The roots of Mesopotamian mysticism are to be found in the institution of divine kingship. To explain the para­doxical divinity of a mortal king, he was presented as son of the goddess of love, Inanna/Ishtar, the divine spirit capable of crossing the boundary of heaven and earth. In due course, the arguments backing up this cen­tral dogma expanded into a complex system of mystical thought, pervading the entire Mesopotamian civilization. The relevant ideas and practices are best known from Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian sources (first half of the ist millennium BCE), but they have a long prehistory extending back to the 3rd millennium, if not earlier.

The divinity of the king resided in his spiritual perfection, which made him consubstantial with god. This notion was expressed and propagated by means of a pleth­ora of verbal and visual images, symbols, and allegories, such as "sacred marriage," which symbolized the king's mystical union with god. The most important of these was the so-called sacred tree, which symbolized a per­son's spiritual growth toward god. Its crown and base stood for heaven and earth, its trunk for the power of love, and its fruits for virtues equated with divine powers. Perfecting the latter according to the esoteric doctrine of the tree opened the way to immortality. Important myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Descent of Ishtar explicate this way of salvation in allegoric terms keyed to the tree. The spiritual meanings of the myths and symbols were, however, never put into writing but kept as secrets to be discovered only through initiation and contemplation.

In Mesopotamian texts and iconography, the king is often portrayed as a personification of the sacred tree, to emphasize his status as the "perfect man." However, this does not mean that the possibility of attaining spiri­tual perfection was limited to the king alone. In the Descent of Ishtar, the goddess plays the role of a fallen but resurrected soul, thus opening the possibility of spiritual rebirth and salvation to anybody ready to tread her path.

Emulating the sufferings of the goddess, her devotees practiced ascetic denial of the flesh, the world with its temptations being visualized in terms of prostitution. Accordingly, sexual abstinence was considered virtuous, and self-emasculation was common among the devo­tees, who saw themselves as brides adorning themselves for a final union with god in heavenly weddings. The ascetic practices of the cult frequently led to visionary experiences and altered states, including prophecy. Initiates into the secrets of the goddess were pledged not to divulge them to others, under penalty of death.

Another path of salvation lay in the practice of wismonopolize these fields of knowledge. A Babylonian document, not from the palace but from the temple sphere and dated to 541 BCE, accuses a temple functionary from Uruk of having revealed the knowledge written down on certain tablets to a temple slave; the function­ary is to bear "the punishment of the king." The letter and the document show that the secrecy clauses of the texts have to be taken seriously.

During recent years, attempts have been made to show that a systematic esoteric doctrine that can be grasped only by comparison with later Jewish traditions was at the base of all aspects of Assyrian religion. This idea is highly speculative. It is not, however, improbable that there were esoteric teachings regarding individual features of Mesopotamian religion that were never put into writing. For example, the scarcity of written information on Mesopotamian temple towers might hint at their function being deliberately shrouded in mystery by Assyrian and Babylonian priests.

The earliest clearly documented mystical movement within Judaism is the Heikhalot (Heavenly Palaces) mysticism of the talmudic period (2nd-7th centuries CE). The literature of the movement, which is written for the most part in rabbinic Hebrew, although in a very distinctive style, is preserved in many medieval manu­scripts. It is highly amorphous and never seems to have reached definitive closure. Indeed, because Heikhalot ideas continued to be used creatively by later Jewish mystics, additions and changes were being made to the texts as late as the 12th and 13th centuries (by the Rhineland Jewish pietists, the Hasidei Ashkenaz) and the 17th century (by the Sabbateans). However, there seems to be no reason to doubt that the bulk of the sur­viving material goes back to late antiquity. The most noteworthy treatises are the Greater Treatise on the Heavenly Palaces (Heikhalot rabbati), the Lesser Trea­tise on the Heavenly Palaces (Heikhalot zutarti), and the Book of the Heavenly Palaces (Sefer heikhalot, also known as 3 Enoch).

Heikhalot mysticism, like other forms of mysticism, is shot through with a desire for communion with a tran­scendent, divine world. Normally in the literature, this takes place through an ascent to the Merkavah (the Chariot), God's heavenly throne, to be found in the in­nermost of seven concentric palaces (heikhalot), which are located in the seventh heaven. The ascent, which is paradoxically called a "descent" (the mystics being known as "descenders to the Chariot" [yoredei Merkavah] ), appears to be an "out-of-body" experi­ence-a soul excursion of some kind. The psychological condition described cannot now be determined pre­cisely, but clearly some sort of trance or hypnotic state is indicated. Interestingly, in the most famous account of an ascent, in Heikhalot rabbati, the adept is said to con­tinue speaking while in trance and to describe what he is seeing as he journeys through the celestial regions. The ascent is represented as highly difficult and dangerous: the adept has to traverse vast distances, he is opposed by hosts of fearsome angels, and he finds himself in a bewil­dering fiery realm in which the physical laws of this world are suspended or turned inside out. At the climax of his journey he sees the Divine Glory seated on the Merkavah and joins the highest angels in chanting the celestial praise.

This is the form that communion with the divine takes for these mystics. There seems to be no suggestion of absorption into the divine: the ontological distance between God and the adept is strictly preserved. Indeed, it is stressed that even at the height of his ecstasy all that the mystic sees is simply a representation of God: God, in himself, dwells in impenetrable regions beyond the seventh heaven. However, one tradition (found in 3 Enoch) does hint at the possibility of union with the godhead. It records how one human being, the biblical patriarch Enoch, bodily ascended into heaven and was physically transformed into the highest of the archan­gels, Metatron, who is called "the Lesser YHWH" and depicted as the ruler of the cosmos. Later mystics may be correct in seeing this tradition as implying the iden­tity of Metatron and the "manifest" God. If the ascent of Enoch is taken as a paradigm of the mystical ascent, then the possibility seems to be contemplated that the ontological gap between humanity and God may be bridged and the adept ultimately become divine.

The dominant form of the unio/communio mystica in the Heikhalot texts involves an upward movement of the "soul" to "God," but they also contain a minor tra­dition of a contrary movement in which the adept stays where he is and "God" comes down to earth in the per­son of an archangel (usually called the Prince of Torah [Sar Torah]) to commune with him. Significantly, in both traditions it is the adept who takes the initiative and "compels" the contact through theurgical praxis and magical invocation.

The dating of this literature is a problem. In the 19th century, Heinrich Graetz dated it to the early Islamic pe­riod (9th century CE). In the 20th century, however, following the lead of Gershom Scholem , the ten­dency was to push it back into the talmudic period. Scholem suggested that some elements could be carried back as early as the 2nd century cE. The Babylonian Tal­mud contains clear allusions to Heikhalot ideas (tractate Hagigah  and elsewhere), although it does not elaborate on these because it regards them as esoteric knowledge. There are two ways of explaining this rela­tionship. One is to suppose that the Heikhalot texts are a kind of commentary or midrash on the talmudic allusions-an attempt by later scholars to reconstruct the esoteric doctrine at which the Talmud hints. The other is to suppose that the Heikhalot texts genuinely contain in fuller form the ideas alluded to in the Talmud. The second alternative is more plausible. The first seems to re­quire us to postulate a discontinuity between the talmudic and post-talmudic periods that it is hard to justify. Moreover there are highly convincing details in the Heikhalot texts that cannot by any stretch of the imagination have been derived midrashically from the Talmud. Although some of the Heikhalot texts as we now have them are post-talmudic and clearly allude to the Talmud, the bulk of the literature and the doctrine goes back to the talmudic era.

Another problem is whether the Heikhalot texts represent a purely literary movement or reflect genuine mystical and theurgical praxis. There can be little doubt that literary artifice is present in the tradition, particu­larly in its later phases. However, it seems equally clear that the texts point to real mysticism. Heikhalot mysticism fits rather well into the religious ethos of the east­ern Mediterranean world in late antiquity. It shows significant parallels with the theurgy of the Chaldean Oracles and with certain forms of Nag Hammadi texts. That led  Scholem to claim  Heikhalot mysticism could be classified as "Jewish Gnosticism." This is probably overstating the case, as  it lacks a strong dualism (the "hidden" God and the "manifest" God are not opposed powers). However, given that, on the one hand,  postbiblical Jewish tradition ( e.g., the Nag Hammadi treatises The Hypostasis of the Archons and On the Creation of the World) and  on the other hand, the talmudic rabbis, made an indirect relationship between Gnosticism and Heikhalot mysticism a possiblity.

Its general cosmology, broad picture of the heavenly world, angelology, and doctrine of ascent to heaven can be closely paralleled in the apocalyptic writings of the Second Temple period. Indeed some of the Heikhalot writings, such as 3 Enoch, can be classified as late apoc­alypses. There are also close parallels with some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Particularly important here is the work known as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. This work seems to describe the celestial temple and the worship that the angels perform there. It moves inward through a series of increasingly holy domains, until it finally reaches in the holy of holies the immediate pres­ence of God. The text does not explain how this detailed knowledge of the heavenly world was acquired, whether through ascent, or vision, or some other mode of revelation. However, its parallelism with the later Heikhalot texts, both in general terms and in specific detail, is striking. The basic doctrine of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice was probably elaborated by priests in Jerusa­lem in Second Temple times as part of an attempt to pro­vide a more spiritual understanding of the temple cult. The outward rituals of sacrifice were given meaning be­cause they reflected heavenly realities and assisted com­munion with that heavenly world.

There also are possible antecedents to the Heikhalot ideas earlier still in the biblical period. The Heikhalot mystics themselves claimed to be replicating the vision­ary experiences of the great biblical prophets, particularly Ezekiel's vision of the Chariot of God, the Merkavah (Ezek. 1). Unlike the oracles of the prophets, however, Heikhalot teaching was open only to initiates: it was not proclaimed to all Israel. In prophecy and apocalypticism the throne-vision is instrumental, a means to an end. In Heikhalot literature it has become an end in itself. The Heikhalot visionaries were mystics; the prophets and apocalyptists were not. It is very hard to find mysticism in Judaism in any precise sense of the term before the 2nd century CE. Glimmerings of mysti­cism begin to appear in the late Second Temple period at Qumran in the doctrine of the communion of the earthly and heavenly communities in the worship of God. There are also arguably mystical ideas in the writ­ings of the Jewish Platonic philosopher Philo of Alexan­dria. His treatise On the Contemplative Life describes an idealized, protomonastic community dedicated to communion with God. But the first clearly mystical pro­gram in Judaism does not emerge until the Heikhalot mystics of the talmudic period.

The rabbinic authorities of the talmudic period re­garded the teachings of Heikhalot mystics with consid­erable suspicion. This is hardly surprising since on the face of it they challenged some of the fundamental be­liefs of rabbinic Judaism: they reopened channels of di­rect communication with God that rabbinic Judaism held to have been firmly closed since prophecy had ceased in Israel; and, with their interest in high archan­gels such as Metatron (the Lesser YHWH), they ran the serious risk of compromising monotheism. The authori­ties declared esoteric the teachings of the Heikhalot mystics (which they called the "Account of the Chariot"), along with speculation on cosmology and cosmogony (the "Account of Creation"; Mishnah, tractate Hagigah 2.i). Although the study of these matters was not in itself banned, it was forbidden to expound and discuss them in public. The mystical circles themselves concurred with this view. Their writings are full of warnings about the dangers of their doctrine and praxis, about how these should be confined to the select circles, that ofcourse gave rise to its own form of Esoterica later termed the Kaballah (Cabalah/ Qabbalah) and turned into a “Secret Doctrine” by especially ‘Christian’ Cabbalists.(1)
 

1) christiankabbalah.html



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