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TOP | RELIGION | JUDAISM | KABBALAH...Kaballah...Tree of Life...Benben stone mandalas....x-post
To: alt.magick.tyagi
From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (mordred)
Subject: Re: ...Kaballah...Tree of Life...Benben stone mandalas....x-post
Date: 6 Feb 1995 13:44:02 -0800
[from alt.magick: rjb@u.washington.edu (LeGrand Cinq-Mars)]
In article , Colin Low wrote:
>Peggy Brown (oispeggy@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu) wrote:
>: X-posted with permission of the author, Zos.
>
>
>: Now the earliest from of the Sefirotic Tree is from the 10th century and
>: has its foundation in the *Sefer Yezirah* composed between 3-6th centuries
>: and those roots can be traced to Alexandria and first century Gnostics.
>: But what about tracking it back to the Assyrian prototype? Was the Tree
>: transmitted through Babylonian and the Jewish captivity from an even more
>: ancient tradition in Mesopotamia? And how far back can we go?
. . . .
>
>Similarly for the sephirothic tree. Jewish mysticism has a history running
>back several hundred years before Christ, and there are several important
>source documents from the period 100CE-1000CE; although these
>documents impart a distinctive flavour to Kabbalah, in a formal sense
>they are not Kabbalistic. The Sepher Yetzirah was subject to many
>commentaries by Kabbalists, but it is not itself a Kabbalistic document;
>it predates Isaac the Blind by ~1000 years.
>
>Scholem has done a careful analysis of key ideas (and for an oral tradition
>there are a surprising number of manuscripts floating around dating
>right back to the Provencal Kabbalists) and concluded that the origin
>of key Kabbalistic ideas, and the technical use of particular words
>(just as the word "compile" took on a new, very technical meaning in
>the 60's) occured in Provence in the 12th. C in the school of Isaac
>the Blind.
>
>The earliest (vaguish) descriptions of the ToL with which I am
>personally familiar are in the "Bahir", and there are some significant
>differences compared with descriptions in later documents, like the 13th.
>C "Gates of Light" by Gikatilla, which presents a scheme very
>similar to the one I was taught.
>
>I am not convinced by the idea of transmission of the ToL from
>Assyria - I would like to see some evidence for it.
Well, leaving aside for the moment the question of the transmission of the
Tree from Assyria, there are cognate diagrams that predate Isaac the Blind.
Oddly enough, they are Chinese.
Now, 10 is a pretty standard number for a complete set (there is also 12,
of course, or 13, but 10 is also known) -- and once you have the idea
of unities that manifest polarities that return to unities you can get
the notion of alternating 2s and 1s --
x
x x
x
x x
x
x x
-- and so on, with the number 10 saving one from the dilemma of the
child who is reported to have said "I know how to spell "banana" but
I don't know where to stop!"
Having developed such an array, connecting the dots with various lines
is again no conceptually daunting step -- and if in the course of doing so
one should discover things about what others might think of as combinatorics
or network theory, that too cannot be much of a surprise.
Add to the brew an emanationist metaphysics, and something like the
Tree of Life seems, if not inevitable, at least not so much of a surprise.
Still, and nevertheless, having said all that, the near-approaches to
the Tree of Life that appear in Taoist, Buddhist and (later) Neo-Confucian
texts are rather striking. Needham has a nice Neo-Confucian version
in vol 2 of _Science and Civilization in China_ (12th century); Alfonso
Verdu
Verdu, Alfonso, 1925-.
Dialectical aspects in Buddhist thought : studies in Sino-
Japanese Mahayana idealism / Alfonso Verdu.
[Lawrence, Kan.] : Center for East Asian Studies,
University of Kansas, [1974].
discusses various diagrammatic representations of a 10-stage
path of unfoldment & path of return associated with Hua Yen (Kegon)
Buddhism (+7th to +8th century).
There are, I think, similar diagrams in earlier Taoist texts --
obviously the diagrams and general scheme were useful enough to
be taken over by succeeding schools & movements, much as the Tree of
Life has been.
I mention this as a curiosity, since I have never had the time to explore
it in detail, or to discuss it with someone well-grounded in the
relevant literatures to see just what sort of transmission the diagrams
can be shown to have had.
LeGrand Cinq-Mars
rjb@u.washington.edu
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