The Occult

Hermetic Qabalah and Western Esotericism

Kabbalah · 12 min read

Hermetic Qabalah, sometimes simply “the Qabalah” with a Q, is the form of Kabbalah developed within the Western esoteric tradition. It takes the sephirotic tree of Jewish Kabbalah as its central diagram, but interprets it through a Christian, Hermetic, and ritual-magical lens, assigns the sephirot and the twenty-two paths an extensive set of correspondences drawn from tarot, astrology, alchemy, and the elements, and uses the resulting map as the structural foundation of Western ritual magic. The Qabalah is, in effect, the bridge between the Jewish mystical tradition and the modern Western occult revival, and an understanding of it is essential to understanding the Western magical tradition as a whole.

The spelling “Qabalah” is not a typographical quirk. It is the convention used by Western esotericists to mark the distinction between the Jewish tradition, which uses “Kabbalah” with a K, and the Western Hermetic adaptation, which uses “Qabalah” with a Q. Some writers, particularly in the post-Golden Dawn period, have used the alternative spellings as a sign of the Christian or Hermetic provenance of the work. The two traditions are closely related, and the two spellings are used to indicate that the work is a development, not a translation.

The standard scholarly account of the relationship between Jewish Kabbalah and Western esotericism is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Western Esoteric Traditions (2008) and Antoine Faivre’s Access to Western Esotericism (1994); for the history of the Christian Kabbalists in particular, François Secret’s Le Zohar chez les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (1964) remains essential. The classic Western Qabalah reference is Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn (1937–1940, 6th ed. 2001), the standard modern edition of the Hermetic Order’s teaching material.

The Christian Kabbalists

The history of the Hermetic Qabalah begins in the Renaissance, with the encounter between Christian European scholars and the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition. From the late fifteenth century, Christian scholars began to study the Kabbalah in Hebrew and Latin sources, and to use the sephirotic tree as a Christian contemplative diagram.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was the first major figure of Christian Kabbalah. His 900 conclusiones of 1486 included 47 (or, in some counts, 49) Kabbalistic theses drawn from Jewish sources, and although the project was condemned by Pope Innocent VIII in 1487, the interest it sparked continued. Pico’s older German friend and correspondent Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) — the elder of the two and a collaborator, not a student of Pico’s — wrote the first systematic Christian treatise on the Kabbalah, De Arte Cabalistica (1517), which presented the sephirotic tree as a Christian contemplative map and identified the divine names with the persons of the Trinity. Reuchlin’s earlier De Rudimentis Hebraicis (1506) is the foundational text of Christian Hebrew studies. The earlier convert Flavius Mithridates, a Jewish scholar who taught Hebrew to Pico and to others in Florence, deserves mention as a precursor: he translated Kabbalistic material for Pico’s circle and is one of the unsung figures of the early Christian Kabbalah.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian Kabbalah developed further. Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) translated portions of the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir into Latin and developed an elaborate Christian Kabbalistic theology. Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) included Kabbalistic material in his vast encyclopaedic works, notably the Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–1654). Knorr von Rosenroth (1631–1694) compiled the Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684; the standard reference is to the death year 1694, though some older sources give 1689), the most ambitious of the Christian Kabbalistic syntheses, which presented the Zohar and the Lurianic corpus in Latin translation and commentary and became the principal conduit through which the Western esoteric tradition received the Kabbalistic material. The Kabbala Denudata is the single most important source for the Western Qabalah, and it is the immediate source on which the Golden Dawn drew, both directly and via the later intermediaries of Éliphas Lévi and the French occultists.

Éliphas Lévi and the French synthesis

The most important single figure in the development of the modern Western Qabalah, between Knorr von Rosenroth and the Golden Dawn, is the French occultist Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810–1875). Lévi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–1856) is the principal source for the integration of the tarot with the sephirotic tree that has characterised Western esotericism ever since.

Lévi, working in Paris in the 1840s and 50s, drew on Knorr von Rosenroth, on the surviving Christian Kabbalistic tradition, on the French occultists of the early nineteenth century (notably Alphonse de Villers and the Saint-Martinist tradition), and on his own considerable literary gifts. He assigned the twenty-two trumps of the major arcana to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and, by extension, to the twenty-two paths of the sephirotic tree. The integration was not Lévi’s invention in detail — earlier French occultists had suggested it, and Eliphaz Lévi’s older contemporary Court de Gébelin had connected the tarot to Egyptian sources — but Lévi made it canonical for the Western tradition. The Golden Dawn took over Lévi’s attributions, modified them in detail, and added the astrological and alchemical correspondences that have defined the Western Qabalah since.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as the historian of esotericism Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has shown, was the inheritor of the Lévi tradition as much as it was the creator of a new one. The Golden Dawn’s Qabalah is, in a strict sense, the Christian Kabbalah of the Renaissance, filtered through the French occultists of the early nineteenth century, and codified for use in a working magical order.

The Golden Dawn synthesis

The decisive moment in the history of the Western Qabalah was the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888. The Golden Dawn took the sephirotic tree as the central structural diagram of the order, and it added a comprehensive system of correspondences that has defined the Hermetic Qabalah ever since.

The Golden Dawn’s Qabalah assigned the ten sephirot to the ten numerals, the ten divine names, the ten archangels, the ten orders of angels, the ten spheres of the medieval cosmos, the ten planets (with Earth added to the seven), the ten Sephirotic colours, the ten moral virtues, and (for most sephirot) a corresponding tarot trump. The twenty-two paths between the sephirot were assigned the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the twenty-two tarot trumps, and the astrological and elemental correspondences of those letters. The result was an integrated symbolic map in which every detail of the magician’s practice could be located on the tree.

The order’s ritual system, including the pentagram and hexagram rituals and the initiation ceremonies, was designed to operate within a Qabalistic framework. For more on the background of the order, see the history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The most important figures of the Golden Dawn for the Qabalah were William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who translated and adapted the order’s foundational documents, and Aleister Crowley, who joined the order in 1898 (the Ahathoor temple in London in November 1898; he was expelled in 1900) and brought the Qabalah into his Thelemic and OTO work. Crowley’s Liber 777 (1909) is the most concise statement of the Golden Dawn’s table of correspondences. Dion Fortune (1890–1946) used the Qabalistic system extensively in her novels and her teachings, most accessibly in The Mystical Qabalah (1935).

The sephirot in the Hermetic tradition

In the Hermetic Qabalah, the ten sephirot retain their classical divine names and attributes, but they are also identified with the Christian Godhead, with the astrological planets, and with the human body. The classical Jewish identification of the sephirot with the divine names is preserved, but the Christian identification of the upper triad (Keter, Chokhmah, Binah) with the persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) was also widely accepted, and the correspondences of the lower sephirot with the planetary spheres, the elements, and the levels of the human soul were systematised.

The astrological attributions are particularly important. The sephirot are assigned to the seven traditional planets, with Earth added as the sphere of Malkuth, and Uranus and Neptune are sometimes added in the modern period. For more on the planetary system, see astrology. The sephirotic colours of the Golden Dawn (white brilliance, grey, black, blue, red, yellow, emerald, orange, violet, citrine/olive/russet/black) have become standard in the Western occult tradition.

The Tree and the tarot

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Hermetic Qabalah is its integration with the tarot. The Golden Dawn and the early twentieth-century occultists, building on the work of Lévi and the French occultists of the mid-nineteenth century, assigned each of the twenty-two trumps of the major arcana to a path of the tree, and assigned the remaining fifty-six cards of the minor arcana to the four suits and the four elements (Wands to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, Pentacles to Earth). The Marseille and Visconti-Sforza tarots do not use the Golden Dawn’s elemental attributions, and the four-suits-four-elements system is a specifically Golden Dawn construction.

This integration makes the tarot a Qabalistic text. A tarot reading can be read directly off the tree, with the cards interpreted in the light of their sephirotic and path attributions. The Fool (Aleph) is read as the path between Keter and Chokhmah; the Magus (Beth) as the path between Keter and Binah; the High Priestess (Gimel) as the path between Keter and Tiferet; and so on, following the standard Golden Dawn ordering of the trumps given in Liber 777 and in Regardie’s The Golden Dawn. The full system of attributions is the basis of the Western esoteric use of the tarot for both ritual and divination. For a full treatment, see tarot as a tool of divination.

The Tree and alchemy

The Hermetic Qabalah also integrates the sephirotic tree with alchemical symbolism. The lower sephirot, especially Tiferet, Yesod, and Malkuth, are associated with alchemical operations: Tiferet with the coniunctio, the sacred marriage of opposites; Yesod with the prima materia, the raw material for the Great Work; Malkuth with the nigredo, the dissolution of the old form. These identifications are interpretive and not uniform across the Hermetic tradition; the Jungian reading of the Magnum Opus as a journey through the sephirotic tree, developed by Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in Psychology of the Transference (1946), is one influential version. The general point is that the Qabalah provides a structural diagram within which the alchemical work can be located, and the alchemical tradition, in turn, provides a set of images by which the sephirotic work can be meditated.

The Tree in modern ritual magic

The Hermetic Qabalah has been the principal structural diagram of Western ritual magic since the late nineteenth century. The Thelemic system of Aleister Crowley, the rituals of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the teachings of Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light, the work of many independent ceremonial magicians, and much of the Wiccan and Neopagan ritual vocabulary all draw on the Qabalah, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly.

The pentagram ritual, the lesser and the greater, is structured by the sephirotic tree, and the same is true of the hexagram ritual. The opening of a Golden Dawn-style temple, with the four archangels in the four quarters, is in part a Qabalistic act. The Qabalistic Cross, performed at the start and end of many modern rituals, is a brief Qabalistic meditation: the divine names Elohim and Adonai are called on the head, the shoulders, and the heart with a brief Hebrew formula. The full Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is in Regardie’s The Golden Dawn and in Crowley’s The Equinox. For the wider context of this ritual work, see ritual and ceremonial magic.

The Qabalah has also passed into the wider Western culture. The figures of the magician and the seer in twentieth-century fiction, film, and television are routinely shown with the Qabalistic tree, and the vocabulary of the Qabalah has become a recognisable register of the esoteric. For the wider cultural presence, see the occult in popular culture.

A note on the Enochian system

The Golden Dawn’s Qabalah is sometimes confused with the Enochian system of John Dee and Edward Kelley, which is also Qabalistic-adjacent but separate. The Enochian system has its own angels, its own calls, and its own elemental tablets, and the correspondences between Enochian and Qabalistic material are not as direct as the popular literature sometimes suggests. The two systems can be used together — the Golden Dawn did use them together — but they are not the same system.

The Qabalah and the Jewish tradition

It is important to note that the Hermetic Qabalah, for all that it draws on Jewish sources, is a Western esoteric tradition in its own right. The sephirotic tree of the Jewish mystics is, in the Jewish context, a map of the divine and a path of contemplative ascent; the Qabalistic tree of the Western tradition is, in addition, a structural diagram of the Western ritual-magical system. The two are not in conflict, and a serious practitioner will respect both, but they are not the same.

The Jewish Kabbalah has its own internal life, with its own texts, its own masters, and its own contemplative and ethical disciplines. The Hermetic Qabalah is one of several modern Western receptions of the Jewish tradition, and it is the one that has had the largest influence on the contemporary Western occult revival. The history of the relationship is partly a history of cultural translation, partly a history of appropriation, and partly a history of resistance: the Christian Kabbalists sometimes treated the Jewish sources as cryptic witness to Christian doctrine, a reading the Jewish tradition did not endorse, and the Jewish Kabbalists have often been ambivalent about the Western reception. For the Jewish source material, see Kabbalah and the mystical Tree of Life and the mystical Tree of Life.

Sources and further reading

  • Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites & Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order (Llewellyn, 1937–1940; 6th ed. 2001). The standard modern edition of the Golden Dawn’s Qabalah.
  • Aleister Crowley, Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticae (1909; many reprints, including the 1997 Teitan Press edition). The most concise statement of the Hermetic correspondences.
  • Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah (Williams & Norgate, 1935; many reprints). The best modern introductory book on the Hermetic Qabalah.
  • Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–1856; many reprints, including the 2001 Inner Traditions edition). The foundational text of the modern Western Qabalah.
  • Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (SUNY, 1994). The defining modern academic study of Western esotericism.
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2008). The standard scholarly overview.
  • Wouter Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013). A recent readable guide.
  • Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Princeton, 1973). The most important study of the seventeenth-century messianic crisis that shaped much of the Christian Kabbalistic reception.
  • François Secret, Le Zohar chez les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (Mouton, 1964). The standard study of the Christian reading of the Zohar.
  • Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale, 1988). The defining revisionist study of the Jewish source material.
  • Arthur Edward Waite, The Holy Kabbalah (Williams & Norgate, 1929; many reprints). A Christian mystical reading of the Kabbalah by the co-founder of the Golden Dawn’s offshoot, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross.
  • Lon Milo DuQuette, The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford (New Page, 2001) and Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot (Weiser, 2003). Accessible popular introductions.
  • Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero, Self-Initiation into the Golden Dawn Tradition (Llewellyn, 2002). A practical modern manual of the Golden Dawn Qabalah.