The Judeo-Christian mystical traditions (Kabbalah and Gnosticism) have very different creation myths than their mainstream counterparts. In all of the traditions, creation is corrupted: in the mainstream traditions, through human sin; and in the mystical traditions, through flaws in the process of creation. These traditions also have different views of the role of humanity in the repair of this corruption. According to the mainstream traditions, humanity is the more passive bearer of guilt and recipient of mercy and salvation as God remedies the corruption. According to the mystical traditions, humanity was created to serve as the active healer of the corruption on God's behalf. Here, for instance, is a Kabbalistic view of creation:

...Our present world has arisen out of three great dramatic cosmic events–the Simsum, or contraction of God, the Shebirah, or breaking of the vessels, and the Tikkun, the reconstruction or rectification.

Before the Simsum, the various powers of the Ein-Sof or Infinite God, were harmoniously balanced and could not be separated from one another. These aspects were the opposing forces of Compassion (Rahamim) and Stern Judgement (Din), bound together in light. At the beginning of existence, the Ein-Sof withdrew into itself, creating an empty space (the Tehiru or vacuum), within which the forces of Din began to take on an independent life. This deeper concealment, or contraction of the Ein-Sof, thus resulted in a purging of the harsh dross which contained all elements of potential evil from the being of God. The empty space thus contained the forces of Din and a remnant, the Reshimu, or impression of the the Divine Light.

At this point the Ein-Sof emanated a ray, the kab ha-middah or "cosmic measure"... This ray penetrated the tehiru and worked to organise the opposing forces that now filled this space, and brought into manifestation the Primordial Man, the Adam Kadmon...

Initially Adam Kadmon did not have the form of a man, but appears as a set of ten concentric circles, the outer circle remaining in close contact with the Ein-Sof. These ten Sephiroth eventually reorganised themselves into the linear form of the human body. From the head and eyes of this Primordial figure bright light poured forth. This light was gathered and held by the vessels (Kelim) of the Sephiroth. These vessels, the primitive ten Sephiroth, could only receive God, they could not in any sense resemble the giving, creating power of the Ein-Sof. In this sense the vessels were incomplete and could not hold the light.

The vessels of the upper three... at first performed well in the task of holding the light, but when the light poured down through the lower vessels..., these six lower vessels shattered and were dispersed into the chaotic void of the tehiru. This was the Shebirat-ha-kelim, "the breaking of the vessels"... The next stage in the cosmic process, and the one in which we are ourselves living, is that of the Tikkun, the period in which processes of restoration and repair must be undertaken. The primary medium for this restoration is the light that continued to emanate from the eyes of Adam Kadmon...

In Luria's scheme the Biblical Adam had the task of reintegrating the divine sparks as his being contained all of the various worlds, his body being a perfect microcosm of Adam Kadmon. Adam should have separated the divine sparks from the husks and restored them to the light of the divine. Adam of course failed in his cosmic task, and this responsibility has now been passed on to all humanity. It is the task of humanity to find the sparks of the spirit buried in the husks of the material world and and raise these sparks to their divine source.

The mystical tales of creation (delivered, as they so often are, with the caveat that they're insights available only to a select few) will be soothing to those troubled by the image of a God beyond rationality and morality to whom we owe obedience. These myths recognize that something is fundamentally wrong with creation as we experience it, and they don't seek to make us responsible for those flaws. Needless to say, the mainstream traditions tend to see these ideas as apostasy. And in the end, despite being comforting, they're no more convincing than any other creation myth on the progression from an omnipotent and omniscient creator to a creation defined (at least in part) by suffering. But I find them interesting for a different reason.

I discovered these myths not through any study of theology, but through Harold Bloom's literary criticism. Though the connection between these strange, obscure ideas and literature wasn't immediately obvious, I was fascinated by them. As an irregular writer through this Weblog, I'm beginning to understand the connection between mystical conceptions of creation and the effort of writing. I've become convinced that any writer of quality is always dissatisfied with his or her writing; and the better the writer, the greater his or her dissatisfaction. Like the transcendent God of mysticism, we are filled with what seem to be beautiful, eternal notions, and merely contemplating them is a source of great joy. But the effort of creation--of forming those ideas into something outside of ourselves--quickly grows frustrating. Attempts to render the ideas into the inadequate medium of words fall far short of the beauty and timelessness that we beheld, or worse, we lose the ideas altogether to the cognitive process that precedes writing. It is only and always through the process of creation that flaws come into existence. And we are left with our flawed creations--our lame sentences and paragraphs--to bear witness to our failure on their behalf, hope as we may that they will ultimately redeem us.

That's the noble version of the suffering inherent in writing. But more recently, I've discovered a darker reality underlying both the creation of imaginative literature and the mystical myths of creation. I entered into a pointed philosophical discussion that became upsetting. Though my writing in this Weblog is generally not what I would call imaginative literature, I wrote two entries in the approximate form of Freudian case studies that were more creative and ironic than usual in an effort to express my anger, restore my damaged sense of self, and understand my reactions to that discussion. Understood in those terms, they were my most successful pieces of writing yet, not because they best conveyed some beautiful, eternal idea that I had glimpsed, but because they were vessels containing ideas, impulses, and emotions that I wanted to separate from my self. Through a personal process of Simsum, I was withdrawing my self from these flawed pieces of that self, placing them in the vessels of those entries. Posting them was a Shebirah, and after the breaking of the vessels I hoped for some sort of restorative interaction that would bring about a personal Tikkun. But after less than a day, I realized that inflicting further imperfection on the world was unlikely to lead to any rectification. Because I couldn't predict the reaction of my correspondent to something so raw and provocative, I removed those entries and cut short the life of my creations before they spawned too much suffering.

The process of genuine literary creation always brings flaws into existence not because writers are imperfect creators, but because that process is an effort by writers to externalize their flaws. As most of us learned in high school, Shakespeare's character are great not because of their beauty or even necessarily because of their timelessness (though that is important), but because of their fundamentally human and often tragic flaws. Shakespeare was the greatest creator of characters because he was so successful at externalizing his flaws into those characters. So I don't believe that the mystical creation myths reflect any truth about the creation of our universe (or, if they do, that's merely coincidence). Instead, they appear to be the efforts of writers seeking to understand and describe the process of creation as they knew it (an insight available and comprehensible to only a select few), and to project the flaws that they knew through that process onto their character, the ultimate Creator.