Soul-Mates

Literary critic Harold Bloom, a self-professed gnostic, finds a kindred spirit in Joseph Smith:

"One sees why Smith was fascinated by Enoch, and actually identified himself with that extraordinary being. In his own final phase, Smith evidently studied Kabbalah, and came to understand that as the resurrected Enoch his ultimate transformation would be into the angel Metatron, the 'lesser Yahweh,' who is also the angel Michael and resurrected Adam. . .Joseph Smith thus brings together (whether he knew it or not) the three great esoteric traditions of Christian Gnosticism, Sufism, and Kabbalah." (Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, p. 80).

Some of Joseph Smith's later ideas are familiar to students of the Kabbalah, including the pre-existence of the human soul, the idea that God shares a bodily form with humanity, the promise of a career path with promotion elevating human beings to angelhood and beyond, and the premise of many worlds. The Kabbalah is a medieval renaissance of gnosticism. Early Christian authors like Tertullian, Irenaeus and Hippolytus fought tooth and nail against the gnostics, because their profuse and elaborate mythology simply cannot be reconciled with such bedrock Christian convictions as monotheism and God's goodness. Let's trace the history of one Kabbalistic idea, that primal Adam is the 'Ancient of Days' of Daniel's vision, into the train-wreck that became the 'Adam-God' doctrine, which has by now been largely abandoned by the Latter-day Saints. Joseph himself taught that Adam was the 'Ancient of Days:'

Although the 'Adam-God' equation was fundamental to the religion of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, in time it came to be unpopular:

"Heresy six: There are those who believe or say they believe that Adam is our father and our god, that he is the father of our spirits and our bodies, and that he is the one we worship.

"The devil keeps this heresy alive as a means of obtaining converts to cultism. . . Those who are so ensnared reject the living prophet and close their ears to the apostles of their day. 'We will follow those who went before,' they say. And having so determined, they soon are ready to enter polygamous relationships that destroy their souls." (Bruce R. McConkie, The Seven Deadly Heresies, June 1, 1980, BYU Fireside).

But what, after all, did 'those who went before' understand by this doctrine? And where did they get it from?

Ancient of Days

So it is to Joseph, and none other, that we owe this identification of Adam as the "Ancient of Days." Who is the Ancient of Days? That title occurs in one book of the Bible, the Old Testament book of Daniel, who saw the "Son of Man" receive a kingdom from the "Ancient of Days:"

From whence comes the identification of this figure with Adam? From the Kabbalah:

Thus we learn that the Ancient of Days is the primordial or original Adam, or more precisely the wrapper that he comes in, as of a garment of light. How does this fit in with the New Testament evidence? This of course is a question that would not have occurred to the Kabbalists, who were not Christians. But in the New Testament we learn that Jesus Christ is the Son of Man of Daniel's vision. He so identifies Himself, including not only Daniel's title 'Son of Man,' but also another element of the vision, the clouds:

Even some of the rabbis understood that the Son of Man in Daniel's vision was the Messiah: "Till thrones were placed and one that was ancient did sit. Why were these necessary?. . .Now, that is satisfactory for all [the other verses], but how explain Till thrones were placed? — One [throne] was for Himself and one for David. Even as it has been taught: One was for Himself and one for David: this is R. Akiba's view. R. Jose protested to him: Akiba, how long will thou profane the Shechinah? Rather, one [throne] for justice, and the other for mercy. Did he accept [this answer] from him or not? Come and hear!" (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 38b). So if Jesus the Messiah is the Son of Man, then who is the 'Ancient of Days' who gives Him the Kingdom? Well, who gives the Kingdom to the Messiah?:

Thus we learn that it is God the Father who gave the Kingdom to the Messiah, Jesus. The reader of the book of Revelation will have seen Jesus Christ, the image of God, appearing to John in similar fashion: "His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters." (Revelation 1:14-15). The chariot wheels were seen also by Ezekiel: "Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel." (Ezekiel 1:15-16). So the very appearance of the 'Ancient of Days' is not what the Bible-reader is conditioned to expect from a creature, from the man of clay. Add to this that He gives the Kingdom to the Son and the identification is clear.

Do you see the train-wreck coming? Joseph, a 'prophet,' identified Daniel's 'Ancient of Days' with the primordial Adam, in accordance with the Kabbalah. This identification was repeated by his successors:

"Among the great and mighty ones who were assembled in this vast congregation of the righteous were Father Adam, the Ancient of Days and father of all,

"And our glorious Mother Eve, with many of her faithful daughters who had lived through the ages and worshiped the true and living God." (Doctrine and Covenants 138:38-39).

It is repeated by them to this day. But the New Testament identifies Daniel's 'Ancient of Days,' with very little room for controversy, as God the Father. What happens when you put these two 'revelations' together?:

The two locomotives, the Kabbalah and the New Testament, both come barrelling down the same track, and they meet at just about the point Brigham Young is standing. The hierarchy of the Latter-day Saints, more concerned with respectability than fidelity to Joseph's vision, once they discovered how badly the Christian world reacted against the idea of old Adam, the original sinner, as God the Father, dropped it, just as they have done with Joseph's other revelations, such as polygamy, that have proven unpopular. Not only does the idea of Adam as the 'Ancient of Days' not fit into the New Testament paradigm, it doesn't fit well with Joseph's other 'revelations,' for instance:

How is that going to work out: that the devil was "before Adam," yet Adam is God the Father, the Ancient of Days? The devil, in Mormon mythology, is a sibling of Jesus and indeed of us all, our 'spirit brother,' one of the numerous spirit-children resulting from the union between Heavenly Father and Mother. We are left with God the Father descending into flesh, somehow in the descent losing or forgetting His deity and paternity, and so far losing His way as to be tricked by His own offspring, in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of Hesiod's Theogony. The intent of both doctrines, the Kabbalistic original and Joseph's copy, seems to be the same: to elevate man and to demote God. While it is certainly true that man was created in the image of God, what gets lost in this doctrine is that man was created in the image of God, he is not his own Creator:

"Somewhere behind this, and now untraceable, there was an earlier Jewish Gnosis, perhaps largely an oral tradition, that was to flourish more than a thousand years later in medieval Provencal and Spanish Kabbalah. This ultimate vision of Adam, preserved later in Hermetic and Christian heterodox texts, has been called the doctrine of the God-Man, the primeval Anthropos. Sometimes this God-Adam was seen as identical with the highest God himself, so that the earthly Adam appeared as a copy or reflection of this original." (Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, p. 161).

What has been lost here is the sense that, "Know ye that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture." (Psalm 100:3). The man of clay who was fashioned in the image is not "identical with the highest God himself," because he is the creature, not the Creator. Moreover such image as we bear has grown clouded and occluded owing to sin. That the image can be lost in this way is partly how we know it is not, and never was, physical conformation. As we are born again and refashioned into the same image in which we were originally created, we change inwardly, not outwardly: "And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." (1 Corinthians 15:49). When Harold Bloom asks, "Was God originally anything more than the Adam Kadmon?" (Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium, p. 205), what Christian can fail to answer 'Yes!'— because the intention here is not good, the intention is to elevate man and drag God downward. The usage of these terms starts with scripture, but takes a wrong turn at a certain point, at which it is prudent to bail out.

Fellow Travellers

Joseph Smith was not the last or only Kabbalist. Though none precisely reproduced his eclectic mix, other students of this dark science upheld one element or another. Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, an eclectic pagan who wrote in the latter part of the nineteenth century, is on board with the general concept of promotion to deity, though not exactly in the Mormon manner:

"Who is bold enough to say that the divine Egos of our mankind — at least the elect out of the multitudes passing on to other spheres — will not become in their turn the 'divine' instructors of a new mankind generated by them on a new globe, called to life and activity by the disembodied 'principles' of our Earth?" (Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled and the Secret Doctrine, Complete Illustrated Edition, Kindle location 33267, SD p. 309).

Margaret Barker is a contemporary author who is popular with those Mormons who retain their loyalty to the old school. She has pioneered a field of study called 'Temple Theology' which purports to show that the authentic worship of ancient Israel, during the first temple period, was polytheistic and devoted in part to a mother goddess.

She identifies the Kabbalists as like-minded practitioners of her 'Temple Theology:' "Beneath the sefiroth of the mediaeval Kabbalists we glimpse the ancient powers of Yahweh, complete with their Eden and temple setting." (Margaret Barker, The Great Angel, p. 93). This is true only insofar as paganism is a constant, rolling along like Old Man River, accompanying faithful Israel on its pilgrimage; compromise with paganism always will show a family resemblance to itself. Want a goddess of wisdom? That's Athena, who sprung fully armed from Zeus' brow! And so there is always an echo. She is aware of the Kabbalists' 'Adam-God' teaching: "Further, the manifestation was in human form; the symbolism depicts the God of the sefiroth as primordial Man, and the great Name Yahweh was shown by Gematria to be the same as Adam." (Margaret Barker, The Great Angel, p. 93).: