DC. Both McClain and I were thrilled to reestablish contact, and he was gracious enough to write the foreword to my first book. Once it was published, he asked me to send a copy to his mentor, Dr. Siegmund Levarie, who was 93 at the time. After Levarie read my book he told McClain that he wanted to meet me.
I arrived at Levarie’s beautiful brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He sat me down in his living room, but he wasn’t one for small talk. The first thing he said to me was: “You know son,... you are the only living person to have figured out the Sefer Yetzirah.” I was a bit rattled by his words, because I thought that I was the only person to have figured out the Sefer Yetzirah since ancient times. After seeing my incredulous reaction, he waved for me to follow him upstairs to his sanctum sanctorum — his library — where he reached up to remove a large and dusty leather bound book. As he set it down on his desk, he told me it took him 35 years just to locate this book. It was by a 19th century German judge and music theorist named Albert von Thimus. Back in the 1970’s, McClain taught me about the mathematical table that von Thimus had uncovered in Plato’s Timaeus. It was the key to unlocking Plato’s mathematical allegories in terms of Pythagorean music theory.
Thumbing through the pages of this wonderful German text was a real adventure for me. Since Levarie was Austrian the language was no issue for him. As we proceeded, it was a bit eerie to find several of what appeared to be my own painstakingly calculated diagrams. But, what shocked me was the realization that Von Thimus was describing the Sefer Yetzirah and not Plato’s Timaeus! Levarie was right. I wasn’t the first person to “crack the code.” The Pythagorean interpretations within the Von Thimus work remained in obscurity until brought to light by Hans Kayser and Ernst Levy in Switzerland during the 1920’s. Levy then taught them to Siegmund Levarie after Levy emigrated to the United States in 1941.
After relating this story to Dr. McClain, he was a bit upset that Levarie never mentioned Von Thimus’s extensive work on the Sefer Yetzirah to him. Perhaps Levarie didn’t want to distract McClain from his work on Plato. Nevertheless, I had to find my own way to the texts of the Orthodox Jewish community, and I was left to my own devices with respect to the Sefer Yetzirah. Although I was not the first to decipher Abraham’s writings, my afternoon with Levarie and Von Thimus was an absolute validation of my work. To philologists who incorrectly date the Sefer Yetzirah’s content to a period no earlier than the 2nd century AD, I have responded to them by directly linking Yetzirah’s mathematics to the mathematics of several Old Babylonian period cuneiform tablets (written during the time of Abraham: circa 1800 BC). To further establish that the mathematical content of Abraham’s writings predate the Torah, The Science of Religion attempts to demonstrate exactly how the embedded Von Thimus table functions as the Bible’s Rosetta Stone — providing the mathematical/musical framework that would later shape all Biblical allegory — and, almost 1500 years later, become the foundation of Plato’s writings. Confident in my knowledge of how Abraham’s writings structured the Bible, I realized that the Quadrivium also shaped the mythology and religious symbols of the most ancient cultures. So, like detectives “following the money,” I ask the reader to join me in my search for the origins and common scientific foundation of religion.
In writing this book I have attempted to follow the advice that Plato attributes to Socrates: “We must follow the argument wherever it leads.” Since religion was born in the cradle of science — the exact sciences of antiquity: arithmetic, music, geometry, (trigonometry) and astronomy — this text begins its narrative at the dawn of civilization, and lets the history of the science of religion unfold before us in logical sequence. I hope the reader enjoys the journey as much as I have.
Introduction
“They wanted to find the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of all the various historical religions, which, since the dawn of history, had been trying to define the reality of the same God.”1 - Karen Armstrong
As we reflect on the history of civilization, we tend to view modern man as the culmination of a long evolutionary process. We view ourselves as the highly sophisticated product of all the Ages of man, each contributing to what we have become as a species. But, perhaps that is a self-centered view. What if the evolutionary curve actually reached its peak several thousand years ago, and mankind is now in decline? Is that possible? Don’t the great advances of modern science prove that mankind has been taking great strides forward? We can certainly talk about the ascent of rational man. But, perhaps the evolution of man’s rational mind occurs at the expense of his intuitive, holistic mind, and its ability to integrate accumulated knowledge in order to guide us forward. We will take a closer look at the arc of history in an attempt to determine what might actually constitute “progress” for the species.
This text will explore the history of the dynamic between science and religion; between the exoteric material world and the esoteric spiritual world; between the conscious waking world of logic and science, and the meditative world of dreams, myths, allegory, and prophecy. Civilization has lost access to its rich legacy of ancient knowledge and wisdom, because people are no longer in the habit of accessing their inner world. As a result, civilization seems to have lost its way. We have lost our inner compass. Some may call it our intuitive mind, but others might say that we must relearn how to listen to the “voice” of our soul — the ever present guardian angel that guides us through life.
The challenge of living in today’s fast-paced world requires highly specialized knowledge, if we are to satisfy civilization’s requirements for an effective division of labor. Specialization is simply a fact of modern life. Modern man seems narrow-minded in comparison to the great ideal of Renaissance humanism: the ability to acquire and integrate knowledge. Were Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Jefferson considered Renaissance men because they were unique geniuses, or was it because they understood what it took to achieve the Renaissance ideal? Is it fair to call a subject matter expert narrow-minded? And, is the Renaissance ideal of integrating knowledge even relevant in today’s world?
If we go back further in time, to the Middle Ages, we would find that today’s liberal arts education is based on the 7 liberal arts, namely: the mathematical disciplines of the Quadrivium (Latin: four roads). The Quadrivium is comprised of: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy; plus the language disciplines of the Trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.2 But, the Quadrivium has much more ancient roots. And, although there are those who would argue that the evolution of religion is largely a reflection of human psychological needs, economics, the politics of power, and other material circumstances, this text will attempt to establish that it is the mathematics and science of the Quadrivium that defines the origins of religion, while the aforementioned socioeconomic factors have only served to distort religion’s basic tenets throughout history — the exact sciences of antiquity as “eternal truth” filtered through a parlor game of telephone — with a calamitously divisive impact on civilization.
This text will attempt to establish that archetypal myths, as well as the complete warp and woof of Biblical allegory, have been structured by the exact sciences in antiquity. In ancient Greece, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle believed that music was central to the Quadrivium because the science of sound provided a way to logically integrate these disciplines into a coherent framework of knowledge.3 For Plato, the mathematics of music defined what Euclid would call “first principles.” Here are Plato’s own words, taken from his dialogue Laws:
As I have stated several times, he who has not contemplated the mind of nature which is said to exist in the stars, and gone through the previous training, and seen the connection of music with these things, and harmonized them all with laws and institutions, is not able to give a reason of such things as have a reason.4
In Plato’s Timaeus, mathematics and music were described as the language of the Demiurge5 who fashioned and organized the universe. Since man was considered an important part of that universe, Pythagoras and Plato believed that man’s soul, as well as the entire universe, could be expressed in terms of both number
