by Mark Booth
Each Hebrew letter is also a number. Aleph, the Hebrew A, is one, Beth is two and so on. There are complex connections here. The Hebrew word for father has a numerical value of 3 and the word for mother has a value of 41. The Hebrew word for child is 44, the combination of Father and Mother.
It gets more mind-blowing.
The numerical value of the Hebrew phrase for the Garden of Eden is 144. The numerical value of the Tree of Knowledge is 233. If you divide 233 by 144, you get very close — to four decimal points — to the value to the golden ratio phi!
In the last few decades mathematicians have applied themselves to the task of finding messages encoded in the text of the books of Moses. Breakthrough work by Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg aimed at discovering transcription codes using equidistant letter sequences. The published results include some names of post-biblical historical figures from Hebrew history, but as yet no propositions, no sequences of sentences or anything that could be read as a message. Again, it is not my secret to reveal, but one Cambridge-based statistician has shown me the results of applying an extremely complex ‘skip code’, a code verified as valid by a Cambridge University professor of mathematics. The fragments he showed me were reminiscent of the Psalms.
Imagine if a whole other book — or series of books — were encoded in the text we have! Would each of these texts have different layers of meaning too?
Such an achievement is beyond the capacity of normal human intelligence.
Recent research by an occult group has shown that J.S. Bach composed some of the world’s most beautiful melodies — such as the famous Chaconne — while at the same time giving each note the value of a letter of the alphabet. Bach’s music spells out secret, Psalm-like messages. This again is surely something beyond normal human intelligence?
In esoteric circles language which is imbued by initiates with layers of meaning is sometimes called the Green Language or Language of the Birds. Rabelais and Nostradamus, contemporaries at Montpellier University, as well as Shakespeare, are all said to have written it. Wagner refers to it when he alludes to the tradition that Siegfried learned the Language of the Birds by drinking dragon’s blood.
One last possibility while we are still on this topic. Perhaps we all speak the Green Language all the time? Perhaps the only difference between us and great initiates like Shakespeare is that they do it consciously?
SIGMUND FREUD WAS DEEPLY INTERESTED in the Cabala. As we will see, it was a formative influence on his thought. But he got hold of the wrong end of the stick when he argued that the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten was the source of Moses’s monotheism. We now know Moses came first. Akhenaten’s ideas of monotheism were subtly but dangerously different.
At the height of the Egyptian New Kingdom, the reign of Akhentaten’s father, Amenhotep III, seemed to signal a new era of even greater peace and prosperity which, even if didn’t match the unique achievement of the Great Pyramid, would see the construction of the most magnificent temples of the ancient world.
After the birth of three daughters Queen Tiy gave Amenhotep a son. Perhaps because he had been long awaited, perhaps partly because it was clear his father did not have long to live, the boy who was to become Akhenaten was brought up inside the temple precincts and grew up with a sense of cosmic mission.
Akhenaten had been born with a chromosomal defect that gave him a strange, hermaphroditic, even unearthly appearance: womanly thighs and an elongated face that might be read as ethereal, even spiritual. This defect can also lead to symptoms of mental instability — mania, delusions, paranoia.
Some combination of these factors may have contributed to his actions, which threatened to disrupt the whole progress of human evolution.
Unlike in Babylon, where kings acted independently of the priesthood, leading to extremes of despotic cruelty, the pharaohs of Egypt ruled under the aegis of the initiate priests. This is why the popular view of Akhenaten’s revolution that sees it as an act of radical individualism is quite wrong.
The start of Akhenaten’s reign coincided with the beginning of a Sothic cycle. This was one of the greatest of the astronomical cycles that shaped history, according to the priestly theology.
The Sothic cycle is 1460 years long. In Egyptian mythology each new beginning of this cycle saw the return of the Bennu bird, the Phoenix heralding the birth of the new age and a new dispensation. When Akhenaten announced the closing of the most magnificent temple in the world at Karnak, and the founding of a new cult centre and capital city approximately halfway between Karnak and Giza, this was not the wilful act of an eccentric individual, but an initiate king acting out cosmic destiny. He was preparing to welcome the return of the Bennu bird in 1321 BC.
His first act was to build a new temple to Aten, the god of the sun disc. In the great courtyard of Akhenaten’s new temple was its centrepiece, an obelisk topped by the Benben stone on which the legendary Phoenix was to alight.
His next act, supported by his mother Queen Tiy, was to build his great new capital city and sail the whole machinery of government down to it on barges. He wanted to shift the earth on its axis.
He then declared that all other gods did not really exist and that Aten was the one, true and only God. This was monotheism in something very like the modern sense. The worship of Isis, Osiris, and Amon-Re was forbidden. Their temples were effaced and shut down, and their popular festivals declared superstitions.
There is something appealing to modern sensibility about Akhenaten’s reforms. Like today’s monotheism, Akhenaten’s was materialistic. By definition monotheism does away with other gods — and it tends to do away with other spirits and other forms of disembodied intelligence too. So monotheism tends to be materialistic in the sense that it tends to deny the experience of spirits — and that experience, as we have already said, is what spirituality really is.
So it was the physical sun that Akhenaten declared divine and the source of all goodness. As a result, the art of Akhenaten’s reign did away with the hieratic formalism of traditional Egyptian art with its ranks of deities. Akhenaten’s art seems naturalistic in a way we find easy to appreciate. Some of his beautiful hymns to Aten have survived and they seem, remarkably, to anticipate the Psalms of David. ‘How manifold is that which you have made. You created the world according to your desire — all men, cattle and wild animals,’ declaimed Akhenaten. ‘How countless are your works,’ sang David, ‘you made all of them so wisely. The world is full of your creatures.’
But behind the poetry, behind all the clean intelligence and modernism there lurked a monomaniacal madness. By banning all the other gods and declaring himself the only channel for the wisdom and influence of Aten on earth, he was in effect making the whole priesthood redundant and replacing them with just himself.
But despite making himself the focus of all religious practice, he withdrew deeper and deeper into the maze of courtyards of his palace with his beautiful wife Nefertiti and their beloved children. He played with his young family, composed hymns and refused to hear any bad news regarding unrest among the people or of the rebellions in Egypt’s colonies that threatened its supremacy in the region.
Collapse eventually came from within. Fifteen years into his reign the daughter on whom he doted died, despite all his prayers to Aten. Then his mother Tiy, who had always supported him, died too. Nefertiti disappears from court records.
Two years later the priests had Akhenaten killed, and they put on the throne the young boy who was to become known to the world as Tutenkhamun.
Immediately the priests set about restoring Thebes. Akhenaten’s capital quickly became a ghost town and every monument to him, every depiction of him, every mention of the name of Akhenaten was ruthlessly and systematically effaced.
Some modern commentators have seen Akhenaten as a prophetic, even saintly figure. It is significant, though, that as we know from Manetho, the Egyptians remembered his reign as a Sethian event. Seth is, of course, Satan, the great spirit of materialism, who always
works to destroy true spirituality. If his envoy, Akhenaten, had successfully converted humankind to materialism, then the three thousand years of the gentle, beautiful growth of the human spirit, and many qualities that had evolved since would have been lost forever.
ALTHOUGH IT MAY NOT HAVE SURVIVED in anything like the same state of preservation as some of the Egyptian temples, no temple looms larger in the collective imagination than the Temple of Solomon.
Saul has recently been identified as a historical character who features in the letters of kings subject to Akhenaten. They loyally wrote to him with reports of local events. Saul’s name in these letters is ‘Labya’, the king of the ‘Habiru’. Following these identifications in the records of neighbouring cultures, we may now say with confidence that David — ‘Tadua’ — became the first to unite the tribes of Israel in one kingdom when he became king of Jerusalem in 1004 BC, which is to say in the reign of Tutenkamun. David lay the foundations of a temple at Jersualem, but died before he could build it, and so this task was left to his son, whom we now know was anointed king of Jerusalem in 971 BC.
Before the advances made by David Rohl’s New Chronology, it had been believed that Solomon, if he was a real historical character at all, lived in the Iron Age. This was a big problem because archaeology could find in the remains of that period no evidence of the wealth and building projects for which Solomon has always been famous. Relocating Solomon in the late Bronze Age has proved to be a perfect fit. The remains of Phoenician-style architecture that a Hiram might have built have been dug up in the appropriate strata.
The figure of Solomon glows in the popular imagination as the embodiment of all kingly magnificence and wisdom — and in the secret tradition, as the magical controller of demons. In the secret traditions of Freemasonry — as we know from an oration by Chevalier Michael Ramsay in 1736 — Solomon recorded his magical knowledge in a secret book which was later laid in the foundations of the second Temple in Jerusalem.
In Jewish folklore Solomon’s reign was so splendid that gold and silver became as common as stones in the street. But because the Jews had no tradition of building temples up to this time, having been a nomadic people, Solomon chose to employ as architect for this project a Phoenician, Hiram Abiff. If the building seems, on the evidence of the measurements given in the Old Testament, no larger than a parish church, it was nevertheless crammed with ornamentation of unparalleled magnificence.
In its middle stood the Holy of Holies, lined with gold plate and encrusted with jewels. It was designed to contain the Ark of the Covenant, containing the tablets of Moses. The Cherubim whose wings stretched protectively over it were, as we have seen, representatives of constellations of the zodiac belt. On the corners of the altar stood four horns, representing the moon, and a golden candlestick with seven lamps — of course, a representation of the sun, the moon and the five major planets on either side. The Pillars of Jakim and Boaz measured the pulse of the cosmos. They were so placed as to mark the furthest points of the sun’s risings of the equinoxes, and according to the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, and Clement, the first bishop of Alexandria, they were topped with ‘orreries’, mechanical representations of the motions of the planets. Decorative, carved pomegranates are mentioned several times in the biblical account. The robes of the priests were decorated with precious stones representing the sun, the moon, the planets and the constellations — emeralds being the only stone named.
The most extraordinary feature of the temple seems to have been a sea — or according to the Koran, a fountain — of molten brass. Again, as with the bronze serpent nailed to a pole by Moses, this image of smelting should alert us to the presence of secret practices dedicated to transforming human physiology.
Hiram, the Master Builder, employed a brotherhood of craftsmen to realize his designs. He classified them according to three grades, the Apprentices, the Companions and the Masters. Here we see ideas of fraternity that will eventually spread beyond the narrowly esoteric to transform the organization of society as a whole, and in the story of the murder of Hiram Abiff we see a warning of how it may all go wrong.
THERE IS AN UNDERCURRENT OF RIVALRY between Solomon and Hiram Abiff in some of the secret traditions. The Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, but she was also curious to meet the man who had designed such a miraculous temple.
And when she felt Hiram Abiff’s gaze on her, she experienced a sensation like molten metal inside.
She asked Hiram how he had managed to bring the beauty of the heavens down to earth in the architecture of the Temple. He responded by holding aloft a Tau cross, a cross in the shape of the letter T. Immediately all the many workers swarmed into the temple like ants.
Again the image of the insect. There are traditions preserved in the Talmud and the Koran that the Temple was built with the aid of a mysterious insect able to carve stone called the Shameer. As with the image of the beehive, we have here an image of spiritual forces — which Hiram is able to command.
Solomon’s Temple in an eighteenth-century print. The Freemasonic scholar Albert Pike called it ‘an abridged image of the cosmos’. The twin pillars Jakim and Boaz contain many layers of meaning, including, on a physiological level, the rhythmic motions of red and purple blood and, on a cosmic level, the spirit’s rhythmic entry alternately into the spiritual and material worlds.
Three of Hiram’s workers were jealous of his secret powers. They decided they wanted to know the secrets of the molten sea. They ambushed him at the end of the day as he was leaving the Temple. When he repeatedly refused to disclose his secrets they murdered him, each dealing him a massive, haemorrhage-inducing blow to the head.
It is said that certain secrets died with him and are still lost, that the secrets divulged in the Mystery schools and secret societies ever since have been lesser secrets.
There is a hint of a sexual element in the account of Sheba’s burning sensation and the Tau cross, but to begin to understand Hiram’s secrets we must ask ourselves, given all the astronomical elements in the design and decoration of the Temple, what was its particular orientation?
Two independent-minded Masonic researchers, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, have worked out this orientation, starting from the clue that Hiram came from Phoenicia, where the principal deity was Astarte — or Venus. Of course, this ties in, too, with the decorative details, already mentioned, the pomegranates which are the fruit of Venus and the emeralds which are the precious stones of Venus.
According to Clement of Alexandria, the curtain which sectioned off the Holy of Holies had cut into it the shape of a five-pointed star. The five-pointed star has always been a symbol of Venus, because the pattern that Venus traces around the ecliptic in its eight-year cycle — five appearances in the morning sky and five in the evening sky — forms a five-pointed pattern. It is the only planet to draw a completely regular figure in this way. This figure is seen sometimes as a pentagram, sometimes as a five-pointed star, and sometimes, as we shall see when we come to investigate Rosicrucianism, as a five-petalled flower, the rose.
As well as being a symbol of Venus, the pentagram is highly significant in geometry because, as Leonardo’s mathematics teacher Luca Pacioli revealed in his book on divine proportion, it embodies the Golden Proportion in every part of it.
But there is more. This sacred geometry operates in time as well as space.
Five Venus cycles of 584 days take place over exactly eight solar years, which means that a Venus cycle is 1.6 of a solar cycle. We have come across this number 1.6 before. It is the beginning of the Golden Proportion, one of the irrational and magical numbers that describe the precipitation of mind into matter.
In the ancient and secret doctrine, the planets and the stars control this precipitation of matter.
The Venus associations multiply, one dimension opening up into another like the bubble universes of modern science. There are many rival etymologies of the name Jerusalem, one being that the original name of the city was
Urshalem, ‘ur’ meaning founded by and ‘Shalem’ being an ancient name of Astarte — or Venus — in her evening setting. In Masonic tradition its own lodges are modelled on the Jerusalem Temple. The five-pointed star of Venus is represented above the ceremonial chair of the Grand Master, and initiates greet each other in a fraternal five-pointed ceremonial embrace. Lodges contain dormer windows, aligned in such a way that the light of Venus shines through them on certain important days. A Master mason is raised into rebirth facing the light of Venus at an equinox.
Bearing in mind the identification of Venus with Lucifer, these associations might at first seem a bit disconcerting. But in esoteric history Lucifer is always a necessary evil. The human capacity for thought was forged out of a balance between Venus and the moon — and the moon, as we have just seen, also features prominently, in the design of the altar of the Temple.
The mission of Solomon was to lead humankind down into a darkening, more material world, keeping the flame of spirituality alive. It was the same mission that Freemasonry would take up in the seventeenth century at the dawn of the modern age of materialism.
THE SOLOMONIC LEGENDS FIND A DISTANT echo in the British Isles. Modern scholarship tends to hold the view that, if the legends of Arthur have any historical basis at all, this lies in the ‘Dark Ages’ following the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain, when a Christian warlord might have fought glorious but ultimately futile battles to repel pagan invaders. An intriguing case has been made that the historical figure behind the Arthur legends was Owain Ddantgwynne, a Welsh warlord who defeated the pagan Saxons at the Battle of Badon in 470. Arthur would in this case have been a title, meaning ‘the bear’.