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Alchemy and the Old Testament
Detailing the departure of the previously enslaved Israelites from the kingdom of Egypt in hopes of establishing their culture upon divinely appointed ground, the book of Exodus is of prime importance to anyone interested in investigating the origins of Judaic religious philosophy and law. Many of the most important events of Israel’s search for independence, including the crossing of the Red Sea, their sustenance by means of miraculously delivered manna and water from a rock, and the reception of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, are presented with such mythic overtones that many investigators find it improbable that these events ever occurred. However, this propensity for disbelief, resulting from an inability to process information in any way different from that which has been forced upon one by contemporary rationalistic institutions, is overcome when one takes into account the “…small repertoire of symbolic terms, serving as highly compressed expressions of entire conceptions of reality, through which [ancient] Jews conventionally expressed their various understandings of the world” (Jaffee, 92-93). Considering the highly probable possibility that the Israelites, while captive, absorbed many of the religious idiosyncrasies of the Egyptians, the art of spiritual alchemy, with its wealth of symbolism, would have undoubtedly been transmitted, as Egypt is widely considered the birthplace of this ancient art. I believe that, using Psalm 22 as an accurate account of a completed alchemical process, one may initiate a reciprocal illumination between certain aspects of the Old Testament, particularly the reception of the Ten Commandments, the symbolism of the Ark of the Covenant, and the deluge of Noah, so as to prove that alchemical knowledge was present during the composition of various portions of this ancient text.
The first step in undertaking a simultaneous evaluation of texts based upon the inherently...