Customer Reviews

Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide to Cabalistic Magic (Llewellyn's Sourcebook)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is an excellent *hermetic* cabala encyclopedia - it is thorough, bringing together most of the information one would see in it, e.g. various attributions a-la Crowley's Liber 777 covering subjects such as the 72 fold name of god, the 42 letters name of god, seals, spirits, tarot, etc.

The book contains three major sections - the first is the encyclopedia itself in English alphabetical order, the second a Hebrew-English dictionary, and the third a gematric index which brings various Hebrew words by their gematric value.

There is a good bibliography, a reproduction of Crowley's Sepher Sephiroth, and a couple of interesting appendixes.

The major problem I see with this book is enormous number of errors in Hebrew - it looks like neither the author not any of Llewellyn's staff working on the book know any Hebrew. This includes not only spelling errors (which lead to errors in the gematria calculations, which means one should double check *all* Hebrew spelling and gematria calculations in this book with a good English-Hebrew dictionary), but also errors in basic material, e.g. none of the spellings of the 42 letters name of God brought in the book is correct.

So, indeed, one can benefit a lot from learning the correspondences and their logic, but still needs to cast doubts about what's written in the book and research for her/himself.

A secondary problem is with images - those are valueable, but many of them look pixelized, as if they were scanned at low resolution and enlarged.

And to repeat my emphasis from the first paragraph - this is a book about *hermetic* cabala, and *not* Jewish cabala. Jewish Cabala uses a different version of the tree of life (described in appendix C of this book), different attributions, etc.

In response to the distraught reviewer, whose review starts, "If you're into ingnoring most of the jewish character..." I have to offer a disclaimer here for any would be potential buyers. True, if you're looking for a book that expounds the principles of the kabbalah while maintaining as much of the jewish historicity as possible, this book isn't the one. But I must say that this book neither claims to fulfill the latter criteria nor is it meant to. This book is meant as a reference tool for those studying the qabalah (spelling you'll usually see when this is the case) in it's capacity as the cornerstone of the western mystery tradition(golden dawn, stella matutina, A.A. etc). The fact that crowley's 777 is included should've made this quite apparent. A word of advice to everyone, but especially the afore mentioned reviewer, you might want to do a little research on any item you plan to purchase and decide to publicly denounce, as you'll kind of have a tendency to make yourself look silly, maybe even of less than average intelligence when you happen to be totally off base. So for those who would persue the "mysteries" you should definitely add this selection to your library as it is a great asset. For those wishing to study the historical and traditional jewish kabbalah your aims would be much better served through books by Aryeh Kaplan and others like them, as your main corpus of study will be the Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar and the Bahir.

this book is a must have ,it has a lot of spirit names there numbers that go to them and names in hebrew,names of god,angels demons the tree of life etc. it is one of the best refernces in cabalistic magic

This is a true Qabalistic encyclopedia, just as the title says. Mr. Godwin has done a beautiful job on this one and deserves praise for it! I recommend any interested folks first read Regardie's "A Garden of Pomegranates" before you get into this hefty volume!

This book provides the practitioner a great resource for the Cabala. The book has listings of Angels, names of God, spirits, and more!! The book was written by a very knowledgable author with deep roots. The book wasn't meant for someone looking for rituals but as a Encyclopedia for everything Cabala (or however you want to write it). The new help for the Hebrew alphabet and pronunciation is helpful but the student should still seek more intense studies of the language before getting too deep. Otherwise I use this book constantly for research and resource.

Definitely more useful for the Hermeticist than for the Jewish mystic, although the Hebrew bits are very well done in both an easily readable native font and multiple transliterations where there is doubt or conflict among sources. The prefatory and supplemental materials are quite good, though I do wish they had gone into more detail on some of the more abstruse topics collected in the encyclopedic entries themselves; e.g., the Tunnels of Set are referenced throughout, but only about one paragraph citing Kenneth Grant as the principle source of that material is given, perhaps because Godwin doesn't find it all that useful himself. It also could use more extensive descriptions on some topics within the entries to obviate the need for cross-referencing to other works, though admittedly that could well push the size of the work up to unmanageable proportions, given its existing heft. All that said, I'm sure I'll be sifting through this as a reference source quite frequently, and it sure beats relying on 777 And Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley alone.

This book has almost everything,I feel that this book is a wonderfull book full of little odds and ends that every student needs.It even pronounces most of the names for you(as accurate as anyone can get in a book)I mean this book for one, is thick and is meant for the use of serious students,It's not full of rituals,it's full of the things you need to do complex magick with(symbols,etc.)It's a must own...

The Serious student of the Cabala will find this reference indespensible. The Gemantric aspects of this book make it worth while, with corispondences. with Sigils tunnels of SET, 72 God Names, etc. etc. This reference is a excellent reference for any Gematria.

David Godwin has done a tremendous job. Yet his Encyclopediae can only be used in a limited manner by beginners. Either you are experianced enough or you ask for guidance by an experianced person.

Should you want to use it as a gematric reference then you definitively have to compare each word with an extensive Hebrew = Your-Mother-Tongue (big-print) dictionary first (or have studied Hebrew). The words'numeric values are sometimes surprising.

Also, if you are working with the "Tree of Life", you will want to decide which tradition you want to follow. They differ!

Aleister Crowley's "Sepher Sephiroth" (which I prefere to call "Sepher Qlippoth") is full of mistakes (!!!) - especially the Prefaces, and not only the Hebrew. Godwin may well be advised to leave it out in the 4th. Edition.

I have been practicing the craft for (sigh!) loooong time. Godwin's book gave my spells the necessary spark to get them fly ! I would seriously suggest you get it; not easy for beginners but a sure source of information.