The Qabalah gives understanding and wisdom through knowledge, strength and mercy through beauty, and a foundation of victory and splendour, crowning the seeker within their own kingdom and raising them to the heights of their own genius. Qabalah is an experiential path which lives up to its literal meaning of ‘received wisdom’, gained as the seeker travels through the worlds guided by the Tree of Life, attaining knowledge and understanding.
As we know it today, the Qabalah, as found in the Western Mystery Tradition, is a system of magical philosophy and spiritual practice which syncretised components of Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, and early Jewish mysticism with aspects of ancient Sumerian and Egyptian cosmologies. In Europe, during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries these diverse sources flowed together into a melting pot of spiritual and magical ideologies generating a lucid, coherent and practical path of spiritual realisation. The resulting philosophies and practices would subsequently influence and inspire a wide range of magical and spiritual traditions which in turn would be highly influential on the western mystery traditions of alchemy, hermeticism, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and all their many derivatives. The influence of the Qabalah can be seen in nearly all the major magical books from the Renaissance, including the Key of Solomon, the Heptameron, Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy and Kircher’s Oedipus Aegypticus.
Juxtaposed with the emergence of Qabalah as a prominent philosophy, came its distilled essence in the glyph known as Otz Chiim (‘the Tree of Life’). Reflecting the commonly used scale of ten numbers combined with the twenty-two Hebrew letters, the image of the Tree of Life comprises the ten Sephiroth (‘emanations’), which are connected by twenty-two horizontal, vertical and diagonal paths. These Sephiroth and Paths weave together the symbolism of the four elements, the seven classical planets, and the zodiac as a single articulate whole. This coalesces all the key elements of the western mystery traditions since its earliest emergence through to the modern day.
David Rankine 