Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Secret Name of God

Rabbi Mark Sameth contends that YHVH, the Tetragrammaton, should actually be read in reverse and that when pronounced in that way sounds like the Hebrew words for "he" and "she" put together. Sameth's interpretation is that the nature of God is both male and female, and that this fact is encoded into the sacred name of deity. From the article:

God thus becomes a dual-gendered deity, bringing together all the male and female energy in the universe, the yin and the yang that have divided the sexes from Adam and Eve to Homer and Marge.

"This is the kind of God I believe in, the kind of God that makes sense to me, in a language that speaks very, very deeply to human aspirations and striving," Sameth said. "How could God be male and not female?"

Thelemites already believe that deity includes both male and female characteristics (Nuit and Hadit) but Sameth's hypothesis could prove a revolutionary idea in Judaism and by extension Christianity and Islam. As Aleister Crowley wrote:

When you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God. (Equinox III:1, 280)

Personally, I have no problem taking the contention that far, but we'll have to see whether or not mainstream Judaism is ready to make the leap.

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