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GM Hint:
The Concept of Qlippoth (see below) occurs again and again
in Golden Dawn related literature, and is an especially important concept
to grasp for Golden Aeon. The concept of The Abyss is also
important
Index
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How do you spell it?
The Hebrew characters are QBLH. The word can be spelled Kabbalah,
Kabbala, Cabbala, Quabbalah, and many other variants. Most modern
Judaic scholars prefer Kabbalah, while Hermetic Scholars use either Kabbalah
or Qabbalah. I’ve used Quabbalah, because it is common in some of
the Turn of the century source material I’ve read, and because it adds
a “antique” flavor to the mysticism. Note that in the history
below I’ve used “before common era B.C. and common era C.E., rather than
B.C. and A.D. , when describing dates. These are the Judaic standard,
and are rapidly becoming the standard among historians and archaeologists.
Please note that this description is not meant to be precise.
It is meant to convey enough information to understand basic references
to the Quabbalah, In many areas I’ve made generalizations or
cut corners that I’m well aware of. At the bottom of this description,
I’ll give a list of recommended readings for deeper information.
Metagame Note: What is
the History of the Quabbalah and Where did it Come from?
The Quabbalah is a body of Jewish mystic learning and teaching that
dates back at least to the 12th century A.D., and probably goes back in
rudimentary form much farther. Jewish faith is based on the “written
law” the Torah (the Judaic scriptures, which are very roughly the same
books as the first five books of the Christian Old Testament, and the “oral
law” which is tradition handed down through generations. During the
last four centuries B.C.E. traditionalists (primarily Sadducees) who adhered
strictly to the written law were slowly marginalized by sects (primarily
the Pharisees) who felt that oral law had equal weight. The tradition
of adherence to the written law only was snuffed out in the C.E. 70 Jerusalem
Rebellion. Modern Rabbitanial Judaism is descended from the oral-traditionists,
who in subsequent centuries wrote down the Talmud as a repository of the
oral-law. In the middle-ages, and later times, various scholars added
Commentaries to the Talmud. At the same time, some scholars
believed in a body of “secret” written law, set down in the Torah, and
set out to study it. Their mystical observations constitute
the body of Literature known as the Quabbalah. The earliest
“formal” work in this body is attributed to Isaac the Blind (c. 1160-1236
C.E.)
How important is the Quabbalah
in contemporary Judaism?
Not very. It is a profound influence on some heretical Judaic
sects like the Hasadim or Lubavichers, who have a strong community
in modern New York City. In the 1920s there was not yet a Hasadic
or Lubavicher community of any size in New York – these groups primarily
immigrated after the Second World War., in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Mainline Jews do not deny the legitimacy of some of the Quabbalistic work.
The work of some of the majority of Kabbalist Rabbis is of historical
importance, and their place as legitimate commentators is not denied (though
some such as the heretical Nathan of Gaza are minimalized or excluded from
consideration). On the other hand, the points on which the Quabbalistic
Rabbis differ from mainline Jewish theology are routinely minimalized.
For the most part, Quabbalah is an esoteric side-track which is neither
denied nor pursued by most modern Jewish scholars, and its influence on
everyday Jewish practice and life outside of the abovementioned sects is
so minimal as to be nearly non-existent.
What do Quabbalists believe about
the history of the Quabbalah
"The Qabalah was first taught by God himself to a select company of
angels, who formed a
theosophic school in Paradise. After the Fall the angels most graciously
communicated this heavenlydoctrine to the disobedient children of earth,
the furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine
nobility and felicity. From Adam it passed over to Noah, and then to Abraham,
the friend of God, who emigrated with it to Egypt, where the patriarch
allowed a portion of this mysterious doctrine to ooze out. It was in this
way that the Egyptians obtained some knowledge of it, and the other Eastern
nations could introduce it into their philosophical systems. Moses, who
was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt, was first initiated into the Qabalah
in the land of his birth, but became most proficient in it during his wanderings
in the wilderness, when he not only devoted to it the leisure hours of
the whole forty years, but received lessons in it from one of the angels.
By the aid of this mysterious science the law-giver was enabled to solve
the difficulties which arose during his management of the Israelites, in
spite of the pilgrimages, wars, and frequent miseries of the nation. He
covertly laid down the principles of this secret doctrine in the first
four books of the Pentateuch, but withheld them from Deuteronomy. Moses
also initiated the seventy elders into the secrets of this doctrine, and
they again transmitted them from hand to hand."
- McGregor Mathers, Introduction to The
Kabbalah Unveiled
What is the Quabbalah
Kabbalah is an aspect of Jewish mysticism. It consists of a large body
of speculation on the nature of divinity, the creation, the origin and
fate of the soul, and the role of human beings. It consists also of meditative,
devotional, mystical and magical practices which were taught only to a
select few and for this reason Kabbalah is regarded as an esoteric offshoot
of Judaism.
- Colin Low, Kabbalah FAQ
Into this mysterious universe we are born,
with no apparent set of instructions,
no maps or equations, no signs or guideposts,
nothing but our equally
unfathomable instincts, intuitions, and reasoning
abilities to tell us where we
came from, why we are here, and what we are
supposed to do. What we do
posses - perhaps it the key to our survival
as a species - is an almost
unquenchable need to know. A human being comes
into this world with a
passionate sense of wonder and inquisitiveness
and an equally powerful need for
self expression. Yet, somehow these seemingly
indelible primal imperatives
become eroded, as a rule, after only a few
years exposure to modern reality and
contemporary educational methods.
Rabbi Dr. Philip S. Berg, tells in the Preface to, "The Zohar - Parashat
Pinhas",
Research Center of Kabbalah Press.
To Jewish mystics, every letter in the Hebrew alphabet was a channel
to the life force of God and
possessed of sacred meaning. Hebrew numbers were also represented by
letters so that names and words had numerical values. Finding associations
of words with the same value revealed a complex series of hidden meanings
beneath the text of the Torah, the book of law attributed to Moses. In
fact, the entire Torah can be considered to be a single long word spelling
out one of the names of God. The significance of the name of God goes back
to ancient Egypt where knowing the name of a god allowed one to gain power
over that god.
What is the Hermetic Quabbalah
The following is condensed from Colin Low’s excellent explanation in
the Quabbalah FAQ:
“Many people who study Kabbalah are not Jewish. This has been happening
for 500 years or so. It is difficult to know what to call this variant
of Kabbalah. "Non-Jewish" is inaccurate, as I have
personally known several Jews who opted for Hermetic Kabbalah in preference
to the traditional
variety! At one time it was called "Christian" Kabbalah, but this is
also very misleading.
The origin of this variant can be placed in Renaissance Italy in the
last decade of the 15th. century. It was an amazing decade. In 1492 Christopher
Columbus set sail for America. In that same year the King of Spain expelled
all Jews from Spain on pain of death, bringing to an end centuries of Jewish
culture in Spain, and causing a huge migration of dispossessed Jews through
Europe, many of whom were welcomed by the Turkish sultan, who is reputed
to have observed that the King of Spain had enriched Turkey by beggaring
his own country.
At around the same time, at the court of the great banking family of
the Medicis in Florence,
Marsilio Ficino had established the Platonic Academy under the patronage
of the Medicis and was
translating the works of Plato. A bundle of manuscripts, lost for centuries
and dating back to the 1st. and 2nd. centuries A.D. was discovered; this
was the Corpus Hermeticum, a series of documents relating to Hermes Trimegistus,
identical with the Egyptian god Thoth, god of wisdom. Cosimo de Medici
told Ficino to stop translating Plato and to concentrate on the Corpus
instead.
At the time it was believed that the Corpus really was the religion
of the ancient Egyptians, and that
Hermes was a kind of Egyptian Moses. The fact that they were written
much later, and heavily
influenced by Neoplatonism, had the effect of convincing readers at
that time that Greek philosophy was founded on much older, Egyptian religious
philosophy - this had a huge influence on liberal religious and philosophical
thinking at the time. Into this environment came the Kabbalah, brought
in part by fleeing Spanish Jews, and it was seized upon as another lost
tradition, the inner, initiated key to the Bible.
Two figures stand out. One was Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola, who
commissioned several
translations of Kabbalistic works, and did much to publicise Kabbalah
among the intellectuals of the day. The other was Johannes Reuchlin, who
learned to read Hebrew and became deeply immersed in Kabbalistic literature.
It must be said that Jews were suspicious of this activity, finding that
Christian scholars were using the Kabbalah as a bludgeon to persuade them
to convert to
Christianity.
It was out of this eclectic mixture of Christianity, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism,
Kabbalah and
Renaissance humanism that Hermetic Kabbalah was born. Over the centuries
it has developed in
many directions, with strong influences from Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism,
but continued input
from Jewish Kabbalah has meant that many variants are not so different
in spirit from the original. Its greatest strength continues to be a strong
element of religious humanism - it does not attempt to
define God and does not define what an individual should believe, but
it does assume that some level of direct experience of God is possible
and there are practical methods for achieving this. In a
modern world of compartmentalised knowledge, scientific materialism,
and widespread cultural and historical illiteracy, it provides a bridge
between the spirit of enquiry of the Renaissance (the homo universalis
or - in Hebrew - hakham kolel) and the emergence of a similar spirit of
enquiry in our own time.
What is the Sephiroth or “Tree
of Life”
The Sephiroth which mean “Emanations of Deity” are ten spheres that
are arranged into a pattern called the “Tree of Life.” This is a symbol
developed by Quabbalists to explain how God structured the universe when
he created it. In both Judaic and Hermetic Quabbalah, many
symbols relate to, or are attributed to, the Sephiroth. Each
Sephira has its own color, Archangel, Choir, and in Hermetic Quabbalah,
Tarot attribution, planetary sign, etc. The Tree of Life is often
depicted projected over the human body.
The meanings of the Sephiroth:
Kether The Crown Primal Chaos
Chokmah Wisdom Sphere of the Zodiac
Binah Understanding Saturn
Chesed Mercy Jupiter
Geburah Severity Mars
Tiphareth Beauty Sol
Netzach Victory Venus
Hod Glory Mercury
Yesod The Foundation Luna
Malkuth The Kingdom The Elements
The Left hand pillar of the Tree of Life is called the “Pillar of Severity”
The Center pillar is called the “Pillar of Mildness”
The Right hand pillar is called the “Pillar of Mercy”
The Hermetic Qabalists add the “invisible sephira” of Da’ath which
does not exist in itself, but is made up of the mingling of the rays of
Binah (Understanding) and Chokmah (Wisdom).
What are the Qlippoth?
The following is condensed from Colin Low’s excellent explanation in
the Quabbalah FAQ:
The word "qlippah" or "klippah" (plural "qlippoth") means "shell" or
"husk". It is in simplified terms the outer covering of which
the sephira are made to contain the light of the deity. The duality
between the container and the contained is one of the most important in
Kabbalistic explanations of the act of creation.
The word "qlippah" is an extension of this metaphor. A qlippah is also
a covering or a container, and as each sephira acts as a shell or covering
to the sephira preceding it in the order of emanation, in a technical sense
we can say the qlippoth are innate to the Tree of Life. Cut a slice through
a tree and one can see the growth rings, with the bark on the outside.
The Tree of Life has 10 concentric rings, and sometimes the qlippah is
equated to the bark. The word is commonly used to refer to a covering which
contains no light: that is, an empty shell, a dead husk.
It is also the case that the qlippoth appear in Kabbalah as demonic
powers of evil, and in trying to disentangle the various uses of the word
it becomes clear that there is an almost continuous spectrum of opinion,
varying from the technical use where the word hardly differs from the word
"form", to the most anthropomorphic sense, where the qlippoth are evil
demonesses in a demonic hierarchy responsible for all the evil in the world.
One reason why the word "qlippah" has no simple meaning is that it is
part of the Kabbalistic explanation of evil, and it is difficult to explain
evil in a monotheistic, non-dualistic religion without incurring a certain
complexity....
If God is good, why is there evil?
No short essay can do justice to the complexity of this topic. I will
indicate some of the principle themes.
The "Zohar" attributes the primary cause of evil to the act of separation.
The act of separation is referred to as the "cutting of the shoots". What
was united becomes divided, and the boundary between one thing and another
can be regarded as a shell. The primary separation was the division between
the Tree of Life (Pillar of Mercy) from the Tree of Knowledge (Pillar of
Severity).
In normal perception the world is clearly characterized by divisions
between one thing and another, and in this technical sense one could say
that we are immersed in a world of shells. The shells, taken by themselves
as an abstraction divorced from the original, undivided light (making another
separation!) are the dead residue of manifestation, and can be identified
with dead skin, hair, bark, sea shells, or shit. They have been referred
to as the dregs remaining in a glass of wine, or as the residue left after
refining gold. According to Scholem, the Zohar interprets evil as "the
residue or refuse of the hidden life's organic process"; evil is something
which is dead, but comes to life because a spark of God falls on it; by
itself it is simply the dead residue of life.
The skeleton is the archetypal shell. By itself it is a dead thing,
but infuse it with a spark of life and it becomes a numinous and instantly
recognisable manifestation of metaphysical evil. The shell is one of the
most common horror themes; take a mask, or a doll, or any dead representation
of a living thing, shine a light out of its eyes, and becomes a thing of
evil intent. The powers of evil appear in the shape of the animate dead
- skulls, bones, zombies, vampires, phantasms.
What is the Abyss?
In modern Kabbalah there is a well developed notion of an Abyss between
the three supernal sephiroth of Kether, Chokhmah, and Binah, and the seven
lower sephiroth. When one looks at the progress of the Lightning Flash
down the Tree of Life, then one finds that it follows the path structure
connecting sephiroth except when it makes the jump from Binah to Chesed,
thus reinforcing this idea of a "gap" or "gulf" which has to be crossed.
This notion of an Abyss is extremely old and has found its way into Kabbalah
in several different forms, and in the course of time they have all been
mixed together into the notion of "the Great Abyss"; the Great Abyss is
one of those things so necessary that like God, if it didn't already exist,
it would have to be invented.
- Colin Low from his Introduction to Kabbala
"The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon, but he is not really
an individual. The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all
possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true
sense of the word - that is, meaningless but malignant, in so far as it
craves to become real. These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps
like dust devils, and each chance aggregation asserts itself to be an individual
and shrieks `I am I!' though aware all the time that its elements have
no true bond; so that the slightest disturbance dissipates the delusion
just as a horseman, meeting a dust devil, brings it in showers of sand
to the earth."
- Aleister Crowley, 1909
For further reading
:
There are many interepretations of the Quabalah. The January author
takes no responsibility for discrepancies between these sites and the January
game. However, the deeper your overall perspective on Kabbala, the
quicker you will be able to make sense of things in game.
Colin
Low's Introduction to Kabbalah
Sefir
Yetzirah - an actual Kabbalistic Text
Kabbalah Faq
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