Kabbalah

[luka]

It's a gift to novelists who want a structure. It gives you a way to categorise all symbolic content and put them into specific dynamic relationships with each other.

 

[luka]

Never heard of that

Find a copy and we'll read it. Apparently it's the big one. The most important textbook!

 

[catalog]

I'm reading that rave book now and I've got bleak house on the way, so can't see it happening. Read it and post some nuggets

 

[luka]

I like how you timetable your reading. Block it in for the next six months

 

[catalog]

Otherwise I get distracted and read nothing of any substance. Reading Joyce recently has made me appreciate doing a proper job

 

[luka]

The ideal of a proper job is important. That's why I like that Prynne stuff about how to read properly. Gives you a terrifying and austere notion of what a proper job might actually entail.

 

[catalog]

I did actually read most of that prynne thing about reading, without intending to, and it was good. Although I can't say what I remember from it. Was just well written. It's like with the phone now and a guardian link, it's not reading is it.

 

[DannyL]

There are various crossovers.

Aleister Crowley was big on the correspondences of words and the associations that brought up.

Kenneth Grant was into that dark side of the tree of life stuff mentioned in the cartoon.

Madonna is into the red wrist band Hollywood version.

It’s hugeness is quite compelling I think.

These are all Western takes on qabalah though which is very different to the Jewish mystical tradition.

 

[luka]

Other life writes a blog about the more traditional side of it if anyone's interested in that

 

[DannyL]

The most common metaphor for how Crowley used the qabalah is as a kind of "filing cabinet" wherein all experience is organised and split into this different categories. There's some interesting accounts of of the subjective experience of doing this in his Magick Without Tears. Everything was kinda cross referenced - all the Gods, spirits, herbs, trees and so forth. His big "phone book" of correspondences is called 777 which apparently is the number you get if you add up the spheres and the paths. Each of the 10 qabalistic spheres is attributed to a planet and each path to a a tarot trump. This stuff is the basis of the Western magical tradition since the Golden Dawn and Crowley. Dion Fortune would be another big conduit for this stuff - SOL, Servants of the Light being her organisation.

I don't know anything about traditional rabbinical qabalah but writing this now, it occurs to me the Western take is in a long tradition of occultists "borrowing" symbols from traditions that they're not part of and don't understand, and spinning their own universes out of them. Theosophy and their reworking of chakras would be another one. They would really get away with it now I don't think - we're too attuned to issues of cultural appropriation.

 

[luka]

If you read the first page of this thread you can learn a little bit about the more traditional side of things.

 

[luka]

But I think it's just as interesting to look at how popular conceptions of it have 'gone to work in the world.'

 

[luka]

The revived western occultism Crowley is central to is also a 'tradition'.

 

[DannyL]

Yeah, I've just read that. Other Life knows his stuff, it would seem! I'd be interested in knowing what this looks like as a regular practice.

And yeah, I agree re. popular conceptions. Tracing their history is interesting though - when I was younger I just accepted this stuff as read rather than seeing them as complex end products of historical process and interaction.

 

[luka]

We can do both at once if other life keeps contributing.

 

[DannyL]

The revived western occultism Crowley is central to is also a 'tradition'.

Crowley's work has his receipt of the Book of the Law at its centre which speaks in Egyptian symbolism, and can stand apart from the qabalistic work.

 

[DannyL]

Yeah, I've got one of Scholem's books here which I've managed to never read. It keeps bubbling to the top of the to read pile and getting rejected.

 

[luka]

You would have read the Frances Yates stuff on 'Christian Kabbala' I guess? That's the most I've ever really done on this

 

[DannyL]

I've read a couple of her books but not the bloody Theatre of Memory which is the biggie. I do recall a few deets about Christian kabbala. Generally Francis Yates.

 

[luka]

As I said earlier I've got a friend bugging me to read Sefer Yetzirah with him so I probably will at some point. Have you read it? I don't really take naturally to this stuff. I don't like structures and formulas and learning things