B"H

EMANATIONS IN GNOSTICISM AND LURIANIC PSEUDO-KABBALAH


The following is excerpted from NEW ADVENT, THE CATHOLICENCYCLOPEDIA, which can be found on the following link:http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06592a.htm

Please pay particular attention to what is said about emanations inthe passage below. It should look all too familiar to you if you are acquainted with Lurianic Kabbalah.

Gnosticism is very ancient. It is a catch-all moniker for a numberof systems of thought and belief that share a number of elements in common.

According to the article, the belief in emanations is common to all forms of Gnosticism.Obviously, these ideas predate Yitzchak Luria by millenia. One is left to wonder: How did this belief come to be integratedinto Lurianic Kabbalah?

COSMOGONY [in Gnosticism].

"Gnosticism is thinly disguised Pantheism. In the beginning was theDepth; the Fulness of Being; the Not-Being God; the First Father,the Monad, the Man; the First Source, the unknown God (Bythospleroma, ouk on theos, propator, monas, anthropos, proarche,hagnostos theos), or by whatever other name it might be called. Thisundefined infinite Something, though it might be addressed by thetitle of the Good God, was not a personal Being, but, like Tad of Brahma of the Hindus, the "Great Unknown" of modern thought. TheUnknown God, however, was in the beginning pure spirituality; matteras yet was not. This source of all being causes to emanate (proballei) from itself a number of pure spirit forces. In thedifferent systems these emanations are differently named, classified, and described, but the emanation theory itself is common to all forms of Gnosticism. In the Basilidian Gnosis they are called sonships (uiotetes), in Valentinianism they form antithetic pairs or "syzygies" (syzygoi); Depth and Silence produce Mind and Truth; these produce Reason and Life, these again Man and State (ekklesia). According to Marcus, they are numbers and sounds. These are the primary roots of the AEons. With bewildering fertility hierarchies of AEons are thus produced, sometimes to the number of thirty. These AEons belong to the purely ideal, noumenal, intelligible, or supersensible world; they are immaterial, they are hypostatic ideas. Together with the source from which they emanate they form the pleroma. The transition from the immaterial to the material, from the noumenal to the sensible, is brought about by a flaw, or a passion, or a sin, in one of the AEons. According to Basilides, it is a flaw in the last sonship; according to others it is the passion of the female AEon Sophia; according to others the sin of the Great Archon, or AEon-Creator, of the Universe. The ultimate end of all Gnosis is metanoia, or repentance, the undoing of the sin of material existence and the return to the Pleroma."

Having considered the passage above, please review my essay entitled "The Names of the Sphirot in the Dead Sea Scrolls", which can be found on the following link:http://tinyurl.com/3xjcp

Now, please see the following link:http://www.dhushara.com/book/consum/gnos/jgnos.htm

I am not endorsing the speculations set forth in the article to be found on the above site. However, what appears to emerge from that article and others that I have seen is that Gnosticism is connected to bastardized and heretical forms of Judaism in part. I ask again: What are elements of this corrupt and strange belief doing in the Lurianic system?

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat