A charming allegory is found in the Zohar, one which unveils better than anything else ever did the true character of Jehovah, or YHVH, in the primitive conception of the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in the philosophy of Ibn Gebirol's Kabalah, translated by Isaac Myer.
In the introduction written by R. 'Hiz'qee-yah, which is very old, and forms part of our Brody edition of the Zohar (1. 5b. sq.) is an account of a journey taken by R. El'azar, son of R. Shim-on b. Yo'haï, and R. Abbah.... They met a man bearing a heavy burden.... They conversed together ... and the explanations of the Thorah, by the man with the burden, were so wonderful, that they asked him for his name; he replied: “Do not ask me who I am; but we will all proceed with the explanation of the Thorah [Law].” They asked: “Who caused thee thus to walk and carry such a heavy load?” He answered: “The letter י (Yod, which = 10, and is the symbolical letter of Kether and the essence and germ of the Holy Name יהוה, YHVH) made war, etc.”.... They said to him: “If thou wilt tell us the name of thy father, we will kiss the dust of thy feet.”He replied: “... As to my father, he had his dwelling in the Great Sea, and was a fish therein [like Vishnu and Dagon or Oannes]; which [first] destroyed the Great Sea ... and he was great and mighty and ‘Ancient of Days,’ until he swallowed all the other fishes in the (Great) Sea.” ... R. El'azar listened to his words and said to him: “Thou art the Son of the Holy Flame, thou art the Son of Rab Ham-'nun-ah Sabah (the old) [the fish in Aramaic or Chaldee is nun (noon)], thou art the Son of the Light of the Thorah [Dharma], etc.”[632]
Then the author explains that the feminine Sephira, Binah, is termed by the Kabalists the Great Sea: therefore Binah, whose divine names are Jehovah, Yah, and Elohim, is simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the Female Power, the Thalatth of Berosus, who presides over the Chaos, and was made out later by Christian Theology to be the Serpent and the Devil. She-He (Yah-hovah) is the supernal Hé, and Eve. This Yah-hovah then, or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos—Father, Mother, Son—on the material plane, and in the purely physical World; Deus and Demon, at one and the same time; the Sun and Moon, Good and Evil, God and Demon.
Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as physically. And if, astronomically, the Moon is one of the seven planets of the Ancient World, in Theogony she is one of the Regents thereof—with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the [pg 424] former referring to her under the name of one of their Archangels, and the latter under that of one of their Gods.
Therefore the meaning of the “fairy tale,” translated by Chwolsohn from the Arabic translation of an old Chaldean MS., of Qû-tâmy being instructed by the idol of the Moon, is easily understood. Seldenus tells us the secret, as well as Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed.[633] The worshippers of the Teraphim, or the Jewish Oracles, “carved images, and claimed that the light of the principal stars [planets] permeating these through and through, the Angelic Virtues [or the Regents of the stars and planets] conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and arts.” And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed after the position of certain planets, those which the Greeks called στοιχεῖα, and according to figures that were located in the sky, and called ἀλεξητήριοι, or the Tutelary Gods. Those who traced out the στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματικοί, or diviners by the στοιχεῖα.[634]
It is such sentences, however, in the Nabathean Agriculture, which have frightened the men of Science, and made them proclaim the work “either an apocryphon, or a fairy tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician.” At the same time, as shown, zealous Roman Catholics and Protestants metaphorically tore it to pieces; the former because “it described the worship of demons,” the latter because it was “ungodly.” Once more, all are wrong. It is not a fairy tale; and, as far as the pious Churchmen are concerned, the same worship may be shown in their Scriptures, however disfigured by translation. Solar and Lunar worship and also the worship of the Stars and Elements can be traced, and figure in Christian Theology. These are defended by Papists, and can be stoutly denied by the Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may be given.
Ammianus Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the Spirits of the Elements (Spiritus Elementorum, and in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων).[635]
But it is found now that the Planets, the Elements, and the Zodiac, were figured not only at Heliopolis by the twelve stones called “Mysteries of the Elements” (Elementorum Arcana), but also in Solomon's Temple, and, as pointed out by various writers, in several old Italian churches and even at Notre Dame de Paris, where they can be seen to this day.
No symbol, even including the Sun, was more complex in its manifold meanings than the lunar symbol. The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male; as, for instance, the Hindû “King Soma,” and the Chaldean Sin; with other nations it was female, the beauteous Goddesses Diana-Luna, Ilithyia, Lucina. With the Tauri, human victims were sacrificed to Artemis, a form of the lunar Goddess; the Cretans called her Dictynna, and the Medes and Persians Anaïtis, as shown by an inscription of Colœ: Ἀρτέμιδι Ἀνάειτι. But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste and pure of the virgin Goddesses, Luna-Artemis, to whom Pamphôs was the first to give the surname of Καλλίστη, and of whom Hippolytus wrote: Καλλίστα πολὺ παρθένων.[636] This Artemis-Lochia, the Goddess that presided at conception and childbirth, is, in her functions and as the triple Hecate, the Orphic Deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins and pre-Christian Kabalists, and his lunar type. The Goddess Τρίμορφος was the personified symbol of the various and successive aspects represented by the Moon in each of her three phases; and this interpretation was already that of the Stoics,[637] while the Orpheans explained the epithet Τρίμορφος by the three kingdoms of Nature over which she reigned. Jealous, bloodthirsty, revengeful and exacting, Hecate-Luna is a worthy counterpart of the “jealous God” of the Hebrew prophets.
The whole riddle of the Solar and Lunar worship, as now traced in the churches, hangs indeed on this world-old mystery of lunar phenomena. The correlative forces in the “Queen of Night,” that lie latent for Modern Science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern Adepts, explain well the thousand and one images under which the Moon was represented by the Ancients. It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the Selenic Mysteries were the Ancients than are now our modern Astronomers. The whole Pantheon of the lunar Gods and Goddesses, Nephtys or Neïth, Proserpina, Melitta, Cybele, Isis, Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one hand, and Apollo, Dionysus, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris, Atys, Thammuz, etc., on the other, all show on the face of their names and titles—those of “Sons” and “Husbands” of their “Mothers”—their identity with the Christian Trinity. In every religious system, the Gods were made to merge their functions, as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the Goddesses were identified as Wife, Mother, and Sister of the male God; the former synthesizing the human attributes as the “Sun, the [pg 426] Giver of Life,” the latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis known as Maia, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maia, in its forced derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks, “mother,” from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all these Goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary.[638] Its primitive meaning, however, was Mâyâ, Durgâ, translated by the Orientalists as “inaccessible,” but meaning in truth the “unreachable,” in the sense of illusion and unreality, as being the source and cause of spells, the personification of illusion.