“I discovered what Darren Aronofsky’s first feature film was: Pi. Want to know its subject matter? ... Kabbalah ... The world of Aronofsky’s Noah is a thoroughly Gnostic one: a graded universe of ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ The ‘spiritual’ is good, and way, way, way ‘up there’ where the ineffable, unspeaking god dwells, and the ‘material’ is bad, and way, way down here where our spirits are encased in material flesh. ... Kabbalah has a pantheon of angelic beings of its own all up and down the ladder of ‘divine being.’ And fallen angels are never totally fallen in this brand of mysticism. ... They redeem themselves, shed their outer material skin, and fly back to the heavens. ... What!? Demons are redeemed? Adolphe Franck explains the cosmology of Kabbalah: ‘Nothing is absolutely bad; nothing is accursed forever--not even the archangel of evil or the venomous beast, as he is sometimes called. There will come a time when he will recover his name and his angelic nature.’ .... when Gnostics speak about ‘The Creator’ they are not talking about God. ... The Creator of the material world is an ignorant, arrogant, jealous, exclusive, violent, low-level, bastard son of a low-level deity. He’s responsible for creating the ‘unspiritual’ world of flesh and matter, and he himself is so ignorant of the spiritual world he fancies himself the ‘only God’ and demands absolute obedience. They generally call him ‘Yahweh.’... This Creator tries to keep Adam and Eve from the true knowledge of the divine and, when they disobey, flies into a rage and boots them from the garden. In other words, in case you’re losing the plot here: The serpent was right all along. This ‘god,’ ‘The Creator,’ whom they are worshiping, is withholding something from them that the serpent will provide: divinity itself. ... Let’s go back to the movie. The action opens when Lamech is about to bless his son, Noah. Lamech, rather strangely for a patriarch of a family that follows God, takes out a sacred relic, the skin of the serpent from the Garden of Eden. He wraps it around his arm, stretches out his hand to touch his son--except, just then, a band of marauders interrupts them and the ceremony isn't completed. Lamech gets killed, and the ‘villain’ of the film, Tubal-Cain, steals the snakeskin. Noah, in other words, doesn't get whatever benefit the serpent’s skin was to bestow. ... The rainbows don’t come at the end because God makes a covenant with Noah. The rainbows appear when Noah sobers up and embraces the serpent. He wraps the skin around his arm, and blesses his family. It is not God that commissions them to now multiply and fill the earth, but Noah, in the first person, ‘I,’ wearing the serpent talisman. ... The scandal is this: of all the Christian leaders who went to great lengths to endorse this movie (for whatever reasons: ‘it’s a conversation starter,’ ‘at least Hollywood is doing something on the Bible,’ etc.), and all of the Christian leaders who panned it for ‘not following the Bible.’ ...Not one of them could identify a blatantly Gnostic subversion of the biblical story when it was right in front of their faces. I believe Aronofsky did it as an experiment to make fools of us ... He’s having quite the laugh. And shame on everyone who bought it.” (“Sympathy for the Devil,” Brian Mattson’s review of the movie Noah starring Russell Crowe, April 2, 2014, drbrianmattson.com) Comments are closed.
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