The H.D. Book (25 page)

The thought of the prophet expands and rises from one level to another . . . until he arrives at the point where the root of his soul is. Next he concentrates on raising the light of the sefirah to
En Sof
and from there he draws the light down, from on high down to his rational soul, and from there, by means of the imaginative faculty, down to his animal soul, and there all things are pictured either by the inner senses of the imaginative faculty or by the outer senses.

Returning from
En Sof,
the unknowable, unimaginable God, from beyond sense, the imaginer, no longer imagining but realizing, carries a light from station to station, sefirah to sefirah, irradiating the imagined with reality, transforming the sense of the divine—the articulated Tree of Life—the cosmos, the rational soul and the animal soul, in light of a source that is a numinous non-sense or beyond sense.

This Tree, too, we saw each year, for at the birthday of the Child-Christos, we were as children presented with a tree from which or under which gifts appeared—wishes made real. This Christmas tree came, we know, from the tree cults of the German tribes, ancestral spirits. A burning tree. But it is also a tree of lights, and where, in the time of Jacob Boehme, in the early seventeenth century, the Jewish and the Germanic mystery ways are wedded in one, the Christmas tree may have also been the Divine Tree of
The Zohar,
lit with the lights of the Sefiroth.

In this ritual of the imagination of Hayyim Vital, there is not only the ascent by pretending, the “as if” of his text, the pretension then, but the mystic is pretender to a throne, a “source” or “root” in the Divine. In the descent a magic is worked and all the pretended way of the ascent is rendered “greater than Reality.” Not only the deep dream but the day dream enlightens or enlivens. “Occasionally,” Werblowsky relates from Vital, “the imaginative faculty may even externalize or project the effects of this ‘light’ so that the experience becomes one of external sense impressions such as of the apparition of angelic messengers, the hearing of voices.”

This Tree of Life is also the tree of generations, for its branches that
are also roots are male and female, and the light or life is a mystery of the Shekinah, the ultimate Spirit-Mother of Israel as well as God’s Glory. The root or seed is a quickening source in the immortal or eternal womb, wherein each man is immortal.

•

In
The Eternal Ones of the Dream,
the psychoanalyst Géza Roheim draws another configuration of source, dream, and transformation of reality, that may cast further light on our way toward a picture of what is involved in poetry when the images and personae of a dream greater than reality appear as active forces in the poet’s world:

Strehlow, who as a missionary living for decades among the Aranda was certainly an authority on their language, tells us that he cannot explain the meaning of the word
altjira,
but it seems that the natives connect to it the concept of something that has no beginning—
erina itja arbmanakala,
him none made. Spencer and Gillen, however, have given another interpretation of the word. In their glossary, we find ‘
altjeringa:
name applied by the Arunta, Kaitish, and Unmatjera tribes to the far past or dream times in which their mythical ancestors lived. The word
altjeri
means dream.’ Strehlow denies this; he says the word for dream is
altjirerama:
and gives the following etymology:
altjira
(god)
rama
(to see).

For one thing, it is clear that
altjira
means dream and not god or ancestor (as Strehlow indicates) for I found that a folktale, a narrative with a happy end, is also called
altjira.

It is evident that Strehlow, from his preoccupation with
Altjira
(God) of the Aranda Bible, managed to miss the real meaning of the word.
Altjira
= dream,
altjireramaa
= to dream;
altjirerinja
= dreaming. This is as near as I could get to Spencer and Gillen’s
altjeringa.
Moses thought it must be a mistake for either
altirerindja
or
altliranga.
There was no name for any mythical period. The time when the ancestors wandered on earth was called
altjiranga nakala,
i.e. ‘ancestor was’, like
ljata nama,
i.e. ‘now is’. Other expressions were noted as equivalents of
altjiranga nakala;
these were
imanka nakula,
‘long time ago was’, or
kutata nakala,
‘eternally was’. This led us to the explanation and etymology of the word
altjiranga mitjina. Mitjina
is equivalent to
kutata,
‘eternal’;
nga
is the ablative suffix
from;
therefore
altjiranga mitjina
= ‘the eternal ones from the dream’ or ‘the eternal people who come in dreams’. This is not my explanation, but that
of the old men, Moses, Renana, and Jirramba. Another Aranda word for dream, ancestor, and story, is
tnankara.
It is not often used, and as far as I could see it means exactly the same as
altjira.
(Roheim,
op. cit.
, pp. 210–11)

In story and tribal rite, the Australian native seeks to convert time and space into an expression of his unity, to create a language of acts and things, of devouring and being devoured, of giving birth and being born, in which man and the world about him come into one body.

In an emu myth of the Aranda, Marakuja (Hands bad), the old man emu, takes his bones out and transforms them into a cave. . . . The kangaroo men take the mucus from their noses; it becomes a stone still visible now. The rocks become black where they urinate. (
Ibid.
, pp. 211–12)

Here the
altjiranga mitjina,
the ones living in a dream of time more real than the mortality of the time past, invade the immediate scene. For the Australians as for Heraclitus, “Immortal mortals mortal immortals, their being dead is the other’s life.” The things lost in time return and are kept in the features of the place. “Environment is regarded as if it were derived from human beings,” Roheim observes.

In repeated acts—bleeding, pissing, casting mucus, spitting into the ground, or in turn, eating the totemic food and drinking the blood of the fathers—the boy is initiated into the real life of the tribe.

An old man sits beside him and whispers into his ear the totemic name. The boy then calls out the esoteric name as he swallows the food. The emphasis on the place name in myth and ritual can only mean one thing, that
both myth and ritual are an attempt to cathect environment with libido
. . . The knowledge of the esoteric name ‘aggregates’ unites the boy to the place or to the animal species or to anything that was strange before. (
Ibid.
, p. 216)

The “breast, anus, semen, urine, leg, foot” in the Australian song, chant, or enchantment, that are also hill, hole, seed, stream, tree, or rock, where “in the Toara ceremony the men dance around the ring shouting the names of male and female genital organs, shady trees, hills, and some of the totems of their tribe,” are most familiar to the Freudian convert Roheim. He sees with a sympathy that rises from the analytic
cult in which Freud has revived in our time a psychic universe in which dream has given a language where, by a “sexual obsession” (as Jung calls it), the body of man and the body of creation are united.

The “blood” of the Aranda, the “libido” of the Freudian, may also be the “light” of our Kabbalist text. “
En Sof,
” Gershom Scholem tells us in
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

is not only the hidden Root of all Roots, it is also the sap of the tree; every branch representing an attribute, exists not by itself but by virtue of
En Sof,
the hidden God. And this tree of God is also, as it were, the skeleton of the universe; it grows throughout the whole of creation and spreads branches through all its ramifications. All mundane and created things exist only because something of the power of the Sefiroth lives and acts in them.

The simile of man is as often used as that of the Tree. The Biblical word that man was created in the image of God means two things to the Kabbalist: first, that the power of the Sefiroth, the paradigm of divine life, exists and is active also in man. Secondly, that the world of the Sefiroth, that is to say the world of God the Creator, is capable of being visualized under the image of man the created. From this it follows that the limbs of the human body are nothing but images of a certain spiritual node of existence which manifests itself in the symbolic figure of
Adam Kadmon,
the primordial man. The Divine Being Himself cannot be expressed. All that can be expressed are His symbols. The relation between
En Sof
and its mystical qualities, the Sefiroth, is comparable to that between the soul and the body, but with the difference that the human body and soul differ in nature, one being material and the other spiritual, while in the organic whole of God all spheres are substantially the same. (Scholem,
op. cit.,
pp. 214–15)

“The world of the Sefiroth is the hidden world of language,” Scholem continues, “the world of divine names.” “Totemic names,” Roheim calls the whispered passwords of the Australian rite. “The creative names which God called into the world,” Scholem calls the Sefiroth, “the names which He gave to Himself.” It is the alphabet of letters revealed to the initiate as at once the alphabet of what he is and what the universe is and the alphabet of eternal persons.

As Scholem hints, “the conception of the Sefiroth as parts or limbs of the mystical anthropos leads to an anatomical symbolism which does not shrink from the most extravagant conclusions.” Man’s “secret parts” are secret names or hidden keys to the whole figure of man, charged with magic in their being reserved. In the communal image, the human figure is male and female. Ass-hole, penis, cunt, navel, were not only taboo but sacred, words to be revealed in initiations of the soul to the divine body, as at Eleusis the cunt of a woman in the throes of birth was shown. In what we call carnal knowledge, in the sexual union of male and female nakedness, God and His creation, the visible and invisible, the above and the below are also united.

Ham, who sees the nakedness of his father, is the prototype of the Egyptian who in an alien or heretic religion knows the secrets of God. To steal a look, like the theft of fire, is a sin, for the individual seeks to know without entering the common language in which things must be seen and not seen.

“At the initiation ceremony the point is to displace libido from the mother to the group of fathers,” Roheim writes. In the contemporaneity of our human experience with all it imagines, there may be not a displacement but an extension of libido: the revelation of the mother remains, the revelation of the male body is added.

Some old men stand in the ring and catching hold of their genitals tell the boys to raise their eyes and take particular notice of those parts. The old men next elevate their arms above their heads and the boys are directed to look at their armpits. Their navels are exhibited in the same way. The men then put their fingers on each side of their mouths and draw their lips outward as wide as possible, lolling out their tongues and inviting the special attention of the novices. They next turn their backs and, stooping down, ask the novices to take particular notice of their posterior parts.

For Roheim, the images and magic of Australian story and rite are one with the images and magic of all dreams:

After having withdrawn cathexis from environment, we fall asleep. But when the cathexis is concentrated in our own bodies we send it out again and form a new world, in our dreams. If we compare dream mechanisms
with the narratives of dream-times we find an essential similarity between the two. The endless repetitions of rituals and wanderings and hunting are indeed very different from a dream; but when we probe deeper we find that they are overlaid by ceremony and perhaps also by history. The essential point in the narratives as in the ritual is that man makes the world—as he does in sleep.

These natives do not wander because they like to . . . Man is naturally attached to the country where he was born because it, more than anything else, is a symbol of his mother. All natives will refer to their ‘place’ as a ‘great place’; as they say ‘I was incarnated there’ or ‘born there’. Economic necessity, however, compels him time and again to leave his familiar haunts and go in search of food elsewhere. Against this compulsion to repeat
separation,
we have the fantasy embodied in myth and ritual in which he himself creates the world.

Where the nursing woman and the countryside itself are both “Mother,” and where in turn the men of the tribe man initiate and reveal maleness as an other Mother, “Mother” means unity, what Gertrude Stein called the Composition. What we experience in dreaming is not a content of ourselves but the track of an inner composition of ourselves. We are in-formed by dreams, as in daily life we experience that which we are able to grasp as information. We see, hear, taste, smell, feel, what can be drawn into a formal relation; to sense at all involves attention and composition. “It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different,” Stein writes in “Composition as Explanation”:

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.

The endless repetitions of rituals and wanderings and hunting as the pattern of life for the Australian is a living inside the Composition; and
in their exhibiting the secrets of the male body to the boy, the men of the tribe are making a composition where what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. In the ritual, song, parts of the body, parts of the landscape, man and nature, male and female, are united in a secret composite of magic names.