January 4 (or December 25 according to the Julian calendar) marked the 380th anniversary of the birth of the great physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and alchemist Isaac Newton. Most of us know him as the brilliant scientist who developed the law of gravity after seeing an apple fall. But behind the common notions of Isaac Newton stood a completely different man who studied doomsday prophecies and tried to understand the patterns of the relationship between matter and spirit.
In July 1936, an auction was held at the Sotheby’s auction house in London, which shocked the world of science. Presented are 327 mysterious manuscripts written by none other than Sir Isaac Newton – one of the greatest scientists in world history, creator of classical mechanics and author of the three famous laws of motion and the law of universal attraction (gravity).
Newton’s descendant, Gerard Wallup, a red-haired Briton and, according to some reports, a man of pro-Nazi convictions, decided to sell for as much as possible the manuscripts of the genius (known as the Portsmouth Papers), which he bequeathed to his family and which were never published. Wallup has no idea what’s on them. He just needs the money to pay for his divorce. But the other two characters in the story have a pretty good feeling about the secrets hidden in the manuscripts.
One of them is the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, the father of the Keynesian school, who at one time worked as an economic adviser to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The other is Jerusalem-based Tanach scholar Dr. Abraham Yehuda, who helped his friend Albert Einstein escape the Nazis in the 1930s.
When Keynes and Yehuda carefully studied the manuscripts, they realized that the scientific community was wrong when, for two hundred years, it considered Newton a scientist who devoted most of his time to the development of scientific theories and rational thinking. The works presented for sale leave no room for doubt: a significant and large part of Newton’s research was devoted to completely different areas: the study of the “divine laws” that govern matter and spirit.
He explores the relationship between morality, mathematics and prophecy; between the secrets of alchemy and the processes of creation; between the temples and the placement of the “stars” in the solar system. He searches for Noah’s Ark, tries to find out the location of the lost Atlantis, believes that there is a connection between the laws of nature and the pattern of human development. He studied Torah, Kabbalah and the New Testament in depth. Contrary to the 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire’s claim that Newton worked on his writings “to relieve the fatigue of more difficult studies,” as if these manuscripts were not so important, it turns out that Newton not only spent more most of his time on them, but also gained insights and made discoveries in these areas. He believed that there was an ancient wisdom that had been forgotten for generations after humanity had been corrupted. Newton devoted his life to the discovery of this ancient knowledge.
What’s in the manuscripts?
Keynes died in 1946, but before he died he took care to transfer the notes to the Cambridge University Library. Dr. Yehuda became seriously ill in 1951 and bequeathed his share of Newton’s work to the National Library in Jerusalem. While in England there is a rush to reveal the secret manuscripts, which are mainly related to alchemy and theology (in the 1990s they will appear on the Internet as part of the Newton Project), in Israel little attention has been paid to the old manuscripts devoted to Judaism and chronology of ancient peoples. Only after litigation did they enter the National Library in the 1970s, and for the next 30 years they were studied by only three scholars. One of them is Dr. Ayval Leshem-Ramati, a former professor of history at the Hebrew University who devoted seven years to studying Newton’s work since the mid-1990s.
The scientific community of the world, wishing to preserve its “scientific purity”, has difficulty accepting these manuscripts and perceives them in the same way as Voltaire: they see in them the “dark side” of Newton, some strange addition to his rational personality. Scientists treat them with curiosity and a smile, but nothing more. So what’s in these manuscripts? In February 2003, Britain’s Telegraph published an article saying: “Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest British scientist of all time, predicted the end of the world: just 57 years away.”
“Newton believes that the prophecies of Daniel and the revelation of John tell us how ‘God’s plan’ will work in history,” explains Leshem-Ramati. – The end of all this, of course, is the apocalypse – the “judgment day”. Newton believes that the apocalypse will be as Christians understand it: the world will be destroyed and people will be judged according to their good and bad deeds. In the era when Newton lived, many thought that the apocalypse would happen in their time. Newton’s analysis showed that this was not the case.” Newton compared 20 different editions of the prophetic writings, examined ancient writings and used research by the British scholar Joseph Mead, who developed a “code” to decipher the books of Daniel and John. After all, Newton himself wrote a book devoted to reading the symbols of the prophets. “The book teaches how to translate prophecies and sees them as a kind of language,” explains Dr. Leshem-Ramati. – Newton studied not only prophecies from Jewish sources, but all existing prophecies in the world, except Buddhist and Muslim. He showed that everything predicted by Daniel and John actually happened.” According to David Castillejo, one of the researchers of Newton’s works, Newton’s calculations indicate that the Jews will begin to return to their land in the late XIX century and that a great upheaval awaits them in the 1940s.”
The Divine Plan “Newton openly stated that God created the world,” explains Dr. Leshem-Ramati. – He believes that there was a fall in the Garden of Eden, which led to the moral degradation of mankind. Then God chose the righteous Noah to start a new era. After Newton researched this topic, he found a connection between the data on the size of the ark that Noah received from God and the data on the size of the tabernacle, as well as the dimensions of the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem.”
Newton studied the exact dimensions of the First Temple, believing that if he could find the dimensions of every pillar, tile, and corner, he could learn about the structure of the universe and discover what he called the “Divine Plan.” According to him, the structure of the temple contains the dimensions of the universe and was built by divine inspiration.
On the diagrams he depicted in his manuscripts, he described the architectural structures as well as the size of the structures and the number of stairs in the various passages. He discovered the so-called divine proportion – the golden ratio (a harmonic ratio of sizes that is widespread in nature). “Noah became the first possessor of the Divine Plan,” continued Dr. Leshem-Ramati, explaining the logic behind Newton’s thinking, “and passed it on to his sons.” After a thorough study of history, Newton showed that all the cultures that arose after Noah—the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, etc. – adhere to the teachings of Noah and his sons. Newton believed that there was one primordial religion, the source of all religions, and it was not Judaism. This is an older religion – the religion of Noah. “According to Newton’s manuscripts, when people after Noah stopped keeping the commandments and began to worship the sun and stars, and the fear arose again that the ‘Divine Plan’ would collapse, Abraham appeared – the next divine messenger. The purpose of his mission is to remind humanity of the virtues. Newton wrote that if man is inherently more virtuous, then his consciousness and internal organization are similar to God’s internal organization. That is, if God reveals his plan to people, then man can use it for his own benefit. But if a person does not possess virtue, he moves away from God and is not able to understand His plan”, continues Leshem-Ramati. After Abraham, humanity is again corrupted and the next savior messenger is Moses. Thanks to him, we learn about the history of the creation of the world and about morality. Newton explains that everything is written in a simple language that people can understand, but also shows how the laws of the world are encrypted in the Torah. “Newton argued that God was constantly sending us prophets to prevent destruction, and that the next prophet was Jesus. Jesus for Newton is like Moses, Abraham and Noah. Each coming prophet reveals something else in the “Divine Plan”. The difference is that Jesus understands that people should not be given so many commands, so he gives them the “Divine Plan” in its purest form, in the simplest way: love God, honor Him and also “love your neighbor as yourself,” explains the researcher. There are only two commandments. If Judaism revolves around the number 7, then according to Newton the number 2 is associated with Christianity. But Newton shows that what happened to the Christians was much worse than what happened to the Jews. They became so corrupt that none of them followed what Jesus said. In November 1690, Newton sent two letters of about 25,000 words each to his friend John Locke, the famous philosopher who is now considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment. These are explosive letters, the contents of which were secret, for if even one paragraph had become public, Newton would probably have immediately lost his professorship at Cambridge. In his letters, Newton opposes the Holy Trinity, a concept he believes was invented by church leaders in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and added to the New Testament, but the concept did not exist earlier. Newton compared about 30 versions of the New Testament, some of them in different languages, cited about a hundred interpretations of church leaders, and proved in his letters to Locke that the Holy Trinity never existed. In Newton’s time, the Catholic Church executed thousands of people for refusing to swear that Jesus and God were one and the same. “He did not at all think that Jesus replaced God (as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity claims) – says Dr. Leshem Ramati. – Jesus is God’s messenger, who came to remind us of the virtues and of the “Divine Plan”. Newton writes that John also received the Plan in fairly accurate form, but after him no one could be trusted.
The Law of Karma
Another subject that fascinated Newton was alchemy, which dealt with the transformation of base metals such as iron or lead into gold. His secret experiments in alchemy revealed to him, as he tried to show in his manuscripts, the spiritual and material laws hidden in the processes of material transformation and return to a purer and original state. From his point of view, alchemy traces the divine activity of matter as a play between the forces of attraction and repulsion at the atomic level.
“Of Newton’s three laws of motion, the third law states that every action has an equal force and an opposite reaction,” recalls Dr. Leshem Ramati. – Newton called it “the law of action and action reaction”. It’s a principle very similar to the principle of karma, where you reap what you sow. Because we humans behave in a certain way, Newton explains that if we do not become wise (he uses the word “wise” in the sense of “righteous”), then our feelings will become coarse, we will not become righteous people, and so we will absorb the reality. We will continue to act in this way, and on the Day of Judgment we will pay for it: we will reap what we have sown.” In 1696, Newton left the world of science and became the manager of the Royal Mint. One of the key actions he took was establishing the first gold standard in Britain. Newton held this position for the last 30 years of his life. “Newton understood better than any other man how force works in the world. That’s why he also understands politics – says Dr. Leshem-Ramati. – He knows that if you use an external force, then you directly create friction or resistance. He is interested in how God manifests his power. Virtually every person on the path to enlightenment will tell you that their desire is to be free of karma. This preoccupied Newton. With the help of the laws of mechanics and gravity, he tries to understand how God carries out his will without being affected by it. It is necessary to understand that in the seventeenth century, when Newton lived, there was no division between physics and metaphysics. The approach boils down to understanding the laws of the universe—the interrelationship of the laws by which matter operates and the laws by which spirit operates. Newton saw in the study of this his vocation.’
In this sense, Newton is not very different from Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543), who took the title of “center of the universe” from the Earth and placed it in orbit around the Sun. Newton’s ideas were similar to those of Johann Kepler (1571 – 1630), who developed a series of laws describing the motion of the planets around the Sun, and at the same time he was a devout Lutheran who saw scientific research as an attempt to understand God’s will. spirit. Moreover, Newton was not very different from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed differential and integral calculus and also studied the relationship between spirit and matter. And yet, according to Dr. Leshem-Ramati, none of these scientists went as far as Newton in discovering the inner connection between science and spirituality, in an attempt to unite them. “Newton wanted to restore the ancient wisdom that had been lost,” she concludes, “but he understood that his generation was not yet ready to accept most revelations.” Therefore, he has hidden large parts of his research and decided to give only what is not disputed. One of the problems researchers face in understanding Newton is finding a scholar who is not only well versed in mathematics and physics but also interested in theology and alchemy, the history of the prophets, and other areas with which the great scientist was engaged in.’
Illustration: William Blake’s Newton (1795) presents the scientist as a divine geometer / Public Domain
