Theosophy - The Kabalah and the Kabalists by H.P.Blavatsky
Adyar Pamphlet
No 105, September 1919
The Kabalah and the
Kabalists
by
H.P. Blavatsky
Theosophical Publishing House,
Adyar, Chennai (Madras) India
The Kabalah and the Kabalists
at the Close of the Nineteenth Century
[Reprinted from Lucifer Vol X.]
[The spelling of the word is various; some write
Cabbalah, others Kabbalah. The latest writers have introduced a new spelling
as more consonant with the Hebrew manner of writing the word and made it Quabalah.
This is more grammatical, perhaps, but as no Englishman will ever pronounce
a foreign name or word but in an Englishified way, to write the term simply
Kabalah seems less pretentious and answers as well.]
UNIVERSAL
aspirations, especially when impeded and suppressed in their free manifestation,
die out but to return with tenfold power. They are cyclic, like every other
natural phenomenon, whether mental or cosmic, universal or national. Dam a river
in one place, and the water will work its way into another, and break out through
it like a torrent.
One of such universal aspirations, the strongest
perhaps in man’s nature, is the longing to seek for the unknown; an ineradicable
desire to penetrate below the surface of things, a thirst for the knowledge
of that which is hidden from others. Nine children out of ten will break their
toys to see what there is inside. It is an innate feeling and is Protean in
form. It rises from the ridiculous (or perhaps rather from the reprehensible)
to the sublime, for it is limited to indiscreet inquisitiveness, prying into
neighbours secrets, in the uneducated, and it expands in the cultured into that
love for knowledge which ends in leading them to the summits of science, and
fills the Academies and the Royal Institutions with learned men.
But this pertains to the world of the objective.
The man in whom the metaphysical element is stronger than the physical, is propelled
by this natural aspiration towards the mystical, to that which the materialist
is pleased to call “superstitious belief in the supernatural”. The
Church, while encouraging our aspirations after the holy - on strictly theological
and orthodox lines, of course - condemns at the same time the human craving
after the same, whenever the practical search after it departs from its own
lines. The memory of the thousands of illiterate “witches” and the
hundreds of learned alchemists, philosophers and other heretics, tortured, burnt,
and otherwise put to death during the Middle Ages, remains as an ever-present
witness to that arbitrary and despotic interference.
In the present age both Church and Science, the
blindly-believing and the all-denying, are arrayed against the Secret Sciences,
though both Church and Science believed in and practiced them - especially the
Kabalah - at a not very distant period of history. One says now: “It is
of the devil!” the other that “the devil is a creation of the Church,
and a disgraceful superstition”; in short that there is neither devil
nor occult sciences. The first one forgets that it has publicly proclaimed,
hardly four hundred years ago, the Jewish Kabalah as the greatest witness
to the truths of Christianity! [This is demonstrated by what we know of the
life of John Picus de Mirandola. Ginsburg and others have stated the following
facts, namely, that after having studied the Kabalah, Mirandola “found
that there is more Christianity than Judaism in the Kabalah; he discovered in
it proofs of the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Divinity of
Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem, the fall of the Angels,” and so on. “In
1486, when only twenty-four years old, he published 900 theses, which were placarded
in Rome (not without the consent or knowledge surely of the Pope and his Government),
and which he undertook to defend in the presence of all European scholars, whom
he invited to the Eternal City, promising to defray their traveling expenses.
Among the theses was the following: ‘No science yields greater proof of
the Divinity of Christ than magic and the Cabbalah.’” The reason
why will be shown in the present article.] the second, that the most illustrious
men of science were all alchemists, astrologers and magicians - witness Paracelsus,
Van Helmont, Roger Bacon, etc. But consistency has never been a virtue of Modern
Science. It has religiously believed in all which it now denies, and it has
denied all that it now believes in, from the circulation of the blood up to
steam and electric power
This sudden change of attitude in both powers cannot
prevent events from taking their natural course. The last quarter of our century
is witnessing an extraordinary outbreak of occult studies, and Magic dashes
once more its powerful waves against the rocks of Church and Science, which
it is slowly but as surely undermining. Anyone whose natural mysticism impels
him to seek for sympathetic contact with other minds, is astonished to find
how large a number of persons are not only interested in Mysticism generally,
but are actually themselves Kabalists. The river dammed during the Middle Ages
has flowed since noiselessly underground, and has now burst up as an irrepressible
torrent. Hundreds today study the Kabalah, where scarcely one or two could have
been found some fifty years ago, when fear of the Church was still a powerful
factor in men's lives. But the long-pent-up torrent has now diverged into two
streams - Eastern Occultism and the Jewish Kabalah; the traditions of the Wisdom-Religion
of the races that preceded the Adam of the “Fall”; and the system
of the ancient Levites of Israel, who most ingeniously veiled a portion of that
religion of the Pantheists under the mask of monotheism.
Unfortunately many are called but few chosen. The
two systems threaten the world of the mystic with a speedy conflict, which,
instead of increasing the spread of the One Universal Truth, will necessarily
only weaken and impede its progress. But the question is not, once more, which
is the one truth, for both are founded upon the eternal verities of prehistoric
knowledge, as both, in the present age and the state of mental transition through
which humanity is now passing, can give out only a certain portion of these
verities. It is simply a question: “Which of the two systems contains
most unadulterated facts; and, most important of all - which of the two presents
its teachings in the most Catholic (i.e., unsectarian) and impartial
manner?” One - the Eastern system - has veiled for ages its profound pantheistic
unitarianism with the exuberance of an exoteric polytheism; the other - as said
above - with the screen of exoteric monotheism. Both are but masks to hide the
sacred truth from the profane; for neither the Âryan nor the Semitic philosophers
have ever accepted either the anthropomorphism of the many Gods, or the personality
of the one God, as a philosophical proposition. But it is impossible, within
the limits we have at our disposal, to attempt to enter upon a minute discussion
of this question. We must be content with a simpler task. The rites and ceremonies
of the Jewish law seem to be an abyss, which long generations of Christian Fathers,
and especially of Protestant Reformers, have vainly sought to fill in with their
far-fetched interpretations. Yet all the early Christians, Paul and the Gnostics,
regarded and proclaimed the Jewish law as essentially distinct from the new
Christian law. St. Paul called the former an allegory, and St. Stephen told
the Jews an hour before being stoned that they had not even kept the law that
they received from the angels (the æons), and as to the Holy Ghost (the
impersonal Logos or Christos, as taught at Initiation) they had resisted and
rejected it as their fathers had done (Acts vii). This was virtually
telling them that their law was inferior to the later one. Notwithstanding that
the Mosaic Books, which we think we have in the Old Testament,
cannot be more than two or three centuries older than Christianity, the Protestants
have nevertheless made of them their Sacred Canon, on a par with, if not higher
than, the Gospels. But when the Pentateuch was written, or rather re-written
after Ezdras, i.e., after the Rabbis has settled upon a new departure,
a number of additions were made which were taken bodily from Persian and Babylonian
doctrines; and this at a period subsequent to the colonization of Judea
under the authority of the kings of Persia. This re-editing was of course done
in the same way as with all such Scriptures. They were originally written in
a secret key, or cipher, known only to the Initiates. But instead of adapting
the contents to the highest spiritual truths as taught in the third,
the highest, degree of Initiation, and expressed in symbolical language - as
may be seen even in the exoteric Purânas of India - the writers
of the Pentateuch, revised and corrected, they who cared but for earthly
and national glory, adapted only to astro-physiological symbols the supposed
events of the Abrahams, Jacobs, and Solomons, and the fantastic history of their
little race. Thus they produced, under the mask of monotheism, a religion of
sexual and phallic worship, one that concealed an adoration of the Gods, or
the lower æons. No one would maintain that anything like the dualism and
the angelolatry of Persia, brought by the Jews from the captivity, could ever
be found in the real Law, or Books of Moses. For how, in such case, could
the Sadducees, who reverenced that Law, reject angels, as well as the soul and
its immortality? And yet angels, if not the soul’s immortal nature, are
distinctly asserted to exist in the Old Testament, and are found in the
Jewish modern scrolls. [This is just what the Gnostics had always maintained
quite independently of the Christians. In their doctrines the Jewish God, the
“Elohim,” was a hierarchy of low terrestrial angels - an Ildabaoth,
spiteful and jealous.]
This fact of the successive and widely differing
redactions of that which we loosely term the Books of Moses, and of their triple
adaptation to the first (lowest), second, and third or highest, degree of Sodalian
initiation and that still more puzzling fact of the diametrically opposite beliefs
of the Sadducees and the other Jewish sects, all accepting, nevertheless, the
same Revelation - can be made comprehensible only in the light of our
Esoteric explanation. It also shows the reason why, when Moses and the Prophets
belonged to the Sodalities (the great Mysteries), the latter yet seem so often
to fulminate against the abominations of the Sodales and their “Sod”.
For had the Old Canon been translated literally, as is claimed, instead of being
adapted to a monotheism absent from it, and to the spirit of each sect, as the
differences in the Septuagint and Vulgate prove, the following contradictory
sentences would be added to the hundreds of other inconsistencies in “Holy
Writ”. “Sod Ihoh (the mysteries of Johoh, or Iehovah) are
for those who fear him,” says Psalm xxx 14, mistranslated “the
secret of the Lord is with them that fear him.” Again “Al (EL) is
terrible in the great Sod of the Kadeshim” is rendered as - God is greatly
to be feared in the assembly of the saints” (Psalm Ixxxix 7). The title
of Kadeshim (Kadosh sing) means in reality something quite different from saints,
though it is generally explained as “priests,” the “holy”
and the “Initiated”; for the Kadeshim were simply the galli
of the abominable mysteries (Sod) of the exoteric rites. They were, in short,
the male Nautches of the temples, during whose initiations the arcanum, the
Sod (from which “Sodom,” perchance,) of physiological and sexual
evolution, were divulged. These rites all belonged to the first degree of the
Mysteries, so protected and beloved by David - the " friend of God”.
They must have been very ancient with the Jews, and were ever abominated by
the true Initiates; thus we find the dying Jacob’s prayer is that his
soul should not come into the secret (Sod, in the original) of
Simeon and Levi (the priestly caste) and into their assembly during which
they “slew a man” (Genesis, xIix 5,6) [To “slay
a man” meant, in the symbolism of the Lesser Mysteries, the rite during
which crimes against nature were committed, for which purpose the Kadashim were
set aside. Thus Cain “slays” his brother Abel, who, esoterically,
is a female character and represents the first human woman in the Third
Race after the separation of sexes. See also The Source of Measures,
pp 253, 283, etc.] And yet Moses is claimed by the Kabalists as chief of the
Sodales! Reject the explanation of the Secret Doctrine and the
whole Pentateuch becomes the abomination of abominations.
Therefore do we find Jehovah, the anthropomorphic
God, everywhere in the Bible, but of AIN
SUPH not one word is said. And therefore, also, was the Jewish metrology
quite different from the numeral methods of other people. Instead of serving
as an adjunct to other pre-arranged methods, to penetrate therewith as with
a key into the hidden or implied meaning contained within the literal sentences
- as the initiated Brahmins do to this day, when reading their sacred books
- the numeral system with the Jews, is, as the author of Hebrew Metrology
tells us, the Holy Writ itself: “That very thing, in esse, on which,
and out of which, and by the continuous interweaving use of which, the very
text of the Bible has been made to result, as its enunciation, from the beginning
word of Genesis to the closing word of Deuteronomy.”
So true is this, indeed, that the authors of the
New Testament, who had to blend their system with both the Jewish and
the Pagan, had to borrow their most metaphysical symbols not from the Pentateuch,
or even the Kabalah, but from the Âryan astro-symbology. One instance
will suffice. Whence the dual meaning of the First-born, the Lamb, the Unborn,
and the Eternal - all relating to the Logos or Christos? We say from the Samskrit
Aja, a word the meanings of which are: (a) the Ram, or the Lamb, the
first sign of the Zodiac, called in astronomy Mesha ; (b) the Unborn,
a title of the first Logos, or Brahmâ, the self-existent cause of all,
described and so referred to in the Upanishads.
The Hebrew Kabalistic Gematria, Notaricon, and
T’mura are very ingenious methods, giving the key to the secret meaning
of Jewish symbology, one that applied the relations of their sacred imagery
only to one side of Nature - namely, the physical side. Their myths and the
names and the events attributed to their Biblical personages were made to correspond
with astronomical revolutions and sexual evolution, and had nought to do with
the spiritual states of man; hence no such correspondences are to be found in
the reading of their sacred canon. The real Mosaic Jews of the Sodales, whose
direct heirs on the line of initiation were the Sadducees, had no spirituality
in them, nor did they feel any need for it apparently. The reader, whose ideas
of Initiation and Adeptship are intimately blended with the mysteries of the
after-life and soul survival, will now see the reason for the great yet natural
inconsistencies found on almost every page of the Bible. Thus, in the
Book of Job, a Kabalistic treatise on Egypto-Arabic Initiation, the
symbolism of which conceals the highest spiritual mysteries, one finds yet this
significant and purely materialistic verse: “Man born of a woman is .
. . like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth
not” (xiv 1, 2). But Job speaks here of the personality, and he
is right; for no Initiate would say that the personality long survived the death
of the physical body; the spirit alone is immortal. But this sentence in Job,
the oldest document in the Bible, makes only the more brutally materialistic
that in Ecclesiastes, iii, 19, et seq., one of the latest records.
The writer, who speaks in the name of Solomon, and says that “that which
befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts, even . . . as the one
dieth so dieth the other . . . so that a man hath no preeminence above a
beast,” is quite on a par with the modern Hæckels, and expresses
only that which he thinks.
Therefore, no knowledge of Kabalistic methods can
help one in finding that in the Old Testament which has never been there
since the Book of the Law was re-written (rather than found) by Hilkiah.
Nor can the reading of the Egyptian symbols be much helped by the mediaeval
Kabalistic systems. Indeed it is but the blindness of a pious illusion that
can lead anyone to discover any spiritual and metaphysical correspondences or
meaning in the Jewish purely astro-physiological symbology. On the other hand,
the ancient pagan religious systems, so-called, are all built upon abstract
spiritual speculations, their gross external forms being, perhaps, the most
secure veil to hide their inner meaning.
It can be demonstrated, on the authority of the
most learned Kabalists of our day, that the Zohar, and almost all the
Kabalistic works, have passed through Christian hands. Hence they cannot be
considered any longer as universal, but have become simply sectarian. This is
well shown by Picus de Mirandola’s thesis upon the proposition that “no
Science yields greater proof of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Kabalah”.
This is true of the divinity of the Logos, or of the Christos of the Gnostics;
because that Christos remains the same WORD
of the ever-unmanifested Deity, whether we call it Parabrahm or Ain Suph
- by whatever name he himself is called - Krshna, Buddha, or Ormazd. But this
Christos is neither the Christ of the Churches, nor yet the Jesus of the Gospels;
it is only an impersonal Principle. Nevertheless the Latin Church made
capital of this thesis, the result of which was that, as in the last century,
so it is now in Europe and America. Almost every Kabalist is now a believer
in a personal God, in the very teeth of the original impersonal
Ain Suph, and is, moreover, a more or less heterodox, but still a Christian.
This is due entirely to the ignorance of most people (a) that the Kabalah
(the Zohar, especially) we have, is not the original Book of Splendour,
written down from the oral teachings of Simon Ben Jochai; and (b) that the latter,
being indeed an exposition of the hidden sense of the writings of Moses (so-called),
was as equally good an exponent of the Esoteric meaning contained under the
shell of the literal sense in the Scriptures of any Pagan religion. Nor do the
modern Kabalists seem to be aware of the fact that the Kabalah as it now stands,
with its more than revised texts, its additions made to apply to the New
as much as to the Old Testament, its numerical language recomposed so
as to apply to both, and its crafty veiling, is no longer able now to furnish
all the ancient and primitive meanings. In short that no Kabalistic work now
extant among the Western nations can display any greater mysteries of nature
than those which Ezra & Co., and the later co-workers of Moses de Leon,
desired to unfold; the Kabalah contains no more than the Syrian and Chaldean
Christians and ex-Gnostics of the thirteenth century wanted those works to reveal.
And what they do reveal hardly repays the trouble of passing one’s life
in studying it. For if they may, and do, present a field of immense interest
to the Mason and mathematician, they can teach scarcely anything to the student
hungering after spiritual mysteries. The use of all the seven keys to unlock
the mysteries of Being in this life, and the lives to come, as in those which
have gone by, shows that the Chaldean Book of Numbers, and the Upanishads
undeniably conceal the most divine philosophy - as it is that of the Universal
Wisdom Religion. But the Zohar, now so mutilated, can show nothing of
the kind. Besides which, who of Western Philosophers or students has all
those keys at his command? These are now entrusted only to the highest Initiates
in Gupta Vidyâ, to great Adepts; and, surely it is no self-taught
tyro, not even an isolated mystic, however great his genius and natural powers,
who can hope to unravel in one life more than one or two of the lost
keys. [The writer in the Masonic Review is thus quite justified in saying
as he does, that “the Kabalistic field is that in which astrologers, necromancers,
black and white magicians, fortune-tellers, chiromancers, and all the like,
revel and make claims to super-naturalism ad nauseam”: and he adds:
“The Christian, quarrying into its mass of mysticism, claims its support
and authority for that most perplexing of all problems, the Holy Trinity, and
the portrayed character of Christ. With equal assurance, but more effrontery,
the knave, in the name of Cabbalah, will sell amulets and charms, tell fortunes,
draw horoscopes, and just as readily give specific rules . . . for raising the
dead, and actually - the devil . . . Discovery has yet to be made of what Cabbalah
really consists, before any weight or authority can be given to the name. On
that discovery will rest the question whether the name should be received as
related to matters worthy of rational acknowledgment.” The writer claims
that such a discovery has been made, and that the same embraces rational
science of sober and great worth “The Cabbalah,” from the Masonic
Review for September, 1885, by Brother J Ralston Skinner (Millian Lodge
No.141).]
The key to the Jewish metrology has been undeniably
unraveled and a very important key it is. But as we may infer from the words
of the discoverer himself in the foot-note just quoted - though that key (concealed
in the sacred Metrology) discloses the fact that “Holy Writ” contains
a rational science of sober and great worth, yet it helps to unveil no higher
spiritual truth than that which all astrologers have insisted upon in every
age; i.e., the close relation between the sidereal and all the terrestrial
bodies . . . human beings included. The history of our globe and its humanities
is prototyped in the astronomical heavens from first to last, though the Royal
Society of Physicists may not become aware of it for ages yet to come. By the
showing of the said discoverer himself, “the burden of this secret doctrine,
this Cabbalah, is of pure truth and right reason, for it is geometry with applied
proper numbers, of astronomy and of a system of measures, viz., the Masonic
inch, the twenty-four inch gauge (or the double foot), the yard, and the mile.
These were claimed to be of divine relation and importation, by the possession
and use of which, it could be said of Abram: ‘Blessed of the Most High
God, Abram, measure of heaven and earth’ “- the creative law
of measure”.
And is this all that the primitive Kabalah
contained? No; for the author remarks elsewhere: “What the originally
intended and right reading was (in the Pentateuch), who can tell?”—thus
allowing the reader to infer that the meanings implied in the exoteric or dead
letter of the Hebrew texts, are by no means only those revealed by metrology.
Therefore are we justified in saying that the Jewish Kabalah, with its numerical
methods, is now only one of the keys to the ancient mysteries, and that
the Eastern or Âryan systems alone can supply the rest and unveil the
whole truth of Creation. [Even as it stands now, the Kabalah, with its
several methods, can only puzzle by offering several versions: it can never
divulge the whole truth. The readings of even the first sentence of Genesis
are several. To quote the author: “It is made to read ‘Brahith bara
Elohim,’ etc., ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth,’ wherein Elohim is a plural nominative to a verb in the third person
singular. Nachminedes called attention to the fact that the text might suffer
the reading, ‘Brash ithbara Elohim,’ etc., ‘In the head (source
or beginning) created itself (or developed) gods, the heavens and the earth,
really a more grammatical rendering’. “(Ibid.) And yet we
are forced to believe the Jewish monotheism!]
What this numeral system is, we leave
its discoverer to explain himself. According to him:
Like all other human productions
of the kind, the Hebrew text of the Bible was in characters which could serve
as sound signs for syllable utterance, or for the purpose of what are called
letters. Now in the first place, these original character signs were also
pictures, each one of them; and these pictures of themselves stood for ideas
which could be communicated, much like the original Chinese letters. Gustav
Seyffarth shows that the Egyptian hieroglyphics numbered over 600 picture
characters, which embraced the modified use, syllabically, of the original
number of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The characters of the Hebrew text
of the sacred scroll were divided into classes, in which the characters of
each class were interchangeable; whereby one form might be exchanged for another
to carry a modified signification, both by letter, and picture, and number.
Seyffarth shows the modified form of the very ancient Hebrew alphabet in the
old Coptic by this law of interchange of characters.
[Before Seyffarth can hope to have his hypotheses accepted, however, he will
have to prove that (a) the Israelites had an alphabet of their own when the
ancient Egyptians or Copts had as yet none; and (b) that the Hebrew of the
later scrolls is the Hebrew, or “mystery language” of Moses, which
the Secret Doctrine denies.] This law of permitted interchange of letters
is to be found quite fully set forth in the Hebrew dictionaries . . . Though
recognized . . . it is very perplexing and hard to understand, because we
have lost the specific use and power of such interchange. (Just so!) In the
second place these characters stood for numbers - as we use specific
number signs - though also there is very much to prove that the old Hebrews
were in possession of the so-called Arabic numerals, as we have them, from
the straight line 1 to the zero character, together making 1 plus 9=10 . .
. In the third place, it is said, and it seems to be proved, that these characters
stood for musical notes; so that, for instance, the arrangement of the letters
in the first chapter of Genesis, can be rendered musically or by song.
[Not the Hebrew helped by the Massoretic signs, at all events. See further
on, however.] Another law of the Hebrew characters was that only the consonantal
signs were characterized - the vowels were not characterized, but were supplied.
If one will try it, he will find that a consonant itself cannot be made vocal
without the help of a vowel, [And therefore, as the vowels were furnished
ad libitum by the Massorets, they could make of a word that they liked!]
therefore . . . the consonants made the framework of a word, but to give it
life or utterance into the air, so as to impart the thought of the mind, and
the feelings of the heart, the vowels were supplied.
Now, even if we suppose, for argument’s sake,
that the “framework,” i.e., the consonants, of the Pentateuch
is the same as in the days of Moses, what changes must have been effected with
those scrolls - written in such a poor language as the Hebrew, with its less
than two dozens of letters - when re-written time after time, and its vowels
and points supplied in ever-new combinations! No two minds are alike, and the
feelings of the heart change. What could remain, we ask, of the original writings
of Moses, if such ever existed, when they had been lost for nearly eight hundred
years and then found when every remembrance of them must have disappeared from
the minds of the most learned, and Hilkiah has them re-written by Shaphan, the
scribe? When lost again, they are re-written again by Ezra; lost once more in
168 B.C. the volume or scrolls were again destroyed; and when finally they reappear,
we find them dressed in their Massoretic disguise! We may know something of
Ben Chajim, who published the Massorah of the scrolls in the fifteenth century;
we can know nothing of Moses, this is certain, unless we become - Initiates
of the Eastern School.
Ahrens, when speaking of the letters so arranged
in the Hebrew sacred scrolls - that they were of themselves musical notes -
had probably never studied Âryan Hindû music. In the Samskrt language
there is no need to so arrange letters in the sacred ollas that they
should become musical. For the whole Samskrt alphabet and the Vedas,
from the first word to the last, are musical notations reduced to writing, and
the two are inseparable. [See The Theosophist, November 1879, article
Hindû Music p 47.] As Homer distinguished between the “language
of Gods” and the language of men, [The Theosophist, xiv
289, 290.] so did the Hindûs.
The Devanâgari - the Samskrt character
- is the “Speech of the Gods” and Samskrt the divine language. [The
Samskrt letters are three times as numerous as the poor twenty-two letters of
the Hebrew alphabet. They are all musical and are read, or rather chanted according
to a system given in very old Tântrika works ( see Tântra Shâstras);
and are called Devanâgari, “the speech or language of the
Gods”. And since each answers to a numeral, and has therefore a far larger
scope for expression and meaning, it must necessarily be far more perfect and
far older than the Hebrew, which followed the system, but could apply it only
in a very limited way. If either of the two languages were taught to humanity
by the Gods, surely it is rather Samskrt - the perfect of the most perfect languages
on Earth - than Hebrew, the roughest and the poorest. For once we believe in
a language of divine origin, we can hardly believe at the same time that
angels or Gods or any divine messenger should have selected the inferior in
preference to the superior.] As to the Hebrew, let the modern Isaiahs cry “Woe
is me!” and confess that which “the newly-discovered mode of language
(Hebrew metrology), veiled under the words of the sacred Text,” has now
clearly shown. Read The Source of Measures, read all the other able treatises
on the subject by the same author.
And then the reader will find
that with the utmost goodwill and incessant efforts covering many years of study,
the laborious scholar, having penetrated under the mask of the system, can find
in it little more than pure anthropomorphism. In man, and on man alone, rest
the whole scheme of the Kabalah, and to man and his functions, on however enlarged
a scale, everything in it is made to apply. Man, as the Archetypal Man or Adam,
is made to contain the whole Kabalistic system. He is the great symbol and shadow,
thrown by the manifested Kosmos, itself the reflection of the impersonal and
ever-incomprehensible principle; and this shadow furnishes by its construction
- the personal grown out of the impersonal - a kind of objective and tangible
symbol of everything visible and invisible in the Universe. “As the First
Cause was utterly unknown and un-nameable, such names as were adopted as most
sacred (In Bible and Kabalah) and commonly made applicable to the Divine
Being, were after all not so,” but were mere manifestations of
the unknowable,
such in a cosmic or natural sense, as could become known to man. Hence these
names were not so sacred as commonly held, inasmuch as with all created
things they were themselves but names or enunciations of things known. As to
metrology, instead of a valuable adjunct to the Biblical system . . . the entire
text of the Holy Writ in the Mosaic books is not only replete with it as a system,
but the system itself is that very thing, in esse,
from the first to the last word.
For instance,
the narratives of the first day of the six days, of the seventh day, of the
making of Adam, male and female, of Adam in the Garden, of the formation of
the woman out of the man, of . . . the genealogy of Ararat, of the ark of
Noah with his dove and raven . . . of Abram’s travel from Ur . . . into
Egypt before Pharaoh, of Abram’s life, of the three covenants . . .
of the construction of the tabernacle and the dwelling of Jehovah, of the
famous 603,550 as the number of men capable of bearing arms . . . the exodus
out of Egypt, and the like - all are but so many modes of enunciation of this
system of geometry, of applied number ratios, of measures and their various
applications.
And the author of Hebrew Metrology ends by saying:
Whatever may have been the
Jewish mode of complete interpretation of these books, the Christian Church
has taken them for what they show on their first face and that only.
The Christian Church has never attributed to these books any property beyond
this; and herein has existed its great error.
But the Western European Kabalists, and many of
the American (though luckily not all), claim to correct this error of their
Church. How far do they succeed and where is the evidence of their success?
Read all the volumes published on the Kabalah in the course of this century;
and if we except a few volumes issued recently in America, it will be found
that not a single Kabalist has penetrated even skin deep below the surface of
that “first face”. Their digests are pure speculation and hypotheses
and - no more. One bases his glosses on Ragon’s Masonic revelations; another
takes Fabre d’Olivet for his prophet - this writer having never been a
Kabalist, though he was genius of wonderful, almost miraculous, erudition, and
a polyglot linguist. greater than whom there was since his day none, even among
the philologists of the French Academy, which refused to take notice of his
work. Others, again, believe that no greater Kabalist was born among the sons
of men than the late Eliphas Levi - a charming and witty writer, who, however,
has more mystified than taught in his many volumes on Magic. Let not the reader
conclude from these statements that real, learned Kabalists are not to be found
in the Old and New World. There are initiated Occultists, who are Kabalists,
scattered hither and thither, most undeniably, especially in Germany and Poland.
But these will not publish what they know, nor will they call themselves
Kabalists. The ‘Sodalian oath” of the third degree holds
now as ever.
But there are those who are pledged
to no secrecy. Those writers are the only ones on whose information the Kabalists
ought to rely, however incomplete their statements from the standpoint of a
full revelation, i,e., of the sevenfold Esoteric meaning. It is they
who care least for those secrets after which alone the modern Hermetist and
Kabalist is now hungering - such as the transmutation into gold, and the Elixir
of Life, or the Philosopher’s Stone - for physical purposes. For
all the chief secrets of the Occult teachings are concerned with the highest
spiritual knowledge. They deal with mental states, not with physical processes
and their transformations. In a word, the real, genuine Kabalah, the only original
copy of which is contained in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, pertains
to, and teaches about, the realm of spirit, not that of matter.
What, then, is the Kabalah, in reality, and does
it afford a revelation of such higher spiritual mysteries? The writer answers
most emphatically - No. What the Kabalistic keys and methods were, in the origin
of the Pentateuch and other sacred scrolls and documents of the Jews
now no longer extant, is one thing; what they are now is quite another. The
Kabalah is a manifold language; moreover, one whose reading is determined by
the dead-letter face text of the record to the deciphered. It teaches and helps
one to read the Esoteric, real meaning hidden under the mask of that dead letter;
it cannot create a text or make one find in the document under study
that which has never been in it from the beginning. The Kabalah - such as we
have it now - is inseparable from the text of the Old Testament, as remodeled
by Ezra and others. And as the Hebrew Scriptures, or their contents, have been
repeatedly altered - notwithstanding the ancient boast that not one letter in
the Sacred Scroll, not an iota, has ever been changed - so no Kabalistic methods
can help us by reading into it anything besides what there is in it. He who
does it is no Kabalist, but a dreamer.
Lastly, the profane reader should learn the difference
between the Kabalah and Kabalistic works, before he is made to face other arguments.
For the Kabalah is no special volume, nor is it even a system. It consists of
seven different systems applied to seven different interpretations of any given
Esoteric work or subject. These systems were always transmitted by one
generation of Initiates to another, under the pledge of the Sodalian oath, and
they have never been recorded in writing by anyone. Those who speak of
translating the Kabalah into this or another tongue may as well talk of translating
the wordless signal-chants of the Bedouin brigands into some particular language.
Kabalah, as a word, is derived from the root Kbl (Kebel) “to
hand over,” to receive” orally. It is erroneous to say, as
Kenneth Mackenzie does in his Royal Masonic Cyclopedia, that “the
doctrine of the Kabalah refers to the system handed down by oral transmission,
and is nearly allied to tradition”; for in this sentence the first proposition
only is true, while the second is not. It is not allied to “tradition”
but to the seven veils or the seven truths orally revealed at Initiation.
Of these methods, pertaining to the universal pictorial languages - meaning
by “pictorial” any cipher, number symbol, or other glyph that can
be represented, whether objectively or subjectively (mentally)—three only
exist at present in the Jewish system. [Of those three not one can be made to
apply to purely spiritual metaphysics. One divulges the relations of the sidereal
bodies to the terrestrial, especially the human; the other relates to the evolution
of the human races and the sexes; the third to Kosmotheogony, and is metrological.]
Thus, if Kabalah as a word is Hebrew, the system itself is no more Jewish than
is sunlight; it is universal.
On the other hand, the Jews can claim the Zohar,
Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Creation), Sepher Dzeniuta, and a few others,
as their own undeniable property and as Kabalistic works.
|