The soul of Edom as it runs its course was articulated vividly as a “flabby, weak-eyed, pretending devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.” Inside its magnificent machines and grand puppetries played in deadly earnest is a terrified, thrashing “spirit storming in blank walls” aghast at what its lies have built: “a dirty house in a gutted world.”

This essay focuses on a simple, large-scale depiction of the veins of image-play in Edom. It is a geopolitics of Esau you can make yourself with a map of the world and a red marker. “Esau, he is Edom” and the old lies die hard.

Lay the map down and consider that we are speaking of “the flabby devil,” Europe headed by Germany (as since the days of the Holy Roman Empire), inheritor of ancient Rome and its ghostly successor in its principality on the Tiber. Let’s begin with the core of the double cross for all Edom’s image play concerns ambiguity, bad faith, reflection and doubling, the hall or mirrors effect that would mimic meiosis, “a natural perspective that is and is not.”

Draw a thick red line from Paris to Moscow; cross it with a stouter one from Berlin to Rome the cesspit to which all descending roads lead, the source of imperial illusions and the comprehensive perversion that clusters around transferred identity, identity theft and the wolfish envy that drives it. This is the core of Edom but the refractions are complex, as complex as the harlot is acquisitive.

To the original tetrad of terror and passionate imperial imagery add a red line from London to Rome, a bridge of malicious co-dependency. Draw additional red lines from London to Washington, Moscow and Berlin. The hive on the Thames is itself a cruciform juncture of the four major power centers, a traumatic tetrad of terror implicated in the Quartet whose ‘world community’ fig leaf was cut from imperial cloth. As in Macbeth, the violence and delusions are “doubly redoubled”; the deceits are not simple nor are they matters simply of greed or the arrogance of power but a madness ingrained in a hybrid character seeking overlay foul with fair and occasioning for all it touches “toil and trouble,” making every victory a traumatic defeat. Just as the innards of Aphrodite are bloody and perverse horror so the mysteries and magical accomplishments of Edom are “fog and filthy air”; obsessed with hell because, like Milton’s Satan it bears hell within it in its greatest assertions of power and deceit, its killing of the true King, it knows and feels that “hell is murky,” the reflection of its own shadowed and tormenting identity. All its fields, from geopolitics to entertainment reflect this hard fantastic fact.

That Washington has linked with Tokyo and London and with Beijing, Moscow, London and Berlin (Europe) only doubly re-doubles the double cross and makes the glittering web more inclusive and inescapable. The same can be said of the over-determined nets connecting Damascus, Riyadh and Teheran to Edom’s major centers. All will sing their note or be blotted out before the world is gutted and the contrivances collapse as the masters giddily intend. “Esau, he is unstable.” It is “the heart of an immense darkness” that increasingly generates images of collapse, death and decay as its governing fictions dissolve or grinningly expose their hollowness in “rat’s ally where the dead men lost their bones” ; the city without a name, Brussels, whose self-negation (without a genuine name or identity is to lack integral being) reminds Marlow of “a whited sepulcher.” It is apt that the dynasty that rules this fictive nation like a fief also occupies the British throne going on two centuries. It is part of the wayward and perverse Anglican Church falling back into the arms of the holy yoni in the universal city with each hand happily washing the other, so to speak.

In his last and perhaps greatest work, a searing critique of the morbidity of image-worship, Shelley emphasizes the bond between dazzling, blinding imagery, morbidity and self-destruction. It is an ultimate repudiation of magike tekne (image-weaving) that brought in the dawn of the modern-postmodern era, the age of masks and shadows and the last imperial end games they sub-serve:

The grove grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,
The earth was gray with phantoms, and the air
Was peopled with dim forms…

Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling
Shadows of shadows…
Some made a cradle of the ermined capes

Of kingly mantles; some across the tiar
Of pontiffs sat like vultures; others played
Under the crown which girt with empire

A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made
Their nests in it. The old anatomies
Sat hatching their bare broods under the shade

Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes
To reassume the delegated power
Arrayed in which those worms did monarchize
Who made this earth their charnel …

The dance of death also strikingly featured in this masterwork and associated with the Dionysian energies that pervade image play and poiesis, continues until the revelers sink into the dust of fire and frost. So to the grand game, its processing of peace and myriad forms of counterfeit reality, “fiends that palter with us in a double sense” and “lie like truth,” in the end “signifying nothing” but the collapse of the illusion. By its own logic, “literate despair” becomes illiterate and speech dissolve into “mere lumps of sound” as the flabby devil places its crown on “a baby’s or an idiot’s brow” the better to crush out the humanity remaining in the cultural stock from which illusions were generated and whose life they absorbed into fantastic idealizations and mystical creeds.

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical 3rd edition, Robert Kimbrough editor, 1988), 20, 24
2. Wallace Stevens, “A Postcard from the Volcano” (1937), 21-4
3. Shakespeare, Macbeth (Penguin 1995, editor G.K. Hunter), 1.2.38-9; 1.6.14-15; 1.1.1-10
4. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Odyssey 1962, Merritt Y Hughes edition), IV 73-110 passim; Macbeth 5.1.35; Satan’s character exemplifies the inner conflicts and torment of the West and its commitment to illusion as self-transformation, a balm haunted by doubts and bad faith.
5. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Harper 1996 revised translation Aaron Asher), 1.5
6. The phrase in the Midrash actually is spoken by Ishmael, thus: “Esau, you are unstable” and refers to the twin’s homicidal and fratricidal plans for Isaac and Jacob, a game it obsessively plays to this day. Midrash HaGadol and Baba Kama 92
7. T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” (1922), 38-9
8. Heart of Darkness, 13
9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Triumph of Life” in Shelley, Poetical Works (Oxford 1970, Hutchinson edition corrected by G. M. Matthews), pages 518-19, verses 480-505
10. Ibid. pages 510-11, verses 137-75
11. Macbeth 5.6.58-61, 5.5.43-4, 5.5.28
12. Stevens 12-13 op. cit; Conrad op. cit; Shelley verse

But the main point for our studies of Western poiesis, particularly the link between idealization, image-weaving and the wasteland is that Iago functions in the play (with Roderigo, Cassio and others as well as Othello) like Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s own ambitions: he displaces fact by plausible fictions embedded in erotic desires. The conquest of life by images, like Macbeth’s “fatal dagger” or Edmund’s vision of being Earl of Gloucester and even King of Britain is the core fact of Western creativity and culture; it is the antechamber and womb of virtual reality, the displacement of life by phantoms. There is a curious mirroring involved in Iago’s destruction of Othello by erotic jealousy because Iago himself is driven by a fierce feeling of unrequited service (an intense mirror of the feeling his mixture of lust and disdain give his wife, Amelia) and a failure of Othello’s love and loyalty to him. In effect, Iago is a woman scorned and his mixture of heated erotic imagination and misogyny keeps his character and through it, the entire play roiling once Othello overlooks him for promotion in favor of Cassio. In revenge, a lover’s revenge, Iago destroys Othello with the passion that torments him. He infects and possesses him with images of erotic jealousy and betrayal, ones he himself feels, leading Othello to destroy his dear ones and himself. The triumph of the image is a corruption both of eros and of war into suicide, a domestic harbinger of “that last dim battle in the West” when Arthur’s house divides through sexual betrayal, cynicism and outraged faith and the realm and elements collapse in upon themselves moaning in a dead white mist that de facto represents the tormenting fantasies of Othello and, with ambivalence added of Macbeth.

Unable to serve as Othello’s “place holder” (lieutenant), the site of his investment of erotic or warlike energy, Iago makes Othello, and secondarily Roderigo serve as “the garden for [his] will” assuming the male role via malicious deceits even as his confused sexual passions are served by the conceits by which he gets the dupes of his fiction to ‘invest’ (or “spend” in a common sexual metaphor) in him, serving both as their “purse” and goad. His reiterated, didactic but intense injunction that Roderigo “put money in [his] purse,” money that winds up in his pockets indicates his combination of avarice and erotic hunger. Iago is a whore and like the most gifted of that trade a genius at playing, elaborating and manipulating fictions of desire. A master of ambiguity, he incarnates the meiotic aspect of poiesis where the image splits from the reality and “nothing is but what is not.” Like the nightmare of displaced authority and rash judgment in Lear, he excels at reducing all relationships and acquaintances to “nothing.” This precisely is the suicidal aspect of poiesis and its transformative erotic nature. Divisive and polymorphic, it is “the thing [id] itself… a poor bare forked animal,” the place where art and nature intersect and man seeks to re-invent himself, for better or ill, adopting the generative act and all the paradoxes built into its biology.[1]

The play occurs mainly on Cyprus which in ancient times was dedicated to the goddess of metamorphosis and overmastering appetites: Aphrodite who was beloved to have stepped ashore there. As dismembered male genitals embodied in “a modest lovely goddess” Aphrodite alludes to the close connection between eros, artistic idealizing and traumatic transformation, — the horrible hybrid matter being hidden within the beguiling form. This can take a comedic turn as in the “Pygmalion” story (the sculptor was a Cyprian devotee of Aphrodite), a lethally punitive one as in Hippolytus or simply a brutally instructive one as in the Women of Trachis.[2]

Iago’s destruction of Othello by destroying his mind with images of erotic betrayal is a quintessential art work. The network (weaving or web, magike tekne) of related images center on comments like “a black ram is tupping your white ewe” leading to Othello’s tormented vision of men and women as “goats and monkeys,” a powerful, precise and unsettling image whose sensual excess and metamorphic disorder recalls Laertes’ entranced and over-heated description of the French horseman Lamord (“the death”) as a centaur, “incorpsed and demi-natured with his beast,” a figure of lust that generates the symbolic cluster of poison, pearl, and treacherous, adulterous “union” (embodied in the image of Lamord) that climatically elaborates the  play’s thematics.

Embodying and suffering the agonies of a hybrid culture, Iago, jealous of Cassio and Othello for various reasons including his obsessive jealousy about his wife generates an almost endless stream of vivid metaphors for coitus, many of them hermaphroditic, auto-erotic and associating the sex act with ‘putting money in your purse.’ One simile refers to the body as the “garden of the will” that is tilled and impregnated by its desires and schemes. The obsessive quality of Iago’s harping on this theme reflects the self-generating, self-perpetuating nature of image-making: energy pours into the image which like the monster jealousy, like a vampire drains and possesses the mind (or culture) that generates and worships images. It is a deadly, narcissistic process like drowning, like falling through a looking glass. The West is the culture of the spectacle (theatron) and Iago is one of its grand producers of demonic images that, like Geraldine in “Christabel” possess and displace their host.

Iago’s possession of Othello is a form of sexual intercourse (there is an evocative, modern and obscene English phrase for this form of hostility) and so is poiesis itself and the process of metamorphic idealization it unfolds. Apt for Iago’s obsession with money it is a process of investment, — of psychic energy and desire in the image extrapolated from the individual or culture it re-presents. It is interest that lives off its principal until both ‘die’ together, the “ranks of death” being the underbelly of imagery’s glittering visions and wit. The image gradually drains life from its generating source and then possesses and displaces it: the image becomes real the body simply a resource, like that of Orpheus; like taxpayers. Just so the image created by Iago of Desdemona sporting with Cassio displaces their reality for the image-deranged Othello who becomes the host desecrated by his jealous officer. The projection by which Christian civilization, a culture of aesthetic rituals blames its self-creating poetics on its own host, the Jews, whose derekh its magic negates is recapitulated in the ambiguities and deceitful liminality of arch-liars like Iago whose nature is cloven, a paradox, a hybrid beast or satyr “with witchcraft in its wits and treacherous gifts,” the promise of salvation through revelation of the fiend, the fiction that exists in the mind of the seducer and leaps into the credulous like a virus.

Even Iago’s designation as Othello’s “ancient” (flag or banner carrier) indicates his role as a bearer of imagery, a form of relational RNA. The image carrier strives to displace the lieutenant and even his General and to a great extent succeeds. The play carries the tragic logic of image work and its denouement from idyll to apocalypse to elegy.

Regarding my hypothesis of traumatic eroticized transposition within poiesis, a cultic extrapolation of meiosis note the tragic tetrad formed by Iago, Othello, Desdemona and Amelia; Iago is linked powerfully to his ‘husband’ (master) and wife and re-makes the situation of Othello in his image as the Moor weds the image-weaver and appoints him as his lieutenant the better to pour his poison into his ears.

Othello and Desdemona are prime targets for Iago’s work because of their full blown, very public somewhat smug and impatient passion (he takes her, and she gives herself, without her father’s consent or knowledge). They become the garden for his dazzling array of suggestive metaphors and hints, the poiesis of his will. The situation is another of Shakespeare’s variations on the theme of the “un-weeded garden” of lust: “things rank and gross in nature” and in art “possess it merely.”

Othello encapsulates the trajectory of image work and, in the nature of the bond of African Moor and Italian Christian encodes the hybrid quality that makes a culture prey to the metamorphic drive of poiesis. The idyllic phase is the intense, infatuated passion of Othello and Desdemona; they are the world; his role as the great General and hers as the dazzling woman of passion whose beauty and goodness disarm all critics. Under the pressure of jealous Iago’s image-weaving (the image is hungry for life), the apocalyptic phase of poiesis ensues as Othello responds with increasing horror to the image Iago presents of Desdemona, one that possesses Othello and disorders his marriage as Iago displaces Desdemona. The tragedy ensues when the image and its accompanying passions destroy nature, disorder mind and reality leading to the elegiac phase that accompanies the death of the individual or cultural body and the short-lived triumph of the petrifying, lifeless image, the demonic Iago, his transient, symbolically homosexual union with Othello and the bodies on the bed. Strangling displaces intercourse, a mutation in which the female body becomes a phallus squeezed by the female/male clutch till it yields its breath; a transposition suited to the depths of metamorphosis to which Shakespeare drives the action through Iago a man whose interesting name hints at the core love-hate in the West’s confounded breast. This epitome of poiesis also is an apt homage to Aphrodite’s transformative power that is given full play in Sohpocles’ great play on Herakles, “the Women of Trachis” noted above.[3]

This pattern of poiesis, this trajectory of traumatic possession by imagery or rhetoric ensuing in displacement and death is the essence of the West which remains obsessed with possessing and displacing its original source, Jacob. Esau is unstable[4] and so is poiesis, the overmastering Greek element in our culture and the engine of its suicidal self-transformations and obsession with identity theft and morbid eroticism.

[2] See Ovid for the Pygmalion story, Euripides for Hippolytus and Sophocles for Women of Trachis.

[3] See also the core myth related by Hesiod, Theogony 90 – 256 (U of Michigan, Lattimore translation). I have explained that the alternative genesis for Aphrodite, by Zeus via ‘Dione’ (female form of Zeus) is lightly veiled hermaphroditic generation and auto-eroticism, a less violently magical conception of the love goddess and her resistless transformative power, intrinsic to poiesis.

[4] Comment by Ishmael on Esau’s plot for them to kill Isaac and Jacob as elaborated by R David Adani in Midrash HaGadol. His point has been proven for ninety years by the Western powers inflammation and use of Islamic jihad against the Jews and against their own nations as the suicidal aspect of poiesis fulfills itself. “And he took Machalat the daughter of Yishmael…” When Esav the wicked saw that Yitzhak blessed Ya’akov, he sought to kill Ya’akov, as is said “And Esav said in his heart…” [“May the days of mourning for my father {i.e. His death} draw near; then I will kill my brother Jacob.” Toldot (Genesis 27:41).
”What did he do?  He went to Yishmael and said to him, “Let us join together, I and you, and we will rule the whole world.”
He said to him "Why and how?"  Esav said to him…”a brother can kill his brother because of the inheritance, that we found with Kayin, who killed Hevel his brother and thus it is permissible for you to kill your brother Yitzhak, who deprived you of all your wealth and of all that you had, and I also will kill my brother, and afterwards we will inherit the entire world, and the two of us will rule all that belonged to Avraham our father.” [A remarkable prevision of Modern-postmodern great power geopolitics]
Yishmael said to him, “I can’t believe your words, because you are not stable.”  Esav said to him, “If I will take your daughter, will you believe me?”
Then, immediately, “And he took Machalat, the daughter of Yishmael for a wife …” [“in addition to his {Canaanite wives} as a wife for himself”]. Toldot (Genesis 28:6-9). Esau’s use of Cain’s murder as a legalizing precedent is as mad as is the subsequent credulity of Ishmael who accepts sexual possession as a test of validity anticipates the dynamics of Othello written several centuries after this commentary whose insights on character and persuasion glance near the core of poiesis as well as cultural polemics.

I proposed further that the process of idealization is generated by Greek culture’s view of the world as radically metamorphic in substance to the extent that its image-work or magike tekne prominently includes unnatural and dream-like transformations of being and substance, composite and supernatural beasts: centaurs, satyrs, the Minotaur, harpies and the sphinx. These monsters, in turn often are matched by the gods frequent changes of form and identity and they have a semi-divine attributes. The divine is closely linked to the demonic and metamorphic. Because metamorphosis as conceived and presented in these culture’s works has strong unnatural aspects it is a frequent source of terror. The process of idealization itself, as the image separates from and possesses or becomes its generating body intrinsically includes terror, awe and, usually death.

The West’s pattern of idealization is rooted in Greek and Roman key words. Greek idein means “to see,” implicitly to see or image: to see a pattern of images. From here develops the term, magike tekne from the words which led (through Latin) to imago, imagine and its derivatives, to synonyms like phantom, apparition, semblance and shadow; and from the word for weaving (tex-textus) that shows how our texts, from the Greco-roman point of view are matters of image-weaving, the magic of a seer or spell-caster: someone who manipulates nature to degrade or idealize but, in any case, to create images, eidolon, idols that change identity. A core word, id, is the source of idein, idea and idealize that links the process of image-work to idolatry and identity. Id (“it” or “that one”) is the core of idem (“the same”) and thus identity and its apparent opposite, identical spring from one seed, like twins. The etymological bond between identitas and idemptitas reflects the process of idealization, of projection of an idyll or alternate self, a phantom that becomes the ‘image-ideal,’ the alter-ego, double, even the possessor or displacer of its source. As the displacement or clone of the generating body-individual the image-phantom thus has an essentially predatory and consuming function. At length, by some reality test, the process of disillusionment sketched above ensues in an apocalyptic collapse of the image or double into its source, yielding elegy. Often this process is mediated by the gods; it is a theurgic poiesis, essentially tragic, often rooted in erotic trauma, ultimately in coition often of a divine being and mortal: the blood-fire or blood-knot from which glorious fictions of heroic idealization, as in the stories of the House of Tantalus-Atreus grow. Often these stories, as in that of Kadmus (“the one from the east”), Zeus and Europa (which produced Ariadne, Phaedra and Minos), Cinyras, Myrhha, Adonis, Aphrodite and Artemis (the avenging boar, see Hippolytus and his Amazon mother) are imported from the Middle East and transformed. These patterns of imagery were represented in the “viewing place” (theatron) of Dionysus, god of transformations and communal rapture, in Athens during the spring Dionysia. It is a culture based on worship and attempted mastery of the demonic through art.

Coition, sexual intercourse is the id, “that one” from which doubling and idealization proceed. In the Greco-Roman substrate this produces a theurgic and tragic poeisis that springs from erotic trauma. The blood-knot, fire, star and flower which pervade the imagery of the Oresteia epitomize the process, its source in gender conflict and terror and its symbolism

Here I would briefly like to explore how this dynamic poiesis looks from the perspective of Kabala as articulated in Sefer Yetzirah, “the Book of Formation.”

The “Long Version” of the Book reviews the core point of close explication of the Hebrew Scriptures: that the letters each are composed of other letters and when pronounced themselves form words that add overtones of meaning to the plain text. Spelling out the words, and their constituent letters formed by pronunciation of the letters reveals their “filling” (milui) which has its own numeric value as does each letters itself. A key organizing principle for studying the harmonics of each word and letter is that the twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alphabet comprise three primary or “mother” letters, seven ‘double letters’ that can be pronounced hard or soft depending on whether they have the dagesh vowel within them. The remaining twelve letters are called elementals which, like the doubles relate to the months, tribes of Israel, parts of the body and emotional qualities. The focus of this study prompts us to focus initially on the three mother letters, aleph – mem – shin the nature of their relationship and the hermeneutic perspective they add to considerations of poiesis. These letters derive from and exist in association with the ten sefirot (“qualities” or “sapphires”) that issue from the ineffable Creator. Together they constitute “thirty-two mystical paths of wisdom.”

Aleph, the first letter of the aleph-bet is associated with Keter (“crown”) the first visible form of the Creator. It is a conduit through which flow all virtues, qualities and meaning. It exists in a ‘triangular’ form with Mem which represents male wisdom and, water and compassion and shin which metaphorically, for interpretive purposes is understood as the internal fire of woman that molds the seed of wisdom into understanding. The integration of wisdom and understanding produces daat, “knowledge” metaphorically indicating their “son.” Notable here is the difference from the Greek concept of theurgy caused by an avatar or composite being. Instead there is a flow of energy from a divinity that is the source of all and cannot be idealized or represented but expresses itself in human actions and relationships founded in the letters in which meaning is inscribed like information in DNA. Also noteworthy is the lack of erotic trauma or confusion in the paradigm and the fact that it is not about idealization but fruition and fulfillment of identity: it is natural and complementary to science and, despite the complexity of letter-analysis, to reason. Wisdom, understanding and the knowledge derived from them all derive from the divine source that created all things.

Of particular interest to this study of the transformative and erotic aspects of poeisis is what Sefer Yetzirah says about the letter Lamed, the letter which, when pronounced yields the roots for the Hebrew words teach, study, learn, scholar and teacher. These meanings all relate closely to the harmonics of the three mother letters, Crown, Wisdom and Understanding and their issue, knowledge. The relationship of man to woman and of both to the source of all life is thus based in teaching and learning; man and woman have wisdom and understanding, have a complementary rather than antagonistic relationship grounded in the discriminate place of each in relation to each other, to knowledge and to God. The result is the fruition and elaboration of all other qualities rather than idealization, possession, displacement and their associated trauma. This fruition is linked to Lamed, the largest letter of the aleph-bet and to aspects of study which ultimately lead back to their source, recognition of a dynamic relationship with the Creator.

These relationships embed sexuality in marital bonds and learning. They are dynamic but also stable, not metamorphic in the Greco-Roman sense. Lamed is made “king over coition” and associated with the holy season (month of Tishrei) in both its male and female aspects. Thus, the letter associated with coition and the generative integration of wisdom with understanding, male with female is associated with the birth of mankind, male and female that occurred on Rosh Hashanah, literally, “the head of the year” which thus implies the bond to Keter, the only perceivable aspect of the Creator from which life, energy and the beginning of wisdom flows. So coition, the basis of the relationship of man and woman is associated with humanity, forgiveness and joy; the orientation toward the Creator occurs as much from below as from above and includes the integrity of national as well as family and individual life. Theurgy, if it is proper to use the term in regard to Judaism is imparted to and part of human nature and the genetic process. It also fundamentally involves naming and literacy as primary facts of Creation for both contain the secrets, or principles to be discovered of life, of good life.

Well-known homiletic commentaries on the letters that spell “man” and woman” underscore the quality of generative complementarity embedded in the Hebraic substrate of Western culture. The words each contain two of the three mother letters, aleph and shin. One transliterates them as ish (“man”) and isha (“woman”). The full Hebrew spelling for man is aleph-yud-shin; for woman, aleph-shin-hei. The reference of aleph (“one”) to the Creator and of shin to fire already has been noted. Yud and hei both are ‘weak’ consonants, often simply place holders for vowels, forming the plural or, in the case of hei a common singular ending for female nouns. Yud is the first letter of the Tetragrammaton; hei appears in it twice as its second and fourth letters giving it a four-square and balanced structure. The two hei’s are joined by a vav, a ‘bridge’ or hook that denotes the six sefirot of human qualities from kindness to foundation and link the head, heart and loins with the limbs. The six collectively are considered ‘male’ sefirot. So the Tetragrammaton indicates a pairing of two male and two female attribute groups like the nucleic acids that form a discrete segment of DNA. Putting together the weak consonants from the words for man and woman forms one of the names of G-d; extracting them from the words for man and woman leaves aleph-shin, the Hebrew word for “fire” (aish). This indicates that without orientation toward the Creator at the center of the generative bond human beings consume themselves with passions or fire, a conflagration seen often in Greek drama both literally as in the Women of Trachis by Sohpocles and figuratively as in Hippolytus, the Bacchae of Euripides and many others.

The integration of creativity / thought, life-giving breath and generative sexuality also is expressed by a hermeneutics of the body. This aspect of Kabala, of how G-d forms and informs creation identifies the head with the fire of creative thought, the loins with the mem of wisdom, an unconscious, sustaining source of knowledge, and the chest with breath and glory, the aleph that received and sustains life from the Creator. Again the emphasis is on integration and complementarity of essential qualities: breath mediates between creative fire and subconscious generative ‘waters,’ between conscious and unconscious activities and energies. Instead of a theurgic poeisis, Hebrew culture has a derekh or “way” to go through life that engages the Creator Whose influences come directly from ‘above’ while human influences are manifold, diffuse, interactive and ubiquitous spanning generations and establishing the unique historicity of Hebraic consciousness and its sense of responsibility in which free will or what is acquired exists in balance with what is inherited and absorbed from the human and natural environment.

This sensibility, this way of considering the place of humanity in the world and in relation to the divine contrasts starkly with theurgic poeisis, for example, with the rigid chastity – or phobia – of Hippolytus, the consequent intention of Aphrodite to destroy him by destroying his step-mother and father, with grief and guilt, and the plan of his virgin goddess to wreak vengeance of the mortal favorite of Aphrodite. The generative and gendered complementarity of the Hebraic way also contrasts radically with the monstrous and violent ancient Greek view of Aphrodite as presented by Hesiod or the less obviously fantastic, autoerotic derivation of her nature from Zeus and his genitive reflection, Dione who guards his “sacred oak.”

A final comment from Sefer Yetzirah emphasizes the central power of language, naming and articulation, all based on literacy and the knowledge encoded in Hebrew letters and its unashamed, natural association with coition and the genitals as the foundation of all sovereignty from that of a nation to individual intelligence. The mouth and “the speech of the lips” are associated with royalty and dominion (Malkhut). This energy / potential is the ‘recipient’ or articulator of all the energies in the other nine sefirot, the three supernal ones denoted by the mother letters and the six (kindness, strength, truth, endurance, honor, foundation) that stream from the limbs, breast and loins. The loins are the foundation (Yesod) of the infinite energies received and embodied in man. From them come children, the knowledge that is the conception of understanding ‘impregnated’ by wisdom which comes from the Creative Source. Thus the Source of life energies, including all forms of knowing inhere in the subconscious drive to generate children (which also is the first positive commandment to all mankind). This is the “foundation” or exoteric secret (sod) which gathers all the qualities when understood to flow from the ineffable Creator to be expressed, studied and articulated in letters and naming. Naming, history and its truth, including the logic rather than the magical transformation of nature is the basis of Hebraic art which is an art of learning in all disciplines understood to be linked essentially with generative sexuality and articulation of wisdom.

The relation between literacy, articulation of knowledge and complementarity of heart, mind and loins also is contained in the Hebrew words for circumcision. The common term for this act, essentially an act of literacy, awareness of the Creator and thus the logic of nature and history is brit, literally covenant. Genesis 17 specifies that this “everlasting covenant” (brit olam) is inextricable from the covenant of “everlasting possession” of the land and integral to changing the names of Avram and Sarai to Avraham and Sarah. The literal word for circumcision is milah which also means “word.” The text thus indicates the integration of articulation, purity in generation – sexuality with everlasting placement of Israel in its land as part of the structural logic or speech of creation. Words and naming correctly are part of a genetic, erotic, national, agricultural and architectural project that includes all disciplines and fundamentally concerns articulation of truth: realization of the letters and words of the aleph-bet. Thus when Moses protests his inability to speak adequately to Pharaoh he says, “I have uncircumcised lips”; fluency, truth, liberation from tyranny and the elaboration of history require a fluency that is related to genital purity and fertility in splendor, Yesod HaTiferet, the line of Jacob to Joseph, from the heart to the righteousness of the loins which is under the head (reish~rosh) of the twilight of history that precedes Sabbath and whose potential is inscribed for peace, integration of head, heart and loins via understanding of Jewish letters and texts. When this knowledge and integration is negated by, for example, the religion of Esau, in the absence of this literate fluency, we get war and shadow-war, a war of terror emerging from a culture of terror, an olam sheker in which nothing is reliable or true: “the horror.”

The model of the fruitful, creative logic that imbues Creation and integrates head, heart (soul) and loins is expressed in the structure of the Holy Temple, its laws and ritual as Sir Isaac Newton understood through decades of study. It encodes a comedic not tragic understanding of human life that it is essentially good, not mainly to be endured as the Greeks taught. Moreover it is a real-life drama with a purpose that is good; good but not ecstatic or magical. The return of the true king will bring a repair of the world but not change the order of nature. The parables about “the lion and the lamb” are just that, parables and metaphors connoting that the nations will learn how to accept rather than attack and persecute Israel and the Jews and will be glad to learn, rather than to deform and appropriate its teachings. Then there will be “peace to the far and to the near.” The ultimate “psalm of song” whose “foundation is in the holy mountain” will emerge from their ‘capacitors,’ the paired cherubim above the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. Yesod HaTiferet and the integration of the divine energies within and between human beings are the antithesis of the spectacular cultural shows and obsessive, ostensibly cathartic trauma of Hellenism, spectacles whose image-work is a dead end of refraction and virtual reality in a thrilling but hard cycle of idyll, apocalypse and elegy.

When the Hebraic substrate of the West and the world is understood and honored, the positive potential of the sefira of Malkhut, grace and beauty, will stream through the world. But Judaism understands that human actions are partly self-directed and can take many forms: the Creator is not a puppet master like the gods of Greece. Until the nations are willing to study and learn from the Lamed of Israel and its integration of eros with articulation, rational and intuitive learning, — horror will displace grace. That is the state we have been enduring for centuries, increasingly so: a culture of terror and its unstable virtual reality, a culture of lies. If humanity ever puts off the fascinations of image-weaving, doubling and the idealizations and shadow work of erotic trauma it will experience a sun of righteousness with healing in its wings. Perhaps it is time for the Hebraic approach to art and identity.

[1] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton, Kimbrough 3^rd edition, 1988), 75-6

[2] Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation in Theory and Practice (Weiser 1993); Yetzirah literally denotes formation from a pre-existing substance. Beriah connotes creation from intangible.

[3] Ibid 271-2, chapter One of the “long version” explains the “ten Sephirot of Nothingness” and subsequent chapters explicate their relation to the harmonics of the letters of the aleph-bet. All Hebrew letters are consonants; some silent, place holders for vowel points; some which can be articulated depending on grammar.

[4] This month begins with Rosh Hashanah and extends through Sukkoth, the autumn harvest festival of joy.

[5] Sefer Yetzirah op cit 150, chapter 3:6 passim

[6] Genesis 1:28, echoed in 8:15-17, to Abraham 15:5, Jacob 28:3, again 35:11-12 when Jacob is given the title, Israel.

[7] Exodus 6:12; Sefer Yetzirah op cit 34-7

[8] Genesis 37:1 and elaborated the entry of Jacob’s descendants to the Promised Land as part of the covenants.

[9] I am drawing on Eliyahu the Vilna Gaon’s version of Sefer Yetzirah.

[10] Olam sheker means a world or era of lies; see note 1 on Heart of Darkness

[11] It now is known that Sir Isaac Newton’s breakthrough works in math were based on his intensive study of core Hebrew texts like the Mishne Torah, Sefer HaChinuch, of sages like Hillel and Shammai, Ibn Ezra, R. Isaac Abarbanel and many others: Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton, M. Goldish (International Archives of the History of Ideas, Dordrecht: Klewer); http://www.templeinstitute.org/isaac_newton_holy_temple.htm links to museum texts

[12] Rambam (“Maimonides”), Hilchot Melachim 11-12, final two chapters of the  last book of Mishne Torah (explication of the commandments); on the laws of the Holy Temple see Rambam Hilchot Beit HaBechira

[13] Psalm 87; Exodus 25:8-22 on the building of the ark and cherubim for the sanctuary or Kodesh (“holy”).

These contrived wars do not occur only through proxies. In Mesopotamia and Afghanistan as in Korea and Vietnam, perhaps even in WW II (and the diplomacy that prompted it) the great powers did not and do not scruple to consume the lives of their own soldiers toward the torn peace of the War Process which leads to increasing global management of human resources and distraction of human energy and intelligence from the arts and sanctity of life.

This profound dishonesty, this perversion of language, thought and lives is ubiquitous in the postmodern world whose media of communication form a distraction machine meant to deflect and bury truth by dazzle and misleading categories of thought and slogans. This report focuses on a few that involve military action. Their development can be monitored on Debkafile (www.debka.com) a news link listed on this site.

One report explains that Syria has been using Israeli drones against Kurds who live in northeastern Syria. Israel’s enemy acquired this military technology from Israel’s semi-ally, Turkey with whom Israel once did extensive trade and some military cooperation. But governments change and the Turks are not sure whether they are predominantly non-Arab Turks or Muslims. So the Turks, who have been suppressing and killing Kurds and Armenians for centuries are now helping the regime of the artificial State, Syria to hunt and kill them too.

The recent history of relevant geopolitical betrayals and ironies should be mentioned. Turkey is the only Asian member of NATO. Though far from the North Atlantic, it is part of its peace and security because it blocks Russia’s direct route to the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. So Russia got in through the back door via Iran, its old enemy, Syria and Hezbollah-Lebanon, an Iranian proxy. This is relevant to the contrived attrition by which the great powers manage the War System.

Turkey is a geo-political and historical anomaly; an ambiguous entity. It is a European as well as an Asian nation, its small piece of the southeastern Balkans a remnant of Turkey’s centuries of imperial hegemony in the Balkans. Its largest city, Istanbul (Byzantium) is on the West side of the Bosporus and sometimes is still called Constantinople after the Roman Emperor who first tried to organize what became Christianity. Despite being on the losing side in WW II (though it defeated British forces many times), the British and French allowed Turkey to re-take it’s the remnant of its Balkan Empire back from the Greeks in 1919-20 and they have held it ever since. Now led by a truculent Islamic party, Turkey wars on the Kurds, an ancient Caucasian region people indigenous to the eastern part of the State (as are the Armenians) and aligns itself with the frequently hostile Syrian regime to its south. A common slogan at the end of WW I and the ensuing years of treaties that re-shaped Europe and the Middle East was “Kurdistan for the Kurds, Arabia for the Arabs and Judea for the Jews.” Then Britain’s regime decided that a unified Mesopotamia (“Iraq”) and strong Turkey were more important than self-rule for ancient peoples so the Arabs got two dozen states (one of them, Syria), the Jews had to fight for a scrap of “the Jewish National Home” the British were mandated to foster, and the Kurds got a century of oppression and statelessness.

The game continues at the losers’ expense as Washington, Britain’s chief enforcing power in NATO and other diplomatic-managerial-financial ventures, particularly its State Department helped to sanitize and empower the Islamic party that now spurs Turks against the West and into alliance with the hated Syria in order to continue suppressing the Kurds and keep the entire pot boiling…

Now that Israel “has lost its only Muslim ally in the Middle East” Greece is rushing to take its place. Greece is also a member of NATO which is anomalous geographically and given the intense antipathy of Greeks and Turks dating to the latter’s invasion of the Middle East, centuries of assaults on the Greek Byzantine Empire and subsequent occupation and enslavement of Greece till 1830 (southern Greece; 1880 for much of northern Greece). The hostility also flared in Turkey’s July 1974 invasion of Cyprus, an ancient Greek habitation, and occupation to this day of almost 40% of the island. Britain has a hand in these matters, too. In 1571 the Ottoman Turks conquered Cyprus; in 1914, Britain seized the island and ruled it as a Crown Colony till the treaty of Lausanne, 1923.

Now that the Turks are aligned with the Syrian regime, itself a client of Iran and Russia, we learn that Greece is allowing Israel to train in its airspace and practice bombing the anti-aircraft missile batteries it received from Russia in 2000. This is an epitome of the flexible alignments of the War System, a modern refinement geared toward long-term management of an ancient habit of shifting enmities. There is more than cultural logic to a Jerusalem-Athens tie that always will be a bit askew. The well-publicized economic perils of Greece, explained as a possible catalyst to failure of world economies was allayed not by the diplomatically hyper-active EU but by Israel which also spent some decades helping the Kurds, as more equivocally did America’s intelligence services.

In regard to this essay’s topic, the most interesting feature of the growing alignment of Athens with Jerusalem was the comment that NATO wants Greece to become “the Christian mainstay of NATO in the Balkans and southern Europe – in place of the Muslim Turkish army.” The irony of this was suavely elided by the news service: it was NATO itself that destroyed Yugoslavia and Serbia creating several new Muslim States in the Balkans only a century after the Balkan peoples had succeeded in liberating themselves of eight centuries of Islamic occupation and imperial oppression. The great irony that under the hegemony of London-Washington the Turks were to police the peoples that long had enslaved is now on the way down the “memory hole” like other ‘incorrect’ and inconvenient history.

The contrived conflicts of attrition continue. In the name of peace the War System reigns to advance the agenda of the oligarchies that rule the Western powers for their own class benefit and goals. The failure of grace that would lead to genuine peace is that of Israel, oppressed by its own entrenched oligarchies and unable to use its resources to express and secure its own grace, self-respect and purposeful might. A true Israeli government, a leadership that like Jacob was tam, wholesome, complete and integral, the root of eternal (tamid) and thus true to the Netzach Yisrael would deploy all the abilities of its people to securing Israel’s essential nature. As a perennial client regime it does the opposite: it does not develop its own top-line aircraft but refines those of America and the armaments of other nation’s (e.g. India) militaries. This suits a core goal of the great powers: to preempt Israel from ever being the integral alternative to its homogenizing control of the world.

So Israeli drones are used against Kurds by Turkey and Syria while Hezbollah again masses on Israel’s northern border and politicians express ‘shock’ (like in Casablanca) that UNIFIL does nothing to prevent this provision of UN agreement 1701 once written and spoken of in tones of awe and veneration. This is no surprise: the French commander of UNIFIL in fall 2006 already announced that his troops were there mainly to stimulate the local economy, to visit cafes and beaches, etc. Journalists profess astonishment that PM Netanyahu does nothing about this, little more than the EU or UN. It is mainly the EU and NATO that decide what, when and how much Israel does to defend, much less assert its identity and integrity. Conflict between Iran and Israel could break out at any moment, “like the strike of a match” one reads while the powers manage the dialectic. As the title of this essay states, all these events exemplify contrived conflicts and failures of grace.

[1] In Hebrew, kerua (“to tear, rend or shred”) has the numeric value 376 as does Esav and shalom, an irony showing that any ‘peace’ (shalom in Hebrew) that does not grow from its root, shin-lamed-mem (shaleim) is a false peace that shreds those involved in it and, eventually rends the world with Hamas (“violent pillage”). See Tehillim (“Psalm”) 85:11-12. Shaleim is a core word-concept: the lamed “teacher”) mediates between the male (mem) and female (shin) energies that flow from the crown of Aleph.

[2] Read The Aaronsohn Saga by Shmuel Katz (2008) for a detailed account of how the British were helped finally to defeat the Turks and then secure “Mandates” over much of the Middle East.

[3] One can read many articles charting this process on www.memri.org also linked on israelendtimes.com

[4] Debkafile Weekly, June 25, 2010

[5] Ibid.

[6] 1 Samuel 15:29; see Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation (Weiser 1990), 22-97

[7] See discussion in Narrett, WW III: the War on the Jews (lightcatcherbooks.com 2006)

The Oxford Research Group, ORG it partly funded by the Ford Foundation which supposedly has no intrinsic bond to Henry Ford’s influential book, The International Jew (1922) which can be read online. Ford was very interested in clarifying “the Jewish Question.” Do read it, not least chapter 13, “the world’s foremost problem” describing Jews and the ‘myth’ of anti-Semitism which Ford termed a Jewish propaganda weapon. The proof of his thesis must have been the holocaust. After all, he said “history is bunk”: his book shows the nature of his wisdom.

A recent bit of slander and preemption was put forth by ORG which probably has no link to the Royal Institute of International Affairs offspring of the Oxford-hatched Round Table. It claims that Israel has the capacity and the plans for a massive attack on Iran, not only its nuclear facilities but its cities. Curiously, ORG has never shown much concern about Iran’s demonstrated and flaunted plans to annihilate Israel. Nor is it known for criticizing the repeated performances of Ahmadinejad at the UN building, his home away from home; nor for the rain of rockets from Hamas-Gaza on Jewish towns and farms, etc.

These foreign powers and thought-creators have their complement in the perennial client regimes in the Mandate. The abyss separating Israel’s regime from Jewish law is demonstrated not only by its collaborating with foreign powers in preventing Jews from settling the entire Promised Land but in abjuring the positive commandment to preempt and utterly destroy any foe gathered against or threatening it. Instead of Maimonides and mandatory war there is a continuance of the Mandatory administration (1918-48). Events since the 1930s have shown that the British know how to rule through client regimes in Israel, pre and post-State.

This topic is not new; neither is the client State’s servility or the contrived dialectic of its tweedle dim and tweedle dumber Labor-Likud dance. Seek my books or archives for details. Also worthy attention is the grandiose agenda of the “British-American Security Information Council” (BASIC) which is the threshold to the New World Order about which H.G. Wells wrote and Winnie Churchill spoke with such fervent eloquence. Here is a snippet from their sanctimonious web page:

The transatlantic security community is understood to include the nations of North America and Europe, including Russia. Our target audience in Europe and North America includes policymakers and opinion shapers – government officials, journalists, academics and other individuals and institutions needing reliable information and analysis about transatlantic security and arms control issues.

“Target audience” nicely captures the controlling metaphor and method of operations in the age of mass media and opinion molding by “thought leaders.” It is the NewSpeak of our stormy era: “security” means oligarchic manipulation. It also connotes how the globalist elites conceptualize Israel, the paradigm of an integral and sovereign nation, in its founding document, anyway. Or one might say, as with many English alliances, it is a natural extension of the dominion and obsession of Esau, the hatred of the imitation and image-crazed for the original and genuine. It will never end until Israel asserts itself which may only happen by default: as Esau fragments in its whirl of imagery and power projects. As Ishmael says in the Midrash, “Esau, you are unstable!” Esau never will cease using or seeking to use Ishmael as a tool in his compulsive war against Jacob.

There is a hearty cross-pollination between BASIC and ORG, for example, “prior to joining BASIC in 2002” the Executive Director “worked as an analyst for the Oxford Research Group.” An MP member is also embedded in the RIIA. These interstices are typical; the DNA of petrifaction and control. Tony Blair epitomizes the orgion (“secret rites”), the special envoy for the “Quartet” that is the shadow of a sextet, apt for the sixth millennium and its geometry of trauma. The perspective and affiliations of The New Oxford Review also suggest the power axes building in Europe for the past century or so. “Esau, he is Edom.” One thinks of the song explaining sarcastically how Israel is “surrounded by pacifists who all want peace” as in peace process…

The British are particularly relentless. They essentially gave Europe to Hitler to slaughter the Jews and help sell a permanent Anglo-American alliance for which America pays with blood and money. Their elite knew WW II was coming. Consider that Evelyn Waugh ‘predicted’ WWII in Vile Bodies (1930); in Eyeless in Gaza (1936) Aldous Huxley has the protagonist note that his father believes that the next war will be about 1940: good guess. Huxley’s older brother Julian was the dominant eugenicist of the 20^th century and a leading figure in the push for dialectic synthesis of political systems leading to a regionalized world system. A. Huxley’s famous Brave New World is a satire of his older brother’s plans. Eric Blair (Orwell), a student of Huxley’s had a grimmer view of those managing the mutation of lies into ‘truths’ and burying history as part of establishing and sustaining a War System.

The BP-Libya-Oil spill matters also suggest Downing Street webs. New British PM, Mr Cameron insists “that BP’s Libyan oil contracts were not behind the release of Abdulbaset al-Megrahi,” the Libyan spy involved in the bombing of Pan AM over Lockerbie. He also “is expected to defend BP” and somehow to skate past reports that “Sir Mark Allen, a former MI6 official who is now a special adviser to BP… travelled to Libya to broker oil deals on behalf of BP with Colonel Gaddafi,” the Telegraph reports.[8]

“The oil company has admitted that Sir Mark had two conversations, and wrote a letter to Jack Straw, the then Justice Secretary, about the prisoner transfer agreement.” The article also suggests that Tony Blair is an economic adviser to Libya. Mr. Blair has been the point man or “envoy” of ‘the Quartet’ dictating to Israel almost as long as he has been a knight of the church and candidate for President of the EU.

These entwined events illustrate the nexus of diplomacy, ‘intelligence,’ finance, terror and ecological disasters that lead governments to impose more regulations on individuals and small businesses. It also exposes a facet of London’s long-term engagement with jihad.[9]

The Trilateral leg of this system, East Asia, is being prepped by Esau to be the model for “global governance” in the 21^st century. This was the theme of an IMF meeting in Korea July 11-12. This model is not pleasant; nor is the process by which NATO, the British “Commonwealth” morphs into a World “Commonwealth” the better to eat you with, my dears…

As for Ford, his contemporary and admirer, Hitler, and his contemporary theosophist, Alice Bailey, also obsessed with Jewish identity and distinctness,[10]  — his legacy lives on…

[2] Wells, The New World Order (1940; 2007 re-print); Churchill see his speech at Westminster College in Missouri, March 1946; BASIC includes Russia in North Atlantic security, as Churchill urged in what is mischaracterized as his ‘Iron Curtain” speech which was more about internationalization and coexistence.

[3] George Orwell, 1984; the Ministry of Newspeak constricts thought and contorts language till “the lie becomes truth” just as Israel becomes “Palestine,” the fiction replacing the reality that anchors the world.

[4] William Blake, Jerusalem, emanation of the Giant Albion (c.1810, illustrated epic poem)

[5] See Midrash HaGadol on Torah  portion “Toledot” (Genesis 26:34-5, 28:6-9)

[6] Genesis 36: 1,8,19, 43

[7] Bob Dylan, “Neighborhood Bully” on Infidels (Columbia Records 1982)

[8] “Tony Blair Met Colonel Kaddafi in Libya last Month,” London Telegraph, 7-18-10, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7895997/

[9] Shmuel Katz, Lone Wolf, a Biography of Zev Jabotinsky (NY 1996), 2 Volumes; Israel Eldad, the First Tithe (1950; English translation 2008); E. Narrett, WW III: the War on the Jews (lightcatcherbooks 2007)

[10] Alice Bailey, essays like “the Inner Source of the Outer Turmoil” (1939) collected in The Externalization of the Hierarchy (Lucis 1952; 2001)