Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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had eventually triumphed over the ancient goddesses of Canaan and their erotic cults. But as Kabbalists struggled to
express the mystery of God, the old mythologies reasserted themselves, albeit in a disguised form. The Zohar describes
Binah as the Supernal Mother, whose womb is penetrated by the 'dark flame' to give birth to the seven lower sefiroth.
Again Yesod, the ninth sefirah inspires some phallic speculation: it is depicted as the channel through which the divine life
pours into the universe in an act of mystical procreation. It is in the Shekinah, the tenth sefirah, however, that the ancient
sexual symbolism of creation and theogony appears most clearly. In the Talmud, the Shekinah was a neutral figure: it had
neither sex nor gender. In Kabbalah, however, the Shekinah becomes the female aspect of God. The Bahir (c.1200), one
of the earliest Kabbalistic texts, had identified the Shekinah with the Gnostic figure of Sophia, the last of the divine
emanations which had fallen from the Pleroma and now wandered, lost and alienated from the Godhead, through the world.
The Zohar links this 'exile of the Shekinah' with the fall of Adam as recounted in Genesis. It says that Adam was shown the
'middle sefiroth' in the Tree of Life and the Shekinah in the Tree of Knowledge. Instead of worshipping the seven sefiroth
together, he chose to venerate the Shekinah alone, sundering life from knowledge and rupturing the unity of the sefiroth. The
divine life could no longer flow uninterruptedly into the world, which was isolated from its divine Source. But by observing
the Torah, the community of Israel could heal the exile of the Shekinah and reunite the world to the Godhead. Not
surprisingly, many strict Talmudists found this an abhorrent idea but the exile of the Shekinah, which echoed the ancient
myths of the goddess who wandered far from the divine world, became one of the most popular elements of Kabbalah. The
female Shekinah brought some sexual balance into the notion of God which tended to be too heavily weighted towards the
masculine and clearly fulfilled an important religious need.
The notion of the divine exile also addressed that sense of separation which is the cause of so much human anxiety. The
Zohar constantly defines evil as something which has become separated or which has entered into a relationship for which it
is unsuited. One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is
evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and
made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection. The
Zohar finds the root of evil in God himself: in Din or Stern Judgement, the fifth sefirah. Din is depicted as God's left hand,
Hesed (Mercy) as his right. As long as Din operates harmoniously with the divine Mercy, it is positive and beneficial. But if
it breaks away and becomes separate from the other sefiroth, it becomes evil and destructive. The Zohar does not tell us
how this separation came about. In the next chapter, we shall see that later Kabbalists reflected on the problem of evil,
which they saw as the result of a kind of primordial 'accident' that occurred in the very early stages of God's self-revelation.
Kabbalah makes little sense if interpreted literally, but its mythology proved psychologically satisfying. When disaster and
tragedy engulfed Spanish Jewry during the fifteenth century, it was the Kabbalistic God which helped them to make sense of
their suffering.
We can see the psychological acuity of Kabbalah in the work of the Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia (i 24O-after 1291).
The bulk of his work was composed at about the same time as The Zohar but Abulafia concentrated on the practical
method of achieving a sense of God rather than with the nature of God itself. These methods are similar to those employed
today by psychoanalysts in their secular quest for enlightenment. As the Sufis had wanted to experience God like
Muhammad, Abulafia claimed to have found a way of achieving prophetic inspiration. He evolved a Jewish form of Yoga,
using the usual disciplines of concentration such as breathing, the recitation of a mantra and the adoption of a special posture
to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Abulafia was an unusual Kabbalist. He was a highly erudite man, who had
studied Torah, Talmud and Falsafah before being converted to mysticism by an overwhelming religious experience at the
age of thirty-one. He seems to have believed that he was the Messiah, not only to Jews but also to Christians. Accordingly,
he travelled extensively throughout Spain making disciples and even ventured as far as the Near East. In 1280 he visited the
Pope as a Jewish ambassador. Although Abulafia was often very outspoken in his criticism of Christianity, he seems to have
appreciated the similarity between the Kabbalistic God and the theology of the Trinity. The three highest sefiroth are
reminiscent of the Logos and Spirit, the Intellect and Wisdom of God, which proceed from the Father, the Nothingness lost
in inaccessible light. Abulafia himself liked to speak about God in a trinitarian manner.
To find this God, Abulafia taught that it was necessary 'to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it'. The phrase
'untying the knots' is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the fundamental agreement of mystics worldwide.
The process described can perhaps be compared to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock those complexes that impede the
mental health of the patient. As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of
creation but which the soul cannot perceive. As long as we clog our minds with ideas based on sense perception, it is
difficult to discern the transcendent element of life. By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go
beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokmah ha-Tseruf (The
Science of the Combination of the Letters) which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to