Jewish Magic? What happened here

[RecycledBenedict]

Don't forget that Christianity was first codefied into a state religion by a Roman emperor who sought to cement his power.

You mean Theodosius I, I suppose?

[Wimsaur]

You mean Theodosius I, I suppose?

Constantine the Great
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great

[RecycledBenedict]

Constantine the Great
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_the_Great

What was so wrong with Constantine the Great? It was Theodosius I who made Nicene Christianity the only state religion. Many persons confuse them with each other. With modern standards Constantine was a dictator, but so was every Roman emperor. The Empire enjoyed some sort of almost-freedom of religion during the reign of Constantine, which is very far from the intolerant situation during Theodosius' reign (or the situation under Diocletian).

[RandallS]

Christianized bibles conveniently change most of the references to divination or Magick (see Aaron) to better enslave and control people.

A Reminder:

generalized bashing of religions is against forum rules and there really no way to read that "to better enslave" except as bashing.

[Castus]

Look up the story of Joseph who used divination for Pharaoh.
Look this up in Tanakh not a Christian version.

Looks like it was in the Christian version too:

And Joseph said unto them, What deed is this that ye have done? wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?-- Genesis 44:15, KJV Translation

Further, Jews are taught from day one of Life to question teachers and authority.

Such a generalisation would, I'm sure, come as a great shock to the Hasidim or the Haredim.

Rabbi means teacher.

In Judaism, a rabbi /ˈræbaɪ/ is a teacher of Torah. This title derives from the Hebrew word רַבִּי rabi [ˈʁäbi], meaning "My Master" (irregular plural רבנים rabanim [ʁäbäˈnim]), which is the way a student would address a master of Torah. The word "master" רב rav [ˈʁäv] literally means "great one".

There are no spiritual authorities in Judaism.

Are you quite sure? Because I can think of a few.

[RecycledBenedict]

Such a generalisation would, I'm sure, come as a great shock to the Hasidim or the Haredim.

But Wimsaur's claim is rather true about Conservative Judaism, isn't it?

Many years ago, I listened to a lecture held by Rabbi Morton Narrowe for some of us gentiles. Both the big synagogue in Malmo and the big synagogue in Stockholm are 'mixed' synagogues, both having both Orthodox (usually Modern Orthodox, since the Hasidim go elsewhere) and Conservative members, and Narrowe served as Rabbi in Stockholm. He was educated in both an Orthodox yeshiva and a Conservative seminary, identified as Conservative himself, but since he served at a mixed synagogue he had to be sensitive for both denominations.

Narrowe stressed the importance of, that opposite opinions were faithfully preserved in Talmud, and the permissive - even encourageing - atmosphere, within the Judaism he knew, to wrestle with the text in order to find several meanings (even mutually exclusive ones) in the text.

[Castus]

But Wimsaur's claim is rather true about Conservative Judaism, isn't it?

Many years ago, I listened to a lecture held by Rabbi Morton Narrowe for some of us gentiles. Both the big synagogue in Malmo and the big synagogue in Stockholm are 'mixed' synagogues, both having both Orthodox (usually Modern Orthodox, since the Hasidim go elsewhere) and Conservative members, and Narrowe served as Rabbi in Stockholm. He was educated in both an Orthodox yeshiva and a Conservative seminary, identified as Conservative himself, but since he served at a mixed synagogue he had to be sensitive for both denominations.

Narrowe stressed the importance of, that opposite opinions were faithfully preserved in Talmud, and the permissive - even encourageing - atmosphere, within the Judaism he knew, to wrestle with the text in order to find several meanings (even mutually exclusive ones) in the text.

 
That is very true! Especially in regards to Torah, which is inexhaustible. This is reflected in the way Conservative Jewish law handles dissenting opinions, which I've discussed with you before. However different Jews and different movements do different things in different ways and I am very wary of generalising. Certainly there is a venerable tradition of wrestling and engaging with text in Judaism, and that applies across the entire Jewish spectrum from Reconstructionists to hardcore Satmar Hasidim, but the way that tradition is expressed varies hugely.

I don't want to fall into a trap which is common with liberal Judaism; namely writing off highly Orthodox or observant Jews who have developed traditions of strong rabbinic leadership, or an approach to Torah which is more reverential than it is engaging, as inauthentic to some argumentative spirit of Yiddishkeit. Neither do I support the fulminations of Orthodox Jews who grade every non-Orthodox Jew on an inevitably declining scale of observance. I'm privately convinced that there's only one wrong way to 'do Jew' and even then there are those who disagree. This is why statements like 'Judaism does/believes/disbelieves X' make me nervous, and why I find it much easier to assess particular strands of Judaism within the context of their own movements -- even the 'postdenominationals'.

But that's all terribly OT, so ignore me.

[RecycledBenedict]

That is very true! Especially in regards to Torah, which is inexhaustible. This is reflected in the way Conservative Jewish law handles dissenting opinions, which I've discussed with you before. However different Jews and different movements do different things in different ways and I am very wary of generalising. Certainly there is a venerable tradition of wrestling and engaging with text in Judaism, and that applies across the entire Jewish spectrum from Reconstructionists to hardcore Satmar Hasidim, but the way that tradition is expressed varies hugely.

I don't want to fall into a trap which is common with liberal Judaism; namely writing off highly Orthodox or observant Jews who have developed traditions of strong rabbinic leadership, or an approach to Torah which is more reverential than it is engaging, as inauthentic to some argumentative spirit of Yiddishkeit. Neither do I support the fulminations of Orthodox Jews who grade every non-Orthodox Jew on an inevitably declining scale of observance. I'm privately convinced that there's only one wrong way to 'do Jew' and even then there are those who disagree. This is why statements like 'Judaism does/believes/disbelieves X' make me nervous, and why I find it much easier to assess particular strands of Judaism within the context of their own movements -- even the 'postdenominationals'.

But that's all terribly OT, so ignore me.

I will certainly not ignore you. This answer was very informative and interesting.

I can relate to, what you write about wariness against generalisations. When my Lutheran friends claim, that 'all Gnostics are dualists who regard matter as evil', and when my Neo-Gnostic friends claim, that 'no Gnostics are dualists who regard matter as evil', I become slightly tired. The difference between the more or less monistic Gospel of Truth and a highly dualist scripture such as the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex, would be obvious for anyone who keep one's head clear. The same is true about the clear difference in worldview between Corpus Hermeticum treatise V and XI, in the monistic end of the spectrum, and Corpus Hermeticum treatise IV and VI, in the dualistic end of the spectrum. Many generalisations are often bad.

[Hippie-Witch]

Also, Sefer Yetzirah is pivotal for understanding both Judaic and Hermetic Kabbalah.

-Wimsaur.

Thank you!
I think I'll get that book just so I can better understand what I came across. I don't know if it is the path I'll choose to follow but I have no doubt it will be enriching to read.

Two thirds or more of the Christian Bible contain the Hebrew Bible. It is not that much of a surprise, that Christians (and even Christian magicians) of the Renaissance held so-called 'Old Testament' characters in high regard. There are also some other cultural aspects of the time to consider:

1. Ceremonial magic entered western Europe by translating Moslem and Jewish magical treatises written in Arabic, Aramaic or Hebrew into Latin. The Iberian peninsula was the most conducive environment for this translation-process. Especially the royal court of Alfonso X of Castile (1252-1284) was important in this regard.

2. The knowledge of Latin was of course alive during the entire time between the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the mid-18th century, but the knowledge of the other classical languages - Greek and Hebrew (plus Aramaic and Arabic) - fluctuated considerably. By the 15th century, primarily in the Italian peninsula, but increasingly so north of the Alps, too, the interest in Greek and Hebrew increased. Among other things, it led to the translation of the Christian Bible into the vernaculars during the 16th century, but it also influenced the way Christians viewed magic: It was expected, that books about magic should contain 'holy words' in the sacred languages of Hebrew and Greek. This wasn't entirely new for the 15th century. Liber Iuratus Honorii, probably from the 14th century, did also contain such 'holy words'.



It is not fraudulent in the sense we use that word today. We have to take the cultural patterns of other times in consideration.

Conventionally, we use to call the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey 'Homer', but there has been a discussion for centuries if these epics are the gradual works of redactors or the works of a single author. When we say 'Homer', we do not really refer to one particular historical person, but to 'the person or persons who wrote, gathered, added and redacted The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Likewise, we speek, out of convention, about the Daoist classic Daodejing as it was written by an old Chinese sage called Laozi. We now know, that Daodejing was written, collected, added to and redacted in a rather long writing process. Laozi is now  just shorthand for 'the group of persons, whomever they were, who redacted the Daodejing.

Likewise, the biblical scriptures of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numeri seem to be the work of a series of authors, collectors and redactors, who finished their work in the late 6th century BCE or during the 5th century. When some people use to call them 'First to Fourth Books of Moses', it is just a convention. They were certainly not written by a historical Moses (if such a person did exist), but it is a convention to call them 'Books of Moses', because Moses is the primary character in three of them - and in Deutoronomy, which probably has another origin.

There were several scriptures written by Jews and Christians in the centuries shortly before and after (only after in the case of Christians, of course) the Common Era, in which the message was put in the mouth of Biblical characters like Enoch, Moses, Baruch or Ezra/Esdras. If you are curious about them, you will find many of them edited by James H. Charlesworth in the 1980s.

Old books about magic - sometimes known as grimoires - very often follow this pattern of using a historical or mythical character as a pseudonym. That is the case with the Sixth and Seventh books of Moses, but also with several books under the names of King Solomon or St. Cyprian, respectively. And these are not the only examples out there. The content of a grimoire must be judged from if anyone finds the content useful, not from the choice of pseudonym by the author(s).

One old book of Jewish magic, Shimmush Tehillin, treat the subject matter of using the Psalms in the Hebrew Bible for magical purposes. The so-called Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses often have an addition in the end, containing an adaptation and translation of Shimmush Tehillin, edited by Gottfried Selig, so even with your narrower definition of authenticity, there is some very Jewish magic in the 6th&7th.

Wow! I really didn't think of any of that. Yeah, I suppose when works are very very old sometimes they become skewed slightly, borrowed, and maybe not in their original form. It's better that than them becoming lost to the world. Thank you

[Hippie-Witch]

Besides the reasons that Frater Benedict just outlined (thank you!), there's another reason: there's a long and distressing history of people writing texts (and making art, and all sorts of other things) that pretend to be from one group (and often a group that is distrusted in society) to make them look bad, or to use to misrepresent their beliefs (because others can then point at it and say "Look, this text that claims it is Jewish says X!") or otherwise cause problems.

It happens in a wide range of cases, but there are an awful lot of times (especially between about the medieval period and after World War II) when Judaism is a prime target, and it's good to be careful at what materials you look at and where they came from, and what people who are within that community have to say about it. Some of the disparagement and ways texts are used against a community can be pretty subtle, and if you don't know the details, very hard to spot.

That makes a lot of sense. Seeing as the Jews were targets so many times, I will be careful to make sure what I am reading is credible. Thank you
 

It seems to me (as someone who comes from a pure Jewish family) that Jews have a vastly different perspective to that of a Christian.

Jews, unlike Christians, do not visually personify God. God has no face and no body (other than the entire universe).
This affects our entire outlook on life. The reason God is so scary in Tanak (which Christians call the old testament) is because he/she/it can not be identified with other than which name is cited per biblical passage.
When Christianity took our holy books, they omitted the different names of God (some masculine, some feminine, some singular, some plural), and replaced them with Lord.
The true meaning of the names of God were taught only to priests who first had to learn the symbolic language of Kabbalah to understand the subtle complexities of them.
Thus, the names are as masks that each refer to different aspects and personalities of the 1 God.
It is equally understood that these personalities are not God but the character of God's actions.

At no point is a Jew to visualize God because to do so is to limit God. God is unlimited and unknowable and to impose a face/limitation upon it is considered idol worship.

-Wimsaur.

 
Oh my goodness, do I love that. That was one thing about Christianity and even Wicca (though many Wiccans do not believe the Lord and Lady are actually beings with physical forms, but energies with certain characteristics that come to us as personified beings for us to better understand.) I could never get on board with. I would sit their in Catholic school going, "Really? Really? A giant man with a beard sits at a table in heaven with Jesus on the right and they eat dinner and what not?" Sounded like a children's story to me.

[RecycledBenedict]

I could never get on board with. I would sit their in Catholic school going, "Really? Really? A giant man with a beard sits at a table in heaven with Jesus on the right and they eat dinner and what not?" Sounded like a children's story to me.

 
I don't think that 'giant man with a beard sits at a table in heaven' is a good desciption of the Christian view on God. It is better to criticize Christianity for what it is guilty of, than what it is not guilty of. Don't build straw-men. For the Christian theologian Paul Tillich, God is 'the Ground of Being'. The Catechism of the Catholic Church has the following to say (§40):

God transcends creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, imagebound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God–"the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable"–with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

And in §239 the CCC rejects the view that God would be male.

[RecycledBenedict]

Thank you!
I think I'll get that book just so I can better understand what I came across. I don't know if it is the path I'll choose to follow but I have no doubt it will be enriching to read.

The most comprehensive translation of Sefer Yetzirah was translated by Aryeh Kaplan and published by Samuel Weiser Inc. in 1990. Sefer Yetzirah exists in four manuscript versions, and Kaplan's edition contains all of them. Kaplan also wrote a very detailed commentary, which includes large amounts of traditional Jewish kabbalah.

Jewish Kabbalah and Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah are not identical to each other, although they stem from a common historical root: Early Jewish Kabbalah. The second, middle, branch of Kabbalah's historical development is Christian Kabbalah. It branched off from early Jewish Kabbalah in the 15th century, and it is out of Christian Kabbalah Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah evolved. Two authors in particular stands with one leg in Christian Kabbalah and one leg in Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (who wrote Three Books on Occult Philosophy) and Athanasius Kircher (who wrote Oedipus Aegyptiacus). The modern stage of development of Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah began with the French author Eliphas Levi in the 1850s.

Meanwhile, traditional Jewish Kabbalah has survived in especially three Jewish communities:

• Lithuanian descendants of mitnagdim
• Hasidim
• Mizrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews in the Middle East

Since the beginning of the Haskala movement among Western and Central European Jews in the 18th century, Kabbalah has been looked upon in disdain among those Jews who became Reform Jews, Conservative Jews and Modern Orthodox Jews.

Jewish Renewal is a movement which began in the 1960s, which brings the progressive values of Reform Judaism (which otherwise is anti-mystical) together with the mystical dimension of Hasidism (which otherwise nurture extremely conservative values). The most famous Renewal Jew is Zalman Schachter Shalomi.

[RecycledBenedict]

Wow! I really didn't think of any of that. Yeah, I suppose when works are very very old sometimes they become skewed slightly, borrowed, and maybe not in their original form. It's better that than them becoming lost to the world. Thank you

What I wrote had not so much to do about being skewed or borrowed. 'Original form' is a concept that is very hard to define, when it comes to literary works of the age we are discussing. My point was, that using a pseudonym (or afterwards being given one by others) was quite normal for some communities in the past. That was not forgery in the modern sense.

[RecycledBenedict]

I think I'll get that book just so I can better understand what I came across. I don't know if it is the path I'll choose to follow but I have no doubt it will be enriching to read.

My first attempt to answer came out jumbled, and it is too late to edit, so I write this clarification.

The Hebrew word Kabbalah means The Received (and is today used in a non-religious way about receipts in Israel). When it is used about religion, it refers to a particular type of Jewish mysticism and to two branches of mysticism that has branched off from early Jewish Kabbalah: Christian Kabbalah and Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah.

Mysticism exist within every religion, although to varying extents. Mystical experiences are altered states of consciousness by which a person have a direct experience of a spiritual, transcendent or divine reality. There are several different types of mystical experience.

Jewish mysticism existed before Kabbalah. Kabbalah is a particular type or sub-set of Jewish mysticism. Although influential on Kabbalah, Sefer Yetzirah is not kabbalistic in itself: It belongs to an earlier stage of Jewish mysticism, and was compiled at some point in time between 100 CE and 600 CE. According to legend, it was written by Abraham, but that is just a legend. The subject matter of Sefer Yetzirah is (among other things) the idea that the entire Cosmos consists of Hebrew letters, and each letter correspond to a particular set of correspondences - non-causal connections of symbolic (but not exclusively symbolic) nature.

As I just wrote, Sefer Yetzirah became influential on Kabbalah. Kabbalah proper emerged in the Iberian Peninsula around the year 1200. The most important founder was Isaac the Blind, and the most important early Kabbalistic literary work was Sefer Bahir (translated by Aryeh Kaplan into English in 1979). The new things with this Iberian Kabbalah was the idea of Sephirot: Ten emanations out of the divine Unlimited, through which God - in the Jewish sense - manifest itself.

A new wave of Kabbalah occurred in the 1290s, when Kabbalist Moses de León distributed the book Zohar to the Jewish world. According to legend, Zohar was written by 2th century rabbi Simeon bar Yochai, but in reality Zohar was most probably written  by Moses de León himself.

In 1492, the Spanish king decreed all Spanish Jews to emigrate, and the town Safed in the Holy Land became one of the destinations for fleeing Spanish Jews, among them some kabbalists. In the mid-16th century, the kabbalist rabbi Isaac Luria became very influential, and most forms of Jewish Kabbalah today are influenced by him. The central idea of Lurianic Kabbalah is that an imbalance occurred in the gradual manifestation of the divine, and that Jews are supposed to mend the 'broken parts' of the divine, by acting in conformance to Jewish Law. Luria's ideas became known among Jews in Central and Eastern Europe thanks to two disciples of Luria: Israel Sarug (the writings of whom influenced Kabbalah among mitnagdim - the critics of hasidism) and Hayyim Vital (the writings of whom influenced Kabbalah among hasids).

Some Jews fleeing intolerant Spain ended up in the Italian Peninsula - then consisting of a large number of independent city-states, duchies, principalities and republics. The trendy mode of thinking at the time was (and is) called the Renaissance. Some Renaissance thinkers expected a primordial truth equally available in Christian theology, ancient Egypt and among Greek philosophers, and when some of these Christian philosophers acquaintanced recent Jewish immigrants, they came to hear about Kabbalah. Pico de la Mirandola was an important author belonging to what became a new branch of Kabbalah: Christian Kabbalah.

Among some adherents of Christian Kabbalah there existed an interest in magic. I have already mentioned Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Athanasius Kircher. In the 1850s this Neo-Hermetic attitude within Christian Kabbalah emerged as a third branch of Kabbalah:Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah. The most conspicuous thing with Levi's thinking was that Levi supposed a correpsondence between the Hebrew letters and the trumps of the Tarot cards. The idea was not entirely new: A man called De Mellet had suggested the same thing in the 1770s and 1780s (but counting backwards). Levi counted forwards, and also associated the ten pip cards of each suit with sephirot, and associated the four court cards of each suit with the four letters of the divine name YHWH. Levi set an occult movement in motion, and after his death, in 1875, there existed Occultists interested in Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah in both France and UK. Some of them organised themselves in several esoteric orders in the 1880s and 1890s.

It is worh remembering, that Levi's idea of a connection between tarot and Kabbalah is not a part of Jewish Kabbalah: It is typical for Neo-Hermetic Kabbalah. Most Jewish kabbalists were at the time probably not aware of Levi and his ideas, but scholar Gershom Scholem, the first Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jersualem, wasn't impressed and wrote (collected and published in Kabbalah, New York/Harmondsworth 1974, p. 203):

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 origins 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 (Gérard 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.

[Hippie-Witch]

I don't think that 'giant man with a beard sits at a table in heaven' is a good desciption of the Christian view on God. It is better to criticize Christianity for what it is guilty of, than what it is not guilty of. Don't build straw-men. For the Christian theologian Paul Tillich, God is 'the Ground of Being'. The Catechism of the Catholic Church has the following to say (§40):



And in §239 the CCC rejects the view that God would be male.

 
It really depends where you are in Christianity. I believe their are some groups that realize that deity is above gender, however the groups I've been involved with really seem to think he's a man sitting in the sky. I have heard Priests say every Sunday that Jesus sits at the right hand of the father; I've seen many people take this very literally. They pray to their Heavenly Father. If I took a stroll up and down the congregation at my parents church and asked if they believe if God is male, female, or neither most would say male.

The thing about a lot of Christians and Catholics is that they learn more from attending church and what they are told from relatives than from actually sitting down and reading the bible. I'm not saying this is the case for all of them, but it does seem to be the trend in North America.

That's why it's so easy to pull pranks like this one:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCQ0svB0UUU[/video]

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDlxCvFZWw[/video]

Those were not pieces of scripture that were brought up during mass so they were unaware of them.

I'm not trying to say that Christians are ignorant, however I am saying that a lot of them seem to not actually study their religion as deeply as other groups may. (I know many Christians that have never read the bible, however you'll never find a practicing pagan that hasn't read multiple books)