Resurrection of the Word: Mahoyael : Book Three

MAHOYAEL: Book Three At the beginning of the Abraham—Isaac—Jacob epic, the Scribe is silent, dreading the explanatory texts. Indeed, father, mother, daughter and son are seen in this epic as symbolic persons whose significance is numerous and most profound. They live in every realm of existence. More than other symbols (fire, earth, water, wine) these family characters wield an hypnotic power over humanity. Men and women identified themselves, for centuries, with the mythical role of these persons, and in the world-theatre have performed the symbolic scenes, even to the dénouement of the myth of Jesus, the submission of woman to the Word, her purification and the symbolical transformation of water into wine and woman becoming the lady. OA   The evolution of mythological analogies between characters (the father's wife transforms herself, becomes his sister, then becomes the son's sister, then virgin, then the son's wife, the son who does not take the place of the father . . . ) is paralleled by the evolution of societies. As long as man does not understand his surroundings he is controlled by his reactions to them, and therefore controlled by the surroundings. The accumulated reactions are the sum of the species' mechanical past, therefore the past of the functionally maimed individual. This past is transformed as symbols and myths in the unconscious. Tltus, as long as the individual attributes reality to the symbols in his dream his humanity is maimed. It is customary to think that the biblical "Genesis" is an account of the creation of the world. Yet when fifty chapters are interpreted by means of the original code in cipher, 109 it is seen that, from the first verse, the world is accepted as being extant and defined as a single energy with two aspects, com- pression and explosion. The purpose of the fifty chapters is to deepen and develop this postulate in order to act in man: to see how this single and double energy acts and manifests in the human realm; to understand the drama of the movement when opposed by less evolved realms ranging from mineral to animal: and finally to release the mature man's cosmic vocation and röle in the Universe. In brief, this genesis is humanity's. The Code written in cipher puts in vivid relief three stages of this explanation. First are the archetypes. There, Cain, as a projection of Cosmic Energy, stands erect before man in servitude, and the latter, Abel, disappears, obliterated. (Historically, Cain the non-conformist, the unruly, the heretic, the confounded poet, the independent expert, the creative genius, explorer of places forbidden by the Abels, has always been badgered, persecuted, excommunicated, crucified or burnt alive by the Abels, instruments under the curse of the Earth, but the Cains are always, in the final account, "exalted seven times". A second stage is the allegory of Noahh and his sons. In it, eponymous ancestors personify historic cycles and collective behaviour throughout the cycles. The third stage, pseudo- historical, is the great poetical epic of Abraham-Isaac-Jacob, ending with the Book of Joseph, Jacob's eleventh son. To follow and explain it step by step would require an enormous work. I can give only some of its episodes here; such as the ordered and forbidden murder of Isaac by his father. The aim of the myth here is to involve History in its movement, and being warned by the death of Abel and by the defeat of Noahh and his sons, it proceeds warily: it tests the resistance of the persons who arc expected to carry the human seed to its maturity. Abraham, a projection of cosmic energy, inaugurates, in short, a technique of "tests": he can no more kill Isaac than Elohim can kill Jacob, or YHWH Moses. 110 A Psychological Commentary Is not every man the son of someone? Doesn't he carry the conflict between father and son within him? But what does he do? As son he is in conflict with the father and wounds him. Hence his weakness, his inferiority. This son-to-be who opposes that which is, who suffers because things are as they are, this childishness, this dependence, this non-fulness, this lack of something, makes a stand and wounds. Thus feebleness becomes exalted: it is exalted because of its weakness, because it is not the father. Then this feebleness takes the place of the father and establishes itself in opposition to itself. It is yet another weakness, for the contrary of a thing does not overcome and complete it, but shares its mistakes, and is one aspect of it. If it is true that the son depends on the father, still more does the father depend on the son. His will power exists only because of the weakness of the son over whom it is exercised. Being engendered by this weakness, fed by it, conditioned by it, it truly owes everything to it: it is less than powerless. His triumph is a disaster. In Israel the son does not kill the father and the father is forbidden to kill the son. The son does not kill the father because Israel is the denial of Oedipus, the negation of Oedipus, his redemption. The father does not kill the son because YHWH, who asks for the son to bc sacrificed, stops the father at the crucial moment. The son does not want to kill the father, the father cannot any longer kill the son. In this conflict Israel deprives itself of the two possible, conceivable solutions. For five thousand years it has lived in trouble through not accepting these deaths. Jesus has not changed anything. In spite of the desire to be identified as one, the father and son remain apart. The resolution of the psychological conflict is swallowed up in the symbols and everything is lost. The son must have the passion to lose his life, in order to find it. But in dying the son should not any longer feel himself to be the son, and not feel abandoned by the father. In his agony he ought not to have lost remembrance of his voluntary sacrifice, nor 111 asked his father the reason for what appeared to bc his abandonment. This question rcsurrectcd him on the right hand of the father: the conflict, far from being resolved, became deeper. Israel acknowledged its own loss and continued its investigation. The herds of Gentiles were only too happy to accept this false solution which had divided the father into two; a shepherd and a flock. Israel does not wish to resolve this conflict, but to go beyond it. Hasn't it a means of doing this: circumcision? "God" accepted this pact with Abraham, then stopped him in the act of sacrificing Isaac, because Isaac was the first to be circumcised at eight days old. Abraham had already granted Isaac the power to sacrifice himself as son and free himself, conquer himmslf, come back to life, conquer God, resurrect him in the flesh. The son was free, free to be son no longer, but the father had still to agree to proving his resistance. In accepting this proof Abraham showed trust in circumcision. Israel's conflict was surpassed. The Great Figures in Evolution The Father of all being is the force of expansion enclosed in Number. This father destroys all static and transitory equilibrium (his Son) for he is the essence of it. Kronos eats his children, but the Intemporal calls Kronos his son, and this is Creation. Expansion, enclosed by the universe, thereupon obliges it, in the process, to create the world. This essence that is hidden in organised life, and unknown to beings, can no longer shrink back: it can free itself only as mass, becoming light, works out an acceptable solution. For the Father the originating act is explosion: for the Mother, the static mass, it is not. Because there is neither duration, number, nor space for the Father. He is the Intemporal in Duration. That is where he is: he cannot but be there. If he were not, the breaking up would have continued until amends were made to him. The existence of all unstable equilibrium is proof that there exists a permanent movement that destroys it. 112 Such is the Father. He is nearer to the heart and the soul than the heart and the soul. He is more inward than the centre of the marrow. He is the Light of light, the Movement of movcmcnt. Men call him God and invoke him. Israel begats him, for he is its transfigured flesh, redemption of the begotten: redemption by love which flesh feels for what is not flesh, but which opposes it. Such is the love called, in the myth, Holy Spirit: sensual love of the spirit, not flesh becoming spirit: impregnation of the deepest feelings, and not evasion of feelings that wished to be spirit. In the flesh it becomes the conjunction of spirit and heart. This love is the organic completion of radiation. This luminous, organic body is the Son, his sensual love for creation. Such are the Father who becomes Son, the Son who begats the Father. The Mother as wife of the Father is overcome, the Son refuses to marry her as she is still his Mother. He will not marry the female who procreated flesh. He will marry the movement in the flesh, the Word made flesh, the unpolluted flesh. In short, the Mother must become young again. She must catch up with her Son. The time she must catch up is the duration that she created when she was female. She must reabsorb this very same duration that her mass determined. It is the period elapsing between the crucifixion of the Word and its resurrection. It is the time necessary for inertia to engender harnessed movement. It is the time needed by the world-solution of harnessed expansion in order to establish its equation. I cmphasise it: the solution is there to start with; it is the light. Then there must be a certain continuation determined by this light-solution, so that it may establish its equation— the universe, its mass, its attraction, its organic life. This duration is evolution. More and more organised, earthly substance gives constitution to living beings. For the Father these beings are movement, 113 for the Mother inertia. Seeds in animal species gradually become stabiliscd as they elude the Father and slip under the Mother's domination. These loves of the Father and Mother are indeed gigantic struggles at all moments. Instant by instant the Father sees the embryo escape him and merge, not in its own movement, but in the Mother's inertia, foundering in an untimely and specialised maturation. The struggle between the male and female of the species spreads out. The centrifugal males take upon themselves the motives of the father; the females protect themselves. In the insect kingdom the male is killed. These nuptials engender in the maternal womb the female's blind son who the Father disowns. In the human species the Father's movement is spared. This contradictory movement is living in man and his works, in spite of man and his works. This is the truth. Israel identifies with this movement in spite of Israel. That again is the truth. The history of man will be misunderstood if human birth according to the symbolism of Israel is not understood. The resurrection of the Son is the birth of individual consciousness. The dynamic balance of the Word has triumphed over the female. The creatures' intense desire to reach a permanent balance has made some of them stumble into an admirable, vital adventure: they are carried away by a whirlwind. The forces of the past are still within them, but in disorder. Their confusion causes the collapse of certainty. On the threshold of cosmic balance the individual sees his personal balance denied. At the precise moment of birth he is no longer an individual! What happens to him as soon as he is separated? He is seized with dizziness. A small isolated drop within this closed consciousness, he says: "1 and the world". His dream begins. The herd calls to him: "Not you, us!" and weaves the broken bonds again. A thousand knots contract where one had parted. The individual is lulled in the collective, tranquillising, functional conscience: the Son of Adam is crucified anew, 114 killed and buried. The Father sacrifices the son and wounds the Mother: the drama goes on without end. What was complete no longer exists; what was birth is torture. Through the voice of Israel YHWH inveighs in anger against the Jews and curses them. For the Son, as son, the drama is inescapable: if he does not die for the mother, in the mother, in her womb, he must die for the father. The mother wants to swallow him; she opens all the vast mouths of the earth to drink his blood. The father wants to sacrifice the future; he wants the blood of the Word to impregnate this female. Thousands upon thousands of times Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, then be slain in Israel and be born of the Word, so as to come to life again in the female who is gradually restored to youth, purified, regenerated and finally, from being cleansed in blood, a virgin. The myth must unfold until the end. To deny it causes the catastrophe Of Hham. Because he is not mythological YHWH lends himself to the mythological frolic of Japhet and Schem. He cannot escape. Because he disowns the future he accepts it. He is obliged to; it's the pact, the alliance of the indeterminate and number. Individual consciousness must, outside this duration, be the whole of time-light. Truth is One: cosmic, social, individual. Happy the man who perceives it on the point of a needle! But for the man eventually born, time is reversed: the past becomes the future and the future becomes the ancestor. Such is time according to the Intemporal. For the man who is still the Son of Woman the ancestors are in the past. That they may be, in his view, descended from the sun, from the moon, from apes, or from the animal totem, has little importance. In his imagination he returns to them and says: that is from whence I came. For the Son of Adam the inverse is true: all past beings are those who could not forbear to escape from him while he was still not yet born. They are the 115 sons he disowns. And he, being the Word in his cosmic totality, is ever, as an individual, only his own negation. At every moment, as Word, he kills the mythical Son of Woman in him who would be inclined to usurp YHWH. He is Cain ceaselessly killing Abel within himself. Only at such a price is he truly one with the Father. And as Father he is, internally, Abraham sacrificing Isaac at every moment. The mistake of the Nazarenes was to describe the fulfillment of the symbols instead of dissolving them. That this mistake, at that time, might have been unavoidable is a question that will not be argued in this book. The history of Israel is only a web of similar appearances. They are all in the same category; historical developments of a single theme. Through my voice Israel does not disavow these appearances but breaks away from them. All are authentic, complete, but always untimely. Individual consciences are drawn to and recaptured by the herd. But if they let themselves be caught again it is to dream their personal dreams the better. Greediness insulated in their consciences frames their static self whose equilibrium opposes the Word's. As always, the Word incarnates in the process of being murdered. The imprisoned self fights against the free self. The Son, the dead body of the Word, struggles with the Word that wants to regain his body in order to return to life! This man, Ben-Adam, has disowned the past ancestry, and and that is all to the good. But why has his Father become God? Why isn't he completely within him? Indeed, why isn't he purely and simply himself? Separated from his essence, a move that is untrue to himself, this Son of Man calls himself Son of God: where is this God the Father? High up and far away. High in space, distant in time. Inaccessible in this world. Accessible only after death? Oh, yes! Alive he has not lived and being dead wishes to be alive! Nevertheless, man, this ripe seed, is the very Dialectic that 116 was delineated on carth at the foundation of the world. Man is either YHWH or not yet a man. What is Jesus, this Son of That-which-he-is? Why is he not yet himself? "My Father who is here or there, who has told me this or that, to whom I am going; from whence I came . . . " It was Abel who said this, most certainly the dead-body Son of Woman, and not the Son of Man. These words belong to the future: without a doubt the individual is still prisoner of his dream and not dead to himself, having pierced through his dream. Assuredly, it is time, indeed, for the Spirit of Truth to come! The consequences of this Son who calls himself son, try as he may to be persuasive ("he who sees me sees the Father"), are deadly. Despite himself he puts a distance between the Father and himself, between each person and his essence; and from this fact, behold, power and authority are usurped in his name! The result is that Jesus married the female duration. The Spirit of Truth had not yet come. A BELIEVER: Mahoyael, you are being paradoxical. He who is aware that he is the son of Eternity is also aware of himself as the son of Earth; as unity and duality. In the bosom of the Father, however, he does distinguish himself from him. He is God and man, glorified and humble, Word and creature. It is the opposite of usurpation. MAHOYAEL: I say usurpation! If he is dual he is separated from his essence and is not the Word! . . . The distance which, in the Son's spirit, divides him from the Father is in fact only the mythical distance which divides him from himself. He who says "1 am, and I am not one and dual" is the usurper. He usurps because of his restriction. He usurps because he does not want to usurp. But he who says "YHWH is totality" is not a usurper. And if he says "my mouth speaks and is the Eternal" he is not a usurper. For in the Absolute there is no distance. And he who assigns no place to himself assigns none to others. And he for whom YHWH is neither low nor high, neither close nor afar, neither aloof nor withdrawn, but universal and complete, does not lend ground on which to build a Temple. 117 Such, always, is the unwarranted assumption of Sons, Pharaohs, Christs or Jew. Their only remedy is in their sacrifice. YHWH accepts Number, but the future has to be killed. It has to be killed so that the true Son, Word and Father may be born. The Son who calls himself son is still in duration. He is in the period thoughtlessly woven by the Mother; he is her creature, recaptured by her. If the Son of Adam is unaware of his indisputable eternity and not twofold, surpassing the Word, he is indeed only the Son of Woman. He who says "1 am the son of man" is not The Son of Adam. He who says "1 am man" is the son of no one. The Intemporal kills the becoming to enable the woman to re-absorb duration. But if the Intemporal does not accept the temporal there are only Hham and catastrophies. Lacking the real concrete fulfilment, it can only be its own usurper. It is but a false eternity, an abstraction, a force of exploitation and a solid seat of power. Abraham had seen the Son-Pharaoh on his hierarchic throne. The fathers on their throne were hardly any better. Each time YHWH is fictitious he is known as domination. What could Abraham the Hebrew do? In the bargain agreed between Japhet and Shem, in the duration determined by the Matriarchal mass, could he enact his essential self before the hour was ripe? And being unable to, what remained but the gestures prescibed by the myth? Hham had said: "1 have seen the Father and that is enough". From the eminence of their thrones the first absolute kings stated the same thing. They scorned all hierarchy. Alone and undisguised they assumed the röle of Father unveiled. But Abraham remembered, and Pharaoh also remembered the ritual murders when, at the prescribed time, the absolute kings became the victims. These kings played the röle of Father, and the myth condemned them to be slaughtered in a ritual sacrifice from which they could not escape. Such were the horrifying memories sheltering in the sanctuaries of Egypt. In the far-off, early days, when the Mother was vanquished, the 118 Father had believed it was easy to install himself. What an absurd hope, a mythical vision! He could no more assert himself then than he can today. (After centuries and centuries are not those who repeat "0ur Father which art in heaven" still assigning their essence to the stratosphere?) Undoubtedly, the people who, from the beginning, played the röle of "Father" thought that they were not paying too much for the privilege of having their lives murdered ritually. Undoubtedly their female was so swollen and intoxicated in this röle that they voluntarily allowed their throats to be cut. Later, no doubt, they considered that power and life were more valuable than power and death. The "Father" veiled himself. The pseudo-Eternal took refuge, retreated to the innermost chambers of palaces, stationing in front of himself a host of priests to circulate the blinding smoke of religion and morals. For armed force is never enough. By withdrawing, the person of the "Father" denied himself. By interposing defensive systems between himself and the Mother's mass he betrayed the Intemporal. For if the Intemporal does not engender through the Mother it does not exist. If the person who intends to assume that röle screens himself, stands aloof, he becomes, in a flash, not the Father but the future, the Son conquered by the female! Ah, the person called "Father". does not accept ritual assassination any more. In this mythical comedy he undoubtedly reckons that the Mother has devoured him long enough for the Son to be born. Unmistakeably he is right, since he becomes the Son.. . . A dialectical transformation! The people in the myth become their own opposites; the men are puppets! Israel knows and understands this, and at no moment assumes one of the röles, but always affects the opposites. Peoples and Nations, pontiffs and sovereigns are a Cosmic comedy. Israel is the meaning and movement of this Comedy: it is its theme and dénouement. 119 From the earliest beginnings of History human beings identified with their actors' röles in the Comedy, but the cause is to be perceived in the heart of this dream, the conscience of Israel. From the first glimpse of an individual, human consciousness, to the moment when Time is turned upside down, when the human embryo denies its prehistoric ancestry and comes to recognise itself in unmanifested being-as-such, the domination of man over man manifests itself, the betrayal, in his name, of YHWH. Israel denies the false God and his seats of power. Such is Israel to this day. But despite the centuries and present achievements, and the reign of the Messiah that is awaited and mourned, what has today changed in the minds of the shepherds, colonels, dictators, pontiffs and popes? Whether they call themselves fathers of their people, caesars, or czars, or sons, or authorised powers, or are invested with the national soul of the herd, or that they are personifications of the State, behold, they give orders, they appoint themselves as guardians; they want masses of infants for cannon fodder, and women to be female. In their warlike and male guise these commanders are, in fact, doubly female. Their enlarged egos, like the bellies of termite queens, have killed, cut up and devoured the Word. Their deeds are excrement. Woe to the great! Woe upon them! May ill-fortune and my curse fall upon them! Cursed be he who invokes YHWH Believing him to be a person! Be this foetus cursed in its misery! in hatred will I pursue and destroy him! Lost be he who imagines YHWH To be as humans in heart, pity, intelligence or conscience, Who prays, who begs, who says "listen", Thinking to speak to him! 120 YHWH sees you not and hears you not, For you are hidden to the Immanence in you Hidden inside your own time and space, Hidden in your violent-sounds and obscure lights Sunk in the universe Of your fabrication, In the limited universe of your creations Far beyond reach of your own souls, How dare you attempt to meet A conscience illimited? There is no bosom to receivc your cravings. Your souls, like fragmented daylight, Yet measureless, and self-sustaining Move wherever light can move, Where conscience has no walls or references. But you, incompleted, less than the dead, Why does death frighten you? You dream, O dead, of prolonging your pre-natal lives, Of saying "1 am", On the breast of a being who says "I am". Thus dreams the foetus in its mother. Likewise, "1 am" affirms duration. But the Intcmporal has no duration. "1 am" discloses itself to be Number. Thus, "I am" discloses itself to be Number. But the One is manifested by numbers. Female beings, life's vampires, Artificial persons, terrified exploiters, That is what you are, With your priests, all, without exception, Your masters, hypocrites and vampires! YHWH hates you! He pursues you, He never pardons He docs not harken, He does not save you! The corruptible continues corruptible, In spite of tears and supplications, 121 Whatever pertains to the continuance of the female Shall ncver cross the threshold of immortality. And in your rotten consciences what is your God? Beginning and end of endless duration. What is he if not hope for your future continuance? He is the unfathomable depth which separates you from essence. He is credulity, enslavement to your convictions. Ah, recognise my voice! May your minds open like carth under the plow! May your uncircumcised opinons burst their sheaths Like walnut shells! Listen to the Voice, abandon your images! Leave the past to the past, the dead to the dead! Destroy the myth by swallowing it! Do not say: "In past times the voice of the Eternal Was authentic, but this one is not". Say, rather: "The call of the past was caught in my dream And I like this dream that protects my sleep". Say: "My dream transforms every call into an image, I like these images which prey on the call, Which sustain my sleep, Which justify my sleeping and lull me". Say: "Mahoyael, today I hate you, Because you shake me into complete awakening. Out of hatred I shall reject you, I shall pretend not to know you, I shall say: 'In our times YHWH does not speak', And by that confess that in my spirit I wished that he never spoke again, For his voice disturbs me". Say: "1 will harden myself against being ripped open, I wish to believe and obey. I demand a shepherd, be he duke or god, Dictator or priest, or sooner both, For this abdication of my being 122 Is the appeasement to which I aspire". Say: 'There are two deaths; that of the germ in the egg, That of the shell broken at birth". Say: "It is the first of these deaths that I demand, I, I, for myself". Such are your personages and the röles you play, Such is the female father, his female son, Such is the all-powerful female, always her, Rigged out in all the disguises of your röles. Female peoples and their female armies, Female dictators, female priests, And their female morals and religions. Female spiritual guides, or female sensualists, Female appeal to your ancestors, turning backwards, Female inversion of Time, marching backwards, Altars of your female countries, cult of death, Female collective consciousness, herds, Mechanical beings, murderers of the Word. What have you done? WIIat are you doing? Oh, the night of my Passion! Night of agony! Why, why this murder of YHWH? Why this birth that does not wish to be born? And why these sepulchres? . Ah, this cry, this despair! This cry is here, in you, in your body, Swiftly, may your concepts be shattered! Ah, swiftly . . . Ah, this heart-rending cry, This excruciating cry before creation, Choked by your insensibility! If ewer the world expressed its grief, It expresses it today. If ever its voice transpierced the gloom, It is here present, it demands . . . Ah, the blood of this voice! It flows in your body of light 123 Rent by your own claws . . . Rent by your own claws . . . Your light in tattered rags . . . Ah, the drops of your light, in the mud! Haven't you eyes to discern The characters of the shepherds? Why do they intervene between the Earth and you? Between the Earth and me, Why are these bloodthirsty shepherds there? What have they come to perpetrate between me and myself? What are these high walls they are raising Between my heart and my love? What are the frontiers, nations and races? What are these bricks in their chest? What arc these doctrines and beliefs Between my brain and my mind? What are these systems moulded by the brain? Why do they justify their functional röle Pouring molten lead into my head? Haven't you eyes to discern The character of the shepherds? What do they want? Safe frontiers? Safe laws? Safe dogmas? Safe creeds? What do they want? You well know; are you not with them? Are they the only characters in this tragic farce? Arc you not a walking-on part in the scene? Hasn't your voice appealed to them ? Isn't your cowardice their pedestal? Your abdication their one strength? And the rowdy clamour of the Intemporal, The developing Word, The wonderful creative expansion, The explosion Of life, 124 The birth of light Are buried alive in the crypt within you! Drop by drop passes away the life you could have begun, Your blood is no more than mire, Shaken by madness the great female Breaths warlike virtues into her sons. Already she opens her countless mouths In presentiment of drinking all the blood. . 125

Carlo Suares, Resurrection of the Word, Shambhala, 1974, p.109-125