From My Flesh, I See God: Spiritual Pregnancy and the Boundaries of Kabbalah
摘要
This chapter explores the expanding powers of the body in changing rituals of sacred sexuality and ibbur (spiritual pregnancy) from medieval to early modern kabbalah. It examines the history of Kabbalistic myth to do so, analyzing key texts that describe and model these rituals. We can trace this history because kabbalah is a cumulative tradition, in which the model of participation changes over time. The sources examined here interpret the same texts over and over, namely the Book of Job, the Song of Songs, and the Zohar (which also interprets these biblical texts). In the course of this exploration, some interesting patterns emerge. Both sacred sexuality and spiritual/mystical pregnancy began as stories of divinity: parts of the divine perform the hieros gamos, become pregnant, and give birth to create and sustain the cosmos. In the Middle Ages, kabbalists began to ritually imitate and participate in these divine interactions, so that the locus of power moved from the divine to one of human-divine interaction. In the sixteenth century, sources narrate a human containment of the divine, and some seventeenth-century sources develop these earlier myths and practices to describe messianic self-birth and heresy. In this way, changing rituals of sacred sexuality and ibbur illuminate the boundaries of nomian kabbalah as they cross them.