Bashert

[Javblanc]

The Jewish tradition has coined the Yiddish word BASHERT (literally "DESTINY") to designate the twin flame, the predestined couple of each one, the soul with which one was created. In Yiddish, a fiancé is referred to as a basherter, and a fiancée a basherte. Medieval Kabbalists talked at length about that destined companion, who will ensure our soul is complete. In The Secret of the Marriage of David and Bathsheba, Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla (13th century) explains that “when a being of the male sex is created, his female sex spouse is necessarily created at the same time, because a half form is never created in the Higher World, but a single, whole form.” And in the Zohar, we can read: “All the world’s souls, who are the fruit of the labour of God Almighty, are mystically one, but when they descend upon the World they are separated into male and female. They are together throughout the first creation, and then they are separated, one towards the right (the male), the other towards the left (the female), and then God joins them in couples; God, and only God, for only He knows the appropriate spouse for each soul. Happy is the man who is righteous in his work and follows the path of the truth so that his soul can re–encounter his original spouse, and he can become effectively perfect, and through his perfection, the whole world is blessed.” (Sefer ha–Zóhar I, 90b) Since, according to their conception, the twin flame completes one's own soul, the Kabbalists gave this search for “the other half” a crucial importance of a metaphysical order. That is why they devised a range of "magical" procedures (what is known as ‘practical Kabbalah’) to locate the twin flame.

[Javblanc]

Kabbalah is full of references to the twin souls, starting with the Zohar and other medieval treatises such as "The Secret of the Union of David and Bathsheba" by Josef Gikatilia, and ending with Isaac Luria, the last of the great kabbalists. According to Kabbalah, the complete human being is male and female at the same time, and thus was created. But as a result of the Exile of the Shekinah (the "wife" of God), the human being created in divine image and likeness split into two halves. And it is these two halves that we know by the name of "twin souls" (Bashert in Jewish terminology). Quoted from Sefer-ha-Zohar: “Before coming to this Earth, each soul and each spirit is composed of one man and one woman united in one single being. Descending to Earth, these two halves are separated and sent to incarnate two different bodies. When it’s time for marriage, God unites them as before.”

Therefore, the Jewish sages symbolised God (although it’s a multipurpose symbol) with a six–pointed star, the star –or shield– of David, which upon closer inspection appears to consist of two superimposed and intertwined triangles. The Chinese sages also represented what they called Tao –which would be Divinity– with that dual appearance. The “naked eye” appearance of the Tao is the Tai Kih, the Great Essence, represented by an empty circle; the x–ray is the yin–yang, represented by that same circle helicoidally divided into two halves: a white half –yin– corresponding to the female principle, and a black half –yang–, the male principle. (To symbolise that both principles are also present in their opposite, the white zone has a black circle and vice–versa.)

This bi-unity, this intrinsic Duality in the Unity, is reflected, according to the Kabbalists, in the Ark of the Covenant, where the Divine Presence resided (meaning, the Shekinah, which the Kabbalists later personified and to whom they gave the role of God’s Wife… but let’s not complicate this any more than we need). Over the Ark’s mercy seat rose the Kerubim, two gold chiselled “Cherubim” whose presence was not accidental, it was part of God’s instructions for Moses to build the Ark: “And you shall make two cherubim of gold; of hammered work shall you make them” (Exodus 25:18). And because God does not do anything, or orders anything to be done without having a good reason, the kabbalists asked themselves, when it comes to the Cherubim, what could that good reason be? The Scripture says that they contemplated the sacred Ark, but also each other, “their faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be” (Exodus 25:20). The two Cherubim represented, kabbalists concluded, the divine Spouses, in whose image and likeness twin flames were created. Even though it’s not specified in the instructions for the Ark’s construction, kabbalists ruled that the Cherubim were of the opposite sex. They based this idea on a grammatical circumstance, which is that to say “two”, the Exodus does not use the word shene but shenayim, which, contrary to the former, expresses not a mere Duality but a Duality of opposites. They went even further and, in spite of each Cherub standing on one end of the Ark, they deduced from their face–to–face position, that they were embracing each other, being that embrace the very image of the perfect union, of the Yichud, of God’s Unity for the Kabbalah.

[haroldsails]

Fascinating, thank you Javblanc. Can you recommend further reading ??(accessible online)

[Michel Leclerc]

Haroldsails, you are not asking me but Javblanc. Because I am a little familiar with the Zohar, I allow myself to give you my opinion.

I would recommend reading the Zohar. The classical English translation is the one by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon (published by the Soncino Press). A better translation is however the French one by Charles Mopsik (published by Verdier), if you master French. Mopsik’s Notes are masterly.

Two additional notes.

The Zohar is basically a Medieval compilation of texts of about a millennium earlier (more or less contemporary with gnosticism and early Christianity) heavily edited and synthesised (in the good sense). All such texts, whether they are Jewish or Christian or Mandean or Manichean or “Pagan” (Hellenistic syncretism) are indebted to earlier Greek thought, specifically Pythagorean thought and Plato, and of course Plotinus (the Enneads). Quite a lot of what is in the Zohar profits from being compared with such earlier thinking: the Greeks clarify the Zohar.

The second note: don’t read it on the Internet. Buy it: the Zohar is a book (or a small collection of books) that is there to stay (in your library). Its occasional study is an excellent echo-chamber.

It follows that buying Pythagoras’ Golden verses, the pre-Socratic Greeks Parmenides, Heraclitus and Empedocles, Plato himself and Plotinus‘ Enneads will enrich your thinking enormously. If you have studied them, you will agree, I guess.

The Master of Masters, who brings it all together in one supreme synthesis, is however the “greatest Shaykh” of Islam, Ibn ‘Arabî. The most brilliant introduction to him is written by William Chittick, who also wrote an excellent book on Rumi.

[Javblanc]

Ever since I had a powerful déjà vu experience with a girl who crossed my path at the age of twenty (see the thread 'My Love Story' in Spirituality, Remarkable Personal Experiences), I have been doing extensive research on this theme of the bashert (soul mate). I found that Jewish tradition is not the only one that abounds in references to it. I have put everything in writing. The result is a book that I gladly put at your disposal. I have tried to attach the pdf here, but it seems to be too long. I'll try to get the Avalon library to accept it as a donation. In the meantime you can do one thing: send me a private message indicating your email and I will send you the book as an attachment. This also applies to anyone interested in the subject: send me a message or an email so that I can give you my book. Best regards

P.S. My book is now available to everyone at the Avalon Library. The English version, but also the original in Spanish. You choose.

ENGLISH:
https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Xav...t%20Wisdom.pdf

SPANISH:
https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Xav...%20Antigua.pdf

[Javblanc]

At the beginning of the 19th century, a new form of trance was discovered by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer. It was a trance state akin to somnambulism and received the name of Animal Magnetism. In addition to medicinal uses, this trance or ecstasy was eventually found useful in various fields, such as the treatment of mental illnesses and, coincident with the appearance of Spiritualism, the contact with spirits. Louis Alphonse Cahagnet (1809-1895) was one of these early hypnotists specialized in the Hereafter (a method widely used later by psychic researchers, such as Brian Weiss or Michael Newton). In reference to the book by Cahagnet “The Celestial Telegraph or Secrets of the Life to Come Revealed Through Magnetism", the spiritualist historian and member of the Society for Psychical Research Frank Podmore stated: "In the whole literature of Spiritualism I know of no records of the kind which reach a higher evidential standard, nor any in which the writer's good faith and intelligence are alike so conspicuous." ("Modern Spiritualism" 1902).

Here are some examples of the testimonies related to love and marriage collected by Cahagnet from his hypnotic subjects:

"Since we meet again in families, no doubt the husband rejoins his wife _ "Yes; but they do not live as on earth, on our impure love; they live like brother and sister."—" What! there is no love in heaven? _ "There is a love unknown to the earth, and incomprehensible to those who are on the earth; it may be compared to a chaste and pure friendship."—" Are all beings assembled there in pairs?" _"Yes. This union of two beings is the foundation of all happiness."

Another testimony, provided in a later sitting:

"Every being has his complement awaiting him in heaven... Every being that is born is double, whether man or woman and we meet each other in heaven even though we may not have met on earth... They meet again at the same time in heaven; but, though born at a different period, she will, nevertheless, rejoin her half to complete it, and live with it in a union as pure as holy".

This one is from another spirit and from another medium:

"Every being is created double, and sooner or later united to his half... But every one meets not forthwith with his own... However, in the superior heaven where the reunion, the junction of the two halves, is definitely effected, each half is penetrated with a holy love for his partner, whom none can either envy or dispute, each having his own half, from whom he could not divert the least affection."

The main medium of Cahagnet's sittings was Adèle Maginot to whom the following testimony belongs:

“Are unions or marriages formed in the place where you are? _ "We marry, as on earth, with this difference: that it is for eternity. We can never more separate inasmuch as we can not be united unless an exact resemblance exists in the affections, the mode of thinking, and all that constitutes perfect happiness."—" Is the woman we have married on earth the one who becomes our wife in heaven? "Not always. We are much better acquainted with the affections and defects of each other, and God would not suffer an unequal match, as on earth."

[Javblanc]

THE HIDDEN WIFE

For many ancient sages, man's twin flame is the Eve before the Fall, the Eve that was contained in Adam before God removed her from his side. Let's take a look at a group of seventeenth century Christian theosophists. In the texts of Jakob Boehme and his disciples, Adam’s original “hidden wife” is called Sophia. (They borrowed this name from the Gnostics: that is what they called God’s feminine person.) The Boehminists reserved the name Eve for the earthly, “fallen” wife: the manifested wife, the wife after divorcing her husband. For them, “Sophia” was not a woman’s name like “Eve”, it was a Goddess name, and in their texts they referred to her as such. “Celestial Virgin” or “divine Virgin”, they called her. And they insisted that it is this Woman for whom men feel true longing: she is the secret object of their quest for the twin flame. And any man who believes he has quenched his thirst for love by marrying Eve on Earth is merely fooling himself with a pale imitation, because, deep down, it is with Sophia he aspires to marry. With Sophia, who had been his wife in the past, in the Origin. (Notice that I am talking from a male perspective –I am following the theosophists in this–; but evidently, this subject has two sides. If we were to stand on the opposite side, we would talk about Eve’s original “hidden husband”, whom we would not call Adam but some other name, so we could distinguish the “hidden husband” from the manifested one.)

A Tarot card will help us visualize this dilemma between Eve and Sophia.

Tarot cards are the prototype for the modern playing cards, but unlike these, Tarot cards enclose hidden meanings. Meanings encrypted in them by their creators, probably members of some medieval underground society, who wanted to secretly disseminate through those cards their esoteric knowledge. There is a card of this mysterious deck that appears to illustrate a philosophical dilemma, the false quandary between the “celestial Woman” and the “earthly woman”. In The Lovers, Tarot’s sixth Major Arcana, we can see a man who, at some point in his path, arrives at a crossroad. This crossroad is personified by two women; one is wearing a crown, the other is not (in some versions, this other one is wearing a crown made of grape leafs). One represents the heavenly Woman, the other the earthly woman. Both women have also been seen as embodiments of spiritual and carnal love respectively. In one of the oldest versions of this card, from the Marseille Tarot, a winged archer –Cupid– hovers above the man and, given where his arrow seems to be pointing, appears to be favouring the earthly woman. Apparently, the man is attracted to both women, but he must choose one and so his heart is torn.

This Marseilles card is rich in meaningful details. For one, the earthly woman is so similar to the man that one could say they are twins: the same facial traits, the same expression, the same blonde hair, the same simple clothing. Whereas the woman wearing a crown looks nothing like him. In fact, he and the blonde woman seem to form a couple: they are facing each other, one next to the other, in a sort of embrace (the brunette and crowned woman is standing in the foreground, in profile). Everything points to the man having arrived at that place in the company of the blonde woman; that is when the other one appeared to him, and now there he is, torn between the two… We could suppose that the card’s author was aware (and that would be the card’s hidden message) was aware that the right solution to the dilemma of The Lovers is not to choose one of the two women. Because, deep down, they are one and the same, just at two different points in time. The celestial Woman corresponds to a distant past (and a distant future also), when she was still contained in Adam; while the earthly woman is the woman of today, the woman after God removed her from Adam's side.

[Javblanc]

SALAMAN & ABSAL
Persian literature is rich in love stories featuring couples of androgynous children who, having grown up together, are traumatically separated, and then spend the rest of their lives looking for each other, until finally they reunite and get married. These couples tend to be brothers and sisters, or cousins. Some titles are Gushtasp and Ketayuna, Mihr and Mushtari, Warqah and Gulshah, Houmay and Houmayoun… But among all these, perhaps the most famous one –thanks to a celebrated Arabic version by the Sufi poet Jami– is a text originally written in Greek amidst the Hermetic circles of Alexandria: the story of Salaman and Absal, which goes a little something like this:
A king entrusts his son to the care of a young nursemaid (in other versions, Salaman and Absal are brother and sister). Salaman grows up very close to Absal. With each passing year, it becomes increasingly clear that they are in love with each other. But the king is not willing to allow such matrimony and thus decides to separate them. First, he tries to accomplish this through subtle means, but he fails. Then he decides to kill the young woman. But Salaman is one step ahead of him and he flees with his beloved. He flees, we are told, “beyond the Western sea”. (This escape, in reality, is an exile: in the ancient sages’ symbolic geography, the West stands for the lower world). The king resorts, then, to his magical arts and he puts a spell on the lovers so that it becomes impossible for them to consummate their union (which substantiates the essence of the Exile: the loss of the Tawhid, the privileged state of perfect union, of non–separation or non–Duality). Unable to unite as before, the young lovers opt for suicide, and so they hold hands and cast themselves into the sea. But the king, who is spying on them through a crystal ball, summons the spirits of the water to save his son. However, Absal’s death makes this rescue effectively useless, as Salaman’s grief was so powerful it was on the verge of killing him. His father takes him to a sage who, mysteriously, assures him: “A few days will suffice me to cure him and to make Absal his companion for eternity.” Salaman agrees to spend forty days in invocations in a cave, just as the sage prescribes (caves were considered to be the ideal place for initiations). He also accepts the conditions he is imposed to recover his beloved, the main condition being that he must not love another woman. He must also dress like Absal, in what we can observe an exponent of an ancient practice in initiations: that of dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, often those of the spouse herself, with the purpose of symbolically restoring the individual to his lost half.
Salaman, then, enters the initiation cave. Following the sage’s directions, he progressively interiorises Absal. With each passing day, he sees her more beautiful in his heart, until, at the end of the symbolic forty days, it appears to him that it’s not Absal who he sees. In her place, he sees a divine Figure, a feminine Figure of extraordinary beauty: the goddess Venus (“Sophia”, Jakob Boehme would call her). Salaman, then, turns his back on Absal and can only think of this goddess: “O Sage! I no longer wish for Absal. In this Figure I have found a sign that has made me averse to the company of Absal. I desire nothing but this Figure.” But the sage reminds him of his commitment to not love another woman: “Now we are nearing the moment when the return of Absal, who shall be restored to you, will signify the fulfilment of our prayers”, he tells him.
At the end, his twin soul is indeed returned to him, and in such a way that nothing will be able to separate them ever again.

[Javblanc]

BANU UDHRA (“THE SONS OF VIRGINITY”)

One of the greatest connoisseurs of medieval Arabic and Occitan erotica is the Frenchman René Nelli. His book The Troubadours Erotica is an essential reference to students of courtly love. Courtly love is the Middle Ages’ heroic love, a love that was praised and advertised by those poets who composed music for their verses and sang them, the troubadours. In the strictest sense, the troubadours were the Occitan poets who sang in Provencal (a language very close to catalan) during the twelfth and thirteenth century, although there were later troubadours from all over Europe, singing in different languages. The troubadour Guiraut Riquier describes his brothers as “men with the God given gift of wisdom, made to bring clarity to the Universe”. Many troubadours were professionals who made a living travelling from castle to castle during the warm months. The troubadour’s natural audience was the nobility: the ladies and knights of the court, always eager to listen to the new songs composed by the troubadours. Those summertime trips were like the tours of modern day singer–songwriters, except back then there were no airplanes or freeways to shorten the distances. But to compensate for this, there were jongleurs, much more numerous travelling musicians, thanks to whom the troubadours songs could travel quicker than the artists themselves, spreading their music over a wider audience.

Before the Occitan troubadours, there were the Arabic poets and reciters, whose main subject was heroic love as well, pure and naked love. Nelli summarises the conception of erotic love implied by their verses: “Just like the soul is superior to the body, so spiritual love, by nature, is superior to physical love. Arabic chastity, then, cannot resemble in any way Christian continence. It was not a mortification pleasing to God, but the only way to reach the true essence of love… (For the medieval Arabic poets) continence has an esoteric value… it corresponds both to the only love worthy of this name and to a true mystic revelation, leaving the plane of earthly realities way behind. Consequently, for them, chastity was intrinsic to love: love demanded chastity.” (L’érotique des troubadours)

Talking about the Arabic ideal of chastity is talking about Udhra love, which is how courtly love is known in the Arab world. The name comes from a tribe who flourished between the seventh and eighth century in the Southeast of the Arabian Peninsula, in a remote valley in Yemen. The Bedouin tribe of the Banu Udhra, the “Sons of Virginity”, produced many poets; with the peculiarity that Udhra poetry is monothematic: it deals with one single issue, spiritual love. But, in addition, the Udhra poets practiced what they preached: they became famous for cultivating the type of love they put into verse; a pure and chaste love, so intense (its intensity came from its purity) that it was said they “died of love”. The Arabic chronicles of the time tell about Udhras dying of no particular infirmity, but of love towards their lady. Otherwise, Udhra love verged on mysticism, on religion, to the point that orthodox Muslims denigrated and accused it of interfering with the worship of the Most High.