[Opinion] Is kabbalah universal?

[Morell]

First I apologize if I misspell the term. I don't use this system nor do I study it too much.

At least where I move it seems that a lot of people favor Kabbalah in their occult practice. Good reason for me to explore this topic. So I took a look with questions in mind:

Is Kabbalah universal system?
Can I find it at core of any occult practice?
Is it important for me to learn Kabbalah?

So I took a look. At first on occult system Kabbalah, later I also read a collection of texts on Jewish mystical system Kabbalah. I've learned what both are about and it was really interesting learning. I was especially surprised that Jewish Kabbalah is rather mystical system taking Jewish tradition to it's... maybe extreme, but I would rather say peak. On other hand occult kabbalah felt very shortened and simplified, although it gained angels and demons and mirror map, becoming map of life and death. I say simplified because this is but one understanding of one rabbi who drew the map while other Rabbis made other maps of creation. But in the end I found answers to my questions.

Is Kabbalah universal system?
No. It works at its peak only in system of understanding the world that Jews and Christians. I was rolling my eyes when reading how people tried to put together Kabbalah and Norse paganism both modern and historical. The book Uthark: night side of the runes is great example of such attempt in both included texts. For some it might work, but they are based on too different world view and understanding of reality.

Can I find it at core of any occult practice?
No.. Not all occult system use demons, angels, or system of 10 sefirot or other 10 levels of reality.

Is it important for me to learn Kabbalah?
Yes. It's not necessary for my practice, but learning about how others view the world is of value for sure.

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So this is my opinion on Kabbalah. How about you? What do you think?

 

[Amur]

Hmm the Tree of Life is part of Kabbalah yes but Kabbalah in itself is the hebrew aleph-bet which makes it interesting. One could argue that a system of 10 is universal. But then again a system of 22 is just an extension of the system of 10(The paths on sefirot are 22). Kabbalah is more about the Aleph-Bet than the Sefirot so I would say that it's usable like it is and in it's own context, but not universal. Sure it's interesting to study the hebrew language in many ways but not necessarily universal.

 

[Morell]

One could argue that a system of 10 is universal...

I disagree on that being potentially universal, we are using it so it might feel so. If there is universal system then it could be binary system: 1 and 0, or yes and no.

 

[Kepler]

As things like its arrangement as natural science(cosmology) and numerological(isopsephy) gear Hellenistic it seems to be universal and inserted into the Hebrew texts via the Septuagint. It's not limited to alpha-bet, that's only an expression of it, and one based on misunderstanding of natural science. But, its universality, being based on natural science, is shown in its inherent ability in being able to adapt by new information discarding falsehood and revealing Truth for the undogmatic. But being undogmatic, that universality could be available only for those who know, will, and dare.

 

[HoldAll]

For the last few months I've been reading what scholars of religion (Gershom Scholem, Joseph Dan, Moshe Idel, etc.) have to say about the Kabbalah, and my preliminary conclusion is that yes, it's mysticism carried to its extreme or peak, like you said. At the same time, orthodox Judaism more and more begins to look to me like an overly rigid cult with its 613 commandments, strict social rules and purity requirements that seem to leave no room for individual spiritual expression. My hunch is that Kabbalah (and before it Hekhalot mysticism) developed as a reaction to this whole ossified rabbinic structure because for some people following all those laws and customs simply weren't satisfying enough and didn't really arouse more ecstatic spiritual emotions in them.

Jewish Kabbalists of course despise the Western Hermetic Qabalah as being ridiculously simplicistic but I have to say I'm growing fond of it again for this very reason… Jewish Kabbalah appears to me like a bewildering and sometimes muddled maze while Hermetic Qabalah is pretty straightforward in comparison. We might squabble over whether the Archangel Michael should be assigned to Hod or Tiphareth but that's about the height of controversy.

The best thing about the Hermetic Qabalah for me is the Tree of Life glyph though. Despite all my reading, I still haven't worked out yet whether it's a genuinely Jewish Kabbalist invention or rather a Christian Cabalah innovation by Johannes Reuchlin or others that only became so universal due to the advent of printing (before that time, frequent copying of manuscripts by hand would have distorted or garbled the diagram). I would say the Qabalistic Tree of Life is only universally useful when viewed from a psychological angle, as a sort of flowchart, organigram or map - how do things develop or are created, in which stages, or what input is necessary by which players? Treating the Tree as a mere 'filing cabinet' for various correspondences is really too crude for occult purposes, you might just use simple tables like in Crowley's "Liber 777" though.

It's the Qabalistic Tree glyph that makes all the difference. In old Hebrew manuscripts one finds the sephiroth arranged in a spiral, in concentric circles or along a single beam, which makes detecting not-so-apparent relationships between various factors impossible as opposed to mapping a given process on the Tree, for example; of course you can also use it as a model for spiritual ascent or descent or for more arcane purposes. The Qabalistic Tree provides structure while the Jewish Kabbalah tends to be fuzzy and chaotic… The other day I read in one of those scholarly Kabbalah books the following sentence "Every sephira is infinite". Ten different equally infinite infinites which are necessarily less infinite than the infinite Ain Sof??? Ah, mysticism… You could perhaps say the Hermetic Qabalah imposes order where the Jewish Kabbalah ponders the ineffable if you want to be flippant.

You could also see it as a mental gym or playground for associative imagination as per Dion Fortune's dictum that the Qabalah was the yoga of the West. Is it worth the bother? There are other diagrams like the pentagram or the chakra system showing mystical connections but the Tree is more complex and comes with tons of lore behind it which ensures that students will take it very seriously. It can play a major role in a magician's thinking, I'd say, but it's not absolutely indispensable.

 

[Amur]

I disagree on that being potentially universal, we are using it so it might feel so. If there is universal system then it could be binary system: 1 and 0, or yes and no.

Ahh yeah you meant beyond humanity. In that perception I agree with you that it's not that usable. Binary is universal.

If you want universal structures look into mathematics My avatar Tetractys is one of them.

 

[PinealisGlandia]

The other day I read in one of those scholarly Kabbalah books the following sentence "Every sephira is infinite". Ten different equally infinite infinites which are necessarily less infinite than the infinite Ain Sof???

Consider the set of all whole numbers, the set of all natural numbers, the set of all prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence. Each of these sets is infinite, but they are not the same size. Infinite does not necessarily equal infinite.

 

[Lurker]

Is Kabbalah universal system?
No. It works at its peak only in system of understanding the world that Jews and Christians. I was rolling my eyes when reading how people tried to put together Kabbalah and Norse paganism both modern and historical. The book Uthark: night side of the runes is great example of such attempt in both included texts. For some it might work, but they are based on too different world view and understanding of reality.

For human beings? I don't know. Some claim it is, but as you're claiming, that might be ethnocentric.


If you want to extend the word 'universal' to mean truly Universal, then we shouldn't expect aliens in star systems differnt from ours to use it either. For example, if you are on a planet with only 3 other visible planets and your species has 8 fingers and 8 toes instead of 10, then you wouldn't expect our base-10, Ptolemaic model to be used. As you mentioned, binary might make more sense Univerally, but it becomes awkward for conveying information as the complexity of the information increases.

Ultimately, Qabala is a map of the inner planes, but the map is not the territory. The map gives us a way to try to look at the territory so we can navigate it and try to make sense of it intellectually. Other systems or cultures may have different maps, yet may be equally efficatious.

Is it important for me to learn Kabbalah?
Yes. It's not necessary for my practice, but learning about how others view the world is of value for sure.

That is the sophisticated attitude of a true explorer.

"Every sephira is infinite". Ten different equally infinite infinites which are necessarily less infinite than the infinite Ain Sof???

I think a better way of thinking about it is as continuous consciousness, analogous to white light. When light is passed through a prism, you create a rainbow effect of separating the light into its spectral components. So if I want to work with Tiphareth, for example, then I need to filter out the non-yellow components of the white light (using the Briatic color scale as an example) so I'm left with the yellow of Tiphareth. The non-prime colors make up the energy of the paths, depending on the mixture of the colors of the Sephiroth they connect. This model is abstract enough that you don't have to worry about things fitting into other things, just adjusting frequencies of your filter for whatever working you're doing.

That's how I hang onto my sanity when thinking about these things, anyway. Thinking of them in terms of space and time, on the other hand, just leads me to scratching my head endlessly. (YMMV, of course.) Ultimately everything is a symbol for trying to understand what we can of some finite aspect of the ineffable, like the blind men trying to understand an elephant by feeling different parts of it - although in this case the elephant is infinite.

Consider the set of all whole numbers, the set of all natural numbers, the set of all prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence. Each of these sets is infinite, but they are not the same size. Infinite does not necessarily equal infinite.

That's not correct, actually, although unless you're a mathematician it's doubtful you would know this - throw your common sense out the window when dealing with higher level math.

All infinite sets of countable elements have the same cardinality. It isn't until you are dealing with uncountable sets, like the real number line, that the cardinalities becomes different. Transfinite set theory is mathematical mindfuckery at its finest.

To quote John von Neumann, and I have no idea who he was addressing:

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 11:21 PM

continuous consciousness

So, just to elaborate, my analogy with light really applies to consciousness. If I want to work with Tiphareth, to continue the example, then I want to filter out the other states of consciousness and 'tune in' the state of consciousness symbolized by Tiphareth.

 

[cormundum]

Kabbalah is not universal. It is essentially a closed system meant for Jews, written by Jews. The attitudes in those works towards Gentiles are remarkably negative, and most of the good stuff was borrowed from the Hermeticists and Platonists. The rest of it is just obsessions over the commandments and how they are to be fulfilled and with what special intentions they are to be done.

 

[Romolo]

The mystical qabalah (as described by Dion Fortune) is (to me) the ultimate occult Swiss pocket knife, the esoteric cupboard that can store seemingly endless symbols and relations, the pair of glasses that allows you to see four worlds at once, the cosmic scales with which you can weigh any matter. It takes a while before its many facets “click”, but once it does, the gnosis it offers is hard to brush off.

 

[Anziel_Merkaba]

Is Kabbalah universal system?
Can I find it at core of any occult practice?
Is it important for me to learn Kabbalah?

In a way, it is a universal system, in that anyone can benefit from its practice if they choose to practice it. The issue is while it is a robust and well designed system its rigidity often leads to narrow ways of thinking among the people who practice it. I used to hang out with a bunch of Hermetic Kabbalists, but I never really stepped into it the same way they did because I realized that it doesn't really add anything that wasn't already there for a practitioner who has already realized their path.

If you want to be technical I'm a non-kabbalistic Hermetic practitioner, so while I do work within the same framework of all things being one and one being the mind or God, I don't personally recognize different 'levels' of all things. The number one mistake Kabbalistic practitioners make is to think the spheres have clear boundaries between them, when realistically it's more of a spectrum from Malkuth to the Ein above Kether than individual clearly defined levels of reality. And honestly I don't really blame them because the shift from infinite and timeless formlessness to finite temporal solidity is a hard thing to really grasp so they take 'chunks' of that spectrum and say each 'chunk' is 'this' or 'that' to help them wrap their minds around the idea.

At a low level it's a very powerful tool that anyone can use to grow as a practitioner but once a practitioner reaches a certain level it usually becomes a crutch that limits the user instead of a tool to further empower the user. That said if one can realize it's limitations and make the proper understandings, a high level Kabbalist is stronger than anything else at the same level besides a Hermetic practitioner (which stems from the same root)

All=One=Zero=Mind, if that makes sense.