George Sassoon and Rodney Dale

First published in 1978 by

Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd

The Old Piano Factory

43 Gloucester Crescent, London NW1

© 1978 by George T Sassoon & Rodney A M Dale

ISBN 0 7156 1289 1

At the end of the thirteenth century, a Spanish Jew, Moses Ben Shem Tov of Leon, wrote a work - the Zohar - which immediately became a best-seller. For centuries, it remained one of the three most important works of Jewish literature, the others being the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.

The Zohar is divided into sections or books, and four of them are of special interest: The Greater Holy Assembly, The Lesser holy Assembly, The Book of the Mystery, and The Assembly of the Tabernacle. We call these 'the texts'.

The oral traditions upon which the texts are based are said to go back to the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and the forty years' wandering in the wilderness. Furthermore, they are different in character from the rest of the Zohar for they describe, in minute detail, something called 'The Ancient of Days'.

The Ancient of Days comprises two main parts - the Ancient One and the Small-faced One. It can be taken to pieces, cleaned and reassembled. Amongst other features, the assemblage has skulls, a brain, eyes, noses, beards (divided into several parts), testicles and a penis. What can the Ancient of Days be?

Conventionally, 'Ancient of Days' is thought of as an epithet for God in Heaven, but can He really be thought of in the terms outlined above? There are three possibilities.

First, it could indeed be a description of God in Heaven, but we can rule this out unless (a) God is really like this and (b) the writer knew that God is really like this. Second, it could be a description of God by a fanciful mystic (or a school of fanciful mystics). Third, it could be a description of something other than God, known as the Ancient of Days.

The third possibility seems the most appropriate, because there is always a clear distinction drawn in the texts between God in Heaven (The Holy One, Blessed be He! - QB"H) and the Ancient of Days. Of course, the Ancient of Days could be another heavenly resident, but apart from this being inconsistent with monotheism, the texts give a very clear statement of what the Ancient of Days does (or did):

The dew distills into the skull of the Small-faced One ... and from this dew they grind the manna ... and the manna did not appear to he derived from this dew except at one time; the time when Israel was wandering in the desert…

It was these words which first suggested to us that the Ancient of Days, far from being God - or even a god - was a machine for making the manna which nourished the Israelites during their desert wanderings (Exodus 16, Numbers 11, Deuteronomy 8, Joshua 5, etc.).

Our technological interpretation of the texts is presented in our book The Manna-Machine, published simultaneously with The Kabbalah Decoded. In The Manna-Machine we lay bare the description in all its anthropomorphic detail, matching it piece by piece to similar machines made today for oxygen regeneration and food production in closed environments.

The Kabbalah Decoded presents the full translation of our interpretation is based; we must therefore say something of their provenance.

A full discussion of the Zohar is to be found in Professor Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and in his article in Encyclopaedia Judaica. Interested readers will find there all they need to know about the work, its author, and the effect it had on Jewish thought. Here, we will confine ourselves to describing the path by which the Zohar found its way to us.

As we said above, the texts were first written down at the end of the thirteenth century by Moses of Leon. They are generally said to be written in Aramaic, but Moses' style is so peculiar that we have termed it 'Zoharese'.

Hand-written copies - many still extant - circulated until the first printed editions became available in 1559, when two editions were published simultaneously in Italy - at Mantua and Cremona. In 1677 a German mystic, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (whom we call KvR), published a parallel Zoharese/Latin text: Kabbala Denudata. KvR saw the texts as mystical, and added 'interpretations' of his own to his Latin, which served to make the result even more mystical in appearance.

At the end of the nineteenth century an English magician, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers - founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and first mentor of Aleister Crowley - translated Kabbala Denudata into an archaic form of English. His style was presumably yet again to reinforce the mysticism; his purpose was no doubt to provide material for his magical rituals. Mathers added comments of his own, and published it under the title The Kabbalah Unveiled; it has been in print ever since.

It was Mathers' book which led us to the conclusion that the Ancient of Days looked very like a manna-machine. It was clear, however, that we would have to embark on a new translation of the texts if we were really to find out what they said, and this we did. We were not disappointed, and here we present our new translation.

We refer to our predecessors as KvR/Mathers, and it is worth saying something about their work. They did not translate The Assembly of the Tabernacle; they confined thenselves to the other three books. We can see from Kabbala Decoded that KvR was familiar with both the Mantua and the Cremona Codices. Mathers, however, states that his version is 'translated from the Latin Version of Knorr von Rosenroth and collated with the original Chaldee and Hebrew text'. Chaldee is another name for Aramaic - what he meant by 'collation' is not clear to us. He offers some transliterations, especially where the effect is mystical or has some numerological significance. There is evidence that he could read the original text, but he is honest in telling us that he translates 'from the Latin Version', since he omits parts which KvR has in his Zoharese but not in his Latin.

Neither is the state of Mathers' knowledge of Latin clear to us. To take an important example, we have the title SPRA DTzNIOVThA. KvR gives 'Siphra de Zenultha seu Liber mysterii sive occultationis'. We know that the original means The Book of THE Mystery, indicated by the emphatic Th. We also see that KvR has used 'seu ... sive . . .', a construction indicating alternatives. Mathers has gilded the lily by translating both mysterii and occultationis - The Book of Concealed Mystery. Whether this was in the interest of mysticism rather than of accuracy, or whether he just didn't know, cannot be ascertained. There are many places in the texts where KvR/Mathers have strayed from the straightforward translation, even without its mystical overtones. We would not, however, underestimate our gratitude to Mathers; whatever his shortcomings, his book served to draw our attention to the texts.

If the texts describe a manna-machine, they must indeed be drawn from traditions which date back to the time of the Exodus, for it was then that the machine was producing its manna. No authority would commit himself to saying that the material cannot be this old, though some have said that its age is irrelevant. We cannot see this argument. If our theory is to be tested, it is of the greatest importance that the antiquity of the texts should be discussed.

Many questions have been raised in the course of consideration of the dating of the texts. Some have suggested that the Zohar must post-date the Bible because of the wide use of Biblical quotations in the Zohar, but this does not prevent such quotations coming from common stock. Neither should we rule out the possibility that Biblical quotations may have been added because they seemed apposite and assisted with the memorisation of the material.

Another criticism which has been levelled at our interpretation is that some of the ideas expressed in the texts are to be found in early Gnostic writings. Again, we would say that this is hardly proof that these ideas could not have come from common stock.

Then again, we are told that the ideas in the Zohar are expressed in terms consistent with the times in which they were it written. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. However, ideas very often are expressed in contemporary terms without the ideas themselves being altered - a survey of through the ages will confirm this. And if the material were circulating orally, there is no reason why some of it should not have leaked out and found its way into contemporary thought.

It is up to the proponents of a non-technological Zohar to find another explanation for the extraordinary correlation between the texts and a descriptive manual for a manna-machine, not to mention the light which our work throws on the origin of so much religious tradition and practice.