The Kabbalah Course
Text Materials
For each segment of the course, students receive 15-30 pages of text material prepared by the instructor. These materials are provided for the personal use of registered students. Copyright laws prohibit unauthorized copying or distribution.
Following are some excerpts from the text materials:
Segment 1:
According to Kabbalistic teachings, God created the universe by a process of emanation, or “birthing.” However a catastrophe occurred requiring a cosmic act of redemption. Whether or not the catastrophe was associated with the Fall of Adam and Eve, the teachings insist that humanity must participate in the cosmic redemption. This is a most important point—and one that is most relevant to our work in the world. The modern Kabbalist asserts that the “redemption” in which we must participate is not atonement for the primeval sin but the establishment of harmony at all levels of reality.
The Kabbalah portrays humanity as a pilgrim on a long spiritual journey. We came from Spirit, and eventually we shall return to Spirit. During our sojourn in physical reality our task is to understand our predicament, learn from experiences, develop meaningful relationships to God and our fellow human beings, and rise in consciousness—as measured by our progression through the sefiroth and the worlds. The Earth is not our ultimate home, but the Kabbalah regards it as divine, and we treat it as a cherished place of visitation. During our time here we are charged with raising its consciousness and that of the kingdoms with which we come into contact. . .Segment 2:
By far the most important name Jews of the biblical period applied to God was YHVH. Known as the Tetragrammaton, (Greek: “name of four letters”), it occurs more than 6,800 times in the Hebrew Bible. It was considered so powerful that only the high priest was permitted to speak—or perhaps chant—it, and then only once a year, at Yon Kippur, in the privacy of the Holy of Holies. Classical Hebrew is composed entirely of consonants, so we do not know the correct pronunciation... In everyday speech, Jews of the biblical and rabbinic periods avoided uttering YHVH for fear of blasphemy. Instead they might allude to it as “The Name;” they would do the same even when writing scholarly or devotional texts. Alternatively they might use Adonai (ADNY, “Lord”) as a substitute. Adonai appears in the Bible almost as many times as YHVH. It appears in one passage along with the Tetragrammaton: “A Psalm of David. O Lord [YHVH] our Lord [Adonai], how excellent is thy name.” [Psalm 8:1]
By the High Middle Ages, some Jews had become less shy of invoking the Tetragrammaton for devotional or magical purposes. One of them was the Rabbi Joseph Gikatalia who was born in Castile, Spain, in 1248. In his best-known text, The Gates of Light, he explained that caution was still needed:
The great, glorious, fearsome name, YHVH, is a name that included all the other divine names that are mentioned in the Torah. There is no divine name that is not included in the name YHVH. Realizing this, you must be aware how careful you must be when you pronounce this name. When you pronounce the name YHVH, you take on your lips all the holy names. It is then as if your mouth and tongue are carrying all the holy names, upon which depend the universe and everything in it.
Gikatalia provided one of the first lists of divine names assigned to the sefiroth. Many others have done so since, and there is some variation from one teacher to another. Table 2 shows a representative set of the names. Like the names of the sefiroth themselves, the divine names assigned to them all appear in scripture. Moreover, we know that the ten names were already given special significance in the fourth century CE because church father Jerome—a Christian scholar with unusual proficiency in Hebrew—listed them in a letter to his female friend Marcella.
Segment 4:
The divine light first manifests in Kether. The light then cascades like water from one sefiroth to the next. At each stage the light encounters denser levels of reality, until in Malkuth it reaches the physical level. In Kether, the Divine is only partially manifest. Full manifestation—or “existence,” which literally means “to stand aside from”—demands duality, which first occurs in the polar opposites of Chokmah and Binah and continues through two other pairs of opposites: Chesed and Geburah, and Netzach and Hod. The first several sefiroth are so far above our level of consciousness that we can only glimpse their meaning; but the lower sefiroth are more comprehensible to the human mind.
The theological significance of the sefiroth was discussed by Nachmanides, Eleazor of Worms, and others as well as by the author of the Bahir. An important question was whether the sefiroth expressed the divine essence or were simply instruments of its manifestation. More specifically: should the sefiroth be viewed as divine emanations or as the vessels into which those emanations flowed? For example, Nachmanides argued that they were divine emanations. Cordovero concluded that the two views were both valid and mutually complementary. Each sefirah can be considered as a form and also as the light that dwells within it.
Explaining why the Ain Sof must manifest in precisely ten sefiroth, Cordovero turned to the Tetragrammaton, the unutterable name of God. He observed that the four Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton, YHVH expand to ten when the letters are spelled out: yod, he, vav, he. Furthermore, as Pythagoras had pointed out, ten is the sum of the digits one through four. “Ten” also had special significance in the Torah, where we find the Ten Commandments and the ten “sayings” of Genesis 1: “God said, Let there be light… God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters…,” and so forth.
Segment 6:
The modern Hermetic Kabbalah emerged from the Rosicrucian-Masonic tradition in France. Most influential was Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875) who referred to himself as a magus and adopted the pseudonym Éliphas Lévi. His greatest contribution may have been to popularize esoteric studies; Lévi’s works on ceremonial magic disclosed information that had long been discussed only in the secret societies. However his scholarship was shallow, and frequently he used creative imagination as a substitute for knowledge. Arthur Waite, whose work will be discussed later, expressed the following opinion: “I do not think that Lévi ever made an independent statement upon any historical fact in which the least confidence could be reposed.” However Waite softened his opinion:
What seems to distinguish him from all other occult writers is not his knowledge as occultist, but the peculiar genius of interpretation which he applied to that knowledge, the surprising results which he could obtain from an old doctrine, even as from an old author. They were not reliable results; they were not in harmony with any secret knowledge… but they wore the guise and they spoke the language of occultism, and it is they which have fascinated his admirers. . .
[Later in the segment]
In Isis Unveiled Blavatsky reaffirms the Shekinah’s association with Malkuth and her role as the recipient of the emanations from all the sefiroth from Kether to Yesod. However, she adds:
[The Shekinah] is held to be higher than any of these; for she is the “Divine Glory,” the “veil,” or “garment,” of Ain-Sof. The Jews… say that she is the glory of Jehovah, which dwelt in the tabernacle, manifesting herself like a visible cloud; the “Glory” rested over the Mercy-Seat in the Sanctum Sanctorum.
In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky suggests that “the Norse Yggdrasil, the Hindu Aswatha, the Gogard, the Hellenic tree of life, and the Tibetan Zampun are one with the Kabbalistic Sephirothal Tree.” In each case “the tree was reversed… its roots were generated in Heaven and grew out of the Rootless Root of all-being.”
Alice Bailey makes several references to “the nine sefiroth”: that is the nine sefiroth above Malkuth. In A Treatise on Cosmic Fire she explains them as triple manifestations of each of the three aspects of the Solar Logos; in other words they form a trinity of trinities. She notes that the nine sefiroth are the vehicles through which the nine “Lipikas who are the sumtotal of the agents for the Law [of Karma].” Lipikas are said to be spiritual beings charged with recording every event or thought in the phenomenal universe. This is an interesting inversion of conventional Kabbalistic belief: instead of the sefiroth revealing the nature of God, they encapsulate the unfolding drama of an already manifest reality.
Segment 7:
We all have characteristics—latent or actualized—of both Chokmah and Binah, both Chesed and Geburah, and both Netzach and Hod. The latent ones may be repressed into what psychologist Carl Jung called our “shadow”—the totality of instincts, impulses and drives that we find unacceptable and cannot admit into the fragile persona we are trying to protect. We may repress one half of a polarity: for example, our Netzach characteristics, while trying to convince ourselves (and others) that we are totally driven by Hod. Or we may suppress our Binah characteristics while frantically accentuating those of Chokmah. What we repress we may also project out onto other people and call it “evil.” The attitudes and behavior we most angrily condemn in others are likely to be those lurking in our own shadow.
We may experience the opposites serially, at different times of our lives. However the transitions should be smooth, and the goal should be to move toward stable equilibrium. Wild swings of the pendulum from one extreme to the other are dangerous. For example, the manic-depressive oscillates between Netzach and Hod, in each half-cycle experiencing the worst features of each. Or we may experience the opposites in successive lifetimes.[Later in the segment]
The notion of the Holy Guardian Angel was the product of Ashkenazic Judaism. We saw in Segment 3 that Abraham of Worms developed a ritual for contacting the Angel. That same ritual became a focus of interest by Aleister Crowley and other early 20th-century occultists ...
Holy Guardian Angels have close counterparts in the various kinds of personal angel encountered in Hinduism. They can be correlated even more closely with the Solar Angels discussed in Theosophical literature and in the writings of Alice Bailey... Helena Blavatsky referred to personal angels most often using the Sanskrit term manasaputras (literally “sons of mind”). But she also used a number of other terms, including: sons of wisdom; lords of persevering ceaseless devotion; brahmaputras (“sons of Brahma”), and B’nai-Elohim (“sons of God”). This last, conspicuous insofar as it is the only Hebrew term, is a reference to the passage in Genesis where “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” [Genesis 6:2] ... In one passage in The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky used the term “Solar Angels," explaining that they are “the endowers of man with his conscious, immortal Ego.” [Secret Doctrine, II, p. 88] She added that they can be equated “with those who in India are termed Kumaras, Agnishwattas, and the Barhishads.”
“Solar angel” is Alice Bailey’s preferred term, but she also uses manasaputra, angel of the presence, Ego (capitalized), overshadowing soul, or soul on its own level.” According to Bailey, the Solar Angel has overshadowed the lower human nature for an extended period of time:
The great solar Angel, Who embodies the real man and is his expression on the plane of higher mind, is literally his divine ancestor, the “Watcher” Who, through long cycles of incarnation, has poured Himself out in sacrifice in order that man might BE. [Initiation, Human and Solar, p. 115.]