Madonna, The Matrix and Kaballah
I found another far out newspaper article on Madaonna and Kaballah.
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When movies inspire a religion
Manny Frishberg
JTNews Correspondent
Kabbalah is making a comeback — big time. The ancient and enigmatic writings of Jewish mysticism not only has Madonna, the one-time Material Girl, headed down a spiritual path, but has helped sell thousands of pieces of red yarn for $27.95 each over the Internet.
At the same time, a recently erected Web site trumpets the founding of “Matrixism,” a new religion based on the spiritual revelations contained in the Wachowski brothers’ trio of Matrix movies. Matrix joins the Star Wars sextet of films in spawning a religious movement from its spiritual gloss. In both Britain and Australia, groups have sought to file for official recognition for a religious movement based on George Lucas’s concepts of the Light Side, the Dark Side and the Force.
Liturgical references abound in The Matrix, including names like Trinity and Zion. There is a baptism and a betrayal. In spite of the Christian trappings, it lacks any idea of sin or repentance. In their place, however, is an Eastern meditative concept of liberation from illusion — more Buddhist than Christian. On some Web blogs, reader-commentators have even suggested that the symbolism is more Jewish than Christian.
“Look at Zion, and look at Neo’s name, Mr. Anderson,’” wrote Josè from Spain, on the BBC News site. “The root ‘Ander’ evokes ‘Andros,’ which means ‘Man’ in Greek, so ‘Anderson’ becomes ‘the Son of Man’ ... the one that will liberate them from their enemies by means of force.”
In the end, the Wachowski brothers did not rely on any one religious system, as co-writers and directors of the films. They have made a spiritual melange all their own.
According to Wendy X, the acting secretary and spokesperson for the nascent religious order, its founder wishes to remain anonymous, but “there are exactly 323 people who have emailed us to declare Matrixism as their religion” as of November 11.
Nor are the few fringe religionists alone in taking the spiritual message of The Matrix seriously. Egypt’s most senior film committee, made up of 15 critics, academics, writers and psychologists, decided to ban The Matrix Reloaded on the grounds that the film “explicitly handles the issue of existence and creation, which are related to the three divine religions, which we all respect and believe in” and “tackles the issue of the creator and his creations, searching the origin of creation and the issue of compulsion and free will.”
University of Washington Comparative Religion professor and regular JTNews columnist Martin Jaffee said he feels that attraction to such pop religious movements reflects “a genuine desire” to inform their spiritual lives.
“When it goes in the directions it’s going to, it’s just an indictment of the emptiness of the available options,” he said. “Basically it means that the established traditions are so weak that they can’t sustain any kind of real questioning, so people go to all sorts of crackpot stuff.
“I don’t dismiss it as emptiness or anything like that,” he added. “I think it’s silliness but you respond to everybody from where they are.”
Jaffee cautioned that he is not very familiar with the Matrix theology in particular.
“I’ve never even seen the movies,” he said. Instead he referred to a recent film that played in art houses near the University, called Pi.
“Pi deals with some aspects of Jewish mysticism,” he said, “but it’s not very deep. It has no depth of knowledge of Jewish sources or anything. It’s an entertainment, in the sense that it uses something flashy and mysterious and seems profound on first blush but it doesn’t have any substance to it.”
He also related Pi to the current trendy adherents to the Kabbalah in places like L.A.
“It’s being marketed by people who are polishing off one part of Kabbalah to make it very attractive to a certain marketing niche. But it’s not what Kabbalah is and most people who do Kabbalah in a serious way don’t want to have anything to do with it,” said Jaffee. “That’s where we are, in the Age of Sound-bites. Everything can be marketed now. Everything’s a product.”
Rabbi Ted Falcon, spiritual leader of the Bet Aleph Meditative Synagogue, said he looks upon the phenomenon more with hope than with cynicism or trepidation.
“I see the fact that the mythic imagination is translating itself through movies to be hopeful in the sense that that’s where people are,” he said. “Most of those people are not reading, they’re not exploring any other way.”
He said films like The Matrix “give you comic-book violence to interest you and...something that resonates with a part of you that you have forgotten, because if the message of the mystics is true, then it’s something all of us already come with.”
Falcon, who saw two of the three films, said he understood about two-thirds of what he saw, “but I have a 28-year-old son who tells me what they are about.” He said he sees the move to a religion around them as “more an attempt to express a spiritual reality than it is to express a specifically religious reality.”
“From a mystical standpoint, and this is kind of true of mystics in whatever culture and whatever time, there is a ‘Unitive Awareness’ — namely a realization that there’s only one God, that there’s only one One, and we’re it,” he said.
“This is a great week for it,” Rabbi Falcon continued, “because this is the week of Jacob’s dream in the Torah, and that is the essence of that awakening — awakening to the fact that this place where I’m standing is nothing other than the House of God and the gateway to Heaven, which is the essence of the way that mystics would speak it: ‘Right here, everything is, and I didn’t know it.’”
Falcon said while he welcomes the opening of a dialogue that films like this allow, he would prefer that they led people to explore some of the extant traditions instead.
“My own preference would be that people would be curious to ask, ‘Are these ideas around in any of the traditions that we are already celebrating?’ Because they are,” he said. “These are not new things and they are far more grounded in substantial teachings which have to do with ethical behavior and a deepening appreciation of our responsibilities to each other and to all life.”
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If you have never heard of Matrixism a good synopsis of it can be found at
http://circleofpneuma.blogspot.com/2005/04/matrixism.html .
