Friday, March 02, 2007
MORE ON CABALA FROM THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA
There is a relationship between Judaism and Gnosticism. The entry states that Gnosticism is of Caldean origin and "Gnosticism was Jewish in character long before it became Christian."
Gnosticism--that is, the cabalistic "Hokmah" (wisdom)...seems to have been the first attempt on the part of the Jewish sages to give the empirical mystic lore, with the help of Platonic and Pythagorean or Stoic ideas...It was the ancient Cabala which, while allegorizing the Song of Songs, spoke of Adam Kadmon, or the God-man, of the "Bride of God," and hence of "the mystery of the union of powers" in God...Speculative Cabala of old...spoke of "the germ of poison from the serpent transmitted from Adam to all generations"...
Original sin?
In the Cabalistic tree, the right side is the source of light and purity, the left side is the source of darkness and impurity according to the entry.
The Testament of Solomon is said by the entry to have
recently brought to light the whole system of conjuration of angels and demons, by which the evil spirits were exorcised...
The Sefer Refu'ot or Book of Healing
contains the "prescriptions against all the diseases inflicted by demons, which Noah wrote according to the instructions given by the angel Raphael and handed over to his son Shem.
There is a reference to healing by demonic powers.
Neoplatonism is said to produce "that state of enthusiasm and entrancement that made people "fly in the air" by "the wagon of the soul" and achieve all kinds of miracles by way of hallucinations and visions."
Spiritualism of the New York Trancendentalists reported by Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J. in his book THE CHURCH AND SPIRITUALISM--a spiritualism that manifested in table-rapping sounds--very much resembles this passage from the encyclopedia entry:
The whole principle of emanation, with its idea of evil inherent in matter as the dross is found there, and the entire theurgic Cabala is in all its detail developed there; even the spirit-rapping and table-turning done in the seventeenth century by German cabalists by means of "shemot" (magic incantations)...
Contrary to the Christian concept of God creating out of nothing, according to the encyclopedia "God created the world from matter He found ready at hand...Eminent Palestinian teachers hold the doctrine of the preexistence of matter in spite of the protest of Gamaliel."
A fourth century Palestinian Midrash
asserts that three of the elements--namely, water, air, and fire--existed before the creation of the world; that water then produced the darkness, fire produced light, and air produced wisdom, and the whole world thereupon was made by the combination of these six elements. The gradual condensation of a primal substance into visible matter, a fundamental doctrine of the Cabala...
God is said to be the dwelling place of the universe by the mystics of the Talmudic period, but the universe is not the dwelling place of God. This would make the universe a part of God, even though God is not contained in the universe. Out of this comes the idea of union between God and man. The concept is pantheistic and is also a part of New Age doctrine.
According to the entry Metatron, said to play the role of the demiurgos, and expressly mentioned as God, passed into the Cabala from the Talmud. It is the demiurgos that Blavatsky claimed was the God of the Christians, an inferior god who created the world and caused the spiritual essense of man to fall into materialization.
