Jack Spira, Divine Speech in Sefer Yetzirah and Jābirean Takwīn
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Jack Spira Notes Toward a Supreme Friction Divine Speech in Sefer Yetzirah and Jābirean Takwīn I WILL CREATE AS I SPEAK. ARYEH KAPLAN, LITERAL TRANSLATION OF ‘ABRACADABRA’ HE WHO ERRS IN THIS ERRS IN ALL. JĀBIR IBN ḤAYYĀN, KHITĀB AL-AḤJĀR Most if not all monotheistic traditions begin with and operate upon the understanding that all of creation as we know it results from a first, single cause, a god. But within such an understanding of the cosmos, how is our own role delimited, and in what endeavors are we overstepping our bounds? To answer this, I will here compare two works of great historical significance in the magical practices of monotheistic society: the ancient mystical text of the Sefer Yetzirah and selected writings by the early medieval alchemist Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. Within their respective cosmologies, each work adopts a conspicuously phonetic approach to the practice of magic. Through an examination of the methods each applies to the act of anthropogenesis—golem-making in the Jewish tradition and takwīn (the alchemical creation of life) in the Islamic—and the historical context and legacy of each, we can begin to articulate an ethic of creation that unites the two works and the societies they inhabited. In the final analysis, we find a divergent reverence for the pursuit of knowledge, a shared wariness of the dangers of imitating god, and above all else a constant return to the power of speech. THE SEFER YETZIRAH Very little can be said precisely about the origins of the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation). Rabbinic tradition commonly attributes its (oral) authorship and the teachings it Spira 2 contains to the partriarch Abraham, whose name appears in the final stanza of the book. By most estimates, scholarly and religious, the text was likely not committed to writing until sometime between the second and fifth centuries of the Christian era. This outside limit is when the first known quotation of the Yetzirah occurs, and the earliest commentary appears in the tenth century. With more than dozens of extant versions of the text, it is the most variant of Judaic written works. The content of the Yetzirah is itself highly cryptic. In the introduction to his translation and commentary of the work, Torah and Kabbalah scholar Aryeh Kaplan classifies the Yetzirah as a primarily meditative treatise, but with a distinctly magical bent. The text itself classifies in various ways—and in terms more poetic than analytic—the letters of the Hebrew language. While it is often translated as an account of how god created the cosmos, Kaplan points out that the wording can more accurately be read in the imperative. Accordingly, Jewish lore and scholarly commentaries alike have portrayed the text as a manual for a sort of phonetic meditation on the names of god that, at a certain level of mastery, can bring about supernatural events. Over the course of six chapters, the book variously categorizes, sexes, and permutes the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In no certain terms, it appears to establish an ontology linking various letters and combinations thereof with different modes, actual (in the case of the composition of the cosmos) or potential (of the levels of the soul), of being. These include direct correspondences to parts of the human body and other aspects of creation: He made the letter Resh king over Peace And He bound a crown to it And He combined one with another And with them He formed Saturn in the Universe Friday in the Year Spira 3 The left nostril in the Soul, male and female. (4:13) Keeping in mind that the verse can also be read in the imperative (e.g. “Make the letter Resh… Bind a crown to it…”), we begin to see the makings of a sympathetic magic, by which concentration upon and manipulation of letters and sounds might allow one to alter natural events through a form of phonetic correspondence. Such is the case with the making of a golem (an animated human form), the most advanced feat that could be accomplished with study of the Yetzirah.1 As an example of the meditative-magical character of the text, let us examine the recipe for golem-making given in one of the oldest extant commentaries on it, that of Rabbi Eliezer Rokeach of Wormes. Writing around the turn of the thirteenth century, Eliezer extrapolates upon the following verse: He permuted them, weighed them, and transformed them, Alef with them all and all of them with Alef, Bet with them all and all of them with Bet. They repeat in a cycle and exist in 231 Gates. It comes out that all that is formed and all that is spoken emanates from one Name. (2:5) Extending the directive “Alef with all of them / and all of them with Alef” to the entire alphabet, we can understand the 231 Gates as a network of all the possible combinations of two letters from twenty-two (see fig. 1). A meditative chant was then constructed as follows. For each letter in such a combination, one would combine the letter with the first letter of the Tetragrammaton 1 The earliest example of this use of the text could have been by Abraham, as recounted in the ambiguous reference in Genesis 12:5 to the “souls that they [Abram, Sarai, and Lot] had made in Haran.” Typically, however, a golem is understood to be different from a “soul” in the sense of a bona fide human being, but rather an anthropomorphic creature that looks, acts, and possible even speaks like a one. As the third century Rabbi Elazar put it, “If all the people in the world came together, they could not create a gnat and imbue it with a soul” (xx). The first mention of a golem by name occurs in the Sefer HaBahir, a Kabbalistic text first published early in the twelfth century, in a commentary on the Talmud. Spira 4 (the unutterable, four-letter name of god) and pronounce the two together with each of the five Hebrew vowels, and then proceed to the next letter in the name. Once all four letters of the name, in combination with the first letter in a pair, had been vocalized with each vowel, the same would be done with the second letter in the pair. This sequence (fig. 2) could be completed for as many pairs as desired. In order to create a golem, one would, for each part of the body, take that part’s corresponding letter (say, Resh, for the left nostril), construct an array of 231 (or 221)2 pairs from it, and recite for each letter in the array the aforementioned sequence of vowels and letters of the Tetragrammaton, proceeding on to every letter in the alphabet and its corresponding body part. If one were to pronounce four syllables a second without rest, Kaplan calculates the process would last just under seven hours.3 To this phonetic recitation, Eliezer adds further ritual instructions, as paraphrased by Kaplan: An initiate should not do it alone, but should always be accompanied by one or two colleagues. The Golem must be made of virgin soil, taken from a place where no man has ever dug. The soil must be kneaded with pure spring water, taken directly from the ground. If this water is placed in any kind of vessel, it can no longer be used. The people making the Golem must purify themselves totally before engaging in this activity, both physically and spiritually. While making the Golem, they must wear clean white vestments… one must not make any mistake or error in the 2 Eliezer, motivated by the Kabbalistic significance of the number 221 (which appears elsewhere in the Yetzirah) and seeking to improve upon earlier logical arrays of letters developed in the manner of the Gates, read 231 as 221 and removed ten redundant instances of the pair Alef-Lamed in order to produce his preferred array (fig. 3). 3 Another thirteenth century rabbi, Abraham Abulafia of Spain, constructed a system in which each pair (between a letter of the array and a letter of the name) should be pronounced in every possible permutation of letter and vowel ordering, lengthening the process tenfold, and, going further, imposed a metrical breathing pattern and system of head movements to be performed with each syllable (fig. 4). Figure 3. The 221 Gates according to Rabbi Figure 1. 22 points, 231 lines. The 231 lines Eliezer Rokeach of Wormes (1160-1237). connecting the 22 letters are the 231 Gates. Caption and diagram from Kaplan (fig. 28) Caption and diagram from Kaplan (fig. 18) Figure 2. The sequence for Alef and Bet. Caption and diagram from Kaplan (fig. 36) Figure 4. Abulafia's system of vowel motions. Diagram from Kaplan (fig. 40) Spira 6 pronunciation… During this entire procedure, no interruption whatsoever may occur. (127) The description of this ritual is notable for several reasons. First, the stipulation that one should never undertake the creation of a golem alone is echoed in a midrash (a rabbinic commentary, often unattributed) on Genesis 12:5 (see fn. 1) which emphasizes that the plural “they” in the scripture indicates that Abraham, too, employed collaborators in his magic. For if Abraham had attempted to create souls on his own, “he would have gone too far in emulating his Creator” (Kaplan xiii). This distancing of human actions from divine generation is highlighted in the very concept of yetzirah. Though often translated as ‘creation’ in the book’s title, yetzirah more precisely connotes ‘formation’, the composition of things from existing materials.