The origin of ancient Kabbalah Automatic translate

Of all the secret magic sciences, Kabbalism should be considered the most mysterious and causing the greatest number of fears and rumors. There is no unity on the question of what is Kabbalah, does it exist at all.

Used materials from the site http://fantalov.ru "200 Mythological paintings by Alexei Fantalov."

“Kabbalah” in translation means “tradition”. The authorship of the ancient Kabbalistic work “Sepher Yetzirah” is traditionally attributed to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham - the character of the first book of the Torah (in the Latin Bible it is called “Genesis” (“Origin”), and in the Russian - the First book of Genesis), which lived long before the birth of Moses and writing the first books of the Bible.

In the apocryphal (non-canonical) biblical tradition “The Book of Enoch” the creation of “Kabbalah” is attributed to the fallen angels. In the book we read: “When beautiful daughters began to be born to people, the angels saw and loved them. They took wives of their choice, lived with them, taught them Kabbalah. Azazel (the leader of the fallen angels) taught people how to make shields and swords, mirrors and jewelry, as well as wearing precious stones, tinting eyebrows and using blush. Armers taught the use of roots and all sorcery, Asaradel taught to observe the movement of the sun, moon and celestial bodies, Akibibiel taught signs and signs. The world has completely transformed. ”

The passage quoted from the Book of Enoch is an expanded interpretation of the first book of the Torah about the descent of angels from heaven, which caused the spread of murder and debauchery among people, as a result of which God decided to destroy the human race and arranged the Great Flood. Kabbalah apologists came up with a different story of the acquisition of this knowledge, according to which Moses received it from Jehovah God. According to this version, the author of the first Kabbalistic book was not Abraham, but Moses. He recorded two religious works.

One - the Torah - the first five books of the Bible, known among the Orthodox as the Pentateuch, which contains the Ten Commandments. The second is the secret scripture that marked the beginning of Kabbalah. If the first book was intended for the whole people, the second one was only for the chosen circle of initiates, and the attempt of others to penetrate its secrets should be punishable by death, as the postulates of secret revelation in some places conflicted with the main book for general use.

Only the fact that the main Kabbalistic scripture “Light” was compiled in parallel with the oldest book of the Jewish Talmud is known about the origin of Kabbalah, as several references in one of these works to the other indicate. Hence the appearance of the legend that Moses wrote two sacred books. “Sepher Yetzirah” has been known since the thirteenth century, when it was brought to Spain by a poor Jewish wanderer named Moses Leon, who claimed that he knew the secret of immortality, posing as “Eternal Jew”.

The content of Kabbalah teaching is no less mysterious than its origin. In addition to the fact that almost all Kabbalah scriptures are encrypted, they also do not contain any general idea, but consist of teachings and instructions, which in some books often contradict one another. The functional use of Kabbalah can be divided into two sections: “Holy Kabbalah” and “Great Kabbalah”.

“Sacred bondage” is not a scientific or magical, but a religious-philosophical teaching. For the Hebrew rabbis it was of great importance and was placed above the "Great Kabbalah." However, for a modern scholar, “Holy Kabbalah” is a method of “deciphering” the holy Jewish books and is not of great interest. The spread of this teaching was facilitated by the Hebrew alphabet itself, in which there were no vowels (when writing, their place was indicated by a dot under the previous consonant or before the word if it began with a vowel sound). In addition, each letter denoted not only a consonant sound, but also a certain number. Kabbalists simply replaced one word in Scripture with another with the same amount of numerical meanings of the letters composing it and received a completely different meaning.

"Big Kabbalah" is a collection of magical knowledge of the Jewish people, greatly enriched by acquaintance with Egyptian and Babylonian, and later Arab secret sciences. The penetration of "Big Kabbalah" into Europe brought about a real revolution in European magic and determined the development of not only magical sciences, but also natural science before the Inquisition.

In one of the Egyptian pyramids, among the descriptions of the acts of the pharaoh buried there, there is a mention of that. that he invited "sorcerers from the east." Judging by the life of this pharaoh, it is about Jewish Kabbalists. The Egyptian secret science owes to the Kabbalists not only the appearance, but also the completion of the formation of the “Hermes tool” (Hermes is the Greek name for the god Thoth). This is a magic table with which Egyptian priestesses and Jewish Kabbalists predict the outcome of the disease. Unfortunately, after the adoption of Christianity in Egypt, zealous bishops ordered all magical works to be burned in the Library of Alexandria, and the “Hermes tool” has not survived.

However, judging by ancient Greek sources, some methods of this magic table are striking in their similarity with modern methods of medical diagnostics, discovered only a few decades ago. From ancient Egyptian parchments we learn that the Egyptians used a mirror in order to determine "whether the hand of the angel of death touched a person by the reflection of the eye." In one of the ancient Kabbalistic works you can find a description of taking a blood test from a finger. True, it is not clear from the text whether the author and the contemporary Aesculapius understood what to do with the blood taken after that.

It seems that over time, at least in antiquity, Kabbalah did not progress, but degraded. And here you involuntarily recall the original legend that some more highly organized creatures, descended from heaven, brought it to people. Later, in the popular representation, they became angels who rebelled against God led by Lucifer. At the moment when people received secret knowledge from them, they seemed powerful beings endowed with immortality and revered along with God.

Even in the Bible, in the first book of the Torah, we read that Jews from the time of the first patriarchs made two sacrifices at once. One to the One God Almighty, the other to Azazel, the leader of the angels who descended from heaven. Obviously, they committed terrible sacrilege. They put their God and the devil on a par. Such sacrilege can be explained by only one thing - Azazel was not for them the demon and devil, in which he turned into medieval European mythology.

However, one thing is obvious - now it is no longer possible to establish the real circumstances of the origin of Kabbalah. The version of bringing this secret knowledge from outer space seems no more improbable than the invention of it by Moses, but perhaps inferior in reliability to the hypothesis that some individual enlightened Jews, like the biblical patriarch Joseph, got acquainted with the magical studies of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians, and then announced that they had received them from the angels.

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