The Jews, Qabala and the Correspondences Industry

[Wintruz]

I recently received the following question and considered that someone here may get something from my answer:

Q. I am new to magick but heard that it cannot be practiced without Qabala. There's no magick without QBL. Is that true?

A. A bit like "Hermeticism", Qabala is poorly defined in most modern, Western magical systems and there are many who believe themselves to be studying it without really asking why. They've simply been told that Qabala is a part of the magician's curriculum, that somehow memorising data and correspondences will help them and, if it goes any further than that, Reuchlin's Tree of Life glyph might be conceptualised as a type of metaphysical filofax. There's a sad irony here, in that, beneath Kabbalah, is a far older, largely ignored tradition which is more spiritually potent and more relevant for the majority of modern magicians.

Kabbalah is the "mystical interpretation" of Judaism, traditionally said to have been revealed to Moses, by God, on Sinai. Other traditions place the mythopoetic origins in Adam being taught it by the angel Raziel after the expulsion from Eden. In reality, Kabbalah emerged from a Roman-era attempt to interpret fledgling Rabbinical Judaism in the light of Platonism. In much the same way that Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas would later turn to Aristotle for the philosophical grounding of their religions, Hellenised Jews of the first century sought to understand their religion in the light of the Platonism which philosophically supported traditional (pagan) Graeco-Roman religion. The most famous example of this is Philo of Alexandria interpreting the angels of Jacob's Ladder as souls ascending back to the Godhead or else descending to be reborn in the Earth (ideas at the Heart of Plato, but not the Torah). The Kabbalistic interest in numerology also stems from this time; an attempt to read Pythagoranism through the lens of the Torah. As God is said to have spoken the world into existence, Pythagoras' emanationist numerology would soon be applied to Hebrew letters.

These adaptations of Platonism remained a marginal interest among Jewish theologians until the interaction between medieval Jews and Islamic theologians in Moorish Spain. Influenced by a similar, very widespread interpretation of Islam through the lens of Neoplatonism (see al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali), Moors, Jews and pre-scholastic Christians noticed distinct similarities between their religions, unaware that these similarities were more deeply rooted in the shared influence of Platonic theology than their scriptural traditions. Two things occurred at this time. The first was the illusion of perennialism, the idea that the three monotheisms were rooted in the same Wisdom, rather than the separate, ancient war-strategies of unifying the Hebrews in the case of Moses and the Arabs in the case of Mohammed. The second thing to occur was the codification of this universal perennialism in the Zohar, a work far more deeply indebted to Plato and his student Plotinus than Rabbinical Judaism. The work has been criticised by Jewish theologians numerous times throughout the centuries.

Expelled from (now, again) Catholic Spain, Jewish immigrants to Renaissance Italy arrived shortly after the Platonic corpus made its way to Florence through (also-immigrating) Byzantine scholars. In the case of the Florentine Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola, the "discovery" of Kabbalah through Jewish immigrants was revelatory; the Jews spoke of the same things of which the ancient Greeks spoke. He concluded that there must be a shared ancient wisdom tradition and, because Christ had been Hebrew, this must be Kabbalah or "Cabala" as the Christian interpretation is often distinguished. Pico, a noble soul, received his education in Cabala from a Jewish-Christian convert, Flavius Mithridates, who wished to use Cabala as a way of converting other Jews to Christianity (through the famous YHVH/YHShVH letter mysticism). For modern magicians, it cannot be expressed clearly enough that Pico was not an expert in Kabbalah, his reading was patchy, and, most importantly, he was unaware of its origins in the Platonic tradition which he was already studying (see Pico Della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism by Wirszubski).

After Pico's short life, a major division occurred. In Judaism, Isaac Luria definitively placed Kabbalah in Jewish religious practice, especially Messianism. This continues today and is very much at the core of Hasidic Judaism. The best efforts of Madonna aside, it is of practically no use whatsoever for those outside of Judaism. Elsewhere, German Cabalists, who mostly derived their knowledge of Cabala from Pico's fragmented, patchwork understanding, developed a type of practical Cabala. This reached its apotheosis in Henrich Cornelius Agrippa, a poor student of Pico, though he often plagiarises vast parts of Pico's 900 Theses in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy without understanding the theses. It's useful to write of this tradition as "Qabala" to distinguish it from Christian Cabala and Jewish Kabbalah. Through circuitous routes, Qabala was integrated into the studies of the SRIA and then the Golden Dawn. From the Golden Dawn it has entered contemporary magical practice.

Is Qabalah useful for magicians?

As the metaphysics of Kabbalah are derived from Platonism, these ideas can be studied at their Greek source in clear language and without Judaic accoutrements which are superfluous and irrelevant for most people. Because they are at the heart of so much mysticism, a good reading in Plato, Plotinus and Iamblichus often bestows a greater learning in the metaphysics of most of the world's mystical traditions than studying the individual traditions. After this reading, studying a text like the Zohar takes on a different hue; the ways in which humans have made the ideas work for them becomes the object of study.

The Qabalistic Tree of Life may have use as a mnemonic device for the memorisation of correspondences and staggering numbers of trees have been cut down for books written about these correspondences. However, the correspondences themselves derive, not from Qabala, but from classical literature; we know that roses and doves invoke Venus because of Ovid and Iamblichus, not Agrippa, not the Golden Dawn. I'd therefore say that time spent with the ancient sources is more beneficial than time spent with the later attempts to "make them fit".

It's interesting that two major magical movements which have almost entirely avoided Qabala are Wicca and Asatru, both based on traditions (Celtic and Norse) which have been less frequently shoehorned into the Tree of Life schema. These are perhaps the beginning of a magic no longer tethered to the unnecessary edifices of the past.

 

[Xingtian]

I agree that people really should be well-grounded in Plato, Plotinus, etc. before approaching the later Western magickal systems that are so heavily dependent on Platonism. It seems to me that disciplines like Kabbalah are approached in modern occultism like something that dropped out of the sky fully formed (well, too be fair, that is more or less the official claim, but come on, does anyone really believe that?) and the actual history of these practices is largely ignored. I really don't understand why someone would spend countless hours poring through complicated tomes and systems without first turning to the root texts which are often much easier and, I daresay, more fun to read. That said I do think there is much unique and worthwhile development in the Zohar and other texts, useful to everyone, provided they are not approached in a dogmatic or uncritical manner. And many beautiful and worthy things arise through history from misreadings and partial understandings, so I don't take Christian Qabala's dodgy moorings in "the real thing" to necessarily be a strike against it.

With regard to correspondences, here we come to the analogical and poetic heart of magic, and knowing how the various systems have developed, contradicted, and changed over time is a good cure for dogmatism and scrupulosity. In his defense of Homer, Proclus even went so far as to argue that, for ineffable realities, the most incongruous symbols can be the most appropriate. Awkward attempts to make things fit is all part of the fun of western esotericism. So I think ultimately magicians should approach correspondences as poets and not actuaries or chemists consulting charts.

It should be noted that the idea of an ancient wisdom tradition uniting Judaism and Platonism goes back pretty far. The middle and late Platonists were often keen to frame their philosophy as emobdying such a tradition shared by Egyptians, Babylonians, Brahmins, etc. Sometimes Jews were added to the mix. Numenius was influenced by Philo and declared, "What is Plato but Moses in Attic Greek?" Numenius in turn was major influence for Plotinus who was accused of plagiarizing him. One of Porphyry's main criticisms of Christianity is that they betrayed a venerable ancient tradition (Judaism), for which he has enormous respect, for a ridiculous novelty.

 

[Xenophon]

I recently received the following question and considered that someone here may get something from my answer:



A. A bit like "Hermeticism", Qabala is poorly defined in most modern, Western magical systems and there are many who believe themselves to be studying it without really asking why. They've simply been told that Qabala is a part of the magician's curriculum, that somehow memorising data and correspondences will help them and, if it goes any further than that, Reuchlin's Tree of Life glyph might be conceptualised as a type of metaphysical filofax. There's a sad irony here, in that, beneath Kabbalah, is a far older, largely ignored tradition which is more spiritually potent and more relevant for the majority of modern magicians.

Kabbalah is the "mystical interpretation" of Judaism, traditionally said to have been revealed to Moses, by God, on Sinai. Other traditions place the mythopoetic origins in Adam being taught it by the angel Raziel after the expulsion from Eden. In reality, Kabbalah emerged from a Roman-era attempt to interpret fledgling Rabbinical Judaism in the light of Platonism. In much the same way that Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas would later turn to Aristotle for the philosophical grounding of their religions, Hellenised Jews of the first century sought to understand their religion in the light of the Platonism which philosophically supported traditional (pagan) Graeco-Roman religion. The most famous example of this is Philo of Alexandria interpreting the angels of Jacob's Ladder as souls ascending back to the Godhead or else descending to be reborn in the Earth (ideas at the Heart of Plato, but not the Torah). The Kabbalistic interest in numerology also stems from this time; an attempt to read Pythagoranism through the lens of the Torah. As God is said to have spoken the world into existence, Pythagoras' emanationist numerology would soon be applied to Hebrew letters.

These adaptations of Platonism remained a marginal interest among Jewish theologians until the interaction between medieval Jews and Islamic theologians in Moorish Spain. Influenced by a similar, very widespread interpretation of Islam through the lens of Neoplatonism (see al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali), Moors, Jews and pre-scholastic Christians noticed distinct similarities between their religions, unaware that these similarities were more deeply rooted in the shared influence of Platonic theology than their scriptural traditions. Two things occurred at this time. The first was the illusion of perennialism, the idea that the three monotheisms were rooted in the same Wisdom, rather than the separate, ancient war-strategies of unifying the Hebrews in the case of Moses and the Arabs in the case of Mohammed. The second thing to occur was the codification of this universal perennialism in the Zohar, a work far more deeply indebted to Plato and his student Plotinus than Rabbinical Judaism. The work has been criticised by Jewish theologians numerous times throughout the centuries.

Expelled from (now, again) Catholic Spain, Jewish immigrants to Renaissance Italy arrived shortly after the Platonic corpus made its way to Florence through (also-immigrating) Byzantine scholars. In the case of the Florentine Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola, the "discovery" of Kabbalah through Jewish immigrants was revelatory; the Jews spoke of the same things of which the ancient Greeks spoke. He concluded that there must be a shared ancient wisdom tradition and, because Christ had been Hebrew, this must be Kabbalah or "Cabala" as the Christian interpretation is often distinguished. Pico, a noble soul, received his education in Cabala from a Jewish-Christian convert, Flavius Mithridates, who wished to use Cabala as a way of converting other Jews to Christianity (through the famous YHVH/YHShVH letter mysticism). For modern magicians, it cannot be expressed clearly enough that Pico was not an expert in Kabbalah, his reading was patchy, and, most importantly, he was unaware of its origins in the Platonic tradition which he was already studying (see Pico Della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism by Wirszubski).

After Pico's short life, a major division occurred. In Judaism, Isaac Luria definitively placed Kabbalah in Jewish religious practice, especially Messianism. This continues today and is very much at the core of Hasidic Judaism. The best efforts of Madonna aside, it is of practically no use whatsoever for those outside of Judaism. Elsewhere, German Cabalists, who mostly derived their knowledge of Cabala from Pico's fragmented, patchwork understanding, developed a type of practical Cabala. This reached its apotheosis in Henrich Cornelius Agrippa, a poor student of Pico, though he often plagiarises vast parts of Pico's 900 Theses in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy without understanding the theses. It's useful to write of this tradition as "Qabala" to distinguish it from Christian Cabala and Jewish Kabbalah. Through circuitous routes, Qabala was integrated into the studies of the SRIA and then the Golden Dawn. From the Golden Dawn it has entered contemporary magical practice.

Is Qabalah useful for magicians?

As the metaphysics of Kabbalah are derived from Platonism, these ideas can be studied at their Greek source in clear language and without Judaic accoutrements which are superfluous and irrelevant for most people. Because they are at the heart of so much mysticism, a good reading in Plato, Plotinus and Iamblichus often bestows a greater learning in the metaphysics of most of the world's mystical traditions than studying the individual traditions. After this reading, studying a text like the Zohar takes on a different hue; the ways in which humans have made the ideas work for them becomes the object of study.

The Qabalistic Tree of Life may have use as a mnemonic device for the memorisation of correspondences and staggering numbers of trees have been cut down for books written about these correspondences. However, the correspondences themselves derive, not from Qabala, but from classical literature; we know that roses and doves invoke Venus because of Ovid and Iamblichus, not Agrippa, not the Golden Dawn. I'd therefore say that time spent with the ancient sources is more beneficial than time spent with the later attempts to "make them fit".

It's interesting that two major magical movements which have almost entirely avoided Qabala are Wicca and Asatru, both based on traditions (Celtic and Norse) which have been less frequently shoehorned into the Tree of Life schema. These are perhaps the beginning of a magic no longer tethered to the unnecessary edifices of the past.

"Correspondence Industry"---I love that phrase!

Some writers---e.g., David Myatt---use a 7-fold "Tree of Wyrd" they claim to derive from the Divine Pymander text. This, though, is mayhap not a "major" movement. Me, I early on developed a repugnance for the Qabalah crowd. What you refer to as the "make them fit" mentality.