength of her judgment with short pleasures, leads the greater part into fornication, and thus deprives them of the coming excellent Bridegroom (Homilies, 3.27).

It is the “coming excellent Bridegroom,” however, who will restore “Female Prophecy” to her unitary state, by filling her with the same “Holy Spirit” which he himself embodies (Clementine Recognitions, 1.45),212 and which (according to the Clementina generally) is the male “Wisdom,” or the “Chrism” derived from the Tree of Life (1.46). Thus Schoeps proposes to explain how the traditional Wisdom-based concept of “making the female male” through “marital” union (cf. Gospel of Thomas, Log. 114) made its way into the Homilies and Recognitions, with their “in no way Gnostic disdain of the ‘female’ sexual principle,”213 or the spiritually unattached genders presently found in nature. This Ebionite syzygy-doctrine first appeared in the Kerygmata Petrou (ca. A.D. 200),214 which explains that God, though himself a Unity, allowed all manifested things to arise in opposites, subject to a biological dualism.215 Thus was the “True Prophet” created with his female companion. She it was who proclaimed her prophecies to “those born of woman,” i.e., to those of the world.216 The Apostle Paul was said to have been her mouthpiece; according to the Homilies, he taught the existence of separate gods, in opposition to “true” monotheism.217 “Female Prophecy” also taught the

212 Compare the chart on pp. 163–64, above, where the preexistent Christ is the Holy Spirit, as opposed to the “female” earthly Church. 213 In Bianchi, “Judenchristentum,” 528–29. Italics added to stress the fact that this idea has a history of its own, apart from Gnosticism. 214 However, this is a different Kerygmata Petrou than the one mentioned by Clement in the Miscellanies, 6.5.54. 215 Schoeps, in Bianchi, , “Judenchristentum,” 532–53. 216 Kerygmata Petrou, 3.22 (in Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 2:117). 217 Kerygmata Petrou, 1.1 (in NTAp, 2:111). See also Clementine Homilies, 8.16. In the Clementina, Peter’s enemy is Simon the Magician (Acts 8), who appears throughout to have been a thinly disguised portrayal of Paul (see Jean Daniélou, TJC, 63).

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“false” doctrine (presumably shared by Paul) that “she herself will be deified,” since there are “many gods” (cf. 1 Cor 8:5).218 Although we possess the Kerygmata Petrou in only fragmentary form, and find no scriptural refutation there of “Paul’s dualistic theology,” the closely related Homilies contain a clear explanation of how this apparent dualism arose. God’s Wisdom, it says, though seemingly separate from himself, was that which he rejoiced with as with his own Spirit. It is united as soul to God, but is extended by Him, as his hand, fashioning the universe. On this account also, one man was male, and from him also went forth the female. And being a unity, generically, it is yet a duality, for by expansion and contraction the unity is thought to be a duality (Homilies, 16.12).219

Karl Schubart, also speaking at the Messina Colloquium, suggested that Pharisaic Judaism may have known an analogous syzygy-theory, which it likewise opposed to the dualistic mythology of Gnosticism and which later emerged very clearly in the Sepher Yetzirah (third to sixth centuries):220 The Holy One, praised be He, created a counterpart to everything which He made … And thus such counter-pairs are normal.221

This also helps to explain how the Church’s early Hexaemeron speculation222 was able to imagine such a close relationship between the human syzygy, “Adam-and-Eve,” and the heavenly syzygy, “Christ-and-the-Church,” for according to Jewish-Christian belief the same “True-Prophet” dwelled in both the Primal Adam and in Jesus, and it consisted of the same archetypal male-female syzygy. Though the “True Prophet changed its forms and names from the beginning of the world” (Clementine Homilies, 3.20), it bore the perfect “image of God” when it entered Jesus. Yet both Adam and Jesus, “who is called ‘Christ’ by a certain excellent rite of religion” (i.e., anointing), “were filled with the identical ‘spiritual oil’ from the Tree of Life,” namely

Kerygmata Petrou, 3.23 (in NTAp, 2:117). In Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, 8:315. 220 According to Scholem, Kabbalah, 27. 221 In Bianchi, “Judenchristentum,” 536–37. Schubart believes that the Mishna may refer to this doctrine in the famous passage forbidding certain esoteric speculations in public. (Hagigah 2:1). 222 See p. 146 ff, above. 218 219

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Wisdom, or the Holy Spirit (1.45–46),223 and it “breathed of the divinity of Him who made him” (8.20). The idea that Jesus was an incarnation of the “True Prophet” or “Wisdom” led to the “adoptionist” Christology of the Ebionites, who claimed that the “power” by which Jesus was anointed at the time of his baptism was a form of the Wisdom/Holy Ghost. Though it had partially dwelt in other great heroes of Israel—such as Adam and the patriarchs—making them “friends of God and prophets” (Wis 7:27), it had come in its complete syzygetic form when it entered Jesus (Clementine Homilies, 3:20). Thus even this Jewish “adoptionist” tradition presupposes that a truly Divine Presence dwelt in Jesus, much like the “name” which entered Yahweh’s “Angel” (Exod 22:21), or the “divine glory” and “divine fulness” of John and Paul, both of which could enter and deify men. In fact, if other men would equally fulfill the demands of the Law, they too could receive this “Power,” and become “Christs” (Hippolytus, Refutations, 7:34). Thus the Primal Adam (before the Fall) was generically related to Christ, by virtue of the same heavenly syzygy which dwelt in them both. Unfortunately, after the Fall, the earthly Adam lost his divine completeness and became the “antitype” of Christ. Yet after the “True Prophet” reappeared in his completeness in Jesus of Nazareth, he became the “WeddingGarment” which could be worn by his Bride, the Church (Clementine Recognitions, 4.35). Thus would be reconstituted the primal male-female “Adam” in his pristine form. A similar syzygy-doctrine involving the male and female aspects of Wisdom is found in the writings of the Elkasaites, another branch of Ebionite Christianity. According to Hippolytus, the contents of their “Sacred Book” were delivered by an “angel” of enormous height: And there is also a female with him … whose measurement … is according to the (gigantic) standards already mentioned. And the Male is the Son of God, but the Female is called Holy Spirit (Refutations, 9.13 [ANF edition, 9.8]).

Here the Holy Spirit is assigned the female role, in contrast to the male “Holy Spirit” of the Clementina. This agrees, however, with the Valentinian custom of calling the Heavenly Mother the “Holy Spirit” (Gospel of Philip 63:30–32; 69:4–7, trans. Wilson; 70:22–25; etc.). Schlier, on the other hand, would find the Clementine doctrine of a male Holy Spirit closer to the 223 The Holy Spirit is equated with Wisdom in 1.39, and performs the same task of purifying and endowing mortals with immortality.

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“normative” Christian view, which he sees behind the syzygy-pattern of the Ephesian “Great Mystery” (pp. 160–62, above). Actually, these Elkasaite “male” and “female” angels were but complementary aspects of each other, emanating from the same monistic reality; to this extent, they would have agreed with Philo’s view of God’s “Powers,” as symbolized by the malefemale Cherubim: While God is indeed One, his highest and chiefest Powers are two … of these two Powers … the Cherubim are symbols … These unmixed Powers are mingled and united (On the Cherubim, 27–29).

It also agrees with the traditional Wisdom conception of the God who begat “Wisdom” as his creative “Agent” or “Bride,” and in whose image the Primal Adam was created. It was from this “monistic” Adam that the female, Eve, was later derived (Clementine Homilies, 16.12). Thus, those JewishChristians who were known as “Ebionites” had a traditional view of God’s male-female “Powers” parallel to Philo’s male-female Cherubim, signifying that even the God of monotheism appeared naturally in bisexual division, after which image the sexuality of created beings was patterned, a view roughly parallel to, but in no way dependent upon, Gnosticism.

LATE DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TEMPLE MYSTERY IN “ORTHODOX” CIRCLES We have already spoken of the denial of Temple-access to Christianity’s Gentile converts (pp. 133–34, above), since non-Jews were traditionally excluded from entry into its sacred precincts (Acts 21:28–29). Yet for some years after the Resurrection, Jesus’ Jewish disciples “continued daily in the Temple.” This included Paul, who undertook the required purifications in preparation for the Temple pilgrimage, and who attended the Passover in Jerusalem on a regular basis.224 Paul’s Gentile converts, on the other hand, had to content themselves with a proleptic foretaste of their eventual union with the Savior, symbolized by their “baptism into Christ” (Gal 3:27–28). For such, the Temple—which was in any case destroyed in A.D. 70—could have had little personal value. Thus many early church writers (as we have just seen) turned their attention away from the physical edifice toward the Heavenly Temple, of which the earthly Temple had been the effective cultsite (Heb 8:4–5; 9:11, 24). Jewish Christians, however, continued to hope for the rebuilding of a physical Temple in Jerusalem, as we saw in the Odes 224

See pp. 113–14, above.

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of Solomon (pp. 184–85, above). But others, like the martyr Stephen, appear to have rejected altogether the idea of a physical Sanctuary, arguing that no earthly building could ever again claim to possess permanent value (Acts 7:48–50). Today, it is commonly supposed that this rejection of a “Temple built with hands” was inspired by the Qumran belief that God’s “true Temple” was the “spiritual Temple,” i.e., the Community of Believers, who were operating in lieu of the “polluted” Jerusalem Temple (1QS VIII, 5–10). But this was only a temporary arrangement, for (as the Temple Scroll makes abundantly clear) the Qumran sectaries also looked forward to rebuilding the physical Temple as the center for the coming eschaton; and the same was undoubtedly true on many early Christians. Bertil Gärtner in fact comments that the fact that the “house” in 1 Pet ii 5 is said to be spiritual does not mean that it is less real than the Jerusalem temple; it stresses the new level on which the temple and its cultus have been placed through the person and the works of Jesus.225

It is also to be noted that many formal characteristics of the old Temple and its rites remained as “relics” in the liturgy and buildings of Catholicism. Chapels were still constructed on a tripartite plan,226 with an “atrium” or “forecourt” in the front, a main section or “nave” (hekhal) in the middle, and a “Sanctuary” (d ebir, or “Holy of Holies”) at the rear, set off by a barrier (the former “veil”). This was where the priests continued to offer the “sacrifice” of the Mass. The congregation was still viewed as an ecclesia peregrinans making its pilgrimage through the cultic wilderness, beginning with baptism and unction in the “outer precincts.” On certain occasions this led to the “Stations of the Cross” through which the participant personally identified himself with the Savior and his sacrifice. The ancient “Paschal Vigil” was also seen as a “Passover Journey” leading from death into life, accompanied by the reading of the Creation story, and the lighting of candles to represent the fiat lux (“let there be light!”), followed by a recounting of the Exodus as a parable of man’s progress toward salvation. As we shall presently learn from Cyril of Jerusalem’s fourth-century account, the “Chrism of Salvation” was still applied to the candidates’ ears, 225

notes.

The Temple and the Community in the New Testament (Cambridge, 1965), 73,

226 Corresponding to the three parts of the Jerusalem Temple and the three stages of man’s spiritual progress. See pp. 82–84, above; also 43, 113–14.

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nostrils, and breast to impart eternal life (see below). The altar was also still present, with its seven candles (the Menorah), oil, myrrh, incense, hymns, and Tri-Sanctus, all accompanying the priest’s entry into the the inner shrine (or Holy of Holies). Even the sunburst around the monstrance (the vessel containing the Divine Presence) reminds us once again of Wisdom’s Light-Stream, with which the communicant had come to have “communion.” This was further enhanced by means of the “unleavened bread” of the Eucharist. Medieval paintings also show the Lord extending his right hand through the veil which separated heaven and earth, greeting the soul of the dead, and drawing him back into eternal life. Such conspicuous survivals of Temple worship and the “Great Mystery” indeed suggest that early Christians by no means viewed the Temple as “obsolete,” as we have so often been told. Yet Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Mysteries (ca. A.D. 349) show how Gentile “orthodoxy” tended more and more to transform Christianity’s original Temple-worship into an elaborate baptismal rite. Nevertheless, we still recognize in Cyril’s “baptismal” mystery much that originally belonged to the Sanctuary and the Holy of Holies. To prepare the candidate for entry into the “Inner Chamber,” he was first stripped and immersed in water 2.4); this, we are told, was a “symbolic enactment” of his personal participation in Christ’s Crucifixion (cf. Rom 6:3), even as the latter “received the nails in his hands and feet” (2.5). Next, the candidate was anointed with oil placed “on the forehead and sense organs” to “quicken the soul” (3.3). This anointing also included “the ears, to have ear quick to hear the divine mysteries. Then the nostrils, that … you may say, ‘We are the incense offered by Christ to God’.” This was followed by oil on the breast, or the “putting on the breastplate of justice,” that you “might withstand the wiles of the Devil” (3.4). A white garment representing the Spirit was then put on the subject (1.10; 4.8); Satan was rebuked with “upraised right arm” (I:4), opening the way for him to return to the Garden of Eden, from whence he had earlier been banished (1.9). Along the way, he had to “pass through fire and water,” sometimes with the loss of life (5.17). At the conclusion of the rite, the candidate extended his hand to receive the Bread of Communion: Coming up to receive … make your left hand a throne for the right (for it is to receive a King), and cupping your palm, so receive the Body of Christ (5.21).

All of these things were now done away from the Temple, though the memory the Heavenly Sanctuary—where the true service was still thought to take place—would continue to loom in the background and inform

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Christian soteriology for centuries to come. The last traces of the old “journey through the wilderness” in fact still emerged in such late literary classics as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the medieval Everyman plays, which again showed the “New Israelite” working his way toward the Heavenly City (Heb 11:13–16; 12:22–24). Significantly, the legend of the Wandering Jew showed just the opposite, namely the “Old Israelite” who habitually came short of “rest” (Heb 4:1) because he would not accept Christ as his Messiah and High Priest.

6 GNOSTICISM AND THE WISDOM MYSTERY INTRODUCTION One of Christianity’s greatest unsolved mysteries is the origin of the Church’s ancient branch known as “Gnosticism,” a branch which at one time far exceeded “orthodoxy” in numbers and influence. It is almost universally recognized that Gnosticism had significant roots in Judaism, while at the same time being markedly anti-Jewish. This seeming contradiction has puzzled scholars for well over a century, and has caused many to search for Gnosticism’s characteristic ingredients outside of the Judaeo-Christian sphere. Yet exactly the same thing could be said of Christianity itself, for it also originated in the beliefs of the Old Testament, yet repudiated them as insufficient versions of the full truth. We shall in fact attempt to demonstrate that Gnosticism developed almost entirely amongst Christian intellectuals who were trying to reconcile the nature of Christ—whom the New Testament identified as the God of the Old Testament and the Son of the “Unknown Father”—with an ignorant Yahweh who declared himself to be the sole god anywhere (Isa 45:5), and a god without familial ties. At the same time, this Jewish Yahweh gave a lesser gospel to the world (Gal 3:19–20), and created a physical world full of sorrow and death, which Christ alone could rectify and redeem from its suffering. We shall also try to explain their intellectual method of integrating every known fact of science and religion into a single, comprehensive point of view—not unlike the “Grand Unification Theories” (GUTS) or “Theory of Everything” (TOE) proposed by modern physicists—hoping thereby to explain how a single Divine Reality unfolded into the manifold world of gods and material phenomena. They began by equating the Light-Stream in the Temple with the Logos-River of the Stoics, describing how it flowed from the Transcendent God into the planetary spheres, and thence into the world of particulars, taking on an increasingly inferior quality the farther it was removed from its Source. And by correlating the Hellenistic notion of the “Three Natures”—pneumatic, psychic, and hylic—with the New Testament’s “Three Degrees of Glory,” they found that they could explain how 245

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the “Wisdom/Logos” first appeared to the Jews as a cruel god of war and the author of corrupt matter, but later as the revealer of the “True God” and the means of escaping to a higher plane of existence. Unfortunately, many Gnostics correlated the Greek notion that “the body is a tomb” (sōma = sēma) with Paul’s statement that “to be carnally minded is death” (Rom 8:6), thus arriving at a systematic theology which increasingly deprecated the flesh. Yet the earliest Gnostics retained the more balanced view of Scripture that the body needs only to be disciplined in order to be truly spiritual. Others continued to view the Resurrection as a literal event, rather than an “illusion” designed to elude the powers who sought to perpetuate the soul’s imprisonment in matter. The first Valentinians were in fact praised for their “warm approval of marriage.” Such facts demonstrate that the “heterodox” positions of Gnosticism vis à vis those of the “Great Church” were largely a matter of readjustment and evolution, rather than the importation of “apostate” doctrines from outside of JudaeoChristian tradition. Each “new” theologouemon of Gnosticism thus turns out to be a response to some perceived tension between the values inherited from Judaism and the newer insights of Jesus, though they were frequently explicated with the help of contemporary learning. As in the case of Philo, Gnosticism’s values were drawn entirely from Scripture, even when the language of Hellenism or of Oriental syncretism was employed. Thus Gnosticism worked from the same Gospels as did the other Christians, there being no “Gnostic Gospels” in the true sense of the word, but rather “Gnostic meditations” or “commentaries” on the orthodox books used by the rest of the Church.1 The Gnostics thus claimed to base their doctrines on the very same authorities as “orthodoxy,” and in many cases to have preserved what others had already begun to forget. For this reason, we shall discover that Gnosticism frequently helps us to discover the original forms of Christ’s Gospel, rather than “heretical” departures therefrom. This is especially clear where R. McLain Wilson, Gnosis and the New Testament (Oxford, 1968), 88; George W. McRae, “The Gospel of Truth,” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (New York, 1977), 37; Kendrick Grobel, The Gospel of Truth (New York, 1960), 20–21; Birger A. Pearson, in ABD, 4:948–49. Though the Gnostics sometimes called their works “gospels,” they were never “gospels” in the true sense of the word, for they contained no presentations of the life of Jesus, and seldom contained collections of his sayings. Instead, they were generally attempts to interpret and synthesize his teachings in an “intellectual” and comprehensive manner, hoping to reveal their ultimate significance. 1

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the Gnostics claimed to have received doctrines which contradict their later positions, e.g., the doctrine of felix culpa, which taught that Adam’s Fall into mortality was a “blessed sin” and an upward step for mankind, deliberately willed by God as a training event for the preexistent soul. Such an idea would never have been thought of by those who had theological grounds for rejecting the flesh, hence must have been derived from an earlier and more traditionally “scriptural” point of view. We shall especially attempt to demonstrate that Gnosticism was a continuing and logical development of Wisdom’s Light-Stream and the way in which it unfolded into the events of Creation and became available to men in the Temple. As the governing force that “effectively orders all things” (Wis 8:1) it was the bearer of God’s attributes to the world; and as “the image of God’s goodness” and the “mirror of his active power” (ibid., 25–26) it was the equivalent of the New Testament “Holy Ghost,” i.e., the pneumatic vehicle which mediates the divine fulness to others (pp. 106–10, above). Thus the Gnostics referred to the mysterious realm of light between God and the world as the Pleroma (the “fulness”), for within it were to be found the totality of his divine qualities and the basic patterns which govern the cosmos. Hence by “dissecting” the Pleroma, one might hope to discover the hidden nature of the Divine. A Gnostic “cross-section” of the Pleroma in fact revealed the same syzygetic prototypes which governed the sexes on earth—in particular, the Divine Tetrad of “Father-Mother-Son-andDaughter” (pp. 15–16, above)—verifying the statement in Genesis that “God created man in his own image, male and female.” In short, the “Divine Fulness” was found to consist of successive generations of sexual pairs, and the Gnostics believed that it was a breakdown in this ideal pattern which caused the loss of Eden’s wholeness and the Fall of the First Couple. But just as Philo thought of the Light-Stream as a “Royal Road” along which men could reascend toward God (pp. 42–43, 83–84, above), the Gnostics saw it as the means of rejoining the Supreme Source to its phenomenal creations, thereby enabling them to reclaim their pristine images and be reintegrated into the Perfect Light. As in the older Wisdom Mystery, this was accomplished by means of spiritual henosis, or the reunion of the Divine with its earthly antitypes. Thus the New Testament “Great Mystery” became the “Bridal Chamber” rite of the Valentinians and the Marcosians, through which were catalyzed the “marriages” of Christ and the Church, the Divine and the Secular, and the Husband and Wife, all following the same syzygetic pattern as depicted by the Embracing Cherubim. After the destruction of the Temple, however, human marriages would replace the

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images in the Holy of Holies, thus providing the “cherubic” image with which to activate the others.

GNOSTICISM AND THE HEXAEMERON One of the chief concerns of most Gnostic writings was the series of events which are described in the early chapters of Genesis. We have already seen how Old Testament writers depicted the light emanating from God’s Throne as a series of fiery “rivers,” commonly seven in number, becoming the seven planetary spheres as they descend toward earth (pp. 54ff, above). We also saw how various Jews and early Christians saw these seven components of the light as “angelic” beings, while other saw them as the seven days of creation. Thus came into being the doctrine of the Hexameron, or the preexistent spiritual creation, which included the “first created angels” (the protoctists), a special version of which was Christ and the preexistent Church (pp. 144–45, above). Different Gnostic schools dissected this sevenfold LightStream in their own individual ways, but basically sought to demonstrate that the material world had emanated in all of its particulars from a single Source of Light, representing what many have called a polytheistic monotheism, or a basic “Oneness” from which all “Multiplicity” unfolds. While this was not to suggest that all things are part of God (as in Far Eastern metaphysics), it did imply that a single divine fulness activates and operates through all of God’s mediators, even within the “angels” and lesser “gods” who share his power. Thus, while there is but one Supreme God, he works through many divine beings who comprise a hierarchy of deified “powers” and “principalities,” indiscriminately referred to by the New Testament as archai, exousai, or dynameis (Rom 8:38; Col 1:16; 1 Pet 3:22; etc.). It is especially important to note how the original bene ha’el of Israelite theology survived in monotheism in the form of “angels” (LXX Deut 32:80), later described as secondary “lights” and “powers” by apocalyptic Judaism. In 1 Enoch’s calendrical system, for example, these became the controlling “angels” who had charge of the various portions of the year; and the Gnostics imagined their descent into time and space as the annual procession of months and days, resulting in a Pleroma of three hundred and sixty “lights.” The Sethians placed at their head the “Four Luminaries” (Armozel, Oriel, Daveithei and Eleleth), i.e., the four cherubim who governed God’s “glory” in Ezekiel 1. These in turn became the “Days of Creation,” plus the Day of Rest, according to the Hexaemeron tradition.

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Bentley Layton has conveniently diagrammed the “devolution” of this light into the images and archetypes of the material world.2 Here we are able to watch the Light-Stream as it divides into dual genders (the Divine Image of Gen 1:27), triads (the three degrees of glory), quartets (periods of sacred history), heptads (the planetary angels and days of creation), tens (emanations of the Word, e.g., the Ten Commandments), twelves (the Twelve Tribes, the Apostles, the stages of the Zodiac), and finally thirties, seventies and three-hundred-sixties (the constellations and the elements of time and space), giving us a kind of “Unified Field” from which one might derive all earthly phenomena. Indeed, it became an “exploded diagram” of God’s “fulness” as it directs the physical creation from within, and a “blueprint” for the lower worlds of matter. We must especially take note of its first unfolding, or the division of “the One” into dual genders. Here we have the origin of the divine syzygetic pattern, according to which all things would emerge as male-female pairs. Every plant and every animal thus had its sexual counterpart, even the particles within the atom, which are similarly divided into negative and positive partners. At its very heart lay the conviction that all divine powers have their consorts and were the models for all subsequent couplings. The Fall, on the other hand, was explained as the result of the Wisdom/Logos having lost his female partner, who in her isolation became the “Fallen Sophia” and the Creatrix of the material world. Again, a hieros gamos between the Fallen Sophia and her pleromatic Male Counterpart would be the means of restoring the primal pattern and the perfection of the Light World. But this reunion must first be initiated on earth by the marriages of the men and women who call Sophia their “Mother” and who would claim the Savior as the “Father” of their salvation, for as Quentin Quesnell explained, the man and the woman through marriage become the basic units of Christ and the Church (pp. 125–27, above). We shall describe these events in more detail later on, but mention them here in order to establish the basic relationship between the older Wisdom Mystery and its later Gnostic forms.

THE ORIGIN OF THE GNOSTIC DEMIURGE The typical Gnostic derogation of the Old Testament Creator to the rank of an inferior Demiurge, who created a material world, and then sought to perpetuate man’s “enslavement” to it by means of sexual reproduction, 2 As they appear in the Apocryphon of John; see his The Gnostic Scriptures (Garden City, NY, 1987), 12–13.

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probably began with the fact that certain Christians believed in a God above him, a being sarcastically referred to by Origen’s arch-foe, Celsus, as a “super-celestial God,” one higher than the Jewish Yahweh: Celsus … alleges that certain “Christians, having misunderstood the works of Plato, loudly boast of a ‘super-celestial’ God, thus ascending beyond the heaven of the Jews” (Origen, Against Celsus, 6.19).

Origen’s response was that the prophets themselves (who were indeed much older than Plato) spoke of a “super-celestial place” beyond the ordinary heavens, for example, the author of Psalm 48:4; who exclaimed, Praise God, ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens, let them praise the Lord!

Thus it would appear that Origen saw nothing in such a belief which contradicted the older traditions of Christianity and the Bible, including what he believed to have been the traditions of the “prophets.” Some writers, of course, believed that Jesus himself was a worshipper of the Jewish Yahweh, whom they referred to as the “God of our fathers” (Acts 3:13; 5:30; 22:14), i.e., the traditional “God of Israel” (Matt 15:31; Luke 1:68; Acts 13:17). Yet it is not clear whether or not it was Yahweh to whom the Gospel writers referred as Christ’s “Father” (Rom 15:6; 1 Cor 1:9; 2 Cor 1:30—or even as man’s “Father” (Luke 11:2; 2 Cor 6:18; Gal 1:4; 4:4–7)—for Jesus not once calls him “Yahweh” (= “Lord,” i.e., Adonai), but rather “El” (Matt 21:6; Mark 15:3), or even “Abba,” the Aramaic word for “Daddy” (Mark 14:36), and he taught his disciples to do the same (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).3 Norman Perrin has in fact shown that the name “Abba” was never used for Yahweh,4 hence Jesus must have had good reason for doing so. No doubt the main reason for this was that the New Testament frequently identifies Jesus himself as Yahweh. Yahweh’s title, “LORD” (used in place of “YHWH” when spoken aloud) was always translated in the Greek Septuagint as kyrios, and this is traditionally applied to Jesus throughout the New Testament: “The Lord, Jesus Christ (kyrios Iēsous Christus). Thus, “to an early Christian accustomed to reading the OT, the word ‘Lord,’ when used of Jesus, would suggest his

D. E. Aune adds that the name “Abba” stands behind all of the early recorded prayers of the disciples to the Father, and explains his grammatical reasons for so concluding (In The International Standard Bible Enclyclopedia, 1:3.) 4 Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York, 1967), 41. 3

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identification with the God of the OT.”5 Richard Longenecker also calls attention to the “name” given to Jesus in Phil 2:9–11: “God has highly exalted him and given him the name which is above every name,” for it is “the name at which every knee shall bow,” confessing that “Jesus Christ is Lord” (kyrios) (Rom 14:11 = Isa 45:23), i.e., the vocal equivalent of “Yahweh.”6 Thus, Joel 2:32 predicts that salvation would come to those who “call on the name of Yahweh,” the same name which Paul applied to Christ (Rom 10:13). Jean Daniélou therefore concludes that the title “Lord” (which was equivalent to both “name” and kyrios), when used of Christ, was equal to the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) itself.7 Longenecker8 thus proposes that the epithet “Lord” served as a “terminological bridge” to the use of the title “God” for Jesus in John 1:1; 20:28;9 Rom 9:5;10 2 Thess 1:12; Titus 2:13 and 2 Pet 1:1. R. E. Brown also cites considerable evidence in both rabbinical and Septuagint sources that the Old Testament name “I AM” (Heb ’ehyeh, Greek ego eimi)11 had long been recognized as the equivalent of Yahweh, and S. E. Johnson, “Lord (Christ),” in IDB, 3:151. Joseph Fitzmyer agrees that “in using kyrios of both Yahweh and Jesus … Luke continues the sense of the title already being used in the early Christian communities, which in some sense regarded Jesus as on a level with Yahweh.” Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1981), 203. At the same time, Luke appears to have looked on Jesus as the Son of Yahweh (Acts 3:13), showing that the problem which bothered believers at Nicaea was already felt in second- and third-generation Christianity. 6 The Christology of Early Jewish Christianity (Grand Rapids, 1981), 128. The “Name” (shem) was generally supposed to be the Tetragrammaton, YHWH. 7 TJC, 148. 8 Richard Longnecker, Christology of Early Jewish Christianity (Grand Rapids, 1981), 136. 9 R. E. Brown also writes that the use of kyrios for Jesus would naturally lead to the application of theos (God) to him, since theos was the common Septuagint name for Yahweh. Jesus, God and Man (Milwaukee, 1967), 29. He also refers to other New Testament passages such as 1 John 5:20; Hebrews 1:8; 2 Peter 1:1; Romans 9:5 and Titus 2:13. 10 Though the punctuation and meaning of Romans 9:5 has long been debated, the clear majority of ancient commentators held that Christ was being identified with God (“Christ, who is over all, God blessed for ever!”) E. Stauffer, “theos,” in TDNT, 3:105. Guthrie also points out that the word “blessed” would be in the wrong position for a normal doxology (“Christ, who is over all. God (be) blessed for ever!) New Testament Theology (Downer’s Grove, IL, 1981), 339–40. 11 See Exodus 3:14. 5

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that it was so understood by the gospel writers who applied it to Jesus.12 John 8:24, 28, 58 and 13:19 also applies the absolute form of the verb ’ehyeh to Jesus (“before Abraham was, I AM”). This was further emphasized when the revelatory formula, “Be not afraid, It is I,” was spoken to the frightened apostles during a storm (John 6:20; Matt 14:27), Yahweh being the Israelite God of the Storm (Ezek 38:9; Nah 1:3). Mark 14:62 therefore equates “I AM” directly with the “Son of Man,” a title which Jesus often used of himself.13 Other specific identifications of Christ and the Old Testament Yahweh include Isaiah 40:3 (“Prepare ye the way of Yahweh”) and Matthew 3:3 = Mark 1:3 = Luke 3:4 = John 1:23 (“Prepare ye the way of the Lord” [i.e., Jesus]); Joel 2:3 (“Whosoever shall call on the name of Yahweh shall be delivered”) and Romans 10:13 = Acts 2:21 (“Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord [Jesus Christ] shall be saved”); Psalms 110:1 (“Yahweh said unto my lord”) and Mark 12:35–37 = Matthew 22:41–45 (“How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David … for David himself calleth him lord.”14 Christ is also said to be the Creator who made heaven and earth,15 the “Rock” (Yahweh) who led Israel through the Red Sea (1 Cor 10:4), and the “Stone” refused by the builders.16 He is also called “Savior” throughout the New Testament—an epithet reserved strictly for Yahweh in the Old Testament (Judg 3:9; Isa 45:15). He is likewise the Church’s “Redeemer” (go’el, Job 19:25; Isa 43:3; etc.), and the one who judges and forgives sin— another of Yahweh’s exclusive prerogatives (Gen 15:14; 1 Chr 16:33; Ps 96:13; Isa 43:25). Thus it is Jesus to whom “every knee shall bow … and every tongue confess,” just as it was to the God of the Old Testament (Rom 14:11 = Isa 45:21–23).

12 John I–XII, 533–38; also C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge, 1970), 94. 13 E.g., Matt 9:6; 10:23; Mark 2:10; 13:26; Luke 5:24; 18:8; etc. 14 It is clear here that this New Testament “Lord” is understood to be the same as the Old Testament “LORD.” Unfortunately, English translations of the New Testament “Lord,” even when it is the equivalent of YHWH, do not spell it with small capitals (“LORD”), as they do throughout the Old Testament. The KJV of Mark 12:36, however, correctly gives “LORD” for YHWH, since it is a quotation from the Old Testament, but falls back to the customary “Lord” in 12:37. 15 Compare Genesis 1:1 with John 1:3; Ephesians 3:9; 2 Corinthians 4:6; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2–3. 16 Compare Psalm 118:22 and Acts 4:11.

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How, then, could the Gnostics come to look upon Yahweh as a god who was less than their own Jesus Christ? Here we must recall that the normal theology of Paul included two divine beings: To us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things,17 and one Lord, Jesus Christ (1 Cor 8:6).

In short, Jesus Christ had a Father above him, one whose mysterious presence within himself gave him his redemptive power: God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor 5:19).

John likewise believed that Christ had a Father of his own, but one whom the Jews no longer recognized: Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him (Matt 11:27; Luke 10:22; John 14:7).

Morton Smith therefore concluded that it was Jesus alone who “revealed the hitherto unknown Father,”18 in contrast to the Old Testament God, who had repeatedly revealed himself to the prophets and was already well known.19 The earliest Christians in fact believed that it was none other than Jesus Christ, the Son of the Unknown Father, who had appeared to the patriarchs as the “God of Israel” throughout her early history: For if you had understood what has been written by the prophets, you would not have denied that He was God, Son of the only, unbegotten, unutterable God.20 For Moses says somewhere in Exodus the following: “The Lord spoke to Moses, and said to him, I am the Lord, and I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, being their God; and my name I revealed not to them, and I established my covenant with them” (Exod 6:2ff). And thus again he says, “A man wrestled with Jacob” (Gen 32:24, 30), and asserts it was God; narrating what Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” And it is recorded that he called the place where He wrestled with him, the Face of God. It is always presupposed that the Father is the one who wills and brings about creation through his Son. The Son is therefore his Creative Agent, but he is the “Creator” (Heb 1:1–2). 18 The Secret Gospel (New York, 1973), 112; our emphasis. 19 For this reason, John states that “No man hath seen God at any time,” not referring to Yahweh—who was repeatedly seen of many—but to the “Unknown Father,” he “whom the Son hath declared” (John 1:18). 20 In his Second Apology, Justin adds, “To the Father of all … there is no name given” (6). 17

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A GREAT MYSTERY And Moses says that God appeared also to Abraham near the oak in Mamre, when he was sitting near his tent at mid-day (Dialogue With Trypho, 126).

Justin also notes several other instances where the Son spoke or appeared in the Old Testament as “God,”21 and goes on to preface his next chapter with the explicit comment, “These passages of scripture do not apply to the Father, but to the Word” (i.e., the Son). Continuing, he turns to the subject of Yahweh’s mysterious “Father,” the so-called “Unbegotten God”: These and other such sayings are recorded by the Lawgiver and by the prophets; and I suppose that I have stated sufficiently, that wherever God says, “God went up from Abraham,” or “The Lord spoke to Moses,” and “the Lord came down to behold the tower which the sons of men had built,” or when “God shut Noah into the Ark,” you must not imagine that the Unbegotten God Himself came down or went up from any place. For the ineffable Father and Lord of all neither has come to any place, nor walks, nor sleeps, nor rises up, but remains in His own place, wherever that is, quick to behold and quick to hear … Therefore neither Abraham, nor Isaac, nor Jacob, nor any man, saw the Father and ineffable Lord of all, and also of Christ, but saw Him who was according to His will His Son, being God, and the Angel22 because He ministered to His will; whom also it pleased Him to be born man by the Virgin; who also was fire when He conversed with Moses from the bush (Dialogue, 127).

In short, the Old Testament “Yahweh” was the Son of still another Deity, the “Ineffable Father,” who remains in his own high heaven, quite unknown to the Jews. Maintaining a strict numerical distinction between the two, Justin explains that the “Ineffable God” is the Old Testament “Lord’s” own Lord: When Scripture says: “The Lord rained fire from the Lord out of Heaven,” the prophetic word indicates that there were two in number: One upon earth, who, it says, descended to behold the cry of Sodom; Another in Heaven, who is also Lord of the Lord on earth, as He is Father

21 Genesis 7:16; 12:5; 18:22; 19:24; Exodus 6:29; Numbers 11:23; Deuteronomy 32:21; Psalms 24:7; 110:1. 22 The LXX of Isa 9:6 has megales boules aggelos (“great Angel of Counsel”), which was another source of the Son’s “angelomorphic Christology” (see pp. 145– 54, above).

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and God; the cause of His power and His being Lord and God (ibid., 129).23

Eusebius also explained that while Christ was the well-known God of the Old Testament, he had been so “adorned by the Father” (Church History, 1.3); who had at the same time remained an enigma to the ancients (ibid., 1.2). The Jewish Christians, however, explained that the Father was the mysterious “High God” (Elyon), who “chose his Son, who is also called Lord, to rule over the Israelites as his special portion” (Clementine Homilies, 18.4).24 Oddly enough, however, the Old Testament God did not appear to know anything about his mysterious Father, for in Isaiah he arrogantly boasts that I am Yahweh, and there is none else, there is no God beside me (45:5). Ye are my witnesses, saith Yahweh, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me (Isa 43:10).

Neither did the Jews who worshipped him know anything of his Father’s existence: Then said they unto him, Where is thy Father? Jesus answered, Ye neither know me, nor my Father: if ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also (John 8:19). It is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God: Yet ye have not known him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying (John 8:54–55).

Even more significant was the fact that this ignorant creator-god had produced a world of “thorns and thistles” (Gen 3:18), a world full of pain and suffering, and had given the Jews a powerless Law of Moses with which to hopefully extricate themselves from it:

23 He also comments that “when Scripture records that God said in the beginning, ‘Behold, Adam has become like one of Us’,” the plural number was to be taken literally (Dialogue, 129). 24 The source of this passage was the Hebrew original of Deuteronomy 32:8–9. See note 24, p. 13, above.

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A GREAT MYSTERY For there is verily a disannulling of the commandment going before for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof. For the law made nothing perfect (Heb 7:18–19).

The Law of course taught proper moral principles, and told men how they should live in the world. But it gave them no power with which to overcome their natural impulses: Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good … but I am carnal, sold under sin … To will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do … I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me … O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Rom 7:12–24).

Even worse, it condemned them to death, for leaving them powerless to keep each one of its commandments without exception, it left them short of perfection: For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all (Jas 2:10). For I testify again to every man that is circumcised (i.e., hopes to live by the Law of Moses), that he is a debtor to do the whole law. Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace (Gal 5:3–4).

The Law of Moses thus destroyed, instead of saving. Salvation would become possible only through the Spirit of Christ, which gives men quickening power and begets new lives in them: I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died (Rom 7:7–8). For the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life (2 Cor 3:5).

The Law of Moses was at best a “lesser law,” whose elementary principles prepared men for Christ’s saving power, at which time they would no longer require the tutelage of the Old Testament: But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.

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But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster (Gal 3:23–25).

Meanwhile, without hope of salvation by means of a spiritual “new begetting,” the Jews remained under bondage to the material elements: Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world … For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman (i.e., the Jew) was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman (i.e., the Christian) was by promise (Gal 4:3, 22).

Their Law had in fact been revealed by one of God’s “angels,” rather than by God himself: Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added to make wrong-doing a legal offense, until the seed should come to whom the promise was made; and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator (i.e., Moses). Now a mediator is not needed for a party acting alone, and “God is one” (Gal 3:19–20, partly NEB).

Clearly, then, the Law came not from the Father—who is “One”—but from the “angels,” who were of a lower supernatural order. John even went so far as to claim that the source of Judaism’s present inspiration was the Devil: Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it (John 8:42–44).

Indeed, even the Old Testament makes the surprising statement that the Jewish God was the one who had created darkness and evil: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I Yahweh do all these things (Isa 45:7).

In the increasingly pessimistic and “spiritualizing” milieu of contemporary apocalypticism, this seemed to explain to many Christians why the Jewish God’s first commandment had been to “Multiply and replenish the earth” (Gen 1:28), for in this way he might capture and enslave the preexistent souls in the murkiness of matter. Thus blinded and enfeebled, they would no longer remember their true spiritual nature, nor would they wish to re-

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turn to the light whence they came, for those who are “carnal” have neither the ability nor the desire to please the Transcendent Father: For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God (Rom 8:5–8).

Paul’s statement was no doubt misunderstood by many of his readers—as it still is today—who were convinced that all things “carnal” are intrinsically evil, and that the “spiritual” alone is truly good. No doubt Paul had intended simply to point out that the flesh by itself—without the enlightenment of God’s Spirit—inevitably leads men into error. But for many who lived in the Hellenized world of the Savior, the body was seen as the major source of all concupiscence and death (sōma = sēma), and Yahweh’s creation had been the sole source of such an existence. Thus we arrive at the picture of a Jewish God who is already partially demonized, making him the author of everything which conduces to sin and suffering, quite in contrast to the redemptive power of Christ, who came to save men from bondage to the material world and the sphere of death. How, then, could the Jewish Yahweh have been so different from Christ, when the New Testament identified them as the very same individual? The Gnostic answer was indeed brilliant: viewed as an manifestation of the Johannine Logos, Christ/Yahweh had simply appeared at different times with differing degrees of glory, just as the Light-Stream of the Wisdom/Logos had begun as the Father’s Transcendent Light, then dimmed as it gave rise to the planetary spheres, and finally emerged in the darkness of matter, in a highly attenuated form. But Paul’s Christ also began as a heavenly being, who “emptied” himself of his divinity when he assumed the form of a “servant” (Phil 2:6–7). Jewish Christians likewise thought of Jesus-Wisdom as one who had appeared on earth several times, embodied in various Jewish heroes; but lately he had come in his complete form as the “True Prophet” (pp. 241–43, above). “Wisdom” had in fact assumed many different forms throughout its history, appearing as an “effluence of God’s glory” (Wis 7:25–26), the light which “enters men and makes them prophets” (7:27), God’s “Only Begotten Son” (7:22), God’s creative companion (Prov 8:22ff), even God’s “Daughter” (Philo, On Flight and Finding, 50). Philo also believed that Wisdom’s varying levels of brilliance corresponded to the three levels of the Temple, and that men could ascend through them towards union with the

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perfect Light (p. 44, above). When this concept reappeared in Christian theology as the “Three Degrees of Glory,” it offered an immediate explanation for the differing degrees of Christ/Yahweh’s power. The Gnostics accordingly viewed the Wisdom/Logos as the divine power which activated both of his forms, at first as the creator of a material and defective world, then as its Savior and re-creator, revealing at last the full strength and majesty which the Unknown Father had originally invested in him. Simone Pétrement thus concludes that “the Logos of God directed the action of the Demiurge without the Demiurge’s knowledge; the Savior himself can thus be called Demiurge … (But) the true God is only known to us thanks to Christ.”25 Elaine Pagels likewise explains that in Valentinian exegesis the creation came about “through the Logos energizing the Demiurge.”26 These changes correspond generally to the “condescension” of Christ in “normative” Christology; but in Gnostic Christology they became the graded emanations of the Logos/Son, whose divine preexistence was modified by a remarkable series of lesser manifestations and activities within the sphere of created matter.

THE FALL OF SOPHIA But we cannot understand these “lesser” appearances of the Logos/ Wisdom without taking into account the many influences from Israelite polytheism which went into its creation. These influences had long been reduced by the official Jewish monotheism to mere “hypostases” or “personifications” of the One God’s internal “powers.” But they also preserved memories of discrete male and female deities who had once comprised the familial pantheons of the ancient Semites. As the Father’s creative agent (Prov 8:22ff), for example, “Sophia” (the Greek title for “Wisdom”) retained certain masculine qualities, not unlike the Canaanite and Babylonian “Sons” who had defeated the “monsters of chaos” at the time of creation.27 We also detect traces of several former female deities, such as the Canaanite Asherah and Anath, who frequently bore the name of hkm, “Wisdom,”28 and who were looked upon as the necessary counterparts of their Husbands in the management of the Ugaritic cosmos. Significantly, the nouns for “Wisdom” in both Hebrew and Greek were also feminine, thus causing “her” A Separate God (San Francisco, 1990), 48. The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis (Nashville, 1973), 31. 27 E.g., the legends of Ba‘al and Marduk. 28 See note 12, p. 26, above. 25 26

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to be referred to in common parlance as a “woman” (“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars,” Prov 9:1; “She is an exhalation from the power of God,” Wis 7:25). Thanks to the memory of these ancient male and female deities, who traditionally assisted their Father El29 in Semitic mythology, Philo could write that “while God is indeed one, his highest and chiefest powers are two. Of these two potencies … the (male and female) Cherubim are symbols” (On the Cherubim, 27–29).30 Thus the Father’s “agents” in even monotheism were still believed to have been male and female, working together to sustain the economy of the divine world. Indeed, when they worked as one, they were said to be “male”; but when they were separated, the results became “female,” i.e., incomplete and lacking in spiritual qualities.31 The Jewish Christians similarly described the original Logos/Wisdom (the “True Prophet”) as a perfect syzygy, i.e., as a Male with a Female Companion, who in his completeness had returned to restore the true Gospel of Moses. But whenever the Female attempted to work alone, she had appeared as the “False Prophet,” inspiring the “False Pericopes,” those passages of scripture which occasionally contradict the “correct” message of the Old Testament, such as references to more than one God.32 In the system of Simon (active ca. A.D. 41–54)—whom the early Church Fathers insisted was the first Gnostic—Sophia33 had been the “Worker” through whom God created the heavens (Ps 136:5). According to Tertullian, she had anticipated his wishes and obediently descended into matter in order to carry them out. While doing so, however, she was detained by the very elements which she had created,34 thus producing a Sophia who was specifically associated with the “fallen” world of matter. Philo, on the other hand, believed that God had personally created the Also called ’Il, ’Ilu, An, etc., in various other Semitic dialects. See p. 14, above; our emphasis. 31 See pp. 45–50, above. Philo’s use of the categories “male” and “female” may have gone back to Plato’s concept of the androgynous First Man, as found in the Symposium. This image of the unified “androgyne” versus the dual sexes found in nature was probably widely known in Hellenistic circles during Philo’s lifetime. See Richard A. Baer, Jr., Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden, 1970), 87. 32 See pp. 87, 235–40, above. 33 “Sophia” was said to have been the “Thought” (Greek Ennoia) of the Logos. “Ennoia” was in fact the name which she would later bear in many of the more advanced Gnostic texts. 34 De Anima, 34. 29 30

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spiritual part of man—he being of mixed nature, both good and evil—and left the creation of the physical part to the angelic Powers,35 one of whom was traditionally said to have been Sophia (Prov 8:22ff). But Menander († ca. A.D. 80) and Saturnilus (early 2nd century)— both followers of Simon—soon began to devalue the worth of the material creation, calling it a “tragic” work, and attributing it wholly to Wisdom’s “angels.”36 It is further maintained by some writers that Saturnilus (together with the shadowy figure of Cerinthus) was the first to have pictured the Old Testament Creator as an inferior angel, thus distinguishing him still further from the true God, and picturing him as one of the “Protoctists.”37 The Alexandrian scholar, Basilides, in turn maintained that the Jewish God was the “Leader” of Sophia’s “inferior angels,” thus reducing him to an almost demonic level.38 Even this, however, could still be said to agree with Paul’s statements that YHWH was the author of a “carnal” law (Heb 7:16), which came forth through the intermediacy of “angels,” rather than from God himself (Gal 3:19–20).39 Thus it could be concluded that only the feminine portion of the “Logos/Sophia” had been at work when it instituted the Gospel of Judaism and created the material world. It was in fact Sophia’s dissociation from her male counterpart and their male-female completeness which best accounted for the defective and unbalanced qualities or her “carnal” products. “Perfection” was by now considered to be both male and female working in perfect harmony; whereas “femaleness” was the result of either sex working in isolation.40 The historical precedents for this view no doubt included the Jewish ideal of marriage, which stated that men must emulate God’s malefemale image and unite to beget offspring (Gen 1:26–28). Sexual wholeness and marriage were in fact prerequisites for entry into the Temple (Deut 23:1–2).41 There were also the tragic events in the Garden, which, as Genesis 1:26–27 suggests, were antitypes of the heavenly realities which had preceded them. Thus, as the male-female oneness of the first couple had been based on a divine male-female image, it might be reasoned that Yahweh’s On Flight and Finding, 68–70; On the Change of Names, 30–31; On the Confusion of Tongues, 169–80; On the Creation of the World, 72–75. 36 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.23–24. 37 See pp. 144–45, above, and the account of the Hexaemaron. 38 G. Filoramo, History of Gnosticism (Oxford, 1990), 82. 39 See p. 257, above. 40 As embodied, for example, in the writings of Philo; note 50, p. 260, above. 41 See pp. 19–22, above. 35

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removal of the woman from the man’s side (2:21–22) was similarly based on a break in the preexistent oneness of the sexes. In the New Testament this scheme actually reappeared as the basis for the Ephesian “Great Mystery,” where Christ and the Church had constituted a heavenly syzygy before the world came into being, but had became separated at the time of creation. Now their salvation would take place when they are “remarried” in the eschaton.42 The legend of the “Sons of God” who lusted after the “daughters of men” also hinted at a cosmic catastrophe which had befallen the heavenly race, for it gave birth to the wicked generations whom God was obliged to destroy in the Flood (Gen 6:1–4). There was also the story of the “War in Heaven,” during which a portion of the spiritual world was cast out and gave rise to sin (Isa 14:12–15; 1 Enoch 6; Jude 6; etc.). God’s creative power was thus alienated and damaged, as we saw in the myth of the “Homeless Wisdom.”43 These considerations all help to explain why the Gnostics believed that a preexistent tragedy had once taken place in the heavens, during which the perfect light of the Logos/Wisdom lost some of its brilliance, and was obliged to appear in history as the incomplete and defective female Creative Principle. From this popular and widespread sexual analysis came the Gnostic myth of the “Fallen Sophia,” who began her career as the “Upper Sophia,” still joined to a male companion, but ended as the “Lower Sophia,” fallen and dissociated from a masculine counterpart. But it also gave the Gnostics an opportunity to correlate the traditions of Judaism and Christianity with the further insights of Hellenistic science, for example, the Greek notion that existence comes forth in three graded levels: the pneumatic (or purely ideal), the psychic (or mental and emotional), and the hylic (or physical and materialistic). Combined with the view that “maleness” is complete and spiritual, and that “femaleness” is sensual and incomplete, this produced a kind of “Unified Field Theory” which could explain a whole range of graded phenomena in both scripture and history, especially the differences between the Jewish Creator-god and Christ. It would of course be the reunion of these separated powers through marriage that would restore the heavens and the universe to their pristine harmony and glory. In particular, it would be the reunion of the Fallen Sophia and her masculine counterSee pp. 153–54, 159–63, above. This also mirrors man’s syggeneia with preexistent Wisdom (Wis 8:17–20; Philo, On the Creation of the World, 146). 43 See pp. 24, 90 and 96, above. 42

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part—the “male” Logos—that would restore her and her fallen world to their intended syzygetic perfection, or as the Christians preferred to say, “the male Christ” and his “feminine Church.”

THE GNOSTIC PLEROMA The Gnostics now applied this holistic view of reality to an analysis of the Divine Fulness—that quintessential outpouring of God’s power which flowed down as a Light-Stream into the Temple to enervate and control the physical world.44 This was the same Fulness which the Father bestowed on his sons in order to make them divine (Col 2:9–10). A dissected “crosssection” of it would in fact reveal the same structure of syzygetic “malefemale images” which God had originally bestowed on creation. To “receive the Fulness” therefore meant that individuals must receive the heavenly image of marriage back into their own lives. We shall thus see that the Valentinian Gnostics warmly approved of marriage,45 primarily because it was a recreation of unions above. But it particularly meant that to be “married” to Christ one had to be married to a spouse, just as Sophia had to be reunited to her masculine Logos. The “Pleroma” was thus found to have emanated in successive generations of syzygetic pairs, called “Aeons” in most of the Gnostic literature. As the Kabbalists would later recall, these Aeons were derived from the same Semitic “Triad” of “Father-Mother-Son” which we encountered at the head of the Israelite pantheon,46 only extended by the Son and Daughter’s marriage into a “Tetrad” of “Father-Mother-Son-and-Daughter.”47 These “Son and Daughter” marriages were frequently repeated in many Gnostic systems, giving rise to three or four generations of male-female deities, for the basic meaning of the “Tetrad” was not simply that there was a typical family of four at the head of the pantheon, but rather that the parental model was to be continually imitated by its offspring, thereby producing an ongoing genealogical process throughout time.

See the summary on pp. 81–83, above. Henry Chadwick, in Alexandrian Christianity, ed. J. E. L. Oulton and H. Chadwick (Philadelphia, 1954), 10. 46 See page 15, above. 47 See the section on “The Kabbalstic Mystery,” below. 44 45

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The prototypes of these familial Tetrads can be clearly seen throughout the ancient Near East,48 for example, in the Egyptian Primal Pair, Shu and Tefnut, who gave birth to the Creative Pair, Geb and Nut, the gods of earth and sky; or in ancient Sumer, where the gods who represented heaven, earth, sea and air were arranged into successive pairs of male and female deities. In Babylon, the same deities reappeared with Semiticized names. At the very beginning was Apsu and Tiamat (the sweet and salt waters), whose coupling gave rise to all of the others. Chief among these were the Father, An, and his consort Antu; after them followed numerous subsidiary pairs of gods and goddesses who controlled the various processes of the cosmos. These included Enlil, the Lord of the storm and the Tablets of Destiny, whose consort was Ninlil; also Ea, the god of wisdom, and his consort, Ninki. And there was also Sin, the moon-god and father of the sun, who was married to Ningal, the goddess of reeds and fertility. Best known in the West were Tammuz and Ishtar (derived from the Sumerian Dumuzi and Inanna), whose love resurrected the dead husband after his death in the underworld.49 Their story was later transferred to Marduk, the Babylonian creator and restorer of life, after his own death and resurrection through his marriage to Sarpanit. The same essential story is paralleled by accounts in other Near Eastern cultures which describe the death, resurrection, and marriage of divine couples like Osiris and Isis, Adonis and Aphrodite, or Attis and Cybele, whose basic pattern has now been admitted by even doubters like Henri Frankfort, who long insisted that “differences” between the various regional versions far outweighed their “similarities.”50 After an exhaustive consideration of the ancient sources, T. N. D. Mettinger also comes to the 48 See R. Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York, 1967), 164–70. The elaboration of the basic Tetrad into increasing numbers of generations was also paralleled by many Gnostics in creating various versions of the structure of the Pleroma. This elaboration can be clearly seen in the late Semitic paganism documented by Philo Byblis between A.D. 64 and 141, and which Conrad L’Heureux believes to have been determinative in the writings of the Gnostics. “There can be no doubt that these materials are related,” Rank among the Canaanite Gods (Missoula, 1979), 32. 49 S. N. Kramer, who for some years doubted that Tammuz was actually resurrected from the underworld through his wife’s ministrations, has now admitted— thanks to the discovery of previously missing parts of the Sumerian text—that this was indeed the case. See his “Dumuzi’s Annual Resurrection: An Important Correction to Inanna’s Descent,” BASOR 183 (1966): 31. 50 Kingship and the Gods (Chicago, 1948), 287.

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conclusion that the originals would have had the same general meaning that Christians saw in the story of death and new life.51 Closer to Israel, of course, was the Canaanite “Tetrad” of Father El, his wife, Asherah, and their Son and Daughter, Baal and Anath. Again, it was the latter couple’s marriage which brought about the Son’s resurrection and the rebirth of nature each spring. Monotheistic Judaism was very successful in suppressing any hint of a comparable marriage between Yahweh and a consort,52 but there is evidence that he too had been a married god who died and was resurrected,53 a marriage that was effectively concealed by “allegorizing” it as the “marriage” of God and Israel. It may well be that Song of Songs preserves memories of this ancient marriage, now hidden behind the symbolic figures of “Solomon” and his “Shulamite Bride.”54 Indeed, William Albright had demonstrated on linguistic grounds that the Song had direct counterparts in the Ugaritic literature, which are at least a thousand years older than it is in its present form.55 This suggests that it originated in the same Canaanite background which was “retribalized” as “Israelite culture” during the early Iron-age, and would thus have been part of Israel’s own tradition at one time.56 See his The Riddle of Resurrection (Stockholm, 2001), 148–54. Now documented by Iron-age finds at Kuntillat Ajrud, in the Sinai Desert, and at Kirbhet el-Qom, near Hebron. See the discussion in the third edition of Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess (1990), 300–301. Asherah was at first the wife of El, but during the Monarchy, Yahweh seems to have taken over his place in the pantheon, along with his wife. This is a difficult problem which has not yet been solved to the general satisfaction of scholars. 53 E.g., Ezekiel 8:12–16, where Yahweh has departed from the earth, and is being lamented as “a Tammuz” by weeping women at the door of the Temple. His return is then welcomed by the symbolism of the rising sun on the day of equinox. See pp. 51–55, above. 54 A view especially promoted by T. J. Meek, “Canticles and the Tammus Cult,” American Journal of Semitic Literature 39 (1922–23): 1–14. 55 “Archaic Survivals in the Text of Canticles,” in Hebrew and Semitic Studies Presented to Godfry Rolles Driver, ed. Winston Thomas and W. D. McHardy (Oxford, 1963). 56 “We now see the emergence of Israel as a complex phenomenon involving, first, the arrival of new peoples in the central hills from a variety of sources, including especially the collapsing cities of the Egypto-Canaanite empire, and second, the gradual process of ethnic self-identification.” P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “The Origins of Ancient Israelite Religion,” in The Rise of Ancient Israel, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington, DC, 1992, 131–32). Also, William Dever: “Most of the early Israelites, or 51 52

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But the Canaanite/Proto-Israelite Tetrad57 was eventually enlarged into Sanchuniathon’s late-Phoenician theogony, now consisting of four successive generations of deities,58 with El and Baal being preceded by Ouranos, the god of the heavens, and he by his Father, Eliun—a name no doubt derived from Elyon (“The Highest”), one of El’s traditional epithets. Why these “older” generations were added to the basic Canaanite Tetrad remains unclear, but they appear to have been influenced by Hesiod’s theogony, and/or the well-known Hurro-Hittite theogony, as illustrated by Conrad L’Heureux (here shown without their female members);59 these in turn were remarkably similar to the theogonies which we find in the typical Gnostic Pleroma, according to the researches of Hans-Martin Schenke: Hurrian Sanchuniathon Gnostic60 Hesiod Alala Eliun Pro-Father Uranos Anu Uranos Father Kronos Kumarbi El-Kronos Christos Zeus Storm-God Zeus (Baal-Hadad) Savior Schenke traces the Gnostic succession back to an original two generations of Father-Mother-and-Son, which by “reduplication” (Verdoppelung) gave rise to an entire sequence of “begettings.”61 In the resulting Tetrad, as described in the Apocalypse of John, Bently Layton would place after “Christos” proto-Israelites, were indigenous Canaanites” (“How to Tell a Canaanite from an Israelite,” in ibid., 149). See also Dever’s Recent Archeological Discoveries and Biblical Research (Seattle, 1990), and his comprehensive review article “Israel, History of (Archaeology and the Israelite ‘Conquest’),” in ABD, 3:546–58; also, Niels Peter Lemche, “Israel, History of (Premonarchic Period),” in ABD, 3:536–45, discussing Israel’s premonarchial history from the same point of view (both 1992). 57 Conrad L’Heureux has recently noted that the Ugaritic records describe only the two generations of El and Baal, and were not as yet extended into the generations listed by Sanchuniathon. See his Rank among the Canaanite Gods, 43. See also p. 15, above, for more on the original Semitic Triad, and note 24, p. 36. 58 Ca. 600 B.C. This date was assigned by Wm. F. Albright, on linguistic grounds, though Otto Eissfeldt would place Sanchuniathon in the second millennium B.C. See the discussion of L’Heureux, Rank among the Canaanite Gods, 41. 59 Ibid., 32. He also observes that “there can be no doubt that these materials are related” (ibid.) 60 Taken from H.-M. Schenke, “Nag Hamadi Studien III,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 14 (1962): 353. Schenke, however, believes that the original form of this succession was the primal Triad of Father-Mother-Son. 61 Ibid., 354, 355.

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the “Four Luminaries,” or the “four-faced” Cherubim who stood at the head of Ezekiel’s Light-Stream.62 These in turn became the archetypes of the four epochs of Gnostic history—the first three being antediluvian (i.e., the first, the second, and the third to ninth generations of mankind), and the last being the world after Noah.63 Thus, even the material cosmos will be seen to have emerged from images found in the Divine Fulness, or the intermediate world of light. The Gnostics may also have wished to work into this “Unified Field Equation” the Heliopolitan succession of Atum/Re, Shu-Tefnut, Geb-Nut, and the sibling pairs, Osiris-Isis and Seth-Nephthys—or even Plato’s famous list of primal deities, which also included a “Craftsman-Demiurge.”64 The result was a universal picture of the Pleroma which accounted for a surprising number of historical and religious phenomena, and which at the same time agreed with the biblical picture of man’s origin and progress through the world. In short, the ancient Light-Stream of Ezekiel and the Wisdom writers—later developed into a coherent metaphysic by Philo— evolved into the New Testament “Fulness,” and finally into the Gnostic “Pleroma,” becoming in the process an “Intermediate World of Light” which linked the Transcendent to the Earthly, and which contained the eternal images and attributes which God desired to impress upon his physical creation.65 But it also explained the tragic events which befell that creation, and which necessitated its eventual redemption.

In Ezekiel 1; see pp. 248–49, above. The Gnostic Scriptures (Garden City, NY, 1987), 15. 64 Philo had already claimed that the Greeks derived their wisdom from the Mosaic revelation. It is significant in this regard that the original Hebrew version of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (ca. 1000 B.C.) exactly parallels Philo’s account in the Critias: 62 63

When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance … he set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But Yahweh’s portion was his people, Jacob the lot of his inheritance (Deut. 32:8–9, recently discovered at Qumran). The gods distributed the whole earth by regions … They apportioned to each his own righteous allotment … Then the gods received diverse districts as their portions and reigned over them (Critias, 109b–c).

65 One cannot fail to see that such ideas helped to create the doctrines of NeoPlatonism, though these were actually based on Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, which only used philosophy to better explain them.

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It is not our purpose, however, to discuss “Gnosticism” per se,66 but rather to account for its development from the traditions of the Temple and the Light-Stream. Nor are we concerned with cataloguing the variety of “myths” which the Gnostics produced. Actually, these were not “myths” at all, for they were not derived from independent religious sources, nor did they represent “foreign” cultural traditions which had somehow been grafted onto Christianity.67 Instead, they were “mathematical” constructs, deliberately designed to explain the mysterious events which took place within the biblical Pleroma, using “personified characters” instead of algebraic symbols. We read, for instance, of dramatis personae with names like Ennoia (“Thought”), Bythos (“Depth”), Sige (“Silence”), Barbelo (“God Is Four”[?]), Logos (“Word”), Sophia (“Wisdom”), Aletheia (“Truth”), and Zoe (“Life”), none of which were considered to be ontic beings with independent existences, though they accounted for the structure of God’s actual family (cf. Eph 3:14–15). In this, they bore striking resemblances to the gods and goddesses of Semitic prehistory, and would have been the archetypal patterns (or “Celestial DNA”) which gave rise to such beings in the proto-Israelite pantheon. What we actually find in the Gnostic Pleroma, then, are abstract symbols for the divine attributes and interactions which comprise God’s New Testament “Fulness,” and which he promised to bestow on others through the process of “spiritual begetting.” In short, they were what the Gnostics discovered when they “dissected” the Divine Nature and revealed what it was that bore God’s power and deity to his new sons and daughters. A great many individuals, however, have been fooled by the plethora of unfamiliar names and personifications which they find in Gnostic texts, and have frequently concluded that these must have come from some “foreign” source having little to do with legitimate Christianity. But the Gnostics were not the inheritors of exotic religious traditions, but rather scholars and exegetes who attempted to understand the New Testament in a logical and comprehensive way, and thus to be able to correlate it with all of the The Gnostics never in fact claimed to belong to anything called “Gnosticism,” this being a later designation imposed on it by outsiders. “Gnosticism” was instead a particular way of viewing Scripture, one which its followers avowed was strictly based on Christian doctrine, but one which was divided into many different “sects,” as was so-called “orthodoxy.” 67 Gnosticism’s occasional appeal to outside traditions was only to support and verify its own doctrines and to prove that they were “universal.” In this, the Gnostic method resembled the method of Philo, who used Greek learning to support his Jewish ideas. 66

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religious and scientific phenomena which they perceived throughout history, especially the “Lesser Law” of Judaism and its relationship to the “Fuller Law” of Christ. The following version of the Gnostic Pleroma is fairly standard and will serve to typify how the Gnostics generally thought about the preexistence, prehistory, and earthly career of mankind, as well as Christ’s redeeming work to save it from its fallen condition. In its simplest form (as found in The Exegesis of the Soul), the originally “virgin” (i.e., sexually complete)68 power in the Pleroma fell into matter and separated itself into masculine and feminine portions; the latter became a prostitute and prayed to the Father for help. After being baptized and purified, her masculine counterpart—who was actually her Brother, the FirstBorn Son—was sent to her. Their marriage in the Bridal Chamber reunited them as a “virginal” and “androgynous” Unity, symbolized by the marriages of earthly husbands and wives; then they returned to heaven, regenerated by the Father’s grace. The Valentinians explained this basic scheme with additional details which made it still more comprehensive. They began by explaining how the “One God,” who had existed by himself before time, divided into male and female polarities, through which he initiated the dynamic process of creation. These archetypal poles were the “Propator” (or Father of All) and “Silence” (the Mother of All), which in turn gave birth to a Son and Daughter called “Intelligence” and “Reality.” Thus originated the Primal Tetrad of “Father-Mother-Son-and-Daughter.” But “Reality,” driven by an insatiable urge to create, broke away from “Intelligence” and was exiled from the Pleroma. Her passions became matter (the hylic elements), and her repentance the psychic souls, whereas her vision of the Savior (an embodiment of “Intelligence”) bestowed a “weak” pneumatic nature on them. The psychic souls were then given “formation” and “education” amidst the hylic elements. Their perfection will be completed when the pneumatic Savior “strengthens” and regathers their pneumatic portions to himself (lrenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.1.1–8.5). Meanwhile, their education amongst the hylic elements would serve as a “school-master to bring them unto Christ” (Gal 3:24). In the Gospel of Philip this was expressed with the saying, “When we were Hebrews we had only our mother, but when we became Christians we had both father and mother” (52:22–25).

68

See pp. 47–48, above.

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Their restoration (apokatastasis) to their original oneness with Christ will be the great “Wedding Feast” promised by Scripture, and it will take place in the Heavenly “Bridal Chamber,” prefigured below by the rejoining of human “Adams” and “Eves” in the earthly Bridal Chamber, i.e., the Jerusalem Temple: When Eve was in Adam death did not exist. When she was separated from him death came into being. If he enters again and attains his former self, death will be no more (Gospel of Philip 68:23–27). If the woman had not separated from the man, she would not die with the man. His separation become the beginning of death. Because of this Christ came to repair the separation which was from the beginning, and again unite the two, and to give life to those who died as a result of the separation and unite them. But the woman is united to her husband in the Bridal Chamber. Indeed, those who have united in the Bridal Chamber will no longer be separated (ibid., 70:9–20).

It will thus be seen that the pneumatic and psychic principles which presently operate in the world are but extensions of either complete or incomplete sexual principles which originated in the Divine, and that the marriages of their earthly antitypes are but stages in their ongoing reunion and salvation. Using the “mythological” names which the Valentinians devised for these abstract sexual principles, the early Church Father, Irenaeus, recounts how Bythos, a “Perfect Unity” of Propator and Sige (Father and Mother), gave rise to Nous (“Intelligence”) and Aletheia (“Reality”), which was also a “Perfect Unity” (i.e., Son and Daughter). Nous further devolved into the Logos (the “Word”), and Aletheia into Zoe (“Life”); Zoe in turn divided into thirty male-female “Aeons,” who were God’s creative “attributes.”69 Sophia (“Wisdom”) was the final manifestation of the devolving Female Principle (Sige→Aletheia→Zoe→Sophia), falling into matter as the earthly Church, while the Savior was the final manifestation of the devolving Masculine Principle (Propater→Nous→Logos→Christos), both united and incarnate in the perfect flesh of Christ. This of course presupposes that Jesus himself had been a married individual, as we read in the Gospel of Philip: 69 E.g., “Man,” “Mingling,” “Undecaying,” “Pleasure,” “Blending,” “Happiness,” “Faith,” “Ancestral,” “Ecclesiastical,” etc. These “attributes” correspond roughly to the “Sephiroth” from which the Kabbalistic world was created (see “The Kabbalistic Great Mystery,” below). It is also said that the number “thirty” represents the “hidden” years of the Logos prior to his public mission (e.g., the “preexistent” career of Christ, corresponding to his thirty earthly years).

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And the wife (koinōnos) of the Savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth (63:32–36).

Indeed, earthly marriage was considered by them to be the reflection of the heavenly marriage in the Pleroma and also to be the “catalyst” for the human couple’s soteriological “marriage” to Christ. (This we shall detail in the following section when we discuss “The Gnostic Bridal Chamber.”) The so-called “Sethian” Gnostics developed this analysis still further, hoping to explain how the male and female characteristics of God became attached to both “Adam and Eve” and “Christ and the Church,” and in such a way that the marriage of the human pair could symbolize and “catalyze” the marriage of the heavenly pair. Thus we read in the Apocryphon of John that the “Father of the All” began his creative work by emitting his Female Principle, Barbelo, and that they together begot five androgynous sets of divine attributes: “Thought,” “Foreknowledge,” “Love,” “Indestructibility,” and “Truth” (4:10–6:10). These “attributes” flowed into their Son, the “Thrice Male,” or “Self-Originate” (Autogenes)—meaning the Father’s self-replicating nature—or the uncreated power which continues forever by means of posterity (7:15–30). The Son’s luminous “attributes” had four “Faces,” corresponding to the four Cherubim at the head of the “Light-Stream” (Ezek 1:10; 1 Enoch 9, 40, 71; Rev 4:6–7); these were the “Four Luminaries” (Armozel, Oriel, Daveithei, Eleleth), found chiefly in documents of “Sethian” provenance. Armozel contained the preexistent Christ and Adam (Autogenes and Adamas),70 while Oriel contained the preexistent Seth, and Daveithei his preexistent posterity (the preexistent Church). Thus all were in possession of the same “likeness and image” which the Father gave to Adam (cf. Gen 5:3 and 1:26). In this way was created the “True Race” of Immortals, i.e., the preexistent spirits of the patriarchs and the Saints, including those who would repent and be glorified at a later date. Eleleth, however, contained certain souls who would be slow to be converted (Apocryphon of John, 8:28–9:24). The seed of Cain, on the other hand, would be begotten by the future Demiurge (ibid., 10:27–28, 34) and therefore would possess his “darkened” (i.e., psychic) power (11:7–15). This appears to have been deduced from Genesis 4:1, where Eve states: “I have gotten a man from Yahweh.” It was at this point that Sophia (who was the last emanation in Eleleth) wished to create without the help of her Consort (Apocryphon of John, 9:25– 70

Who in the Exegesis of the Soul were preexistently brothers (132:9–10).

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35). The result of her one-sided effort was Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge (10:1– 19), who unknowingly received some of his Mother’s pneumatic power (10:20–21; 13:26–28), thereby supposing himself to be the “One True God” (11:15–22; cf. Isa 43:10). Yet because he was mostly “darkness,” he diluted her power, causing it to become “weak” (Apocryphon of John, 11:10–15). In its “weakened” (i.e., psychic) form, it was shared with the Demiurge’s seven angels (12:4–10), who used it to create the Hebdomad, or the seven “planetary spheres” (11:22–35; 12:25–26).71 But when Sophia saw how her pneumatic power had been “diminished” (13:14–17), she implored the Pleroma to rescue it. Her heavenly Consort (the Savior) responded by raising her to an “intermediate” place (i.e., Judaism), where she could rest until her “deficiency” was corrected (13:33–14:13). Then he set about to lure Ialdabaoth into relinquishing Sophia’s imprisoned light by placing it in human flesh; this he would later rescue by means of the Atonement. To set this daring plan into motion, the voice of the “Father-Mother” reached down to Ialdabaoth, revealing that a god higher than himself exists (14:14–15), at the same time disclosing his image in human form (14:21–24; 15:8–9).72 When Ialdabaoth and his angels saw his wonderful image reflected on the waters, they immediately began to create a man after its “likeness” (15:1–3), clothing it with their own psychic characteristics (15:13–18:2) and the hylic elements of matter (18:2–19:1). This psychic-hylic creature, however, remained “inactive and motionless” (19:13–14) until Ialdabaoth was tricked into blowing his spirit into its face (19:23–25),73 not realizing that this was These were symbolized by the seven-branched Menorah in the Temple. Compare the human appearance of God’s “glory” in Ezekiel 1:26–27. 73 There was also a tradition in Late Judaism that the original Adam was at first a worm-like creature who crept on the earth and could not stand upright until God breathed his soul into him. See Filoramo, History of Gnosticism, 92, 221. Gershom Scholem connects this tradition with the legend of the Golem, who was made of the clay, and had to be awakened with magical commands using the Sacred Name. “Die Vorstellung von Golem,” Eranos Jahrbuch 22 (1953): 240ff. Louis Ginzberg also makes mention of such a tradition: “When God was about to put a soul into Adam’s clod-like body, He said: At what point shall I breathe the soul into him?” This tradition may have been extant when the Gnostics produced their great synthesis of religious knowledge. For instance, R. Johanan b. Haninah, an Amora who flourished in the third century, opined that during the first twelve hours of Adam’s existence he had remained lifeless (b. Sanhedrin 38b), an idea based on Psalm 139:16, which refers to his body as a golem. The idea that holy men might also create golems is developed in Sanhedrin 65b (Scholem, Kabbalah, 351). 71 72

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in fact some of Sophia’s “weak” pneumatic power. Thus “Adam” received a pneumatic spirit of his own, and became more intelligent than the angels (19:32–20:5). But because he was “free from sin,” they became jealous of their intended victim, and imprisoned him in “the lowest region of matter,” where they hoped to subjugate him and capture his pneumatic light for themselves (20:6–14). But the Father-Mother sent him a helper, called Epinoia (a personal manifestation of the “Beneficent Spirit,” 20:15–16), who could teach him concerning the true source of his pneumatic element and show him the way back to heaven (20:23). Thus Sophia’s “deficiency” would be corrected, and her “seed,” the race of Seth, restored to its “fulness” (21:20–21, 27–28). The Demiurge next attempted to imprison the newborn Adam and the indwelling Epinoia in carnal mortality, so that he could control the coveted pneumatic elements (20:25–21:16). Thus he placed Adam in the seductive luxury of Paradise, where the “Tree of Life” would maintain him in slothful indolence (21:16–25). But Epinoia enlightened him by means of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” which taught him of his divine potential and “awakened his thinking” (22:3–8; 21:16); indeed, it was the Savior himself who ordained that Adam should eat of the fruit of this Tree (22:9), communicating his will through Epinoia (22:28–32): It was I (Christ) who brought about that they ate … The Serpent taught them to eat from wickedness and lust … that Adam might be useful to him. But Adam knew that he was disobedient, due to the light that was in him, which corrected him in his thinking (Apocryphon of John 22:3–18). The powers thought that it was by their own power and will that they (caused Adam to partake), but the Holy Spirit was accomplishing everything through them as it wished (Gospel of Philip 55:14–19).

The Demiurge and his angels then sought to remove Epinoia74 from Adam and take her for themselves, but she skillfully eluded them (22:28–32). They were able, however, to obtain an earthly “Eve” from his rib, one which possessed the likeness of Epinoia (22:34–36). The real Epinoia then taught Adam to recognize in his wife this image of his true spiritual self (“he recognized his counter-image,” 23:9), it being his personal allotment of Christ’s Spirit (referred to by the Valentinians as the “angel”). It is this “angel” At this point, it seems that Epinoia (actually the Holy Spirit) and Adam’s own pneumatic spirit are one and the same. Cf. 1 Corinthians 6:17: “He who cleaves to the Lord is one Spirit.” 74

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which men receive when they marry a wife in the Bridal Chamber (“they will send him his Consort,” 23:14–15), meaning that the earthly union “catalyzes” a spiritual union with the Savior (Eph 5:31–32). In short, when the psychic man marries a spouse (Epinoia’s “image”), he receives the pneumatic nature which she symbolizes, and is made complete. This explains why the Gnostics supposed that marrying a wife in the Earthly Bridal Chamber would simultaneously “marry” them to the pneumatic Christ in the Heavenly Bridal Chamber, and in the process restore God’s Male-Female Image75 at all levels, corporate and personal, heavenly and earthly. That the Gnostics deemed this procedure to be vitally necessary for their salvation suggests that such a doctrine had previously existed in the Primitive Church. This was undoubtedly the ancient tradition which Heinrich Schlier detected behind the Pauline “Great Mystery” (pp. 159–61, above), according to which the preexistent spirits of the Church had once been “consubstantial” with the preexistent “Bridegroom,” and must again be reunited to him—one couple at a time—thus reconstituting the heavenly “Body of Christ.”

THE GNOSTIC BRIDAL CHAMBER As long as the Jerusalem Temple was still standing Christians could imagine that the embrace of the Cherubim symbolized Christ’s “marriage” to the Church, as well as the marriages of their earthly antitypes. Paul characterized this sacred paradigm as the Ephesian “Great Mystery,” wherein the “marriage” of Christ and the Church was paralleled by the marriages of men and women (Eph 5:31–33). In 1 Corinthians 11:11 he further opined that “the man is not without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord,” i.e., when spiritually united to the Savior. We already saw how the early Gospel of Thomas referred to the “marriage” of Jesus/Wisdom and the disciples as “the two becoming one, so that the male is no longer male, and the female is no longer female” (Log. 22).76 This union was depicted as a sacred embrace (“When you place eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image”), no doubt patterned after the Embracing Cherubim in the Holy of Holies, the latter being referred to as a “Bridal Chamber” (Log. 104). This is undoubtedly what Matthew’s Jesus was speaking of when he asked, “Can the children of the Bridal Chamber 75 76

Genesis 1:26–27. See p. 100, above.

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mourn, as long as the Bridegroom is with them?” (Matt 9:15), and what John the Baptist meant when he declared that Jesus was the “Bridegroom” (John 3:29), and he the “friend” of the Bridegroom. Such an embrace and “marital union” was still recalled by the late first (or early second) century Odes of Solomon, which tell how “Immortal Life embraced me and kissed me” and how “the arm of the Bridegroom over the Bride” yokes them together; the result was that “He who is joined to him who is immortal truly shall become immortal.”77 After the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, many Christians felt it necessary to construct Bridal Chambers of their own, where similar “marriages” could be enacted. The Marcosians,78 for example, were said to construct a Bridal Chamber (numphon) and perform a mystical rite with those who are being initiated, pronouncing certain invocations, and they affirm that it is a spiritual marriage that is celebrated by them, after the likeness of the unions above (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.21.3).

Nymphon is also the word which the Gospel of Philip would use to depict the Jerusalem Holy of Holies (69:24–25), where Christ and the Church were simultaneously united with the unions of human couples.79 Marcus, their leader, in fact characterized their ritual embraces with the same kind of language which Philo had used to describe the Embracing Cherubim, or God’s male-female “powers,” as they united in the Temple: And these Powers, being simultaneously clasped in each other’s embrace, do sound the glory of Him by whom they were produced (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.14.7). See pp. 187–92, above. A late second century Valentinian sect. 79 See the complete quotations on pp. 269–70, above. Though there is no evidence that couples were actually married inside of the Jerusalem Temple, the Mishnah records that it was on the Feast of Tabernacles that men traditionally chose their brides (Ta‘anit 4:8). Josephus (Antiquities 15.11.5) adds that the pure then “came in together with their wives.” The medieval traveler, Estori ben Moses, further quoted from a Rabbi ben Hyrkanus to the effect that Solomon had provided two gates of entry, one for mourners, and the other for married couples. Deuteronomy 23:1–2 in fact barred access to the Temple to those who were sexually imperfect, suggesting that one had to be married before being allowed inside, and that the act of henosis which the Cherubim depicted then provided spiritual witness of their hoped for union with YHWH. As we shall see, however, the Gnostics appear to have actually married couples inside of their “Bridal Chambers,” since Hebrews 10:19–20 declares that Christians should have personal access to the Holy of Holies. 77 78

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Though he multiplies their number to seven (the original number of components in the Philonic Light-Stream), they are “simultaneously enclasped” in imitation of the divine unions in the Pleroma (which he refers to as the “Heavenly Womb”), and from whence come the souls of infants, who cry “in praise of God” as they are born (ibid., 1.14.8). Hippolytus also records that the Simonians (another late secondcentury Gnostic group) engaged in sacred embraces to promote the marriage of Christ and the Church: Indeed, they count themselves blessed because of this union, and say it is perfect love and the Holy of Holies (Refutations, 6.19.5).

Irenaeus, however, claimed that these embraces were not very spiritual, because some of the females became pregnant (Against Heresies, 1.6.3).80 Indeed, early Christians were often accused of immoral behavior.81 Justin Martyr, on the other hand, felt obliged to protest that promiscuous intercourse “is not one of our mysteries” (First Apology, 29). Schenke likewise believes that the ritual embrace in the Valentinian Bridal Chamber was only symbolic and culminated in a simple kiss:82 For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth. For this reason we also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace which is in one another (Gospel of Philip 59:2–5).

Another second century text which depicts these ritual embraces and their soteriological effect is the Gospel of Truth: They cling to his head, which is a repose for them. And they hold themselves to him so that, as it were, they receive from his face something like kisses (46:28–34. trans. Bently Layton). They possess his head which is a rest for them, and they hold on close to him, as though to say that they have participated in his face by means of kisses (ibid., trans. George W. McRae).

This may have been polemic, however, since (as Bousset observed long ago) the reporter no longer understood the true meaning of the rite, and viewed it as a deception practiced on unwary females. Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 316; quoted in R. M. Grant, “The Mystery of Marriage in the Gospel of Philip,”Vigiliae Christianae 15 (1961): 133. 81 See pp. 204–7, above. 82 “Das Evangelium nach Philippus,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 84 (January, 1959): 5. 80

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Though this was also a Valentinian “Gnostic” production, it was still “incomparably closer to normative Christianity than that of Valentinius’ later disciples, who much more than he were influenced by syncretism.83 Thus we are probably reading of a rite which belonged to the authentic traditions of the early Church.84 Kendrick Grobel’s translation suggests that this was not merely the embrace of Christ and the Church, but the embrace of a husband and wife inside of the Bridal Chamber, through which they united themselves to Christ’s “Face”: Theirs is His head, which becomes a repose for them, and they are enclasped as they approach Him, so that they have partaken of His face by means of the embraces (46:28–34).

This reading again supports the Valentinian notion that one’s soteriological union with Christ is “catalyzed” by the union of the man and woman in the Bridal Chamber. We earlier saw that this mystery of spiritual fusion was also depicted in the “orthodox” epistle, 2 Clement (dating from the second century), which likewise stipulated that men shall enter the kingdom “when the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female” (12).85 Indeed, this important idea would still be quoted verbatim by Christian writers in the Middle Ages (e.g., in the Tractatus Aureus Hermetis)86 as the hidden secret of alchemy, a secret going all of the way back to the Gospel of Thomas and Paul’s “Great Mystery.” But the most important use of this archetypal

83 Karl Heussi, quoted in Kendrick Grobel, The Gospel of Truth (New York, 1960), 15. 84 Kendrick Grobel places the composition of the Gospel of Truth at around A.D. 150 (Gospel of Truth, 28), that is to say, about the same time that W. C. van Unnik supposes Philip to have been written. George W. MacRae proposes “the middle or second half of the second century,” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 37, although van Unnik suggests a date as early as A.D. 140–145, due to the “primitiveness” of its Valentinianism. Jung Codex (London, 1955), 54, 97–104. In any case, it too had to have been in existence prior to A.D. 180, when Irenaeus disapprovingly spoke of it (Against Heresies, 3.11.9). Like the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth remains relatively free of late Gnostic fantasies. It makes, for example, no mention of Wisdom’s fall from the Pleroma (though the figure of Plane, or “Error,” may be an early form of her in maturing Valentinian doctrine, Grobel, 24). 85 See p. 101, above. 86 Thomas’s “the above as the below” and “the outer as the inner” became the Tractate’s “superius/inferius” and “externis/internis.”

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embrace would be made in the second century Gospel of Philip,87 to which we have already alluded several times. Here we find a graded sequence of ordinances, beginning with the “cleansing bath” of baptism, leading through a

The opinions of early commentators concerning the date of the Gospel of Philip vary considerably. Henri-Charles Puech fixed it generally during the second or early third centuries, because of its Valentinian associations (in HenneckeSchneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 1:278). R. McLain Wilson favored the second century, because “in Philip the Gnostic system has not yet dissipated into fantasy as in some other later texts” (Gospel of Philip, 3–4). It in fact retains numerous points of contact with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, though we cannot make too much of this, since even “the Gnosics remained fairly close to the ‘orthodox’ Church down to about 180” (ibid., 4). The author of Philip obviously considered himself to be a Christian (52:21–24; 75:30–36), and one who recognized the Apostolic tradition (62:7ff); Valentinus, according to Tertullian, was even considered for a bishop’s seat in the Roman Church. W. C. van Unnik maintains that Valentinus was himself the author of Philip, which would necessarily place its composition around A.D. 140–145 (The Jung Codex, 54, 97–104.). Andrew K. Helmbold, in considering both the relatively undeveloped state of Philip’s Valentinianism and the book’s own insistence that it is a “Christian” work, concludes that “it would be difficult to make this claim after the time of Irenaeus” (ca. A.D. 180) “Gnosticim,” in Wycliffe Bible Encyclopedia, 1:688). Just as the previous concensus that the Gospel of Thomas was a “Gnostic” work from “ca. A.D. 140” has now been shown to be unwarranted (thanks to its lingering associations with the Wisdom tradition), it would appear that many conceptions in the Gospel of Philip once thought to be “Gnostic” are likewise of an earlier theological provenance. Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics (New York, 1960), even believes that Philip came from early Jewish-Christian circles (ibid., 225), though Valentinus had begun to make his own novel use of some of them. It therefore seems prudent to choose a somewhat earlier date for Philip than Wesley Isenberg’s “second half of the second century” (in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 131), just as Davies chose an earlier date for the Gospel of Thomas. In fact, both contain the same traditional Wisdom themes of “Union with Light” in the Bridal Chamber, “putting on the Divine Image,” and the restoration of Adam’s archetypal “maleness,” as well as the Christian apocalyptic themes of the preexistent Church, Adam and Eve as surrogates for Christ and the Church, and the use of human marriage as a soteriological sacrament. Thus we are inclined to accept van Unnik’s original estimate of a date around A.D. 140 for the composition of the Gospel of Philip, though we must of course allow for the possibility that various additions or reworkings of the text occurred before it was committed to the hand of the copyist at Nag Hammadi in the early fourth century. 87

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“resurrection” and something called “the redemption,”88 and culminating in the rite of the Bridal Chamber: Baptism has the resurrection and the redemption. The redemption [is to hasten into] the Bridal Chamber; but the Bridal Chamber is supreme … You will not find [anything like] it (Gospel of Philip 69:25–27).89

In the Bridal Chamber one again finds the earthly “images” of marriage which catalyze the heavenly “marriage” with the Savior and a return to the perfect state of the Beginning: Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. One will not receive truth in any other way. There is a rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is certainly necessary that they must rise again through the image … The image must rise again through the image. The Bridegroom and the image must enter through the image into the truth; this is the restoration (apokatastasis, 67:9–18).90

In fact, one must take on the image of the heavenly Bridegroom and his Bride through one’s own earthly marriage: If one does not become a bridegroom or a bride (one) will not be able to see the Bridegroom or the Bride (ibid., 82:24–26).

This “Great Mystery” was understood quite literally by the Valentinians, being both “a reenactment of the archetypal situation”91 and its “catalyst.” Thus it was at once a real human marriage and an indispensable “foretaste and assurance of ultimate union with an angelic, heavenly counter-

88 The “Redemption” may possibly refer to salvation from “spiritual death” (“at-one-ment” with God), as opposed to salvation from “mortal death” (resurrection). See Eric Segelberg’s “The Coptic-Gnostic Gospel according to Philip and Its Sacramental System” Numen 7 (1960): 189–200. These appear to correspond to the following sacramental system: “The Lord did everything in a mystery: a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption (apolytrōsis) and a bridal chamber” (Gospel of Philip 67:27–30). 89 Using Schenke’s suggestions for filling the lacunae. See R. McLain Wilson, The Gospel of Philip (London, 1962, 140–141). 90 For apokatastasis Wilson gives “the final consummation and restoration of all things” (ibid., 129). 91 Andrew Helmbold, The Nag Hammadi Gnostic Texts and the Bible (Grand Rapids, 1967), 70.

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part.”92 “The object in view was evidently to anticipate the final union … at the end of time, realizing it in the sacrament.”93 Thus the “Lesser Mystery” of human love led to the “Greater Mystery” of union with Christ. The Gospel of Philip further tells us that the Bridal Chamber where this union took place was eikonikos (65:11–12), a word which is usually translated as “mirrored” or “mirror-like.” According to the Greek-English Dictionary of Liddell and Scott, eikonikos can also have the additional nuance of “simulated,” a meaning which comes out clearly in the following passage: This is the man created ‘according to the image’ (eikonikos), i.e., ‘created by simulating the reflected image’ (72:14).

This reminds us again of Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians: We all reflect as in a mirror the glory of the Lord; thus we are transformed into his image from glory to glory (3:18).

We also recall how the Wisdom writers and Philo described the contents in the Holy of Holies as “mirrors” of God’s glory (Wis 7:25–27; Philo, Questions on Genesis, 1.57; Who Is the Heir?, 112; etc.), designed to reflect God’s image to the beholder and to fill his mind with its “multitudinous light,” thereby rejoining the light of the soul to the light which comes from God.94 The “Final Document” issued by the 1966 Messina Colloquium on Gnosticism therefore defined the goal of Gnostic worship as (bringing together) the divine identity of the knower (the Gnostic), the known (the divine substance of one’s transcendent self), and the means by which one knows (gnosis as an important divine faculty to be awakened and actualized).95

How this took place will be the subject of the next section.

Isenberg, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 1977 edition, 131. See also Wilson, who agrees that a real marriage took place, which was “the earthly counterpart of the final union in the Pleroma” (Gospel of Philip, 121). There “the sacred marriage of the Aeons” (Christ and the Church) “provided the model for earthly activity, and the Valentinian sacrament of the bridal chamber was in some sense a foretaste of the final bliss” (ibid., 96). 93 Kurt Rudolph and R. McL. Wilson, Gnosis: the Nature and History of Gnosticism (San Francisco, 1983), 245. 94 See pp. 58–62, above. 95 In Bianchi, Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, xxvii. 92

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THE MYSTERY OF THE BRIDAL CHAMBER In a very important paper, which appeared in 1980, Jorunn Buckley provided a valuable summary of the actual process by which salvation took place in the Valentinian Bridal Chamber.96 We believe that if one adds her indispensable analysis to Philo’s interpretation of the Sacred Marriage in the Holy of Holies,97 and these to Stevan L. Davies’ study of the Gospel of Thomas,98 one will obtain a very clear picture of the “Great Mystery” as it once existed in early Judaism and Primitive Christianity. Buckley begins by quoting the author’s belief (already encountered in the Gospel of Thomas, Log. 77) that Truth, which existed since the beginning is sown everywhere. And many see it as it is sown, but few are they who see it as it is reaped (Gospel of Philip 55:19–22).99

This is because men in their present worldly state are blind and dissimilar to the Truth. But they must attain a state of “divinity” while yet in the world if they would attain it after death. Indeed, it is not possible for anyone to see anything of the things that actually exist unless one becomes like them … But you saw something in that place and you became those things. What you see you shall become (61:27–38; our emphasis).

Buckley summarizes the philosophical implications of these statements as follows: Like influences the like. The next step, however, the acquisition of divine identity, seems to require that the distinction between subject and object be abolished. So there may, in effect, be no difference between subject and object, simply because the usual separation of the world and the aeon no longer holds. If identification with the divine is thus obtained, while the believer remains in the flesh, this identification enables him to behave as if he had already left this world.100

This process she conveniently epitomizes with the following short formula: “identification of knower-known-means of knowledge,”101 which in effect says that “A Cult-Mystery in the Gospel of Philip,” JBL 99 (1980): 569–81. See pp. 38 ff, above. 98 See pp. 88 ff, above. 99 Buckley, “Cult-Mystery,” 571. 100 Ibid., 571. 101 Ibid., 570. Compare the Messina statement on p. 280, above. 96 97

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the merging of the initiate’s image with the image of God takes place by means of a third image—the means of knowledge—which is common to them both102 and which will inform and direct their “mystical fusion.” Buckley finds that the required means of knowledge in the Gospel of Philip was the “mirrored (eikonikos) Bridal Chamber” (65:11–12).103 Though its blatantly sexual images were considered by the world to be a “defilement of the form,” they were nevertheless indispensable, for through them, one was introduced to the “undefiled relationship” of Christ and the Church (64:35ff): What is the resurrection? The image must rise again through the image. The Bridegroom and the image must enter through the image into the Truth (67:14–18).

Acquiring the proper image in the Bridal Chamber, then, while yet in the flesh, was the sacramental means of assuring one of “full identity with the divine entity,”104 even “the transition from being a Christian to becoming Christ” (67:26–27):105 You saw something in that place and you became those things. You saw the Spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw the Father, you shall become Father (61:27–31).

For this purpose, the Holy of Holies (or “Bridal Chamber”) was opened to us who are below, in order that we should go in to the secret of the Truth … But we shall to in through despised symbols and weaknesses (85:11–15, trans. Wilson).

The “despised symbols” are of course “marriage in the world,” whose image is a “defilement” of the True. But it is through them that one will merge

102 Davies referred to this common link as a spatial metaphor: “This image of God can be recaptured temporally … or discerned cognitively … and possibly even apprehended spatially, although it is not clear how one might spatially apprehend such an Image. Nevertheless, one may anticipate such a spatial metaphor.” The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (New York, 1983), 69. We believe that the Embracing Cherubim—which he seems to have been unaware of, though he clearly “anticipated” them—were the “spatial metaphor” which linked the viewer to the image of the Divine. 103 Buckley, “Cult-Mystery,” 572. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid.; our emphasis.

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one’s own image with the Divine Image. This is why the Gospel of Philip insists that No one shall be able to see the Bridegroom and the Bride unless one becomes a bridegroom or a bride (82:24–26, trans. Wilson; our emphasis).

Marriage in the Bridal Chamber thus turns out to be the third link in Buckley’s formula, “identification of knower-known-means of knowledge,” i.e., the catalyst and the governing paradigm which actualizes the merging of the initiate’s image with the Image of God (Gen 1:26). We have preferred to use Wilson’s translation at this point, because his expression, “despised symbols,” graphically indicates that the author of Philip was still thinking of the symbolism of the Embracing Cherubim (or as the author of Gospel of Truth calls them, “the embraces”). Whether or not actual statues had been resupplied for use in second-century “Bridal Chambers,” we cannot say; but their symbolism certainly did. This symbolism may even have been re-created by the participants themselves, as reflected in mirrors, in order to provide the necessary image which would bring about the identification of their own images with the “image” of the Divine. (This will be discussed in the following section.) Buckley thus continues: “The third element, the means of knowledge, has now become visible. Going through the ‘lowly and weak image’” (i.e., Wilson’s “despised symbols” of earthly marriage) “the believer acquires the pure union … The Gospel’s own insistent claim to the effect that types and images are needed to reach salvation, ought to be taken literally. Only through cultic means may the triple identification occur between knowerknown-means of knowledge.”106 In conclusion, “the Gospel of Philip challenges the long-lived definition of Gnosticism which rests solely on the individual’s theoretical insight,”107 or that knowledge per se automatically releases the soul from its bondage to matter. Rather, as she points out, “correct cultic application of (the Gnostic’s) knowledge abolishes any distinctions between this world and the beyond. By practice, the knowledgeable one simply turns earth into heaven.”108 In this way, “the full-fledged Gnostic in Gos. Phil. transforms

Ibid., 573. Compare the Gospel of Thomas, Log. 22, where the image of the believer becomes one with the Image of God. 107 Buckley, “Cult-Mystery,” 579. 108 Ibid. 106

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himself into a unified, resurrected being in the bridal chamber.”109 By “being joined to the Truth” he actually becomes the Truth (84:13). But to make this possible, the inaccessible, heavenly Truth must first be transformed into “types and images” (67:9–12) which the Gnostic can apprehend; next, he must transform himself into a form which corresponds to these “types and images” (union with a wife). Finally, “the distance between the two is bridged by being turned into communicating transformations so that the Gnostic can meet with the Truth in the ritual action of the sacrament.”110 One of the great advantages of Raphael Patai’s research111 is now obvious, for we are finally able to understand precisely what these “types and images of the Truth” in the Temple were, namely, the heavenly marriage symbolized by the embracing Cherubim. To this the Gnostic and his wife conformed in their own “Bridal Chambers,” in order to sacramentally coadunate “knower-known-means of knowledge.” This also explains Stevan Davies’ “spatial metaphor,” through which “an image is brought together in place of an image” (Gospel of Thomas, Log. 22). Thus we at last understand why Philo opined that “the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God” (Questions on Exodus, 2.41), for without this “means of knowledge” (Buckley), one has no means of becoming identified with the known. Philo therefore explains that When God willed to send down the image of living excellence from heaven to earth in pity for our race, that it should not lose its share of the better lot, he constructs as a symbol of the Truth the holy tabernacle and its contents to be a representation and copy of Wisdom (Who Is the Heir? 1l2).

We also understand why the Holy of Holies was called a “mirrored Bridal Chamber” (Gospel of Philip 65: 12), for Wisdom—whose “mirrors” were the Cherubim (Questions on Genesis, 1.57)—was herself the “unblemished mirror of the Power of God,” and an “image of his goodness” (Wis 7:26). We also recall that the Cherubim were symbols of God’s uniting “Powers,” one of which was actually named “Goodness” (On the Cherubim, 27). Thus, there can be little doubt that the embrace depicted by the statues was the mirror in which one beheld the “image of the Truth.” This is why the Gospel of Philip tells us that Ibid., 579. Ibid., 580; our emphasis. 111 See pp. 5–8, above. 109 110

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When we were begotten we were united. None shall be able to see himself either in water (baptism?) or in a mirror without light. Nor again will you be able to see in the light without water or a mirror (69:9–11).

THE MIRRORED BRIDAL CHAMBER We must however consider the possibility that plastic statues as figurative “mirrors” of God’s image (Davies’ “spatial metaphor”) completely disappeared after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, and that they were replaced by actual mirrors on the walls of certain Bridal Chambers (“the mirrored Bridal Chamber,” Gospel of Philip 65:12). The principle of the rite would of course have remained the same: one “saw” God reflected in the image of the Cherubic Embrace, whether it originated from statues, or was recreated by the participants themselves: So in that place you see everything and do not see yourselves, but in that place you do see yourself … and what you see you shall become (Gospel of Philip 62:22–35).

This rather obscure passage seems to say that the man and wife saw their own reflection as they embraced. At the same time, they were given to understand that this was no longer a personal image, but an image of the Truth. Moreover, there is a reference in Clement of Alexandria’s Miscellanies to certain “false Gnostics,” who “embrace the divine vision … in mirrors or by means of mirrors” (7.3; see also below), indicating that the idea of Wisdom as a “mirror of the Power of God” had now been transformed into a physical means of reflection (“nor will you be able to see in light without water or a mirror,” Gospel of Philip 69:10–11). Thus, Buckley’s “means of knowledge” may have become the “mirrored reflection” of the participants in the Bridal Chamber, which once again united the “image of the knower” with the “image of the known.” We find similar information about the “mirrored Bridal Chamber” in the Nag Hammadi treatise entitled the Tripartite Tractate, which MacRae identifies as “Valentinian,”112 though Harold W. Attridge and Elaine Pagels attribute it partly to the influence of Heracleon.113 There, we learn that the members of the Perfect Man “Nag Hammadi,” in IDB, 5:617. In The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 54. They refer to Heracleon as “a western Valentinian.” Again, it is the Son and the Church who are to be reunited and restored to the Father, who first engendered them as a unity. Instead of the fall of Wisdom, however, it deals with the devolving Logos, who “falls” according to 112 113

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Here again, the Bridal Chamber “reflects” the necessary forms for unitary redemption, becoming a “place of instruction” where one sees the Truth in sexual “images and archetypes.” In the roughly contemporary Acts of Andrew,114 which is said to be encratitic rather than Gnostic,115 the author makes the surprising statement that I hold those blessed who have heard … as in a mirror the mysteries of their own nature, for whose sake all things were created (15).116

This again suggests that the author was aware of some traditional process through which one beheld the Truth by reflective means, “as in a mirror.” Max Pulver compares this to Pseudo-Cyprian’s statement that believers may behold the Savior “in yourselves as one beholds himself in water or in a mirror.”117 This he further explains by saying that When a man looks into his magic mirror he sees not only himself but also the Lord or the Spirit. We are reminded of 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.”118

In other words, by seeing oneself in the “mirror” of the Bridal Chamber, one sees an image of the Divine; the two images are merged, and the attributes of the one are transferred to the other.119

the Father’s will in order to dwell in the Demiurge and to bring forth the Creation: “The Logos uses him (the Archon, Demiurge, “god,” “king,” etc.) as a hand, to beautify and work on the things below” (100:27–33). The Savior and his “Army” also descend from the Logos after being begotten in him by the light of the Pleroma, which restores his perfection. The Savior is therefore clearly related to the Old Testament Creator-god, but in a more perfect form. 114 Quispel dates this work to “before A.D. 200.” See his translation in Vigiliae Christianae 10 (1956): 142. M. Hornschuh (in Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp 2:396) dates it to “the interval between c. 170 and c. 200.” 115 See Hornschuh, in ibid., 2:395. 116 Ibid., 2:414. 117 “Jesus’ Round Dance and Crucifixion,” in The Mysteries; Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Princeton, 1955), 190. Cf. Gospel of Philip 69:11. 118 Pulver, “Jesus’ Round Dance,” 190.

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The same metaphorical reference to images of the Divine “seen in mirrors” is contained in a cryptic allusion to the former Temple itself, found in the third century Acts of John,120 where the Savior leads the Apostles in a sacred “round-dance”: He told us to form a circle, holding one another’s hands, and himself in the middle, and said, “Answer Amen to me” (94).

He explains that he is a “mirror” to them; and they even “reflect” his words back to him with their assenting “amens”: “I have no temple, and I have temples”—“Amen.” “I am a light to you who see me”—“Amen.” “I am a mirror to you who know me”—“Amen.” “And when you have seen what I do, keep silent about my mysteries” (95:25–96:30; our emphasis).

Again, the following temple-related phenomena are deliberately brought back together: temple, light, mirror, mystery. This, as Pulver explains, made possible the “fusion of the mystes with his mystery god”121 and provided entry into “mystical union, or henosis,” with him.122 That this was another form of the disciple’s soteriological “marriage” to the Savior is clearly indicated by the use of the word “rest,” when Jesus-Wisdom says, Being moved towards Wisdom, You have me as a couch; rest in me (96:37).123 For he who hears me shall be united with this race and shall no longer be what he now is, but shall be above them as I am now … If you hear me, you also shall be as I am (100).

Pulver goes so far as to suggest that God’s suffering is transferred to man by this same mirror-process: “Paul uses this mystery image, but does not know or else does not acknowledge the transferrence of the suffering from God to man” (ibid., 190). 120 In Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 2:230ff. 121 Pulver, “Jesus’ Round Dance,” 189. 122 Ibid. 123 For the symbolic meaning of “rest” as a form of the hieros gamos, see p. 187, above. 119

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Nevertheless, the Church soon forgot the meaning of this mystery, though as late as the fourth century, Jesus’ “round-dance” was still considered to have been an authentic, early rite of initiation: That is, Christ was held to have delivered a secret initiation to his disciples, and above all to John. This belief which was widespread outside the orthodox church, accounts for the bitterness, with which the Second Council of Nicaea attacked the Acts of St. John.124

The third-century Acts of Thomas similarly describes Christ’s hieros gamos with a Hebrew “flute-girl,” upon whom “rests the majestic effulgence (reflected light)125 of kings,” symbolizing his union with a “daughter of light”: Her chamber is full of light … Twelve in number are they who serve before her and are subject to her, Having their gaze and look toward the bridegroom, That by the sight of him they may be enlightened; And for ever shall be with him in eternal joy, And they shall be at that marriage … Of which the eternal ones are accounted worthy. And they shall put on royal robes And be arrayed in splendid raiment, And both shall be in joy and exaltation And they shall glorify the Father of the All, When proud light they received (6–7).126

Several themes previously encountered in the Wisdom Mystery are brought together again: a didactic vision of reflected Light in the form of a hieros gamos; thea theou, or visual union with the Light; and the putting on of a garment made of light (cf. Odes of Solomon: “The Lord renewed me with his garment, and possessed me with his light”). But in the same Acts of Thomas (112), the eschatological robe which the initiate receives after returning to “His Father’s house” is again likened to a “reflection in a mirror”: But suddenly, when I saw it over against me, The splendid robe became like me, as my reflection in a mirror. I saw it wholly in me, And in it I saw myself quite apart from myself. So that we were two in distinction Ibid., 173. G. Scholem, “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der kabbalistischen Konzeption der Schechinah,” Eranos Jahrbuch 21 (1953): 74, gives “Abglanz.” 126 In Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson, NTAp, 2:445–46. 124 125

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And again one in a single form, And the treasurers too Who had brought it to me, I saw in like manner, That they were two of a single form, For one sign of the King was impressed upon them, His who restored to me through them … My splendid robe Gleaming in glorious colors … And the likeness of the King of Kings Was completely embroidered all over it (112).

Once again, the identification of “knower-known-means of knowledge” has occurred by means of a mirrored reflection. The “sign of the King” (or the “likeness of the King of Kings”) is obviously the Divine Image which is to be merged with the image of the initiate (“We were two in distinction and again one in a single form”)—seen “as my reflection in a mirror.” Gershom Scholem also compares these “mirror” passages from various Christian apocrypha to the Shekhinah’s role as the “Light of Perfect Life” in the Book Bahir.127 From this we learn that the Shekhinah—now seen as God’s “Lower Wisdom”128—is yet another “reflection (Abglanz) of the hidden Primal Light” (Bahir, 98).129 Again, we recognize traditional elements derived from Wisdom’s description as “an effluence of everlasting light, an unblemished mirror of the active power of God, and an image of his goodness” (Wis 7:26). Similarly, as Scholem points out, the “Lower Shekhinah” (called Malkuth by the Kabbalists)130 is a reflection of the divine Light, “seen in a dark mirror” (cf. 1 Cor 13:12), as she breaks into variegated beams to become the light of the material creation.131 It was this “Lower Shekhinah” who dwelt continually with Israel, sharing her exile on earth: She dwelled continually with Israel since the erection of the “Tent of Dwelling,” as it says in Ex. 25:8: They shall build me a sanctuary, that I

127 Section 88; in his “Zur Entwicklungsgechichte,” 74; see also his translation, Das Buch Bahir (Leipzig, 1923), 95–96. 128 Compare the “Lower Sophia,” p. 262, above. 129 “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte,” 73; also Das Buch Bahir, 107. 130 Meaning “Kingdom,” i.e., that portion of the Divine which reaches out of heaven and enters material creation. 131 “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte,” 83–84.

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In short, even the Shekhinah—who was a Jewish form of the Holy Spirit— was once deemed to be a “mirror of God,” who would remain “below” as long as Israel was worthy or her.133 Her function as a “mirror” must have been widespread in early Jewish and Christian circles, for we find echoes of it throughout the literature of both faiths—even as late as the Middle Ages—when authors like the Dutch mystic, Jan van Ruysbroek (ca. 1350), still taught that (the soul) can behold God in the mirror of the Spirit … We contemplate what we are and are what we contemplate; for our essence, without losing any of its proper personality, is united to the divine truth, which respects the distinction.”134

In the Gospel of Philip, however, “becoming what we contemplate” is expressed in quite daring fashion: But you saw something in that place, and you became those things. You saw the Spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw the Father, you shall become Father. So in this place you see everything and do not see yourself, but in that place you do see yourself—and what you see you shall become (61:27–35).

Thus we must conclude that “divinization” (theōsis, theopoieisthai) was one of the goals of the Gnostic Bridal Chamber, just as it was in the older Wisdom tradition,135 Jewish apocalyptic,136 and Primitive Christianity,137 for union with the Divine and “divine sonship” also made the candidate divine: A horse begets a horse, a man begets man, a god begets god. So it is with the bridegrooms and the bride (75:25–28).

Being married, the candidate sees his own married image, is filled with the Father’s married image (Gen 1:26), and becomes Christ and the Father, or what the Apocryphon of John calls Autogenes—“the Self-Existent Divine In ibid., 86. Compare the passage from b. Baba Bathra, 99a, p. 18, above. 134 Quoted by Dennis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World (Garden City, NY, 1957), 159. 135 See Philo’s Questions on Exodus, 2.39–40, p. 67, above. 136 See the evidence from Qumran, pp. 78–80, above. 137 See pp. 139–40, above. 132 133

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Fulness”—which perennially comes forth as eternal generations of “Father, Mother and Son” (9:10–11). The Gospel of Philip refers to this indwelling “Divine Fulness” as the one who is within them all. But that which is within them all is the fulness. Beyond it there is nothing else within it. This is that of which they say, “That which is above them” (Gospel of Philip 68:12–17).

And just as the Father’s indwelling fulness made Jesus a god (John 14:10), it will make the Gnostic divine. Thus the creators of the Nag Hammadi library approvingly added The Teachings of Sylvanus (a non-Gnostic work) to their collection, for it corroborated the traditional primitive Christian doctrine that Christ, who has exalted man, became like God, not in order that he might bring God down to man, but that man might become like God (111:8–13; our emphasis). This is what God has given to the human race, so that … every man might be chosen before all the angels and the archangels (115:30–35).

THE HIEROGRAMIC IMAGE OF THE FATHER The classic image of God’s “Powers” as a male-female syzygy—the Embracing Cherubim in the Jerusalem Holy of Holies—reappears most graphically in several of the Gnostic works in the Nag Hammadi library, for example, in the Trimorphic Protennoia, a “Barbelo-Gnostic” treatise from shortly after A.D. 200.138 Here, God’s Wisdom is called Protennoia (“Primal Thought”). As an emanation of the “Unknown First Principle”139 she appears both as “the Voice” (the Father), “the Sound” (the Mother) and “the Word” (the Son). But as the “Spirit of Creation” (36:4–10), she likewise emerges as a male-female syzygy (42:8), whose Cherubim-like attributes are remarkably well-preserved: I am androgynous. I am both Mother and Father since I copulate with myself. I copulate with myself and with those who love me (45:1–5).

This corresponds exactly to what we learned about the Embracing Cherubim, who also represented the union of God’s male-female “Powers,” as well as the soteriological union of God and Man. Thus, God’s Protennoia John D. Turner, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 461. Equivalent to Autogenes, the “Self-Existent Diving Fulness,” in the Apocalypse of John, 307. 138 139

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is first of all the self-fertilizing “womb that gives shape to the All by giving birth to the Light” (45:6–8). But those who “long for her” (45:22–23) are invited to “partake of the mystery of knowledge and become a light in Light” (48:33–35) by “putting on” her shining glory (49:31–32). In this way, they too will “become gloriously glorious, the way you first were when you were light” (45:18–20). In short, by means of a hieros gamos with God’s Protennoia, the unitary state of “light dwelling in Light” may be reconstituted (36:26–33). The resulting unitaries are now called “Sons of the Light” (41:15–20), for they have “heard the mysteries” (40:36–37) and have been made to “shine again” (41:30–42:2). The hieros gamos of God and Man is also described in the tractate called Asclepius, a Hermetic writing apparently included in the Nag Hammadi collection because of its insights into the mystery of overcoming duality and returning to the unitary state:140 The restoration of the nature of the pious ones who are good will take place in a period of time that never had a beginning. For the will of God has no beginning, even as his nature (74:7–13).

Once again, the restoration is depicted graphically in terms of the Embracing Cherubim: And if you wish to see the reality of this mystery, then you should see the wonderful representation of the intercourse that takes place between the male and the female. For when the semen reaches the climax, it leaps forth. In that moment the female receives the strength of the male; the male for his part receives the strength of the female, while the semen does this … If it happens in the presence of those who do not understand the reality, it is laughable and unbelievable. And moreover they are holy mysteries (65:15–35).

Deification again appears to be one of the results, since the restoration of the unitary state is accompanied by an exchange of divine “strengths” between the male and female. Just where this “holy mystery” occurred we are not told, but it is said to have been imparted by no less than the famous Hermes Trismagistus, who once explained that “the Good One created the world in his own image through the union of Zeus and his Female” (74:31–75:25). In the same way, man creates “gods” by the same sexual means:

140

James Brashler, Peter Dirkse, Douglas M. Parrott, in ibid., 330.

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For just as the Father, the Lord of the Universe, creates gods, in this way too, this mortal, earthly living creature, the one who is not like God, also himself creates gods … Not only is he god, but he also creates gods (68:25–34).

In this case, however, the sometime Gnostic devaluation of the Old Testament God as an “Ialdabaoth” is no longer apparent, for the creation is again described as a positive event. Thus “man on earth creates gods according to (man’s) likeness,” just as God creates souls after God’s likeness (69:22–27). This time, God’s purpose for instituting the earthly process was that man should gain knowledge, restrain his passions (67:25–27), and direct his steps towards immortality (67:29–30). And with the acquisition of knowledge, human beings become better than the gods, for they have become both mortal and immortal:141 And it happened this way because of the will of God that men be better than the gods, since indeed the gods are immortal, but men alone are both immortal and mortal. Therefore man had become akin to the gods, and they know the affairs of each other with certainty. The gods know the things of men, and men know the things of the gods (67:34–68:11).

This is a secret, however, and a “matter of communion between the gods and men,” about which too much should not be said, “since we are divine and are introducing holy matters” (68:16–22). The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, a Nag Hammadi text which equates Jesus with Seth and his “perfect Race,” also speaks of a “wedding of truth, and a repose of incorruption” (67:5–11). This also takes place in a Bridal Chamber, prefiguring the heavenly Pleroma, where the hieros gamos with the Savior takes place simultaneously: It also happened in the places under heaven for their reconciliation … Those who assumed the form of my image will assume the form of my word. Indeed, these will come forth in light forever, and in friendship with each other in the spirit, since they have known in every respect and indivisibly that which is one (67:19–68:12).

The “form of my image” again refers to the “marriage” of the soul and the “Son of the Majesty” in the Pleroma, for that is where the wedding and the wedding robe is, the new one and not the old, nor does it perish. For it is a new and perfect bridal chamber of the 141 Ibid., 330. Compare Genesis 3:22: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good from evil.”

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A GREAT MYSTERY heavens … an undefiled mystery … which does not perish … They who were not afraid before me … will pass by every gate without fear and will be perfected in the Third Glory (57:9–58:13).

Many of these texts also describe the Sacred Kiss which accompanied the hieros gamos, and which we first encountered in the Gospel of Thomas (“Whosoever drinks from my mouth shall become as I am,” Log. 108): His offspring, the things which exist, being innumerable, illimitable and inseparable, have, like kisses, come forth from the Son of the Father, like kisses because of the multitude of those who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, though it involves many (Tripartite Tractate 58:19–29). And he kissed my mouth. He took hold of me, saying, My Beloved! Behold, I shall reveal to you those things that neither the heavens nor the archons have known … Am I not alive? Because I am a father, do I not have power for everything? ... Understand and know everything, that you may come forth just as I am … But now, stretch out your hand. Now, take hold of me (Second Apocalypse of James, 56:14–-57:11).

This last text, also from the Nag Hammadi library, records a revelation which James (the brother of Jesus) has just received from the resurrected Lord. Significantly, it makes use of a Jewish-Christian tradition which closely tied the leader of the Jerusalem Community to the Temple,142 describing him as an escort guiding the Gnostic through the heavenly door, the “illuminator” and “redeemer,” i.e., the one who leads the initiate through the veil into the “Holy of Holies.”143

This text appears to be a continuation of the First Apocalypse of James, in which the resurrected Jesus also embraces and kisses his brother, prior to revealing the secret words of immortality: And the Lord appeared to him. Then he stopped his prayer and embraced him. He kissed him, saying, “Rabbi, I have found you! I have heard of your sufferings which you endured. And I have been much distressed.” … The Lord said, “James, do not be concerned … I am he who was within me.144 Never have I suffered in any way, nor have I been distressed … Now, since you are a just man of God, you have embraced and Recorded by Hegesippus; see Charles W. Hedrick, in ibid., 269. Hedrick, in ibid. 144 Another reference to Autogenes, or the “Self-Existent Divine Fulness.” 142 143

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kissed me … James, behold, I shall reveal to you your redemption. When you are seized, and you undergo these sufferings, a multitude (of archons) will arm themselves against you that they may seize you … Not only do they demand toll, but they also take away souls by theft. When you come into these powers, one of them who is their guard will say to you, “Who are you and where are you from?” You say to them, “I am a Son, and I am from the Father.” He will say to you, “What sort of son are you, and to what other do you belong?” You say to him, “I am from the Preexistent Father, and a son of the Preexistent One’ … When he says to you, “Where will you go?” you are to say to him, “To the place from which I have come, there shall I return.” And if you say these things, you will escape their attack (31:2–34:20).

Most of these are themes which we have already seen in the Gospel of Thomas—another Jewish-Christian text which exalted “James the Just”—i.e., the sacred embrace and kiss (Logg. 22, 108), the revelation of the hidden things (Log. 108), and the special words which Jesus teaches the initiate to say to the guards as he seeks to enter heaven: If they say to you, “Who are you?,” say, “We are His Sons and we are the elect of the Living Father” (Log. 50).

As in the Gospel of Thomas, these later texts from Nag Hammadi also base their soteriology on the premise that the initiate originally came from the Light and that salvation consists of returning to it, thereby reestablishing the preexistent unity which he once enjoyed with the Wisdom-Logos. Thus, the introduction to the entire Nag Hammadi library—The Prayer of the Apostle Paul—begins by stating that the initiate originally came forth from the Savior: My Redeemer, redeem me, for I am yours; from you have I come forth (1A:3–6).

This text no doubt bears the name of “Paul” because of its association with the belief contained in the “gloss” to Eph 5:30: “We are members of his body, formed of his flesh and bones, from his flesh and from his bones,” i.e., from the preexistent Body of Christ.145 Based on the same belief, the Trimorphic Protennoia then goes on to explain that the world came into existence when the “Heavenly Adam” (the preexistent Body of Christ) was separated into two halves, i.e., into male and female:

145

See pp. 152–53, above.

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A GREAT MYSTERY This Aeon (the world) that is was completed in this fashion, and it was estimated, and it was short, for it was a finger that released a finger, and a joint that was separated from a joint (42:33–43:4).

Their original oneness will be reconstituted when the two halves are brought back together again, like the “rib” that was taken from the side of the man: Enter through the rib whence you came, and hide yourself from the beasts (the passions) (The Interpretation of Knowledge, 10:34–36).

The rejoining of these once common parts was described in the Gospel of Thomas as another sacred embrace which reunited eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness (Log. 22).

The restored “unitary” was then ready to enter the kingdom, for the “members” of the “Perfect Man” were back together again (Tripartite Tractate 123:4–15). No one will in fact be able to see the King as long as he remains “naked” (Gospel of Philip 65:25–26), i.e., without his Heavenly Partner, whom he acquired through union with a wife in the Bridal Chamber. The Exegesis of the Soul, perhaps written around A.D. 200,146 specifically describes the restoration of the “Perfect Man” as a hieros gamos, or the reunion of male and female partners: From heaven the Father sent (the soul) her man, who is her brother, the first-born. Then the bridegroom came down to the bride. She gave up her former prostitution and cleansed herself of the pollutions of the adultress, and she was renewed so as to be a bride. She cleansed herself in the bridal chamber and she filled it with perfume; she sat in it waiting for the true bridegroom … But then the bridegroom, according to the Father’s will, came down to her into the bridal chamber … But once they unite with one another they become a single life … For they were originally joined to one another when they were with the Father … This marriage has brought them back together again and the soul has been joined to her true love, her real master (132:7–133:9).

This will be the soteriological “marriage” which is the effective source of “rejuvenation” and eternal life: Now it is fitting that the soul regenerate herself and become again as she formerly was. The soul then moves of her own accord. And she re146

William C. Robinson, Jr., in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 190.

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ceived the divine nature from the Father for her rejuvenation, so that she might be restored to the place where she originally had been. This is the resurrection from the dead (134:6–12).

In some texts, the Sacred Marriage is described as a form of “spiritual indwelling” (John 14:10), which results when “Life” lives in perfect union with his “Bride”: My God and my Father, who saved me from this dead hope, who made me alive through a mystery of what he wills … Bring me from a tomb alive … Because I am alive in you, your grace is alive in me (Second Apocalypse of James 62:16–20; our emphasis). And I ascended to the Vitality as I sought it, and I joined it in entering in. And I saw an eternal, intellectual, undivided motion that pertains to all the formless powers147 … I know the One who exists in me (Allogenes 60:19–61:7).

In short, when the “One who is Light” dwells in marital fusion with the soul of the initiate, they become “the same” (Dialogue of the Savior 136:23), just as the prophet Hosea described the union of the Holy with the Unholy in order to make them both holy: Now that I have known thee, I have mixed myself with the Immutable. I have armed myself with an armor of light. I have become light (The Gospel of the Egyptians 66:27–67:4). Having seen the light that surrounded me and the God that was in me, I have become divine (Allogenes 52:10–12).

In many of these treatises the symbolism of the Embracing Cherubim is still very much alive, and in some cases (e.g., the Trimorphic Protennoia and Asclepius) exact and literal. But it remains as ever always the image of the “Father-Mother” (Gen 1:26–7) which informs them, and which the man and wife must take upon themselves in the Bridal Chamber in order to become divine.

Compare Philo’s vision of the Cherubim as representing the harmonious motion of the planets (pp. 57–60, above), as well as Clement of Alexandria’s reference to the Cherubim as the two “hemispheres” in divine interaction (pp. 219–20, above). 147

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GNOSTIC REVERSAL OF THE LAW OF MARRIAGE In all of the foregoing examples of the Gnostic “Great Mystery,” human marriage was still seen as a positive step toward restoring the Primal Oneness of God and Man, even where the masculine aspect of the Wisdom/Logos was reduced to the rank of “inferior Demiurge,” and its feminine aspect to the rank of “Fallen” or “Lower Sophia.” Some Gnostics, however, went so far as to completely denigrate human marriage, deeming it to be a deliberate temptation on the part of the Demiurge to entice men into casting their seed into future generations of flesh, thereby keeping their souls entrapped in matter for the benefit of the Demiurge and his angels. This may, however, have begun already in certain “orthodox” factions of the Church, which deemed marriage to be fit only for the present age, and which would eventually give rise to the Catholic elevation of celibacy and monasticism over family life. Judaism, on the other hand, has always remained remarkably consistent in showing respect for God’s first commandment to be “fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Gen 1:28). Indeed, in all the rabbinic literature cited by Strack and Billerbeck there is mention of but one celibate Jew, Ben Azzai, who was indeed described as a hypocrite who failed to live up to his own view of the holiness of matrimony.148 Even the purported evidence of Essene celibacy is at best inconsistent, since the Dead Sea Scrolls generally commend marriage and since burials of women and children have been found at Qumran.149 Thus, Millar Burrows notes, [It is a] fact that marriage and family life are contemplated as normal in the Rule of the Congregation … It is not yet possible to go beyond the tentative conclusion … that the sect probably included both communities of celibates and settlements of families. At any rate, the Rule of the Community assumes that there will be families in the Community of “the Last Days.”150

It is also significant that the traditional Nazirite, who viewed his career as a special call to sanctity, vowed only to (a) avoid alcoholic drink, (b) leave his hair uncut, and (c) avoid the presence of the dead (Num 6).151 The strict rules of sexual avoidance in the area of the Temple likewise had only to do 148

1:807.

Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich, 1922),

Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York, 1955), 233. Millar Burrows, More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York, 1958), 383. 151 J. C. Rylaarsdaam, “Nazirite,” in IDB, 3:526. 149 150

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with ritual cleanliness, not celibacy; in fact, it was generally accepted by Halakhah that the Pentateuchal laws of purity applied specifically to priests, entry into the Temple, and the eating of holy things,152 and in no way recommended asceticism as a separate and special way of life for those who wished to make a profession of religion. Finally, the Alexandrian “Therapeutae,” who actually did practice asceticism and celibacy during the first century B.C. (Philo, On the Contemplative Life, 8.65–68), appear to have been a syncretistic sect which combined Judaism with Neo-pythagorean and Egyptian religion (especially the Serapis cult). So little is known about them, however, that even Eusebius (Church History, 2.7) supposed them to have been Christian monks. In any case, it is clear that they found no warrant for their celibate life style in the Jewish portion of their background. The evidence concerning Christianity in the New Testament is similarly in favor of marriage, in spite of dogmatic assertions to the contrary. Jesus himself clearly reiterated God’s first commandment (Matt 19:5), as did Paul the Apostle (1 Cor 6:16). We have already seen that the celebrated reference to “eunuchs” (Matt 19:12), when read in context, teaches only that one must not remarry after putting away a wife for adultery (vv. 9–12).153 Paul similarly recommends that persons do not remarry after the loss of a spouse, but remain agamos (“unmarried”), even as he (1 Cor 7:8). The word agamos can mean either “never married” or “de-married,”154 but in the present context it must signify “de-married” since Paul uses it three verses later to refer to women who have separated from their husbands (“But if she depart, let her remain agamos, or be reconciled to her husband”). On the other hand, he says in verse 25 that he has no commandment whatsoever from the Lord concerning “virgins” (parthenoi). Even the famous passage supposedly recommending “virginity” (1 Cor 7:1) should be read not as a statement of Paul’s own belief, but as a restatement of the question he is about to answer:

G. Alon, quoted by Yigael Yadin, The Temple Scroll (Jerusalem, 1983), 1:277. See p. 221, above. Even the concession “for adultery” is probably not original with Jesus, since it does not appear in the same passage in Luke 16:18 or Mark 10:11. See also Wm. Albright and C. S. Mann, Matthew, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1971), 226: “Commentators have generally taken the position that these words are not part of the saying as originally uttered, but are a community regulation later inserted in the text. It is certainly inconsistent with v. 6.” 154 Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 4. 152 153

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His answer, of course, was that in view of the temptation to immorality, all men and women should be married. This is undoubtedly what he sought to express in the notorious passage which supposedly displays Paul’s “contempt” for marriage: “It is better to marry than to burn,” i.e., it is better to remarry than to suffer with uncontrollable lust (v. 9).156 There is very good evidence in the New Testament that Paul himself was once married. Thus, his words in 1 Corinthians 9:5 (“Do we not have the right to be accompanied by adelphēn gunaika like the other apostles?”) probably refer to his own wife, since gunē would be redundant if it meant merely “women,” especially as it comes after adelphe (“sisters”).157 Indeed, “the verb and object in this verse form a special idiom, gunaika periagein, meaning in classical Greek “to have a wife”;158 thus the NEB translation, “Have I no right to take a Christian wife about with me, like the rest of the apostles?” Clement, who knew Greek well, also specifically understood gune to mean “wife” (Miscellanies, 3.6.53); and both Eusebius (Church History, 3.36) and Ignatius (Epistle to the Philadelphians) listed Paul among the Apostles who “lived in marriage.” Clement (Miscellanies, 3.6.53) and Origen (Homily on Romans, 1.1) even believed that Paul’s wife lived at Philippi, and was the one whom he addressed as syzygos (“partner”) in Philippians 4:3. It was in fact not until the fourth century that Jerome finally translated gunē as mulier (“woman”), instead of uxor (“wife”) in his Vulgate, permanently fixing the idea of unmarried females in the Apostolic circle in Catholic tradition.159 Basil (On the Resurrection, 1), though himself an ascetic, still accepted as fact that all of the Apostles were married; this would of course have included Peter (cf. Mark 1:30; 1 Pet 5:13), of whom Clement said, “We are told that 155 Translation by W. F. Orr and J. A. Walther, I Corinthians, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1976), 205. J. Massyngberde Ford, “Levirate Marriage in St. Paul (1 Cor VII),” New Testament Studies 10 (1963–64): 362, also argues that this is the question, rather than the answer. 156 Clement of Alexandria also attests to this interpretation: “It is of second marriage that the apostle says, ‘If you burn, marry”’ (Miscellanies, 3.1.4). 157 See William Phipps, Was Jesus Married? (New York, 1970), 99. The following five footnotes are also derived from this excellent summary. 158 J. B. Bauer, “Uxores Circumducere,” Biblische Zeitschrift 3 (1959): 94–102. 159 See also Albert Oepke, “gunē,” in TDNT, 1:776–88; The Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968), 2, 267.

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the blessed Peter, when he beheld his wife on the way to her execution, rejoiced on account of her call and her homeward journey” (Miscellanies, 7.11.63). Similarly, the “Western” textual tradition of Acts 1:12–14 states that the “wives and children” of the Apostles were present in a Jerusalem “Upper Room” after the Crucifixion,160 a reading which is increasingly accepted by modern authorities.161 Luke 8:2–3 likewise mentions the gunaikes—including Mary Magdalene—who traveled with and provided for Jesus and the Twelve. It is therefore natural that the Epistles expected marriage of bishops, elders, deacons, and the like (1 Tim 3:2, 5; Titus 1:6; Rom 16:3; 1 Cor 7:2; etc.), and that some forty of the earliest Popes were married.162 The Presbyterian scholar William Phipps has recently argued that Jesus was himself married.163 As an adult member of the Jewish community, he would have been obliged to obey the first commandment, or to have become an object of scorn and disgrace. Jesus in fact claimed to submit to every law which he taught to others, even where the necessity for one such as himself might not have been immediately apparent (e.g., baptism: “Suffer it to be so; for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness,” Matt 3:15). He was likewise said to have been “tempted in all points, like we are” (Heb 4:15), never hesitating to associate throughout his ministry with the fair sex (Luke 7:36–50; Mark 14:3–9; John 4:7–30; 12:1–8; etc.). In John 11:5 it is clearly stated that he had an intimate companionship with Mary and Martha,164 with whom he may have traveled from northern Palestine to Judea, staying for a while with their brother Lazarus at Bethany.165 According to Tertullian, these women were constantly attending him (On the Flesh, 7). From at least the second century, it was conjectured that the two Marys may have been the same person; thus, Mary the sister of Martha and Mary Magdalene were widely viewed as a composite figure,166 a tradition carried

Phipps, Was Jesus Married? 100. Kirsopp Lake and H. J. Cadbury, in The Beginnings of Christianity, ed. F. J. Foakes-Jackson (London, 1933), 4, 10, 11; G. W. H. Lampe, “Acts,” in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (London, 1962), 887. 162 John A. O’Brien, “Why Priests Marry,” Christian Century 87 (1970): 417. 163 See note 157, page 300, above. 164 Phipps, Was Jesus Married? 65. 165 Ibid., 65, 207–8. Also compare Luke 17:11 with the section beginning at 9:1, including the first mention of Jesus and the sisters in 10:38–42. 166 Phipps, Was Jesus Married? 66. 160 161

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on to this day by the Roman Church.167 Indeed, Mary Magdalene was herself associated with Jesus throughout his career, being the one who performed the tasks connected with his burial—tasks normally assigned to the immediate family. She was also the one to whom Jesus first appeared after his Resurrection (John 20:14–18), showing that she was in a real sense more important to him than the disciples. Since we have no information about Jesus’ life between the ages of 12 and 30 (the period when betrothal and marriage took place in Jewish culture), Phipps argues that it was simply taken for granted by the writers of the New Testament that Jesus conformed to the mores of his time, a view indeed accepted by even Gnostic writers during the mid-second century (p. 270, above). It was shown in an earlier section that Paul viewed human marriage both as a personal obligation and a symbol of Christ’s marriage to the Church. We also noted an ancient custom in which the marriage of a holy prophet to a fallen woman symbolized God’s redemptive “marriage” to his “Lost Sheep,” as in the cases of Simon Magus and Hosea (pp. 207–8, above). Thus Jesus may indeed have had a wife of his own, such as the “fallen” Mary Magdalene, whose reputation was appropriately blackened by his followers to make her appear as the traditional symbol of “Fallen Israel,” or Christ’s soteriological “wife.” Yet paradoxically, the very fact that human marriage could represent divine “marriage” eventually made it possible to reduce the value of the former in favor of the latter, i.e., to negate the mere “symbol” in favor of the “spiritual reality” to which it referred. There are in fact two instances in the New Testament where either exegetical uncertainly or textual corruption make it appear that this process had already begun in the Primitive Church, repudiating human marriage in deference to some “higher” ideal. First of all, there is the famous statement in Luke 20 contrasting human marriage with eternal life: The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage; but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead neither marry, nor are given in marriage, for they are equal to the angels, and are the children of God (20:34–36).

This immediately, however, strikes us as being in direct contradiction to Jesus’ warm endorsement of the first commandment in Matthew 19:5–6: 167

Hugh T. Pope, “Mary Magdalene,”Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1910).

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For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh. What therefore God hath joined, let not man put asunder.

Moreover, we note that the Lukan passage appears in significantly different form in the earlier Gospel of Mark: For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels which are in heaven (12:25).

In this unquestionably older version, it is merely stated that one cannot enter into marriage after the resurrection, a view which is in fact preserved in the second century Gospel of Philip in the following manner: If anyone becomes a son of the bridal chamber, he will receive the light. If anyone does not receive it while he is in this world, he will not receive it in the other place (86:4–7; trans. Wilson).

In the context of Philip, becoming a “son of the Bridal Chamber” (cf. Matt 9:15) meant to be “married” to the Savior. Nevertheless, this could only be brought about by means of a sacramental union with a spouse (“no one will be able to see the Bridegroom and the Bride unless one becomes a bridegroom or a bride,” 82:24–26). The Valentinians (to whom this gospel belonged) therefore claimed that to be “like the angels” specifically meant to be married, i.e., in the unitary state,168 for though this ultimately referred to the marriage of the soul and its “consort,” the image of the latter could only be found in the initiate’s own husband or wife.169 This Valentinian exegesis of Luke 20:34–36 is at least consistent with Jesus’ reference to the disciples as “sons of the Bridal Chamber” (meaning that they have been “married” to him), while insisting that they must also enter into human marriage (Matt 19:5–6). Thus, the “angelic” state does not preclude the necessity of human marriage, any more than Philo’s “unitary” state precluded the obligation of marriage for the Jews. Likewise, if we accept the Gospel of Thomas as a genuine early sayings-collection of the Savior, we must reconcile its doctrine of “marriage” to Jesus-Wisdom with the Church’s official insistence on human marriage, just as Paul did in his “Great Mystery” (Eph 5:22–33). 168 Grant, “The Mystery of Marriage in the Gospel of Philip,” 132. “Literally the gospels say that there is no marrying in heaven, but the Valentinians understood that being like or equal to the angels … was really marriage. Such a heavenly, spiritual union will be a Pleroma or Fulness of Joy and Rest.” 169 See pp. 273–74, above.

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We shall even find an analogous relationship between divine and earthly unions in the Zohar, which taught that a man’s soul will not be united with him after death unless it is first “completed” by earthly marriage (III:7a, 296a).170 In fact, the Church itself must have believed something very similar, for one of its favorite scriptures, the Book of Enoch (quoted no less than 128 times in the New Testament),171 claimed that the resurrectionstate would be a continuation of marriage: And then all the righteous ones will escape and become the living ones, until they multiply and beget tens of hundreds (1 Enoch 10:17; trans. R. H. Charles and M. A. Knibb).

Here, “the living ones” refers to those who have attained eternal life (cf. 10:10), and is the idiom employed in the Gospel of Thomas to designate those who have been made immortal by the Wisdom Mystery (“These are the secret words which the Living Jesus spake … Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death … and he will live,” Intro., and Logg. 1, 4). That they will nevertheless continue to “beget” (1 Enoch 10:17)) suggests that they must also enter into ordinary marriage. If Jesus accepted this as Scripture (as did the Church for several centuries),172 he too may have envisioned “eternal life” as a continuation of marriage, and may have interpreted the expression “as the angels” to mean male and female in continuing unity, as well as in unity with himself: For the man is not without woman nor the woman without the man, in the Lord (1 Cor 11:11).

Indeed, it is said in 1 Peter 3:7 that redeemed Christians will be “co-heirs (synkleronomoi) of the grace of life,” i.e., married both to each other and to Christ in the hereafter. Though later Christians were loathe to imagine that an earthly condition such as marriage could endure into eternity, we should remember that physical existence was given eternal meaning once and for all through See “The Kabbalistic Great Mystery,” below. See the introduction to R. H. Charles’ edition of The Book of Enoch (London, 1913), xcv–xcix. See also Charles F. Potter’s Did Jesus Write This Book? (New York, 1965), passim, which explains the many instances of dependency in the New Testament on the Book of Enoch. 172 St. Augustine said that the Church excluded 1 Enoch from the canon after many centuries solely because it purported to speak of the preexistence, a doctrine which the Church finally forbade at the Council of Constantinople in 553. 170 171

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Christ’s own Incarnation and Resurrection, as well as by the promise of man’s resurrection. To say, then, that the supreme experience of earthly marriage had no enduring significance would rob God’s first commandment of its divine dignity and reduce his Male-Female Image (Gen 1:27) to a kind of aberration: Celibate son and virgin mother, conceiving not by human intercourse, but by the Holy Ghost … They leave in a weird limbo of silence and obscurity the crucial process of human generation. Is the limbo obscene—a terrible and loathsome wilderness whose passage had to be endured by a reluctantly incarnate God? ... The impulse of an asceticism which was no essential part of the Christian Gospel has been incessantly at work to diminish the virtue of the Incarnation. The process began early with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, which was intended to exalt the deity of Jesus by enshrouding him in miracles—as though the fact of his mortal birth were not miracle enough!—till we have reached at last the complicated refinements of the Immaculate Conception.173

The fact is that in none of Jesus’ authentic teaching do we find any evidence that he had disavowed the traditional Jewish regard for lawful sexual union.174 On the other hand, if we take seriously the New Testament’s description of his resurrection-body (Luke 24:39; John 20:27)—after which man’s own resurrection-body is to be fashioned (Phil 3:21)—we must attribute enduring physical qualities to the divine resurrection-state, which for the Christians who read the Book of Enoch undoubtedly included marriage. A second ambiguity found in the New Testament concerning the worth of human marriage is Paul’s hesitation to commend it to the Corinthians “in view of the shortness of the times” (1 Cor 7:29ff). This passage has been variously thought to demonstrate Paul’s “contempt” for marriage, a “conciliatory attitude” towards converts who were involved in a local ascetic trend, or even the personal care of one who had recently suffered the J. Middleton Murry, Adam and Eve (London, 1944), 95–96, 108. Quoted in Phipps, Was Jesus Married? 191. 174 Several early manuscripts of Luke 20:34–35 have “The sons of this age procreate and are born, but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die any more” (see S. Gilmour, “Luke,” in Interpreter’s Bible, 8:354). In other words, humanity procreates and is born in this life, but need not do so in order to continue in the next, for he can no longer die. As for the marriage state, it can be concluded that those who are worthy to be resurrected will not wait to enter marriage in the next world, just as stated in the Markan parallel. 173

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loss of his own spouse (Eusebius, Church History, 3.30). Nevertheless, these interpretations actually raise more questions than they answer. To begin with, since Paul expressly commands marriage to all (1 Cor 7:2)—even stressing the legitimacy of sexual pleasure (vv. 3–5)—under what circumstances does he now appear to contradict himself and to extol the unmarried state (v. 33)? Was he perhaps referring to a situation similar to that of the so-called “eunuch,” whom Jesus had told to avoid remarriage after putting away a wife (Matt 19:9–12)? This might indeed be suggested by verse 27, which essentially repeats the Savior’s advice in such cases: “Art thou bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife.” Again, who is the “virgin” who “cares for the things of the Lord” more than a married wife? (v. 34). Or the man who has such a “virgin”? (v. 36). Many commentators believe that these verses refer to fathers with unmarried daughters, while others see the practice of men living with virgines subintroductae (pp. 210–12, above), a practice which was already becoming widespread by the second century.175 Actually, 1 Corinthians 7:32–34 is the only passage which unambiguously appears to exalt the unmarried condition: There is a difference between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit, but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

Yet as it now stands, this statement can scarcely be reconciled with the rest of Paul’s teaching on the subject. The usual justification for these anomalous verses is that (1)Paul is now old and widowed and is too tired to feel any desire for remarriage; indeed, in verse 40 he recommends “abiding” as one is; and (2) the “distress of the eschatological Messianic woes” is about to break loose,176 making married life impractical. The latter conclusion, however, is never fully explained, for why married couples would be less able to face the rigors of the eschaton than the unmarried is never disclosed. What is clear, though, is that in its present state of preservation, the entire last half of 1 Corinthians 7 (vv. 25–40) is remarkably different from See note 121, p. 205, above, for J. C. Hurd’s summary of the practice and the comments of Orr and Walther. Compare also C. S. C. Williams, “I and II Corinthians,” in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (1962 ed.), 958. 176 Williams, “I and II Corinthians,” 958. 175

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the rest of Paul’s writing on the subject of marriage, especially in Ephesians 5:22–33,177 which places human marriage on a par with Christ’s marriage to the Church. In fact, it is even different from the first half of the same chapter, which (when properly translated) agrees perfectly with Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 19:3–12, except that Paul is even more permissive regarding the possibility of remarriage after losing a spouse (1 Cor 7:8–9). As we just noted, however, the fact that human marriage was taken to symbolize the marriage of Christ and the Church soon made it possible for some to abandon the practice of human union altogether in favor of the spiritual “reality” to which it pointed. The latter in fact turned out to have much greater emotional appeal for some of the Church’s Hellenized members, who traditionally viewed the body as vile and ephemeral. This was indeed the philosophy of second-century writers like Justin, who sought to convince Trypho the Jew that death came to the “Virgin Eve” because of carnal intercourse, whereas the “Virgin Mary” was made pregnant by the Logos (Dialogue with Trypho, 100). His disciple Tatian later founded the Encratites (“those who practice self-control”), based on a general prohibition of sexual intercourse as a form of depravity (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.28). All of this was justified by the prevailing idealism of Plato and the Stoics, and by a growing Neo-Platonist ethic which identified virtue with asceticism. We saw similar influences at work in the allegories of Philo, who was nevertheless too Jewish to repudiate God’s command to multiply and replenish the earth. Tatian, however, went so far now as to suggest that it was Adam, not God, who ordained marriage (Diatessaron; gloss on Matt 19:5). His hatred of sex, not surprisingly, found expression in his picture of Jesus

177 The most famous of Ephesians’ modern commentators, Markus Barth and Heinrich Schlier, both argue for Paul’s authorship of the Epistle; see Ephesians, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1974), 1–3, 36–50; Der Brief an die Epheser (Düsseldorf, 1957), 22–28, respectively. This opinion is also shared by Robert M. Grant, A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (New York, 1972); Adolph von Harnack, “Die Adresse des Epheserbriefes des Paulus,” Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 37 (1910): 696–709; and many others (Abbott, Asting, Gaugler, Haupt, Hort, Klijn, Michaelis, Percy, Robinson, A. Robert and A. Feuillet, Roller, Sanders, Schille, Schmidt, Scott, Westcott, Zahn (in Barth, Ephesians, 38). Another large group argues for its composition by someone following Paul’s instructions, or an earlier text: Albertz, Benoit, Cerfaux, Goguel, Harrison, Holtzmann, Murphy-O’Connor, Wagenführer, etc. (in ibid.).

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as the “paradigm of virginity,”178 an ideal which spread rapidly throughout the early Church, finding particularly fertile ground in Syriac Christianity and in such forms of Gnosticism as Manichaeism and Catharism. His new movement was soon joined by other Christians, such as Origen (who castrated himself to avoid sexual temptation) and Tertullian (who taught that woman was the “Devil’s Door,” On the Apparel of Women, 1.1), and who succeeded in turning Jesus into a “Bridegroom of Pure Spirituality”—the sole legitimate object of Christian longing—and once and for all replaced physical lust with intangible, heavenly joys. Song of Songs also enjoyed great vogue as an allegory of Christ’s spiritual union with the Church wherever this anti-sexual attitude prevailed. This interpretation took root amongst Christians sometime around A.D. 200, with Hippolytus’ now partly lost commentary on the famous Old Testament love-song, though it remained for the prudish Origen to popularize it during the mid-third century.179 Nevertheless, Origen demanded that any literal understanding of eroticism in Song of Songs be eliminated and interpreted in Platonic fashion as purely “spiritual love.” This work in time became a favorite text of those who abandoned the world and retired to cloisters in order to enjoy the “heavenly love” of Christ. The effect of this Christian Platonism was also felt by the Gnostics. Though some of them still tolerated human marriage as a sacramental means of actualizing their “marriages” to the Savior (pp. 286–90, above), the rest came to look upon earthly union as a transient and fugitive profligacy, indeed, the very tool employed by the evil Powers to extend the tyranny of matter over the soul. Part of the reason for this was the Church’s growing bias against Judaism and the Old Testament Law. Armed with an incomplete understanding of Paul’s doctrine that only the man Jesus had been able to keep the Law in its entirety (and for that reason only his righteousness could suffice to justify men; Rom 5:18–19), many Christians condemned the Law itself as a faulty instrument of salvation,180 even attacking the God who revealed it.181 Since

178 179

114ff.

Phipps, Was Jesus Married? 133. See Marvin Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1977),

Paul never condemned the Law, per se, but rather man’s inability to keep the Law, which was actually “just and holy” (Rom 7:10–14). God in his mercy therefore sent his Son, who alone was righteous enough to keep the Law, that men might be joined to him and share that righteousness (2 Cor 5:17–21). At the same time, the 180

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the prevailing opinion of Late Hellenism agreed that physical existence was evil, the Old Testament Creator could now be blamed for originating the cosmos and for giving the command to multiply and replenish the earth by sexual means. Thus there developed amongst the Gnostics a marked “anticosmism,” characterized by a hatred of Judaism, its God, the Old Testament Law, and the physical creation, all of which were considered to be parts of a conspiracy designed to keep men’s spiritual substance from returning to the Light where it belonged: For no one who is under the Law will be able to look up to the Truth, for they will not be able to serve two masters. For the defilement of the Law is manifest; but undefilement belongs to the light. The Law commands one to take a husband or to take a wife, and to beget, to multiply like the sand of the sea. But passion which is a delight to them constrains the souls of those who are begotten in this place, those who defile and those who are defiled, in order that the Law might be fulfilled through them (The Testimony of the Truth, 29:22–30:11).

Nevertheless, the image of sexual union as the sacramental symbol of the soul’s reunion with the Light continued to have a special fascination for the Gnostics, even for those Gnostics who viewed sexuality as an abomination. Thus, the author of the Greater Questions of Mary could still claim that the sexual act had redemptive value (“We must so do in order that we may live,” pp. 214–15, above), though he simultaneously frustrated its natural use by practicing a perverted form of birth control, designed to prevent the further imprisonment of souls in bodies. A new form of Gnosticism thus came into being (the so-called “Libertine Gnosticism”), which sought to exhaust the physical powers of sex through the destructive enjoyment of its own impulses, so that only the “spiritualized archetype” to which it pointed remained, namely the heavenly union with the Light. This was justified intellectually with the claim that Christ had set the Christian free from the literal demands of the Law (“Ye are not under the Law, but under grace,” Rom 6:14).182 The Gnostic was therefore at liberty to abuse his own body Crucifixion and Resurrection demonstrated the Son’s power, with which the believer was to become one in “marriage.” 181 This of course presupposes that these same Christians believed in the existence of another God, who was higher than Yahweh, and without whom there could have been no possibility of relegating the latter to a subordinate position. 182 This was the doctrine of antinomianism, i.e., that the spiritually perfect were no longer subject to ordinary laws. Even the Valentinians appear to have had an

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with impunity, in order to liberate its sexual energies (the imprisoned light) without producing issue. The German scholar, Leonhard Fendt, some years ago (1922) described a number of the sects which practiced these “libertine” rites.183 The Phibionites, for example, made it a practice to offer up their own semen as a sort of “Eucharist” in place of the bread and wine. Following a ritual meal (patterned after 1 Cor 11:23ff), the husbands said to their wives, “Arise, and perform the agape with thy brother.” The sexes thereupon exchanged partners and engaged in promiscuous intercourse, practicing coitus interruptus so that the semen was caught in the hand. This they offered to heaven, saying: “We present thee with this gift, the body of Christ.” Epiphanius, who preserved this account for us (Panarion, 26.4.1), says that the celebrants then ate the effluent, repeating that it was “Christ’s Body and the Passover (pascha), for whose sake our bodies also suffer (paschei),184 and who are obliged to acknowledge the suffering of Christ.” In much the same way, they collected the menstrual blood of the women and consumed it as a common meal, affirming that “it is the blood of Christ.”185 Here we again see how Gnosticism repudiated traditional Jewish values, for semen and menstrual blood were among the most “unclean” of all objects and elite “inner circle” which (in sharp contrast to their usual “warm approval of marriage,” Clement, Miscellanies, 3.1.1) were said by Irenaeus to “fearlessly practice everything that is forbidden,” maintaining that “carnal things should be allowed to the carnal nature, while spiritual things are provided for the spiritual” (Against Heresies, 1.6.3). Such elitists “highly exalt themselves, and claim to be the perfect and the elect seed … They themselves have grace as their own special possession, which has descended from above by means of an unspeakable and indescribable copulation, and by this means more will be given them. They maintain, therefore, that in every way it is always necessary for them to practice the mystery of copulation … using these very words: ‘Whosoever is in the world and does not unite with a woman is not of the truth; but whosoever is of the world and has intercourse with a woman shall not attain to the truth’.” In short, ordinary men were obliged to live by the Law, but those who were under grace were free to ignore the restrictions of common morality. See also Werner Foerster, Gnosis (Oxford, 1972), 2:313. 183 Gnostische Mysterien (Munich, 1922). 184 The relationship of the Passover to Christ’s passion here is obviously based on a folk etymology: in this case, pascha = paschei. 185 Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 3–4. One should bear in mind that the “Female” was believed to “surround the white seed of the Male with her own blood, as with red fire” (Clementine Homilies, 3.27). Thus the menstrual blood was thought to be a positive contribution to the process of conception.

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hence the object of the most intense taboos. On the other hand, Jacob Milgrom has argued that these substances were dangerous precisely because they represented the forces of life, which was why they could harm or destroy when handled improperly.186 It therefore followed that the anti-Jewish Gnostics saw in them special powers from above, which must be reclaimed from the processes of reproduction and used strictly for their “spiritual” value. It further happened that if impregnation resulted, the fetus was ritually aborted, ground up with honey and spices, and eaten by the celebrants.187 Epiphanius tells us that this was done to outwit the “Archon of Lust,” who sought to trick men into reproducing their wretched race (26.5.6). Elsewhere, he added that “if it should prove that the soul had borne a son, it is kept back until it is in a position to receive its children back to itself” (26.13.3), i.e., to reclaim the lost pneumatic substance of the parent. Both of these statements allude to the Gnostic belief that the powers of procreation are in fact heavenly powers (ano dynameis), i.e., spiritual elements stolen from the Higher Wisdom (Barbelo) and imprisoned by the Demiurge in semen and blood, in order to maintain his cosmic creation. Thus, “the seed is good, but the work of procreation evil; for the seed is the power of the All-Mother, while the work is the power of the Ruler of this world, carried out with stolen property.”188 It was therefore the aim of the Gnostic to say at the end of his life, “I have sown no children for the Archon, but I have uprooted his roots, and I have collected the members that were scattered” (26.13.2). In this way, he believed that he had retrieved (sullego) Barbelo’s stolen property from its involvement in the processes of procreation and would be able to return it to its proper owner. In fact, the Nicolaitans (another name for the Phibionites?) held that Barbelo herself worked tirelessly to rob the Archons of their seed by appearing to them in the form of a beautiful woman, “that by doing so she may receive again her own power that was inseminated into these various beings” (25.2.4).189

186 187

craft.

Leviticus 1–16, Anchor Bible (New York, 1991), 766–68. This may provide a clue to the origin of similar practices in medieval witch-

Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 6. This may have been a form of the Jewish belief that Lilith (the evil counterpart of the Shekhinah) often appeared to men to rob them of their seed, as well as a prototype of the medieval succubus, who visited men by night to cause nocturnal pollutions. 188 189

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Nevertheless, just why the Phibionites called Barbelo’s stolen “power” the “Passover,” or “Body of Christ,” was not precisely explained by Epiphanius. Fendt believed that this was due to the fact that the Christian Eucharist and the Phibionite “sperm-sacrifice” began separately as secret “cult-meals,” during which the celebrants invoked their respective deities in order to help them perform their heavenly work. In the case of the Christians, this was the sharing of Christ’s redeeming sacrifice; in the case of Phibionites, this was the sullegein of Barbelo’s lost powers. The Phibionite sperm-meal, however, was more than an imitation of Barbelo’s activity, for those who consumed it believed that they were actually Barbelo’s scattered members and that they desperately needed to reclaim the pneumatic substances which they consumed. Thus when certain Christians, who were familiar with the Phibionites, compared the Eucharist in their own Communion with the Phibionite sperm-meal, some of them were impressed enough by the latter to take it up as a “superior” vehicle for their own Christian worship.190 This assimilation, Fendt calculated, took place some time around A.D. 200.191 What the meal may have been like before that, he believed, could be determined from material preserved in 2 Jeu (from ca. A.D. 200), which describes a prototype meal of semen and blood, with the explanation that “We have known the True Knowledge, and pray to the True God” (C. Schmidt, Koptisch-gnostische Schriften, I. 304). Later in the century, the same practice was mentioned in the Pistis Sophia (Schmidt edition, 351, 14ff), this time with the words, “We believe in Esau and Jacob” (see also Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.31.1), suggesting the presence of a Jewish component.192 But since the sperm-meal was itself essentially unaltered, Fendt concluded that it must have been the original form of the rite and that it received its Eucharistic character only through assimilation to Christian values. Fendt in fact suggested that one might learn something about the Eucharist by examining those features which most interested the Phibionites. Particularly, he noted that the Eucharist must have been from very early times connected with the agape-kiss and that both had originated side by side in communal gatherings designed to promote the love and unifica190 Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 10–12. Fendt also offers a psychological explanation for the Eucharistic formula, “We present thee with this gift, the Body of Christ,” which he believed was originally a pre-Christian “sperm-meal” celebrating an Asiatic-Egyptian Mother-goddess. 191 Ibid., 13. 192 Ibid., 13–14.

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tion of Christ’s members.193 Thus, the fourth-century Phibionite formula, “Perform the agape with thy brother,” appears to be a genuine relic of early Christian practice, in which the congregation was united by bread and a holy kiss, and sanctified as “God’s People.”194 The Phibionite-Christians at the same time replaced the brotherly kiss with their own explicit horrendum and sacrum, against which the original agape now seemed a pale and ineffectual shadow.195 But while Fendt may have accounted for some of the formal relationships between these Christian and Phibionite practices (liturgical structure and language), their organic relationship may have been deeper than even he realized. To begin with, the basic connection between the Sacred Kiss and the Mystery of Sexual Union was probably part of the Primitive Christian agape from the start (pp. 174–75, above). The communion of bread and wine was also a recognized form of union with the Divine. Thus the Phibionite sperm-sacrifice and the Eucharist were already varieties of the same Wisdom Mystery, long before Gnostic “innovations” took place. Furthermore, Phibionite doctrine was assuredly related to Christian belief since the former’s “Barbelo” was none other than the ancient “Wisdom,” and thus indigenous to both traditions. Though she may have been further modified by contemporary Mother-goddess cults, she was essentially related to Christ in the same way that Wisdom was related to him in the Valentinian system, namely that both were “mediators” who emanated from the Unknown Father, a fact that even Epiphanius acknowledges in his summary of Phibionite mythology: In the eighth heaven (above Ialdabaoth’s Hebdomad) is the female power who is called Barbelo and the Father of the Universe, its Lord, who is also called Autopater (“Self Father”), and another one, Christ, who brought himself to birth, and this Christ is the one who descended and showed men this knowledge, whom they also call Jesus (Panarion, 26.10.4).

The Phibionites thus revered the same “Father-Mother-and-Son” worshipped by other Gnostics, and whom they likewise explained as emanations from Autopater, the “Self-Existent.” Thus Christ and Barbelo were Aeons in the same traditional hierarchy of Light. And though Epiphanius Ibid., 18. Ibid. 195 Ibid., 19, 11. 193 194

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does not supply us with details, it is obvious that Barbelo had subsequently “fallen” into matter, for her power was being regathered in the form of the souls imprisoned in semen (26.10.9–10). It was Christ’s role to unite spiritually with these fallen souls during Gnostic intercourse, which at the same time released Barbelo’s powers from the ritual sperm-meal. The Phibionite males then identified themselves with Christ by uniting sexually with the various women of the group in order to assist them in overcoming the Archons:196 Be one with me, that I may present you to the Archon (26.9.6).

When each had successfully united with the required number of women (corresponding to the number of Archons who sought to bar his passage into heaven), he boastfully declared, I am Christ, for I have descended from above through the names of the 365 Archons (26.9.9).

The Phibionite could then claim that his sperm contained not only the Mother’s recovered power, but also Christ’s male power, hence it was the Body of Christ, “in which all things—even male and female—are reconciled” (cf. Gal 3:28; Col 1:18–28). This explanation has the advantage of agreeing with the known facts of Gnostic soteriology, but it also vindicates Epiphanius’ details concerning the nature and purpose of the sperm-cult, which Kurt Rudolph has recently dismissed as being “exaggerated” and an imaginary product of the reporter’s own concupiscence.197 2 Jeu and the Pistis Sophia further verify his account; and other early authors refer to similar “obscene practices” amongst the Christians of the day, such as Minucius Felix, who around A.D. 210 admitted that the Church was sometimes accused of being a religio libidinum, in which members worshipped the virile member during secret, nocturnal rites—even eating their own children! He also describes the same “incestuous lust” displayed by Phibionites during their “fellowship meals” Compare the Gospel of Philip 65:1–26: “As for the unclean spirits (= archons), there are males among them and there are females. The males are they which unite with the souls who inhabit a female form, but the females are they which are mingled with those in a male form … But none shall be able to escape them since they detain him (the soul) if he does not receive a male power or a female power—the bridegroom and the bride. One receives them from the mirrored Bridal Chamber.” 197 Gnosis, 249. 196

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(agape), when all indulged in indiscriminate sexual intercourse (Octavius, 9). Origen was in fact obliged around A.D. 248 to defend even the majority Christians against the charge that they “offered up an infant in sacrifice and partook of its flesh,” enjoying promiscuous coition during their meetings in the darkness (Against Celsus, 6.27). Even Clement of Alexandria mentions these “obscene meals”—which he revealingly says are not worthy of being called an “agape” (Miscellanies, 3.2)—though he ascribes them specifically to the Carpocratians, who were widely known to have been involved in sexual deviancy. In another passage, Clement expresses his disgust that such groups would refer to their Aphrodite pandemos (sexual love) as a “mystical communion,” when it was only “common sexual intercourse” (Miscellanies, 3.4). Perhaps the most interesting report of all, however, is that of Hippolytus (Refutations, 6.19), who recorded that the Simonians called their indescriminate copulation the “Holy of Holies”—an obvious recollection of the connection between Christianity and the imagery of the Embracing Cherubim in the Temple. That both Clement and Hippolytus (ca. A.D. 210–230) were thinking of practices like those of the Phibionites is further shown by the fact that Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 1.31) and Justin (Apology, 10.29) both characterized them with the technical expression, solvere opera hysterae (“destroying the work of the Female”)—i.e., the work of the Fallen Wisdom and her Demiurge—which was the imprisonment of souls in bodies. Accordingly, the “Female’s” defeat was equivalent to restoring the light of the Higher Wisdom, as in the Phibionite sullegein.198 Thus, we have good reason (contra Rudolph) to take Epiphanius’ report concerning the Phibionite agape seriously. The latter’s Panarion (26.11.1) also shows that some Gnostics resorted to ritual masturbation in order to thwart the process of procreation. They used as supporting texts both Acts 20:34 (“These hands were sufficient, not only for me, but for those with me”) and Ephesians 4:28 (“Working with your own hands, that you may have something to share with those who have nothing”). There were also those who employed homosexual union for the same purpose (26.11.8; 13.1); and there were Gnostic women who copulated and fornicated constantly, but “never proceeded with actual intercourse … so far as to conceive.” These were admiringly called “virgins” (12.11.10), perhaps recalling the Philonic principle that ordinary intercourse

198

See Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 12–17.

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makes women out of virgins, but “intercourse with God” (i.e., ritual intercourse) turns them back into “virgins” again.199 Fendt describes still other Gnostic versions of Mystic Communion in which a Serpent was venerated as a symbol of the Logos.200 The so-called Ophites (“Serpent-worshippers”) and Naassenes (from Hebrew nahaš, or “snake”) believed that the Serpent who instructed Adam and Eve in the Garden was none other than Wisdom. After her “fall,” she became the sleeping dragon in the depths of the sea, out of whom the physical creation proceeded. In this legend (in Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.30.3), we recognize four more themes from traditional Judaism and early Christianity: (1) the account of Creation, when God’s Spirit (the Wisdom/Logos) rested upon the face of the waters; (2) the concept of the Cosmos as the Body of the Logos; (3) the Old Testament conception of the watery deep as a chaos monster (Leviathan); and (4) the prophecy that the Son of Man would some day be “lifted up” like Moses’ “Brass Serpent” in the Wilderness (John 3:14). These themes were ingeniously combined in Ophite theology with the belief that Wisdom could still be found in ordinary serpents. This was of course rendered more plausible by the Gnostic reversal of Old Testament values, which reduced Yahweh to the rank of Demiurge, but dignified the Serpent as the Unknown Father’s special envoy.201 Thus, the Ophites prepared their Eucharist by allowing a snake to thrash about in the bread,202 undoubtedly to impart Wisdom’s presence to the sacred repast. At the same time, they performed the agape by kissing the serpent’s mouth, showing again that (for some Christians, at least) the agape was a form of union with Wisdom. In this way, they were able to commune with the “SerpentPower” of the Logos, quoting as legitimation Luke 22:19: “This is my body which is given for you.”203 See pp. 45–50, above. Gnostische Mysterien, 25. 201 Compare also ibid., 25–26. We must reject, however, Fendt’s suggestion that the Asiatic Magna Mater lies behind this imagery. It may well have been drawn upon for additional corroboration, but the original elements of this symbolism are all to be found in the Bible. See also pp. 273–74, above, for the Gnostic legend of the Serpent’s role in illuminating mankind. 202 Fendt believes that the absence of wine in this ceremony corresponds to an early form of the Eucharist, in which bread only was specified. See Acts 2:46; Acts of Thomas, 27, 49, 50. 203 Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 28. We must again disagree with Kurt Rudolph (Gnosis, 247) that the Ophite Serpent-Eucharist had nothing essential to do with 199 200

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Fendt also discusses an Ebionite form of the Eucharist which employed bread and water in place of the customary bread and wine (Panarion, 30.16).204 Von Harnack was of the opinion that the first Christians were commanded merely to celebrate a sacred meal together, as in the Lukan tradition, which fails to specify what drink shall accompany the bread (Luke 22:19–20). Only after the Gnostics began to object to the use of alcohol did the Church counter by specifying that wine be included in the Eucharist— largely in opposition to the Gnostics’ use of water.205 There were other Christians, who like the Gnostics, were forbidden the use of alcohol and regularly used different substances in its place. Thus, we read in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho (117) that any solid or liquid might be substituted for the bread or wine.206 Even the parallel tradition which took the use of wine for granted (based on the Last Supper) did not attach particular significance to the wine per se.207 Irenaeus, on the other hand, objected heartily to the omission of wine from the Eucharist, arguing that the mixture of wine and water, prior to being presented to the communicants, specifically symbolized the union of God and man (Against Heresies, 5.1.3).208 Christianity, but was a continuation of Greek and Hellenistic cults like that at Eleusis and that of Sabazios. 204 Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 29 ff. 205 Ibid., 36. 206 Ibid., 30 and 78. 207 Ibid., 36. 208 Russian churches explained the mystery of water and wine as the mystery of God and Humanity uniting at the Incarnation, when the Mother of God was impregnated to produce the Savior. Psalm 45 was recited as a kind of epithalamium (“Upon thy right hand did stand the Queen,” etc.), preceded by the words, “Blessed is the union of the Holy Ones (hagia), always, now and forever from ages of ages.” The Jacobites used to say, “Mingle, O Lord God, this water with the wine, just as thou didst unite thy Godhood with our own humanity.” The Armenians, as they mingled the two, proclaimed, “Let the Holy Ghost come upon thee and let the power of the Most High overshadow thee.” Nestorian Churches carried the symbolism even into the kneeding of the Eucharist dough, which was partly formed into phallic shapes (kaprana, melka, “King”), and partly into the shape of cups (melkaita, “Queen”), both of which were then united and thoroughly mixed. Ethel Drower, Water into Wine (London, 1956), 62–64, 66, 68, 75, 76–77, 78; also The Secret Adam (Oxford, 1960), 52, 69, 76, 79, 91, also note 63. The “Pouring out” of water was itself associated with fertility rites; see Patai, Man and Temple (New York, 1969), 36–7; also Genesis Rabbah 78:16; 1 Samuel 7:3–10; Tosefta, Sukkoth 3:18; Zechariah 14:17–18.

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This is significant for us because it shows once again that certain early Christians interpreted the Eucharist as a hieros gamos symbol, similar to the symbolic mixing of wine and water at the autumn rite of Water Libation.209 Irenaeus’ reason for preferring wine in the Communion therefore supports our contention that some sort of Sacred Marriage stood behind the Eucharist from the beginning, representing the union of Christ and the Church. The Gnostics, however, insisted that pure water was even holier than wine, and therefore an appropriate symbol for the divine element in the mystery of union. In this, they were supported by the Mandaeans, whose Mambuha-Communion exclusively employed water,210 for to them the “living water” represented the Heavenly Jordan, or the realm of Light.211 A similar water-Eucharist can be found in the Pistis Sophia (Schmidt edition, 243ff), which describes the forgiveness of sin by calling down the “Powers” (dynameis) from the Father’s Treasury of Light into the bread and water, providing for the expungment of errors committed by the assembly.212 This resembles the use of semen in the Phibionite sullegein, for the powerful liquid with its imprisoned “light” also set one free from the dominion of the Demiurge. In these late versions of the Eucharist, semen and water are roughly equivalent as bearers of light,213 showing perhaps that water was an even more basic and primitive symbol of the Divine than wine. One thinks in this connection of the frequent use of water as a symbol of the Spirit at Qumran, e.g., in the Hymn Scroll, with its obvious recollection of the traditional “River of Wisdom” (Sir 24:25–30): And all the rivers of Eden shall water the boughs (of the eternal Planting), and it shall become a mighty forest … and it shall be a well-spring of light and an eternal unfailing fountain (1QH VI, 16–17).

In fact, 2 Jeu follows the epiclēsis (Invocation) with an explanation that the wine of the Eucharist turns into the water of life, i.e., the water of baptism,

209 See Patai, Man and Temple, the chapter entitled “The Ritual of the Water Libation,” 24ff. 210 Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 32. 211 Ibid., 32. 212 Ibid., 33–4. 213 Ibid., 35.

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at the moment of blessing,214 showing clearly that water had a higher significance than the wine itself. Behind such rites Fendt detects what must be the most archaic symbol of all for divine power, namely water, which appears to have been the natural and essential medium of Christian cult-mysticism from the very start. Whether one drank it or was immersed in it, it was the mediator of heavenly life, the source of gnosis, forgiveness, salvation, and divinization.215 Water, in short, was the symbol par excellence for the Light, or the heavenly “effluence” which we first encountered in the Wisdom Mystery, and the element to which the initiate was traditionally “married” in the Temple. The Gnostic’s sacrament of semen obviously belonged to the same tradition. It too was divine Light, or “water of life,” because it bore the logos spermatikos which had descended from above to animate Creation. According to the Libertine Gnostics, it too had to be freed from its entrapment in the physical world by sexual means, first by awakening it, then by preventing it from being diverted into procreation. As Jacques Lecarrière poetically observes in his slender but perceptive essay, The Gnostics,216 And so we see that in the very depths of corporeal darkness, in the world of ash and mud that is each human body, only an all-embracing asceticism or the effusion of erotic desire and the ecstatic cult of women can revive the flickering spark we keep within us. Just as the ash at the heart of a dying fire glows red, being the burnt-out stars of matter which has been consumed and, by the same token, ultimately saved, so for the Gnostic, the mental embers that glow red in the ashes of the body, when liberated and saved through gnosis, are the sure sign that his path will one day lead him to the circle of stars.

Gnostic groups survived as late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. All of them—including the Bogumils and the Cathars of Provence—now believed that the “Perfect” should either avoid sexual fulfillment, or employ it as a means of exhausting itself. As Denis de Rougemont has recently shown,217 the Catharist Troubadours adopted the latter stratagem as their secret cult practice, choosing to serve some idealized “beloved,” who nec214 Schmidt edition, 309. Conversely, the water of baptism is identical to the “first sacrifice” (Schmidt edition, 245, 15ff). The Acts of Thomas likewise makes baptism a part of the water-Eucharist (121). See Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 35–36, 79. 215 Fendt, Gnostische Mysterien, 36. 216 English translation (New York, 1977), 95. 217 Love in the Western World.

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essarily remained unattainable. Thus, sexual ardor was kept tormentingly alive, though never allowed to find satisfaction in the world. The same author has further argued that the romance of Tristan and Iseult was informed by the same Gnostic hatred of the world, and the realization that true spiritual union could only be consummated in death. Perhaps this reflects in a final, strange way the fact that genuine love was considered at one time to be eternal, and to endure beyond the grave: ki ‘azzah kammewet ‘ahavah. For Love is strong as Death (Song of Songs 8:6).218

GNOSTICISM AS A DEVELOPMENT OF THE LIGHT-STREAM It should now be clear that Gnosticism, far from being “foreign” to Christianity, was a natural development of indigenous Christian beliefs—many of them since forgotten—and it therefore offers welcome corroboration of their existence prior to being eliminated by so-called “orthodoxy.” As James M. Robinson notes in his introduction to The Nag Hammadi Library, “Christian Gnosticism emerged as a reaffirmation, though in different terms, of the original stance of transcendence central to the very beginnings of Christianity” (p. 4). Simone Pétrement—the leading modern proponent of a Christian origin for Gnosticism—also comes to the conclusion that the progressive formation of Gnosticism can be depicted by considering the development of a branch of Christianity, the Pauline, Johannine branch. It seemed to me that Gnosticism gradually took shape, by a series of stages, beginning with the Gnosticizing tendencies one finds in the New Testament, up to the moment when Gnosticism properly so-called appeared at the beginning of the second century (our emphasis).219

Elaine Pagels likewise adduces considerable evidence to show that the Gnostics based their theology largely on the works of John and Paul, whose writings they considered to be their basic scripture.220 Even the Church Fa-

See Marvin H. Pope’s interpretation in Song of Songs, 229, 668–69. A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism (San Francisco, 1990), 482. 220 The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis (Nashville, 1973); The Gnostic Paul (Philadelphia, 1975). In her more recent The Gnostic Gospels (New York, 1979), she writes: “If we go back to the earliest sources of Christian tradition— the sayings of Jesus (although scholars disagree on the question of which sayings are genuinely authentic), we can see how both gnostic and orthodox forms of Christianity could emerge as variant interpretations of the teaching and significance of Christ” (148). 218 219

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thers were unanimously agreed that Gnosticism developed entirely within Christianity and was therefore a uniquely “Christian heresy.” The original “transcendence” of which Robinson speaks had to do primarily with the Church’s apocalyptic world-view, according to which the Earthly had fallen from the Heavenly during a cosmic catastrophe, wrenching apart the male-female relationship which had existed between Christ and his preexistent Church. The Church, however, was still linked to her intended Spouse by a Light-Stream which terminated in the Jerusalem Temple, but was visible only to those whose mystical vision was suitably awakened. There it waited to reveal itself to the fallen Community and reunite its members to Christ. This in turn became the basic pattern of Gnostic salvation. Robinson’s “different terms,” on the other hand, reflected the dualistic barrier which had emerged between the heavens and the world of the Jewish God, who now believed himself to be the only deity, and who gave the people of Moses an “inferior law” with which to bind them to his fallen creation. Thus it will be seen that the claims of the Gnostics may be largely traced to Christianity’s own claims, though occasionally carried to logical extremes through intellectual virtuosity. Their derogatory view of Judaism was in fact but a consequence of Christianity’s belief that it possessed a more complete version of God’s Law, one which had earlier been given to the patriarchs (Matt 19:8; Gal 3:8), but had been simplified at the time of Moses to manage the unruly worshippers of the Golden Calf.221 Scholars who have recently argued that Gnosticism originated within Jewish circles will thus see that their view is at least partly true, though its Jewish roots had first to undergo a Christian “correction” before they could become identifiably 221 As Leo Schaya writes in The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah (Baltimore, 1975), “the original Tablets of the Law emanated from the Tree of Life … (But) Israel, by worshipping the Golden Calf ‘was judged unworthy of benefitting from them.’ Therefore, Moses, following the divine command, gave the people other Tables, ‘which came from the side of the Tree of Good and Evil.’ The first Tables … were the light and doctrine of the Messiah, the outpouring of universal deliverance, the source of eternal life on earth. The second Tables represented the indirect or ‘fragmented’ manifestation of the light” (quoting from the Zohar). Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah (New York, 1965), 69–70, gives the following references for this doctrine: Zohar I:26b; II:117b; III:124b; 153a; 255a; Tikkun Zohar, 56, 60; Zohar Hadash 106c. See also 4 Ezra 14:4–6, which states that God gave two sets of Torah on Sinai, one for the people, and one for the elite.

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“Gnostic.” In the process, the Jewish “heresy” of Two Powers in Heaven,222 as well as the belief in a hypostatic Logos/Wisdom, evolved into the Christian “Father and Son,” and their “angels” into the “Aeons” of the Gnostic Pleroma—now explicated with the help of a developing NeoPlatonism and a growing trend toward asceticism. The Gnostics also preserved the soteriological scheme of the Jewish Temple, which taught that men could be redeemed through a hieros gamos with their Source (the Wisdom Mystery), making them “one flesh” with the Divine. This hieros gamos survived in the New Testament as Paul’s “Great Mystery,” which likewise consisted of Christ/Wisdom’s “marrage” to his people. In the Gospel of John this became the doctrine of “spiritual indwelling,” explaining the mechanism of the Atonement as man’s “At-OneMent” (henosis) with the Divine, as opposed to the legalisms of the Mosaic Law. These two expressions of the Wisdom Mystery in turn became the “Bridal Chamber” of the Gnostics, teaching once again that the mystery of sexual union was the sacrament which “catalyzed” the mystery of union with Christ. Thus the “Bridal Chamber” became an affirmation of the Judaeo-Christian marriage doctrine, which in its own way verified the belief of the first Christians, who had not yet elevated celibacy over normal marriage. Even the antinomian rites of later Gnostics still showed the paradigmatic importance of the marriage bond, which they employed in their curiously perverted way in order to control the life force which it contained. Most significant, perhaps, was the manner in which the Gnostics preserved the ancient theology of the Light-Stream. Philo had earlier described how Temple pilgrims were “inseminated” by the divine virtues which it carried to the earth; and the New Testament writers saw it as the “Light” of God’s Spirit, mediating his divine attributes and powers to mankind—even a “fulness of Godhood” (plērōma tēs theotētos, Col 2:9). Thus the Light-Stream led to the Church’s concept of the “Divine Fulness,” and the “Divine Fulness” to the Gnostic Pleroma, with its archetypal patterns of deity. Its theologians now dissected and analyzed these patterns in an attempt to lay bare a “Unified Field” which might explain both contemporary science and religion. In the process, they rediscovered within its luminous structure the same Familial Images which had given rise to the generations, and saw in its heavenly history the archetypal paradigm of humanity’s own Fall, sexual isolation, and marital restoration. Thus would be reconstituted the male-

222

See p. 26, above.

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female completeness of the Pleroma, both Man and Woman, and Christ and the Church. It is most remarkable how the Gnostic Pleroma carried on this ancient tradition of the light-world and its preexistent images, reaching all the way back to the Semitic doctrine of the Heavenly Archetypes. Thus we read in the Babylonian Enuma elish the Father’s command to his Son: “A likeness of what (Marduk) made in heaven, let him make on earth” (VI:112), showing that “the configuration of the sky corresponds to the phenomena of the earth,”223 and that “our own life is but a particular form of the universal life.”224 The Preacher also explained that “What has been is what will be … for there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9)—even the Temple (Exod 25:9) and the events of history.225 Indeed, as Mircea Eliade has carefully demonstrated, most primitive men understood reality to be “a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype,”226 and Franz Cumont was able to trace its Semitic formulations all the way back through “the first twenty or thirty centuries of Mesopotamian history.”227 Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend find these preexistent archetypes even farther back in the Neolithic period and show that the mathematical precision needed to detect and quantify their heavenly movements was available by at least 4000 B.C. According to these scholars, the entire “Protopythagorean” world believed that the soul came from a celestial fire, but fell to earth as a result of the disruption known as the “Precession of the Equinoxes,” during which the human spirits were ejected from their luminous home via the Milky Way. This ubiquitous tradition gave rise to such myths as the Hindu “Churning of the Milky Sea,” the “Cosmic Drilling” of Horus and Seth, the Icelandic “Amlodhi and his Spinning Top,” the Mesopotamian “Stirring of the Apsu before Ea,” and the Platonic Demiurge, with his great “Mill of Time”—all corresponding to the celestial rotation of the stars.228 This widespread doctrine will therefore be seen to be much older than even the Zoroastrian menak and getik (“heavenly archetype” and “earthly Ibid., 12 [uncertain reference, ed. note]. Ibid., 74 [uncertain reference, ed. note]. 225 Compare Isaiah 14:12–15 with 14:4, 16–22, also with Ezekiel 28:12–19 and Daniel 11:36–39, 45. In each of these instances, Satan’s attack on the Mountain of the Lord is the pattern for similar attacks by earthly kings. 226 The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton, 1954), 5. 227 Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (New York, 1960), 6. 228 See their Hamlet’s Mill (Boston, 1977). 223 224

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antitype”), which many have claimed to be the source of Gnostic dualism. But according to Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, these Zoroastrian ideas were themselves “essentially Semitic and astral,”229 showing that their origins were indeed much older than their reputed appearance in the sixth century B.C., having originated no doubt within the thought world of the proto-Semites. Edwin Yamauchi has in fact shown that the major sources of Zoroastrian theology were compiled much too late to have had any influence on the development of Gnosticism,230 and probably belonged to a general Near Eastern tradition of immemorial antiquity. We accordingly believe that Gnosticism was hardly the result of outside influences grafted onto Christianity, or even of unidentified “Jewish” influences previously unknown, but rather the survival of an ancient and enduring belief in man’s origin in the heavens and his eventual reunion with his Source. This tradition was handed down for millennia by the ancestors of Israel and the Primitive Church, though it has been obscured by the recent “orthodoxy” of both factions. Yet the same tradition was serendipitously explained once again by the English word, “Atonement,” being the real meaning of salvation, or “At-One-Ment” with the Divine. Symbolized at one time by the Embracing Cherubim, this remained the central function of the Temple and the Gnostic “Bridal Chamber,” where Man and God were made “one flesh” (Eph 5:31–32), or as Paul expressed it elsewhere, “one Spirit” (1 Cor 6:17). Thus the Divine Fulness was directly shared with believers; and the Gnostic Pleroma offered an “exploded view” of the continuous process by which God “extends himself to those whom he loves, so that those who came from him might become him as well” (Tripartite Tractate, 73:23–28).

229 230

Symbols and Values in Zoroastrianism (New York, 1966), 98. Pre-Christian Gnosticism (Grand Rapids, 1973).

7 THE GREAT MYSTERY IN THE MIDDLE AGES THE KABBALISTIC GREAT MYSTERY We have now returned to the point at which we began our study, i.e., at the original Jewish conception of human marriage as a sacred and divine obligation and a reflection of God’s own image, holy and worthy of veneration for its own sake. Most importantly, it was charged with great soteriological power when one became united to the Divine Reality which it symbolized. After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70, pious Jews continued to search for visions of God’s “Face” or “image” in private, the object being to see what Isaiah and others had seen in the Temple (Isa 6:1ff), or even in exile (Ezek 1:4–26; Dan 7:9–14). How this tradition of communion with God passed down to medieval Jewish mystics is still largely unknown, but thanks to the indefatigable researches of Gershom Scholem, it has at least become certain that its origin and roots lay in the mystical traditions of the Second Temple. After the Temple disappeared, these traditions went mostly underground, resurfacing here and there in scattered mystical treatises, until they eventually emerged into the full light of day in the writings of the German Hasidim (ca. 1150–1250). They reached their greatest flowering, however, in the writings of the Spanish “Kabbalists,” especially in the thirteenth-century book known as the Zohar (“the Splendor”), of which we shall have more to say presently. “Kabbalah” in fact means “the Transmission,” i.e., “the Tradition” which was handed down from the immemorial past, and whose history Scholem has summarized as follows: Subterranean but effective, and occasionally still traceable, connections exist between these later mystics and the groups which produced a large proportion of the pseudepigrapha and apocalypses of the first century before and after Christ. Subsequently a great deal of this unrecognized tradition made its way to later generations independent of, and often in isolation from the schools and academies of the Talmudic teachers. We know that in the period of the Second Temple an esoteric doctrine was already taught in Pharisaic circles. The first chapter of Genesis, the story of Creation (Ma’aseh Bereshit ), and the first chapter of Ezekiel, the vision

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A GREAT MYSTERY of God’s throne-chariot (merkabah), were the favorite subjects of discussion and interpretation which it was apparently considered inadvisable to make public … It seems probable, however, that speculation did not remain restricted to commentaries on the Biblical text. The hayyoth, the “living creatures,” and other objects of Ezekiel’s vision were conceived as angels who form an angelologic hierarchy at the Celestial Court … One thing remains certain: the main subjects of the later Merkabah mysticism already occupy a central position in this oldest esoteric literature, best represented by the Book of Enoch. The combination of apocalyptic with theosophy and cosmogony is emphasized almost to excess: “Not only have the seers perceived the celestial hosts, heaven with its angels, but the whole of this apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic literature is shot through with a chain of new revelations concerning the hidden glory of the great Majesty, its throne, its palace … the celestial spheres towering up one over the other, paradise, hell, and the containers of the souls” (MTJM, 42).

These were the visions experienced by such prophets as Enoch (1 Enoch 14), Abraham (Apocalypse of Abraham and The Testament of Abraham)1 and Ezra (4 Ezra; The Greek Apocalypse of Ezra; Vision of Ezra; Quotations of Ezra; the Revelation of Ezra, etc.),2 and which appear to have become part of an oral tradition paralleling the more familiar traditions of the rabbis and the Talmud.3 These were already the subject of esoteric speculation during the Second Temple period, and the Mishna (Hagigah 2:1) gave them the name of ma’aseh merkabah, referring to the vision of God’s glory seated on his Cherubic Throne (the merkabah). The same traditions were also treated extensively in the Qumran literature, where we read about the angels surrounding God’s Throne, and how to enter into communion with them (pp. 75–82, above). The late Jewish version of Enoch known as 3 Enoch gives us an especially rich account of the prophet Enoch’s ascent to the merkabah and what he saw there,4 though it was obviously based on the earlier pseudepigrapha known as 1 Enoch and 2 Enoch, the first of which contains material from approximately 160 B.C. In James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City, NY, 1985), 1:681–705. 2 Also in ibid., 1:517–604). 3 D. S. Russell, Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (Philadelphia, 1964), 173– 74. 4 3 Enoch, or the Hebrew Book of Enoch, ed. Hugo Odeberg (New York, 1973). This book is generally dated to approximately the sixth or seventh centuries of our era. 1

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From the fourth century on, and possibly even earlier,5 we encounter a growing number of treatises describing the world of the merkabah—very similar to the structure of the Gnostic Pleroma—with graduated levels, different orders of angels, and special rituals designed to facilitate communication with the Great Being seated on the merkabah. The best known of these descriptions are contained in the Lesser Hekhaloth and the Greater Hekhaloth (the hekhaloth being the “palaces” or “mansions”6 which surround the Heavenly Throne). The Greater Hekhaloth also contains the oldest known description of “God’s Body” (the shi’ur komah), which is generally depicted in gigantic terms (“Great is our Lord, and mighty is his power,” Ps 147:5). First Enoch in fact characterized him as “infinite” (“I have seen the measure of the height of the Lord, without dimension and without shape, which has no end,” 13:8). But in order to ascend to the merkabah, one had to reveal the “secret names of God” to the angelic doorkeepers. The one who gave them correctly was admitted through a Forecourt called pardes, “the Garden of God” (cf. Rev 2:7), after which the hekhaloth themselves began. Here we are obviously speaking of something based on the structure of the Temple, whose own hekhal stood between the Forecourt and the Holy of Holies. Here the visitor became aware of the Tri-Sanctus (“Holy, Holy, Holy”) as it was sung by the angelic choir, just as Isaiah had heard it centuries before (Isa 6:3). God’s shape, however, was based primarily on descriptions of the “Beloved” found in Song of Songs (5:11–16), showing that the mystics still thought of God in sexual terms. We already noted that the German hasidim referred to him as the keruv meyuhad (“Special Cherub”),7 an obvious reference to the Embracing Cherubim in the Second Temple. He was also said to be an “emanation of God’s Glory” (i.e., Wisdom), containing two contrasting attributes, “holiness” and “sovereignty,” just as Philo had described God’s male and female powers in the Holy of Holies (“While God is one, his highest and chiefest powers are two, even goodness and sovereignty,” On the Cherubim, 27–28).8 That God indeed had a Feminine Counterpart, with whom he engaged in marital relations, is frequently commented on by the Kabbalists, being one of the longest-lived traditions of Israelite religion, though it was by now interpreted in monotheistic fashion as the union of G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1965), 374. Cf. John 14:2, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” 7 See p. 10, above. 8 See also p. 14, above. 5 6

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his divine “attributes” (see “The Secret of a King,” below). As we saw earlier, these had also found their way into the Gnostic systems of male and female “Aeons,” those divine “emanations” who were likewise in sexual conjunction and who mediated the Transcendent to the Worldly. Jewish Merkabah mysticism also depicted the link between God and man as a River of Light emanating from the “Special Cherub” on the heavenly Throne. Philo had imagined it entering the Temple as a sevenfold “Light-Stream,” where it became visible in the Holy of Holies as the Embracing Cherubim and the articles within the Ark (pp. 57ff, above). In the fully blown Kabbalism of the Zohar and Isaac Luria, this Light-Stream would become a series of unfolding sexual polarities, called the “Sephirotic Tree,” or God’s devolving male-female attributes (sephiroth), again in sexual conjunction. Together, they comprised the preexistent prototype of man (Adam Kadmon) or a cosmic representation of God’s male-female image (Gen 1:26–27). With its roots in heaven, Adam Kadmon joined God’s Transcendent Unity (En Sof ) to his multiform creations by means of internal procreations, corresponding roughly to the male-female gods of ancient Israel. In the words of Gershom Scholem: (This) hieros gamos, the “sacred union” of the King and Queen, the Celestial Bridegroom and the Celestial Bride, to name a few of the symbols, is the central fact in the whole chain of divine manifestations in the hidden world. In God there is a union of the active and the passive, procreation and conception, from which all mundane life and bliss are derived … One of the images employed to describe the unfolding of the Sefiroth pictures them … as the offspring of mystical procreation, in which the first ray of divine light is also the primeval germ of creation; for its ray which emerges from Nothing (i.e., God beyond human understanding) is, as it were, sown into the “celestial mother,” i.e., into the divine Intellect, out of whose womb the Sefiroth spring forth, as King and Queen, son and daughter. Dimly we perceive behind these mystical images the male and female gods of antiquity, anathema as they were to the pious Kabbalist.9

And because man’s existence begins at the lower end of this divine chain, his own sexual life is a continuation of the divine sexual life, which further explains why both Paul and the Gnostics could link the “Lesser Mystery” of human union with the “Great Mystery” of divine union.10 It also explains Scholem, MTJM, 227. In Paul’s case, however, the “divine union” is no longer the polytheistic original, but the allegorized version, i.e., union of God and Israel, or Christ and the 9

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why the Kabbalists viewed their personal relations with their wives as “catalysts” and sacramental reenactments of the heavenly Great Mystery. But before we describe this Kabbalistic hieros gamos in detail, let us briefly examine the divine sexual life within the earlier schemes of the sephiroth. Just as Christian Hexaemeron speculation had derived the earthly Church from a preexistent corporeity consisting of Christ and the Church— betrothed to each other from before Creation—so did the Kabbalist derive the souls of men from a wedded prototype in the heavens (the “Body” of Adam Kadmon). In the Sepher Yetzirah (“Book of Creation”), written perhaps between the third and sixth centuries,11 these attributes were simply described as primordial “numbers,” ten in all, which together with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet were the elements out of which the world was created. Because they came from God, they also represented progressive stages of his devolution, similar to the angelic intermediaries through which Wisdom’s Light-Stream descended into matter.12 In the Book Bahir (Sepher ha-Bahir), containing material from the gaonic period (seventh to eleventh centuries), these primordial “attributes” were known as middoth, variously described as “Knowledge,” “Fruitfulness,” “Righteousness,” etc., all intertwining, recombining, and eventually “crystallizing” into matter. The Bahir also related these middoth to the Gnostic Aeons and pictured them as an organism of light, arranged into descending potencies, with its roots in heaven and its branches in the world.13 By the time of the Zohar (written ca. 1290 by a Spanish Kabbalist named Moses de Leon), the sephiroth were clearly visualized as God’s sexual attributes (like the Aeons in the Gnostic Pleroma), constituting a sort of “inner merkabah” within Ezekiel’s “outer merkabah.”14 These sexual attributes were also thought of as the beginning stages of divine revelation, as En Sof (the Absolute) emerged from his Unknowable Root, much like the shoots of a growing tree emerging from the depths of the earth. It was in fact this “Sephirothic Tree” whose mature branches formed the skeleton of the created universe. Yet En Sof was not only the Root of the Cosmic Tree,

Church, though it is still symbolized by the concomitant unions of husbands and wives. 11 Scholem, MTJM, 75. 12 Ibid., 76–77. 13 Compare the Qumran hymn, 1QH VIII, 4ff, on p. 147, above. 14 Scholem, MTJM., 207.

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but its Sap;15 thus it served both as prototype and living core, sustaining all things because of the power of the sephiroth circulating within.16 In the system of Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the sephiroth were also thought of as the divine “names” or “attributes” which God emanated in order to organize and create the world. At the top stood Kether, the “Supreme Crown,” or the “abyss” through which En Sof must penetrate in order to begin his process of devolution. Some mystics called it the “Realm of Nothingness,” into which En Sof must first “empty” himself at the start of his dialectical unfolding, for “every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness is crossed, and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible” (Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona).17 Kether was also the upper “womb” from which the other sephiroth would emerge.18 It formed a “trinity” with the next two sephiroth, namely Hokhmah (“Wisdom”) and Binah (“Intelligence”), which were male and female, respectively. From the sexual union of the latter issued the seven lower sephiroth, corresponding to the seven days of creation,19 which in the Christian Hexaemeron were either the Protoctist Angels of the preexistent Church,20 or the seven planetary spheres (Prov 9:1). At the head of the lower sephiroth stood Hesed (“Loving Mercy”) and Din (“Stern Judgment”), whose intercourse was moderated by Tifereth (“Beauty”)—also called Rahamin (“Compassion”). A last pair, Netsah (“Embrace”) and Hod (“Majesty”) came together in Yesod (“Foundation”), otherwise described as “the Phallus,” through which the last sephirah, Malkuth (“Kingdom”)—a synonym for the Shekhinah—receives the “seed” as it flows into creation. These ten sephiroth were no less than the stages of God’s descent into the living cosmos, manifested as a series of male-female polarities and potencies, each in sexual conjunction and each giving birth to the next in a continuous creative process. According to legend, however, there came about a “shattering of the vessels” within this preexistent process, perhaps related to the ancient story of the War in Heaven, during which a portion of Adam Kadmon’s light was lost (“a part of God separated from himself”); these “scattered Ibid., 214. Ibid., 214–15. 17 Ibid., 217. He lived ca. 1300. Compare also Philippians 2:7, and Christ/Wisdom’s kenosis. 18 Ibid., 217. 19 Ibid., 220. 20 See pp. 143 ff, above. 15 16

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sparks” were the individual souls of Israel. Previously, God had been in union with his Shekhinah, and heaven and earth were One. As explained by another thirteenth-century Kabbalist, Joseph Gikatila, this Oneness had existed at the beginning of Creation; when the channels between the higher and lower regions were open, and God filled everything from above to below. But when Adam sinned, the order of things became disorder, and the unity of heaven and earth was broken.21 The Shekhinah (or Malkuth)—who of all the sephiroth was the only one who actually descended into the material world—was now characterized as God’s “Bride,” i.e., the lost and earthly “female counterpart” of God.22 Now she is described as the Knesseth Israel, or the spiritual substance of the Earthly Community,23 much like the Church, who is also Christ’s “Bride” in the Christian and Gnostic systems. The reintegration of the exiled “sparks” with God would take place as individual Kabbalists and their wives “reascended” the “rungs” of the sephiroth, which (like Philo’s “Royal Road”) provided a “Ladder of Ascent” (sullam ha-‘aliyah), each step corresponding to some virtue which must be incorporated into their personal lives. The final “rung” will be Devequth, or complete “adhesion” to God.24 Thus the Kabbalists described the continuous process whereby the Infinite God (En Sof ) differentiates himself into phenomenal attributes and brings about creation, a process which Scholem characterizes with Shelly’s famous lines: Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

Today, the Shekhinah (or spiritual principle of mankind) lies “exiled” from God. But the duty of Israel is to mend this separation through mitswoth (religious acts enjoined by Torah), and through special kawwanoth (“intentions” or “mental concentrations”), dedicating each act to the restoration of the harmony which should exist between Man and God. This restoration is known as tikkun, and its aim is to bring about “perfection above and below, so that all the worlds shall be united in one bond.”25 Thus, as Isaac the Blind (ca. 1200) explained it, the most basic kawwanah of all was Scholem, MTJM, 231. Ibid., 229. 23 Ibid., 213. 24 See pp. 70–71, above, and the discussion of the verb dabaq, from which the noun devequth is derived. 25 Scholem, MTJM, 233. 21 22

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This principle of tikkun was of utmost importance for the Kabbalist, for not only does the lower world get its spiritual direction from above, but the spiritual activities above are reciprocally influenced by conditions below. This undoubtedly went back to the idea, already expressed in the Talmud, that the embrace of the Cherubim depended upon Israel’s own behavior (p. 7, above); when Israel was righteous, God’s “Powers” came together; when Israel was unrighteous, they turned away from each other. Even God’s unity, then, suffers when men are given to sin, a concept which may ultimately be a reflection of the statement found in Isa 63:9: “In all their affliction he was afflicted.” In the Zohar, this reciprocity was tersely expressed with the epigram, “The impulse from below calls forth the impulse from above” (I:164a).

THE KABBALISTIC SACRED MARRIAGE Ascent up the “ladder” of the sephiroth had first of all to be accompanied by the mystic’s conformity to God’s male-female image, or as the Zohar succinctly puts it, God’s Presence cleaves to the man, but thanks only to his union with a wife (I:50a).

This again goes back to the traditional Jewish belief that He who does not marry thereby diminishes the image of his Maker … Man and woman are therefore commanded to marry and beget children, for it is written, “Male and Female created he them” (Tosefta, Yebamoth 8:4 and 6:6).

The pious Kabbalist was accordingly expected to do his own part in bringing about God’s unity by living with a wife in sexual harmony, so that the “Lesser Mystery” of human union could promote the “Greater Mystery” of spiritual union, and the process of tikkun could proceed. Thus the Kabbalist viewed earthly sex as an imitation of the sexual life in the sephiroth. Unlike “orthodox” Christians, who during the Middle Ages almost completely devalued human sexuality, Jewish Kabbalists rejected asceticism and continued to respect and obey God’s first commandment (Gen 1:28), not only as a concession to biological necessity, but as the most 26

Scholem, Kabbalah, 175.

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sacred of mysteries in its own right. In the words of Gershom Sholem, the Kabbalist confidently believed that “every true marriage is a symbolic realization of the union of God and the Shekhinah”:27 When is a man called complete in his resemblance to the Supernal? When he couples with his Spouse in oneness, joy and pleasure, and a son and a daughter issue from him and his female … He is complete (here) below after the pattern of the Supernal Holy Name … A man who does not want to complete the Holy Name below in this manner, it were better for him that he were not created, because he has no part in the Holy Name. And when he dies and his soul leaves him, it does not unite with him at all because he has diminished the image of his Maker (Zohar, III:7a; trans. by Raphael Patai).

In this manner, the image of the Archetypal Man (Adam Kadmon) would be reconstituted, and eternal life made possible for the united couple, who themselves became a “Perfect Man.” This was generally explained in terms of the myth found in Genesis 2:24–28, which Paul made the basis for his own “Great Mystery” (Eph 5:30–33): The female was extended on her side and she cleaved to the side of the male until she was separated from him. Then she was brought together with him face to face. When they came together, they appear in reality to be only one body. From this we learn that the male alone appears to be only half a body … When they come together as one, however, they appear really to be one body. This is so. Moreover, when the male couples with the female they actually become one body,28 and all the worlds are joyful because they receive blessing from the complete body. This is the secret contained in the verse (Exod 20:11): “Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it;” for on it were all things found to constitute the one complete body, the Matrona (Shekhinah) cleaving to the King to form one body. Therefore are blessings ushered in that day. We learn from this that he who remains without a wife, so that he is not both male and female, is counted only half a body. No blessing rests on anything that is blemished or lacking;29 it is found only in that Scholem, MTJM, 235. Compare 1 Corinthians 6:16–17; Ephesians 5:30–33. 29 Compare Deuteronomy 21:1: “He that is wounded in the testicles or hath his privy member cut off shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” Sexual union was thus considered even in the Old Testament to be necessary for obtaining the blessings of the Lord. 27 28

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A GREAT MYSTERY which is complete, in something whole and undivided. A thing which is divided cannot endure forever, nor will it ever receive blessing (Zohar, III:296a; trans. Patai).

This conjugal union constituted the central core of the Kabbalistic Sacred Marriage rite, details of which are found scattered through various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises. The earliest reference to it appeared already in the Talmud, which states that Torah scholars used to perform marital intercourse each Friday (Ketubbot 62b), in order to welcome the Sabbath and to initiate the hieros gamos of God and his Shekhinah.30 Later Kabbalists, ever respectful of tradition, followed suit by scheduling their own domestic rites so as to take place at the same time. Starting on Friday afternoon, those living in Safed and Jerusalem used to dress in white and go into the fields (an “Exodus” into the desert?) to greet the “Sabbath Bride” (Shekhinah), who was now called the “Ecclesia of Israel,”31 a term which shows the close relationship between the “Community of Israel” and Christ’s “Church” (ekklesia), for both considered themselves to be “Brides” of God. After the joyous meeting—marked by songs32 and prayer—a family ritual began at home. The family members now marched around the table with bundles of myrtle (cf. the lulabs used in the former Temple), praising the housewife as the image of the Heavenly Mother.33 The evening meal was then begun as a wedding feast in honor of the King and his Shekhinah, and the great Wedding-Hymn of Isaac Luria— “like the hymn of a mystery religion”34—was sung, describing in intimate detail the Sacred Marriage of the Heavenly Father and Mother: I sing in hymns to enter the gates of the field of apples of holy ones.35 A new table we lay for her, a beautiful candelabra sheds its light on us. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 140. Ibid., 142. 32 The most popular has always been Solomon Alkabez’ famous Lekha dodi: “Go my Beloved, to meet the Bride, let us receive the face of the Sabbath.” Song of Songs was also intoned as an epithalamion for God and the Shekhinah, a custom which probably throws light on the inclusion of that book in the Old Testament. 33 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 142. 34 Ibid., 143. 35 Scholem explains “the field” as a reference to the “feminine principle of the universe,” while the “apple trees” are Shekhinah herself “as the expression of all other sefiroth or holy orchards, which flow into her and exert their influence through her” (ibid., 140). The holy field is of course “fertilized” during the Sacred Marriage, resulting in the production of souls (ibid., 140). 30 31

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Between left and right the Bride approaches in holy jewels and festive garments.36 Her husband embraces her in her foundation (yesod, or sexual organs), gives her fulfillment, squeezes out his strength. Torments and cries are past. Now there are new faces and souls and spirits … Bridesmen, go forth and prepare the bride … to beget souls and new spirits … She has seventy crowns,37 but above her is the King that all may be crowned in the Holy of Holies.38

The special reference to the “Holy of Holies” immediately betrays the Temple-provenance of the rite; indeed, it has been said that the Jewish home (rather than the synagogue) was the true successor to the Temple, which otherwise ceased to exist after A.D. 70.39 This connection with the former Temple is further demonstrated by a line in Luria’s hymn, directing that the Shekhinah “be surrounded by six Sabbath Loaves, connected on every side with the Heavenly Sanctuary.” Here one thinks of the Shewbread in the Jerusalem Temple, as well as the Holy of Holies where God’s hieros gamos with his Shekhinah took place, now reenacted by the earthly union of the Kabbalist and his wife. Thus, the role of the Embracing Cherubim passed on to the pious couple in their “Domestic Temple,” and the bodies of the mystic and his wife became a “living chariot” (merkabah) for the Shekhinah, just “like the Holy Beasts which carry the Throne of honor.”40 In short, through a process of mystical assimilation, the husband and wife became the Embracing Cherubim, and God’s spiritual Presence came to dwell between them, just as he had done in Exodus 25:22 (see pp. 20–21, above). Thus we have a general Sacred Marriage feast which took place simultaneously on three different levels: the “Lesser Mystery” of human union, the “Greater Mystery” from which human souls are derived, and the union of God and Israel. That the Kabbalistic feast was still held in honor of the Shekhinah—who was none other than Sophia in a thinly disguised form—is 36 Compare Exodus 11:1–2, and our discussion of the jewels and raiment “borrowed” from the Egyptians as Sacred Marriage ornament (pp. 30–32, above). 37 Undoubtedly a remnant of the ancient belief that El and Asherah had seventy “sons of God,” or “stars of morning,” in Canaanite mythology (Ras Shamra Tablets, IV AB, i.3–4); also the ideal number in Israelite myth for the preexistent community and the earthly family (Exod 1:5). 38 Translation in Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 143–44. 39 Personal statement by Jacob Milgrom. 40 Y’hiel Mikhael Epstein, Seder T’fillah Derekh Y’share (Offenbach, 1791), 10b, 23b, 24b, quoted in the third edition of Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit, 1990), 186. All other quotations from this work are from the first edition.

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further evidence of its origin in the Temple, for as we read in the Apostolic Constitutions (which Goodenough considered to be a fragment of Jewish liturgy), it was for Sophia that Temple-feasts were appointed in the first place, “that we might come unto the remembrance of that Wisdom which was created by Thee”—she who was “Creatrix and dispenser of Providence, and the one to whom God spoke when he said, ‘Let us make man in our image.’”41 The Sacred Marriage of God and his Shekhinah continued to be the goal of Jewish worship until the most recent of times. During the sixteenth century, Isaac Luria recommended that all of the sacred commandments be observed with the express intent (kawwanah) of bringing about their heavenly unification. In his Sefer ha-Kawwanot (“Book of Intentions”), for example, he proposes that during prayer one must be careful always to say before everything, “For the unification of the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, in fear and trembling and awe, in the name of all Israel,” as one must always unite the male and the female.42

These Lurianic kawwanot were soon repeated in prayer books everywhere. Thus an Ashkenazic version, printed in Frankfort in 1697, specifies that “if a man prepares his body for the performance of a commandment, he should say explicitly that he does it for the unification of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah.” As an example, it mentions the wearing of the tzitzit-fringes on the undergarment (tallit qatan), which makes of one’s body “a vehicle for the Shekhinah, after the manner of the Holy Beasts who support the Throne of Glory” (Ezek 1).43 These special kawwanot—referred to as “unifications” (yihudim)—have continued to appear in Hasidic, Sepharidic, and Oriental Jewish prayerbooks to the present day. Some direct attention to the wearing of the prayer-shawl (which also has tzitzit-fringes) and the use of the phylacteries, which are strapped to the head and the left hand during prayer, again for the purpose of bringing God and his Shekhinah together.44 One Viennese example, “according to Sephardic custom,” specifies that the two phylacteries be visualized as the “brains” of God and his Female, “so that the BrideBy Light, Light (New Haven, 1935), 343. Quoted in Raphael Patai, The Seed of Abraham: Jews and Arabs in Contact and Conflict (Salt Lake City, 1986), 26. 43 In ibid., 27 44 Ibid., 28–29. 41 42

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groom (may) embrace the Bride,” i.e., become “tied together” by means of the leather thongs!45 Theodor Reik also notes that Ashkenazic Jews of his acquaintance recalled these nuptials when winding the straps of the phylacteries about the hand by reciting the following words from Hosea: And I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving kindness, and in mercies; I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know the Lord (2:4, 19).46

These tiny bits of otherwise forgotten tradition show that the Community of Israel is still to be identified with the Shekhinah as the “Bride” of Yahweh, just as was Gomer of old. Another prayer book of Sephardic provenance recommends that the yihudim formula be recited on other liturgical occasions, such as the sanctification of the new moon, the New Year tashlikh ceremony, the preparation for the kappara-rite, the eve of Yom Kippur, the making of lulabs for the Feast of Tabernacles, and before entering the Sukkoth-booth, etc. In the latter instance, the following is to be recited: Be it the will from before You, O Lord, my God and the God of my fathers, that You let Your Shekhinah rest among us, and spread over us the booth of Your peace, by virtue of the commandment of the Sukkah which we fulfill to unite the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah, in fear and trembling, to unite the Yah with the Weh in complete union, in the name of all Israel.47

A song for the same feast directs the worshipper’s thoughts to “the Holy of Holies, paved with love.” Another (composed for the seventh day) petitions that “love arise between them (God and the Shekhinah), and kiss us with the kisses of your mouth” (Song of Songs, 1:2),48 re-creating, as it were, an ancient hieros gamos in the Temple. The Song of Songs is also recited after the Passover Seder-meal, according to Sephardic instruction, to relate that feast to God’s Union with his Female. The special connection between the Sacred Marriage and the tzitzitfringes may reach back into prehistory. W. Robertson Smith theorized that they were originally related to the Arabian “fur tunic” worn by the faithful

Ibid., 29. Pagan Rites in Judaism (New York, 1964), 109–10. 47 In Patai, Seed of Abraham, 30. 48 In ibid., 30. 45 46

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in front of the Ka‘ba, cut from the hides of sacred animals.49 Theodor Reik would trace them to the fleece of the ram, which presumably had totemic significance for certain Hebrew tribes.50 On the same theory, the leather phylacteries might be derived from the Divine Bull, representing the horn on the head and the hoof of the foreleg, connected by strips of hide.51 The wearing of both articles, then, would signify the putting on of divine power, as symbolized by the sacred animal, now seen as the “living garment of the god.”52 Indeed, the Sifre says that he who wears the fringes “receives the Lord” (115); similarly, the windings of the phylacteries are said to form the letters of God’s Name.53 Thus the wearer himself becomes divine, invested with the same power which Jesus felt go out of him when a sick woman touched the “hem” of his garment (Mark 5:30).

THE SECRET OF A KING The unification of God and his Shekhinah is an especially important kawwanah to be observed during human procreation, referred to by certain Kabbalists as the “Secret of a King.” This, as we just saw, was to take place precisely at midnight, to coincide with the heavenly nuptials of the King and his Bride. Raphael Patai has summarized the teaching of the Zohar on this important point as follows: If the wife conceives at that hour, the earthly father and mother of the child can be sure that it will receive a soul from the Above, one of those pure souls that are procreated in the divine copulation of the King and Matronit. When a pious earthly couple perform the act, by doing so they set in motion all the generative forces of the mythic-mystical universe. The human sexual act causes the King to emit his seminal fluid from his divine male genital, and thus to fertilize the Matronit who thereupon gives birth to human souls and angels.54

Thus we have another clear instance of the ancient principle of “dual paternity” (pp. 44–45, above). Further details of the conjugal act within the sephi-

Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 3rd ed. (London, 1927), 436ff. Reik, Pagan Rites, 141, 148; compare Genesis 22:13; Exodus 25:5; Joshua 6:5; etc. Thus the four tzitzit would correspond to the four legs of the animal. 51 Reik, Pagan Rites, 140–41. 52 Ibid., 145, 148. 53 Ibid., 105. 54 Hebrew Goddess, 195–96. 49 50

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roth, prior to passing the divine “seed” to the earthly parents, are contained in an Aramaic prayer composed especially for the Sabbath Eve ritual: Be it the will of the Ancient One, the Most High One, and the Most Secret One, and the Most Hidden of All, that the supernal Dew be drawn from Him to fill the heart of the Small Face and to fall upon the Orchard of Holy Apples, in radiance of face, in pleasure and joy for all.55

This affirms that human marriage is vitalized by the procreative power of God, who is the literal Father of Souls (cf. Heb 12:9; Acts 12:28), and the spiritual Ancestor of the Human Race. In fact, the Shekhinah herself (as we noted earlier) is also present during the legitimate act (Zohar I:50a; b. Sotah, 17a). Thus, as the man and wife unite, the King unites with the Queen, and all the participants merge indistinguishably in a common hieros gamos: The absconditus sponsus enters the body of the woman and is joined with the abscondita sponsa. This is also true of the reverse side of the process, so that the two spirits are melted together and are interchanged continually between body and body … In that indistinguishable state which arises it may be said almost that the male is with the female neither male nor female, at least they are both or neither. So is man affirmed to be composed of the world above, which is male, and of the female world below. The same is true of the woman.56

This echoes the Zohar (I:50a), which adds that the Shekhinah “cleaves to the man, but thanks only to his own union with his wife.” Philo also declared that Isaac united with Sophia in the person of his wife (note 36, p. 34, above). Union with Shekhinah was in fact so important—being equivalent to union with God—that whenever a Torah-scholar returned from a trip, it was incumbent upon him to “procure nuptial gratification to the wife of his heart” in order that the Shekhinah would again establish herself in their home (ibid). But the act should especially be repeated at midnight on the Eve of the Sabbath, so that holy offspring will be born to the parents, should impregnation occur. Such offspring, who received the best souls, were called “sons

In Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 265. A. E. Waite, The Holy Kabbalah (New Hyde Park, NY, 1960), 381. Gershom Scholem says of Waite that his work “is distinguished by real insight into the world of Kabbalism” (MTJM, 212), though his historical and philological discussions are virtually worthless. 55 56

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of the King.”57 This secret of drawing the best souls into children was already hinted at by Origen, who in Contra Celsus (5:29) wrote that it is good to keep close the Secret of a King (Tob 12:7), in order that the doctrine of the entrance of souls into bodies not be thrown before the common understanding, nor what is holy be given to the dogs, nor pearls before swine.

Waite also sees this mystery in the Kabbalah, for he says that “the Secret of Divine Generation is however a Secret of the Doctrine” (i.e., Kabbalism), “and is reserved for the initiated therein; it is apparently they alone who draw down the holy souls which are the fruit of the union between God and His Shekhinah.”58 We also recall the passage in the Wisdom of Solomon, which describes the descent of these souls into bodies as follows: I was, indeed, a child well-endowed, having a noble soul fall to my lot, or rather, being noble, I entered an undefiled body (8:19–20).

Medieval Jews, when practicing this “Secret of a King,” dedicated their procreative power to “the completion of his Holy Name” on earth. The Zohar several times informs us that the secret meaning of the four letters in the Holy Name is “Father-Mother-Son-Daughter,”59 i.e., the familial malefemale paradigm, which is to be replicated through the begetting of human offspring. Extending the “Holy Name” by means of sons and daughters of one’s own is in fact the ultimate goal of the “Royal Secret,” and the highest form of honor which one can pay to God. We need not be disturbed by the apparent discrepancy between the idea of the soul’s preexistence60 and its creation simultaneously with the production of a body, for the Kabbalistic practitioners of the Sacred Marriage were merely adapting the traditional belief in human preexistence to a mys57 Waite, The Holy Kabbalah, 388. Waite bases this on Zohar III:78a, which in fact shows that they are descended from the “King,” though without using this precise title. It also says that they are of the house of David, “that they may inherit the holy kingdom, he and his sons, for all generations.” 58 Waite, The Holy Kabbalah, 388. 59 The “Name” being “YHWH.” In Patai, Hebrew Goddess, 162. 60 See 4 Ezra 4:33ff; b. Yebamoth 62a; b. Sifre, 143b; 2 Baruch 23:5; 2 Enoch 23:4; 58:5; etc. The preexistent souls were said to dwell in a chamber called the guf or araboth prior to their entrance into women’s wombs. The Bereshith Rabbah even says that God took counsel with them before creating the world (8:8). See also Scholem, MTJM, 239–43.

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tagogic rite, without undue concern for the problem of time. Indeed, the “Secret of a King” had not only to do with the “Royal” origin of the soul, but with its deliberate selection by parents, who for that purpose had been initiated into the mystery of dual paternity, which took place both above and below in response to the divine sexual impulse during the Sabbath Eve hieros gamos. Finally, we must not overlook what both Jews and early Christians undoubtedly discovered empirically, that God “sows” happiness in men through their pious union with their wives. Since marriage was ordained by God for man’s joy and fulfillment, it was only natural to expect that the Holy Spirit would dwell with those who lived in compliance with God’s Image, as depicted by the Embracing Cherubim in the Temple. Perhaps this explains why Philo likened the two Cherubim to the spheres of heaven, one moving harmoniously within the other (On the Cherubim, 21–26), for (as Louis Ginzberg adds) it was said in “old Jewish sources” that the “Harmony of the Spheres” began to resound during the first lawful intercourse of Adam and Eve.61 Philo therefore concluded his book On the Cherubim with the advice that his readers become a “fit house,” where “one can expect the descent of the divine Powers; joined in commonality of daily life and board with virtue-loving souls, they will sow within them the action of happiness, even as they gave Abraham and Isaac the most perfect thankoffering for their stay with them” (98, 106). The Congregation of Beth-El, founded in 1740 in Jerusalem, was one of the very last to have practiced the Kabbalistic Sacred Marriage in a systematic way. According to their belief, the King and Queen shared in the pleasure of the men’s unions with their wives. The covenant of the Congregation therefore read as follows: The Lord in His desire for the repentance of the flock caused us, the youngest of the flock, to be inspired to band together as one person for the sake of unifying the Holy One, blessed be He and his Shekhinah, to give pleasure to our Creator … to love one another with a spiritual and bodily love, and all this only to give pleasure to our Creator by a cleaving of spirit and unity, the only exception being that each of us shall have his wife separate unto himself.62

61 62

Legends of the Jews, 5:39. Quoted by Herbert Weiner, 9½ Mystics (New York, 1969), 94–95.

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CATHOLIC MYSTICISM AND THE SACRED MARRIAGE Medieval Christianity, though forced by biological necessity to defend the legitimacy of human unions, exhibited a growing predilection for asceticism and “spiritual marriage” to the Savior. To bring this about, Christian mystics developed interior disciplines of their own, hoping thereby to recapture the unitive experience, or even to behold the Beatific Vision, which was a visual kind of hieros gamos with the Divine. Thus the re-creation of the Temple Mystery (and what the Hellenists called thea theou) continued to define much of the Christian mysticism which we are about to discuss. The seeds of the asceticism which in time became the sine qua non for spiritual attainment in Christianity can perhaps be traced back as far as Hosea’s allegorization of hierogamy, which replaced the unions of gods and goddesses with the “marriage” of Yahweh and Israel. By assigning a “higher” meaning to the latter, the repudiation of natural marriage became inevitable. Attempts to further spiritualize this allegorical “marriage” produced figurative accounts of the “wooing” of Lady Wisdom. There was also the influence of the Jewish Rechabites, who at the time of Jeremiah lived in the desert in order to avoid the corruption of city life (Jer 35:2–18). Hellenized Jews who lived in Egypt were similarly influenced by the monastic practices which flourished around them during the centuries prior to Christ. We hear, for example, of ascetics in the Fayoum as early as 340 B.C. and of pagan Egyptian cults (Isis and Serapis) which commonly practiced renunciation of the world. Sir Flinders Petrie thus describes celibate recluses in the Serapion at Memphis in 170 B.C. and again in A.D. 211.63 The Greek schools at Alexandria further exacerbated the obvious differences between the worldly and the divine. Like their predecessors, the Platonists, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans, they taught that perfection comes only to one who overcomes his physical self and turns to the Divine Reality.64 Thus we recall the platonizing allegories of Philo, which viewed physical copulation as the “work of the senses,” whereas spiritual union was seen as a means of escaping the worldly and reestablishing the soul’s oneness with the purely intellectual. Such philosophical veneration of the “otherworldly” may even have had an effect on some Essenes, who reportedly preferred the celibate life.65 It is, however, certain that it influenced the Jew-

Egypt and Israel (London, 1923), 133–34. Margaret Smith, The Way of the Mystics (New York, 1978), 11. 65 See pp. 297–98, above. 63 64

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ish Therapeutae, who allied themselves syncretically with certain Hellenized Egyptian cults, especially those with a Neo-Pythagorean background. No Jews, however, at any time denied the legitimacy of God’s commandment to marry, and in fact continued to employ its imagery in a positive manner, as, for example, Philo’s use of the unions of the Patriarchs and their wives to symbolize Wisdom’s union with the soul. Indeed, Philo believed in the historicity of the Patriarchs, though perceiving in them two levels of meaning, a worldly and a spiritual, just as Paul’s “Great Mystery” depicted the union of the sexes (Eph 5:28, 31, 33) as well as the union of Christ and the Church (vv. 30, 32). Medieval Christianity, on the other hand, was ready to exploit the debasement of human sexuality in favor of purely “spiritualized” hierogamy and the rarified anti-worldliness of celibacy. This ascetic philosophy especially left its mark on Egyptian Christianity. The second-century Emperor Hadrian was thus convinced that Egyptian Christians partly worshipped Serapis,66 though Eusebius believed that the Therapeutae had been Christian monks, so similar were their practices (Church History, 2.17). Just how these practices passed on to monastic Christianity is presently unknown; but the trials and persecutions of Christ’s followers in Egypt, beginning in the second century (including the first organized attack upon the Church by Emperor Decius in A.D. 250), appear to have driven many of the religious into the deserts for refuge. In any case, by A.D. 300 there were numerous monks and ascetics living in the area, following the model of the Alexandrian theologian and self-castrator, Origen. Paul of Thebes (a contemporary of Origen) is the first of these anchorites whose name has come down to us, and he is reputed to have been the founder of eremitic monasticism. His pupil St. Anthony (born ca. 250) gathered other solitaries together to practice the regular subjugation of the flesh in search of spiritual attainment. He was in fact the one who is supposed to have first reduced monasticism to a system.67 His younger contemporary, Pachomius (born A.D. 292), originated the cenobitic form of monasticism, where monks lived together in groups under a superior. From A.D. 320 to the beginning of the next century, this system of ascetic life grew to include as many as fiftythousand practitioners in Upper Egypt alone.68 W. Phipps, Was Jesus Married? (New York, 1970), 162. Smith, Way of the Mystics, 13–14. 68 Ibid., 15. 66 67

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Though the New Testament condemned celibacy as a heresy in no uncertain terms (1 Tim 4:1–5), it seems that retiring to the desert for contemplation in times of spiritual stress was practiced even by Paul (Gal 1:17), just as it had been by Jesus (Matt 4:1ff; Luke 4:1ff). The idea of withdrawing into the desert for the ritual hag or hadj (Exod 3:18, Lev 23:41–43, and the Pilgrimage to Mecca) may in fact have been determined by an ancient belief that only in the uninhabited places could one fully commune with God, undisturbed by civilization and its sinful luxury. Thus, Narcissus, Bishop of Jerusalem, during the late second century, is known to have given up his ecclesiastical duties and to have retired into the desert where he practiced his austerities undisturbed. We find Syrian documents in the third century indicating that the custom was also becoming widespread there. Eusebius, too, mentions the proliferation of these Syrian ascetics during his lifetime.69 It was Hilarion (born ca. 290) who brought the eremitic type of monasticism from Egypt to Syria, where he had been converted by St. Anthony. One of his most famous followers was Jerome, who built a monastery near Bethlehem in A.D. 385. Syrian ascetics tended to be even more extreme than the Egyptians. The famous “pillar-hermits” (stylites), for example, made their first appearance in Syria before becoming popular in Egypt, and it was in Syria that the Encratites found their most congenial home. Typical of the Syrian attitude was the statement of Ignatius, the second Bishop of Antioch, who in the second century declared that nothing but Christ could ever again stir him to desire (Eusebius, Church History, 3.36). Montanism, with a similar policy of asceticism, also began in Asia Minor during the late second century. Some time around A.D. 358, Basil the Great took the cenobitic form of monasticism to Greece, where he was joined by Gregory of Nazianzus in establishing colonies of monks who sought immortality through mortification of the flesh and union with the Divine. Midnight was Basil’s favorite time to “be alone with God”—the same time chosen by Jewish Kabbalists for their marital communion with Yahweh. Gregory characteristically notes that such unions made men “strangers to earthly desire and full of the calm of divine love … plunged into ineffable delights.”70 Monasticism also spread eastward into Mesopotamia and Persia. An Egyptian pearl-fisher named Mar Awgen († A.D. 363), who had lived with 69 70

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 25.

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the monks of Pachomius, founded a monastery near Nisibis which specialized in eremitical asceticism. From there, monasticism progressed as far as India, probably aided by the influence of Manichaeism, whose Gnostic tendencies likewise favored fleshly renunciation as a means of regathering the “scattered light” to God.71 By the fifth century, the whole area from Edessa to the Indus River was filled with so-called hesychastae, “Silent Ones,” who (in the words of Thomas of Marga) sought the “completion of their natures through a bond with the invisible Creator,” whose image was reflected in the “intellectual mirror of the heart.” Those who see by the “light of its glorious rays” receive the gift of the Holy Spirit which “dawns upon the souls of holy men,” and makes them immortal,72 the very gifts bestowed by union with Wisdom in Philo’s mystery. The major theoretical influences on these early pioneers of monasticism were the writings of Clement and Origen, which we discussed earlier.73 Clement’s “True Gnostic,” as we recall, taught that God was the Ultimate Reality, and that union with him should be the sole object of man’s desire. Thus the early ascetics of the Church systematically rejected human marriage in order to enter into intellectual fusion with him and the deification which it promised. Basil the Great’s mysticism was especially indebted to the teaching of Origen, whose spiritualized version of the Wisdom Mystery was the model for his own writings on the subject: By His illumination … He makes them spiritual by fellowship with Himself. Just as bright and transparent bodies, on contact with a ray of light, themselves become translucent, and emit a fresh radiance from themselves, so souls wherein the Divine Spirit dwells, being illuminated thereby, themselves become spiritual and give forth grace to others. Hence comes to them unending joy, abiding in God, being made like unto God, and, which is highest of all, being made God (De Spiritu Sancto, 9.23).

His companion, Gregory of Nazianzus, similarly claimed that men’s souls could enter into intellectual fusion with God, who is “Wisdom and Light,” since they themselves possess a fragment of the Divine Nature. Man was deliberately created in the Image of God, he wrote, so that “like could be71

See the section entitled “The Wisdom Mystery in Medieval Gnosticism,” be-

72

Ibid., 27, 30, 32–3. See pp. 213–24, above.

low. 73

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hold like.” First, however, the soul must purify itself as far as possible by withdrawing from the world, so that by means of that likeness, it may be able to apprehend that to which it is like, placing itself like a mirror beneath the purity of God, so that it can mold itself upon the Archetypal Beauty, by its fellowship therewith and its vision thereof (De Virginitate, 100.11).

By such fellowship with God’s “mirrored” reflection, the purified soul would attain its true “virginity,” or “union with the incorruptible Godhead” (ibid.), reminding us again of Philo’s “virgin” state, where the soul becomes “male” or “unitary” through “marriage” to the Incorruptible (pp. 46–48, above): What greater praise of Virginity can there be than to be shown through these things as in a manner deifying those who are partakers of its pure Mysteries, so that they become sharers of the glory of the One true Holy and Blameless God, being made akin to Him by their purity and incorruptibility? (De Virginitate, 100.5).

Radiant “in fellowship with the true Light” (100.11), the soul is then joined to her immortal Bridegroom in Mystic Marriage and bears the fruit of her love for the “True Wisdom, who is God” (100.20). What God extended from himself in the first place, he now draws back to himself and becomes one with it, “like being joined to its like” (De Anima et Resurrectione). The fourth-century Egyptian monk, Macarius, like the Gnostics and their “Upper” and “Lower Wisdoms,” believed that God was both transcendent and immanent. Not only does he dwell in the height, which no man can see; but If you seek God in the depth, you will find Him there. If you seek him in the fire, you will find Him there also. He is everywhere, both under the earth and above the heavens and with us too (Homilies, 12.10, 12).

It is very likely that Macarius had access to material from the Gospel of Thomas when he penned these words, for that earlier work likewise taught that God (through his Wisdom) is the Light which is above them all; I am in all things; all things came forth from me, and all things reached me. Cleave a piece of wood and I

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am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there … Whosoever is near me is near to the fire (Logg. 77, 82).74

He too believed in the innate kinship of God and the soul, which made possible man’s “marriage” to the Divine. But first, The soul that desires to live with God in rest and eternal light … must be slain and die to the world and be rapt away into another life and to an intercourse that is divine … into the city of the Light of the Godhead (Macarius, Homilies, 1.8).

As Philo’s Questions on Exodus made clear, the place where this “divine intercourse” takes place is the top of “Mt. Sinai” (2.39–40), or the Holy of Holies—also called “the City” (the figure of speech adopted by the author of Hebrews to designate the area behind the veil of the Temple, 10:19–22; 11:13–16)—i.e., “Zion” and the “Church of the Firstborn” (12:22). There, the languishing soul basks in the “Light of the Godhead,” is “possessed by nothing but its desire for God,” and “sets aside all other things for the sake of the heavenly Bridegroom, whom it now receives, at rest in His fervent and ineffable love” (Homilies, 4.4): The soul, thus rapt away and inflamed by the fire of love, is granted the heavenly Vision, where the soul, with no veil between, gazes on the heavenly Bridegroom face to face, in unclouded Light, having communion with Him in full assurance, and thus is made worthy of eternal life … For when the soul … is joined and commingled with the Holy Spirit by that secret communion, and being united with the Spirit is deemed worthy to become Spirit itself, then it becomes all Light, all eye, all spirit, all joy, all rest, all exaltation, all heartfelt love, all goodness and loving-kindness (10.4; 17.10).

Here, as in the Temple-exegeses of Clement and Origen, as well as in the Mystical Marriages of Basil and Gregory, the familiar themes of the Wisdom Mystery reappear, and the soul again passes through the parted veil into the Holy of Holies, where it has union “face to face” with its Heavenly Bridegroom. Once more it experiences thea theou, or “Beholding the Face of God,” is filled with God’s Light, and receives a share of his Glory. Its

One of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (OP 1:24–31), found in Egypt in 1897, contains the same saying, showing that it was available there in the early years of the Church. See J. Finegan, Hidden Records of the Life of Jesus (Philadelphia, 1969), 196– 97. 74

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image is once again made a “mirror” of God’s image, making it “virgin” and “like God.” In fact it becomes God. It was Dionysus the Aeropagite who in the late fifth century popularized the technical terms henosis (fusion), and theosis (deification), with which to describe these mystical attainments. Like his predecessors, he tells us how the soul enters into the “Holy of Holies,” where the veil has been uplifted, and gazes “face to face” upon the Divine. As God welcomes it with his heavenly embrace, it enters into “abiding union with the Beloved.”75 The two are assimilated like images in a mirror, reflecting the Primal Light and the Heavenly Ray to those who come after it.76 Thus, for Dionysus, union again meant deification: God Himself deigned to come to us with outstretched arms … and by union with Him to assimilate, like as by fire, things that have been made one … God bestows Deification itself by giving a faculty for it to those that are Deified … With understanding power He gives Himself for the Deification of those that turn to Him (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy;77 Divine Names, 7.5).

THE SACRED EMBRACE AND THE STIGMATA Mystical Marriage to the Divine remained as one of the important goals of the ascetic life throughout medieval Christianity. Drawing largely upon the imagery in Song of Songs, its writers commonly referred to Christ as the Sponsus (Bridegroom) and the Church (or the Soul) as the Sponsa (Bride). Song of Songs itself was interpreted as a spiritual drama depicting the various mystical states leading to henosis and theosis. The sexual element in these Mystical Marriages of course remained quite obvious, even offensive, to some: I remember well I once heard a religious man give a very excellent sermon, the greater part of which was about these caresses of the Spouse with God; but the sermon caused great laughing among the audience; and everything he said was taken in such bad part … that I was astonished.78

Smith, Way of the Mystics, 81. The Heavenly Hierarchy, trans. by John Parker (London, 1897), 14. 77 Parker edition, 76. 78 St. Teresa of Avila, Conceptus, I, quoted by M. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1977), 187. 75 76

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These words were penned by no less than St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), who was perhaps better than any other acquainted with the underlying eroticism of the Mystic Marriage. Giovanni Bernini’s famous statue of her in the church of St. Maria della Vittoria in Rome thus shows her in a state of transfigured ecstasy, receiving the darts of love from her Sponsus, an ecstasy which is vividly described in the numerous paeans of love which she composed to her Bridegroom: Now my Lord, I ask you nothing else in this life but to “kiss me with the kisses of your mouth” (Song of Songs, 1:2), and this in such a way that I should not be able, even though I wished, to withdraw myself from this union and friendship (Conceptus, III). Often when the soul least expects it, our Lord calls her suddenly. She hears very distinctly that her God calls her … She trembles and utters plaints. She feels that an ineffable wound has been dealt her, and that wound is so precious in her sight that she would like it never to heal. She knows that her divine Spouse is near her, although He does not let her enjoy his adorable presence, and She cannot help complaining to Him in words of love. In this pain she relishes a pleasure incomparably greater than in the Orison of Quietude … The voice of the WellBeloved causes in the soul such transports that she is consumed by desire … For what greater happiness could she wish? To this I do not know what to answer; but I am certain that the pain penetrates down to the very bottom of the bowels, and it seems that they are being torn away when the heavenly Spouse withdraws the arrow with which He has transpierced them.79

The intermingling of pleasure and pain which Teresa describes during the act of spiritual love was a subject frequently addressed by women mystics. Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672), for example, exclaimed to her divine Spouse: O my Love … Have you no pity on the torments that I suffer? Alas! Alas! My beauty! My Life! Instead of healing my pain, you take pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you and die in your sacred arms.80

Particularly associated with these ecstatic yet painful experiences of divine love was the granting of the stigmata, or Christ’s Sacred Wounds, showing perhaps more graphically than anything else that the recipient had become truly one with the crucified Lord. Such a doctrine was already 79 80

Quoted by B. Z. Goldberg, The Sacred Fire (New York, 1930), 197–98. Quoted in Ibid., 197.

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adumbrated in the New Testament. Paul especially taught that one can completely know Christ only through “fellowship with his suffering” (Phil 3:10). Peter similarly declared that Christ left us an example that we should “suffer like as he did” (1 Pet 3:10). Paul therefore claimed that he personally had been “crucified with Christ” (Gal 1:20), in order that he might “live with Christ” (Rom 6:6–8).81 In fact, he may have referred to his own stigmata, since he speaks of “bearing in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus” (2 Cor 4:10–11). In another epistle he also writes, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Gal 6:14, 17). Since Christ “married” himself to the Church by means of his supreme Sacrifice (Eph 5:24), it is only natural that the Bride be willing to receive her Spouse by intimately sharing his sufferings on the Cross: Like a Bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world … He came to the marriage bed of the Cross, and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in the place of his bride … and he joined the woman to himself forever (Augustine, Sermo suppositus, 120.8).

St. Veronica in 1697 received her own “marks of the Lord Jesus” on the “marriage bed of the Cross” during the ecstasy of the divine Embrace: O God! O God! Such were the raptures of divine love which consumed me that I can neither speak nor write of my burning desire. “Thou shalt be wounded as I am wounded with five wounds,” said the Divine Voice … “O Spouse of my heart, my one and only love, crucify me with thy self … Thou didst suffer and wast nailed to the Cross for love of me, vouchsafe that I may suffer and be crucified for love of Thee.”82

The Blessed Osanna Andreasi in 1476 also told how the wounds of Jesus’ hands and feet were transferred to her during the embrace of love: “My Spouse, beloved Spouse, fear not the pain; the more thou dost suffer On earth the nearer shalt thou be to My Heart in heaven.” Lo! From the … red Wounds there darted forth forked flambent rays which pierced through, like the thrust of white hot daggers, her feet and hands.

See also the discussion of deification and the sharing of Christ’s sacrifice, p. 139, above. 82 Quoted by Montague Summers, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (London, 1950), 152. 81

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She swooned. half-dead moaning pitiously, “like the lament of the turtledove.”83

During this intimate sharing of Christ’s Sacrifice—called the “theopathetic state” by Delacroix84—the soul “becomes God by participation” (St. John of the Cross).85 Thus, St. Teresa declared that during the act of Mystic Marriage the Virgin Mary said to her Son, “Let thy bride be crucified with Thee”: In an instant, I saw five brilliant rays of light dart forth from the Five Sacred Wounds … Four of them appeared in the form of great pointed nails, whilst the fifth was a spear-head of gleaming gold … but this, lancing upon me, pierced my heart through and through, and the four sharp nails of fire stabbed through my hands and feet. I felt a fearful agony of pain, but with the pain I clearly saw and was conscious that I was wholly transformed into God.86

Well into the late Middle Ages, then, it appears that the ancient doctrine of deification by means of union with Wisdom—and in particular, union with his suffering on the Cross—was still widely remembered. St. Teresa thus claims that during stigmatization “the soul is entirely transformed into the image of its Creator—it seems more God than soul.” Other famous contemplatives also characterized this state of fusion as deification, during which one becomes the “instrument” or “medium” of God (Blessed Henry Suso, 1300–1365),87 “swimming in the Godhead like a fish in water” (St. Mechthild of Hackeborn, ca. 1240). Then one is “literally absorbed in God” and transformed into the Uncreated Essence itself (Johann Tauler, 1300–1361).88 The stages leading to this Mystic Marriage and deification have been generally classified by students of Christian mysticism as follows: In ibid., 154. Note the reference to the “turtledove” in Song 2:12. Études d’histoire et de psychologie du mysticism (Paris, 1908); quoted in Summers, Physical Phenomena, 177. 85 In ibid., 177. Compare again Albert Schweitzer’s statement that “the Body of Christ … is the point from which the dying and rising again, which began with Christ, passes over to the elect who are united with him”—The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul (New York, 1931), 118—in short, those who are willing to share his sacrifice. 86 The Seventh Mansion, quoted in Summers, Physical Phenomena, 153. 87 See ibid., 177. 88 In ibid. 83 84

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These appear, moreover, to correspond very closely to the traditional Christian stages of salvation, i.e., 1-Faith in Christ, 2-Repentance, 3-Fecundation by water and Spirit (John 3:5); “Putting on Christ” (1 Cor 12:13; Gal 3:27), 4-“Dying with Christ” (crucifixion of the “Old Man”; Rom 6:5–6, 5-Resurrection with Christ, receipt of the Divine Fulness (John 17: 22; Eph 3:19), the completed Sacred Marriage (Rev 19, 21).

We will discover later on that they also resemble the various stages of the alchemical Sacred Marriage, which was one of the forms in which the Wisdom Mystery survived until relatively late in Christian history: 1-Preparation, purification of the adept, 2-Union and dissolution of opposites (“marriage”), 3-Nigredo (death, putrifaction), 4-Resurrection as the “Philosopher’s Stone” (the “whiteness,” or eternal life and Godhood). (See “The Alchemical Sacred Marriage,” below.)

Thus we can only assume that a common thread of belief ran through all of these transformations of the hieros gamos theme, in which Union with the Divine made possible the immortality and even the deification of the soul after death.

89 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York, 1948), 160–70. She stresses the fact that Christian mysticism does not include the further stage of self-annihilation and absorption into God to which Far-Eastern mysticism usually leads. The Christian mystic never looses his own identity, even though some writers occasionally appear to imply it with their excessive language. Christian mysticism in fact never advances beyond the Johannine doctrine of spiritual indwelling: “I pray for them which shall believe on me through their word, that they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us … And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them” (John 17:21–22), or the Judaeo-Pauline doctrine of dabhaq and kollao (“spiritual cleavage to God,” pp. 70–71, 122, above). The same is generally true of Jewish Kabbalism and of Moslem Sufism, as well.

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THE VIRGIN MARY AS A WISDOM FIGURE IN THE SACRED MARRIAGE Other mystics—mostly men—entered into union with the Divine through the mediation of the Virgin Mary, just as intertestamental heroes enjoyed spiritual union with God through his feminine Wisdom (pp. 33 ff, above). A special Mariological interpretation of the Sacred Marriage existed as early as the fourth century, when writers like Ephraem, Ambrose, Epiphanius, and Peter Chrysologos applied the text of Song of Songs to Mary’s heavenly nuptials with God, from which the Son was derived.90 They may have been encouraged in this by the fact that several contemporary feasts of the Virgin employed lessons from Song of Songs, suggesting that it was she whose Mystic Marriage was being described.91 One of the special passages in Song of Songs which seems to have been used in support of this understanding of Mary was Song 3:6 (“Who is this ascending from the steppe?”), which some exegetes saw as evidence for Mary’s Assumption into heaven, showing “that heavenly Queen and heavenly Spouse … has been lifted up to the courts of heaven with the divine Bridegroom.”92 Marvin Pope sees as precedents for such an interpretation the many “love goddesses and fertility rites of the ancient Near East” whose traditions probably went into the original creation of Song of Songs93 and which later contributed to the deification of Mary. Specifically, he notes certain striking affinities between the “Black Beauty” of Song 1:5, the Indian goddess Kali, the “Black Goddess” of the Hittites, the “Black Aphrodite,” the “Black Demeter” of Phigalia, the “Swarthy Artemis” or Diana of Ephesus, the goddesses Isis, Athena, and many others who were represented ubiquitously by black stones (including the Black Stone in the Ka‘aba, at Mecca, and the black Madonnas of Christian Europe). These are a few of the “random bits and pieces,” he argues, that went into a common tradition which reached from Western Asia to India in the East, linking Near Eastern pre-

Paschal P. Parente, “The Canticle of Canticles in Mystical Theology,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 6 (1944): 146; quoted in Pope, Song of Songs, 185: “What other soul was there who could in all truth have claimed to have celebrated the mystic nuptials with God except Mary the Immaculate, the Mother of God?” 91 Pope, Song of Songs, 185. 92 Roland E. Murphy, “The Canticle of Canticles and the Virgin Mary,” Carmelus 1 (1954):18–28; quoted in Pope, Song of Songs. 93 Pope, Song of Songs, 191. 90

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history with Song of Songs and the medieval cult of Mariolatry.94 Thus the Virgin Mary was still called Regina Coeli by the Latin Church, just as her Semitic predecessor, the “Queen of Heaven” (Jer 7:18; 44:17), had been. But this common tradition again relates Mary’s role as God’s “Bride” and Mother of Christ to the Jewish figure of Wisdom, she who was both God’s “Bride” (Wis 8:3), and a veritable Mother-goddess, soon to be declared Theotokos (“Bearer of God”) by the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431). Beginning in the twelfth century, another Marian interpretation of Song of Songs and the Sacred Marriage began to gain prominence in the writings of Rupert de Dentz, Denis the Carthusian, Cornelius à Lapide, Nigidius, etc., again arguing that Mary’s relationship with God was the ideal example of the Church’s relationship with Christ. Thus Roland E. Murphy speaks of the “Marian aspect of the Church,”95 and P. Alfonso Rivera claims that the bridal symbolism in Song of Songs applies to Mary as the “individualized collective object” to which the poem refers.96 Mary, in other words, is the one whom the description of “the Bride” fits in a special and singular way, being the “noblest example of what is described collectively,” i.e., the Church. This “ecclesiological” version of Mary was again one of Wisdom’s special characteristics, who in the Wisdom of Sirach was already identified with her people “Jacob” (24:8, 12), and in rabbinic Judaism was personified as the “Community of Israel.” In Gnostic Christianity she likewise became the Preexistent Church. The “ecclesiological” Motherhood of Mary was also recognized by several of the early Church Fathers, for example, Origen, who considered her to be the “Mother of all Christians,” applying to her the words of Jesus, “Woman, behold thy son,” and (when addressing the “beloved disciple”), “Behold your mother” (John 19:26–27; 20:2).97 Her “perpetual Virginity,” on the other hand, appears to have been an attempt to show that her “maternal fecundity” was inexhaustible, similar to those of her predecessor, Anath, who was also called btlt, or “Virgin,” in the Ras Shamra texts. Thus she became known as the “New Eve”—the one through whom Christians are saved—and a complement to the title, “New

Ibid., 191. Murphy, “Canticle of Canticles,” quoted in Pope, Song of Songs, 189. 96 “Sentido mariologico del Cantar de los Cantos,” Ephimerides Mariologicae, 1:437–68; 2:25–42 (1951, 1952); summarized in Pope, Song of Songs, 189. 97 Commentary on John, 1.6. 94 95

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Adam,” which was given to Christ (1 Cor 15:45).98 The Odes of Solomon also described the Church as the “Perfect Virgin,” the one who “will enter into you” and “make you wise in the ways of Truth” (33), just as Lady Wisdom in the Wisdom of Solomon (7:27). Indeed, Joan Chamberlain Engelsman, one of the scholars who has recently studied Mary’s ecclesiological Wisdom-background, feels that the Church “as preexistent Wisdom has not yet received enough recognition,”99 an omission which we too should like to correct. As we noted earlier, the Church’s early Hexaemeron doctrine and 2 Clement’s exegesis of Genesis 1:27 both clearly identified the Church as Christ’s pre-existent Bride, hence the basis for Paul‘s “Great Mystery,” where Adam and Eve are also symbols of the preexistent Christ and the Church (Eph 5:30–33, long version).100 Since the Wisdom-writers had also designated men’s souls as “fragments” or “rays” of Wisdom’s Light, it was natural for the Gnostics to designate the Church herself as a form of Wisdom. Schlier’s analysis of the syzygy-pattern at the heart of Paul’s “Great Mystery” (pp. 160–61, above) likewise derives the Church from a preexistent corporeity of the masculine Wisdom and his Heavenly Bride, whom the Gnostics later turned into the the preexistent syzygy, “Christos” and “Sophia,” i.e., the syzygy from which Christ and the earthly Church are descended. The Mariological view of the Church as a Mother101 and Heavenly Bride thus had its roots in the traditional figure of Wisdom, who was developed by Gnostics into the Mother of angels and the Church, just like the Hebrew goddesses who were turned into angels and “hypostases.”102

98 See also Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 100; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3:22.4; Odes of Solomon, 19. 99 The Feminine Dimension of the Divine (Philadelphia, 1979), 133. 100 See p. 144 ff, above. 101 This theme has also been developed by Joseph Conrad Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia: An Inquiry into the Concept of the Church as Mother in Early Christianity (Washington, 1943). 102 Methodius (The Banquet of the Ten Virgins, 8.5) specifically designates the Church as “a power … whom the prophets … have called sometimes Jerusalem, sometimes a bride, sometimes Mount Zion, and sometimes the Temple and Tabernacle of God,” all of which remind us of Wis 7:27: “the one who enters holy souls and makes them friends of God,” as well as the language of Philo. See Engelsman, Feminine Dimension, 134–35.

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In view of Mary’s many Wisdom and goddess-parallels, then, it is hardly surprising that medieval mystics applied Song of Songs to their own Marian intercourse with the Divine. As a “bridge between God and man” (Proclus), Mary—like Wisdom before her—entered into mediating union with her lovers in order to bring them closer to her Son. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, what amounted to a brand-new religion of “Mariolatry” erupted throughout Christendom, producing an independent literature devoted to the passionate love of knights and mystics for Christ’s divine Mother. About 1230, for example, a French prior, Gaultier de Coincy, gathered dozens of contemporary Mary legends into a poem of over 30,000 lines, describing all manner of amorous and adventurous relationships between Mary and her worshippers. Typical of these tales was the monk who was cured of an illness by sucking milk from her breast during an intimate moment.103 The love of such worshippers for her often surpassed even their love for Christ. Caesarius of Hesterbach (ca. 1230) was thus persuaded by Satan to deny Christ, but could not be prevailed on to renounce Mary. The same monk on another occasion heard a brother praying to Christ, “Lord, free me from this temptation, or I will complain of thee to Thy Mother!”104 In short, Mary became to Christ what Christ-Wisdom was to the Father, i.e., his Intermediary, through whom he dealt with mankind. Typical of these love-relationships with the Virgin was the case of Henry Suso (fourteenth century), who referred to Mary as the heavenly “Wife” and “Empress of his heart”: Should I be the husband of a Queen, my soul would find pride in it; but now you are the Empress of my heart … You are the love whom my heart loves; for you I have spurned all earthly love.105

St. Bernard (twelfth century) likewise sang of his intimate spiritual relations with the Virgin. She frequently came to him, as he tells us, in amorous visions, and during their ensuing passionate embrace he would cry out to her, “My Love! My Love! Let me ever love Thee from the depths of my heart!”106 Even later mystics continued to search for God through intimate loveunions with the Blessed Virgin. A brother of the King of Hungary, for example, is said to have been ready to marry a certain noble woman for politiHenry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres (Boston, 1926), 258. G. C. Coulton, From St. Francis to Dante (London, 1908), 119. 105 Quoted in Goldberg, Sacred Fire, 199. 106 In ibid., 199. 103 104

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cal reasons. One night, however, while praying the words, “How beautiful art thou, and how fair” (Song 1:16), Mary appeared to him as a lady of surpassing loveliness, saying, If indeed I am as beautiful and fair as thou sayest, why dost thou abandon me for another bride? Know, then, that if thou wilt break off this marriage, I will be thy Spouse, and thou shalt inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, where I am Queen.” This prince thereupon fell down in worship before her and went away that very night to devote the rest of his life to her as an anchorite, finally dying amidst songs of angelic choirs.107

Yet these same lovers of Mary sometimes approached Mary’s Son in a feminine role, since the “female” soul (like the soul in the Wisdom Mystery) was capable of intimate union only with the masculine Logos. St. Bernard, for example, not only sought the Virgin as his love-object, but spoke of his intimate relationship with Christ as a bride uniting with her Bridegroom: Suddenly the Bridegroom is present and gives assent to (the soul’s) petition; He gives her the kiss asked, of which the fullness of breasts is witness; For so great is the efficacy of this Holy Kiss, that the Bride on receiving it conceives the swelling breasts rich with milk being the evidence.108

This alternation of the sexes, wherein the soul has intercourse with Christ as a “female,” or with Mary as a “male,” is another of the traditional hallmarks of the ancient Wisdom tradition, where the initiate wooed Lady Wisdom as a male or was impregnated by God’s seed as a female (p. 34, above). But as some could reach God solely through Mary; Montague Summers explains that a Vision or the Presence of Our Lady is necessary to the fulfillment of the Mystical Marriage, since the Son will not give Himself in wedlock without the consent and approval of His Mother, and the Mother must be present at the marriage of Her Son.109

As an example, he mentions St. Gemma Galgani (b. 1878), who sought first of all to become one with Mary, in order that “her heart could be one with the heart of Jesus.” After that espousal, Jesus appeared to her in the form of an infant in his Mother’s arms; the Mother, taking a ring from his finger, then gave it to Gemma, thus solemnizing their union. St. Catherine of SiIn Summers, Physical Phenomena, 73. In Goldberg, Sacred Fire, 200. 109 Physical Phenomena, 72. 107 108

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enna (ca. 1364) was also espoused in this manner to Christ by the Virgin. Male mystics, on the other hand, sought divine union directly with Mary herself, as in the case of St. Hermann of Steinfeld, who was greeted by the Virgin as a “Joseph,” the name of her earthly Spouse.110 The tradition of Wisdom’s bisexual nature in even medieval Christianity has recently been traced by Phyllis Trible to the Old Testament and the numerous feminine characteristics attributed therein to Yahweh.111 His “compassion,” she notes, was commonly described by a word based on the Hebrew root rhm (“womb”).112 Other “uteral” language was placed in Yahweh’s mouth by various prophets, including Jeremiah, who characteristically wrote that “My inner parts yearn for him; I will surely have motherly compassion on him” (31:20). In these and similar passages, Trible explains, “divine mercy is analogous to the womb of a mother.”113 God was also said to have breasts (Hos 9:14; Ps 131:2), and to be able to hyl (“give birth,” Deut 32:18; Job 38:29; Isa 42:14). In short, he was a being with female as well as masculine traits, who goes into labor, gives birth, has a womb, suckles Israel, and gives comfort like a mother (Isa 66:7–14; Num 11:12). Even in the Old Testament, then, the Divine already consisted of both male and female attributes, which, when they reappeared in medieval Christianity, made possible the mystic’s alternate devotion to a masculine Christ or to his feminine Mother, both as surrogates for divine union with the Father. There were some medieval God-seekers who worshipped the Divine Feminine simply in the form of an unnamed goddess-figure. St. Francis of Assisi thus addressed his yearning to a female personification whom he called “Lady Poverty,” but who can hardly have been anyone but a personification of the Virgin: Yes, I am thinking of taking a wife more beautiful, more rich, more pure than you could ever imagine.” She was Lady Poverty, as he called her. She became his bride, his ideal; to her he swore faith and love, and throughout his life his thoughts were devoted to her. Often in his visions, his bride descended from heaven to join her spouse. He would then welcome her in his arms, kiss her gently, and show her all the

Ibid., 72, 94. “God, Nature of, in the Old Testament” in IDB, 5: 368–69. 112 Exodus 34:6; Nehemiah 9:17; Psalms 78:38; 86:15; 103:8; 111:4; Isaiah 49:15; 69:14; Jeremiah 12:15; 30:18; Hosea 1:6–7; 2:1, 4, 19, 23; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2. 113 Trible, “God,” 368. 110 111

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delicate attentions that the ardent lover showers on the object of his desire.114

Francis’ follower, Jacopone da Todi, likewise extolled “Lady Poverty” as his lover, in whose arms he longed to dwell: O Poverty, high Wisdom! to be subject to nothing, and by despising all to possess all created things. God will not lodge in a narrow heart; and it is as great as thy love. Poverty has so ample a bosom that Deity Itself may lodge therein.115

In both instances it would seem that the archetypal Wisdom Mystery had survived in a purely abstract fashion, divorced from all personalities, but preserving in a remarkable way the immemorial recollection of the divine goddess who formerly ruled over the hearts of men, and who still entered into intimate unions with them, in order to bestow upon them the heavenly gifts of wisdom and immortality, even her deity.

THE WISDOM MYSTERY IN MEDIEVAL GNOSTICISM That branch of the Church known as “Gnosticism,” and which was eventually rejected by so-called “orthodoxy” as heretical, did not die out completely after the victory of Nicaea and the Hellenized Creeds, but retired to the East, where it passed through such metamorphoses as Manichaeism and Paulicianism, reemerging finally in the West in a form known as “Catharism.” There it found the new spirit of Mariolatry congenial to its own idealization of femininity, giving rise in the process to both the Troubadour movement, with its poetic praises of the Unattainable Woman, and the “intellectual love” of Dante Alighieri for Beatrice. In order to understand Catharism, however, we must first cast a look at those intermediate forms of Gnosticism which had made their home in the East and which were in their own way developments of the familiar Wisdom Mystery. It is generally thought that Catharism (from the Greek word katharos, “pure”) originated amongst the neo-Manichaean sects of Asia Minor, especially the Bogomils of Dalmatia and Bulgaria, and that it later reached the West through Italy, Germany, and Hungary.116 Its progress is difficult to date with accuracy, but it is known that the Bulgarian Bogomils came into

Quoted in Goldberg, Sacred Fire, 202. Quoted in Underhill, Mysticism, 207, n. 3. 116 Edmond Holmes, The Holy Heretics (London, 1948), 25. 114 115

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being during the middle of the tenth century,117 perhaps under the influence of the so-called “Paulicians,” who had migrated into Asia Minor from Armenia around 872.118 It may also have exerted its influence through Manichaean outposts in fourth century Gaul and Spain,119 having reached even North Africa, where St. Augustine had been a Manichaean for a number of years. The Paulicians supposedly had their origins in Syria and showed a predilection for the teachings of the Apostle Paul. Their doctrine embodied a form of dualism which they either borrowed from the Manichaeans or brought with them from their original Palestinian homeland. The resulting Bogomil movement seems also to have found a ready soil in Italy, where Pope Gregory the Great (ca. 600) was obliged to contend with so many Gnostic sects that he found it necessary to exhort the Italian bishops to take strict measures against them.120 It is worth remembering that Northern Italy was also home to the Arians and the heretical Waldensians, the latter being sometimes connected with the Cathars. Manichaeism developed in Mesopotamia during the third century, in an area long saturated with heterogeneous religious influences. Among these were the indigenous Babylonian cults, which survived well into the Christian era; a strong Jewish presence, established at the time of the Babylonian Exile (597 B.C.); and Zoroastrianism, brought in by Persian rulers (539 B.C.). These were joined by Alexandrian Hellenism (late fourth century B.C.) in bringing intellectual clarity to their philosophical writings, as well as imparting a Platonizing influence on them. In the second century of our own era, Syriac Christianity also penetrated the area through centers at Edessa and Nisibis, bringing with it the strongly encratitic form of worship typified by the Acts of Thomas. This was accompanied by Marcionite theology, with its denigration of the Old Testament Demiurge, as well as sundry Jewish and Jewish-Christian sects, including the early Mandaeans, who had been driven out of Jerusalem during its destruction a century earlier. Most important of all, we must mention the growing influence of sundry Western Gnostics, among whom was the Syr-

Ibid., 374. Ibid. 119 Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis (San Francisco, 1983), 331. 120 Holmes, Holy Heretics, 26. 117 118

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ian Bardaisan, who lived at the court of Abgan IX in Edessa from 179 to 266.121 Bardaisan’s theology was based on a cosmic dualism between the God of Light and the Darkness (hylē). At the time of the Fall, the primeval elements of light, wind, fire, and water became mingled with hylē, giving rise to the material world. Only Christ, the pure “Word of Thought” and “Power of the First God,” can bring order to this confusion of pneumatic, psychic, and hylic substances and release the pneumatic souls of men. These, Bardaisan taught, will then be restored in the Bridal Chamber to a spiritual oneness with God.122 This form of Gnosticism helped to prepare the ground for Manichaeism, whose founder, Mani, was born in A.D. 216 in the vicinity of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Persian capital on the Tigris. Mani’s father belonged to a Jewish-Christian baptizing sect known as the Elkasaites, claiming descent from the Syrian prophet, Elkasai, who was active around A.D. 100 and whose basic syzygy-theory we have already mentioned (p. 227, above). According to this Jewish-Christian tradition, the transcendent “One God” causes all things—including his own Presence in the world—to exist as pairs of male and female opposites. This male-female Presence was clearly related to the bisexual Wisdom—whose masculine counterpart was the “True Prophet” that descended upon Jesus at the time of his baptism. Since the human soul is also a “fragment” from the same Wisdom, it follows that it too has a heavenly counterpart, called the “angel” by the Valentinians, or the syzygos (“consort” or “twin”) by the Manichaeans. This part of Mani’s background has now been confirmed by the recent discovery of the Cologne Mani-Codex,123 which frequently refers to the syzygos as a sort of “guardian angel,” or that portion of the Light Spirit which has been allotted to the individual for his personal redemption. Kurt Rudolph thus views Manichaeism as a system with a “Christian-gnostic tenor,” mediated through the “Syrian-Mesopotamian environment of a heretical-gnostic Jewish Christianity,”124 and related still farther back to the Jewish “baptizers” who lived along the banks of the Jordan before the time of Christ.125 Rudolph, Gnosis, 327. Ibid., 328–29. 123 The Cologne Mani-Codex, “Concerning the Origin of His Body,” trans. Ron Cameron and Arthur J. Dewey (Missoula, MT, 1979), 14. 124 Rudolph, Gnosis, 334. 125 John Turner has described “the numerous baptismal sects that populated Syria and Palestine, especially along the Jordan valley, in the period 200 B.C.E.–300 121 122

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When Mani was twelve years old, his own syzygos appeared to him and assured him that it would henceforth become his protector and assistant. Mani later recognized this experience as an endowment by the Holy Spirit or Paraclete (cf. John 16:17ff), whose vessel he now considered himself to be. On the 19th of April, 290—at the age of twenty-four—he believed that he had a call from God to be an “Apostle of Light.” His subsequent missionary efforts were enormously successful, spreading during his own life time as far as India in the East, and Syria and Egypt in the West. By the fourth century, the Manichaean Church stretched all the way from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and deep into Central Asia.126 Manichaeism, according to Hans Jonas127 and Kurt Rudolph,128 became one of the world’s greatest independent religions, standing alongside of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam as history’s “most monumental single embodiment of the gnostic religious principle.129 Mani’s Christology and eschatology, however, appear to have been basically Christian-Gnostic, with the familiar “docetic” Jesus and the usual scheme of “cosmic exile” and “regathering.” In fact, Mani declared himself to be “an Apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, the Father of Truth, from whom I also was born.”130 Thus, while Mani drew material from several religions in order to C.E: the Essenes/Dead Sea sect, the pre-Christian Nasorenes, the Ebionites, Pauline and Johannine Christians, Naasenes, Valentinians/Marcosians, Elkasaites, Sabeans, Dositheans, Masbotheans, Gorothenians, Hemero-baptists, Mandeans, and the groups behind the Odes of Solomon, Acts of Thomas, Pseudo-Clementines, Justin’s Baruch, etc; cf. J. Thomas, Le mouvement baptiste en Palestine et Syrie (Gembloux, 1935). These baptismal rites, often representing a spiritualizing protest against a failing or extinct sacrificial temple cultus (so Thomas), are mostly descendants of ancient Mesopotamian New Year enthronement rituals in which the king, stripped of his regalia, symbolically undergoes a struggle with the dark waters of chaos, cries for aid, is raised up and nourished by water or food, absolved and strengthened by a divine oracle, enthroned, enrobed, and acclaimed as king, acquiring radiance and authority.” “Sethian Gnosticism: a Literary History,” in Nag Hammadi Gnosticism and Early Christianity, ed. Harold Attridge, Charles Hedrick and Robert Hodgeson, Jr. (Peabody, MA, 1986), 68–69. 126 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1963), 207. 127 Ibid., 206. 128 Rudolph,Gnosis, 326–27, 329. 129 Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 207–8. 130 Cologne Mani-Codex, 53. Rudolph adds that the form of Manichaeism contained in the Christian-Gnostic flavored Coptic texts found at Medinet Madi (Middle Egypt) in 1930—the most famous of which is the Kephalaia (“Chapters”)—and

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appeal to their various factions, he was actually attempting to express the basic system of dualism which he perceived to be essential to all of them. Indeed, his own system was eclectically designed to suit nearly everyone. Accordingly, he had no esoteric doctrine for the elite, but laid out his message plainly for everyone to see, which perhaps explains why it was still alive and intellectually stimulating at the time of the Bogomils and the Cathars. Mani’s “Universal Gnostic System,” however, differed in one significant respect from the usual Gnostic-Christian dualism, which generally taught that Darkness and Evil were the result of God’s Light being attenuated as it flowed away from its Source. Mani instead accepted the Zurvanite principle of eternally preexisting Good and Evil Principles. Nevertheless, his cosmogony and soteriology had much in common with the other systems, for he too believed that the Light was presently imprisoned in the Darkness, and will be redeemed when it is drawn back to its native element by the “Mind of Light” (the nous)—apparently another form of the ancient “Logos-Wisdom.” During the first stage of this process, Darkness (hyle) comes to the border of Light and fights against it, resulting in an admixture of the two principles. To meet this challenge, God creates the “Great Spirit” (“Sophia”), who gives rise to the “Mother of the Living.” The latter then brings forth the Primal Man, with his accompanying Pentad of fire, wood, water, light, and ether, also called his “Garments” or his “Living Soul.” But when Primal Man descends to repel the Darkness, he allows himself to be vanquished, so that his fivefold “Living Soul” can be left in the underworld to serve as “bait” for catching the Darkness. In a second stage, God sends a “Living Spirit” (similar to the Persian Mithra) to awaken Primal Man. He successfully draws him back to the Light, though his fivefold “Living Soul” is now in the clutches of the archons. At this point, “Living Spirit” sets into motion the process which will eventually rescue Primal Man’s “Living Soul,” at the same time creating a Cosmos from its dispersed particles.131 These will play a positive role in God’s overall scheme, since they will protect the various parts of the uni-

published by Carl Schmidt in Neue Originalquellen des Manichaismus aus Ägypten (Stuttgart, 1933), is probably the closest to Mani’s own original Manichaean teaching (ibid., 334). 131 According to Jonas, the “Living Spirit” is the Manichaean equivalent to the Gnostic Demiurge (Gnostic Religion, 230).

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verse, especially the Sun and the Moon, and serve to guide mankind back to the Heavenly Light. In a third stage, an envoy called “the God of the Realm of Light” comes to dwell in the sun, and begins to purify the scattered particles of “Living Soul.” To direct their regathering, he creates a “Pillar of Glory”— also called the “Perfect Man” because he is an androgynous restoration of Primal Man—to which the liberated particles can successfully be drawn. Visible in the form of the Milky Way, he guides them safely towards the moon, then to the sun, and finally to the “New Aeon,” or the Upper Spiritual World.132 Meanwhile, the “Pillar of Glory” shows himself in his naked androgynous form to the archons, who spill their seed on the ground, giving rise to the plants and animals, which henceforth become prisons for the remaining particles of light. They also copy God’s image and fashion bodies in which to incarcerate the souls of Adam and Eve, hoping that they and their progeny will devour and retain the other captive sparks. But God sends “Jesus Splendor” (the preexistent Christ) to enlighten them concerning their true nature. As their instructor, he summons “Mind of Light” (the divine Nous), who enters into human souls and leads them back to their place of origin. “Jesus the King” (the earthly Christ) finally appears to judge the world, consuming it with fire and purifying the last particles of trapped light.133 The role of mankind in this redemptive process is simply to break the cycle of procreation and the further imprisonment of light. The Elect were of course expected to abide strictly by this ascetic rule; but the great mass of believers (the “Hearers,” or “Soldiers”) were asked only to care for the needs of the Elect until such time as they too (in a future incarnation) might join their ranks. The “Sinners,” on the other hand, fell eagerly into the plans of the archons, living like beasts, destined in the end to fall into eternal Darkness. We immediately recognize in this grand scheme several elements from the traditional Gnostic Wisdom-Mystery: the various stages of divine “emanation” and “regathering” which constitute cosmogenesis and salvation; the archontic creation of Adam and Eve from God’s Image (pp. 272–75, above); the loss of the archon’s seed at the sight of the naked Perfect This may ultimately be a reflection of the Hindu Pitriyana, or “Path of the Fathers,” which guided men’s souls from the earth to the celestial regions via the Milky Way, the Sun, and the Moon. 133 Rudolph, Gnosis, 337–39. 132

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Man;134 the reconstitution of Primal Man from the reassembled sparks of Light; the Primal Triad of Father-Mother-Son; the Primal Man and his fivefold Pentad of Living Soul (much like the Valentinian Savior and his company of “angels,” whose individual forms would still be called angelicus in the Catharist version);135 three graded levels of the “Logos-Wisdom”; and 7three levels of human beings, corresponding to the pneumatics, psychics, and hylics of the West. Yet even more central to the entire Gnostic tradition was the saving of the fallen souls through the “Great Mystery” of union with the “Mind of Light,” followed by their deification and regathering into God’s Body: At the end, when the cosmos is dissolved, this same Thought of Life shall gather himself in and shall form his Soul (i.e., Self) in the shape of the Lost Image. His net is his Living Spirit, for with his Spirit he shall catch the Light and the Life that is in all things and build it into his own body (Kephalaia, 5; trans. Jonas).

How much of this doctrine may have come from the Iranian fravashi (the soul’s heavenly counterpart or “guardian angel“), and how much from the Valentinian “angel,” we cannot say; but the angelic “light-double” appears almost everywhere throughout the gnosticising area, even as far east as Persia.136 It was also of considerable importance to the Mandaeans, who likewise sought to regather the scattered souls and their preexistent counterparts (the mabda dmutha) into the heavenly body of Adam Kadmon. Significantly, this also took place by means of a spiritual hieros gamos, called the masiqta.137 Thus, the souls of the dead and “the spirits of light which govern them” were brought back together as a Mystical Body, called the “Light Body of Primal Man,” which “swells like a pregnant woman” as it is perfected by the Father.138

Hypostasis of the Archons, 89:19–30; On the Origin of the World, 111:8–28; 114:27–115:3; 116:11–117:15. 135 Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (Boulder, 1978), 34. 136 Ibid., passim, esp. 13–34. 137 E. S. Drower calls this a “creation of the Secret Adam, limb by limb, in the primal vastness of the cosmic Womb, the Mother,” the words “Father” and “Mother” being used of the two cosmic Powers during the “sacred marriage.” The Secret Adam (Oxford, 1960), 74. 138 Ibid., 83–84. A. V. Williams Jackson, Researches in Manichaeism (New York, 1965), 255–65, gives a more detailed account of the same myth. 134

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This Mandaean symbolism also has obvious ties to the Wisdom Mystery, with its goal of regathering Wisdom’s scattered “rays” and making them “pregnant” with divine “Virtues.” Yet in the Manichaean texts— perhaps due to their extremely ascetic tone—the sexual metaphor is not as conspicuous. Nevertheless, the same theoretical basis which we found in the Philonic and Gnostic versions of the Mystery are still apparent in both. In Manichaeism, for example, man’s soul, “as a part of the light (i.e., God), is the element to be saved; and the saving element is the ‘spirit’ (nous, or pneuma).”139 These come into union when the latter “enters all men who are to be saved,” either by revelation and gnosis,140 or even by a special rite, whose purpose was to endow a person with the gift of the redeeming Spirit. This special rite is described in chapter 10 of the Kephalaia as the “laying-on-of-hands,” which ordained the elect person as part of the Manichaean inner circle.141 At the same time, it bestowed the “Spirit of Light” upon him.142 It was also understood that at the moment of death his personal “Form of Light” (spirit-double) would appear to him and console him with a kiss, offering him its right hand. This he venerated as his feminine Savior, also called the Daena, or “the Maiden who guides him.”143 The Sacred Marriage character of their reunion is further indicated in the Cologne Mani-Codex by the fact that the spirit-double is called syzygos (“consort,” 18;12–13; 20;4–5; 23:4–5). The result of their mystic “marriage” was “Rest” (anapausis), symbolizing the completed hieros gamos in the traditional Wisdom Mystery (12:4–5; 43:1–2; see pp. 191–93, above). The reunion of the soul with its feminine “Light-Form” thus reminds us once again of the older Wisdom literature, where the latter frequently appeared as “Lady Wisdom.” Thus, the same concept probably stood at the heart of the oldest Manichaean theology; Kurt Rudolph in fact believes that the Coptic Manichaeica (containing the above-quoted Kephalaia) “comes closest to the original system.”144 The familiar “Kiss of Love”—now found in both Manichaean and Catharist ritual—was also part of the earlier Wisdom Mystery (pp. 103, 173–75, 182, above), and was perhaps mediated to them through Bardaisan’s “Bridal Chamber” rite (pp. 360–61, above). Rudolph, Gnosis, 338. Ibid. 141 Ibid., 342. 142 De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 85, 74. 143 Ibid., 85. Corbin (Man of Light, 34–35, 148, n. 41) particularly draws the parallel between the Daena and the Valentinian “angel.” 144 Rudolph, Gnosis, 334. 139 140

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Theodore bar Khoni’s account of Manichaean salvation (Book of Scholia, ca. A.D. 792) also contains a late version of the mystic “union at the veil,” involving Primal Man and the “Mother of the Living” (Wisdom). This encounter (which also served as the prototype of man’s salvation) took place when the “Mother’s” hypostatized “Call” put on Man’s hypostatized “Answer.” Like the Jewish Logos-Wisdom, these were personifications of the spoken “Word,” and appear to have been connected with a ritual exchange of questions and answers in an initiation ceremony. A. V. Williams Jackson connects this mystical “putting on” to Paul’s baptismal hieros gamos, where the saving element was also said to be “put on” like a garment: Through faith you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. Baptized into union with him, you have all put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave or freeman, male and female; for you are all one person (Eph. 5:31–32) in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:27–28; see also Eph. 4:24; Col. 3: 10).

Paul’s verb enduo (“to put on”) literally means “to dress.” The Manichaean version similarly uses the Syriac verb l ebash, the same verb used in the Peshitta of Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24 to indicate the mystery of union with the Savior (“Ye have put on [l ebash] the new man”). That a hieros gamos was also intended in the Manichaean rite is further suggested by the Cologne Mani-Codex, which equates “Rest” with the putting on of the “Garment” (87.4–5). Bar Khoni’s mystery of union concluded as the “Mother of the Living” led the saved through the “Door” which separates the Light from the Darkness145—another reflection of the goddess Wisdom, who regulates all movement through the horos-limit (p. 24, above). The Manichaeans especially described their relationship to her as “Sons of the Widow,” no doubt because she had become the “Fallen Mother” without a Spouse, or the seed of the “Fallen Sophia” who hoped to receive Christ as the “Father” of their salvation (p. 269, above). Hegemonius (Acta Archelai, 7.4–5) also describes how the Father’s “Living Spirit” descended to the “Door,” extended its right hand to the candidate, and drew him back into the Light. “On this account, the Manichaeans, if they meet each other, give their right hands as a sign of

Williams Jackson, Researches in Manichaeism, 229–32; 259–63. “Call” and “Answer” seem to be personifications of a ritual question and response at the “Door” separating the two worlds and will be repeated by each man as he enters heaven (Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 223). 145

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having been saved from the Darkness.”146 St. Augustine, who was well acquainted with the Manichaeans, identified the “Living Spirit” as the Holy Ghost,147 she whom the intertestamental Wisdom-books characterized as “Lady Wisdom,” and certain Gnostic-Christians as the “Mother of men and angels.” Williams Jackson believes that the Manichaean “Mother of the Living” was the same Wisdom (Sophia) who appeared in the other Gnostic systems.148 This, however, requires some qualification, since the Bogomils, through whom Manichaean doctrine is presumed to have passed to the Catharists, thought of the “Living Spirit” primarily as the Holy Ghost and saw their redemption as a “spiritual baptism” along the lines found in John’s Gospel.149 This Catharist Holy Ghost, however, came to the individual in much the same way that it came to the Valentinians, i.e., as an individualized “guardian spirit” or “angel”: The Holy Ghost was regarded as being, next to Jesus, the chief of all the celestial spirits; but the Catharists also applied the epithet holy to each of the guardian spirits of the celestial souls. When the souls of men have accomplished their penitential work, the guardian spirits, who had watched over them in heaven, are restored to them, and each of these spirits becomes the Paraclete or Consoler of the soul to which it is attached, as long as the latter has to remain on earth.150

There can be little doubt, however, that the feminine “Savior” who reunites herself to the souls of dying Manichaeans and Cathars with a kiss was ultimately a form of God’s feminine Wisdom, identified by most Jews and Christians as the Holy Spirit, or the divine “surrogate” through whom one attained perfect oneness with Christ and the Father (pp. 23 ff, above). It is

146 Ibid., 265. See also pp. 181–82, above. Several Manichaean texts refer to the symbolic extension of the right hand with which to lead the initiate through the Door into the Light (Williams Jackson, Researches in Manichaeism, 265, n. 26). Even St. Augustine, who was a Manichaean for a while, alluded to this rite when he says “May the right hand of Light protect you!” (Epist. Man. Fund. 62.13). Hans Jonas connects this ritual hand clasp with the question-and-answer ritual at the Door (= the horos, or veil). See his Gnostic Religion, 222–23). 147 Williams Jackson, Researches in Manichaeism, 289. 148 Ibid., 321. 149 Rudolph, Gnosis, 374–75. See also pp. 106–10, above, for John’s doctrine of spiritual henosis with the Divine, or “spiritual indwelling.” 150 Holmes, Holy Heretics, 8.

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she who stood behind the Catharist Troubadour’s “Lady,” and who was too “lofty” to attain while in this world.

SEXUAL RITES AMONGST THE CATHARS? It is generally believed that faithful Cathars were divided into two groups, the “Believers” (Credentes or Imperfecti) and the “Perfect” (Perfecti).151 The former, being too weak to comply with the strict renunciation of the world demanded of the Perfecti, were allowed to marry, living pretty much like other Christians, procreating their kind in the usual family setting. The Perfecti, however, claimed to abstain completely from owning property, communicating with worldly persons, lying, shedding blood, eating flesh, and (above all), engaging in sexual intercourse—even in marriage. Only those who had mastered these strict rules could receive the Consolamentum, or the ritual union which rejoined the soul to its “syzygy” (“Guardian Spirit”), and who would remain its “Comforter” or “Consoler” throughout life.152 This Consolamentum, in contrast to ordinary sexual relations, consisted mainly of a chaste prayer, a covenant to renounce all worldly activities, the laying-on-ofhands to unite the candidate with the Holy Spirit, and the Kiss of Peace, exchanged between the assembled Perfecti. Yet the opposing of this mystical union to ordinary marriage may have been more apparent than real, much like the Catharist-inspired custom of “Courtly Adultery” or “Love of the Lady,” which the Troubadours claimed to oppose to “marriage in the flesh.”153 Thus, To an uninitiated reader of Provençal poems and Arthurian romances, Tristan was no doubt guilty of committing adultery, but at the same time the fault took on the aspect of a splendid experience more magnificent than morality. What for the Manichaeans was a dramatic expression of the struggle between faith and the world thereupon became for such a reader an ambiguous and searing “poesy” … What had hitherto been a “fault” now became—in symbol—something mystically virtuous.154

We should also add a third group, the “Non-Believers,” as did the Manichaeans, who likewise spoke of three groups: the “Elect,” the “Hearers” (i.e., “Believers”), and the “Sinners” (Non-Believers), an obvious parallel to the Christian pneumatics, psychics, and hylics (also sarkiks, or “fleshly men”). See Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 232. 152 See Holmes, Holy Heretics, 10–11. 153 De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 286. 154 Ibid., 287. 151

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This again reflects the preoccupation of the Libertine Gnostics with various forms of sexual expression which were no longer truly “sexual,” but rather deviant forms of sex—i.e., sex used against itself—generally consisting of unnatural vices, employed as substitutes for marriage. It therefore comes as no surprise to learn that even the Perfecti were sometimes accused of immoral rites. Indeed, to the Catholics it seemed that the Cathars cared far too little for chastity as bodily disciplines. So long as it did not lead to the conception of children, they positively seemed to encourage sexual intercourse or at least not to discourage it—a complete reversal of the Catholic view.155

This of course makes it impossible for us to decide whether the Cathars were truly ascetic, or whether they believed that their spirituality gave them immunity from sin. The medieval writer, Pierre de Vaux-Cernay, in fact declared in his Hystoria Albigenses156 that the Cathars believed it impossible to sin with any part of the body below the navel—the same antinomian attitude held by the Phibionites. As a result, they were suspected of all manner of unnatural practices, a rumor they themselves encouraged by claiming that “casual debauchery” was preferable to marriage, “because marriage was a more serious affair, an official regularization of a wicked thing.”157 One special Cathar practice to which we must call attention was asag, or the ritual trial undergone by a knight, who had to pass an entire night naked with his Lady without giving in to temptation.158 The important thing to note here is that asag was not merely a proof of continence, but “was meant to fuel desire to paroxysm,” much like “like the Tantric preparation for magical coitus.”159 R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz refers to this deliberately cultivated passion as “the Great Desire which unites body with spirit well beyond the union of bodies in the Little Desire,”160 being a state of “spiritual ecstasy” fed by the sublimated lust of the carnal “Lesser Mysteries.” Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee (Cambridge, 1947), 152. 1:17, ed. Guaben and Lyon (Paris, 1926); quoted in Runciman, Medieval Manichee, 182. 157 Ibid., 152. 158 C. Fauriel, Histoire de la poesie provençale (Paris, 1846); quoted by Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of Sex (New York, 1983), 309. 159 Evola, Metaphysics of Sex, 309. 160 Adam l’homme rouge (Paris: 1927), quoted by Evola, Metaphysics of Sex, 233. 155 156

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Thus, erotic love, roused by a real woman, could be used as an “initiatory process” to spiritually unite the lover with “the glorious Woman of the mind,”161 i.e., the “occult force of Womanhood,”162 whom we again recognize as Sophia, the ancient goddess of the Wisdom Mystery. This practice was remarkably like that of liaisons with virgines subintroductae, during which a “brother” spent the night with his “virgin,” engaging in kisses and various “sports” (pp. 206–8, above), perhaps even engaging in coitus reservatus. The Catharist asag also suggests some kind of symbolic fondling, for as one of their poets said, “He knows nothing of donnoi” (“Love’s Vassalage,” called domnei in Provençal) “who wants fully to possess his lady.”163 This practice of first arousing, then transmuting, sexual desire— without the emission of seed—corresponds to what the Persians called karezza and may have been brought to the West in the train of those Manichaean influences which gave birth to Catharism.164 Yet whether or not karezza was an official practice, “the ideal of the Troubadour was at least to gaze upon and worship the unveiled form of his lady,”165 an ideal “love” not entirely unlike the vision of Lady Wisdom during thea theou in the Jewish Temple.166 Thus the Cathars may have had unknown rites of their own, which employed the “Lesser Mystery” of sex as a “catalyst” for initiating the “Great Mystery” of union with Wisdom, thereby explaining the frequent accusations of immorality brought against them. The most lasting of these accusations was undoubtedly the designation “Bougres” (the French form of “Bulgars”), describing not only their historic ties to the Bulgarian Bogomils, but the unnatural sex practices supposedly rife amongst them. The name “Bougre” has in fact been anglicized as “bugger,” and it was certainly justified in the case of those Troubadours who were notoriously homosexual, e.g., Arnaut Daniel, who (along with the Tuscan Guido Guinicelli) was condemned to the “sodomite’s circle” in Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto 26). Thus Catharist dualism, which sought to eradicate the propagation of the species, was often suspected of relying on the same vice for attaining its goal. This again explains why the Cathars “disapprove(ed) of marriage far more than of casual sexual intercourse, for the latter represents merely one isolated sin, See “The Intellectual Wisdom Mystery of Dante Alighieri,” below. Evola, Metaphysics of Sex, 195. Our capitalization of “Womanhood.” 163 A. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman (New York, 1958), 146. 164 Ibid., 145–47. 165 Ibid., 146. 166 Ibid., 147. Watts, however, gives the Latin form, theoria. 161 162

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while the former is a state of sin. Similarly, sexual intercourse of an unnatural type, by removing any risk of procreating children, was preferable to normal intercourse between man and woman.”167 The Troubadours in fact referred to their “Lady” as mi dons (= mi dominus, “My Lord”), as did the Andalusian and Arabic poets who imitated them and who likewise were notoriously homosexual.168 Such practices may have begun amongst the Messalians, who dwelled in the area around Edessa, where the pre-Bogomil “Paulicians” originated.169 According to Psellus (De operatione Daemonium) they already had an initiation ceremony embodying the kind of acts which gave their successors their sinister name and reputation, and the same kind of practice which has sometimes been connected with the mysterious Templars, to whom we now turn.

TEMPLAR GNOSTICISM? Did the Templars have anything to do with propagating Gnostic influences to the West, particularly in a homosexual form? Such vice would indeed be another example of “ritual sex-avoidance” for the purpose of “spiritualizing” love, as it was practiced amongst the Libertine Gnostics. We are not, of course, speaking so much of the personal deviancy of various Templar leaders—such as Jacques de Molay, another whose sodomy was well known170—but to what has been called “the formalization of the homosexual availability of all Templars to each other on demand,” i.e., a doctrinal requirement for avoiding natural intercourse with women.171 The notorious “Scatological Kiss” which was part of the Templars’ initiation ceremony would also seem to be an “avoidance” rite designed to repudiate the “Sa-

Runciman, Medieval Manichee, 176. Op. cit., 95 [uncertain reference, ed. note]. 169 Runciman, Medieval Manichee, 177–78; see also his pp. 21–25 for a summary history of the Messalian, Paulician and Bogomil connection. It is worth noting that the Paulician influence was still alive in France in 1022, where so-called “Popelicians” were condemned to be burnt at Orleans for their heretical practices. Thomas Wright, George Witt, and Sir James Tennett, [G. Legman], The Guilt of the Templars (New York, 1966), 250. 170 G. Legman, quoted in Wright, Witt, and Tennett, Guilt of the Templars, 107– 8. 171 Ibid., 109; our emphasis. The seal of the Templars, which shows two knights riding horseback, one behind the other, was popularly interpreted to show the Devil “seducing” a Templar from behind (ibid., 109, 155). 167 168

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cred Kiss” of ordinary Christians, a kiss which had been part of the original Wisdom Mystery. The Gnostic provenance of Templar belief has long been asserted by a number of scholars.172 Such claims generally begin with the observation that the Templars were obliged to deny the “orthodox” Christian God and the Cross, reflecting the Gnostic conviction that the Jesus who died on the Cross was not the Heavenly Christ, but merely his earthly shell. These claims were also based on the fact that the androgynous god of the Templars was popularly referred to as “Baphomet,” a name which has been explained as a term of derision derived from “Mahomet,” that is to say the “heathen” deity eschewed by ordinary Christians, and with whom the Templars had become acquainted during their lengthy stay in the Near East.173 Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, on the other hand, noticed that surviving representations of Baphomet greatly resembled Gnostic statues brought back from Palestine, especially those connected with Valentinian, Ophite, and Nessarine rites.174 In this connection, we must mention the remarkable discovery made by Hugh Schonfield that “Baphomet in Hebrew characters produced b-ph-w-m-t, which by Atbash converted immediately into s-w-ph-y-’a (Sophia), the Greek word for Wisdom.”175 “Atbash” was a special cipher used in Jeremiah, the Talmud, the Midrash, and various Kabbalistic writings to conceal the identity of individuals who were the objects of prophecy and it operated by substituting for the original letters the letters of the alphabet in reverse order.176 “So this centuries-old secret was for the first time thus revealed,” writes Schonfield; indeed, most of the known figures which resemble Baphomet seem to offer androgynous links between the Templar The “latest and clearest” statement on the Gnosticism of the Templars is said to be that of John Charpentier, L’Ordre des Templiers (Paris, 1945); see Wright, Witt, and Tennett, Guilt of the Templars, 20. 173 G. Legman. quoted in Wright, Witt, and Tennett, Guilt of the Templars, 85. This author notes that until recently the English dialect word for an “idol” or “occult charm” was a “Mahomet” or “mommet.” That “Baphomet” was derived from Islamic worship per se (as some have suggested) is of course impossible, since no androgynous deity was ever connected with the religion of Mohammed. 174 Mysterium Baphometis revelatum, Fundgraben des Orients vol. 6 (Vienna, 1818); quoted by Wright, Witt, and Tennett, Guilt of the Templars, 267–68; also 20. G. Legman’s interpretation of Baphomet as the Greek baphe metius (“Baptism of Wisdom”), however, seems artificial and contrived. 175 The Essene Odyssey (Longmead, Saftsbury, Dorset, 1984), 164. 176 B. J. Roberts, “Athbash,” in IDB, 1:306–7. Here it is spelled “Athbash.” 172

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deity and the Gnostic “Wisdom,” who was also male and female in one, a conception which we have followed all the way from its early appearance in the Philonic Mystery (pp. 45ff, above). Baphomet (if this explanation is correct) would thus be a late survival of the principle adumbrated by the united Cherubim in the Temple, i.e., the reconstitution of the Divine Male-Female Image: “When you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female” (Gospel of Thomas, Log. 22; Gal 3:28; 2 Clement 12). The Chronicles of St. Denis in fact describe the Templar god as a male-female idol with two beards, one on the masculine face, and the other representing the female pubic hair.177 Such a statue was actually turned over to the commissioners who were investigating the Templar scandal, and it appears to have been hermaphrodite, with “two faces and a silver beard.”178 An English Templar, Stephan de Staplebridge, however, acknowledged that there were two grades of Templars, the first outwardly agreeing with the Catholic faith, but the second strictly “contrary thereto.”179 This coincides once again with the Catharist and Gnostic practice of accepting initiates secretly into their unorthodox higher teachings, while maintaining their “orthodoxy” before the unsuspecting. To the candidate who attained this upper level of initiation, the Templars’ mysterious rites were then privately disclosed, rites which were said to “make the earth produce and the trees to blossom”180—well-known metaphors for the blessings of the ancient Mysteries, as this beautiful fragment from Aeschylus illustrates: Chaste Heaven yearns to embrace the Earth; deep longing seizes Earth to unite with him. Torrents of rain pour down from the silent Sky; the Earth conceives and bears mankind the verdant grasses and Demeter’s gentle fruits. The Nuptial Shower awakens the forest’s blossoming springtide; all that comes from me (Aeschylus, Fragment 44).

Just how this may have related to the proposed rites of buggery, which the Templars are said to have espoused, is difficult to determine; yet it is obvious that without some lofty belief of their own they would hardly have risked death at the hands of the Inquisition by persisting in their secret

G. Legman, in Wright, Witt, and Tennett, Guilt of the Templars, 93. Ibid., 94. 179 Ibid., 273–74. 180 Legman, in ibid., 34. 177 178

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practices.181 Yet we must remember that so-called “orthodoxy” was never the only version of Christian belief, even at its very beginning, and representatives of Christianity’s great gnosticizing branch were still alive and active throughout Asia and Europe at the time when the Templars sought to keep open the pilgrimage routes to the Jerusalem Temple for the sake of their heavenly vision, whatever that vision might have been.

THE INTELLECTUAL WISDOM MYSTERY OF DANTE ALIGHIERI Of much loftier spirituality was the intellectually conceived Lady-Worship of the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri (1265–3121), and the school which followed him. As we learn from his celebrated Vita Nuova, his youthful and unrequited love for the unapproachable Beatrice caused him early in life to experience a profound rebirth of spirit and a creative fervor almost unmatched in the rest of the world’s romantic literature. Thanks to his visionary encounter, Dante and his followers succeeded in transforming Beatrice’s image into the symbol of the Ideal Woman who dwells amongst the angels, no longer human, but transformed into a Divine Force capable of raising her lovers to the celestial heights inhabited by God’s elect.182 The literary fictions with which they accomplished this transformation appear to have been inherited ready-made from the Troubadours and amounted to a deliberate evocation of some “Lady of the Mind” (as Dante called her), one who was endowed with an autonomous reality apart from the earthly woman who inspired her. Thus Beatrice became for Dante a heavenly “Initiatrix” into the Mystery of Divine Love and an embodiment of the “occult force of Womanhood” (pp. 370–71, above). Dante’s vision must also be counted among the important sources behind Goethe’s image 181 Ibid., 133–34. Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, (New York, 1888), is the leading English-speaking exponent of the opposite view, namely, that the Templars were entirely innocent of the charges to which so many of them confessed. The same opinion (written by a Catholic author) is found in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 14th ed. (article, “Templars”). But as Legman points out, Lea “challenges or overlooks” the dozens of the Templars who “kept their faith and the secret of their initiation … and died … screaming, yet silent as to the questions hammered at them.” Hans Prutz, Geheimlehre und Geheimstatuten des TempelherrenOrdens (Berlin, 1899) also refutes this kind of apologetic and argues that the Templars were truly guilty of a dualist and obscene heresy embodying “Catharist” elements (see Legman, in Wright, Witt, and Tennett, Guilt of the Templars, 133, 161–63). 182 Umberto Cosmo, A Handbook to Dante Studies (New York, n.d., probably 1947), 39–40.

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of the “Eternal Feminine,” that sublime image which draws man’s spirit onward and upward until it reaches its divine potential: Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan (Faust II, conclusion). (The Eternal Feminine draws us onward).

Yet as Julius Evola points out in his perceptive study, The Metaphysics of Sex, Dante’s noble “Woman” was none other than the goddess Sophia of the ancient Wisdom Mystery. Thus the various women celebrated by these Italian “worshippers of love”—whatever the names assigned to them— were but “one single woman, an image of ‘Blessed Wisdom’ or Gnosis, an image of the principle of enlightenment, salvation and transcendental understanding.”183 She was, in short, the feminine aspect of God, in whom man finds his missing Higher Self, and the force that causes love to burn within him until the soul is reunited with its Divine Source. Still, this lofty worship began on a physical plane. Though viewed as sacred, it was aroused by a real woman. Guido Cavalcante (1250–1300), one of Dante’s predecessors in the worship of love, thus describes how one’s beloved is transformed into a virtual Redemptress and Savior by perceiving her higher nature, a nature whose origin was amongst the stars: I seem to see such a beautiful woman coming out of her lips that my mind cannot understand her, and it seems that at once another woman of new beauty is born of her, in which a star is moving, and says, “Your salvation has appeared.”

To receive a heavenly greeting from this mysterious “New Woman”—who is the Divine Feminine residing in every earthly woman—is the true goal of love, according to Dante’s Vita Nuova. When the man perceives her, she provokes in him a spiritual crisis, which enables him (if he is strong enough) to destroy his old self (“initiatic death”) and to seek for that part of life “beyond which one cannot go if one wishes to return” (ibid). Quoting Cavalcante again, the poet is reborn and transfigured by “Love’s Image,” as it acts upon the “potential intellect” (the nous),184 which in ordinary men lies 183 Metaphysics of Sex, 194–95; our emphasis. See also Lizette Andrews Fischer, The Mystic Vision of the Grail Legend and in the Divine Comedy (New York, 1967), who argues that Dante’s Ideal Woman is the symbol of transubstantiation, “by which God continues to dwell with men,” a “type and pledge of the heavenly,” a “vision” and a “sacramental mirror” of which we shall see one day “face to face” (ibid., 116). These were, of course, the archerypal functions of Wisdom. 184 Evola, Metaphysics of Sex, 197.

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dormant. “You pass through my eyes to my heart,” he says, “and awaken the intellect that was formerly useless.” This was in fact the very process described by Philo, who spoke of the fragmented human nous being restored to wholeness by an erotic vision of Wisdom in the Temple (pp. 40ff, above). Dante further says of it, Behold, the God who is stronger than I, and who approaching will govern me (Vita Nuova).

Thus a rebirth of the soul begins to take place, initiated by Eternal Womanhood through the spiritual ecstasy which she provokes. Simultaneously, it is drawn out of its earthly “lodging” and hastens on toward “ontological perfection.”185 The stage of “initiatic death” which the arrows of love initially produced was called the mors osculi (kiss of death) by Giordano Bruno (Erorici furiori, II.1.47). It was important because it symbolized the death out of which everlasting life will come once the spirit is released from its earthly shell and reunited with God’s feminine aspect—the Essence of Love. This is a process which we will again encounter in medieval alchemy, called nigredo, or the “blackness” of death. But the Higher Unity which arises triumphantly out of death is all light. Dante’s school often depicted this Higher Unity with the image of the hermetic Rebis (see below), who was the redeemed male and female aspects of Deity rejoined through marital fusion: “Love, you have made us one instead of two, with higher virtue through wedlock.”186 Cecco d’Ascoli even likened this experience to Paul’s ascent into the Third Heaven in Second Corinthians (12:1–4): I am transformed into the Third Heaven in this Woman, so that I know not who I was. Wherefore I feel more blessed every hour. My intellect took form from Her as her eyes showed me salvation, as I looked at the virtue in her countenance. Therefore I am She.187

Dante, too, reiterates this daring assertion of redemptive, fusion with the Feminine Divine: This Woman who spiritually was made one thing together with my soul (Vita Nuova).

Ibid., 197. Ibid., 197–98. 187 Ibid., 198. 185 186

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Thus love becomes the power of immortality, for lovers are “those who die not,” but live in “another century of joy and glory” because they have been initiated into God’s Eternal Life (Giacomo di Baisieux).188

THE PERFECT MAN AS REBIS The intellectual love described by Dante, Cavalcante, and Giordano found its ideal symbol in the figure of the Male-Female Rebis, or Hermaphrodite, which represented for certain members of their school the goal of spiritual fusion and the transcending of duality.189 The history of the so-called Rebis (“dual-nature”) is virtually lost in the mists of time. Plato long ago spoke of a “spherical Hermaphrodite,” or preexistent “Original Man,” who was male and female in one. At the time of creation, he was separated into divided genders, which have longed ever since to regain their wholeness through love and sexual union (Symposium, 189c–193d). Philo’s generic “First Man” was also bisexual before the Fall (On the Creation of the World, 151–52). Being preternarually complete, he was able to devote himself without distraction to spiritual matters and to God (Allegorical Interpretation, 2.74; Special Laws, 1.9; Questions on Genesis, 3.48). Alchemists often identified the Hermaphrodite or Rebis with the god Mercury (Hermes), who was the Unifying Spirit, or the logos spermatikos who permeates and sustains creation. He is also the “Christ-Anthropos” who is scattered throughout the universe, and whose reconstitution was one of the aims of spiritual alchemy.190 This appears to be a reflection of Ephesians 2:17–22, which states that Christ’s work is to “break down the dividing wall of hostility” that divides mankind, and to “create in himself one new Man in place of two.” Primitive cultures have perennially expressed this “unity-withinduality” by means of various theriomorphic images, especially the conjugation of ophidian deities, for instance, the Sumero-Babylonian caduceus (ca. 2600 B.C.), which shows entwined serpents in sexual union as a sign of their divine wholeness and healing power. Similar pairs of divine serpents in 188 Ibid., 198. Evola refers to this as “‘salvation’ achieved through the awakening and renovation of the inner power of being,” which “ensures participation in everlasting initiatory life.” Compare Dante’s redemptive male-female fusion with the Zohar, III:7a; III:296a, quoted above, p. 21. 189 See the frontispiece to this book. 190 Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton, 1970), 6–17; J. E. Circlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Synge (New York 1962), xxix, 170, 198–99.

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ritual conjugation have been found throughout the rest of the world, depicted in objects as diverse as Celtic crosses, the Aztec Coatlique’s “serpentskirt,” the snake-bodice of the Greek Gorgon, Egyptian coins depicting Isis with intertwining snakes, Pompeian murals honoring Ceres, decorations on Chinese Shang and Chou pottery, ancient Elamite sculpture, and paleolithic cave-drawings, all inspired no doubt by the sacred awe which men felt at the sight of these dreaded animals copulating—animals whose bite can cause death, but who were annually “resurrected” when they sloughed off their old skin and reemerged anew. Even unpaired serpents symbolized Deity in much of the ancient world. We think immediately of the Egyptian Uraeus, which was a form of Ra’s “Sacred Eye,” or the power of the High-God. Even the Israelites once worshipped Yahweh in the form of a serpent (2 Kgs 18:4); for this reason, Christ was symbolized as an “uplifted serpent” on the Cross (John 3:14; cf. Num 21:5–9). Yahweh was in fact still shown a century or two before the Common Era as an “Anguipede,” i.e., an ithyphallic being with two serpents for legs,191 suggesting his male-female attributes and their sexual potency. Thus, the way was prepared for medieval Europe to recognize the ancient image of copulating serpents as a symbol of God’s uniting malefemale “Powers,” corresponding very closely to the imagery of the Embracing Cherubim in the Jerusalem Holy of Holies. The Rebis may in fact have originated in the Far East as a pair of copulating serpents who became fused together in the form of a hermaphrodite. The most famous European copy of this fabulous “Two-in-One” (see the frontispiece to this book) shows it holding aloft the age-old creative symbols of the compass and square and can be traced all the way back to China, where it symbolized the legendary couple, Fu Hsih and Nü Kua, the semi-divine and serpent-like beings who established the human race when the earth first emerged from chaos. They too hold aloft the compass and square as symbols of their male and female creative powers; furthermore, they were shown as a “Two-in-One” in a ritual embrace (see figure 1, following page).

See Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton, 1974), fig. 274, for several illustrations and a description of these curious objects. Hermes (the god associated with the alchemical Hermaphrodite) was often shown in the same ithyphallic state. 191

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Figure 1: SOURCES OF THE “REBIS”: (a) Sumerian Caduceus (ca. 2600 B.C.). (b) lndian Nagakals (Serpent Deities) Intertwined. (c) Late Babylonian serpent-deities united as One. (d) Chinese Fu Hsih and Nu Kila (the Creator Couple), united as intertwined serpents, and holding aloft the compass and square. (e–g) Second-century Han tomb reliefs, also holding the compass, square and quipu. (h) Seventh-century T'ang Dynasty Fu Hsih and Nu Küa. (i) Alchemical serpents uniting to represent Eternity. (j) The European “Rebis,” also holding aloft the compass and square, with uniting serpents at their feet. (See also the frontispiece of this book.)

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The Chinese Sinologist, Wen I-To, believes that Fu Hsih and Nü Kua were originally totem animals with ophidian tails, belonging to the indigenous primitive tribes of East Asia; Jean Przyluski has shown that they were especially connected with the sun. They also represented the Cosmic Mountain that supports the sky and were closely associated with the Great Bear as it rotates about the polar axis of the earth. They are usually shown resting upon a single foot, or tail, which is perhaps why a limping dance has been an important part of their worship, designed, it would seem, to produce thunder and rain.192 Fu Hsih is the best-known of all these “unipeds.” From the very start, he was closely associated with divine wisdom, being the one who taught men to reckon with knotted cords and to use the famous Trigrams. These would later become the basis for the Hexagrams of the I Ching and their system of divination. He is first referred to in literary sources from about the fourth century B.C. During the Former Han Period (ca. 2nd cent. B.C.), his wife began to appear with him in various artistic representations; there they are generally seated together, facing one another, and holding aloft their famous symbols of creation.193 From around the time of Christ, however, and for reasons unknown, they are shown with intertwining tails, depicting a creative embrace, perhaps under the influence of Indian nagakals (intertwining serpent deities), whose own form was derived from the Sumero-Babylonian caduceus.194 Sir Mark Aurel Stein discovered an exceptionally fine seventh-century example of Fu Hsih and Nü Kua in the caves of Ch’ien-fo-Tung (in the Taklamakan Desert), where the ancient Silk Road entered northern China from the West.195 Again, they are shown in their serpentine embrace, conspicuously displaying the sacred compass and square, closely corresponding to the hermetic Rebis, even down to their cosmic sun and moon symbols in the background. 192 “Etudes Indienne et chinoises; Les Unipeds,” Melanges Chinoise at Bouddhiques 2 (1933): 307–32; Wen I-To is quoted in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, 1954), 1:263. 193 Needham, Science and Civilisation, 1:163–4. See also Carl Whiting Bishop, “The Geographical Factor in the Development of Chinese Civilization,” The Geographical Review 12 (1922): 19–41, esp. 26; Balaji Mundkur, The Cult of the Serpent (Albany, 1983), 175; Donald Mackenzie, Myths of China and Japan (Boston, 1977), 275– 77. 194 Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilisation (New York, 1946), 73–74. 195 See Stein’s Innermost Asia (Oxford, 1928), 2:707; Smithsonian Magazine, (May 1977): 95–103, contains a general account of Sir Aurel Stein’s expedition.

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A degree of uncertainty, however, surrounds the question of how and when the compass and square became so intimately associated with these creative demigods, for the earliest accounts of their contribution to the arts of civilization mention only the invention of the Trigrams and the knotted cord, or quipu.196 Without question, the compass and square were already well known to the early Chinese (as they indeed were nearly everywhere else),197 for the universal male and female principles which they represented (yang and yin) were associated even in the I Ching with heaven and earth, which were said to be “round” and “square,” respectively: Ch’ien is heaven. It is round. It is the ruler, the father, jade, metal, etc … K’un is the earth, the mother … the level … and black soil, etc … (Appendix 5, chapter 11, “Remarks on Certain Trigrams”).

K’un is further described in the body of the I Ching as “strength, square, and great” (1:2). James Legge’s translation appends to this the observation that “the earth itself, according to the Chinese conception of it, (was) a great cube.” Moreover, the yin-elements of wind and wood were symbolized by the sun-Trigram, which also connoted the instruments for measuring squareness: Sun suggests the idea of wood, of wind, of the oldest daughter, of a plumb-line, of a carpenter’s square (Appendix 5, Chapter 18, “Remarks on Certain Trigrams”).

The Ch’ien-fo-Tung picture of Fu Hsih and Nü Kua also appears to show the carpenter’s square and plumb-line together, though the artwork is somewhat defective at this point. The Huai-nan Tzu of Liu An († 122 B.C.) summarizes this ancient symbolism as follows: The way of Heaven (ch’ien) is termed Circular, and the way of Earth (k’un) Square … The Square governs Darkness (Yin) and a round figure governs Brightness (Yang) (chapter 3).

Significantly, however, the I Ching itself—a book whose roots go back into the Ch’un Period (ca. 720–474 B.C.)—describes Fu Hsih simply as the revealer of the eight Trigrams (“Great Appendix, 11.7.11) and the knotted cord (11.7.23). Even as late as the second century A.D., artwork on a tomb196 197

Donald Mackenzie, Myths of China, 275–77. In Egypt, for example, they were the “amulets of Orisis.”

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shrine at Wu Liang shows Fu Hsih and Nü Kua with only a square and a quipu,198 suggesting that the compass and square as a pair were not inevitably associated with the divine couple. A famous T-shaped banner which covered the Lady of Tai’s coffin around 186 B.C. even shows Fu Hsih alone, with neither compass nor square, though he is flanked on both sides by the appropriate sun and moon symbols.199 A stone carving from Hsih Chin about the same time shows Fu Hsih and Nü Kua together again, holding the sun and moon symbols, but this time without compass or square. Yet an impressed brick from the Eastern Han Period (ca. 100 B.C.) shows them with both compass and square, as well as the sun and moon symbols, but without the intertwined tails that were to become the antecedents of the hermaphroditic Rebis. There is also another striking problem associated with these ancient demi-gods, namely, the assignment of the compass or square to a specific sex; indeed, our illustrations appear to be inconsistent on this point. Many of the Chinese examples, for instance, show Fu Hsih holding the feminine square, while Nü Kua, his wife, holds the masculine compass. Yet the European Rebis reversed this symbolism, placing the compass in the hand of the male and the square in the hand of the female.200 At the same time, the sun and moon (whenever shown) are always associated with male and the female, respectively. This is also the case with the medieval Rebis, whose masculine half has the compass and the sun, and whose feminine half has the square and the moon. We also note that in all of these illustrations, including the one from Europe, the compass appears on the left side, and the square on the right, regardless of who holds them. How are we to explain these anomalies? It would seem that the use of the sun and moon symbols may actually be older than that of the compass and square, hence already fixed in relation to the male and the female. The compass and square, on the other hand, are shown in a fixed position with respect to the one who is about to receive them. S. Madhihassan explains this “ritual” arrangement by analyzing a second-century Han Period gravedecoration, where Fu Hsih hands his square to a woman, and Nü Kua offers her compass to a male. Presumably, these recipients will then commu198 Needham, Science and Civilisation, 1:464. Needham, however, identifies the quipu in another volume of the same book as “a pair of compasses” (1956, 2:210). 199 Needham, Science and Civilisation (1976), 5.3.21–23. 200 S. Mahdihassan, “Dualistic Symbolism, Alchemical and Masonic,” Iqbal Review (1963): 55–78.

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nicate them to a person in the tomb, acting as mediating links, much as Wisdom mediated God’s light to man and a photographic negative transfers a positive image to a print: The soul can be separated and serve as the positive or Yang element. The body is inert matter which can be processed until it becomes soullike when it behaves as the negative of the Yin half … According to Philo, “the soul can so dominate the body that the latter shows forth an imitation of the powers of the soul.”201

Alternatively, one might suspect that foreign models have somehow influenced the Chinese use of these architect’s symbols, causing the masculine Fu Hsih to hold the square, and the feminine Nü Kua to hold the compass. This would have been in direct opposition to the traditional Yin-Yang view of “round” and “square” as female and male features, even though the feminine Yin was still associated with earth, and the masculine Yang with the sky.202 R. B. Blakney further also notes that Chinese mystics, while asserting the ascendancy of the masculine yang over the feminine yin in the patriarchal society of China, acknowledged that the soft and yielding yin always prevails in the end over what is rigid and strong. Thus, Poem 6 of the Tao Te Ching praises the “Mystic Female” because she inevitably overcomes the “Male,” just as water inevitably wears away stone. This notion, he theorizes, may go back to a time when the Chinese had a prehistoric matriarchy, whose lingering influence led to the philosophy of “Yinism” and the mystical worship of the “Mother.”203 As we shall see later on, Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism also reversed the roles assigned to the male and female genders during Tantric copulation, the female being active in the former, and the female passive in the latter.204 This hints at an active exchange of ideas between the various cultures of the Far East, in the process of which they were often reexamined in novel contexts and with new connections.

Ibid., 63, 58–59. As we shall see, Tantric Hinduism and Tantric Buddhism also reversed the roles assigned to the male and female genders in Tantric copulation. See “Possible Survivals of the Wisdom Mystery in the Far East,” below. 203 R. B. Blakney, The Way of Life: Lao Tzu (New York, 1955), 25. 204 See “Possible Survivals of the Wisdom Mystery in the Far East,” below. Also Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (Garden City, NY, 1970), 200–1, for the reversal of roles between the sexes. 201 202

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YIN AND YANG, THE REBIS, AND ALCHEMY Just how the figure of the “Two-in-One,” or “Rebis,” representing the mystical marriage of divine male and female principles, was transmitted to the West, is presently lost in the mists of time. But it is certain that it was somehow blended with the many other Near Eastern and European versions of the Wisdom Mystery to produce one of the more striking symbols of the alchemist’s “Great Mystery,” which was the production of “gold” (i.e., Eternal Life) from the dross of phenomenal existence and its many painful sets of opposites. Many students of the subject believe that the kind of alchemy to which we are referring originated in China, perhaps as early as the sixth century B.C. From the very start, it aimed at prolonging life (macrobiotics) through the manipulation of the Yin and Yang, those universal opposites whose interaction produces the phenomena of nature. According to Taoism,205 phenomenal existence in all its variety comes from the separation of the single cosmic Unity, called Tao, into pairs of opposites: Tao the undivided, Great One, gives rise to two opposite principles, Darkness and Light, yin and yang. These are at first thought of only as forces of nature apart from man. Later, the sexual polarities, and others as well, are derived from them. From yin comes K’un, the receptive feminine principle; from yang comes Ch’ien, the creative masculine Principle; from yin comes ming, life; from yang, hsing or essence.206

By balancing these opposing forces with the proper mystic practices, the ego can be freed from the stresses of phenomenonality, and again regain the harmony of the Tao. Because the soul is itself light, it can become part of the “Great Light” and realize its intrinsic immortality. Yet unlike the Hindu Vedantin, the Taoist never loses his personal identity, for the idea of personality is preserved in a transfigured form, always bearing the “traces” of its experience in the world.207 In Neo-Taoism, this was symbolized as the blossoming of the mysterious “Golden Flower,” an image not unlike that of

205 One must however distinguish between the original, philosophical Taoism and the “religious Taoism” of the modern Chinese masses, which is largely an assortment of magical practices unrelated to what we are discussing. 206 Richard Wilhelm and C. G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower (New York, 1950), 73. 207 Ibid., 18.

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Figure 2: SOURCES OF ALCHEMICAL AND MASONIC SYMBOLISM, (a) Taoist Yin-Yang Symbol. (b) Hindu Lingam and Yoni Symbols in conjunction. (c) The Ouroboros: The end is the beginning. (d) Graeco-Egyptian Ouroboros; hen to punta. “The one is the all.” (e) Alchemlcal Sacred Marriage (Albert of Villanova). (f) The Marriage of the King and Queen. (g) Passing through the Negredo (death). (h) Resurrection: “The Secret of a King” (“Here is born the Emperor of all Honor. None higher than he can be born”). (i) Tibetan yab-yum. The active Buddha coupling with his passive Wisdom (Prajna). (j) Eighteenth-century Tibetan yab-yum diagram. (k) Hindu Tantric union; the feminine/active Shakti resuscitating the masculine/passive Shiva. (l) Tantric Mantra with interpenetrating male and female triangles. (m) The Masonic Second Degree (note the sun and moon symbols, i.e., the Compass and Square). (n) The Masonic Third Degree (note the resurrected Sun-Being). (o) Masonic Emblem containing the Secret Name of God. (p) The Masonic Royal Arch Degree; perfect union permits passage through the veil.

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the medieval alchemist’s “Mystic Rose,” representing the attainment of eternal life within the soul of the adept. The opposition and harmonization of these universal Yin and Yang principles were well developed by the third century B.C.208 Their first proponents, however, seem to have advocated the ascendancy of Yin over Yang. Indeed, the characteristics of the Wise Man were initially associated with the “Mystic Female” (see p. 395, below), not unlike the Western Wisdom. Even the Tao was for a long time described as a “Mother” and the ideal state as that of a “Woman.”209 In the more intellectual atmosphere of the philosophers, however, both the feminine and masculine forces were called into balanced interplay and remained so throughout the further development of Chinese civilization. The familiar Taoist emblem of Yin and Yang in the act of interpenetrating one another visually expresses the ideal balance which maintains the higher Unity of the Tao (see figure 2, above). A further refinement of Yin and Yang was the interaction of the “Five Elements” (earth, wood, metal, fire, and water). Of all the metals, however, Chinese alchemists prized cinnabar (mercuric sulfide) the most, and it had long been used as a pigment on prehistoric burial ornaments because of its blood-red, “life-giving” color. This was also the substance which could be transmuted into gold, the symbol of immortality; hence, by at least 133 B.C., the search for ways to make gold became an important goal of alchemical research. More important still, by eating cinnabar, it was believed that one could see the Immortals in P’eng-lai, and learn from them the secrets of longevity.210 During the early years of our own era, these theories developed into the Neo-Taoist “Interior Gods Hygiene School,”211 which claimed that the microcosm of man was a theater for the same divine forces which govern the universe, hence these could be controlled by the proper manipulation of the body’s internal Yin and Yang. A similar interest in the “macrobiotic” control of these universal principles was beginning to appear at about the same time in the West. This is all the more remarkable because efforts by Western “proto-chemists” had previously been limited to gaining chemical knowledge for strictly practical purposes.212 Suddenly, however, a new kind R. B. Blakeney, Way of Life, 24. Ibid., 25. 210 Holmes Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way (Boston, 1957), 99–100. 211 Ibid., 105–12. 212 Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 5.4.355. 208 209

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of “philosophical alchemy,” initiated by Bolus of Mendes and the Physika kai Mystika of pseudo-Democritus (second century B.C.), began to speak of “marrying” the divine principles in various minerals, which like the gods unite, die, are resurrected and transformed into “Gold,” the symbol of the Unitive State and Immortality.213 Although the recipes of these new alchemists were ostensibly designed to change baser metals into gold, a closer examination shows that their authors—like the Chinese alchemists—were actually interested in the spiritual technique of soteriology.214 On the other hand, the Chinese, who had previously shown little interest in fertility rites,215 began to engage in sexual practices designed to produce eternal life, practices very much like those of the Gnostics, who hoped to stimulate the trapped light in the semen and return it to its Source. Thus we are led to the inevitable conclusion that a reciprocal exchange of ideas had recently begun to take place between East and West. We shall later comment on the possible influence of the Wisdom Mystery upon Chinese sexual practices; for now, we are interested chiefly in the effect which Chinese alchemy had upon the “proto-chemistry” of the West. Joseph Needham, in his magisterial study, Science and Civilisation of China—now approaching a dozen very large volumes—has made a detailed study of this important cultural exchange; much of what follows is based upon his carefully documented research. Needham begins by calling attention to the quick succession of dates linking the first fully documented alchemist in China (Tsou Yen, ca. 350– 270 B.C.) and the first Western alchemist, the Graeco-Egyptian Bolus of Mendes (ca. 175 B.C.).216 Significantly, Bolus’ successor, pseudoDemocritus, claimed that his teacher had been “Ostanes the Persian,” which suggests that these Hellenized Egyptians got their science through some Eastern conduit, such as the geographical link that had been forged when Alexander the Great united Sogdia, Bactria, the Indus Valley, Parthia, Media, Anatolia, Palestine, and the Nile Valley into a single L-shaped block, reaching as far as the Chinese mountains in the East. The famous “Magi” spoken of by later writers in the West (cf. Matt 2:1) probably came from the

Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas (Chicago, 1982), 2:301–5. Ibid., 302. 215 Needham, Science and Civilisation, 5.4.361, n. d. 216 Ibid., 324–28. 213 214

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central portion of this enormous block, and our Ostanes (ca. 485–465 B.C) appears to have been one of them. Ostanes and his “Magi” dealt in all sorts of divination and astral lore.217 Since they also worshipped the Zoroastrian’s dual principles of Mazda and Ahriman (Light and Darkness), they were undoubtedly sympathetic to the concept of Yin and Yang which came into their area from China. During the last three centuries before Christ they in fact became a veritable clearinghouse for the magical arts of the peoples surrounding them, dubbed by Needham the “Mazdean Diaspora.”218 It was also through this geographical link, Needham argues, that the word chemia (“chemistry”) reached the West, being the Chinese word for “gold-art” (chin kiem).219 The word was eventually normalized in the West by Zosimus (third century),220 passing into Arabic as al-kimiya, and finally entering Europe with a flood of eleventh- and twelfth-century scientific translations of other Arabic texts.221 With it, or course, came a concomitant assortment of color-symbolism, specialized chemical techniques, and the philosophical theories with which to explain them, all of which clearly show the basic similarities between Western and Chinese alchemy.222 We call special attention to the following Chinese and Western concepts: (1) The “Unity-within-Duality” which is achieved through the collaboration of the sexes; (2) The idea that one’s End and one’s Beginning are identical (symbolized by the Ouroborus); and (3) The mystical process of “distillation.” It may be difficult to say which culture first influenced the other in these matters, but some degree of reciprocity between them must be assumed. 1. Both Taoism and Hellenism recognized the idea of a Primal Unity behind phenomena, based on the essential relatedness of all universal laws and processes: The All is One, by it arises everything, and if the All were not One, it would be nothing at all. The All is One, by it is everything engendered; the One is the All, and if it did not contain all things, it could not enIbid., 336. Ibid., 334. 219 Ibid., 351–55. He also suggests an alternative derivation from Hebrew hometz or Arabic khamud, both meaning “leaven,” referring to the process of fermentation and color change in chemical reactions (ibid., 351). 220 Ibid., 345. 221 Ibid., 355. 222 Ibid., 355–74. 217 218

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The great “Engenderer” was of course the Tao, which continuously manifests itself in the phenomenal world as Yin and Yang. It was inevitable that these cosmic opposites be further connected with the division of the sexes, which Needham refers to as the “ontological sexualization of Yin and Yang.”225 Alchemists also perceived the “sexual” nature of all chemical reactions. Stated very simply, when two substances are joined in “marital” union, they give birth to a new one, whose characteristics are derived from the spiritual qualities of the “parents.” It was especially hoped that the right balance of male and female elements would lead to the re-establishment of the Primal Unity, or the Philosopher’s Gold. This doctrine must have profoundly impressed students in the West, where the Wisdom Mystery and Sacred Marriage tradition were already well established, for it found an immediate echo in the writings of its own alchemists: Above, the celestial things, below the terrestrial; by the male and the female the work is accomplished. Join the male and the female, and you will find what you are seeking. If the two do not become one, and the three one, and the whole of the composition one, the result will be nothing (Aphorisms of Zosimus, and The Philosophical Egg).

It was as symbols of this “Sacred Marriage” of Yin and Yang that Fu Hsih and Nü Kua came to have such significance for alchemists in the West, appearing in European illustrations as the hermetic Rebis (see frontispiece). 2. The symbol of the Ouroborus—or the familiar image of the serpent consuming its own tail (see figure 2)—also received similar recognition in both the East and the West, signifying “In my end is my beginning,” or the equivalence of protology and eschatology (see pp. 98–103 above). Jade Ourobori have been found from as early as the ninth century B.C. in China,

In ibid., 359. In ibid. 225 Ibid., 364. 223 224

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and in Mesopotamia and Egypt from around 2300 B.C.226 These figures show that both of the cultures which produced them believed in the unity of time, i.e., in the eternal preexistence and restoration of all things. A number of double Ourobori have also been found in Arabic alchemical texts of the 12th century A.D., incorporating the male-female symbolism of Yang and Yin with that of the time-transcending Ourobos, to signify that when male and female become perfectly one, time will likewise be collapsed into a unity.227 Carl Jung and S. Mahdihassan have also connected the Ouroboros with the uniting couple, Fu Hsih and Nü Kua,228 since they too are serpentfigures illustrating the principle of male-female “unity-within-duality.” 3. The phenomenon of distillation (doubtless discovered universally by accident) was viewed with the same metaphysical awe in both East and West because something “spiritual” appeared to have been born from the “marriage” of the Yin and Yang in the substances being united. These then rose “heavenward” when heated (cf. the expression spiritus when used of alcoholic distillates). The Manichaeans similarly believed in the “salvation of souls” or the “spirits of light” which would be gathered to the Great Light and “distilled” out of matter’s darkness in the Last Days.229 So too did medieval alchemists take it as axiomatic that the “Philosopher’s Stone” could be “distilled” from the proper “marriage” of baser substances, i.e., from various male and female elements in sexual conjunction. Needham has also considered the vessels in which these “magical” changes took place and has shown that phallic and womb-shaped reaction chambers were preferred by alchemists in both the East and the West, the configurations of which they believed to be theologically significant.230 Some diffusion can be proved,231 but independent invention is largely at work here, since chemical vessels were designed to accommodate the same basic processes which take place universally. These, then, are a few of the major alchemical motifs which were probably transmitted through what Needham calls the “Ostanes-

Shown in ibid., 382–83 and 375. Ibid., 378. 228 “Dualistic Symbolism; Alchemical and Masonic,” 18; quoted also in Needham, Science and Civilisation, 5.4.379 See Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Princeton, 1953) 371–72. 229 Needham, Science and Civilisation, 5.4.385. 230 Ibid., 55–102. 231 Ibid., 103–22. 226 227

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Bolus-Pseudo-Democritus-Connection,”232 motifs which are of interest to us because of their obvious compatibility with the Wisdom Mystery. Before we leave the subject of these early cultural exchanges, however, we should note a particularly revealing legend connected with pseudo-Democritus and his purported teacher, Ostanes, a legend which moreover seems to be connected in some way with the Temple. It will be recalled that the Gospel of Thomas had described a sacred embrace between the candidate for the Wisdom Mystery and the “Living Jesus” (who has just died and been resurrected), thereby making them “One.” This makes it possible for them to “enter the Kingdom” together (see p. 101 above). The very same ritual—at least in its essential points—is preserved in the nearly contemporary alchemical writings of pseudoDemocritus, telling how the author was tormented by his desire to learn “how substances and nature unite and combine themselves into one.” In order to accomplish this, he must invoke the shade of his dead master, Ostanes the Mede, who had died before being able to share his wonderful secret.233 He is told that the necessary information will be found in a certain temple; during a sacred feast, a secret door in one of the temple pillars spontaneously opened to reveal to him the prized knowledge that “One nature is charmed by another nature; one nature conquers another nature; one nature dominates over another nature.” This appears at first to be another version of the Chinese theory of the “Five Elements,” in which Yin and Yang combine in various proportions to produce the different kinds of substances.234 But it is also happens to be a version of the Sacred Marriage, showing how a Greater Power unites with a Lesser Power to impart its own characteristics to it. This is in fact an epitome of the Wisdom Mystery, as well as “salvation by grace,” where union with a “soul-element” transforms a “material-element” into something with a higher nature. We again recall Mahdihassan’s statement that during the alchemical hieros gamos the body becomes like the cosmic soul that unites with it (p. 394, below). Most important of all, however, is the fact that the secret knowledge which governs this mystery could only be revealed to the initiate in the Temple by a resurrected master!

Ibid., 387–88. We also recognize in this an early verson of the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, which we shall discuss below. 234 Needham, Science and Civilisation, 312, 335. 232 233

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Another version of this same “Ostanes” story can also be found in the Arabic Kitab-al-Fusul. Here, as in the Nag Hammadi Three Steles of Seth, there are three pillars inscribed with the desired knowledge, one in Egyptian, one in Persian, and one in “Indian,” again emphasizing the continuity of Eastern hermetic culture with that of the West. These secret inscriptions on miraculous pillars eventually gave rise to the myth of the “Emerald Tablet,” on which the central secret of chemical knowledge was to be found, according to treatises from about the seventh century onwards.235 The main significance of these two stories for us is that they show how early adepts perceived the similarity of alchemy—the science of immortality—to the mystery of resurrection and readily assimilated the two, even employing the same repertory of symbols and legends for both. In the next section, we shall see how Christian alchemists employed the alchemical “Sacred Marriage” as a means of expressing the New Testament “Great Mystery” in their own terms.

THE ALCHEMICAL SACRED MARRIAGE It has been said that Arabic alchemical theory consisted of a mixture of the Taoist idea of longevity and the Greek concept of “pharmacal potency,” based on the blending of the four primary qualities (earth, air, fire, water), which finally replaced the Chinese theory of the “Five Elements” in the West.236 The Arabs learned this alchemy in centers of Hellenistic learning, which they occupied soon after the founding of Islam, the main flowering of which took place between the ninth and eleventh centuries.237 After that, Western scholars became active translating Arabic treatises on the subject into Latin. Between 1120 and 1180 a whole avalanche of such works became available in southern Europe; and by 1250, Arabic alchemy stood generally revealed to the Western world.238 Coming on top of the secrets of Kabbalism (which were also gaining vogue at the same time), this new knowledge must have seemed a veritable revelation to European intellectuals, who were already acquainted with the traditions of the Wisdom Mystery. Zosimus’ own writings in fact claimed that alchemy was revealed by the fallen angels to the daughters of men (1 Enoch 7–8), thus presupposing a Judaeo-Christian origin for the new art. Ibid., 335, 373. Ibid., 490. 237 Ibid., 391. 238 Ibid., 402–3. 235 236

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And when they described the sexual union of the archetypal Male and Female (Aphorisms, p. 400, below), Christian adepts immediately recognized something close to their own ideas of the Church’s Sacred Marriage to the Logos. Thus, the science of alchemy, with its forgotten roots in the “marriage” of Yin and Yang, became a vehicle for expressing the “Mystic Marriage” of Christ and the Believer, or the Heavenly with the Earthy. We can easily see how this ancient alchemy was assimilated to JudaeoChristian tradition when we compare Zosimus’ description of the Philosopher’s Stone with that of the medieval alchemists. Zosimus (quoting Ostanes) had written that there was a “Stone” in the Nile which contained a miraculous spirit (a “mercuric essence”) capable of transforming base matter into noble.239 These new adepts quickly took this to refer to none other than Christ, the “cornerstone” of the Church (Eph 2:20), and the “stone” cut from the mountain without hands (Dan 2:34). Yet the identification of Christ and the “Philosopher’s Stone” does not appear in European texts until the thirteenth century, just after Wolfram’s account of the Holy Grail as a “Stone of Light.”240 Recent research has in fact connected Wolfram’s Grail-Stone with contemporary developments in alchemy,241 specifically hinting at a possible Manichaean origin.242 A similar source for Zosimus’ “Stone” is suggested by his description of a “mysterious stranger,” Nikotheus, who knew the secret name of the Light which it bore; Nikotheus, as it turns out, was one of the Manichaean Church’s special prophets.243 This Philosopher’s Stone was further defined as the prima materia which contains all opposites within itself, resolved back into their Primal Unity, or the “one nature which conquers all.”244 Whoever possesses it can produce the eternal metal of the sun, which is gold, i.e., the “one homogenous substance,” just as God is “homogenous” and “one in essence.”245 To achieve this Primal Unity is to attain eternal life. Here again we recognize Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 295–97. In Raymond Lully’s Codicillus, chapter 1. See Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 358. Also M. Caron and S. Hutin, The Alchemists (New York, 1961), 70. See “The Wisdom Mystery and the Holy Grail,” below. 241 Henry and Renée Kahane, The Krater and the Grail: Hermetic Sources of the Parzival (Urbana, 1965). 242 See “The Gnostic Character of Wolfram’s Grail Christianity,” below. 243 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 370–71. 244 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 43. 245 De circulo quatrato, 45–46; quoted in Mysterium Coniunctionis, 48. 239 240

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the goal of the ancient Wisdom Mystery, which was to restore the “feminine soul” to its primal “Maleness” through reunion with the Divine. It is hardly surprising, then, that the central rite of alchemy was also the mystery of spiritual union with the Logos-power, represented by the “mercuric” Rebis, who also represented the hermaphroditic unity of “Male” and “Female.” At the time of Philo, those initiated into union with the LogosWisdom had been called “Kings,246 and the pathway leading to this union was called the “Royal Road,” or the “Road to Sophia.”247 The secrets of the mystery were accordingly referred to as the “Secret of a King,” after Tobit 12:7 (“It is good to keep close the Secret of a King”). Significantly, the alchemical Sacred Marriage was also called the marriage of the “King and Queen” and was appropriately illustrated as a royal couple engaged in ritual intercourse (see figure 2)—a conception which also appeared in contemporary Kabbalism (p. 328–29, above). The goal of their royal union—like that of Chinese Yin and Yang—was the reconciliation of life’s opposites, called the mysterium coniunctionis by Carl Jung.248 Yet its true purpose was to create eternal life, never the production of earthly gold. This is most important, for we recall that the Gnostic secret par excellence was also the union of male and female to create a higher unity and eternal life: If the woman had not separated from the man, she would not die with the man … Christ came, in order that he might remove the separation which was from the beginning, and again unite the two, that he might give life to those who died in the separation (Gospel of Philip 70:6–17).

It was also the secret of the Gospel of Thomas, which taught that in order to achieve eternal life, the male and the female shall become One, “the upper side as the lower,” and “the outside as the inside” (Log. 22). Remarkably, this is the exact same formula which appears in the medieval alchemical tractate, Tractatus Aureus Hermetis, declaring that the Perfect Man is a “quaternario” of superius/inferius and externis/internis, united as One.249 Thus we return full circle to the very beginnings of the Christian tradition. This is also demonstrated by the treatise called the Rosarium philosophorum (printed in 1593 from an earlier source), specifically defining alchemical reactions as Goodenough, By Light, Light, 221. Ibid., 135. 248 Mysterium Coniunctionis, 3–6. 249 In ibid., 11–12. 246 247

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becoming “one New Man” in Christ Jesus “in place of two,” that “so making peace, we might reconcile both to God in one Body” (cf. Eph 2:15– 16).250 Still other medieval treatises on the subject saw a reference to the “alchemical marriage” in Song of Songs, for example, the Aurora Consurgens, which says that the familiar lines, “I will go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth” (Song 3:2), referred to the longing of the King to unite with the Queen, so that they might produce the Philosopher’s Gold, which was the inner secret of Gnosis and Immortality.251 This “great work” of achieving eternal life is further described in the Heliodori Carmina as the “wreath of victory” which the completed soul brings back with it when it returns to the body after death.252 In most of these examples this is described with such theoretical clarity that it is impossible not to recognize again the essentials of the Wisdom Mystery which lay at its heart. To have been satisfied with the production of mere earthly gold would have been to betray the deep secret which lay concealed in the alchemist’s recipes, and which were in fact coded instructions for the reenactment of the spiritual mystery of the soul’s union with Christ. Generally, there were “three degrees of perfection” which had to be passed through in order to reach the highest state.253 In the first, the male and female opposites must be dissolved into a perfect solution. Alchemical treatises invariably depict this as a man and his wife having sexual intercourse (see figure 2).254 After this earthly union, the couple dies, passing into the black nigredo state, i.e., death and putrefaction. From out of this blackness the immortal elements are “distilled” (i.e., ascend into heaven), becoming white in the process, because they have been purified and are now strong enough to resist the ardors of the fire in which they will eventually dwell. In the third stage, the King is reunited with his Queen in a Royal hieros gamos—the spiritual counterpart of the union below. Here we again encounter the ancient distinction between the “Lesser Mystery” of carnal union and the “Greater Mystery” of heavenly union. From the latter, the perfection of the “Philosopher’s Stone” is finally born, which has the In ibid., 14. In ibid., 17. 252 In ibid., 9. Cf. the Zohar, III:7a and 296a, pp. 20–21, above. 253 S. K. de Rola, Alchemy: The Secret Art (New York, 1973), 10–12. 254 Ibid., plates 27–28, 37, 41–42. 250 251

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property of transmuting baser “metals” into “gold,”255 i.e., the transformation of mortality into eternal life, and “corruption” into “incorruption.” Later alchemists, however, forgetting the spiritual basis of this doctrine, tended increasingly to concern themselves with the desire for ordinary wealth and power. But the genuine alchemist sought no less than to bridge the chasm between the earthly and the heavenly (Matt 18:18), uniting everything in a Universal Redemption, and wearing Immortality and Divine Love as his crown.256 Jacob Boehme, who was indebted to both Kabbalism and alchemy, specifically insisted that this redemption applied to the human couple, as well as to Christ and the Church. He therefore taught that the primal separation of Adam and Eve will be repaired through Jesus Christ, and that the human man and wife will become one flesh eternally (pp. 269– 70, above). The true purpose of sexual love, in his eyes, was “to help man and woman integrate internally the complete human image, that is to say the divine and original image.”257 As Julius Evola summarized this apparently wide-spread hope, the two persons washed and stripped naked … give way to the person who is beyond the two, that is, the Rebis or crowned hermaphrodite, Sun and Moon together, who “has all power” and is immortal.258

THE WISDOM MYSTERY AND THE HOLY GRAIL The idea of a Temple, tomb, or alchemical vessel as a “womb” in which the mystery of fecundation and rebirth takes place has obvious parallels in the myth of a sacred vessel which dispenses endless fertility and transforms death into life. This brings us to the medieval legend of the Holy Grail, which had the character of a “bottomless vessel” filled with spiritual fertility—even material plenty. Biblical sources for such a concept include the inexhaustible water of life which flows forth from the base of the Temple (Ezek 47:1; Joel 3:18; Zech 14:8; Rev 22:1), the Messianic Banquet at the end of time (Isa 25:6–7), New Testament references to the cup from which Christ and his disciples drank wine at the Last Supper, as well as the endless supply of the Bread of Life (John 6). All these, moreover, were interconnected with the theme of Ibid., 9. See also Evola, Metaphysics of Sex, 256–57. De Rola, Alchemy, 7–8. 257 Franz von Baden, quoted by Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One (New York, 1965). 258 Evola, Metaphysics of Sex, 257. 255 256

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the eschatological Sacred Marriage, or Wedding Feast, when earth is restored to its primal fecundity, and the riches of heaven dispensed freely to all (Matt 22:4; Rev 19:9). The water of life was originally thought to well up from beneath the Eben Shetiyah in the Holy of Holies, in response to the arrival of Yahweh, the Solar Bridegroom (p. 50, above). This had an early counterpart in the Sumero-Akkadian myth of the life-giving waters which flowed forth from a basin underneath the couch at the conclusion of Ningirsu’s Sacred Marriage to Bau (Cylinder B from Gudea; ca. 2250 B.C.).259 This was similar to the restored abundance which followed Dumuzi’s hieros gamos with Inanna: The King, like the sun, shines radiantly by her side. He arranges abundance, lushness, and plenty before him. (Hymn to Inanna; trans. Diane Wolkstein and S. N. Kramer). At the river may there be overflow, In the field may there be rich grain, In the marshland may the fish and birds make much chatter, In the canebrake may the old reeds and young reeds grow high, In the steppe may the mashgut-tree grow high, In the forests may the deer and the wild goats multiply, May the orchards produce honey and wine, In the garden beds may the lettuce and cress grow high, In the palace may there be long life, In the Tigris and Euphrates may there be floodwater, On their banks may the grass grow high, may it fill the meadows, May the holy queen of vegetation pile high the grain in heaps and mounds, My queen, queen of heaven and earth, queen who encompasses heaven and earth, May he enjoy long days [at your holy] lap.260

After the ritual copulation of Baal and Anath, the skies also poured down their life-giving moisture onto the thirsty desert below: The heavens did rain, and the wadis flowed again with honey (Ras Shamra Text I AB iii:3ff).

Franz Böhl, “Das Menschenopfer bei den alten Sumerern,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 39 (1930): 96. 260 A Sacred Marriage Text, in the British Museum; translated by S. N. Kramer, in The Sacred Marriage Rite (Bloomington, IN, 1969), 83. 259

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The Israelites similarly viewed the Jerusalem Holy of Holies as the Sacred Marriage chamber of Yahweh and Israel (see p. 19, above). It is from there that the waters of life will flow forth once again in fulfillment of their eschatological marriage covenant (cf. Ezek 16:8): And behold, waters of life issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward … And it shall come to pass that everything that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live (47:1, 9).

The same imagery of life-giving waters welling up from beneath the Temple also dominates the symbolism of the “molten sea” (1 Kgs 7:23–26), which doubtless represented the underground Cosmic Ocean (t ehom; cf. “the blessings of the deep [t ehom] that couches beneath”; Gen 49:25). The Messianic Banquet, too, was connected with the consummation of Yahweh’s “marriage” to Israel. Already at the conclusion of the covenant hieros gamos on Mt. Sinai, the Israelites sat down and “ate and drank” (Exod 24:11; 32:6). The Exodus which led to the event was symbolically interpreted as a repetition of Yahweh’s victory over the chaos monsters at the time of Creation (Ps 89:9–10; 87:4; Isa 51:910; Hab. 3:7ff; etc.), and it was said that their slain bodies would provide the food for the great feast at the end of time (2 Baruch, 29:4–8). Death itself would be abolished, and replaced with eternal plenty: And on this mountain (= Temple) shall the Lord of Hosts make unto all peoples and feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined (Isa 25:6–7).

The Wisdom of Solomon similarly promises a “new creation” in the Last Days (19:6), with an abundance of imperishable “ambrosial food” (19:21). Salvation in the New Testament is likewise described as a banquet at which the fatted calf will be slaughtered and served (Luke 15:23). The marriage of Christ to the Church was therefore referred to as a “Wedding Feast” (Matt 22:1–14), in which “oxen and fatlings are killed” (v. 4; Luke 12:37). The earth’s productivity will then be increased ten thousand fold so that no man will ever hunger again (2 Baruch 29:5–6; 1 Enoch 62:14; 3 Enoch 48:10). The ultimate spiritualization of this prodigious banquet was Christ’s promise to provide the heavenly food that causes its partakers to live forever (John 6:50–58). The sacrificial piercing of his crucified body, and the blood and water that gushed from his side (19:34), were clearly part of the fulfillment of this promise; these events would later be associated with the Lance that wounds the old Grail King (“death from sin”) and then restores him (“resurrection”). The heavenly food, on the other hand, was already connected by the writers of the Synoptic Gospels with the Cup used to

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celebrate the Last Supper, and which offered life-giving “communion” (hieros gamos) with the crucified and resurrected Jesus (Matt 26:27; Mark 14:23–24; Luke 22:20; esp. 1 Cor 10:16). This in fact became the most popular form of the Grail, and it would continue to provide sustenance for its keepers, according to most versions of the medieval legend. Other contributions made by the Bible to the symbolism of the Holy Grail include the story of Elijah’s inexhaustible supply of meal and oil (1 Kgs 17:16; cf. also 2 Kgs 4:2–7), which we shall discuss later on in connection with the Masonic “Widow’s Son.”261 We shall also see that Parzival was considered to be a “Widow’s Son,” suggesting that he too possessed a vessel of limitless plenty, i.e., the Holy Grail. Jesus’ multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes (Matt 14:15ff; Mark 6:35ff; Luke 9:12ff; John 6:5ff) was another prototype of the Grail’s infinite blessings, as was the mysterious Ark of the Covenant, with its pot of self-replenishing manna and Aaron’s perpetually budding rod (Exod 16:32–4; Num 17:10). Perhaps the greatest influence of all, however, was the traditional themes of fertility and spiritual regeneration inherited from the ancient hieros gamos (Eph 5:31–32), and which certain scholars claim to have been symbolized by the association of the phallic Lance and the feminine Cup (see below). At its heart we can also imagine once again the Embracing Cherubim as symbols of God’s fructifying union with the Church. In spite of this rich scriptural legacy of pre-Grail symbolism, however, there was never any Christian tradition attributing special properties to the Cup used by Christ at the Last Supper or any account of its preservation after his death. For these, we must look outside of the official teachings of the Church. In fact, if we begin to trace the actual precedents of the GrailCup back in time, we arrive not at Scripture, but at ancient Celtic models, which by the twelfth century had evolved into the Percival portion of the Arthurian legend, and which certain Christian authors felt provided a useful allegory for the depiction of their mystical vision of divine fertility. By infusing the ready-made Arthurian tale with their own new meaning, they succeeded in converting an essentially pagan myth about a golden cup with magic properties into a Holy Grail with spiritual bounties. The quest to discover its whereabouts they converted into a parable of man’s spiritual search for God. Thus, the Grail story became once again the story of the ancient Temple pilgrimage and the blessings which flowed from the Great Mystery in the Holy of Holies. 261

See “Survivals of the Wisdom Mystery in Freemasonry,” below.

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The completed Grail legend concerns a heavenly vessel which made its first appearance on earth at the time of the Crucifixion. Joseph of Arimathea came into possession of it after the Last Supper and used it to catch a few drops of the Messiah’s blood, from which time forth it became an object of legend and veneration.262 Subsidiary episodes relate how Joseph and his followers brought the Grail to the West of England (usually Glastonbury, though there was a parallel legend associated with Fecamp, in France), where they founded a Church and enshrined the holy object.263 We next hear of the Sacred Cup when King Arthur’s knights set out to discover its whereabouts, now said to be somewhere in “Muntsalvesche,” “Carbonek,” or even completely out of the world.264 But before they can accomplish their task they must undergo various ordeals and perils, which bar the way to the unspiritual and worldly minded.265 The few who actually succeed in reaching the Grail (Galahad, Percival, and Bors) find it lodged in a mysterious castle ruled over by an aged Fisher King, who is wounded in the genitals (“the thigh”), and whose realm has become a waste. He cannot recover from his impotence until someone asks him the proper question and receives the correct answer: “Whom does the Grail serve?” (or “Who serves the Grail?”). Once these requirements are satisfied, the King and his domain are healed; but the young Quester takes the King’s place as the new Ruler. The Grail is then restored to “Sarras” in the East (the site of the True Temple), where its mysteries can be resumed as they were originally intended. Galahad ascends into heaven; Percival is the new Grail King, and Bors returns to Arthur’s court to tell of the miracle.266 Percival and his companions are in fact the new “Temple pilgrims” who have come to be initiated into union with Christ’s death and resurrection. The aged Fisher King is a paradigm of the “Old Man” (Rom 6:6) who must be put to death by participation in the Savior’s Crucifixion; the young Quester is the model for those who would be restored to eternal life. The 262

5–6.

John Matthews, At the Table of the Grail, ed. John Matthews (London, 1984),

These stories have been gathered together by George F. Jowett, The Drama of the Lost Disciples (London, 1975). Jowett apparently believed most of these tales himself. 264 Most of this material is preserved in Malory’s fifteenth century Le Morte D’Arthur, which in turn was extracted from the French of Chrêtien de Troyes (Conte du Graal), which we shall discuss below. 265 Matthews, At the Table., 6. 266 Ibid. 263

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Fisher-King is also for Christians the “Fisher of Men,” whose initials, I-XΦ-‘-Σ (Iesous Christus Theou Huios Soter, “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”) were represented by the image of a fish from the earliest times. His loss of genital potency is healed when someone learns to sacrifice in the service of God and mankind, thereby restoring the ancient “nuptial” between Christ and his Church (Rom 7:4). Then the earth blossoms anew, the Temple is restored in the East, and the life-giving mystery of fecundity and spiritual transformation is resumed. As for the mysterious Cup itself, modern researchers, including R. S. Loomis,267 Helaine Newstead,268 and D. D. F. Owen,269 have uncovered the Celtic models which were converted into the Grail of medieval legend. Owen, for example, has carefully shown how legends of semi-divine heroes in search of a beautiful maiden and her magic cup were gradually converted into literary productions like the eighth-century Dream of Oengus, or the eleventh-century Phantom’s Frenzy. These were in turn imported into Wales, and woven by early twelfth-century cyfarwyddiaid (professional storytellers) into a composite legend which described a noble youth brought up in remote forests, ignorant of his own identity (The Dream of Macsen Wledig). While hunting, he dreams of a beautiful girl, and is stricken with love for her. A wasting sickness comes upon him, and he sets off in search of the object of his vision. He eventually arrives at King Arthur’s castle, where he demands and receives aid. He is thus enabled to find the girl, but she cannot join him, as she is in her father’s power and transformed into a hideous shape. After overcoming hostile ordeals, the hero returns and kisses her mouth, changing her into a beautiful woman. She thereupon serves him a lavish feast; taking a Golden Cup, she asks, “To whom shall it be served?” (the archetypal Grail question!). The hero’s own identity is finally revealed by her father, and the couple is united in a royal wedding.270 This popular tale became known as “The Fair Unknown” (Le bel inconnu), and it circulated widely throughout Anglo-Norman areas by the end Arthurian Tradition and Chrêtien de Troyes (New York, 1949); Wales and the Arthurian Legend (Cardiff, 1956); The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (Cardiff, 1963). Loomis derives the Grail from Bran’s magic drinking horn, and King Rhydderch’s magic platter, both of which provided endless food and drink and which became assimilated in French romances as a “graal,” or a “broad and slightly deep dish” (Helinandus, ca. 1240). 268 Bran the Blessed in Arthurian Romance (New York, 1939). 269 The Evolution of the Grail Legend. (Edinburgh, 1968). 270 Ibid., 82–83; see also 13–15; 32, 35–37, 42, 47. 267

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of the twelfth century, when Chêtien de Troyes (ca. 1180) fashioned it into the “Percival” section of his Conte du Graal.271 Here the rough Celtic beginnings were finally assimilated to their Christian equivalents Lug’s blazing spear, for example, becoming the sacred Lance, the god Bran (or perhaps the King who is “always seated” in The Phantom’s Frenzy) becoming the “crucified” Fisher King, and the decayed ruins of Caer Seint, where the Welsh composite was probably put together, becoming the “Wasteland” of mortality and death.272 But it was not until after Chrêtien that someone first identified the Golden Cup as the Holy Grail—the vessel supposedly associated with the life of Christ. Chrêtien’s work in fact attaches no Christian significance to the fabulous object. This was the achievement of the “First Continuator” (the anonymous poet who completed Chrêtien’s unfinished manuscript), who for the first time used the expression “le sainte Graal” in his enlarged edition.273 Interpolations in five of the ten manuscripts of various other “Continuators” now claimed that this was the very Cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught Christ’s blood before bringing it to England.274 Chrêtien’s description of Percival’s Good Friday visit to the old hermit, however, did contain a passing reference to Christ’s Passion—even a description of the Grail as a “tant sainte chose”—so that the “First Continuator” was encouraged to add his own identification of the Grail as a genuine relic of the Crucifixion. This, then, became the form in which Chrêtien’s poem was given to the world, and in which the magic Cup of Celtic legend became once and for all an object of Christian piety and veneration.275 Robert de Boron, working from the “First Continuation,” gave us his own version of the Grail story, entitled Joseph d’Arimathie, in which the Grail was connected for the first time with the Last Supper. He also introduced the concept of the Grail as a light-giving object, probably under the influence of the fourth century apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.276 Another important antecedent for the Holy Grail was the Celtic belief in magic cauldrons, which could be connected with the Grail in a general Ibid., 146, 156 notes, 201. Ibid., 199–201. 273 Ibid., 167; see Ms. IV, line 1363, “de saint Graal a descovert,” where all other manuscripts read “un graal trestot descovert.” 274 Ibid., 168–9. 275 Ibid., 171–72. 276 Ibid., 173. In it, the resurrected Jesus appears to Joseph and to the souls in Hell in a flash of light. 271 272

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way since they too provided mystical rebirth, poetic inspiration, and physical nourishment. The “Cauldron of Annwn,” for example, was an enchanted vessel of “rebirth,” described in The Spoils of Annwn, a part of the Taleisen tradition. There it was said to be the object of King Arthur’s quest in the Underworld, where he found it guarded by nine maidens who served the great goddess Calleah (the Celtic version of Hecate).277 Geoffrey Russell in 1966 made the fascinating suggestion that Glastonbury had become connected with the Grail legend because Glastonbury Tor was anciently regarded as a point of entry into Annwn and its magic cauldron.278 Fieldwork in 1979 in fact showed that there was once a gigantic maze around the Tor, perhaps belonging to a Celtic initiatory rite symbolizing the sacred quest for the goddess who resided at its heart, similar to other mazes in the antique world.279 The “Cauldron of Ceridwen,” also from the Taliesin Cycle, was another source of poetic inspiration and wisdom. In it, a young goddess brewed the potion that prepared initiates for her mysteries. But the “Cauldron of the Dagda” (the All-Father) was the most famous vessel of all, being the source of general plenty, as bottomless as Elijah’s oil barrel.280 These cauldrons doubtless had a general influence on the myth of the Grail as a source of endless nourishment and fertility, perhaps even shaping the concept of the alchemical hermetic vessels in which the Philosopher’s Stone was to be prepared. For this reason, nearly all modern researchers admit that the Celtic “cauldrons’’ were important contributors to the growing picture of the Grail, and were certainly recognized by Christian authors as having powers analogous to the object of their own mystic quest. The Lance in turn became a natural corollary to the Cauldron, and was used to represent the Quester’s personal power. Working together, these two items led to the attainment of eternal life, corresponding generally to 277 Adam McLean, “Alchemical Transmutation in History and Symbol,” in Matthews, ed., At the Table, 60–61. 278 See Geoffry Ashe, “The Grail and the Golden Age,” in At the Table, 14–15. The Tor in fact has seven terraces, which appear to have been artificially shaped into a maze. “Mazes,” “seven-storied mountains,” and “underworld cauldrons” all belong together, according to the traditional pattern of the “Ziggurat,” or “TempleHill,” with its underground Waters of Life flowing out from the base. 279 Ibid., 15–16. 280 McLean, in ibid., 60–61; Jesse L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York, 1957), 72–96; A. C. L. Brown, Notes on Celtic Cauldrons of Plenty (Boston, 1913).

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the powers of the Embracing Cherubim in the ancient Wisdom Mystery. “Lance and Cup were in truth connected in a symbolic relation long ages before the institution of Christianity, or the birth of a Celtic tradition,” writes Jesse L. Weston (whose theories we will discuss more fully later on). “They are symbols of immemorial antiquity and world wide diffusion, the Lance, or Spear, representing the Male, the Cup, or Vase, the Female reproductive energy.”281 Thus the Bleheris and Balin versions of the Gawain story depicted the Spear carried upright in the Vase, a familiar hieros gamos symbol illustrating life and reproductive vitality.282 Their association also continued in the later and more fully Christianized versions of the Grail legend.283 Indeed, the Lance was usually carried in procession by a boy, and the Grail by a maiden,284 showing that they were recognized as masculine and feminine symbols which operated as a pair. For that reason, perhaps, the spear of the god Lug was associated with the motif of the magic cauldron even before the Grail legend took shape, just as they appeared worldwide in the form of the lingam and yoni, the thunderbolt and bell, the pillar and hollow, the Yang and Yin—all natural signs of hierogamy and fecundation.

THE GNOSTIC CHARACTER OF WOLFRAM’S GRAIL CHRISTIANITY This, then, describes the major Christian, pre-Christian, Celtic, and pagan sources which Chrêtien’s “First Continuator” and Robert de Boron brought together and Christianized for the first time around A.D. 1180. From then on, the Grail story attracted more and more Christian material to itself, “drawing on an almost inexhaustible fund of tales, pious and profane, Christian apocrypha and matters of Britain”285 until it became a virtual allegory depicting the Christianity of its new poets. Yet the reason why some of these authors—for example Wolfram von Eschenbach—professed a somewhat peculiar and novel kind of Christianity, with which they now invested the legend, or what theological convictions they personally entertained, is still difficult to determine. Indeed, we shall find in Wolfram’s “Grail Christianity” a variety of heterodox features which appear alongside of more traditional Catholic themes. Much of what follows is an account of Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 75. Ibid., 75. 283 Ibid. 284 Ibid., 76. 285 Owen, Evolution of the Grail, 173. 281 282

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the various attempts which have been made to isolate and identify these unique elements, though we must at times be more speculative than certain. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1200–1212) is certainly the greatest of all these new versions of the Grail story and is of interest to us chiefly because it best shows the kind of Christianity to which the Celtic legends were drawn. Conversely, the Celtic sources are of interest because they show us what sort of pagan materials the authors of the Christian Grail story found compatible with their own beliefs, thus helping to identify the nature of their personal faith. As we pointed out earlier, “orthodox” Christianity had no story of its own concerning Joseph of Arimathea or the Grail, either in folk legend or in art. The Dutch writer, Jacob van Maerlant, in fact as early as 1210 denounced the Grail history as a mass of “lies,” pointing out that the Roman Church knew nothing whatever of it.286 Indeed, the Christianity depicted in Wolfram’s Parzival has peculiarities which distinguish it from normative Christianity. These, significantly, have been described by Trevor Ravenscroft, Samuel Singer, Rolf Schroder, Hanna Closs, and others, as Manichaean.287 Wolfram’s “Grail of Light,” for example, is quite different than the Grail in most other accounts. Chrêtien had thought of it as a platter spacious enough to hold a large fish. Robert de Boron and Chrêtien’s “Continuators” changed this into a vessel associated with the Crucifixion and the Last Supper. The prose romance, Perlesvaus (written before 1212), saw it as a chalice, which changes into a child, and then into a crucified man with a spear in his side. Another prose account, the Lancelot of ca. 1215 to 1230, calls it simply “sangkgreal” (sang réal, “royal blood.”), without further details. In the Queste del Saint Graal it is even a kind of “Beatific Vision,” floating mysteriously into the hall at King Arthur’s court, inspiring the knights to continue their spiritual quest. Wolfram, on the other hand, describes the Grail as a luminous stone, the only Biblical sources for which would appear to be the “Stone” cut without hands (Dan 2:34), or the “white stone” mentioned in Revelation 2:17. This object, furthermore, was clearly associated

Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 2–3. Trevor Ravenscroft, The Cup of Destiny (York Beach, ME, 1982), 34–36; Samuel Singer, Wolfram und der Gral: Neue Parzival Studien (Bern, 1939); Rolf Schroder, Die Parzivalfrage (Munich, 1928); Hanna Closs, “The Meeting of the Waters,” in Matthews, ed., At the Table, 45. 286 287

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with the Temple, since it was connected with the hidden manna in the Holy of Holies: The Ark of the Covenant … wherein was the golden pot that had manna … (Heb 9:4). To him that overcometh, I will give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give to him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, that no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it (Rev 2:17).

Orthodox Catholicism spoke very little of this “white stone,” though it recognized Christ as the “Stone cut without hands.” The Manichaeans, on the other hand, had a very prominent belief in a stone of light similar to Wolfram’s Grail, which they identified with Mithra’s sacrifice to the sun-bull, and from which came the flood of light that penetrated the dark matter below.288 In Manichaean Christianity, Mithras was equivalent to the archangel Michael, who attacked the vanquished “Light” (the Manichaean Lucifer) and released a “stone of light” (the Logos) from his crown. Michael then formed himself into a vessel to receive it, becoming a repository for the sun-host (Eucharist) or “Light of Christ.”289 Wolfram’s “stone of light” thereafter dispensed its wonder-working powers each Good Friday, when a Holy Wafer was laid upon it by an angel.290 In order to find Wolfram’s Grail, however, the initiate must pass through three stages of consciousness (like the three grades of humanity in Primitive Christianity and Gnosticism) and learn to read the “starry script” or the “mysteries of gnosis.”291 He must then take on himself the wounds of self-sacrifice in the service of others,292 and “die” in order to be reborn, knowing that “in Christ, the human soul could become a living vessel of the spirit,”293 i.e., a “Grail,” just like the Manichaean “Michael.” The “strangeness” of this Grail-Christianity is further demonstrated by the fact that Wolfram claims to have gotten his story not from Chrétien (who he said “had it all wrong”), but from “Kiot the Provençale,” who in turn learned it from an “Arabic” manuscript written by an author named

288

above.

Compare the Manichaean intermingling of Light and Darkness, pp. 372–73,

Ravenscroft, Cup of Destiny, 34–36. Ibid., 9. 291 Ibid., 15, 13, 120. 292 Ibid., 29. 293 Ibid., 31. 289 290

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“Flegetanis,” which he discovered at Toledo.294 The name “Flegetanis” (according to Ravenscroft) is Persian for “Starry Script”; but his Jewish identity is established by the fact that Toledo was a leading center of Kabbalism during the twelfth century, as well as by Wolfram’s statement that “from Israel’s race he came, and the blood of kings of old times, of Solomon, did he show.” Flegetanis, who was said to have lived some twelve hundred years before Christ, had prophesied that the “messenger of the starry vision” (i.e., Jesus) would one day come from this same Jewish race and that the blood of God would flow in his veins.295 Flegetanis is further identified by Wolfram as a descendent of Hiram of Tyre, the builder of Solomon’s Temple (later the “Hiram Abiff” of Freemasonry). Kiot, who wished to restore the True Temple (the light-filled body of Jesus), was looking for surviving members of this ancient bloodline, who might again learn to read the “starry script” and become the “New Temples” of Christ. Significantly, the names of the surviving members of this mysterious bloodline who were worthy enough to be knights of the Holy Grail appeared supernaturally around the edge of Wolfram’s GrailStone, thus connecting it with both the “white stone” of Revelation 2:17 and the “new name which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.” The name thereafter disappeared, so that no one else could read it. We also recall that the typical Grail-hero grew up in a remote forest not knowing his own identity; this he learned only after he had completed his quest for the Grail, thereby discovering that he was in fact a “Son of the Widow” (see below), i.e., a rightful descendent of the Heavenly Wisdom and the Primal Light. Parzival’s (or Percival’s) own genealogy was derived in various ways from this “Israelitish” bloodline, according to different versions of the Grail story. Sometimes he is the descendent of Joseph of Arimathea (Jesus’ uncle), and sometimes a grandson or nephew of the Fisher King. Wolfram, however, carefully traces his lineage all the way back to Adam through Cain, making no mention whatever of Seth! This is another important indication of Gnostic influence, for along with their derogation of the Old Testament Yahweh, certain Gnostics gave special honor to Adam’s first son, “whose sacrifice the god of this world did not accept, whereas he accepted the bloody sacrifices of Abel; for the lord of this world delights in blood” (Hippolytus, Refutations, 5.16.9–10). There were even Gnostics who called 294 295

Ibid., 136, 141. Ibid., 50, 137–38.

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themselves “Cainites” in honor of this archetypal “outcast from the world of sense,” condemned by an ignorant Demiurge to be a “fugitive and vagabond on earth.” Cain instead became the head of a secret line leading to Christ, intentionally challenging the values of Jewish and Christian “orthodoxy.”296 Wolfram thus tells us that God would one day take upon himself the form of Adam’s sinful race in order to redeem the “earth” (Cain’s “grandmother”) which had been stained by the shedding of Abel’s blood. Kiot picks up the trail of this fabled line in a place called “Anschau,” where he reads of an ancient hero named “Mazadan” (Ravenscroft: “Mac Adam”) and the record of his family. This he traces through David and Jesus to Parzival, through his mother Herzeleide: And further the story ran, How Titurel, the grandsire, left his Kingdom to Frimutel, And at length to his son, Amfortas, the Grail and its heirdom fell; That his sister was Herzeleide, and with Gamuret she wed And bare him for son the hero whose wanderings ye now have read.

As we mentioned earlier, all three versions of the older Percival story (by Chrêtien, Robert de Boron, and the anonymous author of Perlesvaus) designate the hero as a “Son of the Widow,” just like the Masonic Hiram Abiff.297 Indeed, this is “an image in which we see ourselves reflected as children of both the exiled Sophia (Wisdom) and Jesus, the son of Mary.”298 In short, “Son of the Widow” is a designation for Parzival’s spiritual bloodline—or descent from Cain—a meaning attached to it by the Manichaeans

Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 94–5. Jessie L. Weston, The Quest for the Holy Grail (London, 1913), 119; From Ritual to Romance, 206–7. She theorizes that the “Widow’s Son” was (1) a folk hero who grew up in the wilderness ignorant of men, and )2) a mystery-term denoting a certain grade of initiation. Presumably the two became fused together in the Grail story, so that Percival, the boorish “son of a Widow,” in time became Parzival, the “mystery initiate” and “son of the Light.” See also her Legend of Sir Percival (London, 1909), 2:307. 298 Caitlin Matthews, “Sophia, Companion on the Quest,” in Matthews, ed., At the Table, 124. 296 297

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to show that they belonged to the Light and were capable of receiving it again as “Living Grails” or “Christs.”299 This, Ravenscroft notes, “is a heresy only to those who are as yet unable to distinguish between Christ the Logos and Jesus the man,”300 a distinction which may be traced back through Gnosticism to the JewishChristian doctrine of the preexistent Logos-power (or “True Prophet”) which descended upon “Jesus of Nazareth” at the time of his baptism (p. 239, above). In the same way, these “Living Grails” may themselves receive the Logos-power and become “Christs,” which is indeed one of the Grail’s innermost secrets. Wolfram’s Gnosticizing theology is further betrayed by the aged hermit, Treverizent, who tells Parzival that man came into existence the moment that Lucifer fell from Heaven. Earth then became his Mother, but fratricide stained her with blood. Now she must be redeemed by the child of a pure Maiden, whom some have identified as the Gnostic Sophia.301 The child Jesus was thus purified by the Sophia-Logos when it came to dwell in him, as it must in all of the Elect.302 Then they too will be restored—like the Phoenix—to deathless youth, realizing their heavenly lineage and destiny. Those whose names magically appear on the edge of the Grail must however renounce the love of women. The King may of course marry, since he is a figure of Christ, whose Spouse is the Church. Even the knights of the Grail and the maidens who attend it may go forth in secret and “have children who will in turn one day enter the service of the Grail, and so serving, enhance its company” (Wolfram, Parzifal, 495). This sounds very much like marriages amongst the ordinary Cathars; though the perfecti were to abstain from matrimony, the Believers were allowed to marry and have families so that the faith might be kept alive. The Grail knight’s true love, on the other hand, is Christ himself. “Of this true Love these sweet tidings tell. He is a brightly shining light and does not waiver from His love. The man to whom He gives His love finds bliss in that love” (ibid., 466).

Ravenscroft, Cup of Destiny, 138–44. Ibid., 146. 301 Ibid., 146–47; see also Matthews, “Sophia, Companion,” 111–22. 302 Ravenscroft, Cup of Destiny, 149–55. 299 300

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THE GRAIL-MAIDEN AS WISDOM AND GUARDIAN OF THE ARK Caitlin Matthews sees a close parallel between the above-mentioned Sophia and the “Woman with the Golden Cup” in the Grail legends. She too has two identities, like the Gnostic Sophia; first, she is the Hag who must receive the hero’s kiss (hieros gamos) in order to reveal her true nature; then she becomes the “pure” maiden, restored to her pristine beauty, along with the revitalized Wasteland.303 In the same way, the Lower Wisdom, when reunited with her Consort, was restored to her “male” or “unitary” condition as the Higher Wisdom. The Grail which she brings with her is her fertilized “womb,” from which a new mankind will emerge as “Kings and Queens” of creation.304 The Hag is also the Old Eve, through whom men fell, and the beautiful maiden is the New Eve, or the Mother of those who will become “Christs” by uniting with the Light.305 Finally, she is our constant companion in the Mysteries. Here Caitlin Matthews detects influences inherited from the Jerusalem Temple, for Jewish Kabbalists, she remarks, had similarly viewed the Shekhinah—who dwelt above the Ark—as man’s Companion and Guide during his exile on earth. Brian Cleeve indeed believes that the Ark was one of the Grail’s most important prototypes, alongside of the Celtic cauldrons, eventually becoming Christ’s “Cup of Blessing” and the Manichaean “stone of light”: In the history of God’s dealings with us, is there any object which could be regarded as performing the functions of the Grail before Christ? One object that immediately comes to mind is the Ark of the Covenant. And following the Ark of the Covenant, there is the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple, or possibly some object within the Holy of Holles, such as the altar stone.306

Matthews, “Sophia, Companion,” 116–17. See also note 182, p. 375, above. Ibid., 118. 305 Compare Origen’s doctrine of becoming “Christs” (Christoi) by reception of the Logos (pp. 234–35, above). Matthews in fact finds that the present Grail symbolism resulted from the fusion of apocryphal Christian legend with Celtic legend, according to which the king “would often have to undergo a symbolic remarriage with a priestess who represented the Goddess for the purpose of the ritual” (Matthews, “Sophia, Companion,” 115). 306 “The World’s Need,” in Matthews, ed., At the Table, 134. 303 304

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Yet while Cleeve comes tantalizingly close to discovering the real secret of the Holy of Holies, he was apparently unaware of the Embracing Cherubim, which like Miss Weston’s Lance and Cup in sexual juxtaposition represented Yahweh’s “marriage” to Israel (b. Yoma 54a). Indeed, their hieros gamos is what generated the blessings that flowed from the hidden Sanctuary, not the altar stone (eben shetiyah), which merely “capped” the waters of life. It is in fact quite possible that some of the Grail poets had been inspired by actual memories of the Embracing Cherubim, since Rashi still spoke of them in the eleventh century, and the author of the Zohar in the thirteenth.307 John Matthews, drawing on still another Kabbalistic tradition, comes even closer to the truth when he observes that after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 it became necessary to reconstruct a “Spiritual Temple” which would be activated by man’s union with God, so that initiates might become “Vessels of Light,” or “Grails,” fashioned after the image of the uniting Cherubim: Qabbalistic teaching has it that “the temple has been destroyed, but not the path of purification, illumination, and union that lay concealed in it.” For when the perfected soul of mankind “rises like incense from the golden altar of the heart, and passes through the most inward curtains of his being to the holy of holies within,” then the two cherubim who stand guard over the Ark of the Covenant (of the heart) “are united in the presence of the One, in Whom the soul recognizes its eternal life and its own union with Him. Henceforth, the soul is called the eternally ‘living’ (hayah), ‘the one and only’ (yehidah),” the perfect. The Light has come like veritable tongues of fire upon all who reach the center of the Temple and find there the seat of God in the heart of his Creation.308

The Light, of course, is none other than the Logos-Wisdom, the “Grail Maiden,” whose symbols and “mirrors” (as we learned at the beginning of this study) were the Embracing Cherubim. Thus the Grail legend was in a very real sense a surviving form of the ancient Wisdom Mystery.

See pp. 8, 18–19, above. “Temples of the Grail,” in Matthews, ed., At the Table, 88; our emphasis in the English passages. His quotes are from Lee Schaya, “The Meaning of the Temple,” in Sword of Gnosis (Baltimore, 1974), 364–65. 307 308

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THE GRAIL AS TEMPLE Thus the image of the Second Temple, together with its Embracing Cherubim, was finally transformed into the Grail Temple, as the juxtaposed Lance and Cup suggest. Albrecht’s version of the Grail story, Der jüngere Titurel, in fact traces its origin all the way back to “Solomon’s Temple,” which was now a mysterious ruin. Helen Adolf has advanced a special version of this “Grail-as-Temple” theory in her Visio Pacis: Holy City and Holy Grail.309 She not only expands the image of the wonder-working Ark to include the Holy of Holies, but also the Holy City, the ideal “Mt. Sion,” where the Heavenly Citadel will one day reappear to bless the earth. The Holy City was of particular interest to contemporary Christians because the Holy Sepulcher was located there. As the tomb of the risen Lord, it had taken over the functions of the destroyed Temple, becoming a “life-giving vessel” to those who sought to liberate it from the Saracens.310 Adolf accordingly theorizes that the Grail in its final form represented the ruins of the Holy City, and in particular the “glorious but threatened Tomb” which it contained.311 The ruined Temple and Christ’s Tomb are indeed related concepts, as Christ himself recognized when he prophesied that he would rebuild the “Temple” (his dead body) in three days (Matt 26:61; 16:21). Both symbolized the place where mortality puts on immortality, and both possessed transforming power, as we frequently observe in connection with burial sites designed to resemble the regenerating womb of the “Great Mother.” Thus Adolf compares the “Grail-as-Tomb” to Solomon’s Temple as a source of spiritual fecundity.312 This parallel between Grail and Temple has also been noted by other writers. Ludwig Uhland in the nineteenth century, and more recently V. T. Holmes,313 both observed that the Grail Castle was constructed on the plan of the Jewish Tabernacle in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The pot of “golden manna” in the Holy of Holies (Heb 9:4), as we earlier noted, especially resembled the heavenly bounties of the Grail, since its “ambrosial food” was none other than Christ’s shed blood, which Albert of Aix (a contemporary State College, PA, 1960. Ibid., 35. 311 Ibid., 39. 312 Ibid., 135. 313 Quoted in ibid., 39. 309 310

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chronicler) likened to the “hidden manna” and the “white stone” (Rev 2:17).314

THE RITUAL THEORY OF THE HOLY GRAIL Jesse L. Weston has further hinted at the Gnostic character of GrailChristianity in what is perhaps the most famous of all Grail studies, From Ritual to Romance (1920). Though her so-called “Ritual Theory” of the Grail’s origin and meaning has recently been contested, due to the unbridged historical gaps between her proposed source (the “Naassene Mystery”)315 and the resulting “Grail Mystery,” her intuition that both embodied the same pattern of fertility-worship and initiation into eternal life is still widely discussed. She begins with Hippolytus’ theory that the Naassenes themselves had already assumed a similarity between the age-old fertility-mysteries of Attis, Tammuz, Baal, Osiris, Adonis, and the Gnostic mysteries of union;316 the latter were then assimilated to the former in the Gnostic system of redemption. This system consisted basically of becoming “wholly male” through union with the “Virgin Spirit” (Refutations, 5.8.44). Unfortunately, how this “higher form of the Attis cult”—in which it was presumably known and practiced by the early Gnostics—was brought to Britain, she has not been able to explain, though she suggests that British Christianity was “curiously heterodox” from the very beginning, as indicated by the surprising tolerance shown for Mithraism by it and other forms of northern Christianity, well into the fifth century.317 More poetry than fact, perhaps, is her suggestion that this Gnostic Christianity and its thinly disguised fertility worship went underground for nearly a thousand years, “linger(ing) on in the hills and mountains of Wales, Quoted in ibid., 66. Text in Migne, Patrologia Latina 166, col. 549. Preserved in Hippolytus, Refutations, Book 5. 316 Weston, From Ritual to Romance, 149: “That Christianity might have borrowed from previously existing cults certain signs and symbols, might have accomodated itself to already existing Fasts and Feasts, may be, perforce has had to be, more or less grudgingly admitted; that such a rapprochement should have gone further, that it should have even been inherent in the very nature of the Faith, that, to some of the deepest thinkers of old, Christianity should have been held for no new thing but a fulfillment of the promise enshrined in the Mysteries from the beginning of the world, will be to many a strange and startling thought. Yet so it was.” 317 Ibid., 170–71. 314 315

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as Mithraic worship had done in the Alps and Vosges.”318 Its memory, she believes, can still be detected in certain Grail stories which tell how aforetime there were maidens dwelling in the hills who brought forth to the passing traveller food and drink. But King Amangons outraged one of these maidens, and took away from her her golden Cup … As the result the springs dried up, the land became waste, and the court of the Rich Fisher, which had filled the land with plenty, could no longer be found. For 1000 years the land lies waste, till, in the days of King Arthur, his knights find maidens wandering in the woods…

Hearing tales from these maidens about the long-forgotten Cup, Arthur’s knights began their now famous quest to recover the Grail and restore the land to its former fertility.319 It is more likely, however, that this charming episode was but another memory of the Celtic “Cauldron of Plenty.” We must also assume in place of better evidence that the “Gnostic-tainted Christianity” which did shape the Grail legend was not incorporated with its Celtic precursors until at least the time of Chrêtien’s “First Continuator” or Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie, when the assorted influences of the Bogomils, Cathars, Waldensians, Templars, Crusaders from the Near East, Jewish Kabbalists, and Arab mystics were all at their height. Nevertheless, an awareness of the “Naassene Mystery” and early Gnosticism helps alert us to those specific features of the Grail legend which betray the kind of Christianity that probably inspired Wolfram’s version of the Parzifal story. To begin with, Miss Weston notes that both were characterized by their extreme secrecy: The Grail’s secret must be concealed And never by any man revealed, For as soon as this tale is told… Evil will follow him all his life.320 He who tells it shall have great woe, For of the Grail it is the sign That he in pain and ills will pine Who reveals its secrets to any man.321

Ibid., 173. Ibid., 172–73. 320 Quoted in ibid., 138. 321 In ibid., 138. 318 319

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The mystery itself, Miss Weston continues, was characterized by the fact that its worshipper “partakes of, and becomes one with, his God, receiving thereby assurance of eternal life.”322 This is of course what took place in the Gnostic and Wisdom Mysteries and was very different from the Greek mysteries, which clearly differentiated between the human and the divine (“There is one race of men, and another of gods”). The latter unfortunately became the view of “orthodox” Christianity, with its “unbridgeable gulf” forever separating man from God. But the Gnostic mysteries perpetuated the Primitive Christian belief that Man’s Light and God’s Light are preternaturally related and can therefore be reunited. Thus, when Wolfram’s Parzival intimates that man can himself become a Holy Grail, containing the same Light which transformed the man Jesus into Christ, Miss Weston sees the presence of Gnostic soteriology, such as the ancient Naassene document contained. She next compares typical Gnostic and Grail initiations, which were similar to the Wisdom candidate’s “pilgrimage” through the cultic “wilderness” in search of the Higher Regions (pp. 122–23, above). This is especially characteristic of the ordeal undergone in the “Perilous Chapel.”323 In this sinister place—which we immediately recognize as an avatar of Temple and Tomb—the initiate must encounter and overcome threats of physical death, equivalent to a spiritual journey through the Underworld. This would be followed by his victorious ascent into the Third Heaven in search of eternal life and union with God.324 Miss Weston has in fact been able to produce a Middle English poem, Owain Miles, or The Purgatory of Saint Patrick, which describes the same initiatory “death” and “rebirth” which she detects in the contemporary Grail initiation. In it, the hero, “after purification by fasting and prayer,” descends “into the Netherworld … passing through the abodes of the Lost, finally reaching Paradise, and returning to earth after Three Days, a reformed and rejuvenated character”:325 Then with his monks the Prior anon, With Crosses and with Gonfanon Went to that hole forthright, Through which Knight Owain went below, There, as of burning fire the glow, Ibid., 141. Ibid., 155, 182. 324 Ibid., 182; 185–86. 325 Ibid., 184–85. 322 323

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They saw a gleam of light; And right amidst that beam of light He came up, Owain, God’s own Knight. By this knew every man That he in Paradise had been, And Purgatory’s pains had seen, And was a holy man.

Earlier versions of this spiritual initiation, Miss Weston suggests, were St. Paul’s ascent into the “Third Heaven” (2 Cor 12:1–4), and the Jewish mystic’s ascent to the Merkabah. We have also seen it in Origen’s and Clement’s “True Gnosis,” which interpreted the Temple experience as the soul’s mystic journey through the heavens in search of God. Wilhelm Bousset likewise mentions a number of rabbinic journeys into the world beyond, undertaken at great risk, in search of the secret knowledge needed for eternal life.326 At the very heart of this secret knowledge, Miss Weston believes, was the initiate‘s “enlightenment into the meaning of Lance and Cup, in their sexual juxtaposition,” signifying man’s spiritual union with God327—just as the Embracing Cherubim in the Holy of Holies had once represented the hieros gamos of the soul and Wisdom in the Philonic mystery (pp. 40–41, above). Thus, the fertilized Cup became a symbolic source of spiritual “plenty,” and the initiate became a “Grail” or “vessel of light” in his own right, which indeed accords with the higher meaning of Wolfram’s Grail romance. In summary, it has been said of the Grail legend that “the Fall is our exile from Paradise; we make a Wasteland of the Garden of Eden. The quest is our spiritual journey, and the Grail is our return to our sovereign condition as kings and queens of creation.”328 “The Grail Maiden, the Shekhinah or Sophia, is a personification of that holy object; she is the Grail or Ark, the hidden treasure which symbolizes the union of the soul with the Divine.”329 Through this life-giving union, the “son of the Widow”—that “divine fragment” who had “extended himself” from the Light—is restored to oneness with his Heavenly Source, and the King with the wounded “Thigh” 326 “Die Himmelsreise der Seele,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 4; quoted in From Ritual to Romance, 185. 327 Ibid., 182–83 and n. 14. 328 Matthews, “Sophia, Companion,” 118. 329 Ibid., 125.

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(both Christ and the initiate) is healed of his earth-bound impotence. He in fact becomes Christ, the Crucified King with the Sacred Wounds,330 and is resurrected unto eternal life. We already saw that this mystic identification of the initiate with Christ had been symbolically hinted at by Wolfram’s derivation of the Grail knights from the same bloodline that gave birth to Jesus. But it emboldened other authors to propose that Jesus had actually had offspring of his own,331 begotten through Mary Magdalene, his koinonos in the Gospel of Philip (p. 277, above). As Jesus was the earthly counterpart of the preexistent Christus, so Mary was the earthly counterpart of Sophia, to whom he was preexistently betrothed.332 Furthermore, as Sophia was the Gnostic “Mother without a Spouse,” Mary was the “fallen woman” who longed to be reunited with her Savior (Gospel of Thomas, Log. 114). Their human offspring were the earthly vessels of this divine lineage. Thus the “Holy Grail” (Saint Gral) turned out to be Jesus and Mary’s “Royal Blood” (Sang real).333 This theory of Jesus’ “Royal Blood” has been recently revived by Michael Baigent, Robert Leigh, and Henry Lincoln in their popular book Holy Blood, Holy Grail,334 which appears to rest on an old tradition that Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, Martha, Joseph of Arimathea, and several others, were transported after the Crucifixion to Marseilles, in southern France. While there, Joseph was supposedly consecrated by Saint Philip and sent to England, where he established a Church, while Lazarus and Mary remained in Gaul, founding one of the royal houses.335 The Marseilles portion of this story is first mentioned in The Life of Mary Magdalene, composed by Hrabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz (776–856), and later elaborated in William of Malmesbury’s Antiquities of Ibid., 124. Bob Stewart, “The Grail as a Bodily Vessel,” in Matthews, ed., At the Table, 180–87. 332 Hans-Martin Schenke, introduction to Leipoldt-Schenke, Koptisch-gnostische Schriften aus der Papyrus Codices von Nag-Hamadi (Hamburg-Bergstedt, 1960), 34. See also Schlier’s reconstruction of the Ephesian Sacred Marriage, pp. 163–64, above. 333 Compare Helen AdoIf, Visio Pacis, 82. She, however, gives it a purely eucharistic meaning. 334 Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York, 1982), 277. This is explained by virtue of the fact that sang real and Saint Graal were pronounced approximately the same. The authors also observe that “we do not think the Incarnation truly symbolizes what it is intended to symbolize unless Jesus was married and had children” (ibid., 383). 335 Ibid., 277–81. 330 331

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Glastonbury to include the story of Joseph of Arimathea. The longer account is best known today through the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Varagine, contained in his Life of Saint Mary Magdalene (1270).336 Wolfram’s hint that the caretakers of the Grail belonged to the same mysterious family that gave birth to Jesus invited further identification of this bloodline with the pilgrims who landed at Marseilles, who in turn were seen as the natural family and descendants of the Savior. Yet the existence of a spiritual family derived from the Savior was prophesied long ago in Isaiah 53:10, which Christians generally hold to be a reference to Christ’s “reborn seed”: It pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief; when his soul shall make an offering for sin, he shall see his seed.

Mark also spoke of a spiritual family issuing from the Savior, to which Jesus referred when he declared that Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother (3:35).

R. G. Hamerton-Kelly believes that Jesus was also hinting at the disciples’ “mysterious divine origin” when he declared “his true kin to be those who have the same relationship with God as he does.”337 This was probably a reference to the familial relationship which existed between the preexistent Christ, the heavenly Church, and the Father before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4; 3:14–15), and which became the model for the present relationship between God and his reborn “sons.” But it was also the meaning of the Manichaean phrase, “son of the Widow,” indicating the believer’s heavenly descent from the preexistent Wisdom. In short, God’s present family is a copy of his preexistent family, a family which was “foreknown,

336 See also George F. Jowett, The Drama of the Lost Disciples, 33, 61–72. Jowett relies mainly on Caesar Baronius’ Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607), who quotes from an early Acts of the Magdalene. Montague Rhodes James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924), 117 also mentions a legend that Mary Magdalene went to Rome, preserved in “Byzantine chronicles and other late documents.” 337 Pre-Existence, Wisdom and the Son of Man (Cambridge, 1973), 49; our emphasis.

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predestinated and called” by the Savior before Creation.338 Finally, it explains why Parzifal was called a “Son of the Widow” in the Grail legends.

SURVIVALS OF THE WISDOM MYSTERY IN FREEMASONRY Many of the traditions of which we have been speaking also managed to survive in the lore of modern Freemasonry, especially the symbolism of the restored Temple and the destiny of the “Widow’s Son” to inherit eternal life through reunion with the Savior in the Holy of Holies. The compass and square as divine creative symbols (see the discussion of the “Rebis,” pp. 377ff, above), seems to have penetrated Europe at least as early as the Gothic Age, when the great cathedrals were being erected. Thus Christ the “World-Builder” is shown over the main portal of the Cathedral of Santa Croce in Florence (to mention but one of several wellknown examples), holding aloft the workman’s square as a sign of his creative power. This was not merely a reflection of the pride of the builders, however, for contemporary alchemical treatises were also making use of the compass and square as symbols of the male-female powers which accomplish the “Great Work” of unification and transmutation (pp. 384–93, above). These two kinds of symbolism were of course related, since the Wisdom tradition viewed creation and re-creation as essentially the same process. This is also true of modern Masonic thought, which began to make use of this archaic religious symbolism when Speculative Masonry replaced Operative Masonry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This ancient symbolism is especially noticeable in the ritual conjunction of the compass and square on the altar during the granting of the first three “Degrees,” and which some Masonic writers have recognized as a form of the Sacred Embrace.339 Indeed, when superimposed, they form interlaced triangles, one of antiquity’s favorite symbols for the hieros gamos. With the apex upward, the compass represents the phallic “Trinity”; with the apex down, the square represents the female mons veneris. And with their bases closed, the intertwined emblems become the sign of the Royal Arch Degree, the so-called “Solomon’s Seal,” or the “Sign of David,” an ancient 338 Ibid., 154–56. “The idea of the solidarity of the Redeemer and his own is expressed as the pre-existence [sic] of the community of the righteous with the Son of Man” (ibid., 222). 339 See George Riley Scott, Phallic Worship (Westpoint, CT, n.d.), 261. One of Southey’s poems also refers to the Masonic triangle as follows: “Behold the Sacred Triangle is there, holding an emblem which no tongue can tell” (in ibid.).

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“mandala” whose marital significance was familiar even in the Far East (see figure 2).340 The archaic meaning of this symbolism—coming as it does at the climax of a figurative passage through the three levels of “Solomon’s Temple”—is highly reminiscent of Philo’s conception of the Temple pilgrimage as a three-part spiritual journey through the wilderness in search of union with Wisdom (see p. 122, above). The author of Hebrews likewise viewed the Temple experience as a re-creation of man’s spiritual quest for Christ and the Heavenly City (11:13–16). This archetypal quest was in fact still remembered in the popular “Mystery-Plays” of the Middle Ages, in which “Everyman” relives his journey through the world in search of salvation. In a negative way it became the legend of the Wandering Jew, who was condemned to search endlessly because he rejected Christ’s offer of “Rest” (Heb 3:10–11). John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1675) is perhaps the most famous literary product of this ancient tradition, which Philo long ago determined to be the real meaning behind the outward ordinances of the Jerusalem Temple Cult. The Masons may at one time have had their own Mystery Play, a practice common among the worker’s guilds of the late Middle Ages, a play making use of dramatic events which were of particular interest to themselves. One of these was presumably transformed into the legend of Hiram Abiff, the “Widow’s Son,” who (with his two companions) discovered important secrets buried on Mt. Moriah while working on the construction of the First Temple; and allowed himself to be killed rather than divulge them to outsiders: Such a Masonic play may well have been of an esoteric character, meant for inner circles only, and transmitted purely by oral tradition, and therefore not available in written form. This suggestion of mine is made all the more plausible by the comment made by a Mr. A. W. Pollard … making reference to Sir Edmund Chamber’s The Medieval Stage, to the effect that no such Miracle Play is mentioned, beyond what “seems to have been a pageant in dumb show rather than a proper miracle play.”341

340

45–47.

See Giuseppi Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala (London, 1962),

Alex Horne, King Solomon’s Temple in the Masonic Tradition (North Hollywood, CA, 1974), 331; our emphasis. This theory first appeared in Robert Race’s “The Legend of the Third Degree,” British Masonic Miscellany, 9:84–133. 341

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The building of an important edifice like the Temple of Solomon, with a depiction of the obstacles to be overcome while completing the noble work, would have been an ideal subject for a play presented by guilds of working masons. It would have been even more appropriate if this could be associated with the motifs of pilgrimage, sacrifice, and spiritual growth, which had been part of the original Temple cult. Recent scholars in fact note striking similarities between the Masonic drama and the general pattern of the original Temple Mystery, especially as it may have been transmitted through the medium of Jewish Kabbalism: To me it seems reasonable to believe that the core of the drama came down from Solomon’s day; that it was preserved until medieval times by Jewish, and especially Kabbalistic, literature; that it found a place among the traditions of the old builders because it was so intimately related to the story of the Temple, around which so much of their symbolism revolved; that it was inherited by seventeenth-century Masons, in crude form, and along with a mass of other traditions; that it was elaborated and given its literary form by the early framers of the ritual; and that it embodied so wonderfully the idea at the center of the Third Degree.342

To these must of course be added the unofficial Christian and Gnostic traditions which we described in the previous section. Unfortunately, we have at present no hard evidence to support such a transmission, especially one reaching back all the way back to the time of Solomon’s Temple. Nevertheless, there are many details in the modern Masonic rite which can be shown to have actually existed in the original Judaeo-Christian Wisdom Mystery. The archaic significance of the juxtaposed compass and square, for example—like the hermetic Rebis—symbolized the same reunification of “male” and “female” (God and Man) which we saw in the ancient Wisdom Mystery. The Kabbalists, too, declared this to be the secret meaning of the Tetragrammaton, or “the unification of God’s Name” by reuniting his male and female aspects (see pp. 19–20, above). Thus the secret Masonic Name of God (“G”) suddenly appears within the intertwined compass and square, depicting the begetting of divine attributes and rebirth. This we discover when the candidate for the Third Degree reenacts the resurrection of Hiram Abiff:

342 H. L. Haywood, Symbolical Masonry (Kingsport, TN, 1923); quoted in Horne, King Solomon’s Temple, 282.

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Brother, you have on this occasion represented one of the greatest men that ever lived, and the tragical catastrophe of his death, burial and resurrection.

Peter Tompkins explains these ritual words by pointing out that every man is himself the living, slain and rearisen Christ in his own person … no less than Very God of Very God.343

This shows why Catholicism has so vigorously opposed Freemasonry, for the Masonic rite implies that man can himself become divine through fusion with the resurrected Christ. Indeed, the resurrected Hiram Abiff is an obvious metaphor for Jesus, whose embrace gave life to the candidate in the Ephesian “Great Mystery.” Thus, the compass and square, as they appear conjointly upon the Masonic altar, inevitably recall the Embracing Cherubim in the Holy of Holies, and the candidates “marriage” to the Divine,344 somehow remembered across an interval of nearly two millennia. In fact, an 18th century Masonic Catechism (the Lancashire, or “Lodge of Lights” Ms.) still asks pointedly, Q—What did the 2 Cherubims on the ark of the covenant represent? A—The mystery of the Golden Altar.

The use of the title, “Widow’s Son,” to designate the Masonic initiate is also very ancient, for as Carl Jung has shown, the Manichaeans held Jesus to be the exemplary “Son of the Widow”; as his followers, they too distinguished themselves as “Children of the Widow.”345 Others called Jesus “the Orphan,”346 again showing that he was without earthly father, but perhaps also to show his identification with the “Homeless Wisdom” (pp. 26, 95, above). In the Aurora Consergens “the Orphan” is also the prima materia which has not yet mated. His Mother (the “Widow”) was of course the Female without a Consort—or the Gnostic “Mother” of the scattered “Light-Seed” who await redemption (pp. 367–68, above). In Christian tradition, the “Widow” was also the Church who awaits her Bridegroom and salvation (Isa 54:4; 61:10; Rev 19:17; 21:2). The Jews further identified her with the Kabbalistic Malkhut (“Kingdom”)—called Almanah (“Widow”) in several alchemical treatises—as she is the one who receives the “stream of emanaPeter Tompkins, The Magic of Obelisks (New York, 1981), 110. See p. 39, above. 345 Mysterium Coniunctionis, 17–23. 346 At least as far back as the Carmina Heliodori, an eighth-century Byzantine writing. See Jung, op. cit., 18 [uncertain reference, ed. note]. 343 344

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tion” through the phallus to bring about the creation of the material world (pp. 330–31, above). To refer to oneself as a “Son of the Widow,” then, appears to be a very old practice, most likely derived from Manichaean or Grail sources, to describe one’s origin and destiny in terms of a heavenly descent from Wisdom and the restoration of primal completeness through “marriage” to Christ. In this sense, the legend of Hiram, “the Widow’s Son,” also signifies one who remains true to his spiritual identity and quest, even to the abjuring of material existence in exchange for eternal life. Mani’s own martyrdom provided a historic precedent for this kind of sacrifice; but since Jesus was the “Son of the Widow” par excellence, we are reminded that it was his sacrifice on the Cross that provided the “chief cornerstone” for the construction of the new Temple (Eph 2:20–22; 2 Pet 2:5–8), and which became the prototype for the reconstructed Masonic “Temple of Solomon.” It was also an ancient tradition amongst builders that “foundation” or “completion-sacrifices” be made to ensure the stability of important edifices, in some cases the sacrifice of the builder himself.347 Thus the sacrifice of the “Widow’s Son,” Hiram, would have carried with it the notion that the Author of man’s salvation accomplished his work through the giving of his own life and that the initiate who identifies himself with Hiram-Christ must do the same by serving his fellow man. Yet there are still deeper meanings behind the expression “the Widow’s Son,” which take us back into the provenance of the intertestamental Temple Mystery, the goal of which was to gain immortality through “fellowship” with the Divine. Since the biblical account of Hiram Abiff (huram abiv, “Hiram his father”; 2 Chr 4:16) tells us only that he was an “able craftsman” (2 Chr 2:11, 14), sent to “discover every device” (LXX architektonesai, to “act as chief builder”) needed for the construction of the Temple, we must assume that some of the details in the modern legend were drawn from non-scriptural sources. After investigating a number of prototypes which might explain the specific form of the present Hiramic story, Masonic researcher Alex Horne found it necessary to discard all but three: (1) its possible derivation from an unknown Mystery Play (already discussed), (2) the “social demands” of general anthropology and folklore” (which need not detain us here, since these are too vague to yield any positive clues), and (3) the

347

Horne, King Solomon’s Temple, 291.

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recently discovered and somewhat bizarre account of Noah’s attempted resurrection by means of the “five points of fellowship.” As it turns out, the latter theory and the theory of derivation from a Mystery Play are not mutually exclusive. J. R. Rylands has in fact suggested that a Noachic “Miracle-Drama” produced at Wakefield and Newcastle in the late Middle Ages already contained the “necromantic” events of the modern Hiram Abiff ritual in a “ludicrous” fashion.348 A purely Masonic version of this Noah-legend, moreover, was actually discovered in 1936, in the so-called Graham Ms., a document of probable Scottish origin “not later than the early seventeenth century.”349 It recounts the thaumeturgic core of the modern Hiram-legend, this time placed in the personae of Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth, who (like Hiram Abiff) were also seeking to recover secret knowledge from their recently deceased father. Horne further compares this Noachic tale with the parallel legend of Bezaleel, the Tabernacle builder (Exod 31:2–5), whose two companions after his death must be deprived of the desired knowledge of holy architecture unless a quorum of three can somehow be reconstituted to receive it—even by resurrecting the dead. When one compares this story with the present legend of Hiram Abiff and the rite of the Third Degree, their essential relatedness becomes immediately apparent, for it too involves the revelation of the required secret after the deceased Noah has been symbolically resurrected.350 Thus, the seventeenth-century Graham Ms. informs us that We have it by tradition and yet some reference to Scripture that Shem, Ham, and Japeth went to their father Noah’s grave to try if they could find anything about him that would lead them to a veritable secret that this famous preacher had … Now these three men had already agreed among themselves that if they did not find the very thing itself, that the first thing that they did find was to be for them as a secret … So that they came to the grave, and finding nothing save the dead body almost entirely consumed, they took a grip at a finger and it came away; so from joint to joint; so to the wrist; and so to the elbow. So they reared up the dead body and supported it, setting foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, cheek 348 Quoted in Horne, ibid., 342. Compare the thirteenth-century French proseaccount of such events, pp. 439–40, below. This proves that such things were actually known in the Middle Ages. 349 According to handwriting experts at the British Museum and the English Public Record Office. 350 Compare Richardson’s Monitor of Free Masonry (Chicago, 1975), 36–38.

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A GREAT MYSTERY to cheek, and hand to back, and cried out, “Help, Oh Father” as if they had said, “O Father of Heaven, help us now, for our earthly father cannot.” So they laid the dead body down again, not knowing what else to do. Then one of them said, “There is yet marrow in this bone; and the second said, “but a dry bone,” and the third said, “it stinketh.” So they agreed to give it a name, as it is known to Freemasonry to this day…351

Dimly, we recognize in this strange episode the “Saved Savior,” who must himself be resurrected before he can give life to his disciples.352 But of equal importance is the ancient idea that their bodies must first be joined by the “Five Points of Fellowship.” We first encountered these “fellowship points” in the story of Elijah, who restored life to a slain widow’s son by stretching himself three times upon the child’s body (note 53, pp. 105–6 above): O Lord my God, hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son? And he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried unto the Lord, and said, O Lord, My God, I pray to thee, let this child’s soul come unto him again (1 Kgs 17:20–21).

Elisha repeated this process with even more precise “Masonic” details, by lying upon another woman’s dead son, mouth upon mouth … eyes upon eyes, and his hands upon his hands…

After this, “the flesh of the child waxed warm” (2 Kgs 4:34–35). Here we have three of the five “Points of Fellowship.” The same basic form of contact Horne, King Solomon’s Temple, 341; Horne’s italics. Richard Reitzenstein, Poimandres (Leipzig, 1904), and Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos (Nashville, 1970), especially took this to be a Gnostic idea, ultimately traceable to the Iranian Gayomart legend, which likewise had a “Redeemed Redeemer” who must be saved from his own involvement with matter before he can save his people. Carston Colpe has now thoroughly discredited these theories in Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (Göttingen, 1961) by demonstrating that their presumed lines of filiation do not in fact support such a concept. The Iranian sources, furthermore, are much too late to have influenced Christianity in the manner proposed; see Edwin Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism (Grand Rapids, 1973), 30, 70, 96, 103, 165ff. The only “Redeemed Redeemer” who can presently be verified is the Primal Man of Manichaeism (see pp. 363–64, above), who is now more generally thought to have been based on the model of Jesus Christ, who also had to be resurrected from the tomb before he could resurrect others. Others point to man’s consanguinity with the Wisdom/Logos, who both saves and is saved from material history. 351 352

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recurs in the New Testament when Paul restores a young man to life by “falling upon him and embracing him” (Acts 20:10). The apocryphal account of a “Young Man’s” resurrection by Jesus (see p. 112, above) may also contain a faint recollection of such a life-giving embrace (“Jesus stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him, and began to beseech him that he might be with him”). Later, we encounter the sacred embrace described in the Seder Eliyahu Rabbah (eighth century), during which God promised to raise up the dead by lifting them out of the dust, setting them on their feet, and placing them between his knees and pressing them to him.

It adds, moreover, that the Messiah will be the same “Son of the Widow” whom Elijah had raised from the dead!353 But the most explicit precedent of all for the Masonic “Points of Fellowship”—as described in the Graham Ms.—was the Sacred Embrace which Jesus bestowed upon the initiate in the Gospel of Thomas, patterned (as we saw earlier) after the Embracing Cherubim in the Jerusalem Holy of Holies: When you make eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, and an image in the place of an image, then shall you enter the Kingdom (Log. 22).

The expression “fellowship,” which so often appears in connection with these sacred embraces, goes back to Paul’s and Peter’s New Testament practice of referring to Christ’s union with the disciples as koinonia (“fellowship”), showing that those who hope to obtain eternal life with him must also be willing to share his life and sufferings in the service of others (pp. 138–39, above): As ye are sharers (koinōnoi) of the sufferings (of Christ), so shall you also be of the consolation (2 Cor 1:5–7). That I might know him and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings (koinōnian tēs pathēmatōn autou), being conformed to his death, that if possible I may obtain the resurrection from the dead (Phil 3:10–11). He has given us precious and very great promises that you might become sharers (koinōnoi) of the Divine Nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world (2 Pet 1:4). 353

See the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 9.527.

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Additional embraces depicting this saving “fellowship” were preserved in the Jewish-Christian Odes of Solomon (“Thou hast given us thy fellowship” (Ode 4); “And I put off darkness, and put on light. And even I myself acquired members … and his everlasting fellowship” (Ode 21:3–5).354 The Coptic Gospel of Philip similarly retains the Greek word koinōnia to describe Mary Magdalene’s redemptive relationship with Christ (59:8–9; 63:33), a relationship which apocryphal writers understood to be that of “consort” or “wife.”355 This again reflects the widespread tradition in the Western Church that Mary was the “fallen” human counterpart of the Church, whom Jesus had come to redeem, even as Hosea’s wife, Gomer, had been the counterpart of Yahweh’s fallen “Bride,” the spiritually “dead” Israel (Hos 1–3). By such fellowship, “the holy united itself to the unholy in order to make it holy” (Andersen and Freedman),356 i.e., shared its Divine Nature with its defunct “partner” (koinonos) in order to bring her back to life. Assimilated by medieval stone-workers to their own “trade legends” of “Hiram the Temple Builder,” the Noachic version of this Sacred Embrace supplied the magical element for the completed legend of Hiram Abiff, the Resurrected Master who passes secret knowledge to his followers, just as the “Living Jesus” passed “secret words” containing eternal life to his disciples in the Gospel of Thomas: These are the secret words which the Living Jesus spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote … Whoever finds the explanation of these words will not taste death (Introduction and Log. 1).

The imparting of secret knowledge by a supernaturally revived Master also appeared in the very early alchemical literature. We already saw that Pseudo-Democritus (first century A.D.) was said to have received the secrets of alchemical immortality from his dead teacher, Ostanes (p. 392, above). The idea of reviving the dead or dying with the sacred embrace of a living person also makes a surprising appearance in Gustave Flaubert’s short story, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler (1875). Here we read how Julian, whose vocation it was to ferry travelers across the river adjoining his inn, one day revives a dying Leper by lying against him, thus sharing his body heat with the expiring Stranger:

See pp. 182–87, above, for the complete texts on the “embrace of fellowship” in the Odes of Solomon. 355 See pp. 301ff, above. 356 Hosea, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY, 1980), 165. 354

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“Take off thy clothes, that I may have thy body’s warmth!” Julian took off his clothes and lay down on the bed again, naked as when he was born; and he felt the Leper’s skin against his thigh, colder than a serpent and rough as a file. He tried to hearten him, and the other answered in gasps: “Ah, I am dying! Come closer, warm me! Not with the hands; no, with thy whole body!” Julian stretched himself completely over him, mouth to mouth and chest on chest. Then the Leper clasped him, and his eyes suddenly became as bright as stars; his hair drew out like sunbeams … An abundance of delight, a superhuman joy flooded into Julian’s soul as he lay swooning; and he who still clasped him in his arms grew taller, ever taller, until his head and feet touched the two walls of the hut. The roof flew off, the firmament unrolled—and Julian rose towards the blue spaces, face to face with Our Lord Jesus, who carried him to heaven (trans. Arthur McDowall; our emphasis).

One immediately wonders what Flaubert’s sources for this remarkable account of Christ’s life-giving embrace might have been. Was it deliberately patterned after the Masonic embrace? Flaubert himself claimed to have derived it from a thirteenth-century stained-glass window in the Cathedral at Rouen, which depicts the life and adventures of St. Julian. But this window merely shows St. Julian ferrying a stranger—who turns out to be Christ— across the river and being rewarded with eternal life. For the embrace itself, we must turn to a parallel thirteenth-century prose account of St. Julian’s life, also known to Flaubert in the free version of Lecointre-Dupont (1830), which disguises Christ as a Leper who must be saved by contact with a woman’s body—in this case, Julian’s wife! Before the wife is able to oblige with the necessary embrace, however, the Leper blesses the couple for their proffered kindness and disappears.357 The ferryman’s wife was of course a figure for the New Testament “Bride of Christ,” i.e., the Church, she who must be willing to do for others what Christ is willing to do for her (cf. John 15:13 with 13:38). This, then, must have been the original form of Julian’s embrace, at least as the anonymous medieval author understood it, embodying once again the ancient notion that one can be “warmed” into life by a sacred “sexual” contact:

357 See Benjamin F. Bart and Robert Francis Cook, The Legendary Sources of Flaubert’s Saint Julien (Toronto, 1977), 134–36.

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Flaubert, however, for reasons of his own, chose to transfer this embrace directly to Christ and Julian, perhaps in order to produce a more “conventionalized” version of it, such as contemporary Masons were acquainted with. The idea of portraying Christ as a “Leper” was also very old, dating at least to the first quarter of the second century, when Aquila translated Isaiah 53:4 (“we did esteem him as stricken”) as “we did esteem him as haphēmenon,” i.e., “leprous.” The same tradition appeared in the Talmud and Midrash, which describe the expected Messiah as a “Leper” (b. Sanhedrin 98a, 98b; Sepher Zerubbabel).359 But the Old French account may also have been based on the biblical belief that the sick and dying could be resuscitated by means of an intimate embrace, as, for example, when a beautiful maiden was placed in bed with the ailing King David in order to revive him. Yet due to his weakened condition, “the king knew her not,” thereby precipitating a grave crisis in the kingdom, for David must now cease to be king and make way for a successor. Here again is the idea that sexual union transfers life. Thus the LXX specifies, “let her excite him and lie with him,” just as Julian’s wife intended to do for the leprous Christ. But a more direct connection between the Graham Ms. and the traditions of the Bible may be found in Eusebius’ fourth-century Church History (10.4). This time it is the carcass of the bride who is foul and loathsome, just like the “stinking” dead bones that the Masons hoped to resurrect. Eusebius, however, has added Bezaleel to the names of Solomon, Noah, and Hiram as archetypal builders and restorers of the Temple—which is in fact the Church herself (Matt 26:61; Mark 14:58; John 2:19). The Talmud also assigned special wisdom to the figure of Bezaleel, claiming that he “knew how to combine the letters by which the heavens and the earth were created” (b. Berakoth, 55a). Indeed, he was said to have been filled with God’s Spirit, as well as with the secret knowledge by which the “heavens were 358 Ibid., 48. It should be noted that Flaubert transformed Julian’s unsuccessful attempts to warm the cold stranger with his own limbs prior to the intended embrace with the wife into the final embrace itself, omitting entirely her role in the matter. See ibid., 46–47, 135, 151. 359 See Joachim Jeremias, “pais theou,” in TDNT, 5:690; Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts (New York, 1979), 20, 31–32, 105.

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established” and the “depths broken up” (Prov 3: 19–20). Clearly, Bezaleel was already a well-known figure for the Creator, and so he would be for the “Hiram Abiff” of the Freemasons. In the section entitled “Panegyric on the Splendor of Our Affairs,” Eusebius singles out this symbolic Creator, “Bezaleel,” as the “Chief Architect” of the restored Temple: Another Zerubbabel superadding a glory to the Temple of God, much greater than the former (Church History, 10.4).

This “great glory,” he adds, was foreshadowed by Hiram’s building of the Temple at Tyre, the original prototype for the Jerusalem Temple. He then recounts how “Bezaleel” succeeded in raising an eternal edifice which will never again pass away. The following account is condensed from Eusebius’ rather lengthy text, but we have preserved his characteristic language, in order to show its “proto-Masonic” allusions (here italicized): Now the Savior has come to his Holy Hill. Seeing his Bride lying desolate upon the ground, he stretches forth his hands and raises up her dead carcass, causing her to stand upright. She who was assailed by the batteries of her enemies and left for dead upon the earth becomes a restored Temple, whose chief Cornerstone is the Savior himself. In its Holy of Holies the Spouse reclaims his Wife—a woman once deserted and rejected—now clothed in glory and ornaments befitting a royal Bride. Then seeing her promised sons, she asks, “Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children and am a Widow?” Yet her promised restoration was inscribed of old on Sacred Tablets, and is now brought to reality by “Bezaleel,” the new and excellent “Zerubbabel,” our most peaceful “Solomon,” i.e., Jesus Christ, the Architect of the New Temple. Wonderful and mighty is this work, but more wonderful than wonders are these archetypes, these renewals of divine and spiritual buildings in our souls, which the Son of God himself framed and fashioned according to his own image, and to which everywhere and in all respects he imparted the likeness of God (ibid.).

Eusebius then summarizes the overall meaning of his parable as follows: A kind of intellectual image on earth of those things beyond the vault of heaven … A Temple of celestial types, a Temple given in symbols and figures (ibid.).

We are especially struck by his references to the “dead carcass” of the Church (cf. the Scottish Graham Ms. and its “stinking dead body”), which

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the Savior now causes to “stand upright” (Graham Ms: “reared up”).360 She who was “assailed by the batteries of her enemies” also reminds us of the mortally wounded Hiram Abiff, who was at once a symbol of Christ and the Christian who aspires to be identified with him. The “restored Temple” is of course the central goal of Freemasonry, being the “true spiritual house” which will provide the “way into the truth and the life” (Dumfries No. 4 Ms., Catechism). Meanwhile, as the Church was formerly a “Widow” rejected by her Husband (cf. Isa 54:6), her children are still appropriately called “sons of the Widow,” a common designation for members of the Masonic Fraternity. The importance of a “quorum of three” in the stories of Bezaleel and Noah’s sons may have had a precedent in the Gospel of Thomas, which says: Where there are three gods, they are gods; where there are two or one, I am with him (Log. 30).

This rather obscure statement appears to have obvious connections with Matt 19:20: For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

The author of Thomas also seems to have believed that whenever two disciples are united to Christ-Wisdom, all three become gods, for the power of the Living Jesus is shared with the others through spiritual koinonia. Such a thought may also stand behind the notion of an obligatory quorum of three in the Masonic legends, where either Noah’s three sons, or Bezaleel’s two companions plus himself must be present before secret knowledge can be shared. One is also reminded of the Mishnaic law forbidding the imparting of secret knowledge to more than two or three at a time: The forbidden degrees (Lev 18:6) may not be expounded before three persons, nor the story of Creation before two, nor the Chariot (Ezek 1:4ff) before one alone, unless he is a Sage who understands of his own knowledge (Hagigah 2:1).

This restriction to two or three communicants at one time is still observed in the granting of the Masonic Royal Arch Degree, which stipulates that three candidates must be present, for it is then that the true name of God is

360 Compare the Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, where God “sets the dead on their feet” and embraces them.

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revealed, as it was anciently known by the three Masters, King Solomon, Hiram of Tyre, and Hiram Abiff. It is also claimed by Freemasons that the kind of knowledge so desperately sought by Noah’s sons was preserved inside of the Twin Pillars of the Temple, Jachin and Boaz, “the better to serve as safe repositories for the archives of Masonry against all conflagrations and inundations” (Official Iowa Monitor). Yet these have almost certainly been confused with the “Pillars of Enoch,” or “Pillars of Seth.” The latter were described for the first time by Josephus (Antiquities, 1.2:3), and eventually made their way by means of the fourteenth-century Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden into Masonic Tradition. They too were constructed to preserve secret knowledge from the coming catastrophe of fire and water; Alex Horne has shown that they were later conflated with the Pillars of Solomon’s Temple, which thenceforth took over their function as repositories of Masonic lore.361 It is also worth noting that in the Ostanes legend, which we mentioned earlier, Pseudo-Democritus found the secret knowledge of his resurrected Master engraved inside of an ancient pillar. The recently discovered Nag Hammadi library also contains a tractate describing Seth’s pillars, entitled The Three Steles of Seth (the number increased to three to symbolize the triadic nature of the God it espouses). While the Nag Hammadi text was probably unknown to our Masonic sources—which mention only twin pillars—it may give us some idea of what early writers believed to have been contained on Seth’s steles. Josephus claims that this was astronomical knowledge; The Three Steles of Seth makes it an ecstatic ascent through the heavens, ending in a vision of the “first eternal, preexistent One” (124:18–25). This, as we showed earlier, was also Philo’s interpretation of the Temple Mystery; in fact, the Temple was for him a model of the Cosmos and the place for gaining access to God’s Presence. The Nag Hammadi text further describes union with God as the sole means of becoming divine. Its author—who was “one of the multiplicity begotten according to the division of all who are really one” (123:6–9)— prays that Barbelo/Wisdom will again “unite us as thou hast been united … according to the image of the preexistent One” (123:30–124:5). The result will be the initiate’s identification with God. This may give us a better idea of what was traditionally associated with the “Pillars of Seth,” or the “Pillars

361

Horne, King Solomon’s Temple, 235; see also his 221–38.

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of Enoch” and a faint memory of what was once taught behind the twin pillars of the Jerusalem Temple. The same basic doctrine would be found on today’s “Pillars of Seth”—now replaced by the Pillars of the Masonic Temple—for the modern Widow’s Son is still encouraged to realize that his destiny is the same as that of his Resurrected Master. This was of course the heart and core of the Philonic Temple Mystery, and the real significance of the “Five Points of Fellowship,” where “like is joined to like” and reanimated in union with the Logos-Wisdom. In fact, their similarity to the Sacred Embrace in the Gospel of Thomas is so great that we may with confidence assume that the original Wisdom Mystery was the ultimate spring from which the whole conception flowed.

POSSIBLE SURVIVALS OF THE WISDOM MYSTERY IN THE FAR EAST We have finally to consider the possibility of the influence of the Embracing Cherubim outside of the Judaeo-Christian cultural sphere. We have already discussed a possible route by which alchemical ideas were brought from China to the Near East as early as Alexander the Great’s conquests in 320 B.C.362 In one of the initial volumes of his Science and Civilisation in China, Joseph Needham also discusses the Silk Trade Route, as well as the various sea-lanes in use during the first and second centuries of our era, all of which may have played a significant part in mediating Gnostic, heterodox, and orthodox Jewish and Christian ideas to the Far East.363 Carl W. Bishop especially calls attention to the role of northwestern China in this cultural exchange, where travelers from the regions of Bactria, Sogdia, Persia, and elsewhere had entered from the West since time immemorial.364 That such influences were actually shared from an early date is further demonstrated by the fact that there were living in Alexandria at the height of its cosmopolitan prominence people who had come from as far off as India.365 Indeed, the Indian emperor, Asoka, had already sent Buddhist misNeedham, Science and Civilisation, 5.4.387–88. Ibid., 1, figure 32, for a map. 364 Ibid., 1:163–64; Carl Whiting Bishop, “The Geographical Factor in the Development of Chinese Civilization,” Geographical Review 12 (1922): 19–41, esp. 26; Balaji Mundkur, The Cult of the Serpent, 175; Donald McKenzie, Myths of China and Japan, 275–77. 365 Dio Chrysostom, Thirty Second Discourse to the People of Alexandria, 36, 40 in Jack Finegan, Hidden Records in the Life of Jesus (Philadelphia, 1969), 67. 362 363

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sionaries to Egypt as early as the third century B.C.366 Eusebius, on the other hand, records that Pantaenus had been on a Christian mission to India during the second century of our own era. When he arrived, he discovered persons who already knew of Christ, and who were using the Gospel of Matthew “in Hebrew letters,” supposedly left there by Bartholomew (Church History, 5.10).367 Jean Daniélou also raises the possibility of early Pythagorean and Indian influences upon the Gnostic, Carpocrates,368 who taught the very nonJewish doctrine of reincarnation. Origen (Commentary on John, 6.7) adds that there were even Alexandrian Jews who had begun to entertain this uncharacteristic belief. While most forms of Buddhism did not teach true reincarnation, Indian popular religions did, along with assorted theories of emanation, the threefold division of souls, and the ascent of the spirit after death through the planetary spheres, all of which would have proven attractive to certain Jews and Christians in the West. Several authors have in fact found traces of these ideas in both the Gnostic system of Basilides369 and the Manichaean Gnosis. We are especially struck with the similarity of the path taken by the ascending “sparks of light” in the latter—a path leading heavenward via the moon, sun, and Milky Way—and the Hindu Pitriyana (“Way of the Fathers”), as described in the Chandogya Upanishad,370 demonstrating a clear case of cultural exchange between India and the Near East. Edward Conze, speaking at the Messina Colloquium on Gnosticism in 1960, called attention to even more specific parallels between Gnosticism Ibid., 67. Ibid., 73. 368 Buddhism teaches the doctrine of anatta (Skt. anatman), or “no-soul.” It does, however, believe in a causal chain (pratitya samutpada) in which the conditions that gave rise to the phenomenon of bodily consciousness (namarupa) re-create the same thing all over again after death if the practitioner has not broken the chain successfully. Nevertheless, certain forms of Mahayana Buddhism appear to have taken over Sankara’s Vedantic idea of a Universal Soul. Popular Buddhism likewise makes little distinction between the phenomenon of bodily consciousness and an indestructible “soul.” 369 See J. Kennedy, “Buddhist Gnosticism, the System of Basilides,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1902): 377–415. 370 Compare Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis, 337–38, and Paul Deussen, The Philosophy of the Upanishads (New York, 1966), 334–36; Kennedy, “Buddhist Gnosticism,” 381. See also note 131, p. 363 above. 366 367

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and Late Buddhism, this time showing signs of cross-fertilization from West to East.371 We have not the time to consider his valuable paper in detail, but must mention that both systems recognized (1) Salvation by knowledge (gnosis, jnana), ignorance being the root-cause of evil; (2) Three levels of spiritual attainment; (3) The critical role of Wisdom (Sophia, Prajna) in cosmogenesis and redemption; (4) A difference between the Quiescent Godhead and the active creator-god (Demiurge), and (5) Reunion with God (even sexual union) as the means of redeeming the initiate from his painful involvement with phenomenality.372 The figure of Wisdom is of special interest to us, since from around 200 B.C. both Buddhism and Judaism spoke of a divine female figure (Prajna), who was both “mother” and “nurse,” a “hypostasis” of the Law (Torah, Dharma), God’s “Consort,” a dispenser of knowledge, the “food and drink” of life, and a form of the Supernal Light.373 Like Wisdom in the West, Prajna was a virtual goddess with a creative function. This is particularly true in the Buddhist Tantric systems. In the Hevjara Tantra, for example, we are told that “Prajna is called Mother, because it is she who gave birth to the world.”374 Yet Wisdom’s role in the Tantric creation of the world is so different from that of ordinary Buddhist thought (where true Wisdom removes the illusion of the world) that the newer idea must have come from elsewhere.375 There was also a radical new departure when the Buddhist Tantras began to attribute innumerable female consorts to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Significantly, the girls involved in ritual intercourse with Tantric initiates were also called prajnas (“wisdoms”).376 But what perhaps most distinguished this new movement from the rest of Indian thought was that Tantrism (like the Gnostic Mystery in the West) began to view ritual intercourse as an instrument of salvation. Furthermore, this soteriological use of sexual relations was justified by the same kind of antinomianism which characterized the Gnostic libertines, arguing “Buddhism and Gnosis,” in Origini dello Gnosticismo, ed. Bianchi (Leiden, 1967), 651–67. 372 Conze also describes other similarities which are not as important for our discussion; see ibid., 652–65. 373 Ibid., 656. 374 Ibid. 375 Ibid., 657. 376 Ibid. They are also known alternately as vidyas (“thoughts”), which correspond roughly to the Gnostic ennoia (“thought, knowledge”). 371

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that the cosmic value of ritual sex was such that it transcended the requirements of common morality. Both the Vedas and the Upanishads had of course long viewed conjugal union as a form of hieros gamos, prescribing sexual relations as the appropriate kind of sympathetic magic for promoting the fertility of flocks and fields.377 The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for example, commended the union of husband and wife as symbols and promoters of cosmic fertility: I am the heaven; thou, the earth; her lap is a sacrificial altar; her hairs, the sacrificial grass; her skin, the soma-press. The two lips of the vulva are the fire in the middle. Verily, as great as is the world of him who sacrifices with the strength-libation, so great is the world of him who practices sexual intercourse, knowing this (VI 4–20).

Carried out on a group level, such intercourse was thought to have a profound effect on the fertility of the earth. A few Brahmanic texts also perceived ritual union to be a form of the mysterium coniunctionis, in which phenomenal opposites are symbolically reconciled (Aitareya Aranyaka, III:l.6; Sankhayana Aranyaka, VII 14). Nevertheless, it is not until the event of Tantrism that the soteriological value of sexual union for the human soul was developed. Shortly after the third century, the Tantric iconography of divine couples in sacred embrace—like the two Cherubim in the Jerusalem Holy of Holies—appeared for the first time in both Buddhist and Hindu sources. The most famous examples of this Tantric iconography, showing Prajna (Wisdom) in redemptive union with her male counterpart, are the notorious yab-yum (“Father-Mother”) statues of Tibet (see figure 2), remarkably like the uniting figures of Fu Hsih and Nü Kua in China a few centuries earlier. A simultaneous development of Tantric Hinduism also took place for the first time, depicting the divine copulation of Brahman’s male-female counterparts, Shiva and Shakti. Shiva was the one who dreamed things into existence, and Shakti was the one who gave them phenomenal substance. Examples were soon to be found everywhere in India, for example, the erotic carvings in the caves at Elephanta, or the notorious Temple at Kharjuraho, showing countless depictions of the Divine Intercourse which gives birth to the worlds—“in play, as it were.”378 It is this same Shakti who also appears in popular religion as “Kali, the Black Goddess.” Like the Shaivite Shakti, she too is a Cosmic Progenitress 377 378

Mircea Eliade, Yoga (New York, 1958), 254–59. Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India (New York, 1956), 564.

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who both creates and destroys. In numerous folk paintings she is shown straddling the erect phallus of the dead Shiva in a hieros gamos, restoring him to life as part of the never-ending cycle of birth, death, and recreation.379 More abstract symbols of this soteriological copulation are the lingam and yoni (or pillar and ring), found together in most worshippers’ homes even today (see figure 2). The word lingam is probably an ancient Dravidian term meaning “plow” or “penis,”380 but its soteriological incorporation into Tantric designs for redemptive purposes (mantras or yantras) was also relatively late, coincidental with the general introduction of Tantric iconography into India. When we consider the great similarity of these Tantric developments in India and Tibet to the sexual rites of the Near East, it becomes immediately apparent that some kind of cultural exchange must have taken place between the two areas. “It is a fact,” writes Edward Conze, “that both Mahayana (the new form of Buddhism) and the Tantras developed in the border regions of India which were exposed to the impact of Roman, Hellenistic, Iranian, and Chinese civilization, and we also know that the Buddhists were in close contact with the Thomas Christians in South India and the Manichaeans in Central Asia.”381 Yet while both the Buddhist and the Hindu Tantrics developed ritual copulatory techniques remarkably similar to those of the Gnostic Bridal Chamber, it is strange that the Hindus chose to assign the active role to the female, while the male was active for the Buddhists. Thus, in Buddhist Tantrism, woman is prajna, or yum, static and quiescent, and the male is upaya, or yab, dynamic and phenomenally active. In Hindu Tantra, on the other hand, the woman represents the goddess Shakti, active and creative, while the male represents the god Shiva, quiescent and dreaming. This again suggests that the various forms of Tantric iconography were traded back and forth—or even copied from foreign sources—then applied to their respective systems in an eclectic manner. We also note that Tantric texts first ap-

See Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra (London, 1973), pl. 88. Eliade, Yoga, 352–53. 381 Conze, “Buddhism and Gnosis,” 665. Was Thomasine Christianity especially acquainted with the Gospel of Thomas? If so, the ritual embrace described in Logia 22 and 108 may have been partially disseminated through the Thomasine mission in the East. 379 380

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pear around A.D. 600,382 though “Tantric” (copulatory) statues were known as early as A.D. 300.383 But by the time the latter reached Tibet, the goddess was shown sitting astride the god’s lap, always facing him—a posture quite unknown elsewhere—further demonstrating a conscious process of selection and assimilation which must have taken place under the influence of external models (see figure 2). Since the Jews were reticent to spread knowledge of their secret rites, it is most likely that any influence which the Embracing Cherubim may have had upon Tantric practice was indirect, coming perhaps through the Gnostic Bridal Chamber rite, which was well-known throughout the Near East during the early years of the Common Era. G. Tucci has in fact noted important similarities between Manichaean Gnosticism and Tantra, particularly the idea that the semen generated during sexual relations is identical with the Divine Light (bodhicitta; pp. 373–75, above).384 The Guhya Samaja Tantra also says that the goal of ritual intercourse (maithuna) is to stimulate the internal production of bodhicitta, or “the primal splendor that created the world.”385 Mircea Eliade also believes that Near Eastern influences helped form Tibetan myths about the origin of man from the Primordial Light.386 Since the Light was trapped in matter at the time of creation, Tibetan ritual copulation aimed at suppressing ejaculation so that the Light might be recovered, very much like the Phibionite practices which we encountered in the West (pp. 311–14, above). Alan Watts’ suggestion that the Manichaeans practiced a form of ritual coitus reservatus called Karezza, which the Crusaders presumably brought back to Europe as the Catharist art of Courtly Love,387 would also indicate that such a ritual had indeed spread from the Holy Land as far east as Iran. Unfortunately we are reduced to mere speculation here, though Karezza was probably known there about the time that Tantric practices became prevalent in India.

Rawson, Art of Tantra, 15; Eliade, Yoga, 400–401, suggests that a few Tantric texts existed even before the fifth century, but certainly “not before the first centuries of our era.” 383 Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (Garden City, NY, 1970), 213. 384 “Some Glosses upon Guhyasamaja,” Melanges Bouddhiques et Chinoises 3 (1935): 349ff; quoted in Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One (New York, 1965), 40– 41. 385 Eliade, The Two, 41. 386 Ibid., 41–42. 387 Man and Nature, 145–46. 382

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To summarize, Eliade concludes that “we must reckon with possible Gnostic influences, which could have reached India by way of Iran over the Northwest frontier.”388 The result there was “a great philosophical and religious movement” which “assumed the form of a pan-Indian vogue from the sixth century onward.” Almost overnight, “Tantrism becomes immensely popular, not only among philosophers and theologians, but also among the actual practitioners of the religious life (ascetics, yogins, etc.), and its prestige also reaches the ‘popular’ strata.”389 Eliade finally remarks that this new Tantrism bears “more than one curious parallel” with the “mysterio-sophic current” (i.e., the Wisdom Mystery) of early Christianity, in which the traditions of the Gnostics, Hermetic doctrines, Graeco-Egyptian alchemy, and the antique mysteries all come together.390 In short, Eliade’s research suggests that the Judaeo-Christian Wisdom Mystery was one of the prime influences on the creation of Indian Tantrism, with its sexual techniques and its colorful iconography. Among the “curious parallels” mentioned by Eliade, we must especially call attention to the eclectic manner in which Philo’s Cherubim and the ritual partners in yab-yum were assigned their philosophical values, suggesting the possible trading of foreign influences. According to Philo, Cherub “A” represented The Male: Father, Husband, Begetter, Creator, Reason, Goodness; he was peaceable, gentle and beneficent.

Cherub “B” was The Female: Mother, Wife, Bearer, Nurturer, Wisdom, Sovereignty; she was legislative, chastising and correcting.391

In the Buddhist scheme, we have the following pairs of characteristics: The Male: Positive, dynamic, instrumental, generative. The Female: Negative, passive, intuitive-wisdom, bearing.

The Hindus, on the other hand, chose to reverse these philosophical attributes: The Male: pure consciousness, passivity. Yoga, 202; our emphasis. See also his 206–7. Ibid., 200. Eliade gives a detailed summary of the early literature of Tantrism in this same work, pp. 309–404. 390 Ibid., 202. 391 See Patai’s list in Hebrew Goddess, 115. 388 389

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The Female: worldly phenomena, activity.

Agehananda Bharati also comments on the curious significance of pilgrimage in these Tantric practices, a tradition long-known to the Semitic nations in the West. “Although pilgrimage figures importantly in the religions of India,” he observes, “it never had any canonical status in non-tantric traditions.”392 Was this important difference also due to influences from the Semitic West? As in the Near East, the center of pilgrimage was considered to be the seat of a goddess, which the pilgrims ritually circumambulated.393 392 Bharati, Tantric Tradition, 85. He adds that circumambulation of shrines is still common amongst the non-Aryan peoples of India, “but it is hard to say whether these autochthonous groups are preserving a pre-Aryan custom or whether they have simply taken it over from the Hindu ritual” (ibid., 93). In the latter case, the question would become: where did the Hindu Tantric ritual originate? 393 Sacred stones were ritually circled by Semitic pilgrims in pre-Islamic times, even as modern pilgrims circle the Ka‘ba today. Animals were sacrificed to them, and their blood smeared on the stones. Individuals stroked and kissed them, in order to bind themselves as closely as possible to the deities represented therein. Maria Höfner, “Die vorislamitische Religionen Arabiens,” in Die Religionen Altsyriens, Altarabiens und der Mandäer (Stuttgart, 1970), 359. This must have been a universal Semitic custom, because we learn from comparative and archaeological studies that other ancient tribes—including the Hebrews—venerated stones (masseboth) with similar offerings of blood and fat, and with much embracing and kissing. H. Ringgren, Israelite Religion (Philadelphia, 1966), 24–25. Some masseboth excavated in Palestine appear to have been “smoothed as if by the repeated contact of pious hands” (G. A. Barrois, “Pillar,” in IDB, 3:816), suggestive of the intimate contact which early Israelites had with such images (Ezek 16:17). Female pilgrims, before the days of Mohammed, made the circuit of the Black Stone naked (cf. Exod 32:25) while reciting obscene verses. Patai, Sex and Family Life in the Middle East (Garden City, NY, 1959), 152. According to W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, London, 1927, 687, Palestinian women in the nineteenth century still bared their breasts while praying. A sacred prostitute was kept for the early Arabs, who regarded her services as part of the religious observance. Such was the famous “Kharga” of the Banu ‘Amir tribe, who considered herself to be “one of the pilgrimage rites” (Patai, Sex and Family Life, 152). There was also in former times an altar-feast, at which rain was secured by a Sacred Marriage between a god and a woman who was led to him ceremonially (Minaean Text RES 3306; in Höfner, “Die vorislamitischen Religionen,” 338; compare Zech 14:17), while the rest of the women made a circuit of the shrine where he was established (Sabaean Text Ja 735; in Höfner, “Die vorislamitischen Religionen,” 338). This is not essentially different than the habit of Moslem pilgrims even today as they approach the Ka‘ba at Mecca,

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Such sites were also connected with sacrifice. In Hindu Tantra, this was the sacrifice of Shiva’s Spouse, who had previously been decapitated, and whose pieces became the pitha, or “resort” of the goddess.394 In Buddhism, these pithas were the places where one could rise to Buddhahood through union with one’s Yogini (female partner, or embodiment of Prajna).395 They are always four in number, sometimes said to represent the four points of the compass,396 and sometimes the pudenda, the two nipples and the tongue of the goddess.397 They were also hypostatized by the Buddhists as private “temples,”398 i.e., spiritual locations where the work of unification could take place. This naturally included the human body itself, in which male and female can be brought together as One. It may also be significant that in the Dravidian South of India, circumambulation of pilgrimage sites was connected with the worship of the Nagakals (entwining serpent-deities), whose form was imported from the Sumero-Babylonian caduceus, and which probably influenced the iconography of the intertwining Fu Hsih and Nü Kua in China (see figure 1). The philosophical explanations which we have seen for these various Tantric phenomena—especially the assigning of symbolic meanings to the partners of ritual maithuna—all show the same tendency to rationalize established ritual techniques, which possessed the character of initiations into a mythological situation, i.e., the sexual union of Man and God. And though we cannot presently prove any definite connection between the hierogamy of the West and maithuna in the East, neither can we dismiss out of hand the strong impression that what the Embracing Cherubim once represented in the Jerusalem Temple obtained a wide influence across the Far East during the first five or six centuries of the Common Era. In fact, what we seem to observe is the unfolding of a single mystery-tradition across the entire Fertile Crescent as far as China, India, and Tibet, showing male and female chanting the so-called talbiyaht: “Here we come, O Allah, no partner hast thou,” suggesting that some kind of “espousal” with a god (cf. Jer 2:2) was once part of the ritual. In fact, the whole purpose of the typical “pilgrimage feast” (Arabic, hajj, Hebrew hag) appears to have been “espousal” to one’s god, and the obtaining of the divine blessing which flowed from such a union. We also recall that a hag (KJV “feast”) was the reason given for Israel’s “pilgrimage” into the desert (Exod 13:6). 394 Bharati, Tantric Tradition, 86, 85. 395 Ibid., 88. 396 Ibid., 89. 397 Ibid., 90. 398 Eliade, Yoga, 198.

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Wisdom-figures dispensing their divine gifts through sexual means. If this is true, then the yab-yum statues of Tibet and the couplings in the caves of Elephanta may provide a faint reflection of what the Embracing Cherubim looked like in the Jerusalem Holy of Holies two thousand years ago.

THE TANTRIC SACRED MARRIAGE AND THE TAOIST “GOLDEN FLOWER” Tantric copulatory ritual (maithuna) aimed at uniting life’s contraries sexually in a state of absolute unity (advaja). As in the case of the “ontological sexualization” of Chinese yin and yang, the Hindu Tantric visualized phenomenal polarities as manifestations of the passive Shiva and his active Shakti, whose apparent separation created the illusion of duality and resulted in human suffering. The goal of the male yogin was therefore to unite the principles of Shiva and Shakti within his own body through sexual union with his female yogini. During the ecstasy of their conjunction, the goddess Shakti (who sleeps in the form of a serpent [kundalini] at the base of the spine) is awakened, and rises upward through the spinal column to the top of the skull, where Shiva dwells, thus becoming one with him. It will therefore be seen that Shakti is associated with the instinctive and the phenomenal powers of nature, whereas Shiva is associated with the mental and spiritual. When these are successfully brought together in the “temple” of the body, the Shivaite becomes an “androgyne,” or “male-female,” in which all opposites are reconciled.399 Hindu Tantric sadhana (mystical method) also includes madya (liquor), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish) and mudra (grain or beans); together with maithuna, these constitute the “Five M’s” (pancha makara) and are thought of as offerings to the goddess, as well as the means of providing the necessary enjoyment for successful Tantric practice. It is said in this connection that cannahis indica (vijaya) is also used to heighten sexual pleasure.400 Hindus, however, make a distinction between “left-handed” Tantra (where the “Five M’s” are actually employed) and “right-handed” Tantra, where substitutes may be used. The latter include various mudras (bodily 399 Eliade, The Two, 117–18; Yoga, 259–67; Sir John Woodroofe (Arthur Avalon), Shakti and Shakta (Madras, 1951), 596–649; Bharati, Tantric Tradition, 263–68. Bharati’s explanation is by far the most complete and detailed, and should especially be read in conjunction with his pp. 228–63, which describe the spiritual and ritual preparation for the final union. 400 Bharati, Tantric Tradition, 251–53.

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positions), combined with strongly visualized mental images, amounting to internalized sexual rites.401 A yogin, however, should practice actual maithuna at least once in his life to bind himself to his yogini; thereafter he can obtain supreme samapatti (“attainment of oneness”) with her by exercises of a subjective nature.402 Such interior exercises include the achieving of “immobility of breath, thought and bindu,” i.e., the retention of the life-force contained in the semen; thus, the kundalini can again be awakened and caused to rise as if the woman were actually present.403 Actual maithuna begins with the dedication of a triangular mantra (cosmic “temple-diagram”) on which the candidates will sit. The initiate’s “Shakti” is then brought in, dressed in a red robe, and purified with water. He touches her forehead, eyes, nostrils, mouth, arms, and thighs, consecrating her as a form of the divine Mother. He then engages in ritual copulation “father-face to mother-face,” i.e., Shiva to Shakti, finally casting his semen as a sacrificial offering “into the fire,” while visualizing within himself the oneness of the god and the goddess.404 Buddhist maithuna, on the other hand, aims at the retention of the semen. Indeed, one of the major texts of Buddhist Tantra, the Jnanasiddhi, says, “Having brought down the ‘thunderbolt’ (symbol of the god) into the ‘lotus’ (symbol of the goddess), he should not let go of the bodhicitta (the Light within the semen).405 Buddhist maithuna also makes little use of the other “M’s,” for ritual union by itself is thought to be sufficient for immediately achieving unification with the Divine, this being realized through the “Father-Mother Oneness” of the initiate and his woman. Yab-yum is therefore called the “Short Path” to Enlightenment and is supposed to replace many lifetimes of ordinary good works and proper thinking. The same preliminaries, however, are observed: the mandala, in whose center the rite is to take place; the ritual purification; and the proper visualizations to direct the results.406 At the time of his first initiation, the adept is also given his own yidam (indwelling feminine deity), the one whom he will later imagine to have within him when he practices his sadhana. This he carries out in his household shrine, surrounded by the appropriate ritual articles, such as the bell Eliade, Yoga, 248, 261. Ibid., 261–62. 403 Ibid., 248–49. 404 Bharati, Tantric Tadition, 263–65. 405 Ibid., 296 406 John Blofeld, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet (New York, 1970), 147–68. 401 402

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(symbolizing Female Wisdom) and the scepter (symbolizing the Thunderbolt, or male potency).407 Bodhicitta is first generated by various mantric sounds and meditations.408 Seated within his mandala—which is now the “temple” of his sought-after deity409—he performs yab-yum with his partner, seeking to realize the reconciliation of life’s polarities. In the process, he becomes upaya (“means, instrumentality”), and she prajna (“Transcendent Wisdom”); he is karuna (“Compassion”), she is šunyata (“the Void,” the non-phenomenal). Together, they merge as a single mahasukha (“Great Bliss”). As the initiate successfully identifies himself with these primal qualities, the “Body of all the Buddhas” begins to appear at the base of his skull, whose light-rays finally dissolve into his own being.410 Yet not only are the poles of phenomenal existence reconciled in this manner, but also phenomenality (Sangsara) and Nirvana, for ultimately All is One (“How can Nirvana not be Sangsara, and Sangsara not be Nirvana?” ).411 This form of worship belongs to the Prajnaparamita (“Perfection of Wisdom”) school, around which Mahayana Buddhism developed just prior to the time of Christ, and which pictured Ultimate Reality as something void of antinomies and phenomenal attributes (“neither existence nor nonexistence”). Popular imagination, however, represented this Reality as a transcendent goddess-figure, in whom all opposites are reconciled as an unspeakable and ineffable Truth, but which can be directly experienced because she is everything which is: She is unstained, and the entire world cannot stain her. She is a source of light, and from everyone in the triple world she removes darkness … She is identical with knowledge. She never produces any dharma (object of sense) because she has forsaken the residues relating to both kinds of coverings, those produced by defilement and those produced by the cognizable. Neither does she stop any dharma. Herself unstopped and unproduced is the Perfection of Wisdom. She is the Mother of the Bodhisattvas (Ashtasahasrika, VII 170–71).

Ibid., 182–85. Ibid., 185–88. 409 Ibid., 201, 203–9. 410 Blofeld, Tantric Mysticism, 209–12. 411 The best philosophical surveys of Buddhist Tantra are perhaps those of S. B. Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tantric Buddhism (Calcutta, 1958), 77–144, and Herbert V. Guenther, The Life and Teaching of Naropa (Oxford, 1963), 131–249. 407 408

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Tantric practice in fact aimed at perceiving this divine Wisdom as pure experience; and since Reality is ultimately non-dual, it can be found in even that which is worldly and human: Because the Buddha-cognition is contained in the mass of beings, Because it is immaculate and non-dual by nature, Because those who belong to Buddha’s lineage go towards it as their reward, Therefore all animate beings have the germ of Buddhahood in them. The Body of the perfect Buddha irradiates everything, Its Suchhess (true Reality) is undifferentiated, And the road to Buddhahood is open to all, At all times have all living beings the germ of Buddhahood within them. (Ratnagotnavibhaga, 1.27–28).

This of course means that sexuality can be a direct experience of the divine. Indeed, by undergoing ritual yab-yum as a noetic event, the psychological data of “subject” and “object” are merged into a single perception, and transformed into pure “Buddha-cognition,” i.e., non-divided bodhicitta. The initiate who becomes one with this Ultimate Light—both within and without— is redeemed from mortality, because he already stands at the center of the Eternal. It was pointed out earlier that ancient China, though long acquainted with the Taoist doctrine of yin and yang, never showed an indigenous interest in fertility rites. Nevertheless, from about the second century on—just about the time when Tantra was evolving in India—Chinese alchemists suddenly began to employ sexual yoga as a ritual means of providing immortality. As we noted earlier, Chinese alchemists believed that the processes of nature were controlled by the mating of male and female principles (yang and yin), manifest on a phenomenal level as the “Five Elements.” The most important of these elements was cinnabar (mercuric sulfide), an element supposedly found in the human body and associated with life because of its blood-red color. Upon “distillation,” it yielded the mysterious “quick-silver” (metallic mercury), which alchemists believed could be transmuted into gold. Or if eaten, it was supposed that it could produce a vision of the Immortals in P’eng-lai and their secrets of eternal life.412 These traditional elements of belief came together during the early years of the Common Era as the Neo-Taoist “Interior Gods’ Hygiene 412

Holmes Welch, Taoism, 99–100. See note 210, p. 387, above.

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School,”413 the aim of which was to regulate the forces controlling the human body, much as yin and yang controlled the activities of the universe, thereby leading to longevity (macrobiotics), or even to immortality. Man’s “interior gods” were presided over by the Triad of the “Three Ones,” each localized in his own “Field of Cinnabar.” They in turn were controlled by T’ai I, the “Great One” who lives in the “Field of Cinnabar” at the top of the head.414 It was the manipulation of these inner “gods”— associated with the various substances in the body—that provided the rationale for the sexual “alchemy” which suddenly began to characterize late Taoism. The first of these new “alchemical” practices was an erotic rite known as the “Union of Breaths,” supposedly invented around A.D. 175 by the “Three Changs,” who were the early governors of the Neo-Taoist Church. Where they first obtained their idea can only be guessed; but its aim was remarkably similar to that of Tantric Yoga, namely, to cause the light in the semen from the lower “Field of Cinnabar” to rise and unite with the vital essence above, thus forming the “Mysterious Embryo” which would eventually develop into a “pure new body.” Thus, when the adept died, his “pure body” would be released and become immortal.415 The Taoist Church even made sexual alchemy the object of collective orgies, which scandalized the neighboring Buddhists and Confucians with their unbridled promiscuity. After joining in a square-dance called the “coiling of the Dragon” (yang) and the “playing of the Tiger” (yin), the participants retired to private booths to engage in ritual intercourse. Now they frequently exchanged partners, for the man’s yang (concentrated in the semen) was most effectively nourished by the female orgasm. Hence it was desirable for a man to have relations with as many female partners as possible, inducing a climax in each, but postponing his own until the last. Thus, he achieved the maximal internal production of “light” without losing it prematurely. In the end, he “returned the semen to repair the brain” by pressing the urethra closed with the finger during ejaculation, forcing the fluid “up the spinal column” into the Field of Cinnabar in the head.416

See pp. 387–88, above. Welch, Taoism, 106–7. 415 Ibid., 109, 113, 121. 416 Ibid., 120–26. 413 414

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This alchemical hieros gamos later became the subject of the famous treatise entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower.417 It is significant that the Chinese way of writing “Golden Flower” (Chin Hua) involves two characters, which, when written one above the other, form the word “light” (kuang). Apparently, this secret symbol was invented in a time of persecution as a way of veiling the doctrine from outsiders.418 When the yin and yang were successfully united, the mysterious “Golden Flower” and its light bloomed within the initiate:419 When one begins to apply this magic, it is as if, in the middle of one’s being, there were a non-being. When in the course of time the work is finished, and beyond the body there is another body, it is as if, in the middle of the non-being, there were a being. Only after a completed work of a hundred days will the Light be real, then only will it become spirit-fire. After a hundred days, there develops by itself in the middle of the Light a point of the true Light-pole (yang). Suddenly there develops the seed-pearl. It is as if man and woman embraced and a conception took place.420

This hieros gamos of man’s Inner Light with the universal True Light is also described as the “Adhering Fire” (Li), or “Bride,” uniting with the “Abysmal,” or “Eternal Boy”: If the light of the essence is held permanently, the Abysmal and the Adhering have intercourse spontaneously (i.e., the semen is retained). When the Abysmal and the Adhering Fire mix, the holy fruit is born. The ripening of the holy fruit is the effect of the Great Heavenly Cycle.421

Here again, conspicuous elements of light-worship and fertility-magic point to outside hierogamic influences superimposed on an original Taoist doctrine of simple yin and yang. One looks first of all to Persian Zoroastrianism, with its highly developed light-symbolism, for even in the T’ang Period, there were a number of Persian temples in China.422 Another probable inSee Wilhelm and Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, 5. Though written in comparatively modern times, it was based on the seventh- or eighth-century doctrine of the “Golden Elixer.” 418 Ibid., 9. 419 Chang Chung-Yuan, Creativity and Taoism (New York, 1963), 156. 420 Wilhelm and Jung, Secret, 341, quoting from The Secret of the Golden Flower (3). 421 Ibid., 69, 70. 422 Ibid., 10. 417

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fluence was Nestorian Christianity, which was very influential in China from the T’ang Period until late in the Middle Ages. Richard Wilhelm in fact believes that there is “a strong admixture of Nestorian ideas” in the ritual of the “Golden Flower,”423 particularly the Pauline doctrine of cleavage to Christ, who unites all things into one, and is reborn in the initiate as a new existence.424 The “Eternal Boy” is easily recognizable as the New Christ, who is “formed within” (Gal 4:19), and who is the true “Bridegroom” of the soul. Other Nestorian parallels to the “Golden Flower” include the soul’s rebirth from water and fire; light once again is the “life of man,” and the eye is the “light of the body.” One even needs “oil for one’s lamp,” so that it can burn brightly.425 Finally, Gnostic Sacred Marriage traditions appear to have had an important influence on this Chinese alchemy, particularly the technique of producing the “inner light” by means of sexual union. After these materials were assimilated and transformed into the practices described in The Secret of the Golden Flower, their symbolism probably filtered back into Europe in the form of the hermetic Rebis, itself a stylized version of the ritual unification of yang and yin, the Primal Male and Female, Heaven and Earth. There they were welcomed back by Westerners already trained in the symbolism of the Wisdom Mystery. Yet the resemblance of these Eastern symbols to the Embracing Cherubim in the Jerusalem Temple remains remarkable. Thus, we might summarize the essential interrelatedness of these many versions of the Sacred Marriage Mystery in the words of the Chinese alchemist, Shang-ku-san-tai, who wrote, with words appropriate to all: The union of man and woman is like the mating of Heaven and Earth. It is because of their correct mating that Heaven and Earth last forever. Humans have lost this secret and have therefore become mortal. By knowing it, the Path to Immortality is opened once again.

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 8–9, 132–35. 425 Ibid., 9. 423 424

8 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION “At-one-ment” with God. In the preceding pages we have attempted to trace the development of an ancient soteriology that existed alongside of the sacrificial rites of the Jewish Temple, referred to by Paul as a “Great Mystery” (Eph 5:32), and by intertestamental Jews as a “Wisdom Mystery,” a unitive tradition that was secretly portrayed by the Embracing Cherubim over the Ark of the Covenant (b. Yoma 54a), and which sought to redeem fallen man by uniting him spiritually to God’s creative companion and envoy. Though orthodoxy has long denied the existence of objects in the Holy of Holies after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC, we have seen evidence that Solomon’s statues had been replaced sometime during the Second Temple period by figures depicting a male and female in an erotic embrace, signifying Yahweh’s redemptive “marriage” to Israel, and on an individual level, the transformation of the believer into a being of light. Philo, who was a contemporary of Jesus, described the Cherubim in some detail; and Josephus, who had been a priest in the Temple, admitted in Contra Apion that the Romans found “that which was agreeable to piety” when they entered the Holy of Holies in A.D. 70, though he was not permitted to describe it to outsiders. The sixth century historian, John Malalas, recalled that one of the things that the Emperor Titus found when he destroyed the Second Temple was the Cherubim, and that his son, Vespasian, reerected them outside the city walls of Antioch at a site still known as “the Cherubim” (Chronographia, 10.45). In 1973, Raphael Patai published important evidence from rabbinic and Kabbalistic sources detailing the existence of the Embracing Cherubim. In 1988, Moshe Idel showed that they were part of “a mystical tradition” at least as old as Philo, in which “the cherubim were envisioned as syzygies” (a male-female pair), a tradition “made explicit in the Talmud itself.”1 Idel’s sources also affirm that the statues were “intertwined with one another, as 1

B. Yoma 54a; Kabbalah: A New Perspective (New Haven, 1988), 132, also 131.

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symbolized by the form of the cherubim,”2 and specified that their union took place “in the Temple to increase the fruitfulness of Israel” (Rabbi Eleazar, Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, I.3). Characterized in the Talmud as God’s “large Face” and “small Face,” these divine manifestations were sometimes known as the “Bridegroom” and the “Bride,”3 or God’s internal male and female powers, powers that united sexually to bring about the creation of man. According to the Kabbalists, Adam and Eve were created according to the same pattern, hence were expected to unite in marriage, following the model established in the heavens, thus guaranteeing their survival in the world to come. According to Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Christians remembered the embracing statues as “a pair of angels,”4 who sought to unite in order to restore the oneness of God and man. This shows that memories of the marriage mystery survived in Christian writings for several centuries, even in Gnostic legends of a heavenly fall that could be repaired by restoring the unity of the sexes, evolving finally into various forms of quietism and alchemy, perhaps even interacting with Far Eastern Tantrism, whose feminine partner in similar rites of union was also called “Wisdom” (Prajna). The basic premise of this ancient tradition was that men are not saved by sacrificial offerings, or by the substitution of scapegoats, but by uniting with God and sharing his power. It came into Jewish Christianity as the mystery of “marriage” to Jesus/Wisdom, during which God and man become “one flesh” and “one spirit” (Eph 5:31; 1 Cor 6:17). Yet in all of its metamorphoses, the “Great Mystery” rested on the premise that men were derived from God and that their destiny is to be reunited with him (“protology = eschatology”), and in this way receive the divine nature. This was not “absorption” into God (as in Hindu samadhi), but spiritual “cleavage,” or “adhesion” (devekuth), thereby creating a pneumatic continuum that mediates the traits of the Whole to its Parts, while preserving their personal identities. In the process, God’s Spirit plants new life in the moribund, a life that will survive beyond the grave, thus doing for the individual what he cannot do for himself. Unfortunately, modern Judaism and Latin Christianity have tended to prefer forensic solutions, based on “sacrifice, substitution, ransom,” etc.5 Quoted in ibid., 131. Idel, Kabbalah, 134. 4 Ibid., 132–33. See our pp. 224–26, above. 5 See pp. 136–38, above. 2 3

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Yet the equally legitimate tradition of uniting man to God and “begetting” divine qualities in him played a critical role in earlier soteriologies and is still suggested by the rite of communion. Intertestamental Judaism and Primitive Christianity in fact promised no less than deification (theopoesis, theosis), when the Bridegroom married the Bride and planted his supernatural life in her, making them spiritually “one.” The felicitous English expression invented to describe such unions was the thirteenth-century phrase, “at-one-ment,” which was employed scripturally for the first time in Tyndale’s translation of Romans 5:11, where Paul declares that through Christ “we have received the ‘atonement’ (katallagē).” In Greek, katallagē means “reconciliation,” or “the restoration of friendship and harmony.” Tyndale, however, preferred to render Paul’s katallagē with the more pregnant expression, “at-one-ment,” which serendipitously suggested the idea of a literal union.6 Thus, with a fortunate new word, he offered his readers a deeper understanding of what Paul and John meant by “oneness with Christ” than the establishment of mere “harmony” or “mental agreement,” an act for which there was no exact equivalent in either the Hebrew Old Testament or the Greek New Testament, though the idea of “cleavage” to the Lord was clearly anticipated by the use of the verb dabaq (“cleave, cling”) in the Psalms. The Greek word for this deeper kind of “oneness” would undoubtedly have been henosis, which is derived from the numeral, hen (“one”), hence meaning “to become one.” Jewish mystics likewise adopted the Hebrew word yiḥud (“unification”) as a proper description of man’s soteriological union with God, also derived from the number “one” (eḥad), and which similarly meant “to become one.” Unfortunately, the idea of “at-one-ment” was somewhat compromised when it was employed to render the Old Testament verb kipper, which actually means “to wipe clean,” or “to purify,” referring to the use of sacrificial blood to sanctify the Temple on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). Association with blood-sacrifice in turn invested “at-one-ment” with a punitive or disciplinary meaning, making it a forensic act instead of a transformation through union with the Divine. The difference between these two kinds of soteriology can be seen when we compare the Latin and Greek theories of salvation. In the former, God delivers men from guilt by extracting a penalty E.g., “He made them at one with God, that there should be nothing to break the atonement, but that the things in heaven and the things on earth should be joined together as it were into one body” (Thomas More). “Their long divided bodies they atone, and enter amorous parley” (Thomas Heywood). 6

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from his Son, while in the latter, he delivers them from corruption by uniting himself with the unholy in order to make it holy. W. Adams Brown summarized this important distinction by pointing out that in Latin tradition, Christ redeems men by suffering death and punishment for their sins (“expiation,” “penal substitution,” “scapegoat,” etc.), whereas in the Greek tradition it is not Christ’s death that answers man’s need, but sharing the power of his resurrection.7 Thus while the Latin Church saw God and Christ as lawgivers and judges—eager to “balance the books” and “punish transgression”—the Greeks saw them as the Ultimate Reality with which the sinner must unite in order to be transformed into something new. This again corresponds to the original meaning of the English word “atonement,”8 whereas other Western languages have favored the Latin idea of “expiation,” or “penal satisfaction” (e.g., German Sühne [the original meaning behind versöhnen], Busse, Genugtuung; French racheter, expiation, réparation, etc.). The “punitive” idea also worked its way into the popular understanding of the English word “atonement,” which now means “to pay the price, to make reparation.” Modern Jews likewise tend to think of “atonement” as a process of “remorse” and “mortification,” whereas the original New Year’s Day—which eventually became Yom Kippur—was probably a day of intense joy over God’s return to his Temple.9 Attaining righteousness through the receipt of God’s Spirit was also the object of the Jewish Wisdom Mystery; hence it would be unjust to characterize Jewish soteriology as exclusively “legalistic,” as many Christians have done. Indeed, we have seen that the New Testament idea of renewal through henosis with the Divine had important roots in the Jewish Temple feasts, when pilgrims went to the Sanctuary to receive a personal vision of God’s “Face,” and to be filled with his light,10 just as “at-one-ment” with Christ filled the penitent with God’s Spirit, his supernatural righteousness making it possible to keep God’s law successfully (Rom 8:3–5; 2 Cor 3:9). In this sense, Johannine and Pauline soteriology was a continuation of Jewish tradition, probably mediated by the same Jewish-Christian community that gave us the Gospel of Thomas, later transformed by Paul into the “Great Mystery” 7 See his “Expiation and Atonement,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York, 1925), 5:641–50. 8 Oxford English Dictionary, 1:754–55 (Second Edition). 9 See Julian Morgenstern, “The Gates of Righteousness,” HUCA 6 (1929): 1– 37, esp. 19, 25, 31–32, 35. 10 See “The Temple as a Source of Power” (pp. 64–82, above).

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of “Marriage to Christ,” and by John into the “Marriage Supper of the Lamb.”

THE HEAVENLY PATTERN OF THE SEXES IN THE GREAT MYSTERY According to the Great Mystery, an eternal male-female pattern governs behavior on several levels: marriages that take place in the celestial world, man’s redemptive marriage to Yahweh-Christ; and human marriages that assimilate husband and wife to heavenly prototypes. Indeed, though it is largely ignored by modern believers, this divine male-female paradigm has been a critical part of Israel’s soteriology for countless centuries, probably since the time of the Sumero-Semitic “Sacred Marriage,”11 shaping the symbolism of the Temple, and inspiring numerous scriptural references to God’s “marriage” to his people, the most striking being the poetry of Song of Songs. Though some have dismissed Song of Songs as little more than a collection of antique love-ballads, its true meaning no doubt goes back the union of Yahweh and a Female Companion during Israel’s Iron Age, a union imitated ritually by the taking of brides during the ancient Feast of Tabernacles. Gershom Scholem’s valuable summary of this immemorial tradition is worth quoting again for its depiction of this Divine Sexuality and the great importance it had in Jewish tradition, and by extension, in New Testament and Gnostic traditions of Christ’s union with the Church: The hieros gamos, the “sacred union” of the King and Queen, the Celestial Bridegroom and the Celestial Bride, to name a few of the symbols, is the central fact in the whole chain of divine manifestations in the hidden world. In God there is a union of the active and the passive, procreation and conception, from which all mundane life and bliss are derived … One of the images employed to describe the unfolding of the Sefiroth pictures them … as the offspring of mystical procreation, in which the first ray of divine light is also the primeval germ of creation; for its ray which emerges from Nothing (i.e., God beyond human understanding) is, as it were, sown into the “celestial mother,” i.e., into the divine Intellect, out of whose womb the Sefiroth spring forth, as King and Queen, son and daughter. Dimly we perceive behind these mystical images the male and female gods of antiquity, anathema as they were to the pious Kabbalist.12

11 12

See pp. 264–65, above; also p. 398. Scholem, MT JM, 227.

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The Catholic paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, considering the universal importance of this sexual paradigm, drew a similar conclusion, though he couched it in scientific language, describing the attraction of the sexes an integral part of the cosmic order: The mutual attraction of the sexes is so fundamental a fact that any explanation of the world which does not succeed in incorporating it structurally, as an essential part of its edifice, is virtually condemned (Esquisse d’un universe personnel, 1936, Oeuvres, vi. 91).13

The union of the sexes would in fact appear to be part of what physicists call the “Anthropic Cosmological Principle,” a design encoded in the very atoms and particles of the universe. One even suspects that the Genesis account of the Primal Adam’s separation into isolated sexes, and his reconstitution by means of marriage (Gen 1:26–27 and 2:22–24), were based on an intuitive recognition of meiosis and fertilization, where the 46 chromosomes of Ideal Humanity are first reduced to the 23 chromosomes of egg and sperm, so that they can recombine to recreate the 46 chromosomes of the human being. This also survived in the domestic hieros gamos of the Kabbalists, during which legitimate intercourse transformed the husband and wife into the Holy Cherubim, at the same time “catalyzing” the union of God and his Shekhinah, who came to dwell between the human couple, and to plant superior souls in their offspring (the “Secret of a King”). Loss of the Great Mystery and its association with the Temple were largely due to the latter’s destruction in A.D. 70. We nevertheless encounter a number of idealized plans for a restored Temple, as it was pictured, for instance, in the “True Gnosis” of Clement of Alexandria, or in the “secret mysteries” of Origen. Many of the “heretical” Gnostics also built “Bridal Chambers,” patterned after the Jerusalem Holy of Holies, where a symbolic marriage was believed to “catalyze” the marriage of Christ and the believer. Thus, theoretical pictures of a restored Temple cultus continued to conclude by passing through the veil in union with Christ (Heb 10:19–20), or simply beholding the Embracing Cherubim as a sign of one’s forthcoming union with him (9:5). In the Johannine mystery, one received a celestialized vision of the Ark and saw the Bridegroom coming to marry his Bride (Rev 11:19; 21:2), as the worshipper was transformed into a “pillar” in the Temple that is God and the Lamb (3:12; 21:22). For the growing number of Gentile converts, however, who were not allowed to enter the Sanctuary, baptism 13 Quoted in Christopher Mooney, Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ (Garden City, NY, 1968), 241.

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had to suffice as the means of bringing about a redemptive union with Christ—as hinted by Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (3:27), or as recalled in Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Mysteries—for the loss of the original mystery and its replacement by Constantine “orthodoxy” left the Church without an authentic Temple tradition. We have also seen that early Jews and Christians conceived of the Temple as the earthly terminus of Wisdom’s Light-Stream. This “Light-Stream” was thought of as an “effluence of God’s glory” and a “mirror of his active power” (Wisdom of Solomon, 7:25ff), hence the means of communicating his attributes to men. Philo in fact told how this “effluence” of divine light “consorted” with men in the Temple, “begetting” divine qualities in them, even deifying them. The Johannine and Pauline concept of a “fulness of Godhood” that transfers deity to others would also appear to be a development of the sapiential Light Stream, during which one was filled with God’s luminous power, and divine qualities were engendered in him. A distinct advance over the Jerusalem cultus, however, was the requirement that those who hoped to become “one” with God must be willing to participate personally in the sacrifice that Christ initiated on the Cross (“dying and rising with Christ”). In this way, they would be assimilated into the mystery that science calls “negative entropy” (John 6:5–14), learning to provide instead of consume (4:31–34). And as they had been enabled to obey God’s Law, they would be judged and rewarded according to their works. Thus obedience became a prerequisite for admission into heaven (Matt 19:17), since the Law in its deepest intent consists of the norms that prevail in God’s Kingdom, though they were now based on the selfless love of Christ, rather than on legalistic considerations. In this way, the cult of animal sacrifice was transformed into the cult of self sacrifice, in synergy with the miraculous power that Christ displayed by his resurrection from the dead on behalf of his “friends.” Thus the New Testament promised that men would become “sharers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), and “transformed into the image of the Lord” (2 Cor 3:18). They would be made “like him” (1 John 3:2), their bodies “the same as his glorious body” (Phil 3:21), and filled with “all the fulness of God” (Eph 3:19). The Church Fathers used John 10:34–35 as a “proof-text” for the promise of deification, a promise that survived for some time in the Greek Church, but was reduced to sanctification by Latin Christians, as it is by most modern believers.

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THE LIGHT-STREAM AND THE GNOSTIC PLEROMA Gnostic intellectuals were especially eager to explore the internal structure of God’s “fulness,” and to understand its ability to bestow deity on others. Like “Wisdom” and the Holy Spirit, the Gnostic “Pleroma” was an “effluence of light,” containing the collective attributes and powers of Godhood.14 One might in fact characterize the Gnostic Pleroma as an “exploded diagram” of the Johannine and Pauline “fulness,” revealing its internal male-female pattern, a pattern that was organized like the divine lineages in the ancient Semitic theogonies. The Gnostics also saw in their Pleroma the sapiential River of Light as it flowed down from God’s Throne, branching into the angels and “days of creation” as they emerged at the time of creation (the “Hexaemeron”), no doubt contributing to the Neo-Platonic doctrine of “emanation.” In particular, they saw within the Pleroma the same “Father-Mother-Son-and-Daughter” pattern that the Kabbalists saw in the four letters of the Sacred Name (YHWH), and which likewise corresponded to the polytheism of ancient Israel. We must therefore view the Gnostic Pleroma not as the product of an alien mythology, but as a “cross section” of Wisdom’s “Light-Stream” or the New Testament “fulness,” one that contains the collective laws and energies that comprise Godhood. Those who consider the Gnostic Pleroma to be peopled with “foreign” and “non-Christian” figures should therefore realize that bizarre figures like Barbelo, Ennoia, Fate, the Upper and Lower Sophias, and the Thrice-Male Son were not alien beings, but algebraic symbols used to track the heavenly powers and their interactions, revealing the hidden structure of the “fulness.” In particular, the Gnostic Pleroma showed how God extends himself through angels and deified “offspring” to dwell in others, and in the process make them what he is: A process of extension, as the Father extends himself to those whom he loves, so that those who came forth from him might become him as well (Tripartite Tractate 73:23–28). The Father is the one who is within the rest. But that which is in them all is the fulness (Gospel of Philip 68–12–14).

Gnosticism further coordinated the devolving contents of the LightStream with the three levels of reality recognized by Greek science (pneumatic, psychic, and hylic), and corresponding to the “Three Degrees of Glory” 14 Described by de Faye as “la divinité sans Dieu lui-même,” cited in G. Delling, “plārās,” TDNT 6:300.

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that were encountered in the Jewish Temple, the same “Degrees of Glory” that Christians would attain after death.15 Even apparent differences between the Jewish Creator and the Christian Savior—who are actually identified in much of the New Testament—could be explained as graded appearances of the same individual—the Wisdom/Logos—who was in fact a historical relic of El’s ancient Son, Yahweh (Deut 32:8, original version). Thus the Gnostics arrived at what we might call a “Unified Field Theory” that explained the whole of ancient knowledge, both sacred and secular, at the same time reconciling the apparent differences that appear on a worldly level. Gnosticism also offered invaluable evidence of the Christianity that gave it birth, and whose traditions it sought to preserve, even if it sometimes distorted them. Indeed, it was never intended as a new religion, but as an explanation of the old, one that was especially designed to show the hierarchical relationship between Christianity and the Judaism that engendered it. In particular, it was a development of the conservative Jewish-Christianity that survived in Jerusalem until the destruction of the Temple, and which left us such works as the Gospel of Thomas and the Odes of Solomon. For this reason, the Gnostics considered themselves to be the sole surviving examples of true orthodoxy, amidst a plethora of diverging sects, including the one that would eventually prevail in the West. Finally, we have sought to verify this important tradition by examining its influence on medieval traditions like the Holy Grail and Freemasonry, both of which held union with the Divine to be the authentic method of attaining salvation. In so doing, they were only perpetuating the traditions of the Christianized Temple, which did not disappear altogether with the advent of Constantine Christianity, but went underground as the “Muntsalveshe” of the Grail legend, the alembic of the alchemical “Sacred Marriage,” or as the “Solomonic Temple” of the Freemasons, all of which offer substantial evidence of Christianity’s former veneration of the Holy of Holies as the earthly portal that leads into Eternity.

15

See pp. 43–44, 82–84, 245, 257–58, 272–73, above.

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A GREAT MYSTERY Anderson, George W. “The Psalms,” in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible. Edited by Matthew Black and H. H. Rowley. London: Nelson, 1962: 409–43. Arndt, William, F., Wilbur Gingrich, and Walter Bauer. A GreekEnglish Lexicon of the New Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Ashe, Geoffry. “The Grail and the Golden Age,” in At the Table of the Grail: Magic and the Use of Imagination. Edited by John Matthews. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Attridge, Harold W., Charles W. Hedrick, and Robert Hodgeson, Jr. Nag Hammadi Gnosticism and Early Christianity. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1986. Attridge, Harold W., and Elaine Pagels. “The Tripartite Tractate,” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Edited by James M. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1977: 58–103. Aune, David E. The Cultic Setting of Realized Eschatology in Early Christianity. Leiden: Brill, 1972. Baer, Richard A. Jr., Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female. Leiden: Brill, 1970. Baigent, Michael, Robert Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. New York: Delacourte Press, 1982. Barker, Margaret. The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem. London: SPCK, 1991. -------. The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992. -------. The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003. -------. The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God. London: SPCK, 2007. -------. On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Temple Symbolism in the New Testament. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. -------. Temple Theology: An Introduction. London: SPCK, 2004. Barrois, G. A. “Pillar,” in Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 3:815–17. Bart, Benjamin F., and Robert Francis Cook. The Legendary Sources of Flaubert’s Saint Julien. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Barth, Markus. Ephesians, Anchor Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974. Batey, Richard A. “Jewish Gnosticism and the ‘Hieros Gamos’ of Eph V:21–33,” New Testament Studies 10 (1963–64): 121–27. -------. New Testament Nuptial Imagery. Leiden: Brill, 1972.

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A GREAT MYSTERY Brooks, Beatrice A. “Fertility Cult Functionaries in the Old Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 60 (1941): 227–53. Brown, Arthur C. L. Notes on Celtic Cauldrons of Plenty and the Land Beneath the Waves. Boston: Ginn, 1913. Brown, Raymond E. Jesus, God and Man. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1967. -------. John I–XII, Anchor Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. -------. John XIII–XXI, Anchor Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. --------. The Semitic Background of the Term “Mystery” in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968. Brown, Raymond E., and Paul J. Achtemeier. Mary in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Browning, Don S., M. Christian Green, and John Witte, Jr., eds., Sex, Marriage, and Family in World Religions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Bruce, F. F. The Epistle to the Hebrews: the English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964. Buchanan, George W. To the Hebrews, Anchor Bible. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. Buckley, Jorunn. “A Cult-Mystery in the Gospel of Philip,” Journal of Biblical Literature 99 (1980): 569–81. Burchard, Christoph. “Joseph and Aseneth: A New Translation and Introduction,” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Edited by James H. Charlesworth. Volume 2. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985: 177–247. Burney, C. F. The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922. Burrows, Eric. “The Number Seventy in Semitic,” Orientalia 5 (1936): 389–408. Burrows, Millar. The Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Viking Press, 1955. -------. More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Scrolls and New Interpretations. New York: Viking Press, 1958. Cameron, Ron, and Arthur J. Dewey. The Cologne Mani-Codex: (P. Colon. inv. nr. 4780): Concerning the Origin of His Body. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979. Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Image. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Caron, M., and S. Hutin. The Alchemists. New York: Grove Press, 1961.

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A GREAT MYSTERY Collins, John J., and Michael Fishbane, eds. Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Colpe, Carsten. “ho huios tou anthrōpou,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 8:400–77. -------. Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule: Darstellung und Kritik ihres Bildes vom Gnostischen Erlösermythus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961. Conze, Edward. “Buddhism and Gnosis,” in Origini dello Gnosticismo. Edited by Ugo Bianchi. Leiden: Brill, 1967: 651–67. Coppens, J. “Miscellanées Bibliques,” Bulletin d’Histoire et d’Exegese de l’Ancien Testament 23 (1947): 173–90. Corbin, Henry. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Boulder: Shambhala, 1978. -------. Temple and Contemplation. London and New York: KPI in association with Islamic Publications, 1986. Cosmo, Umberto. A Handbook to Dante Studies. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1947. Coulton, G. C. From St. Francis to Dante: Translations from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221–1288). London: Duckworth, 1908. Cumont, Franz. Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. Cunliffe-Jones, Hubert, Benjamin Drewery, and George Park Fisher. A History of Christian Doctrines: In Succession to the Earlier Work of G. P. Fisher. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Dahood, Mitchell. The Psalms, Anchor Bible. Volume 1. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965. Daniélou, Jean. Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1973. -------. The Theology of Jewish Christianity. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964. Dasgupta, S. B. An Introduction to Tantric Buddhism. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1958. Davies, G. Henton. “Ark of the Covenant,” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 1:222–26. Davies, Stevan L. The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom. New York: Seabury Press, 1983. Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. 4th edition. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980.

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A GREAT MYSTERY Drower, Ethel S. The Secret Adam: a Study of Nasoraean Gnosis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. -------. Water into Wine: A Study of Ritual Idiom in the Middle East. London: Murray, 1956. Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques. Symbols and Values in Zoroastrianism, their Survival and Renewal. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Dupont-Sommer, A. The Essene Writings from Qumran. Oxford: Blackwell, 1961. Edersheim, Alfred. The Temple: Its Ministry and Services as They Were at the Time of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978. Eichrodt, Walther. Theology of the Old Testament. 2 volumes. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967. Eissfeldt, Otto. “El and Yahweh,” Journal of Semitic Studies 1 (1956): 25– 37. Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. -------. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History Return. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. -------. Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York, Sheed & Ward, 1958. -------. The Two and the One. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965. -------. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books, 1958. Elior, Rachel. The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism. Portland and Oxford: The Littman library of Jewish Civilization, 2004. Emerton, J. A. “The Origins of the Son of Man Imagery,” Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1950): 225–42. Engelsman, Joan Chamberlain. The Feminine Dimension of the Divine. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979. Engnell, Ivan. Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Epstein, Y’hiel Mikhael. Seder T’fillah Derekh Y’share. Offenbach, 1791. Evola, Julius. The Metaphysics of Sex. New York: Inner Traditions International, 1983. Fauriel, C. Histoire de la poesie provençale: cours fait à la faculté des lettres de Paris. Paris: J. Labitte, 1846. Fendt, Leonhard. Gnostische Mysterien: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Christlichen Gottesdienstes. Munich: Kaiser, 1922. Filoramo, Giovanni. A History of Gnosticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Filson, F. V. “Peter,” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 3:756–57.

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A GREAT MYSTERY Smith, Morton. “The Case of the Gilded Staircase,” Biblical Archeology Review 10 (Sept./Oct. 1984): 5, 50–55. -------. Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. -------. The Secret Gospel: the Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel according to Mark. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Stählin, Gustav. “phileō,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 9:119–46. Stählin, Otto. Clemens von Alexandrien, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1905–1936. Stauffer, E. “theos,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 3:94– 121. Stegmann, B. Christ, the “Man from Heaven”: A study of 1 Cor. 15, 45–47 in the Light of the Anthropology of Philo Judaeus. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1927. Stein, Sir Mark Aurel. Innermost Asia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia, Kan-su and Eastern Iran, Carried out and Described under the Orders of H.M. Indian Government. 4 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928. Stewart, Bob. “The Grail as a Bodily Vessel,” in At the Table of the Grail: Magic and the Use of Imagination. Edited by John Matthews. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Strack, Hermann Leberecht, and Paul Billerbeck. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. Munich: Beck, 1922–61. Strugnell, John. “The Angelic Liturgy at Qumran (4q serak šhirot ‘olat haššabbat),” in Congress Volume, Oxford, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 7. Leiden: Brill, 1960: 318–45. Summers, Montague. The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. London: Rider, 1950. Tabor, James D. Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise in Its GrecoRoman, Judaic, and Early Christian Contexts, Studies in Judaism. Lanham: University Press of America, 1986. Taylor J. Glen. Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993. Thomas, Joseph. Le mouvement baptiste en Palestine et Syrie (150 av. J.-C.300 ap. J.-C.). Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1935. Tödt, H. E. The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965. Tompkins, Peter. The Magic of Obelisks. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

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van der Toorn, Karel. “Prostitution (Cultic),” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, 5:510–13. Trible, Phyllis. “God, Nature of, in the Old Testament” in Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 5:368–69. Tucci, Giuseppi. “Some Glosses upon Guhyasamaja,” Melanges chinois et bouddhiques 3 (1934–35): 339–53. -------. The Theory and Practice of the Mandala. London: Rider, 1962. Turner, H. E. W., and Hugh Montifiore. Thomas and the Evangelists. Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1962. Turner, John D. “Trimorphic Protennoia,” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Edited by James M. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1977: 511–22. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: a Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948. van Unnik, W. C. “The ‘Gospel of Truth’ and the New Testament,” in The Jung Codex: A Newly Recovered Gnostic Papyrus, Three Studies. Edited by F. L. Cross. London: Mowbray, 1955. de Vaux, Roland. Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions. 2 volumes. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. -------. The History of Early Israel. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978. Vermes, Geza. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Volz, Paul. Das Neujahrsfest Jahwes; Laubhüttenfest. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1912. Vriezen, Theodore H. The Religion of Ancient Israel. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967. Wagner, Reinhardt. Die Gnosis von Alexandrien. Stuttgart, n.d. [1968]. Waite, A. E. The Holy Kabbalah: A Study of the Secret Tradition in Israel as Unfolded by Sons of the Doctrine for the Benefit and Consolation of the Elect Dispersed through the Lands and Ages of the Greater Exile. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960. Wallis, G. “dābhaq,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, 3:79–83. Watts, Alan. Nature, Man and Woman. New York: Pantheon, 1958. Weber, Ferdinand. Jüdische Theologie auf Grund des Talmud und verwandter Schriften gemeinfasslich dargestellt. New York: Olms, 1975. Weiner, Herbert. 9½ Mystics: the Kabbalah Today. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1969. Welch, Holmes. Taoism: The Parting of the Way. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

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Yamauchi, Edwin. Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Proposed Evidences. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973. Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. New York: Pantheon Books, 1946. -------. Philosophies of India. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956.

INDEX absorption, 71, 72, 363, 468 Adam Kadmon, 29, 82, 338, 339, 341, 344, 377 Adonis, 271, 428 agape, 106, 207, 209, 210, 218, 319, 321, 322, 324, 326 alchemy, 285, 390, 391, 398, 401, 403, 406, 407, 408, 411, 455, 463, 465, 468 allegories, 2, 119, 316, 354, 487 Anath, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 28, 35, 197, 266, 271, 366, 412 antitypes, 20, 119, 254, 268, 277, 282 Aphrodite, 271, 324, 365 Archons, 320, 323, 376 Ark, vii, 5, 6, 7, 13, 27, 53, 54, 57, 58, 66, 67, 69, 124, 139, 177, 220, 225, 260, 338, 414, 421, 425, 426, 427, 432, 467, 473, 482, 492 Artemis, 365 asceticism, 307, 313, 316, 329, 331, 343, 353, 355, 356 Asherah, 26, 27, 52, 55, 266, 271, 346, 482, 493, 502 Atonement, 2, 19, 84, 87, 169, 279, 332, 334, 470, 476 Attis, 271, 428 Baal, 11, 12, 13, 16, 26, 28, 33, 52, 90, 197, 271, 272, 273, 412, 428 Baphomet, 385, 386 baptism, 88, 91, 93, 115, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 142, 155, 173, 174, 175, 176, 199, 203, 207, 238, 245, 247, 248, 286, 292, 310, 328, 373, 380, 424, 473 Barbelo, 275, 278, 299, 320, 321, 322, 323, 448, 475

Bardaisan, 372, 379 beard, 386 Beatific Vision, 236, 238, 353, 421 beginning, 10, 25, 34, 51, 57, 63, 64, 66, 79, 90, 99, 100, 102, 123, 146, 155, 156, 157, 161, 162, 172, 175, 178, 223, 232, 245, 248, 261, 264, 270, 277, 286, 289, 292, 300, 310, 327, 330, 340, 341, 354, 355, 387, 400, 401, 404, 409, 427, 429 blood, 68, 115, 119, 120, 132, 141, 142, 166, 169, 243, 319, 320, 321, 381, 400, 413, 415, 417, 421, 422, 423, 424, 428, 456, 462, 470 Bogomils, 371, 375, 380, 384, 430 Bogumils, 329 Buddhism, 374, 397, 450, 451, 453, 457, 461, 481, 482 bull, 32, 33, 421 caduceus, 391, 394, 458 Catharism, 316, 371, 383 Cathars, vii, 329, 372, 375, 381, 382, 384, 425, 430 cauldrons, 418, 426 celibacy, 226, 306, 307, 332, 354, 355 Celtic, 391, 414, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 426, 430, 479, 491 chaos, 16, 76, 173, 181, 266, 325, 373, 392, 413 chariot, 22, 204, 219, 336, 346 cinnabar, 400, 462 circumcision, 129, 132, 161, 171, 172, 173, 174, 186 cleavage, 70, 140, 169, 363, 464, 468, 469 cleave, 124, 125, 131, 169, 311, 469

489

490

A GREAT MYSTERY

communion, 44, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 88, 123, 124, 180, 186, 187, 209, 248, 301, 322, 324, 335, 336, 356, 358, 413, 469 compass, 392, 393, 395, 396, 397, 435, 437, 438, 457 consummation, 18, 192, 233, 287, 413 Coptic, 102, 127, 190, 207, 286, 374, 378, 443, 483, 499 Cybele, 271 Degree, 108, 400, 435, 436, 437, 440, 447, 496 deification, 3, 40, 83, 122, 143, 184, 215, 219, 234, 237, 356, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 377, 469, 474 desert, 17, 27, 29, 30, 31, 77, 79, 89, 151, 152, 345, 353, 355, 412, 457 door, 38, 105, 114, 122, 272, 303, 406 Ebionite, vi, 89, 146, 182, 186, 241, 242, 243, 246, 326 Eden, 64, 128, 137, 167, 186, 196, 197, 249, 253, 328, 432 effluence, 24, 51, 56, 57, 82, 113, 189, 190, 194, 199, 265, 297, 328, 473, 474 El, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 47, 79, 90, 93, 107, 170, 256, 266, 271, 272, 273, 346, 352, 475, 483, 490, 495 Elkasaite, 230, 233, 246 Elyon, 14, 79, 90, 261, 273 Encratites, 316, 355 equinox, 52, 53, 272 Eucharist, 1, 126, 127, 130, 132, 199, 207, 209, 248, 319, 321, 322, 325, 326, 327, 328, 421 eunuchs, 226, 308 Eve, 10, 20, 128, 131, 134, 137, 138, 139, 145, 157, 158, 160, 188, 204, 245, 246, 277, 278, 279, 281, 286, 314, 316, 325, 350, 352, 366, 376, 411, 425, 468, 493

fire, 6, 37, 52, 53, 55, 56, 66, 67, 76, 81, 98, 148, 149, 242, 243, 249, 261, 319, 329, 333, 358, 359, 362, 372, 375, 376, 400, 407, 410, 427, 431, 448, 452, 460, 464, 465 Fisher King, 415, 417, 423 fruitfulness, 19, 161, 191, 196, 198, 468 Fu Hsih, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 404, 453, 458 gnosis, 39, 113, 149, 219, 239, 288, 328, 329, 378, 422, 451 Gnostic, vi, vii, 1, 15, 22, 28, 50, 57, 58, 96, 98, 99, 102, 106, 127, 134, 137, 146, 150, 160, 165, 168, 176, 178, 183, 195, 201, 202, 206, 212, 217, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 236, 238, 240, 242, 243, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 264, 265, 267, 269, 270, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 294, 298, 299, 301, 303, 306, 310, 319, 320, 322, 323, 325, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 356, 366, 372, 374, 375, 376, 378, 379, 380, 381, 385, 387, 408, 409, 419, 423, 424, 425, 428, 429, 430, 431, 433, 437, 438, 441, 449, 450, 452, 454, 455, 465, 468, 471, 474, 480, 483, 485, 486, 487, 489, 490, 494, 499, 501, 502 Gnosticism, vi, vii, 1, 13, 28, 39, 57, 82, 96, 127, 129, 137, 154, 158, 174, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184, 194, 195, 203, 239, 243, 244, 246, 251, 252, 253, 254, 268, 274, 275, 280, 287, 288, 291, 316, 318, 319, 329, 330, 331, 334, 356, 371, 372, 373, 385, 422, 424, 430, 441, 450, 451, 454, 475, 477, 478, 483, 484, 486, 487, 489, 491, 495, 497, 498, 499, 503

INDEX Gnostics, 22, 50, 82, 145, 176, 194, 203, 218, 222, 239, 252, 253, 254, 255, 259, 265, 269, 270, 274, 275, 276, 278, 280, 281, 283, 286, 293, 306, 317, 318, 320, 323, 324, 326, 327, 328, 330, 331, 332, 339, 357, 366, 367, 372, 382, 385, 401, 423, 429, 455, 473, 474, 475, 483, 490 gold, 31, 32, 52, 55, 190, 236, 362, 398, 400, 401, 402, 408, 409, 410, 462 Gospel of Philip, 7, 97, 105, 106, 121, 127, 129, 160, 176, 195, 203, 210, 213, 243, 246, 276, 277, 278, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 298, 299, 304, 311, 312, 323, 409, 432, 443, 475, 480, 482, 486, 488, 502 Gospel of Thomas, v, 38, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102, 107, 121, 123, 128, 130, 138, 140, 160, 169, 178, 179, 183, 184, 187, 188, 189, 200, 203, 205, 209, 214, 216, 237, 243, 282, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, 292, 302, 303, 304, 312, 313, 358, 386, 405, 409, 433, 442, 443, 447, 449, 453, 471, 475, 482, 486, 502 harlot, 108, 125, 134 Heavenly Council, 20, 71, 75, 76 henosis, 38, 72, 88, 109, 140, 142, 169, 170, 182, 237, 254, 283, 295, 332, 359, 380, 469, 471 heptad, 77, 148, 160 Hexaemeron, v, 58, 78, 102, 138, 147, 149, 150, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 245, 254, 255, 339, 340, 366, 474 hieros gamos, 10, 14, 19, 20, 29, 34, 36, 42, 51, 65, 123, 131, 134, 135, 137, 165, 181, 182, 188, 191, 192, 197, 198, 200, 201, 205, 255, 295, 296, 300, 301, 302, 305, 327, 331, 338, 339, 344, 346, 348, 350, 352, 353, 364, 377, 378, 379, 406, 410,

491 412, 413, 414, 419, 425, 426, 432, 435, 452, 453, 463, 464, 471, 472 Hindu, 333, 376, 399, 450, 452, 454, 456, 458, 459, 468 Hiram Abiff, 405, 422, 424, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 443, 446, 447, 448 Hittites, 365 honey, 177, 179, 197, 199, 200, 320, 412 horos, 24, 119, 379, 380 hypostases, 266, 367 Ialdabaoth, 279, 301, 322 indwelling, 70, 92, 98, 111, 140, 141, 154, 171, 182, 280, 299, 305, 332, 363, 380, 460 Ishtar, 16, 271 Isis, 16, 38, 118, 271, 274, 353, 365, 391 Ka‘ba, 29, 348, 456 Kabbalah, 8, 10, 11, 21, 58, 82, 204, 213, 244, 280, 331, 335, 337, 342, 344, 345, 346, 350, 351, 468, 488, 492, 498, 499, 501, 502 Kabbalism, 16, 17, 27, 76, 224, 338, 350, 351, 363, 407, 409, 411, 422, 436 Kali, 365, 453 karezza, 212, 383 kavod, 3, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 136 kiss, 106, 114, 179, 180, 187, 209, 210, 211, 278, 284, 302, 303, 322, 348, 360, 368, 370, 378, 381, 385, 389, 425 Leper, 443, 444, 445 Light-Stream, vi, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 78, 147, 148, 160, 194, 248, 251, 253, 254, 255, 265, 269, 273, 274, 275, 278, 283, 329, 330, 332, 338, 339, 473, 474 lion, 24, 56 logos, 11, 40, 107, 148, 194, 232, 328, 391

492

A GREAT MYSTERY

Logos, 3, 24, 28, 46, 47, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 69, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 100, 121, 146, 148, 149, 160, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 192, 193, 194, 218, 220, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 238, 251, 255, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 275, 277, 293, 304, 306, 316, 325, 331, 368, 375, 377, 379, 407, 408, 421, 424, 425, 427, 441, 449, 475, 485 male-female image, 11, 20, 268, 338, 343 Mandaeans, 327, 372, 377 Manichaean, 371, 374, 375, 378, 379, 380, 383, 408, 420, 421, 422, 426, 434, 438, 450, 454 Manichaeism, 316, 356, 371, 372, 374, 377, 378, 379, 380, 441, 502 manna, 57, 116, 177, 178, 179, 414, 421, 428 Marduk, 31, 52, 266, 271, 332 Marriage of the Lamb, 115, 127 Mary Magdalene, 213, 214, 278, 309, 310, 311, 432, 433, 443, 495 marzeah, 210 Mecca, 29, 355, 365, 457 Melchizedec, 39, 43, 44, 91, 95, 117, 122, 140, 239, 484 Merkabah, 42, 57, 81, 83, 116, 124, 172, 186, 194, 204, 218, 239, 336, 338, 431, 483, 493, 498 milk, 37, 118, 192, 193, 194, 199, 200, 367, 369 mirror, 25, 60, 93, 112, 113, 116, 162, 163, 195, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 253, 288, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 356, 357, 359, 388, 473 Mishnah, 7, 54, 132, 159, 283 monad, 44, 48, 233 monasticism, 306, 354, 355, 356 Montanism, 355

Mother Goddess, 26, 27 mystae, 63, 104 mystics, 28, 75, 82, 140, 239, 335, 337, 340, 353, 361, 364, 367, 368, 369, 397, 430, 469 Nag Hammadi, 97, 106, 143, 214, 252, 284, 286, 287, 293, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 330, 373, 406, 448, 477, 479, 487, 488, 492, 494, 497, 501 navel, 186, 382 New Year, 30, 52, 53, 54, 55, 348, 373, 470 nous, 47, 59, 113, 375, 378, 389 Ophites, 325 orthodoxy, 8, 96, 134, 184, 207, 248, 251, 253, 275, 330, 334, 371, 387, 423, 467, 473, 476 Osiris, 16, 271, 274, 428 Ouranos, 273 Ouroborus, 403, 404 particles, 255, 375, 376, 472 Paulicians, 371, 384 Pentad, 375, 377 Phibionites, 319, 320, 321, 323, 324, 382 Philosopher’s Stone, 364, 405, 407, 408, 410, 419 phylacteries, 347, 349 pillar, 24, 355, 419, 448, 453, 473 Platonism, 49, 228, 274, 317, 331 pleroma, 58, 82, 168 Pleroma, vi, vii, 253, 255, 269, 270, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 283, 285, 287, 294, 301, 302, 312, 331, 332, 334, 337, 340, 474 preexistence, 35, 63, 92, 93, 99, 151, 156, 157, 163, 184, 232, 265, 276, 313, 351, 404 pregnant, 45, 283, 316, 377, 469 procreation, 41, 45, 46, 63, 165, 196, 215, 320, 324, 328, 338, 349, 376, 472

INDEX prostitute, 37, 38, 125, 208, 213, 217, 276, 457 Protoctist, 149, 341 protoctists, 149, 254 pseudepigrapha, 17, 335, 336 Pythagoreans, 353 Queen of Heaven, 13, 365 Qumran, 36, 44, 55, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83, 133, 151, 177, 181, 184, 186, 190, 197, 204, 207, 247, 274, 298, 307, 328, 336, 340, 483, 484, 485, 500 Ras Shamra, 16, 23, 28, 346, 366, 412 Rebis, vii, 390, 391, 392, 393, 395, 396, 398, 404, 408, 411, 435, 437, 465 Rechabites, 353 resurrection, 28, 52, 88, 92, 93, 120, 128, 141, 142, 169, 191, 197, 271, 286, 287, 290, 305, 311, 312, 313, 314, 406, 413, 415, 437, 439, 441, 442, 470, 474 ritual embrace, 105, 284, 392, 454 ritual meal, 175, 319 rod, 57, 117, 414 round-dance, 295, 296 sacra, 68 Sacred Marriage, vi, vii, 1, 2, 30, 31, 40, 42, 83, 103, 107, 118, 122, 123, 127, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 164, 165, 166, 191, 192, 197, 229, 234, 236, 239, 288, 305, 327, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 352, 353, 363, 364, 365, 378, 400, 403, 404, 406, 407, 409, 411, 412, 433, 457, 458, 465, 471, 476, 490 sanctify, 107, 130, 136, 175, 470 Sarpanit, 31, 271 seal, 12, 137, 173, 199, 221, 385 seed, 15, 41, 42, 47, 65, 88, 90, 118, 123, 198, 221, 223, 243, 263, 279, 280, 306, 318, 319, 320, 341, 349, 369, 376, 379, 383, 434, 464

493 semen, 21, 300, 319, 320, 321, 323, 327, 328, 401, 454, 459, 460, 463, 464 Sephiroth, 16, 58, 277 serpent, 128, 217, 326, 391, 392, 393, 394, 404, 444, 458, 459 serpents, 325, 391, 392, 393 sevenfold, 56, 57, 77, 116, 147, 160, 254, 338 seventy, 152, 153, 346 Shakti, 400, 453, 454, 458, 459, 460, 503 Shekhinah, 3, 6, 8, 11, 16, 17, 21, 27, 28, 29, 35, 44, 46, 59, 118, 196, 209, 215, 297, 298, 320, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 426, 432, 472 Shiva, 400, 453, 454, 457, 458, 460 size, 159, 168 snakes, 391 soma, 113, 164, 168, 452 Sophia, vi, 3, 28, 34, 39, 40, 48, 91, 178, 209, 214, 243, 255, 266, 267, 269, 270, 275, 277, 279, 280, 297, 306, 321, 323, 327, 346, 350, 367, 375, 379, 380, 383, 386, 388, 408, 424, 425, 426, 432, 433, 451, 491, 498 soteriology, 87, 108, 160, 170, 182, 249, 303, 323, 375, 401, 431, 467, 470, 471 square, 392, 393, 395, 396, 397, 435, 437, 438, 463 Stoic, 24 Stoics, 251, 316, 353 sun, 25, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 62, 85, 113, 157, 184, 188, 190, 197, 219, 234, 235, 236, 237, 242, 271, 272, 333, 375, 394, 395, 396, 400, 408, 412, 421, 450 surrogate, 12, 23, 33, 38, 42, 48, 107, 138, 194, 381

494

A GREAT MYSTERY

syzygy, 28, 146, 147, 164, 165, 230, 233, 234, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 267, 268, 299, 366, 373, 381 Tantra, 451, 453, 454, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 496 Tantric, vii, 383, 397, 398, 400, 451, 452, 453, 454, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 463, 478, 482 Tantrism, 452, 454, 455, 468 Tetrad, 15, 21, 253, 270, 271, 272, 273, 276 Tetragrammaton, 257, 437 theogony, 272 Theotokos, 365 throne, 24, 53, 56, 75, 76, 79, 82, 172, 214, 249, 336 tomb, 114, 213, 252, 305, 393, 396, 397, 411, 427, 441 transfiguration, 112, 113 Tree of Life, 64, 126, 243, 245, 280, 331 Triad, 15, 82, 270, 272, 273, 376, 462 Trigrams, 394, 395, 396

trinity, 340 Troubadour, 371, 381, 383 Upanishads, 451, 452, 483 Valentinians, 216, 221, 226, 243, 252, 254, 276, 277, 281, 287, 312, 318, 373, 380 Vedas, 452 virgin, 33, 34, 35, 41, 47, 48, 50, 65, 107, 135, 178, 181, 225, 226, 227, 276, 313, 315, 357, 359, 383 virgines subintroductae, 154, 212, 218, 315, 383 wedding feast, 345 white stone, 421, 422, 428 wilderness, 2, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 42, 43, 44, 67, 117, 177, 213, 248, 249, 313, 424, 431, 435 wine, 64, 126, 199, 319, 322, 326, 327, 328, 411, 412 womb, 7, 193, 300, 338, 340, 369, 405, 411, 425, 428, 472 Zoroastrian, 333, 402 Zoroastrianism, 333, 372, 464, 483