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THE ANCIENT OF DAYS: DEITY OR MANNA MACHINE?
By: George T. Sassoon, New Farm, Tytherington,Warminster, Wilts BA12 7AA G.B. (+44) (0)1985-840205
For: James R. Lewis, Center for Academic Publication, 160 North Fairview Ave.,
Suite D282, Santa Barbara CA 93117 (805) 968-5152 fax 968-3773
All rights reserved.
Following my mother's death in 1975, I was exploring her library and found a strange book entitled The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S. L. Macgregor Mathers. First published in London in 1887, the work was still in print, so clearly enjoyed a steady sale. It purports to be a translation of certain parts of the The Zohar, an ancient Jewish mystical work, and consists largely of physical descriptions of an entity known as the Ancient of Days.
I had come across this title in the well known English hymn "Immortal, invisible", and as a brief mention in the Biblical book of Daniel, and had vaguely assumed it to be simply another title of God. But in Mathers' book, there was a depiction of something clearly very different from our present concepts of the Almighty. The book was in the form of a series of lectures given by a certain Rabbi Simon bar Yochai to a group of his disciples, in which he claimed to be passing on a body of ancient secret knowledge which had hitherto only been transmitted orally. This was said to be the Secret or Unwritten Law given by God, as opposed to the written Law laid down in the books of Moses.
The material was split into three sections, known as the Book of Concealed Mystery (BoM), the Greater Holy Assembly (GHA), and the Lesser Holy Assembly (LHA). These were split into Bible-style numbered verses for ease of reference.
What was this secret knowledge? I found passages such as:
(GHA 37) Like as if it were said, "He is found (that is, He may in some way to a certain extent be known), and he is not found;" for He cannot be clearly comprehended; but He hath as it were been formed; neither yet is He to be known of any, since He is the Ancient of the Ancient Ones.
(38) But in his conformation is He known; as also he is the Eternal of the Eternal Ones, the Ancient of the Ancient Ones, the Concealed of the Concealed Ones; and in His symbols is he knowable and unknowable.
(39) White are His garments, and His appearance is the likeness of a Face vast and terrible.
(40) Upon the throne of flaming light is He seated, so that He may direct its (flashes).
(41) Into forty thousand superior worlds the brightness of the skull of His head is extended, and from the light of this brightness the just shall receive four hundred worlds in the world to come.
(42) This is that which is written, Gen. xxiii. 16: "Four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant."
(43) Within His skull exist daily thirteen thousand myriads of worlds, which draw their existence from Him, and by Him are upheld.
I wondered what had led my mother to acquire this book, then remembered that when younger she had briefly been interested in the occult. The work, it seemed, was used widely by mystics, devotees of eccentric religions and such-like, and it must have been these people who had kept it in print for nearly a century. It was extraordinary that I, a hard-nosed engineer, should have stumbled across it.
At first I was inclined to dismiss the book as fanciful nonsense, but certain aspects of it puzzled me. Why was this ancient "secret knowledge" considered to be so important? It was clearly a detailed description of some physical object - an idol, perhaps - but what then of the Jewish abhorrence of idolatry? Above all, what was this material doing in a supposedly religious work?
These questions nagged, and having nothing better to do at the time, I looked up the original sources: first, Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata which gave parallel Latin and Aramaic texts, and then the original Aramaic in an edition printed in Lublin, Poland, 1882. Being something of a linguist, I decided to tackle the Aramaic. It is not a very complicated language, once the script has been mastered, and I was aided by the fact that it was obviously not the author's native tongue. According to Gershom Scholem, the world's leading expert on the Kabbalah, the Zohar had originally been written down by Moses of Leon, a Spanish Jew, in about 1290. It has been circulating among the Jewish community ever since then in manuscript and in printed forms. Aramaic was the language of Babylon, akin to Hebrew, and it became the everyday language of the Jews after their captivity in that city, Hebrew being reserved for religious purposes as Latin was in the Catholic Church till recently. Aramaic was Jesus Christ's native tongue.
In spite of any linguistic difficulties, I found the Aramaic Zohar far clearer than the Latin and English translations, and stripped of Mathers' and von Rosenroth's flowery language it became a very lucid description of a physical object. The Ancient of Days consisted principally of three "skulls", an outer one which contained two others inside it, placed one above the other. In the middle of this arrangement was the "cardinal lamp", which shone with "a brightness to exceed all brightnesses". It has a "beard", the "hairs" of which grow out of one part of its "face" and back in again at other places; there is no mention of a body, but there is a "strong right arm", there are six feet; and in between them there are two testicles, and a penis. A substance known variously as the "dew", the "oil of great goodness" and other terms, ran down from the upper parts of this object, to be stored in the "testicles" and finally discharged from the "penis".
What, we may ask, was the purpose of all this wealth of detail? A description of the anatomy of God? Certainly not, for when God Himself is mentioned it is under the title: The Holy One - Blessed be He! The Ancient of Days is kept totally distinct in the texts. We discover the function of the Ancient of Days towards the end of the Lesser Holy Assembly (my translation):
(LHA 436) Into the skull of the Small-faced One there drips the dew from the white head, and it is contained in it.
(437) And this dew is seen in two colors; and by it is fed the field of the holy apples. And from this dew they grind the manna of the just ones for the world to come. And by it the dead are raised to life. And the manna did not appear to be derived from this dew except at one time; the time when Israel was wandering in the desert. And (then) the Ancient one of All fed them from this place. But afterwards, it was not found. As it is said (Exod. 16:4) "Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you." And also (Gen. 27:28) "Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, etc."
At last, we have finally been told what this Ancient of Days did. It did not speak, or move of its own accord; it was carried around in the desert and placed on various "thrones", which had to be "cast down" when the next move was made. But now we learn that its function was to produce manna. Could it have been some type of machine?
According to the Bible, the manna that fed the Israelites fell from the sky and was collected by the people themselves. At once, I thought of various practical difficulties here: surely the manna would have become mixed with sand, dirt, or gravel; and how could the ration of one omer per family have been enforced? There is no satisfactory modern explanation of the so-called "miracle" of the manna; insect secretions have been suggested, but surely the Israelites would have been aware of this given the numbers of insects required, and we would have read today that God sent the insects, not that the manna came "from heaven". It is generally assumed that the manna was collected each morning from the ground - but this is never explicitly stated. The only reference to the "ground" is this: (Exod. 16:14):
In all other mentions of the manna that I can find, the people are said merely to have "collected" their rations, and that there was a precise amount for each family. This would have been very difficult to enforce if the people were gathering it from the ground, and what of the infrequent rainstorms of the Sinai area? The manna would have been spoilt. Wild animals, too, would have been attracted by the regular free food. The Bible makes no mention of any such difficulties. Every indication is that the magical substance was not collected haphazardly, but was distributed in an orderly manner. In that case, what was its source?And when the dew that lay was gone up, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar-frost on the ground.
Could the manna have come from a technological miracle, a machine? Of course, such a machine would have been far beyond the technology of ancient times, but for argument's sake let us suppose that such a thing did exist. If so, it would have been something far outside the experience of the early Israelites, and we can understand their concern that the Zohar material, the description of the machine, should be preserved. Moses of Leon claimed to have committed it to writing in spite of the prohibition against doing so, as it was in danger of being lost as a purely oral tradition.
One fact supporting the machine theory is that the Zohar texts include many measurements among the descriptions of the physical parts. The length of the "penis", for example, is given as 248 "worlds". This "world" unit is used for not only lengths but also areas and volumes, and I speculated that mustard seeds or similar small objects of fairly uniform dimensions could have been used. On this assumption, the overall dimensions of the machine came out as a few metres in each direction - a practical size.
Lacking words for machine parts, the compilers of the Zohar used names of parts of the human body - the "skulls", "eyes" and many other terms. It is interesting to note that the Apache tribe used the same technique when coining words for parts of motor vehicles in their own language. Examples of these are given in The Manna Machine (p. 45).
The next question was: could it be possible to build such a machine to produce a basic foodstuff, given our present technical knowledge or some reasonable extrapolation of it? At this point, I had involved my friends Rodney Dale and Martin Riches in the project, and it was Rodney who suggested that a manna-like substance might be synthesized by the intensive cultivation of some microscopic water plant such as Chlorella, a type of pond-weed which reproduces extremely rapidly in the correct conditions.
For Chlorella-type organisms to grow, the principal requirements are: water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and light. As regards the water, the upper part of the Ancient of Days comprises a dew-still, a cooled surface which could extract sufficient water even from the dry air of the Sinai desert; carbon dioxide and nitrogen are available in the atmosphere, and could be made available to the culture by circulating it through the "beard-hairs" in contact with the air via a semi-permeable membrane; and as for the light, the Zohar makes endless mention of the "cardinal lamp" in the interior of the Ancient One. The other requirement, of course, is energy. Based on a realistic Israelite population of 600
"families" rather than 600 "thousands" - the Hebrew word "ALP" can mean either - we came up with a figure around 500 kilowatts, which is within the capacity of a small modern nuclear reactor. The light source could have been a neutron-pumped laser, and electricity for the control circuits generated thermoelectrically.
In addition to the thick beard-hairs, or circulation coils, there are also "thousands and thousands, myriads and myriads" of tangled black hairs - electrical wiring, for sure.
So - the thing is feasible, and we understand that such devices are used in nuclear submarines for air purification, and there have been several experiments using similar systems intended to investigate the feasibility of closed ecological systems for spacecraft.
The next question is: supposing there was such a device, what became of it? According to the Zohar, it was used during the desert wanderings to feed the people, but ceased to function on their entry into the Promised Land. Thereafter, it became a ritual object, cared for by a few priests known as the Lords of Measurements. The Bible refers to the The Ark of the Covenant, but it was probably not the Ark which was taken to the battle with the Philistines (1 Sam. 4) but this machine. The enemy captured it, and were stricken with "emerods" - possibly sores caused by exposure to radioactivity. Such was their terror of the object, that they returned it to the Israelites, the only people who knew how to handle it safely, though there were accidents before it finally came back to the safe hands of the priesthood.
An interesting by-product of our linguistic research was the discovery that many Jewish customs and traditions appear to owe their origins to the manna-machine texts (as we call them) of the Zohar. For example, the word "mercy" (ChSD) is used in the texts to refer to manna. This Hebrew word means originally either: something white; or else: something for nothing, in the sense of
"charity". Both these descriptions apply to the manna; the Bible says that it was white in color, and the Israelites appear to have been surprised that they did not have to pay for it. In numerous places in the Old Testament, the Psalms especially, the word is used in a sense which suggests that it was not so much the abstract forgiveness of God, but a physical substance, and a foodstuff at that. For example, Ps. 90:14 has:
We know that the manna was distributed at dawn. And Ps. 25:6: Remember, O Lord, thy tender mercies and loving-kindnesses which [existed] in ancient times.Satisfy us early (lit. in the morning) with thy mercy.
Why should they have existed then, but not later? According to the Zohar, there are various grades of "mercy.":
So mercy was a commodity to be stockpiled, and existed in various grades. According to one tradition (for which I have regrettably lost the source), when the Israelites went into the desert a number of Egyptians tagged along with them. These people were given inferior-grade manna known as "small mercies", from which no doubt comes our expression: "be thankful for small mercies". These Egyptians are referred to in Exod. 12:38 as the "mixed multitude".(GHA 398) There is internal mercy and external mercy. Internal mercy is what they call that of the Ancient of Days . . . it is necessary for mercy to be increased, and to build up, and it should not run short or be cut off from the world [people] . . . And this is . . . the mercy of the Ancient of Days. . . . [and there is] . . . that other mercy, that of the Small-Faced One, of which it is written (Ps 89:2) "For I have said, mercy shall be built up for ever..."
These are but a few examples of references to mercy as a foodstuff. The reader will find many more for him/herself in a perusal of the Old Testament.
We even find an echo of the manna-distribution ritual in Christian communion rituals, where after the verse and response:
The people line up at the altar for their "bread of heaven", by now christianised to being metaphysically transformed into the body of Jesus. I speculate that had the manna been originally gathered from the ground, the priest would scatter the communion wafers outside and the congregation would leave the church to pick them up. But as it is, the mystical nutriment is produced by the priest at the altar, as if by magic.Lord have mercy upon us
Christ have mercy upon us
Lord have mercy upon us
Another aspect of Christian ritual that is relevant is the following:
We must ask: what does the word "praise" mean? It means to recite a list of somebody's (or something's) glorious attributes. Now if there was a complex machine that made the manna, the actions needed to make it perform would have been complex too. A check-list would have been required, to ensure that the operations were performed correctly and in the right order. In my view, there was such a check-list, and the Book of the Mystery is what remains of it. The guardians of the Jewish secret tradition were expected to expected to memorize this, along with much other material, since nothing could be written down. So we can compare the injunction: "Praise ye the Lord!" to an instruction to recite the check-list. The congregation's response: "The Lord's name be praised" is equivalent to: "We will take the check-list as read". A modern equivalent could be:Praise ye the Lord!
The Lord's name be praised.
1st pilot: Lower ye the landing-gear!
2nd pilot: The landing-gear be lowered.
If there had been a manna-machine which fed the tribe of Israel during their forty years in the desert, we would expect it to have given rise to many traditions in their religion, and to continue to occupy a central place in the faith. From our analysis, this appears to be the case, though it takes an understanding of the code-words to see it.
The episode of the golden calf, which took place while Moses was up on the mountain receiving instructions from the Lord, may have been an outbreak of manna-machine worship. When he returned, Moses would have seen this as a distraction and imposed the conditions of strict secrecy in which the machine was to be kept. Thereafter, the only indications of the machine and its function that the common people would have seen would have been the fire and smoke over the Tabernacle, the exhaust, which indicated that it was functioning. When the fire and smoke ceased, they knew that it had been closed down and that it was time to move on.
When the forty years were up, the people entered the land of Canaan, from which the resident tribes had been expelled by the Lord in an early example of ethnic cleansing. At this point the manna supply ceased - so what became of the machine? In my view, it was either identical with - or later became confused with - the Ark of the Covenant. Though supposedly a simple wooden box, the Ark has many properties ascribed to it which are in fact more appropriate to the manna-machine. The Ark (or machine), no longer serving any useful purpose, was kept in a shrine where it was tended by a few priests who spent their time studying it and trying to reactivate it.
It was brought out for the battle against the Philistines, as mentioned earlier, then after its return went back to obscurity until David, in an attempt to reunify his kingdom, brought it to Jerusalem., where he housed it in a tent. Many of the Psalms attributed to David appear to be laments that the machine could not be reactivated, and made to give again of its "former mercies".
Later, David's successor Solomon built his Temple to house the Ark, but in all probability it was the Ancient of Days that occupied pride of place in the Holy of Holies. This inner sanctum was only entered once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, by the High Priest alone. It appears that he made some ritual attempt to restart the machine, using sympathetic magic. After pouring oil over himself to simulate the "oil of great goodness" running down the "hairs of the beard", he pronounced the magical word said to have been used by Moses, and awaited results. Of course, nothing happened, and this was taken to mean that the Lord had not forgiven the sins of Israel. "Yom Kippur" means literally: "the day of the wiping", today interpreted as the wiping off of the sins of Israel. but perhaps, in fact it was the day that the High Priest wiped the machine over with an oily rag. Most interestingly, it was still regarded as dangerous, for the High Priest had a golden chain attached to his ankle so that the junior priests could haul him out through the curtain in case of an accident. Only he and he alone was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies.
At the conquest by the Babylonians, the Ark and the machine were evidently lost, perhaps hidden in a cave across the Jordan, or even in one of the caverns under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is significant that Israel's holiest place today is the Western (or Wailing) Wall - could the venerable relic still be buried behind the ancient masonry?
Coming closer to modern times, there is some evidence that the Knights Templars may have found the Ancient of Days - or a part of it - and brought it to Europe. They are said to have spent several years excavating under the Temple Mount, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the force behind the foundation of the Temple Order, spent a lot of time consorting with Jewish scholars. For a churchman of the time, this was tantamount to religious suicide, yet it did nothing to hinder Bernard's rise to power and subsequent canonization. Possibly even, this recovery operation was the hidden agenda behind the Crusades.
The Templars are said to have had a mysterious idol known as the Baphomet, which had many characteristics of the Ancient of Days. If this name is transposed according to a common Hebrew cipher (the AThBSh), it becomes ShVPIA or "wisdom" in Greek. This was the name of the upper skull of the Ancient One. The Ancient of Days of the Zohar has much in common with the later Christian notion of the Holy Grail, a miraculous object which dispensed heavenly food, and which was guarded by knights known as "Tempeleisen". But all these speculations must remain unproven until the machine, or some identifiable part of it, is located. The Templars hid all their treasure before the dissolution of the Order in 1307; where it is now is anybody's guess. Speculations range from various sites in Palestine and Europe, to Mexico and the Money Pit on Oak Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. It is very possible that the Templars were regularly crossing the Atlantic before Columbus, and that the navigator himself was in possession of their sailing instructions, which he could have acquired from the Order of Christ, the Temple's successor in Portugal.
The biggest question of all, however, is: supposing that there was a manna-machine, where did it come from in the first place? According to the Zohar, it was given by "the Lord" to Aaron and his tribe of priests, who also received the "secret knowledge" of how to operate it. Who, then, was "the Lord"? He was certainly not the omniscient, omnipotent God of our religions today, but a figure in many ways human, but with some superhuman powers. Was "the Lord" a space visitor? This is the explanation which best fits the facts, but we shall never know for sure unless some artifact of demonstrably extraterrestrial origin can be found. The description in Exodus 19 of the Lord coming down upon Mount Sinai could scarcely be bettered as a primitive peoples' account of a spacecraft landing, and the Lord himself has nothing whatsoever in common with our modern abstract Deity.
J. and P. Fiebag give an excellent account of modern-day cargo cults: religions that arise following contact between technically-advanced and technically-primitive cultures. The best-known of these is the cult of John Frum, an American soldier who visited the Pacific island of Tanna during the 1920's or 1930"s. The memories of his short stay have developed into a full-blown religion among the islanders, which continues to this day. Other legacies of the second World War are tribes who lay out airfields, make models of radio equipment and antennae, and try to call down the white "gods" in their "great birds" from the sky, to give them once again the "cargo" (or western goods) for which they yearn. Interestingly, these cults appear to continue even after contact with the so-called civilized world has been re-established. Could it really be so that the grand old religions of Judaism and Christianity are derived from a millennia-old cargo cult? Perish the thought - but we cannot dismiss the possibility.
Whatever our opinions, it is an established fact that the Zohar texts exist, with their descriptions of the Ancient of Days, and that they have existed since long before anyone could possibly have imagined that a machine could be constructed which produced a foodstuff. Furthermore, as we show in The Manna Machine, the description corresponds to a device which could in fact perform that function. The word Zohar means "lighting up" - does this refer to the spiritual illumination of the reader's soul, or to switching on the "cardinal lamp" of the Ancient of Days? The manna-machine hypothesis cannot legitimately be rejected until a credible alternative origin for this material has been found. If we do reject it in its entirety, surely it would be a gross insult to the old rabbis who so painstakingly preserved it for us, and an action that can only be prompted by culture-shock rather than logic.
For all we know, the universe could be teeming with civilizations far more advanced technically than our own, which for various reasons eschew contact with us. To screen their radio and other emissions from us should present them with no great problem. The Fiebags compare us to a tribe living on a remote island, who occasionally see an ocean liner in the distance, or a jet's contrail in the sky. Perhaps, a Coca-Cola can is washed up - what would they make of it? The Ancient of Days - the manna-machine - may well be just such a relic, an unconsidered trifle abandoned by visiting spacefarers.
Machines such as the Ancient of Days may well have been carried aboard "The Lord"s" spacecraft to feed the crew. In fact according to the Talmud, another collection of traditional Jewish lore, manna was the food of "angels", and was totally absorbed by the body; those who lived on it had no need to relieve themselves. It is hard to believe that such a detail could have been invented unless there was some basis of truth behind it, and synthetic food would be a necessity aboard spacecraft.
There are many more items of evidence to support our manna-machine hypothesis, and even twenty years after the original research we still stumble over more. There is insufficient space to give them all here, so we can only refer readers to our original publications, The Manna Machine and The Kabbalah Decoded, and also the excellent work of the Fiebag brothers which I have just finished translating into English, and which we hope will shortly be published in the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mathers, Samuel Liddell MacGregor The Kabbalah Unveiled London 1887, 12th impression 1971
Knorr von Rosenroth, Christian Kabbala Denudata Sulzbach, Frankfurt, 1677-1684
[Moses of Leon] Sepher ha-Zohar, Lublin, 1882
Scholem, Gershom Gerhard Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, (3rd Edn.) London 1955
Sassoon, George Dale, Rodney The Manna-Machine Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1978.
Available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor Mich., ref. no. AU00392 as quality bound photocopy.
Sassoon, George (Ed. Dale) The Kabbalah Decoded (Translations of original texts), Duckworth, London 1978. Available from University Microfilms as above ref. no. AU00393.
Fiebag, Johannes & Peter Die Entdeckung des Grals Goldmann, Muenchen, 1989
English translation under consideration by publishers.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Sassoon (born London, 1936, son of the poet Siegfried) was educated at Oundle School and Cambridge University (MA Natural Sciences), thereafter working in the electronics industry principally on specialized scientific instrument design. Now semi-retired, he lives in Wiltshire, England, and Scotland. He is glad to receive comments on the Ancient of Days and related matters to e-mail address:
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