Kabbalah is an ancient and modern aspect of Jewish mysticism. It is a
large body of speculation on the nature of divinity, the creation,
the origin and fate of the soul, and the role of human beings. It
consists also of meditative, devotional, mystical and magical
practices which were taught only to a select few and for this reason
Kabbalah is regarded as an esoteric practice of Judaism. It is also
known as one of the "mystery" traditions and many aspects of Kabbalah
have been studied and used by non-Jews, such as the Rosicrucians,
Freemasons, and the Golden Dawn for over several hundred years. Some
say that the Seals of the United States are Kabbahlistic in nature.
According to Jewish tradition, the Torah - the first five books of
the Old Testament, was created prior to the world and she advised God
on such weighty matters as the creation of human kind. When Moses
received the written law from God, tradition has it that he also
received the oral law, which was not written down, but passed from
generation to generation.
The Torah is believed to be Divine, and in the same way as the Torah
was accompanied by an oral tradition, so there grew up a secret oral
tradition which claimed to possess an initiated understanding of the
Torah, its hidden meanings, and the divine power concealed within.
This is the focus of the Kabbalistic tradition, a belief in the
divinity of the Torah, and a belief that by studying this text one
can unlock the secrets of creation and the Creator.
Another aspect of Jewish religion which influenced Kabbalah was the
Biblical phenomenon of prophecy. The prophet was an individual chosen
by God to "spread the word", and there was the implication that God,
far from being a transcendental abstraction, was a being whom one
could approach (albeit with enormous difficulty, risk, fear and
trembling). Some Kabbalists believed that they were the inheritors of
practical techniques handed down from the time of the Biblical
prophets.
Most Jewish Kabbalists would state that it is impossible to study
Kabbalah without knowing Hebrew. Most Hermetic Kabbalists learn some
Hebrew, but there are many practical exercises and ritual techniques
which can be employed with only a minimal knowledge of Hebrew.
There is no question that a knowledge of Hebrew can make a very large
difference. Non-Jewish texts on Kabbalah abound in simple mistakes
which are due largely to uninformed copying. Thousands of important
Kabbalistic texts have not been translated out of Hebrew or Aramaic,
and the number of important source texts in translation is small. The
difficulties in trying to read the archaic and technically complex
literature of Kabbalah should not be discounted, but it is well
worthwhile to acquire even a superficial knowledge of Hebrew.
Many Kabbalists view the Torah as the word of God and Hebrew as the
language of creation. In this view the alphabet and language are
divine and have immense magical power. Many of the source texts of
Kabbalah are commentaries on the Bible, and derive their insights
using a variety of devices, such as puns, anagrams, gematria (letter
manipulations) and cross references to the same word in different
contexts. Many symbols are used as well including, of course, the
Tree of Life and the pentagram.
Many people who study Kabbalah are not Jewish. This has been
happening for 500 years or so. It is difficult to know what to call
this variant of Kabbalah. "Non-Jewish" is inaccurate, as I have
personally known several Jews who opted for Hermetic Kabbalah in
preference to the traditional variety! At one time it was
called "Christian" Kabbalah, but this is also very misleading.
The origin of this variant can be placed in Renaissance Italy in the
last decade of the 15th. century. It was an amazing decade. In 1492
Christopher Columbus set sail for America. In that same year the King
of Spain expelled all Jews from Spain on pain of death, bringing to
an end centuries of Jewish culture in Spain, and causing a huge
migration of dispossessed Jews through Europe, many of whom were
welcomed by the Turkish sultan, who is reputed to have observed that
the King of Spain had enriched Turkey by beggaring his own country.
At around the same time, at the court of the great banking family of
the Medicis in Florence, Marcelio Ficino had established the Platonic
Academy under the patronage of the Medicis and was translating the
works of Plato. A bundle of manuscripts, lost for centuries and
dating back to the 1st. and 2nd. centuries A.D. was discovered; this
was the Corpus Hermeticum, a series of
documents relatingto Hermes Trimegistus, identical with the Egyptian
god Thoth, god of wisdom. Cosimo de Medici told Ficino to stop
translating Plato and to concentrate on the Corpus instead.
At the time it was believed that the Corpus really was the religion
of the ancient Egyptians, and that Hermes was a kind of Egyptian
Moses. The fact that they were written much later, and heavily
influenced by Neoplatonism, had the effect of convincing readers at
that time that Greek philosophy was founded on much older, Egyptian
religious philosophy - this had a huge influence on liberal religious
and philosophical thinking at the time. Into this environment came
the Kabbalah, brought in part by fleeing Spanish Jews, and it was
seized upon as another lost tradition, the inner, initiated key to
the Bible.
Two figures stand out. One was Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola, who
commissioned several translations of Kabbalistic works, and did much
to publicise Kabbalah among the intellectuals of the day. The other
was Johannes Reuchlin, who learned to read Hebrew and became deeply
immersed in Kabbalistic literature. It must be said that Jews were
suspicious of this activity, finding that Christian scholars were
using the Kabbalah as a bludgeon to persuade them to convert to
Christianity.
It was out of this eclectic mixture of Christianity, Hermeticism,
Neoplatonism, Kabbalah and Renaissance humanism that Hermetic
Kabbalah was born. Over the centuries it has developed in many
directions, with strong influences from Freemasonry and
Rosicrucianism, but continued input from Jewish Kabbalah has meant
that many variants are not so different in spirit from the original.
Its greatest strength continues to be a strong element of religious
humanism - it does not attempt to define God and does not define what
an individual should believe, but it does assume that some level of
direct experience of God is possible and there are practical methods
for achieving this.
