Kabala (or Kabbalah or Cabbalah or Cabbala or Cabala)

A Hebrew and Jewish system of Gnosticism or Theosophy. The word means "doctrines received from tradition." In ancient Hebrew literature the name was used to denote the entire body of religious writings, the Pentateuch excepted. It was only in the early Middle Ages that the mystical system known as Kabalism was designated by that name.

The Kabala deals with the nature of God and with the sephiroth, or divine emanations of angels and man. God, the En Soph, fills and contains the universe. As in Gnosticism, God is boundless, inconceivable, and distantly transcendent. In a certain mystical sense, God can be thought of as nonexistent or preexistent. To justify existence the deity had to become active and creative, and this was achieved through the medium of the ten sephiroth, intelligences that emanated from God like rays proceeding from a luminary.

The first sephiroth was the wish to become manifest, and this contained nine other intelligences or sephiroth, which again emanated one from the other—the second from the first, the third from the second, and so forth. These ten sephiroth were known as the "Crown," "Wisdom," "Intelligence," "Love," "Justice," "Beauty," "Firmness," "Splendor," "Foundation," and "Kingdom." From the junction of pairs of sephiroth other emanations were formed; thus from Wisdom and Intelligence proceeded Love or Justice and from Love and Justice, Beauty.

The sephiroth were also symbolic of primordial man and heavenly man, of which earthly man was the shadow. They formed three triads, representing intellectual, moral, and physical qualities: the first was Wisdom, Intelligence, and Crown; the second, Love, Justice, and Beauty; the third, Firmness, Splendor, and Foundation.

The whole was encircled or bound by Kingdom, the ninth sephiroth. Each of these triads symbolized a portion of the human frame: the first, the head; the second, the arms; the third, the legs. Although those sephiroth were emanations from God, they remained a portion of God, simply representing different aspects of the One Being.

Kabalistic cosmology posits the existence of four different worlds, each forming a sephirotic system of a decade of emanations generated thusly: from the world of emanations, or the heavenly man, came a direct emanation from the En Soph. From the emanation was produced the world of creation, or the Briatic world of pure nature, less spiritual than the world of the heavenly man. The angel Metatron inhabited the Briatic world and constituted a world of pure spirit. He governed the visible world and guided the revolutions of the planets. From the world of pure nature was created the world of formation or the Yetziratic world, the abode of angels.

Finally, from these three worlds emanate the world of action or matter, the dwelling of evil spirits. It is said to contain ten hells, each becoming lower until the depths of diabolical degradation are reached. The prince of this region is the evil spirit Samuel, the serpent spoken of in the book of Genesis, otherwise known as "the Beast."

The universe was incomplete, however, without the creation of man. The heavenly Adam (the tenth sephiroth) created the earthly Adam, each member of whose body corresponds to a part of the visible universe. The human form is said to be shaped according to the four letters that constitute the Jewish tetragrammaton: YHWH.

Souls preexist in the world of emanations, and are all destined to inhabit human bodies, according to the Kabala. Like the sephiroth from which it emanates, every soul has ten potencies, consisting of a trinity of triads—spirit, soul, and elemental soul, or neptesh. Each soul, before its entrance into the world, consists of male and female united into one being, but when it descends to earth, the two parts are separated and animate different bodies.

The destiny of the soul upon earth is to develop from the perfect germ implanted in it, which must ultimately return to En Soph. If the soul does not succeed in acquiring the experience for which it has been sent to earth, it must reinhabit the body three times so that it becomes duly purified. When all the souls in the world of the sephiroth have passed through this period of probation and returned to the bosom of En Soph, the Jubilee will begin. Even Satan will be restored to his angelic nature, and existence will be a Sabbath without end. The Kabala states that these esoteric doctrines are contained in the Hebrew Scriptures but cannot be perceived by the uninitiated; they are, however, plainly revealed to persons of spiritual mind.

The Kabala is sometimes regarded as occult literature, and it has been stated that the philosophical doctrines developed in its pages have been perpetuated by a secret of oral tradition from the first ages of humanity. As British Hebrew and biblical scholar Christian D. Ginsburg notes (1863):

"The Kabala was first taught by God Himself to a select company of angels, who formed a theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the angels most graciously communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of earth, to furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility and felicity. From Adam it passed over to Noah, and then to Abraham, the friend of God, 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. Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt, [as] first initiated into the Kabala in the land of his birth, but became most proficient in it during his wanderings in the wilderness, when he not only devoted to it the leisure hours of the whole forty years, but received lessons in it from one of the angels. By the aid of this mysterious science the lawgiver was enabled to solve the difficulties which arose during his management of the Israelites, in spite of the pilgrimages, wars, and frequent miseries of the nation. He covertly laid down the principles of this secret doctrine in the first four books of the Pentateuch, but withheld them from Deuteronomy…. Moses also initiated the seventy Elders into the secrets of this doctrine, and they again transmitted them from hand to hand. Of all who formed the unbroken line of tradition, David and Solomon were most deeply initiated into the Kabala. No one, however, dared to write it down till Simon Ben Jochai, who lived at the time of the destruction of the second Temple…. After his death, his son, Rabbi Eliezer, and his secretary, Rabbi Abba, as well as his disciples, collated Rabbi Simon Ben Jochai's treatises, and out of these composed the celebrated work called Sohar, i.e., Splendor which is the grand storehouse of Kabalism."

This legendary account of kabalistic origins, however, has found little support from historians. The mysticism of the Mishna and the Talmud, the older Hebrew literature, must be carefully distinguished from that of the kabalistic writings.

At the time of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Kabala found an audience among Protestant biblical scholars who turned to the Hebrew text for their biblical translations. From writers such as Johannes Reuchlin, Old Testament professor at Wittenburg, a Christian Kabala (usually spelled Cabala or Qabala) developed and was passed into non-Jewish occult circles.

Non-Jewish occultism and magic became deeply indebted to kabalistic combinations of the divine names for the terms of its rituals, deriving from the Kabala the belief in a resident virtue in sacred names and numbers. Certain rules were employed to discover the sublime source of power resident in the Jewish scriptures. Thus the words of several verses in the Scriptures that were regarded as containing an occult meaning were placed over each other and the letters were formed into new words by reading them vertically. Often the words of the text were arranged in squares so they could be read vertically or otherwise.

Words were joined together and redivided, and the initial and final letters of certain words were formed into separate words. Every letter of the word was reduced to its numerical value, and the word was explained by another of the same value. Every letter of a word was also taken to be an initial of an abbreviation of that word. The 22 letters of the alphabet were divided into two halves, one half placed above the other, and the two letters that thus became associated were interchanged. Thus a became l, b became m, and so on. This cipher alphabet was called albm, from the first interchanged pairs. The commutation of the 22 letters was effected by the last letter of the alphabet taking the place of the first, the next-to-last the place of the second, and so forth. This cipher was called atbah. These permutations and combinations are much older than the Kabala and were recognized by Jewish mystics from time immemorial.

During the nineteenth century a revival of magic—based in large part upon the Kabala and the identification of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet with the tarot—occurred in France, primarily around Éliphas Lévi. From Lévi a new appreciation of the Kabala passed to the magicians of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and through it to Aleister Crowley, a dominant practitioner of magic in the twentieth century. It would be difficult to think of modern magic without the Kabala and its related practices of gematria and path workings.

Within the Jewish community study of the Kabala revived in the eighteenth century with the development of the Hassidic movement under the leadership of the Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760). This form of Judaism was seen as a competitor by the orthodox Jews, who organized efforts to suppress it during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hasidim (Jewish mysticism) in Europe was largely wiped out during the Holocaust, but has survived in the United States and Israel. Some Jewish Kabalists have resented the Kabala being appropriated by non-Jewish occultists. Most, however, have participated in what has become an active dialogue with contemporary occultists. Jews and non-Jews alike, for example, appreciate the scholarship of Gershom Scholem, the greatest Kabala scholar of this century.

Sources:

Abelson, Joshua. Jewish Mysticism: An Introduction to Kabbalah. New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1981.

Achad, Frater [Charles S. Jones]. The Anatomy of the Body of God: Being the Supreme Revelation of Cosmic Consciousness. Chicago: Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, 1925. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1969.

Bension, Ariel. The Zohar in Moslem and Christian Spain. New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1932.

Berg, Phillip S. Kabbalah for the Laymen. New York: Research Center of Kabbalah, n.d.

Franck, Adolphe. The Kabbalah. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1967. Reprint, New York: Citadel, 1979.

Gaster, Moses. The Origin of the Kabbalah. New York: Gordon Press, 1976.

Halevi, Z'ev Ben Shimon. An Introduction to the Cabala—Tree of Life. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972.

Kalisch, Isidor, trans. Sepher Yezirah. New York, 1877. Reprint, San Jose, Calif.: Rosicrucian Press, 1950. Reprint, North Hollywood, Calif.: Symbols and Signs, n.d.

Lévi, Éliphas. The Book of Splendors. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1973.

Luzzatto, Moses. General Principles of the Kabbalah. New York: Research Center of Kabbalah, 1970.

Meltzer, David, ed. The Secret Garden: An Anthology of the Kabbalah. New York: Seabury Press, 1976.

Pick, Bernhard. The Cabala. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1903.

Rauchlen, Johannes. On the Art of the Kabbalah. Translated by Martin Goodman and Sarah Goodman. New York: Abaris Books, 1983.

Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: Quadrangle, 1974. ——. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Schocken, 1960.

——, ed. Zohar—The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken, 1963.

Sperling, Harry, and Maurice Simon, trans. The Zohar. 5 vols. New York: Rebecca Bennet Publishing, n.d.

Waite, Arthur E. The Holy Kabbalah. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1960. New York: Citadel, 1976.