The Rended Veil — 1

And they shall make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in the midst of them
Exodus 25:8

Tradition has long held that the veil of the temple, referred to in all three synoptic gospels as being torn (Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38 and Luke 23:45) at the moment of Christ's death upon the cross, was that which separated the Holy of Holies, the most sacred and interior part of the temple at Jerusalem, from the Holy or main body of the temple where the liturgical observances took place. Another view, equally as venerable (in Origen, and also St Thomas) holds that the veil referred to was that which stood some 25 metres tall and which hung in front of the main temple doors. Assuming the temple was visible from Golgotha, only its exterior would have been in sight, thus only the outer veil could have been seen. To assume however that the synoptic accounts are of a purely literalist viewpoint closes the door to any symbolic or spiritual significance other than that which is overt and explicit, reducing its meaning to an historical and anecdotal one.

This outer veil, masak, was, as Josephus tells us, was a:
"Babylonian tapestry, with embroidery of blue and fine linen, of scarlet also and purple, wrought with marvelous skill. Nor was this mixture of materials without its mystic meaning: it typified the universe . . . Portrayed on this tapestry was a panorama of the entire heavens . . ."

Josephus' description bears much in common with the inner veil, paroketh, as described in Scripture (Exodus 26:31, 36:35, 2 Chronicles 3:14), so much so that we may assume the two were near enough identical, except in size, which is of course incidental and of no meaning in this context. In fact in the biblical description of the tabernacle (Exodus 25 on) there were no solid walls, it was a portable structure and Moses was directed to make 'hangings' on all four sides. The outer veil can then be seen as the last vestige of these hangings, but as all were made to the same design, the veil and the hangings, or the two veils of the temple, perform the same essential function, each conveyed the same message, the same 'mystic meaning'. Furthermore the outer veil can thus be seen not only as a repetition but intrinsically as a projection or a prolongation of the inner (the first veil), the veil which all others have as principal. Each veil reveals 'a panorama of the entire heavens', and each conceals a mystery, the sacred reality behind it. This relationship of the two veils, one to the other, is the aspect we shall explore in this essay.

The temple traces its origin back to Exodus, "And they shall make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in the midst of them" (25:8). The exoteric understanding is of a sanctuary as a sacred place, both taking their root from the Greek sacare 'to set aside' and thus denotes a place set aside, by man, for the worship of God. The esoteric dimension of 'sanctuary' is that within it one is outside of ordinary time and space. The veil was made: "According to all the likeness of the tabernacle which I will shew thee" (25:9), and thus is an earthly or physical manifestation of a spiritual reality. The veil bore an mage of the cosmos, which tells us that it marked the separation between Creator and His creation. What lay beyond this veil lay beyond the created order, it was a 'sanctuary' miqdash in which God could reside in order to be known, and from where "I will appear to thee, and I will commune with thee" (Exodus 25:22).

Like the tabernacle before it, the temple at Jerusalem functions as God's dwelling place (mishkan) or the holy place of His 'indwelling' (shekhinah) with His people. According to the Talmud (Yoma 54b) In it is found the 'foundation stone' (eben shetiyah) around which the earth was created and upon which the whole world rests. This has its correspondence in many traditions. According to Greek myth Zeus let fly two eagles from opposite ends of the earth, and they flew towards each other and met over the town of Delphi, and this point at which they met was thus determined as the centre of the earth. The point was marked by the Omphalos stone in the temple of Apollo. When Harmonia wove the veil representing the whole universe, she started with the Omphalos stone at the centre and from there worked outward. The Omphalos was not only sacred to Apollo at Delphi but also marked the tomb of the slain and resurrected Dionysus. The Omphalos is also held to be the tomb of Python, the dragon that Apollo slew, and in the stone is often portrayed with a serpent coiled around it. For the Pythagoreans, the Omphalso symbolised the Monad, the seed of the universe. In Egypt their omphalos was the Ben-ben at Heliopolis, the theological centre of their culture, and prototype for the pyramids. Dedicated to the sun, the soul of the sun-god Ra, in the form of the Phoenix, would often alight upon it. There is an Omphalos in Ireland, at Tara, the seat of the High Kings of the Gaels, and the Stone of Scone sat beneath the seat of the kings of Scotland. Of course, there is the Dome of the Rock in Islam. The notion, both of centre, and of foundation, finds its expression in all traditional cultures. In the Kabbala (Zohar: Terumah 157a) the Holy of Holies is the centre of the temple, the temple is the centre of Jerusalem, Jerusalem of The Holy Land and the Holy Land of the world. As foundation of the world the temple stands in direct line of the vertical axis of creation and thus represents the locus of the influence of the Divine, which determines its exterior and functional aspect as spiritual centre for the people of Isreal.

The temple then signified the notion of centre, and in its internal structure realised the vertical or hierarchical axis by a series of three courts, the Divine, the cosmic and the corporeal. In the centre and thus representing the highest point was the Holy of Holies, God in His Isness; the "the deep" of Genesis 1:2, the "I Am That I Am" of Moses, the 'Ground' or 'Gottheit' of Meister Eckart, God in His Inscrutability. Outside or 'below' that was the Holy, wherein stood the symbols of the Jewish Tradition and here was enacted the ceremonies and rituals of the liturgical life. Finally 'below' the Holy was the Outer Court, and it was from here that man commences his journey back to God. Here was the altar and the basin and oral tradition informs us that sacrifice and purification were (and still are) necessary dimensions of spiritual realisation. In the language of symbology the element of sacrifice is fire because it consumes the gross and material and thus releases that which is subtle and of the essence. In the case of washing the symbology once again is obvious, so much so that ritual washing is a powerful element in almost every religious tradition on the planet. The metaphysical symbolism here is that washing signifies a return to a primordial and natural state of purity or innocence.

In closing then, it can be seen that in any and every tradition the temple 'fixes' the relationship between creature and creator in dimensional space. It also 'fixes' this relationship in time, by the procession of its liturgical calendar, and also in eternity, or more accurately in the eternal, in the transcendent, by the remembrance and thus continuance of the given covenant upon which tradition is founded, a contract which springs from the eternal and is the sapiential life and being of the temple itself. This last marks the vertical aspect in its most explicit form and seen in this light the two veils stand one above the other, in a hierarchical relationship, in that the lower, to repeat, is a projection and continuation of the higher in its own domain. The two veils thus separate three worlds; the mundane, the sacred and the Divine, which is reflected in man in corpus, animus, spiritus — body, soul and spirit.