In
Darren Aronofsky’s new star-gilt silver screen epic, Noah, Adam and Eve
are luminescent and fleshless, right up until the moment they eat the forbidden
fruit.
Such
a notion isn’t found in the Bible, of course. This, among the multitude of
Aronofsky’s other imaginative details like giant Lava Monsters, has caused many
a reviewer’s head to be scratched. Conservative-minded evangelicals write off
the film because of the “liberties” taken with the text of Genesis, while a
more liberal-minded group stands in favor of cutting the director some slack.
After all, we shouldn’t expect a professed atheist to have the same ideas of
“respecting” sacred texts the way a Bible-believer would.
Both
groups have missed the mark entirely. Aronofsky hasn’t “taken liberties” with
anything.
The
Bible is not his text.
In
his defense, I suppose, the film wasn’t advertised as such. Nowhere is it said
that this movie is an adaptation of Genesis. It was never advertised as “The
Bible’s Noah,” or “The Biblical Story of Noah.” In our day and age
we are so living in the leftover atmosphere of Christendom that when somebody
says they want to do “Noah,” everybody assumes they mean a rendition of
the Bible story. That isn’t what Aronofsky had in mind at all. I’m sure
he was only too happy to let his studio go right on assuming that, since if
they knew what he was really up to they never would have allowed him to make
the movie.
Let’s
go back to our luminescent first parents. I recognized the motif instantly as
one common to the ancient religion of Gnosticism. Here’s a 2nd century A.D.
description about what a sect called the Ophites believed:
“Adam
and Eve formerly had light, luminous, and so to speak spiritual bodies, as they
had been fashioned. But when they came here, the bodies became dark, fat, and
idle.” –Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, I, 30.9
It
occurred to me that a mystical tradition more closely related to Judaism,
called Kabbalah (which the singer Madonna made popular a decade ago or
so), surely would have held a similar view, since it is essentially a form of Jewish
Gnosticism. I dusted off (No, really: I had to dust it) my copy of Adolphe
Franck’s 19th century work, The Kabbalah, and quickly confirmed my
suspicions:
“Before
they were beguiled by the subtleness of the serpent, Adam and Eve were not only
exempt from the need of a body, but did not even have a body—that is to say,
they were not of the earth.”
Franck
quotes from the Zohar, one of Kabbalah’s sacred texts:
“When
our forefather Adam inhabited the Garden of Eden, he was clothed, as all are in
heaven, with a garment made of the higher light. When he was driven from the
Garden of Eden and was compelled to submit to the needs of this world, what
happened? God, the Scriptures tell us, made Adam and his wife tunics of skin
and clothed them; for before this they had tunics of light, of that higher
light used in Eden…”
Obscure
stuff, I know. But curiosity overtook me and I dove right down the rabbit hole.
I
discovered what Darren Aronofsky’s first feature film was: Pi. Want to
know its subject matter? Do you? Are you sure?
Kabbalah.
If
you think that’s a coincidence, you may want a loved one to schedule you a
brain scan.
Have
I got your attention? Good.
The
world of Aronofsky’s Noah is a thoroughly Gnostic one: a graded universe
of “higher” and “lower.” The “spiritual” is good, and way, way, way “up there”
where the ineffable, unspeaking god dwells, and the “material” is bad,
and way, way down here where our spirits are encased in material flesh. This is
not only true of the fallen sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, but of fallen
angels, who are explicitly depicted as being spirits trapped inside a
material “body” of cooled molten lava.
Admittedly,
they make pretty nifty movie characters, but they’re also notorious in Gnostic
speculation. Gnostics call them Archons, lesser divine beings or angels
who aid “The Creator” in forming the visible universe. And Kabbalah has
a pantheon of angelic beings of its own all up and down the ladder of “divine
being.” And fallen angels are never totally fallen in this brand of mysticism.
To quote the Zohar again, a central Kabbalah text: “All things of
which this world consists, the spirit as well as the body, will return to the
principle and the root from which they came.” Funny. That’s exactly what
happens to Aronofsky’s Lava Monsters. They redeem themselves, shed their outer
material skin, and fly back to the heavens. Incidentally, I noticed that in the
film, as the family is traveling through a desolate wasteland, Shem asks his
father: “Is this a Zohar mine?” Yep. That’s the name of Kabbalah’s sacred
text.
The
entire movie is, figuratively, a “Zohar” mine.
If
there was any doubt about these “Watchers,” Aronofsky gives several of them
names: Semyaza, Magog, and Rameel. They’re all well-known demons in the Jewish
mystical tradition, not only in Kabbalah but also in the book of 1
Enoch.
What!?
Demons are redeemed? Adolphe Franck explains the cosmology of Kabbalah:
“Nothing is absolutely bad; nothing is accursed forever—not even the archangel
of evil or the venomous beast, as he is sometimes called. There will come a
time when he will recover his name and his angelic nature.”
Okay.
That’s weird. But, hey, everybody in the film seems to worship “The Creator,”
right? Surely it’s got that in its favor!
Except
that when Gnostics speak about “The Creator” they are not talking about God.
Oh, here in an affluent world living off the fruits of Christendom the term
“Creator” generally denotes the true and living God. But here’s a little
“Gnosticism 101” for you: the Creator of the material world is an
ignorant, arrogant, jealous, exclusive, violent, low-level, bastard son of a
low level deity. He’s responsible for creating the “unspiritual” world of flesh
and matter, and he himself is so ignorant of the spiritual world he fancies
himself the “only God” and demands absolute obedience. They generally call him
“Yahweh.” Or other names, too (Ialdabaoth, for example).
This
Creator tries to keep Adam and Eve from the true knowledge of the divine and,
when they disobey, flies into a rage and boots them from the garden.
In
other words, in case you’re losing the plot here: The serpent was
right all along. This “god,” “The Creator,” whom they are worshiping is withholding
something from them that the serpent will provide: divinity itself.
The
world of Gnostic mysticism is bewildering with a myriad of varieties. But,
generally speaking, they hold in common that the serpent is “Sophia,”
“Mother,” or “Wisdom.” The serpent represents the true divine,
and the claims of “The Creator” are false.
So
is the serpent a major character in the film?
Let’s
go back to the movie. The action opens when Lamech is about to bless his son,
Noah. Lamech, rather strangely for a patriarch of a family that follows God,
takes out a sacred relic, the skin of the serpent from the Garden of Eden.
He wraps it around his arm, stretches out his hand to touch his son—except,
just then, a band of marauders interrupts them and the ceremony isn’t
completed. Lamech gets killed, and the “villain” of the film, Tubal-Cain,
steals the snakeskin. Noah, in other words, doesn’t get whatever benefit the
serpent’s skin was to bestow.
The
skin doesn’t light up magically on Tubal-Cain’s arm, so apparently he doesn’t
get “enlightened,” either. And that’s why everybody in the film, including
protagonist and antagonist, Noah and Tubal-Cain, is worshiping “The Creator.” They
are all deluded. Let me clear something up here: lots of reviewers
expressed some bewilderment over the fact there aren’t any likable characters
and that they all seem to be worshiping the same God. Tubal-Cain and his
clan are wicked and evil and, as it turns out, Noah’s pretty bad himself when
he abandons Ham’s girlfriend and almost slays two newborn children. Some
thought this was some kind of profound commentary on how there’s evil in all of
us. Here’s an excerpt from the Zohar, the sacred text of Kabbalah:
“Two
beings [Adam and Nachash—the Serpent] had intercourse with Eve [the Second
woman], and she conceived from both and bore two children. Each followed one of
the male parents, and their spirits parted, one to this side and one to the
other, and similarly their characters. On the side of Cain are all the haunts
of the evil species; from the side of Abel comes a more merciful class, yet not
wholly beneficial -- good wine mixed with bad."
Sound
familiar? Yes. Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, to the “T.”
Anyway,
everybody is worshiping the evil deity. Who wants to destroy everybody.
(By the way, in Kabbalah many worlds have already been created and
destroyed.) Both Tubal-Cain and Noah have identical scenes, looking into
the heavens and asking, “Why won’t you speak to me?” “The Creator” has
abandoned them all because he intends to kill them all.
Noah
had been given a vision of the coming deluge. He’s drowning, but sees animals
floating to the surface to the safety of the ark. No indication whatsoever is
given that Noah is to be saved; Noah conspicuously makes that part up during an
awkward moment explaining things to his family. He is sinking while the
animals, “the innocent,” are rising. “The Creator” who gives Noah his vision
wants all the humans dead.
Many
reviewers thought Noah’s change into a homicidal maniac on the ark, wanting to
kill his son’s two newborn daughters, was a weird plot twist. It isn’t weird at
all. In the Director’s view, Noah is worshiping a false, homicidal maniac of
a god. The more faithful and “godly” Noah becomes, the more homicidal he
becomes. He is becoming every bit the “image of god” that the “evil” guy who
keeps talking about the “image of god,” Tubal-Cain, is.
But
Noah fails “The Creator.” He cannot wipe out all life like his god wants him to
do. “When I looked at those two girls, my heart was filled with nothing but love,”
he says. Noah now has something “The Creator” doesn’t. Love. And Mercy. But
where did he get it? And why now?
In
the immediately preceding scene Noah killed Tubal-Cain and recovered the
snakeskin relic: “Sophia,” “Wisdom,” the true light of the divine. Just a
coincidence, I’m sure.
Okay,
I’m almost done. The rainbows don’t come at the end because God makes a
covenant with Noah. The rainbows appear when Noah sobers up and embraces the
serpent. He wraps the skin around his arm, and blesses his family. It is
not God that commissions them to now multiply and fill the earth, but
Noah, in the first person, “I,” wearing the serpent talisman. (Oh, and by the
way, it’s not accidental that the rainbows are all circular. The circle
of the “One,” the Ein Sof, in Kabbalah, is the sign of monism.)
Notice
this thematic change: Noah was in a drunken stupor the scene before. Now he is
sober and “enlightened.” Filmmakers never do that by accident.
He’s
transcended and outgrown that homicidal, jealous deity.
Let
me issue a couple of caveats to all this: Gnostic speculation is a diverse
thing. Some groups appear radically “dualist,” where “The Creator”
really is a different “god” altogether. Others are more “monist,” where God
exists in a series of descending emanations. Others have it that the lower
deity “grows” and “matures” and himself ascends the “ladder” or “chain” of
being to higher heights. Noah probably fits a little in each category.
It’s hard to tell. My other caveat is this: there is no doubt a ton of Kabbalist
imagery, quotations, and themes in this movie that I couldn’t pick up in a
single sitting. For example, since Kabbalah takes its flights of fancy
generally based on Hebrew letters and numbers, I did notice that the “Watchers”
appeared to be deliberately shaped like Hebrew letters. But you could not pay
me to go see this movie again so I could further drill into the Zohar mine
to see what I could find. (On a purely cinematic viewpoint, I found most of it
unbearably boring.)
What
I can say on one viewing is this:
Darren
Aronofsky has produced a retelling of the Noah story without reference to the
Bible at all. This was not, as he claimed, just a storied tradition of
run-of-the-mill Jewish “Midrash.” This was a thoroughly pagan retelling of the
Noah story direct from Kabbalist and Gnostic sources. To my mind, there is
simply no doubt about this.
So
let me tell you what the real scandal in all of this is.
It
isn’t that he made a film that departed from the biblical story. It isn’t that
disappointed and overheated Christian critics had expectations set too high.
The
scandal is this: of all the Christian leaders who went to great lengths to
endorse this movie (for whatever reasons: “it’s a conversation starter,” “at
least Hollywood is doing something on the Bible,” etc.), and all of the
Christian leaders who panned it for “not following the Bible”…
Not
one of them could identify a blatantly Gnostic subversion of the biblical story
when it was right in front of their faces.
I
believe Aronofsky did it as an experiment to make fools of us: “You are so
ignorant that I can put Noah (granted, it's Russell Crowe!) up on
the big screen and portray him literally as the ‘seed of the Serpent’ and you
all will watch my studio’s screening and endorse it.”
He’s
having quite the laugh. And shame on everyone who bought it.
And what
a Gnostic experiment! In Gnosticism, only the "elite" are
"in the know" and have the secret knowledge. Everybody else are dupes
and ignorant fools. The "event" of this movie is intended to
illustrate the Gnostic premise. We are dupes and fools. Would Christendom
awake, please?
In
response, I have one simple suggestion:
Henceforth,
not a single seminary degree is granted unless the student demonstrates that he
has read, digested, and understood Irenaeus of Lyon’s Against Heresies.
Because
it's the 2nd century all over again.
Postscript
Some
readers may think I'm being hard on people for not noticing the Gnosticism at
the heart of this film. I am not expecting rank-and-file viewers to notice
these things. I would expect exactly what we've seen: head-scratching
confusion. I've got a whole different standard for Christian leaders: college
and seminary professors, pastors, and Ph.Ds. If a serpent skin wrapped
around the arm of a godly Bible character doesn't set off any alarms... I don't
know what to say.
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