Remake the mud and cook it

Regarding the verses of The Message Rediscovered 15, 68 and 68’, and 23, 57 and 57’

All religious or philosophical traditions involve, in order to remain alive, the transmission of the mystery that constitutes their foundation. That is the very meaning of the word tradition, from the Latin tradere, to transmit or pass on from hand to hand.

The object of this transmission must necessarily be the same at all times and in all places, since the truth remains eternally, everywhere and always, the same. Those who possess this object, and who look after it, express it through images that may be quite different according to places and times, but faithful images. Thus, the robes may be many and diverse, but they should none the less be well fitted and make it possible to discern the immutable body of a truth that reveals itself to nobody but him to whom it is given in marriage.

When this transmission dies out, the religion or philosophy that manifested it outside in the world dries out and eventually dies, like a tree that no sap gives life to any more. The images themselves to which we just referred become gradually erased from the hearts of men.

In Judaism, this tradition is designated by the word cabala, from the Hebrew kibbel, to receive. This word thus means: reception or receipt, and consequently, tradition. The cabala is transmitted, and becomes inaccessible outside of this transmission.

It is from then on impossible to study it from the outside. Its manifestations are so diverse that the human mind finds it impossible to synthesize this apparent chaos. The course of the cabala is very difficult to recognize in exegetic texts. The historians were often mistaken about it, failing to recognize it where it was, and believing to see it where it was not. He who is not a cabalist will make his judgements according to his own norms, whose external nature precludes any comprehension of the subject in question.

It is in this way that the cabala has been considered as a doctrine that would have been transmitted secretly, by word of mouth, it is said, in certain closed circles, and advancing in parallel to the teaching of the Jewish religion. Some historians have believed to recognize in it, moreover, all sorts of influences: Alexandrine, Gnostic, Christian… This doctrine is believed to have arisen in Spain and in the south of France in the XI century. Such conceptions restrict the dimensions and depth of the cabala to that which the human mind can conceive about itself, and to that which can be revealed by a study of the texts from the outside.

We find an extremely clear allusion to the existence of a Jewish cabala in a passage from the Mishna, the oldest part of the Talmud, which relates the teaching of the rabbis at the time of the Second Temple. This passage attributes to Moses the origin of this Judaic cabala:

«Moses received (in Hebrew kibbel) the Torah from Sinai; then he passed it on Joshua; Joshua passed it on to the Elders; the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets to the men of the Great Assembly».

The verb kibbel is thus related here to the Torah itself. Notice this: this people that had crossed the Red Sea without wetting their feet, wandered for forty years in the desert, nourished by manna, this people that had had the vision of Sinai, received the two tablets of stone, carried the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy Land across the river Jordan, would this people, then, not have received the Torah? Only Moses, says this text, received it in his day, and he passed it on to just one man, Joshua. With the passage of time, a very small number of men were graced with the gift of the Torah: the Elders, the Prophets, the men of the Great Assembly. The people received nothing of it but the exterior: books, a story, a worship, in other words, images.

The text we have quoted gives us some more information of which we should take careful note. From whom did Moses receive the Torah? From Sinai. The text does not say: on Sinai, it says from Sinai. To what does this refer?

There are two possible etymologies of the word Sinai, which are not necessarily contradictory. According to the first, the meaning would be thorn bush, which makes us think of the burning bush on Mount Horeb, as though the two mountains were in fact just one. We shall concern ourselves here not with this first sense, but with the second, which would be mud.

 Moses would therefore have received from a mud, or on contact with it, the gift of the Torah. This second sense alludes, as we shall see, to the mysteries of cabalistic alchemy, for there is no cabala without alchemy, nor alchemy without cabala.

The perspectives of Hermeticism will perhaps help us to better understand what is really involved here.

The expression «Remake the mud and cook it» relates to a very old teaching on the mud «that does not wet the hands», the first matter of what the alchemists called their Stone.

According to Raymond Lully (Theoria, LXXVII ):

«Our Stone can be found only in the belly of the putrid things from which it is extracted. This substance from which the corruption comes is quite thick and muddy, and has a pronounced airy unctuousness».

The same Philosopher writes in his Codicillum:

«Our quicksilver is begotten from a vile and muddy substance and by a sole natural way».

 According to Arnaldus de Villanova, the quicksilver or water of life must be poured, in order to work, onto fixed lime that is at once wet-nurse, wife and mother, and which the Philosophers call «our earth». These teachings appear obscure. They allude, however, not now to concepts, but to an alchemical operation carried out by hand in the laboratory. It is not irrelevant here to point out that the alchemists have compared the work of the Stone to the fabrication of glass. They make this earth sweat by means of their fire and it is thus transformed into a life-giving mud called bath, rebis or double thing. That is why, according to Arnaldus de Villanova, «our earth» is at once wet-nurse, wife and mother.

But, one may ask, what have these alchemical considerations to do with the Torah of Moses? Are the two subjects not miles apart from one another? We should reply that this earth or mud of which the alchemists speak is called in Hebrew Adamah (Genesis II, 7) (clay), and that this word is simply the feminine form of Adam: man. Thus designated is the earth of which man was made; it is to him like his mother and his wet-nurse, and linked to him by a bond of natural sympathy; he is instructed on contact with it, it is to him like a mirror in which he contemplates himself.

Quite foolish is he who puts asunder what God has joined together: the body and the spirit! (Matthew XIX, 6 and Mark X, 9). In the Concordance Mytho-Physico-Cabalo-Hermétique by Saint Baque de Bufor, we find the following passage:

«On manipulating the true chaotic silt of the air, one solves without difficulty and progressively the philosophical enigmas, one goes through the whole of mythology, and one penetrates the true meaning of certain passages of the Old Testament, and that of all the works of Solomon» (ed. Obelisco, Barcelona, 1986, p.112).

The words of the Holy Scriptures were not written at random. We must therefore read them carefully without trying to water down their meaning. We have just referred, in relation to the first matter, to a manipulation, source of knowledge. It is in the literal sense that we must interpret the words of the cabalist Nahmanides, in the introduction he wrote to his Commentary on the five books of the Pentateuch:

«… What is more, we have in our hands a tradition of truth…».

Similarly, in the Talmud (Talmud of Babylonia, Berakhot 5a), the scholarly Talmud, we can read the following:

«He who receives (kibbel) them (the Iesourim or bonds of love), what shall be his reward? He will see his seed, prolong his days; and more than that, his study shall remain in his hand, as it is written: And the love of the Lord shall prosper in his hand (Isaiah LIII, 10)».

We could conclude in no better way than by quoting this testimony of Abraham Abulafia about his vocation for the cabala:

«And he called me by my name, Abraham, Abraham! And I said: here I am (Genesis XXII, 11). He taught me the true way. And he woke me as one wakes a man from his sleep, to compose a new work. In my days, nothing of the like was composed. And I forced my will and I put my hand to something that is almost beyond my means» (Cited by G. Scholem, Les grands courants de la mystique juive (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism), Payot, Paris, 1950, p. 390, note 40).

And it was with a tremendous bond that Abraham bound his Passover!