Satan Never Tempted Me - A brief digital history of an odd little tune

“Ol' Enoch he lived to be three-hundred and sixty-five when the Lord came down and took him up to heaven alive. .” - Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Dry Bones

There is an old song recorded by the folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928 under the title Dry Bones (Click Here to hear the song via Archive.org), I draw your attention to it due to the fact that it has rather odd lyrics for what seems to be an ordinary folk hymn. The lyrics of the last verse in this recording are odd enough that the Wikipedia entry on the song actually omits them in favor of an alternate version found on the webpage of contemporary folk singer Judy Cook.

The song begins without any controversy, yet after a few brief verses recounting the story of Enoch’s translation into heaven, Paul’s escape from prison, Moses and the burning bush, and Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones coming to life, Lunsford intones an eerie concluding verse that takes us back to the temptation in the Garden of Eden:

“Adam and Eve in the Garden, under that Sycamore tree, Eve said to Adam, Satan never tempted me. I saw, I saw the light from Heaven shining all around. I saw the light come shining, I saw the light come down.”

In Cook’s version she changes Eve’s statement to the more orthodox - “Adam, Old Satan is a’tempting me.” Although Cook discovered the song via Lunsford’s recording, the version she uses changes the last verse to fit a rendering of the subject that balances with the standard Christian reading. Ironically Lunsford was known to alter and omit lines himself when he felt that they were too risqué for the educated Appalachian ‘hillbilly’ persona that he cultivated in his performances. The fact that this verse was included in his song means that they did not strike a particularly off chord with him. It's interesting to note that the description of the song on Archive.org does the same alteration as the Wikipedia entry and quotes the verse that Cook uses rather than Lunsford's clear singing of "Satan never tempted me" in the recording.

On her web-page where the altered lyrics of her version are found she includes some history on Lunsford’s recording saying that ‘he first heard (the song)…from a traveling Black preacher named Romney who came through western North Carolina.’

Lunsford was a lawyer in professional life and a careful folklorist, the idea that he might have mistaken the controversial last verse seems unlikely and it proves to be much more fruitful if we return to the previous examples and examine what underlying theme connects all of these familiar Biblical stories and ties them together with this strange rethinking of the story of the Fall.  The answer is surprising considering the source – the theme is gnostic revelation, not the mixed bag of heretical doctrines that so inflamed the early Christian church, rather it is gnosis in its technical sense, that of a direct and intimate revelation of the Divine source. It’s a different sort of heresy, the kind that got Jesus nailed to a cross.

It also appears to be the kind of heresy that causes innumerable sources to innocently skew the lyrical content of a simple folk song without recognizing that they are damaging the oral transmission of a very potent spiritual teaching.  This simple little tune contains within it a key that opens up the Biblical narrative in a way that centuries of scholarly theological speculation, academic acrobatics and comparative analysis has failed to do – and it came from an itinerant evangelist passing through North Carolina in the early 20th century.

I can’t take any credit for discovering Lunsford’s recording, it was a link to the piece on Archive.org and a brief note from the contemplative mystic David Chaim Smith that lead me to it. He said quite simply – “This song has a very esoteric meaning if you understand the implications.” Mercifully Smith’s book The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis, now in its second edition thanks to Inner Traditions, helps illuminate the issue:

“The serpent is called “Nachash,” which has a numerical value of 358. This number shares gematria with the word “moshiach” (messiah). This suggests that the same power that can awaken the hearts of human beings can also cause confusion and antagonism. Creative tension is such a power. If its essential nature is recognized, then gnosis can be realized. However, if conventional fixation habitually contracts the brilliance of Ain Sof, then endless grasping will continually usurp creativity to manifest endless egoic nightmare scenarios. Life is what mind produces, and its habits determine the manner in which it will manifest. Thus the power of creativity inherent in the serpent stands at the cusp of discernment between the two trees in the garden and the two paths they represent.”

Smith’s book focuses on the first three chapters of Genesis, however, as we can see from the song and his explanation of the term nachash the implications of these teachings stretch throughout the Old and New Testament. In the introduction he indicates how exceptional the mystery implied by this song truly is when he points out that “hidden within the first three chapters of Genesis rests one of the greatest jewels of Western mystical literature. Proper appreciation of this is rare. For millennia religious literalism has dominated the role of the Bible, imprisoning its subtle inner wisdom within the most coarse and superficial aspects of the narrative.” Those familiar with the writings contained in the Zohar, Sefer Yetzirah and other classic kabbalistic texts will be surprised at the ease in which Smith opens up their seemingly impenetrable mysteries and reveals the Biblical narrative as a powerful source of non-dual contemplative teachings. Those unfamiliar with kabbalah will still be astonished at how the Bible, a text that has become so commonplace and derided in our society, offers them far more insight into gnostic contemplative practice than the material being churned out for the contemporary spiritual market.

So how did a wandering evangelist in North Carolina end up with a folk song that contains a core aspect of one of the deepest contemplative mysteries of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Perhaps he simply “saw the light from Heaven shining all around.” The oral tradition has a living power to it that defies attempts at easy explanation. Suffice to say, after listening to Lunsford’s tune or reading The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis the next time you’re in a hotel room you’ll look at that Gideon’s Bible a bit differently.

Click Here to visit the Inner Traditions website for more information on The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis.

Click Here to visit David Chaim Smith's webpage for more information on his work. 

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

Qabbalah and problems regarding spatial metaphors

The following is something I jotted up to a friend as an explanation about something I said in passing on the phone with him about spatial metaphors and the Kabbalah. I assume it'll expand and work its way into the Immanence of Myth. I also have more to say about the first point, some of which was inspired by an article of Mimi Lobell's that John Lobell sent to me recently. Perhaps some of you will find it useful or interesting, if not this'll serve as a reminder to myself. Any conversations that spin off of it are always welcome- questions and conversations in many ways are helping to direct the expansion of this project.

We constantly make our metaphors spatial, often when we are not actually referring to a spatial relation. This could even be the crux of the metaphor. For instance, we commonly say something like "I'm feeling pretty up" or "I'm feeling pretty down." There's a sense that we immediately understand from these metaphors that bears no relationship with reality. In other words, even though it shouldn't make sense, it makes perfect sense. This is the nature of a metaphor, we don't say "she ran like a deer," we say "she was a deer." There's a sense in which something that is logically untrue is true in another sense; the conjoining of these two or more ideas tells us something about its nature, even though the actual statement is false.

(This is an element of mythological thought that has caused no amount of trouble in religion, clearly, but that's not what I want to get at.)

The Qabbalah is in many ways a spatial as well as numerological metaphor created to deal with metaphysical ideas that could not possibly be dealt with in such subtlety in any other way. So a structure was built that allows us to relate these very abstract ideas with one another in a way that is very concrete and intuitive to us: a spatial "map," the tree of life.

Further, it was well recognized by priests and scholars alike at the point of the birth of Kabbalah (anywhere between the 4th and 12th century), that the divine could not exist separate from anything. That is to say, the divine cannot itself have qualities, for to have a quality is to acknowledge the absence of a quality, (if God is light then does darkness exist without God? How can anything exist outside of the absolute/infinite/etc.) Yet if it is without qualities, then how can it be said to exist at all? They worked around this issue with the tree, by saying that all of these seemingly distinct elements are essentially the result of an element outpouring to the next- they are not only linked but actually inseparable.

This "tree" is broken up into what are essentially layers of reality, called Sephiroth (סְפִירָה, "eminations"), from the tangible and material (Malkuth) to the completely meta-physical (Keter). These are connected by paths which correspond to the psychological states apparent in the transition from one of these layers to the next, and as such though there are dense correspondences associated with the Sephiroth, the associations for the paths are more narrative. This is most clearly seen in the association of the Major Arcana cards of the Tarot - or the archetypes they represent - with those paths. (FN The Major Arcana are distinct from the other cards, in that they represent archetypical personas that can also be seen as "journey states," such as the Fool and the Magus. There's a lot in the Book of Thoth on these two, not to mention the Golden Bough, Arthurian legend especially the legend of Parcival, or even Apocalypse Now for that matter.)

The usefulness and meaning of these "associations" is possibly best understood not only psychologically but also anthropologically. This quotation from Claude Levi-Strauss is strangely appropriate: "The customs of a community, taken as a whole,
always have a particular style and are reducible to systems... the number of systems is not unlimited and... in their games, dreams, or wild imaginings... human societies, like individuals, never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repetior... By making an inventory of all recorded customs, of all those imagined in myths or suggested in childrens and adult games, or
in the dreams of healthy or sick individuals or in psycho-pathological behavior, one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemical elements, in which all actual or hypothetical customs would be grouped into families, so that one could see at a glance which customs a particular society had in fact adopted."

Though this is not the intention of the 'original' Kabbalah we see in the Sefer Yetzirah or Zohar, it is nevertheless what it evolved into, through the practices of Christian and Jewish mystics alike, taking on its penultimate form - in this regard - in the so-called magical orders of the Victorian age. And although much of the analysis and charts of associations produced by these groups may arguably be flawed or at the least culturally biased themselves, and though they are to some extent subjective in any case, it is nevertheless an analytical as well as creative tool too useful to be simply overlooked. These charts, and an explaination thereof, is best found in works like Israel Regardie's Garden of Pomegranates, Dion Fortune's Mystical Kabbalah, or a great deal of Aleister Crowley's work, most particularly the Book of Thoth, Magick In Theory and Practice, 777, and Book 4. (At the same time, all of these should be approached with some degree of skepticism.)

However, in bifurcating the divine, an inherent heirarchy is created within the tree of life so long as you think of that spatial metaphor as literal, that Keter is "above" Chesed or Netzach, that one "ascends" to "travel" from Malkuth to Yesod, etc. None of these are the case- they are metaphysical and psychological realities which have no spatial reality. They are only said to have that as a way of thinking of them, as otherwise we simply can't wrap our head around it. It's a small lie to avoid a larger one. The only truth to the tree of life is actually Ein Sof, the unmanifest which all of the sephiroth eminate from, and even then, in an oddly Hegellian realization, the rabbis later created the idea of Ein Sof Aur, the boundless possibility to pair against the unmanifest, almost Sunyata like-ness of Ein Sof. Sunyata is the Buddhist void which is also the ground of being, both are essentially the same concept, or in this case, category, since Sunyata and Ein Sof both represent the true
monad which simply cannot be conceived, nor thought of as anything other than a quality-less void containing in potentia all possible qualities. (The idea of Sunyata may be argued to contain both Ein Sof (the negative aspect) and Ein Sof Aur (the positive) within it, but this is irrelevant to the point.)

You can see in the duality of ideas such as Ein Sof and Ein Sof Aur that we are actually incapable of creating a truly monistic concept without at least implying a duality behind it, (and often a trinity behind that). It is difficult to say if this is simply a barrier of our own nervous system or an inherent quality of the universe beyond perception- when thinking of any single thing we must "frame" it within an area that is not that thing. It is an odd pre-requisite of thought. To think of a thing outside of which there exist nothing but that thing is mind-boggling, at best we think of it ever expanding, but what would it have to expand into? This is the ground that Kabbalah and other similar metaphysical systems attempt to strike at, through some of the conceptual tricks already discussed.