Cabala and Qabalah

Readers who look for books on the Kabbalah soon meet the word spelled three ways. Modern writers often use the spellings to mark three different things: Kabbalah for the Jewish tradition that this series has followed, Cabala for the Christian reading of it that began in the Renaissance, and Qabalah for the Hermetic system of the nineteenth-century occultists. The convention is loose, and many writers ignore it, but it marks a real history. This last essay of the series follows the tradition out of the Jewish world, and asks what happened to it there.

The first essay began with the name. Kabbalah means receiving, and the tradition understood itself as a chain: teachings handed from master to disciple, guarded, given only to those prepared for them. This essay is about what happened when the chain was broken, or rather when the teachings were taken up by people who stood outside it altogether, and read them for purposes of their own.

Captivated§

Ginsburg, whose essay of 1865 has guided this series, opens it by noting that the Kabbalah “captivated the minds of some of the greatest thinkers of Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.1). He was right, and the story began even earlier. Ramon Llull, the Majorcan philosopher and missionary of the late thirteenth century, learned Hebrew and Arabic in order to convert Jews and Muslims, and came to know the Kabbalists of his day. Ginsburg says that “instead of converting his Kabbalistic teachers” Llull was won over by them, and that their art of combining letters suggested his own Great Art, a method of combining the divine attributes by means of turning wheels (Ginsburg 1865, 3.28). Modern scholars are more cautious about how much Llull owed to the Kabbalah. But the shape of the later story is already there: a Christian who came to the Jewish mystics with the intention of converting them, and was himself changed.

Florence: Pico della Mirandola§

The real beginning was in Florence, in the 1480s. The city’s scholars, gathered around Marsilio Ficino, had translated Plato and the Hermetic writings, and believed they had recovered an ancient theology: a single wisdom, given at the beginning, which had passed through Moses, Hermes, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato before reaching its fulfilment in Christ. Into this circle came a young nobleman of extraordinary gifts, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. If there was one ancient wisdom, Pico reasoned, the Jews must have kept part of it, and the Kabbalah was the part they had kept.

He set out to learn it. He studied Hebrew with Jewish teachers, among them the philosopher Yoḥanan Alemanno, and had a large body of Kabbalistic writing translated into Latin for him by a learned convert, Flavius Mithridates. Ginsburg sums up what he concluded: “he found that there is more Christianity in the Kabbalah than Judaism”. In 1486, at twenty-three, Pico published nine hundred theses that he offered to defend in Rome before the scholars of Europe, and among them was the boldest of his claims: “No science yields greater proof of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Kabbalah.” ¹1 Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah, paragraph 3.40: “1463–1494. The Kabbalah, which soon after its birth became partially known to Christians through Raymond Lully, was now accessible to Christian scholars through the exertions and influence of the famous Count John Pico di Mirandola (born in 1463). This celebrated philosopher determined to fathom the mysteries of the Kabbalah, and for this purpose put himself under the tuition of a …” Read in context Ginsburg says that Pope Sixtus IV was delighted with Pico’s work; Sixtus died in 1484, two years before the theses. The debate was in fact stopped by Innocent VIII, who had several of the theses condemned.

The debate never took place. Pope Innocent VIII suspended it, a commission condemned several of the theses as heretical, and Pico fled to France, where he was briefly held, before he was allowed to return to Florence. He died in 1494, at thirty-one. The speech he had written to open the debate, later called the Oration on the Dignity of Man, became one of the most famous texts of the Renaissance. In it the human being is the creature with no fixed place in the order of things, free to sink to the level of the beasts or rise to union with God. Pico drew on the Kabbalah, as he drew on everything, to say so.

Pico distinguished two parts of the Kabbalah, much as Abulafia had done two centuries before: a science of the sefirot, which he compared to a natural philosophy of the divine, and a science of the divine names and letters, which he regarded as the highest form of what he called natural magic, the power to unite heaven and earth. Both, for him, were not Jewish possessions but fragments of the first revelation to humanity, preserved by the Jews in secret and now to be restored to their true meaning. In that idea lay both the generosity and the danger of everything that followed. It honoured the Jewish mystics as keepers of a divine wisdom, and denied that the wisdom was theirs.

Reuchlin and the defence of the books§

Pico’s enthusiasm passed to Germany through Johannes Reuchlin, a jurist and humanist who became the greatest Christian Hebraist of his age. Reuchlin wrote the first full Hebrew grammar by a Christian scholar, and two books on the Kabbalah. In the first, On the Wonder-Working Word, published in 1494, he argued that the name of Jesus, written in Hebrew, was the four-letter divine name with the letter shin, the letter of fire and spirit, set in its midst: the unpronounceable name made speakable (Ginsburg 1865, 3.45). In the second, On the Art of the Kabbalah, he defined the Kabbalah as “a symbolical reception of Divine revelation”, given so that human beings might attain communion with their Creator (Ginsburg 1865, 3.47). The book was dedicated to Pope Leo X, and Ginsburg reports the praise it received from popes, cardinals and scholars alike (Ginsburg 1865, 3.49).

Much of Reuchlin’s Kabbalah consisted of finding Christian doctrines in Hebrew letters: the Trinity in the first word of Genesis, read as the initials of Son, Spirit and Father, and so on. Ginsburg, himself a Christian, says that such proofs “will now be deprecated by every one who has any regard for the laws of language” (Ginsburg 1865, 1.97). But Reuchlin deserves to be remembered for something else. When a convert named Johannes Pfefferkorn persuaded the emperor to order the confiscation of Jewish books, Reuchlin was asked for his opinion, and gave it against the confiscation: the books, he argued, should be studied, not burned. The controversy that followed lasted most of a decade, brought him before church courts, and divided the learned world of Germany. In an age when Jewish books were burned, the Christian who loved the Kabbalah stood up for the people who had kept it.

From Agrippa to Knorr von Rosenroth§

In the next century and a half the Christian Cabala spread in two directions. One was magic. Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, published in full in 1533, made the divine names and the sefirot part of a great system of correspondences, together with the planets, the angels, the elements and the virtues of stones and herbs. The Kabbalah, which the Jewish masters had mostly kept away from magic, was now one of its chief instruments. The other direction was learning. Guillaume Postel translated the Book of Creation into Latin; the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, in an enormous work on Egypt, “maintained that the Kabbalah was introduced into Egypt by no less a person than the patriarch Abraham” (Ginsburg 1865, 3.59), and so made it part of the ancient theology that the Florentines had imagined.

The most important of the Christian scholars was Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, who, with the help of a Jewish teacher, published between 1677 and 1684 the Kabbala Denudata, the Kabbalah Unveiled: Latin translations of large parts of the Zohar and of the works of Gikatilla, Cordovero and Luria’s school, with notes and glossaries (Ginsburg 1865, 3.62). It was the first time that Christian readers could study the Zohar itself, and for two centuries most of them knew it through Knorr’s Latin. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More corresponded with him and contributed to the work, and Francis Mercury van Helmont, who helped to prepare it, carried its ideas to Leibniz. Knorr believed, as Ginsburg notes, that Shimon bar Yoḥai had written the Zohar under divine inspiration, and that it was essential for understanding Christianity (Ginsburg 1865, 3.61).

A Christian contemplative Cabala§

Not all of the Christian Cabala was polemic or magic. For some of its readers it became a way of contemplating the divine life. The Franciscan Francesco Giorgi of Venice, in his Harmony of the World of 1525, wove the sefirot together with Plato’s cosmology and Christian theology into a single vision of a universe sounding in proportion, in which every creature answers to a level of the divine. The cosmos was a hymn, and the Kabbalah helped him to hear its intervals.

In Germany a century later, the shoemaker of Görlitz, Jacob Boehme, described the life of God as a hidden abyss that comes to know itself through a play of contrary powers, wrath and love, darkness and light, and that brings forth the world as the mirror of that self-revelation. The resemblance to the Kabbalah’s hidden Ein Sof and its sefirot of judgment and mercy is striking, and later readers took it for granted. Scholars still debate how much, if anything, Boehme knew of Jewish sources. His followers had no such doubt. In the eighteenth century the Lutheran pastor Friedrich Christoph Oetinger read Boehme and the Kabbalah together, and in 1763 published his interpretation of a great allegorical painting, commissioned by a Württemberg princess for the church at Bad Teinach, in which the sefirot are drawn as the pillars of a temple through which the soul ascends to Christ. In these writers the Christian Cabala was not an argument against the Jews but a meditation on the inner life of God. It still borrowed a Jewish map for a Christian journey.

The Hermetic Qabalah§

In the nineteenth century the tradition changed hands again. In France, the former seminarian Alphonse-Louis Constant, writing as Éliphas Lévi, joined the Kabbalah to the Tarot: the twenty-two major cards, he argued, corresponded to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and both encoded a single magical doctrine. The idea had no basis in the history of either, but it proved enormously fruitful.

In London in 1888, three Freemasons founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult society of the modern West. One of them, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, had the year before published The Kabbalah Unveiled, an English translation of three books of the Zohar made not from the Aramaic but from Knorr’s Latin. The Golden Dawn made the Tree of the sefirot the framework of its whole system. The ten sefirot and the twenty-two paths between them were matched with the Tarot trumps, the planets, the signs of the zodiac, colours, gods and angels, and the initiate climbed the Tree by grades, through ritual, meditation and visualisation. Aleister Crowley, who passed through the order, published tables of these correspondences; Dion Fortune, in The Mystical Qabalah of 1935, presented the Tree as a map of the psyche and a method of inner development. Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, which this site will read in a later series, belongs to the same world.

The Golden Dawn also gave the Tree a contemplative use that outlasted the order. Its members were taught to imagine themselves walking the paths between the sefirot, meeting the images associated with each, and to visualise the Tree within the body, a column of light descending from the crown of the head to the feet. Israel Regardie, who published the order’s rituals in the 1930s, presented this last practice, which he called the Middle Pillar, as a method of psychological integration. The poet W. B. Yeats, a long-standing member, drew on the order’s symbolism in his work. For many modern readers, this is the only Kabbalah they have met.

The Qabalah of the occultists is a real tradition with its own teachers, practices and seriousness, and many people have found in it a path of inner discipline. But it is a different tradition from the one this series has followed. Its texts are largely modern, its sources reach the Zohar at two removes, and its central practices, from ritual magic to the attribution of Tarot cards to the paths, have no place in Jewish Kabbalah. Gershom Scholem, who did more than anyone to recover the Jewish tradition for modern scholarship, spoke of the occultist versions with open impatience.

What was kept, and what was lost§

It would be easy to tell this history as a simple theft, and part of it was worse than theft. The Christian Cabala was born, in Llull and Pico and Reuchlin, as an instrument of mission. Its scholars studied the Kabbalah in order to show the Jews that their own mystics had been Christians without knowing it, and converts were urged to use it to win others. In a Europe where Jews were expelled, confined and sometimes killed, the claim that their own tradition testified against them was not an innocent one. Jewish critics in Italy, such as Leon Modena in the seventeenth century, regretted that the Kabbalistic books had ever been printed, because of what was being done with them.

What was lost is clear from the earlier essays. The Jewish Kabbalah was never a system that could be lifted out of a life. It was read in Hebrew and Aramaic, as part of a lifetime of study of the Torah and the Talmud. It was bound to the commandments: the Kabbalist prayed three times a day, kept the Sabbath, and performed each act of obedience with the intention of uniting the Holy One and the Shekhinah. It was transmitted from teacher to student, within communities that knew its dangers, and it opened, as the first essay showed, with a warning that it could destroy the unprepared. Its highest aim, devekut, began with walking in God’s ways: clothing the naked and comforting mourners. None of this travelled. What travelled was the diagram.

Two losses in particular touch the subject of this site. The first concerns the hidden God. The Jewish Kabbalists, as the third essay described, placed Ein Sof beyond the Tree altogether: the Infinite has no sefirah, no attribute and no image, and the Tree grows down from a silence that no map can show. In the occult Qabalah the hidden God tends to become the top rung of a ladder, the last grade of an initiation that can be climbed by effort. The apophatic humility at the heart of the tradition becomes a programme. The second concerns the world. In Luria’s Kabbalah, as the fifth essay showed, the shattering of the vessels is a cosmic catastrophe, and its repair is the shared work of a people through history, gathering the sparks in every act of prayer and kindness until the exile ends. In the Hermetic Qabalah the work of repair becomes, for the most part, the private ascent of the individual soul. The ladder remains; the broken world that the ladder was meant to mend has mostly disappeared from view.

And yet something real did travel. The Tree of the sefirot, even in Christian and occult hands, kept its central intuition: that the world, the human being and the life of God share one structure, so that to know oneself rightly is to know something of God, and to be transformed is to be drawn back into unity. The Christian Hebraists, whatever their motives, created the scholarly study of Hebrew in Europe, and Reuchlin’s defence of the Jewish books was a moral act. In the twentieth century, Jewish scholarship, beginning with Scholem, recovered the Kabbalah as a living part of Jewish history, and Jewish teachers have since brought its contemplative teaching to readers of every background, from within the tradition rather than against it.

The history has a lesson for anyone who studies unitive knowledge across the traditions, as this site does. Every contemplative teaching can be lifted out of its life and made into a system: yoga into exercise, Buddhist mindfulness into a technique, Sufi poetry into a mood. Something survives each time, and something essential is lost. The traditions themselves would say that the knowledge they speak of is not a set of doctrines but a transformation, and that the transformation depends on the practices, the disciplines and the community that the doctrines were meant to serve. A diagram can show the way; it cannot walk it. The Kabbalah called itself receiving, and receiving needs a receiver who has been formed to receive.

The end of the series§

These seven essays have followed the Jewish mystical tradition from the chariot of Ezekiel and the four who entered the garden, through the Book of Creation and the Tree of the sefirot, the infinite God beyond it and the nothing at its crown, the Zohar and the exiled Shekhinah, Luria’s shattered vessels and the work of repair, to the cleaving of the soul to God and, finally, to the strangers who took the tradition up. Throughout, the Kabbalah has held two things together that many traditions separate: a God hidden beyond every name, and a God as near as the next breath; a knowledge that is the highest secret, and a practice that begins with ordinary kindness.

The series that follows on this site, a reading of Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, will return to the Qabalah from the other side, in the work of one of its modern interpreters. Readers who want to go further into the Jewish tradition itself will find its texts in the Library, and its masters, as the tradition always said, in the living teachers who have received it.