Umbrae
kwaw said:As I read it The Holy Kabbalah by Waite is in greatest proportion about Jewish Kabbalah, and acknowledged scholars of the subject such as Scholem and Idel rate it as fairly accurate and comprehensive within the available resources of the time. There is in fact very little in it as regards the ToL or 22 letters [about 20 pages out of 630 are directly concerned with the sephiroth, four worlds and paths + about another 6 appendix pages on the sephiroth and 2 on the four worlds]. Book X reports on Christian development of kabbalah and XI of 'occult' or esoteric aspects. For anyone who can cope with his style of writing personally I would recommend it.
LOL difficult to answer when the post gets re-edited hourly.
Well, lets examine what Gershom Scholem says:
Kabbalah - Gersholm Scholem Pages 202-203
…The many books written on the subject in the 19th and 20th centuries by various theosophists and mystics lacked any basic knowledge of the sources and they very rarely contributed to the field, while at times they even hindered the development of a historical approach. Similarly, the activities of French and English occultists contributed nothing and only served to create considerable confusion between the teachings of the Kabbalah and their own totally unrelated inventions, such as the alleged kabbalistic origin of the Tarot-cards. To this category of supreme charlatanism belong the many and widely read books of Eliphas Levi (actually Alphonse Louis Constant; 1810 – 1875), Papus (Gérard Encause; 1868 – 1916), and Frater Perdurabo (Aleister Crowley; 1875 – 1946), all of whom had an infinitesimal knowledge of Kabbalah that did not prevent them from drawing freely on their imaginations instead. The comprehensive works of A.E. Waite (The Holy Kabbalah, 1929), S. Karppe, and P. Vulliaud, on the other hand, were essentially rather confused compilations made from secondhand sources.
Further, Waite was by his own admission (Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot – K. Frank Jensen (I don’t have my copy here and am unable to provide the page number) was a plagiarist who was rather pleased when the he’d recycle previously published stories and never got in trouble (it appears as a piece of personal correspondence in the chapter on Waite himself).
I have a personal issue with Waite – and that I’ll admit freely. I personally did not find The Holy Kabbalah helpful or particularly eastern, I found it quite pedantic; as was Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah.
Living Kabbalah (I have not, nor have I ever investigated what I refer to as ‘Red String’ Kabbalah, and as such exclude it from this post) requies one to ask, “How are we to live in the presence of God”, or perhaps more correctly, ‘how would you act, if God were in the room with you?’.
Eastern or Jewish Kabbalah is about achieving balance in and of the four worlds.
Spiritual growth to be is about striving for balance, or Yishuv Olam. Not about dogma, or "confused compilations made from secondhand sources."