The Magician's Kabbalah

by Marcus Katz

  We must remember that our map here is of a dynamic journey of ascent, rather than an open series of paths and landmarks. It is like climbing a mountain, we often find a route blocked to us until we return in better conditions, or with better tools, or more experience. Sometimes we have to find a detour as the most direct route is impassable. Sometimes we have to check alternative routes before making our ascent up the route originally planned. Initiation is not a direct and open path.

  So the image here that Waite uses for the Sun, of Christ with hands extended in healing, emblazoned with the Sun, is showing the promise of Adepthood, a re-investment of one’s place in the eternal “beauty” of Tiphareth.

  The paths, and hence the Major Arcana, to Waite, are the images of sanctification; a close union with God and resultant moral perfection. In this he follows the tarot tradition of virtues; each card being an increasingly higher virtue in a particular sequence.

  5. Tiphareth

  We will examine the symbolism of the Hermit card in the Sephirah of Chesed, even though it leaves from Tiphareth, as it will be easier to highlight particular aspects of the card in the light of Chesed.

  Tiphareth, as we noted in the introduction of this section, resides upon the triad of Lucifer (Devil), Christ (Sun) and the Garden of Eden (Lovers) with the Angel of Reconciliation pouring forth from it the four rivers of Eden to Malkuth, where they are received as baptism for the return journey.

  Further, Death, the Hermit and the Fool are illustrated on the paths leading out of Tiphareth up the Tree, with the Last Judgement card on the path running above the Sephirah.

  It is certainly the mystical death that is enshrined in the Waite-Trinick image of the Death card. Whilst we live the life of adepthood in Tiphareth, reborn in a new form of consciousness, in Geburah we must learn to die and leave buried that old sense of selfhood, for a new life in Chesed, exempt from all former estates.

  Waite speaks of the parallels in all forms of symbolism; that actual death and mystical death have correspondences, and everything in deep spiritual life has its equivalent in life as it is manifest in the everyday world. In Geburah come to exist in a state between life and death, it is a dispassionate equilibrium which is almost a constant trance, yet one of awakening. It is this state that is then exhausted and collapsed upon the Last Judgement path when we enter into Chesed. It is suggested by Waite in this precise mapping that there is no way to this union unless we pass through the mystical death, and find our resurrection – through the path of Last Judgement.

  6. Geburah

  The most salient symbol of Geburah is that given to the path of Teth which connects it across to Chesed, and here corresponding to the Last Judgement card. Waite connects this card with the Hanged Man, or submerged divinity, which descends from Geburah to Hod. The rainbow symbolism is seen in both, as they are both bridges and covenants seen from the place of Death. The other such bridge and covenant is the High Priestess, whose path we do not tread but leads up to Binah.

  If we look down, we see only the unknown depths and sense dimly our own sleeping spirit. If we look across, to where we must go next, we see the realisation of adepthood, the resurrection of that spirit in the radiance of the divine. Waite calls this the solstice of the eternal summer, and the restoration of the world through the awakening of the highest of lights. It is the grade of the Adeptus Exemptus in Chesed to which our attention is taken with the Last Judgement card leading from Geburah.

  Geburah indeed is the House of Death and where we must overcome concupiscence, in all its forms as the strong life-force that denies death and resists that ultimate transfiguration.

  The High Priestess connects Geburah to Binah, the place of the supernal Eden, of which Malkuth is a reflection, and is seen by Waite as the process of absorption. She is the Shekinah in the form of the archetypal soul, in whose image our very soul is created – she is thus the Mother of All Souls. Her Work is that of Love, or Union, shown by every path we have journeyed, and leading ultimately to one destination; the Crown of Kether. In that love we are utterly absorbed after all trial and judgement, after all restitution. All this happens in Binah, the uttermost and all-consuming Sephirah of final Understanding.

  Waite and Trinick depicted their High Priestess as a heavenly figure being drawn down into the body of a worshipping figure below; or perhaps the figure is arising in spirit into the High Priestess above. The components of Malkuth and Tiphareth, previously “married” below, are now married again in a spiritualised union which immolates the soul into non-being with God.

  7. Chesed

  Whilst the Hermit card is first seen from Tiphareth, it is here in Chesed (to which the path also connects) that its symbolism is most refined. The Hermit is the Keeper of the Secret Tradition, and the light of the divine Word. The light shines through a lantern to symbolise that even at this stage of our ascent, the mysteries are still partially veiled, clouded in language and pretence of understanding. In the mythic story told by Waite, the figure is the messenger of the King’s Secrets, the bearer of the secret tradition from Da’ath to the three Sephiroth of Chesed, Geburah and Tiphareth. In this sense he is the power of the fourth Order, which comprises the highest and most sublime of the initiates who work alone in the World of Ascension.

  In our everyday terms, the Hermit is language, symbols, and the way in which our awareness (Tiphareth) receives and formulates the most abstract and rarefied of impressions (Chesed) during our engagement with reality.

  Similarly, the Hierophant illustrates the path connecting Chesed back down to Netzach. This is not a path that is travelled in the journey up the Tree, as Waite says of his system that it is only concerned with the channels of grace, and following those back to union. The path of the Hierophant is one third of a triad with the Hermit (the Word) and the Sun (Christ), and represents the Official Church. As such, it is all churches and regulation of the Word of God through Christ whereas the Hanged Man on the opposite side of the Tree is the hidden tradition of self-realisation.

  Waite also equates each path with its text in the Sepher Yetzirah, which he consistently refers to as “the hidden tradition”. It is this “hidden tradition” that he makes reference to several times in Pictorial Key to the Tarot and is the key to unlocking how he saw the mysteries of the Minors – by referencing them to the Sepher Yetzirah.

  In every case as we progress in our journey, we must make the symbols alive in us, through not only contemplation but activity; we must align our life to their teaching and integrate their philosophy into our actions and decisions, not merely reduce them into our own choices and predilections.

  Da’ath

  Waite saw Da’ath as of paramount importance in his spiritual map, the most significant landmark of mystical experience. He terms it variously the Secret Palace, the Everlasting Hill of Vision, the Hidden Church, the Holy of Holies, and views it as the attainable threshold of all which is divine.

  In the Waite-Trinick images is an illustration corresponding to Da’ath, in the manner of the tarot images, so much so that at first we were led to believe it was an image of the Hierophant or perhaps the Emperor, even the Ace of Cups. It shows a Priest in the Order of Melchizedeck, offering the sacrament of wafer and wine in a chalice. In the background stands a city or church, which is the Higher Salem, wherein are the beloved congregation.[33]

  Its mystical experience is of the highest order, the union of subject and object in a point of everlasting spiritual ecstasy. It is endless peace and the perfect realisation of all seeking. In the esoteric system called the Astrology of the Soul, Da’ath corresponds to Saturn, a dark and secret light.

  Like a cosmological black hole, Da’ath draws in and out the light, clothing it with manifest symbols and withdrawing those symbols on the event horizon of our souls return.

  Below Da’ath is the Fool, which for Waite is the macrocosmic Christ, a figure drawn by Trinick as a naked (and apparently asexual) Christ with stigmata, suspended under the huge black sphere of Da�
��ath. This is the anti-self, the negation of the self-centre of Tiphareth. The Adept looks up from their position in Tiphareth and sees nothing, for there is nothing there that the self can recognise, as no Self is present in that Higher Realm. Thus the initiate continues instead on their journey to Geburah through the Death card, dying a slow spiritual death when the most immediate step (off the cliff leaving the Dog of Faith behind) was in front of them all the time. A Fool’s Journey indeed.

  Above Da’ath is the Wheel, connecting to Kether, the Crown and Sephirah numbered One on the Tree of Life. If we were to make a sentence of these two words, it would be “Knowledge of the Crown”, in effect, the knowledge of God. So Waite’s Wheel is somewhat more than the fickle acting out of fate and fortune in our world; it is the transcendent glory and joy of union with God. In this manner, the path is described in the Sepher Yetzirah, as “the uniting intelligence” and is so called because “it is itself the essence of Glory. It is the consummation of the Truth of individual spiritual things”. In the Waite-Trinick image, the Wheel is held in the breast of the Shekinah, presenting the knowledge of divinity in the centre of the axle of all creation.

  We come here at last to see that light which shone in the darkness, and we comprehend it.[34]

  8. Binah

  We have described the High Priestess previously, and will describe the Empress when we come to look at Kether below; the remaining path connecting to Binah is that of Strength. This illustrates the connection between Binah (‘understanding’) and Da’ath (‘knowledge’) so we see in the Waite-Trinick images a very different symbolism to that of a Lion and a Maiden.

  Strength is depicted by Trinick as a feminine angel whose hair falls behind her almost to her ankles, polarising both cultivated and wild energies in one image. She is that which holds as the Chariot is that which releases. She is the Being to his Going.

  When we consider that Binah is the Sephirah of structure, atop the pillar of Form, and provides the matrix for all creation, and Da’ath is a non-Sephirah, something that arises between Chockmah and Binah as a necessity of their engagement, we might see that there is a tension between these emanations. It is akin to that of a heavy superstar orbiting a black hole – vast interplays of incomprehensible forces and gravitational stresses, bending not only light, but time.

  Strength is the illustration of this silent dance of intolerable stress; not only at a cosmic and metaphysical layer, but in the very atoms and quantum forces operating in your own body, and every pattern of your life.

  9. Chockmah

  We will consider the Emperor in our text on Kether below, and look at the Chariot and the Magician that connect Chockmah to Da’ath and Kether respectively. The Chariot to Waite is symbolic of the Prince of the Elect, a chosen one who has attained the highest knowledge. Yet, as he briefly teases in the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, he is one who would not be able to answer to the High Priestess. This is a candid yet concealed statement to the effect that the mind and learnt knowledge (Da’ath) will take you so far in your chariot, but only by grace and through experience (High Priestess) can the final stages be undertaken in the Work.

  The Magician likewise is placed between Chockmah and Chesed to signify that he too may have mastered all the elements, but he must leave these toys behind to attain Wisdom (Chockmah) and become the Emperor to sit beside the throne of God (Kether).

  10. Kether

  Into Kether we return through the final symbols of the Great Paths; we have seen the Wheel above Da’ath, and from the pillars on each side of the temple are the paths of the Empress and the Emperor, the potencies of form and force, of structure and energy, of feminine and masculine. They are the final dualities that are resolved in the unity of Kether; all duality and all division.

  At this level it is more difficult to consider these images as separate or individual; all the symbols becoming more closely united as we reach up the Tree of Life. In the World card below, we saw each symbol laid out and separate; now we return to the world in which all symbols are obsolete.

  The Empress is enthroned upon the oceans of night in Binah, and the Emperor presides over the quarry of devotion, Chockmah. They are the realisation of divine understanding and wisdom in the world. They are transitory in their rulership and aegis as are all things, yet remain as abiding patterns, revolving forever upon the wheel of creation.

  We can also see these as the three great forces of the universe in all triune forms; the creator in the Empress, the destroyer in the Emperor and the Maintainer in the Wheel.

  Having looked specifically at these versions of the whole map, and how it can be utilised to model, locate and predict our experience of the territory of magical and spiritual experience, we will now return to the history and development of the Kabbalah, and then look at each Sephirah in detail.

  The Tree of Sapphires

  Voices of the Word, Leaves of the Light

  As we have touched upon, the Kabbalah (a Hebrew word meaning "handed down” or “oral tradition”) is the term used to denote a general set of esoteric or mystical teachings originally held within Judaism, but later promulgated to a wider audience in the 12th century onwards through centres of learning such as Toledo in Spain. It consists of a body of teachings and analysis dealing with the nature of the Universe, aspects of divinity, and the method of creation. From this set of teachings is derived the role of man in the revealed scheme of things.

  The history of the Kabbalah is difficult to fix to dates and linear sequences of succession due to its nature as oral, traditional, teachings. Long before printing presses, the Kabbalistic teachings were passed from teacher to pupil as oral teachings and collections of manuscripts, which in turn may have been copies of other sets being used by other teachers. The original impulse of Kabbalah, however, emerged from a first century school of Jewish mysticism termed Merkabah, meaning ‘chariot’. These mystics utilised secret methods of spiritual ascent in order to attain mystical experience.[35] These experiences can be recognised as those common to any modern adept following the occult initiatory system, for example; "the world changed into purity around me, and my heart felt as if I had entered a new world".[36]

  The teachings of the Merkabah mystics became part of the Heikhalot school, whose name means ‘palace’, referring to the spiritual planes through which the mystics ascended. The description of these journeys seems to bear similarities to the journey of the soul into the Underworld depicted in the ancient Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day, with magical words or appropriate names of the gods to be spoken before each door is passed and each palace entered.

  Three classical texts formulate the basic structure of traditional Kabbalah, being:

  The Sefer-ha-Zohar; Book of Splendour - First printed 1558-60 and 1559-60

  The Sefer Yetzirah; Book of Formation - First printed in Mantua 1562

  The Sefer-ha-Bahir; Book of Light - First printed in Amsterdam 1651

  The collective writings that became the Holy Zohar are now widely acknowledged to be the work of Moses de León, dating from 1280. These dense and complex writings, written in Aramaic, emerged in Spain and rapidly become a foundation stone of Kabbalistic study.

  Many of the later Kabbalistic schools are formed about these books, finding in them interpretation and meanings revealing the work of God and Creation. The school formed at Safed in the sixteenth century produced many of the leading thinkers of Kabbalah, particularly Rabbi Isaac Luria, called the Ari (1534-1572), and Rabbi Moshe Cordevero, the Ramak (1522-1570). The former is responsible for much of the current structure and cosmology of Kabbalah, as the Lurianic school of thought provided answers to many of the more complex issues of Kabbalistic thought, particularly relating to the ‘breaking of the vessels’.

  The next major historical development of Kabbalah came with the formation of the Hasidic Movement in the mid 1700's, based around the Rabbi Israel, more commonly known as the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), which means ‘master of the word’, a high mark of respect in Ka
bbalism.

  Having briefly examined the development of Kabbalah within the Judaic mystical tradition, we must now attempt to sketch some of the significant points at which it passed through to the occult tradition, particularly in Europe, and then to the modern Magician.

  The Kabbalah and its teachings passed across into the magical philosophy primarily by transition through medieval Christian thinkers who saw in Kabbalah a model and validation for their own tradition. From the late fifteenth century Jewish converts to Christianity brought Kabbalistic views to the attention of other theologians. A Platonic Academy in Florence, founded by Giovanni Mirandola (1463-94) furthered research and discussion of Kabbalah amongst the philosophers of the time. The later publication of the Shaarey Orah, ‘Gates of Light’ in Latin (1516) brought further interest in the teachings of the Bahir and the fundamental plan of the Tree of Life.

  The prime source for the precursors of the occult revival were without question Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), a German Jesuit whose Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652) detailed Kabbalah amongst its study of Egyptian mysteries and hieroglyphics, and Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia (1533).

  Other works, such as those from alchemists including Khunrath, Fludd and Vaughan indicated that the Kabbalah had become the convenient meta-map for early hermetic thinkers. Christian mystics began to utilise its structure for an explanation of their revelations, the most notable being Jacob Boeheme (1575-1624). However, the most notable event in terms of our line of examination is the publication of Christian Knorr Von Rosenroth's (1636-89) Kabbala Denudata in Latin in 1677 and 1684, which provided translations from the Zohar and extracts from the works of Issac Luria.