TEMPLARS
Modern occultists, for whom Baphomet is now a potent symbol, see in this
idol a representative of the Universal Principle, Azoth or theFifth Element which to alchemists is the key to turning lead
into gold. This is probably what it meant to the Templars too. But to
their interrogators, the tortured knights were confessing Devil worship,
and they were punished accordingly. The Order was disbanded, the Grand
Master burnt at the stake, and the offending knights sent to do penance
at various monasteries. The power of the Templars was crushed.
The Messianic Legacy: By Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh
http://books.google.com/books?id=eXEWzyAjNQYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Knights Code of Chivalry
A knight was expected to have not only the strength and skills to face combat in the violent Middle Ages but was also expected to temper this aggressive side of a knight with a chivalrous side to his nature. There was not an authentic Knights Code of Chivalry as such - it was a moral system which went beyond rules of combat and introduced the concept of Chivalrous conduct - qualities idealized by knighthood, such as bravery, courtesy, honor, and gallantry toward women.
Knights Code of Chivalry dating back to the Dark Ages
The Knights Code of Chivalry was part of the culture of the Middle Ages and was understood by all. A Code of Chivalry was documented in 'The Song of Roland' in the Middle Ages Knights period of William the Conqueror who ruled England from 1066. The 'Song of Roland' describes the 8th century Knights of the Dark Ages and the battles fought by the Emperor Charlemagne. The code has since been described as Charlemagne's Code of Chivalry. The Song of Roland was the most famous 'chanson de geste' and was composed between 1098-1100, describing the betrayal of Count Roland at the hand of Ganelon, and his resulting death in the Pyranee Mountains at the hands of the Saracens. Roland was a loyal defender of his liege Lord Charlemagne and his code of conduct a description of the meaning of chivalry.
The Knights Code of Chivalry and the vows of Knighthood
The Knights Code of Chivalry described in the Song of Roland and an excellent representation of the Knights Codes of Chivalry are as follows:
To fear God and maintain His Church
To serve the liege lord in valour and faith
To protect the weak and defenceless
To give succour to widows and orphans
To refrain from the wanton giving of offence
To live by honour and for glory
To despise pecuniary reward
To fight for the welfare of all
To obey those placed in authority
To guard the honour of fellow knights
To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit
To keep faith
At all times to speak the truth
To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun
To respect the honour of women
Never to refuse a challenge from an equal
Never to turn the back upon a foe
Of the seventeen entries in the Knights Codes of Chivalry, according to the Song of Roland, at least 12 relate to acts of chivalry as opposed to combat.
The Knights Code of Chivalry and the legends of King Arthur and Camelot
The ideals described in the Code of Chivalry were emphasized by the oaths and vows that were sworn in the Knighthood ceremonies of the Middle Ages and Medieval era. These sacred oaths of combat were combined with the ideals of chivalry and with strict rules of etiquette and conduct. The ideals of a Knights Code of Chivalry was publicized in the poems, ballads, writings and literary works of Knights authors. The wandering minstrels of the Middle Ages sang these ballads and were expected to memorize the words of long poems describing the valour and the code of chivalry followed by the Medieval knights. The Dark Age myths of Arthurian Legends featuring King Arthur, Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table further strengthen the idea of a Knights Code of Chivalry. The Arthurian legend revolves around the Code of Chivalry which was adhered to by the Knights of the Round Table - Honour, Honesty, Valour and Loyalty.
Knights Code of Chivalry described by the Duke of Burgandy
The chivalric virtues of the Knights Code of Chivalry were described in the 14th Century by the Duke of Burgandy. The words he chose to use to describe the virtues that should be exhibited in the Knights Code of Chivalry were as follows:
Faith
Charity
Justice
Sagacity
Prudence
Temperance
Resolution
Truth
Liberality
Diligence
Hope
Valour
The Knights Code of Chivalry as described by the Duke of Burgandy.
cont.
Baptism of Wisdom
The Baptism of Wisdom: Baphomet Series #2
The Oxford English Dictionary says that the first appearance of the name “Baphomet” in English was in the book The View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages
by Henry Hallam, published in 1818. Here the word was described as “an
early French corruption of ‘Mahomet’,” the name of the Muslim prophet,
more frequently spelled “Mohammed” in modern times. This is a theory
that has been supported by many other authors since then. There are two
main reasons behind this. One is that the Templars were suspected at the
time of their trials of having been secret converts to Islam. In at
least one of the knight’s confessions he mentioned that he had been
taught to exclaim the word “Yallah” during the blasphemous ceremonies,
which he said was “a word of the Saracens.” Also, according to scholars,
“Mahomet” was used in the Middle Ages as a generic word for “idol.”
But there have been other interpretations as well. The writer responsible for our modern understanding of Baphomet was a mid-nineteenth-century occult author named Eliphas Levi. Born Alphonse Louis Constant, he was the son of a shoemaker in Paris who had studied in the Seminary of St. Sulpice, a known hotbed of occultism and heretical thinking. He eventually dropped out, got married and began writing books about ritual magic that were published in the 1850s under the Hebraicized version of his name.
Levi’s main thesis was that all forms of occultism and mysticism held a common, secret doctrine. Ritual magic, he said, utilized the existence of what he called the “Astral Light,” defined as “a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of nature.” (1) It was this agent which reflected the magician’s will, expressed during a ritual, and actualized it into existence. He illustrated this concept with a hieroglyphic form which he called “Baphomet,” claiming that this was the spiritual principle secretly revered by the Templars. Levi used this picture as the frontispiece for a number of his books.
At first glance Levi’s Baphomet looks like the Devil himself. But that is only because the most common modern depiction of the Devil is based on the card of the same name in the popular Rider-Waite tarot deck, and this card is itself based on Levi’s depiction of Baphomet. Certainly the creature presented by Levi looks demonic and evil, with the head and legs of a goat, along with a human torso sporting both male and female sexual organs. On its forehead is that foremost symbol of witchcraft, the pentagram, and between its horns issues forth an enflamed torch.
Levi repeatedly stated that Baphomet was not the same as the Devil, however. Rather it was a symbol of a transcendental power beyond good an evil, man and beast, or male and female energies. Baphomet was in Levi’s view the synthesis of all energy, both on Earth and in Heaven, forming something greater than the sum of its parts, capable of performing any transformation of matter which the human mind could conceive. As for the meaning of the word, Levi suggested it was a code, made up of abbreviations for the Latin words “Templi omnium hominum pacis abhas,” meaning “the father of universal peace among men.”
Levi wrote many books in which he proclaimed the virtues of Baphomet, and of the universal agent which he said the figure represented. His writings, translated into English by A.E. Waite, helped to spread the occult revival which swept Europe in the mid-1800s. His ideas contributed greatly to the type of magic that was practiced by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Later, at the turn of the twentieth century, one Golden Dawn student, Aleister Crowley, not only adapted many of Levi’s ideas, but saw himself as a reincarnation of Levi. He took on “Baphomet” as his own initiatory name in the magical order he headed: the Order of Oriental Templars (a.k.a. “Ordo Templi Orientis,” or “O.T.O.”) Crowley also chose to use Islamic terminology when he proclaimed himself the “Caliph” of the O.T.O.
Towards the end of his life, Eliphas Levi himself had come to question his dabblings in the occult. When he had quit the seminary as a young man, his mother had actually committed suicide, perhaps because of her disappointment in her son’s life choice. Levi had apparently carried that guilt with him his whole life, and as he neared death, he converted back to Catholicism. His final book, Magic: A History of Its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, was a sad attempt to reconcile the faith of his family with the occult ideas he had promoted all along. The text if full of statements which contradict those found in his previous works. He came to describe Baphomet as a false idol, and the Templars as practitioners in Black Magic:
“For their better success, and in order to secure partisans, they fostered the regrets of every fallen worship and the hopes of every new cultus, promising to all liberty of conscience and a new orthodoxy which should be the synthesis of all persecuted beliefs. They even went so far as to recognize the pantheistic symbolism of the grand masters of Black Magic, and the better to isolate themselves from obedience to a religion by which they were condemned beforehand, they rendered divine honors to the monstrous idol Baphomet, even as of old the dissenting tribes had adored the Golden Calf of Dan and Bethel. Certain monuments of recent discovery and certain precious documents belonging to the thirteenth century offer abundant proof of all that is advanced here. Other evidences are concealed in the annals and beneath the symbols of Occult Masonry.”
There are three very interesting lines in this last quote. The first is his description of the secret Templar doctrine as “the synthesis of all persecuted beliefs.” The second is his claim that “monuments of recent discovery” and “precious documents belonging to the thirteenth century” proved that the Templars were guilty of worshipping this demonic idol. The third is the proposition that the deepest secrets of Baphomet are hidden within the codes of Masonic symbolism.
The second point may indicate where Levi got his idea of the Baphomet image from. After all, the Templar confessions described Baphomet mainly as a head. True, some of them told of rituals in which the behind of a goat was kissed. But where did Levi get the idea for a winged half-human, half-goat androgyne? According to various writers, Levi based his depiction of Baphomet on a gargoyle that he found on a former Templar property, either in Saint Bris le Vineux in Burgundy, Lanleff in Brittany, or St. Merri in Paris. This brings us to a series of depictions of similar creatures discovered on Templar properties by a nineteenth-century Austrian Orientalist scholar named Joseph, Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, presented in his book Mystery of Baphomet Revealed. In it he documented a number of objects discovered at Templar properties throughout Europe.
From Von Hammer-Purgstall's Mystery of Baphomet Revealed.
Von Hammer-Purgstall’s “Baphometic Idols,” as they were later called by other authors, consisted mostly of statuettes, coffers and cups presenting strange images of inhuman figures. Seven of the images show only a head, and in two of these cases it is a head with two faces, much akin to the descriptions given by some Templars of the Baphomet head. Many of them were decorated with scenes of bizarre sexual ceremonies of a seemingly religious nature. The figures presented were in some cases covered all over their bodies with multiple eyes, or with serpents.
One image in particular, from the lid to a coffer found in Burgundy, looks most especially like it might have influenced Eliphas Levi’s depiction of Baphomet. It shows a female or androgynous figure crowned with towers ala the goddess Cybele of the ancient world. He/she is holding in each hand a chain, and connected to each chain, floating in the air and upside-down, are the figures of the Sun and the Moon. Below the figure’s feet are a 7-pointed star and a pentagram. Between these is a human skull.
Cybele with gnostic chains, from Von Hammer-Purgstall's Mystery of Baphomet Revealed
This combination of images was not unique, but rather turned up repeatedly at Templar properties surveyed by Baron Von Hammer-Purgstall, and in other versions the figure is shown with a beard, making it quite clear that it was meant to be taken as androgynous. This, then, may have been why Eliphas Levi chose to depict Baphomet in this way. The origin of the goat-headed aspect of Levi’s Baphomet can be found in the Von Hammer-Purgstall collection as well. This is a depiction of a winged and goat-headed figure with human legs seated upon an eagle. Arabic, Greek, and Latin inscriptions were found among these images too. One in particular brings to mind the confessions of the Knights Templar about Baphomet. Von Hammer-Purgstall translated it thus:
“Let Mete be exalted, who causes things to bud and blossom! he is our root; it is one and seven; abjure (the faith), and abandon thyself to all pleasures.”
You will recall that some confessing Templars said Baphomet “caused the land to germinate.” Von Hammer-Purgstall believed that the Templars had been secret practitioners of Ophite Gnosticism, a sect I will discuss later on in this book. The word “Mete” in the translation above was a Greek word for “wisdom.” He believed “Baphomet” was an illusion to the Gnostic rite of “Bapho Metis,” the “Baptism of Wisdom.”
A gnostic orgy much like the witch's sabbath and Templar rituals. From Von Hammer-Purgstall's Mystery of Baphomet Revealed
The word “Mete” has also been connected by some linguists to the name of the sun god Mithras, worshipped by some Gnostics as an incarnation of divine wisdom. Thus Aleister Crowley’s alterative interpretation of Baphomet as meaning “Father Mithras” can be considered part of the same family of translations. More recently Dr. Hugh Schonfield, known for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, also proffered an interpretation that again led back to this concept of divine wisdom or gnosis. He said that “Baphomet,” when transliterated into Aramaic and fed through a cipher, yields the word “Sophia,” another Greek word meaning “wisdom.” In a similar vein, Sufi scholar Idries Shah has suggested that the Templars were influenced by Islamic Sufism, and that the word “Baphomet” came from the Arabic “Abufihamat,” meaning “Father of Understanding.”
Thus it has been generally accepted among scholars that, one way or another, Baphomet represented to the Templars the concept of divine wisdom, and that they were secretly Gnostics. Thus many modern authors who are sympathetic to the Gnostic worldview have declared that the Templars were “innocent” of the charges against them. They were not guilty of Devil worship or practicing obscene rites, say these authors. They were merely “Gnostics.”
But such a point of view seems a bit naïve. As my investigation revealed, quite a wide variety of religious cults have been branded as “Gnostic” throughout history. Not all of them have shied away from extreme sexual practices, the blaspheming of the Judeo-Christian God, or the glorification of the Devil. If the Templars were indeed Gnostics, then none of the accusations against them were out of the question.
Endnotes:
1) Magic: A History of Its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, page 39. Dover Publications, New York, 2006 Edition.
But there have been other interpretations as well. The writer responsible for our modern understanding of Baphomet was a mid-nineteenth-century occult author named Eliphas Levi. Born Alphonse Louis Constant, he was the son of a shoemaker in Paris who had studied in the Seminary of St. Sulpice, a known hotbed of occultism and heretical thinking. He eventually dropped out, got married and began writing books about ritual magic that were published in the 1850s under the Hebraicized version of his name.
Levi’s main thesis was that all forms of occultism and mysticism held a common, secret doctrine. Ritual magic, he said, utilized the existence of what he called the “Astral Light,” defined as “a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of nature.” (1) It was this agent which reflected the magician’s will, expressed during a ritual, and actualized it into existence. He illustrated this concept with a hieroglyphic form which he called “Baphomet,” claiming that this was the spiritual principle secretly revered by the Templars. Levi used this picture as the frontispiece for a number of his books.
At first glance Levi’s Baphomet looks like the Devil himself. But that is only because the most common modern depiction of the Devil is based on the card of the same name in the popular Rider-Waite tarot deck, and this card is itself based on Levi’s depiction of Baphomet. Certainly the creature presented by Levi looks demonic and evil, with the head and legs of a goat, along with a human torso sporting both male and female sexual organs. On its forehead is that foremost symbol of witchcraft, the pentagram, and between its horns issues forth an enflamed torch.
Levi repeatedly stated that Baphomet was not the same as the Devil, however. Rather it was a symbol of a transcendental power beyond good an evil, man and beast, or male and female energies. Baphomet was in Levi’s view the synthesis of all energy, both on Earth and in Heaven, forming something greater than the sum of its parts, capable of performing any transformation of matter which the human mind could conceive. As for the meaning of the word, Levi suggested it was a code, made up of abbreviations for the Latin words “Templi omnium hominum pacis abhas,” meaning “the father of universal peace among men.”
Levi wrote many books in which he proclaimed the virtues of Baphomet, and of the universal agent which he said the figure represented. His writings, translated into English by A.E. Waite, helped to spread the occult revival which swept Europe in the mid-1800s. His ideas contributed greatly to the type of magic that was practiced by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Later, at the turn of the twentieth century, one Golden Dawn student, Aleister Crowley, not only adapted many of Levi’s ideas, but saw himself as a reincarnation of Levi. He took on “Baphomet” as his own initiatory name in the magical order he headed: the Order of Oriental Templars (a.k.a. “Ordo Templi Orientis,” or “O.T.O.”) Crowley also chose to use Islamic terminology when he proclaimed himself the “Caliph” of the O.T.O.
Towards the end of his life, Eliphas Levi himself had come to question his dabblings in the occult. When he had quit the seminary as a young man, his mother had actually committed suicide, perhaps because of her disappointment in her son’s life choice. Levi had apparently carried that guilt with him his whole life, and as he neared death, he converted back to Catholicism. His final book, Magic: A History of Its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, was a sad attempt to reconcile the faith of his family with the occult ideas he had promoted all along. The text if full of statements which contradict those found in his previous works. He came to describe Baphomet as a false idol, and the Templars as practitioners in Black Magic:
“For their better success, and in order to secure partisans, they fostered the regrets of every fallen worship and the hopes of every new cultus, promising to all liberty of conscience and a new orthodoxy which should be the synthesis of all persecuted beliefs. They even went so far as to recognize the pantheistic symbolism of the grand masters of Black Magic, and the better to isolate themselves from obedience to a religion by which they were condemned beforehand, they rendered divine honors to the monstrous idol Baphomet, even as of old the dissenting tribes had adored the Golden Calf of Dan and Bethel. Certain monuments of recent discovery and certain precious documents belonging to the thirteenth century offer abundant proof of all that is advanced here. Other evidences are concealed in the annals and beneath the symbols of Occult Masonry.”
There are three very interesting lines in this last quote. The first is his description of the secret Templar doctrine as “the synthesis of all persecuted beliefs.” The second is his claim that “monuments of recent discovery” and “precious documents belonging to the thirteenth century” proved that the Templars were guilty of worshipping this demonic idol. The third is the proposition that the deepest secrets of Baphomet are hidden within the codes of Masonic symbolism.
The second point may indicate where Levi got his idea of the Baphomet image from. After all, the Templar confessions described Baphomet mainly as a head. True, some of them told of rituals in which the behind of a goat was kissed. But where did Levi get the idea for a winged half-human, half-goat androgyne? According to various writers, Levi based his depiction of Baphomet on a gargoyle that he found on a former Templar property, either in Saint Bris le Vineux in Burgundy, Lanleff in Brittany, or St. Merri in Paris. This brings us to a series of depictions of similar creatures discovered on Templar properties by a nineteenth-century Austrian Orientalist scholar named Joseph, Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, presented in his book Mystery of Baphomet Revealed. In it he documented a number of objects discovered at Templar properties throughout Europe.
From Von Hammer-Purgstall's Mystery of Baphomet Revealed.
Von Hammer-Purgstall’s “Baphometic Idols,” as they were later called by other authors, consisted mostly of statuettes, coffers and cups presenting strange images of inhuman figures. Seven of the images show only a head, and in two of these cases it is a head with two faces, much akin to the descriptions given by some Templars of the Baphomet head. Many of them were decorated with scenes of bizarre sexual ceremonies of a seemingly religious nature. The figures presented were in some cases covered all over their bodies with multiple eyes, or with serpents.
One image in particular, from the lid to a coffer found in Burgundy, looks most especially like it might have influenced Eliphas Levi’s depiction of Baphomet. It shows a female or androgynous figure crowned with towers ala the goddess Cybele of the ancient world. He/she is holding in each hand a chain, and connected to each chain, floating in the air and upside-down, are the figures of the Sun and the Moon. Below the figure’s feet are a 7-pointed star and a pentagram. Between these is a human skull.
Cybele with gnostic chains, from Von Hammer-Purgstall's Mystery of Baphomet Revealed
This combination of images was not unique, but rather turned up repeatedly at Templar properties surveyed by Baron Von Hammer-Purgstall, and in other versions the figure is shown with a beard, making it quite clear that it was meant to be taken as androgynous. This, then, may have been why Eliphas Levi chose to depict Baphomet in this way. The origin of the goat-headed aspect of Levi’s Baphomet can be found in the Von Hammer-Purgstall collection as well. This is a depiction of a winged and goat-headed figure with human legs seated upon an eagle. Arabic, Greek, and Latin inscriptions were found among these images too. One in particular brings to mind the confessions of the Knights Templar about Baphomet. Von Hammer-Purgstall translated it thus:
“Let Mete be exalted, who causes things to bud and blossom! he is our root; it is one and seven; abjure (the faith), and abandon thyself to all pleasures.”
You will recall that some confessing Templars said Baphomet “caused the land to germinate.” Von Hammer-Purgstall believed that the Templars had been secret practitioners of Ophite Gnosticism, a sect I will discuss later on in this book. The word “Mete” in the translation above was a Greek word for “wisdom.” He believed “Baphomet” was an illusion to the Gnostic rite of “Bapho Metis,” the “Baptism of Wisdom.”
A gnostic orgy much like the witch's sabbath and Templar rituals. From Von Hammer-Purgstall's Mystery of Baphomet Revealed
The word “Mete” has also been connected by some linguists to the name of the sun god Mithras, worshipped by some Gnostics as an incarnation of divine wisdom. Thus Aleister Crowley’s alterative interpretation of Baphomet as meaning “Father Mithras” can be considered part of the same family of translations. More recently Dr. Hugh Schonfield, known for his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, also proffered an interpretation that again led back to this concept of divine wisdom or gnosis. He said that “Baphomet,” when transliterated into Aramaic and fed through a cipher, yields the word “Sophia,” another Greek word meaning “wisdom.” In a similar vein, Sufi scholar Idries Shah has suggested that the Templars were influenced by Islamic Sufism, and that the word “Baphomet” came from the Arabic “Abufihamat,” meaning “Father of Understanding.”
Thus it has been generally accepted among scholars that, one way or another, Baphomet represented to the Templars the concept of divine wisdom, and that they were secretly Gnostics. Thus many modern authors who are sympathetic to the Gnostic worldview have declared that the Templars were “innocent” of the charges against them. They were not guilty of Devil worship or practicing obscene rites, say these authors. They were merely “Gnostics.”
But such a point of view seems a bit naïve. As my investigation revealed, quite a wide variety of religious cults have been branded as “Gnostic” throughout history. Not all of them have shied away from extreme sexual practices, the blaspheming of the Judeo-Christian God, or the glorification of the Devil. If the Templars were indeed Gnostics, then none of the accusations against them were out of the question.
Endnotes:
1) Magic: A History of Its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries, page 39. Dover Publications, New York, 2006 Edition.
The Consort of God
The word “gnosis” is Greek for knowledge, and is defined by Webster’s
Dictionary as “knowledge of spiritual matters; mystical knowledge.”
Meanwhile, “Gnosticism” is generally said to have been a spiritual
movement in which this idea of “spiritual knowledge” or “divine wisdom”
was considered the ideal goal of the spiritual practitioner. These cults
prevailed mainly throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East from
the first to the third century AD.
“Gnosis” was not merely the intellectual possession of a body of knowledge, but a state of mind in which the practitioner’s individual being is literally united with the divine essence, which cannot be defined by mere words. Thus the achievement of gnosis is a direct contact between the practitioner and God, a personal spiritual experience not necessarily mediated by any priest or church. The gnosis itself was personified by Sophia, a goddess-figure named after the Greek word for “wisdom.” Christ was seen by these groups not as a material being but as a spiritual emanation of the divine essence, meant to bring us back into unity with our spiritual origin through the spreading of gnosis.
It was the Gnostic group known as “the Ophites” from whom Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall believed the Knights Templar had copied their ritual and secret theology. The word “Ophite” comes from the Greek word for “snake”, a reference to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, which they revered as the true savior and hero of the story of Genesis, because he brought divine wisdom, or “gnosis” to mankind in the form of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Likewise the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, is described as a “demiurge”, the evil creator of the universe who, is so doing, separated man from the divine essence by causing spirit to incarnate into matter. The word “demiurge” comes from a Greek word meaning “artisan”, “craftsman”, or “skilled worker.” The Ophites believed that the demiurge did not want mankind to be illuminated with divine gnosis, and thus reunified with the uncreated essence, because that would allow us to escape his false creation. That is why he forbade eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and that is why, in this worldview, the Serpent promoted it.
There have been several different Ophite sects throughout history, including the Naasenes, the Sethians, the Mandeans, and the Borborites. The Naasenes, named after “na‘asch”, the Hebrew word for “snake”, existed in the first century AD. They called the demiurge “Yaldabaoth”, “Samael”, or “Saklas.” The Sethians believed that Adam and Eve’s third son Seth was a divine emanation, born purely of spirit, and that it was the destiny of Seth’s descendants to eternally battle the sons of Cain, whom they thought to be the posterity of the demiurge. The Mandeans are a pseudo-Islamic sect that we will look at in greater detail later on. The Borborites, meaning “the filthy ones’, were particularly known for their rituals involving the consumption of menstrual blood, semen, and aborted human fetuses. (These are things which the Knights Templar were accused of doing also.) Allegedly, there even existed a sect called the Cainites, who, rather than seeing him as the child of the demiurge, revered Cain as a martyr for the cause against the demiurge.
In general, it was the Gnostic view that the world was created in a series of “emanations” of Godhead, or “aeons”, which descended one from another, each new generation more dense, less subtle than the last. Sophia, or “divine wisdom”, was the last and the lowest of those emanations. It was she who fell from grace and became impregnated with Ialdaboath, destined to create an evil material universe with his demigod helpers, the “Archons.”
The Gnostic concept of Sophia has been frequently compared with the mystical idea of “Chokmah” found in the Jewish cabala. In that system, the universe is represented by the Tree of Life, consisting of various “Sephiroth”, or spheres of existence. The “paths” which connect the spheres are all paved with Chokmah, the Hebrew word for wisdom. This is defined as the wisdom that existed beyond good and evil, before Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In his commentary to the Kaballistic text known as the Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation), Aryeh Kaplan defines Chokmah thusly:
“Wisdom is pure thought, which has not yet been broken up into different ideas… On the level of wisdom, all men are included in a single world soul.”
In the Gnostic version of the creation story, each aeon generated a “syzygy”, or a hermaphroditic pair of male and female god-forms. Each of these pairs mated to generate the aeon that followed. Sophia’s male counterpart was Christ (whose first incarnation, in some Gnostic stories, was the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.) In this case, however, Sophia attempted to generate the next aoen without the help of her male counterpart. The result was her bastard son Ialdaboath (Jehovah), who then in turn created our current, corrupted universe. In Gnostic cosmology, the fall from perfection occurred before creation, and was in fact the cause of creation.
During this process, a portion of Sophia’s divine essence (named Ashemoth) became trapped within creation, and outside of the “Pleroma”, or the “fullness of God.” It is for this reason, according to the Gnostics, and Jesus appeared on Earth, to redeem Sophia and allow her to return to the Godhead. This return is the definition of the state of gnosis sought by Gnostic spiritual practices.
The idea of “Sophia” as an emanation of God, specifically the “wisdom” of God, is part of mainstream Christian theology as well. The word “sophia” is used six times in the New Testament. In I Corinthians 1:23-24 the text refers to “Christ the power of God, and the sophia of God.” Just as the Gnostics saw Sophia as the female counterpart to Christ (and believed that the two had originally been a single hermaphroditic being), the Eastern Orthodox Church sees Sophia as co-equal with Christ, and simultaneously an aspect of Christ as well. The Hagia Sophia, or Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constanstinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) was once the most magnificent church in all of Byzantium before it was seized in the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and turned into a mosque. “Sophiology”, or the worship of the female aspect of Christ as God’s wisdom, has influenced many Christian mystics, including Jakob Bohme and Hildegard of Bingen.
Sophia has been compared to the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit, part of the Trinity, and to the cabalistic concept of the Shekinah, a.k.a. the Matronit, the female aspect of God the Father who can also be thought of as God’s consort. “Shekinah” is a word that means “whirlwind”, as well as “divine presence”, “royal residence”, and “resting place.” God used the Shekinah to manifest his presence every time he appeared to the Israelites.
Now that we understand Sophia, this may help us to understand the secret doctrine of the Knights Templar and the mystery of their idol, Baphomet. For the name “Baphomet” is thought by some scholars to have been a code for the name “Sophia”, utilizing what is known as the “Atbash cipher.” In this system, the order of the alphabet is inverted so that A is equal to Z, B is equal to Y, etc. When the letters of the name “Baphomet” are converted into Aramaic (the Greek-Hebrew mix language used in Palestine in Jesus’ time) and then run through the Atbash cipher, the result is “Sophia.” The Templars, then, could have been worshipping the Gnostic female wisdom principle under the name of Baphomet.
It does seem that the “Sophia” of the Gnostics is the same concept as that of Baphomet as held by the Templars and by Eliphas Levi. Or perhaps, rather, Baphomet is a fusion of the concept of Sophia and the concept of the demiurge. He is at once both the hidden wisdom of the universe and the hidden power that created it. He is equivalent to the Masonic concept of the Great Architecht of the Universe. Indeed, the Gnostic sect known as the Basilideans worshipped a supreme god called Abraxas who, like Baphomet, represented the unity of good and evil. He was depicted with the head of a cock and two serpents for legs (a god form also called the “Anguepede.”) To the Gnostics Sophia was the supreme Wisdom beyond polarity. As Sophia describes herself in the Gnostic text Thunder Perfect Mind:
“…I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.…
I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.…
For I am the wisdom of the Greeks and the knowledge of the barbarians. …
I am the one whose image is great in Egypt, and the one who has no image among the barbarians.…
I am the one whom you have pursued, and I am the one whom you have seized.
I am the one whom you have scattered, and you have gathered me together.…
I, I am godless, and I am the one whose God is great.…
I am the one whom you have hidden from, and you appear to me.
But whenever you hide yourselves, I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear, I myself will hide from you.…
…come forward to me, you who know me, and you who know my members, and establish the great ones among the small first creatures.…
Those who are without association with me are ignorant of me, and those who are in my substance are the ones who know me.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me, and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me, and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.
I am the union and the dissolution.
I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.
I am the one below, and they come up to me.…
I, I am sinless, and the root of sin derives from me.
I am lust in (outward) appearance, and interior self-control exists within me.…
I am the knowledge of my name.”
“Gnosis” was not merely the intellectual possession of a body of knowledge, but a state of mind in which the practitioner’s individual being is literally united with the divine essence, which cannot be defined by mere words. Thus the achievement of gnosis is a direct contact between the practitioner and God, a personal spiritual experience not necessarily mediated by any priest or church. The gnosis itself was personified by Sophia, a goddess-figure named after the Greek word for “wisdom.” Christ was seen by these groups not as a material being but as a spiritual emanation of the divine essence, meant to bring us back into unity with our spiritual origin through the spreading of gnosis.
It was the Gnostic group known as “the Ophites” from whom Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall believed the Knights Templar had copied their ritual and secret theology. The word “Ophite” comes from the Greek word for “snake”, a reference to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, which they revered as the true savior and hero of the story of Genesis, because he brought divine wisdom, or “gnosis” to mankind in the form of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Likewise the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, is described as a “demiurge”, the evil creator of the universe who, is so doing, separated man from the divine essence by causing spirit to incarnate into matter. The word “demiurge” comes from a Greek word meaning “artisan”, “craftsman”, or “skilled worker.” The Ophites believed that the demiurge did not want mankind to be illuminated with divine gnosis, and thus reunified with the uncreated essence, because that would allow us to escape his false creation. That is why he forbade eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and that is why, in this worldview, the Serpent promoted it.
There have been several different Ophite sects throughout history, including the Naasenes, the Sethians, the Mandeans, and the Borborites. The Naasenes, named after “na‘asch”, the Hebrew word for “snake”, existed in the first century AD. They called the demiurge “Yaldabaoth”, “Samael”, or “Saklas.” The Sethians believed that Adam and Eve’s third son Seth was a divine emanation, born purely of spirit, and that it was the destiny of Seth’s descendants to eternally battle the sons of Cain, whom they thought to be the posterity of the demiurge. The Mandeans are a pseudo-Islamic sect that we will look at in greater detail later on. The Borborites, meaning “the filthy ones’, were particularly known for their rituals involving the consumption of menstrual blood, semen, and aborted human fetuses. (These are things which the Knights Templar were accused of doing also.) Allegedly, there even existed a sect called the Cainites, who, rather than seeing him as the child of the demiurge, revered Cain as a martyr for the cause against the demiurge.
In general, it was the Gnostic view that the world was created in a series of “emanations” of Godhead, or “aeons”, which descended one from another, each new generation more dense, less subtle than the last. Sophia, or “divine wisdom”, was the last and the lowest of those emanations. It was she who fell from grace and became impregnated with Ialdaboath, destined to create an evil material universe with his demigod helpers, the “Archons.”
The Gnostic concept of Sophia has been frequently compared with the mystical idea of “Chokmah” found in the Jewish cabala. In that system, the universe is represented by the Tree of Life, consisting of various “Sephiroth”, or spheres of existence. The “paths” which connect the spheres are all paved with Chokmah, the Hebrew word for wisdom. This is defined as the wisdom that existed beyond good and evil, before Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In his commentary to the Kaballistic text known as the Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation), Aryeh Kaplan defines Chokmah thusly:
“Wisdom is pure thought, which has not yet been broken up into different ideas… On the level of wisdom, all men are included in a single world soul.”
In the Gnostic version of the creation story, each aeon generated a “syzygy”, or a hermaphroditic pair of male and female god-forms. Each of these pairs mated to generate the aeon that followed. Sophia’s male counterpart was Christ (whose first incarnation, in some Gnostic stories, was the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.) In this case, however, Sophia attempted to generate the next aoen without the help of her male counterpart. The result was her bastard son Ialdaboath (Jehovah), who then in turn created our current, corrupted universe. In Gnostic cosmology, the fall from perfection occurred before creation, and was in fact the cause of creation.
During this process, a portion of Sophia’s divine essence (named Ashemoth) became trapped within creation, and outside of the “Pleroma”, or the “fullness of God.” It is for this reason, according to the Gnostics, and Jesus appeared on Earth, to redeem Sophia and allow her to return to the Godhead. This return is the definition of the state of gnosis sought by Gnostic spiritual practices.
The idea of “Sophia” as an emanation of God, specifically the “wisdom” of God, is part of mainstream Christian theology as well. The word “sophia” is used six times in the New Testament. In I Corinthians 1:23-24 the text refers to “Christ the power of God, and the sophia of God.” Just as the Gnostics saw Sophia as the female counterpart to Christ (and believed that the two had originally been a single hermaphroditic being), the Eastern Orthodox Church sees Sophia as co-equal with Christ, and simultaneously an aspect of Christ as well. The Hagia Sophia, or Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constanstinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) was once the most magnificent church in all of Byzantium before it was seized in the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and turned into a mosque. “Sophiology”, or the worship of the female aspect of Christ as God’s wisdom, has influenced many Christian mystics, including Jakob Bohme and Hildegard of Bingen.
Sophia has been compared to the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit, part of the Trinity, and to the cabalistic concept of the Shekinah, a.k.a. the Matronit, the female aspect of God the Father who can also be thought of as God’s consort. “Shekinah” is a word that means “whirlwind”, as well as “divine presence”, “royal residence”, and “resting place.” God used the Shekinah to manifest his presence every time he appeared to the Israelites.
Now that we understand Sophia, this may help us to understand the secret doctrine of the Knights Templar and the mystery of their idol, Baphomet. For the name “Baphomet” is thought by some scholars to have been a code for the name “Sophia”, utilizing what is known as the “Atbash cipher.” In this system, the order of the alphabet is inverted so that A is equal to Z, B is equal to Y, etc. When the letters of the name “Baphomet” are converted into Aramaic (the Greek-Hebrew mix language used in Palestine in Jesus’ time) and then run through the Atbash cipher, the result is “Sophia.” The Templars, then, could have been worshipping the Gnostic female wisdom principle under the name of Baphomet.
It does seem that the “Sophia” of the Gnostics is the same concept as that of Baphomet as held by the Templars and by Eliphas Levi. Or perhaps, rather, Baphomet is a fusion of the concept of Sophia and the concept of the demiurge. He is at once both the hidden wisdom of the universe and the hidden power that created it. He is equivalent to the Masonic concept of the Great Architecht of the Universe. Indeed, the Gnostic sect known as the Basilideans worshipped a supreme god called Abraxas who, like Baphomet, represented the unity of good and evil. He was depicted with the head of a cock and two serpents for legs (a god form also called the “Anguepede.”) To the Gnostics Sophia was the supreme Wisdom beyond polarity. As Sophia describes herself in the Gnostic text Thunder Perfect Mind:
“…I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.…
I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.…
For I am the wisdom of the Greeks and the knowledge of the barbarians. …
I am the one whose image is great in Egypt, and the one who has no image among the barbarians.…
I am the one whom you have pursued, and I am the one whom you have seized.
I am the one whom you have scattered, and you have gathered me together.…
I, I am godless, and I am the one whose God is great.…
I am the one whom you have hidden from, and you appear to me.
But whenever you hide yourselves, I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear, I myself will hide from you.…
…come forward to me, you who know me, and you who know my members, and establish the great ones among the small first creatures.…
Those who are without association with me are ignorant of me, and those who are in my substance are the ones who know me.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me, and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me, and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.
I am the union and the dissolution.
I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.
I am the one below, and they come up to me.…
I, I am sinless, and the root of sin derives from me.
I am lust in (outward) appearance, and interior self-control exists within me.…
I am the knowledge of my name.”
Two Adams, Two Eves
In The Book of Genesis there are a number of mysteries that
have always puzzled scholars and vexed religious apologists. One of the
most bothersome issues occurs right in the first two chapters. It
appears that there are two separate tellings of the creation of the
human race!
The first version can be found in Chapter 1, verses 26-31, where on the sixth day of creation, after he created the heavens and the earth, the flora and the fauna, God says:
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
The use of a plural possessive pronoun here by the supposedly singular “God” is telling, and indicates that there was more than one creative being involved. This is another mystery often explained away by Christian apologetics as unimportant, but it tends to corroborate the Gnostic view of creation being a joint process.
Yet that isn’t the only deliberate misinterpretation of the text commonly made by Christian apologetics. A key detail of this first creation story is that the Lord instructs the newly created mankind that all vegetation has been created for their consumption, and they are free to eat whatever they want:
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
So it would appear then that God created man on the sixth day. Furthermore, he apparently created man and woman at the same time. It is unspecified whether there is only one human couple created at first, or several, but let us just assume there was only one. Why, then, does God seem to re-create mankind later in Chapter 2? That chapter starts out with a description of God resting on the seventh day. Then in verses 4-9 we are told:
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
This is the first mention of the Tree of Knowledge and its special fruit. A few verses later (15-17), Adam is given charge of tending the garden. He is also told specifically not to touch the fruit of that particular tree:
“And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
It is only at this point, in verses 18-25, in this second version of the story of mankind’s creation, that the female is mentioned at all:
“And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. … And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
So in the first creation, man and woman were created at the same time. They were apparently created the same way, from the dust of the Earth, whereas in the second creation the man was created first, then the female created secondly, out of Adam’s rib. In the first version, God created man “in his own image.” In the second creation, God breathes into Adam “the breath of life”, something not mentioned in the first creation. In the first creation, there is no mention of a garden, and no mention of forbidden fruit. Rather mankind is specifically told to eat whatever they want–that all vegetation had been created for that purpose–and it is all “good” in the Lord’s eyes. Perhaps most importantly, since only the creatures of the second creation are given rules to follow, only they can transgress those rules. The first mankind is blessed and told to “be fruitful and multiply.” It is only the second mankind that experiences the fall from grace after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and it is only after this that they begin to breed, seemingly as a result of the sexual awareness that they gain after the Fall.
Alchemical depiction of the Divine Androgyne
The cabalistic interpretation of the two creation stories is much different than, say, your Protestant pastor, who is likely to tell you that it’s just bad writing. He would probably tell you that the compiler of Genesis, while inspired directly by God with every exact word, just sort of “accidentally” repeated himself with the story of man’s creation, and that the slight differences between the two accounts are negligible at best.
Jewish scholars and kabbalists, however, who truly believe every word of the Torah was inspired by God, say that there are a number of legends which explain the two accounts of Adam’s creation. The rabbinical school known as the Pharisees believed that the first creation was of Adam Kadmon, the perfect Primordial Man, a mirror image of the divine Logos (“the Word”), and a hermaphroditic being. Philo wrote that Adam Kadmon, whom he also called “heavenly man” or “original man” was “born in the image of God” with “no participation in any corruptible or earthlike essence; whereas the earthly man is made of loose material, called a lump of clay.” The second creation was when the female half was split apart from the whole, to become Adam and Eve.
The Pharisees actual thought that the Primordial Adam was created and destroyed prior to the actual creation of the universe, and the Zohar says that within his body were contained all of the elements of creation. That text even indicates that God patterned existence after the image of Adam Kadmon, and that perhaps God himself was made in Adam’s image, not the other way around. Or perhaps Adam Kadmon is God, in this view, and the creator of Adam and Eve. As the Zohar says, “The form of man is the image of everything that is above and below; therefore did the Holy Ancient select it for His own form.” This seems to agree with what the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:45-47:
“And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.”
He refers to Adam Kadmon as the “second man” because Paul thought that, although he was conceived as a spirit prior to the creation of the earthly Adam, he wasn’t created in the flesh until afterwards. This is because Paul believed that Adam Kadmon incarnated for the first time as Jesus Christ. In a similar vein, members of the Judeo-Christian Gnostic sect known as the “Elcesaites” believed that when Adam Kadmon split in two, the male side became the Messiah, and the female part the Holy Ghost.
These interpretations aside, it seems that the splitting apart of Adam Kadmon into male and female, and the fall of Adam and Eve from grace are both metaphors for the same essential concept: the fall of existence from a purely spiritual realm into a material world. It is analogous to the fall of existence into creation described in the Gnostic creation myths, in which Sophia splits apart from her male counterpart, the Serpent Christ, and attempts creation on her own, with disastrous results.
The first version can be found in Chapter 1, verses 26-31, where on the sixth day of creation, after he created the heavens and the earth, the flora and the fauna, God says:
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
The use of a plural possessive pronoun here by the supposedly singular “God” is telling, and indicates that there was more than one creative being involved. This is another mystery often explained away by Christian apologetics as unimportant, but it tends to corroborate the Gnostic view of creation being a joint process.
Yet that isn’t the only deliberate misinterpretation of the text commonly made by Christian apologetics. A key detail of this first creation story is that the Lord instructs the newly created mankind that all vegetation has been created for their consumption, and they are free to eat whatever they want:
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
So it would appear then that God created man on the sixth day. Furthermore, he apparently created man and woman at the same time. It is unspecified whether there is only one human couple created at first, or several, but let us just assume there was only one. Why, then, does God seem to re-create mankind later in Chapter 2? That chapter starts out with a description of God resting on the seventh day. Then in verses 4-9 we are told:
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
This is the first mention of the Tree of Knowledge and its special fruit. A few verses later (15-17), Adam is given charge of tending the garden. He is also told specifically not to touch the fruit of that particular tree:
“And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
It is only at this point, in verses 18-25, in this second version of the story of mankind’s creation, that the female is mentioned at all:
“And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. … And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
So in the first creation, man and woman were created at the same time. They were apparently created the same way, from the dust of the Earth, whereas in the second creation the man was created first, then the female created secondly, out of Adam’s rib. In the first version, God created man “in his own image.” In the second creation, God breathes into Adam “the breath of life”, something not mentioned in the first creation. In the first creation, there is no mention of a garden, and no mention of forbidden fruit. Rather mankind is specifically told to eat whatever they want–that all vegetation had been created for that purpose–and it is all “good” in the Lord’s eyes. Perhaps most importantly, since only the creatures of the second creation are given rules to follow, only they can transgress those rules. The first mankind is blessed and told to “be fruitful and multiply.” It is only the second mankind that experiences the fall from grace after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and it is only after this that they begin to breed, seemingly as a result of the sexual awareness that they gain after the Fall.
Alchemical depiction of the Divine Androgyne
The cabalistic interpretation of the two creation stories is much different than, say, your Protestant pastor, who is likely to tell you that it’s just bad writing. He would probably tell you that the compiler of Genesis, while inspired directly by God with every exact word, just sort of “accidentally” repeated himself with the story of man’s creation, and that the slight differences between the two accounts are negligible at best.
Jewish scholars and kabbalists, however, who truly believe every word of the Torah was inspired by God, say that there are a number of legends which explain the two accounts of Adam’s creation. The rabbinical school known as the Pharisees believed that the first creation was of Adam Kadmon, the perfect Primordial Man, a mirror image of the divine Logos (“the Word”), and a hermaphroditic being. Philo wrote that Adam Kadmon, whom he also called “heavenly man” or “original man” was “born in the image of God” with “no participation in any corruptible or earthlike essence; whereas the earthly man is made of loose material, called a lump of clay.” The second creation was when the female half was split apart from the whole, to become Adam and Eve.
The Pharisees actual thought that the Primordial Adam was created and destroyed prior to the actual creation of the universe, and the Zohar says that within his body were contained all of the elements of creation. That text even indicates that God patterned existence after the image of Adam Kadmon, and that perhaps God himself was made in Adam’s image, not the other way around. Or perhaps Adam Kadmon is God, in this view, and the creator of Adam and Eve. As the Zohar says, “The form of man is the image of everything that is above and below; therefore did the Holy Ancient select it for His own form.” This seems to agree with what the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:45-47:
“And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.”
He refers to Adam Kadmon as the “second man” because Paul thought that, although he was conceived as a spirit prior to the creation of the earthly Adam, he wasn’t created in the flesh until afterwards. This is because Paul believed that Adam Kadmon incarnated for the first time as Jesus Christ. In a similar vein, members of the Judeo-Christian Gnostic sect known as the “Elcesaites” believed that when Adam Kadmon split in two, the male side became the Messiah, and the female part the Holy Ghost.
These interpretations aside, it seems that the splitting apart of Adam Kadmon into male and female, and the fall of Adam and Eve from grace are both metaphors for the same essential concept: the fall of existence from a purely spiritual realm into a material world. It is analogous to the fall of existence into creation described in the Gnostic creation myths, in which Sophia splits apart from her male counterpart, the Serpent Christ, and attempts creation on her own, with disastrous results.
Queen of the Night
There are other interpretations of the hermaphroditic first man in Genesis
besides the concept of Adam Kadmon. But to understand them, we need to
understand the figure of Lilith, who, according to kaballistic legend,
existed prior to the creation of Eve, and was Adam’s first lover. Her
name means “spirit of night.”
As the story goes, Lilith was made to be a companion to Adam. According to one version of the story Lilith was not created by God but originated spontaneously out of the Great Supernal Abyss at the time of creation. From the descriptions of her that exist she appears to be, in fact, a shade or a demon. The children she bore Adam were half-demon as well, as there were said to have been thousands of them. Lilith and Adam allegedly quarreled over sex, specifically about who would be on top. When Adam insisted on being on top, Lilith left him. She is said to have disappeared from Paradise by pronouncing the secret and sacred name of God (the “Tetragrammaton” of Kaballistic lore). Some legends even state that she obtained the divine name from God himself by seducing him! According to one version of the story, upon pronouncing the name she shape-shifted into an owl and flew away. She fled to the Red Sea, which, according to legend, has been her abode ever since. However, in the Midrash Abkier it says that Lilith came to Adam again when he separated himself from Eve for 130 years after realizing that his sin had brought death into the world.
But that wasn’t the end of Lilith’s relationship with mankind. She continued to have sexual relations with the sons of Adam by visiting them in their dreams at night. Nocturnal emissions were believed by ancient and medieval Jews to be evidence that the man had been visited by the succubus Lilith. Demon children were born from these unions, but the rabbis said that God cursed Lilith so that all of her children would die upon birth.
As a way of getting revenge for that, they said that Lilith also visited infant boys in their sleep to suffocate them. Thus, every instance of the mysterious malady known as “crib death” (which affects mostly boys) was attributed to Lilith, and superstitious Jews would leave magical amulets on the walls of their children’s bedrooms to ward off these attacks. The word “lullaby” is believed to derive from the incantations that Jews would sometimes say over their children while putting them to bed, again to protect them from Lilith. This is also the origin of the Jewish and European custom of letting boys grow their hair long until age three: to trick Lilith into thinking that they are girls. Some even dressed their sons in girls’ clothes during this vulnerable period in their lives.
However, according to some Jewish writers, Lilith’s role in the story of Genesis was even more important. For some legends state that the Serpent which tempted Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge was none other than Lilith! Furthermore, at that time Lilith was not just a single serpent, but part of a serpentine Hermaphroditic duality.
Lilith’s male counterpart was named Samael, “the Blind One.” In Jewish legends, this is the name of a demon that is sometimes considered synonymous with Satan. In Gnostic creation myths, Samael was another name for Ialdaboath or Jehovah, the demiurge. One kabbalistic term for the combined creature of Lilith-Samael was “the Other God.” They are also referred to as “the male and female Leviathan.” God allegedly castrated the male to keep them from mating “and thereby destroying the Earth.” This is supposedly why Lilith became horny for human males–because her demon husband–her male half– could no longer have sex with her. Others say that because of the castration, Lilith and Samael have to use an “intermediary” called the “Groomsman” or “Taniniver” (meaning “Blind Dragon”) to have sex, which sounds some weird kind of spiritual strap-on. The image brings to mind that of the Egyptian goddess Isis forging a magical dildo for her dead and dismembered husband Osiris when she brought him back to life so that she could have sex with him.
Although Lilith–nicknamed“Woman of Whoredom” seduced Adam, and bred a race of demons with him, Samael allegedly seduced Eve as well. So according to the Kaballists, Adam and Eve both had their first sexual experience at the hands of the Hermaphroditic serpent. There would seem to be a connection between these experiences and the act of disobedience that caused Adam and Eve to fall from grace in the biblical text. Genesis Chapter 3: 1-7 tells us:
“Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”
It seems that, in part, the wisdom gained by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was awareness of their own sexuality, “carnal knowledge.” Indeed the Hebrew word “yada”, meaning “to know”, also means “to have sex with”, and is used in that sense dozens of times throughout the Torah. This was the wisdom that the Serpent wanted to share with Adam and Eve. Upon becoming aware of their separate bodies, and of their differing genitals, they became anxious to cover them, so they made clothes for themselves. But when God saw that they have realized their own nakedness, he knew that they’d eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Genesis 3: 8-11 says:
“And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”
In a way, the Serpent was telling the truth when he told Eve that eating the fruit of Knowledge would not kill her, at least not immediately, and that it would make her like unto a god. Not only did she and Adam gain the awareness that had heretofore been forbidden to them, but they also gained the power of generation: the power to create life “in their own image” just like God. (1) But this transgression did bring death into the world for the first time as well.
The state of being that seems to have existed before the Fall was one of timeless eternity: the perfection of undifferentiated oneness. That is clear not only from the words of The Book of Genesis, but also from the interpretations of it found in the traditions of Gnosticism and the Cabala. This is why the chronology of the events in the first three chapters of Genesis is hard to follow in linear time. This story is a representation of how our universe, including linear time, was created. Thus the events themselves did not occur inside of linear time, but outside of it.
Like the aeons of the Gnostic creation, the “6 days” of creation, as told in Genesis, represent the stages of development of a universe coagulating from a state of pure chaos. The first man, Adam Kadmon, existed prior to the creation we currently live in. Within this Hermaphroditic being were all of the elements needed for the creation of the human race. The Garden of Eden could be thought of as like a petrie dish in which those elements were placed so that they could evolve into the first separate male and female. When the male and female elements separated into two distinct beings, they began to procreate, and that was when they were cast out of the Garden. That is when sexual generation, including life and death as we know it, began, as implied in the story of Genesis.
Perhaps this is why Eve is only given her name, which means “life”, in Chapter 3, Verse 20, after they were cursed by God for their transgression. The verse says that Adam called her that “because she was the mother of all living.” Later, in Chapter 4, after they are driven from the Garden, Adam “knows” his wife for the first time, and she conceives both Cain and Abel. God makes it pretty clear in Chapter 3 that sexual reproduction is one of the curses that will haunt their lives now that they have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve will now be burdened with the pains of childbirth. (2)
On a related note, Adam will forever after struggle to harvest food to eat from the ground. Prior to the fall, in the Garden of Eden, all of his needs had been provided for effortlessly, but in a world of birth and death, once must work hard in order to survive. Genesis Chapter 3: 16-19 states:
“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
The Zohar refers to Lilith as “the Torturous Serpent”, and Samael as “the Slant Serpent”, or “the Great Sword Leviathan.” These desciptions would seem to identify the two snakes with the kabbalistic concepts of the Flaming Sword which guarded the Garden of Eden, and the twisted serpent coiled around the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden.
The Kabbalistic “Tree of Life” a pictorial representation of the universe. It contains 10 “Sephiroth”, or “Spheres of Emanation” which represent different aspects of existence. The are ranked in a hierarchy, with the subtlest (more spiritual) realms at the top, and the denser (more material) realms at the bottom. In the diagrams the Flaming Sword is shown as a zig-zag lightning bolt (the Slant Serpent”) winding its way down the Sephiroth, on the Tree, forming a path from the top to the bottom. Simultaneously, the “Torturous Serpent” is shown slithering its way upward, forming a path from the bottom to the top. (3)
But the “Flaming Sword” and the “Tree of Life”–separate from the Tree of Knowledge– are mentioned specifically in Genesis 3:22 – 24 (where we read the plural possessive voice of God again):
“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.
So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.”
So what exactly is the meaning of this? First of all, the Tree of Life was only briefly mentioned before this. Adam and Eve were never told not to eat its fruit. The way it is stated here by God, it is as if they did not have the ability to eat of the Tree of Life until after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. If there was no death in the world prior to the Fall, there would have been no need for the Tree of Life.
Furthermore, why forbid it to mankind now, especially just after their Fall from Eden? They had just been condemned to a state of mortality after living in a state of deathlessness. Why not let them redeem themselves and live forever again? The motive appears to be fear: God does not want mankind to have the same kinds of powers that he and his mysterious unnamed companions have.
For kabbalists Lilith and Samael would appear to represent both the serpents that tempted Adam and Eve, as well as the instruments used by the Cherubim to “keep the way” of the tree of life. They were at once both paths back to the highest sphere of existence, and the divine guardians appointed to keep the uninitiated from attaining it. Regarding Lilith, Zohar 1:119b states:
“She approached the gates of Paradise on earth, and saw the Cherubim guarding the gates of Paradise, and sat down facing the Flaming Sword, for she originated from that flame. When that flame revolved, she fled.”
Strangely, the 13th century Spanish Kabbalist R Isaac Hacohen said that Lilith is “a ladder on which one can ascend to rungs of prophecy.”
Endnotes:
1) It is perhaps symbolically important that it was fruit, the seed of a tree, which brought her this understanding.
2) This, in contrast to the male and female created in Genesis Chapter 1, who are told to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,” as if it is a blessing, not a curse.
3) Interestingly, the term “crooked serpent” is now often applied to the figure of Satan by Christians.
As the story goes, Lilith was made to be a companion to Adam. According to one version of the story Lilith was not created by God but originated spontaneously out of the Great Supernal Abyss at the time of creation. From the descriptions of her that exist she appears to be, in fact, a shade or a demon. The children she bore Adam were half-demon as well, as there were said to have been thousands of them. Lilith and Adam allegedly quarreled over sex, specifically about who would be on top. When Adam insisted on being on top, Lilith left him. She is said to have disappeared from Paradise by pronouncing the secret and sacred name of God (the “Tetragrammaton” of Kaballistic lore). Some legends even state that she obtained the divine name from God himself by seducing him! According to one version of the story, upon pronouncing the name she shape-shifted into an owl and flew away. She fled to the Red Sea, which, according to legend, has been her abode ever since. However, in the Midrash Abkier it says that Lilith came to Adam again when he separated himself from Eve for 130 years after realizing that his sin had brought death into the world.
But that wasn’t the end of Lilith’s relationship with mankind. She continued to have sexual relations with the sons of Adam by visiting them in their dreams at night. Nocturnal emissions were believed by ancient and medieval Jews to be evidence that the man had been visited by the succubus Lilith. Demon children were born from these unions, but the rabbis said that God cursed Lilith so that all of her children would die upon birth.
As a way of getting revenge for that, they said that Lilith also visited infant boys in their sleep to suffocate them. Thus, every instance of the mysterious malady known as “crib death” (which affects mostly boys) was attributed to Lilith, and superstitious Jews would leave magical amulets on the walls of their children’s bedrooms to ward off these attacks. The word “lullaby” is believed to derive from the incantations that Jews would sometimes say over their children while putting them to bed, again to protect them from Lilith. This is also the origin of the Jewish and European custom of letting boys grow their hair long until age three: to trick Lilith into thinking that they are girls. Some even dressed their sons in girls’ clothes during this vulnerable period in their lives.
However, according to some Jewish writers, Lilith’s role in the story of Genesis was even more important. For some legends state that the Serpent which tempted Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge was none other than Lilith! Furthermore, at that time Lilith was not just a single serpent, but part of a serpentine Hermaphroditic duality.
Lilith’s male counterpart was named Samael, “the Blind One.” In Jewish legends, this is the name of a demon that is sometimes considered synonymous with Satan. In Gnostic creation myths, Samael was another name for Ialdaboath or Jehovah, the demiurge. One kabbalistic term for the combined creature of Lilith-Samael was “the Other God.” They are also referred to as “the male and female Leviathan.” God allegedly castrated the male to keep them from mating “and thereby destroying the Earth.” This is supposedly why Lilith became horny for human males–because her demon husband–her male half– could no longer have sex with her. Others say that because of the castration, Lilith and Samael have to use an “intermediary” called the “Groomsman” or “Taniniver” (meaning “Blind Dragon”) to have sex, which sounds some weird kind of spiritual strap-on. The image brings to mind that of the Egyptian goddess Isis forging a magical dildo for her dead and dismembered husband Osiris when she brought him back to life so that she could have sex with him.
Although Lilith–nicknamed“Woman of Whoredom” seduced Adam, and bred a race of demons with him, Samael allegedly seduced Eve as well. So according to the Kaballists, Adam and Eve both had their first sexual experience at the hands of the Hermaphroditic serpent. There would seem to be a connection between these experiences and the act of disobedience that caused Adam and Eve to fall from grace in the biblical text. Genesis Chapter 3: 1-7 tells us:
“Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”
It seems that, in part, the wisdom gained by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was awareness of their own sexuality, “carnal knowledge.” Indeed the Hebrew word “yada”, meaning “to know”, also means “to have sex with”, and is used in that sense dozens of times throughout the Torah. This was the wisdom that the Serpent wanted to share with Adam and Eve. Upon becoming aware of their separate bodies, and of their differing genitals, they became anxious to cover them, so they made clothes for themselves. But when God saw that they have realized their own nakedness, he knew that they’d eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Genesis 3: 8-11 says:
“And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”
In a way, the Serpent was telling the truth when he told Eve that eating the fruit of Knowledge would not kill her, at least not immediately, and that it would make her like unto a god. Not only did she and Adam gain the awareness that had heretofore been forbidden to them, but they also gained the power of generation: the power to create life “in their own image” just like God. (1) But this transgression did bring death into the world for the first time as well.
The state of being that seems to have existed before the Fall was one of timeless eternity: the perfection of undifferentiated oneness. That is clear not only from the words of The Book of Genesis, but also from the interpretations of it found in the traditions of Gnosticism and the Cabala. This is why the chronology of the events in the first three chapters of Genesis is hard to follow in linear time. This story is a representation of how our universe, including linear time, was created. Thus the events themselves did not occur inside of linear time, but outside of it.
Like the aeons of the Gnostic creation, the “6 days” of creation, as told in Genesis, represent the stages of development of a universe coagulating from a state of pure chaos. The first man, Adam Kadmon, existed prior to the creation we currently live in. Within this Hermaphroditic being were all of the elements needed for the creation of the human race. The Garden of Eden could be thought of as like a petrie dish in which those elements were placed so that they could evolve into the first separate male and female. When the male and female elements separated into two distinct beings, they began to procreate, and that was when they were cast out of the Garden. That is when sexual generation, including life and death as we know it, began, as implied in the story of Genesis.
Perhaps this is why Eve is only given her name, which means “life”, in Chapter 3, Verse 20, after they were cursed by God for their transgression. The verse says that Adam called her that “because she was the mother of all living.” Later, in Chapter 4, after they are driven from the Garden, Adam “knows” his wife for the first time, and she conceives both Cain and Abel. God makes it pretty clear in Chapter 3 that sexual reproduction is one of the curses that will haunt their lives now that they have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. Eve will now be burdened with the pains of childbirth. (2)
On a related note, Adam will forever after struggle to harvest food to eat from the ground. Prior to the fall, in the Garden of Eden, all of his needs had been provided for effortlessly, but in a world of birth and death, once must work hard in order to survive. Genesis Chapter 3: 16-19 states:
“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
The Zohar refers to Lilith as “the Torturous Serpent”, and Samael as “the Slant Serpent”, or “the Great Sword Leviathan.” These desciptions would seem to identify the two snakes with the kabbalistic concepts of the Flaming Sword which guarded the Garden of Eden, and the twisted serpent coiled around the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden.
The Kabbalistic “Tree of Life” a pictorial representation of the universe. It contains 10 “Sephiroth”, or “Spheres of Emanation” which represent different aspects of existence. The are ranked in a hierarchy, with the subtlest (more spiritual) realms at the top, and the denser (more material) realms at the bottom. In the diagrams the Flaming Sword is shown as a zig-zag lightning bolt (the Slant Serpent”) winding its way down the Sephiroth, on the Tree, forming a path from the top to the bottom. Simultaneously, the “Torturous Serpent” is shown slithering its way upward, forming a path from the bottom to the top. (3)
But the “Flaming Sword” and the “Tree of Life”–separate from the Tree of Knowledge– are mentioned specifically in Genesis 3:22 – 24 (where we read the plural possessive voice of God again):
“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.
So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.”
So what exactly is the meaning of this? First of all, the Tree of Life was only briefly mentioned before this. Adam and Eve were never told not to eat its fruit. The way it is stated here by God, it is as if they did not have the ability to eat of the Tree of Life until after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. If there was no death in the world prior to the Fall, there would have been no need for the Tree of Life.
Furthermore, why forbid it to mankind now, especially just after their Fall from Eden? They had just been condemned to a state of mortality after living in a state of deathlessness. Why not let them redeem themselves and live forever again? The motive appears to be fear: God does not want mankind to have the same kinds of powers that he and his mysterious unnamed companions have.
For kabbalists Lilith and Samael would appear to represent both the serpents that tempted Adam and Eve, as well as the instruments used by the Cherubim to “keep the way” of the tree of life. They were at once both paths back to the highest sphere of existence, and the divine guardians appointed to keep the uninitiated from attaining it. Regarding Lilith, Zohar 1:119b states:
“She approached the gates of Paradise on earth, and saw the Cherubim guarding the gates of Paradise, and sat down facing the Flaming Sword, for she originated from that flame. When that flame revolved, she fled.”
Strangely, the 13th century Spanish Kabbalist R Isaac Hacohen said that Lilith is “a ladder on which one can ascend to rungs of prophecy.”
Endnotes:
1) It is perhaps symbolically important that it was fruit, the seed of a tree, which brought her this understanding.
2) This, in contrast to the male and female created in Genesis Chapter 1, who are told to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,” as if it is a blessing, not a curse.
3) Interestingly, the term “crooked serpent” is now often applied to the figure of Satan by Christians.
The Matron & the Maiden
The legend of Lilith becomes even more complex when we learn that, according to the kabbalists, there are in fact two Liliths:
Lilith the Matron and Lilith the Maiden. The latter is described as the
“slave” or “handmaiden” or the former. Lilith the Matron is said to be
both the mate of Samael, and of God himself, analogous to the concept of
Sophia as the bride of God. Lilith the Maiden comes across as her dark
doppelganger, just as the Gnostics believed that Sophia had a darker
half named “Achemoth”, an emanation of hers that somehow got trapped
outside of the “Pleroma”, or “fullness of being.” Occult authors Nigel
Jackson and Michael Howard also compared Sophia and the elder Lilith in
their book The Pillars of Tubal-Cain, saying that Sophia has
even been described as “Adam’s companion of youth”, i.e. Lilith. They
also write that Lilith the Matron “represents the qualities of the
feminine self that the Shekinah does not carry.” They describe the
Lilith-Samael androgyne as “an aspect of ‘the power of God’ and
represented on the Tree of Life as the sephirah Geburah.”
Another Jewish legend that seems to be connected with these concepts asserts that God’s wife, the Shekinah or Matronit (or Sophia) was who for a time “exiled”, while a slave woman, her “handmaiden”, took her place. The “handmaiden” appears to be equated with the Egyptian kingly line. The Zohar tells us:
“One day the companions were walking with Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai. Rabbi Shim’on said: “We see that all these nations have risen, and Israel is lower than all of them. Why is this? Because the King sent away the Matronit from Him, and took the slave woman in her place. Who is this slave woman? The Alien Crown, whose firstborn the Holy One, blessed be He, killed in Egypt. At first she sat behind the handmill, and now this slave woman inherited the place of her mistress.’ And Rabbi Shim’on wept and said: ‘The King without the Matronit is not called king. The King who adhered to the slave woman, to the handmaid of the Matronit, where is his honor? He lost the Matronit and attached Himself to the place which is called slave woman. This slave woman was destined to rule over the Holy Land of below, as the Matronit formerly ruled over it. But the Holy One, blessed be He, will ultimately bring back the Matronit to her place as before. And then, what will be the rejoicing? Say, the rejoicing of the King and the rejoicing of the Matronit. The rejoicing of the King because He will return to her and separate from the slave woman, and the rejoicing of the Matronit, because she will return to couple with the King.’”
Occult writers Nigel Jackson and Michael Howard equate the slave woman mentioned here with Lilith. The metaphor is commonly thought to refer to the time of destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the exile of the Israelites to Babylon in the 6th century BC. But why then the reference to the “Egyptian slave woman”? Although it was the Hebrews who were at one point the slave of the Egyptians, several Egyptian women are depicted as slaves to important Old Testament figures, including Hagar, Abraham’s slave and the mother of his disowned son Ishmael. Interestingly, Hagar was said by kabbalists R. Ya’aqov and R. Yitzhaq to “resemble” Lilith. Hagar and Ishmael were exiled to the desert to die of thirst after Abraham’s wife Sarah became jealous of them. God miraculously saved them. This concept of the slave woman as the mistress of the matron’s husband is a recurring theme in all of the legends pertaining to our inquiry, and brings to mind the relationship of the younger Lilith as the slave or handmaiden of the elder.
Lilith the Maiden is said to be the consort of the demon Asmodeus. Her mother is said to be a demoness named “Mehetabel”, meaning “something immersed”, which brings to mind the meaning of Baphomet’s name: “Baptism of Wisdom.” As I will explain in greater detail later on, ancient baptism rites involved full-body submersion into water. According to The Zohar, Lilith the Maiden incarnated in human form as Naamah, the daughter of the Cainite Lamech. Thus, the race of Lilith’s human descendants are sometimes referred to by kabbalists as the “sons of Naamah.” The Zohar said that it was originally Naamah who first seduced the angels or “sons of God” referred to in Genesis Chapter 6, causing them to lust after human females and incur God’s wrath (a subject that we will delve into more deeply later on.) Lilith the Maiden/Naamah also allegedly incarnated as Moses’ Egyptian wife, Zipporah. Both Liliths were said to have incarnated as the two prostitutes who approached King Solomon to judge in their dispute over the parentage of a young child (for which he famously ruled that the child should be cut in half and shared between them).
Others see Lilith and Naamah as just two of a quartet of concubines for Samael. According to kabbalist Nathan Nota Poira:
“Samael was given four kingdoms, and in each of them he has a concubine. The names of his concubines are: Lilith, whom he took as his consort, and she is the first one; the second is Naamah; the third, Even Maskit; and the fourth, Igrat daughter of Mahalath. and the four kingdoms are: first the kingdom of Damascus, in which is found the house of Rimmon; the second, the kingdom of Tyre, which is opposite the land of Israel; the third, the kingdom of Malta, which formerly was called Rhodos; and the fourth, the kingdom called Granata, and some say that it is the kingdom of Ishmael. And in each of these four kingdoms dwells one of the four aforementioned concubines.”
These four “concubines” are taken by other authors to be separate incarnations or emanations of the same goddess, Lilith. Besides Naamah and Lilith, the names of the other concubines vary according to the source. The above-quoted source names them as Even Maskit and Igrat. Other names that have been listed include Mahalath and Nega’. They appear to be demons like Lilith, but some of them also specifically correspond to women mentioned in the Bible.
Mahalath is the daughter of Abraham’s son Ishmael, whom he sired by the daughter of Kasdiel, the Egyptian sorcerer. Ishmael’s father disapproved of the marriage and successfully pressured him into divorcing her before the baby was born. Mahalath, who is also known as Bashemath, is said to have performed “sorceries” in the desert with her mother, evoking a spirit named Igratiel, who had sex with Mahalath and conceived a daughter named Igrat. Mahalath later married Esau, the son of Isaac and brother of Jacob. Esau was the first of the kings of Edom.
Igrat went on to have sex with King David one night while he was sleeping, and conceived a child named Adad who was a duke of the nation of Edom. According to the kabbalists, Adad is the same as the demon Asmodeus, or Ashmodai, which comes from the Hebrew words “Sh’mi Ad, Ad Sh’mi”, meaning “My name is Ad, Ad is my name.” And of course, you will recall that Asmodeus was said to have been the husband of “Lilith the Maiden.” Asmodeus was also said to have taken over King Solomon’s throne for a while, which would only make sense, as Asmodeus may have been, legitimately, the son and heir of David, and thus Solomon’s brother and rival to the throne. To bring things full circle, although there were many historical kings of Edom named Adad (which was also the name of one of Ishmael’s sons and of an ancient storm god worshipped in that region), one in particular is said to have been married to a woman named Mehetabel, which you will recall is also said to have been the name of the mother of Lilith the Maiden.
If you find the intertwining of this demonic family tree confusing, you are not alone. But this is the nature of Lilith. As the “Eve of Life,” Lilith described herself in the Gnostic text On the Origin of the World:
“I am the portion of my mother,
and I am the mother.
I am the woman,
and I am the virgin.
I am the pregnant one.
I am the physician.
I am the midwife.
My husband is the one who begot me,
and I am his mother,
and he is my father and my lord.
He is my potency.
That which he desires he speaks
with reason.
I am still in a nascent state,
but I have borne a lordly man.”
Another human incarnation of Lilith was, allegedly, the Queen of Sheba, that mysterious woman mentioned in I Kings Chapter 10 who came to visit King Solomon. “Sheba” is thought to correspond to the ancient kingdom of Saba in Southern Arabia, which included Eritrea, Ethiopia and Yemen. The word “sheba” means both “oath” and “seven” in Hebrew. Allegedly this queen visited Solomon because she had heard of his renowned wisdom and wanted to text it, for she too was a woman of wisdom. She arrived bearing an enormous tribute of gold, spices and precious stones. She presented Solomon with a series of riddles to test his wisdom, all of which he answered easily. She was so awestruck by his wisdom that she decided to convert to Solomon’s religion of worshipping one God. Solomon, quite enamored of her, presented her with loads of expensive gifts in return, which she took home with her when her visit was over.
But according to extra-biblical references, there was much more to the relationship between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. All of these legends agree that they were lovers. Stories originating in Ethiopia say that Solomon sired a son with her named Menelik, or, according to Nigel Jackson and Michael Howard, Mardek (meaning “son of the wise”). Many scholars believe that the Song of Solomon or “Song of Songs” found in the Old Testament was meant to be a poem about Solomon and the Queen. The test of the poem is overtly sexual in nature. Human body fluids like vaginal secretions, female ejaculate, semen, menstrual blood, and other things, such as sexual organs, are disguised as “spikenard”, “wine”, “myrrh”, “living waters”, “the Rose of Sharon”, and “the Lily of the Valley.” The “bride” in this poem describes herself symbolically as “black”, which makes sense if she was an Ethiopian.
The Queen of Sheba is the subject of a number of bizarre folk tales, as related in the book The Pillars of Tubal-Cain by Nigel Jackson and Michael Howard. One says that when she was a girl she was tied up in the branches of a tree as a sacrificial offering to a dragon. Seven “holy men” came to rescue her by slaying the dragon. Some of the dragon’s blood splashed on her left foot and leg, turning it into that of a goat. Solomon first caught sight of the leg when she walked across a mirrored floor in his palace. As the authors relate, “Solomon decided that she must be one of the desert demons known as the seirim, who follow Azazel, or the demonic vampire Lilith.” The goat imagery directly relates to Baphomet, and the goat-demon Azazel will be discussed in greater detail later on.
Other stories about the Queen of Sheba include one stating that Solomon gave her the emerald Grail stone that fell from Lucifer’s crown, and which was later carved into the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. The Grail legends tell us that Sheba built the “Ship of Solomon”, which was made from timber taken from the Tree of Knowledge, and could travel through time. There is also a Masonic tradition that King Solomon had three of his masons murder the Master Mason of his temple, Hiram Abiff, because the Queen of Sheba had fallen in love with him and Solomon was jealous.
Another Jewish legend that seems to be connected with these concepts asserts that God’s wife, the Shekinah or Matronit (or Sophia) was who for a time “exiled”, while a slave woman, her “handmaiden”, took her place. The “handmaiden” appears to be equated with the Egyptian kingly line. The Zohar tells us:
“One day the companions were walking with Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai. Rabbi Shim’on said: “We see that all these nations have risen, and Israel is lower than all of them. Why is this? Because the King sent away the Matronit from Him, and took the slave woman in her place. Who is this slave woman? The Alien Crown, whose firstborn the Holy One, blessed be He, killed in Egypt. At first she sat behind the handmill, and now this slave woman inherited the place of her mistress.’ And Rabbi Shim’on wept and said: ‘The King without the Matronit is not called king. The King who adhered to the slave woman, to the handmaid of the Matronit, where is his honor? He lost the Matronit and attached Himself to the place which is called slave woman. This slave woman was destined to rule over the Holy Land of below, as the Matronit formerly ruled over it. But the Holy One, blessed be He, will ultimately bring back the Matronit to her place as before. And then, what will be the rejoicing? Say, the rejoicing of the King and the rejoicing of the Matronit. The rejoicing of the King because He will return to her and separate from the slave woman, and the rejoicing of the Matronit, because she will return to couple with the King.’”
Occult writers Nigel Jackson and Michael Howard equate the slave woman mentioned here with Lilith. The metaphor is commonly thought to refer to the time of destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the exile of the Israelites to Babylon in the 6th century BC. But why then the reference to the “Egyptian slave woman”? Although it was the Hebrews who were at one point the slave of the Egyptians, several Egyptian women are depicted as slaves to important Old Testament figures, including Hagar, Abraham’s slave and the mother of his disowned son Ishmael. Interestingly, Hagar was said by kabbalists R. Ya’aqov and R. Yitzhaq to “resemble” Lilith. Hagar and Ishmael were exiled to the desert to die of thirst after Abraham’s wife Sarah became jealous of them. God miraculously saved them. This concept of the slave woman as the mistress of the matron’s husband is a recurring theme in all of the legends pertaining to our inquiry, and brings to mind the relationship of the younger Lilith as the slave or handmaiden of the elder.
Lilith the Maiden is said to be the consort of the demon Asmodeus. Her mother is said to be a demoness named “Mehetabel”, meaning “something immersed”, which brings to mind the meaning of Baphomet’s name: “Baptism of Wisdom.” As I will explain in greater detail later on, ancient baptism rites involved full-body submersion into water. According to The Zohar, Lilith the Maiden incarnated in human form as Naamah, the daughter of the Cainite Lamech. Thus, the race of Lilith’s human descendants are sometimes referred to by kabbalists as the “sons of Naamah.” The Zohar said that it was originally Naamah who first seduced the angels or “sons of God” referred to in Genesis Chapter 6, causing them to lust after human females and incur God’s wrath (a subject that we will delve into more deeply later on.) Lilith the Maiden/Naamah also allegedly incarnated as Moses’ Egyptian wife, Zipporah. Both Liliths were said to have incarnated as the two prostitutes who approached King Solomon to judge in their dispute over the parentage of a young child (for which he famously ruled that the child should be cut in half and shared between them).
Others see Lilith and Naamah as just two of a quartet of concubines for Samael. According to kabbalist Nathan Nota Poira:
“Samael was given four kingdoms, and in each of them he has a concubine. The names of his concubines are: Lilith, whom he took as his consort, and she is the first one; the second is Naamah; the third, Even Maskit; and the fourth, Igrat daughter of Mahalath. and the four kingdoms are: first the kingdom of Damascus, in which is found the house of Rimmon; the second, the kingdom of Tyre, which is opposite the land of Israel; the third, the kingdom of Malta, which formerly was called Rhodos; and the fourth, the kingdom called Granata, and some say that it is the kingdom of Ishmael. And in each of these four kingdoms dwells one of the four aforementioned concubines.”
These four “concubines” are taken by other authors to be separate incarnations or emanations of the same goddess, Lilith. Besides Naamah and Lilith, the names of the other concubines vary according to the source. The above-quoted source names them as Even Maskit and Igrat. Other names that have been listed include Mahalath and Nega’. They appear to be demons like Lilith, but some of them also specifically correspond to women mentioned in the Bible.
Mahalath is the daughter of Abraham’s son Ishmael, whom he sired by the daughter of Kasdiel, the Egyptian sorcerer. Ishmael’s father disapproved of the marriage and successfully pressured him into divorcing her before the baby was born. Mahalath, who is also known as Bashemath, is said to have performed “sorceries” in the desert with her mother, evoking a spirit named Igratiel, who had sex with Mahalath and conceived a daughter named Igrat. Mahalath later married Esau, the son of Isaac and brother of Jacob. Esau was the first of the kings of Edom.
Igrat went on to have sex with King David one night while he was sleeping, and conceived a child named Adad who was a duke of the nation of Edom. According to the kabbalists, Adad is the same as the demon Asmodeus, or Ashmodai, which comes from the Hebrew words “Sh’mi Ad, Ad Sh’mi”, meaning “My name is Ad, Ad is my name.” And of course, you will recall that Asmodeus was said to have been the husband of “Lilith the Maiden.” Asmodeus was also said to have taken over King Solomon’s throne for a while, which would only make sense, as Asmodeus may have been, legitimately, the son and heir of David, and thus Solomon’s brother and rival to the throne. To bring things full circle, although there were many historical kings of Edom named Adad (which was also the name of one of Ishmael’s sons and of an ancient storm god worshipped in that region), one in particular is said to have been married to a woman named Mehetabel, which you will recall is also said to have been the name of the mother of Lilith the Maiden.
If you find the intertwining of this demonic family tree confusing, you are not alone. But this is the nature of Lilith. As the “Eve of Life,” Lilith described herself in the Gnostic text On the Origin of the World:
“I am the portion of my mother,
and I am the mother.
I am the woman,
and I am the virgin.
I am the pregnant one.
I am the physician.
I am the midwife.
My husband is the one who begot me,
and I am his mother,
and he is my father and my lord.
He is my potency.
That which he desires he speaks
with reason.
I am still in a nascent state,
but I have borne a lordly man.”
Another human incarnation of Lilith was, allegedly, the Queen of Sheba, that mysterious woman mentioned in I Kings Chapter 10 who came to visit King Solomon. “Sheba” is thought to correspond to the ancient kingdom of Saba in Southern Arabia, which included Eritrea, Ethiopia and Yemen. The word “sheba” means both “oath” and “seven” in Hebrew. Allegedly this queen visited Solomon because she had heard of his renowned wisdom and wanted to text it, for she too was a woman of wisdom. She arrived bearing an enormous tribute of gold, spices and precious stones. She presented Solomon with a series of riddles to test his wisdom, all of which he answered easily. She was so awestruck by his wisdom that she decided to convert to Solomon’s religion of worshipping one God. Solomon, quite enamored of her, presented her with loads of expensive gifts in return, which she took home with her when her visit was over.
But according to extra-biblical references, there was much more to the relationship between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. All of these legends agree that they were lovers. Stories originating in Ethiopia say that Solomon sired a son with her named Menelik, or, according to Nigel Jackson and Michael Howard, Mardek (meaning “son of the wise”). Many scholars believe that the Song of Solomon or “Song of Songs” found in the Old Testament was meant to be a poem about Solomon and the Queen. The test of the poem is overtly sexual in nature. Human body fluids like vaginal secretions, female ejaculate, semen, menstrual blood, and other things, such as sexual organs, are disguised as “spikenard”, “wine”, “myrrh”, “living waters”, “the Rose of Sharon”, and “the Lily of the Valley.” The “bride” in this poem describes herself symbolically as “black”, which makes sense if she was an Ethiopian.
The Queen of Sheba is the subject of a number of bizarre folk tales, as related in the book The Pillars of Tubal-Cain by Nigel Jackson and Michael Howard. One says that when she was a girl she was tied up in the branches of a tree as a sacrificial offering to a dragon. Seven “holy men” came to rescue her by slaying the dragon. Some of the dragon’s blood splashed on her left foot and leg, turning it into that of a goat. Solomon first caught sight of the leg when she walked across a mirrored floor in his palace. As the authors relate, “Solomon decided that she must be one of the desert demons known as the seirim, who follow Azazel, or the demonic vampire Lilith.” The goat imagery directly relates to Baphomet, and the goat-demon Azazel will be discussed in greater detail later on.
Other stories about the Queen of Sheba include one stating that Solomon gave her the emerald Grail stone that fell from Lucifer’s crown, and which was later carved into the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. The Grail legends tell us that Sheba built the “Ship of Solomon”, which was made from timber taken from the Tree of Knowledge, and could travel through time. There is also a Masonic tradition that King Solomon had three of his masons murder the Master Mason of his temple, Hiram Abiff, because the Queen of Sheba had fallen in love with him and Solomon was jealous.
Baphomet, by Iona Miller, 24x36
