La Convivencia celebrates diversity and welcomes new interpretations of old beliefs which hold true to the idea that the world is a place of perfection and beauty.
La Convivencia presented Kabbalah and Interfaith, a three-day international conference on how mystical interpretation of religion can contribute significantly to community, faith and harmony. Location: Birmingham, UK,15th-17th April 2011.
For a period of almost 400 years, in the days when Spain was ruled by the Moors, the believers in Judaism, Christianity and Islam lived together in relative peace. On the surface there were tensions but at the root there was a deep understanding of the links between the faiths. This “convivencia” has permeated esoteric teaching to the present day.
Scholarship and mysticism thrived in Spanish towns such as Toledo, Cordoba and Granada as students and teachers in all three disciplines helped each other to learn, translate and understand ancient teachings
On April 15, Ian presented his paper, The Tree of Life Outside Judaism.
It has long been known that Genesis contains versions of stories from Mesopotamia. For example, we can now identify the type of Tree in nature which the writer of the Eden story in Genesis would have had in mind, and it is definitely not the apple tree.
Some authors have claimed an Egyptian origin for the mystical Tree symbol but it is actually Asiatic and a symbol of Kingship linked to the health of the land and in its people, tended by angelic beings. Ian will speak mainly on the symbols of ancient Iraq.
Assyria was in northern Iraq, close to Kurdistan, a likely site of Eden in Genesis. The palace art of Assyria (9th to 7th centuries BCE) in the British Museum depicts a sacred Tree closely connected with the Divine Ruler. It is argued to be akin to the Jewish Tree glyph that is recorded (as a description of the Sefirot) in Hebrew mystical texts datable to about 2,000 years ago, such as the Sefer Yezirah.
Ian Freer's book Pagan Eden – Assyrian Origins of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life will soon be available from O-Books.
