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From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (mordred)
Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi
Subject: Re: dippen' toes in unfamiliar water
Date: 10 Mar 1995 23:50:10 -0800
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Reply-To: Paul.Hume@f235.n109.z1.fidonet.org (Paul Hume)
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[from alt.magick: Paul.Hume@f235.n109.z1.fidonet.org (Paul Hume)]

Rich -
 
1) You need to distinguish, to avoid massive confusion if nothing else,
between the traditional qabala of Judaic mysticism and the magical, or
hermetic, or goyische qabala of western ceremonial magick. The latter began to
diverge from the former when gentile philosophers, looking for a theoretical
structure on which to hang metaphysical concepts in the early
Renaissance, found the definitions, the "vocabulary," of the qabala to suit
their needs very closely. From there to, say, the cookbook qabala od of Liber
777, or any of a zillion other "tables of correspondences" and similar
applications, the divergence continued pretty strongly. No Jewish qabalist is
going to worry two pins what Tarot card corresponds to what path - nor is he
even likely to use the same map of the paths that the magician, happily
chugging away at ritual engineering on a qabalstic basis, does (even the map of
the Tree of Life is different between the Judaic system and its bend-sinister
offspring).
 
So the qabala of Sholem, Kaplan, Idel, and Sheinkin (to name four authors whose
works on Judaic qabala I commend to you) won't bear huge relationships to the
qabala of Fortune or Crowley - though you'll see the ancestry in the latter.
 
That said, the rest of my maunderings refer to the magical qabala.
 
2) Qabala is an architecture, not a grimoire. Qabalistic rituals seen in modern
writings are built (when they are on the qabalistic model) according to its
principles, but not written down in a Big Book O' Qabalistic Rituals. Rather
like a program written according to a system of structured design. The system
doesn't provide actual code, but principles by which workable code may be
written. How one then implements the high level design, the programming
language, etc. is up to the programmer.
 
3) Nope. Too lengthy. Read Fortune. If you want a VERY quick dip, with the
understanding that it is shallow but essentially accurate, read Ted
Andrews "Simplified Magic."
 
4) Criminy, if I could explain how this stuff works, I wouldn't likely be on
line yammering about it. Do you mean the seals between the Four Worlds (Assiah,
Yetzirah, Briah, and Atziluth)? Or the "Abyss" between the lower Tree and the
Supernals? Different views of the same concept, I'd suggest.
Its one more approach to the challenge of the mystic: how to directly apprehend
Deity. Ritual, or meditation, or ordeal, stirs up energy and keeps the mind of
the mystic focused on God. Loss of ego, snarling that it is the Big Cheese, is
snuck up on by these practices. Eventually a trans-rational event, the loss of
I and That awareness, happens - and the
mystic becomes aware of the Thou - the unique essence of Divinity (read Martin
Buber, I And Thou, for one lyrical approach to these concepts).
This may express itself as visions, revelations, awarenesses, when the mind
returns to where it can think about what just happened.
 
Magick tends to build a landscape of concrete symbols to guide the mind
in this process. So things like "seals" (which must be cracked or opened by the
magick word, etc.) are popular terms in the magical vocabulary.
The ideas of veils, lying between normal perception and the union with
God (devakot) are inherited directly from Qabalistic imagery. Kaplan's
two books, Meditation And The Bible, and Meditation And The Kabbalah, are
excellent sources on the Judaic qabala's approach to these issues.
 
5) Judaic qabalists don't believe in archetypal broohaha. They are Jews and
believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (though with a more mystical
take than some of their kin). Magical qabalists tend to be
syncretistic, though if they take their qabala straight, they tend also to be
monists (all the Gods we can conceive of are aspects (albeit either
infinite Themselves or at least very very big) of the En Sof - the literally
indescribable reality from which manifestation at all levels proceeds.
 
From there the territory gets very diverse, with Jungian understandings of
Qabala, mystical takes on the Qabala with more or less Christian flavors,
scientific takes on the Qabala as maps of the Universe without reference to
underlying Deity, etc.
 
Paul