In the late sixteenth century, four separate editions of the Nostradamus prophecies were published in the city of Paris, each of which contained major textual alterations from all other editions: thirty-nine prophetic stanzas were entirely deleted and replaced with other stanzas. Morten St. George, author of Incantation of the Law Against Inept Critics: A Guide to Cryptic Thinking, made a discovery. He discovered that the numerical sequences of consecutive deletions corresponded exactly to numerical sequences found in a book called the Sefer Yetzirah, the earliest known text of the medieval Kabbalah.
That was only the beginning. St. George's next discovery was that many sections of another classical text of the Kabbalah, known as the Bahir or Sefer ha-Bahir, were essentially a cryptic derivative (riddles and parables evidently designed to teach in the style of the masters of Zen) of prophecies published by Nostradamus centuries later. It became self-evident that some of the famous prophecies were known in medieval times and hence predates Nostradamus. The ancient prophecies had a name: the Revelations of Elijah.
Combining a passage from Saadia Gaon's Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah with information from other sources, St. George has concluded that the cabalists believed that a chariot descended from the sky and delivered both the Sefer Yetzirah and the Revelations of Elijah to Talmudic scholars, in a Babylonian desert, in the late sixth century. That would mark when and where the Kabbalah originated. Copies of the Sefer Yetzirah were eventually scattered around the globe. The Revelations of Elijah, however, according to St. George, were never copied because this book glowed in the dark (and continued to do so for centuries), causing the cabalists to believe that it contained the divine essence.
A few centuries later, the Babylonian cabalists migrated to Europe. St. George found indications that the group carrying the Revelations of Elijah went to Germany, and then settled in Provence, Nostradamus' homeland.
The story does not end there. In subsequent investigations, St. George stumbled upon signs in the writings of Hayyim Vital and elsewhere that Isaac Luria, founder of the Lurianic Kabbalah, went to Provence to study the Kabbalah under Nostradamus, and that Luria may have assisted in writing the stanzas that mask the revelations. St. George suspects that Luria's gateway to Nostradamus was Nostradamus' brother, a grain dealer who made frequent trips to Egypt, and that accounts of Luria having spent seven years living as a hermit were merely a fabrication to cover up his disappearance from Egypt. Contact with the Revelations of Elijah, according to St. George, would explain how Luria, still too young by tradition to be even taught the Kabbalah, was able to impact the cabalistic community in the Holy Land.
St. George feels that Nostradamus may have been too preoccupied with the future of humankind to have spent much time developing cabalistic theory. Consequently, the Kabbalah that he taught Luria, and which Luria took to the Holy Land, was likely developed within secret circles in earlier times. According to St. George, significant elements of the Lurianic Kabbalah can be seen as a product of reflections upon the Book of Light, otherwise known as the Revelations of Elijah.
St. George considers the Revelations of Elijah to be the greatest, longest-lasting, and best-kept secret in human history, maintained and yet unbroken for a thousand years. He also thinks it foolish to believe that a concealed book cannot influence the course of history, but he declines to go into details on that theme. St. George also declines to explain why Nostradamus decided to destroy the Revelations of Elijah, but he insists that to the very end the Provencal cabalists never disclosed their possession of that book; their only mistake was publishing revelations that they could not understand.
Incantation of the Law Against Inept Critics: A Guide to Cryptic Thinking is not a book about the Kabbalah. The word Kabbalah makes no appearance in its text. St. George's book does, however, fully reproduce the Paris alterations in relevant context, and, in unrelated context but nonetheless useful, it also exhibits the revelations that form the subject matter of the Bahir riddles.
Source: Gersiane de Brito
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