Now, technically, none of this - the Tree 528, my deep delve into Jewish Kabbalah, none of it, would have happened if it hadn't been for those plucky Hermetic Qabalists of the early 20th Century. And by that I mean the Golden Dawn. And Crowley. Especially Crowley.
I grew up in the halcyon-only-in-retrospect days before the Internet. Occult knowledge for the most part could only be gleaned from the few books on the subject, and only if you were actively looking for them sequestered in the back of dusty bookstores. It was through (I think) the Subgenii that I found the Discordians and RAW and from there began my relationship with Uncle Al.
Whether you like Crowley or hate him (and I share Master Wilson's fondness), it is undeniable that he left a large mark (or smear if you are so inclined) on Western Occultism. He was for all his faults, an insanely prolific author. I probably started in on his work in my late teens or early twenties.
- I should emphasize here, that I absolutely do not follow the Golden Dawn system or that of the A.·.A.·., in fact it was dissatisfaction with Crowley's system in particular that I formulated my own. Nonetheless, the influence on me cannot be denied. -
Before the advent of the interwebs, one could not just willy-nilly go look up something that was confusing or odd, or have access to entire libraries at the flick of a keyboard... and I spent many fruitless yet entertaining hours looking at arcane charts of correspondences and symbols and terminology, that at first glance make no sense. I mean the Satanic stuff was pretty obvious to anyone fed a diet of Metal \m/, but a lot of it was just confusing without access to any background information or terminology. Even with the endless profusion of occult books in the modern era, it is sometimes difficult to get past the surface and really understand what a certain correspondence or term means. The details of the direct influence will be spelled out in The Tree - the point here is that my exposure to the Occult, and Occult Qabalah in particular was the result of the work of a group of early Twentieth Century Brits who directly laid claim to the dissemination of the secrets of the Ancients - secrets that have always existed and over the millenia have reappeared under many guises and amongst many peoples, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Hindu Yogi, The Sufis and Dervishes, the Gnostics, the Yazidi and yes, even the Jews - finally all errors had been rectified and The Truth™ revealed....
What they left out was of course, was that this was monstrously condescending. A world view of Empire and Colonialism, Crusades and Christianity.
Not that they did that on purpose particularly, I am guessing that such thoughts never once crossed their minds. Syncretism was the name of the game and if something didn't quite fit, well then fuck it - just change the meaning!
Now this of course, is an age old tradition, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. My system makes no pretentions of ancient roots - do I do a lot of research? Yes. Do I cherry pick hints and allusions in the writings of ancient Kabbalists to further my own point of view and allude to hidden secrets that only my unique, percipient, and awe-inspiring awesomeness has finally revealed to the uncultered and delusional masses? Yes, yes I definitely do that. Syncretism is by its nature a methodology of creativity. And well, if one throws in a claim of Ancient pedigree here and there, not only does it add a nice gloss of authenticity, pseudonymous attributions are themselves a time honored path. But, sometimes, somewhere in that joy of "rediscovery", some things that should not have been forgotten drop by the wayside, or are so changed as to make a claim of authenticity basically just a big Fuck You.
Even this of course, is not really an issue though. There is nothing that says not offending people is a necessity, there are technically no Sacred Cows (all Cows are Sacred!), nothing that precludes one from taking the traditions and work of others and molding it into something new, often with diametrically opposing conclusions to the original, while still keeping the original names of the things you just changed. But it certainly could be considered a Dick Move. For there is also absolutely nothing wrong with having a little respect. One doesn't have to be a patsy or obsequious or even particularly deferential, but it isn't too much to ask one to not be a Dick.
I want to very much stress here again - taking old things and making them into something new is what people do. It is how original ideas come into being. And the work of the Golden Dawn and Crowley is indeed very orginal and very impressive. That is not the issue. The issue is the taking of things that are very much an ongoing and living tradition - at the time of the Golden Dawn and Crowley (late 19th/early 20th centuries) Kabbalah had become a central tenet of Modern Judaic thought and was flourishing and vibrant and growing. - It is the claiming of that tradition, topping it off with the assumption that the people who actually invented it did not actually do so and were incorrect in their interpretation of it in any case (Kircher), all the while being part of a group of people (Christian Europeans) that had been mercilessly persecuting the inventors for nigh on two thousand years non-stop (up to and including the period at which the claim was being made - 5 million Jews did not flee to America from Europe between 1890 and 1920 on a lark) - that is the issue. It was at the very least a perpetuation of an ongoing Dick Move.
Of course judging the past by the mores of the present is basically futile. But here is a little tip. When it is said, "but that is just how it was done back then", that is always referring to the people in control. I guarantee you that in the olden days, the people who were dragged onto slave ships or were being killed in pogroms didn't just shrug their shoulders and accept it because slavery or anti-semitism was in vogue at the time. Being enslaved or killed in a pogrom was just as fucked up then as it appears to be now, just not to the people doing the enslaving or pogromming. Now (to the best of my knowledge) Westcott and Mathers and Crowley et al. were not actually enslaving anyone or personally killing any Jews, they were just products of their culture (even though Mathers at least should have thought about it, the father of his wife - the inestimable Moina Mathers (née Bergson, High Priestess extraordinaire) - spent much of his youth travelling Europe avoiding anti-semitic purges). The same cannot really be said however of the Christian cabalists of the previous few centuries on which the version of Qabalah the Golden Dawn system used was based on.
While some of the original Christian Cabalistic populizers (Mirandola and Reuchlin) were somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the Jews - even if only from a scholarly standpoint - nonetheless, for both of them, and for Christian Cabala in general, there was an overarching drive to use Kabbalistic thought as a methodology of conversion . This was explicit in Mirandola's 900 Theses, written in 1486 CE, with the Oration on the Dignity of Man - sometimes referred to as the "Manifesto of the Renaissance" - as the introduction and accompaniment to the Theses, which was eventually published in 1496.
Of course in the meantime, in 1492, after nearly 150 years of increasingly virulent pogroms and mass forced conversions of the Jews on the Iberian penninsula, and the growing percecutions of the Spanish Inquisition (which was primarily a tool of enforced compliance on converted Jews and Moslems) the enitre Jewish population of Spain was given an ultimatum to convert to Christianity, leave the country, or die. The Jewish community of Spain had been by far the largest in Europe, and had had an uninterrupted presence on the peninsula for a bit more than a thousand years... So maybe not All Men....Over the next 400 years or so, Christian Cabala ran rampant with the glory of ancient Hebrew secrets obviously proving that Jesus was Lord. Take the Name of 72, a name of God used for mystic purposes for a good millenium and a half, and add a Yah or an Al to the end of each name and call it angels instead? Sure, why not. Change the directions, attributions and names of the archangels of the four quarters in use for 1000 years - definitely. Insert a Shin into the middle of the most Holy (in Judaism) name of God so that it kind of looks like a phonetic version of Jesus? Absolutely! Take random characters from the Tanakh and make them Demons to be controlled in the name of Jesus by way of butchered Hebrew phrases like in the Solomonic grimoires, fuck yeah! (Though to be sure, the Gods and Goddesses of myriad other cultures were treated similarly in those... ) In fact the whole conception of there being 72 demons in the Gromoires, was based off of Reuchlin's invention of the 72 angels. Did the tale of Solomon involve demons? Yes. Were there 72 of them? No. All that though, would be relatively fine. New and interesting ideas to be sure. Awesome graphic design in the Grimoires. Yet concurrently with all of this, there was horrific persecution of the people who came up with the original ideas: Dick. Move.
Which brings us to Hermetic Qabalah. Building on the successes of the Solomonic Grimoires, Hermeticism became syncreticism 2.0. Everything got thrown in. Agrippa on steroids. The heavens themselves get rearranged and shifted around. Core symbolism gets tweaked. Entirely new versions of well established mystic descriptions of the universe are proposed, yet keep the old names. Hell - the Tree of Life, the backbone of the Golden Dawn system, in theosophic Kabbalah a symbol of the very structure God itself - becomes a filing cabinet. Or by the late Twentieth Century - a filofax. Symbols and meanings change and shift over millenia, reverence for the past is a nostalgic chimera of a world that was undoubtedly just as short and brutish as our world is now, the new arises from the ashes of the old... but just because something is new and pertinent to the modern zeitgeist, and arguably even useful, is not an excuse to be a dick about it.
Here is an anecdote. (And I appreciate anyone who has read all the way through my venting. This is very cathartic, thank you). Recently I was talking to a fellow wizard, and we were talking about Kabbalah, and he mentioned that he didn't really know anything about it particularly, having only ever many years previously read "Chicken Qabalah" by Lon Milo DuQuette. Now I had heard of the book, but had always sort of ignored it for the silly title, nor did I really know anything about the author. So I read it out of curiosity. Apparently, a lot of people totally love the book and love him. Me? I will be honest. I thought it was... ok-ish I guess, and to be honest, offensive in that incredibly smary white guy "I don't mean to be offensive and all my funny caricatures of X are really meant in a super loving and playful way, but here is a bunch of offensive shit hah hah hah" kind of way. To be fair, he starts the book with an apology, but still... really Lon?
The book more-or-less achieves its primary purpose of explaining Thelemic Qabalah relatively thoroughly (DuQuette is very active in Thelemic orders and is a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, a quasi-Christian religious offshoot of the Ordo Templi Orientis). DuQuette is a pretty good writer and is sort of funny.. his style is extemely reminicent of Robert Anton Wilson... like really, really extremely... the asides, the invented personae, the abrubt jump cuts and presentations of topics in the form of a screenplay, all of that. Granted, it is a good style overall - humor is indeed very important, I like humor. In the book he does make clear that Thelemic Qabalah is not at all the same as Hebrew Kabbalah, correctly, and then makes some truly terrible generalizations and completely incorrect statements about what Hebrew Kabbalah is, pretty much throughout the book.. I mean like really just incorrect shit. The conceit of the book is a fictional character - Rabbi Lamed ben Clifford - who explicates his version of what Chicken Qabalah is. This Rabbi is funny. He has a propeller on his yarmulke. He likes pork and is not even a rabbi! See! funny! (A side note, there is absolutely nothing involving Kabbalah that requires one to be a Rabbi, so whatever).
The first chapter starts with an explanation of the name of the book. Apparently DuQuette did a presentation in New York called "You Can Forget 90 Percent of What You Know About the Balahbalah". Afterwards a very irate man came down and yelled at him for being blasphemous and having terrible Kabbalah, calling it (in DuQutte's version) a fowl word... Chicken Kabbalah (see, get it? Get it?). Apparently people in the audience began to laugh at the man for being so upset and look at him, he can't even talk right, look at his face get all red! Then the man spat on the floor and huffed off.
Now whether this "hateful slobbering man" was really looking for a word for "foul" and just didn't have a great grasp of English, is debatable I suppose*... but what is instantly clear, is that the man was pretty obviously Jewish, and being that this was in New York, most likely a Hasidic Jew. And what is also very obviously clear, is that he probably couldn't give two fucks about the particulars being taught, there is lots of disagreement about different styles of Kabbalah, he probably just thought DuQuette was mocking the practice and mocking God. Hasidic Jews are very orthodox in religious practice - the mocking of the name of God is indeed taken very seriously - and they are also very heterodox in philosophic practice - Hasidic Judaism is based on extremely Kabbalistic teachings (as oposed to other Orthodox sects and Rabbinical judaism in general). And to be very clear here - Kaballah in Hasidism, is a contemplative and particpatory practice to achieve union with God. It is the absolute core of the movement.
Now I do not care for Hasidism - I do not practice Judaism, do not revere IHVH, and really, really do not like patriarchal organized religious systems at all - none of them... however I am also not a dick about mocking other people's religious and philospohical practices, especially in their home town.
Picture if you will that this lecture was in Mecca, and was called "You Can Forget 90% of What You Know About Pisslam", and contained an extended section about different ways to desecrate pictures of Mohammed. Or at the Six Grandfathers and then some white guys broke your treaty and carved four giant colonizer heads on your sacred mountain, I mean, was called "You Can Forget 90% of What You Know About Reverence For Your Asscenters" and then the lecturer killed a bunch of eagles. Dick moves right? New York (and especially Brooklyn) is in many ways a Mecca for Hasidic Jews, or at least the followers of the Lubavitch-Chabad movement. Kabbalah is at the core of their teachings. This isn't new, or unknown, or unexpected. Just because you might preface your book that anyone that takes your "playful treatment of Jewish themes as being anything other than lovingly good-natured" are "all hatemongers and bigots" with "dangerous pathologies and diseased minds", doesn't really make it so. Maybe it was just you being kind of a Dick the whole time.
The treatment of Thelemic Qabalistic themes and practices, relatively thorough. Literally any discussion of Hebrew Kabbalah in the book? Pretty fucking abysmal... All the asides about those irate and ever so orthodox and stuffy Rabbis and their weird hangups and "rules". Really fucking cringey.
C-
*To anyone who is not blindingly lily-white, it is immediately obvious that the word the man used was kachen. It's Yiddish and it means "Shit". The irate Jewish man was telling him his Kabbalah was for shit. Shit Qabalah.
But hey, pretending to not understand the funny angry Jew, it makes for a great joke huh?