Joseph and His Brothers Page 6
no longer justify or tolerate it and much to His pain, after a final grace period of one hundred twenty years, had to dispense His watery justice. And how in His marvelous kindness—in which His angels shared not a whit—He had left open a back door through which life might escape, in the form of an ark covered with pitch, into which Noah and the animal world climbed. Joseph knew that as well, and knew the day on which the creatures had entered the ark: the tenth day in the month of Marcheshvan, and on the seventeenth the flood burst, at the time of the spring thaw, when Sirius rises by day and water begins to surge in the wells. On that very day— Joseph had learned the date from old Eliezer. But how often had that day returned since then? He did not think of that, nor did old Eliezer think of it—and here lies the beginning of the illusion of piercing through the vista of time, of the foreshortenings and confusions that govern tradition.
Heaven knows when the Euphrates, always prone to irregularity and violence—or perhaps the Persian Gulf, bursting over the flat-lands amid whirlwinds and earthquakes—had invaded to drown everything and, though not the source of the tradition of the Flood, had provided that story nourishment for a final time, enlivening it with the awful look of reality and establishing itself as the Flood for all following generations. Perhaps the most recent horror-filled incident of this sort had occurred not all that long before, and the closer it lay, the more intriguing the question whether—and if so, how— the generation for whom this was a personal experience was able to confuse its present affliction with the subject matter of a tradition, with the Flood. It happened, and that it happened should not be cause for any amazement or intellectual disparagement. The experience consisted not so much in something out of the past being repeated, as in its becoming the present. But the attainment of such a present reality was based in the fact that the circumstances leading to it were present at all times. The ways of the flesh were corrupted at all times, or could be despite the greatest piety—for do people even know if they are doing good or evil in God's eyes or if what appears good to them may not be an abomination before heaven? In its stupidity humankind knows neither God nor the decrees of the underworld; at any time forbearance may prove to be exhausted and judgment enacted. Nor, more than likely, had the warning voice been missing, the voice of a knowing and arch-clever man who could
interpret the signs and, taking wise measures beforehand, is the only-one of tens of thousands to escape—but not before first entrusting the tablets of knowledge to the earth as the seed of future wisdom, so that once the waters have dispersed, everything can begin anew from this written seed. At any time—that is the word of mystery, a mystery that knows no time. But the form of timelessness is the now and the here.
The Flood took place on the Euphrates, but it took place in China as well. Around the year 1300 before our era, there was a dreadful mutiny of the Huang Ho—which, by the way, led to measures controUing its course—a repetition of the Great Flood that had occurred some one thousand fifty years before, under the fifth emperor, whose Noah was named Yao; but, in terms of time, it was a long way from being the true, the first Flood, for the memory of that original event is common to all peoples. Just as the Babylonian tale of the Flood that Joseph knew was only a postscript to ancient and ever more ancient originals, so, too, the flood experience itself can be traced back to ever more remote primal scenes, and presumably one is being especially thorough if one designates the sinking of the land of Atlantis beneath the ocean's waves as the final, the true original— ghastly news of which, spreading to all the regions of the earth whose inhabitants had once come from there, became fixed forever in human memory as a variable tradition. That is, however, only an illusory station and preliminary goal. One set of Chaldean calculations shows that a period of 39,180 years lay between the Flood and the first historical dynasty in the land of the two rivers. Therefore the sinking of Atlantis—a mere nine thousand years before Solon and thus a very recent catastrophe within the perspective of earth's larger history—cannot possibly have been the Flood. It, too, was but a repetition, a moment when something from the deep past became the present, a terrible refresher of memory; and the real origin of the story must be moved back to at least that incalculable moment in time when the continental island called Lemuria, itself only a remnant of the old continent of Gondwanaland, vanished into the billows of the Indian Ocean.
Our concern is not time that can be enumerated, but rather its abrogation in the mystery of the transposition of tradition and prophecy, lending the word "sometime"—or, better, the word "once"—its double meaning of past and future and thus its import as
potential present. Here the idea of reincarnation has its roots. The kings of Babel and of the two lands of Egypt, both curly-bearded Kurigalzu and Horus, whose name was Amun-is-content, in his palace at Thebes plus all their predecessors and successors, were the sun god manifested in the flesh—which is to say, myth became mys-terium in them, without the tiniest space left for differentiating between being and meaning. It would be three thousand years before a time came when people could dispute whether the Eucharist's host "is" or merely "signifies" the body of the sacrificial victim; but even those terribly futile discussions have been unable to change the fact that the essence of the mystery is and remains the timeless present. That is the meaning of the solemn rite, of the feast. Every Christmas the child who is to save the world, who is destined to suffer and die and rise again, is born on earth in a manger once more. And when at midsummer, at the Feast of the Weeping Women, the Feast of the Burning Lamp, the Feast of Tammuz—in Sichem or at Beth-lachem—Joseph experienced in the enlarged present the murder of the "lost and lamented son," of the young god, of Osiris-Adonai, followed by his resurrection amid the many sobbing flutes and joyful cries, what reigned over all that was the abrogation of time in mystery, the same nullification that interests us here, because it removes every logical stumbling block from a mode of thought that simply recognized the Flood in each new calamity of rising waters.
Alongside the story of the Flood stands the one about the Great Tower, shared, like the first, among many people. Situated in the localized present of there and then, it likewise offered as much occasion for forming backdrops and dreamy transpositions. It is as certain as it is excusable that Joseph, for example, plainly believed the tower of the sun citadel in Babel, called Esagila or House of the Raising of the Head, to be the Great Tower. Even the wanderer from Ur had doubtless believed as much; and not only in Joseph's immediate circle, but indeed in the land of Shinar as well, people beHeved it without question. This ancient and monstrous seven-storied tower of Esagila—built, as everyone agreed, by Bel, the Creator, though with the assistance of the black-haired people he first had to make;
renovated and enlarged by Hammuragash the Lawgiver; and enameled in a brightly colored splendor that Joseph could picture in his mind—was for every Chaldean the embodiment of a tradition of great antiquity now made visible and experienced in the present: a Tower built by human hands and reaching to the heavens. That in Joseph's particular world the Tower saga was joined with other notions not actually intrinsic to it—with the idea of "scattering," for instance—can only be explained by the personal behavior of the moon man, by his annoyance and emigration, since for the people of Shinar such a concept had nothing whatever to do with the migdals or citadel towers of their cities. On the contrary, Hammuragash the Lawgiver had expressly ordered it be written down that he had made their spires so high in order "to gather*' a fickle people dispersing in all directions back under his sway, under the rule of "heaven's envoy." But, given his views of divinity, the moon man had taken offense at this and scattered, in defiance of Nimrod's royal poHcy of gathering; and thus in Joseph's homeland something out of the past, but still present in the form of Esagila, took on an aura of the future and prophecy. Judgment hovered over that heaven-high, defiant monument to Nimrod's royal presumption; not one stone would be left upon another and its builders would be confounded and scattered by the Lord of
the gods. That is what old EHezer taught Jacob's son, thus preserving the double meaning of "once" and achieving out of a mixture of saga and prediction a timeless presence in the present—the Tower of the Chaldeans.
For Joseph, then, this structure was bound up with the story of the Great Tower. But it is clear, of course, that on the immeasurable journey back to the original tower, Esagila is only a backdrop of dunes—one of many. The people of Mizraim also viewed the Tower as part of the present, in the form of King Khufu's astounding desert tomb. And in nations of whose existence neither Joseph nor old Eliezer had even the vaguest notion, in the middle of America, in fact, people had their "Tower" as well—or their image of the Tower—the great pyramid of Cholula, whose ruins reveal dimensions that certainly would have had to rouse anger and jealousy in King Khufu. The people of Cholula always denied that they themselves built this gigantic edifice. They declared it to be literally the work of giants, for, they maintained, it was wanderers from the East, a superior people drunk with longing for the sun, who had set their
fervor and energy to work in raising it up out of clay and bitumen in order to draw near to their beloved star. Several things speak for the supposition that these advanced strangers were colonists from Atlantis; and it would seem that wherever these sun-worshipers and inveterate astronomers went, their most urgent task was to raise up, before the marveling eyes of the natives, mighty observatories built after the model of their high towers at home—in particular, of one in the middle of their land, the soaring mountain to the gods of which Plato speaks. So perhaps the prototype of the Great Tower should also be sought in Atlantis. At least we cannot follow its history any farther back and have reached the end of our study of this strange object.
But where did Paradise lie? The "Garden in the East"? The place of serenity and happiness, man's home, where he had tasted of the evil tree and been driven out—or, better, driven himself from it and scattered over the earth? Young Joseph knew this as well as he knew about the Flood, and from the same sources. He had to smile a little whenever he heard inhabitants of the Syrian desert claim that the great oasis of Damascus was Paradise—for one could not dream of a more heavenly place than that, green with orchards and sweetly watered gardens nestled between majestic mountains and seas of meadows, teeming with all sorts of people, rich in luxurious commerce. Nor, out of courtesy, did he actually shrug, though he did so in his mind, whenever men from Mizraim declared the site of the garden had obviously been Egypt, for it was the center, the navel of the world. The curly-bearded men of Shinar implied the same thing, that Babel was the sacred middle point of the world, when they called their royal city "Gate of God" and "Bond Between Heaven and Earth"—as a boy Joseph could fluently imitate their sophisticated dialect, repeating it after them: ''Bab-ilu markas same u irsitim." But Joseph had better information from closer to home, taken directly, in fact, from the life of his good and solemnly pondering father, who, while still a young man—on his journey from his family home
at Well of Seven to Naharaim to see his uncle in Haran—had unexpectedly and unwittingly stumbled upon the real Gate of Heaven, the true navel of the world: at the hilltop city of Luz, with its sacred circle of stones, which he had then named Beth-el, House of God, because there, while fleeing from Esau, he had been granted the grandest and most dreadful revelation of his life. Ever afterward, that hilltop—where Jacob had stood his stony pillow on end as a monument and anointed it with oil—was for Joseph and those around him the middle of the world, the place of the umbilical cord between heaven and earth. Paradise, however, had not lain there, either, but in regions of the beginning and of home, somewhere there—so Joseph's childish conviction, one that enjoyed wide support, by the way—in the land from where the man of the moon city had once set out, in lower Shinar, there where the river divided and the moist soil between its arms abounded in trees that bear sweet fruit even today.
It has long remained the view favored by theological science that it was here, somewhere in southern Babylonia, that one should search for Eden, that Adam's body was formed from Babylonian clay. And yet once again we are dealing with the familiar backdrop effect—the same system of overlapping, of localizations referring us back farther still—that we have had numerous opportunities to study. Except that in this case, we are dealing with a truly extraordinary and, in the most literal sense, alluring version of it, for it lures us above and moves us beyond anything earthly. Except that here the gorge of the well of human history is revealed in all its depths, in depths beyond all measure—indeed a bottomlessness to which one ultimately can no longer apply the concepts either of depth or darkness, but, on the contrary, only images of height and light—those bright heights, that is, out of which could come a Fall, the story of which is inextricably linked with our souls' memory of the Garden of Happiness.
The traditional topography of Paradise is precise in one respect. There was, it is said, a river that went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there divided into the world's four rivers: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Euphrates, and the Hiddekel. The Pishon, so one interpretation adds, is also called the Ganges; it encompasses all of India and bears gold with it. The Gihon is said to be the Nile, the
greatest river of the world, which encompasses the whole land of the Moors. The Hiddekel, then—its current swift as an arrow—is the Tigris, which flows toward the east of Assyria. There is no dispute as to this last. Disputed, however, and by credible parties, is the equation of the Pishon and Gihon with the Ganges and Nile. Instead, they say, what is meant is the Araxes, which empties into the Caspian Sea, and the Halys, which flows into the Black Sea; for Paradise is indeed to be thought of as situated within a Babylonian perspective, yet not in Babylonia itself, but in the Armenian alpine country north of the Mesopotamian plain, where those rivers have sources close together.
Reason greets such information with a certain amount of applause. For if, as the most venerable report has it, the "Phrat," or Euphrates, arose within Paradise, it is untenable to think of the latter as located at that river's mouth. But having awarded the palm to the land of Armenia on the basis of that insight, we would at best have made one step leading to the next truth—only to come, then, to a halt one backdrop, one confusion farther on.
God gave the world, as old Eliezer himself instructed Joseph, four sides: morning, evening, noon, and midnight, watched over from the throne of dominion by four holy beasts and four guardian angels, who keep an unswerving eye upon this fundamental order. Did not the pyramids in Lower Egypt likewise have their four sides, each covered with sparkling cement, turned precisely toward the earth's four quarters? That same arrangement held for the rivers of Paradise. Their courses were to be thought of as serpents, the tips of whose tails touched but whose mouths lay far apart, each directed toward one of the four points of heaven. This is an obvious adaptation. Transferred to anterior Asia, it repeats the geography of another place now lost from sight, but with which we are very familiar: Atlantis, of course, where, according to Plato's descriptive repon, the same four rivers flowed in the same fashion—pointing at right angles to the four quarters of the earth—from the towering mountain of the gods at the center of the island. By tracing back in this way, we lend every such learned dispute as to the geography of those "headwaters" or the site of the garden the mollifying stamp of idle speculation, for it becomes clear that the idea of Paradise—located now here, now there—ultimately owes its graphic description to
various peoples' memories of a land now vanished, where a wise and advanced race of humans once spent blissful centuries under an order as gentle as it was holy. One cannot fail to recognize that at work here is a mixing of the tradition of an actual paradise with the saga of humankind's Golden Age. The memory of such a place refers, quite justifiably it would seem, to a Hesperian land, where— if all reports do not deceive us—a great people once lived a wise and pious life under favorable conditions never again achieved. But this could not possibly have been the Garden of Eden, m
an's home and the place of his Fall; it forms only a backdrop, another illusory goal on our temporal and spatial journey to Paradise—for the study of earth's earliest history looks for primal man, for the Adamite, in eras and places that perished before Atlantis itself was ever settled.
A journey of alluring and taunting delusion! For even given the excusable, though misguided, possibility of equating Paradise with the land of golden apples where the four rivers flowed, how could such a blunder—even granting the self-deception was made in good faith—have succeeded when confronted with the wraithlike world that forms the next, most distant promontory, where the tormented larva of the human species (a figure in which the handsome and beautiful Joseph would have refused, with the most justifiable outrage, to recognize himself) endured his lustful, fearful nightmare of a life, in desperate battle with armored mountains of flesh, with flying lizards and ravening salamanders? That was not the Garden of Eden; that was hell. Or rather, it was the first, accursed state after the Fall. It was not here, not at the beginning of time and space, that the fruit of the Tree of Lust and Death was plucked and tasted. That came before. The well of time, it turns out, has been plumbed before we ever reach the goal, the end and the beginning, we seek. The history of man is older than the material world that his will has worked, older than the life that rests upon his will.
A long tradition of thought—based on humankind's truest self-perception and arising early on, to become incorporated as an heirloom into the long succession of religions, prophecies, and
epistemologies of the East, into Avesta, Islam, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, and Hellenistic cults—deals with the figure of the first or perfect human being, adam qadmon in Hebrew, who is to be thought of as a youthful creature of pure light, created before the beginning of the world as the prototype and epitome of humanity, with which, then, variable but ultimately concordant doctrines and reports become associated. This primal man, so it is said, had from the very beginning been God's chosen warrior in the battle against the evil invading the newly created world, but had come to harm, had been chained by demons, imprisoned in matter, estranged from his origins, but had been freed again from his earthly, bodily existence by a second emissary of the Godhead, who in some mysterious way was himself yet again, his own higher self, had then been led back into the world of light, but in the process had had to leave behind portions of his own light, which was then used for forming the material world and humankind on earth. What marvelous stories—in which, to be sure, the already discernible religious element of redemption is still overridden by cosmogonic intentions; for we hear how this primal human Son of God contained within his body of light the seven metals, each corresponding to one of the seven planets, from which the world was formed. This is also expressed by the fact that this being—who in emanating from the first paternal cause was both light and man—descended through the seven planetary spheres and from the ruling power of each sphere received some portion of its nature. But, then, as he gazed downward, he noticed his reflection in matter, became enamored of it, descended to it, and thus found himself ensnared in the bonds of lower nature. This explains, then, man's double nature, whereby the hallmarks of a divine origin and essential freedom are forever entangled beyond unravelment in the heavy fetters of the lower world.