- Shalom & Welcome! - Mortimer J. Adler's How to read a book - a guide to self-education1 is excellent, if you have been looking for “a light book about heavy reading”, and its 11-page listing of the world's great books is difficult to better.
Barbara Thiering's Jesus the man and Jesus of the Apocalypse2 are not themselves great books, but merit attention here because they are a public expression of their author's attempt to reconcile the text of one undeniably great book, viz., the Christian New Testament, with on the one hand the contents of the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls and on the other hand her own very deeply experienced need to understand Jesus of Nazareth as “a real, human, fallible figure,” and not “a divine being” at all.
Her publisher's summary of her findings is clear enough: “Jesus was the leader of a radical faction of Essene priests. He was not of virgin birth: he was a direct descendant of King David. He did not die on the Cross: drugged into a coma, he was later revived. The many visions mentioned by the Apostles were actual meetings with Jesus as he continued to preach and travel as far as Rome. He married Mary Magdalene, fathered a family, and later divorced. He died sometime after A.D.64.”
Startling to some as Barbara Thiering's assertions about the Jesus Christ of history may seem to be, the novelty of her writing does not result from the bizarre nature of her conclusions, but consists rather in her patiently argued and meticulously documented claim that she is doing no more than decode a large quantity of factual information about Christ and about early Christianity that has always been there, waiting to be read, in the actual text of the New Testament, but which previous interpreters have failed to detect even the presence of, because they lacked the requisite key…
Thus, as she reads and translates it into English, the text of Revelation (1:1-3) runs: “A revealing of Jesus Christ, which gave to him the God, to show to the slaves of him (God) the things which must come about shortly. And he (God) has given a sign, having sent from through the angel of him (God) to the slave of him (God), John. Who witnessed the Word of the God. And the Witnessing of Jesus Christ, Whatever things he (Jesus) saw. Blessed is He Who Reads. And the Ones hearing the Words of the prophecy. And keeping the things in it written, for the season is near.”
In order properly to interpret that text, however, it is necessary to decode it. Thanks to the rules for decoding she has developed, the resulting passage is seen to be a letter written by Jesus from Antioch in June 44 A.D. to Agrippa the Younger, who was expected to arrive in Cyprus in September that year, and it reads: “A public appearance of Jesus Christ, by special permission of Matthew Annas, to inform Agrippa of the new calendar with its primary feast at Pentecost. Matthew has granted a promotion, sending his chief celibate to appoint the Herodian Gentile missionary John as seer in the Ephesus congregation. Matthew is the superior of Jesus when he is in the outside world. Peter is head of the pilgrim congregation for Jesus, who is now at a monastery. You, Agrippa, as the Herod who gives the reading from scripture, are a Blessed One, equal to a celibate keeping midnight vigils. When you are in the congregation you listen to the lay teacher teaching from the prophecies of the Old Testament. You study the Writings yourself, and observe the ascetics' calendar, for which June A.D. 44 is your intercalation season.”
Decoded in a similar fashion, the text of Revelation (22:21) translates into English as: “The Grace of the lord Jesus with the holy ones. Amen,” and is to be interpreted as stating: “The crown-prince of Jesus III is with a Christian priest. The service is finished.”
It is not my present purpose further to examine Barbara Thiering's uniquely individual reading of the New Testament. However, I admit to experiencing some surprise at the lack of any explicit references to gematria in Jesus the man, and also to being considerably disappointed by the paucity and poor quality of her references to numbers and to Pythagoreanism in Jesus of the Apocalypse.3
Consider instead this most illuminating extract from Peter Tompkins' excellent study, Secrets of the Great Pyramid:4 “The problem of translating hermetic language from hieroglyphs is highlighted by Giorgio de Santillana when he points out that in the Erman-Grapow Egyptian dictionaries there are thirty-seven terms for ‘heaven.’ As a result, says Santillana, the elaborate instructions in The Book of the Dead referring to the soul's celestial voyage translate into ‘mystical’ talk, and must be treated as holy mumbo-jumbo. Modern translators, says Santillana, believe so firmly in their own invention, according to which the underworld has to be looked for in the interior of our globe - instead of in the sky - that even 370 specific astronomical terms would not cause them to stumble. He gives as an example the goddess Hathor being described as ‘lady of every joy,’ when the literal translation is ‘the lady of every heart circuit.’ The determinative sign for ‘heart’, explains Santillana, often figures as the plumb line coming from the astronomical or surveying device, the merkhet. ‘Evidently,’ says Santillana, ‘the heart is something very specific, as it were, the centre of gravity.’
J. Ralston Skinner in The Source of Measures was convinced that the Pyramid was not a tomb, but a temple of initiation. He went further and linked the Pyramid to the Jewish cabala, a system of allegorical symbolism among the initiated which sets forth the secret teachings of the Bible, concealing the great cosmic principles of man's origin.
According to Skinner the key to the cabala was said to be the geometrical relation of the area of the circle inscribed in the square, or the sphere in the cube. This gave rise to the relation of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, with the numerical value of the relation expressed in integrals, such as 22/7.
The relation of diameter to circumference, says Skinner, was considered a supreme one, connected with the god names Elohim and Jehovah, the first being the circumference, the second the diameter, which were numerical expressions of these relations.
Tons Brunés, who dedicated his The Secrets of Ancient Geometry to the Fraternity of Free Masons, shows that the Great Pyramid, like most of the great temples of antiquity, was designed on the basis of an advanced but hermetic geometry known only to initiates, only fragments of which percolated to the classic and Alexandrine Greeks. According to Brunés, the secret of this ancient geometry was so well guarded that the whole of it was not revealed until the publication of his book in 1969.
Brunés shows how the ancient Egyptians used the basic design of a circle inscribed in a square to divide both circle and square geometrically into equal parts from 2 to 10, and all their possible multiples, without recourse to measuring or arithmetical calculations, with the aid of nothing but a straightedge and a compass - common emblems, along with the Pyramid, of the Masonic orders of yesterday and today.
In Brunés' reconstruction of the secret geometry, the cross emerges as the first geometric addition to the circle and square, and is the key not only to the solution of geometric problems but to the development of numerals and the alphabet.
By including the diagonals, every number both Latin and Arabic and all the letters of several alphabets may be obtained.
According to Brunés, both mathematics and the alphabet sprang from geometry, not the reverse. He says that nowadays we use numbers as the primary factor in our calculations, and geometry only as a subsidiary, whereas he believes the Egyptians reversed the order. He uses a detailed analysis of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus to demonstrate that the ancient Egyptian system of counting was directly governed by geometric factors and that their ideas and theories were bound in geometric rules.
Brunés found that the circle was indeed considered sacred by the Egyptians, as were the square and the cross and the triangle, all of which are intimately incorporated into the Great Pyramid with its square base and triangular faces designed to represent the ‘sacred’ circle.
Brunés demonstrates how the circle inscribed in a square and quartered by a cross enabled the ancient Egyptian geometer to inscribe in a circle the basic figures of pentagon, hexagon, octagon and decagon.
Of these the pentagon with its five-pointed star is perhaps the most important: it automatically produces the Golden Section and the ø proportion in the simplest geometric manner.
Each line of the five-pointed star - the symbolic sign of recognition of the initiated Pythagorean, whose hermetic meaning it meant death to reveal - cuts the other in the proportion of major to minor: the Golden Section…
Though Greece has been looked upon as the birthplace of mathematics - largely because of surviving written material on the subject of mathematics and geometry - Brunés points out that Pythagoras, the founder of Greek mathematics, spent 22 years in Egypt as a priest of the temple, and only returned to Greece after Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, burnt the temples at Memphis and Thebes in 527 B.C. and dragged him off as a prisoner to Babylon.
Back in Greece, Pythagoras taught mathematics on the basis of what he had learnt in Egypt; but after his death his followers were persecuted and had to take refuge abroad. Some eighty years later, Plato left Athens after the execution of Socrates and joined the Pythagorean societies. He travelled to Egypt, where he too was initiated into the lower degrees of learning in the temple, which were slowly recovering from being disbanded by the Babylonian-Persian conquerors.
Plato collected documents and writings connected with Pythagoras. In the end he produced the concept that the cosmos was represented by the five regular solids that can be inscribed in a sphere.
Brunés maintains that Plato incorporated into the body of his writings, and especially in the Timæus, the secret teachings of the Egyptians, which he had sworn not to divulge directly, but which he handled in a hermetic language for which Brunés provides a solution.
Brunés says that Moses, who was also an Egyptian priest, had knowledge of the ancient geometry, which he passed hermetically in his instructions for building the Tabernacle, data which eventually reached Jerusalem and were incorporated into holy teaching.”
Surely, if this is so, Barbara Thiering's arduous decoding of the New Testament might have been expected to result in her being able to disclose to her readers at least the rudiments of this “holy teaching”, but for that we shall need to look elsewhere.
I am especially intrigued by Tompkins' mention of there being thirty-seven different words meaning “heaven”, since it is by now well known that 37 is also the number of Jesus Christ.5 Lea and Bligh Bond have assembled considerable evidence of “a systematic tendency” observable in the New Testament for Christian titles and phrases to be multiples of 37 when the numerical values of the letters composing them are added together.
As they noted in The Apostolic Gnosis6: “According to the law of chance only some 3% should appear. Anything more would point to design of some sort.” Their own investigations, although far from complete, led them to the unavoidable and irresistible inference “that there is something here which cannot be regarded as accidental,” since they have already found that there are theologically significant names and titles in the New Testament's received Greek text which, when analysed in accordance with the acccepted rules for gematria, have values of: 1 × 37; 2 × 37; 3 × 37; 4 × 37; 5 × 37; 7 × 37; 8 × 37; 9 × 37; 10 × 37; 11 × 37; 12 × 37; 13 × 37; 14 × 37; 15 × 37; 16 × 37; 17 × 37; 18 × 37; 19 × 37; 20 × 37; 21 × 37; 22 × 37; 23 × 37; 24 × 37; 25 × 37; 26 × 37; 27 × 37; 28 × 37; 29 × 37; 30 × 37; 31 × 37; 32 × 37; 33 × 37; 34 × 37; 35 × 37; 36 × 37; 37 × 37; 38 × 37; 39 × 37; 40 × 37; 41 × 37; 42 × 37; 43 × 37; 44 × 37; 45 × 37; 46 × 37; 47 × 37; 48 × 37; 49 × 37; 50 × 37; 51 × 37; 52 × 37; 53 × 37; 54 × 37; 55 × 37; 56 × 37; 57 × 37; 58 × 37; 59 × 37; 60 × 37; 61 × 37; 62 × 37; 63 × 37; 64 × 37; 65 × 37; 66 × 37; 67 × 37; 68 × 37; 69 × 37; 70 × 37; 71 × 37; 72 × 37; 73 × 37; 74 × 37; 75 × 37; 76 × 37; 77 × 37; 78 × 37; 79 × 37; 80 × 37; 81 × 37; 82 × 37; 83 × 37; 84 × 37; 85 × 37; 86 × 37; 87 × 37; 88 × 37; 89 × 37; 90 × 37; 91 × 37; 92 × 37; 93 × 37; 94 × 37; 95 × 37; 96 × 37; 97 × 37; 98 × 37; 99 × 37; 100 × 37; 101 × 37; 102 × 37; 103 × 37; 104 × 37; 105 × 37; 106 × 37; 107 × 37 and 108 × 37, which equals 3,996, viz., the circumference of a circle with diameter 1272 (just as 666 is the circumference of a circle with diameter 212).
Although I must again leave it to interested readers to study both of Bligh Bond and Lea's books for themselves, Warren Kenton's Foreword to their second volume is also pertinent to our present theme. “Gematria or the study of numbers and their relationship to letters and words,” he writes, “originated in Babylonia. It was adopted by the Greeks and later still by the Jews of the second temple period. It was a method by which connections between theme, idea, place and people could be made to deepen the understanding of what was written. If used in conjunction with the literal and allegorical methods many insights can be found in the familiar stories and characters portrayed in the scriptures. This can lead on to the fourth level of awakening when the scriptures become revelatory and alive as one sees them present in the world of today. The fifth level is to recognize that they are also within onself and relate to ones own development as a soul. The sixth level is to perceive the cosmic dimension of the text and how we are all involved in a spiritual reality in which history, allegory and metaphysics are fused into the flow of creation and manifestation of Divine Will. The last level is the direct contact with the Holy One. Here everything is seen as a reflection of G-d so that word, symbol and number disappear in the realization of I AM THAT I AM.”
To avoid a possible misunderstanding it will be as well to clarify before proceeding that highly as I esteem Peter Tompkins' study of the Great Pyramid, I do not believe it to be of Ancient Egyptian origin. In my already cited March 1995 RILKO lecture-presentation of Zecharia Sitchin's account of the origin of planet Earth and of the creation of Man I accepted his suggestion that the Great Pyramid was orginally built by the Anunnaki after the Deluge c.10,500 B.C., when they also established their new post-Diluvial Space-Port in the Sinai peninsula with a Mission-Control Centre on Mount Moriah, where the city of Jerusalem still stands. I also agreed with his reading of several surviving ancient texts, according to which the Enlilite god Ninurta emptied the Great Pyramid of the greater part of its technical equipment c.8,670 B.C. at the end of the Second Pyramid War, Jericho was established c.8,500 B.C., and both the Sinai Space-Port and its associated underground silo were regularly available for Anunnaki use until they were annihilated in 2,024 B.C. by the deliberate detonation of seven atomic bombs which also destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.7 That remains, broadly speaking, my position today, but I accept that Alan F. Alford's more recently proposed alternative time-table of events also deserves to be taken into account.8
That said, it is well to reconsider I AM THAT I AM. Alan Alford claims that although “the meaning of the name Yahweh (sometimes pronounced Jehovah) has puzzled theologians for thousands of years - so much so that the Jewish Publication Society now leaves the name untranslated, with the footnote ‘meaning of the Hebrew uncertain’, this is not a true statement… because the meaning of the Hebrew ‘ehyeh asher ehyeh’ is actually quite clear - it literally means ‘I am who I am’. As Karen Armstrong has suggested, in common parlance it equates to ‘mind your own business’.”9 He then goes on to argue that Yahweh is none other than Ishkur, the anti-Babylon, anti-Egypt, anti-Marduk Enlilite god of Anatolia and the Americas, claiming: “The first reason Yahweh's face could not be seen was to prevent the Isrælites from recording his image and hence exposing his secret identity to their enemies. And the second, more practical, reason was that he was absent on business elsewhere.”10
Zecharia Sitchin also realizes that “one of the most powerful biblical epithets for Yahew is El Shaddai,” a term that by mediæval times had “assumed an aura of mystery” and become “a code word for kabbalistic mysticism,” but simply means “god of mountains”. Nevertheless, he denies that Yahweh can be equated with Ishkur. Since “the Prophets” counted Iskhur “as just one of the Ba'al gods of neighbouring nations who were an abomination in the eyes of Yahweh, there is no way, therefore, that Yahweh could have been one and the same as Adad,” who is known to have been simply Iskhur under another name.11
In any case, as already mentioned,12 Sitchin accepts that the true G-d of all the Anunnaki-Elohim was that very same G-d whom Jews, Muslims and Christians are at one in worshipping today, and quotes13 the Jewish hymnal prayer:
Even more importantly, especially in view of the masculine bias of the synagogue prayer just quoted, it needs to be noticed that “Yahweh” does not precisely equate to I AM THAT I AM. Let Valentin Tomberg explain:
“No human being, not even the wisest, can name G-d (in the biblical sense) in such a way that the name would be no mere designation but real and effective… Only the person himself can designate himself as ‘I’. It is the same with regard to the name of the G-d who transcends the self (‘I’). The G-d who transcends the self is, so to speak, the sun whose single rays are the individual ‘I’s and… is, in the sense of St. Augustine, ‘more I myself than I myself am’. Now, if the name ‘I’ is misused when it is not used by the speaker himself, it is all the more misused when the name of the G-d who transcends the ‘I’ is used by someone other than G-d… The name of G-d which was revealed to Moses corresponds completely with the Being of the G-d who transcends the self (‘I’). The name ‘I am the I am’ is not the name which Moses gave G-d, but on the contrary it was given and revealed by G-d… it cannot be used in the sense of ‘He’ or ‘It’ but only in the sense of transsubjective Being. It contains no analogy, no likeness or image from the entire realm of existence, except for the analogy with the ‘I am’ experience of the human being…
In fact, two names were revealed to Moses - one name that is absolute: ‘I am the I am’ or ‘I am’; and a second, the name of the G-d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, YHVH, which is to be His name for ever and which, ‘to his remembrance’, is to be valid throughout all generations. Thus was revealed to Moses the timeless, absolute, [entirely non-gender-discriminatory] and cosmic name ‘I am’, and also the name valid for historical time, the name of the ‘G-d of the fathers’, YAHVEH (YHVH)…
The tetragrammaton, the name composed of four letters, contains the secret of fatherhood, motherhood, childhood, and the family… the name EHIYEH indicates G-d's dominion in heaven, and the name YHVH G-d's sovereign power on earth.” Hence, although the high priest was permitted once each year reverently to speak the name YHVH at a celebration within the Holy of Holies in the innermost temple to which no other person was admitted, EHIYEH (“I am”) was, quite simply, G-d's utterly unutterable name, since no legitimate speaker was ever available to utter it.14
The Albanian-born foundress of the world-wide Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa, already considered by many to be a saint, died aged 87 on Friday, 5 September 1997 in Calcutta, and Pope John-Paul II's personal representative, Cardinal Sodano was principal celebrant at the High Mass for her State Funeral there on Saturday, 13 September. Although the sisters' Constitutions forbid the keeping of any television set, radio, tape-recorder, projector or camera in any of the order's convents, Mother Teresa's success was notably facilitated by the media-coverage she managed to attract wherever she went.
As I wrote in 1978,1 “it would be ridiculous for the sheep to try and walk like the dog, or for the ox to attempt to trot like a horse.” Quoting the words of St. Francis of Sales (1567-1622), more recently I made the same point a trifle differently in the course of a lecture on Prayer in the church of St. Michæl & all Angels, Exeter, on 13 April 1994: “At the creation G-d commanded the plants to bear fruit each according to its kind and now likewise commands Christians, the living branches of the vine, to bear fruit by practising devotion according to their state in life. The practice of devotion must differ for the gentleman and the artisan, the servant and the prince, for widow, young girl or wife. Further, it must be adapted to their particular strength, circumstances and duties…”
Educators, politicians and publicists are all too prone to forget that what is sauce for the goose may very often not be sauce for the gander, since what is absolutely true often turns out to be relatively false.2 This was wisely appreciated by St. Clement of Alexandria (150-215) who, therefore, within the context of a contemporary controversy distinguished “truth” from “Truth”, and wrote: “Even if they should say something true, one who loves the Truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true things are the Truth; nor should that truth which seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true Truth - that according to the Faith.” And, no doubt remembering Jesus of Nazareth's divinely prudent admonition,3 he added: “Not all true things are to be said to all men.”4
Clearly, however, Jesus of Nazareth's and Clement of Alexandria's wise counsels will be of little use to us, unless we know how to discern between what is true Truth and that which is not. Doctor Crawford Knox of Ottery St. Mary, a member of the Scientific & Medical Network, provides his readers with some very helpful guidance: “The instance is sometimes quoted,” he writes, “of the man who claimed that when he visited a certain congested city ‘on G-d's work’, he always found a parking-place waiting for his car. He attributed this to his Faith and G-d's caring response to it.
Such claims have been dismissed derisively even by devout churchmen on the ground that G-d would not get involved in such trivialities. Such dismissal of the claim implies, however, not only that G-d is able to intervene but has some system of priorities. But if these priorities do not include the trivial, neither do they include many personal tragedies nor do they include the prevention of the wider horrors that constantly afflict this world, sometimes on a gigantic scale. And it requires mental ability approaching ‘double-think’ to accept that a G-d who could stop such horrors but does not do so, is a G-d of love.
Such objections, however, no longer apply if,” as Crawford Knox explains, “the dynamic plenitude of G-d is such that he is always present in creation, sustaining it and always seeking to redeem and guide it further into his life wherever and whenever it opens itself more fully to him. On this basis, normal life, with both its trivialities and extremes of good and evil, marks the continuously varying point of balance between the limits of where creation opens itself to the creative love and reason of G-d that seeks constantly to sustain, redeem and guide it further into his life, and where, beyond these limits, creation shuts itself off and deviates blindly and often wickedly from his love and reason. On this basis also, we need to recognise that creation is an almost infinitely complex system, interlocked one part with another at many levels; and that the scope of G-d's sustaining and guiding powers to prevail must depend not only on the openness of individuals but also on the openness and so on the responsiveness to the guiding powers of the Holy Spirit of the continuously varying situations in which they find themselves.”5
To the extent that the absence of the requisite degree of openness is something for which a particular individual is personally responsible, the human obstacle that needs to be overcome is one that existentialist philosophers, such as Miguel de Unamuno and Jean-Paul Sartre, have taught us to call bad faith. Unwittingly, perhaps, the Nobel Prize winner, Professor Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer of the Technical University of Munich, who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, appears recently to have fallen victim to this very human failing. Peter Plichta has published6 what appears prima facie to be relevant evidence.
“One day, around noon, at the end of January [1984], I received a telephone call from Professor Fischer. His voice sounded very agitated. ‘Mr Plichta, I have been in touch with Mr Mössbauer and told him that the two of us wanted to introduce him to something new, and that there was some need for caution in this regard. He wanted to know whether your discovery would raise doubts about quantum mechanics. I told him that quantum mechanics would not even exist if what you discovered turned out to be true. Quantum mechanics would then simply turn out to be a figment of the imagination. My colleague Mössbauer then got very angry and accused me of putting everything we have accomplished at risk. Our great achievement, modern physics, was the result of tremendous efforts, and now everything would collapse should any doubts arise. Such people as yourself should not be given support under any circumstances. He refuses to meet you. He does not even want to hear any of the new ideas’.”
Bad faith of this sort is not at all uncommon, and not only because of our individual proneness to what the phenomenologist, Paul Ricœur, called rassentiment - a general reluctance to acknowledge that any other person can actually be in any significant respect better than “I” conceive myself to be!7
Sometimes, however, the true Truth will brook no denial. Zecharia Sitchin mentions the famous incident of the Handwriting-on-the-Wall. “It took place in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar's successor as regent in Babylon, Bel-shar-utzur (‘Lord, the Prince preserve’) whom the bible calls Belshazzar, c.540 B.C. As related in chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel, Belshazzar made a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and was feasting and drinking wine - a scene known from several Babylonian and Assyrian depictions of royal banquets. Drunk with too much wine, he gave orders to fetch the gold and silver vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had seized from the Temple in Jerusalem, so that ‘he and his nobles, his concubines and his courtesans might drink from them. So the vessels of gold and silver from the sanctuary in the House of G-d in Jerusalem were brought in; and the king and his nobles, his concubines and courtesans, drank from them; they drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze and iron and of wood and stone.’ As the pagan merriment and defilement of the sacred objects from Yahweh's temple continued, ‘suddenly, there appeared the fingers of a human hand, and it wrote upon the plaster of the palace wall, opposite the candelabra; and the king could see the wrist of the hand as it wrote.’
The sight of a human hand - disembodied, floating by itself unconnected to an arm and a body - was disconcerting; the suddenness of the appearance only added to the sense of foreboding. ‘The king's mind was filled with terror, his countenance turned pale, every limb of his became limp, his knees knocked together.’ He must have realized that the desecration of the vessels from the Temple of Yahweh had triggered an ominous Divine Encounter with some unknown dire consequences.
He shouted for the seers and diviners of Babylon to be rushed in. Addressing the ‘wise men of Babylon’ he announced that whoever could read the writing and interpret the meaning of the apparition should be rewarded and elevated to the third highest rank in the kingdom. But none could interpret the vision nor understand the written message. And ‘Belshazzar sat pale and utterly scared and his nobles all perplexed.’
Upon this scene of fear and desperation in walked the queen; and when she heard what had happened, she pointed out that the wise man Daniel had been known for his ability to understand and interpret dreams and divine messages. So Daniel was called in and was told of the promised rewards. Refusing the rewards, he nevertheless agreed to interpret the vision. By then the writing hand must have vanished, but the writing on the wall remained. Confirming that the bad omen was the result of the desecration of the Temple's vessels that were consecrated to the G-d Most High, the Lord of Heaven, Daniel explained the writing and its meaning: ‘This is why by Him the hand was sent, and why this writing was inscribed. These are the words of the writing: Mene, mene, tekel u Pharsin. And here is the words' interpretation: Mene - G-d hath numbered the days of thy kingdom, and it is finished. Tekel - Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting. U Pharsin - Thy kingdom shall be divided, to the Medes and Persians it shall be given.’
Belshazzar kept his promise, and ordered that Daniel be robed in purple and honoured with a chain of gold around his neck, and proclaimed third in rank in the kingdom. But ‘that very night, Belshazzar king of the Chaldeans was slain, and Darius of the Medes took the kingdom’.”8
G-d, as St. Bernard of Clairvaux explained, is measure and number and weight - or, as St. Augustine puts it: “Numbers are the thoughts of G-d. The divine wisdom is reflected in the numbers impressed on all things. The construction of the physical and moral world alike is based on eternal numbers.”
Like numbers, letters too are rooted in geometry. A or alpha in its primitive form is based on the geometrical shape of the tetrahedron. W or omega similarly derives from the cube. The pattern of the middle letter of the alphabet, M, owes its form to that of the octahedron.9 G-d, therefore, the supreme Geometer of the universe, is traditionally said to be not only “Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End,” but also the Middle or universal Medium as well, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”10
Unsurprisingly, since all individuals are unique, and since in our personal growth we are each of us at different stages, not all interpreters understand the religious symbolism of the alphabet in the same way. “Bayley believes that the AVM glyph A bears the meaning of ‘Ave Millennium’ or ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. The internal M can also be understood to stand for ‘Maria.’ The orthodox view this as a sign of ‘Ave Maria’ and believe it to refer to the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. The implicit meaning of the symbol is that the millennial promises can be realized only when the ^ and the V are joined in harmony. The ^ is the archetypal masculine symbol, the ‘blade,’ and the V, its ‘equal opposite,’ is the archetype of the feminine, the ‘chalice.’ The harmony thus restored in heaven will be reflected in relationships on Earth.
At present, we have the paradigm of a perpetually bachelor son and a virgin mother as our ideal of holiness. A possible result of this combination is devaluation of the conjugal relationship of flesh-and-blood partners throughout the centuries. Yet it is the relationship of Bride and Bridegroom that is G-d's model for holiness, as expressed by innumerable prophets and mystics. We should note that this symbol is duplicated in the emblem of the compass and T-square of modern Freemasonry, A, which was once rooted in the medieval hope for the peaceful Millennium.
The letter M is prominent in many of the heretical watermarks… Often the letter M appears with a fleur-de-lis emerging from its centre. Other designs that feature multiple Ms are towers and castles. These are possible references to the Magdal, the tower or the ‘stronghold’ of the daughter of Sion.11 Bayley also found a number of elaborate crowns that feature the letter M, one of them including a G for Gésu (French for ‘Jesus’) and a horn representing the heretical preaching that shatters the ‘Rock’. This same G is prominent in the centre of the compass and T-square emblem of Freemasonry, where it is now believed to refer to the word geometry instead of Gésu…
Many of the watermarks have multiple Ms for Mary Magdalen and for the waves of the sea - mare in Latin; Miriam, the ‘salt sea’ or ‘Lady of the Sea’ in Hebrew. The meaning of the waves is the dissolution of forms. As we know, water can come in violently destructive torrents of storm and flood, as well as in gentle streams. Even tiny ripples can cause erosion and ultimate destruction.
The heretical doctrine of Jesus' marriage, like the waves formed by the MMs (the initials of Mary Magdalen), is, I believe, understood to be linked to the sign for Aquarius. Since that sign is understood to symbolize the dissolution of forms, I suspect that the heretics hoped their doctrine of the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalen would erode the existing monolith of the orthodox church. It could then pave the way for an enlightened and wholesome myth in which the Earth was understood to be the partner of G-d, the sacred vessel that contains divinity…”12
Margaret Starbird has here no more than touched upon quite a number of interesting and potentially important questions. Personally I agree with Joseph Blenkinsopp that “what should be affirmed at the present juncture is the need for coexistence between different interpretative systems with their quite different but not necessarily incompatible agendas. We need an edict of tolerance to discourage the tendency of new theories to proscribe their predecessors. This might, for example, encourage us to recover the insights of the patristic writers or the great Jewish exegetes of the Middle Ages. It would leave us free to look for the æsthetic aspects of the ‘text in itself’ without feeling obliged to condemn the quite different project of the historical practicioner.”13
Thankfully, however, the differences to which Blenkinsopp so helpfully draws our attention, are not destined to be ultimate. “The concept of attunement (Stimmung) embraces both the æsthetic and the theological elements. An existence is envisaged which is like an instrument tuned by the Spirit: at the breath of the Spirit, the instrument like the Aeolian harp rings out in tune. This is an attunement (Gestimmtsein) which is a concordance (Überein-stimmung) with the rhythm of G-d himself, and therefore an assent (Zustimmung) not only to G-d's Being, but to his free act of willing which is always being breathed by G-d upon man. And finally in virtue of this pliancy it is the order (das Stimmen) within man himself - his Augustinian rectitudo [or inner Truth] - which makes him to be himself the work of the divine Artist.”14
“The thoughts of well-meaning people live in the air. They inhabit the air as we do our houses. Before they are placed in books, and only by thinking them, and even if they are never written, they already live in the air… And without our knowing it, without our understanding in our heads, the ideas and souls of ideas that inhabit the air nourish us and encourage us”15
The Bible confirms and extends this truth: “The heavens declare the glory of G-d, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork, day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge. No utterance at all, no speech, not a sound to be heard, but from the entire earth the design stands out, this message reaches the whole world.”16
The less poetic but more precisely scientific parallel biblical statement: “Thou hast arranged all things by measure and number and weight,”17 has been very recently echoed by Peter Plichta: “The infinite numbers by virtue of their prime number structure contain not only a numeric æsthetic, but are also the key to the material world and a medium of information to infinity.”18
Although it has become fashionable to suppose that human speech, which enables us to comment upon but hardly to add to this universally resonant silent discourse within creation, results from evolution,19 that is on the one hand to fail to take into account the extent in which human beings differ from apes and chimpanzees,20 and on the other hand it is utterly to neglect biblical reports of one of Adam and Yahweh's quite detailed conversations in the Garden of Eden.21
As Zecharia Sitchin pertinently remarks in connection with the text of Genesis (3:8-13): “This is quite a conversation. Not only the Deity can speak; Adam and Eve can also speak and understand the Deity's language. So, in what language did they converse, for there must have been one (according to the Bible). If Eve was the First Mother, was there a First Language - a Mother Tongue?…
It is gratifying to note that in recent years, modern science has come around to the belief that there was indeed a Mother Tongue; and that both types of Homo sapiens - Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal - could talk from the very beginning… It was mainly advances in other fields, such as anthropology, biogenetics, and the Earth sciences, as well as computerization, that opened new avenues of study of what some call ‘linguistic genetics’… The skeletal remains of a sixty-thousand-year-old Neanderthal included an intact hyoid bone - the first ever to be discovered. This horned-shaped bone which lies between the chin and the larynx (voice box) anchors the muscles that move the tongue, lower jaw, and larynx and make human speech possible. Combined with other skeletal features, the hyoid bone offers unequivocal proof that Man could speak as he does today at least sixty thousand years ago and probably much earlier…
A ‘breakthrough’ conference was held at the University of Michigan in November 1988. Titled ‘Language and Prehistory’, the conference brought together, from seven countries, more than forty scholars from the fields of linguistics, anthropology, archæology, and genetics. The consensus was that there had been a ‘mono-genesis’ of human languages - a Mother Tongue in a ‘proto-proto-proto stage’ at a time about 100,000 years ago.
Still, scientists from other fields relating to the anatomy of speech, such as Philip Liberman of Brown University and Dean Falk of the State University of New York at Albany, see speech as a trait of Homo sapiens from the very first appearance of these ‘Thinking/ Wise Men.’ Brain specialists such as Ronald E. Myers of the National Institute of Communicative Disorders and Strokes believes that ‘human speech developed spontaneously, unrelated to the crude vocalization of other primates,’ as soon as humans acquired their two-part brains.
And Allan Wilson, who had participated in the genetic research leading to the ‘One-Mother-of-All’ conclusion, put speech back in the mother of ‘Eve’: ‘The human capacity for language may have come from a genetic mutation that occurred in a woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago,’ he announced at a meeting in January 1989 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.”22
As regards our use of writing, I have already mentioned that, like numbers, letters too are based on geometry.23 The Sumerian scholar, Zecharia Sitchin, elucidates: “Mathematicians, especially those dealing with graph theory - the study of points joined by lines - are familiar with the Ramsey Graph Theory, named for Frank P. Ramsey, a British mathematician who, in a paper read to the London Mathematical Society in 1928, suggested a method of calculating the number of various ways in which points can be connected and the shapes resulting therefrom. Applied to games and riddles as well as to science and mathematics, the theory offered by Ramsey made it possible to show, for example, that when six points representing six people are joined by either red lines (connecting any two who know each other) or blue lines (connecting any two who are strangers), the result will always be either a red or a blue triangle. The results of calculating the possibilities for joining (or not joining) points can best be illustrated by some examples. Underlying the resulting graphs (i.e., shapes) are the so-called Ramsey Numbers, which can be converted to graphs connecting a certain number of dots. I find that this results in dozens of ‘graphs’ whose similarity to the Mesopotamian cuneiform signs is undeniable.”24 “If Enki, or his daughter Nidaba, the Sumerian ‘goddess of writing,’ had known as much as Frank Ramsey, they must have had no problem in devising for the Sumerian scribes a mathematically perfect system of cuneiform signs.”25
All natural boundaries and thresholds have a similarly mathematical basis, and may never safely be arbitrarily ignored. Indeed, even every scientific “breakthrough” appears to exact its price…26
A North American New Age visionary writer, very recently emphasising acceleration even more than speed, also strikes a positively admonitory note we may do well to ponder:
“Uranus will move into Aquarius in January 1996, and you all will feel the early vibration of the Age of Aquarius! You will begin to feel like a volcano that is ready to erupt, like a horse that wants to rear and run, or like a libertine who wants to follow desire. You will try becoming your future image of yourself no matter who or what is in your way!
Everything is going to move faster, and nothing will ever be the same again. Chiron will attain its closest passage to the Sun on February 14, 1996, and it will sweep away the medical technocracy during 1997 and 1998, when it is in opposition to its sighting position. The long battle to be able to choose either natural or allopathic medicine will finally be won by you, since you will understand the survival codes. You will never allow anyone to control your bodies again. Saturn will move into Aries in 1996 in April, when you will feel great personal warrior powers. You will wonder if all the speed and pressure will ever cease, and the answer is no. However, you will be speeding up and synchronizing with the outer planets!…27
According to Dom Bede Griffiths (1906-1993), “The perennial philosophy” or, as I would much prefer to say, the most recent rediscovery of the perennial philosophy “stems from a crucial period in human history in the middle of the first millennium before Christ. It was then that a breakthrough was made beyond the cultural limitations of ancient religion to the experience of ultimate reality. This reality which has no proper name, since it transcends the mind and cannot be expressed in words, was called Brahman and Atman (the Spirit) in Hinduism, Nirvana and Sunyata (the Void) in Buddhism, Tao (the Way) in China, Being (to òn) in Greece and Yahweh (‘I am’) in Isræl, but all these are but words which point to an inexpressible mystery, in which the ultimate meaning of the universe is to be found, but which no human word or thought can express. It is this which is the goal of all human striving, the truth which all science and philosophy seeks to fathom, the bliss in which all human love is fulfilled.”1
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was equally committed to this quest for our universal communion I+N Love, but never lost his keen appreciation of the traditional Catholic distinction between Nature and Grace. As he wrote to Maurice Blondel: “The only Millenarianism I can foresee is that of an era when men have become conscious of their unity in all men and of their intimate connection with all else and can thus freely throw the fullness of their souls into the divine conflagration. All our work strives ultimately to prepare the sacrificial host upon which divine fire must descend.”2
More recently, similar considerations led the great Christian theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar to ask himself: “In the eyes of universal history, must the Church be understood as the next-to-last reality, the work of the second Person of the Trinity, just as creation and the Old Testament were the works of the first Person - a work that will be overtaken by an age of the Spirit, long-awaited, hoped for, and still to come? Or is she, as the one, holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, invested with the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the final and definitive reality, filled with internal potentialities that will unfurl across the ages, embracing them until the end?”3
“In the late medieval period, the most influential ‘end-of-world’ prophecies were those derived from the followers of the twelfth-century monk, Joachim di Fiore [died c.1200], whose numerology was rooted in sevens, with sub-numerologies of twos and threes… The followers of Joachim had predicted the end of the world for 1260, using arcane numerology based on Biblical exegesis.”4 While acknowledging that Joachim's followers' predictions were, to say the least, ill-timed, Von Balthasar feels that the call Joachim di Fiore addressed to the Church is one that we still need to hear:
“From within the Church, Joachim called for her succession of herself into a new age - an age of the Spirit. Thus the entire spiritual history of Europe can be read in the light of his thought: in a hundred different ways, we have tried either to give the Spirit free reign within the Church of Christ or to draw the Church forcefully into a third age of the human spirit - finally set free. These two lines of thought open the way for myriad nuances and shades of difference. How many nuances appear between the two extremes! - between, on the one hand, a Christian attitude that sees the Crucified Christ as the ultimate manifestation of divine love, exhaling his Spirit as a gift to the Church, and, on the other hand, all the attempts, hesitant or more vigorous, to push him beyond himself in some ‘theology of hope’! Making our way through the thick of this debate, we come to see that there is no other subject that is theologically more exciting or decisive than this - the most pressing subject imaginable in the spiritual history of the West… The Church's surpassing of herself into the whole of history is part of the essential structure of the Church… The Church herself brings about this surpassing, and even more she coincides with it.”5
In a 150-page document Father Henri de Lubac gave to several of his close friends on the occasion of his eightieth birthday he had written: “As early as 1956 I made the following notes in order to situate the matter more clearly - and I must admit that I am still standing at the same point: ‘I believe my book on mysticism has inspired me for a long time in everything I work on; in its light I make my judgments and gain the criteria for ordering my thoughts and ideas. But I will never write this book. It goes in every respect beyond my powers, physical, mental, and spiritual. Its articulations stand clearly before my eyes. I see the direction in which the problems must be dealt with and in which their solution must be sought, but I am unable to formulate this solution. Yet this is sufficient for me to exclude at all times from books I read and theories I find the points of view that do not correspond to what I dimly perceive.”6
After reading de Lubac's Le Mystère du surnaturel Étienne Gilson wrote to the author: “With regard to the essential question I find myself in agreement… You have said everything one can say, especially the most important thing, namely, that in the end one must be silent. For we really stand before a mystery… I see salvation only in a Thomasian philosophy, as you understand it, together with Augustine and Bonaventure and the great Fathers of the East…”7
As Von Balthasar points out, de Lubac had “soon realized that his position moved into a suspended middle in which he could not practice any philosophy without its transcendence into theology, but also no theology without its essential inner substructure of philosophy.” Hence, the found himself obliged consistently to oppose not only what Gilson has called Cajetan's castration of St. Thomas8 but also today's “new form of Christian schizophrenia that yields so much to post-Kantian scientific rationalism and secularism (as ‘opening to the world’) that the only thing left for the sphere of faith is a groundless fideism.”9
The anonymously authored and only posthumously published Meditations on the Tarot - a journey into Christian Hermeticism10 is among the best available antidotes to this malaise.
“It is very important to put these teachings into practice. The people who are receiving these instructions are not simply here to gather some intellectual knowledge but, having received the empowerment, have come here to receive the teachings in order to put them into practice. It is very important that we really apply what we hear… The point here is to receive the teachings in order to transform one's own mental continuum.”11 “There is, in fact, no difference whatever between the emptiness taught in one path and the emptiness taught in the other.”12
“Illuminate the darkness enclosing my mind. Enlighten my intelligence and wisdom so that I may gain insight into Buddha's words and the texts that explain them!”13
- Shalom & Welcome! - 
© The Neith Network Library 2005
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