Hermetic Qabalah
Syncretic Western esoteric system rooted in Kabbalah and Renaissance magic.
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Hermetic Qabalah is a Western esoteric tradition that blends mysticism and occult practices, serving as the foundational philosophy for magical orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It emerged from Christian Kabbalah during the European Renaissance and incorporates influences from Jewish Kabbalah, Western astrology, alchemy, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and tarot symbolism.
Quick Facts
- Primary influences
- Kabbalah
- Western astrology
- Alchemy
- Pagan religions (Egyptian and Greco-Roman)
- Neoplatonism
- Hermeticism
- tarot
- Preliminary states of divinity
- Ain (nothing)
- Ain Suph (without limit)
- Ain Suph Aur (limitless light)
- Number of sephiroth
- 10
- Notable early figures
- Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
- Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
- Athanasius Kircher
Facts from the source article.
History
The practice of assigning numeric values to alphabetic letters originated in the Greek city of Miletus with the Milesian system, seen in vase graffiti from the 6th century BCE. Aristotle noted that the Pythagorean tradition, founded by Pythagoras of Samos in the 6th century BCE, used isopsephy, the Greek forerunner of Jewish gematria. The Milesian system became common by the reign of Alexander the Great and was adopted in Egypt under Ptolemy II Philadelphus.
In the 19th century, Helena Blavatsky claimed that Hermeticism and Kabbalah shared secret teachings with Neoplatonism and Hindu philosophy. Modern Hermetics often see Qabalah as originating in classical Greece and later adopted by Jewish mystics. Jewish Kabbalah entered the Hermetic tradition by the 15th century through Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who combined Platonism, Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, and Kabbalah. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa incorporated Kabbalah into his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and Athanasius Kircher further developed this syncretism by adding Orphism and Egyptian mythology.
Teachings
Hermetic Qabalah focuses on the nature of divinity, which it views through a Neoplatonic lens as a series of emanations from the godhead rather than a separate, transcendent being. Before manifestation, three preliminary states exist: Ain, a state of complete nullity; Ain Suph, a concentration of that nothingness without limit; and Ain Suph Aur, the limitless light from which creation begins.
From Ain Suph Aur emerges the first of ten emanations called Sephiroth, which are Kether, Chokhmah, Binah, Daath, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malkuth. Daath is considered a hidden sephirah or part of Binah and is not assigned a number. Each sephirah receives a flow of divine light from the unmanifest through Kether, a process depicted as a lightning flash on diagrams of the tree of life.
English Qabalah
Several systems of English gematria, known as English Qabalah, assign numeric values to Roman script or English alphabet letters and are linked to Hermetic Qabalah. In 1904, Aleister Crowley wrote Liber AL vel Legis, which contains the instruction at verse II:55 to obtain the order and value of the English alphabet.
Crowley later produced Liber Trigrammaton in 1907, a work featuring 27 three-line diagrams called trigrams composed of solid lines (Yang), broken lines (Yin), and points (Tao). By attributing 26 Roman letters to these trigrams, Crowley believed he had fulfilled the injunction, though he noted that no significant Qabalah had resulted from this attribution. Liber Trigrammaton remains cryptic and has been interpreted variously by Thelemic scholars, who sometimes correlate its trigrams with the I Ching and other symbolic systems.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Hermetic Qabalah (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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