The archetypal man created, modeled, and balanced on the tree of life, the Adam Kadmon, from the very beginning, before the contraction of the Ain Soph (the ineffable void), and after its expansion into the form of ordered and finalized emanation, represented the ultimate meta-human concept: the model from which the flesh-and-blood Adam, host in Eden in Malkuth, had been shaped.
But the human wanted “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26-27) was not, in the words of the supreme poet, “made to live like a brute,” and the “provocations” of the serpent, symbol of the most hidden life that, with its darting out of the womb of the Earth to show itself as the primordial soul of every evolved consciousness, soon became not an invitation but an accurate categorical imperative.
The tree of life, planted in the east, could not remain the only “consolation” for those who yearn to rediscover their innate nature and thus, ultimately, to re-deify themselves. The coils of that serpent, coiled toward the north, the direction from which evil comes (simply because it is less enlightened), soon indicated that the purpose of Eden was inherent in its dramatic overcoming, in the separation of the newborn from its mother, in the partogenesis equivalent to the first initiatory step: death, putrefaction, the whole alchemical journey and rebirth toward what is only apparent darkness but which, in reality, conceals the seed of actual knowledge.
Adam plunges into the abyss, and so does Adam Kadmon, previously fully irradiated by the higher Sefiroth, lower himself along with the entire world of Hessiah to the limine of Malkuth, the Qliphot Lilith, the point from which it will begin to become the Adam Beliyy’al, the “dark,” evil, negative archetype, in that it is no longer oriented toward ascending to Kether but rather “caged” in occult tunnels filled with every potential for evil.
The “horrendous” descriptions of the end of Adam Kadmon are all the eviler, the more they are intended to draw man away from gnosis and the crowning of his ultimate goal, that is, not submission to any creative deity, but a reunion, equal and equivalent, with the same substance from which all is generated. The Adam Beliyy’al is not the archetype of the murderer, the thief, the evil general who orders extermination and rape. It is “only” the counterbalance to initiation into an apparent monistic light (which, however, immediately betrays its dualism at the level of Assiah) to make a man a “cyclops,” that is, a being already semi-divine but with the full knowledge that the final overcoming of dualism cannot be separated from the darkness of the qliphotic worlds.
Worlds that, according to orthodox purism, would be places of perdition where the most fierce demons devour the poor lost person, but instead, after an initial terror (analogous to that envisaged by the alchemical motto V.I.T.R.I.O.L. – Visita Interiora Terrae et Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem), he begins to realize the essence of his innermost nature: the knowledge that will open the door to perception and the deepest gnosis.
Abhor evil, if that is a restriction, deprivation of freedom of expression, a desire not to show, to forbid!
Abhor the evil of those who donate “Earthly Paradises,” where there are trees from which one cannot eat. Instead, eat from those trees. Eat of it and make gods of it, even paying the price of apparent darkness, a darkness that, through your path, you will soon transform into a universe of pure light never adulterated by ideologies!
Adam Kadmon and Adam Beliyy’al embrace the eternal desire to finally realize “the miracle of the one thing” of hermetic memory.
Reference text:
- In On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem guides the reader through the central themes in the intricate history of the Kabbalah, clarifying the relations between mysticism and established religious authority, the mystics' interpretation of the Torah and their attempts to discover the hidden meaning underlying Scripture, the tension between the philosophical and the mystical concepts of God, and the symbolism employed in mystical religion
- With a new foreword by Bernard McGinn Leggi di più
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