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To: alt.magick.tyagi From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (mordred) Subject: Re: dippen' toes in unfamiliar water Date: 10 Mar 1995 23:50:10 -0800 [from alt.magick: Paul.Hume@f235.n109.z1.fidonet.org (Paul Hume)] Rich - 1) You need to distinguish, to avoid massive confusion if nothing else, between the traditional qabala of Judaic mysticism and the magical, or hermetic, or goyische qabala of western ceremonial magick. The latter began to diverge from the former when gentile philosophers, looking for a theoretical structure on which to hang metaphysical concepts in the early Renaissance, found the definitions, the "vocabulary," of the qabala to suit their needs very closely. From there to, say, the cookbook qabala od of Liber 777, or any of a zillion other "tables of correspondences" and similar applications, the divergence continued pretty strongly. No Jewish qabalist is going to worry two pins what Tarot card corresponds to what path - nor is he even likely to use the same map of the paths that the magician, happily chugging away at ritual engineering on a qabalstic basis, does (even the map of the Tree of Life is different between the Judaic system and its bend-sinister offspring). So the qabala of Sholem, Kaplan, Idel, and Sheinkin (to name four authors whose works on Judaic qabala I commend to you) won't bear huge relationships to the qabala of Fortune or Crowley - though you'll see the ancestry in the latter. That said, the rest of my maunderings refer to the magical qabala. 2) Qabala is an architecture, not a grimoire. Qabalistic rituals seen in modern writings are built (when they are on the qabalistic model) according to its principles, but not written down in a Big Book O' Qabalistic Rituals. Rather like a program written according to a system of structured design. The system doesn't provide actual code, but principles by which workable code may be written. How one then implements the high level design, the programming language, etc. is up to the programmer. 3) Nope. Too lengthy. Read Fortune. If you want a VERY quick dip, with the understanding that it is shallow but essentially accurate, read Ted Andrews "Simplified Magic." 4) Criminy, if I could explain how this stuff works, I wouldn't likely be on line yammering about it. Do you mean the seals between the Four Worlds (Assiah, Yetzirah, Briah, and Atziluth)? Or the "Abyss" between the lower Tree and the Supernals? Different views of the same concept, I'd suggest. Its one more approach to the challenge of the mystic: how to directly apprehend Deity. Ritual, or meditation, or ordeal, stirs up energy and keeps the mind of the mystic focused on God. Loss of ego, snarling that it is the Big Cheese, is snuck up on by these practices. Eventually a trans-rational event, the loss of I and That awareness, happens - and the mystic becomes aware of the Thou - the unique essence of Divinity (read Martin Buber, I And Thou, for one lyrical approach to these concepts). This may express itself as visions, revelations, awarenesses, when the mind returns to where it can think about what just happened. Magick tends to build a landscape of concrete symbols to guide the mind in this process. So things like "seals" (which must be cracked or opened by the magick word, etc.) are popular terms in the magical vocabulary. The ideas of veils, lying between normal perception and the union with God (devakot) are inherited directly from Qabalistic imagery. Kaplan's two books, Meditation And The Bible, and Meditation And The Kabbalah, are excellent sources on the Judaic qabala's approach to these issues. 5) Judaic qabalists don't believe in archetypal broohaha. They are Jews and believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (though with a more mystical take than some of their kin). Magical qabalists tend to be syncretistic, though if they take their qabala straight, they tend also to be monists (all the Gods we can conceive of are aspects (albeit either infinite Themselves or at least very very big) of the En Sof - the literally indescribable reality from which manifestation at all levels proceeds. From there the territory gets very diverse, with Jungian understandings of Qabala, mystical takes on the Qabala with more or less Christian flavors, scientific takes on the Qabala as maps of the Universe without reference to underlying Deity, etc. Paul
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