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To: alt.magick,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.pagan.magick,alt.occult
From: catherine yronwode 
Subject: Re: QBL, Kabbalah and History
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 17:32:12 -0800

rubeus wrote:
> 
> Allan Bennett, who later became Bhikku Ananda Metteya, says the 
> following,
>
> "Qabalah is the marshalling forth by number."
>
> To read what this might mean i suggest going to the earliest known 
> roots of mathematics and checking up on Pythagoras.

Unfortunately, Allan Bennet, like many Christian-born dabblers in
kabbalah during the late 19th and early 20th century, had at his
disposal no knowledge of Hebrew. He probabaly did have access to Knorr
von Rosenroth's scanty 18th century compilation of texts, translated
into Latin (and scavanged further into English by S. L. MacGregor
Mathers). If he was very assiduous, he might possibly have read (in
Latin) a few non-Hebrew kabbalistic texts that had been written by
forced converts to Christianity (marranos) in order to satisfy the
various ecclesiastical agencies that in various times and places in
Europe from the 1200s through the 1600s regulated the expulsion,
torture, and murder of Jews who refused to convert. Or -- and these
would have been *truly* useless -- he may have read one or two
mis-interpreted and propagandistic (anti-Jewish, pro-Christian) "cabala"
books authored by Christians like Pico della Mirandola during the
Renaissance. NONE of these -- nor the sum total of them -- would have
constituted a true course in the kabbalah. 

"Qabalah is the marshalling forth by number," he said. What could he
have meant? My guess is that because gematria -- which *does* deal with
number-symbolism as a path to understanding God -- is a *part* of
kabbalah, and because no translations of kabbalistic works cited above
were available to non-Hebrew readers at the time Bennet studied (or
*thought* he studied) the kabbalah, he and members of his circle were
prone to making egregious errors of this sort when describing the
subject. 

Ignorance, not an attempt to mislead, was doubtless the cause, but the
error remains and must be countered with the truth. The truth is that
the kabbalah is a diverse and complex Jewish system of mysticism and
includes within it many, many methods used to understand the workings
and nature of God. In addition to gematria, astrology is also taught, as
is phrenology, several philosophical systems of "emanation" (some of
which are mutually contradictory), numerous variants of sephirotic
"tree" and "star" designs (not just the one y'all know and love),
angelology, demonology, and quite a bit of cosmology and theology. There
are also tales of miracles, wonmder-stories, and accounts of the works
of learned men. 

In a previous post somewhere in these long, torturous threads on how QBL
is (mis-)understood by modern Thelemites and Crowleyities, i posted the
actual contents of a group of kabbalistic texts (a gloss taken from
Gershon Scholem's book "The Kabbala") and i thought that with that post
i had laid to rest the false notion that the kabbalah is comprised
merely of gematria and a couple of less interesting systems of
number-symbolism manipulation. Yet here we are, a week or two later, and
the idea persists.  

Yet it need not. 

You don't have to be a Jew to learn about the kabbalah; you don't even
need to learn Hebrew. You just need to study the subject from authentic,
scholarly Jewish sources, rather than by latching on to obsolete
Edwardian English "hermetic" pseudo-Egyptian, pseudo-Christian,
pseudo-Gnostic mis-translations and mis-interpretations which can at
best supply you with a third-hand mis-introduction to a paltry portion
of the wide-ranging Hebrew texts. 

Here is a parallel: The bulk of the Thelemites who are now online do NOT
hold the opinion that Crowley's poorly conceived musings on the Chinese
I Ching -- based on the very bad translation by Legge (all he had
available) -- were an ACTUAL account of the I Ching and its place in
Chinese religious philosophy. 

One reason for the lack of Crowleyite fanaticicm in this realm was that
even back in the 1960s, every hippie in the world who had read the
better, later translation of the I Ching by Wilhelm and Baynes, flawed
though it was, could see the daftness in Crowley's abortive attempt to
work with the material through Legge's mis-interpretation.

And, as if that were not bad enough, the shortcomings of Crowley's
notions (dependent on Legge's  poor translations) look REALLY silly
today (as does Wilhelm's scholarship) in light of the great translations
of the I Ching that have recently been written and published by (gasp!)
Chinese people! 

(I mean...the NERVE of those guys like Hwang -- living in China all that
time and never telling us seekers after wisdom that they could read
Chinese, possessed ancient variant editions of the I Ching, had an
understanding of the developmental history of ideograms, and were
grounded in a thorough knowledge of the historical events that shaped
the texts! Why, it's enough to make you think that they had a separate
CULTURE or something and had not acceeded to the hegemony of the
Imperialist West :-) ) 

I am very sorry that Allan Bennet (and Aleister Crowley and S. L.
MacGregor Mathers and Arthur Edward Waite and the whole lot of 'em) had
such poor resources to work from and did not trouble themselves to learn
Hebrew or to study Judaism and Jewish mysticism in context. I will not,
however, stand by while late 20th century Thelemites keep on trotting
out their mentors' tired, erroneous, thread-bare pseudo-explanations of
what the kabbalah really is. It won't wash. Not in the light of modern
scholarship. 

To all such deluded people, i adjure you: If you REALLY want to know
about the kabbalah instead of confusing yourself with Bennet & Co.'s
silly errors, go out and buy a copy of Gershon Scholem's "Kabbala" and
just fucking read it, okay? PLEASE? Pretty please with sugar on top? 

Thanks. 

:-)

cat the Jewess

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