Qabalah Gates of Light The Occult Qabala

The Qabalah Gates of Light:
The Occult Qabalah
Reconstructed
Revised Edition
The Story of How, and Why, the Masters of the Occult Misunderstood the
Jewish Kabbalah.
By Gary M. Jaron
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Jaron
First published April 2014
Revised edition published 2018
Printed by CreateSpace, Charleston South Carolina, U.S.A.
CreateSpace is a DBA of On-Demand Publishing LLC, part of the Amazon
group of companies.
©2018 Gary M. Jaron
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1985061828
Gary M. Jaron can be reached at [email protected]
Blogs: http://garyjaron.com/
Figures rendered by Isaac Hall
2014 Manuscript edited by Annie Agard
Cover Illustration taken from the cover page of the 1516 Latin translation
Portae Lucis of Rabbi Gikatilla s circa
Sha are Orah, Gates of Light. The source
of the picture was the Center for Online Judaic Studies.
This book uses Palatino Linotype font. This selection was based on the
font used in my hardback edition of Ray ”radbury s Dandelion Wine.
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I offer my heartfelt thanks to Cedar,
for putting up with my loud kvetching,
as I worked on this book.
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Table of Contents
Table of Figures ...................................................................................................5
Why a New Edition? ........................................................................................... 6
1: The Purpose Behind This Book. ....................................................................8
2: Why Study the Kabbalah? The Answer the Qabalists Gave. .................. 14
3: The Rules of the Game .................................................................................. 26
4: The Jewish Kabbalah and the Christian Cabalah ...................................... 31
5: The Origin of the Occult Qabalah ............................................................... 40
6: Introduction: The Sefer Yetzirah, The Bahir and The ZoharError! Bookmark
not defined.
Sha are Orah the Original Gates of Light .. Error! Bookmark not defined.
8: The Qabalah Texts ......................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
9: The Key to the Kingdom: Etz Chaim, The Tree of LifeError! Bookmark not
defined.
10: The Diagram of the Tree ............................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
11: The letters and the Paths ............................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
12: How and Why the Qabalists Were Mislead.Error! Bookmark not defined.
13: The Meaning of the Hebrew Names of the SefirahsError! Bookmark not
defined.
14: Keter .............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
15: Chakmah, Binah and Da at ........................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
16: Gedulah/Chesed, Gevurah/Din, and TiferethError! Bookmark not defined.
17: Netzach, Hod and Yesod ............................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
18: Malkuth......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
19: My Planetary Qabalah Correspondences . Error! Bookmark not defined.
20: English Alphabet Gematria ........................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
21: Philosophic Metaphors ............................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
22: The Road Goes Ever On ............................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Bibliography ....................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Commentary ...................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
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Table of Figures
Figure 1: Enclosed Tree ......................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 2: Illustration from Latin Translation of Sha’are Orah . Error!
Bookmark not defined.
Figure 3 .................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 4 .................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 5 .................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 6 .................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7: English translation of Kircher’s Tree Error! Bookmark not
defined.
Figure 8 The 1300 Kabbalist Tree ........ Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 9: Enclosed array with GRA based lettersError! Bookmark not
defined.
Figure 10: Modern Qabalah Tree ........ Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 11 Zohar/ARI Tree with my planets ...... Error! Bookmark not
defined.
Figure 12: Enclosed Tree with my planetsError! Bookmark not defined.
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Why a New Edition?
In 2017 when I first began to contemplate writing a sequel to this first
book, I was led onto a train of research and thought that ultimately brought a
realization that I had made some errors and false assumptions when I wrote this
first edition of this book.
First off I now realize that Kaplan s natural array and his placing of the
GR“ s letters on that array, was a fabrication of his own devising, a mistake that
he created. None of the original Kabbalists made use of such an array, as Kaplan
himself notes on page of his book on the Sefer Yetzirah.
Next, I now realize that what I call the Enclosed array was the one used
by the earliest school of Kabbalists and was replaced by Joseph ben Abraham
Gikatilla, in his Gates of Light and by the Zohar.
When I set about to place the Hebrew letters onto the tree both in the
Enclosed array and the Zohar/Ari version, I mistakenly tried to replicate
Kaplan s attempt to use the GR“ s arrangement on his Natural “rray as the
model to emulate. That was my mistake. The working out of GR“ s true Tree
and his letters on that tree is a prominent part of my second book.
I also now realize that Athanasius Kircher was even more deliberately
fabricating a falsehood, than I had first realized. He choose to use what was in
his time an outdated version of the Tree, the Enclosed array, since now the
Kabbalists had embraced the Gikatilla /Zohar/Ari version at the time Kircher
published his book on Cabala. Kircher also fabricated his own letter placement
on his Tree completely ignoring the Sefer Yetzirah. Despite the fact that he
offered a translation of the text into Latin in his own book.
Lastly, I had confused the meanings of Hod and Netzach, by getting
those misapplied to the correct sefirah.
Therefore this revised edition has numerous changes based on the above
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realizations.
G.M. Jaron, February 1, 2018.
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: The Purpose Behind This Book.1
I first encountered the symbols and ideas of the Qabalah in 1970 when I
began exploring the Occult and Magick. I first encountered Jewish Kabbalah
from a course I took at the University of California at Northridge in 1974. The
professor was a self-proclaimed Rabbinic Kabbalist. The class textbooks were
Gershom Scholem s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and On the Kabbalah and its
Symbolism. Reading them was like encountering lightning on a clear day. What
puzzled me was I kept recalling the Occult Hermetic Qabalah material that I had
previously read and those author s claims that their works were based on the
Jewish sources. It was clear to me that theirs was a collective failure to make use
of the Rabbinic source material correctly. Trying to understand these disconnects
and divergence became a pet project that became in 2000, the first version of my
thoughts and research in the earliest draft of this book. It was never completed in
any satisfactory way and reluctantly abandoned.
On July 7, 2012, I was attending the third annual TheurgiCon Conference
in Oakland, California where one of the presenters made an interesting comment
concerning the question of what is an appropriate offering to make to one of the
Gods. It went something like this; he challenged the idea that someone could
make an offering of a chocolate cup cake with red sprinkles to one of the ancient
Gods. The speaker explained that there was a young practitioner of the Occult
Note on the style of my writing: 1) I will use the feminine form of the third person
singular pronoun when referring to an individual person in the abstract. 2) I will use
italics and single marks to designate quoted texts so as to highlight visually the
difference between my own words and those of another author. I will reserve double
marks to designate spoken dialogue. This is my own convention and an adaption of the
traditional MLA or Chicago Manual of Style systems. 3) The subject of this book is the
iconic image of the Tree of Life known in Hebrew by the word Sefiroth. This image is
made up 10 spheres interconnected by lines. When referring to an individual sphere of the
Sefiroth the Hebrew word sefirah will be used.
1
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arts who had made this offering of the sprinkle covered cupcake at a ritual the
speaker had attended. The young practitioner then justified the correctness of the
choice by explaining that the color red of the sprinkles covering the cupcake
seemed like an appropriate color for that God. The TheurgiCon presenter then
went on to explain that these ancient deities are not mere figments of the
imagination. These deities, he said, have a long recorded history and literature
that explains who they are and how to interact with them. It is not appropriate,
he said, to make up whatever you feel like. This book agrees with his nochocolate-cupcakes-with-sprinkles-of-any-color rule.
If you believe that, it is perfectly acceptable to make an offering of
chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles to a specific God or Goddess then you should
simply put this book back on the shelf and not purchase it. This book is not
speaking to you. However, if you feel that entities, powers, deities, and the like
do exist, that varying cultures have been interacting with them for a very long
time, and that these traditions need to be respected, then this book speaks to that
attitude. I believe that the powers of the Sefiroth have a reality that should be
respected and that our interaction should be conducted out of historically
invigorated respect.
I further believe that the sefirahs with their specific powers have not
been listened to by many past and present practitioners, and hence their many
interactions with them seem to me to be of the offering-cupcakes-with-sprinkles
type. Many practitioners have been to a certain degree in error. What I mean is
that in most Occult rituals that invoke or communicate with specific sefirahs, it
was if the practitioners were sending a message to the wrong telephone number
or house address. The actual entity living there is not the one they wanted to
communicate with. Now, if the entity was nice and polite, they have been
forwarding these messages, but there is the possibility that over the years of
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misdirected communications they just got tired and annoyed and have been
tossing them in the trash. My book tries to explain the source of these mistaken
addresses.
To begin with, this book is concerned with the word that has become
associated with the efforts of the Rabbis who created the Jewish mystical
tradition. That mystical tradition has a long history, and its impact on the nonJewish world and non-Jewish traditions is really the focus of this book. I will use
these three different spellings of this word, Kabbalah, Cabalah, and Qabalah, to
refer to three different ideas and foci of the groups who make use of some of the
symbols first created in that Jewish/Rabbinic mystical tradition. This idea and
system of notation is not new with me, and others have found it a useful
convention.
The differences between the three spellings begins with the question
how do you transliterate the eleventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet that is the
letter Kuf. Is it spelt with a K, a C, or a Q? If you look through texts on this
subject and on the Web, you will encounter basically three varying spellings,
they are Kabbalah, Cabala or Cabalah, and lastly Qabalah. Initially the choice of
K, C, or Q was a sincere attempt to transliterate the Hebrew letter accurately. The
difference began with historical usage. The oldest writings by non-Jewish
scholars would often use the C spelling. I will ascribe the C to refer to the specific
Christian variant of the Kabbalah tradition. Then in the 1700 or 1800, the nonJewish writers began to use the Q spelling. I will use the spelling with a Q to
refer to the Occult variant of the Kabbalah tradition. The K spelling was often
used by Jewish writers, especially with the important work of Gershom Scholem
in the
s. Gershom Scholem transformed the study of the Jewish mystical
tradition by his assertion that it was a major force in the shaping of Judaism.
Henceforth Jewish scholars consistently and intentionally used his K spelling.
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I will for the sake of clarity designate certain differing beliefs with each
of these spellings. Therefore, I will place significance to the different spelling and
intentionally mean something specifically when I spell it with a C, or Q, or with a
K. When I speak on this topic and wish to differentiate between the three
sources, I will call them the Kay-ballah, the Cee-ballah and the Que-ballah .
The term reconstructed from this book s subtitle refers to an attitude and a
project in the neo-pagan movements and traditions2. The reconstruction
movement and attitude attempts to utilize what is known of the past by scholars
who study that past so that some form of that can be practiced today. Examples
of this process are many and varied. Neo-pagan groups studied archaeology,
anthropology, and any historical records they can get their hands on to reimagine and reconstruct the religious practices of ancient cultures such as,
Canaanite, Celtic, Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Phoenician, Roman, and Slavic, etc.
I am thus proposing to go back to the source texts of the Rabbis who
created the Jewish mystical tradition to find out what is known of that tradition
and to reexamine them in light of the idea of creating a practice of them for
today. I am not imagining a Jewish practice but trying to acknowledge the
existing practice of the Occult tradition. I wish to re-orient an Occult practice that
is rooted in the original meaning and purpose of the Sefiroth as conceived by
those who created this system, the Rabbis of the Kabbalah. What I am suggesting
is that there needs to be a reconstructing of the Occult tradition based on the
source texts of the Rabbinic/Jewish Kabbalah.
What do I mean by Occult and those who practice within this tradition?
Occultists are people who study and or practice Occult teachings. So, what does
(Adler 1979) Possibly a term coined by Isaac Bonewits, according to the Wikipedia site
on the topic of Polytheistic Reconstructionism.
2
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the word Occult mean? Referring to the Oxford English Dictionary, it presents the
first two definitions, which give the attitude behind the word, and then the
fourth definition discloses the variant I am interested in and I am referring to.
1) Hidden (from sight); concealed (by something interposed); not
exposed to view. [First used in print in 1567]
2) Not disclosed or divulged, privy, secret; kept secret; communicated
only to the initiated. [First used in print in 1533]
4) Of the nature of or pertaining to those ancient and medieval reputed
sciences (or their modern representatives) held to involve the knowledge
of or use of agencies of a secret or mysterious nature (as magic,
astrology, theosophy and the like … [First used in print in 1633]3
Therefore, I am using the term Occult as the study of things ancient and
medieval that has been kept secret , concealed and something not previously
exposed to view, such as the truth concerning magic, astrology, theosophy,
and to that list, I would add neo-Platonic and Hermetic thoughts and beliefs.
These were all gathered together by such organizations in the 1900 th century the
Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis, amongst many others. I am writing
this book to explore the connection behind the Occult traditions with the
mystical tradition of the Judaic culture and religion known generically as the
Kabbalah.
By exploring where the Occult tradition strayed from the Rabbinic
source material, and what problems arose as a result, I hope to show why there is
a need to reexamine the current understanding of the Rabbinic tradition. In this
light, I suggest a return to the Rabbinic Kabbalah source material to rebuild the
symbol system that has become the central core of the Occult Qabalah tradition,
such as the Tree of Life, which is called the Sefiroth by the Jewish Kabbalah.
3
(Oxford University Press 2004)
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I will propose for use within the Occult Qabalah system a reconstructed
Sefiroth, aka the Tree of Life, on the basis of the Rabbinic Kabbalah source
material.
This book is not meant to be the end of any journey in the realm of the
Jewish Kabbalah or the Occult Qabalah. My book is meant to be a beginning.
This book offers a new set of orienting tools, a re-tuned compass, and a new map
to assist you, the reader, in finding your way in this vast territory of knowledge. I
will point toward many ideas but will not conclude or exhaust the possibilities.
My book is offered in the hope that you, my readers, with more knowledge in
such endeavors will explore in depth where I have only given brief outlines or
suggestions.
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: Why Study the Kabbalah? The Answer the Qabalists Gave.
Why study the Jewish Kabbalah? Eliphas Levi wrote, in his usual grand
and flamboyant style, the following as his first sentence of his preface to his
exploration into the Jewish Kabbalah system: Judaism is the oldest, the most
rational, and the truest of religions.
4
Here is how Arthur Edward Waite frames the importance of this subject:
From whatever point of view it may be approached, the Kabbalah is,
however, of importance: it connects with other literatures which are
included like itself under the general denomination of mystical, and
there is a sense in which it has been thought, in its highest
development, to stand at the head of it all.5
Dion Fortune explains it this way:
Very few students of Occultism know anything at all about the
fountain-head whence their tradition springs. Many of them do not
even know there is a Western Tradition….The adepts of those races
whose evolutionary destiny is to conquer the physical plane have
evolved a Yoga technique of their own … This technique is based upon
the well-known but little understood Qabalah, the Wisdom of Israel. …
Everything must have a source. Cultures do not spring out of
nothing…The mysticism of Israel supplies the foundation of modern
Western Occultism. It forms the theoretical basis upon which all
ceremonial is developed. Its famous glyph, the Tree of Life, is the best
meditation-symbol we possess because it is the most comprehensive. 6
Returning to Waite: The Victorian schools of French and English Qabbalism
(Levi, The Book of Splendours: the Inner Mysteries of Qabalism Its relationship to
Freemasonry, Numerology & Tarot 1894, 15)
4
5
(Waite 1924, v)
6
(Fortune 1935, 1-2)
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were inclined...to claim all Occult sciences are rooted in the Secret Tradition of Israel;
but it seems more correct to infer that the Kabbalah has been engrafted on [to them]…
7
Aleister Crowley explained the importance of the Kabbalah thusly in
appendix A of his book Liber 777:
Qabalah is: (a) A language fitted to describe certain classes of
phenomena and to express certain classes of ideas which escape regular
phraseology. You might as well object to the technical terminology of
chemistry.
b An unsectarian and elastic terminology…
(c) A system of symbolism which enables thinkers to formulate their
ideas with complete precision, and to find simple expression for
complex thoughts…
(d) An instrument for interpreting symbols whose meaning has become
obscure, forgotten or misunderstood by establishing a necessary
connection between the essence of forms, sounds, simple ideas (such as
number) and their spiritual, moral or intellectual equivalents.
(g) a system of criteria by which the truth of correspondences may be
tested with a view to criticizing new discoveries in the light of their
coherence with the whole body of truth.8
2 B: Examining the Reasons Behind Their Answer.
The Qabalists all believed that there was a tradition of universal Occult
truths, knowledge, and wisdom that was supposed to be passed down through
the ages from some ancient and mysterious source. According to this view of the
Occult tradition, the Jewish Kabbalah was believed to contain the closest thing to
this ancient source material of Occult Truths in Western Civilization. The
Hebrews became the Jews, and during this transition, they became a culture that
7
(Waite 1924, 542)
(Crowley, Liber 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley Including
Gematria & Sepher Sephiroth 1909, 125)
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revered the written word. They ultimately wrote scrolls and books. The Jews
supposedly took the oral records not only of their own tradition but also of those
secret Occult teachings and recorded it in books. What is historically true is that
the oral tradition of the Hebrew/Jews became first the Torah. Later material was
added to their collection of sacred texts to become the Holy Scriptures known as
the TaNaK, which is made up of the Torah, the prophetic writings, called the
Nevi im, and then the other writings, the Ketuvim, the proverbs, psalms, and the
other recordings of history. The Rabbis added to this material and created what
they referred to as the Oral Tradition; this was the commentaries on the TaNaK.
This material eventually became the Talmud and so much more. They also began
to write down the teaching of their mystics and this became the Kabbalah
tradition. According to the Occult Qabalists, hidden here was recorded as well
the secret knowledge of all those other cultures the Hebrews/Jews had
encountered.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers spins a version of this origin story for the
Kabbalah
The Kabbalah was first taught by God himself to a select company of
angels…From Adam it passed over to Noah, and then to
Abraham…who emigrated with it to Egypt, where the patriarch
allowed a portion of this mysterious doctrine to ooze out. It was in this
way that the Egyptians obtained some knowledge of it, and the other
Eastern nations could introduce it into their philosophical systems.9
I believe that Mather picked up this idea that God taught the Kabbalah to
angels, who taught it to Adam, from Jesuit Priest Athanasius Kircher, but more
about this later.
Here is Dion Fortune s version of the origin of the true science of the
9
(Mathers 1887, 5-6)
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West known as the Qabalah
The original stream of Hebraic mysticism has received many
tributaries. We see its rise among the nomad star-worshippers of
Chaldea, where Abraham in his tent among his flocks hears the voice of
God. …Generation by generation we trace the intercourse of the
princes of Israel with the priest-kings of Egypt. Abraham and Jacob
went thither; Joseph and Moses were intimately associated with the
court of the royal adepts. When we read of Solomon sending to Hiram,
King of Tyre, for men and materials to aid in the building of the Temple
we know that the famous Tyrian Mysteries must have profoundly
influenced the Hebrew esotericism. When we read of Daniel being
educated in the palaces of Babylon we know that the wisdom of the
Magi must have been accessible to Hebrew illuminati. …Esoteric
traditions avers that the boy Jesus ben Joseph, when His calibre was
recognized by the learned doctors of the Law who heard Him speak in
the Temple at the age of twelve, was sent by them to the Essenian
community near the Dead Sea to be trained in the mystical tradition of
Israel, and that He remained there until He came to John…Christianity
had its exotericism in the Gnosis, which owed much to both Greek and
Egyptian thought. In the system of Pythagoras we see an adaption of
the Qabalistic principles to Greek mysticism. 10
Here is Eliphas Levi s conception of how the Kabbalah came to be
transmitted to the Christian world
The Hebrews are in possession of science whose existence St. Paul
suspected and which St. John, initiated by Jesus, both hid and revealed
within the immense hieroglyphs of the Apocalypse, borrowing for the
most part from the prophecy of Ezekiel. 11
The publication of this work[The Book of Splendors] will make known
the implacable hate borne by priests of Catholicism towards
Freemasonry, which is Judaism reformed according to the thought of
Jesus and his beloved apostle, John, whose Qabalistic revelation has
10
(Fortune 1935, 3-4)
(Levi, The Book of Splendours: the Inner Mysteries of Qabalism Its relationship to
Freemasonry, Numerology & Tarot 1894, 15)
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always been the gospel of occult Christianity and the schools of
unprofaned Gnosticism. Associated with these schools are the
Johannites, the non-idolatrous Templars and the advanced initiates of
occult Masonry. It is there that that keys of future are to be found, for
there are preserved the secrets of the single, universal revelation whose
doctrines Judaism, first and perhaps singly among religions, has
preached to the world.12
As we can see according to these Occult fairytale histories it was the case
that either the Hebrews learned of God s secrets and taught them to the world by
passing them on to the final true inheritors of all wisdom, the esoteric Christians,
or alternatively the ancient Hebrews mastered these truths during their sojourns
with the ancient learned of the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and the Babylonians.
For those early Occult Qabalists, these Christian seekers of true wisdom,
desired to explore the wisdom they believe was the heritage of those ancient
cultures, such as Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt. The problem was these were for at
that time lost and locked into silence since they could not translated the material,
and so they fell back onto what they did have access to, which was the materials
of those ancient Hebrews. Those Christian scholars had pounced upon what
Hebrew texts they could find. These Hebrew texts could be translated and
therefore this made the hidden knowledge potentially available to those
scholars. Therefore, translations of a few of these Rabbinic Hebrew texts were
undertaken. At first, they were translated into Latin, later still these texts were
translated into other more accessible European languages.
The Occult Qabalists believed that the secrets of all those other ancient
civilizations lived on in the teachings of the Hebrew mystic tradition ; and this
(Levi, The Book of Splendours: the Inner Mysteries of Qabalism Its relationship to
Freemasonry, Numerology & Tarot 1894, 16)
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helps to explain their interest in the Jewish Kabbalah. The Occult Qabalists
hoped to gleam the end result, the final product of these early teachings of Occult
Western cultures in the writing of the rabbinic Jewish Kabbalists.
The Occult Qabalists believe that just as there were universal scientific
theories and truths, which were not contained or confined to any one culture, so
must there also be universal Occult wisdom. Their model made some sense.
Since, science was laying down the secrets of the universe it seemed logical that
there should be an Occult science.
This idea of Occult science was inspired by the worldview of science that
they grew up with. Actually, the worldview of science that the Occult Qabalists
had inherited went back to the very birth of the modern world, which was
inextricably connected to the birth of, and the triumph of, science and reason in
the years 1637 - 1690.
The problem with the Occult Qabalists analogy of an ancient Occult
Science to a universal scientific worldview was that whereas scientists
attempted to understand the nonverbal things-in-themselves and always relied
on the observations of this nonverbal underlying reality that could be quantified,
verified, measured and validated to determine the principles of science and what
would be considered scientific facts, this process could not be duplicated with
the Occult Science .
The focus of the Occult Science was not the non-verbal realm separate
and distinct from human conceptions. Rather the Occult focused on human
understanding and interpretations of abstract concepts that were non-sensory
ideas conceived of by humans. God, Gods and Goddess, demi-Gods, angels and
such were not nonverbal objects that could be quantified, verified, measured,
and validated.
These entities that were the focus of the Occult investigations had only
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one form of certainty and measurability, and that was within the mind of the
beholder. Whether the encounter with them occurred as part of external reality
can never be determined with any form of certainty. Hence, these encountered
entities only existed after the encounter with any measure of validation in the
recounting of the event. They were and are beings of internal reality, beings that
do, and did exist in the minds and words of the beholders.
These entities were verbal, abstract constructs with no discernible and
provable direct reference to non-verbal things of nature and reality. Hence, the
Occult Science was always a concoction of human internal experience that was
conveyed in word and preserved in the heritage of a specific culture and
communities.
My own insight of the We shape, and are shaped by, ideas
13
principle best
explains the variations in these insights and concepts. A more formal explanation
of this insight was stated by prof. Steven T. Katz Mystical experience is overdetermined by its socio-religious milieu: as a result of his process of intellectual
acculturation in its broadest sense, the mystic brings to his experience a world of
concepts, images, symbols, and values which shape as well as colour the experience he
eventually and actually has.
14
Every participant in a culture used and uses
metaphors and symbols of their culture to describe the universe, and this is the
stuff that the Occult Science was made of.
The truth is that a person can never exist outside of their cultural
upbringing. Every human through the process of acquiring a human language
enters into the process of enculturation. To speak, write, and think in a particular
human language is to participate in a human culture in its broadest sense.
13
(Jaron, Find Your Way 2018)
14
(Katz 1978, 46)
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Therefore everything you think, speak, or write is in conformity with, expanding
on, or purposely contradicting and challenging, the culture you live in. Here I am
using the phrase live in to take into account your own linguistic, geographic and
historical setting and context.
The Occult truths of those ancient civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, and
Babylon were the farthest thing from universal. They were a product of their
culture and the individuals living in that culture as it existed at that time. The
Jewish Kabbalah was a Jewish mystical tradition with some influences from
those other cultures as the specific authors were exposed to them. A specific
author would take ideas from the other cultures and then transmute those ideas
into the symbols and metaphors of the Jewish culture. This is why the Jewish
Kabbalah was always a product of the Jewish worldview.
The Christian Cabalah in the Renaissance was a product of their
Christian world view. It grew out of the desire to find a uniting of ancient pagan
pre-Christian mystical insights to complement and supplement and hence to
serve Christianity as they saw it. Without having real access to the texts of
Sumer, Egypt and Babylon, they imagined that they could find in the materials of
Judaism, Greece, and Rome the ideas whose source they presumed came from
those prior three older cultures. This imagined fantasy is what they wanted to
believe and so they created an amalgam of ancient occult insights. Now having
inherited the Christian bias of supposed cultural supremacy, they therefore
desired to show that all this prior occult wisdom flowed into and found its
supreme form in a variation of Christianity as they were now developing it, this
variant tradition which would be called Christian Cabalah.
It was only with modern times of the 1637-
s that the dream of a
cultural nonspecific universal system of science was truly and fully born. This
dream was a very Western civilization worldview. The seed of this dream started
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with the Greeks and their dream of universal truth, a system that describes how
things are. This was intensified when Alexander the Great brought much of the
known world under the influence of one culture, the culture of the Greeks. He
began to create a single world culture to rule conceptually as he ruled by military
force. That was how the dream of universal truth was fabricated; it was the
dream of a Western Worldview.
That dream was given new life and form by Rene Descartes with his
1637 book Discourse on Methods and Isaac Newton with his 1687 book: Natural
Philosophy s Principles of Mathematics. From Descartes and Newton was born the
paradigm of mathematical language being something that is not limited to any
specific culture, but is a pure universal language. With the acceptance of the
Western paradigm of science throughout the world, mathematics has been
accepted as the first, perhaps the only, truly human universal system. To many
scientists mathematics is supposedly beyond the merely human.
Let me take you briefly back to the birth of the paradigm of modern
science and with it the modern worldview. In 1660 Europe was in revolution. At no
time in its brief history as a society had any generation stood to the future with an
orientation so distinct from that of its ancestors.
15
The worldview of the Western
world was the born in ancient Greece. This worldview was pass down through
Rome and Arabic Empire, and in this worldview anything was possible,
especially miracles of God. In this world of the ancient philosophers and
thinkers, the Divine was intimately connected to everything, so that it was the
function of natural philosophy to serve theology.
The revolution of the seventeenth century overthrew this ancient way
of thought. The material world was dissociated from the world of God
15
(Nussbaum 1953, 1)
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and assumed to be rational, so that it could be apprehended and
mastered by observation and measurement.
In the Discourse of Methods (1637), Descartes had organized the
method of free inquiry by which Europeans were to develop the control
of nature. He had reversed Copernicus, who had displaced the earth as
the center of the universe: there Descartes had put man--alone,
intangible, percipient--with only his mind to grasp and master his
world.
Descartes succeeded in defining a universe in which the human reason
was supreme. …In the world of experience…it could lead, as Descartes
saw, to mastery of the material world: We might thus render ourselves
lords and possessors on nature. (From Discourse on Methods, part
VI).16
Descartes put as his starting point of his, and in his opinion anyone
else s, analysis the concept of doubt and the distrust of ones senses and one s
experience. You could not trust either, Descartes said. The answer to doubt was
the first principle Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am . The human mind and
its ability to think rationally was the sun around which the entire universe was to
orbit. Descartes followed Plato s view of the senses and ignored “ristotle s trust
that he place in them. Descartes put the senses and experience on trial, and he
assumed that the senses were guilty, and false, unless they could be verified by
instruments of so-called objective means and codified in mathematical principles.
What Descartes had started, Isaac Newton finished off. Using Descartes
principles of doubt, Newton built his own rational analysis. Under the influence
of this method, Newton believed all existence could be revealed as being a
mathematical and mechanistic certainty, and through this combined process, all
things came to be reduced to mechanical component parts. Newton s
16
(Nussbaum 1953, 1-2)
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Principles of Mathematics was an epochal work, which was destined to serve as the
frame of reference for physics and other sciences for more than two centuries…
17
For his own and succeeding generations, Newton converted the world
into formulas of measurement. It became a world, in which the physical
and the mathematical appeared as the two essential and complementary
aspects of reality. The empirically observed and the mathematically
deduced were given a factitious identity. All the more effectively
because he did it in the name of empirical observations. …The world of
matter became a world of atoms -- solid, glassy, hard, impenetrable
particles --existing in otherwise empty immaterial space and time. 18
Once a scientist leaves the nonverbal observations and begins to explain
and formulate her thoughts and ideas in a human language, she begins to leave
the universal and enter the culture of her language system. English is one
cultural collection of systems and there is a joke/quote that was and still is valid
that America and England are two cultures divided by a common language. 19 “merica
is a culture different from England, and also different from Australia and
Canada, though each somewhat share what is called the same English language.
They are all not the same as French, or German, even though these all share the
Western civilization worldview, each with its own variant of the worldview. And
as the West is different from the Eastern Civilizations, such as Chinese, Japanese,
17
(Nussbaum 1953, 24)
18
Nussbaum, pg. 26.
This has been attributed to George Bernard Shaw, as well as Winston Churchill, both
attributions cannot be verified. However, Bertrand Russell in the Saturday Evening Post,
June ,
article Can Americans and Britons be friends , wrote It is a misfortune for
19
Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common
language. “lso, Oscar Wilde wrote in The Canterville Ghost,
, We have everything
in common with America nowadays, except of course, language. The source for both is
found in Wikiquote.
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and Indian, Korean, etc., each of those cultures is also different and distinct
The Occult Qabalist, being shaped by the worldview of modern science,
and by the primacy of physics in the realm of science, dreamed of and sought to
find an equivalent system in the Occult realm. This Western modern dream
transformed the Jewish mystical tradition that was the Kabbalah, and then based
its system upon the work of the Christian Cabalists who had already
amalgamated much of the prior insights and teachings of pre-Christianity into
the service of Christian mysticism, and made a new thing. This new system went
beyond just supporting Christianity and instead devised a system to bridge the
teachings coming from Judaism, Greece, India, and China into a new system:
Occult Qabalah. This supposed universal mystical system was Occult Qabalists
attempt at creating a selection of ideas and blending them from the entire world
into a single new Western framework of Occult teachings. This new invented
idea of the Occult Qabalah was supposedly based on the Jewish Kabbalah, but
was treated as a mathematical language a supposed abstract and culturally
non-specific language/system to contain Occult truths in the same way that
mathematics contained universal truths for the physicist. The Occult Qabalists
were subconsciously creating a new idea and were also subconsciously forcing
themselves to fail to be self-aware. They were forcing themselves to forget that it
was their own desires that were the source of this invented system that
previously did not exist. This invention was actually proof that no one can create
a system that is not based upon the cultural environment from which it is
developed; no system is divorced from the cultural worldview of its creators.
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: The Rules of the Game
How can a worldview cause a misinterpretation? Let me present an
example. In the United States there is a game played with a bat and a small ball.
A pitcher throws the ball towards a batter. The pitcher wants to throw this ball in
such a way that the batter fails to hit the ball in a way that is legal according to
the rules of the game. The hitter is trying to hit that ball and thus be able to run
to the bases. A team scores when a runner is able to come back to the place where
the batter was standing. In the United States this game is called, Baseball. In
England, there is a game that has all of those same elements. However, it is a
very different game using very different set of rules. This game is called Cricket.
If a player who only knew cricket or only knew baseball went to watch
the other game and tried to understand it, she would fail. The two games, though
having some basic similarities, are very different in the specific details. The two
displaced players of the games would look upon the other game and be puzzled
as to what was going on and why things were being done the way they were.
To a cricket player, the bats are supposed to be flat, but a baseball player
knows that bats are rounded cylinders. In cricket, the ball is thrown in a manner
and style very different from that uses by a pitcher in baseball. If you took a
baseball pitcher out of that game and asked him to throw the ball for a cricket
game, he would do it incorrectly. The same results would occur with a cricket
pitcher trying to participate in a baseball game.
Another difference between the two is that in cricket, there are only two
bases with a series of three short poles or sticks between them, while in baseball
there are four bases with no sticks. The worldviews of cricket and baseball are
not the same, and thus the rules of the two games are different.
Let s explore the worldview of those non-Jews who have studied the
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Jewish Kabbalah for a moment. They are coming out of a Christian upbringing
and worldview. Christianity believes that it is the only true faith and the only
true religion. Christianity believes that the only purpose for the ancient Hebrews
and the Jewish faith was to set the stage for revealing the truth that is
Christianity. Christianity asserts that the only ideas of value within the tradition
of the Hebrews and the Jews were those that were passed on and found their
fulfillment in Christianity. For Christianity, the only thing of value within the
teachings of the Hebrews and the Jews is whatever relates to the message of the
coming of Jesus
their Christ.
According to these rules of the game, you can take whatever you like
and want from the Hebrew and Jewish tradition and disregard and jettison the
so called old ideas associated with them, since they are irrelevant to the greater
supposed real truth of what is to come after the Hebrews and the Jews.
This attitude, these rules of the game, I assert are the unconscious
premises that orient those non-Jews who created the Occult study of the Jewish
Kabbalah.
However, if you accept the no-chocolate-cupcakes-with-sprinkles-ofany-color rules, then, you are believers in the concept of reconstructing the past
traditions to use in the present. For you then a respect for that past culture is
your guiding star, your orienting tool and purpose. Therefore, the culture that
needs to be studied is the culture of the Kabbalah, which is ultimately and
specifically the rabbinic Jewish culture.
I assert that the Occult Qabalah Tree of Life symbols are based on and
depended on Babylonian astrology, and Hellenistic and Roman symbols and
deities. Now, the question to ask is how did the Rabbinic Jews relate to and
remember these three cultures of Babylon, Greece and Rome? To appreciate the
rules of the game for the rabbinic Jews who created the Kabbalah, we need to ask
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ourselves how they recalled those three cultures.
Let us start with Babylon. According to the Hebrew Bible, there were
three deportations of Jews to Babylon after Babylon conquered Judea and
destroyed the first temple in Jerusalem. There was the exile of King Jeconiah, his
court and many others in Nebuchadnezzar's eighth year; Jeconiah's successor
Zedekiah and the rest of the people in Nebuchadnezzar's eighteenth year; and a
later deportation in Nebuchadnezzar's twenty-third year. These are attributed to
597 BCE, 587 BCE, and 582 BCE, respectively. The forced exile ended in 538 BCE
after the fall of Babylon to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who gave the Jews
permission to return to Judea province and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Exilic period was a rich one for Hebrew literature. The Hebrew
historians of the Exile include Jeremiah 39 43 (which saw the Exile as a lost
opportunity); the final section of Second Kings (which portrays it as the temporary
end of history), Second Chronicles in which the Exile is the Sabbath of the land ,
and the opening chapters of Ezra, which records its end.
Every year the ”abylonian s destruction of the first Temple and the exile
of the people is recalled during the reading cycle of the Torah and TaNaK in the
Synagogue on the holy day of mourning to remember the that destruction of the
Temple, the holy day of Tish B Av.
Now turning to Greek impact on Jewish culture, one way the ancient
Greeks are recalled is with the yearly celebration of Hanukah. According to the
traditional account of the events, in 167 BCE Antiochus IV of the Seleucid
Hellenistic kingdom based in Syria ordered an altar to Zeus erected in the
Jerusalem Temple. Antiochus IV also banned circumcision and ordered pigs to
be sacrificed at the altar of the Temple.
Antiochus's actions provoked a large-scale revolt. Mattityahu, a
prominent member of the priestly caste and his five sons Jochanan, Simeon,
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Eleazar, Jonathan, and Yehuda, led a rebellion against Antiochus. Yehuda
became known as Yehuda (Judah) HaMakabi ( Judah the Hammer ). By 166 BCE
Mattathias had died, and Yehuda/Judah took his place as leader. By 165 BCE, the
Jewish revolt against the Seleucid monarchy was successful. The Temple was
liberated and rededicated. This means that the Greeks were remembered as the
ones who desecrated the Temple, and the menorah becomes the symbol of that
act of rededication of the Temple. The menorah is lit each year to celebrate the
festival of Hanukkah and the defeat of the Seleucid Greek religious Empire.
Lastly, let us turn to Rome, which brings to mind the war of revolt with
Roman Empire. According to Josephus, the violence which began at Caesarea in
66 CE was provoked by Greeks sacrificing birds in front of a local synagogue 20.
The Roman garrison in Caesarea did not intervene, and the long-standing
Hellenistic and Jewish religious tensions took a downward spiral. A series of
events led to open Jewish revolt throughout Judea against Rome and war
between the two began. In 69 C.E. Vespasian, who was the general of the Roman
force in Judea, had been elevated to the status of Emperor replacing the
disgraced and dead Nero, and Vespasian left his son Titus in charge of the
ongoing war. Titus began a siege upon Jerusalem to bring an end to the rebellion
and the war. Josephus claims that 1,100,000 people were killed during the siege,
of which a majority were Jewish, and that 97,000 were captured and enslaved 21.
With the Roman victory, the Temple is once again destroyed and it is completely
ransacked. The day of this destruction is said to have occurred on Tish B Av,
which was the day the Babylonians had also destroyed the temple. Henceforth
the two events become associated on the religious calendar of the Jewish people
20
(Josephus 75) Book II, chapter 14, section 5
21
(Josephus 75) Book VI, chapter 9, section 3
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by the Rabbis to recall the two times when the Temple had been destroyed by the
enemies of the Jewish people, the Babylonians and the Romans.
As you now should be able to conclude, the rabbinic worldview does not
look upon the Gods and religions of those three conquering empires of Babylon,
Greece and Rome with anything resembling kindness or fondness. The Rabbis
view those cultures with their religions as the enemies of Rabbinic Judaism s
religious values and freedom. Keep this lesson in mind when we discuss and
analyze the assumptions behind the thinking of the Occult Qabalists.
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: The Jewish Kabbalah and the Christian Cabalah
I will first explore briefly the origins of the Jewish Kabbalah and the
Christian Cabalah. For the origins of the Cabalah, I will rely on my reading of the
source materials of Joseph Leon Blau, Arthur Edward Waite, and Frances Yates.
However, let me say a few words about mystical traditions in general.
From time immemorial, our species has a need to understand the world we live
in. This need compels us to search for meaning and order. Out of this search
eventually came what we now call philosophy, science, and religion. Every
culture in its formative years developed a religious worldview, a system of
beliefs and metaphors that shaped its understanding of the world by focusing on
what was considered supremely important. This set of ideas gets transformed
into symbols and can be described by the term the sacred.
That system of the sacred was passed down through the generations.
The sacred explains where we come from, and where we were going, collectively
and individually. Religion is the culture s system that is developed to formulate
and formalize the collective and individual interaction with that sacred.
The founders of those religious systems tended to be visionaries,
individuals who literally had auditory and/or visual visions. From these
founders, the religious system acquired a set of metaphors and symbols. As the
religious system was taught to those in that culture, there were individuals who
desired to know and experience the Divine by more direct and intimate means.
These individuals were mystics, and out of their communion with the Divine,
they came back with a life changing experience. When they attempted to
comprehend what that experience was, they did so within their cultures and
their individual metaphor/symbol systems. They were shaped by their culture,
and in that process of comprehending what they experienced; they in turn
continue the process of shaping that culture. These individuals created new
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aspects of that culture, that religious system. This new sub-set is the culture s
mystical system. Every culture has its own unique mystical system to describe
their own unique understanding of their sacred. The mystical system serves the
culture by expanding and adding depth to that culture s sense of the sacred.
Within the history of the Jewish people, this mystical system has come
eventually to be known by the name Kabbalah. Although the Jewish people did
not exist in isolation and were undoubtedly influenced by others and their
culture s, still the Jews crafted the Kabbalah for themselves using their cultural
metaphors and wrote it in a language familiar to, and they thought only
available, to themselves. This mystical tradition could be as old as Judaism itself,
which would make it 3,000 to 5,000 years old, depending on how you calculate
the history of the Jewish/Hebrew culture. Whenever you see the word Kabbalah in
this book, I am talking about the living, ongoing mystical tradition of the Jewish
people. Important Kabbalah source texts were The Bahir, The Sefer Yetzirah,
Sha are Orah, and The Zohar.
Now, I will briefly recount some history that you are probably very
familiar with. The first century was a time of major transition and invention
within Judaism. One of those new forms of Judaism centered on the teachings of
Jesus of Nazareth and with the destruction of the Temple, this group like the rest
of Judaism had to address this crisis. Out of this crisis, it created and crafted the
New Testament texts to insure its identity and survival. Saul of Tarsus was a Jew
who found the Judaism of his upbringing no longer satisfying and out of his
repeated encounters with fringe groups that he was debating, his unconscious
began to shape an amalgamation of ideas that would satisfy his spiritual needs.
His exposure to the gnostic/mystery religious groups, including the early
followers of Jesus, enable him to use the gnostic/mystery religions metaphors
and symbols and blend them with his own dissatisfied version of Judaism.
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Building upon the structure of the nascent Jesus Jews, he was primed to create
something new. While traveling on the road to Damascus Saul had a mystical
encounter and from this, he was transformed. He took on the name Paul and
became a believer in his own vision of the teachings of the Jesus Jews and he
crafted what would become Christianity. Paul directed his efforts not at other
Jews but towards a non-Jewish audience.
Both Paul and the other early Jewish Jesus followers as they set down
their ideas believed that they could take the material, symbols, and metaphors of
Judaism and recast and reuse them to suit their new purposes. What would
become the modus operandi of the Christian worldview was an attitude that
Old ideas should be appropriated and assimilated for their own New and
therefore better purposes, and that whatever was not used, these leftovers,
should be trashed and discarded. As the years went by the texts of this group
would become the New Testament. Eventually they would leave their old Jewish
roots behind and craft a different religion with its own way of seeing the world.
The two religions would exist in parallel with little meaningful communication
between them. Eventually Christianity would become antagonistic towards and
resentful of the existence of its parent, Rabbinic Judaism s continued existence.
It was because of this lack of communication that led to the mystical side
of Judaism s growth and development being a complete unknown to
Christianity. In the early years of the Jewish mystical tradition, I am generically
calling the Kabbalah, its teachings and its manuscripts were not widely
distributed and only passed on amongst a small set of teachers and their
students. This circle grew slowly over time as this group increased and
dispersed, willingly or not, over wider geographic space. This wide ranging
geographic disbursement increased the amount of and the exchange of
manuscripts. Now there was a possibility for this knowledge to spread to an
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even wider circle.
It was in the late 1400's when a new vision of the world was taking shape
in Christian Europe. The impetus of this intellectual movement was the wealth of
manuscripts brought to Florence Italy from the Byzantine Empire centered in
Constantinople. With the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Christian Europe
began to have access to previously unknown Greek and Roman manuscripts. The
study of these texts began a re-examination of Plato and a discover of the
writings of thinkers who would be called Neo-Platonists, in addition to the
writings of other Greek and Roman intellectual schools of thought, such as the
Hermetic school, the Orphic school, the Pythagorean school and others. This new
vision of the world was trying to create a synthesis out of the inheritance of ideas
and beliefs whose source was Greece and later Rome. This new world view
would acquire the title of the Renaissance. This worldview held the belief that a
complete human being should be knowledgeable in all fields of human
endeavors, such as the Arts and the Sciences. This world view believed that all
wisdom shared a single purpose to enlighten and revitalize Christianity with a
new rebirth.
It was the desire to amalgamate all this wisdom of the ages from the nonChristian sources that led some to find and pick up the Jewish Kabbalah
material.
Joseph Leon Blau, A. E. Waite, and Frances Yates all agree that the
inventor of what will become the Christian Cabalah is the Italian Renaissance
scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494).
[In 1486Giovanni Pico]conceived…the idea of summarizing all human
knowledge in a compendious summa in the medieval tradition, and
decided to go to Rome to defend publicly the nine hundred theses into
which he had compressed the philosophic wisdom of the ages. There he
announced that he would dispute with all comers and generously
issued an invitation to scholars to attend the disputation…The Oration
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on the Dignity of Man was written in Rome as an introduction to the
nine hundred theses.22
In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII halted the proposed debate and began
investigating Pico s heretical ideas.
Included among the nine hundred were forty-seven theses drawn from
Hebrew Kabalistic sources and another seventy-one 'cabalistic conclusions
according to Pico s opinion, derived from the fundamental ideas of the Hebrew sages,
greatly strengthening the Christian religion.'23 This manuscript according to Blau,
Waite, and Yates was the birth and source of the Christian Cabalah. Pico believed
that he had found in the Kabbalah ideas and proofs that confirmed the truth of
the Christian religion. There is no science which makes us more certain of the divinity
of Christ than magic and Cabalah. 24 Pico used the Kabbalistic system of Gematria to
make conclusions which, to quote the phrase repeatedly used by Pico, No
Hebrew cabalist can deny. The conclusions were that the Christian Trinity could be
proven and demonstrated by the use of Kabbalistic Gematria. Gematria is based
on the Hebrew's use of letters as having numerical equivalents. Gematria is a
system of a series of alphanumeric substitutions and manipulations whereby
new insights can be derived and 'deduced'.
In the fourteenth Cabalist Conclusion that Pico states most clearly his
argument that Cabalah confirms the truth of Christianity. Briefly the
argument is that the name 'Jesus' is the Tetragrammaton [YHVH], the
ineffable name Yahweh, the four lettered (in Hebrew letters) name of
God but with a medial S (shin) inserted [Y-H-SH-V-H]. The meaning
implied, and as expanded by later Christian Cabalists (notably by
22
(Gilmore 1952, 196)
23
(Blau 1944, 20),Pg. I, 107, Pico Della Mirandola, Opera Omnia, Basel, 1572.
24
(Blau 1944, 24),Pg. I, 105, No. 9, Pico Della Mirandola, Opera Omnia, Basel 1572.
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Reuchlin in the De verbo mirifico) is that the S in the Name of Jesus
makes audible the ineffable Name (composed only of vowel sounds) and
signifies the Incarnation, the Word made flesh or made audible. 25
Pico believes that there are numerous Christian doctrines that are proved
by the Cabalah. His list includes the mystery of the Trinity, the Word made flesh, the
divinity of the Messiah, original sin, and its expiation through Christ, the heavenly
Jerusalem, the fall of the demons, the orders of the angels, expiations, and punishments in
hell. 26
In his system, Pico equates the planets27 and a variety of other concepts
and terms from Orphic traditions and Zoroastrian traditions with the various
sefirah of the Sefiroth and with other ideas that Pico found in the Kabbalah texts
that he studied.28
According to Scholars such as Blau who have studied Pico's writings:
The major source in Hebrew cabalistic literature for the conclusions of
Pico was the Bible commentary by Menahem Recanati. It is important
to mention this only because Menahem's commentary is not an
original work but a simplification of the Zohar. Pico's source may be
said, therefore, to be a watered-down version of the cardinal document
of the Cabalah.'29
Pico brought the Cabalah into the Christian world; largely through his
influence it remained a factor in the thought of many people for nearly
two centuries. His own knowledge was limited; his over-dependence on
25
(Yates 1979, 23)
26
(Blau 1944, 25)
27
(Blau 1944, 22)Pg. I 111, no. 48, Pico
28
(Blau 1944, 22-23)
29
(Blau 1944, 28)
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one source perhaps reprehensible. But the knowledge of others increased
because of his limited knowledge; and other sources were studied
because he had studied one source. Out of the ashes of The Phoenix of
his age' grew the Christian Cabalah.30
I will designate those non-Jewish individuals and their mystical system
they developed by the term Cabalah. I will define a Cabalist as an adherent of the
Christian religion who believes that the Jewish Kabbalah is either a precursor
within Judaism of certain doctrines which ultimately are expounded in
Christianity and/or someone who mixes and or finds Christian dogma, symbols,
motifs, and metaphors in their understanding of the Kabbalah. The Cabalah is
always a Christian system.
After Pico's 1486 work there came others Christian Cabalists, German
Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) author of On the Miracle-Working Name, 1494, Paul
Ricci, who translated Gikatilla's Sha'are Orah, Gates of Light from Hebrew into
Latin in
, Ricci s son sent a copy of this text to Johannes Reuchlin who used it
when he wrote his 1517 text On the Art of the Kabbalah. Francesco Giorgi (14661540) of Venice, author of De Harmonia Mundi, first published in 1525, Athanasius
Kircher (1570-1629), German Jesuit who was the author of the important book
Oedipus Aegyptiacus in 1623, and the German Lutheran Christian Knorr Von
Rosenroth (1636-1689), who translate a portion of The Zohar in his two volume
Latin work: Kabbala Denudata: The Kabbalah Unveiled, published in 1677-168431.
The Christian Cabalah is an ongoing and living tradition, and one that is
different and divergent from the Jewish Kabbalah.
30
(Blau 1944, 40)
MacGregor Mathers translated part of Rosenroth s Latin translation of The Zohar into
English in Mathers book The Kabbalah Unveiled in 1887.
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An example of a modern Christian Cabalist who ventures off into his
own Occult Christianity is Carlo Suares (1892-1976). He is the author of The
Second Coming of Reb Yhshwh: the Rabbi Called Jesus Christ, amongst other books.
You can find his work on websites dedicated to his teachings. Suares s work is
clearly not kosher . Suares s Cabalah is built upon the modus operandi of
Christianity, which is that the Jewish people do not possess the wisdom and
insight to recognize the truth. The truth that Suares believes is that the Jewish
people existed only as a mere means to an end, and that end was to be the birth
culture for Jesus the one who was the Christ. The Jews by their refusing to
convert to the truth of Christianity is evidence of their collective ignorance. For
Suares the only truth the Kabbalah possess is found in the material of the Sefer
Yetzirah which he considers to be the work of Abraham and thus pre-Jewish.
Suares discovered a new re-interpretation of the True meaning behind the
letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Suares rejects both Jewish Kabbalah and Occult
Qabalah as misguided and erroneous. To quote Suares:
In particular, the majority of cabalists are Jews enslaved to the Torah,
and they have always asserted that one cannot know how to be a
cabalist without practicing the Mosaic law. In this way Mosaism both
annexed and rejected the Qabala and made it unrecognizable.
But the Qabala is not a derivative from, or a superstructure of, of a
Heresy of Mosaism. The contrary is true: Moses was directed to give
out this very ancient knowledge antedating Judaism in an historical
sequence (and it is undeniable that the people who received it became its
protective shell).
The Sepher Yetsira leaves no doubt as to its anteriority and its
cabalistic method: it never refers to Moses, or to his laws or to the
historical Jewish people. It is outside the flow of time. Its only contact
with history -- in language that has nothing anecdotal about it -- is the
legendary Abraham. (Suares, Sepher Yetsira, p.113)32
32
(Revived Qabala 1997)
39
40
Qabalah Gates of Light
Jaron
Suares has completely ignored the fact that the Sefer Yetzirah depends on,
uses the insights of, and uses the metaphors from, and even quotes, passages of
TaNaK, the collective text of Holy Scriptures of the Jewish people. The Sefer
Yetzirah clearly was not written by Abraham, since it quotes and used the TaNaK,
which was written hundreds of years after Abraham could have lived and died.
For example, one of the core motifs of the Sefer Yetzirah is the division of the
Hebrew letters into three groups, these are the Mother letters (Alef, Mem and
Shin), the Double letters (Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Caf, Peh, Resh, and Tav) and the rest
of the letters of the alphabet (Heh, Vav, Zayin, Chet, Tet, Yud, Lamed, Nun,
Samekh, Eyin, Tzadi, and Kuf) are called the Elemental letters. Now the inclusion
of Resh as a double letter is depended on the existence of the Hebrew text of the
TaNaK. The fact that the letter Resh is considered a double letter only makes
sense when you refer to the grammar of that text and the presence in the text that
the letter Resh is receiving the grammatical mark the dagesh in that text. 33
Without the existence of that fact, the Resh would never be considered by the
Rabbis as one of the double letters.
My only explanation for a modern scholar, such as Surares, to believe
and assert the Sefer Yetzirah was the product of a pre-Torah Abraham is to
consider that he was biased by his Christian religious worldview and thus
ignoring clear and obvious evidence to the contrary. Let us now leave Christian
Cabalah and move onto the Occult Qabalah.
33
(Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, The Book of Creation: In Theory and Practice 1990, 160)
Jaron
Qabalah Gates of Light
41
: The Origin of the Occult Qabalah
Now we shall go over the origin of those people who created the Occult
Qabalah. In general, these Occultists, who used and discussed the Rabbinic
Jewish Kabbalah, did so by accepting the premises of the Christian interpretation
of the Cabalah, and hence they could almost be considered Christian Cabalists.
However, in general they believed in ideas beyond the accepted Christian
theology such as the teachings of the Greek Neo-Platonists and Pythagorean
mystery schools. They believed these other teachings and traditions contributed
to a greater understanding of the Divine. The earliest of these Occult scholars
and practitioners were Christian practitioners of occult wisdom tradition who
saw Jesus as yet another wisdom teacher rather than the incarnation of The One
and only True God . Their use of the Kabbalah was not to support Christian
theology as was the goal of Christian Cabalah, but rather to enhance this Occult
theology ; hence I am distinguishing them from their fellow Cabalists by
designating them as early Qabalists.
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