Two streams

The teaching

As each stream in its own terms teaches it.

What is received

Kabbalah means what is received, and the word tells how it is taught: from a teacher to a pupil, within the life of Torah, prayer and the commandments. It is not a separate religion or a system that stands on its own. It is the inner side of Judaism, the answer to the question of what the Torah and the commandments mean at their deepest, and its books are written for readers who already know the Torah, the prayers and the Talmud well.

Four ways of reading

The Torah is read on four levels, which the kabbalists name together PaRDeS, the orchard. Peshat is the plain sense of the words; remez is the hint, what they point toward; derash is the meaning drawn out in the homilies of the sages; and sod is the secret, the mystical sense. Kabbalah is the study of the fourth, and it never cancels the other three: the plain sense stands, and the secret is its soul.

The Zohar gives the teaching a picture. The stories of the Torah are its garment, the commandments are its body, and within is its soul. Fools look only at the garment, the wise look at the body beneath it, and the wisest look at the soul. Woe, it says, to anyone who thinks the Torah is only stories.

Intention in the commandments

For the kabbalist every commandment does something above as well as below. The world's wrongs divide the divine qualities, above all the Holy One, blessed be He, from his presence in the world, the Shekhinah, and a commandment done with intention, kavvanah, helps to join them again. Many prayer books still print, before a commandment, a short declaration that it is done for the sake of that union. Kabbalah adds no new acts; it gives the old ones a direction.

The orchard and its cautions

The tradition guards this study. The Mishnah rules that the work of creation is not expounded before two, nor the work of the chariot before one, unless he is wise and understands of his own knowledge. The Talmud tells of four sages who entered the orchard: Ben Azzai looked and died, Ben Zoma looked and was harmed, Elisha ben Abuyah cut the shoots and fell away from the faith, and only Rabbi Akiva went in in peace and came out in peace.

So the custom grew of beginning only with a firm base in Torah and law, a settled life and a teacher. Maimonides asks that a person first fill himself with bread and meat, the knowledge of what is permitted and forbidden, before walking in the orchard. Many communities add an age, forty, though not all keep it.

The tradition also divides its own study in two: the contemplative Kabbalah of ideas, which seeks to understand the sefirot and the meaning of the commandments, and the practical Kabbalah of holy names and amulets, which most of its masters forbade or kept for the very few. What is taught here is the first.

The Christian Cabala

From about 1500 Christian scholars read the same books for another purpose. Pico della Mirandola taught that no science more surely shows the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah, and Johann Reuchlin built on the Hebrew letters and the names of God a proof of the Trinity and of Jesus as Messiah. This Christian Cabala kept the Tree, the letters and the names, and gave them a Christian sense the Jewish sources do not have.

The Hermetic Qabalah

The occult orders of the nineteenth century took the Tree further from its source. For the Hermetic Qabalah the Tree of Life is a map of everything, and every symbol of every system has its place on it. Each sefirah has a planet, a colour, gods of the Egyptian and Greek pantheons, an angel, an image, a perfume and a precious stone; each path has a Hebrew letter, a tarot trump and a sign, an element or a planet.

Dion Fortune calls the Qabalah the yoga of the West. Its students learn the tables of correspondence by heart, so that any symbol met in a dream, a myth or a rite can be placed on the Tree and read by its neighbours, and they spell its names in their own way: Kether, Chokmah, Tiphareth, Malkuth.

The Tree as a ladder of grades

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn made the Tree a ladder of initiation, its grades numbered by the sefirot from the bottom up. A Zelator stands in Malkuth, a Theoricus in Yesod, a Practicus in Hod, a Philosophus in Netzach, and an Adeptus Minor in Tiphareth, the centre; the grades above it, up to the three at the crown, were held by few or by none. Between Chesed and Binah lies what this stream calls the Abyss, dividing the seven lower sefirot from the three above, and its crossing is the great ordeal of the system.

Telling them apart

The two streams answer different questions. Jewish Kabbalah asks what the words and commandments of God mean and how a person serves God through them; its practice is prayer, study and the commandments, done with intention and inside a community. The Hermetic Qabalah asks how all symbols fit together and how a person may rise through the planes; its practice is ritual, meditation and correspondence, done in a lodge or alone, outside any one faith.

A reader should know, before each book, which of the two questions it is asking. The Jewish sources speak of commandments, prayer and the Torah, cite the Zohar, the Talmud and the Safed masters, and spell the word Kabbalah; the Hermetic sources speak of rituals, grades and correspondences, cite the Golden Dawn, and spell it Qabalah.