The birth of Kabbalah: the Bahir
A 12th century Jewish mystical text revolutionized the magical conception of the universe like no one before it. But what is the revelation of the "Book of Enlightenment"?
The Sefer-ha-Bahir, the "Book of Enlightenment" or "of the Light," is considered by a great scholar and kabbalist like Gershom Scholem to be an absurd text. It is very short, just forty pages; without a defined author (although many suspect it to be the mystic Isaac the Blind); "incredibly sloppy" in language; and finally, a container of theosophical sentences explaining the Bible, attributed to inaccurate if not non-existent Jewish scholars and religious authorities. It is the classic "fluff" book, never to be bought because it is misleading (and delusional). However, in reality, the Bahir marked a true revolution in the history of the Jewish religion, which, starting from 1180, spread from Provence throughout the Mediterranean, influencing all of Western esotericism to this day. Yes, because the Bahir gave birth to the Kabbalah, the Jewish Kabbalah, that set of mystical concepts that transcend the Israelite religion to reach a deeper sense of universal archetypes that are the foundation of all confessions. Paradoxical for a cult like that of Israel, which can be defined as a fundamentalist theocracy in its most orthodox sense and which, instead, in the 12th century, demonstrated an unprecedented capacity for syncretism and evolution in history. Or maybe there is a precedent: that Egyptian-Gnostic-Platonist cult that had its natural home in Alexandria (until it was relegated to the shadows by the fanaticism of Roman Christians). But what is most astonishing about Kabbalah is its ability to innovate a text like the dogmatic and immutable biblical one. Through the analysis of the words and individual letters of the Torah, the kabbalists managed to penetrate the occult meaning of the universe, precisely by rediscovering the meaning of the archetypes of myth.
For centuries after the Diaspora, Judaism erased the sense of myth from its rituals, losing the use of symbols and the consciousness of their power. Symbols are tools for understanding unwritten messages; they can describe places of energy, sacred sites, cursed areas. They are not positive or negative in themselves, just as a road sign indicating falling rocks or a dangerous curve is not evil but simply performs its task of signaling the possibility of an event. Kabbalah, through its connections with neighboring religions, recovered the use of myth and symbols to explain reality, thus revealing a universe of images within the Bible. The Torah, in particular, venerated as an entity in itself, became the focus of mystical speculations, leading to the development of extraordinary concepts like the Tree of Life, one of the most characteristic elements of the Kabbalists.
How did this elaboration come about? It took a lot of boldness to dare so much, but evidently, the 12th century was an enlightened period of the Medieval Era if we consider how many esoteric entities were born during that historical moment. Amid the Gnosticism of the Templars, the Manichaeism of the Cathars, and the transcendent influences of Islamic Sufis, it is not surprising that 12th-century Provence (as well as Languedoc and Spain) was a fertile ground for the development of arts and knowledge. We recall the Provençal troubadours, esoteric storytellers who are the foundation of modern literature, as well as the tales of the Grail or the Arthurian cycle.
In this fertile ground influenced by external currents, Judaism was able to go against itself and its principles to become, almost paradoxically, a polytheistic religion. The key concept of the Bahir is the exile of the Shekinah, the presence of God. Here, God splits: he divides into the Shekinah, his feminine aspect. Shekinah is to be conceived as an intelligent energy, the Providence so dear to Alessandro Manzoni: a mix of justice, love, mercy, and vengeance. The Shekinah is beneficent and benevolent but can also be dark and dangerous, and her ambiguous condition arises from the cyclical conception of time and the universe. This world is not the first, nor the last: God created the world in such a way that the existence of things and creatures was destined to receive a message of awareness, an evolutionary teaching.
In this context, the meaning of the Tree of Life is that there are ten Sephirot, ten "spheres" interconnected, emanating divine power and intelligence, divided according to the aspects of the Creator. The ten Sephirot are connected to man and the universe and represent the projection of God into materiality: they are divided into four types of manifestations, from the exclusively divine plane to the exclusively material, low, and impure plane. It starts from the plane of human material action, Asiyah, then moves to Yetzirah, the world of spiritual formation; then to Beri'ah, the world of creation, the realm of high, angelic intelligences; finally, the last plane is Atziluth, the world of emanations, where the Ein Sof, the infinite, the primordial nothingness, manifests.
How to connect Man, immersed in the materiality and physicality of his body, with the infinite and superior Divine? Man, according to Kabbalah and Judaism, has fallen due to Original Sin: Adam materialized in the dimension we live in because he chose to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (the famous apple of Eve). But the Kabbalists reveal that he was previously anchored to the Tree of Life, to the Sephirot, and thus able to traverse God's emanations to move at will between dimensions. Sin is therefore the symbol, the metaphor of a renunciation: the renunciation of divinity. However, this is a temporary fact, because the soul, a divine particle, instinctively pushes man towards the light, upwards, towards the sky. It is not possible to achieve everything in one life, and so the Kabbalists introduce the concept of reincarnation to explain the evolutionary process of each soul. The human soul thus finds itself living for thousands of years, learning, falling, rising, gradually approaching the original light, the infinity of the Ein Sof, in a process very similar to that narrated by Buddhist religion.
In this, however, the soul is accompanied by the presence of God, the Shekinah, which is "in exile," having voluntarily materialized to help its own child and, like a loving mother, follows and nourishes him on his journey. The Shekinah is therefore equated entirely with the material life of the people of Israel, from the times of slavery in Egypt to the Diaspora. But how to interpret these data? Is it possible that they are true, or are they, as always happens when talking about myths, spiritual metaphors?
We know from history that the Jewish people were not slaves in Egypt and, on the contrary, they themselves were the conquerors of the Pharaohs' land. Historical reality tells us that the Egyptians did not have slaves, as they were not an imperialist and conquering state; during the period when the Jews theoretically resided on the banks of the Nile, we witness the invasion of the Hyksos. The name derived from the hieroglyph Heqa Kasut, which means "rulers of foreign lands," this invading people of Semitic-Canaanite descent came from Anatolia and managed to infiltrate Egypt by taking advantage of a political power vacuum. Having conquered Memphis around 1700 BCE with King Salitis, the Hyksos did not destroy the Egyptian political and administrative system but simply amalgamated into society, adopting Avaris as their capital and Seth, the god of evil, brother and murderer of the benevolent Osiris, as their principal deity.
Alongside him, they also adopted two Canaanite deities, Anat and Ishtar, while still allowing the Egyptian people freedom of worship. This trinity endured for two Dynasties, the 15th and 16th, during which the Hyksos rulers (including the notable Khyan, a true Julius Caesar of the era) extended their influence into Palestine, Crete, Anatolia, and Nubia. Paradoxically, it was thanks to the intervention of the Nubian kings that Egypt freed itself from the foreign yoke and regained independence, although the Hyksos people did not leave the country and continued to live mingled with the multi-ethnic pharaonic society at least until the advent of Akhenaton, the "heretic" ruler who imposed the cult of the God Aton, the solar disk.
The issue has generated much debate: a few years after the alleged deposition of Akhenaton or at least his disappearance, the Bible introduces the famous episode of the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt and slavery. This is a historically incredible coincidence, leading to the identification of the monotheistic Akhenaton with Moses, the leader and guide of monotheistic Israel. The Jews brought with them an object that has the same dimensions as the sarcophagus contained in the King's Chamber in the Pyramid of Cheops: the Ark of the Covenant might not have been constructed by Moses but was instead a looted object of incredible power in which the Shekinah, the presence of God, materialized. It is not difficult to hypothesize that the Jews fleeing Egypt are the descendants of the Hyksos, worshippers of a male deity as powerful and vengeful as the Egyptian Seth, accompanied, albeit subordinately, by a feminine, maternal consciousness that is no less terrible and powerful, being capable of both nurturing (the Manna in the desert) and killing. The Shekinah, depicted as a conscious entity, suffering and weeping for the guilty materiality of her children, was surely modeled on the figure of the Goddess Isis, omnipresent in our articles as the primordial archetype of Mother Earth.
After the death of her husband Osiris at the hands of her brother Seth, Isis was imprisoned and chained as a slave by Seth himself. Helpless, although the mistress of Magic and Elements, she weeps, despairs, and is justly prostrated by the dramatic situation she finds herself in. The Shekinah who weeps and suffers for the fate of Israel living in Exile represents the sense of Man forced to materialize, to live in a dimension not his own, unsuitable for his inner divinity. According to Kabbalah, every man is therefore a God, and the meaning of the Star of David, "as above, so below," takes on its full significance. The divine becomes human, and every action we take, even the most mundane, can influence stars, galaxies, and spiritual worlds. Isis weeps because she is imprisoned, because the universe is at the mercy of the God of Chaos and sterility: her desire is to generate Horus, the savior who will take the place of Osiris, defeating the usurper Seth.
The Shekinah mourns the exile of Man from the Ein Sof, from communion with divinity (the Orientals would say from Nirvana) but desires to generate the savior, the Messiah. The Kabbalists, starting with the Bahir but following a narrative line that will manifest in the subsequent Zohar, tell us that we humans are the Messiah. It is we, with our infinitely small actions, who influence the infinitely great. Chaos, Evil, is generated by us: Adam left divinity, chose to experience materiality, and here we are, prisoners of a low dimension, in contact with dark and confused energies that prevent us from seeing the primordial light from which we come. The sense of exile is the expulsion of Adam from the Garden of Eden, but also the flight of Israel from Egypt, its Babylonian captivity, the Diaspora after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and all the pogroms and persecutions that Jews endured, almost passively, throughout their history. This culminates in the final annihilation with the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. Today, Israel is an imperialist state, having fought five wars in fifty years, in the full bellicose spirit of the Hyksos: but it has lost the Shekinah, it has lost the Kabbalistic spirit. A Kabbalist is an initiate who seeks the presence of God in the world.
Seek the Shekinah, strive to integrate it into your environment, and harness its immense love-power. From a Kabbalistic perspective, Israel prefers to bomb rather than seek its inner power, thus distancing itself from its divinity and contributing to the maintenance of Chaos instead of its neutralization. In this way, it will never return to the Garden of Eden; its inhabitants will no longer be the children of the Shekinah but will live in the hope of a Messiah who will never come, because they cannot develop it within themselves. One of the key concepts of Kabbalah, also derived from Egyptian religion, is that this world is incomplete, and its incompleteness makes even the higher worlds incomplete. Therefore, the task of Man, the Messiah within us, is to realize God's project, the "Heavenly Jerusalem," here in the material world. Being spiritual, tolerant, loving towards animals and the planet, pacifist, respectful of laws and human rights without betraying or harming anyone: these are obvious, mundane things, yet divinity manifests in these acts. And only after many cycles of reincarnation, according to the Kabbalists, does one become aware of these necessities.
Of course, in the Bahir, these concepts are not presented except in a cryptic and obscure manner. We are in 1180, too early in this school of thought to have a clear picture of the mystical philosophy of Kabbalah. The criticisms from traditionalist rabbis were then exceedingly fierce, accusing the Kabbalists of heresy. However, in these criticisms, with the discerning eye of someone familiar with esoteric religions, we can glimpse those common traces that spread from Egyptian Kemetism throughout the known world. A message, similar to that professed by the Templars, which places Man at the center of responsibilities: a message of hope and struggle, of challenge and love. Nevertheless, Kabbalah endured with great success among the humble layers of the Jewish population until the 19th Century, when it was supplanted by the opposing Jewish Enlightenment.
Today, true Kabbalists are few, very few: as mentioned, with the state of Israel, perhaps the mystical sense that drew support from the esoteric currents of neighboring religions has been lost. But the work, precious though difficult and obscure, of these scholars is more relevant today than ever.
