Author Draja Mickarahic and the Qabbalah

[luotenrati]

Draja Mickarahic was one of the earlier occult authors that I started reading and he is still one of my favourites. His writing is clear and very practical and I like his results-oriented approach. What struck me is that he argued in his writings several times against using the Kabbalah as a system. I have allowed myself to paste a rather large quote from his Practice of Magic.

“The difficulty with this particular set of beliefs is that it is more limited than one would imagine. While it is certainly an elegant and very wordy system, admirably suited to the presentation of Jewish religious mysticism in its original incarnation, it is not a complete magical system at all, and was never intended to be. In the predecessor to the Jewish system there were only eight spheres, with optionally added interconnecting paths. These eight were expanded to ten spheres to suit the requirements of Jewish religious practice, in which a minion of ten men is required to offer prayers to God. Through this expansion, the original eight spheres lost their original meaning and much of their real value for most practical magical work.
On the other hand, the Qabbalah is an excellent magical system for those who are practitioners of the Jewish religion, especially those who are members of the strictly orthodox Hasidic branch of Judaism. This still means that it is useless, or nearly so, for those who are neither orthodox Jews, or at the very least, literate in Hebrew. Cabalism quickly becomes an exercise in futility for most of the modern followers of ceremonial magic, who have "christianized" it, however mentally pleasing it may be.” (Mickaharic, 1995, p. 41)

Now I understand this reproach to the cultural aspect of the K/C/Qabalah. It is a valid argument but you can take it or leave it. Some may argue that it is very operationalizable and that it does not even need to have anything in common with Hebrew. Take JMG's Celtic GD system for example.

“As with any magical system, there is a minimum which can be accomplished with it. But it must be noted that placing the system in your subconscious mind means that you can never go beyond the minimum. When you desire to use the Qabbalah for magic, you will place a close limit on yourself. ” (Mickaharic, 1995, p. 41-42)

This is the main argument that put me off the Qabbalah for years though. That it might act as a limiter.

“Aside from the various ritual and ceremonial magical systems which are in use today, there are also a number of other systems which could be developed to, at least the extent of the Qabbalah, and some to an even deeper extent. Those who are believing Roman Catholics could use the meditations of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. These exercises can develop the spiritual faculties, and through them, an excellent set of worldly correspondences can be fit into the Stations of the Cross. This would better fit into the Christian world view, and allow a much greater facility with Ritual and Ceremonial Magic than the Qabbalah ever can for believing Christians. The fourteen stations of the cross can also be fit into the minor arcana of the tarot very welt each station matching one card in each of the four suits. Each of the tarot suits has an elemental attribution, thus each of the stations of the cross could be viewed from the point of each of the four elements. The meditations could then be fit into the major arcana of the tarot, as further steps or events in the life of Christ, or attributes of Christ as the redeemer of humanity.” (Mickaharic, 1995, p. 42)

This is another cultural argument, related to upbringing. Personally, I don't find it very convincing. He is saying something along the lines of 'you should do magick based on your culture'. What if someone does not have such a culture to speak of? My life is marked by being of mixed Austrian-Polish ethnicity. Everywhere I have lived, I was always an outsider, so no culture feels 'at home' for me anyway. Besides, spirit does not care where you are from. What does God care what your ethnicity or upbringing is? It's a senseless perspective in my opinion. Some symbols might resonate more or less with someone based on his past experiences. Those resonances can be imprinted just as easily into one's mind by performing rituals and initiations however. Like Pascal recommends, if you act as if you believed in God, you will come to believe in him eventually. It is possible to graft resonances into one's psyche by the ritual enactment of a world-view. He basically says it himself that it is completely arbitrary.

Finally, he has to say something about the Tarot and the Qabbalah as well:

“The tarot trumps, or major arcana, are enthusiastically fitted into the Qabalistic tree by those who call themselves Christian Qabalists, along with everything else in the known universe. The tarot cards, them selves, can be developed as a separate system of belief and used as the foundation of a system of ritual and ceremonial magic on their own. This may be done with out consideration of any theoretical connection to the Qabbalah they may have accumulated. Having twenty two places to classify things is not necessarily a virtue. Using the tarot trumps and the minor arcana for ritual work, within their own context of belief would bring them a little closer to their original intention, but not much. The tarot trumps are not a part of the Hebrew Qabbalah, and never have been. They were placed there by enthusiastic amateurs who noticed a correspondence between the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet the twenty-two major trumps, and the twenty-two spheres and paths of the Qabbalah. The correspondence is false, no matter how widely it is believed in.” (Mickaharic, 1995, p. 42-43)

I don't really have anything to say to this but maybe it interests some of you.

I'm curious what you have to say about this. What is your stance on this matter? For me, the most problematic aspect by far is the question of limitation. If I remember correctly, in another book he says that if you sufficiently graft the Qabalistic worldview into your psyche then it is difficult to get out of it again. From a chaos magic perspective this would be rather undesirable as you want to be able to belief shift. I read somewhere that the proper middle pillar maps the entire body across the tree of life so that every part corresponds to every sephira. I guess I'm worried about a sort of irreversibility of such an operation which would lead to limitation, which is why I have avoided the Qabalah and the Tree of Life for the past couple of years.

 

[solxyz]

As I have written elsewhere, I am rather markedly anti-Kabbalistic, although I'm not sure if my reasons for this are the same as Mickaharic's, whose reasons remain rather obscure and muddy even after having read all of that. First of all, I don't think that he's correct about an 8 sphere system being adjusted to 10 for specifically Jewish reasons. My understanding is that the Greek predecessor to the Tree of Life was the Tetractys, which was a 10 sphere system for entirely mathematical reasons (1+2+3+4).

My reasons for disliking Kabbalah are, first, philosophical - that I think the basic platonic scheme on which it is built is fundamentally misguided. And second, perhaps somewhat like Michaharic, I find it extremely awkward and overly intellectual ("very wordy"). My experience with it is that it leads away from direct experience rather than being a system that brings clarity to what is already being experienced. You speak of "imprinting" the system on oneself, and that is indeed my experience - that the system has to be imposed from the outside instead of being a natural fit for what is already going on. Just as one minor example, the central pillar doesn't work well as a chakra system.

For an organizing map/associational system, I much prefer a four-directions system, which are one of the most recurring themes in human culture.