Today, many well-known celebrities have popularized a New Age pop-psychology distortion of Kabbalah that has more in common with the writings of Deepak Chopra than with any old Jewish source. In fact this most influential European fetish tradition grew out of Christians problematic relationship with Judaism. In that culture, an extensive and influential tradition did indeed associate books, letters, and the act of writing with a form of practical magic. This tradition derived from the Qabbalah (spelled in many different ways), an esoteric, form of Jewish mysticism popularized during the 14th century created by Spanish Jews.

Originally Qabbalah meant oral tradition referring to religious lore passed on from teacher to pupil and in the Talmud, a qabbalah was a teaching attributed to a noted rabbi, maintained orally by the schools that derived from him. In its earliest form, then, the concept of the Qabbalah was similar to that of folklore, in that it was composed of beliefs and practices maintained by small groups of Jews outside of the official institutions of the religion as expressed in Scripture and other devotional writings.

During the fourteenth century however, qabbalism took a variety of forms. At the beginning, qabbalists reasoned, God was all-present and infinite, and thus had to withdraw, or limit Himself voluntarily, to make room for a nondivine world. God performed this by means of a series of emanations, divine sparks overflowing and becoming trapped in the matter of the created world. These emanations include semidivine spir its created by God to perform the tasks of maintaining the world, but they also permeate all of visible creation. Hints of the nature and will of God therefore can be found in the most trivial details of natural phenomena.

The most widespread of these symbol sets was organized in terms of ten mystical concepts, understood in terms of ten words used by God to create the world, but usually referred to as sefirot, literally, ciphers or numbers. In Hebrew, as in most European writing systems, letters were used also as numerals until the Arabic system of writing numbers was adopted in the twelfth century. Individual letters in Biblical passages thus could be seen as symbolically significant, and the Qabbalah generated an increasingly complex pattern of links between these hidden revelations in Scripture and equally mystical hints of God‘s nature in physical nature and historical events.

The source of this so called occultor secret language, is that analogies and metaphors are conceived of not merely as imaginary and mental connections between different entities, but as real connections. At its most Drawing on the biblical account of Adam‘s naming of the animals and on Plato‘s dialogue Cratylus, occultists regarded the connection between word and thing as natural and real, rather than as conventional: a word signified something, not by social agreement and custom, but by embodying the true essence or nature of the thing (see Stuart Clark‘s Thinking with Demons 1997, pp. 287, 289)

By imitating the heavenly spheres the magician could bring down celestial forces to the earthly realm, or as Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) the first to publish a drawing of the Three of Life with ten, sephirots, wrote; the very likenesse of one thing to another, is a sufficient bond to link them together (della Porta, Natural Magic, p. 15.)

The Catholic Pico de la Mirandolla one of the first to popularise the idea of a Christian Cabala during the 15th centuree divided the Cabala in the first and true Cabala,”which taught the true sense of the Law received from the mouth of God on the mountain. Calling it a science Pico de la Mirandolla meant to use this to convert the Jews. Another division included those sciences that the Jews called Cabala by transference (transumptive), since these too were concerned with secret things. One of these was the ars combinandi, which involved anagrammatic manipulations of Scripture/Gematria; another was the supreme part of natural magic, which concerned the powers of superior things that exist over the moon. The phrase superior things that exist over the moon was apparently meant to be ambiguous as that part of the Cabala that concerns the powers of celestial bodies.

Some Jewish qabbalistic communities received instructions from angelic messengers who spoke through members in a trance state; others received answers to difficult questions through automatic writing; still others practiced a form of transcendental meditation brought on by reciting divine names. One late-fifteenth-century qabbalist advocated a form of ceremonial magic intended to hasten the arrival of the messianic aeon. Among Jews in Germany, starting in the sixteenth century, a form of table-tapping (a predecessor of the Ouija board) was combined with the singing of psalms and the recitation of divine names. For common people therefore, the philosophical theoretical Qabbalah was, at an early period, paralleled by an extensive literature of practical Qabbalah, which harmonized theology with Semitic folk practices of divination and magical protection.

A typical amulet might contain one of the magical names of God-often the tetragrammaton, or YHWH, the mystical, unpronounceable name of the deity. The charm might feature parts of biblical texts in Hebrew script, particularly from the Psalms, each of which was held to have specific magical powers. It is not surprising to soon find lists of divine names circulating among Christians around 1500, when a series of works appeared in Italy and Germany, claiming to offer outlines of the Qabbalah. Some of these translations, produced by converts to Christianity, were sometimes distorted. And others, such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa‘s De occulta philosophia and the widely circulated Clavicula Solomonis, were plainly spurious.

A most widespread treatise of this sort circulating among nonJews was the Shemhamforash, an exposition of the secret significance of the divine names and their use in practical magic. The title (also given as Schemhamporas and even Semiphoras) is likely a corruption of the genuine qabbalist concept of the shem hammephorash, or the distinctive excellent name. This was the divine name YHWH, also known as the tetragrammaton or four-letter name, because it was held too sacred for laypersons to pronounce and so wts normally communicated in writing using the four consonants alone (Encyc. Brittanica, 11th ed., 26:670). The shem hammephorash was indeed used widely in Jewish folklore for amulets and magical formulae. But the treatise to which it gave its name mingled Christian and Jewish concepts-and even averred that the tetragrammaton had now been replaced by a pentagrammaton, namely, JESUS.

Later this led also to a form of anti-Semitism, with German and American editions of the spurious Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses an anthology of woodcuts, supposedly traced from an old manuscript, illustrating conjuring amulets and protective talismans. These are purported to have been drawn “from the Mosaic books of the Cabala and the Talmud. The introduction to the Sixth Book, for instance, claims that the following tables and seals were revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai and communicated secretly to Aaron and Joshua, and thence via their descendants to King Solomon, who used them to command spirits to collect his legendary wealth.

The preface also notes that the material, though the highest mystery, was discovered in 330 by the Roman emperor Constantine and given to Pope Sylvester, who had it translated but ordered that it never be made public, under threat of excommunication. In 1520, however, a copy came into the hands of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who highly recommended it and allowed it to be published.

What follows are seven “secret seals” to be used with accompany ing conjurations to achieve various practical results. Two of these, for locating water or ore, bring hidden treasures to the surface of the earth. Others promise help in gaining fortune or healing sickness. Perhaps to save money, these woodcuts were printed in negative impressions, producing white letters on a black background. The incantations are composed of a bewildering combination of German, Latin, and garbled Hebrew words and phrases. The theology is also confusing: apparently Jewish phrases and concepts freely mingle with explicitly Christian references. Thus information derived from the Talmud and Qabbalah; is freely mingled with material from Christian grimoires especially from Le Veritable Dragon Rouge, and from German (non-Jewish) folklore. The Sixth and Seventh Books, therefore, fall into a long and unsavory German tradition of equating a garbled version of Judaic mysticism with devil-worship and might be the reason Adolf Hitler who was born in a village on the border between Bavaria and Austria equated the occult, with Jewish.

In fact also after WWII the book remained vital in rural Germanic cultures. In the 1950s, Planet-Verlag, an occult publisher in North Germany, printed and sold 9,000 copies. In 1956, a coalition of anti-superstition crusaders around Johann Kruse, sued the publisher, claiming that some of the spells included might be taken as encouraging occult murders. Although folklorist Will-Erich Peuckert testified for the defense, a lower court in fact found Planet-Verlag guilty of harmful publication and imposed heavy fines.

In Pennsylvania, after Richard Shaner admitted in 1960 that his family had owned a copy of the book, he and the Pennsylvania Folklore Society were flooded by requests from residents for help against jealous neighbors. Cheap reprints of what is now the Wehman Brothers publication remain readily available, and are popular among African American occultists as well as some of German ancestry there.

While rejecting as evil the tradition from which the book came, rural Christian cultures nevertheless circulated and used it because they find some of its rituals and talismans useful for certain purposes. In fact, the book’s power may be enhanced by the superficially Judaic trappings, which make the contents seem far more diabolical than a list of charms made in the name of the Christian Trinity. For Protestant audiences, the claim that the volume is secretly owned by the Vatican Library is further proof both of its evil nature and of the need to own it oneself for self-protection.

To sum up, lore about the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses pointed to its pseudo-cabalistic contents to portray it as a Jewish devil-book.

But to turn back to the Christian Cabbalists of the Renaissance who considered it ascience, Pico did not intend to synthesize Hermeticism (a term I will clarify next) and Kabbalah so much as to subordinate them both to Christianity. Renaissance Hermetists simple used them as examples to demonstrate their independent confirmation of the central doctrine of Christianity, the divinity of Christ. And just as he Gnostic myth is a synthetic product that the history of religions scholars assembled from widely disparate materials the same can be said for the modern Kabbalah.  

 

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