Kabbalah is the tradition of Jewish mysticism, and its central text, the Zohar, appeared in Spain in the thirteenth century. Tradition ascribes it to the second-century rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, though modern scholars link it to Moses de León. One of its most dramatic sections is the Idra Rabba, the Greater Holy Assembly. In it Shimon bar Yochai gathers his students in a field and describes the divine in startling bodily images. According to the story, the revelation is so intense that several of the students die from it.
The Ancient of Ancients
The Zohar speaks of the Holy Ancient One, a hidden aspect of God beyond all description, whose image draws on the “Ancient of Days” in the Book of Daniel. In Daniel’s vision the figure has hair like pure wool and a throne of flames. The Zohar distinguishes the Long Face, the vast and patient aspect of God, from the Short Face, the lesser aspect through which the world is governed. Above all of them stands Ein Sof, “without end,” the infinite divine that cannot be pictured at all. The Ancient of Ancients is said to be the concealed of the concealed, and his light is said to illuminate hundreds of thousands of worlds.
How Kabbalah reached the West
In 1486 the Italian scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola included Kabbalistic theses in his famous nine hundred conclusions, and Christian Kabbalah became part of Renaissance learning. In the 1600s Christian von Rosenroth published a Latin collection of Zohar texts, the Kabbala Denudata, and S. L. MacGregor Mathers translated parts of it into English in The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887). Mathers co-founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which is how these ideas entered modern Western occultism.
The four creatures
The bull, lion, eagle and man around the throne come from Ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot. The same four creatures appear in the Book of Revelation, became the symbols of the four Gospel writers, and show up again at the corners of the Wheel of Fortune and World cards in the tarot.
The painting
A white-bearded figure in red sits on a throne between two pillars, surrounded by a bull, a lion, an eagle and a man, the four living creatures of Ezekiel’s vision. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- The plate’s caption says the head of the Ancient is cleft like Zeus’s, to let wisdom come out in the form of Athena. A Greek myth is borrowed to explain a Kabbalistic image.
- The text describes the robes as white, but the painter shows them red, to signify the fire of cosmic activity.
- The thirteen fountains that flow from the divine beard are usually read as the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy from the Book of Exodus.
- The two pillars with six-pointed stars recall the pillars of Boaz and Jachin at Solomon’s Temple, which appear in many Masonic lodges.
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