Fantastic Metropolis

I mentioned before the similarity between Hildegard’s visions and those of Emanuel Swedenborg advisedly. One reason was Swedenborg’s own insistence that Christ never became a man, similar to that of the Cathars, as it helps provide the first link between Hildegard and them outside of their joint insistence on the corruptions of the flesh and the falsity of a Satanic figure pretending to be God. Secondly, because even Swedenborg ultimately turned out to be unable to truly understand or codify his visions in a unique manner, turning to the theology of his birth to attempt to understand them. Hildegard had no Abelard to encourage her to turn her great rational intellect towards understanding what she saw, instead she had Bernard and others trained by him (including Eugenius III) to encourage her to ignore reason for emotional impact, to strip her experiences of their subtleties. Meanwhile, the Cathars themselves found their ascetic approach to religion appealing to many (many noble families in Languedoc took up Catharism… not so much the radical, “Satan fathered Jesus” form but the less radical “Jesus descended from heaven to bring us gnosis and free us from the cage of flesh created by a mad demiurge who believes himself to be the one true God” form) picking up bits and pieces from the Kabbalah and attempting to make them fit their Christian-derived Gnosticism. Neither was prepared to even go as far as the Essenes or Zoroastrians had, much less so far as Blake, who even transcended Swedenborg in his understanding.

Let us try and reason this, then, using both the Kabbalah and Zurvanite Zoroastrianism as our guide, and perhaps a reference or two to the ancient Hebrew pair of Yahweh and Asherah, his wife.

It begins with either Zurvan, the null state, existing before space and time and outside them both, or with Ain, the true nothingness that is neither good nor evil, neither light nor shadow. Zurvan/Ain do not actually exist, because all either could ever be seen as is the potential for existence… much as in Kabbalism one ascends from Assiyah, this world, the world where things happen up the tree of life, climbing up the spheres again and again to move across all ten sephiroth until one enters the world of Yetzirah, where all things are formative and distinct and can happen, and then up the tree still further until one reaches the conceptual plane of Briah, where the idea of distinct existence begins to be possible, finally leading to Atziluth, the realm of the Archetypical, where thought and reality, essence and the limitless light of creation are not distinct from one another. Beyond that is Adam Kadmon itself, the Shi’ur Komah which is the palimpsest and the plan for all creation. But beyond all of that, beyond even the abyss hanging in the heart of the tree between the sephiroth where the ego of the observer must ‘die’, there is the truth. Zurvan is a collapsing wavefront, and he can be either Ahura Mazdha or Ahriman, there is no separation between them. Ain contracts itself down into a single point, moving from Ain (nothingness) to Ain Sof (boundlessness), moving from the emptiness of all possible potential to the bursting fullness of all possible potential about to be expressed. This moment of tzimtzum, or contraction, is what allows the entirety of the sephirothic tree to come into being. It illuminates the divine plan, it creates the levels of discrete reality from Adam Kadmon where all is one, all things that exist and the light that illuminates them is joined, the essence and that which carries it indistinguishable, and the descent from Atziluth to Assiyah is the creation of actuality from potential, where things move from being possible to being conceived of to being distinguishable and understood and finally to being real. Yet in this process, the limitless light of Ain Sof Aur, that which makes all of this happen, creates a paradox in allowing distinctness to exist. In order for things to be, they also have to have an infinite amount of not being. As the conceptual lightning flash descends, there is always a loss… everything that exists in Assiyah is something, and therefore is not anything else, unlike in the higher realm of Adam Kadmon where everything is everything.

In Kabbalism, all the not being is literally referred to as shadow, the shadows cast by the limitless light. Without the shadows, there would be no distinction between concepts, and therefore no existence at all… and this would make a mockery of the primal state of Zurvan/Ain, for all things that are possible must be able to exist, and in order for them to exist, they must be separate from one another, and in order for them to be separate from each other they must be capable of not being each other, and therefore it must be possible not to be something, which leads us inexorably to the conclusion that it must be possible not to be. In order for Zurvan to create the cosmos, to make the Wise Lord Ahura Mazdha, to create at all, he must be capable of destruction… indeed, the act of creation requires that destruction happen. If there are no shadows then there is nothing but light, and light alone is nothing at all. Ahriman is necessary. The Qlippoth, the cracked shells, the garbage disposal of existence is where everything that isn’t goes, and therefore is just as much a bed of possibility as is its opposite. After all, things that aren’t do come into being, and where were they before? Where the things that don’t exist wait. (Yes, I realize this suggests the morphic cosmos of implication and explication created by Bohm and Sheldrake, but a line mentioning that connection seems enough to me, considering that they’re easy enough to find.) It is in the decision to find the created, discrete entities of existence to be evil or corrupt merely because they possess more of that qlippothic not being that they are distinct and physical, and therefore less potential and more actual than the higher planes of existence where the error creeps in. Furthermore, as Blake suggests, ultimately the distinctness is a lie.