The left is having a good laugh at the expense of so-called Christian churches who encouraged their members to flock to Noah.
In Darren Aronofsky’s movie Noah, Adam and Eve are luminescent and fleshless, right up until the moment they ate the forbidden fruit. Any Christian worth his or her salt knows that this is nonsense and isn’t found in the Bible. Aronofsky claims that he was using poetic license but was he?
According to Dr. Brian Mattson, in “Sympathy for The Devil” Aronofsky wasn’t taking liberties with anything because the bible was not his text. He used a mystical tradition more closely aligned to a form of Jewish Gnosticism, the Kabbalah.
The world of Aronofsky’s Noah is thoroughly Gnostic. Those fallen angels encrusted in lava (rock men) are called Archons, a lesser divine being or angel who aid “The Creator” in forming the visible universe, according to the Kabbalah. The whole move is figuratively a Zohar mine.
The Zohar (Hebrew: זֹהַר, lit. Splendor or Radiance) is the foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah. It is a group of books including commentary on the mystical aspects of the Torah and scriptural interpretations as well as material on mysticism, mythical cosmogony, and mystical psychology. The Zohar contains a discussion of the nature of God, the origin and structure of the universe, the nature of souls, redemption, the relationship of Ego to Darkness and “true self” to “The Light of God”, and the relationship between the “universal energy” and man. It first appeared in Spain in the 13th century, published by a Jewish writer named Moses de Leon who ascribed the work to Shimon bar Yochai (“Rashbi”), a rabbi of the 2nd century during the Roman persecution. Yochai, according to Jewish legend, hid in a cave for thirteen years studying the Torah and was inspired by the Prophet Elijah to write the Zohar.
In Aronofsky’s movie, Noah never referred to God, but to “The Creator.” When Gnostics speak about “The Creator” they are not talking about the one true God of Christianity. To Gnostics “The Creator” of the material world is an ignorant, arrogant, jealous, exclusive, violent, low-level, bastard son of a low level deity, responsible for creating the “unspiritual” world of flesh and matter. He is so ignorant of the spiritual world that he fancies himself the “only god” and demands absolute obedience. Gnostic mysticism holds that the serpent in the garden, called “Sophia,” “Mother,” or “Wisdom,” represents the true divine.
Many reviewers of the film thought Noah changed into a homicidal maniac on the ark, wanting to kill his son’s newborn daughters. But in Aronofsky’s interpretation of the Zohar, Noah is worshiping a false, homicidal maniac of a god [The Creator] and the more faithful and “godly” he becomes, the more homicidal he becomes. He fails “The Creator” when he cannot wipe out all life because “his heart was filled with nothing but love.”
In the next scene Noah killed Tubal-Cain and recovered the snakeskin relic, “Sophia,” “Wisdom,” the true light of the divine. The rainbow doesn’t come at the end because the living Christian God made a covenant with Noah, the rainbow appears in Aronofsky’s fairy tale when Noah sobers up and embraces the serpent.
