Sepher ha-Bahir

Numerous sources have attributed the enormous power attained by the Templars to the possession of some mysterious treasure—some referred to it as the Holy Grail—that made them so feared and hated that the Catholic Church became devoted to their brutal suppression. That treasure has sometimes been identified with the Ark of the Covenant. The Arch of Titus famously depicts legionaries carrying off menorahs and other Jewish plunder following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. But the Ark of the Covenant is not portrayed. In 410 AD, after Alaric conquered Rome, the historian Procopius (c. 500 – c. after 565), a Byzantine scholar from Palestine, in History of the Wars, lists among their spoils “the treasures of Solomon’s Temple, a sight most worthy to be seen, articles adorned with emeralds, taken from Jerusalem by the Romans.”[1] The Visigoths resettled in the south of France in what is today Languedoc, in Southern France.

As presented by Sean Kingsley in God’s Gold: A Quest for the Lost Temple Treasures, Rome was again subjected to an even more thorough sacking, this time by the Vandals in 455 AD. Again according to Procopius, referring to the spoils, “It was an exceedingly great amount, among the items taken were the treasures of the Jews, carrying off the temple menorah to their capital city of Carthage.”[2] The Byzantine general Belisarius defeated the Vandals in 534 AD, ransacked Carthage, and sailed back Constantinople to present the spoils of war to the emperor Justinian I (527 – 565 AD). In describing the “treasures of the Jews” presented to Justinian during Belisarius’s triumph, Procopius reported:

And one of the Jews, seeing these things, approached one of those known to the emperor and said: “These treasures I think it inexpedient to carry into the palace in Byzantium. Indeed, it is not possible for them to be elsewhere than in the place where Solomon, the king of the Jews, formerly placed them. For it is because of these that Gaiseric captured the palace of the Romans, and now the Roman army has captured the Vandals.” When this had been brought to the ears of the Emperor, he became afraid and quickly sent everything to the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem.[3]

It may have been in an attempt to recover these treasures that the Templars participated in the First Crusade. Another possibility is that the Templars were aware of some other treasure still buried beneath the site of the Temple of Solomon. Their known excavations may contribute to the explaining the sudden and enigmatic appearance of the Sepher ha-Bahir in the late twelfth century, first among the Ashkenazi Hasidim, and then among the Kabbalists of Septimania, and which then contributed to the Cathar heresy the Templars were associated with, and in turn, the development of the legends of the Holy Grail.

The network of aristocratic families involved in the Princes’ Crusade, were connected with the birth of the Kabbalah in Southern France, igniting the emergence of the lore of the Holy Grail, which was connected to the heresy of the Cathars, who were closely related to the Templars. Although it was founded in an earlier tradition of Merkabah mysticism, or what he called “Jewish Kabbalah,” Gershom Scholem dated the emergence of the Kabbalah sometime between 1130 and 1200, in Provence, or more precisely in its western part, known as the Languedoc. According to Scholem, it is in cities of Septimania like Lunel, Narbonne, Posquières, and perhaps also in Toulouse, Marseilles, and Aries, that are found the first mystics regarded as Kabbalists. Their disciples then transmitted the Kabbalistic tradition to Spain, where it took root in places such as Burgos, Gerona, and Toledo, from which it spread to other Jewish communities.[4]

As late as 1143, Peter the Venerable of Cluny, in an address to Louis VII of France, condemned the Jews of Narbonne who claimed to have a king residing among them. The place of residence of the Makhir family at Narbonne was designated in official documents as Cortada Regis Judæorum.[5] According to Golb:

This dynastic line, the first of whose members was an eminent personality named Makhir, retained its power and wealth throughout the Middle Ages and until the beginning of the fourteenth century, many of its members were named Todros or Qalomynus. In establishing this office, the Carolingians clearly intended to stabilize and legally to protect the many Jewish communities in this part of their realm.[6]

In 1144, Theobald, a Cambridge monk and Jewish convert, spoke of “the chief Princes and Rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain and assemble together at Narbonne, where the royal seed resides.” The “Royal Letters” of 1364 also record the existence of a Rex Iudaeorum (King of the Jews) at Narbonne.[7] The belief of Davidic descent is corroborated by the use of the Lion of Judah as a heraldic device on a seal of one Nasi (prince), Kalonymus ben Todros, in the later thirteenth century.[8] In 1165–66, Benjamin of Tudela, the famous Jewish traveler and chronicler, visited Narbonne, which he described as, “a city pre-eminent for learning; thence the Torah (Law) goes forth to all countries. Sages, and great and illustrious men abide here. At their head is R. Kalonymus, the son of the great and illustrious R. Todros of the seed of David, whose pedigree is established. He possesses hereditaments and lands given him by the ruler of the city, of which no man can forcibly dispossess him.”[9]

The Ashkenazi Hasidim, who maintained relations with the fymus of Narbonne, were a conduit for some of the mystical traditions of the Sefer ha Bahir, or the “Book of Brightness,” the earliest example of Medieval Kabbalistic thought.[10] However, the emergence of the Bahir poses a puzzle to modern historians, because its emergence in the last half of the twelfth century marked the sudden reappearance of Gnostic doctrines that had been lost to Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple. Given the sudden appearance of its Gnostic content, it is possible that the Bahir was derived from ancient sources which may have been discovered by the Knights Templar in their excavations of the Temple ruins.

There are many legends about the source of the Templars’ wealth. According to Masonic legend, when the Templars came under trial in 1301, their leader de Molay arranged for them to return to Scotland, where, according to Masonic lore, they had brought with them a number of “Eastern Mystics,” referring to the Mandaeans—also recognized as the Sabians—or the radical Ismaili sect of the Assassins of the Islamic world—who were “rescued” from the Holy Land, thus inaugurating the traditions of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Also according to Pike, the Templars were students of a group of “Johannite Christians,” who revered the author of the Book of Revelation,[11] a reference to the Mandaean sect of Iraq.

While this Masonic legend is impossible to verify, it is founded on the real preservation of occult knowledge from the Islamic world, likely transmitted to the Western world during the Crusades. Legends have long associated the Templars with treasure, of either material or spiritual value.[12] They have been linked to mythical relics such as the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. Hugh J. Schonfield argued that the Templars may have found the contents described in the Copper Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which describe treasures hidden around the Holy Land.[13] Engraved on a rolled sheet of copper is an inventory of various hidden treasures, possibly those of the Jewish Temple. The Copper scroll also provides directions for their recovery, though they have been difficult to interpret. Among the items listed are ingots of gold and silver talents, hidden in tombs and caves and down cisterns.[14] The treasure of the scroll may have consisted in part of the treasure of the Jewish Temple, presumably the Second Temple. Theodor H. Gaster argued that Josephus stated that the main treasure of the Temple was still in the building when it fell to the Romans, and also that other texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls were critical enough for the priesthood of the Temple for their authors to have been close to take away their treasures for safekeeping.[15]

In 1867, a group of Freemasons including Captain Wilson, Lieutenant Charles Warren and a team of Royal Engineers, re-excavated the area and uncovered tunnels extending vertically vertically from the Al Aqsa mosque, for some 25 meters, before fanning out under the Dome of the Rock, which is generally thought to be the site of King Solomon’s temple. Crusader artefacts found in these tunnels attest to Templar involvement. More recently, a team of Israeli archaeologists, intrigued by the Warren and Wilson discovery, reinvestigated the passage and concluded that the Templars did in fact excavate beneath the Temple.[16]

Kabbalists themselves considered the Bahir to be much older, attributing its oldest traditions to the teacher of Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi ben Haqana, of the first century AD, and crediting many of the book’s sayings to the tannaim and amoraim. However, as Gershom Scholem noted, it is doubtful that the attribution to some of the later authors is always original, for often it appears as if they were the result of later redaction in which names were added or altered.[17] Rather, it appears to represent a form of early classical Gnosticism, which had long disappeared from Judaism, and had survived only in non-Jewish sources. As Scholem recognized:

The language and concepts are the same, and we look in vain for an answer to the question how this terminology could have originated or been re-created anew in the twelfth century, unless there was some filiation to hidden sources that were somehow related to the old Gnostic tradition.[18]

As Joseph Dan noted, “No satisfactory explanation has yet to be proposed for the appearance or even the sources of the Gnostic symbols in the Bahir.”[19] Medieval Kabbalists claimed that the Bahir did not come to them as a unified book, but in pieces found in scattered scrolls and booklets. The text sometimes ends discussion in mid-sentence, and often jumps randomly from topic to topic. One scholar has suggested that at some early point in the transmission of the text, various pages of the book could have been scattered in the wind and then were reassembled in an incorrect order.[20]

According to Scholem, “the earliest strata of the Sefer ha-Bahir which came from the East, prove the existence of definitely Gnostic views in a circle of believing Jews in Babylonia or Syria, who connected the theory of the Merkabah with that of the ‘aeons.’” [21] Essentially, the Bahir transforms the Merkabah tradition into a Gnostic one, whereby the ten Sephiroth of the Sepher Yetzirah become “Aeons.” The divine emanations are represented by the allegory of a tree, which forms the image of the Archetypal Man, and watered by the Sophia, from which souls blossom forth. The tree possesses twelve directions, like the twelve signs of the Zodiac. To these branches correspond three regions of the world, the Serpent or Dragon, the Sphere and the Heart. Each has twelve “overseers” or archons, totaling thirty-six powers, to correspond with the thirty-six decans of astrology. Each of the thirty-six archons are found in the other, and, all are found in the Dragon, who, according to the Sepher Yetzirah, “is placed over the universe like a king upon the throne.”[22]

The pupils of the early Kabbalists coming from Spain to study in the Talmudic academies of southern France were the principal agents of the Kabbalah’s transplantation to that country, where they were responsible for the production of a text that drew on the Bahir, the Sefer ha Zohar, or Book of Light, the most important medieval Kabbalistic text. Mystical tradition also purports that the Zohar was based on an earlier “Arabic Kabbalah” of the Brethren of Sincerity. Isaac the Blind (c. 1160 – 1235), who widely suspected of being the author of the Bahir and son of Abraham ben David, a father of Kabbalah, was a pivotal figure among the thirteenth century Kabbalists of the Languedoc, and studied not only Jewish, but also early Greek, and Christian Gnostic writings, as well as the Brethren of Sincerity. Some historians even suspected him to be the author of the Sefer ha-Bahir. The Brethren of Sincerity and other Sufi mystics were widely studied by later Jewish mystics, such as Abraham Ibn Ezra, Moses Maimonides, Judah Halevi, Bahya Ibn Pakuda, Ibn Gabirol (ca. 1021 – 1059). The philosopher who most personified the interweaving of Judaism and Islam was the eleventh century Spanish Jew, Ibn Gabirol, who assimilated ideas from the Brethren of Sincerity to such an extent that it was his primary source of inspiration after the Bible. He also followed the teachings of the tenth century Sufi mystic Mohammed Ibn Masarra, who had introduced Sufism to Spain.[23] Ibn Gabirol, along with Ibn Arabi, was considered one of the two great followers of Ibn Masarra (883–931 AD), an Andalusian Muslim ascetic and scholar considered one of the first Sufis as well as one of the first philosophers of Moorish Spain.

Ibn Arabi, who was heavily influenced by the Epistles of the Brethren of Sincerity, formulated many of the ideas that became central to the Zohar.[24] The Zohar first appeared in Spain in the thirteenth century, and was published in Castile by a Jewish writer named Moses de Leon. But de Leon ascribed the work to Shimon bar Yochai, a rabbi of the second century at the time of the Roman persecution. According to Jewish legend, Shimon bar Yochai hid in a cave for thirteen years studying the Torah and was inspired by Elijah to write the Zohar. The author of the Zohar drew upon early mystical texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir, the early medieval writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, and upon the Bible commentaries written by medieval rabbis, including Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra, David Kimhi and even authorities as late as Nahmanides and Maimonides.

Golem

According to Keith Schuchard, the Templars adopted the Second Temple mysticism that would later feature in Freemasonry, principally from three leading Jewish Kabbalists from Spain: Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Abraham bar Hiyya (c. 1070 – 1136 or 1145) and his student Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089 – c.1167) were the leading influences behind the mystical tendencies of the Ashkenazi Hasidim.[25] The central figures of the Kalonymus founders of the Ashkenazi Hasidim, once they resettled in southern Germany, centered in Worms, Speyer, and Mainz, included Rabbi Samuel ben Kalonymus Hehasid, his son Rabbi Judah Hehasid “the Pious” (1150 – 1217) and Judah’s disciple, and its last major member, Eleazar ben Judah ben Kalonymus (c. 1176 – 1238), known as Eleazar of Worms. Astrology, which he called “a sublime science,” also had a place in Ibn Ezra’s work, which was cited extensively over the centuries, including by Rabbi Eleazar of Worms.

The first reference to Hasidim comes from the Bible, where human beings who love God and are loved by Him are referred to as hasid, meaning “pious.” The first to adopt the name were the Hasidim in Judea in the Second Temple period, known as Hasideans after the Greek rendering of their name. The Hasidaeans, who are mentioned three times in the Books of Maccabees. In the winter of 167 BC, immediately after the plundering of the Temple by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the abolition of the observance of the Law, “a company of Hasidaeans, stalwarts of Israel, every one of them a volunteer in the cause of the Law” joined Mattathias and his sons in their armed resistance against the Seleucids.[26] Opinions are divided as to whether the Hasideans were the predecessors of the Pharisees, the Essenes or both.[27] They are referred to in the Talmud as the “Pietists of Old” who would meditate an entire hour in preparation for prayer.

The bulk of the magical material of the practical Kabbalah, to be distinguished from speculative Kabbalah, is found in the writings of the Ashkenazi Hasidim, who were a conduit for some of the mystical traditions of the Sefer ha Bahir.[28] As Scholem remarked, the methods of the Kabbalists often tended to be more magical and theurgic than mystical, and therefore, “this may have something to do with the origin of the medieval stereotype of the Jew as magician and sorcerer.”[29] Throughout Europe, and from the earliest times, the Jews were charged with practicing black magic.

Astrology and alchemy were two aspects of what is known as practical Kabbalah, which, according to Scholem, was understood to refer to all magical practices that developed in Judaism from Talmudic times through to the Middle Ages.[30] Already in the early medieval era, a ba’al shem or “master of the name” referred to a master of practical Kabbalah who was an expert at issuing amulets for various types, invoking angels or devils, and exorcising demonic possessions.[31]

For the most part, practical Kabbalah was a supposedly purely motivated “white” magic, and only the most perfectly virtuous persons were permitted recourse to it, and even then, never for private benefit, and only in times of emergency and public need. Nevertheless, the lines were frequently overstepped and obscured, resulting in the appearance in practical Kabbalah of a good deal of “black magic,” meaning magic intended to harm others or that employed “the unholy names” of various dark, demonic powers, and magic used for personal gain.[32] Often, the white magic practices of amulets and charms are found side by side with the invocation of demons, incantations, and formulas for personal gain, and even sexual magic and necromancy. Purposes could include the discovery of hidden treasure, invincibility in the face of one’s enemies, and so on. Into such collections, many originally non-Jewish elements were incorporated, including Arab demonology and German and Slavic witchcraft.[33]

The Sefer Hasidim (“Book of the Pious”), which presents the combined teachings of the three leaders of German Hasidism during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—Samuel the Chassid, his son Judah the Chassid of Regensburg, and Elazar Rokeach—is the most significant relic of this movement. The Ashkenazi Hasidim were fascinated by demons, vampires and werewolves, and they believed in the existence of witchcraft and in astrology. There is a description in the Sefer Hasidim where the rabbi of the community advised that for a baby born with teeth and a tail that these be cut, lest it ate people when it grew up. A community where women ate children is also described. The Sefer Hasidim concerns itself with Estries, female vampires of Jewish folklore that were believed to prey on Hebrew citizens, and who are able shape-shift, fly, and can become the undead. Estries were created at sunset, before the first Sabbath before creation, and as a result they are able to shape-shift. The Sefer Harokeah, by Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, says: “When an estrie that has eaten children is being buried, one should observe whether her mouth is open. If it is, she will persist in her vampirish pursuits for another year unless it is stopped up with earth.”[34]

In some accounts estries are considered identical with succubi, demons in female form that appears in dreams in order to seduce men. The male counterpart is the incubus. Both were portrayed as beautiful, blood-thirsty female demons, with succubi thought to favor babies and young children as prey. Estries, like other vampires, needed to feed on blood to survive and were more indiscriminate in their choice of victims. Succubi were said to kill pregnant women and babies out of jealousy or spite, and to seduce or rape men. Estries and succubi were both said to be able to appear as humans or in spirit form at will, but Estries were also described as able to turn into birds or cats and various other animals. According to the Sefer Hasidim, a woman who was suspected of being an estrie was injured when she appeared to a Jew as a cat and he hit her.[35]

One problem which intrigued the Ashkenazi Hasidim was the possibility of the creation of a “golem” (literally, shapeless or lifeless matter), an artificial man made of clay brought to life through magical combination of the sacred letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which acted as a guardian over the Jews. The identification of the Sefer Yetzirah, concerning the creative force of the Hebrew letters, as the means to create a golem, was derived from interpretation of two statements in the tractate Sanhedrin in Babylonian Talmud. One relates that the early fourth century sage Rava created a person; in the second, two other sages were studying “the laws of creation” and created a “triple calf” which they ate for a celebration. Some commentators identified these “laws of creation” with the Sepher Yetzirah, which would have enabled Abraham to create a human being. [36]

The earliest known written account of how to create a golem can be found in Sodei Razaya by Eleazar ben Judah of Worms. In his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, Eleazar wrote that after kneading virgin soil from the mountains with pure water, the first stage of creation of a golem is to form the “limbs.” Each limb has a “corresponding letter mentioned in Sefer Yetzirah,” and this letter is to be combined with every other letter of the Hebrew alphabet to form pairs. Then a more general permutation is done of each letter of the Hebrew alphabet with every other letter into letter pairs, “each limb separately.” This second, basic method of combination is called the “221 gates.” Then each letter of the alphabet is combined with each vowel sound. That concludes the first stage, for the formation of the golem’s body. In the second stage, each letter of the alphabet is combined with each letter from the Tetragrammaton (YHVH, the four letter Name of God), and each of the resulting letter pairs is pronounced with every possible vowel sound. In this case the use of the Tetragrammaton, even though it is permutated, is the “activation word.”[37]

Kabbalah

One source credits ibn Gabirol with creating a golem, possibly female, for household chores.[38] Like Ibn Gabirol, Abraham bar Hiyya and his student Abraham ibn Ezra were leading exponents of the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain. Abraham bar Hiyya, also known as Abraham Savasorda, was a Jewish mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who resided in Barcelona, and was given high official status by the Templars when they came to Spain to fight a crusade against the Muslims.[39] Bar Hiyya was active in translating the works of Islamic science into Latin, and was likely the earliest to introduce Arabic algebra into Christian Europe. In his mathematical treatises, bar Hiyya, who was versed in Merkabah lore, often made use of masonic and building imagery.[40] While the Sefer Yetzirah and Merkabah were among the main sources of the Bahir, certain medieval sources had an influence as well, such as a treatise by bar Hiyya.[41]

Abraham Ibn Ezra, was related to a Judah ben Joseph ibn Ezra, and shared with him a mutual friend in Judah Halevi (c. 1075 – 1141).[39] Judah ben Joseph ibn Ezra, also called ha-Nasi, had considerable influence with Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile, the of son Raymond of Burgundy and Urraca of León, the daughter of Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile. Judah was a relative of a relative of Moses ibn Ezra (c. 1060 – 1140), who belonged to one of the most prominent families of Granada. Moses ibn Ezra is considered one of Spain’s greatest poets and to have had a great influence in the Arabic literary world. His Arugat ha-Bosem quotes authorities like Hermes (identified with Enoch), Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, pseudo-Empedocles, Alfarabi, Saadia Gaon, and ibn Gabirol, a major influence on the Toledo School. “The true philosophical home of Avicebron [ibn Gabirol],” explained F.E. Peters, “is in the Zohar and in the speculative sections of the Cabala.”[40] One source credits ibn Gabirol with creating a golem, possibly female, for household chores.[41]

According to Joseph Dan, the author of the Sefer ha Bahir, also displayed some awareness of Ibn Ezra’s work.[42] Ibn Ezra, and his relative Moses ibn Ezra, refer to the Hermetic tradition, mainly from Muslim sources, in order to integrate Hermetic speculation into their own systems. Among these advocates of Hermes, Abraham ibn Ezra was the most effective transmitter of Hermetic themes to later centuries. In “Hermes Among the Jews,” Fabrizio Lelli explains, “Sustained by Ibn Ezra’s authority, many medieval Jewish scholars felt licensed or even compelled to adapt Hermetic scientific and technical material to traditional Midrashic exegesis of the Bible.”[43] He often refers to astrology in his Bible commentaries. To him heaven with its constellations is “the book of life,” in which man’s destiny is written, and against which there is recourse to God as “the Almighty,” who overrules all these influences.[44]

Ibn Ezra often hinted that he was a member of a secret fraternity, composed of an illuminated elite, whose members wandered through Europe.[45] Ibn Ezra was one of the most distinguished Jewish biblical commentators and philosophers of the Middle Ages.[46] Growing up in Tudela, Navarre, northern Spain, beside Judah Halevi (c. 1075 – 1141), the two became close friends. Halevi is considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets. His greatest philosophical work was The Kuzari (“The Khazars”), which takes the form of a dialogue between a rabbi and the king of the Khazars who has invited the rabbi to instruct him in the tenets of Judaism. According to Halevi, though the Jews had lost their homeland and the Temple, they could still achieve access to them through visualization techniques. Halevi died shortly after arriving in the Holy Land in 1141, then part of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

When Ibn Ezra would move to Cordoba as a young man, Halevi would follow him. This trend would continue when the two would begin their lives as wanderers in 1137. Wandering both together and separately from one another for some three decades, Ibn Ezra would travel from Spain to Baghdad. Ibn Ezra travelled widely, to northern Africa—perhaps in Africa at the same time with Judah Halevi—and Egypt, and Italy. Many suppose his travels took him to Palestine and even to Baghdad, and he was also said to have travelled to India, where he purportedly visited the Cochin Jews of the Malabar coast.[47] He wrote of India’s advanced knowledge of astrology, mathematics, and the sciences.[48] He was in Narbonne in, or shortly before, 1139, and in Northern France where he came into contact with the celebrated grandson of Rashi, Rabbi Jacob Tam (1100 – 1171).[49] He eventually settled down in Rome, then Lucca, the place of origin of the influential Kalomymos family, for a few years before his death. It was during this latter period of his life that he composed his most famous works.

Ibn Ezra translated two astrological works by Mashallah ibn Athari. Ibn Ezra undertook intensive research into Greek and Arabic mathematical works, and he became the main channel of Neoplatonic and Islamic philosophies to the Jewish communities of Europe. Ibn Ezra would have probably known of the Picatrix, a book of magic and astrology, which most scholars assume was originally written in the middle of the eleventh century.[50] The work was purportedly produced by the Sabians, and much influenced by the Epistles of the Ismaili Brethren of Sincerity. It was originally written in Arabic under the title Ghayat al-Hakim, which most scholars assume was originally written in the middle of the eleventh century. The Arabic title translates as The Aim of the Sage or The Goal of The Wise. David Pingree summarizes it as “the most thorough exposition of celestial magic in Arabic,” referring to the sources for the work as “Arabic texts on Hermeticism, Sabianism, Ismailism, astrology, alchemy and magic produced in the Near East in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D.”[51]

Alchemy

Ibn Gabirol’s cosmology influenced the thirteenth century theologians and alchemists like Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Llull.[52] Albertus Magus’ writings displayed his encyclopedic knowledge of topics such as logic, theology, botany, geography, astronomy, astrology, mineralogy, alchemy, zoology, physiology, phrenology, justice, law, friendship, and love. Among the British, the foremost alchemist was the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (c. 1219/20 – c. 1292), a Franciscan friar and Oxford don. All sorts of tales are associated with him. He was accused of having conjured the elements, of summoning the devil, of fabricating a mirror that revealed the future, and of sculpting a brass head capable of talking. Like many occultists of the period, he found himself in conflict with the Church authorities, and in sometime after 1277, he was jailed by Franciscan Minister General Jerome of Ascoli (later Pope Nicholas IV), and remained in house arrest for the next fourteen years.

Bacon drew upon arguments expressed by the Sufi Brethren of Sincerity, whose encyclopedic mystical treatises greatly influenced him.[53] Bacon believed that not only the Egyptians but all the Greek philosophers, including Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, received their wisdom from the Jews. Hermes, who lived at the time of Moses, passed on Jewish wisdom to his grandson, Hermes Trismegistus, who merged Jewish and Egyptian wisdom. To prove his point, Bacon drew frequently on the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum, which he believed to be authentic. The Secreta Secretorum (Latin for “The Secret of Secrets”), also known as the Sirr al-Asrar (“Secret Book of Secrets”), which appeared in many variant texts from the tenth century on, purports to be a letter from Aristotle to his student Alexander the Great on neo-Platonic, Arabic, and Hebraic astrological, magical, and alchemical lore. One twelfth century version of the Secretum drew on the Sepher Yetzirah. Bacon himself was familiar with the numerology of the Sepher Yetzirah and the techniques of Merkabah.[54]

Like Bacon, the authenticity of the Secretum Secretorum was also believed by Scotus John Duns Scotus (1266 – 1308), who shared Bacon’s support of Kabbalistic and Neoplatonic Jewish philosophers. Scotus is generally considered to be one of the three most important philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. Scotus left his northern homeland in search of Hebrew and Arabic learning. In Paris he studied with a Jewish instructor and developed great admiration for Jewish mathematical and mystical learning.[55]

In 1297, Scotus met Raymond Llull (c. 1232 – c. 1315), the first author to use the expression “Immaculate Conception,” which inspired his own doctrine, after it received favorable support among some Franciscan theologians. Llull, who was named Doctor Illuminatus, was born in Majorca in a mixed environment of Christian, Muslim and Jewish culture. Llull was familiar with the teachings and methods of the Sufi Brethren of Sincerity.[56]

Through Llull himself explicitly condemned such subjects, he gained a wide reputation the Middle Ages and Renaissance as an alchemist. Llull’s parents had come to colonize the formerly Almohad-ruled island of Majorca. Although he had a family, he lived what he would later call the licentious life of a troubadour. In 1263, Llull experienced a series of visions reported in his autobiography Vita coaetanea (“Daily Life”):

Ramon, while still a young man and Seneschal to the King of Majorca, was very given to composing worthless songs and poems and to doing other licentious things. One night he was sitting beside his bed, about to compose and write in his vulgar tongue a song to a lady whom he loved with a foolish love; and as he began to write this song, he looked to his right and saw our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross, as if suspended in mid-air.[57]

The vision came to Llull five times in all, leading him to leave his former life behind in order to pursue a life in the service of God. After a short pilgrimage, he returned to Majorca, where he purchased a Muslim slave from whom he intended to learn Arabic. Between 1271 and 1274, Llull wrote his first works, a compendium of the Muslim thinker Al-Ghazali’s logic and the Llibre de contemplació en Déu (“Book on the Contemplation of God”). Llull urged the study of Arabic and other languages, along with his own works, to convert Muslims and Christian heretics, and travelled through Europe to meet with popes and nobles to try to establish colleges to prepare future missionaries. In 1276 a language school for Franciscan missionaries was founded at Miramar, funded by James II.[58] In 311, following missionary trips to North Africa, Lull finally achieved his goal when the Council of Vienne ordered the creation of chairs of Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean (Aramaic) at the universities of Bologna, Oxford, Paris, and Salamanca as well as at the Papal Court.[59]

Moshe Idel argues that Llull had access to techniques of ecstatic Kabbalah, similar to those taught by Abraham Abulafia (1240 – c. 1291), the founder of the school of “Prophetic Kabbalah,” and described in contemporary Hebrew treatises on the Sepher Yetzirah.[60] Abulafia’s first journey in 1260 was to the Land of Israel, where he intended to search for the legendary river Sambation and the Ten Lost Tribes. In 1280, he went to Rome in order to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism on the day before Rosh Hashanah. When he heard of it, the Pope issued orders to “burn the fanatic,” as soon as he reached Suriano. Abulafia went to Suriano despite the threat, and when he arrived he heard that the Pope had died from an apoplectic stroke during the preceding evening. Abulafia returned to Rome, where he was thrown into prison by the Franciscans, but was liberated after four weeks’ detention. He was next heard of in Sicily, where he supposedly appeared as a prophet and Messiah.

Abulafia called his system the “Kabbalah of names,” referring to the divine proper names, or magical “names of power.” Abulafia’s Kabbalistic permutations involved the use of letters of the alphabet, and especially the Tetragrammaton and other names of God, such as Adonai and Elohim, for the purposes of meditative training. Another technique involved gematria, which is based on interpretations of the meaning of words from the numerical value of letters in Hebrew.[61] Gershom Scholem also noticed that, already in the thirteenth century, in the Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia, the techniques used “to aid the ascent of the soul, such as breathing exercises, the repetition of the Divine Names, and meditations on colors, bear a marked resemblance to those of both Indian Yoga and Muslim Sufism.”[62]

While he conversed with Muslim Sufis and Jewish Kabbalists, Llull also studied the writings of John Scotus Erigena (c. 815 – c. 877), the greatest Christian philosopher of the Dark Ages, whose Neoplatonism annoyed Rome, all the while shaping the systems it later adopted. Erigena’s translations of the works of Christian Neoplatonists, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Gregory of Nyssa, made them accessible to Western thinkers. Erigena translated from Greek into Latin a treatise on angelic hierarchies attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, which drew on concepts in early Jewish Gnosticism as well as Neoplatonism. In his principal work, On the Division of Nature, John Scotus attempted to reconcile the Neoplatonist doctrine of emanation with the Christian tenet of creation. Though highly influential upon his successors, notably the Western mystics and the thirteenth century Scholastics, De divisione naturae eventually suffered condemnation by the church because of its pantheistic implications.

Llull merged Erigena's angelic hierarchies with the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah.[63] Erigena proposed that through various stages of illumination, an initiate could be angelized or deified, a process “symbolized by entrance into the outer porticoes of the temple of Solomon.”[64] Fascinated by mathematics and geometry, Erigena developed “a mystic sense of the building of the Temple of Solomon,” which contains “the measure by which all things (in the eschaton) are measured.”[65] Erigena’s theosophy influenced Azriel of Gerona and other Jewish theosophers, who recognized similarities between his Temple mysticism and that of the Sepher Yetzirah.[66]

The alchemist’s hope was to perform the transmutation in the laboratory of turning lead into gold. One vital part of the process was the mysterious agent known as the Philosopher’s Stone. Alchemists perused ancient manuscripts, and worked to find the coveted formula through experimentation, a labor that was generally known as the Great Work. There were many theories about how to pursue the Great Work, and each one carefully guarded his theories, experiments, and even the equipment used in the process. “I swear to you upon my soul,” Llull vowed to his readers, “that if you reveal this, you shall be damned.” A later adept, writing under the name of Basil Valentine, warned that “to speak of this even a little further would mean being willing to risk to sink into hell.” As Englishman Thomas Norton wrote in the fifteenth century: “This art must ever secret be. The cause whereof is this, as ye may see: If one evil man had thereof all his will, All Christian peace he might easily spill, And with his pride he might pull down, Rightful kings and princes of renown.”[67]

The story of Nicholas Flamel, born around 1330, a mixture of his own writings, municipal records, and anecdotes, was one of the best-known tales of the Philosopher’s Stone during the Middle Ages, particularly in France. According to texts ascribed to him almost two hundred years after his death, Flamel had learned alchemical secrets from a Jewish converso on the road to Santiago de Compostela.[68] Flamel is said to have had a dream one night seeing an angel with a book. The angel said, “Flamel! Behold this book of which thou understandeth nothing; to many others but thyself it would remain forever unintelligible, but one day thou shalt discern in its pages that none but thyself shall see.”[69]

In 1357, browsing through old manuscripts, Flamel came across the same book he saw in his dream. The title of the book was Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer, and Philosopher to the Nation of the Jews, by the Wrath of God dispersed among the Gauls, sendeth Health, one of the most famous in Western esoteric tradition, partly to its importance within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The story involves Abraham of Worms who recounts how he found Abramelin the Mage in Egypt who taught him a powerful form of Kabbalistic magic. The text describes a lengthy, difficult and elaborate ritual whose purpose is to obtain the “knowledge and conversation” of the magician’s “guardian angel” who will appear and reveal magical secrets. The magician must evoke and bind the Twelve Kings and Dukes of Hell (Lucifer, Satan, Leviathan, Belial, etc.), who deliver a number of familiar spirits associated with a set of magical word-square talismans provided in the Abramelin’s Book Four. Thereby, the magician is promised the ability, for example, to find buried treasure, cast love charms, the ability of magical flight, and the secret of invisibility.

[1] Procopius of Caesarea. History of the Wars, trans. H. B. Dewing (London, 1919).

[2] Ibid., 3.4.2–3.

[3] Ibid., 4.9.6–9.

[4] Scholem. Origins of the Kabbalah, p. 13.

[5] Gustave Saige. Les Juifs du Languedoc antérieurement au XIVe siècle (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1881), p. 44.

[6] Norman Golb. The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 15.

[7] Doat Collection, pp. 53 et seq., 339-353.

[8] Graboïs. La dynastie des ‘rois juifs’, p. 52 n. 23; cited in Zuckerman. Princedom, pp. 170-71.

[9] Marcus N. Adler, “The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela,” Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 16(1904), p. 459; cited in Jeremy Cohen. “The Nasi of Narbonne: A Problem in Medieval Historiography.” AJS Review Vol. 2 (1977), p. 63.

[10] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 183.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Napier. A to Z of the Knights Templar.

[13] Hugh J. Schonfield. The Essene Odyssey: The Mystery of The True Teacher and The Essene impact on The Shaping of Human Destiny (Element Books, 1984).

[14] Napier. A to Z of the Knights Templar.

[15] Theodor H. Gaster. The Dead Sea Scriptures (Peter Smith Publishing Inc, 1976).

[16] Ben-Dov. In the Shadow of the Temple, p. 347

[17] Scholem. Origins of the Kabbalah, p. 53.

[18] Ibid., p. 69.

[19] Joseph Dan (ed.). The Early Kabbalah (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 28.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 22.

[22] Chapter 6.

[23] Tom Block, “Towards an Understanding of the Jewish/Sufi,” Speech to the Jewish Community Relations Council, Ratner Museum, May 2, 2007 [http://www.tomblock.com/published/shalom_jewishsufi2.php]

[24] Ibid.

[25] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 38.

[26] 1 Maccabes, 2: 39–48.

[27] James Connell Henriques. “The Identity of the Hasideans of 1 and 2 Maccabees: A Re-examination of the Topic with a Focus on the History of Scholarship.” PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2009.

[28] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 183.

[29] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 31.

[30] Ibid., p. 183.

[31] Ibid., p. 184.

[32] Ibid., p. 183.

[33] Ibid., p. 184.

[34] Admit Kosman. “Love Thy Vampire, Kosherly.” Haaretz (Septum 28, 2011).

[35] Geoffrey Dennis. “Vampires: Jewish Goth? Bloodsuckers in Judaism.” Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism. Retrieved from http://ejmmm2007.blogspot.com/2006/11/vampires-jewish-goth.html

[36] Joseph Dan. Kabbalah: a very short introduction (Oxford), p.106-107.

[37] F. Levine. “Techniques for Creating a Golem.” Practical Kabbalah. Retrieved from http://kabbalah.fayelevine.com/golem/pk006.php; see also Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magic and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; and Aryeh Kaplan, translation of and commentary on the Sefer Yetzira. 

[38] Sarah Pessin (April 18, 2014). “Solomon Ibn Gabirol [Avicebron].” In Zalta, Edward N. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2014 ed.).

[39] “Abraham bar Hiyya (Savasorda),” EJ; on links between Jews and Templars, see S. Baron, Social, IV, 37; X, 67, 331.

[40] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 46.

[41] Sefer Hegyon ha-Nefesh, ed. G. Wigoder, (Jerusalem, 1969), as cited in Joseph Dan (ed.). The Early Kabbalah (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 28.

[42] Sefer Hegyon ha-Nefesh, ed. G. Wigoder, (Jerusalem, 1969), as cited in Joseph Dan (ed.). The Early Kabbalah (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 28.

[43] Fabrizio Lelli. “Hermes Among the Jews: Hermetica as Hebraica from Antiquity to the Renaissance.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, University of Pennsylvania Press, Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 2007, pp. 120.

[44] In his commentary to Psalms 69:29, Genesis 17:9, and to Exodus 6:3, 33:21.

[45] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 39.

[46] Adolph Drechsler. Illustriertes Lexikon der Astronomie (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1881).

[47] “India.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/india

[48] Ibid.

[49] Richard Gottheil & Wilhelm Bacher. “Ibn Ezra, Abraham Ben Meir (Aben Ezra).” JewishEncyclopedia.com.

[50] Dov Schwartz. Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval Jewish Thought. In The Brill Reference Library of Judaism, Volume 20. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 10.

[51] David Pingree. “Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-hakīm,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 43, (1980), pp. 1–15.

[51] “Picatrix” Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Magriti, Translated into German from the Arabic by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1962), p. 20.

[52] Frank Magill. The Middle Ages: Dictionary of World Biography, Volume 2 (Routledge, 2012), p. 500.

[53] G. Sarton, History, II, 246; cited in Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 67.

[54] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 68.

[55] Ibid., p. 69.

[56] Ramon Lull. Selected Works of Ramon LLlull, ed. Anthony Bonner (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), I, 292n.26.

[57] “Historical Background and Life” in Anthony Bonner (ed.), Doctor Illuminatus. A Ramon Llull Reader (Princeton University 1985).

[58] “Who was Ramon Llull?” Centre de Documentació Ramon Llull, Universitat de Barcelona, retrieved from http://quisestlullus.narpan.net/eng/1_intro_eng.html

[59] Albrecht Classen. Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature (Taylor & Francis, 2018). pp. 280.

[60] Moshe Idel. “Ramon Lull and Ecstatic Kabbalah,” JWCI, 51 (1988), 70-74.

[61] Sami Sjöberg. The Vanguard Messiah: Lettrism between Jewish Mysticism and the Avant-Garde (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015), p. 48.

[62] Scolem. Kabbalah, p. 180.

[63] Keith Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 72.

[64] P.A. Dietrich and D.F. Duclow, “Virgins in Paradise: Deification and Exegesis in ‘Periphyseon V,’” in G.H. Allard, ed., Jean Scot Ecrivain (Paris: Cahiers d'Études Médiévales, 1986), pp. 31-37.

[65] James McEvoy. “Biblical and Platonic Measure in John Scottus Eriugena,” in Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten, eds., Erigena: East and West (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1994), p. 159.

[66] Gabrielle Sed-Rajna. “L’influence de Jean Scot sur la doctrine du kabbaliste Azriel de Gérone,” in Jean Scot Érigène et l'histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1977), pp. 453-462.

[67] Time-Life Books, ed. Mysteries of the Unknown: Secrets of the Alchemists (Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1989), p. 45.

[68] Juan García Atienza. Leyendas del camino de Santiago (EDAF, 1998), p. 59.

[69] Secrets of the Alchemists, p. 46.

Volume One

Introduction

1. Babylon

2. Ancient Greece

3. The Hellenistic Age

4. The Book of Revelation

5. Gog and Magog

6. Eastern Mystics

7. Septimania

8. Princes' Crusade

9. The Reconquista

10. Ashkenazi Hasidim

11. The Holy Grail

12. Camelot

13. Perceval

14. The Champagne Fairs

15. Baphomet

16. The Order of Santiago

17. War of the Roses

18. The Age of Discovery

19. Renaissance & Reformation

20. Kings of Jerusalem

21. The Mason Word

22. The Order of the Dragon