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By Root 2305 0

the good and the evil. The good souls (neshamot) of the righteous, both created and as yet uncreated, fly around the Throne of Glory. The basic scheme of Daniel is kept intact, however, even though we have some attention to immortal souls in the document, as souls in the intermediate state (after death but before resurrection) are also described, followed by the souls of those who are damned forever. These are probably the oppressors of the righteous community in the book of Daniel, reinterpreted as sinners generally. They are described as permanently stained black, like the bottom of a pot, while the intermediate souls only go down for a temporary cleansing, from which they emerge unstained.

In this passage, the immortality of the soul has been absorbed enough to compel the writer to describe judgment as an eternal process. But note that the enterprise of cleansing souls and reincarnating them mediates the stern judgment of the unrighteous that we find in the more apocalyptic texts. In Jewish mystical texts, the process of combining immortality of the soul with the resurrection of the body has yielded to a more merciful heavenly economy than was evident in Christian apocalypses.

Metatron also becomes the leader of innocent little souls who died studying Torah, as Jesus is described as the special Lord of little children in the Gospels (Mark 10:14). Here, the children play under the Throne of Glory, the same place that the souls of the martyred saints are stored in the book of Revelation.

Those who have died early must be accommodated in the divine hierarchy, so morning daycare has been arranged for the innocent souls who have been taken from life before they have had the opportunity to study the law and live their full span. Their education must be completed in heaven. Because they died in innocence they are treated in ways that were reserved for martyrs.

Hekhaloth, Iranian Religion, RASC, Magic, and Hermetism

MERKABAH MYSTICISM is later than some of the apocalypses we have studied, though the two corpora must certainly overlap and influence each other for a long time. At the same time, there are many facets of the literature which are undoubtedly from the early levels of Jewish tradition and which could, in fact, inform us about the mystical practices of the communities that produced apocalyptic literature. From the apocalyptic literature we can assume that many of the themes are early-including the notion of secrets and even the theurgy, the ascensions, angelic worship both as an object of speculation and an object of adoration. Indeed, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain an explicit angelic sabbath liturgy. All of these things, we see amply evidenced in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament.

The heavenly ascents of Kartir and Arda Viraf, reviewed in chapter 4, “Iran,” are set in the third century CE. While the Arda Viraf Nameh is likely to be an early Islamic document in Zoroastrianism, the inscription of Kartir is much earlier. In Iranian religion, the use of psychedelic drugs has been firmly established and so the heavenly journey is also clearly a journey inwards into the psyche, replete with all the details of Zoroastrian heaven and hell.

The connection between these heavenly journeys and ecstatic experience is quite a bit earlier than the Arsacid period. The stories of Enmeduranki (equivalent with Enoch), Adapa, Etana, and others were cherished foundational stories among the divinatory priesthoods of ancient Mesopotamia. So the possibility exists that all these mystical techniques were already being practiced in the ancient prophetic and divinatory arts of ancient Mesopotamian culture.

If so, we should see their existence in the Hellenistic world as a secondary development to an entrepreneurial culture that developed under Greek rule. All over the world of late Antiquity traditional priesthoods were in decline and religious entrepreneurs of all types learned priestly traditions for personal spiritual and material benefit. In the process, they spread these ancient traditions far and wide.

There is little evidence