Hermetic Qabalah
[citation needed] It draws on a great many influences, most notably: Jewish Kabbalah, Western astrology, Alchemy, Pagan religions, especially Egyptian and Greco-Roman, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and the symbolism of the tarot.
[1] Hermetic Qabalah adheres to the Neoplatonic conception that the manifest universe, of which material creation is a part, arose as a series of "emanations" from the "godhead".
[3] The emanations of creation arising from Ain Suph Aur are ten in number, and are called Sephiroth (סְפִירוֹת, singular Sephirah סְפִירָה, "enumeration").
[7][8] The general principle involved is that the Qabalist will meditate on all these attributions and by this means acquire an understanding of the character of the sephirah including all its correspondences.
[11] According to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's interpretation of the Kabbalah, there are ten archangels, each commanding one of the choirs of angels and corresponding to one of the Sephirot.
[17] Aristotle wrote that the Pythgoraean tradition, founded in the 6th century BCE by Pythagoras of Samos, practiced isopsephy,[18] the Greek predecessor of Jewish gematria.
[22] Modern Hermetics, however, see Qabalah as originating in classical Greece based on Indo-European cultural roots, and only later adopted by Jewish mystics.
Pico's Hermetic syncretism was further developed by Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest, hermeticist and polymath, who wrote extensively on the subject in 1652, bringing further elements such as Orphism and Egyptian mythology to the mix.
[citation needed] Hermetic Qabalah was developed extensively by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,[26] Within the Golden Dawn, the fusing of Qabalistic principles such as the ten Sephiroth with Greek and Egyptian deities was made more cohesive and was extended to encompass other systems such as the Enochian system of angelic magic of John Dee and certain Eastern (particularly Hindu and Buddhist) concepts, all within the structure of a Masonic or Rosicrucian style esoteric order.
[citation needed] It is a set of tables of correspondences relating various parts of ceremonial magic and Eastern and Western religion to the thirty-two numbers representing the ten spheres (Sephiroth) plus the twenty-two paths of the Qabalistic Tree of Life.
The panentheistic nature of Hermetic Qabalists is plainly evident here,[citation needed] as one may simply check the table to see that Chesed (חסד "Mercy") corresponds to Jupiter, Isis, the colour blue (on the Queen Scale), Poseidon, Brahma, and amethyst.
Crowley's works, such as Magick, 777, and The Book of Thoth emphasize the Tree of Life and Sephiroth, utilizing Qabalistic principles to explore human consciousness and spiritual growth.
By attributing 26 Roman script letters to the trigrams of this work, Crowley felt that he had fulfilled the injunction to "obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet", as noted in his 'Old Comment' to The Book of the Law.
[37] Correspondences are created with some of the major forms of divination such as the I Ching, Tarot and runes, as well as Greek and Hebrew alphabets, the Tree of Life, Western and Vedic astrology, magic squares, and the Platonic solids.
A primary feature of this qabalah is a new understanding of the Cube of Space and its 26 components of edges, faces, and vertices, which equal the number of letters in the English alphabet.
[44] Various Thelemic practitioners use English Qaballa in rituals and textual analysis, exploring its unique insights into Crowley's work.
