hi Ted,
Ted Hand <[log in to unmask]>
> Even if the golden dawn adepts got the concept of the
> "Qliphot" via Rosenroth,
Mathers. the GD folks otherwise, then, got their ideas
initially from Mathers' translation only. I don't think
we can support the notion that a list of 'the orders of
the qliphoth' can be said to be "the concept of the
qliphot" (as may be found in Regardie and Crowley)
otherwise, but it seems to lose integrity and
disintegrate into ideas with questionable foundation
possibly unintended by any Jewish kabbalist, such
as "The Tree of Death", "The Averse Tree", "Tunnels
of Set", fusion with "The Abyss", with "Da'ath"
("the 11th sephira"), etc., etc.
since i don't have much more than Mathers to hand,
and i don't remember the little text on 'the klepput'
kuch as by Halevi and Scholem that i have obtained
to try to understand the basics, i can't easily
compare what extends into Grant's "Nightside
of Eden" with 'conventional qlippot concepts'
as might have been practiced by Jews or by
Christians who attempted to create Cabalism.
it would be nice if someone (Guido?) could lay out
for us the detail of the history of Jewish (and
Christian?) ideas in association with the term
'qlipput', no matter how it may have been spelled,
and Kabbalah from Luria onward. that'd be one of
the important vectors of making such a comparison
possible.
> we still have a problem explaining how they came
> up with their interpretation and uses of the
> concept,
given that it is a single concept, we could
probably side with those who purport that religious
and mystical ideas are, generally, by occultists and
magicians, taken and turned toward a variety of ends
in part due to ritual or meditative personal
explorations, and partly for sociopolitical struggle.
that is, some of what we can expect is that those
who put forward their ideas about their qabalah will
have dreamed it up based on their mental reflections,
some may have constructed a ceremonial rite using
whatever came to hand in the way of symbolism and
intention that they brought to it, while others
may have been working with a group or a rabbi or
a Hermetic instructor so as to derive their result.
without delving into interviews and coming across
the occasional working manual by any of these folks
i doubt we'll be able to say much of substance
> which do not correspond either to Zoharic Kabbalah
> or to early modern magic/esotericism.
one might easily compare modern Neopaganism and the
remnant cultures and ideas from whom they drew. it
is doubtful that any social lineage or traditional
data will have informed them such that their ideas
would have retained integrity to culture from
whom a good number of them were appropriating
(at least Jewish Kabbalah).
> Something happened in the transition to modern
> occultism that allows for "Qliphotic Magic"
> unknown to the kabbalists.
it seems to me that nothing qliphotic has yet been
established as yet within Jewish culture except
a set of cosmological and cosmogenesis-oriented
poetic theories. if you could point to something
as a precursor to modern occultism employing any
qliphotic ideas for magical purposes i'd really
appreciate that, as i've been looking for it
for years. I had presumed that 'qliphotic magic'
was *the invention* of (demonological and de
facto Satanic) Hermetic qabalists.
> Scholem's comment on Crowley and "brilliant
> misunderstandings" comes to mind.
I'd love to hear more about this, since i only
know about severe negative evaluations by
Scholem in far worse terms than this, such as:
"The many books written on the subject [of Kabbalah] in the
19th and 20th centuries by various theosophists and mystics
lacked any basic knowledge of the sources and very rarely
contributed to the field, while at times they even hindered
the development of a historical approach. Similarly, the
activities of French and English occultists contributed
nothing and only served to create considerable confusion
between the teachings of the Kabbalah and their own totally
unrelated inventions, such as the alleged kabbalistic origin
of the Tarot-cards. To this category of supreme charlatanism
belong the many and widely read books of Eliphas Levi
(actually Alphonse Louis Constant; 1810-1875), Papus (Gerard
Encausse; 1868-1916), and Frater Perdurabo (Aleister Crowley;
1875-1946), all of whom had an infinitesimal knowledge of
Kabbalah that did not prevent them from drawing freely on
their imaginations instead. The comprehensive works of A.E.
Waite, (*The Holy Kabbalah*, 1929), S. Karppe, and P.
Vulliaud, on the other hand, were essentially rather
confused compilations made from secondhand sources.
------------------------------------------------------------
Scholem, Gershom. "Kabbalah", Dorset Press,
1987 (1974 copyright), pp. 202-3.
===========================================================
thank you very much!
nagasiva yronwode ([log in to unmask]), Director
YIPPIE*! -- http://www.yronwode.org/
-----------------------------------------------------
*Yronwode Institution for the Preservation
and Popularization of Indigenous Ethnomagicology
-----------------------------------------------------
|