Review of Desert Wisdom and Prayers of the Cosmos by Neil Douglas Klotz

These books contain an exposition of a remarkable cosmology, rooted in Middle Eastern thought, but linking with modern science. In order to understand what Douglas-Klotz is doing, however, it is necessary to digress into linguistic issues surrounding certain religious texts.

In most of the world's religions considerable importance is attached to the linguistic structures through which the teaching is expressed. Most expositions of the North American indigenous faiths, for example, discuss with care the meaning of such terms as Wakan-Tanka (possibly translatable as Great Spirit); Islam regards the actual words used as themselves an essential part of the Koran; in Judaism and Sikhism liturgical pride of place is given to the book containing in preserved form the founding documents; and so on. Christianity, however, is unique in that (apart from six words) the teaching of Isho'a (Jesus) has been handed down only in translation. It is now almost universally accepted that he taught mainly in the Chaldean dialect of Aramaic, probably with additions of Hebrew when he wanted to link with scripture or liturgy. (Hebrew and Aramaic are very closely related.)

What might have been lost or distorted in the translation from Aramaic to Greek that took place in establishing the Christian scriptures? Douglas-Klotz argues that there are radical differences between the two languages. Greek has far more words than Hebrew/Aramaic, so that words of Aramaic necessarily have a wider range of meaning than words in Greek. Moreover, in Aramaic as in other middle Eastern languages, the core of the word is contained in its consonants (the only part that is written down in most of these languages) so that linguistic links exist between all words with the same consonantal root, something which has no parallel in the European languages. As a result, Aramaic text consists of a succession of broad overlapping pools of meaning, modified by context and the use of vowels, while Greek consists of a series of much more precisely specified discrete terms. Greek is thus one of the worst possible languages in which to translate the words of Isho'a.

In the light of this, several scholars in the nineteenth century began speculating about the originals behind the Greek text, initially by tracing idiosyncrasies within the Greek text — idioms appearing in the New Testament that were abnormal in the Greek of the time and which therefore might have been derived from a too-literal interpretation of the underlying Aramaic. Some consensus emerged from this exercise that there had been in circulation in the first century CE several collections of the original words of Isho'a which had been used by the Gospel writers. Once this had been established, it suggested another and potentially more powerful method of recovering the lost originals, a method followed by Douglas-Klotz. This is to examine the version of the text used in the Aramaic-speaking church, the "Peshita (pure) Text". While this is undoubtedly an Aramaic translation of the Greek (it preserves the detailed structure of the Greek text), it is likely that the Aramaic church still retained at least a memory of the original sayings, and quite possibly the actual documents, at the time when the Peshita was composed. In that case, they would, where possible, have reconstructed in the Peshita parts of the Aramaic original.

Prayers of the Cosmos works with the Peshita text of the "Lord's Prayer", while Desert Wisdom considers a number of other Middle Eastern texts alongside the Peshita, using the Hebrew text of the start of Genesis for its overall structure. Both operate on two different levels. The first level is that of the sound of the words. It is a widespread, though not uncontested, tradition that the effect of a mantra is in part due to the physical interaction between its sound and the human body. So Douglas Klotz includes as an essential part of his exposition a series of body prayers in which the reader is invited to explore for herself this acoustic effect. This is striking effective for the first word of the Lord's Prayer (Abwoon, "Father"), ideally framed to resonate in the lower chakras. It is out of this experience that he has developed his powerful Dances of Universal Peace on the Lord's Prayer, where the effect of the sound is developed into a physico-spiritual meditation.

The second book, Desert Wisdom then carries forward this analysis into the creation story at the start of the Torah, and echoed elsewhere in the Middle East. It is striking how closely the sequence of events (chaos, light, aggregation of matter, stellar bodies, solid earth, plants, animals) matches our current scientific cosmology. Douglas-Klotz notes this, but moves the analysis to a deeper level. Rather than trying to claim that this ancient wisdom was an account of an actual chronological sequence of events that passed without any corporeal witness, he pursues the much more fruitful hypothesis that it records the logical relations between the underlying principles of the cosmos, principles that were indeed unfolded sequentially in time, but which continue to underlie the whole continuing creative process of life, which are continually being manifest. This is in keeping with the traditional understanding of the account as being of events not in ordinary time but in what indigenous Australians call "the Dreaming" (formerly translated as "the Dream Time"). This is clearest in the case of the seventh day of creation, the Sabbath. In a sense, there is only one Sabbath which is both the culmination of the initial creation, and the goal towards which the temporal order is striving; an eternal reality that is periodically manifested in the circling of the week. In this light, the Hebrew words of the creation account become an immensely profound record of the nature of creativity itself.

These are books that are worth working on. While Douglas-Klotz provides from time to time English paraphrases of the texts which give a quick idea of what is being said, these cannot convey the fusion of meanings in the sounds of the words which is the essence of his thesis. It is unfortunate that the paraphrases have often been taken out of context and presented by liturgists as "The Aramaic Lord's Prayer". To understand the argument one must be led, as he does gently and easily, through the words themselves and their inner resonances. Occasionally the printing produces difficulties: with an unfamiliar language every misprint (mainly transpositions of ' and `) sticks out as a potential cause of stumbling. But the path is mainly smooth, and marked by repeated insights calling the reader to pause and contemplate. I strongly recommend these richly rewarding works to anyone interested in the metaphysics of traditional wisdom.

Chris Clarke