Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick Path: shell.portal.com!svc.portal.com!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hplextra!hplb!cal From: cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Colin Low) Subject: Re: How About Some Kabbalah Discussion? Sender: news@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Usenet News Administrator) Message-ID: Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 09:27:59 GMT References: <3ggqqk$s2d@jobe.shell.portal.com> <3gpr9v$oj5@access2.digex.net> Nntp-Posting-Host: clow.hpl.hp.com Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, England X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL0.7] Followup-To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick Lines: 92 Xref: shell.portal.com alt.magick.tyagi:2013 alt.magick:37721 In article <3gpr9v$oj5@access2.digex.net> you wrote: : Colin Low: That was an excellent response. I admire your scholarship and : even-mindedness. : What do you think about the relationship between Gnosticism, : Neoplatonism, and the Kabbalah. Do you think that Kabbalah grew from : Jewish gnosticism. The Merkabah mystical texts and practices seem to have : many things in common with the pagan and Christian gnosticism of their time. I don't know about the scholarship (I'm not convinced that just buying books and reading them counts as scholarship). >From your question, I wonder whether you have read a little book by Scholem called (amazingly enough) "Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition". I suspect you have. In the same way that Christian scholars can manage to interpret the Bible without referring to (or even acknowledging the existence of) the Talmud or the Mishnah, so Scholem expresses his surprise that Christian authors study gnosticism as if it was a purely Christian phenomenon, and confine their scholarship to texts in the Christian tradition, ignoring completely a large body of Jewish gnostic texts in a variety of languages that don't happen to be Greek or Coptic. He comments: "One is often left wondering about the methods used in this approach; and one is no less amazed by the stupendous ignorance of Jewish sources that warps the conclusions and even the basic approach of some of the finest scholars." I have no independent opinion about this, but it seems to me that there is strong evidence that gnosticism was a Jewish phenomenon, and the conflict within Christianity was a conflict between a bunch of Jewish heretical offshoots, with very little to be said for any of them, other than the fact that the victors wrote the histories. Kabbalah seems to be prone to highly gnostic theosophies, and while there might be some transmission of gnostic ideas from early times, I am satisfied in my own mind that many of these outbreaks are spontaneous and evidence that Kabbalah was (and is) an ecstatic and mystical tradition, not just a literary tradition. I have experienced several powerfully gnostic "apprehensions" of reality in my own work and have no problem with the idea that a mystic experiences something objective, and that spontaneous revelations of a gnostic character are often very similar in content. In addition to spontaneous outbreaks, it is also clear that Kabbalah has been influenced by Greek philosophical ideas, including neoplatonism. Jews were expelled from Spain at approximately the same time as the founding of Ficino's Platonic Academy in Florence. Not only were Jews important as translators, but the traffic of exiled Jews through Italy en-route to any place that would have them provided an excellent opportunity for mixing Kabbalistic and neoplatonic ideas - it is no accident that Christian Kabbalah has its origin at this time, in and around the court of the Medicis. As an example, the sixteenth century kabbalist Israel Sarug pirated the ideas of Isaac Luria (via an illicit copy of Chaiim Vital's "Etz Chaiim") and combined them very successfully with neoplatonism, marketing the result as the authentic teaching of Isaac Luria. When Kabbalah is presented as a form of philosophic mysticism it tends to take on a neoplatonic character; when it is encountered in the form of revelation ( with the evocative use of metaphor and allegory so characteristic of mystical relevation) it is much closer to gnosticism. A wonderful example of modern "Kabbalistic revelation" is Dion Fortune's rarely-read "The Cosmic Doctrine". My Kabbalah teacher insisted that I write a detailed commentary on this work, and at the time my cursing and swearing could be heard from several blocks away. Over the years I have come to appreciate that this work is profoundly gnostic in character, and what is more important, authentic. It may seem a strange work to the rational, modern reader, but the more I immerse myself in gnosticism and traditional Kabbalah, the less strange it seems, to the point of being excellent. It is a most sophisticated and well-developed gnostic theosophy. For example, Fortune's treatment of the opposing currents within the Unmanifest (En Soph) exactly parallels the ideas of Nathan of Gaza some hundreds of years earlier, and I am prepared to bet several pints of Uley Bitter that there was no literary transmission. My own treatment of Kabbalah has been strongly influenced by my experience of mathematics and programming, particularly object oriented programming, which has become a dominant specification and implementation paradigm. In its use as a specification methodology, OO design is like a mirror for the human mind: it reveals in detail what Kabbalah and neoplatonism hint at in outline. To conclude, if you haven't read Scholem (I suspect you have), then you will find that gnosticism was a major interest of his, and everything he has written about Kabbalah is informed with comparisons with gnosticism. He is also an excellent writer as well as being an excellent scholar. Cheers, Colin