Whisperers

by J H Brennan

  Jochebed herself became pregnant, but the child was born prematurely, thus allowing her to conceal the birth from the Egyptian bailiffs who, while they watched pregnant Hebrews carefully, were not expecting so early a delivery. She successfully concealed the baby for three months despite the fact that her home was guarded, but the father of the child, Amram, became increasingly concerned that it would be discovered, an eventuality that carried the certainty of death for them all. Consequently, he decided to leave his son’s fate to God and ordered his wife to abandon the baby. Sources vary as to where the child was left—some claim it was on the shores of the Red Sea, others that he was floated away in an ark on a river, usually specified as the Nile. There is closer agreement on what happened next.

  It appears to have been particularly hot in Egypt at the time and much of the population suffered from boils. Among them was Thermutis, a daughter of the pharaoh, who went to bathe in the Nile to seek relief from her pains. There she saw a small ark floating in the water and suspected it might contain one of the infants exposed for drowning on her father’s order. When her servants refused to fetch it, afraid as they were of contravening the pharaoh’s edict, Thermutis retrieved it herself. The little vessel did indeed contain a baby boy23 whom she decided to name Mose (or possibly Tutmose) and bring up as her own.24 Consequently, Moses was reared as a prince of Egypt, with the inference that he was educated in religious, political, civil, and military matters. For all this, he somehow discovered his Hebrew origins and went as a young man to visit Goshen. Tradition has it that he was so appalled by the treatment meted out to his people that he abandoned life at court to come and work among them. One day he witnessed an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew, probably to the point of death. Jewish legend has it that the Egyptian had previously slept with the man’s wife and was anxious to get him out of the way. Moses was appalled by both the dishonoring of the woman (who became pregnant) and the beating. When no one else would intervene, he stepped in himself and killed the taskmaster.

  Angelic spirits watch over the infant Moses in this artistic depiction of his early legend.

  It proved an act impossible to keep secret. Within days, two Hebrew brothers, Dathan and Abiram, betrayed him to the pharaoh who, according to some sources,25 ordered his execution. Moses fled to northwestern Arabia, to what was then the country of Midian. There he married Zipporah, a daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro, and for some years he attended to her father’s flocks. One day, while roaming the wilderness in search of pasture, he saw in the foothills of Mount Horeb a miraculously burning thornbush that somehow survived destruction by the flames. As Moses approached, a voice issued from the fire, introducing itself as the god of his forefathers and ordering him to deliver his people out of their slavery in Egypt.

  The best-known version of this story, a precis in the scriptural book of Exodus, gives the impression that this was Moses’s first brush with paranormal phenomena, a unique experience of divinity that shortly led to the establishment of the Jewish religion. In fact, if rabbinical tradition is to be believed, spirit voices and visions played an important part in the Mosaic dialogue right from the point of Moses’s birth.

  Moses’s father, Amram, belonged to the priestly tribe of Levi and attracted a reputation for extreme piety even among that august company. When Jochebed became pregnant—apparently much to the surprise of all concerned—Amram found himself in a state of confusion: the pharaoh Seti had not only decreed a general separation of Hebrew couples in order to lower the rate of pregnancy, but he had issued his notorious order for the slaughter of any male children whom the couples nonetheless managed to conceive. In his perplexity, Amram turned to God for guidance and was rewarded by a spirit visitation in a dream: God “stood beside him in his sleep” and prophesied that:

  the child out of dread of whose nativity the Egyptians have doomed the Israelite children to destruction, shall be this child of thine and shall remain concealed from those who watch to destroy him and when he has been bred up, in a miraculous way, he shall deliver the Hebrew nation from the distress they are under by reason of the Egyptians. His memory shall be celebrated while the world lasts, and not only among the Hebrews, but among strangers also.26

  Moses’s sister, Miriam, seems also to have been prone to visions: she experienced a white light in the house at the moment of her brother’s birth and prophesied he would grow up to redeem Israel. Later, when the babe was abandoned in the ark, Pharaoh’s daughter is believed to have experienced a revelation of the archangel Gabriel and an appearance of the Shekinah (the feminine aspect of God) in the vessel with the child. When the boy was two years old, she had another spirit visitation, this time from an entity claiming divinity who endowed her with the name Bithiah, the “daughter of God.” In a fascinating aside, the tradition mentions that in face of her pious deeds, she was permitted to enter Paradise alive—an echo of the pharaoh’s own shamanic journeys into the spirit worlds.

  Tradition records a further example of spirit intervention when Moses was two years old. During a banquet, the infant, who was seated on his mother’s lap beside the pharaoh, took the crown from the king’s head and placed it on his own. The act was interpreted as a significant omen and there was immediate discussion as to whether the child should be put to death. Pharaoh, however, decided the matter needed more deliberate consideration and called together a council of “all the wise men of Egypt.” These worthies appeared with the disguised archangel Gabriel in their midst, who suggested testing the child with a choice between an onyx stone and a burning coal. Moses convinced everyone of his stupidity when he picked up the coal and tried to eat it, burning his lips and tongue. The act left him slow of speech for the rest of his life—something mentioned at a later point in the biblical version of his story—but saved him from execution.

  Jewish folklore also suggests the burning bush was not the first instance of a spirit voice communicating with Moses himself. When he visited Goshen as a young man, witnessed Hebrew suffering for the first time, and made his decision to leave court and work among his own people, he heard a disembodied voice proclaim: “Thou didst relinquish all thy other occupations and didst join thyself unto the children of Israel, whom thou dost treat as brethren; therefore will I too put aside now all heavenly and earthly affairs and hold converse with thee.”27 There is also a tradition that when Moses eventually fled from Egypt after killing the overseer, he was led to safety by a vision of the archangel Gabriel.

  There are substantially more mythic accretions to the Moses story, many of which are doubtless the miraculous fictions that attach themselves to every powerful religious figure. However, the examples already mentioned have a ring of veracity about them in that they follow a well-established pattern of voices and visions, culminating in a major revelation. Analysis of this revelation produces some interesting insights.

  In the version given in Exodus, Moses had a vision of an angel who appeared in the midst of a flaming bush. Tradition identifies the angel as the archangel Michael, associated with the element of fire, and suggests he had appeared as a forerunner of the Shekinah who was shortly to descend from heaven. A voice within the flames then called out Moses’s name, but when he went to investigate he was told to halt and remove his shoes for he was approaching holy ground. At this point in the biblical account, the voice introduces itself as “the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”28 The expanded version of Hebrew tradition introduces an additional element of considerable interest to the present thesis: the voice that called to Moses was, recognizably, the voice of his father, Amram.29 It was a long time since Moses had seen either of his parents and he had no way of knowing whether they were alive or dead.

  The legendary interpretation of Moses’s burning bush contact contains an apologia for this curious development. God realized that Moses was a novice in the art of prophecy and reasoned that if he spoke in a loud, godlike voice, the man would be alarmed. But conversely, if he sp
oke softly, Moses might not take his words seriously. Consequently he elected to mimic the voice of Amram, as a reassurance. After explaining the ruse to Moses, God then set about confirming his own bona fides by having the angel Metatron arrange a trip to the seven heavens accompanied by a thirty-thousand-spirit bodyguard. The descriptions of the seven heavens are fanciful in the extreme but carry hallmarks of genuine shamanic experiences, including the visions of Merkava mystics.30

  Following this experience and a spectacular trip to hell, the voice then charged Moses with the task of freeing his people from their bondage in Egypt, which by now was under the rule of Rameses II, one of the most powerful pharaohs in Egyptian history. Not unreasonably, Moses demurred. The voice in the bush instructed him to explain to Pharaoh that he had been sent by YHVH (Yahweh), a name translated in the King James Bible as “I am that I am” but held in Jewish mystical tradition to be an acronym for the ultimate Name of God that must never be pronounced aloud. When Moses complained that he was unlikely to be believed, the entity taught him what amounted to three conjuring tricks—changing a rod to a serpent and back again, creating a temporary illusion of leprosy in one hand, and changing water into the appearance of blood—designed to impress Pharaoh. During Moses’s subsequent meeting with the pharaoh, however, they did nothing of the sort and it was only after a series of plagues that the Egyptian king finally released the Hebrews from servitude.

  Throughout his verbal battles with Pharaoh and during the long nomadic period that followed the Hebrew release, Moses was in almost constant communication with his spirit voice. Eventually it led him and his followers back to the familiar location of Mount Horeb (Sinai) where he had seen the burning bush and there delivered a major communication that was to change the social history of the entire Western world: the dictation to Moses of the Decalogue or Ten Commandments. The act took place in a dramatic thunderstorm, witnessed from a distance by Moses’s followers. It created a social structure unlike any that preceded it, backed as it was by claims of divine authority. Scriptural sources give the uninterpreted rendering as follows:

  And God spake all these words, saying,

  “I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

  “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

  “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

  “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

  “And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

  “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

  “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

  “Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work:

  “But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

  “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

  “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

  “Thou shalt not kill.

  “Thou shalt not commit adultery.

  “Thou shalt not steal.

  “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

  “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.”31

  Interestingly, the spirit voice also gave Moses detailed instructions on how to construct a device that would aid communication from then on, the Ark of the Covenant, which, like the god-statues of old, was to provide a dwelling place for divinity. (Later scriptural reading shows, however, that it was more often used as a weapon of war.)

  Although exhibiting an apparent simplicity, the commandments have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. While the first is often claimed to be a statement of monotheism, this is clearly not the philosophical monotheism of modern Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The spirit tacitly acknowledges the existence of other gods and insists only that they should be seen as subservient to Yahweh. There is controversy too about the ban on “graven images” used as objects of worship. On the face of it, this applies to the statues of other gods worshipped as divinities in their own right throughout the ancient world. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the statue was the god, so that their prohibition would seem to represent little more than a step beyond the first commandment, which insisted other gods must accept the ultimate authority of Yahweh: now they must be banished altogether. But scholarly investigation suggests the prohibition originally applied only to images of Yahweh himself,32 thus emphasizing the importance of direct communication with deity of the type Moses himself seems to have enjoyed throughout much of his adult life. At the same time, the ban on “taking the name of the Lord in vain”—now generally seen as a prohibition against swearing—has been interpreted by some scholars as attacking the use of the divine name for magical purposes, notably the evocation and control of other spirits.

  There is, however, no controversy at all about the far-reaching influence of Moses’s mediumistic activities on the history of Western humanity. Nor, as we shall see in later chapters, was he the only man to make contact with a spirit and in so doing change the world. But before continuing an examination of such individuals, the chronology of our narrative returns us to the more broadly based spirit contacts of other early civilizations.

  4. MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

  ACCORDING TO PLINY THE YOUNGER, ROME’S FAMOUS LAWYER, author, and magistrate:

  There was at Athens a mansion … of evil repute and dangerous to health. In the dead of night … a specter used to appear, an ancient man sinking with emaciation and squalor, with a long beard and bristly hair, wearing shackles on his legs and fetters on his hands … Hence the inmates, by reason of their fears, passed miserable and horrible nights in sleeplessness … The mansion was accordingly … abandoned to the dreadful ghost.

  However, it was advertised … [and] … Athenodorus the philosopher … read the advertisement. When he had been informed of the terms, which were so low as to appear suspicious, he made inquiries, and learned the whole of the particulars. Yet … did he rent the house.

  As evening began to draw on … the shaking of irons and the clanking of chains was heard, yet he never raised his eyes … The noise … approached: now it seemed to be heard at the door, and next inside the door. He looked round, beheld and recognized the figure he had been told of … and followed it. It moved with a slow step … and after turning into the courtyard of the house vanished suddenly and left his company.

  On being thus left to himself, he marked the spot with some grass and leaves which he plucked.

  Next day he applied to the magistrates, and urged them to have the spot in question dug up. There were found there some bones attached to and intermingled with fetters; the body to which they had belonged, rotted away by time and the soil, had abandoned them thus naked and corroded to the chains. They were collected and interred at the public expense, and the house was ever afterward free from the spirit, which had obtained due sepulture.

  The above story I believe on the strength of those who affirm it.1

  In this account, Athenodorus’s practical, down-to-earth approach to the ghost reflects his culture. Ancient Greece was populated by an expansive pantheon of divinities who, while theoretically resident on the distant peaks of Mount Olympus, were intimatel
y involved in every aspect of human life. The supreme deity, Zeus, guarded the home, ensured the sanctity of oaths, protected storehouses and supplicants, insisted on the gift of hospitality to strangers, and brought justice and safeguarded the city, among a host of other duties. His lesser companions took over where he left off: Eros was in charge of love, Selene governed the moon, Demeter protected agriculture, and so on, almost endlessly, so that spirit intervention was accepted as a rule of nature and a fact of life.

  Scholarly analysis suggests classical Greek religion emerged from a blending of Cretan goddess worship and, later, more masculine elements personified in the mighty Zeus himself. But the roots run both deeper and wider than that. Any study of the subject will reveal an uneven, but clearly recognizable, development from primitive magical practice to official state religion. The progression extends from a type of nature worship where spirits were thought to animate the wind and the waters, to a more sophisticated religious expression in which the gods appeared in human form. Yet even at its most developed, the magical element remained, most noticeably visible in popular cults that simply associated natural forces, flora, and fauna with specific gods and goddesses. Overall, religious expression in classical Greece was an amalgamation of early Aegean and later Indo-European elements, with the former including Minoan and Mycenean survivals dating back to the Bronze Age. Against such a background, it comes as little surprise to discover evidence of widespread spirit contact. Among the most intriguing sources were the Greek Mysteries.

  Although often referred to as a religion, the Mysteries were actually an induced religious experience. Tradition has it they were founded by Orpheus, the legendary singer who charmed beasts, birds, rocks, rivers, and trees with voice and lyre. Ancient genealogies date him to a time prior to the thirteenth century BCE, but scholarly investigation is content to fix a later date, somewhere in the fifth or sixth century BCE, which saw the emergence of Orphic groups dedicated to a life of purity, with dietary restrictions and sexual abstinence. The similarity to shamanism has been noted and shamanism is accepted as one of the roots of Orphism. Its main expression, in those early days, was its staunch support of the individual, leaving one free to choose whatever form of worship he or she wished—a novel idea at the time. There is some suggestion of spirit contact, notably in the activities of the priest-prophet Pythagoras, who around 500 BCE, seems to have channeled Orpheus in some of his writings. He certainly attributed portions of his own work to Orpheus without, however, establishing any satisfactory historical provenance. The emphasis within Orphism on “Orphic” poetry, with its traditional evocation of the Muse—herself a spirit creature—is another small pointer in the same direction. But the prime manifestation was in the Mysteries themselves.