The Jewish vector

From me today, a gentle and well-meaning nudge at my magical homies, particularly if Alexandria figures strongly in your own personal explorations: so nu, how’s your knowledge of Second Temple-era and older Judaism?

I ask because I’m currently reading Gordon White’s excellent Star.Ships, wherein he posits an origin for the Western magical tradition which pre-dates the end of the Ice Age, and while I am L O V I N G this book and agree with its assertions (and now need to figure out how to swing a family scuba holiday to Indonesia), I am also, quite selfishly as a Jew, a little disheartened that most of the references to Judaism therein are either encoded within references to early Christianity, or explicitly looking past the Torah/Pentateuch to the wisdom writings of older Near Eastern cultures, eg Sumeria. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Sumerian, Ugaritic and Hittite cosmology, but jumping straight from that to early Christianity and glossing over the extensive – like, extensive – wisdom writings of Judaism to me feels like a disservice to undoubtedly one of the strongest influencing vectors on the Alexandrian magical tradition – as well as a vector which does directly encode numerous Laurasian motifs.

Now, here I am obligated to say that I have a lot more reading to do on this topic, and I’m sure that the Jewish influence on the magicians of Classical antiquity has been at least touched on by numerous authors. For example, I’m also in the middle of reading Saturn’s Jews by Moshe Idel, which is THE book you need to read if you’re looking for links between Jewish astrology, Roman/Christian conceptions of the planet Saturn, and the persecution of ‘witches’ in mediaeval Europe. I’ve also come across numerous scholarly articles examining Jewish magic, but this expertise seems to be siloed amongst researchers and laypeople interested in Judaica, without really leaking through to chaotes, which, to be fair, might be due to their overriding focus on Egypt.

Which, by the way, doesn’t actually make sense, because dismissing a literal interpretation of Exodus without examining the mutual influence between Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture which gave rise to it leaves a large, Sinai-shaped hole in the historical narrative which I would presume chaotes and other modern magicians would want shaded in somehow. But hey.

Is this a good place for me to lay out my pet theory about Exodus? I guess I could briefly go over my pet theory about Exodus. (Don’t worry, Akhenaten isn’t involved.)

So first of all, my theory is predicated on cultural links between the Phoenicians and the Canaanites – remember, ‘Phoenicia’ is a Greek exonym, with the actual people described referring to themselves as Kena’ani (which may have been a catch-all designation but there was undoubtedly a high degree of cross-cultural pollination within the Levant at the time). And as we know, the Phoenicians were the premier maritime power around the time of the Middle and New Kingdoms, bringing them into contact with numerous Mediterranean cultures (eg Egypt).

Leaving aside female Levantine deities eg Asherah, most people know that the Jewish deity (let’s say HaShem, it’s a good name) stems from a syncretisation between the Ugaritic god El and the Canaanite god Yahweh, which is attested from around 1000 BCE. However, these gods also had syncretisms with Egyptian gods. El was syncretised with Ptah at least 500 years earlier – bear in mind that Ptah’s cultic centre was Memphis, which happens to be right in the middle of Goshen, mentioned as an area of Hebrew settlement in Genesis.

Memphis also boasted a strong cult of Thoth, who by the New Kingdom was syncretised with the lunar god Yah. Given that Yahweh does not have a firm etymological origin, this raises the possibility that Yahweh and Yah are directly related. Yahweh as lunar god also makes a lot of sense, given the Hebrew lunar calendar and the fact that Hebrew and Aramaic are written from right to left, resembling the waxing and waning of the moon. A syncretised Yahweh-Thoth (or Iah-Djehuty, as he is attested in the New Kingdom) is also just personally exciting as someone who enjoys Hermeticism generally. Anyways.

To my mind, a non-literal interpretation of Exodus must include something less hand-wavey than ‘Well I mean the Hebrews were nomads and I guess there was a lot of cultural contact between the Egyptians and stuff’. Which is often where it’s left. BUT. My pet theory solves this by saying that Exodus encodes the syncretism and emergent priesthood of Ptah-Thoth, which then travels back to Canaan and becomes HaShem. That took way too long to explain, but there you have it.

ANYWAYS, my point here, particularly with regards to my pet theory, is that Judaism as a link between Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythemes, and its subsequent influence on the emergent magical traditions of Alexandria, has been under-explored, with preference given to examining Christian influence. Guys, Judaism isn’t Christianity’s afterthought, nor is it just a summation of earlier Near East mythologies. Judaism is a wisdom tradition – with both ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ manifestations – which extends back thousands of years, with a written corpus to prove it and an oral tradition which likely pre-dates the written. There’s gold in them there hills, but you can’t dig it out with either an ankh or a cross.

And yes, Judaism isn’t an island. It’s drawn from a number of other Near Eastern wisdom traditions, including Sumerian and older. I’m not saying that Noah’s flood is the be-all and end-all of flood mythemes here. But what I am saying is that a closer reading of the Torah can certainly contribute a lot to not just the examination of Alexandrian magic, but also to the reconstruction of ancient history and the broader Laurasian narrative.

Speaking of Laurasian narratives, what’s up with the Saturnine deity? Its characteristics pop up everywhere, including in Hinduism and – yes – Judaism. But that’s a post for another time, as I have a lot more reading to do.