Daily Note: 12.23.2022
Cold snap!
Winter has definitely asserted itself on this first full day.
As a result, my environment is only semi-functional—so I’ll take advantage of the “opportunity” to share a long excerpt from History, Mystery, and Lore on the late medieval convergence of magic and Kabbalah.
A student of Ficino’s, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), added a crucial dimension to the magical edifice by claiming that natural magic was too weak to be successful without the addition of Kabbalistic magic. Kabbalah, like the Hermetica, was thought to be of very ancient origin—though in fact the formative book of Kabbalism, the Sefer Yetzira, was written between A.D. 300 and A.D. 600. Later, even, than the real dates of the Hermetic writings.
The most detailed version of Jewish mystical philosophy developed in medieval Spain, and found expression in a second great Kabbalistic text, the Zohar. It contained the version of Kabbalah known to Renaissance magicians, and amplified the doctrine of correspondences, as in this passage:
When the Holy One who created the Universe wished to reveal its hidden aspect, the light within darkness, He showed how things were intermingled. Thus out of darkness comes light and from the concealed comes the revealed. In the same manner does good emerge from evil and Mercy from Justice, since they too are intertwined.
This statement, with its pairs of opposites and its talk of the “hidden” and the “revealed,” is obviously reminiscent of Gnosticism. In plain fact, all the traditions rediscovered and adopted by the Renaissance magicians were versions of Gnostic doctrine, bobbing back to the surface after centuries of obscurity beneath the weight of Christian orthodoxy.
Nonetheless, Neoplatonism, the Hermetica, and Kabbalah all added something new and more daring to the development of magical philosophy. The magic derived from Kabbalism went substantially further than the aims of Ficino’s natural magic, because it actually sought to tap into the power beyond astral influences—the power of the angels, archangels, and ultimately God.
Pico's blend of natural and Kabbalistic magic was not so much concerned with practical matters such as healing; rather, it was a creative process by which the imagination was developed to higher levels of abstraction. By knowing the names and numbers (derived by a Kabbalistic form of numerology called “gematria”) of various angels, and using these in invocations and in contemplation, the Kabbalist might approach knowledge of the Sephiroth—that is, the names or powers of God, represented on the Tree of Life.
The addition of Kabbalism took the esoteric foundations of magic to another level. It supplemented the expression of the universal principles on the material plane with corresponding expressions on the mental plane, in the form of numbers and letters.
This was a simple but powerful development. If numbers and letters participate in the original or primal state of being, as the Kabbalists contend, then they can be used for occult purposes, such as the construction of magical spaces and powerful invocations. By means of this reasoning, the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet came to play an important part in occult activities, as did the theory of numbers.
The occult science we know today as “numerology” is a blend of Kabbalistic number theory' and the Pythagorean concept of a “vibrational” universe based on mathematical principles . . . .
To be continued!
Stay warm, and I’ll see you tomorrow. C