“God’s essence is a becoming from Himself to Himself.”
~Martin Heidegger

“In the case of the non-thinglike being of God, becoming as the development of essential fullness is included in being as its essential constituent.”
~Martin Heidegger

1. Sethian Autogenes: a Self-Begotten Christ

In the Apocryphon of John, the ancient “gnostic” text, Yeshua is described as “Autogenes” (“Self-begotten” in ancient Greek). By the inception of the text it is described how the first details sprang from the unique substance (the Monad) and how Christ was born. It is described that the first emanation of the Monad is Barbelo. Barbelo is a begetting (and hence – an intellectual) andogynous entity, and is described as a mother-father (which can be compared with the kabbalistic abba v’imma, a partzuf which unites the hylic and active intellects – the seed and the womb). From Barbelo Christ, the Autogenes, is born:

Barbelo was impregnated and conceived a spark of light, which bore a similar, yet not identical, blessing to hers; and He was the only-begotten Son of this mother-father; the only offspring, the only-begotten child of the pure light, the father.

We learn here of a “Spark of Light” born from the “Pure Light”, which means to some extent – a begetting of light from itself, springing from its likeness onto its likeness. The mother-father, here, is only a vessel through which the light bears itself and begets itself. Christ, composed from Life and Will, Intellect and Knowledge, is begotten (somewhat) from the “Zivug” of the Monad with Barbelo (or perhaps from the autoerotic sexual engagement of the Monad with itself...)
We also learn of the telos of the self-creation of the Monad:

The Holy Spirit bore Her and Barbelo’s Autogenes and fulfilled Him so that He can stand before the great, concealed and virgin Spirit as Christ the Autogenes, and so that He can pray for [Her] loudly.

The Monad (The Holy Spirit) duplicated Herself in the image of Christ so that it can exalt itself, glimpse at its own reflection, love itself and worship itself. Hence, the Monad replicated itself so that it can know itself. Here we learn of the importance of self-begetting for the development of personality (or lack of personality) of the Monad: God needed to beget Himself so that He may depart and pour out of Himself. In the continuation of the Apocryphon it is written:

[The Son was born by Providence.]

Hence, the Son was foreknown in the Holy Spirit, which means the Son is essentially rooted in the divine Monad.

In the other Sethian text, “Marsanes”, there is described the emanation of Autogenes (the Self-begotten One) from the Spirit (unbegotten):

I haven’t finished talking of the self-begotten [...] who became, part by part, the whole place. He emanated; again, He emanated [from] the unbegotten which is not present, which is the Spirit.

Hence, there is a difference between emanation and begetting. Being-born is a deed of gathering of self-substantiality, becoming-activity, attaining personality. In being-born there is a sense of being-gestated and self-growth, while in emanation there is only a sense of existence-by-power.
We find here that the idea that the monotheistic godhead may beget itself is first found in these ancient “gnostic” texts. In my opinion, the Autogony of the godhead in itself is an even more ancient idea which was passed orally esoterically through many years inside many traditions, which may explain the return of the idea in the shabbatean kabbalistic literature, as I will show in the next part of the article.

2. Raza Di-Meheimanuta: Automorphism of Malka Mashicha

According to Gershom Scholem and Yehuda Liebes, the main innovation of the short shabbatean kabbalistic treatise, “Raza Di-Meheimanuta” (henceforth: Rd”M), attributed to Amira”h, is the matter of the self-being-enformed of Malka Kadisha as He is a fetus in the womb of His Mother. And thus is how the matter is formulated in the treatise:

And the enforming of the composition of this Holy Partzuf in the womb inside of Imma [=Mother] was by His Spirit in Itself. Since as the said eight Kings entered Imma, immediately Abba V’Imma [=Father and Mother, hylic and active generative intellects] copulated. Then Abba has disseminated a tip of formless, hylic Mayin Duchrin [=masculine Waters] inside of Imma, and Imma disseminated in response a tip of Mayin Nukvin [=feminine Waters] which was also formless and hylic; and the enforming [of the formless seeds] was done by none other than His Spirit in Itself.

Malka Kadisha (henceforth: M”K) dwells inside His Mother’s womb and there He enforms Himself from above through His Spirit, which is the aspect of Atika Kadisha, Holy Of Holies (henceforth: A”K D”K). The somewhat alchemical or biological language in which the dissemination of the pre-conceived hyle, the copulation and the enforming or the birth following them are described is being used by the author of R”D for the painting of divine self-designing as an organic, natural, automatic procedure. There are many parallels between this account and the description of the birth of Autogenes in the Apocryphon of John: as in R”D it is described how the Spark of the Dark Luminescence (“Nitzotza D’Botzina D’Kardinuta”) hailing from the root, A”K D”K, enforms M”K, thus in the Apocryphon it is described how the Pure Light begets the autotheogonic Spark. In addition, the Apocryphon describes also how the “partzuf” of Mother-Father bears in itself the self-begetting fetus, similarly to R”D where it is described how the partzuf of Abba V’Imma bears in itself the partzuf of M”K which conceives and begets itself in the common effort of Will (A”K) and Power (M”K).
I haven’t found an antecedent to this principle in Lurianic literature preceding R”D, which can bring us to three conclusion: one is that autotheogony is an ancient rabbinic secret passed to shabbatean prophets through kabbalistic initiation and holy spirit; the second is that it is a product of mythical imagination of the author of R”D, characteristic of his era (the second third of the 17^th century, where many far-reaching innovations happened in the fields of science, art and philosophy); the third is that the author of R”D (who, according to the academic concensus nowadays, was R’ Abraham Miguel Cardoso) had access to “gnostic”, and particularly to sethian, thought, through centers of christian theological studies (assuming it was Cardoso).



3. Spinoza, Boehme and Schelling: The Self-Birthing Godhead

In the same period in which the author of Raza di-Meheimanuta wrote of the secret of autotheogony, the Jewish-Portuguese Philosopher Baruch Spinoza was active. In his book, “Ethics”, published posthumously, there appears the proposition that “a substance may not be begotten from another substance.” The meaning of the proposition is not that birth may not happen, but that birth may happen solely from within itself, from the born one. The word which was used by Spinoza is “produci”, hence “[to be] produced”, “generated” or as Jakob Klatzkin translated it into Hebrew: “Lehivaled” (“to be begotten”).
In his book, “The Foundation of Positive Philosophy”, the German Philosopher F.W.J. Schelling compared Spinoza with the Teutonic Theosopher Jakob Boehme, who was active about a third of a century prior to Spinoza. According to Schelling, “Boehme is truly of a theogonic nature,” hence, according to Boehme God is in an incessant struggle to beget Himself, but being begotten (self-begotten too, for that matter), God (or nature) is not free. This is why Schelling finds Boehme’s theosophy as a teaching which isn’t capable of shaking off of the fatalism of spinozistic rationalism. Schelling criticizes rationalism for not giving space for “action” and “free creation”, instead having only “familiarity with pure essential relations.” Hence, Boehme and Spinoza both see God’s birth as a birth from Himself to Himself, and as such as a birth which is not capable of liberating Him from His substance. Schelling sees rationalist physics as “utterly mechanistic” and “soulless”, and thus shows the tendentiousness of his reading of Spinoza, which he uses for the cause of emphasizing the contrast between the (supposedly) lifeless theologies that preceded him to the theory of Godhead of Schelling himself. Schelling contrasts the “substantial” God of Boehme and Spinoza, in which movement is always within the domain of eternality and essential fullness, with the “historical God”, in which the inner movement is replaced with a free poetic “act” which creates a break within the divine natural body and penetrates it with time, history, renewal, and so with the precious “Hegelian” self-realization. In addition, Schelling makes a contrast between rationalism, in which the cosmic movement is from unreality (“nichtseyenden”) or a “No”, to existence (“seyn”) within the domain of the same substance, against the Positive Philosophy, in which the beginning occurs from reality, or the “Yea”, which sets and establishes something other than itself, and thus is free, which is against Fichte’s understanding of freedom, in which a selfhood is free due to its self-positing and self-activity. According to Schelling, in not being established by itself, a being is not prisoned in itself, and is thus free from itself. Hence, only through love and grace, through the self-communication outwards, the Godhead discovers its personality.
Schelling claims that “it is fitting for God to be indifferent to His own being”, and that it is not fitting Him to be “troubled” by it. He claims that the theogonic understanding of Boehme is not reconcilable with science or with philosophy for it returns to the primitive (and perhaps pagan?) principle of the inner birth within the divine substance. In contrast, Schelling raises his positive philosophy, which lives according to the gospel of science and “healthy reason”.

4. Boehmean Autotheogony

In the beginning of his book, “On the Three Principles of Divine Essence”, Jakob Boehme introduces (in the third aphorism in the first chapter) his nearly “barbaric” (to paraphrase Hegel) ontologism:

Know ye, that when God was set to create the worlds and all the things therein, He had no matter to make them out of else than Himself. But understand, that God is a concealed soul with no beginning and no end, and His bigness and depth are all. But a soul doth nothing but rise and flow and move and generate itself frequently.

According to Boehme, every creation is the creation in which God creates Himself. Each and every moment is an instance in which the Godhead renews itself, born into itself. Boehme treads in such a radical path that he contests not only the perception of the world as created ex nihilo, but also the perception of the world as created from primordial matter (which was common in the alchemical literature from which Boehme was informed) and instead he sets the perception of the world as being the same substance as God, a substance which renews itself within the domain of its essence and never disappears nor has itself created from nothingness. And so, we are witnessing a very radical ontologism; in which divine being is not only primordial or superior, but is also the only thing which exists, both in potency and in actuality.
Further in the book (in the seventh aphorism of the second chapter) Boehme interprets the word “sulphur” through esoteric hermeneutics, as Sul stands for the soul (“Seele”) from which the things were brought forth, while Phur stands for the Primal body or matter through which the trinity reaches its consummation.
The word Sulphur represents the autogenesis of the Godhead, its entry into the cycle of life and its formation in the figure and image of itself. It may be compared with the word “VaYeitzer” (“And He Made”) which is interpreted in kabbalistic literature through esoteric hermeneutics as composed of twice the letter Yod along with the word “Tzar” (“formed”), hence the Yod’s are the two primal potencies in which the Godhead was formed.
In the thirteenth aphorism in the eighteenth chapter in the book, Boehme describes the procession between the two principles of the Godhead using his (not accurately) biblical battle cry, “From Eternity to Eternity”:

But the first principle is the bond of an eternity which makes itself and from which God the Father issues forth from the eternity onto the second principle and there He generates His heart and Son [from eternity to eternity].

Hence, God’s becoming is from Himsefl into Himself; from eternity to eternity, from the first principle of the pre-conceived substance lacking thought to the second principle of the appearance of the Word and the Will, as both principles are a state of perfect supernal divine activity.
The issuing of the Godhead from the first eternity onto the Shechinatic heart is an inner process of cyclical, eternal and ongoing self-realization; in which, as Boehme comments, man is meant to be renewed and to discover the new Adam in the figure of Yeshua Christos who is renewed and resurrected constantly. Which means that Boehme’s teaching acts both on the mythical level (God’s life) and on the existential/psychological level (man’s life). And according to Boehme, man works according to the same principles on which the Godhead works, which means that as the Godhead is born out of itself so man will be born anew out of himself onto a newer, riper, and more real selfhood and form.
In the third aphorism in the third chapter of the book, Boehme describes the birth of nature:

And even though I write this now as if there was a beginning to the eternal birth, but it is not so; but the eternal nature indeed begets [or generates] itself with no beginning.

Boehme describes here how birth, unlike our understanding of it as a temporal or linear thing, is actually an incessant, eternal and unbeginning birth; a thing which appears paradoxical on its face, but is actually Boehme’s true secret of the Godhead. The world enlivens and realizes itself incessantly, born from itself never-endingly and with no way out. Here Schelling’s claim that Boehme is concerned, like Spinoza, with relations of pure substantiality is being affirmed: there is, for Boehme, no real birth from one substance to another, from a spring to an exit. Instead, there is the ongoing self-establishment of a lone substance, being in a constant monologue with itself with no departure.
Thus we learn that the rebellion of Schelling and Hegel is not only against the fatalistic pantheism of Spinoza’s, but also against the “barbaric” ontologism of Boehme. In their advancing of history, communication and self-negation into the movement of the Godhead, Schelling and Hegel make the possibility for the exterioriazation which establishs the world-shechinatic personality and affirms the finite totality (although Schelling challenges the totality as well).

On the Author: Gur Dimei is an Israeli “Frankist Incel”, sha”tzposter and an independent researcher of the Zohar.