Studying Kabbalah

The crowned one

Greg based on your post I was obviously not clear on mine. I meant it is USED as an "umbrella term" and has been for a very long time. I generally agree with its root as you put it.
 

Linda Gomez

Kabbalah - Learning

I would read Dion Fortune and Alice Bailey's works. If you are looking for a Mystery School to study correspondence courses, BOTA is highly recommended. In terms of using the Kabbalah for ritual magic, I would caution that your 'intent' and 'method' should be compatible. You might benefit from reading some of Aleister Crowley's works. His attempts at integration seemed to me quite mis-aligned. I found his methods extreme and the impact on his life quite tragic. Good luck with your studies.
 

crystal dawn

for more info on the kabbalah i have found The Complete Guide to the Kabbalah by Will Parfitt a very informative book - this is ideal for begininers or for people who dont know too much about the kabbalah its full of exercises and attributions and goes into depth and a light read at the same time.

blessings

crystal dawn
 

Kissa

i am waiting for my copy of the Complete Idiot's Guide to Kabbalah. I read good critics about it.
 

KingofCups

If you want to study Qabalah, and not Victorian England's interpretation of it (and all the subsequent interpretations that used them as a source), then you should check out Aryeh Kaplan's translation of the Sefer Yetzirah, it is easily the most complete and thorough translation and commentary available in English. If you really want to study Qabalah after that, then you could take a stab at the Zohar. It may take months or even a year to finish, but it would take a lifetime of study to wrap your head around.
 

venicebard

Sefer Yetzirah is pre-Kabbalistic Merkavah (Work of the Chariot), meaning the Gnostic teachings that formed the ground from which Kabbalah arose: it divided the alef-bet into 3 mothers, 7 doubles, and 12 simples and described the 10 Sefirot as they manifest in the second of the four worlds (that governed by duality, since they are generated in pairs of opposites). But its correlations also include blinds (such as organs assigned the 12 simples, which contradict the signs also assigned them), and jumbled order in the case of the sense organs assigned the 7 doubles (the order of which varies from version to version).

The book Bahir—which describes the Sefirot as they manifest in the first of the four worlds—is Kabbalah proper (Kaplan translated it as well): it was published around or just prior to 1200, in Provence-Languedoc (south of France), where Kabbalah originated. I claim it originated there and then because Judaic Merkavah—which flourished there (as did Troubadours) because of the weakening of the Church brought on by popularity of the Christian ‘Cathar heresy’—came into contact with British Keltic (i.e. Celtic) bardic tradition, the alphabet tradition that would have accompanied the ‘Matter of Britain’ (Arthurian lore) to the Continent. Comparison of the Judaic and Keltic offshoots of the same very ancient (poetic-prophetic or alphabet-generating) source led to reconstruction of a much older and more intact understanding of letters—and Sefirot, evidently, judging from the Bahir as well as the later (Spanish) Zohar (which describes Sefirot as they manifest in the third of the four worlds). This gave rise to Kabbalah within Judaism. And two centuries or so later, generated no doubt by the Keltic (British bardic) side of the exchange (who were non-dualist Christian Gnostics themselves), the Tarot of Marseilles sprang up (though no copies of it survive from earlier than the 1600s, but if it was the standard block-printed deck and thus normally discarded and replaced, that would be understandable). This deck—for my money the only true tarot deck—embodies every relevant detail of the Kabbalah: 10 Sefirot and the four-letter Name manifesting in four worlds or suits, plus 22 trumps expressing the letters via their British bardic numbering (not the Hebrew numbering, which was a secondary phenomenon post-dating the original alphabet-spawning tradition whose reconstruction I claim inspired Kabbalah).

Gershom Scholem is one of the best sources for Kabbalah as it has survived to the present day: his Kabbalah and Origins of the Kabbalah (my favorite), as well as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, will give you pretty much the ‘straight dope’ on the subject.

Now: as to ‘Hermetic Kabbalah’, yes, it has come to refer primarily to the Victorian phenomenon that spawned Crowley et al. But two considerations must modify this overly simplistic view:

(1) That form of ‘Kabbalah’ has little to recommend it except the fact that it did seemingly convey into our own times two correct traditions that otherwise would have been swallowed up in the stew of modern interpretations: (a) the correct assignment of planets to Sefirot (albeit the sun should properly be assigned to 2 or to the 2-6-10 matrix, not simply to 6)—which is how Sefirot manifest in the fourth world (material reality)—and (b) a possibly correct assignment of letters to ‘paths’ on the Tree (of Sefirot). Yet its assignment of letters to tarot trumps is provably false, whichever of its ways one might choose (alef as I Magician, alef as Fool, or Levy’s, or Crowley’s). For bardic numbering is what determined it, not Hebrew letter-order. I am led thus to the conclusion that ‘Hermetic Kabbalah’ today survives from some Christian—or perhaps Hermetic (i.e. alchemical), since the planets-hence-planetary-metals were one of the two things they got right that moderns otherwise might have missed—offshoot of the original Kabbalah.

(2) Kabbalah itself—once probed for its deeper secrets and not just left on the shelf to die from an overabundance of platitudes—lays out the very structure of Hermetic science itself. But this, of course, is a rather involved subject (about which I have written but not yet published a 300+-page book), but suffice it here to say that the extreme antiquity of the underlying tradition reconstructed in the 12th century makes it easily coeval with both Hermetic science proper and the ancient alphabet-spawning tradition. (The latter goes back at least to the early 2nd millennium B.C.E., when both ogam consaine and Tifinag inscriptions are attested, and the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet—which shows a direct relationship to that tradition—goes back even further.)

Still, one should not take what Crowley, or even Mr. Waite, have to say about Kabbalah very seriously (beyond what I mentioned above).

Good hunting.

PS. Bardic numbering yields:

0-cheyt
1-alef
2-heh
3-zayin
4-ayin
5-beyt
6-mem
7-peh
8-samekh
9-kaf
10-gimel
11-tav
12-dalet
13-nun
14-lamedh
15-reysh
16-shin

. . . and by simple deduction (those past 16 were kept secret):

17-vav
18-qof
19-yod
20-tzaddi
21-teyt
 

KingofCups

venicebard said:
Sefer Yetzirah is pre-Kabbalistic Merkavah (Work of the Chariot), meaning the Gnostic teachings that formed the ground from which Kabbalah arose: it divided the alef-bet into 3 mothers, 7 doubles, and 12 simples and described the 10 Sefirot as they manifest in the second of the four worlds (that governed by duality, since they are generated in pairs of opposites). But its correlations also include blinds (such as organs assigned the 12 simples, which contradict the signs also assigned them), and jumbled order in the case of the sense organs assigned the 7 doubles (the order of which varies from version to version).

The origin of the language/logic that the SY describes is likely lost to history. Maybe it's Egyptian, maybe it's Ur, maybe a synthesis or something else entirely. What matters is the contents, and what is conveyed, not so much the particular group currently attaching themselves to it.

Also, in regards to the different attributions of the planets/zodiac/organs/days of the week, etc., there is a logic behind them, it is not random at all, and it is probably beyond me to explain it just yet, but the answer lies in the permutations of YHVH which are laid out in the SY. It involves some cipher breaking, intuition, mathematics, and visual conceptualizing to figure out, but it is testable, logical and not mystically derived. This applies also to the GD planetary assignments, which follow this logic correctly. This system is largely unknown and this leads most people to believe that people like Waite and Case were just mashing stuff at random to fit some preconceived ideas. And while they were definitely trying to synthesize things to fit their own desires, the system they used to do it is one of the only ones that follows this ancient form of logic laid out in the SY.
 

KingofCups

venicebard said:
Yet its assignment of letters to tarot trumps is provably false, whichever of its ways one might choose (alef as I Magician, alef as Fool, or Levy’s, or Crowley’s).

Not "false", but, a purposefully different system which utilizes the same underlying logic. At least in regards to Alef at 0.

venicebard said:
Still, one should not take what Crowley, or even Mr. Waite, have to say about Kabbalah very seriously (beyond what I mentioned above).

Definitely true. Though, they knew more than they let on. They purposefully occulted things to keep them hidden from the public at large. Crowley moreso than Waite, though both are guilty. Their reasoning is understandable, but in this day and age, it matters little I think, because of the mess of misinformaiton out there. You could show someone the system involved down to the last detail, and people either wouldn't understand, or they would just chalk it up as a cute idea and move on to the next thing that comes along. We live in the era of information overload where repetition and redundancy rule. People can be shown the truth and they wouldn't even recognize it.
 

venicebard

Greetings, King of Cups. May I respond to your comments in reverse order? for I feel I can more tactfully address them thereby (I’ll assume you said yes).
KingofCups said:
. . . people either wouldn't understand, or they would just chalk it up as a cute idea and move on to the next thing that comes along. We live in the era of information overload where repetition and redundancy rule. People can be shown the truth and they wouldn't even recognize it.
This is the sad truth, I mean about the age we live in. But I would beg to differ with regard to GD’s ‘system’: yes, they seem to have preserved at least two important keys to the deeper teachings of Kabbalah that are mostly lost to us (unless we reconstruct it ourselves, based on what has survived, as I think I have managed to do over a period of over three decades). But contrary to your saying . . .
. . . they knew more than they let on . . .
. . . , they had not actually penetrated all that deep into mysteries they professed to know, and this makes them 3-parts charlatan to 1-part sage, in my own (not always so humble) opinion, to wit, when you say:
Not "false", but, a purposefully different system which utilizes the same underlying logic. At least in regards to Alef at 0.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the same underlying logic’, but neither laying letters next to trumps in order starting with alef=1 or alef=0 matches up with the actual symbolism of the letters, since the trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles (as can be clearly shown) expressed letters according, again, to bardic numeration (given in my earlier post). The biggest problem keeping this from being generally known (besides general ignorance of bardic numeration) is that the letters themselves are much more poorly grasped today than they were by the originators of Kabbalah (and Tarot of Marseilles) or the originators (in a time long before the Middle Ages) of Merkavah! And Crowley knew so little about them that he did not even manage to match up D—duir the oak, or dalet the door made of oak—with oak! And the rabbis of today are, sadly, just as ignorant of the greater context that would clarify the exact meaning of each letter.

The only way I know of to rectify the problem is to correctly match up each Hebrew letter to its equivalent in the Irish tree-aphabet and augment this with as much knowledge of other ancient alphabets—especially Germanic runes (closely related to tree-letters, the two letters standing for pillars Boaz and Jachin even retaining their tree names), Tifinag (and closely related Libyan, or Numidian), Meroitic, plus the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet whence this last sprang. One has a hard time penetrating to any real depth at all where letters are concerned without this background—and a bit more besides, as I found out when I parsed all the meanings of Semitic roots used in the Old Testament and finally understood the meaning of shin, saille the willow, to be the fount of spring its overflowing and drooping boughs symbolize (many roots starting with shin mean ‘overflow’ and things close to that). And in fact it is my studied opinion that the only reason Kabbalah did spring up when it did was Merkavah’s coming into contact with British bardic lore and seeing in it a close parallel, another branch from the same much more ancient tree (of letter-tradition), the comparison enabling both traditions to ‘fill each other’s holes’ and reconstruct something close to the original pristine knowledge that spawned letters.

Taken, then, to its inevitable depths, this approach leads one (or at least me) to realize that in fact this older tradition that both hearken to is a relic of the previous civilization on this earth, the one destroyed by the melt-off of the last Ice Age (and its accompanying catastrophic events), one which had an understanding of matter and man that literally dwarfs (in my opinion) that of our universities today. For it integrated matter and mind: it maps out reality—that of particle physics, chemistry, biochemistry, plasma cosmology, Hermetic science, and ethics—at a level where ‘Cartesian dualism’ is a child’s delusion and matter and mind are interrelated—not indistinguishable, but interrelated—in the most intimate way.

So no, I do not think that, as you said:
. . . people like Waite and Case were just mashing stuff at random to fit some preconceived ideas.
But there is a definite limit to what they professed that is of any actual value in ferreting out the deeper mysteries of Kabbalah and Hermetic science (i.e. that which underlies the stipulations of astrology and the processes of alchemy).
Also, in regards to the different attributions of the planets/zodiac/organs/days of the week, etc., there is a logic behind them, it is not random at all, and it is probably beyond me to explain it just yet, but the answer lies in the permutations of YHVH which are laid out in the SY. It involves some cipher breaking, intuition, mathematics, and visual conceptualizing to figure out, but it is testable, logical and not mystically derived. This applies also to the GD planetary assignments, which follow this logic correctly.
I think you are ‘out on a limb’ here, and I’ll tell you why. Leaving aside the zodiacal attributions for a moment, the planetary and physiological attributions do not even agree from version to version (Kaplan gives the several variants), which is also true of the permutations of YHV. Now I think those given in I believe it’s the Short version—in the order YHV-YVH-HYV-HVY-VYH-VHY—are the correct ones (as I argue in my book). And there is probably a great deal about the Cube of Space that I have yet to fathom, I’ll grant you. But there is so much else besides that can be gleaned from SY once some of the other blinds and jumbles have been set right, to wit:

The actual zodiacal order of the simple letters themselves has been jumbled, which tree-calendar order and its much more simply understood phonetic basis shows conclusively: the order should be (and undoubtedly originally was) samekh-tzaddi-cheyt-vav-ayin-qof-teyt-heh-zayin-yod-lamedh-nun. This allows us to completely discard the silly list of organs said to correspond to them and restore to them their original physiological correspondences: samekh is shaped like head aries; tzaddi’s two forms show throat taurus when breathing and when swallowing; cheyt is the squared-off shoulders gemini; vav in its earlier Semitic form is a breast (sign cancer) pouring forth milk; qof shows in cross-section the womb virgo; teyt is both the legs crossed under one when meditating and the serpentlike intestines that end in libra the loins (the direction straight down from aries the head); heh shows the male organ and clitoris (scorpio used to be assigned the organ ‘secrets’ in old almanacs), as an erect male organ reaching out from the right of the letter to the opening for it on the left—and heh is even the letter added to Abraham’s name to signify circumcision (a circumcised phallus even being visible on its trump, II LaPapesse), which is on the 8th day because it is the 8th sign; zayin shows both the spine’s terminal filament sagittary is in the closed (circular) zodiac and the thigh it is in the broken-and-extended one; yod shows capricorn as both mid-spine and knee; lamedh shows the arms swinging in a child learning to walk, as seen from the direction of the spine opposite the shoulders (aquarius in the closed zodiac); and nun shows pisces as both the back of the neck linking head and shoulders and the two feet (seen from the same angle as are the kidneys kaf stands for, i.e. from above with the body facing to our left).

As for the doubles, yes one set of correlations has them as the sense organs, based on the fact that of the four senses (smell simply being earth’s sense touch at its most focused) only taste, water’s sense (since things must be in solution to be tasted), has only one sign in the manifested bottom half of the zodiac (the doubles’ ultimate stations), but only as the triads were originally, not as they are in astrology, for originally they were generated in the order fire-air-water-earth (natural order), as is evident from the tradition that the triangles pointing up and down in the ‘Seal of Solomon’ signify fire and water, respectively, not fire and air.

But there happen to be two organ attributions for the doubles, for in a deeper sense (one completely omitted from SY) beyt is the pineal, peh the rear half of the pituitary and feh-sofit its front half, dalet the lungs, tav the heart, gimel the adrenals, kaf the kidneys, and reysh the gonads. These correlations require knowledge of things the GD didn’t have a clue about.

Even the mothers contain a mystery. Yes, where they end up in relation to man makes shin fire, mem water, and alef air. But the mystery of the three mothers whereby the three simples yod, heh, and vav are chosen is not this obvious (since stated) fact but something much more fundamental to why the mothers are mothers: namely the fact that they stand for the original three letters of the Logos, AUM, with U altered to sh as a means of ‘shushing things’ (hiding the secret). And this leads one into the mystery of the four Ofanim of Ezekiel’s vision and what these mean, which forms the basis of Merkavah and yet has been completely lost, though it is quite obvious or at least clear once discovered. They are the four wheels centered, respectively, atop the head of Adam Qadmon—the primordial Adam, undivided, who is in essence the platonic Form ‘Upright Sentience’ (and also the type from which man is ultimately descended)—atop the head of seated Adam, at the heart of seated Adam, and at the heart of the womb. Each is half the height of its predecessor and sits in its bottom half: mem-sofit is the center of the first and represents the box containing the Ark (to which intermediate mem is bowing); shin, at the center of the second wheel, is the crown atop the head of seated Adam (us); alef is the center of the third wheel, which is the zodiac of the body; and intermediate mem can be seen as the womb’s fourth wheel—which is dark like space because it is the womb of time—or as the sign libra itself (where all wheels sit). For S (shin) and M (mem) in the tree-calendar sit at the top and bottom of the round (early spring and the autumn equinox) respectively, while A (alef) is the yuletide silver fir whose station is halfway between these two (even with the center).

The second wheel, by the way, shows the surroundings of seated Adam, and since only its bottom half is manifested (as opaque ground), those seven signs (of it) are represented by the seven doubles. (The first wheel is the all-containing Monad, the One.) And the Logos, by the way, can be confirmed in Egyptian—where the only three letters that were birds were (eagle), w (quail chick), and m (owl)—in the Tibetan mantra AUM, in the term for the High Self in the Huna tradition of Hawaii according to Max Freedom Long—Au-makua, ‘utterly trustworthy parental pair’, which the laws of that language’s construction allow us to also interpret as AUM-akua, AUM-being—in the suffixes of the ruffians Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum who slay the master builder Hiram Abiff for not revealing to them the Word (that is, for not reuniting them into it), and in the simple logic that since the Word stands for the three-part inner self—doer to act in the durationless present, thinker to think about what has finite duration, and knower to know that which is eternal in duration—it must consist of the vowel spectrum leading in from its midpoint to cover what phonetics calls the ‘back vowels’, that is, vowels which, because the pinching-off occurs in front resonate in back. (The problem the Tibetans have is directly traceable to the fact that humans should pronounce the Logos or Word starting with the front vowel spectrum—“ee-ah-oh-oom”—since that half stands for the body and omitting it tends to remove the self from its body, or in this case, its country!)

I could go on, but hopefully you get the general picture by now. (If you or anyone is interested, I will continue to expound what I’ve discovered in future posts . . . but so far, little interest seems to accrue from these wordy posts of mine . . . but I can still hope.)

Finally:
KingofCups said:
The origin of the language/logic that the SY describes is likely lost to history. Maybe it's Egyptian, maybe it's Ur, maybe a synthesis or something else entirely. What matters is the contents . . .
Yes! precisely. The phonetic logic, fortunately, is recoverable, again using the tree-calendar (and ogham alphabet closely associated with it).

The half-circle or cup or Cauldron (as I call it, following Keltic tradition) formed by the bottom half of the surroundings (2nd wheel) is seen as the mouth, and the ‘world-egg’ or Egg in it—the third wheel or bodily torso itself—is seen as the tongue. Calendar order gives the signs of the Cauldron as D-T-K-M-G-P-B, with R left over as the thirteenth month; but this is easily restorable to the original phonetic order P-T-K-R-G-D-B, with R as the Hebrew guttural R at the bottom or gullet (throat), K and G next to it, and P and B up on the lip or rim, with T and D of course in between. And calendar order gives the top five signs of the Egg as L-N-F-S-H, which go out the tongue voiced and back unvoiced; but in Hebrew aries is not F—feh-sofit—but rather samekh, because whereas the pagans worshiped Vran (Fran) as fearn the alder, the F sound that extends or sprouts beyond the tongue or seed (the seed of speech or incantation), the Semites (and I believe the Libyans also, as well as Egyptians) placed aries, the tip of the tongue, on the tongue, an S sound, with the S-sound at taurus being the equivalent of the bardic Ss—sstraif the blackthorn—namely tzaddi, which is slightly farther back than samekh on the tongue, since it is more of a whistling sound.

The bottom seven signs of the Egg, then, derive originally from phonetic order of vowels going U-O-A Aa-E-I-Ii, with A (alef) drawn away to be the center of the wheel to be replaced by qof or Q, which is bardic Kk, a doubling of the K that is that sign on the Cauldron—Q is quert the apple and still shows fruit with stem (and there are roots starting with qof that mean ‘fruit’ and ‘fruit harvest’ and ‘to cut off’ and so on, it being the month of late summer’s harvest) and symbolizes, of course, the ‘fruit of the womb’ or virgo (not to be confused with ‘fruit of the loom’). The rest yield U=vav, O=ayin, E=heh, Ii=yod—this last being ixias the mistletoe (or loranthus, perhaps), which is why yod hovers over the line (being rooted in another tree) instead of coming down to the line—all by way of Greek, I=zayin or zeta also by way of Greek (since zeta is the initial of Zeus because of erosion of D by I or Y, D being the original double occupying the same sign, albeit on the next wheel up), and Aa=teyt, by process of elimination: it’s the only letter left, hence one must presume that it was a vowel only in the Keltic alphabet Robert Graves reconstructs, which can be confirmed from other considerations as well (of which he was unaware) and suggests that the Hebrew tamar, palm (Aa’s tree), may possibly have been spelt with a teyt instead of a tav (as with some other roots I’ve come across), but this is speculation. The vowels, you will notice, go from front to back backwards from where they resonate, but it is clear what is conveyed is that the closing-off of the mouth to produce them goes from front to back, and indeed this inversion seems to be symbolic, at a core level, of the ultimate cause for the human condition: confusing the outer horizon (straight ahead) for the only horizon, thus ignoring the inner horizon, which is straight back from straight ahead.

I think this is enough to show that there is a good deal more to these mysteries than is fully revealed in SY—or the Zohar or the Bahir for that matter—and that great care should be taken not to sell oneself (or the mysteries themselves) short.

Cheers, shalom, n’ all that, and I hope some of this proves enlightening, or at least thought-provoking. (Your feedback, of course, would be welcomed.)