Charles Mopsik

picture by Marc Attali.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA is an excerpt from Charles Mopsik’s last work, ‘Le Sexe des Ames, aléas de la différence sexuelle dans la cabale‘, Editions de l’Eclat, Paris, 2003 & 2021 for this second edition. ‘qabbalah has developed within Judaism a vast network of interpretation that led to the founding of a system that gives space and religious acknowledgment to the multiple forms of the sexual identity, to bi-sexuality, to the distortions between ‘the sex of the bodies’ and ‘the sex of the souls’ and to a complex economy of desire that our contemporary societies are the reflection of. It is this network that Charles Mopsik has explored, through-out the writings of the great qabbalists, such as Hayyim Vital, Isaac Louria or Abraham ben David de Posquières. This final study gives full measure to Charles Mopsik’s paradoxical genius. (From the book cover). Our Via-HYGEIA working English translation. From page 120 to 123. We cannot understand why this book still hasn’t found a publisher in the English speaking world…

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‘A few preliminary clarifications are needed, before we move further within the universe of the qabbalists. We ought to say a few words about the sephirot (plural of sephira), a notion that holds a central importance in theosophical qabbalah: this word designate each of the ten emanations poured-out of the Eyn Sof, the unfathomable infinite, which formed a spiritual structure taking the shape of a human body. The word itself means ‘number’, but the qabbalists often identify it with the word ‘sapphire’, to highlight the mediating function, the filtering, these emanations operate towards the profuse ‘light’ of the Infinite. What Men call ‘God’- alike the personal God whose actions the Bible tells about and to whom it attributes names and psychological qualities-is nothing more than this emanating structure.

Each sephira has a main conventional name, from the first called Keter (the Crown) to the last one called Malkhut (Kingdom) or Atara (Tiara), but the lexicon of their denominations is widespread. Let’s mention to support our purpose, a few types of denominations: thus, the second sephira, Wisdom, is called Mother. Obviously these two sephirot form a couple whose relationship is constant: Like often the ‘Zohar'(‘The Book of the Splendor’, XIIIth century) formulates it, the Father sephira sow in the Mother sephira the primordial seeds or essences of the whole emanative structure of the sephirot we have spoken about. The Mother is the seat of a differentiation process where these seminal essences acquire a certain quiddity (note: essential quality/qualities), alike the embryo that grows in the mother’s womb from a few seminal particles.

The sixth sephira, Beauty, is the insistence where the whole seminal emanations lead and are condensed, at the center of the structure-in the human body it correspond to the spine-and it carries also the name of Knowledge (place of connection of the Father-Mother sephirot) and the Son, their initial begetting (fruit). The ninth sephira, called Yesod (Foundation), holds the function, in the anthropomorphic emanative structure, of the human male sex. It is the organ of the seminal emissions of the divinity that spreads into the cosmos its vivifying and fecundating impulses, thus ensuring Mankind’s prosperity and well-being. This seminal emission is seen in the ‘Zohar’ as a source that must never dry out and whose permanent gushing is necessary to the dissemination of the benevolent divine impulses. It is the human seminal emission-which by its constancy and insistence, its fecundity in the process of the birthing of bodies, that by sympathetic action it exercise in parallel upon the upper world-provokes the uninterrupted emission of the divine seeds of life through the Yesod sephira (‘Zohar’, I, 186b). Yesod was qualified by Rabbi Joseph of Hamadan, Castellan qabbalist of the end of the XIIIth century close to the conceptions of the ‘Zohar’, as “the penis (amah) of the Holy Blessed Himself.”

The last sephira, the tenth or Kingdom, gathers all the emanations and it is the mirror where all the lights, originating from the emanating structure, are absorbed. It is called Daughter or Spouse-the main feminine  dimension-which is in contact with the inferior worlds; worlds of the angels and material world where is played a part of the human history. It is probably for this reason the qabbalists identify it with the Shekhinah-the divine dwelling or presence on earth according to the early rabbinical literature. Harmony rules in this structure whose fundamental dynamism is though through with the help of the relationship and sexual physiology when the sephira Beauty (Tiferet), the Son-the main male dimension- is mated to the sephira Kingdom (Malkhut), the Daughter. Therefore, these two sephirot form two gendered poles whose mating or resting phases rhythm the internal dynamic of the emanative structure and then reverberates in the angelical and human cosmos.

We were compelled to a certain level of schematism and partiality in order to give a rough idea of the whole system of the sephirot. One needs to know further that the process of the birthing of the essences of the sephirot, through which the whole emanative structure is depicted by the qabbalists as both a begetting and a movement of progressive manifestation: Each new apparition of a sephira is a birth. It is then legitimate to talk of a theogony: the deployment of the ten sephirot is the genesis of the human corporeal form through which and in which the infinite happens as divinity. We can also talk of a theophany: the whole of the sephirot and each one of them at its own level manifests a hidden prior essence of this divine becoming.’

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Original French

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