Bat Kol

©Cameron Altaras

An audio recording which explores the gendered blame game encoded in a religious history of noble words and ignoble actions and suggests one pay heed to the advice that “by their fruits you shall know them”[1]

Words and Vocals – Cameron Altaras

Sounds, Effects and Mixing – Jeff Altaras

Length – 12+ min

Bat Kol, a Hebrew term meaning "sound," "resonance," especially as it pertains to a heavenly or divine voice. Other sources claim it “means the reverberation or hum, caused by the motion of all things, which fills the whole world, and which accompanies the human voice and every other sound.” And still further, the “characteristic attributes of the Bat Ḳol are the invisibility of the speaker and a certain remarkable quality in the sound, regardless of its strength or weakness.” Another source explains it as “the sound of a voice issuing from heaven, whence the name ‘the daughter of the voice’.” This audio recording takes into account all of these aspects and begins with the voice of a “special being,” whose function it is, as stated in apocalyptic literature, “to lead the song of the celestial beings in praise of the Most High around His [sic] throne.” Other sources refer to “a kind of Bat Ḳol which, in view of its aims, falls into the category of omens.” [2]

And indeed, this audio recording feels like an omen. 

And so it began.

And so it continues…

Australian Aborigines believe the ancestors “sang” the world into existence. What if there were a voice which emerged out of Nothingness on the breath of the Divine singing a beautiful tone? Perhaps that holy song, that Sancti Canticum, then passing through a prism of the Universe, created the diverging harmonies of all that is. If all diverging parts emerged from one song, why the antagonism we experience as part and parcel of human existence?

That’s where the blame game comes in. To insist that all that has gone wrong is the fault of another, causes further divergence, disharmony and ultimately, disconnection. According to the legends that fuel the world many of us live in, the blame game began along gendered lines.

In brief:

Adam blamed her [Eve].

And the writings of Paul -- to whom many texts of the Christian scriptures are attributed -- continued the blaming and the shaming of the female sex, for example, in the following: “… women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” (I Corinthians 14: 34-35.)

Thus:

And Paul shamed her.

The audio recording, Bat Kol, explores the gendered blame game that has taken place over millennia and in particular, has been encoded in a 2,000-year religious history of the Christian Church.

Stories of gardens and glory, of sacrifice and suffering, were appropriated from ancient cultures. Leaders in the early centuries of the Christian Church, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine and Ambrose re-named and re-appointed the themes and characters, re-working them as religious doctrine. Debates regarding exact wording, in places like Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon, were as political as they were theological. “If religion shaped the political world, then politics forged the character of religion.”[3] Delineation of terms codified in creeds shaped the psyches of believers, as “issues of power were disguised in theological terms.” [4]

Such is the Empire of Religion.

Theologically “forced conformity”[5] decreed that descendants of those banished from original glory exist in a state of sin and sorrow. A constructed hierarchy anointed some with power to dispense to those with none, the grace and mercy that is their due by the mere fact that all on earth are emanations of that Divine One from whom all breath originates in that original song of creation.

A Credo (Latin for “I believe”), known as the Apostles’ Creed, hovers within the consciousness of believers and imprints itself upon their very souls, to remind all of proper belief, for “[q]uite literally, […] eternal salvation depends on holding a precisely correct faith.”[6] That Credo hovers in the background of this recording in its original Latin. In an attempt to un-write it, the Latin recording is literally played backwards and words from the English translation are stated in reverse order. The result sounds like garbled nonsense until it disappears. In the words of Don Juan: “Here, surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous.”[7]

A reference to the three sets of three ringing of the bells of the Angelus, leads the recording to end as it began: a song again, this one carrying a vision set forth in the words of William Blake:

“…Roses are planted where thorns grow,

And on the barren heath

Sing the honeybees.”[8]

When one finds oneself in the silence of Infinity, if one is silent often enough or long enough, one might hear an echo of that Divine voice breaking in on the world once again in holy song … Sancti Canticum … the emergence of a different voice.

So, listen. Listen carefully. Listen to the last resonance, that reverberation, that hum, “which fills the whole world,” that Bat Kol,.

[1] Matthew 7:16.

[2] https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2651-bat-kol

[3] Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,5000 Years (New York: HarperCollins, 2010): xiv.

[4] Ibid., 79.

[5] Ibid., 2.

[6] Ibid., 5.

[7] Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974): 40. I got the idea to use the term “unwrite” from the following: “Not one syllable of all that is written will remain. Even now I begin to speak them backwards, unwriting all you have done.” Clark Strand, “Gospel According to the Dark,” in Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age, (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 130.

[8] William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966/1972): 148.