Huck
Ninamagic said:Still... very gratefull for all your help, BUT....
if you, Huck, tell me that for instance Gerschom Scholem's idea of kabalah 'has not much to do with Tarot', then whose idea has??
My point is: I'm very interested in knowing more about and understanding kabalah, but my main interest is tarot, and therefore I would prefer to know about who to read in that case...
It's not that I don't want to read all the books you recommend, it's just that, living in Denmark... They don't exist, not even in a library. I would have to order and buy them all and my finances unfortunately don't allow that...
In one of the articles of Gershom Scholem one can read that Christian Kabbala did not add much to Kabbala than just the suggestion, that Tarot has had an early connection to Kabbala.
He has the "back to earth" approach, and I love that ... for Jewish Kabbala he had in research history a similar function like Michael Dummett for Tarot, if you know this name. ... and this means, back to the documents. Even Jewish "really" kabbalists didn't love him really for that ... similar as "real" Tarotists didn't love Dummett.
.... reading Scholem can spare a lot of time.
If you've a lack of money, try a University library, if they've the dictionary there, that I mentioned, then you've long biographies of even humble kabalists, a 100 (?, at least rather long and very good) pages article by Scholem to the point Kabbala, each important text in a single point in the dictionary, and each special difficult word (and there are a lot of them) explained, all at hand. Then you could study as long you desire and it might easily happen, that you think, it is too much ... The dictionary has great pages, each book is rather thick and there are about 15 of them ... one learns a lot about Jewish culture generally.
There is a good Jewish dictionary online, I didn't test it for its qualities for Kabbala, but some articles, that I studied, seemed to have a good quality ....
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com
.... but it seems, that it is from 1901-1906, so it can't be very good, as with Gerschom Scholem a lot of progress in this field was achieved and Scholem is of a later date.
Whose idea of Kabbala has something to do with Tarot? Modern (19th century) thinkers like Eliphas Levi and Golden Dawn and all what followed them, based either upon unsubstantiated historical conclusions, which is bad, or the ultimate freedom of any thinker to make a system in the way, that the thinker likes, which at least is a free creative idea. Then the thinker can say, "this is kabbala, as I understand it" and - to cite Gerschom Scholem again - "actually any kabbalist had his own system" or similar in this sense, and there you can see: This freedom has a great tradition ...