n. 12
dicembre 2010

 

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Inside Egypt
Discover the "ten stripes" of the soul

by FRANCESCO GEREMIA
  

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The exodus from Egypt, or Easter, as a historical fact, is only part of a symbolic reflection of the biblical text by A. In Souzenelle, according to the criteria of interpretation of the Kabbalah-Jewish-Christian mysticism. The classic biblical history of the "ten stripes" (Ex 7.1-29; 8.1-10.29; 12.29-34) requires a deep re-reading to understand the hidden meanings. In fact, the author wants to show what is possible carry out, with divine intervention, freedom from slavery, fear, hatred, internal alienation, typical of human being, and entering in an area of ever expanding consciousness in a continuous succession of passages and mutations.

The 'Hebrew' and 'Egyptian', respectively, in this sense become the metaphor of the man who accepts the invitation to the freedom’s land, or, conversely, of which more and more closed in itself, and it is the destruction and death. And Egypt is, as an external territory, the "matrix", the hinterland to individuals and the community, where it continues transmutation occurs. Exterior and interior correspond to the extent that one is the image of the other, the invisible of visible one, the speakable of the unspeakable one, the precarious situation of the permanent.


Moses, Egypt and the revelation of the name

The figure of Moses summarizes and anticipates in personal level the transmutation that affects the whole community of Israel and of humanity. So miraculously saved from the waters, educated in the values of the Egyptian civilization, at first he tries to overthrow with his their means (the murder of an Egyptian guard and the attempted reconciliation of the Jews) the exploitative situation in which his people lives. The action is doomed to failure. Moses escapes to the land of Midian where he marries Zipporah -female figure of his inside to remember, to fund and to rebuild the original unit- and he submit to the rite of circumcision, a physical sign of a change in spirit level.

In this restored unity happens the disclosure of the name, the ineffable reality of God. At once he understood that only human values assimilated in Egypt can't deploy any release, only in the total confidence in the energies that come from above, Moses could face the Pharaoh and begin the story of the exodus to the promised land.

Egypt, therefore, with its large expanse of land, that is a kind of "interior land " of each one and of the people;  we live in a state of "slavery": the divine plan is to start a process, even painful, because each link decay and all aspire to the 'promised land' as a country of true freedom.

 This is not a mechanical and automatic issue, because the doubts and objections to the divine plan will be renewed in the course of human history: it is still a long way to go. Moses is expected to experience the story of Eden, where God plants a tree, called of the knowledge of the non- accomplished task and the accomplished task, of moisture and dryness, of darkness and light. In this man is developed, also by divine intervention, a gradualness of passages and transformations that allow the man to stand up in vertical position in the tree that he is (in Scripture the tree is the symbol of man) to bring the its own fruits. In Moses also reiterates the ancient patriarchs' history, including Abraham’s and Jacob’s. Become strong and stable by the power of God, Moses will face the Pharaoh and will help the rebirth of his people, as the wounds want to show.

The "ten stripes" of the soul

Following Moses, also all the people of Israel must discover and become the "name" that is revealed in the story of the burning bush: Yodhe-waw-he. As it is stated in the Zohar (Book of Splendor) to the mystical Kabbalah, "the tetragrammaton is a sword: yod is a pommel, waw the blade, and both the two he have two courts." In his heart Israel has to become this sword and should be left to mold by it, as the saying of Jesus: "I do not come to bring peace but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). The route to achieve this purpose is described in the biblical text with forms of animal life, images of indefinite possibilities, inherent in the man (similar to the ten animals that God presents to Job to discover his true self: cf Jb 38-39).

They are usually called "injured" and at first glance seem to send a picture of the absurd and the practical confusion. In fact, the text speaks of "miracles, amazing action, wonders" of God for his people, to start the growth process at collective level. Each of these actions has a duplicity of meaning: positive and negative.

From the history also leaves an apparent contradiction in the divine action: He wants to set free his people, after each test He hardens the heart of Pharaoh, almost to prolong the people’s agony. Really, this agony reveals the wisdom of God: one concerns the fact that nothing in human affairs is mechanical and performed once for ever: everything is always the beginning of a journey that awaits further steps; on the other hand, the divine obstacle tends to consolidate, test after test, the internal consistency of the Jews, thereby releasing latent energies and new responsibilities to incorporate.

The water converted in to blood

The trials’ sequence begins with the case of water turned to blood: detached from the relationship with the Name, the yod in the Tetragrammaton, in exile from God and ourselves, the human existence is pulled into a vortex of murders, massacres, bloody tragedies, destructive events that abounds in the news every day. The consciousness of the abyss into which one has fallen, discloses the meaning of Jesus’ gesture changing water into wine. This signal, according to John, is the beginning of the Messianic mystery of Jesus, but also it initiates the transmutation within the Jewish people and the humanity as a whole, where the sword-word, received and formed, is the first step in a maturation process of "the self" and of the distinction of what, once, was confused as purely organic-animal level.

<The wine- blood of the Jews had opened their hearts to divine love, the love that is in them and in all us, one day, be able to" forgive everything, expect everything, take everything, be patient and not take account of unwelcome .... " It is shown the way to the Jew. But he must go further.>

Frogs

The second stage of human growth is related to knowledge, signified by the frogs. Even in Eden, man was described as a tree that tends to its own fulfillment in flowers and fruits. Here, frogs, animals that live in damp places and can jump to dry land, resulting in an image the human task: if we stay on the wet (our unknown deep energies) living in oblivion, but if it does transition to the mainland, we welcome the boost to the awareness of ourselves, to the inside marriage with all our forces, directing them toward maturity.

By divine intervention, Israel lives in Egypt this crucial stage and prepares the vertical position. The Egyptians, however, who reject such a transition, are eaten by frogs, for the powerful energies that inhabit it: the image of today's humanity that, forgetting his own inner life, is at the mercy of the advances and techniques developed by himself.

The parasite

As a direct consequence, appears the parasite, caused by the stroke of Moses’ rod in the dust, the image of the undefined powers that each human has (cf. Gen 2.7). In his situation of exile, the Jewish people realized its potential in the myriads of science, technology, knowledge, inventions, laws, legal systems that give only the appearance of a real order. In fact, the Jew as the Egyptian are living in a world of magic, loose in the archetypes of their existence’s founders and therefore producing untold suffering and death. Moses striking the dust, it becomes a parasite, he tells his people that God puts a dike to the power of the wizards and to the idolatry of science, to discover the need to link intelligence and wisdom with the divine model.


The insect

In the path of light, the Jews will see their God invade their life with a swarm of insects. The Hebrew word Arob inevitably brings to mind Ereb, the night (darkness of creation), and Oreb, the crow (the myth of the flood). Composed of the same letters, but otherwise vocalized, the three words reveal to the people in exile, the need to consult to adamah, mother of the deep. As Noah enters into the ark with all animals, and plays a dip road in his deeper self, he takes the whole animal energy and he goes out with the light of a dove, celebrating the marriage of dark and light, full of the Holy Spirit, in the symbols of the raven and the dove. "Arob, symbolizing the Spirit of God, destroys those who don’t fit into his breath ... but makes the spirit of the Jew in the land of Goshen."

Plague

In each of us, lives the divine tetragrammaton as "I am becoming." The first strip, the word-sword wound killed or freed: in this it appears under the sign of the plague, deber, unlike dabar word of God, which also indicates the thing, because the word of God does what he says. "In all the things-dabar is the verb-dabar that, unrecognized, makes that thing the plague-deber." The Jews are guided by God in this decisive battle of life and death as a developer judgment. "It is the sword that leads to fulfillment / compliance that name in the inner man, but turns against the man who was unconscious, to enter into the revelation of the Holy Name ... In this perspective, the same plague contributes to salvation, the sword only works on view to complying with the creation and the glory of God."


Leprosy and hail

Leprosy, sehyne in Hebrew, the sixth 'plague', appears as the narcissistic self-image that can become paranoia. Job also, all focused on himself, he is beaten with leprosy by God to exceed its childishness and to resume the path of light. In the seventh round, hail, caused by the rod of Moses, God's action escalates: He wants that the "hinterland" of the Jews are disrupted for the emergence of a new consciousness field. The task given to Adam "to preserve and cultivate the earth" (Gen 2:15) becomes the task of all the people: it is no longer a slave to the animals impulses that live -child sexuality and fatuous talk, which stifles the Word’s Voice- is aware of the need to marry the deeper reality of his being and to start the vertical position of his ego (the resurrection, Anástasis.)


The Grasshopper and the darkness

The Grasshopper and the darkness, eighth and ninth trial, confirm each in his way, the need to go down in the darkness of his own self to return to light. Darkness and light are called each other. Even the history of Genesis announced and Job sees God after a long and painful descent into himself; for what the Jews, enslaved in Egypt and strangers to the interior of their being, have been brought out in successive steps to raise and known to the intimate. The darkness is not nothing, or lack of vision: they represent the potential of the light that is inscribed in every being and ask to be taken to become aware of light and spousal love. "It's night, it’s morning ...", each of the days of Genesis says.

"Darkness are the appearance of the deep abyss and the abyss radically separates the uncreated from the created, God from man. But the darkness are the manifestation of the deep, when the Uncreated goes out of his not-knowing, from the radicalism of separation to be met in an icon of the Son of God, in an "I am" of His being! ... No one can be born to the "son" of God that brings, if doesn’t experience of darkness risen from the abyss."

The Jewish experience is the death of Jesus: "There was darkness over all the earth ..." and that found in many of the events of the great mystics of the Christian tradition, known as "dark night" or "night journey."

The death of the firstborn

Finally, prepared by the previous experiences, reaches the tenth plague, the killing of the firstborn: they die because the Egyptians haven’t given birth inside a firstborn 'son' through deaths and successive births and have not incorporated all of them, the secret divine 'name'. This is not a divine vengeance or cruelty, as it has not been for Jesus who died to be released the "son of the father", Bar-Abba. At the end of this long history, Israel understood that the passage, before a human history, is the passage of the bright light of God. "The sword passes over (Pesah-Easter) of the house where the son is born; it falls where there is sterility and destroy the loved child. The name of the destroyer is the Messiah."

Future Memory

An arduous and exciting journey that traced by the ten 'plagues', symbolizing the number (5+5, male and female human being, called by the number 10 corresponding to the yod, the divine name), the internal drive to be achieved during all existence. As for Jesus, from the wine at Cana to the 'Hour' 'of the cross, the unity with the Father has complied, for all humanity too is renewed the same dynamic: from the blood spilled on the earth of the first test to that of the firstborn destroyed in the land of Egypt, it finds love and immense force that builds and fertilizes. Each year, the great Holy Saturday liturgy makes present and guides our ascent of "trees planted along the river" (Psalm 1). Instead of returning to a distant past, these histories are "openness of meaning": in them we discover our glorious destiny. Like the Eucharist, they are memory of the future that God has ordained for all mankind.
 

1. A. DE SOUZENELLE, L’Egitto interiore o le dieci piaghe dell’anima, Servitium, Gorle (BG), 2000.

2. The research of A. De Souzenelle resulted in numerous articles all published by Editrice Servitium (Sotto il Monte, Bg): Nel cuore del corpo la parola; Il simbolismo del corpo umano; L’Egitto interiore o le dieci piaghe dell’anima; Il femminile dell’essere; Risonanze bibliche; L’Edipo interiore; L’arco e la freccia; La lettera strada di vita; Giobbe sulla via della luce; L’alleanza dimenticata; Il bacio di Dio o l’alleanza ritrovata; Il mito di Giona.

Francesco Geremia osm
Priorato di Sant’Egidio
4039 Sotto il Monte (BG)

 

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