Carlo Suares, The Cipher of Genesis: The Original Code of the Qabala as Applied to the Scriptures, Samuel Weiser, York Beach, Maine 1992.
Carlo Suares (1892-1976) was a writer, artist, architect, and one of the most highly regarded kabbalists of his generation. He was born in Egypt and spent most of his life in France. The Cipher of Genesis, originally published in French in 1967, is his masterwork. For the kabbalist, the Hebrew letters themselves, and how they are combined and assembled, contain and reveal multiple depths of meaning. Suares tells us the teachings of kabbalah go back to Moses and even farther, to Abraham and even before Abraham. Kabbalah, according to Suares, is the “most ancient of ancient knowledge.”
The patriarch Abraham, Suares informs us, “possessed the Qabalah as knowledge and as writing.” The “document where was inscribed the number-code of that knowledge came from Mount Ararat, where the mythical Noah’s Ark had come to rest after the Deluge.” Abraham himself came from, Ur of the Chaldees. According to the Qabalah, Suares notes, this Ur of the Chaldees means “the light of the magicians.” Chaldees, Suares tells us, is a translation of the word “Kasdeems.” He adds that:
“The cabalists have always had a horror of the magic of the Kasdeems. Abraham is the beginning of another era. With Him, religion begins to free itself from the ‘light of the magicians”, and to direct itself towards the perception of the inner light of YHWH. In Abram’s hand is a marvelous document; the testament of a lost civilization, brought in the ark.”
The Qabalah “uses the word Sephiroth to express or describe different structures of this one cosmic energy, the Ayn-Soph.” According to Suares, the “testimony” that God instructs Moses to place in the Ark is the Qabala itself.
Suares proceeds to unravel portions of the Book of Genesis sentence by sentence. The true meaning of Genesis, as set out by Suares, has little resemblance to the usual familiar Bible tales. Suares writes, for example, that, “For Israel in its true sense, the name Canaan is not that of a country. It has no frontiers. And YHWH (Yahweh, Jehovah, God) is not a deity to be worshipped, least of all in a temple.” For Suares, YHWH expresses the deepest principles and energies at work within creation, not some kind of “super-being”.
Beginning in the early centuries of Jewish history the belief grew, however, that “ the symbolic narrative of Genesis was a description of actual facts.” Increasingly too, “they worshipped a deity which cannot but be anthropomorphized when it is prayed to.” From the time of Alexander and of Rome, the “secret code of the Qabala” became “a closed book for most, except for Rabbi Akibah and perhaps a few others.” For the kabbalist, Suares clarifies, “YHWH is not a deity but an immanence which can become alive and active when the two vitalities in us, the container and the contained, fecundate each other.”
The kabbalistic legacy of the Christian era began, according to Suares, with “the marvelous Simeon–Bar-Yohai”, the “holy lamp of Israel”, who became the creator of the Zohar during the first century AD. Its essence is that:
“Every Hebrew letter is, in fact, an ideogram which symbolizes one aspect of the cosmic energy. Thus we know where to look for the meaning and purpose of the biblical text: it describes the interplay of those energies in the Universe and in Man… In following the text we then are subjected to an amazing mental exercise which can modify our way of thinking to the extent of uniting us with those very energies which are being described. That, and only that, is the Revelation.”
Suares emphasizes repeatedly that for the student of Qabala:
“Nothing is important except the knowledge that the key to the Revelation is to be found in the letter-numbers. When once we grasp that, we can grope our way through them, and our very first step will already have been taken inside their cosmic life.”
Suares acknowledges that “It may come as a surprise to many Bible readers that the first five chapters of the Book of Genesis were written in code and cannot be deciphered without knowledge of the code.” Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet “represents a specific number the significance of which must be understood.” Each number, in turn, “signifies an aspect of the living forces at play in the Universe; and the text is intended to project these forces into our very being.
In reality, Suares tells us:
“The cosmic and human drama as described in the Bible is an interplay between two partners playing against each other; Aleph, intermittent life-death, unfathomable, timeless mystery evading all mental grasp, and Yod its projection into the time–space continuum, which is its antimony.”
Our personal “I” is our personal “container” or set of containers. This personal “I” as a container is expressed by the Hebrew letter Bayt. The life within us, however, is Aleph.
Suares commences his close examination with the very first word of the Bible, “In the beginning” which is read as “Bereshyt.” In the letters of this first word- in Bayt Raysh Aleph Shhen Yod Tav – we find, he writes, “the name of a cosmic energy acting both outside of us and within us, and each of these cosmic energies is very complex.” To comprehend Qabala, Suares cautions his readers, we must be prepared to clear our minds and be “willing to listen to a story which was originally intended to convey something altogether different from what we are conditioned to believe.”
In Genesis, for example:
“In the severity of its beginning, in its first chapter, in its first verse, in its first sequence of letter-numbers, is the seed, and in the seed is the whole…This sequence is in the Revelation and is the Revelation, and those who grasp it are in the Revelation and are, in action, the Revelation itself. It is, in effect, a formula.”
Suares’ unravelment reads far more like a profound probing of the workings of the laws of physics than like the familiar biblical stories and fables.