After I had successfully placed four published books in the public domain, which is what DGRM and MARM consisted of at that time, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at writing a book that was not wedded to my previous opus, “Pyramid of Power,” since both of these books were a product of that original work. I also wanted to publish a book through either Weiser or Llewellyn, the biggest occult book publishers at that time. I felt that I would get a lot more notoriety being an author with books published in either of those publishing firms. These were my thoughts back in early 2010.
Since I personally knew the acquisitions editor for Llewellyn, having met her at Pantheacon gatherings and briefly talking to her, I thought that I would try my luck with that publishing company first. When talking to her, she told me that they were looking for authors to publish books in a “For Beginners” series, and one major unfilled entry that they had was the Qabalah. Of course, I sort of shuttered at first about taking on such a writing project, but then I realized that I already had a lot of writings on the Qabalah. As part of the background education for the Order I had written up some documents for the Qabalah and had passed them around to my fellow members. These documents were written poorly and did not have my current style of writing, so they would need to be revised and rewritten. However, that was better than having to start with no writings at all.
I was able to put together a table of contents quite easily to scope out what I wanted to write, but then I realized that not only were some of my ideas out of date, some of them contained information that was incorrect or inaccurate. I also lacked a standard set of practices and rituals, and I did not have a very good understanding of the history of the Qabalah. So, I began a period of research that lasted for several months while I also worked on rewriting the sections of text that I had previously poorly written. This has become the typical pattern when embarking on writing a book. What I think I know and have used for many years can be either stale or actually erroneous. I had a number of erroneous ideas and perspectives on the Qabalah that needed some deep research to bring them into a much more accurate presentation. It was an excellent learning situation, and I added considerably to my existing knowledge of the Qabalah as a result of that research. I submitted my first manuscript version in April 2012, and a month or so later, had my final version. The book came out in print in January, 2013.
Despite all of that rewriting and researching, I had to rewrite whole chapters of that book after I submitted it to Llewellyn. The marketing staff at Llewellyn had problems with the more advanced writing style and conceptual narrative that I used, and the subject matter was thought to be too complex or difficult for a beginner. What I didn’t want to do was write a book “Qabalah for Dummies” that was too simplistic to be useful for most occultists and ritual magicians. I wanted to write a book that presented the basic concepts to my readers, but also included more advanced ideas and practices for the more advanced student.
The book, as it was finally sent to the printers, took a middle ground between beginner and advanced students that I felt would be more engaging and interesting to someone who already knew something about the subject area, but wanted to proceed to a more advanced perspective. I feel that I was correct in taking that writing approach, although a few readers left negative reviews because they had assumed that the book was really a beginners guide. I don’t really feel bad about that, since the Qabalah is a very complex topic and if you are going to approach it as a magical discipline then simplicity and a shallow purview must be replaced with a more complex and deeper presentation. The Qabalah is not really a topic to be tackled by the uninformed nor the rank beginner, so it is in a similar position as Enochian magic or grimoire magic - it is not for actual beginners. So that is how the book “Magical Qabalah for Beginners” was developed.
Here is the advertisement for the book, as it is currently written on the back of the cover.
Discover the history and theory of Qabalah as well as its practical ritual uses. Explore the five basic but essential parts of Qabalah: the ten Sephiroth, the twenty-two paths, the Four Worlds, the Three Negative Veils, and the Tree of Life.
The Qabalah is the symbolic key to the Western Mystery tradition. Gain invaluable insights into all occult systems including high magic, Tarot, astrology, alchemy, hermetics, and more. In Magical Qabalah for Beginners, Frater Barrabbas shows ritual magicians, Pagans, and occult students how to incorporate the Qabalah into practice, using tables of correspondences, numerology, acronyms and formulae, sigils and ciphers, contemplation, and the theurgy of ascension. Now is the time to penetrate the mystical properties of Qabalah and make them work in your life.
I also had some good reviews from a few individuals who read the printer’s galley version, and these were included in the book. I guess that Llewellyn had to have some kind of good word, or ‘bon mot,’ for my book to get people excited or curious enough to purchase and read it. The book “Magical Qabalah For Beginners” is still in print, and has sold over 4,000 copies. It is also available in Polish and Russian.
All of that research, writing and rewriting served an important purpose. It made me much more knowledgeable about the Qabalah than I had ever been in the past. As a system, it is complete and without the need for any ancillary practices or studies. You can be a magical Qabalist, but it would seem that being a Qabalist and a ritual magician might be either redundant or a contradictory approach to an applied occultism. That was one thing I discovered.
Writing that book also had another curious effect on me. I lost my passion for the Qabalah when I discovered that to truly function as a Qabalist you had to have sacred scriptures to act as your foundation. Qabalah is not practiced in a vacuum. It should always be focused on revealing the occult truths and magical capabilities within that sacred literature. Also, such a practice elevates the linguistic paradigm of mystical and magical practices, basing it on the power of words and their companions, numbers. I found that lacking a sacred literature was a real deficit in the study and practice of the Qabalah. That lessened my interest in the Qabalah, and I found other magical practitioners were coming to the same conclusion.
It seems almost blasphemous to say that I believe now that the Qabalah is over utilized and contrived in its current occult formulation. One of most important things that I have said about the Qabalah is that the mystical Jewish community created the Kabbalah to add and augment the Talmud as an esoteric commentary on the Tenach, or Hebrew Bible. That is what the Zohar represents to the Jewish study of the Kabbalah. It is the crown jewel, since from that commentary and analysis much of the mystical and magical elements of Judaism has its roots. It is a mystical, occult and magical Talmud, founded on the sacred writings of the Jewish Bible.
If a religion has a sacred body of writing then a Qabalah can be fashioned to develop and gather occult insights into the mystical foundation of that religion. This is true of religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism. Thelema has Liber Al, the Book of the Law, so it would qualify as well. Qabalah is founded on a sacred written language, so Hebrew, Greek, Latin (Vulgate), Arabic, Farsi, Sanscrit and English would represent that sacred language. Since Liber Al is written in English there is a place for an English Qabalah, too.
What is missing in this list is a language and sacred book for Witches and Pagans. While the Chaldean Oracles probably comes the closest to functioning as a kind of sacred writ for modern Pagans, there is nothing for modern Witchcraft. The Chaldean Oracles exist as quoted fragments related by other contemporary and later authors and no complete version of the full text has been found. It is possible (but doubtful) that Neoplatonism might be the answer for a mystical and philosophical discipline that could be reconstituted and used by modern pagans, yet it is even less likely to be relevant for practicing Witches.
The same could be said about the ancient Egyptians, since nearly all of their sacred literary work contains a large volume of magical spells with only some myths and stories passing down through the ages to us. What was sacred to the Egyptians was magical spells that could obtain for them immortality and life beyond death, and they seemed to mix religion and magic quite freely, so there never was anything like a Bible for the ancient Egyptians. In fact despite the dominance of Amun-Ra in the later dynasties of ancient Egypt, there was never actually a single unified religious faith throughout the history of that land, until Christianity came, and then later, Islam.
The lack of a definitive sacred book is also likely true with many of the ancient western polytheistic religions that academics have examined. Books may have been written for priests to perform priestcraft (although little of any of that remains today), and the absence of such an organized clergy in the Greco-Roman period made the Jewish Tenach that appeared after the end of the Temple period a unique contribution to organized religion, especially when it was translated into Greek. Christianity followed suit, the Gnostics were prolific writers of sacred texts, and so did Islam later on.
Zoroastrianism and Hinduism have had a religious literary tradition for nearly 3,000 years, and the Zend Avesta and the Vedic texts are probably distantly related, both linguistically and doctrinally. Zoroaster reformed his creed, and the Vedic texts were complimented with books called the Upanishads. It might be difficult to formulate a Qabalah for those two faiths, but it would not be impossible, as the later heretical cult of Zurvan attempted to do with Zoroastrianism.
What this simple requirement does is leave modern Pagans and Witches out in the cold when it comes to the Qabalah. We have no sacred writings and no sacred language, so the very foundation of a Qabalistic system would evade us. The Tree of Life glyph, based on the Hebrew alphabet and numbering system, would be somewhat useful; but as a model of eschatology it is limited and not very insightful to a pagan or a witch. I have found that the three or four layered world perspective of traditional Shamanism more useful as a model of the natural and spiritual worlds than the Tree of Life. Additionally, the Hebrew Kabbalah does not use the Tarot as a method for characterizing the twenty-two paths, and if a Christian-Greek alphabet were used then two more pathways would have to be derived in a Christian Tree of Life glyph representing that system.
What is left, then, are the many tables of correspondences, based on the 32 paths (Sephiroth and Pathways) or their various sub-structures. Many of the full 32 path-based tables of correspondences are somewhat awkward and not particularly useful, while the ones that are based on the numbers 4, 7, 10 and 12 are much more useful since they can be readily used to build correspondences for the elements, planets, prime numbers and the signs of the zodiac. These tables are also handy for building correspondences for the full Tarot deck, which is probably one of the most powerful magical systems in use today. It stands by itself and doesn’t need the Qabalah to give it meaning and purpose.
Then we come to the topics of Gematria, Notariqon and Temurah. Gematria is the numerological method for equating numbers with words through the art of adding up the letter number values as found in a Hebrew word. Using the Greek alphabet might also be helpful, and there is an association of number values to Greek letters, since they were once used to write numbers when the Hindu-Arabic system of numeration had not yet been invented. It was likely the Greeks who developed this methodology and the Jews found it eminently useful in their Kabbalah.
The key to Gematria is to develop a book of words (Sepher Sephiroth) that has all of the relevant words found in the sacred text attributed to their letter numeric value, and the book is ordered by numbers to group them together. Without such a book, the process is not as revealing and it has the fault of being quite narrow, showing where connections make sense while avoiding those that make no sense whatsoever. A perusal of Crowley’s book Sepher Sephiroth shows that while some numbers have interesting connections, others are practically meaningless in their obscurity.
While I have found Gematria to be a clever curiosity, I have never found it as a useful method of proving a semantic correlation between word concepts. Authors like Kenneth Grant have over-used Gematria to formulate occultic proofs that are as flimsy as the paper they are written on. I think that Gematria has been overused by Grant and some others, since it should only focus on strategic religious terms, and then it also suffers from the noise of correlations that are irrelevant or meaningless.
Notariqon is the art of building and exploding acronyms and Temurah is the art of letter substitution. I have used Notariqon in building letter and word formulas to bind the segments of rituals together into a seamless whole, but it is just a process of building clever acronyms - there is nothing sacred or mysterious about it. These letter number technologies are interesting and at times, clever, but I have not found them very insightful. Perhaps if I had a sacred text to use them against I would discover all sorts of amazing and fascinating mysteries, but I don’t have such a book and so the greater appreciation of the Qabalah is unavailable to me.
After all of these considerations, I do still find the Qabalah useful and since I have incorporated it into my magical workings, it is still relevant to me. Yet I have found that the overuse and even abuse of the Qabalah to be disappointing. There are many other mystical and occult systems to use in the workings of magic. Sometimes not using any system will yield results that are more straightforward and less convoluted than having to add a thick and sometimes awkward layer of Qabalah to a magical working or process for esthetic reasons. These are, of course, just my opinions.
The book “Magical Qabalah for Beginners” is not only recommend by me, the author, but also by other occultists. The large number of sold copies should be an indicator that this book is worth having and reading. It is, however, not really for beginners, despite what the title of the book says.
Frater Barrabbas
No comments:
Post a Comment