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To: alt.magick From: antaios@horusset.com (RIKB) Subject: Re: Is it Qabalah or numreology? Date: 29 Sep 2003 01:22:17 -0700 93 Jim! It depends on how anal-retentive and argumentative one wants to be. Qabalah has become a shorthand term for any kind of gematria-like activity, so if you accept that on a superficial level and just say "o.k., when this person uses the term Qabalah, he's using it to mean a vastly smaller subset of what I consider Qabalah, but at least I know how he's using the term, and I can communicate with him on that basis and forget about the discrepancies." Of course, you could also take the point of view -- ultimately correct, but also a bit assholish in a general context -- that Qabalah is a very specific body of culturally bound wisdom stemming from Jewish mysticism, of which number-letter correspondences are a very tiny and arguably irrelevant feature borrowed from earlier Greek and Babylonian models. From this point of view, what most western occultists are doing is not Qabalah by any stretch of the imagination or in any scholarly or technical sense, even though they may borrow a few diagrams like the Tree of Life or the Hebrew names of angels and so on. In other words, if you want to argue about *what* he's doing, the argument over the terminology he's using is something of a semantic red herring. If what he's doing is superficial or inelegant or superstitious or pointless mental masturbation, those are all quite valid criticisms independent of whether it can be rightly termed "Qabalah." 93 93/93 RIKB
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