Theurgy & Magic
"There is a universal tendency among
mankind to conceive all beings
like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with
which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately
conscious." - David Hume
Talisman from the Sepher Raziel
Magic,
the belief that one can influence one's environment using esoteric
technical skills, is grounded in cultural assumptions about the
nature and structure of reality. One of the simplest and most pervasive
of these assumptions is that everything - people, places, plants,
animals, stones, buildings and manufactured objects - is alive and so
has a soul. These living souls exist within a larger ecology of being
that subsumes what we might think of as our normal daily life. These
living souls
can interact with us directly, and become perceptible in dreams, during
visionary experiences, and sometimes spontaneously. There is a vast
terminology for identifying and classifying this extended "ecology of
being", but for the sake of brevity and simplicity I will follow common
usage and refer to them as "spirits". The ancient Greek term, daimones, would do just as well.
The basic cultural model for relating to spirits differs in very few
respects
from the way that people deal with each other. We know that some people
are kind and
helpful. Some are neutral but prickly. Other people are mean and
spiteful and vindictive. Most cultures view spirits in the same way. A
universal method for smoothing relationships with spirits is
propriation via offerings, usually food and drink, or animal
sacrifices. Problems with spirits happen because people are neglectful
and fail to
respect spirits, break taboos, or irritate people who control spirits.
The normal signs that one has angered spirits are misfortune and
ill-health.Various classes in society specialise in understanding the
relationship between spirits and people, and exhibit the subsidiary
skills of identifying, communicating-with, propriating and manipulating
classes of spirit.
There is no simple, unambiguous, universal term for the technical skill
of working with spirits. Most of the terms one might use are laden with
cultural assumptions. A default term is "magic", and the word is used
here.
There is no reason to believe that in the distant past Europe was
different from animist cultures the world over. The most
significant cultural shift in Europe and the Middle East
- the mileau for Kabbalah - was the early dominance of city
states followed by empires of increasing size. The economy of city
states increased the number of social classes and castes, and the
emergence of empires, in particular the Roman and Persian empires,
increased the number of highly-privileged, educated and urbanised
administrative classes, characterised by an intense hierarchical
stratification. Empires created the infrastructure, community, mindset
and military reach necessary for the emergence of official state
religions. With a degree of approximation one can say that
Christianity became the state religion at the heart of the Eastern
Roman Empire, and Islam the state religion at the heart of the Persian
Empire, with a large amount of friction along the boundaries.
This massive shift from tribal cultures and animist beliefs to empires
administered by privileged hierarchies ruled by an emperor,
caused a similarly dramatic shift in cultural assumptions about the
nature of the spirit world. Taking ancient Greece as an example, as far
back as 500BC animist beliefs were giving way to the belief that the
Kosmos was the outcome of a creative process involving a single supreme
source of all being. This change can be detected with Pythagoras, and
becomes pronounced and highly influential with Plato. The impact of
doing this is that all spirits become subordinate to a larger scheme.
Instead of simply subsisting in an organic natural ecology, they become
organised, stratified, categorised and increasingly dominated by larger
concerns and hierarchies.
One can see this
clearly in the entrance way to many larger churches
and cathedrals. The arch above the main entrance (tympanum)
is often arranged to show the spiritual structure of the Kosmos in the
form of The Kingdom of Heaven. Christ is seated at the centre of the
Heavenly Court, crowned as king, and surrounded by disincarnate
entities: saints and angels, organised according to priority, and in
many cases, various inferior classes of spirit such as demons and
devils tormenting sinners.
The techne of magic evolved
in
parallel with cultural assumptions about the nature of reality, as did
the categorisation of magic and its practitioners. One could
distinguish between the literate and educated, and the illiterate and
uneducated. There was state-sanctioned magic, and there were practices
(even in pagan Roman times) that were illegal and treated as criminal
acts. There were approved entities, and unapproved entities. So, for
example, there was the "low magic" (goetia)
of uneducated peasants, and the "high magic" (theourgia)
of highly educated Neoplatonist philosophers. The state-sanctioned
magic of priests was reclassified as not being magic, while various
itinerant mages, healers, fortune tellers and sorcerors were harrassed
by the authorities. One of the greatest changes from earlier times was
the increasingly clear-cut distinction between morally good entities
(saints and angels), morally ambiguous or dubious entities (the spirits
of the planets, zodiac and decans, days of the week, hours of the day
etc), and morally evil entities (fallen angels and associated legions
of devils). The Christian Church selected for itself a broad class of
rites, ceremonies and ancient practices, reinterpreted and reframed
them according to its own doctrines, and effectively reclassified
anyone else as trafficking with evil spirits.
Any modern discussion of magic in Europe and the Near Middle East tends
to be laden with this cultural baggage from Late Antiquity (i.e. the
transitional period c. 200CE - 500CE). The magical lore from that
period was preserved with its cultural assumptions - a prime
source of being, hierarchy and stratification, the magical importance
of textual formulae, glyphs and secret names of power - more or less
intact. The dominance of Christian culture made any further cultural
development difficult and it was preserved until the Scientific
Reformation of the seventeenth century. The publication of Cornelius
Agrippa's infamous Three Volumes of
Occult Philosophy in
1531-33 was essentially its last gasp. With the increasing rise of
atheism (in all respects a greater barrier to comprehension than
Christianity) it became obsolete, and apart from various
romantically-inspired occult revivals, it has remained so.
The purpose of this preamble is to highlight that the culture within
which magic appears in Kabbalah shares many of the assumptions of the
culture of Late Antiquity but is subtly different. There are those who
will say that magic has no part in the Kabbalah, that this is a
misunderstanding created by occult dilettantes who have misunderstood
and misused Kabbalah. This is incorrect. In fact the praxis is
explained in outline by one of the most respected of the medieval
Spanish Kabbalists, Joseph Gikatilla, in his Gates of Light:
Now you have been informed that the
essence of faith and the basis for
understanding the unity of God is to understand the applications for
each name. For all His Names that are mentioned in the Torah are
included in the Tetragrammaton YHVH, which is similar to a tree trunk.
Each of the other names - those which I have compared to roots and
branches and other hidden treasures - has a unique function.
It is just like a storehouse which has several rooms. Each room within
the storehouse has a specific identity: one room has precious gems, one
has silver, another has gold, while another has different kinds of food
and another has drinks. If a person needs food, he may starve to death
if he doesn't know how to get into the room, even though the rooms are
full. It is not because his request has been denied. He is simply not
aware of which room he needs. So it is with the comprehension of the
blessed Holy Names: there are names in charge of prayer, mercy and
forgiveness, while others are in charge of tears and sadness, injury
and tribulations, sustenance and income, or heroism, loving kindness
and grace.
If one does not know how to concentrate on the very Name which is the
key to the answer of his request, then who is to blame if the request
is not granted? It is his own foolishness and ignorance, as it is
written:
A man's folly subverts his ways and his heart rages against the YHVH.
Proverbs 19:3
For God is open to everyone. It is the foolishness of man that is to
blame - the one who does not know to which room he should go and
therefore returns empty-handed. Yet, man thinks this evil thought, that
God thwarted him from getting what he needed. This, however, is not the
truth, for his own foolishness has let him down. As it is written,
It is your iniquities that have diverted these things, your sins have
withheld the bounty from you. Jeremiah 5:25
One must therefore familiarise oneself with the ways of the Torah and
know the purpose of the Holy Names. He should be expert in them and
when he needs to request something from God he should concentrate on
the name designated to handle that question. If he does so, then not
only will his request be granted, but he will be loved in the heavens
and beloved in the world; he will inherit both this world and the next.
The gates of Light page 14
Some
explanation is required. Gikatilla has assumed that the primary
manifestations of God in this world are active expressions of the
divine names of God, whose interrelationships are represented in a
structure (or living organism) known as the Tree of Life.
When he states "One must therefore familiarise oneself with the ways of
the Torah and
know the purpose of the Holy Names" he is advising the reader to create
an internal simulacrum of the Tree by means of intensive study and
various practices that he ... fails to communicate. The remainder
of his book contains a selection of texts and readings and
correspondences to point the reader in the right direction. The result
of this exercise will be a kind of divine mimesis, the construction of
an internal microcosm that enables the practitioner to literally "be
like God". If this sounds strange, consider that one of the first
practical applications of Newton's laws of motion and gravity was to
improve the art of gunnery. Understanding the flight of abstract
projectiles enables the gunner to hit targets more rapidly, and at
greater distances. To an extent all techne
is simulation; one internalises the art. The archer becomes the arrow.
This is a style of magic that will be unfamiliar to many people. There
is nothing in it about magic circles, black candles, sacrifices,
arcane texts and conjurations, evil spirits, pacts, chanting or
sinister
robes - the kind of imagery that one can distil from the more lurid of
the eighteenth century grimoires and summarised in Waite's Book of Black Magic.
There is no "Black" in Gikatilla's mind; because he is Jewish and not
Christian, it simply does not concern him. His worldview does not
contain the strange, quasi-dualism of Christianity in which the powers
of evil have a near autonomous status and compete for the souls of
humanity. The idea of "selling one's soul" in a Faustian pact would
have seemed utterly ludicrous.
Iamblichus of Ipameia
The most articulate spokesperson
for theurgy was the Platonist Iamblichus
of Ipameia. A descendent of the priest-kings of Emessa in Syria, he
had a peerless understanding both of late Platonism and the cultic
practices of the time. Although he live nearly a thousand years before
Joseph Gikatilla, there are so many similarities in assumption and
structure in the Platonic emanationism of Late Antiquity, and the
emanationism of classical Kabbalah, that his observations are not only
useful, they are profoundly insightful.
Iamblichus believed that the soul, descended into Nature, was so
blinded by its interactions with, and passions for, the external world
that it required physical ritual involving carefully chosen items to
awaken it to the higher orders of reality. The "carefully chosen items"
were sunthemata, items that
had the property of revealing and communicating some aspect of the
divine, and could be physical objects (stones, plants, animals),
perfumes, music, actions, songs or poetry. A ritual immersion in sunthemata had the effect, like a
magnifying glass, of concentrating a divine aspect on the soul and
awakening the corresponding aspect in the soul. Ritual was a natural
adjunct to the worldview of Iamblichus: philosophy prepared the mind,
and ritual awakened the interior eye of the soul to the natural orders
of the Kosmos. In time the soul itself became sunthemata, a conscious channel for
the divine influx capable of demiurgic action and co-creation.
If one substitutes for the theurgic pagan rituals of Iamblichus the
traditional religious rituals and personal obligations of Judaism,
performed with appropriate Kabbalistic kavannah (mindfulness, intention)
and an awareness of Kabbalistic theosophy, then one obtains a theurgic schema similar to what Iamblichus
describes.
The tradition of Hermetic Kabbalah fuses both viewpoints. In 1978 (and
subsequent) the author received instruction in theurgic methods which
contained the theurgic structure of Gikatilla (the structure of
sefirotic invocation outlined in The
Gates of Light) with practical theurgic ritual methods according
to the outline given by Iamblichus.
The style of
magic is so different from the stereotype it is called theurgy
("god-work"), a name coined by Chaldean Platonists in the second
century CE to set it apart from the armchair speculations of theology
("god-talk"). Theurgy is based on the belief that human being have a
divine spark, that human beings share the same demiurgic capabilities
as the creator, and there is a legitimate use of this power to
participate in the dynamic unfolding of the Kosmos. When Gikatilla
states "If he does so, then not
only will his request be granted, but he will be loved in the heavens
and beloved in the world; he will inherit both this world and the next"
he obviously views this kind of activity not only as desirable, but as
a fulfilment of human potential, an awakening to full stature.
A key aspect of Kabbalistic theurgy is the use of names. As Gikatilla
states, names have a unique function. They are not merely signifiers; they are capabilities. One must
know how to concentrate upon them, and for this one must become aware
of the context within which they are embedded. For example, the name Adonai is associated with the
sefira Malkhut and with the Shekhinah,
and a vast association of symbolism, legend, scripture, history and
ritual practice is evoked within the mind of the Kabbalist when this
name is employed. There would almost certainly have been additional
secret techniques used under the guise of "concentration"; Gikatilla
was for a time a student of Abraham
Abulafia, a master of the discipline of tzeruf, a technique of sustained
mental concentration in which names are permuted and combined.
The use of names as capabilities, somewhat in the manner of a platinum
credit card, did provoke a sense of unease. In the Sepher Chasidim, attributed to R.
Judah the Pious, it states:
"One may not say that the invocation
of God's Name obliges Him to do
the will of the invoker, that God Himself is coerced by the recital of
His Name; but that the Name itself is invested with the power to
fulfill the desire of the man who utters it." So yes, as the good Rabbi Judah confirms, it is a platinum credit card!
It is accepted among scholars that the stimulus for the development
of Kabbalah in medieval Europe was a re-reading of a much older stratum
of documents from the near East (particularly Palestine and Babylonia)
and their re-interpretation in the light of the culture of medieval
Europe. This can be likened to the revival of Classical arts during the
Italian Renaissance. In addition to standard texts such as the Tanakh (Jewish Bible), the Talmud, and a large selection of
secondary materials (aggadot and midrashim), there were some very
unusual texts that had been preserved in family lineages such as the
Kalonymous family in the Rhineland, examples being The
Sepher Yetzirah, the Shi'ur
Komah, various Hekhalot
and Merkavah texts, and a disorganised and inscrutable collection of texts published as Sepher Raziel haMelekh. These
texts, highly influential in the development of Kabbalistic ideas, have
a pronounced magical flavour.
Probably the most important is the Sepher
Yetzirah, subject to a large number of commentaries by prominent
Kabbalists. In outline it is little more than a terse, enigmatic and
almost poetic reframing of standard Neopythagorean ideas
from Late Antiquity, transposed into a Jewish setting. In the medieval mind it was literally "The Book of
Creation", a prescription for advanced mystical-magical practices
culminating in the creation of life. Popular myth-making around
this idea gave rise to the many stories about the golem, an artificial being made out
of mud and animated by the power of Holy Names.
The Shi'ur Komah , partly
inspired by traditions surrounding the Song of Songs, is a theophany (a
vision of the divine), and contains a description of the divine throne
and an enumeration of the dimensions and secret names of an
incomprehensibly vast humanoid figure. The traditions concerning it are
lost - even in early medieval times it was inscrutable. It does recall
certain ancient traditions and practices of the Mandean gnostics in southern
Iraq who used
the secret names of the body parts of the giant Primordial Adam (Adam Kadmon)
to create an immortal Body of Light
for a deceased person. There may be similarities with ancient Egyptian
traditions concerning the dismembered body of the God Osiris.
The Hekhalot and Merkavah literature (see for
example The Greater Hekhalot)
is a literature associated with a mystical vision of the divine throne.
It contains detailed enumerations of angels and guards and overseers
and secret seals and is very clearly related to an analagous and contemporary magical
literature, and also to a large body of contemporary gnostic material.
The Sepher Raziel haMelekh is
overtly magical and contains a disjointed collection of texts, some of
which describe supernal realms and their command structure in the
manner of the Enoch literature from antiquity, while others
drill down into the magical uses of synthetically-generated divine
names, such as the Shemhamphorash (name of 72
letters).
Although
Jews suffered episodes of appalling persecution in Europe, one can
point to many communities that had lived with their Christian
neighbours since before they were Christian. It is said the Rhineland
Jews migrated there at the invitation of the Emperor Charlemagne. The
time of ghettos was still a long way in the future. There were many old
and well-integrated communities, and shared a great deal of common
culture with Christians. An adjunct to the dominantly Christian
worldview of medieval Europe was
the appearance of a literature often known as the magical
grimoire, consisting of recipes for summoning various classes of
spirit to practical ends - seducing women, manipulating judges, finding
hidden treasure and so on. The recipe structure of these grimoires
reveals the following preoccupations:
- Time:
propritious moments are determined using ancient occult theories based
around astrology.
- Equipment:
ritual implements have to be prepared according to complex formulae and
typically use rare ingredients.
- Purification:
the practitioner is presented with a list of prohibitions and
commandments (e.g. abstinance, fasting, prayer).
- Protection:
descriptions of protective devices, such as a lamen
and a magic circle.
- Conjurations and
Dismissals: these are often derived from Church liturgy, psalms
etc.
- Names and Seals:
these are the signifiers of the spirits to be summoned.
In several cases this literature has a superficial veneer of deriving
from Jewish sources. A major grouping is the Solomonic literature, which derives from legends
that King Solomon had the ability to control spirits and used them the
build the First Temple. Many of the magical names used are derived from
Hebrew names of power (but equally, many are not). However, the overall
worldview that the grimoire discloses tends to reveal preoccupations
that are more Christian than Jewish - specifically, the need to control
spirits of dubious or malign provenance rather than solicit angels.
There are some exceptions however:
- The Liber Juratus
or Sworn Book of Honorius
contains a complex devotional and ritual formula for a vision of God
that Richard Kieckhefer (in Conjuring
Spirits) believes may have been inspired by Jewish Merkavah
traditions.
- The Ars Notoria
(or Notary Arts) is a collection of magical techniques for cognitive
enhancement - memory, recall, comprehension, and fluency in
intellectual
disciplines. Accessing the Prince of the Torah (Sar Torah) for similar
reasons is one of the preoccupations of the
Merkavah/Hekhalot literature of Late Antiquity.
- The Book of Abramelin the Mage presents an extensive
backstory claiming Jewish origins. There are good scholarly arguments
for and against. The extensive devotional preparation and purification
lasting many months prior to summoning one's Holy Guardian Angel is
plausible in the context of Jewish practice and belief.
The sharp increase in interest in Kabbalah during the Renaissance and
the widespread assumption of a prisca
theologia,
an original vein of Egyptian secret wisdom that had been fractured over
time into separate streams, had lead to the belief that the Hermetic
corpus, Platonism, Christianity and Jewish Kabbalah preserved vestiges
of this ur-tradition and "were all saying the same thing". It is
this spirit of infectious syncretism that infuses Agrippa's compendious
1531 CE collection of occult philosophy and lore. About one third of
the content derives from Kabbalistic sources, and it is his fusion of
traditions in a single volume that has broadly defined "Hermetic
Kabbalah" from that time on. What marks Agrippa as unique is his fusion
of worldview and praxis in a single compendium. It is a bold and in
many ways astonishing work, and a single chapter heading will convey
Agrippa's ability to abstract away from detail in his attempt to lay
forth an underlying unity of viewpoint: "Of divine emanations, which
the Hebrews call numerations, others attributes; the gentiles gods and
dieties; and of the ten Sephiroth and ten most sacred names of God
which rule them, and the interpretation of them."
While it is impossible to generalise about the whole of Jewish culture
in Europe over several centuries (and Trachtenberg makes clear the
extent to which European Jews were influenced by local traditions and
superstitions) it appears that Jews had less need to resort to spirit
conjuring than their Christian contemporaries. There are records of
well-known Kabbalists (such as Chaim Vital) having a wide range of occult
interests, but the theurgic traditions of divine names combined with
practical traditions for their employment enjoyed a legitimacy within
the Jewish community that spirit conjuring did not. Trachenberg
observes that the well-known mezuzah,
fastened to the door posts of houses, was widely believed to repel evil
spirits, and was prepared in a manner almost identical to amulets and
talismen. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the phenomenon of
the wonder-working rabbi was sufficiently entrenched that the better
known were known as Ba'al Shem,
Masters of the Divine Name. Even today one can find individuals (e.g. Rabbi
Eliahu Azulai ) who will prepare a magical talisman using
extremely ancient traditions.
Further Reading
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of
Medieval Ritual Magic
Aryeh Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah
Aaron Leitch, Secrets of the Magickal Grimoires
Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition
Arthur Edward Waite, The Book of Black Magic
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