QABALAH

by

CHRIS MITCHELL

Many spiritual practices that have become popular in the West in recent decades, such as T'ai Chi, Buddhist meditation and yoga, come from an Eastern mystical tradition. We often overlook the fact that the West has a number of mystical traditions of its own - the Christian mysticism espoused by the Celtic Christian church, the Islamic Sufis, and the Qabalah of Judaism.

The beauty of the mystical experience is that it is transcendent, and so labels like "Christian" or "Jewish" or "Buddhist" becomes largely irrelevant. All the religious mystical traditions are like different roads, but leading to the same place.

This article looks at the magical and mystical tradition of Judaism, called the Qabalah. Although it derives from a religion, Judaism, it is a philosophy - a road-map of our consciousness.  It's flexible enough that it has been embraced by people of all faiths and none. Once an obscure and esoteric subject, mainstream bookshops are now packed with books on the subject, and its benefits are being heralded by people like Madonna.

The Qabalah is a Hebrew word meaning "received", an oral tradition of knowledge passed on. The Qabalah can be seen in many different ways - an ancient Jewish saying is that "there are as many ways to Truth as human faces". Everyone has their own path, and each of us carries with us our own Qabalah. Like life itself, you can read about it, write about it and think about it but, at the end of the day, it can't be taught, only experienced.

Legend has it that God taught the Qabalah to Adam, and that its principles were written down by the patriarch Abraham in a book called the Sefer Yetzirah (the Book of Formation). This book uses the concept the Universe was "written" (echoed by the Christian gospels which state "In the Beginning was the Word"), and that the Hebrew letters are imbued with spiritual significance. There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and each letter is assigned to one of the three elements (Fire, Air, Water - Earth was considered to be a combination of all three, and not an element in its own right), one of the seven planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) or one of the twelve signs of the zodiac. By looking for deeper levels of meaning in religious texts, we can come to a true knowledge of God and the Divine sparks that lie within us all. In the Zohar, a famous Qabalistic text, it is written:

"God is unified oneness... Down to the last link, everything is linked with everything else; so divine essence is below as well as above, in heaven and on earth."

This is summed up by the phrase "As above, so below" and is a general principle in the Universe. For example, astrology is based on the premise that large-scale events in the sky (alignments of planets) have an influence on the small scale (a person's life and personality).  In the Qabalistic sense, the huge concept of the body and mind of God is reflected in the smaller-scale body and mind of each individual human.  To the Qabalist, we are truly made "in God's image", and this image can be represented by a map called the "Tree of Life". The Tree of Life is a map of us as much as it is a map of God.

The Tree of Life has ten circles - these are called "sephirot" (singular: sephira). Each sephira represents a "divine emanation" according to the classical Qabalah; in effect, it represents a map of the qualities of God. Each sephira has numerous associations with colours, plants, animals, angels, and a whole range of experiences associated with each one. In addition to the sephirot, there are also 22 paths. Each path also has its own correspondence - in particular, each path corresponds to a Hebrew letter, and to a major arcana card of the Tarot, as well as to colours, plants and numerous other attributions.

In the next article, we'll take a guided tour of the Tree of Life, see what each sephira represents, and try out some exercises associated with the sephirot.

Autumn 2003