Kabbalah, Cabala and Qabalah

In this lesson: Jewish Kabbalah, Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabalah, the Tree of Life and how to borrow with respect.

Kabbalah turns up everywhere in occult books: the Tree of Life, the ten sefirot, the 22 paths linked to tarot trumps. But Kabbalah began, and continues, as a Jewish mystical tradition. Learning its history helps you understand the occult versions and borrow from them with respect.

Jewish Kabbalah

Kabbalah means “receiving” or “tradition” in Hebrew. Its roots lie in earlier Jewish mysticism, including the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, a short and very old text about creation through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and ten primal numbers. Kabbalah as a movement emerged in Provence and Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Bahir appeared in Provence around 1180, and the Zohar, the central work of Kabbalah, was written in Castile in the late thirteenth century, largely by Moses de León, though it presents itself as the teaching of a second-century rabbi. Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) founded the modern academic study of the subject. Historical

The ten sefirot are qualities or emanations through which God is understood to act in the world. The familiar diagram of ten circles connected by 22 paths became standard in later centuries.

How the Jewish tradition grew

It helps to see Jewish Kabbalah as a long conversation with many voices, not one fixed system. Within the tradition, Kabbalah is often understood as wisdom received from earlier sages. Historians date the surviving texts, and I give both views their place. Historical

Before Kabbalah. Jewish mystical writing existed long before the word Kabbalah was used. The Hekhalot, or “palaces”, literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages describes visionary ascents through heavenly halls to the divine throne. The Sefer Yetzirah is very hard to date. Scholars place it anywhere from late antiquity to the early medieval period.

Provence and Spain. In Provence, Isaac the Blind, who died around 1235, is remembered as one of the first great Kabbalists. Circles in Gerona and Castile developed the teaching about the sefirot. Abraham Abulafia, in the later thirteenth century, taught a different, meditative Kabbalah built on combining the letters of divine names. Moshe Idel calls this “ecstatic Kabbalah”.

Safed. After the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, many scholars eventually settled in the town of Safed, in Galilee. There, in the sixteenth century, Moses Cordovero wrote a great systematic summary, and Isaac Luria taught a powerful new myth. In Lurianic Kabbalah, God first contracts to make room for the world, the vessels meant to hold divine light shatter, and human beings help repair the world, tikkun, through ethical and religious life. Luria wrote very little. His student Hayyim Vital recorded the teaching. Historical

Later centuries. Lurianic ideas fed the messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi in 1665 and 1666, and its collapse made many rabbis more cautious about spreading Kabbalah. In the eighteenth century, Hasidism, founded around the Baal Shem Tov, brought mystical ideas into everyday devotion. Kabbalah remains a living part of Jewish religious life today.

The ten sefirot in plain words

The sefirot are often listed like this: Keter (crown), Hokhmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), Hesed (loving-kindness), Gevurah (strength or judgment), Tiferet (beauty), Netzach (endurance), Hod (splendor), Yesod (foundation) and Malkhut (kingship, often linked with the Shekhinah, the divine presence). In Jewish Kabbalah they describe how the hidden God relates to the world, and how human actions can bring them into harmony. They are not planets or a set of spirits to command.

Many Kabbalists also distinguished speculative Kabbalah, about the nature of God, from practical Kabbalah, the use of divine names for protection or healing. Practical Kabbalah existed, for example in amulets, but many teachers discouraged or restricted it.

Christian Cabala

In the late fifteenth century, Pico della Mirandola argued that Kabbalah could confirm Christian truths, and in 1517 the German scholar Johann Reuchlin published De arte cabalistica. This Christian Cabala, usually spelled with a C, read Jewish texts through Christian eyes and fed into Renaissance magic, including Agrippa’s work.

Christian scholars kept building on this. In 1652 to 1654 the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher printed a Tree of Life diagram in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, and its arrangement of the 22 paths later became the model for the Golden Dawn’s tree. Between 1677 and 1684, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth published Kabbala Denudata, Latin translations of Kabbalistic texts. Mathers translated part of it into English in 1887 as The Kabbalah Unveiled, which is how many English-speaking occultists first met these ideas, already filtered through two Christian lenses. Historical

Hermetic Qabalah

In the nineteenth century, French occultist Éliphas Lévi linked the 22 tarot trumps with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the Golden Dawn built a whole system on the Tree of Life, attaching planets, colors, gods, tarot cards and more to its spheres and paths. This occult version, often spelled Qabalah, is a Later tradition and differs a great deal from Jewish Kabbalah.

In the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley’s 777 (1909) and Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah (1935) turned the Golden Dawn tables into handbooks that are still in print. Most modern correspondence lists that pair a sphere with a planet, a color and a tarot card go back to these sources. Modern

Questions beginners ask

Can I study Kabbalah if I am not Jewish? You can read its history, as this course does. Jewish communities hold different views on who should study Kabbalah and how. Some traditionally reserved it for mature, learned students, often said to be over forty. Others teach it more widely. If you want Jewish Kabbalah itself, learn from Jewish teachers and Jewish scholarship.

Do I need Hebrew? For the occult Qabalah, no, though learning the letters adds a lot. For Jewish Kabbalah, Hebrew and Aramaic open the texts, and good translations exist.

Is the Tree of Life diagram in the Bible? Genesis mentions a tree of life in Eden. The diagram of ten sefirot and 22 paths is a medieval and early modern development.

Is Hermetic Qabalah “wrong”? It is a different tradition with its own history. It becomes a problem when it claims to be Jewish teaching or ancient Egyptian wisdom.

Myths to drop:

• “Kabbalah came from ancient Egypt.” No historical evidence supports this. It is an occult claim from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• “The 22 paths always matched the 22 tarot trumps.” That link began with Lévi in the 1850s.
• “Kabbalah is a kind of magic.” Mostly it is religious thought about God, the Torah and the world. Practical Kabbalah is a small, restricted part of it.

A worked example

Imagine you buy a tarot book that says “the Fool is the first Hebrew letter, Aleph, as the ancient Kabbalists taught”. Unpick it. The link between tarot and Hebrew letters began with Lévi in the 1850s, and the Golden Dawn later rearranged it. Jewish Kabbalists did not write about tarot at all. The correspondence can still be useful in your practice, as long as you know it is a modern occult system.

Try this

Draw a simple Tree of Life with ten circles, using any reference image. Beside it, write one line on its roots in Jewish tradition and one on how the Golden Dawn later used it for tarot.

Journal prompts: What did you believe about Kabbalah before this lesson? Which Hebrew idea, such as tikkun, repair, speaks to you, and how can you honor its source if you mention it? How will you label the Tree of Life in your own notes from now on?

The Sefer Yetzirah in a nineteenth-century English version

Historical The Sefer Yetzirah, the “Book of Formation”, is a short, ancient and very difficult Hebrew text, usually dated somewhere between the third and sixth centuries CE, though scholars disagree. It is older than Kabbalah proper, and Kabbalists later wrote many commentaries on it. Its opening lines are the source of the “32 paths of wisdom” that occult books love.

In the 1887 English translation by William Wynn Westcott, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, it begins: “In two and thirty most occult and wonderful paths of wisdom did JAH the Lord of Hosts engrave his name… He created this universe by the three Sepharim, Number, Writing, and Speech.” It continues: “Ten are the numbers, as are the Sephiroth, and twenty-two the letters, these are the Foundation of all things.”

Two things are worth noticing. First, the 32 paths are the ten numbers plus the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which is why later diagrams give the Tree of Life ten circles and 22 connecting paths. Second, Westcott’s translation uses words like “occult”, which tell you as much about Victorian occultism as about the Hebrew. In the original, the sefirot here are probably the ten basic numbers, not yet the divine qualities of later Kabbalah. Seeing the gap between an ancient text and its later readings is the heart of this course.

Three sentences to keep the branches apart

If you remember nothing else, remember these. Jewish Kabbalah is a religious tradition about God, the Torah and the world, practiced within Judaism for some eight centuries. Christian Cabala is a Renaissance attempt by Christian scholars to read Kabbalah as confirming Christianity. Hermetic Qabalah is a modern Western occult system built on the Tree of Life and linked to tarot, astrology and ritual by Lévi, the Golden Dawn and their heirs. The three spellings, often used this way in English, are a handy reminder that these are three different things, though writers do not always follow the convention.

A practice variation: a respectful reading list

Make two short lists in your notebook. On the first, write two books about Jewish Kabbalah by scholars or Jewish teachers, such as Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism or Joseph Dan’s short introduction. On the second, write two books about Hermetic Qabalah, such as Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah. Read one chapter from each list and write a paragraph on the differences in language, aims and audience. That one exercise will protect you from the most common confusion in occult books.

Recap

Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical tradition that emerged in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Provence and Spain, with the Zohar as its central text. Christian Cabala adapted it in the Renaissance, from Pico to Reuchlin. Hermetic Qabalah, from Lévi and the Golden Dawn, linked it to tarot and astrology. Naming which one you mean is both accurate and respectful.

What next

Lilith’s place in the Zohar and later Kabbalah is traced on my Lilith history page, and the Major Arcana guide shows the trumps that occultists later linked to the 22 paths. Next lesson: the great occult revival of the nineteenth century.

Further reading: Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) is the classic. Joseph Dan, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006) is a clear short book. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale University Press, 1988) shows how later scholars questioned Scholem.

Sources

• Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1941).
• Joseph Dan, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah (De arte cabalistica) (Hagenau, 1517).

Go deeper: the art history and Goetia pages on this site

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