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The Inside Story of the Kabbalah
"Exodus" is the title of the second book of the Torah. This book describes how the Israelites, under the leadership of Moses, left Egypt and escaped the tyranny of Pharaoh. Pharaoh made the Israelites work as slaves and would not consent to set them free. But, when confronted by the miracles God performed through Moses, and the disasters He inflicted on his people, Pharaoh relented. And so, one night the Israelites gathered en masse, and began their emigration from Egypt. Later, Pharaoh attacked the Israelites, but God saved them through a further miracle He performed through Moses. But, it is in the Qur'an that we find the most accurate account of the exodus from Egypt, because the Torah underwent much textual corruption after it was originally revealed to Moses. An important proof of this is that in the five books of the Torah-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy-there are many contradictions. The fact that the book of Deuteronomy ends with an account of the death and burial of Moses is indisputable proof that this portion would have to have been added after Moses' death. In the Qur'an, the account of the exodus of the Israelites from Egyptis recounted in detail and most accurately. As with all other stories related in the Qur'an, God reveals much wisdom and many secrets in the course of what is related. For this reason, when believers examine these stories closely, they can extract a number of lessons from them THE GOLDEN CALF One of the important facts concerning the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, as related in the Qur'an, is that some of them rebelled against the religion revealed to them by God in spite of the fact that God had rescued them through Moses from the tyranny of Pharaoh. Some of the Israelites were not able to comprehend the monotheism that Moses communicated to them, but tended continually toward idolatry. The Qur'an describes this strange immoral tendency here:
Despite Moses' warnings, some the Israelites continued in such perversion, and when Moses left them, to ascend alone to Mt. Sinai, it manifested itself fully. Taking advantage of Moses' absence, a man by the name of Samiri came forth. He fanned the sparks of some Israelites' inclination towards idolatry, and persuaded them to fabricate the statue of a calf and worship it.
Why was there such a deviant tendency among some Israelites to erect idols and worship them? What was the source of this inclination? Clearly, a society that had never before believed in idols would not suddenly adopt such inane behavior as to construct an idol and begin to worship it. Only those for whom idolatry was natural inclination could have believed in such nonsense.
However, the Israelites were a people that had believed in one God since the days of their ancestor Abraham. The name "Israelites" or "the Sons of Israel" was given first to the sons of Jacob, Abraham's grandson, and afterwards to the whole Jewish people who derived from him. The Israelites had safeguarded the monotheistic faith that they had inherited from their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, peace be upon them. Together with Joseph, peace be upon him, they went into Egypt and preserved their monotheism for a long period of time, despite the fact that they had lived amidst Egyptian idolatry. It is clear from the stories related in the Qur'an that, when Moses came to them, the Israelites were a people that believed in one God. The only explanation for this is that although the Israelites adhered to a monotheistic belief, some of them were influenced by the pagan peoples among whom them lived, and began to imitate them, replacing the religion chosen for them by God with the idolatry of foreign nations. When we investigate this matter in light of historical records, we see that the pagan cult that influenced the Israelites was that of Ancient Egypt. An important evidence in support of this conclusion is that the golden calf the Israelites worshipped, while Moses was on Mt. Sinai, was actually a replica of the Egyptian idols Hathor and Aphis. In his book, Too Long in the Sun, the Christian author Richard Rives writes:
The influence of the Egyptian pagan religion on some Israelites occurred in many different stages. As soon as they had encountered a pagan people, this leaning towards heretical belief appeared and, as the verse maintains, they said "Moses, give us a god just as these people have gods." (Qur'an, 7: 138) What they unwisely said to their Prophet, "Moses, we will not believe in you until we see God with our own eyes." (Qur'an, 2: 55) reveals that they were inclined to worship a material being that they could see, as their pagan religion provided the Egyptians with. The tendency of some Israelites to the paganism of Ancient Egypt, that we have here outlined, is important to understand and gives us some insight into the corruption of the text of the Torah and the origins of the Kabbalah. When we consider these two topics carefully, we will see that, at their source, is found Ancient Egyptian paganism and the materialist philosophy. FROM ANCIENT EGYPT TO THE KABBALAH While Moses was still alive, some Israelites began to create likenesses of the idols they had seen in Egypt and to worship them. After Moses died, some among them backslid farther into perversity. Of course, the same thing cannot be said of all Jews, but some of them did adopt Egyptian paganism. Indeed, they carried on the false doctrines of Pharaoh's magicians, that lay at the foundation of that society's beliefs, and corrupted their own faith by introducing these doctrines into it. The false doctrine that was introduced into Judaism from Ancient Egypt was also introduced into the Kabbalah. Like the system of the Egyptian priests, it was an esoteric system, and its basis was the practice of magic. Interestingly, the Kabbalah provides an account of creation quite perverted from that found in the Torah. It is a materialist account, based on the Ancient Egyptian mistaken idea of the eternal existence of matter. Murat Ozgen, a Turkish Freemason, has this to say on this topic:
The Jews, by adopting these Ancient Egyptian materialist and esoteric doctrines that were founded on magic, ignored the related prohibitions in the Torah. They took on the magic rituals of other pagan peoples, and thus, the Kabbalah became a mystical doctrine within Judaism, but contrary to the Torah. In her book entitled Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, the English writer Nesta H. Webster says:
There is a verse in the Qur'an that refers to this topic. God says that some Israelites learned satanic sorcery rituals from sources outside their own religion:
This verse maintains that certain Jews, although they knew that they would lose out in the hereafter, learned and adopted the practices of magic. Thus, they strayed away from the Law that God had sent them and, having sold their own souls, fell into paganism (magic doctrines). "They have sold themselves" for an evil thing, in other words, they abandoned their faith. The facts related in this verse demonstrate the main features of an important conflict in Jewish history. This struggle was, on the one hand, between the prophets that God sent to the Jews and those believing Jews who obeyed them, and on the other hand, those perverse Jews who rebelled against God's commandments, imitated the pagan culture of the peoples around them, and followed their cultural practices rather than the Law of God.
PAGAN DOCTRINES ADDED TO THE TORAH The errors of those Jews departing from the true path are often reported in the holy book of the Jews itself—the Old Testament. In the book of Nehemiah, a kind of history book within the Old Testament, the Jews confess their sins and repent:
This passage expresses the desire that a number of Jews had in returning to their faith in God, but in the course of Jewish history sometimes a different segment gained strength, and came to dominate the Jews and later partly altered the religion itself. For this reason, in the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament, there are elements that derive from heretical pagan doctrines, as well as those mentioned above which accord with the true religion. For example (God is surely beyond all these expressions):
These pagan ideas that were introduced into the Torah must have an origin. There must have been Jews who adopted, honored and cherished a tradition foreign to the Torah, and changed the latter by adding into it ideas derived from the tradition they espoused. The origin of this tradition stretches back to the priests of Ancient Egypt (the magicians of Pharaoh's regime). It is, in fact, the Kabbalah which was passed on from there by a number of Jews. The Kabbalah assumed a form that enabled Ancient Egyptian and other pagan doctrines to insinuate themselves into Judaism and develop within it. Kabbalists, of course, assert that the Kabbalah simply explains in more detail the hidden secrets of the Torah, but, in reality, as Jewish historian of the Kabbalah, Theodore Reinach, says, the Kabbalah contains "a subtle poison which enters into the veins of Judaism and wholly infests it."26 It is possible, then, to find in the Kabbalah clear traces of the materialist ideology of the Ancient Egyptians. THE KABBALAH'S FALSE DOCTRINE THAT IGNORES THE FACT OF CREATION God reveals in the Qur'an that the original Torah is a Divine book that was sent as a light to humanity:
Therefore, the Torah, like the Qur'an, contains knowledge and commands related to such topics as the existence of God, His unity, His qualities, the creation of the universe, the purpose of human creation, and God's moral laws for humanity. (But, the original Torah is not extant today. What we possess today is an altered and corrupted version of the Torah.) There is an important point that both the true Torah and the Qur'an share in common: God is recognized as Creator. God is absolute, and has existed since the beginning of time. Everything other than God is His creation, created by Him from nothing. He has created and formed the whole universe, the heavenly bodies, lifeless matter, human beings and all living things. God is One; He exists alone.
While this is the truth, there is a quite different interpretation found in the Kabbalah, that "subtle poison which enters into the veins of Judaism and wholly infests it." Its doctrine of God is totally opposed to the "fact of creation," found in the real Torah and the Qur'an. In one of his works on the Kabbalah, the American researcher, Lance S. Owens, presents his view on the possible origins of this doctrine (God is surely beyond all the expressions in the extract below):
An interesting feature of this mystical theology is that, according to it, human beings are not created, but are in some way divine. Owens describes this myth:
This perverted theology comprises of a mythology of paganism, and formed the basis of the degeneration of Judaism. Some Jewish Kabbalists breached the limits of common sense to such an extent that they even tried to make human beings into supposed deities. In addition, according to this false theology, not only was humanity divine, but it consisted only of Jews; other races were not considered human. As a result, faith in the one Almighty God and serving Him began to be replaced by pagan beliefs and practices. These false beliefs then led to the corruption of the Torah and the inclusion within it of various ideas incompatible with true religious moral values. Another interesting point about the corrupt doctrines in the Kabbalah is its similarity to the pagan ideas of Ancient Egypt. As we have discussed in earlier pages, the Ancient Egyptians erroneously believed that matter had always existed; in other words, they rejected the idea that matter was created from nothing. Some sections of the Kabbalah assert the same thing in relation to human beings; it falsely claims that human beings were not created, and that they are responsible for their own existence. To state it in modern terms: the Ancient Egyptians were materialists, and the doctrine of some sections in the Kabbalah can be called secular humanism. It is interesting to note that these two erroneous concepts—materialism and secular humanism—describe the ideology that has dominated the majority of the world over the last two centuries. It is tempting to ask if there are forces who have carried the doctrines of Ancient Egypt and the Kabbalah from the midst of ancient history to the present day. FROM THE TEMPLARS TO THE MASONS When we mentioned the Templars earlier, we noted that this peculiar order of crusaders was affected by a "secret" found in Jerusalem, as a result of which they abandoned Christianity and began to practice magic rites. We said that many researchers had reached the opinion that this secret was related to the Kabbalah. For example, in his book Histoire de la Magie (The History of Magic) the French writer, Eliphas Lévi, presents detailed evidence that the Templars were initiated into the mysterious doctrines of the Kabbalah, that is, they were secretly trained in this doctrine.29 Therefore, a doctrine with its roots in Ancient Egypt was transmitted to the Templars through the Kabbalah. In Foucault's Pendulum, the Italian novelist, Umberto Eco, relates these facts in the course of the plot. Throughout the novel, he relates, through the mouths of its protagonists, how the Templars were influenced by the Kabbalah and that the Kabbalists possessed a secret that could be traced back to the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs. According to Eco, some prominent Jews learned certain secrets taken from the Ancient Egyptians, and later inserted these into the first five books of the Old Testament (Pentateuch). But, this secret, which was transmitted secretly, could be understood only by the Kabbalists. (The Zohar, written later in Spain, and forming the fundamental book of the Kabbalah, deals with the secrets of these five books) After stating that the Kabbalists read this Ancient Egyptian secret also in the geometric measurements of the temple of Solomon, Eco writes that the Templars learned it from the Kabbalist rabbis in Jerusalem:
When the Templars adopted this ancient Egyptian-Kabbalist doctrine, naturally, they came into conflict with the Christian establishment that dominated Europe. This was a conflict they shared with another important force—certain Jews. After the Templars were arrested, by joint order of the king of France and the Pope in 1307, the order went underground, but its influence continued, and in a more radical and determined way. As we said earlier, a significant number of Templars escaped arrest and appealed to the king of Scotland, the only European kingdom at that time that had not accepted the authority of the Pope. In Scotland, they infiltrated the wall-builders' guild and, in time, took it over. The guilds adopted the traditions of the Templars, and thus, the Masonic seed was planted in Scotland. Still, to this day, the mainline of Masonry is the "Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite."
As we investigated in detail in The New Masonic Order, from the beginnings of the fourteenth century it is possible to detect traces of the Templars-and some Jews associated with them-at various stages of European history. Without going into detail, here are some of the headings under which we examined this topic:
Examples such as these are signs that the alliance between the Templars and the Kabbalists was directed at a change in the social order of Europe. This change involved an alteration in the basic Christian culture of Europe, and its replacement by a culture based on pagan doctrines, like the Kabbalah. And, after this cultural change, political changes would follow. The French and Italian revolutions, for example. In the coming sections, we will look at some important turning-points in the history of Europe. At every stage the fact that will confront us is that there existed a force that wanted to alienate Europe from its Christian heritage, replace it with a secular ideology and, with this program in mind, to alienate people from religious morality. This force attempted to cause Europe to accept a doctrine that had been handed down from Ancient Egypt through the Kabbalah. As we pointed out earlier, at the basis of this doctrine were two important concepts: humanism and materialism. First, let us look at humanism.
23 Richard Rives, Too Long in the Sun,
Partakers Pub., 1996, pp. 130-31 |
