THE ARCANE ARCHIVE
	a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining to occult, mystical, and spiritual subjects.

To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.pagan.magick,alt.tarot,alt.divination,alt.consciousness.mysticism
From: hara 
Subject: Kabbalah and Tarot History

50030714 viii om

shalom alachem, my kin.

Dan Washburn in the Sacred Landscape List at Yahoogroups:
> The golden dawn to the contrary, it has always seemed
> unlikely to me that the Jewish originators of the Kabbalah
> made any attribution of the tarot trumps to the 22 hebrew
> letters and the 22 paths on the tree of life.  

correct, this is a Christian and Hermetic contrivance, 
to great extent fomented by the French and English.

> No Jewish Kabbalah literature that I have ever looked at 
> mentions the tarot.  

Scholem says:

	Similarly, the activities of French and English
	occultists contributed nothing and only served
	to create  considerable confusion between the
	teachings of the Kaballah and their own totally
	unrelated inventions, such as the alleged
	kabbalistic origin of 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 (Gerard Encausse; 1868-1916), and Frater
	Perdurabo (Aleister Crowley; 1875-1946 [note:
	Crowley died in 1947 -- hara], 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.
	-----------------------------------------------
	"Kabbalah", by Gershom Scholem, Dorset Press,
	 1974; p. 203.
	===============================================

which does mention Tarot, but only in the negative.

> Again any references on this prior to Mathers and
> the synthetic genius of the GD either in occult lit 
> or in hard core Jewish Kabbalah?

hard core Jewish Kabbalah doesn't have anything *old*
that includes cartomancy as far as I know. if you're
looking for occult literature, Mathers isn't your
furthest reference backwards in time if you want some
kind of connection between Tarot and Kabbalah. as far
as I know the first reference is Antoine Court de 
Gebelin and his *Monde primitif*, wherein his essay
and that by the comte de Mellet fabulize about the
origins of the Occult Tarot (Egyptian, connecting
the Trumps with the 22 letters of the Hebrew aleph-
beth in alliance with an attribution scheme to be 
found within the kabbalistic text: "Sefer Yetzirah".

> How does da'ath and the tree reconcile with modern
> cosmology?  

that depends on what you consider 'modern' (as in
'developed recently' or 'still yet believed', even
if developed by the ancients, as Neoplatonists).

arguably mysticism has no place with modern,
rationalist metaphysics, which deals in reductionism,
galaxies and stars, black holes and, at best,
string theory and quantum mechanics. no doubt the
conjecture of mystics may be reinterpreted within
such contextual treatments by writers like Stace,
Whitehead, Bohm and others, but their original 
significance(s) in Jewish culture would seem to 
have little foothold left to them by virtue of
there being no agreement of the ontological 
status of the letter-numbers or the Creation as 
represented, instead a rather explosive beginning
lacks any real evidence for anything bringing it
about or, for that matter, for there being nothing
which preceded it. ;>

within Plebeian Neo-Kabbalah, Knowledge (perhaps 
a correlate to whatever "da'ath" may be) is 
differentiated from mystical insight into the 
principles of the cosmos as discovered by those 
exercizing inductive and deductive methods,
which are abstractions approximating reflection
of Law rather than a direct experience of Laws 
as ontological principles regularly operating 
within the cosmos (compare 'union with God' 
and 'union with gravitational fields').
 
> In what way do the structures on the tree 
> influence the events of this world? 

as maps or file cabinets, sefirotic trees 
ostensibly facilitate manipulation of the cosmos 
through an identity of form and symbolism by 
skilled occultists applied within magical rites.

> I can see it as a map of inner shamanic/mystical 
> ascension experience, but I have trouble with it 
> as a framework for the mechanics of the universe 
> and the direction of history.  

inasmuch as sefirotic trees map emanation theories,
they simultaneously describe origination and the
course of the cosmos in general terms. through the
use of metaphor, it may be possible that trees such
as are derived from sensitive mystics might yield
some kind of universal mechanical application, but
I'm inclined to agree with you that this is really
outside the typical range of their use (physics 
as compared with metaphysics).

> What is a unification in Kabbalah?  The Bal Shem Tov, 
> Luria, etc. talk about unifications all the time and 
> I haven't really grasped what they are talking about.  

I'm only passingly familiar with Luria and don't know
much at all about "The Bal Shem Tov". that said, the
concept of unification with God, whatever the mystic
may understand of this term, is probably what is being
discussed in 'unification'. sometimes this is associated
with particular activities with respect to sefirotic
trees (as in conjunction with the sefirah Kether and
movement thereinto), or even as some kind of Grand
Marriage of sefiroth, as Tifareth and Malkuth, 
the Groom and Bride respectively.  

the concept of 'unification with the divine' is a very
large subject which easily extends beyond SL topic focus.
the typical intersection of our interests is in the
area of number mysticism and sacred geometry, which seems 
to be the concern of some modern occultists, and is taken
for Kabbalah at times, usually based on the representations 
of charlatans. 

the manipulation of sefirotic trees and the use of 
gematria appears to have preceded and has extended beyond 
Jewish mystical sources and society, and in the modern  
world, many religious and mystical contexts generate very
intriguing diagrams and theories pertaining to their use.

peace be with you,

hara
  nagasiva@luckymojo.com
==================================

~Subject: Re: Tarot History, QBL, Applications

50030717 viii 

shalom alechem, my kin.

hara:
>> Scholem's "Kabbalah" has Abulafia saying he likes 
>> gematria in the 1200s.

Dan Washburn of the Sacred Landscape List:
> When I read Scholem's article on Gematria in the Jewish Encyclopedia 
> I don't remember him saying anything about the method of reduction 
> though.  

that's interesting. I'll watch for methodological information as
I wander through books on the topic and its historical development.

> I'll check it again, I've got the article somewhere, maybe 
> even neatly filed in my filing cabinet.

thanks. I'd be interested. I understand that what is called
'Numerology' includes such reduction methods, and it wouldn't
surprise me if there was some degree of cross-fertilization,
but I'm not sure what originates where, how old this 
Numerology is, where it comes from, etc. 
 

>> 	-----------------------------------------------
>> 	"Kabbalah", by Gershom Scholem, Dorset Press,
>> 	 1974; p. 203.
>> 	===============================================
> 
> Thanks for this reference!  It seems pretty disingenuous 
> of Scholem, though.  Waite was writing before Scholem 
> himself rescued the subject of Jewish Mysticism from 
> the intellectual dustbin by unearthing and translating 
> numerous primary sources.  So of course Waite was 
> compiling his stuff from secondary sources.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information on
this, but my understanding is that Waite is considered
by Scholem to have been a scholar without access to
enough information (i.e. he wasn't a charlatan like
the others he mentions). 

with regard to "intellectual dustbin", I don't know
enough about the subject to comment. I gather that a
good deal of Kabbalah is oral, and restricted to a
certain culture that doesn't often intersect with
published materials. I could be misunderstanding you.

[CG from the Sacred Landscape List at Yahoogroups:]

Re Waite:

It is not that he didn't have all the facts at hand but 
Scholem sees Waite as being an able philosopher but 
failed in areas of philology and history.

	It is not to the credit of Jewish scholarship 
	that the works of the few writers who were 
	really informed on the subject were never 
	printed, and in some cases were not even 
	recorded, since there was nobody to take an
	interest.  Nor have we reason to be proud of 
	the fact that the greater part of the ideas 
	and views which show a real insight into the 
	world of Kabbalism, closed as it was to the 
	rationalism prevailing in the Judaism of the 
	nineteenth century, were expressed by 
	Christian scholars of a mystical bent, such 
	as the Englishman Arthur Edward Waite of our 
	days and the German Franz Josef Molitor a 
	century ago.  It is a pity that the fine 
	philosophical intuition and natural grasp of 
	such students lost their edge because they 
	lacked all critical sense as to historical 
	and philological data in this filed, and 
	therefore failed completely when they had to 
	handle problems bearing on the facts. [p.2]
[and]	
	In the course of a brief lecture it is not 
	possible to give more than a few examples of 
	the manner in which the Zohar seeks to 
	describe in symbolical terms the theosophic 
	universe of God's hidden life.  Joseph Gikatila's
	"Shaare Orah", "The Gates of Light" is still 
	much the best work on the subject.  It gives 
	an excellent description of Kabbalistic 
	symbolism and also analyzes the motives which 
	determine the correlation between the Sefiroth 
	and their Scriptural symbols. Gikatila wrote 
	only a few years after the appearance of the 
	Zohar, and although he leans heavily on it, 
	his book is also marked by quite a few 
	original departures in thought.  In English
	literature on the subject A.E. Waite's "The 
	Secret Doctrine in Israel" represents a 
	serious attempt to analyze the symbolism of 
	the Zohar.  His work, as I have had occasion 
	to remark at the outset of these lectures, is
	distinguished by real insight into the world 
	of Kabbalism; it is all the more regrettable 
	that it is marred by an uncritical attitude 
	towards facts of history and philology, to 
	which it must be added that he has frequently
	been led astray by Jean de Pauly's faulty 
	and inadequate French translation of the 
	Zohar, which, owing to his own ignorance of 
	Hebrew and Aramaic, he was compelled to 
	accept as authoritative. [p.212]

An example of Scholem's critique of Waite's philological failing:

In Waite's chapter on "The Mystery of Sex" in his 
Secret Doctrine of Israel p. 236-269, Waite built 
his analysis on the incorrect hypothesis that the 
Zoharic term ... [written in Hebrew] 

	means a sex mystery.  As a matter of fact, 
	this term simply signifies the whole of 
	the ten Sifiroth, the mystical world of 
	God, without any sexual or erotical 
	connotation. [p.403, n. 73]

All citations from Gershom Scholem, "Major Trends in 
Jewish Mysticism", Schocken Books: New York, reprint 1995.

[end CG post contribution -- thanks!]

Dan Washburn continues: 
> About Levi, Papus, and Perdurabo I get the feeling 
> that if they had been Jewish he would have declared 
> them great religious innovators.

hara continues:
that is absolutely NOT the case. the reason it isn't
is because these guys were making things up out of
their imaginations and *portraying it as tradition*,
or worse, as dogma, whereas responsible innovators
would at least indicate what had come before them with
accuracy and explain what it was that they had added
and/or discovered (/were told /were gifted /etc.).

it is well-known that at least Levi and Crowley are
fairly unreliable as regards discerning what they
have added to what they claim is traditional data.
not only this, but none of them were part of any kind
of social tradition which is apparently quite often
integral to Jewish Kabbalah study. if you're just 
talking about doing similar things, that's keen.

comparing Kabbalah to a game of telephone, great
religious innovators would have been on phone trees
through which the tradition was being transmitted,
whilst Levi, Papus and Crowley didn't have a
connection and were listening to the occasional
recording they'd acquired from friends, and that
with its limitations and potential problems (i.e.
von Rosenroth -- good but restricted, also a
*published source* rather than some initiator who
could explain all the nuances and things that are
not part of published works).

> Certainly Kabbalah ranges over great territorial 
> differences.  In Safed itself, the heart of 
> Kabballistic speculation, Moses Cordovero said 
> that when he tried to read anything by Luria it 
> put him to sleep. 

it sounds like you know much more about the topic
than I, so I hope you'll correct any misconceptions
I have about it. thanks.
 
> > > How does da'ath and the tree reconcile with modern
> > > cosmology?  
 
> > within Plebean Neo-Kabbalah, Discursive Knowledge
> > (perhaps a correlate to whatever "da'ath" may be)
> > is differentiated from mystical insight into the 
> > principles of the cosmos as discovered by those 
> > exercizing inductive and deductive methods,
> > which are abstractions approximating reflection
> > of Law rather than a direct experience of Laws 
> > as ontological principles regularly operating 
> > within the cosmos (compare 'union with God' 
> > and 'union with gravitational fields').
>  
> I'm losing you here

I'll try to elaborate. as I tried to make plain, the
problem with responding to you is that I'm not quite
sure what "modern cosmology" means to you. taking it
to mean materialistic science and the physics which
extends into quantum theory and unified field theory,
these result in kinds of "Laws", or principles of
observed natural regularity, that are of a VERY
different calibre than what might be described as the
conventional presupposition about kabbalistic Law,
which relates to the divine, the Letters and Numbers,
and (at times) their origination within an emanationist
cosmological framework. is that more clear? :>

I don't have much interest, personally, in trying to
apply sefirotics to Einsteinian or Newtonian physics,
though I can certainly see value in so doing.
 
> > inasmuch as sefirotic trees map emanation theories,
> > they simultaneously describe origination and the
> > course of the cosmos in general terms. through the
> > use of metaphor, it may be possible that trees such
> > as are derived from sensitive mystics might yield
> > some kind of universal mechanical application, but
> > I'm inclined to agree with you that this is really
> > outside the typical range of their use (physics 
> > as compared with metaphysics).
> 
> I'd like to see it done, however, since an emanation 
> theory really appeals to me and I'd like to know that 
> my preferences correspond to the truth re what is out 
> there.

good luck with that. I'm not sure how diagrams and words
and numbers might allow you to discover what is out there,
but I do see that they may be valuable to manipulating or at 
least coming to a better comprehension of what is in here
(i.e. more suited to psychology or mysticism than physics).

> > the concept of 'unification with the divine' is a very
> > large subject which easily extends beyond SL topic focus.
> > the typical intersection of our interests is in the
> > area of number mysticism and sacred geometry, which seems 
> > to be the concern of some modern occultists, and is taken
> > for Kabbalah at times, usually based on the representations 
> > of charlatans. 
> > 
> > the manipulation of sefirotic trees and the use of 
> > gematria appears to have preceded and has extended beyond 
> > Jewish mystical sources and society, and in the modern  
> > world, many religious and mystical contexts generate very
> > intriguing diagrams and theories pertaining to their use.
> 
> What intrigues you about them -- some kind of inner structure 
> of truth that comes through in the gematria, producing 
> non-coincidental number combinations?

some of it is spin-off. I've been intensely interested in
magic and mysticism for most of my life, and the bulk of
occultists with whom I've interacted were obsessed with these
kinds of studies, though usually professing the primacy of
Hebrew, cosmologies involving some God, and a Tarot which
seemed to me half-formed or ill-fitted, even arbitrary.

I would ask them questions enough to determine that they
were sadly dogmatists without the ability to philosophize,
deconstruct their biases and return again to the point of
departure from which what they were working with was 
actually put together. I took my leave hoping that this
wasn't all there was to the occultist community, since I
didn't find their recitation of what they knew convincing,
and wasn't interested in breaking through their certitude
and initiating them into what I know as the degree called
Philosophus (7'). they would have to work it out for 
themselves (or not), and my role was to reconstruct what
they had learned by rote from my own quarter using the
intuitive and shamanic methods with which I was familiar.

eventually I determined that this was probably how the
varying constructions were originally made, perhaps in
reflection of those before them, but with preparation
in transcending rote recitation and insecure clinging.

all this was engaged without work on any sefirotics 
whatsoever. it was only after my 40th year that I have
undertaken to construct a Tarot deck, after making starts
many times in the past, but realizing the actual steps
to doing it would include mapping out its foundation as
a *prerequisite* so that the whole would have integrity
and be something other than an arbitrary set of assignments.

having greatly admired traditional sefirotic trees, often
from those promoting theirs as 'The Tree of Life' in a
manner not unlike those contending about 'The Bible' and
'The God' etc., I set out once more to understand what
these structures implied. this time I proceeded from a 
point of knowing that I was to create my own by clearly
identifying materials which A) should constitute the
building blocks of the structure, and which were what 
I would now call B) the cultural variables that could 
be changed without significantly affecting function.

I should mention before going much further that I have
always been inspired and compelled by geometry and by
taxonomies. I've created numerous mandalas using a
variety of geometric forms and arrays of colours, and
then given them away to kindred. this kind of creation
is by no means unusual to me, and has always been a
type of reflective meditation by which I have without
exception benefitted *in the creation of the object*.
that is, the art of the making of the object is perhaps
more important (to me) than any kind of magical use
that I might find for the object thereafter.

that said, I have also found that reflecting on these
creations thereafter had very beneficial effects on
what I'd call my spiritual development. one of the
mandalas I created was so important to me and so
enmeshed in the initiation I was undergoing (linking
with the OTO, though not as they were mapping it),
that I had the large mandala tattooed on my right 
thigh as part of the event -- a tremendous symbolism 
which touches as much on my spiritual dedication as 
on my body as the Map of the Cosmos.

you asked what intrigues me about them. I wouldn't
say that the gematria has proven to me all that
convincing or inspirational, though minor events in
gematriac combination have proven important to me
*aside* from this work. in fact, I will be looking
for such significant coincidences as *confirmations*
of the completeness and perfection of what I'm 
making at a later time.

in fact I haven't got very far with gematria yet,
having started with the sefirot (unnamed, though I do
refer to them as Numbers and designate them with the
numbers 1 through 10) and particularly the paths, 
that include the Aybeecees (a given) and Trumps (that
I've stolen from tradition and tried to fit into a
coherent set keeping as much from my favourite sources
as I was able -- that being the GD and Crowley minus
the AC-SWITCH).

for more on this (hey malkuth27000!), see:

  http://www.luckymojo.com/avidyana/plebe/tarosymbolismatrix.txt  

with regard to gematria, I knew of nobody who had 
derived a system of significance surrounding the 
English alphabet, and a while back (1993) I decided 
to create this myself, deepening what I later 
understood was called the Ulian Schemata for my own 
purposes. this may be found at:

   http://www.luckymojo.com/avidyana/plebe/l.gematria.fn

I knew that this was just a skeleton, but I don't think
I had plans in mind for exact elaboration (the document
itself mentions a *rune* system :>) other than to make
a basis for later gematria and possible numerolinguistic
investigations that others took up with abandon using
computers in ways I would not have, incorporating all 
manner of elements I found useless.

honestly quite a bit of what I'm making is intuitive,
and intended as what I have come to think of as an 
'improvement' on traditional structures, though as time
wears on the playing field levels a bit and I'm seeing
that what may seem an improvement to me may be something
geared particularly for my time and character, possibly
conducive to reproducting my mystical successes.

no, what intrigues me about them is their puzzle-like
quality. since childhood I've been a puzzle-solver,
the context of the puzzles broadening and deepening
until in my early adult years I despaired at my
inability to tackle certain types of problems that
have tripped up a good number of social scientists
(how will human beings avoid catastrophic reproduction
and consumption rates and the decimation of other 
species? what is my proper political role with respect
to them given my general solitary nature? etc.).

my intent has always been to come as completely as
possible to an apprehension of the significance and
upon what the sefirotics are constructed. Tarot wasn't 
too difficult to understand, especially having stumbled
on some decent sources of material that describes the
historical basis to the Occult Tarot over time and
having had access to a number of occultists who were
interested in discussing this material in public. 

in the case of an occultist's sefirotic tree, therefore,
my main intrigue has been a shift from something that
I feel I know pretty well (Tarot, and a study of the
Trumps, which I've made rather consistently since
obtaining a Harris-Crowley 'Thoth' deck in the early
1980s) to a geometrical form that reproduces or even
completely replaces that selected by varying mystics
through time (Kircher-style, etc.). doing this has
engaged my fundamental occult studies, which sometimes
require shoring up; and my puzzle-solving interests.

my motivation for doing it is not completely clear to
me, though I have suspicions: future ceremonialism,
for example, based on these constructions, for one.
 
> I'm reminded of Dell Washburn's work on the 
> statistical proof that god wrote the bible because 
> of statistically significant clusters of numbers 
> found in the greek and hebrew of certain biblical topics.

LOL! were I to find out that my construction had this
type of statistically significant clustering or some
kind of weird resonance I wouldn't be entirely
surprised, but I doubt that I would ascribe to it the
type of importance or 'proof' quality that you here
are mentioning.
 
peace be with you,

hara
    nagasiva@luckymojo.com

END
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