Multipals 06: Dr. Justin Sledge (transcript)

[MUSIC: "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel]

Chris Sims: Hello friends and neighbors and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible and we try not to be jerks about it. And this is another episode of our fantastic Multipal series where we get people who actually know what they're talking about when what they're talking about isn't Wolverine from the X-Men. Some of them even know what they're talking about when they talk about that. My name is Chris Sims. With me as always is the other set of footprints Benito Cereno. Benito, how are you?

Benito Cereno: Chris, I'm good. Happy Gentile New Year to you in jail. There, those are my traditional jokes for the first episode of the year. There they are.

C: That's very good. That's very good.

B: How are you? How's your 2024 so far?

C: It's not bad. It's not bad. I've already had to take a week-long trip for work.

B: Wow.

C: And I've been keeping it smooth-brained with a lot of Vampire survivors-esque video games.

B: Hmm. Fair enough. Fair enough.

C: You have had a bit of a rough time lately, I know. I made a very bold prediction in our last episode. I was like, yeah, we're gonna come back and we're gonna do Chronicles and we're probably gonna have a Christmas episode.

B: Yeah. So those things didn't happen in large part because, well, as I may have mentioned, I was doing some traveling. My wife and I, we went to Prague just prior to Christmas. Well, actually, specifically for St. Nicholas Day because I wanted to see Mikuláš and Čert and Anděl, which I did. If you go to my Instagram or sign up for my Patreon, you can see many pictures of me and St. Nicholas or Mikuláš as they call him over there. And also the golem. I totally saw the golem. He peeked his head out of the attic of the old new synagogue and you can't prove that he didn't while I was there.

C: And as is tradition, when you go to Europe, I got a lot of pictures of my boy.

B: That's right. Anytime I see a St. Christopher, I text it to Chris. Yeah. Always. You know what they have a lot of in Europe? St. Christopher. He's everywhere. So I had a great time and, you know, maybe at some point we'll be able to dedicate some time talking about the different churches and saints. I saw a shrine to St. Wilgefortis while we were there, which was amazing.

C: I know. Like that, I know that she's your fave.

B: Yeah. I was also trying to chase St. Wenceslas stuff because I was there. Right. And it's like it's there. It's Christmas. He's Christmas adjacent. But, you know.

C: That was actually what we had talked about doing instead of doing a Christmas episode this year. Our plan was to do a St. Stephen's Day episode for December 26th about good King Wenceslas.

B: Yeah.

C: Alas.

B: Alas. So what turns out to have happened instead is that on like our last day on this trip, my wife and I both contracted some kind of European super virus and we had a lingering respiratory infection for four to five weeks. And for much of that time, talking was not a real thing that could have happened. Right. Like...

C: You were rough.

B: My voice was extremely froggy at best and frequently painful. And I had a really bad cough. You'll probably hear some lingering remnants of that in this episode. But it was pretty bad. We were like bedridden sick for basically the week and a half leading up to Christmas after we got back. And because our plan was like, oh, we've still got like a week and a half after we get back to prepare for Christmas. And it was like, no, we're just going to be in bed ordering a DoorDash and doing nothing for that entire time. That is why we ended up not being able to record any episodes since our previous one, because I was very sick and couldn't talk. So my bad, I guess. Otherwise, we had a good trip.

C: Good. I'm glad.

B: Generally, my people ask, like, how was the trip? And the answer is like being there was awesome. Getting there and getting back was terrible. Besides getting ill, we had a lot of airport problems. So whatever. This isn't the time or place. But you know, how was your Christmas, Chris? You had a good Christmas?

C: Very good. Excellent.

B: Yeah.

C: Always have a wonderful Christmas. Shockingly, did not get any swords.

B: That's strange.

C: I was fully expecting it.

B: Yeah.

C: I did have, while AC was out of town for a little bit, I did. I had some alcoholic beverages, played God of War Ragnarok and did order myself the Leviathan Axe. So that is now hanging up on my wall.

B: Nice.

C: Next to Anduril, the Flame of the West and the Master Sword, of course. But yeah, like otherwise a very good Christmas. Before we get into talking about and to our guest for this MultiPals, do you want to talk about our annual gift exchange?

B: Yeah, I think we should. Very briefly.

C: I feel kind of bad because I could not shake what I wanted to get you.

B: No, look, I understand.

C: I could not get it out of my head.

B: I understand. So, so ahead of Christmas, Chris texted me and said, is it okay if I get you what is essentially a gag gift for Christmas? And I was like, buddy, you have to go how the spirit moves you. And my wife said, as long as it's not another sword. And when it arrived, you know what? It turns out it was the very first thing on my list. Go figure. My very own John Cena action figure.

C: And it's a nice one too.

B: It is nice.

J: The alternate hands.

C: He has a removable baseball cap.

B: Yeah. Any configuration of John Cena that in his wrestling persona, like I can't, I wouldn't be able to, you know, recreate my favorite scenes from blockers or anything with it, but...

C: There is weirdly enough, there is a WWE produced and branded action figure of John Cena in his role from what? Fast Nine?

B: Oh, wow.

C: Which is weird. I almost got you that one just because it's like, it's clearly a wrestling figure, but specifically is Bill Toretto or whatever his name is.

B: Yeah. And then, yeah, on the flip side, I got you a book. Cause that's the kind of person I am.

C: Yes. Which I'm actually very excited about. I think we'll be good for both. You told me you got it for me for D&D purposes.

B: Yes. You know, I mean, we text for many reasons because we're friends IRL, but you do often text me questions related to your D&D game sometimes about topics within classics or mythology or sometimes Bible things, cause you're trying to apply. Them to your game. And so I was like, this is a new book that comes highly recommended and is applicable to both this podcast and Chris's broader interest in monsters.

C: Yes. It is a book called God's monsters, which is a great title.

B: It's got a great cover too. If you like tentacles and feathers, there they are.

C: The full title God's Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible by Esther J. Hamori, that is, that is all. That's what I'm into. That's why this show exists.

B: Yes, absolutely. Exactly. And it's got a nice little blurb by Bart Ehrman there on the top. It comes highly recommended by friend of the show, Dan McClellan. Absolutely pick this one up. If you like Bible and you like monsters.

C: I'm looking forward to reading it. I'm looking forward to finding out more about the biblical Tarrasque.

B: Yeah.

C: Which is very prominent in Dungeons and Dragons. So yeah, like I felt a little bad because I'm like, you got me something that is both relevant to the show and relevant to our friendship. And I got you a reference to Froggy Fresh's classic Christmas.

[MUSIC: "Christmas" by Froggy Fresh]

B: Never underestimate how much I like Froggy Fresh.

C: Yeah, good. Cause you understand that this is the next eight Christmases, right?

B: I'm looking forward.

C: Including having to get you two copies of Illmatic.

B: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I'm looking forward to the fudge brownies. Yeah, boy. All right. Before we get into the interview though, real quick, I got a second book recommendation.

C: Okay.

B: Wake up, Chris. New Bible just dropped.

C: Oh, okay.

B: Yeah.

C: This one have the extra chapters in Corinthians from the movie Constantine?

B: It might, you'll have to buy it and check it out. Listeners in the show know that the kind of like base level translation that we use of the Bible has traditionally been the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the HCSB because of the readability, right? It's a nice balance between readability and accuracy. It was a big reason that I like using it. It's very accessible. However, people will know that we also on the show, we use other translations. Most primarily we use the NRSV, the New Revised Standard Version, specifically the New Oxford Annotated Bible, the NOAB.

Well, people who keep up with Bible translation news probably know that in the last year they released an updated edition of the NRSV and so that is like now currently the new contemporary standard for people who are looking for, if you're looking for like a serious academic study of the Bible rather than just something readable, right? So that means they will be doing an updated NOAB, which would be, I think, the sixth edition, but that'll probably not drop until next year or so. So in the meantime, Harper Collins has released the SBL Study Bible, that being the Society of Biblical Literature, which we did discuss with Alexiana Fry last time as she had been at the SBL conference. So the SBL Study Bible is the updated edition of the NRSV. It does include the Apocryphal and Deuterocanonical books, the capital A Apocrypha, so the books that are canon within Catholicism and Greek Orthodox. So it does include those books, many of which we have covered on this show. The Study Bible includes commentaries, essays, sidebars, and that kind of stuff by a lot of the biggest names in biblical studies right now, including Dan McClellan. He's got at least one little essay or sidebar or something in there.

So if you are looking for a new Study Bible until the next version of the NOAB drops in the next couple of years, this is going to be the official Apocryphal's recommendation for a Study Bible if you're looking for serious academic study.

C: Okay. But like I have two HCSBs.

B: Yeah. And again, I stand by that as a very readable version of the Bible that I think is good for use on this show when we're trying to convey the meaning of the text, but if you're looking for like a good Study Bible, typically that's going to be an NRSV.

C: This is not a D&D situation where I need to run out and upgrade immediately.

B: No, no. I will probably get one. I don't know. I might hold out for the next NOAB. We'll see. But these are good resources with lots of historical information and maps and timelines and essays and that kind of stuff. So if you're looking for that kind of information, definitely check it out so that you can get it on the Bad Book website. You can get it on HarperCollins.com. Wherever books are found. It just came out like a couple of months ago, so it shouldn't be too hard to find.

C: Possibly even at your local independent bookseller.

B: Yes. If you got one of those, A, count your blessings, B, go pick up a copy of the SBS Study Bible.

C: And with that, Benito, who's our guest this episode?

B: Our guest this episode is Dr. Justin Sledge, an expert in Western esoterica, who is here today specifically to talk to us about one of the most requested topics in the Bible adjacent world, he's going to talk to us about Kabbalah. And so if you've ever been wondering about that, what's the tree of life all about? Well, we're going to get into it. We're going to explain the entirety of it. You're not going to believe it. We managed to cover every volume of the Zohar within an hour. It's amazing. You're going to come out and you're going to make Madonna look like an absolute scrub in terms of knowledge of the Kabbalah. When you come out the back end of this episode.

C: I will say we do keep our clean tag in this episode, but there is a discussion of sex that does go in some directions you probably don't think it's going to.

B: Yeah, but it's not like, well, no, I don't really, it's not like gross or bad. Just be aware that.

C: Just be aware.

B: Yeah.

C: I know some grandmas listen.

B: Yeah, it does come up, but you know, it does come up in the show from time to time.

C: Listen I also know how they became grandmas. So. Yeah, let's talk to the incredibly named and delightful. Dr. Sledge.

[Music: "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel]

B: All right, Chris, we have with us another excellent guest from the world of Bible adjacent things today. I'm pleased to announce we have with us, Dr. Justin Sledge from among other things, the Esoterica YouTube channel, which is an excellent repository of knowledge about the Western esoteric tradition, including alchemy, hermetic philosophy, Gnosticism, you name it. If it's weird, it's probably on there. Thank you for joining us today. Justin, Dr. Sledge. Hello.

Dr. Justin Sledge: Thank you guys for having me on. And that's an accurate description. If it's weird, it's probably somewhere on Esoterica. So yeah, that's a good, a good description of what I get up to over there on the YouTube.

B: It's a pretty beefy channel. Do you know, like roughly how many videos you have on there?

J: I think we're coming up on like 250, but you know, some of those are live streams and, you know, random stuff, but yeah, it's at least North of a couple hundred videos.

B: That's pretty wild. Cause they are like substantial videos where, you know, there's editing and you have sources and that kind of stuff coming up on the screen. It's very cool. I do encourage people to check out your channel. You've covered topics that I know people that listen to this show would be interested in. You've got some great videos on Lilith. You have at least one on biblical giants. The Refahim episode you did is very cool. Recently you had one on the biblical Magi for Christmas. That was a cool one. So I think people should check that out. But why don't you actually take a moment, I know some of our listeners are already fans of what you do, but for those who are learning about you for the first time, why don't you just take a moment, tell us who you are, what you do, what your field is, hype yourself up.

J: Thank you. I'm Justin Sledge. I'm a, an expert, I suppose, in the field of Western esotericism, which is like you said, it covers things like alchemy and magic and the occult Kabbalah, which we'll talk about later today. My PhD is in philosophy from the university of Memphis, but I also have an advanced degree from the University of Amsterdam, which is one of the only degree granting institutions where you study hermetic philosophy and you can get an advanced degree in hermetic philosophy and other things that I do.

I run the YouTube channel Esoterica, which is a academic channel that studies Western esotericism mostly prior to about 1850. I have other colleagues that cover material after that, although I do some forays into modernity, but mostly I'm covering stuff prior to 1850. So yeah, it's a Western esotericism is a new, exciting sort of interdisciplinary branch and the humanities and covers over religious studies. It incorporates a lot of history, some philosophy. I'm a rare philosopher in this field. Most of it's religious studies and in history folk, but I tend to bring a more philosophical lens and analysis to the topics.

B: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you also for the phrase "for occasional forays into modernity," which is how Chris describes my personal interests. You're currently in Detroit. Is that still accurate?

J: That's accurate. Yeah. I live in Detroit with my family.

B: So I have an important question then. American or Lafayette?

J: Oh God. I can't eat either. I'm Jewish. And so...

B: Okay. I wasn't sure. I didn't know if Coney's were kosher or not. I didn't know if they use kosher dogs.

J: There are kosher Coney's that do exist, but both of those are not kosher, which means they're probably significantly better than the kosher ones. So no, I, this is a place where having an opinion can get you into trouble, like many opinions, and I tried to not have one. So I don't know. They both smell pretty good to me, but that's as far about as close as I can get eating them.

B: All right. Fair enough. I don't want to get you in trouble. And also I wasn't sure if you kept kosher or not, but...

J: This is a very divisive issue in the Detroit community.

B: Yeah. Oh, for sure. I've only been to Detroit a couple of times, but I personally, from my experience, I'm a Lafayette partisan for what it's worth.

C: I've never been, but I have watched RoboCop several times.

B: Yeah. It's basically like that.

C: Yeah. That's what I hear.

J: It's getting better, but yeah, there're definitely RoboCop moments. The great sequence in the Simpsons where Bart and Homer and Moe are talking to each other and Moe is introducing Bart to the world of gambling and he says, you know, Moe says, Hey, you can gamble on anything. He's like, even the Detroit lions? And Mo says, Hey, don't pick on Detroit. Them people are living in Mad Max times. So although the Lions are doing quite good this year, I'm told, I don't follow football very closely, but people are very excited about the Lions this year. So anytime Detroit can celebrate something, then God bless them. Let Detroit celebrate.

B: I think they should. The last time, well, I guess the first time I went to Detroit, the people I was going to see were like, hey, look, don't worry about it. Don't let, you know, the things you hear, the rumors scare you, you'll be fine. And then we got there and they were like, also don't use your cell phone on the street because someone will take it. So I was like, all right.

J: Don't get gas at night.

B: Yeah.

J: Detroit has it's a, they're definitely tough spots of Detroit, but you know, it's, that's a very complicated story in its own right.

B: Yeah, for sure. And you know, we didn't really bring you on to talk about Detroit, although we probably could, I did ask you on the show because we did want to talk about Kabbalah because it's one of many topics that you have discussed on your channel. You have like a whole playlist section on your channel. I think you have like a 14 part video series on in the introduction to Kabbalah. That is a topic that has been requested by our listeners for this show a number of times. And it's just like, I barely know anything about it. I'm not saying I know nothing, but like barely anything. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, Chris texted me and was like, can you explain Kabbalah to me? And my response was "Just reread Promethea." And then his response, if I recall correctly, Chris was, "bold of you to assume I've read Promethea for the first time."

C: Correct.

B: Have you read Promethea, Justin? Are you familiar with that comic at all?

J: I haven't. No, I don't, I don't know this comic.

B: Okay. So it's Alan Moore. It's one he did in the late nineties, early 2000. And it is the comic that is most like a philosophy lecture of any comic that has perhaps ever been printed.

C: And hence me not reading it.

B: Yeah. And a large section of the book, which is like 30 ish issues is him going one by one through the Sephirot. It's a hermetic approach to the Kabbalah rather than Jewish. And so he goes through the different meanings and levels of the Sephirot and stuff. So it's a whole, like it's about mysticism and magic more broadly, but the tree of life is like the center structural element of the book. So anyway...

J: It sounds like Alan Moore.

B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was definitely him exploring his more mystical interests.

C: So we have brought you here so that you can over the course of the next, maybe half hour, explain all of Kabbalah to me.

B: Yeah, exactly.

J: Yep. Yep. I can definitely do that. No problem.

B: So for listeners for whom Kabbalah is nothing but a thing that Madonna did in the nineties and for whom Sephiroth is nothing but a one winged angel, what absolute ground floor basics, what are we talking about here?

J: So Kabbalah is a species of Jewish mysticism. There are many different species of Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah is now the dominant one. And it is a form of theosophy. We might call it speculative theosophy. Specifically around the emanations of the divine, the sefirot you just mentioned, of which there are 10. And it's how the divine dynamism, the divine movement energy between those 10 emanations of the divine work themselves out in history and how we interact with them spiritually and physically even. And it developed primarily in Spain and the 13th century is when the Kabbalah, as we know it first really emerged earliest text of Kabbalah is a short little strange book called the Sefer Bahir, the Book of Illumination, all of the principal text of the Kabbalah is a significantly substantial series of books. It's about 12 volumes in the English translation, which isn't totally complete. And that is called the Sefer Zohar and the book of radiance. And that was produced in Spain sometime in the late 13th century.

So it's the literature of that mystical theosophy. I can say more about theosophy there, but it's that tradition. There's a major bump and explosion in the tradition in the 16th century with a rabbi named Isaac Luria and his students. And that Lurianic Kabbalah basically becomes Kabbalah as we know it now. So originally emerging in the 13th century and then sort of getting a sort of amplification and a giant inflation in the 16th century. So that's Kabbalah. Now, again, there are other forms of Jewish mysticism like Merkava mysticism, which existed prior to the Kabbalah. And so, or in the Sefer Yetzirah, sort of a number letter mysticism that existed prior to the Kabbalah, but that's kind of the ground floor.

B: Right. So the Merkava mysticism would have been a kind of a precursor. That's when we've discussed a little bit on this show and our episodes on Ezekiel and on 3rd Enoch. So listeners who are interested in that can go back and listen to those. We're looking at this as a medieval development of centuries of Jewish mysticism. Right? That coalesces in, like you're saying, medieval Spain more or less, and then kind of develops from there. Right?

J: Right.

B: I would say also eventually Kabbalah gets incorporated into Hasidic practice. Right? Is that correct? It's like a typical element of Hasidism or no.

J: Absolutely. I mean, one could even argue that there basically is no Jewish theology outside of Kabbalah. Kabbalah just is at this point, Jewish theology and basically has been since 18th century probably.

B: Okay.

J: But absolutely, Hasidism is unimaginable without Kabbalah. All Hasidic movements are deeply kabbalistic in a fundamental way.

B: That was my understanding. That was the impression I got from Chabad.org.

J: Yes.

B: Who talked about the importance of Rabbi Israel Ben Eleazar, who we have definitely discussed on this show, the Baal Shem Tov.

C: You talking about the master of the good name?

B: I am talking about the master of the good name.

C: Love that guy.

B: Definitely a guy we have talked about on this show. So now that I'm had you on and I'm learning Kabbalah, how, by the end of this episode, will I be able to teleport like the Baal Shem Tov?

J: So that's a branch of Kabbalah called Kabbalah Maasit, practical Kabbalah. It's basically Jewish magic. Typically you have to get pretty damn righteous before you can do things like teleport or talk to birds or astral travel, the kind of things that the BeShT could do. There's something like a Jewish shaman, cure people with magical divine names, create golems. You typically have to be pretty righteous to pull a lot of that stuff off.

B: Okay. That's fair. I feel like I'm most of the way there.

J: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, all you have to do is convert, assuming you're not Jewish, convert to, you know, very Orthodox Judaism and live a life of extreme

B: asceticism and penance and you're well on your way. Great.

C: I think maybe your earlier discussion of coneys disqualifies you, Benito, unfortunately.

B: Wait, are you saying you're saying I can't eat coneys and be an Orthodox Jewish ascetic? That doesn't make any sense.

J: Yeah, probably not. I mean, there is a tradition, a renegade kabbalist famously named Shabbatai Tzvi, who was a would be Messiah in the 17th century, who argued that he, just him, his followers would argue that it's all of his followers. But he argued that in order to purify the world, he had to descend into the world of the demonic, what in the Kabbalah is called the world of the qlippoth, shards. And he did that by actively subverting Jewish law. He even had a blessing for when he broke Jewish law on purpose in public and Shabbatai Tzvi became extremely controversial. In fact, if folks have ever heard rules around, you can't study Kabbalah until you're 40 and you have to be married and blah, blah, blah, those, all those rules were implemented after the fiasco where Shabbatai Tzvi claimed to be the Messiah and then subsequently converted to Islam in 1666.

B: Perfect. Sounds like that went great.

J: Yeah. Messiah is typically, you know, you know, anytime anyone around you declares that they're the Messiah, you know, which direction to run.

B: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

C: Like I'm going to ask you a question and I feel like you just answered it, but does that dude maybe rule?

J: I mean, Shabbatai Tzvi is a character. I mean, he's sort of, he's such a bizarre person and he suffered from some pretty significant mental health stuff, probably manic depression of some kind, but he was just an extraordinary, he could walk into a synagogue, sing songs in Ladino. And then tell people he was the Messiah and they were like, okay, yeah, you are. And he just, I mean, more than half of the world's Jewish population converted over to this Shabbatian messianic movement in the middle of the 17th century. And it was just a, like a fever dream where he could just convince people he was the Messiah and people believed him. I mean, he had this kind of charisma that is frightening and you just kind of the charisma you see in people like David Koresh or Jim Jones and these kinds of people that seem to attract people like moth to a flame and Shabbatai Tzvi certainly had that and he had a good PR man and this dude named Nathan of Gaza, who was really the kabbalistic engine that really argued for his messianic claims, Nathan of Gaza was a real genius. But yeah, you got to have a good PR man. If you're going to be a Messiah, you got to have a good PR man because you're going to die pretty soon. And so you need a PR man to push your agenda.

B: Yeah, for sure. Okay. So if the practical side of Kabbalah is out for me, because I want to eat a hot dog, what other options do I have for this particular train of study if I can't do practical stuff?

J: If you can't do the practical stuff, you can do the literary side of things, which is you can study the text. Kabbalah is an enormously literary tradition. There's a massive amount of literature, most of which is untranslated to English and the Sefer Zohar has just now gotten a good translation into English. It's again, the foundational text of Kabbalah. Daniel Matt has done a positively heroic task translating it from the bizarre Aramaic that it's composed in - completely artificial language. It's extraordinarily weird, but it's been translated into the 12 volume edition. So many of the foundational works of Kabbalah have been translated.

And so basically what you would do if you want to do Kabbalah is one, you kind of have to get into the way that they read scripture. They read text. A lot of the Zohar is a commentary on the Bible, a very peculiar commentary on the Bible to be sure. But it is a commentary that says, look, when you're reading the Bible, you're not just reading one thing. When Abraham is walking around and doing something, it's not just Abraham. It's actually one of these emanations of the divine. And that story tells you how these emanations of the divine work. So the Bible is being read at multiple levels all at once. And you get all kinds of interesting things coming out of the Bible that are revealed by the Zohar.

I'll give you one example. The Zohar loves lines of the Bible that seem to be completely innocuous. So great example is in the, I think in the book of Genesis, there's a line that says, "and they were 10 Kings of Edom and they died," that's it. It's it's mentioned that there were 10 Kings of Edom and they died. The kabbalists spent dozens of pages unpacking this, and they believe that it shows that there were worlds before this world and those worlds were destroyed by God and those 10 Kings of Edom are actually demonic beings that persist primordially behind our world. Our world's just the next in the process.

So this is the kind of bizarre stuff that you see that the kabbalists begin to develop. So if you want to be in the mind of a kabbalist, you have to study how they study scripture. And as you get into their mindset, you begin to get some sense of what they're up to. And it can be very trippy to say the very least. My friend Zevi (SP?) and I did a long form study of a section of the Kabbalah called the Yanukkah, the wonder child. And it's funny because I think that even weeks after I finished it, I was still reading the Bible, the Torah with this kabbalistic lens on, and it was sort of hard to shake off. So that would be the thing that you would do is you'd come to read scripture the way the kabbalists do. And that's by understanding all the scripture through the lens of, it's not just people in history or people in faith doing things, but the Bible itself, the Torah, especially is a revelation of the inner dynamism of the Godhead hidden, so to speak behind the plain text of, you know, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and doing this, that and the other.

B: Right on. Okay. So it's like an interpretive lens, the idea that there are tiers of understanding of scripture apart from just the plain meaning of the text, right? That there's mystical significance layered on top.

J: Oh, yeah. I mean, and not just lay on top, but it, you know, really the plain reading, what in Hebrew is called the Peshat. That's just the thinnest part of the crust of what's going on. And the kabbalists love to read things very literally. And of course it's a lot of this is because they know Hebrew very well.

So for instance, they'll say, all right, if you look at the very first three words of the book of Genesis, it says, et, right? And so the et, if you know Hebrew, you know, the et just tells you that the next word that follows is going to be a direct object of that sentence. It's Aleph, Tav. They say, no, no, no, no, no. Read it literally. Berashit, Barah, Elohim, et. In the beginning, God created et, Aleph, Tav, the Hebrew alphabet. And it's through the Hebrew alphabet that everything else gets created.

So the first three words of the Hebrew Bible are simply the revelation that God created the Hebrew language first and everything else flows from that. And then you rerun it even further. Don't just, now you have to go back to the word Berashit. Don't read in the beginning, read Barosh with wisdom. Literally the word Rashit is from the Hebrew word Rosh, which means head. And so don't read it as in the beginning, but read it with wisdom. And of course, wisdom is Chokmah. And this is one of the first of these sefirot that emerge in the divine dynamism. So this is the kind of stuff, and they do this for 40, 50 pages, just on the first word of the Hebrew Bible. There's an old phrase in Hebrew, hafakv, babav, hakv, ba, like turn it, turn it round and round, anything in it can be found. So this is the very deep mystical exegesis that the writers of the Zohar revel in.

B: That's very cool. So you mentioned the sefirot. Let's talk about like the basics of the theology cosmology of traditional Kabbalah. What are we looking at? What are these emanations? What is the conception of God? The conception of the universe? Like what is the basic like framework in terms of ideas of like God and the relationship of God and humans and the world and that kind of stuff?

J: So the kabbalists conceive of God as a process more than a being. So God is a becoming. God is a verb for the kabbalists, not a noun. And that verb, the God of being, the processual God of being is coming to be. And the sefirot are how that God comes to be. There are moments in the unfolding of the divine. So you can think of them as various aspects of the divine. So God's mercy, God's wisdom, God's judgment, God's glory, God's beauty, the eminence, the transcendence of God. And so all of these things are set into a kind of dynamic tension. And that dynamic tension, the 10 aspects of God are what propel reality. The reality that we live in. We live in one region of the divine, according to the kabbalists, the lowest section of these emanations. If you're folks who ever studied some neoplatonism, this is where this is all coming from, of course. But the idea is that God's creation or emanating of the universe is not perfect. It's a becoming. This is from the divine name, Ehiya Asher Ehiya. That word is difficult. Ehiya is difficult to translate to English because we don't have a verb like that. In Hebrew verbs are either perfect or imperfect. They're either complete or incomplete. And that's a first person to be verb that's in the incomplete, in the imperfect. So it gets translated. I will be what I will be. What it really means is something like I'm becoming what I'll be. It's you can't, there's no translation in English that works because we just don't have a verb structure like that.

B: Sure.

J: But the idea is that God is becoming and we are part of that becoming. And that in that becoming, we and God are sort of dual creators in that process. And the task of human beings is to follow the divine rules, the meats vote, the laws of the Torah. So you can't eat the coneys. And by following those rules, this reharmonizes the Godhead, which is fundamentally disharmonized through the process of creation. And so by harmonizing the Godhead that ushers in a world of completion, a world of what is called repair Tikkun and that world of Tikkun, that world of reparation, sort of the messianic redemption.

So the idea is that basically you become an Orthodox Jew and you follow the rules. And you understand that the rules are not just rules to be followed because God said so. They're not just to be followed because they're, I don't know, healthy, which I don't know that kosher laws make you any more healthy, frankly, they're not just rules that are there to divide the week up for you into the normal week. And the Sabbath, they're actually part of a larger metaphysical plan for the restoration of reality and the completion of the Godhead. And so that's what you're reading. When you're reading the Torah is the unfolding of that process. We are in the midst of that process. And eventually, according to the kabbalist, they will bring that process to an ultimate conclusion. And that's the gist of it all. So series of emanations, 10, they're disharmonized. The task is to reharmonize them and they're reharmonized through the practice of Judaism. Judaism is the art of the harmonization of the Godhead.

B: Okay.

C: That's pretty straightforward. That's pretty simple. I think I got it.

B: Yeah.

J: And this is all to be said against, folks should know this. This is all being said against Maimonides, right? So Maimonides comes along and he's battling another form of Jewish mysticism. He's really coming at this from an extremely rationalistic way of understanding Judaism. And the kabbalists say, we're not doing that. We're not going to do this rationalist route. We're going to reclaim the, all the wonderful weirdness of Judaism. And we're going to go headlong into a full on kind of mystical way of being Jewish, which for the kabbalists is far richer and far more authentic. So if it sounds bizarre and it is bizarre, it's primarily because they're really pugilists against the Maimonides and rationalists. And it turns out the kabbalists were right, at least to some degree. Maimonides kind of reads everything as metaphors. And well, the idea is if everything's just a metaphor, then why not just metaphor yourself into a church rather than be Jewish and get persecuted and kicked out of Spain, just convert and get land or whatever. And many Jewish intellectuals in Spain did that and then to the great horror of many religious Jewish people. And part of what's going on with the kabbalists is they're doubling down on the sort of hyper Judaism. For them, it's not metaphors. Everything is literal. Literally God is becoming and we are part of that process and no part of that is a metaphor. So that's another thing to know sort of about the backgrounds that part of the bizarreness of all this is a response to the Maimonidean rationalism of the 13th century.

B: Yeah, that makes sense. I was actually going to ask about Maimonides because he takes a rationalist approach, kind of a Aristotelian mode maybe would be accurate.

J: Explicitly. Yeah. He even tells you, if you want to study how God created the world, go study Aristotle's Meteorologica.

C: If I can be allowed to be productive and put this into terms that I understand, and I mean this in only the most respectful way, I assure you, this would be roughly equivalent to my personal philosophy of people saying that no, Batman should be gritty and realistic and me going, no, you don't understand. It makes us so much better when he goes to space because he's been to space. We've seen it. There are comics about that.

J: Yeah. I don't know about Batman going to space.

C: I do.

J: Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, I think this is really people doubling down on the weird aspects of Judaism and really saying that, we're going to go whole hog into the, this weird space is a very psychedelic space. And you know, in this theology, God has a feminine dimension called the Shekhinah, just very carefully tracking to the rise of the Marian cult in medieval Spain, sort of anything you can do, we can do better. So like you have the mother of God, but like we have God, God is her. And we unite with the divine bride on the Sabbath Eve. And if you've ever been to a Jewish service, you've probably been to a Friday night service. And that Friday night service is called Kabbalah Shabbat. It was invented by kabbalists. And it is a marriage ceremony between. kabbalists and God's divine feminine aspect. Again, the sort of balancing out of harmonizing the Godhead. So yeah, there's moments in the Zohar where God's having sex with God's self and generating reality that way through the divine phallus and the divine vagina, I mean, it gets really, really out there.

B: Yeah.

C: So just like Batman.

B: So just like exactly like Batman.

J: Exactly like Batman. Yes.

B: So I think some of these concepts you're saying will be familiar to our long-time listeners. We've had some episodes where we've talked about the Shekhinah. I don't remember which texts we were looking at, but there are some, but also the idea of an infinite kind of distant and impersonal God that breaks up into emanations through which they reveal themselves to humanity in a kind of illusory imperfect plane that represents a higher plane. It's very similar to a lot of the Gnostic texts we've covered, the Neoplatonism you mentioned. So is it fair to say that both Gnosticism and Neoplatonism inform the philosophy of Kabbalah as it's forming?

J: So certainly Neoplatonism did. There's an outstanding debate about the degree to which, well, there's an outstanding debate about the degree to which Gnosticism existed as a thing in itself.

B: Right. Yeah. Typical disclaimer that Gnosticism was not an organized movement, but rather a series of different, et cetera, et cetera.

J: Yeah. Yeah. So with all due respect to, you know, to Williams, yeah, there's some evidence. Evidence is meager. I'll be very careful what I say here. There's some evidence of continuity with some kind of radical dualism from antiquity that may have made its way up to Italy, to the Kalonymos family, and then maybe into some circles that ultimately developed Kabbalah. And we can see some of that in the Zohar where you have like primordial evil, that evil has been there since before creation. And there's a kind of a primordial evil that's been there just as long as God has somehow. And so some of those elements, so Gnostic-y elements are in Kabbalah. Famously Gershom Scholem went really whole hog on the idea of there being a connection, but more scholars recently have said it's difficult to know whether there's a genetic connection or whether they're simply parallel developments along similar lines. I tend to think it's a parallel development and not a genetic connection.

B: Sure. More like convergent evolution.

J: Yeah, something like that. I mean, if at one point somewhere in the Zohar, you know, in the bizarre language of the Zohar, which I should also mention the Zohar is written in a completely artificially developed form of Aramaic, you have to learn just to read it. Even if you read the Babylonian Talmud in the Aramaic of the Talmud, that doesn't totally prepare you to read the Aramaic of the Zohar, which is completely bizarre in its own right. It's almost a new language. If in those texts, we got a quotation from, you know, the Apocryphon of John, or, you know, they ever called something the Demiurge or Sakhlas or Samael, you know, if we got some of that Gnostic language, we'd be like, "Oh, there's a smoking gun," but we've never found something like that.

And there's also people who want to connect the rise of Kabbalah with the so-called Cathars, which are operating in a similar time. Again, assuming they existed, which is just about debate now about whether the Cathars really existed, but dualism was in the air. I mean, we definitely know they were dualists. We have a text, the Book of Two Principles that was produced by somebody who was a dualist. So dualism was definitely in the air and it wouldn't have been all that unusual for some Jewish folks to pick up some moderated dualism in the development of these kabbalistic ideas.

Also, it's worth pointing out too, the Kabbalah was not the invention of one person, it was the invention of a kind of cadre of people around a central rabbi named Moses of León. And Moses of León had a circle around him of people. And it seems like this circle was kind of riffing on similar ideas and developing texts that ultimately became the earliest literature of the Kabbalah. You know, again, this is a big question in the scholarship about who's doing what when we're just now beginning to carve that story up in some kind of way that makes some sense, not that there's consensus about it, there certainly isn't.

C: So again, in many ways, very similar to Batman.

J: I mean, if you think about it, canon and non-canon, yeah. If you, if you sort of want to think about it in terms of fan fiction, in some sense, it is that it's Bible fan fiction with a weird twist.

B: That's yeah. Something that again, listeners of this show will be familiar with.

J: Yeah. Like apocryphal literature and things like pseudepigraphical literature.

B: Yeah. For sure.

J: And the Zohar is pseudepigraphical. That is to say, it does claim to have been written by second century Jewish scholars, specifically around the scholar Shimon bar Yochai. But there's lots of reasons we have to believe that it was not composed in the second century. But if you go to an Orthodox kabbalist and ask them, where did the Zohar come from, they'll tell you that it was written in the second century and then revealed in the 13th century. Most academic scholarship does not accept the idea that it was written in the second century and there's linguistic and geographical and lots of reasons to believe that it wasn't composed then.

B: It wasn't written second century and then was just like chilling for a thousand years and before somebody found it?

J: Yeah. The idea that, you know, that it was passed down from teacher to disciple and, you know, eventually revealed and it was revealed as a sort of a final apocalyptic moment where things are going to get really, really bad. And the Kabbalah was going to be sort of the final capstone, the revelation of Judaism, and that would usher in the days of the Messiah and grist for their mill. I mean, the Zohar is being written in the 1270s, the 1300, 14th century in the 15th century were terrible for Jews living in Spain and that all culminated, of course, in 1492 with the Alhambra decree. And for many people, they took the Alhambra decree as sort of proof that they were definitely living in the last days. You know, you're talking a hundred thousand people forcibly exiled from Spain after they're living there peaceably for a thousand years. Yeah, they took it to be evident that these kabbalists are onto something and it's in the consequences of the Alhambra decree of 1492 where Bayezid II ushers in a large amount of Jews into the Ottoman empire where you get this second explosion of kabbalistic thinking in the form of the Kabbalah of Itzhak Luria and it's Lurianic Kabbalah that basically won the day. There were several competing schools of Kabbalah prior to that, but his ultimately led the day and his is all about exile and redemption. So they were prescient themes in the 16th century.

B: So as I believe I mentioned, our Discord has a number of fans of yours. And so I would not want to deny them the opportunity to ask you some questions. And so I have here some questions from our listeners on Discord. And as far as I can tell from skimming them, they are mostly relevant this time, which is a nice change. Thank you, Discord listeners. If you don't mind, we'll do a couple of questions.

So let's start with Brad, the renegade dope dog. He says, "I am deeply interested in how kabbalistic Jewish mysticism relates to the version of those ideas as co-opted by Gentile wizards over the centuries." I assume he means, yeah, the more hermetic approach or even I guess medieval Christian approach to Kabbalah. So, well, he brings up Promethea. "If you're reading those Promethea issues where Alan Moore gives you a tour of the Sephiroth, how much of that is nonsense from the perspective of a more traditional Jewish paradigm?" So we've already established you haven't read that book, but in general, a more...

C: I have similar questions about Persona 5.

B: I'm going to guess you haven't played Persona 5.

J: No.

B: Yeah.

C: You should. It's got the Qlippoth in it and everything.

J: Yeah. It's amazing how much this stuff, especially in like anime stuff, like so much like Kabbalah wrapped up in anime and stuff these days too.

C: You gotta fight Yaldabaoth at the end. It's a great game.

J: Yeah.

B: So, yeah. So from this more Christianized or even secularized, Westernized take on Kabbalah, yeah. How much of it is nonsense? How much of it retains any air of authenticity?

J: I guess there's two things to say. So there are three Kabbalahs, Kabbalot. I don't know. There's the Jewish Kabbalah, of which there are species inside of Judaism. It is not homogenous.

There is Christian Cabbalah, which was developed primarily by the 15th century scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his successors, people like Johannes Reuchlin and John Dee and Guillaume Postel and Cornelius Agrippa. So those folks felt that the Kabbalah was authentic. It did come from God ultimately, but the Jews, of course, they didn't really understand what they had and it had to be accommodated to Christianity. And in fact, they thought that inside of the Kabbalah, you could find proofs for Christianity and this would allow them to convert the Jews and things like this. That's part of the longstanding Latin polemical tradition. So that's the early Christian Cabbalah typically spelled with a C.

And then in the 19th century, over several centuries, what ends up happening is a Christian Cabbalah ultimately becomes disentangled from Christianity and ultimately it is used as the foundation, the ten sefirot are used as a foundation for building up a system of magical correspondences with things the Tarot or things like the I Ching and Chakras and all kinds of things, and those systems of magical correspondences centered on the spherot, that is called Hermetic Qabballah, typically spelled with a Q. To what degree are all of these transversable? Do they speak to each other?

I would say that Christian Cabbalah and Jewish Kabbalah have a lot in common. That is to say, the Christians are trying to accurately understand the Jewish Kabbalah, they're hiring converted jews to translate texts for them, which are done in a range of quality. But the Hermetic Qabbalah, I would say, is so telephoned out from traditional Kabbalah that they share nothing in common.

I'll give one example: the first three sefirot, Keter, Binah and Chokhmah, those threee sefirot are utterly removed from the world. They're transcendent to the world. We only know them sort of through a glass darkly, to crib a phrase of Paul, I suppose. They're transcendent to the world, but in the Hermetic Qabbalah they just correspond to stuff in the world. Like, they correspond to planets and they correspond to astrology, they correspond to tarot cards. Any traditional kabbalist would look and that and go, you don't understand what these sefirot are.

Also, if you've ever seen the sefirot very neatly aligned, like the so-called Tree of Life, the eight Sechaim [SP?] configuration, that's an ideal configuration that would only occur at the end of the metaphysical process of their harmonization. They never occur like that actually now. They're always moving up and down, they're always in conflict with each other, they sometimes have a affinity with each other. Imagine those ten sefirot more like sort of vibrating electrons moving around you can never know quite where any of them are. That ten very neatly stacked tree of life configuration is completely idealized, and so if you read the Kabbalah, the Zohar for instance, it's all about them moving around and fighting with each other and mating with each other and generating each other and things like that. So, that's where the Hermetic Kabbalah says no... it fixes them in a kind of relationship and says let's superimpose upon that all these other kinds of correspondences and a traditional kabbalist would say "yeah, but that's like a fossil of the sefirot," that's not how they are actually in traditional Kabbalah.

So, yes I would say that if I read a text of Johannes Reuchlin, and knowing what I know about traditional Kabbalah, I would be like "okay, I can see where you're getting these ideas from." If I read a text by, I don't know, a modern occultist, it's unrecognizable to me. It's no longer Kabbalah in any way that I understand.

B: A great answer, I'd actually be very interested to see your perspective on Alan Moore's hermetic take on it now. I feel like now you have to read it and do a video on it.

Let's see, Frozen Trout asks, okay, all right, "If you had to eat every meal for the rest of your life from a single fast food chain, which would it be?

J: Definitely Taco Bell.

B: Definitely Taco Bell? All right.

C: Few things are as shocking to me as the prominence of Taco Bell among biblical scholars we have spoken to.

B: Yeah, our last episode, our last guest we had, I think we spent like a solid 40% of the interview talking about Taco Bell.

J: I would shill for Taco Bell. I would gladly... you know, I don't do sponsorships on the channel, but I would do one for Taco Bell.

B: Yeah.

J: And I would never have gotten through graduate school without it, because, again, as a kosher-keeping person, or kosher-ish, they're one of the only options I can have for like vegetarian food that's like fast food or whatever, and you know.

B: Yeah, yeah.

J: Being a diligent graduate student I spent a significant amount of time drunk, and so, you know, like, where else are you gonna get food at three in the morning and you know, you have to go to your seminar on Heidegger hung over and that's... the answer is Taco Bell.

C: Taco Bell get at us.

B: Come on, not a sponsor, but could be.

J: Could be, yeah, I would totally shill for Taco Bell.

C: We are your people!

J: In fact, if I ever get knuckle tattoos, not that I would, but if I ever get knuckle tattoos, it would definitely say "TACO BELL."

C: That's a good idea.

B: Taco Bell.

J: Yeah.

B: Aw man, aw man, and I will say specifically since you mentioned vegetarian that cheesy bean and rice...

J: So good

B: ...burrito for a dollar? Come on.

J: And also even for vegans Taco Bell's refried beans are vegan and so there's even options for vegans there which is pretty small, you know, slim pickings out there for our vegan folks in terms of the fast food world.

B: Yeah, yeah.

J: The very drunk fast food world

C: I do also want to point out and make sure that everybody knows that was not an edit there was no hesitation on this answer.

J: No there's no hesitation I would absolutely, like I said I would shill for them on the channel.

B: As would we. Get at us Taco Bell. Let's adjust it from last time we'll say, "what is pursuing the mysticism of the divine if not learning to live más?"

C: "What is ascending to a higher form if not running for the border?"

B: Yeah, absolutely.

J: The deep mystical reading of Taco Bell: I'm down for it.

B: All right, next question from Magwitch. Magwitch would like to know is Malkuth the fun part of the tree of life? I heard this as one interpretation of the material world and why spirits are always trying to get in but that was just one rabbi's idea.

J: It is an idea in Kabbalah that Malkuth which is kingdom, this is the realm of God's imminence, God's female, the Shekhinah, dwells amongst us and it's where we live as well. Malkuth is sort of "you are here." It's the lowest rung of the sefirot although not inferior in any sense to the other ones. There's a sense that unlike in some traditions where physicality is derided as thought of as bad, the body thought of as bad, but it's not an idea in Kabbalah.

There are stories in the Zohar where God is creating the first beings and the first Sabbath is coming in and God doesn't have time to give these beings bodies and these beings, these sort of incorporeal beings are called sheydim, demons. And the sheydim hate us because we get to have bodies and have fun. We can have sex for instance, we can eat food and drink wine. In the Kabbalah there's no sense of the body being bad. The body is a great blessing and so you're obligated for instance, if you can, to have sex on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is - the sanctity of the Sabbath is enriched by the sanctity of sex if you can you know. Of course it's heterosexual sex and marrige and all, you know. Of course you can imagine all the things that are gonna come along with that, but...

Yeah the Kabbalah is very pro-body very pro-wine it's all about like eating good food on the Sabbath and living in a body and thinking of the body as part of the image of God and so there's no sense in which the physicality or corporeality is bad and the demons the sheydim actually hate us because we have bodies and they don't and they want to have bodies.

C: Demons want Taco Bell.

B: That's right.

J: Exactly the demon the sheydim, they stand... There's even stories in some of these texts where you if you hear scratching that's the sheydim like scratching at reality trying to get into our world from the world of the Qlippoth because they can see us. In fact they're all around us the Talmud says that if you could see the sheydim, it would be all that you could see, there's so many of them. They're that ubiquitous. There're just so many of them. They try to get into our world, but they can't. But they can see us and we can't see them. It's like a two-way mirror kind of. Yeah, they see us eating and drinking and being merry and they can't stand it. You know that seven-layer burrito that you consume at Taco Bell? They want to eat a seven-layer burrito but they can't.

C: So when you are encouraged to have sex is it so the demons can see it?

J: You know there's a story, right, where this rabbi - there's a student/teacher situation like there always is. It's very common in Jewish lore to imitate your master, to imitate your teacher. You may imitate the way they talk or imitate the way that they dress themselves, imitate what they study. And famously this rabbi was having sex with his wife on Friday night, and he heard something beneath the bed. The student was down there to learn, you know, how this rabbi shags his wife. Obviously the rabbi chided him saying "what in the hell are you doing down there?" And the student said, "you know this too this too is Torah," so yeah maybe.

C: I believe that is from the medieval text "Porky's."

J: I remember that's from Saturday Night Live, Up All Night or whatever from the USA when I was a kid. I used to love those shows. But yeah, this is a tradition that has a lot of fun with itself in terms of you know sex and stuff like that. But yeah, I think the demons are angry as well that they can't have sex and yeah they can see you doing it. Although there's all these, you know, the Kabbalah has all kinds of technical specifications about how exactly you're supposed to have sex, and it's not as fun in the way that they want you to do it, but your mileage may vary.

B: That was a great answer with there was a lot more to that than I was expecting we might get.

C: Honestly incredible.

B: Yeah. For sure.

C: I'm thrilled by it.

B: Yeah. Well, okay, more comic book questions which are to be expected. Have you read the Immortal Hulk? Are you familiar with that series at all?

J: No I haven't read any comic books... The last comic book I read was the Maxx from like the '90s when I was a kid.

B: Oh my god.

J: Like Sam Kieth's the Maxx.

B: Oh we know it. We know what you're talking about.

C: Yeah we know about the Maxx.

J: Yeah so that was the last comic that I read. I still have them downstairs in my basement. I have like all of those comics from the '90s.

B: I will skip this question but I will say you should read the Immortal Hulk.

C: You should read Immortal Hulk yeah like that is one of the best comics ever.

B: A) because it rules but also B) it does use a lot of kabbalistic imagery throughout and it's in my opinion very well done.

C: That comic has one of the most incredible lines that should not be as good as it is which is "Does God have a Hulk?" Which is amazing, like in context.

B: Yes I mean and also it reflects some of the more mystic ideas right like sefirot and Qlippoth right, where there's God and there's a shadow of God. There's a tree of life and there's a shadow of the tree of life and so on.

J: And this is in Kabbalah. Evil emanates from the divine. There's no sort of there's not like a devil character who fights against God. It's actually the inner tensions between God's mercy and God's wrath and the excess of God's wrath becomes the Sitra Achra, the other side, the shadow realm of God but it's still God. And the kabbalists say that evil will be redeemed. In kabbalistic thinking you don't destroy evil. Evil is not to be conquered. Evil to be redeemed. And so even things like anger and you know lust and other things that are typically thought of as sinful the idea is that you don't not feel angry. You don't not feel lustful. Those are divine things too but they need to be converted and redeemed.

C: You have no idea how accurately you are describing the events of Immortal Hulk 1 through 50.

B: Yeah it's true.

J: And God does have a Hulk. It's called Gevurah. That's the Hulk part of God. The mean part or can be mean.

B: A perfect amazing answer. Thank you.

J: Sorry I don't know the comic book references.

B: No no no but I do...

C: I this is very illuminating.

B: Highest possible recommendation from both hosts of this show.

J: Okay yeah, I'll check it out.

B: Okay let's see moving on. Tricorn King, he has two questions. Number one is the kind of extremely specific question that he is known to ask. Are you at all familiar with any esoterica that have positive depictions of Esau and his descendants the Edomites preferably recognizing them as being equal inheritors of God's promise and blessing to Abraham but any positive depictions overall? Extremely specific. Thank you Tricorn King.

J: No definitely not in the Kabbalah. I mean Edom is thought of as the worst of the worst and it should be very clear the Kabbalah, the Zohar especially, is extremely xenophobic. It is emerging out of a world of extreme Christian persecution of Jews and it has nothing good to say about the non-Jewish world. The non-Jewish world is the world of the Qlippoth. It's terrible. It's bad. And Esau is always depicted in an extremely negative light. So yeah the Kabbalah there's no shaking it. There's no denying it. There's no like painting it to be prettier than it is. It was born of a world of extreme religious partisanship and ethnic chauvinism and for sure the stuff about Esau and the Edomites and all this is very, very negative. It's some of the grossest parts of the Sefer Zohar.

B: Oh wow. You know over time because of the Roman province of Idumaea doesn't Edom come to be heavily associated with the Romans specifically and like the idea of like imperialistic Gentile powers as a whole?

J: Yeah it's a long history right? So you're talking about the Talmud famously has a very low opinion of the Romans as you can imagine being the victims of Roman occupation. But yeah I mean Shimon bar Yochai in the Talmud even says that a snake and a Gentile share one thing in common: that they're both better without a head.

C: Dang! That is hard.

J: It's hard but it's like yeah, that's horrifyingly racist and bad and those sections are terrible and antisemites love those sections of the Talmud to quote it because you know, it's like great for them, you know their beliefs that Jews all hate Gentiles.

B: Yeah that kind of stuff is that's popping up in kind of popular discourse these days.

J: Yeah it's terrible. It's awful and but it's also born out of a you know Shimon bar Yochai was an anti-Roman kind of zealot. In fact even the rabbis of the day thought he was too extreme they thought he was kind of psycho. But the Zohar is based on him and so unsurprisingly it's going to contain a lot of this really hardcore anti-Gentile racism and yeah those sections... you know it's I'm not one of these people who says like hey we should just like woke the text and censor it and we shouldn't talk about those parts. I'm like no we should talk about them because their history and they're there and they're ugly and unfortunately history doesn't it's not going to give us all pearls.

And so I always say that you take the you have to take the good with the bad and the Kabbalah has many beautiful and amazing and cool and neat and bizarre ideas that are great for comic books and it also has horrifying racism that is also grist for the mill for religious nationalists who are very interested in you know imperialism in Palestine. So unfortunately it cuts in both ways.

B: Yeah, yeah. Okay second question from Tricorn King and this addresses a topic that has already come up but, "How do you approach Christian Cabbalah? While Christian Cabbalah did start out as appropriative in the 15th century we've had almost 600 years of iteration on it is there anything salvageable there if not what would you recommend as an alternative for any serious Christian looking for an esoteric tradition while trying to be respectful to their Jewish religious cousins?"

J: It's a great question I don't want to commit the genetic fallacy and say just because something was born of a pretty bad intention right the appropriation of Jewish mystical technology in the interest of trying to convert Jews to Christianity is not a great look. At the same time the Christian Cabbalists who I love to read - I read Reuchlin I read Pico. I think they're fine I think that what you should do is if you want to learn about Kabbalah and you're a Christian one should read and appreciate those texts all the while knowing they were created in an environment of religious polemic but also, I don't know reach out to a local rabbi and ask if you can join in a Kabbalah class or study a text with them or something like that.

I think it's that the hedge against the historical reality of appropriation and cultural imperialism the hedge against that is relationships with building relationships across lines of faith in order to better understand and appreciate each other and I think that there are ways for Christians to appreciate and even have the experience of being illuminated by Kabbalah including Christian Cabbalah including Hermetic Qabbalah without it being appropriative or something like that.

So I think it's the genetic fallacy to say oh because it was born out of this very specific somewhat malevolent intention that dooms the entire tradition to that that's fallacious reasoning. But at the same time I think that insofar as it is born out of that then the corrective is to build relationships across lines of faith so that when we appreciate aspects of each other's faith then we do that in a healthy relationship as opposed to inheriting all this somewhat dark stuff from the past.

B: That is a beautiful answer. Thank you very much for that. I know we're kind of brushing up on the end of our time together here so let's have Chris pop in with the final question of the day.

C: I appreciate that like you have revealed that you are going to be equipped to answer this because that is not always the case...

J: Oh boy.

C: ...with the guests we have on the show nothing against them of course but we all have our areas of expertise.

B: Some of our guests are better at this question than others that's for sure.

J: Okay.

C: I am considered an expert in some fields that do not often come up on this show that have given others the impression that I am some sort of clown.

B: Not me. I've never made such a claim.

C: Correct. Justin what do you think is the best Wolverine costume?

J: Oh wow that's a great question. I'm a victim of my time guys like I come out of like the animated X-Men animated series days and so like I can't not think of the X-Men without like the hi-hat drums of the 90s animated series so it has to be that Wolverine costume.

B: Okay.

J: Like, the yellow one.

B: So that's another for the Dave Cockrum iteration of the yellow and blue costume.

J: Yeah I think that's the... my brother tells me that they're recreating the 90s animated series to kind of pick up where it left off so I'm gonna go back and re-watch it.

B: Yes Disney Plus is doing...

C: There's a comic you should also read.

B: There's a comic X-Men 92.

C: It really does a great job of recapturing the feel...

J: The feel of it, yeah, you know, because that's like back then that was like the death of Superman days and like I was reading the like I said I was reading the Maxx and you know I was like really heavy into playing AD&D and really like sort of nerding out in a lot of ways. I can still remember the smell of like the comic book shop that I went to with like the... I think it's the smell of the vinyl comic book card holders was what I'm remembering. But yeah I think that if I had to pick a Wolverine it would probably be the 1990s version just because that's sort of like my touchstone.

C: Well look don't tell Dan McClellan that is the correct answer.

J: Well I don't know it's correct. I've never want to get over on Dan, and be part of you know taking down on his five minute takedown videos I don't want to drive by Dan McClellan.

B: We're going to log on to TikTok and we're going to hear me going or you're going to hear Chris going what's the best Wolverine costume and Dan's like all right let's see it and then he hears you say the X-Men cartoon and he's like actually it's the brown and tan from the 80s.

J: It's funny because I remember like arguing my brother like whose blades were sharper the adamantium blades or the Maxx's blades on his fists and I was like what strange debates 12 year olds have or whatever.

C: Obviously Wolverine's.

B: Obviously Wolverine.

C: Obviously Wolverine's adamantium claws.

J: I have no idea.

C: Now, if we're talking about bone claws Wolverine. You know we're getting this is getting into a different podcast.

J: Yeah it's different terrain, but yeah obviously growing up I was always a huge fan of Magneto. I always loved the Magneto stories and the whole you know Magneto tearing out the adamantium Wolverine was pretty epic.

B: Fatal attractions.

C: This is where I come in on the show.

B: This is where we are...

J: It's so funny because I'm like going to hit a wall. Yeah I'm going to hit a wall like in the late '90s and like once I do that like my pop culture nerd knowledge like dramatically drops off.

C: Well if you like Kabbalah you'll love Apocalypse the 12th.

B: Nope. One day though one day we're going to have a biblical scholar on this show who's like really into the Frank Quitely new X-Men Wolverine look, no shirt leather jacket. Someone's going to be into that. It hasn't happened yet but someone. Again great answer. Great guest. Before we end our time I did ask you if you could prepare for our listeners a brief list a small bibliography of introductory texts on your areas of expertise if they are interested in getting into Kabbalah or even more broadly Western esotericism. Do you have some books to recommend?

J: Sure I have a couple and this tends to go more in the direction of Western esotericism more generally but I could also recommend some specific stuff on Kabbalah. Wouter Hanegraaff Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed is the best starting place. If you just want to get into Western esotericism that's the best book in terms of getting you in. The bibliography is just worth its weight in gold. It's just an absolutely fantastic text. If you want to get into Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem's book Kabbalah is still the best place to start in my opinion. People will argue with me the scholarship has definitely moved on since Gershom Scholem of blessed memory, but it's still the best place to start. In terms of like some primary sources, if you want to really get into sort of occult philosophy Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy has a new translation out that's really, really good. So I would check that out. If you want a historical book of magic that's worth reading Dana Trell has a great translation of the Picatrix which is a historical book of magic. Though the translation of Agrippa is by Eric Purdue. If you want to get into studying Kabbalah like primary texts you can pick up basically any volume of the 12 volume Daniel Matt translation of the Zohar, and just, I don't know take 100 micrograms of LSD and have fun with that.

B: We did not officially endorse.

J: Yeah not officially that. But at any rate the translation of Daniel Matt is really, really good and it's just really fine. I would not recommend starting with volume one just because the introduction of the Kabbalah under the Zohar assumes you already know a lot about the Zohar, and so I would start with another volume. If you have a favorite story in the Bible and in the Hebrew Bible, the Torah you can always go to the Zohar and see what in the world crazy stuff the Zohar has to say about it. But yeah there's some basic texts.

I will say that the literature on the Kabbalah is pretty specialized unfortunately and a lot of it is still in Hebrew and Aramaic and so getting access to primary literature is still really a challenge. The fundamental text of 16th century Isaac Lurianic Kabbalah still haven't been translated to English. So I always tell people, they're like, "Yeah I want to go read the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria." I'm like, "It's not translated." "Well I want to go read the Kabbalah of Moshe Cordovero." It's like, "It's not translated." So unfortunately we're living in a world in which a lot of this stuff is still in the original language so learning Hebrew might be in your future.

B: All right great recommendations and as ever we will get links to those books up on our wiki for our listeners who are interested. Those will be up as soon as possible. All right thank you for being such a great guest. Thank you for your recommendations. Thank you for your good humor and putting up with us. Before we let you go why don't you let our listeners know where they can find you online, where they can follow your work, if you're on any social media platforms, etc. Where can they find you?

J: They can find me just on YouTube on my channel Esoterica. I don't have any other social media because it scares the ever living hell out of me. I have a Reddit account so I'm on Reddit sometimes but otherwise than that I'm just on YouTube under Esoterica. So if you just go to YouTube and search for Esoterica you'll find me.

B: All right as I said at the top of the show absolutely recommended for listeners of this podcast. There are so many videos on so many different topics. Absolutely if you like this podcast you will find something you're interested in on there. They're just full expansions on topics that we've only been able to cover you know a few minutes at a time. Deep dive into the development of Lilith across a couple of videos for example. Absolutely recommend the Esoterica YouTube channel. All right Dr. Justin Sledge thank you so much for coming on our show and making time for us. We know you're much in demand.

J: Thank you. Thank you guys. It's been a lot of fun. I'd love to come back on if you ever want me back on.

B: Anytime. Anytime.

J: Absolutely.

B: If you ever have anything to promote or anything absolutely hit us up. We'll make time for you.

J: Wonderful. Well thank you guys. It's always great to be on the podcast where they're actually like fun because sometimes they're just like really dry and like gotcha like hey let's talk about this one Aramaic verb for 15 minutes. And I'm like that's... I do like that stuff too. That's a part of me that likes that but also there's like oh yeah I could talk about Taco Bell and Wolverine. That's great.

B: Yeah there you go.

C: The next time they do that just be like, yeah well I mean you know Logan didn't have his memory when he joined Alpha Flight.

J: Totally change the topic. I appreciate being on a yeah a lot of fun guys. Thank you for having me on.

C: Start going deep into X-Men lore and see how long it takes them to realize it.

J: Realize it... You know that you guys know that when my one of my April Fool's Day jokes I translated a section of I translated Apple Bottom Jeans into Hebrew and then explicated as if it were a part of the lost section of the Zohar. And my guess was that people who like Apple Bottom Jeans and people who read the Zohar and in the original language won't be part of the same Venn diagram. And so they're definitely people that were watching it up and for 15 minutes long until they realize like hold on this is just Apple Bottom Jeans. That is my humor translating Apple Bottom Jeans into Aramaic and tricking a bunch of Kabbalah people.

C: Wonderful.

B: Amazing.

[MUSIC: "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel]

C: Incredible conversation with Dr. Justin Sledge. Folks if you know someone at Taco Bell, tell them, let them know.

B: If you know that little dog who I know is still around from the '90s, let that dog know. We'll gladly talk about a crunch wrap.

C: Yo quiero advertising dollars.

B: Exactly absolutely.

C: But until then we are not supported by Taco Bell. We are supported by you our generous listeners who go to https://ko-fi/apocrypals where they can kick in as little as a dollar - any amount of money in chat.

B: Any amount of money.

C: As little as a dollar as much as your wallet will bear.

B: That's right.

C: Which even when we have these long gaps between episodes people are continuing to support us and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that.

B: Absolutely. It is necessary for the continuance of this show. It is how we pay our bills. It's how we pay our editor. You can do one-time donation or you can set up a recurring monthly donation in any amount any increment. We appreciate everyone who does that. Goes to ko-fi.com/apocrypals ko-fi.com/apocrypals - name of the site slash the name of the show. Thank you to everyone who does that. It is literally how we do the show. Cannot emphasize.

C: Yes. It has been known to keep roofs over heads.

B: Yeah. So until those Taco Bell dollars roll in, until Nabisco comes around with that sweet Fig Newton endorsement check. Please please help us out. We need you. You're our only hope like they say in the Space Wizards movie. If you like the show, you want to know more about us. We are on various forms of social media primarily Bluesky. Do not hit us up on the old place anymore. I do not look at it. I don't like it. Find us on Bluesky. We're just apocrypals.bsky.social.

Otherwise, if you want to join the discord or if you already forgot the link to our ko-fi or whatever, the best source for links to all of our stuff is the Apocrypals wiki, which is get ready: apocrypals.wiki. So if you go there, you can find an episode list. There are transcripts of some episodes, not every episode, but some episodes have transcripts. You can find links to the bonus episodes, list of rawest verses, links to our Bluesky to our Tumblr to the horrible clown car that is our discord server direct to our Libsyn page, how to make a donation. You can find a link to our merch page where you can find wonderful designs by Erica Henderson and Tom Fowler. Those also go to support... Well, those go to support those artists, but it is another way to help us out.

Otherwise, rating or review on your podcast app of choice. Mention us when people ask for podcast recommendations on Reddit or wherever. Tell your coworkers about us. Sometimes write the name down on a napkin or something because they will probably not spell it correctly in their brain. Every little bit like that helps us out. If you were a writer for a major piece of media that would like to feature us, that would be a cool thing that you could do. I don't know if that had occurred to you, but put us on the news, for example, boy, that could be good for the show. Maybe question mark?

Thank you to everyone who has done those things or has considered doing similar things. Otherwise, if you want to find stuff about us individually, you can find me. I'm also on Bluesky, Benito Cereno, all one word, dot bsky, dot social. I'm on there. I'm not on the old site. My old site account is locked. Do not send me a request because I will not approve it because I'm not going there. I'm not doing it. So find me on Bluesky. Find me on Tumblr. Find me on discord. Find me on Instagram.

Most importantly, find me on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Benito Cereno. And you can follow my independent work, my various Latin translations. I am starting a new translation project. I will be doing officially a translation on the book that my master's degree project was about. It is a satirical sci-fi novel from the 18th century about a guy who falls into the hollow earth and lands on a planet full of talking trees. It is a major influence on subsequent science fiction and fantasy. And it is also weird and funny. You can check that out. I will also be posting updates to the new complete ground up rewrite of my book on Christmas stuff. So if you're interested in that, please sign up to my Patreon. Patreon.com slash Benito Cereno. But also you can subscribe without paying. You can follow my page without any money. Also, if you want to give me money but not subscribe, I also have a store on there where you can buy PDFs of my stories of my King Arthur translation, children's books. I got different stuff out there. So check out my Patreon. Chris, what about you?

C: Everybody can find all of my stuff by going to the-isb.com that has links to everything. Well, I guess it doesn't have links to everything. I haven't updated it since I got my account on Bluesky, but I don't actually want anyone to follow me there. I don't really talk to anyone there. I just post panels from manga that I'm reading.

B: Mm-hmm.

C: Which currently getting ready to put up some really raw stuff from Fist of the North Star.

B: Ooh, nice.

C: Yeah, that's it. That's where you can find me. But yeah, hit up Benito's Patreon, hit up all of our various ways for you to give us money. And hey, if you also like that 90s X-Men cartoon, X-Men '92: The Adventures Continue, a nice big paperback from Marvel Comics is available now that you should look into. And perhaps someone whose podcast you enjoy will get a check quarterly.

B: So let me also recommend the Invincible Universe compendium.

C: Yeah, you should do that!

B: That is another good way to put some money in the pocket of someone you like who needs it.

C: I genuinely get so excited. I've been in the store and I've seen Atom Eve action figures.

B: Yeah.

C: And I've gotten so excited for you.

B: Yeah. Seeing that episode, if those of you don't know what I'm talking about, the Invincible cartoon on Amazon Prime this past summer, they did a special episode based on the character of Atom Eve, which was pretty closely based on a miniseries that I wrote back in 2000 something. So it was very cool to see a story that I wrote adapted for television. It was extremely cool. Yeah, but if you want to see the original story, you can get it in the Invincible Universe compendium, which has a total of like 11 issues written by me and then a bunch written by Phil Hester, who is one of the coolest guys in comics. So you should read his parts too.

C: One of the all-time greats.

B: Yeah, absolutely.

C: Legitimately, yeah.

B: Absolute banger as a writer, artist, and a human being.

C: Phil Hester.

B: My spiritual uncle, Uncle Phil.

C: Meanwhile, the Walter Elias Disney Corporation keeps putting out merchandise brand that is X-Men '97, and for some reason, due to mental illness, I feel personally insulted by that.

B: I feel that, but also every time I see X-Men '97 and it just looks like the cartoon and it's not like Maggot and Marrow, I'm like, "That's not what was going on in '97." You'll need to get it together.

C: Yeah. Yeah bud. Yeah.

B: Get it together.

C: Get it together.

B: If it's not Cannonball with a middle part fighting Gladiator, that's not '97.

C: All right, folks, that's it. Please join us next time. Chronicles is coming soon. We will be doing our episode on Chronicles. That's going to be our next one, and it's not going to take as long. God willing, on the creek don't rise. And Benito's throat continues to be relatively okay. But please join us for that. And thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the show. Thank you to Dr. Justin Sledge for joining us for a really, really fun interview that I did not know was going to help me understand Persona 5 more, but absolutely did. Next time, Chronicles, for Benito Cereno, I've been Chris Sims. Don't forget, everybody, Black Lives Matter.

B: Trans rights are human rights.

C: As are abortion rights.

B: Drag is not a crime.

C: Cops aren't your friends.

B: And free Palestine.

C: Until next time, Benito, peace be with you.

B: And also with you.

[MUSIC: "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel]