Writings of H P Blavatsky
Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky (1831 – 1891)
The Founder of
Modern Theosophy
The Kabalah and
the Kabalists
By
H P Blavatsky
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.
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 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.
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 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, 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.
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 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 had
received from the angels (the ćons), 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 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, 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 reëditing 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 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
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.
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
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 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.
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
preëminence above a beast," is quite on a par with the modern Hćckels, 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 medićval 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.
It can be demonstrated, on the authority of the most learnedKabalists 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 impesonal 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. 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 Âryan 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 Âryan
Hindű 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 unnameable, 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 remodelled 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
Cyclopćdia,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.
Lucifer, May, 1892
H. P. Blavatsky
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.
5The 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 Hindű 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 ofthe
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.
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Preface
Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
Manas Of Reincarnation Reincarnation Continued
Karma Kama Loka
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Arguments Supporting Reincarnation
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Colonel Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
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Theosophy Wales King Arthur Pages
Arthur draws the Sword from the Stone
The Knights of The Round Table
The Roman Amphitheatre at Caerleon,
Eamont Bridge, Nr Penrith, Cumbria, England.
(History of the Kings of Britain)
The reliabilty of this work has long been a subject of
debate but it is the first definitive account of Arthur’s
Reign
and one which puts Arthur in a historcal context.
and his version’s political agenda
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth
The first written mention of Arthur as a heroic figure
The British leader who fought twelve battles
King Arthur’s ninth victory at
The Battle of the City of the Legion
King Arthur ambushes an advancing Saxon
army then defeats them at Liddington Castle,
Badbury, Near Swindon, Wiltshire, England.
King Arthur’s twelfth and last victory against the Saxons
Traditionally Arthur’s last battle in which he was
mortally wounded although his side went on to win
No contemporary writings or accounts of his life
but he is placed 50 to 100 years after the accepted
King Arthur period. He refers to Arthur in his inspiring
poems but the earliest written record of these dates
from over three hundred years after Taliesin’s death.
Mallerstang Valley, Nr Kirkby Stephen,
A 12th Century Norman ruin on the site of what is
reputed to have been a stronghold of Uther Pendragon
From
wise child with no earthly father to
Megastar
of Arthurian Legend
History of the Kings of Britain
Drawn from the Stone or received from the Lady of the Lake.
Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur has both versions
with both swords called Excalibur. Other versions
5th & 6th Century Timeline of Britain
From the departure of the Romans from
Britain to the establishment of sizeable
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
Glossary of
Arthur’s uncle:- The puppet ruler of the Britons
controlled and eventually killed by Vortigern
Amesbury, Wiltshire, England. Circa 450CE
An alleged massacre of Celtic Nobility by the Saxons
History of the Kings of Britain
Athrwys / Arthrwys
King of Ergyng
Circa 618 - 655 CE
Latin: Artorius; English: Arthur
A warrior King born in Gwent and associated with
Caerleon, a possible Camelot. Although over 100 years
later that the accepted Arthur period, the exploits of
Athrwys may have contributed to the King Arthur Legend.
He became King of Ergyng, a kingdom between
Gwent and Brycheiniog (Brecon)
Angles under Ida seized the Celtic Kingdom of
Bernaccia in North East England in 547 CE forcing
Although much later than the accepted King Arthur
period, the events of Morgan Bulc’s 50 year campaign
to regain his kingdom may have contributed to
Old Welsh: Guorthigirn;
Anglo-Saxon: Wyrtgeorn;
Breton: Gurthiern; Modern Welsh; Gwrtheyrn;
*********************************
An earlier ruler than King Arthur and not a heroic figure.
He is credited with policies that weakened Celtic Britain
to a point from which it never recovered.
Although there are no contemporary accounts of
his rule, there is more written evidence for his
existence than of King Arthur.
How Sir Lancelot slew two giants,
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
How Sir Lancelot rode disguised
in Sir Kay's harness, and how he
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
How Sir Lancelot jousted against
four knights of the Round Table,
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
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