Engraving from John Martin’s Seventh Plague of Egypt, 1872

When Moses came down the mountain a second time his face shone brightly, in a way that may remind us of the story of Enoch. The Tabernacle was built, a model of the whole cosmos, and the “glory of the Lord” appeared in it before all the children of Israel.

But one day God informed Moses that he wasn’t the wisest man on Earth. Moses was intrigued. God also told him where to find this wise man—at the “confluence of the two seas.”³

We can identify this place as Bahrain, which means “two seas” or “twin waters.” Divers off the coast of Bahrain can still descend through sea water today to swim in streams of fresh water.⁴ This mysterious phenomenon—caused by vents on the seabed which emit fresh water from vast underground lakes—is called “the divine springs from which flow the paradoxes of life” in the commentaries on the Koran. In Islamic mysticism, the pure water is a manifestation of the spirit that “in the beginning” gave rise to the opposite of spirit, which is to say matter. The salt water, on the other hand, is a manifestation of this matter, and this coming together of opposites accounts for the mysterious and paradoxical quality of life.

We will return to this paradoxical quality, but here we may take it simply as a sign that the story we are about to hear is a strange one.

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Moses set out with his servant to find the wise man. They traveled a long way along the seashore and by midday Moses was growing weary. He told his servant to prepare their meal. At this point the servant had to confess that when they’d stopped to rest earlier, he’d left the fish for their supper behind on a rock.

“What! You forgot it? We must go back and fetch it.”

“No, the strange thing is that the fish—which was well and truly dead, I was certain of it—was just lying there when a large wave crashed against the rock and a drop of water landed on it. Suddenly it came alive again and leapt from the rock into the sea!”

Moses recognized this was a vital clue. The seemingly miraculous rebirth of the fish meant that they had been close to the confluence of the two seas.

They retraced their steps and Moses was surprised to find sitting on the rock a wild-looking old man, bearded and dressed all in green. He looked forbidding, angry, perhaps even a little mad. He made no gesture of welcome or recognition.

“May I walk with you,” said Moses, “so that you can teach me your superior wisdom?”

“You won’t be able to keep up with me,” said the old man, “and besides, you will understand nothing of what I do or say—nothing!”

“I’ll ask God to help me understand,” said Moses. “And I will obey you in all things.”

“If you must follow me around,” said the man, “I have one condition: you must not question anything I do.”

Moses followed the old man as he set off along the shore with surprising speed. After a while they came to a harbor. The old man found a boat moored there. He sprang into it and stamped furiously on the bottom of it until water glugged in. As he stood back to admire his handiwork, the boat started sinking.

“What on Earth have you done?” said Moses. “Do you want the owners of this boat to drown?”

“You have already forgotten your oath?” asked the old man.

Moses apologized.

They set off at the double and after a short while Moses saw a young man coming toward them from the other direction. He was astonished when, without warning, the old man drew a sword from somewhere within his cloak and ran him through, killing him.

As they stood over the bleeding corpse, Moses was breathless. “Are you mad?” he said. “You’ve killed an innocent man!”

The old man raised a reproving finger. “What did I tell you? You can’t bear God’s wisdom, can you? You can’t cope with it.”

Moses said that if he ever questioned the old man again, he’d accept that they would have to go their separate ways.

The old man moved off with great speed again.

In the evening they came to a small, isolated village. It appeared poverty-stricken. No one came out to greet them. The old man bustled over to a ruined wall and began to build it up again with prodigious energy. Moses dared not question him. When the wall was finished, he merely commented that the old man could have charged for all that work.

The old man said, “This is where you and I go our separate ways, but before we part I will explain to you what I have done today. The boat belongs to a poor family. Local landowners are requisitioning all the boats in the area to fight a war. They won’t bother with a boat that needs repairing. The boy I killed was full of evil intent. He was planning to convert his family to demon worship. Now a new, loving child will be born to his parents, who will be a joy to them all their lives. That wall belongs to young orphan boys. Their father had hidden some treasure under it and died before he had the chance to tell them. If the wall hadn’t been repaired, the treasure would have come to light while the boys were still too young to defend themselves. Now they will find it at the right time.”

Moses kept his head bowed while he listened, wanting to concentrate and make sure he took it all in. When he looked up, the old man had disappeared.

Who is this strange figure to whom the mighty Moses defers? He reappears in different guises in the course of sacred history and we shall meet him again shortly.

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The Old Testament has different names for different aspects of God, including the Elohim in the act of creation, and Adonai, or “the Lord.” Yahweh represents a particular aspect of God to do with helping humanity to develop a capacity for reflection, for thinking. We saw in Chapter 8 that in earlier times the whole body was experienced as an organ of consciousness and of perception. As well as head consciousness people had a heart consciousness, a kidney consciousness (expressive of desire), and so on. This sense of different centers of consciousness within the human body was suppressed in the time of Yahweh, as humanity began to forge a “mono-consciousness” envisioned as having its seat in the head.

Mount Sinai, where Yahweh made his revelation to Moses, is literally “the mountain of the moon.” In esoteric terms, Yahweh is seen as reflecting the sun’s light by means of the moon, a cosmic arrangement that makes human reflection possible.⁵

Modern science has come to appreciate how necessary the moon has been for the development of life on Earth. It is responsible for the tilt of the Earth that keeps our climate within the narrow band suitable for organic life. Science has also begun to measure something that folk wisdom has always appreciated—the effect of the phases of the moon on human psychology. A statistical survey on lunar cycles and human aggression carried out in Florida by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and published in 1978 showed that violent assault and murders peaked around the full moon.⁶ But esoteric and mystical philosophy also proposes something altogether more fundamental: that it is only because of the positions and cycles of the sun and moon in relation to each other and to the Earth that we are able to think. The moon reflects down to us the light but also spiritual life of the sun, and because reflected light is weaker than direct light, we can as a result consider spiritual influences that would otherwise dazzle and overwhelm us. Because of the moon we have the capacity for free thought and free will that the angels—who see God directly—do not.⁷

The second of the ten commandments brought down from the mountain of the moon, not to “make any graven image or any likeness of anything that is heaven above” is a commandment to stop thinking in pictures and start thinking conceptually and in abstract terms. It is interesting that scripts said to have been dictated by angels are usually pictorial in content, not conceptual. Again, it may be that we are capable of conceptual thinking in a way that angels are not—and that this is part of what they need from us.⁸

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It was in about 2500 BC, at the beginning of the period that historians call the Late Bronze Age, that Moses traveled toward the Promised Land, carrying with him this newly developing mental faculty. He caused great havoc and destruction among the tribes that stood in his way.

The king of the Moabites, afraid for himself and his people, sent messengers to a seer called Balaam. When Balaam eventually reached the king, he told him the last thing he wanted to hear: that Israel would succeed in battle.

This turned out to be true. God sent an angel out before the Israelites to drive out the Moabites, the Canaanites and other indigenous peoples. Some parts of the biblical narrative giving an account of the Israelites’ progress toward the Promised Land make uncomfortable reading. In one grisly episode thousands of Israelites were slaughtered on God’s instructions. God sent plagues and deadly, fiery serpents. Chapter 31 of the Book of Numbers makes outstandingly hard reading. Inspired by God and commanded by Moses, the Israelites killed all the local kings, took women and children as prisoners and burned the cities. Some commanders were reprimanded for allowing the indigenous womenfolk to live and told to kill all male children. Thirty-two thousand virgins were kept as slaves.

Rainer Maria Rilke, the great poet of angels in modern times, was asked whether, if he cried out to the hierarchies of angels and an angel responded and suddenly held him to his heart, he would be utterly destroyed by it. “Beauty,” he said at the beginning of the Duino Elegies, “is nothing but the beginning of a terror we are scarcely able to bear.” In Rilke’s poetry, angels are the agents of the care the cosmos has for us—but we are ill-equipped to understand them or their work. The fire of divine love may appear as a terrifying and destructive force.