Love in Zohar

                                                   An Introduction

 

I leave out of this article the struggle between those who have and those who do not have the power of money and political administration.

My main concerns, in my creative life as well as in this article, are to create forms of art and to penetrate the meaning of various initiating rituals.

Pursuing these purposes at a certain point I created a cross between a Roman baroque facade and a poetic part of Zohar. That is the 18th century facade of St Andrea al Quirinale by Bernini and the act of love between thought and outspoken word as it has been expressed in Zohar. In combination of quoted text and images made by me, I created a poetic sequence of digital pages; a sequence included in Book 4 of 'Contessina on the balcony'.

I was so thankful to the ancient Jewish scholars for having preserved and developed further the study of Zohar that I tried to trace their presence in Rome but it wasn't any! So I discovered that the 18th century was another century of massive and bloody persecution of anyone that was not faithful to the worldly power of Vatican, then continuation of the almighty Roman Empire. Jewish doctors and philosophical as in particular Kabbalah scholars, who found refuge in Arab and following Norman Sicily during the early Spanish Inquisition have left the southern part of Italy as soon as Spain dominated the Kingdom of Sicily and Naples. But Jewish scholars lived on in Italy such as Emilia Romagna and Venice and created their school in Modena.

So now, mainly through the Parisian heart of Jewish studies of Kabbalah, the larger public can have access to such treasures of the poetic human mind.

I took my quotes for my book chapter with kind permission of the Revue de l'histoire de Religions, 1996, and particularly from the articles 'Le language mystique' by Moshe Idel and 'Pensee, Voix et parole dans le Zohar' by Charles Mopsik. 

I should also add that the christian alchemical thinking has been interwaved with that of arab and jewish scholars having taken swemt also in classic Greek and Pelasgian mystic, both in the Kingdom of Alhabra as well as in the study Centre of Palermo under the Suffi dominium and further supproted by the Norman Kings. It shows when we live in peace we can discover such treasures in each others' culture and develope further the SPIRIT in us, that's when we human that is, and not ferrocious beasts, drugged by ideas of domination! 

Peace and harmony was a well meant purpose also of the Florentine Academy when Pico de la Mirandola and Ficino tried a Renaissance of Humanity at least in Europe, with their fusion of Christian Hellenic and Kabbalah thought.