Theos-Talk Archives (June 2005 Message tt00597)

June 30 2005,

Dear Frank:

HPB wrote:


THE KABALAH AND THE KABALISTS
 
AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
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.

SEARCH FOR TRUTH

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. 

METAPHYSICAL SEARCH & IMPEDIMENTS

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 a "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.

SECRET SCIENCE: IS IT TO BE VICTOR OR VICTIM ?

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 practised 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 [Church] one forgets that it has publicly proclaimed, hardly 400
years ago, the Jewish Kabalah as the greatest witness to the truths of
Christianity; 2 the second [Science], 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. Any one 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.

FINDING THE ONE UNIVERSAL TRUTH

Unfortunately many are called but few chosen. The two systems threaten the
world of the mystics with a speedy conflict, which, instead of increasing
the spread of the One Universal Truth, will necessarily only weaken and
impede its progress. Yet, 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 Aryan 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 had 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. 

BOOKS OF MOSES

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 mace of them their Sacred
Canon, on a par with, if not higher than, the Gospels. But when the
Pentateuch was written, or rather rewritten after Ezdras, [Ezra] i.e.,
after the Rabbis had 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 reediting was o£ 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 symbolic 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
aeons. 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 the 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 .3

SODS and SODALES
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
Jehovah] are for those who fear him," says Psalm xxv. 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 lxxxix. 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 xlix. 5, 6)
.4 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.

JEHOVAH VS. AIN-SUPH

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 prearranged 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 Aryan 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 Sanskrit Aja, a world 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 Brahma, the self-existent cause of all, described and so referred
to in the Upanishads.

Gematra and T'mura 

The Hebrew Kabalistic Gematra 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 Haeckels, 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 mediæval 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 abstracts spiritual speculations, their gross external forms
being, perhaps, the most secure veil to hide their inner meaning.

ZOHAR CHRISTIANIZED

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, that 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 yield 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--Krishna, Buddha, or Ormazd. But this Christos is neither the Christ
of the Churches, 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
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 and 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. 

SEVEN KEYS TO WISDOM

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, show 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
the Western philosophers or students has all those keys at his command?
These are now entrusted only to the highest Initiates in Gupta Vidya, 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 .5

The key to the Jewish metrology has been undeniably unravelled, and a very
important key it is. But as we may infer from the words of the discoverer
himself in the footnote 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 revelation
and impartation, 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 and intended 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 Aryan systems
alone can supply the rest, and unveil the whole truth of Creation .6

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 this purpose 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 .7 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--to be used 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 I to the
zero character, together making 1 + 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 .8 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 of itself cannot be made vocal
without the help of a vowel ;9 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 are 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
rewritten 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 800 years and then found when
every remembrance of them must have disappeared from the minds of the most
learned, and Hilkiah has them rewritten by Shaphan, the scribe? When lost
again, they are rewritten 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 Aryan Hindû music. In the Sanskrit language there is no need to so
arrange letters in the sacred ollas that they should become musical. For the
whole Sanskrit alphabet and the Vedas, from the first word to the last, are
musical notations reduced to writing, and the two are inseparable .10 As
Homer distinguished between the "language of Gods" and the language of men,

Ahrens, when speaking of the letters so arranged in the Hebrew sacred
scrolls--that they were of themselves musical notes--had probably never
studied Aryan Hindû music. In the Sanskrit language there is no need to so
arrange letters in the sacred ollas that they should become musical. For the
whole Sanskrit alphabet and the Vedas, from the first word to the last, are
musical notations reduced to writing, and the two are inseparable .10 As
Homer distinguished between the "language of Gods" and the language of men
,11 so did the Hindus. 
The Devanâgarî--the Sanskrit character--is the "Speech of the Gods" and
Sanskrit the divine language .12 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 good-will and incessant efforts covering many years of study, that
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,
rests 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
unnamable, 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 upon Ragon's Masonic revelations; another takes Fabre
d'Olivet for his prophet--this writer having never been a Kabalist, though
he was a 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 Éliphas Lévi--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 Worlds. 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
good 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 be 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 in 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 the 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 orally by
one generation of Initiates to another, under the pledge of the Sodalian
oath, and they have never been recorded in writing by any one. 

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," or "to receive" orally.

It is erroneous to say, as Kenneth Mackenzie does in his Royal Masonic
Cyclopædia, 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 .13 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.
       
H.P.B. 
Lucifer, May, 1892
 
1 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 make it Qabalah. 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. 
 
2 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 for the
doctrine 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 travelling 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. 

3 This is just what the Gnostics had always maintained quite independently
of Christians. In their doctrines the Jewish God, the "Elohim," was a
hierarchy of low terrestrial angels--an Ildabaoth, spiteful and jealous.

4 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
Kadeshim 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.

5 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
acknowledgement." "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 (McMillian Lodge, No. 141).

6 Even as it stands now, the Kabalah, with its several methods, can only
puzzle by bring 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 'B'rashith barâ 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, 'B'rash
ithbarâ 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! 

7 Before Seyffarth can hope to have his hypothesis 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.

8 Not the Hebrew helped by the Massoretic signs, at all events. See further
on, however. 

9 And therefore as the vowels were furnished ad libitum by the Massorets
they could make of a word what they liked! 

10 See Theosophist, November, 1879, article Hindû Music, p. 47.

11 Thes. xiv. 289, 290.

12 The Sanskrit 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 Tantrika works (see Tantra
Shâstras); and are called Devanâgarî, "the speech or language of the Gods."
And since each answers to a numeral, a d 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 Sanskrit--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.

13 Of these 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 Kosmo-theogony and is metrological. 
=====================================
 
There are many other references, but this one covers the questions asked.

Best wishes,

Dallas

===================================
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Reitemeyer
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 9:08 AM
To: 
Subject: The Jewish origin of Theosophy?

Friends, I received a request from a serious researcher. He writes that
jewish Theosophist A. L. Bosman in his book "The Mysteries of the Qabalah"
(1916), p. 31, claims that Theosophy is from Jewish origin.

That "The Book of Dzyan" is HPB's re-written version of the Jewish Sohar.
Gershom Sholem affirms Bosman.

Also it is said that HPB did not quote from the original text of the Sohar
but from a bad English translation of Knorr von Rosenroths Latin Translation
in his "Kabbala Denudata" (1677-1684), which also contains a bad translation
of the Sifra di-zeniutha. 


Is Dzyan = Zion = The Book of Zion = the holy Book of the Jews?

What do the HPB students say about that claim?

Is this claim true?

Why is that nearly 90 years old research not known in theosophical circles?

Thanks
Frank