God's Metaphor in History

The enemies of Gnosis were and are triumphant, but only in the organizational and political sense. Historically they [Babylon, Rome] seem to have won, but all victories over the spirit remain forever equivocal, and the spark or deepest self is never quite snuffed out.
- Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium

The history of the Jewish people is God's metaphor for Gnosis.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Double Messiah

The genius and hubris of Christianity is the same: the allegorization of scripture. I will use the concept of exile as an example. Pascal writes: "All that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life; libido sentiendi , libido sciendi , libido dominandi ." Wretched is the cursed land which these three rivers of fire enflame rather than water! Happy they who, on these rivers, are not overwhelmed nor carried away, but are immovably fixed, not standing but seated on a low and secure base, whence they do not rise before the light, but, having rested in peace, stretch out their hands to Him, who must lift them up, and make them stand upright and firm in the porches of the holy Jerusalem! There pride can no longer assail them nor cast them down; and yet they weep, not to see all those perishable things swept away by the torrents, but at the remembrance of their loved country, the heavenly Jerusalem, which they remember without ceasing dur...
Read more

The German Emigre

According to another opinion, the Shekhina originally did dwell here below, on earth. However, when Adam sinned, she removed herself to the first heaven. When the generation of Enosh sinned, she moved up from the first to the second heaven. The sins of the generation of the Deluge caused her to withdraw to the third heaven; those of the generation of the Tower of Babel, to the fourth. When the Egyptians sinned in the days of Abraham, she withdrew to the fifth heaven. The sins of the Sodomites impelled her to seek refuge in the seventh heaven. When the seven righteous (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Levi, Kehat, Amram, and Moses) arose, they brought her back down to earth step by step. - Raphael Patai, "The Shekhina" Addendum: the sins of the Germans have exiled the Shekhina from earth for a thousand years to match their führer's reich.
Read more

The Anti-Semite as High School Girl

The Germans hate the Jewish religion less than their race, less their peculiar faith than their peculiar noses. - Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem The most assimilated and preeminent Westerners of Jewish lineage still preserved in their physical physiognomy, if in nothing else, the unmistakable and eternal stamp of Israel. And this inevitable fact has again and again infuriated the pagan peoples of the world. - Ludwig Lewisohn I found the reductio ad absurdum proof of the above sentiment in a blog comment posted by an Internet beauty queen: Plenty of people object to Jewish looks/appearance, not just WNs…Jews tend to be very physically ugly. Actually, the vast majority of Jews aren’t just ugly, many are FRIGHTENINGLY UGLY, so much so that most normal and healthy people of all racial/ethnic backgrounds are immediately repulsed or even instinctively scared (women and children, mostly) of them and as such avoid contact with them. Full-blooded Jews, especially unmixed Ashkenazim, are quite...
Read more