Whenever she found herself in an esoteric jam, Olivia usually turned to Jung to find an answer or an insight. Having saved a goodly part of the world's alchemical texts for posterity, the Cybersybil felt particularly indebted to the work of a brilliant man whose own wife, Emma, had been quite an expert on Grail legend. The mystical book Sefer Raziel is one of the oldest texts of the Cabala. It is identified with "Sifre de-Adam Kadmaa," cited in the Zohar. According to another version the book was made of precious stones and contained the names of seven charms which God gave to Adam. ....This legend probably goes back to Jewish tradition, to stories like the one mentioned in the Zohar: When Adam was in paradise, God sent the holy angel Raziel [from Aramaic ras = secret], the keeper of the higher secrets, to him with a book, in which the higher holy wisdom was set forth. In this book two and seventy kinds of wisdom were described in six hundred and seventy sections. By means of this book there were given to him fifteen hundred keys to wisdom, which were known to none of the higher holy men, and all remained secret until this book came to Adam...Henceforth he kept this book hid and secret, daily using this treasure of the Lord, which discovered to him the higher secrets of which even the foremost angels knew nothing, until he was driven out of paradise. But when he sinned and transgressed the command of the Lord, this book fled from him. ... He bequeathed it to his son Seth. And from Seth it came to Enoch, and from him ... to Abraham. In the Clementine Homilies [2nd cent.] Adam is the first of a series of eight incarnations of the "true prophet." The last is Jesus. [The series consists of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Christ.] ... The series of eight incarnations of the "true prophet" is distinguished by the special position of the eighth, namely Christ. The eighth prophet is not merely the last in the series; he corresponds to the first and is at the same time the fulfillment of the seven, and signifies the entry into a new order. "Holy bread basket!" Miss O immediately wrote to the small group at ORB. "Jung goes on and finds, to his utter amazement, that in most religious philosophies, this eighth prophet is usually...female." This mother they also call the Ogdoad, Sophia, Terra, Jerusalem, Holy Spirit, and with a masculine reference, Lord. She is below and outside the Pleroma. "Maybe...she is also Mary Magdalene," Ravenna supplied, being the only member up at the late hour of the posting. "Are you reading what I'm reading right now?" The archetype of the seven appears again in the division of the week and the naming of its days, and in the musical octave, where the last note is always the beginning of a new cycle. This may be a cogent reason why the eighth is feminine: it is the mother of a new series. In Clement's line of prophets the eighth is Christ. "Exactly," Miss O concurred. "And Jung continues on in this vein, trying to convince himself and the reader that Christ is truly the perfect man-woman hermaphrodite, if you will. But what he maybe missed, and what the Church philosophers- theolgians gloss over is...if Christ and Mary Magdalene were related somehow...say they were cousins and worked together, then...a female - a woman - effected the cross-over from 7th prophet to 8th? Is that why Dali made his 8 feminine in that drawing...8 generations to understand the mysteries contained in the Sefer Raziel...because I do believe Christ had that book and I do believe Mary M saw and read it as well...and as Dali commented once, Tradition is everything...all new Art must be based on old Tradition. I just want to understand what he was getting at..." "So what do we do now? Check into Raziel?" R del C asked the Aether. "Didn't Solomon receive his knowledge from that same source, Raziel? We gotta dig, Ravenna...deeper than we've ever dug before. Raziel is a key - he, she or it is one big ol' signpost we need to follow...even if that means going where Angels fear to tread. All except one, it would seem. "I'll go check my Dictionary of Angels and report back in the morning. Well, my afternoon, your morning," the Italian Fornarina smiled online. "Go get some sleep, Miss O - you won't get anything accomplished if you exhaust yourself. Leave the Raziel research to me, I'll find something good, I promise." "I know...I'm just not used to having friends other than LOL who understand the Occult," Miss O confessed with a heavy heart and tired spirit. "It's so difficult sometimes, Ravenna...I don't think Duke, my husband, gets why I feel so compelled to chase after the truth the way I do; I don't know, I can't explain." "No need. My husband has no clue as to my secret life. He is too busy making money all day designing racing cars - although I suppose that is alchemical, in a way..." "You're married? I never figured you were married!" "All four of us are married," Ravenna divulged. "And none of us, I suppose, are exactly....well, I shouldn't speak for the others. Perhaps we have all flunked Chemistry class!" "Oh gods, I sucked at Science in school - except for Physics. I love Physics...probably why I'm meta-physical," O quipped, glad to have found another Cybersybil in cyberspace. "Thanks for listening Ravenna and good night," she signed off, knowing she should head to the bedroom down the hall where she heard Locky and Duke conducting a symphonic snoring score worthy a Wagner Ring Cycle. But somehow, Miss Olivia willed herself to stay up a little longer, searching her photo cache for an image dear to her heart: a solitary man sitting at a desk covered in strange hermetic symbolism; a man she felt she had known forever, since the Beginning. A man who was oblivious to her very existence. "I miss you more today than I did yesterday," she winced before the computer screen went completely black. "Probably just how Gilles felt about Joan."    Text Copyright © 1999 - ad infinitum cybersybils.com Bovican Books All rights reserved this page created 04/11/08