On my Mandalas page, I mentioned influences from Kabbalah, Alchemy, and Hermetic philosophy. Considering the recent pop-Kabbalah business that's going around, I should clarify where I come from vis-à-vis Kabbalah.
First, a quick background: Kabbalah is a philosophical system, Jewish in origin, based on writings from the early Mediaeval period (C.E.). These writings include a short book called the Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of Creation, which it's best to read with a prior knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet and its phonetic groupings; and the Sepher az-Zohar, or Book of Splendor, an enormous series of volumes that require that the reader already be conversant with the Torah (a.k.a. the Pentateuch, Books of the Law, or Books of Moses, i.e. the first five books of the Old Testament) in Hebrew. I confess up front to having read the Yetzirah only in translation, and only to have tackled the Zohar via Gershom Scholem's short collection, Zohar, The Book of Splendour: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah. This latter volume is most useful for its introduction, and as my knowledge of Hebrew pretty much begins and ends with the alphabet, with little snips of vocabulary here and there, I make no claims to know the Zohar.
Some Renaissance and Reformation European Christians — Rosicrucians and others alchemically-inclined — "discovered" Jewish Kabbalah while they were re-discovering Classical Greek culture and learning, and brought it into a more generally Western school of mysticism. This is the origin of what is today called "Hermetic" Kabbalah (after Hermes Trismegistos, the Thrice-Great Hermes, supposedly what the Greeks called the Egyptian god Thoth). It is in this socio-politico-religious context — namely, that of the explosion of free inquiry, and the Catholic Church's attempts to squelch it — that Kabbalah acquired its frisson of "hidden knowledge." It became esoteric, not only in the sense of requiring careful initiation in a long course of study requiring years of hard work, but that of being secret as well — as it was keeping company with a variety of other, literally forbidden ideas.
Most modern works on Hermetic Kabbalah in English are influenced by the work of a 19th-century English group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Several members (including the notorious Aleister Crowley) went on to develop their own systems — and several (also including Crowley) designed Kabbalah-influenced Tarot decks, some of which are in print at the present day. The merits and demerits of Tarot either for divination or private pathworking, and of the decks in question, is a topic for another day. Beyond the Yetzirah, most of my study of Kabbalah has been derived from the Hermetic school.
[There is a modern organization, headquartered in the United States, claiming to the name of Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Its connection to the original organization is theoretical, and not, apparently, apostolic.]
At least up until recently, most modern Kabbalists either stuck to the mediaeval Jewish writings or to the Hermetic sources, most particularly the Golden Dawn works. My favorite website regarding Kabbalah is Colin Low's Notes on Kabbalah. Low's explanations of the sephiroth (hierarchical spheres, or nodes, on the Tree of Life) are better than any others I've seen in any form of print, hardcopy or electronic. If you are interested in Kabbalah, it would be better for you to read his site, grounded in experience as it is, than for me to try to paraphrase any part of it.
Kabbalah has most recently entered the popular consciousness through the activities of the pop singer Madonna Louise Ciccone, a.k.a. Madonna. She's been studying with Philip, Yehudi, and Michael Berg of The Kabbalah Centre of Los Angeles, which has been peddling allegedly Kabbalistic snake oil since 1969.
The Centre's website (www.kabbalah.com) reminds me of those old magazine ads for the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (A.M.O.R.C.), another, much older, California pop-mysticism operation that has historically reaped its profits by stealing a page or two from a Renaissance-era "secret" tradition in the public domain (in A.M.O.R.C.'s case, Rosicrucianism, with a Cagliostro-inspired Ancient Egyptian design sense). The secrets of the Universe can be yours! Just send us money! No doubt some people have indeed been able to open up their untapped potentials using these methods, but the up-front claims are way over the top, designed to dazzle rather than illuminate. Jeffrey Smith, on Colin Low's site, holds the works of the Bergs in lower regard than he does even that of the Golden Dawn, which he huffs at as "not Rabbinic" (of course it's not Rabbinic; it's Hermetic.)
The Zohar is the key to unlocking the secrets of the Universe, the Centre's site crows. Well, the Zohar is meaningless without the Torah, say Rabbinical scholars, and I have no reason to doubt them, as the few Zohar fragments I've read in translation merely come across as old tales, and rather dull ones at that; I know I'm missing all the patterns and puns and tricks and code-words I'd pick up if I knew Biblical Hebrew. Hermetic Kabbalah, arguably, can be studied with only a basic, general knowledge of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic cosmology — but the Zohar cannot.
[I should note that it is the experience of this gnostic agnostic that, for work with the Tree of Life/Sephiroth, an unanthropomorphised, impersonal, invisible, non-localized God is not only sufficient, but conceptually a better fit than a humanoid, male God sitting on a throne atop the clouds, stroking his long white beard. Let others memorize the names of angels and demons — to me, they're all metaphors. This, perhaps, more than my feminism, colors my non-judgmental attitude toward the Shekhinah.]
Despite what some Rabbis have been saying in their condemnations of the Berg school, gentiles have been studying Kabbalah for centuries. They've just been mostly selling books and pictures, not fashion accessories. $50 for a red thread for your wrist to ward off the Evil Eye? Kabbalah water? Kabbalah candles? What is this, Kabbalistic Catholicism? (Maybe that's Madonna's influence.) Really, I'm the last person to condemn syncretism, but you have to be clear you're playing mix-and-match, and not claim you're working in anyone's tradition but your own. (At least if you can't say your system is ancient, you can, like Gurdjieff, claim it as a fabulous new discovery.)
Moreover, the sale of mass-produced charms strikes me as out of line with the do-it-yourself ethic required for the deep understanding that is the principal benefit of Kabbalah. The strongest talisman is one you make yourself. Kabbalah is about what goes on between your ears, and a bauble of which the wearer has no understanding is worse than useless.
One thing I'm not going to knock Madonna for is appearing in one of her videos wearing tefillin (small boxes containing Hebrew scrolls, to be worn on the hand and head, traditionally only by Jewish men during prayer). This gave one online Rabbinical commentator, probably Orthodox, fits: supposedly, no modest, well-bred Jewish woman would go prancing around wearing tefillin. To the contrary, I have no doubt that there are some Reform and Reconstructionist congregations where such things are known to happen. So the worst you can say about Maddona is that by wearing them in a video, she is wearing them outside a devotional context. (Besides, I have a black silk keepa in my underwear drawer, which I neglected to give back after either a seder, or a funeral, some 10-15 years ago, so who would I be to talk about unauthorized ownership of devotional paraphernalia?)
Another disturbing development is the news that Madonna is bankrolling a Kabbalah program for children. Kabbalah is not kid stuff, never was. It's bad enough she's turned Britney Spears on to it.
There is a Jewish tradition that you mustn't study Kabbalah before age 40, or you will go mad. This isn't just the old fogies trying to keep the kiddies from having any fun; there's a reason behind it. However, like all rules that have a good reason behind them, knowing the reason is the best guide for how to break the rule with impunity. I first read Yetzirah (in translation) at age 28, and it didn't do me a lick of harm. (Some of my acquaintances might beg to differ....)
The tradition that premature study of Kabbalah is a danger to the young mind is based on the idea that one needs to be well-grounded in everyday, practical reality (no matter how boring and venal) before messing with such abstract concepts as Kabbalah is rife with. The same idea emerges in Trivarga, the three-stage Hindu Vedic sequence of pursuits: first Artha, learning a trade and the practical skills needed to acquire and maintain property and/or wealth; next Kama, that is, love, pleasure, and sensual enjoyment in general (not just sex, but, for example, music appreciation); and only after that Dharma (law), ritual life and the pursuit of one's spiritual journey. Moreover, only after all three have been learned can Moksha (liberation from reincarnation and the Wheel of Karma) be attained. Similarly, in Western society, it pays to have a good understanding of the physical universe first, the more subjective and changeable social and economic world next, and only after that the ultimately subjective world of abstract philosophy.
Looking back, I see a few reasons why it was possible for me to read Yetzirah "too young" by tradition, without being sent into a downward spiral of gibbering delusion. First, while I only "got" one small part of it (the part about the ten infinitudes), I didn't sweat the fact that I didn't "get" the rest. A few years later, when I actually knew the Hebrew alphabet, I re-read it and it made a lot more sense; but it wasn't anything that kept me up at night in the meantime. When I was ready to make the attempt, I did so, and was rewarded with a few more nuggets of understanding. The Yetzirah definitely rewards re-reading.
Second, the Yetzirah was not the first time I'd encountered an attempt at a comprehensive, abstract model of the Universe. I'd majored in Chemistry, after all, which had required the study of physics, including such counter-intuitive notions as wave-particle duality and quantum tunneling. I could contemplate such paradoxes without my brain exploding. By the time I read Yetzirah I was already used to four mathematically modellable dimensions (three of space and one of time); when (in the section on the ten infinitudes) a fifth dimension, defined by polarities of Good and Evil, was added to the clearly-discernible first four, it didn't seem like such a stretch.
Finally, though still young, I had already been living away from my parents for a number of years (mostly sharing big old urban houses with other hippies), making a living as a computer programmer, showing up for work, collecting and depositing my paycheck, paying my rent and utility bills, sharing cooking responsibilities with the group, doing my own laundry, filling out my own tax forms, catching buses and trains, using my light carpentry skills, buying and maintaining my first car, keeping track of my bank balance, etc. Any practice of mysticism which came to interfere, as would a drug habit (or indeed any other compulsion), with my ability to maintain my self-reliance, would have set off warning signals as they butted up against my "real life," such as it was, long before actual loose screws started falling out. A more sheltered person, whose practical daily wants were taken care of by others, might not have seen trouble coming before it was too late.
I won't begrudge Madonna her interest in Kabbalah, my aforementioned caveats aside regarding what tradition she thinks she's working in, and how much Hebrew she's bothered to learn. She's only four days younger than I am, and while she's spent most of her adult life in La-La Land, she worked hard to get where she is today, and she's nothing if not a shrewd businesswoman. Britney Spears, however, worries me; I have a suspicion that she didn't study Quantum Mechanics in school, and that she doesn't do her own laundry, let alone her own taxes.
So, bubelah, go ahead and read Kabbalah before you're 40 — but finish school before that, get a job, learn to take care of yourself and even a pet, maybe even settle down with your sweetie first. Otherwise you'll be looking for answers to all the wrong questions.
There was a recent murder case being tried in England, in which a schizophrenic woman, who had studied Bergian Kabbalah, was being tried for the murder of (I believe) her mother — she killed her because she had taken her for a witch, or demon, or some other such menacing supernatural creature.
This in itself does not make the Berg system specifically, or Kabbalah in general, a "dangerous cult," as some have called it. But it illustrates vividly — luridly, in fact — the principle that you need to have both feet on the ground to study Kabbalah and related mystical systems safely. It is a structure for perceiving reality, for interpreting and ordering what you already know of reality; it is not a substitute for that reality.
Some years ago, a college classmate of mine, who had been raised in a fairly mainstream Protestant church, but who for reasons most likely having to do with his family background was in search of his "place" in the world, which continually eluded him, dove down the rabbithole of Gematria. Gematria is Hebrew numerology, dependent on knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet and heavily influenced by the Talmud and the Kabbalah. I take a dim view of numerology in general — most systems are arbitrary Roman-letter-to-Arabic-number maps, garbage-in, garbage-out, nothing more than kaleidoscopic toys through which the paranoid may see what he wants to see. Gematria, unlike most numerological systems you'll encounter these days, is genuinely old, and dependent on an alphabet whose characters were also used as numbers in everyday life. Beyond that, I know nothing about it — neither what it aims to achieve, nor the manner by which it is to be achieved.
Gematria, in particular, has a reputation for driving its practitioners mad — a reputation which I am still not in a position to judge, as I believe my friend was, in fact, diagnosed with schizophrenia before seizing upon this system as the key to Life's mysteries. But whatever was wrong with Brother J. to begin with only became worse, as his letters to me became increasingly festooned with unglossed Hebrew and arcane arithmetic. At one point he shipped me his Aramaic dictionary, a huge, two-volumed hardback set, to what purpose I never discerned. Ultimately, what he thought would be his vehicle for finally grasping the world, only made it more difficult to operate within it. He is now dead, of causes unrelated to his condition or to Gematria, so I will never know how much worse it could have gotten.
This convinced me, at any rate, that those whose grip on everyday reality is tenuous to begin with should stay away from Kabbalah, Gematria, or indeed any system that purports to explain Life, the Universe, and Everything. The map is not the territory (as Robert Anton Wilson would say, quoting someone else), and if you're looking for the answer to everything, you need to know enough about everything (physics, biology, geography, climate, history, anthropology, economics, psychology, technology, civics, war, etc., etc.) in order to frame the question correctly. Otherwise, the purported answers start driving the questions, rather than the other way around.
© 2004 E. J. Barnes