Frater FP - The Magician's Kabbalah.pdf - Federal Jack

eing Jacob Boeheme (1575-1624). However, the most notable event in terms of our line of
examination is undoubtedly 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.
It was this work which, when translated into English by MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918) in
1887 as "The Kabbalah Unveiled", alongside already existing translations of the Sepher Yetzirah,
provided the Kabbalistic backbone of the Golden Dawn Society, from which issued many of the more
recent occult Kabbalists, such as Dion Fortune (1891-1946), who summarised the Sephiroth in her
"Mystical Kabbalah" (1935) and Aleister Crowley (1898-1947). The Christian occultist, and Golden
Dawn member, A.E. Waite also produced many works examining the secret tradition of Kabbalah,
although of all of these occultists, Gershom Scholem says that they relied more on their imagination
than their knowledge of Kabbalah, which he sees as "infinitesimal".
Another stream stemming from Rosenroth's work came through Eliphas Levi (1810-75), who
became familiar with Cabalistic Martinism through Hoene Wronski (1778-1853), and had read both
Boehme and Rosenroth amongst many others. He also became a student of Tarot through the writings
of Court de Gebelin (1725-84), who ascribed to the Tarot an ancient Egyptian origin. From de
Gebelin and Rosenroth, Levi synthesised a scheme of attribution of the Tarot cards to the twenty-two
paths of the Tree of Life, a significant development in that it provided a synthetic model of processes
to be later modified and used by the Golden Dawn as mapping the initiation system of psychological,
occult, and spiritual development. Levi wrote, "Qabalah ... might be called the mathematics of human
thought". Aleister Crowley continued Levi's work to some extent in his seminal work on the Tarot,
"The Book of Thoth".
In summary, the Kabbalah passed from Judaic tradition through to Christian tradition, and
through other flowerings such as the Polish Jewry Kabbalistic revival in the eighteenth century. Many
of the early hermetic scholars and neoplatonic thinkers began to merge Kabbalah with other doctrines
such as Alchemy, and later occultists utilised it as a grand plan of spiritual ascent, bringing it full
circle to its origins in the chariot riding of the mystics from which the tradition stemmed.
It is said by traditional Kabbalists and Kabbalistic scholars that the occultist has an imperfect
knowledge of the Tree, and hence the work of such is corrupt. It appears to me that the Kabbalah is a