Adam Kadmon on television

PHILOLOGOS: How Adam Kadmon Made the Leap From The Kabbalah to Italian Television: Primordial Man Has Had a Long, Strange History.

Is he an imaginative Italian investigative journalist? The descendant, as he claims to be, of an ancient family endowed with mystical powers, stemming from seven androids created thousands of years ago by an extraterrestrial geneticist in ancient Sumeria? A former peace activist — as he also claims — who was attacked and put out of commission in 1986 by a secret group of mobsters called “the Illuminati,” only to resurface again, in 2009, as a popular media figure?

It’s anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, as the guessing goes on, so does a weekly show on Italia 1 television in which Adam Kadmon, which means “primordial man” in the Hebrew of the Kabbalah, unravels such “mysteries” as the abdication of Pope Benedict, the death of Hugo Chávez and the secret life of Michael Jackson, and tilts with the Illuminati, who are still out to get him.

Despite his Hebrew name, there’s no need to suspect that he’s Jewish, because the kabbalistic figure of Adam Kadmon has had literary currency outside the Jewish world for a century or more; this goes back at least as far as the late 19th-century vogue for Theosophy, a movement that drew eclectically on a wide range of mystical sources.