Timothy James Lambert

Reviewed on the basis of an advance reader's copy received from the author. (The current text in print may have some differences.)

The preliminaries of the first volume of Timothy James Lambert's Gnostic Notebook had me thinking that the second volume would contain an exposition of how the memory techniques of classical rhetoric were used in Christian scripture. However, by the end of that volume, he had wandered quite far from the Ad Herennium of pseudo-Cicero, and I was a little disappointed to find in the second volume that he did not return. He did, however, fulfill his promise to engage in esoteric biblical hermeneutics.

In a nutshell, the work of this second volume is to use the Gnostic "sayings" literature in the Apocryphon of James and the Gospel of Thomas to identify parables of interest in the Synoptic Gospels, which Lambert then analyzes for inconsistencies, euphemisms, and signposting language to support a set of esoteric readings. Despite the buildup of the first volume, this one uses no heuristic system comparable to the I Ching or the Gurdjieffian triads, but it does take the Gnostic scriptures as a hermeneutic key to be applied to the Synoptics. (Lambert's focus on parables makes the Fourth Gospel irrelevant here.)

His scenario for how this inter-textual state of affairs came to be is a little confusing. How could it be that the authors of the Gospel of Thomas and Apocryphon of James "knew the Synoptic Gospels" when writing, if in fact "the Gospel of Thomas and the Secret Book of James are older than the Synoptic Gospels"? (21) It seems clear that if the relationships highlighted by Lambert among the texts were by authorial intention, then the Synoptics must predate the two Gnostic books, and the authors of the latter must have been intimate with the intentions of the Synoptic writers.

This book does not seem to reflect an especially pious take on the material of scripture. Although he doesn't cite it in the body of the book, Lambert's four-item bibliography includes skeptic Richard Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus. And in fact, the sort of codes and cross-references that he postulates make a lot more sense in the context of understanding Jesus as a literary character, rather than a historical religious teacher. That makes it entertainingly ironic that the Darby Bible is Lambert's preferred translation, resting as it does in the wellspring of the most fundamentalist strains of modern Christianity. I use "fundamentalist" here to mean anti-interpretational (i.e. the sense put into play by Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory, where there is also a relevant discussion of the relationship between hermeneutics and heuristics). Still, it's true that the dogged literalness of the Darby text makes it useful to someone looking for interpretive openings that may previously have been obscured by translation.

So, what secrets does Lambert disclose? His revelations are--incomplete. Indeed, there is a great deal of gesturing to an unopened curtain, and allusion to unwritten future volumes. But he does highlight some language in the parables that is, to me, suggestive of what I have received as initiated knowledge. Distinct from that, the final part of the book (still addressing a set of chief parables) begins to outline an "alternative system of mathematical knowledge" in antiquity, which has some provocative similarity to the foundations of Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics.

It is clear that Lambert will need at least two more volumes on this sort of 70-page scale if he is to round out the efforts he has begun documenting here. He has made it clear that he already has a final message in mind, but that he is trying to build toward it in a meticulous and systematic fashion. Along the way, he is encountering new difficulties and making new discoveries. It will be interesting to see what comes next.… (mehr)

Reviewed on the basis of a complimentary copy received from the author. (Nevertheless, this review contains only my usual biases.)

In this third volume of Timothy James Lambert's Gnostic Notebook, I was pleasantly surprised to find him executing a version of a project I had contemplated undertaking myself some years ago. To wit: He revisits the theory of matter from Plato's Timaeus and relates it to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics (particularly the closest-packing of spheres and consequent formation of polyhedra), all viewed under the influence of esoteric correspondences. Oddly, Lambert doesn't credit Fuller's work with closest-packing of spheres, although he does use an evocative quote from Critical Path to illustrate one of the correspondences that he asserts.

Most of Lambert's text is concerned to ground these ideas in an unlikely textual synthesis of the Genesis creation account and the I Ching. He admits on his final page that he hasn't provided any narrative to support his claim that the authors of Genesis had the I Ching at their disposal as a key for coding ideas, but he says he'll be picking up this thread in a later volume. Another tease for future work is the promise (150) that the next book will undertake a reading of the I Ching as chiefly concerned with enlightened human procreation, which would perhaps capitalize on the occasional broad hints at sexual symbolism in volumes II and III of the series so far.

Throughout the book, Lambert intuits and adduces a multi-layered system of correspondences which he insists are "falsifiable" and inductively robust. I didn't have trouble maintaining my skepticism toward them, however. One point of especial weakness was his "correction" of the traditional meanings of two of the I Ching trigrams on the basis of relationships within a hypothetical octahedron with planetary attributions to the vertices (in turn corresponding to yin and yang hexagram lines). It's ironic that he takes this revision to indicate the utility of his theory here, as well as suggesting that Hakuin Ekaku (an 18th-century Zen master) composed the "one hand clapping" koan specifically to serve as a clue to this supposed secret (132-5).

There is constant reference to an astrological diagram, "an image which I call the tree of life" (76, fig. 69), which is not the Etz Chaim of the qabalah. It has the planets in a central column, ranging from Earth at the bottom, up through the days of the week from Sol (Sunday) to Saturn (Saturday). While this arrangement is useful for his exposition of the Genesis creation story, he makes an unjustified pivot at the book's end to assert that it maps on to the sat chakras of esoteric human anatomy. The result is one that I personally consider "falsified" on the basis of esoteric instruction I've received, as well as my personal practice.

Despite the "Fourth Dimension" in the title and some discussion in the early parts of the book, there was disappointingly little hypergeometry here. And while Lambert has promised to revisit Salvador Dali's Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), he intends to do so in the context of the Platonic-Christian connection, rather than that of hypergeometry. This volume was as long as the previous two put together, but held my attention less efficiently. Perhaps a more magisterial tone would better suit the material than Lambert's chatty exploratory approach? Yet these are a titled as a "Notebook," and the style reflects that: a tentative groping on the page for the content that will deserve to be summed up in the exposition of a "divine system."… (mehr)

Reviewed on the basis of a complimentary copy received from the author. (Nevertheless, this review contains only my usual biases.)

There is a great deal of ingenuity contained in this slim Gnostic Notebook: Volume One: On Memory Systems and Fairy Tales, which exhibits at least two methods of valuable esoteric exegesis. Alas, I fear that author Timothy James Lambert has worked at odds with his stated aims. The chief of those aims is to demonstrate the possibility of a "literary memory system" in anticipation of a second volume, where Lambert will adduce one in the Christian scriptures. In this first step, he uses for case studies four of the fairy tales (Märchen) collected by the Brothers Grimm.

In his notion of a "literary memory system" Lambert conflates the encoding in the classical memory arts (found in the Ad Herennium of pseudo-Cicero) with the encryption in cryptography and steganography. Perhaps his assertion, not quite explicit, is that the symbol-system of the architectural/figural mnemonic could serve as a steganographic code, but he makes it seem as if it were actually intended for one. In any case, while he introduces the Ad Herennium here, it does not play a part in his exegesis of the selections from the Brothers Grimm.

Instead, Lambert uses two other systems: the triads of 20th-century mystic George Gurdjieff (as interpreted by P.D. Ouspensky) and the ancient Chinese oracle I Ching. In both cases, he admits that there is no evidence that these systems were available to the composers of the Märchen (26-27). Still, he insists that fertile results of his use of these systems as "keys" to interpret the tales should persuade the reader that they were used in writing them (51).

A strikingly similar project to the one undertaken here by Lambert can be found in the magisterial occult work Book Four by Aleister Crowley. In Part II of that book, the "Interlude" states: "Every nursery rime contains profound magical secrets which are open to every one who has made a study of the correspondences of the Holy Qabalah." Crowley then proceeds to demonstrate this claim by analyzing eleven nursery rhymes chosen "at hazard" by one of his students. Instead of the Gurdjieffian triads or the I Ching, he uses the Hebrew Qabalah as amplified through the tradition of ceremonial magic. Crowley advises, however, in a footnote, "If [this interlude] is thought to be a joke, the reader is one useless kind of fool; if it is thought that Fra. P. [Crowley] believes that the makers of the rimes had any occult intention, he is another useless kind of fool."

Crowley's point, as I take it, is to show the power of the heuristic system (in this case, the Qabalah) to produce meaning from relatively muddled phenomena. These nursery rhyme readings are not mere wordplay, but "creative misprision" (to appropriate a phrase from Harold Bloom that I received via Ioan Couliano). The dignity of the heuristic system elevates the reading to "things lofty and secret" (as Lambert quotes Trithemius), producing gold from base substance. The interpretive act is a creative act, and the act of creation is the truth of being. Note, however, that both Lambert's fairy tales and Crowley's nursery rhymes are texts distinctive for their roots in oral transmission (or similarity to others of that sort), and that the organic effects of memory and speech will have selected for them features especially ripe for these sorts of creative exploitation, as well as ones that could seem to have been designed by a practitioner of figural mnemonics.

All of which returns the reader to "The Golden Key," a Märchen appended by the Grimms as a closing to the second volume of their tales. Lambert's take on this story is that it metaphorically points to the use of encryption in composing the other tales (17). I think that it affirms the lesson of Crowley's "Interlude": the primary concern is the golden key (the heuristic system) and how to operate it. The contents of the little chest (any given tale) are doubtless "wonderful things," but the wonders of their particulars depend in fact on the key that is found and the skill of its user. At first, the chest doesn't even have a keyhole; there is no self-evident application of a heuristic system. In a simple narrative metaphor, the Grimms urge the reader--who might well have dismissed any such folklore as "nonsense"--to the work of creative misprision in order to realize the value of this literary heritage.

I will certainly proceed to investigate what Lambert finds in the little chest of Christian scripture with the golden key of the Ad Herennium.… (mehr)

Received a complimentary copy from the author (via LibraryThing).

My general unfamiliarity with the Bible as literary text, as a narrative (as incoherent or incohesive as it might be) caught up with me in the Fifth Notebook. It was always a challenge to put Lambert's arguments into context, when I relied so much upon Lambert to provide that context, so I followed along (sometimes persuaded, others questioning). Here, I simply lose the thread and the fault is mine as much as his.

Lambert sums up the Lost Mythos, but much of his narrative is "extrapolated" since those details are not encoded in Bible books. Interestingly, his isn't any less supernatural than the Bible account itself, it's merely different: a breeding line involving impregnation of human women by angels. Lambert does not discuss in much detail what is meant by angel, whether a purely supernatural being, or perhaps rather a different breed of human.

The Bible as narrative, of course, is always going to be problematic. Not only that the Bible is not the work of a single author, but also that there's not even a single editor and if there's a consensus guiding the placement of books in their (current) customary sequence, I'm largely ignorant of it -- at least, at the level needed to interpret messages as Lambert discusses. Similarly, what "holes" in the narrative result from books left out of the Bible narrative? For me, all of that is central to the issue of interpreting messages hidden, and at this point Lambert's argument is no less interesting than it was in the First Notebook, but has left the realm of argument and become an interpretation as free-standing as most any other Biblical exegesis. The resulting argument isn't primarily a matter of believability, for me, it's simply so far outside my contextual frame as to defy assessment.… (mehr)