The Engimatic Early Christian Books of Jeu of the "Living Jesus" and the Mysteries He Taug
So, the question is, seriously, no... I mean it.... the question is, just what are the mysteries and why does it matter? Because, lets face it, No, I mean it, seriously... lets face it, every single church out there claims to know the mysteries. And they further claim only they have the power or the right spirit, or whatever, to teach them to you, otherwise you will forever remain an ignoramus. You don't have what it takes to learn the mysteries on your own, you need someone else who is inspired to help you grasp them and their system to give meaning to you in your life. That's what they work on mightily to tell you and convince you of. Does it take a church to learn the truth? Are the mysteries truth? What was the goal(s) of the mysteries? What is the goal of the mysteries?
The simplest, most straight forward response is... to find the infinite within the finite. That is the whole point of any of the mysteries, and I mean any of them, Ancient Greek, Early Christian, Ancient Jewish, Mithraic, Dionysiac, Gnostic, Hermetic, Medieval Magic, Alchemical, Kabbalah, Tarot, Astrological, Mormon, modern Christian or science.
We are the finite part of the infinite. Now you don't just walk down the sidewalk, shopping for clothes, on a beautiful sunny day, waving at the neighbors as you see them also shopping and enjoying their day, and point to an object and say "Oh hey... look at that lovely infinite tree!" Or "my what a beautiful fluffy infinite cloud in the sky." Because the actual physical infinite is what we don't see, touch, feel, or hear, let alone smell or experience. In fact, is there a real and actual infinite is a serious philosophical, religious, mathematical and scientific question! And I'm not so sure that it's been settled yet. But what an astonishing thing to study and think on.
I think, however, that I have at least discovered a way to begin to understand the gobble-dee-gook almost gibberish spiritual language of the ancients who did claim to know the mysteries. And I'm going to illustrate this in this paper, using the almost morbidly weird Books of Jeu (circa approx. 300-400 A. D.?), which have been described as "Christian Gnostic," and or something sort of Jewish, in some ways, or perhaps Greek, but there really is no sure way of classifying them. Jesus is said to be teaching his apostles the actual mysteries in detail on how to survive the next world and what knowledge they must have to save their souls. It is the "Living Jesus" who is the instructor in the Books of Jeu, much like the Jesus of the New Testament. "Weird" is just too non-descriptive, so we shall not take it that direction for now.
Birger A. Pearson, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at University of California, describes these books as the "initiatory discourses," that is "descriptions of the emanations that his Father caused Jeu, 'The True God,' to bring forth, emanations with which to fill the treasuries of light."[1]
The mystics, or others who knew the mysteries, were not allowed to speak of them in a public way, and sworn to silence concerning them, yet they did, in fact, speak of them. And we have a lot of their writings. But they are cryptic, to say the least, and their language veils what they were really talking about. So they are doing their job! It keeps those who don't really want to know, away, and it makes those who really do want to know all the more determined to find the way to grasp the language and weird words they shared.
What on the surface appears to be nonsense ("This is the book of the gnoses of the invisible God, by means of the hidden mysteries which show the way to the chosen race, leading to refreshment to the life of the Father in the coming of the Savior, of the deliverer of souls who receive to themselves the word of life, which is higher than all life - in the knowledge of the living Jesus, who has come forth through the Father from the aeon of light at the completion of the pleroma.")...
Say Whaaa...? Did you get that? I didn't either, the first time or two through these books, until I discovered a key to seeing what it means. This sentence is the beginning of the Book of Jeu. There are dang near 175 more pages of this to go through! On the surface, who in their right mind would bother continuing? Well, I did (ayiyi, that might show I'm not in my right mind, Lol!) and I can tell you the cryptic words, allusions, and precepts get worse, not better or easier to understand. It was the numerous and intriguing geometric figures and the comments about them that kept me going. I have drawn several and will share them here and show you how there is a way through the spiritual language morass. Surprisingly, rather than being mystic mumbo-jumbo, I have found this material is actually genuinely well said, and intelligently explained stuff! With the help of a few other authors, I will show that these "hidden mysteries," (not forbidden, only hidden) are a sober and actually realistic and quite good description of something we are already familiar with, right now today - for real. The thing is, they don't use the words we use to describe the math and the music, the astronomy and the geometry as we know it. The key I am going to look at here is the math key. Relax, it's simple math and geometry.
What we are reading is philosophical geometry couched in religious language, "Sacred Geometry" if you will. Actual sober, realistic geometry, of all things! School boy stuff, with incredible intelligence and profound insight into reality, both in the world, and, what the mystics always want to teach us, finally, also within ourselves and every other living person. This is about our own psychology and well being as well, a factor we today tend to ignore about what the ancients were attempting to teach.
Another one of my very favorite Sacred Geometry authors, Michael S. Schneider has said it so very well - "Both Pythagoras and Plato suggested that all citizens learn the properties of the first ten numbers as a form of moral instruction. The study and contemplation of number and geometry can show us, if we look with the eyes of ancient mathematical philosophers, that neither outer nature or human nature is the hodgepodge it may seem. Symbolic mathematics provides a map of our own inner psychological and sacred spiritual structure."[2]
A simple fact presents itself, so simple it is literally overlooked for its significance, so the ancient spiritual teachers have said time and again. This is, after all, their world view we are looking at. Geometry proves the infinite is within the finite, symbolically, if not more so, and each person can learn this for themselves, and re-cognize (see it again, as they already know this, they have just forgotten it, as Plato taught) the eternal truth of the gods and ourselves.
So lets jump full into the spiritual gobble-dee-gook language of the Books of Jeu and see if we can decipher what is trying to be taught.
It is fundamental to recognize at the outset, when we are attempting to understand the ancients, their mindset is not ours, and we cannot put our thinking onto them and judge them from our paradigm. The basic issue which we have failed to understand is this - "It was inherent in Pythagorean doctrine that arithmetical relationships were a manifestation of the divine, and it followed from this that the voice of heaven could be revealed by the use of isopsephy, or, as it was later called, gematria. Accordingly, isopsephy became important to magic and divination , and as an aid to the interpretation of dreams and oracles."[3] This is the fundamental ground which we must understand in order to grasp what they were attempting to teach. All ancient mysteries in the Western world begin with Orpheus and come through Pythagoras. It is their mindset that set the tone as well as the information with which all later mysteries inherited and certainly combined and used, even though it morphed through time with accretions of various cultures.[4]
I did not understand this when I read through the Books of Jeu the first couple of times, and I was just lost. It is the same as I worked through Iamblichus, On The Mysteries, let alone the Pistis Sophia (another early Christian/Gnostic work) or The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth (a Gnostic work). What the Books of Jeu does that other early Christian (I will call it that, for simplicity at this point, even though there is some degree of discussion on just this issue) do not, however, is include numerous and fascinating "pictures" which the "Living Jesus" is explaining to his closed group of secret apostles. It is to those that we get many clues about what we are seeing and reading. Here is one of the first diagrams, (I drew these and added the colors, which makes them more interesting to look at, they are just black and white in the original) if you will, in Jeu. The language is Coptic, which I won't worry about in this paper, although there are some very suggestive proposals the Coptic is gematrically significant. It is to the vowels and geometry I am going to concentrate on. The comments on this particular piece of "Gnostic sigillography" are: "This is his type when he brings forth: This moreover is the manner in which the true God is placed, as he is about to emanate emanations, when he is moved by my Father to bring forth emanations, and to set them up as heads over the treasuries, through the command of my Father. A multitude come forth from them and they fill all the treasuries..."[5]
Now for a little background that helps us understand what this is about. This is how whoever wrote Jeu set up Jesus speaking as a living resurrected person, to his apostles. But the language is simply not at all what we find Jesus speaking like in the New Testament. We read "emanate emanations," and "head of the treasuries," and expressions that are found nowhere in the Bible.[6]
I was very fortunate to find and read Robert Lawlor's inspiring book Sacred Geometry, shortly after my excursus into Jeu, and I caught a glimpse of what was happening as I noticed a small pattern years ago. Just accepting for the moment my personal thesis that the mysteries are about mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy (the ancient Quadrivium), Lawlor shows that One by definition is unity and this includes everything. "There cannot be two Ones. Unity, as the perfect symbol for God, divides itself from within itself, thus creating Two: the 'self' and the 'me' of God, so to speak; the creator unity and the created multiplicity. Unity creates by dividing itself."[7] Now, Lawlor also shows "The Number One is only definable through the number two: it is multiplicity which reveals unity."[8]
In the Books of Jeu, we read over and over again, constantly, staccato fashion, ever repeating, that the "power" and the "mystery" and the "voice" emanates. However, early on we read "A power of my Father moved the true God. It radiated within him through this small idea (thought)..."[9] Assume for the moment that the Books of Jeu are identifying the Father with the dot in a circle, a classic representative hieroglyph of God, a figure of geometry. The only way for this single dot within a circle to increase, to become is through dividing within itself (as Lawlor noted of the Number One, Unity, capable of doing). This emanating then is the dividing of the One (geometrically identified with the Father, originator of all) within itself. Now the principle of emanation becomes at once seeable and identifiable and understandable. It is the Number One becoming multiplicity, number two, three, four, etc. In Jeu, "emanation" is the multiplying of the geometric forms as we go through the numbers, One, to whatever number they want to get to.
"The main stream of Hinduism has always rested on the notion of the One, the Divine, who divided himself within himself to form his own self-created opposite, the manifested universe... the original unity, represented by a circle, is then restated in the concept of the Real Idea, the thought of God, which the Hindus called the bindu or seed, what we call the geometric point."[10] But the Hindus are only one of many various ancient religions which taught this. "Unity creates by dividing itself, and this can be symbolized geometrically... unity can be appropriately represented as a circle... unity can be represented as the Square, which, with its perfect symmetry, also represents wholeness, and yields to comprehensible measure. In geometrical philosophy the circle is the symbol of unmanifest Unity, while the square represents Unity poised, as it were, for manifestation."[11]
I propose this is exactly what we are seeing in the many diagrams in the Books of Jeu. This is our clue. And, understanding the ancient philosophy of numbers and geometry, I suggest we can translate their language into something we can grasp. Lets look again closer at the figure. The central circle has a line running through it vertically. This is the geometric point beginning to expand and symbolically, as a pebble hits the water, it causes ripples, which are the extra circles in the outward rings. We are seeing the expanding of unity into multiplicity, which for Jeu is called emanation. The Father is the circle, since, of course, one of the most famous descriptions of God ever is that "God is a sphere whose circumference is nowhere but whose center is everywhere." But something else caught my eye as well. The circle with a line through it is known as "The Night of Brahma" in Hinduism. When it enters into an active phase of manifestation it is called "The Day of Brahma." Notice how the circle, when the "phallus" is activated as a creative instrument becomes the number 1 and 0, (I colored the 1 gold, the circle blue so we can see it easier) and thus begin the march towards all the numbers through manifestation and creation with the power of the logos, the relationship, the ratio of the line with circle.[12]
Lets look closer at the first Jeu diagram. Notice the circle with the vertical line through it. That line has traveled down out of the circle and continued stretching with vowels aligned on either side of it now. It was through the vowels that the voice of God was heard which caused creation to occur. It is right on que that Jeu says of this figure "Hear now also the type of the treasuries how they will be emanated." (my emphasis)[13] So we have a marvelous confluence of vowels, musical tones, sound, even number symbolism of the number 7, and the ancient astronomy of the 7 planets aligning
with the 7 vowels, 7 music tones, 7 days of the week, etc.[14] In Jeu it is the voices that he commanded which break forth into singing and praise of the emanations of the various "types" which are more geometric shapes which manifests the various ratios and proportions as do the voices and singing with the various ratios of music.[15] Anciently, the voice of God was an "act as a distinct entity with power of its own. Sumerian and Canaanite texts show that the divine voice or command was concretely represented by the mighty sound of thunder... Thy almighty Word (Logos) sprang from the heaven..." Albright says this Logos idea is very old going back into the hoary antiquity of the Sumerians and was old Egyptian as well.[16]
Scholars have noted the prominant and intriguing Middle-Assyrian Silbenalphabet "where mumbo-jumbo combinations of syllables are associated with the creation story culminating in the creation of man. The use of the word zikru for "utterance" is used in the same sense as logos is for "the Word."[17]
In another Jeu diagram we see more on this dot, the infinite point expanding into concentric rings of circles (emanations), only this time the point is the name Jeu itself, clearly intended to symbolize the geometry with the God and its properties also. And the use of the vowels give forth emanations of larger and larger squares which are also described as the "character" of the God. This is a geometry lesson of which the initiate is to take within his own soul for his own uplifting is what I would propose. The voice is identified as the power that brings the emanation out into yet a larger square. Personifying the cosmic voice, the human geometer is taking his compass and straightedge and drawing the process of creation via emanation, his compass representing the voice of God.
Michael Schneider describes this process. "The cosmic creating process is deep within us and can emerge through our hands with the help of the three traditional tools of the geometer - the compass, the straightedge, and the pencil. To the ancients these tools represented three divine attributes that designed the patterns of the world. Just in this century modern science is rediscovering what the ancients symbolized by these three tools and their use. Albert Einstein referred to them as E=MC^2, the famous relationship among the universe's three 'tools' of the configurating process: light, energy, and mass (or matter). The roles and motions of the geometer's three tools in geometric construction replicate the universe's own creating process whereby ideal patterns are approximated in natural design on all levels. We will look at our own constructions on paper as representing universal creations. Each step we take symbolizes a cosmic motion. By contemplating the essence of each of the ten numbers through our geometric construction, we will gaze directly at the lines on the face of deep wisdom, the divine substrate of nature and ourselves."[18] This, I propose, is what we are finding the initiates work in the Books of Jeu with their explanations of the geometric diagrams we have. They just aren't using our own mathematical jargon to describe it, they are using their own Gnostic religious jargon. It's why it appears as gobble-dee-gook to us today, but it's actually not so.
We see further geometric and numeric symbolism expanded the further we read into Jeu. Here the description is much more involved, as are the geometric figures. We are told that here there are twelve
heads in their place, in their ranks. It names the twelve heads on the right hand side, the underlined names are the twelve. Yes, I know, there are more than twelve here. In several places Jeu says there are twelve heads with three watchers, giving us 15. The numbers 3, 4, 12, and 15 are quite important geometrical numbers to the ancients as I shall show in future articles. The key here is the number 12, a very important number in ancient geometry and mysticism.[19] Notice the twin circles having split and each in their own square. This is the famous ancient "reflective principle" we are seeing happening here. A mirror theme in ancient literatures of the mirroring on earth what is in heaven.
So here is my proposition which I will test again and again. I need to keep this short because today's folk can't hardly stand reading much more than 12-15 minutes at a time, and brevity, silly enough, is the watchword called for in our society at this time.
When Jeu speaks of emanation this is just reflecting the multiplication of more geometric figures because of the ratios and proportions involved in actual geometry which, in point of fact, do gives us more and more figures. When the Father is spoken of as being eternal and all powerful, etc., this is referring either to the point or a circle, both symbols mathematically having associations with "God." When we read about voices, this can be where the initiates are actually drawing out the geometric figures in symbolic fashion of the creating voice(s) of the Father, the initiates imitating the creation process by actually doing the geometry. The three watchers, and the twelve heads can be symbolic for the number of figures they are working with, which certainly do have astronomical symbolism involved with them, the zodiac for one thing. So the mystical mumbo-jumbo dissipates when we recognize they may be involved with geometric processes bringing themselves into the picture also, as beings in part of nature. This is precisely the idea of the alchemical symbolism of man as the microcosm, clearly the philosophy coming from antiquity. And there is a fascinating numerical gematric relationship with this as well. All the harmonization of earth and the Cosmos, man and God, music, sound, number, geometry, and astronomy is remarkably coherent and formed the backbone of ancient societal cooperation as well as intellectual, philosophical knowledge as one can find out by reading Plato, Pythagorean philosophy, Aristotle, and the early Christian Gnostics, among others. Their mysteries have actual knowledge hidden from someone who doesn't understand the lingo. They did this deliberately. I suggest a possible way through the morass of silly language they used is recognizing geometry as a potential way to grasp their meaning. I will have much more of this in several more articles. This is enough for now to at least get you to say hmmmmmm.
Endnotes
1. Birger A. Pearson, Gnosticism and Christianity in Roman and Coptic Egypt, T & T Clark International, 2004: 262.
2. Michael S. Schneider, A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science, HarperPerrenial, 1994: xxiii.
3. Kieren Barry, The Greek Qabalah, Alphabetic Mysticism and Numerology in the Ancient World, Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1999: 89.
4. David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism, Quest Books 1993: 202-204.
5. I will use 2 main sources in this study, Violet MacDermot's translation of Carl Schmidt's work on Jeu, called The Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex, E. J. Brill, 1978. And I will use Carl Schmidt's study Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften, Erster Band, Die Pistis Sophia, Die Beiden Bucher des Jeu Unbekanntes Altgnostisches Werk, Akademic Verlag, 1962. Schmidt includes a lot of the Greek terms which MacDermot didn't, and MacDermot uses the entire Coptic corpus on the one side, and her English translation of Schmidt's German translation of the Coptic. Both together give a pretty complete and interesting study of these fascinatingly weird books.
6. This is very easy to verify, the three sources I used to look up "emanation" or anything like it as Jeu uses it extensively, are John R. Kohlenberger III, Edward W. Goodrick, James A. Swanson, The Greek-English Concordance to the New Testament, ZondervanPublishingHouse, 1997; John R. Kohlenberger III, James A. Swanson, The Strongest Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Zondervan, 2001; Spiros Zodhiates, The Complete Wordstudy DIctionary, New Testament, World Bible Publishers, 1992.
7. Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, Thames & Hudson, reprint, 1994: 23.
8. Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, p. 20.
9. MacDermot, Books of Jeu, p. 27.
10. Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, p. 21.
11. Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, p. 23.
12. Marke Pawson, Gematria, Numbers of Infinity, Green Magic, 2004: 95.
13.MacDermot, Books of Jeu, p. 27.
14. Kieren Barry, Greek Qabalah, p. 44-45.
15. MacDermot, Books of Jeu, p. 25.
16. William F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, Doubleday, Anchor Books, 2nd edition, 1957: 371.
17. Simo Parpola, "The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy," in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 52, No. 3 (1993): 176, note 65. One of the most magnificent, significant studies ever printed on the origins of the Kabbalah symbolism and philosophy into ancient Assyrian and Babylonian religion.
18. Michael S. Schneider, Constructing the Universe, p. xxix.
19, John Michell, How the World is Made, The Story of Creation According to Sacred Geometry, Inner Traditions, 2009; Also his magnificent look into the importance of the twelve symbolism anciently in several societies, Twelve-Tribe Nations, Sacred Number and the Golden Age, Inner Traditions, 2008.