Chapter One:
The Kabbalah of Gnostic Christianity
Purpose and Nature of the Kabbalah
The Kabbalah is an archaic system of Jewish Mysticism that has its roots in the assembly of prophets of ancient Israel and the Merkavah Mysticism of Palestine during the time of Jesus (Yeshua in Aramaic). Considering that Yeshua was Jewish and his disciples were Jewish, and understanding him to be a mystic and prophet of his time, it is reasonable to assume that he taught a form of the mystical tradition that has come to be known as the Kabbalah.
For this reason, many mystical and gnostic currents of Christianity have arisen that take the Kabbalah as their foundation. This is certainly true of the Sophian Tradition, which is so interwoven with the teachings of the Kabbalah that it is impossible to separate out Gnosticism and Kabbalah in the Tradition. Essentially, one might call the Sophian Tradition a Christian Kabbalah or a form of Gnostic Christianity that draws heavily upon its Judaic roots. Therefore, to explore Gnostic Christianity, as expressed in the Sophian Tradition, we must explore some of the basic ideas of the Kabbalah from which the teachings and principles of our Gnostic Christianity are derived.
The principal teachings of the Kabbalah were designed to explore and find answers to some basic questions:
- The nature and attributes of God and the Godhead
- The development of a cosmology
- The mystery of the creation of angels and humankind
- The destiny of humankind and angels
- The nature of the human soul and its connection to the divine
- The nature of cosmic forces-angels, demons, elementals and such
- The inner meaning of the revealed law and Holy Gospel
- The transcendental symbolism of numbers and geometrical shapes
- The mysteries contained in the Hebrew letters
- The balance in the play of cosmic forces
- The mystery of divine revelation and prophetic states of consciousness
- The mystery of the divine incarnation and the divine plan on earth
Considering the vast height, depth, and breadth of these metaphysical questions, one can imagine the enormous amount of esoteric teachings, practices, and literature that has formed around the Kabbalah in the course of thousands of years. Although there are many modern truth-seekers who have read a book or two on the Kabbalah and mistakenly assumed they know the Kabbalah, the truth is that even a master of the Tradition, who has studied and practiced the Kabbalah all of his or her life and who actively embodies something of the enlightenment experience it represents, would not claim to know the Kabbalah. One could say that God knows the Kabbalah and that, for our part, we know what we have received of it in our own experience—which is a far cry from knowing the Kabbalah as God knows it.
Essentially, the teachings of the Kabbalah represent the accumulated knowledge, understanding, and wisdom of initiates, which have been gathered from their own direct spiritual experience of the metaphysical dimensions of creatures, creation, and God. The Kabbalah itself is the knowledge, understanding, and wisdom of the true nature of creatures, creation, and God-which is known in full only to God. If the whole of the Kabbalah is in a book, then it is the heavenly Book of Life of which the Holy Scriptures speak, and not any earthly book.
The teachings of the Kabbalah are founded upon the Bible, along with other books of Scripture that did not make their way into the canonized Bible. Thus, to study and understand the Kabbalah in its proper context is to study and understand the Scriptures also. Just as many mistakenly assume that they know the Kabbalah from reading a book or two, likewise many assume that they are knowledgeable in the Kabbalah without being well-studied in the Scriptures. Ultimately, however, one cannot study and understand the Kabbalah without also studying and gaining some understanding of the Holy Scriptures. To engage in the study and practice of the Kabbalah is to embark upon a mystical journey into hidden levels of the Scriptures and the secret wisdom they contain. In essence, the Scriptures and the Kabbalah are one and the same.
Three Branches of the Kabbalah
The teachings of the Kabbalah are divided into three principal forms: the theoretical or contemplative Kabbalah, the meditative Kabbalah, and the practical or magical Kabbalah. The theoretical or contemplative Kabbalah is an intellectual study and contemplation of the principles, doctrines, and correspondences of esoteric wisdom, including gematria, the associations of numbers and geometrical patterns, and so on. The meditative Kabbalah represents the teachings and practices of mystical prayer and prophetic meditation-methods through which one can enter a higher state of consciousness and experience unification with the divine. The practical or magical Kabbalah represents teachings of invocations, incantations, rituals, and such, through which one is able to shift states of consciousness at will and to consciously direct hidden spiritual forces. From this, one will understand that the Kabbalah is both a mystical and a magical Tradition. Here, we will be dealing primarily with the contemplative Kabbalah and to some extent the meditative Kabbalah. The magical Kabbalah will be referred to in passing at different points of this book; however, it is not the subject of this work.
The Ten Holy Sefirot and the Tree of Life
There are ten Sefirot (plural), which are generally referred to as Midot, meaning “measurements” or “dimensions” and, by extension, also meaning “attributes” or “qualities.” The Sefirot are emanations of the divine presence and power of God, or the infinite light of God, and they are vessels receiving God's light and transmitting it to creation. They are gradations of the involution of the infinite light into finite creation, and thus are gradations of the evolution of creatures on the path of return-like rungs on a ladder of light. When we read of Jacob's vision of a ladder reaching up from the earth to the heavens, upon which he beheld angels ascending and descending, the Kabbalah would say that that Jacob had a vision of the constellation of the Sefirot that forms the Tree of Life.
The word Sefirah (singular) is related to the Hebrew word saper, meaning “to express” or “to communicate,” and to the word sapir, meaning “sapphire,” “brilliance,” or “luminary.” It is also related to the words sefar, meaning “boundary”; sefer, meaning “book”; and safar, meaning “number.” All of these terms represent related concepts and indicate the two basic functions of the Sefirot: lights or emanations that act to reveal and express God's presence and power (Shekinah); and vessels that limit and delineate the infinite light of God, bringing it down into the finite realm of numeration and boundary.
Essentially, the Sefirot, and the various levels of their manifestation called Olamot or universes, represent the metaphysical structure of creation or the vehicle through which creature, creation, and God are connected and interact. In Genesis, ten utterances are listed through which God creates. These correspond with the ten Sefirot and suggest the idea of creature and creation as the revelation or expression of God and as the vessel receiving and imparting the divine presence-hence the body of God. Through the Sefirot, God reaches out to us and we are able to reach into God.
The most common way these Sefirot are represented is as a glyph called the Tree of Life (Otz ha-Hayyim). The Sefirot are depicted as ten circles that form three triads, one atop, one in the middle, and one below, with a single Sefirah set as a pendant below the lowest triad. In this same configuration they also appear as ten circles divided into three columns-one to the right, one to the left, and one in the middle-which are called “pillars.” These are two ways to view the same glyph (figure 1, below).
In the view of the three triads of Sefirot and one Sefirah as a pendant, the top triad is called the supernal triad, the triad in the middle is called the moral triad, the triad below is called the action triad. The Sefirah that appears as a pendant is called Malkut (Kingdom). Malkut is the “fruit” of the Tree of Life, as well as the vessel receiving the influence of all the emanations above it. In the view of the Tree of Life as three pillars, the right and left pillars are composed of three Sefirot each, and the middle pillar is composed of four Sefirot. The pillar on the right is called the Pillar of Mercy and the pillar on the left is called the Pillar of Severity-the Pillars of Jachin and Boaz in the temple of King Solomon. One is positive and the other negative; one is male and the other is female; one is white, the other is black-so that these two pillars represent the eternal play of opposites in dynamic interaction. Evil is imbalanced force, out of place or out of harmony. Severity in imbalance is cruelty and oppression, and mercy in imbalance is weakness that allows and facilitates great evil. True compassion is a dynamic balance of severity and mercy.
The Middle Pillar is therefore the path of the ascension, representing the dynamic balance of all polarities or opposites, and the integration of everything that would otherwise be fragmented. The Kabbalah teaches the Middle Way, akin to what is found in forms of Hinduism and Buddhism in the Eastern schools. For this reason, whether the tree is viewed in terms of the triads or the three pillars, the Sefirah Tiferet (beauty), w...
