Concurso real de infracciones

Theological Embryogenesis

“Moses and Homer,” wrote the Austrian philosopher Franz Borkenau in his book End and Beginning, “continue Akhenaten’s struggle against the cults of the dead.”⁴⁶

Indeed, we have seen that whereas Mesopotamian civilization signed off, in the Gilgamesh Epic, with a man who became the god of the dead and the patron spirit of an ancestor cult, in the case of Egypt, Akhenaten was entirely opposed to the world’s underside, that is to say, of the sun’s nocturnal journey beneath the earth at night, and also the human soul’s residence in the Afterlife beyond death.

With the advent of Moses, on the other hand, we are faced with a vector pointing entirely into the future, for Moses is not a figure produced by a society in its twilight, but rather one that is a manifestation of the first pink wash on the dawn horizon. Gilgamesh and Akhenaten are terminal phenomena: they are patinaed with a greenish hue of decay and cultural debility. Moses (and also Homer), on the other hand, are embryonic phenomena of a new age, the Metaphysical Age, that is, and neither were much interested in the cult of the dead and the afterlife.

Moses, though he was an old man (in fact, the Bible says he was eighty when he started out on the Exodus) is nevertheless a signifier that points toward the future, not the past. His itinerary—which can be plotted as a trajectory in the shape of an inverted triangle that leads him from three mountains:

from the pyramids of Giza to Mount Sinai, and then ultimately onward to Mount Pisgah overlooking Palestine—faces east, the direction of the newborn sun, as he gradually makes his way from Egypt through the deserts of the Sinai as though in imitation of the sun’s West to East nocturnal journey beneath the earth. Indeed, the Exodus is a disguised night sea journey through the underworld in which monsters and demons are encountered in such altered forms as that of the pharaoh who chases them through the Red Sea, or the giants of Anak which the Hebrews encounter once they have reached Palestine, or the Amalekites with whom they do battle. At the spot where Moses dies, somewhere atop Mount Pisgah, he is imitating the sun’s rise between the Mashu mountains in the east, where he stands, just like the dawn sun, overlooking the valley—and the future--to the west.

Indeed, so little does Moses have anything to do with the past and the cult of the ancestors generally, that the Bible professes ignorance as to the exact location of his burial site. The message, then, is clear: the dead now are unimportant; what matters is the future, the dawn, the Promised Land.

As he sets out from Egypt, then, Moses is to be imagined as a vessel, his skull functioning as a sort of proto-Ark inside which the embryo of a newborn god is incubating.

Birth

We don’t know if Moses ever really existed or not, but the same doubts raised about him have

also been raised in regards to just about every other semi-historical figure of religious history, Lao-tzu, for instance, or Osiris or Orpheus. Such men might have existed once, in the early pre-dawn horizons of their cultures, but their historicity has long since been replaced by myth, which remembers their essence rather than their phenomenal being. If I were a betting man, however, I would put my money on the historicity of Moses, mainly because the Hebrews are a people unique in history in that they forgot nothing that ever happened to them. The Egyptians, on the other hand, had a more selective memory: they tried to forget Akhenaten and Hatshepsut, as well as a few other undesirables; the Hindus were amnesic, for they forgot everything except their theological ideas; of their history, they preserved not a trace. The Hebrews, on the other hand, carefully preserved every event that ever happened to them, since they regarded history as the manifestation of the divine working out of God’s will. To remember history was also simultaneously to be pious in the observance of His Ways. This doesn’t mean, though, that they didn’t tamper with the timelines: the Bible is a patchwork mosaic that attempts to fuse different traditions from different tribes together into a coherent, but not always very seamless, whole.

However, in the earliest text of the Bible, the so-called J text, written in the south--in Judah, that is--sometime between 900 - 700 BC, the Moses legend is already there, fully worked out. These were the same centuries in which Homer, across the Mediterranean, was writing down and remembering the Trojan War, and in which the Hindus, in the opposite direction, were creating the Upanishads. The Trojan War, moreover, is supposed to have taken place in the same century as that in which most scholars tend to situate the Exodus, namely the thirteenth century BC, so that the time span of latency between the days when the real Agamemnon and the real Moses might have lived, and the time in which their legends first surface in writing is about the same, five or so centuries. Of course, this doesn’t prove anything, but the time span of five centuries of latency does seems to function as something of an archetype: it is roughly the lag between the appearance of the Buddha and his first biographies in the Pali Canon, and it also happens to be about the same time span from the occurrence of the historical King Arthur (not a king, however, but a dux bellorum) in the fifth century AD, and his first appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain in the early twelfth century.

But what matters for our purposes here is not so much whether Moses was a real personage or not, but rather the meaning and importance which the Hebrews ascribed to him as the founder of their culture. Authorship of the entire body of laws, rules and proscriptions associated with Judaic history is (impossibly) ascribed to him, so that in Hebrew religiosity, he functions in the role of a Prometheus or one of those early kings in the Shah-namah, like Jamshid—the inventor of architecture and the first cities--who create the basic archetypes of civilization. Unlike Christ or Mohammed, of whose existences we can be reasonably more certain, Moses is a function in the Hebrew religion: he is x, the unknown and unknowable First Mover of the entire civilization.

In reality, there were probably many exoduses, and the one which scholars generally ascribe to the time of Ramses II (1279 – 1213 BC) was likely only one of these, for the Habiru, along with other Semitic groups of Canaanites, Hyksos and Amorites, had been shuttling back and forth between Egypt and Palestine since at least the First Intermediate Period of Egypt (circa 2100 BC). The invasions of

the Sea Peoples, too, which included the Peleset, or the Philistines who gave their name to the land of Palestine, took place at about this time, and were no doubt the cause of massive population displacements and confusions amongst which the proto-Hebrews were likely to have gotten mixed up.

The significance of the Exodus, though, is that it represents the detachment of a tribal social formation from the Egyptian state apparatus. The myth remembers an historical schism, a break, a rupture of continuity with what had gone before. Moses was the Divider, the Great Separator, of the Hebrew social formation from the body of mother Egypt. He was, as his name implies (“to draw forth”), an obstetrician.

The crossing of the Red Sea, then, is primarily a gynecological image, for it is that of a birth canal through which a newborn people passes as an embryo being expelled from the dying body of a greater, and far older, mother civilization that was entering into its terminal phases. The image marks one of history’s great ruptures, and its significance for religious history is comparable to the day, millions of years ago, when a reptilian egg hatched and the first mammal crawled out of it: a new creature not seen by the world before; a creature with fur, and a womb, and a complex ear constructed out of three bones with a single jawbone.

A singularity, in other words.

The Hebrew Avatar

Somewhere behind all of this stageshow, though, the hand of myth looks over the shoulder of history, guiding the hand that writes.

Later, God will send His Son into the world in order to rescue the fallen human soul from its bondage to the original sin of Adam that stains and deforms the human Image: Christ is Adam before the Fall, an image of human perfection that is sent into the world in order to repair and redeem the damage done by the Fall.

In the days of the prehistoric Habiru, however, God sends his chosen representative, Moses, back into Egypt in order to capture and redeem the fallen Israelites from their state of bondage. Moses is designated by Yahweh to play the role of the Redeemer, just as in the Manichean myth, the Anthropos suits himself up in an armor of Light to do battle with the demons of darkness and ends up being defeated by those demons, who tear off his armor of Light and devour it, thus trapping Light into primordial darkness. The Holy Spirit is then sent down to rescue the fallen Anthropos and restore him to the state of perfection in the Kingdom of Light.

And just as Gilgamesh dives down to the bottom of the Abzu to retrieve the pearl, so Moses descends into the underworld of Egypt to retrieve the fallen Israelites. Such is the role of avatars, for they are always diving and rescuing things: in Hindu myth, for example, Vishnu descends into the world as the Boar Avatar in order to dive to the bottom of the ocean and rescue the goddess Earth, who has been abducted by an elephant demon. He must do the same thing again when he incarnates as Rama in order to rescue Sita from capture by the demon king Ravana.

The structure of the Moses story, then, is inherently mythical. It is not yet fully historical; it is an example of history caught in the moment of awakening, still heavy with the somnolence of dream and myth, as yet untouched by the light of day and its historical processes. The story has the semiotics of

an avataric myth, with Moses performing on the stage of history as a puppet of Yahweh who moves him about like a little stick figure in a Paul Klee marionette theater.

The Accident of History

The cultural ecology, however, within which the Exodus takes place, has the look and feel of an age of cosmic catastrophe: massive population disruptions; manna from heaven; a pillar of fire at night and a column of smoke by day; the drowning of pharaoh’s army; epic battles with the Amalekites and the Canaanites; the near starvation and death of the Hebrews, etc. The imagery of Exodus, as Immanuel Velikovsky once pointed out, is that of some great catastrophic event.

And indeed, the event is sandwiched historically somewhere in between the eruption of the volcano on the island of Thera (Santorini) in the seventeenth century BC and the thirteenth century BC Dark Age of massive population disruptions, invasions of Sea Peoples flooding and smashing into Egypt and Palestine. These peoples have the feel of refugees about them, for they were not just warriors, but entire families, men, women and children pushing ox-carts and carrying battle axes and tents, looking for new homes. The Exodus clearly refers to these times of chaos and confusion that mark the pralaya, or disintegration of civilization from one World Age—that of Bronze—to the next, that of Iron.

It is thus not too difficult to see the wandering Hebrews, against this dark blue canvas of night, Death and falling stars, as a displaced population jarred loose from its cultural container by some sort of cosmic accident. In our own times, beginning with the refugees of Hurricane Katrina, migrant populations displaced from their bounding terrariums by catastrophe—war in Iraq; civil war in Libya; earthquakes in China, Sumatra, Chile and Japan—are on the rise, and with rising sea levels and increasing flooding of coastal zones as an inevitability of our future, it seems we are to grow accustomed to these shifts as an increasingly common site. Such catastrophes mark the disintegrations of World Ages, when one world comes to the end of its horizons and begins to shift and disintegrate into another.

Back in the thirteenth century BC, then, the age of the first generation of civilization, the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia were sliding to an end, as the second generation of civilization—Greeks, Hebrews, Indians and Chinese—began to construct and orient itself on the stage of world history.

The figure of Moses is thus an avatar indeed; an avatar of the kind that is called forth by crisis and emergency to lead and redirect populations that have torn loose from the bounding containers of world history and been flung forth into the chaotic state of historylessness. In the wilderness of the Sinai between Egypt and Palestine, the Hebrews are a population that has fallen through the gaps of history as a seismic shift of subducting historical plates begin to grind against one another. The task of Moses is to shepherd this population from its regression back to a state of nature and lawlessness into a new historical container that is oriented and governed by laws, rules, codes and proscriptions.

Moses, then, is an architect who must design a new historical terrarium within which a people can be returned to the state of History and cultural evolution.

Rage and the Word

The beginnings of that process of redrawing the groundplan for a new cultural biosphere take

place in the Sinai Event, for whereas the crossing of the Red Sea shows us the birth of a people, the Sinai Event gives us the birth of a religion.

From the pyramids of Egypt to Mount Sinai: it is as though Moses, having been born and raised in Egypt, went looking specifically for a mountain analogue to the great pyramids which, having spent his apprenticeship years studying in the city of Heliopolis, he would have been quite familiar with.

But the shift in historical structures overlays the archetype of the Mountain with a new geometry: in Egypt, the mountain had had a thanatological significance, for it was the home of the dead pharaoh and was aligned with the circumpolar stars, toward which it was designed to shoot the pharaoh’s ka, stars known as the Deathless Ones because they never set below the horizon. In the Sinai peninsula, on the other hand, the mountain tells Moses how to live: for it is there that all the laws governing Hebrew society are handed to him by his god Yahweh. And it also there that the Hebrews grow a protective exoskeleton in the form of an invisible god inside of whose mind they are enabled to dwell. The god of the mountain, though, doesn’t tell Moses anything at all about death. For the Age has now shifted its axis and Sheol, the Hebrew underworld, holds no more interest for Moses than did Amenti, the Egyptian underworld, for Akhenaten.

But the important thing about the Sinai Event is what it tells us about how this new god, this Hebrew god, was a very different god from all those who had gone before Him, for the Sinai Event is a coded memory of the origins of the alphabet, which it pictures Moses inventing at the top of the mountain, with Yahweh’s help. The god of the Hebrews is a god intimately connected with writing, particularly with the Hebrew alphabet.

As Regis Debray points out, the essence of the Sinai revelation was that, from henceforth, “the meta is to be found in the mini,”⁴⁷ meaning that god is no longer to be accessed in temples, megaliths and huge, monumental—and therefore immovable—constructions. He is a portable god—a god of nomads and wanderers--not tied to this or that location, and so the primary means of accessing him is through writing. Heremeneutics may have been an invention of the Protestants, but it is the Hebrews

—and especially the later Pharisees--who invented the idea of the priest as a scholar, carefully scanning, from right to left, lines of Hebrew text written down upon scrolls, for clues to His inscrutable will.

The Sinai Event preserves and compresses a memory of the invention of the alphabet, for the old theory that it was invented by Phoenicians in the fifteenth century BC seems to have been wrong. The earliest alphabetic inscriptions found anywhere in the world are termed Proto-Sinaitic, and they were scrawled by Canaanite workers on the walls of a mountain called the Serabit el Khedim in the Sinai peninsula in the eighteenth century BC. This was a turquoise mine that had been set up by the Egyptians of the Twelfth Dynasty, a mine which largely employed Canaanite workers who spoke a language called Old Hebrew. The thirty or so inscriptions found on the rocks and on some statues from a nearby temple to the goddess Hathor—the patron deity of turquoise—reveal that the alphabet was simply a transformation of certain Egyptian hieroglyphic signs. The word for “snake” in Egyptian, for instance, is written with a zig-zag shape of a cobra which these early Canaanites (from about 1800 BC) identified with their word for snake, nahash, which then became the letter ‘N.’ The letter ‘N’ is actually a stylized cobra.

The Egyptian cow goddess Hathor is referred to in these inscriptions as “Baalat,” meaning the mistress of the Canaanite thunder god Baal, whose primary animal was the bull. That the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, is simply a stylized bull’s head turned upside down should perhaps give us pause here, especially when we recall that upon Moses’ descent from the mountain, the Hebrews are depicted as having regressed back to the worship of a golden bull. This may be a dim memory of the temple of Hathor which the Egyptians built at the site of their turquoise mine and which marks the spot where the alphabet was invented in the eighteenth century BC. That the image was inserted into the text by priestly editors concerned with condemning Jeroboam’s worship of the bull god Baal may

The Egyptian cow goddess Hathor is referred to in these inscriptions as “Baalat,” meaning the mistress of the Canaanite thunder god Baal, whose primary animal was the bull. That the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, is simply a stylized bull’s head turned upside down should perhaps give us pause here, especially when we recall that upon Moses’ descent from the mountain, the Hebrews are depicted as having regressed back to the worship of a golden bull. This may be a dim memory of the temple of Hathor which the Egyptians built at the site of their turquoise mine and which marks the spot where the alphabet was invented in the eighteenth century BC. That the image was inserted into the text by priestly editors concerned with condemning Jeroboam’s worship of the bull god Baal may