LEY DE INSTITUCIONES DE SEGUROS Y DE FIANZAS:

Jung had access through secondary sources to many key concepts of Jewish mysticism, and, especially when it comes to descriptions of the psychic accoutrements of femininity, his entire opus bears the distinctive mark of Kabbalistic influence. For example, in discussing gradations of consciousness, he uses a terminology similar to that employed by the Jewish mystics when touching upon such religious ideas as holiness and spirituality. The particular language I am referring to is the vocabulary of light—and by light I mean also darkness and all nuances and shades in between.

Jung resorts to this type of language both when he is talking of fragmentation and reintegration of the human psyche as a whole, and when he is speaking of the male/female dichotomy in particular. In regard to the latter, he admits freely, as do the Kabbalists, that the feminine anima is as often as not conventionally associated with darkness, negativity, even what we call evil.

What Jung seems to have picked up from the Kabbala is that there is something out of the ordinary, something disturbing, about femininity. Something that, in a logical clear-cut upstanding universe, both seem to imply, one might have done better without. And yet, without the feminine, there would be no life at all. Therefore, a necessary evil…?

In possibly the very first manuscript of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Bahir, the Book of Illumination, written down not earlier than the third century and not later than the sixth, it says that a king (God) had in mind to plant nine masculine palm trees (Sephiroth, emanations) in His garden but realized that, if they all were of the one sex, they would not endure. So he took the female part of the palm tree and transformed it into an ethrog (citron), a moonlike feminine shape, referred to in the Bible as the Tree of Beauty (Lev. 23:40), and then the entire orchard flourished.

So, in the Sephiroth (the realm of the emanations), Shekhinah or the divine presence, typified as feminine, was the lowest feminine kingship formed. Jung says something similar, but a touch more derogatory to woman. He says that originally the members of the Trinity, including the Holy Ghost, were all spiritual, and therefore all male, and that it was considered heretical to define the Holy Ghost as Sophia (divine wisdom), female. Nevertheless,

room had to be found for the feminine. In the divine drama, there were already shades of a fourth personality, the possibility of evil, but this could be considered masculine, the sin of Adam, or the devil. But of course it was far more convenient at once to shift the blame for sin upon the victim and to include what was palpably missing, the female, and so, with the entrance of the feminine, as necessary link between spiritual and physical, there is the implication that the way has also been opened for the possibility of evil.

Jung equates this feminine with the Shulamit of the Song of Songs, Jerusalem, the Community of Israel, who introduces herself as ‘black but beautiful’. On this juxtaposition Jung remarks in his Mysterium Coniunctionis that the heroine ‘comes from the same category as the black goddesses such as Isis, Artemis, Parvati, and the Black Virgin’ (1963:420).

Though Judaism is supposedly a paternalistic religion, in the Kabbala we find possibly the highest compliment to the feminine paid by a monotheistic faith, and yet in this regard it is just compliments that hint at their reverse. If the Shekhinah, the divine presence per se, is given a female typology, it is, the rabbis insist, only because the entire function of the Shekhinah is in the inferior realms, nature, the physical.

The point about the Shekhinah is that she is the spatialization of spirituality. If not for the need of substance and square feet, she would telescope back into her Father. Spatialization or the impregnation of the womb of creation immediately implied feminization, at least as far as the human imagination is concerned, of the divine light itself. As soon as God required a ‘place’ for His light, the light as it were descended and became feminized.

When dealing with a lexicography of light, one might have been forgiven for believing that in the Kabbala, the Shekhinah would have been all light. However, because the further the light travels from its source, the dimmer it becomes, paradoxically this is not so, and she is frequently depicted veiled in black garments. Frequently the matriarchs, especially Rachel, the daughter, have to stoop to deception (the substitution under the wedding canopy of her sister Leah for herself) so that she can have children through ersatz means.

Jung also is well aware that the connotations of the feminine are often far from positive, connected as they are with the shadow side of existence, with darkness, the left, the Other Side, and the lower region.

In the Kabbala, this feminine impulse is law, restriction, form—the threatening power of the womb. As opposed to masculine grace, generosity, and boundless desire to broadcast sperm, the female stands for the limited powers of receptivity of the natural world. In herself only slightly darker than the heavenly light, she is not always crystalline or spiritual by any means, but also associated with earth, clay and the grosser forms of materialism. The darkness which is her sphere is mother to all klippot (husks), shells and veils between the soul and the divine mother of all appetite for self-gratification that leads to mortality.

At this point, we can touch briefly on the notion put forward by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist R.Isaac Luria of Zimzum (a divine contraction and self-darkening). ‘Before all worlds were created’, says Rabbi Chaim Vital, a disciple of Luria, and the one who wrote down his ideas, ‘the Supernal Light…filled all existence, and there was no empty space [that was not filled with light]’ (Ashlag 1969). Everything was light, everything was God, in fact, and there was no room for the world. In order to create the world, God had, as it were, to draw back, as one who throws a ball bends back before throwing the ball forward. When God created the world, His light was concentrated into a single point to form a primal space or vacuum to allow matter to come into being. First He retracted; then He sent His light back again into the hollow thus formed, drawing out from Himself a mere thread of His infinite light which He spun and spun until ‘He stretches out Heaven as a garment’ (Ps. 104:2). In relation to God or absolute light (male), this stream of light or divine presence (Shekhinah) and the various receptacles so filled, for example, Israel, the human psyche, the entire created world take on a female typology.

According to R.Luria’s concept of Zimzum, from all His beautiful creation God only created one new thing: ‘He who fashions light and creates darkness’ (Isa. 45:7). God only created darkness, the darkness that permits the light to be seen, darkness having a negative and ‘feminine’ connotation. And again, ‘in the beginning’, says the Bible, ‘God said: “Let there be light”’ (Gen. 1:3), which, according to the opening words of the Zohar, the Book of Radiance, the bible of the Kabbala, means: ‘In the beginning God created a Lamp of Darkness’ (1:15a).

Jung’s description of the ‘inferior function’ of the feminine anima within the psyche is based on the Kabbalistic notion of the Shekhinah’s role in cosmology. She has frequently, says Jung, ‘a shady character; in fact she sometimes stands for evil itself…. She is the dark and dreaded maternal womb which is of an essentially ambivalent nature’ (Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works, vol. 12). This female ambivalence stems essentially from the fact that the womb-type function of the female makes her a link between physical and spiritual.

If the male represents essence, the female stands for emanation, the divine urge to emanate, to create. And yet, once one has reached the essence, is not emanation itself a rather thin spreading out of essentials?

If the enigma of the feminine is not taken as outright evil, still it is mysterious, obscure, subconscious. Therefore, says Jung, while the conscious functions, shared between father and son, are male, the female, mother and daughter, are taken as unconscious. In this allotment of male/female roles, there is undying hostility, says Jung, between the principles, the father and the mother, consciousness and unconsciousness, but the auxiliaries are weaker, so that it is possible for the third function—the daughter—‘to be raised to consciousness and thus made masculine. It will, however, bring

with it traces of its contamination…thus acting as a kind of link with the darkness of the unconscious’ (p. 152).

The idea borrowed by Jung of the feminine being a mediating presence between conscious and unconscious (the Holy Ghost, Sophia, Mary) is not new in the Kabbala, where, however, the contrasting spheres are between spiritual and physical. In the case of the Jewish tradition at least the feminine is not viewed as exclusively physical and in need of any type of ‘masculinization’ in order to rise to spiritual heights. The feminine is as at home in transcendence as in this world! The idea is that God has, in fact, a feminine receptive part of Him, a kind of consort as the Higher Shekhinah or the Mother, who has an earthly representative in the lower spheres, Rachel, the Community of Israel, or the daughter and, just as the lower Shekhinah fares in the material realms, so fares the Higher Feminine in transcendence. The whole reason for creation is that, through the efforts of the daughter in the world of substance, God should be reunited with His Shekhinah. Thus in the Jewish myth, far from the feminine becoming ‘masculine’, she comes into her own by reunion with lost aspects of herself. For example, there is a tale concerning four rabbis in quest of the ultimate who hear the voice of the Shekhinah ring out from a cave: ‘Lamps shall give light from the lampstand.’ The Zohar continues: ‘Here the Community of Israel [a female image] receives the light while the Supernal Mother is crowned, and all the lamps are illumined from her.’ Israel, by the single act of kindling the menorah (the seven—or eight-branched candelabrum), is identified and united with the creative aspect of God through the menorah symbol.

Already in the Midrash, creation and art are feminine activities. Creation is compared to a king who wants to build a palace. He does not build it with his own hands but calls in an architect. This architect, ‘masterworkman’, Oman in Hebrew, is the feminine wisdom in God, Sophia or Torah that was the blueprint for creation.

The Zohar comes out with the startling notion, already hinted at in the Midrash, that it was the feminine principle within God that made creation possible. This whole deployment of male and female creative strategies the Zohar describes in terms of darkness and light.

Only the Supernal Mother had a name combining light and darkness— light which was the supernal vestment and which God created on the first day and then stored away for the righteous, and darkness.

Because the darkness was destined to sin against the light [because man was destined to sin], the Father was not willing to share in man’s creation. [Thus is God absolved of human evil] and therefore the Mother said: ‘Let us make man, in our image, after our likeness.’

‘In our image’ corresponds to light [masculine]. ‘After our likeness’ to darkness [feminine], which is a vestment to light.

[… Also ‘In our image’ to the light of transcendence; ‘After our likeness’ to immanence.]

(Zohar 1:22a-b)

What the Zohar is saying is that the male transcendent God knew that man would sin and was reluctant to create him while the Mother took the initiative. Therefore man is created after the image of the Mother, not the Father, side of God, ‘since the Father was not willing to share with his creation’.

Like Jung, the companions of Rabbi Shimon, the Master-Teacher of the Zohar, seize on the (sexist) notion that man in his lowest aspect should be in the image of woman, mother, earth, whereas the ideal transcendental man is totally male. But R.Shimon disagrees and maintains that man in his very highest aspect is both male and female.

That is why it says: ‘And God said, “Let there be light” ’ [Genesis 1:3].

Let there be light From the side of the Father. And there was light. From the side of the Mother.

And this is the man ‘of two faces’. This ‘man’ has no ‘image and likeness’.

[This represents the ideal relationship between the sexes.]

He [R.Shimon] then paused, and all the friends rejoiced and said: ‘Happy is our lot that we have been privileged to hear things which never were disclosed till now/

(Zohar 1:22a-b)

Another way of describing the act of making the unconscious conscious (the desideratum of Jungian therapy) is reintegration, and here there are sometimes many fissures—the conflict would seem to be between the One and the Many rather than between male and female.

Jung’s description of the many sparks of a primal World Soul or collective unconscious is based on Kabbalistic and Hassidic notions of the ‘breaking of the vessels’.

The sequel to the Lurianic conception of Zimzum is that into the vacuum that appears after God’s self-darkening, lines of divine light pour back in. Crystal vessels are formed to receive them, but they cannot contain the richness and therefore burst, leaving klippot—shards or hard husks covering seeds or germs of light—remnants of the withdrawal of infinite light.

This fragmentation of the divine light results also in the externalization of evil, forcing the lower Shekhinah, Rachel, or the daughter, to fall into the world of materiality, her spirit pacing the boundaries, reaching out to her children in dispersion even though this entails separation from her husband. The aim of creation is to release those imprisoned sparks of Shekhinah- light, that captive princess.

Thus, the human psyche itself is seen as feminine. She, like Jerusalem, like the Shekhinah, like the Community of Israel, is known in Midrash, in the Kabbala, in Hassidism, as the ‘King’s daughter’. The Book of Illumination talks of God’s bride or daughter as a personification of His kingly splendour. This ‘daughter’ is pure object and jewel reflecting the divine radiance to man—in herself she has utterly no personality but is merely and consummately a ‘Beautiful Vessel’, a pure objectivization of divine royalty and splendour. She is the pearl without price, the precious stone, Sophia, Torah, and the collective soul of man as fragmented into the separate rays and sparklets of the individual psyche.

In addition to the sparks being fragments of the individual soul, they are also transpersonal. Belonging to the collective unconscious, they float from one ego to another with the insouciant impersonality of objects or motes of dust; yet it is they who are the broken-up rays of God’s ‘jewel’. Intrinsically the soul of Adam Kadmon, drawn from the reservoir of souls, is quintessential light and was the very ‘idea’ on which the whole of the subsequent drama of creation was based.

It is written: These were the makers [potters] and those that dwelt among

the plantations and hedges; there they dwelt with the king in his work [1

Chr. 4:23]. These were the makers: They are so termed on account of the verse, Then the Lord formed [made] man [Gen. 2:7].

There they dwelt with the king in his work: with the Supreme King of

kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, sat the souls of the righteous with whom He took counsel before creating the world [Ber. Rab. 8:7].

Similarly in the Kabbala, although the self-chosen exile of the feminine (the Shekhinah) and her elevation provide the centre of the whole drama of existence, another way of looking at the same process is that the onus is on man both individually and collectively to effect a Tikkun (reintegration of sparks).

Therefore, the feminine plastic power of God, the ‘Potter’, could be said to have been made up of ‘the souls of the righteous’ before man himself had come on the scene. It was the potential good that man had in him that required that he should be created, no matter what potential evil or suffer- ing lay in store for him also in his own nature. It was the light of Adam Kadmon (original man)—for what is goodness but the primordial light of the reservoir of souls that made it necessary that God create man.

Shekhinah is taken as the collective representative for individual mascu- line endeavours, the individual ‘points’ or scintillations in her bouquet. Thus, though the Shekhinah descends in order to turn her passive (feminine) stance relative to God into the more dynamic action of raising up the lights of the whole created world, how close or how far Shekhinah light comes down depends on man and on the generations of the Tsaddikim (the saints,

Jewish chivalric knights). In relation to the lower spheres, the Shekhinah takes on an active stance made up of the heroic deeds of the individual Tsaddik, or good person.

The individual Tsaddik is only capable of bringing redemption to Israel and to man because he contains an image of the fragmentary souls of all men. In a process closely akin to projection in psychological terms, ‘every individual sees in the Tsaddik his own share, or his image’, says the Great Storyteller (Likkutei Amarim 32a). Not only does the Tsaddik contain within him a little bit of all men, but all men see reflected in him the image of their own potential.

Drawing on various alchemy texts, as we have seen, Jung also says that people are surrounded by multiple luminosities, like so many sparks or points of light, and that these portray the psyche as a multiple conscious- ness—that is, a multitude of luminous particles that in their sum constitute the self. This impressionist panorama represents the total content of arche- types of the collective unconscious.

These fragmented ‘sparks’ of an original integral consciousness corre- spond to the Jewish mystical concept of the ‘breaking of the vessels’ and the challenge imposed on man of effecting a Tikkun, or reintegration of the individual rays. Already an aspect of the Kabbala, this concept was taken over by Hassidism and internalized. No longer are the sparks only part of a purely cosmological process; they represent the fragmentation and reinte- gration of the individual psyche. And this is so even when what is described may seem to belong to the external world of objects. In fact, they are frag- ments of the original soul of the Tsaddik waiting to be reintegrated again