Reception of Lurianic Kabbalah in Occultism

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Structural Deformation of Kabbalah: From the Ontology of Emanation to Cosmic Psychology

An examination of how Lurianic Kabbalah was gradually transformed by Renaissance philosophy, occultism, Theosophy, and New Age spirituality from a theocentric cosmology into an anthropocentric psychology of self-development.

I strongly believe that the anthropocentric orientation of modern occultism owes something to the particular and revolutionary Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, certain aspects of whose teachings lie at the very foundations of modern occult thought. At the same time, I am convinced that Lurianic Kabbalah was profoundly misunderstood by occultists, both because of the imperatives of the spirit of the age and because of the influence of the apostate Kabbalistic doctrines of Sabbatai Zevi (seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire) and Jacob Frank (eighteenth-century Central Europe). This misreading of Lurianic Kabbalah within Western occultism was not merely a matter of faulty terminology; it constituted a structural transformation of an entire theological system.

It should be remembered that Lurianic Kabbalah is the inner, or esoteric, dimension of normative Judaism. It is grounded in the Torah, the mitzvot, and the halakhic framework, and is transmitted through an initiatory and textual tradition. Western occultism, from the Renaissance onward, treats Kabbalah as a universal symbolic code, detaching it from its halakhic, liturgical, and communal context. It reads Kabbalah allegorically or psychologically rather than theologically. In this process, Kabbalah ceases to be an interpretation of Divine action and becomes a map of the inner states of the human being.

In Luria's teaching, the concept of tzimtzum represents the mystery of Divine self-concealment. This does not imply the absence of God, but rather a change in the mode of His presence. God remains absolutely transcendent. In occultism, however, tzimtzum is interpreted as God's withdrawal in order to make room for human action. God is reduced to a kind of structural principle. For Luria, the cosmic order undergoes an ontological catastrophe. Evil is real, not psychological. The world is objectively fragmented. In occultism, this cosmic drama is internalized, causing the ontological weight of evil and responsibility to disappear.

In Lurianic Kabbalah, the human being is a co-worker with God, not an autonomous initiator. Human action depends upon the mitzvot, intention (kavanah), and Divine grace. In occultism, by contrast, the magician becomes an active creator of reality. The Lurianic co-worker of God is transformed into an occult self-created demiurge. This is the crucial anthropocentric inversion, and it opens the door to the emergence of the modern Left-Hand Path (LHP).

The concept of tikkun, the restoration or repair of the world, is in Luria's system a long-term and collective process bound to the community of Israel. It is often invisible and frequently produces no immediate personal benefit. In occultism, however, tikkun is translated into initiation, grades of attainment, “self-work,” and the acquisition of power or knowledge. The restoration of the cosmos is reduced to personal development. The implicit reasoning seems to be that by repairing ourselves, we repair the world; if everyone sweeps in front of their own house, the greater order of things will eventually be restored.

With regard to the influence of the apostate Kabbalistic movements of Sabbateanism and Frankism, Western occultism did not inherit them directly but rather in a concealed and transformed manner. More importantly, it absorbed their underlying mental pattern. This pattern includes the notion that salvation may be attained outside the Law, that transgression can possess a redemptive function, and that the individual may participate directly in a cosmic reversal.

These ideas harmonized remarkably well with Romantic individualism, Protestant subjectivism, and the voluntarism characteristic of modern esotericism. The reasons for this development are not difficult to identify. Western occultism lacked access to the initiatory continuity of Jewish tradition and operated within a culture that had already become secularized, individualistic, psychologized, and detached from revealed religion. As a result, Lurianic Kabbalah had to be translated into the language of inner experience, stripped of theological discipline, and adapted to magical instrumentalism. In this sense, Kabbalah, whether Lurianic or otherwise, was not “misunderstood” by Western occultism in any simplistic way. Rather, it was structurally reshaped from a theocentric cosmology into an anthropocentric psychomagic; from a covenant between God and humanity into the sovereignty of the individual subject; and from the tikkun of the world into self-development.

Viewed in this light, Western occultism does not continue Lurianic Kabbalah so much as secularize it and relocate it within the modern myth of autonomous humanity. Nevertheless, one important point must be emphasized. Certain aspects of Lurianic Kabbalah themselves provided the conditions for such a reception, not because they were misunderstood, but because they were selectively adopted. Luria shifted attention away from the mystical radiance of Divine emanation toward the soul and its “sparks.” This emphasis is strikingly reminiscent of the first premise of Crowley's Book of the Law: “Every man and every woman is a star.” Such a focus aligned perfectly with the emancipatory aspirations of the Reformation, the Rosicrucian movement, and later occultism. The language changed, but the movement toward the elevation of the individual remained.

Let us now follow the descending trajectory of this process into the modern era. Classical Western occultism, despite its deviations, still demands initiation, preserves hierarchies and disciplines, requires symbolic literacy, and retains at least a shadow of metaphysical seriousness. The New Age movement, emerging after the 1960s, abolishes initiation, obligation, and ontology itself, while retaining the terminology. Kabbalah enters the New Age not as a system but as a vocabulary. The Sephiroth become “energy centers” within the human being. In Kabbalah, however, the Sephiroth are modalities of Divine action. They are neither “parts of God,” nor psychic functions, nor structures of the microcosm. Yet within New Age discourse, inheriting this tendency from classical occultism, the Sephiroth are identified with chakras, emotional states, and various “vibrations.” God disappears, leaving behind only impersonal energy.

As already noted, Luria's principle of tzimtzum is translated into slogans such as “consciousness creates reality,” thereby erasing the distinction between God and humanity. The Lurianic paradox of Divine self-concealment becomes a metaphor for the creative ego. In Kabbalah, human beings are responsible yet limited; error has cosmic consequences, and redemption is collective because it is Israel, as a covenantal community, that is redeemed, apart from those who exclude themselves from salvation. Within the New Age framework, however, if “you create your own reality,” there is no sin, only lessons; no responsibility, only experiences. It is as though tikkun, the repair of the world, has been replaced by a form of spiritual self-therapy.

The Shadow of Antinomianism: From Sabbatean Logic to Spiritual Consumerism

Within modern lawless ethics, one can still discern the shadow of Sabbatean logic. New Age discourse frequently repeats slogans such as “just follow yourself,” “rules are social constructs,” or “there is no wrong path.” This is not Kabbalistic ethics but a secularized form of antinomianism stripped of its metaphysical weight. What remains is psychological relativism accompanied by a vast vocabulary of “inner blockages,” “past-life traumas,” and “repressed emotions.” In this framework, evil is neither overcome nor redeemed; it is merely “integrated.” Gnosticism and Kabbalah are transformed into a coaching narrative. Thus, tikkun itself becomes a product. It takes the form of workshops, certificates, online courses, webinars, and, in the pre-digital era, correspondence courses, ayahuasca sessions, and similar offerings. Spiritual work comes to be measured by the speed of achievement, the intensity of experience, and the degree of personal benefit obtained. Ontological labor upon the world is replaced by spiritual consumerism.

The New Age succeeds because it removes fear, guilt, and tragedy. It promises power without sacrifice, offers meaning without obligation, and borrows the authority of ancient traditions without accepting their burden. In this context, Kabbalah functions not as a binding truth but as an exotic source of legitimacy. At that point, it is no longer Kabbalah at all, but only its empty shell. And there, perhaps, is where the Qliphoth truly reside. As a consequence, an entire spiritual industry emerged, a hybrid of parapsychology, pseudo-psychology, therapy, and commerce operating at the borderlands of science, religion, magic, and the marketplace.

What occurs here is a simple substitution of ontology with psychology. Content is transferred from the structure of reality into the dynamics of the psyche. As a result, the world ceases to be the problem; only the individual subject remains problematic. Does that sound familiar? Within this confusion, the great and influential Carl Gustav Jung occupies the role of a crucial transitional figure. Not because he is somehow “to blame,” but because he interpreted esoteric symbols psychologically and thereby legitimized their use outside their original contexts. In doing so, Jung opened the door to the mass appropriation of esoteric symbolism by countless derivative movements that would eventually crowd and dilute what had once been a delicate and demanding spiritual sphere. From Jung, later currents inherited the concepts of archetypes, individuation, and the Shadow, applying them indiscriminately to a vast range of phenomena that require entirely different modes of understanding.

Within many contemporary “integrative” approaches one encounters expressions such as energy work, family fields, constellation work, higher consciousness, and potential activation. These are secularized remnants of serious spiritual and metaphysical concepts derived from Kabbalah, Gnosticism, alchemy, and other complex traditions of knowledge. By secularized I mean stripped of ethics, ontology, and cosmology. 

In the spiritual-coaching slogan “the universe responds to your vibration,” we can easily recognize the descendants of occult anthropocentrism, antinomian ethics, and psychologized Kabbalah. This wreckage of Kabbalah radiates one of the deepest distortions of all: evil must no longer be named; suffering may be “validated” but never judged; and moral judgment itself is considered “toxic.” Such assumptions directly negate the Gnostic drama, Kabbalistic responsibility, and the religious meaning of redemption. Everything is reduced to emotional management.

The notion that evil must not be named because doing so is somehow “unhealthy” bears a striking resemblance to certain contemporary ideological and moral tendencies that transform criminals, offenders, and perpetrators into victims. Such developments are possible because secular culture, or perhaps anti-culture, has little tolerance for transcendence. People seek meaning without religion. Therapeutic language has become socially legitimate, while esotericism is cleansed and repackaged through scientific terminology. Psychology thereby becomes a Trojan horse for metaphysics without responsibility. This form of subversive infiltration advances through the psychologization of ontology, the individualization of salvation, the marketization of spirituality, and the elimination of both evil and law. The result is:

• a subject without God,

• development without truth,

• healing without redemption.

This is how the contemporary spiritual landscape appears when viewed from the perspective of Kabbalah, and not only Kabbalah. 

Finally, we arrive at the culmination of the process: the New Man of the modern age, represented by the holistic model of the human being. By holistic models (New Age spirituality, integral psychology, contemporary spiritualism), it is generally assumed that the human being constitutes a unified and harmonious whole; that all levels of existence form a continuum; that body, psyche, and spirit are merely different aspects of a single process; that development is gradual and evolutionary; that reality is fundamentally good or neutral; and that the goal is integration rather than rupture. These assumptions are presented as self-evident truths. In reality, they are axioms rather than conclusions. Yet these unproven axioms, one might even call them prejudices, are almost never subjected to serious examination.

New Age and Gnosticism

Let us approach the matter from another angle. Let us compare the New Age movement with Gnosticism. Gnosticism does not begin with the question, “How can I develop myself?” Rather, it begins with a much more radical one: Why do I exist in a world that is ontologically alien to me? The fundamental Gnostic postulates maintain that:

• the world is ontologically defective, not merely morally problematic;
• there exists a radical discontinuity between God and the cosmos;
• the human being is inwardly divided rather than whole;
• the pneuma is a foreign element within humanity;
• salvation is a return, not an integration;
• knowledge is the unveiling of the world's falsehood rather than its improvement.

I invoke Gnosticism because, however distorted it may appear to many observers, it constitutes a more coherent and internally consistent doctrine than New Age holism. Holism seeks the integration of all levels of being. Gnosticism seeks the separation of the divine from the worldly. For the Gnostic, “integration” may simply reinforce the prison. For holism, consciousness develops, grows, and evolves. For Gnosticism, consciousness awakens from deception. Awakening is therefore not progress but discontinuity. For holism, the cosmos is a meaningful process. For Gnosticism, the cosmos is the result of error, fall, or deception. 

If the cosmos itself is fundamentally flawed, then no meaningful “holistic development within it” is possible. Holism emphasizes healing, balance, and harmony. Gnosticism emphasizes liberation. The Gnostic pathology is not trauma but ontological captivity. According to holism, everyone can and should develop. According to Gnosticism, only those who carry the pneuma can attain salvation. Modern thought finds this ethically unacceptable, yet it remains ontologically consistent within its own framework. Because modern culture cannot tolerate metaphysical pessimism, because it cannot accept the possibility that the world is not a school designed for progressive growth, it demands optimism, meaning, and progress. For this reason, older doctrines such as Kabbalah and Gnosticism are frequently psychologized, therapeuticized, and symbolized by modern spiritual movements. In the process, however, they cease to be either Gnosticism or Kabbalah.

Gnosticism is fundamentally incompatible with modern holistic models of the human being because it begins from an ontological discontinuity between the Divine and the cosmic order. It understands humanity as inwardly divided, and salvation as rupture and return from the world rather than integration and development within it. Something similar could be said of older forms of Christianity, Kabbalah, Sufism, Hermeticism, and indeed almost any authentic spiritual tradition grounded in a living religious framework. 

Yet we continually witness the return of Gnostic motifs, despite their incompatibility with modern holistic and progressive paradigms. The reason lies in their symptomatic function. Gnosticism returns because it expresses a truth about the experience of modern humanity, even among those who reject its metaphysics. What Gnosticism offers is something modern culture rarely acknowledges: the radical experience of not belonging to the world. Many contemporary individuals recognize themselves precisely in this experience. Modern humanity lives within a technologically organized world while carrying an excess of existential meaninglessness. People possess everything, yet feel that they do not belong. Gnosticism names this condition with remarkable precision:

• the world is alien;
• the order is false;
• something is fundamentally wrong.

This is why the motif continually reappears. Modern culture, however, cannot accept cosmic dualism. It cannot accept the Demiurge. It cannot accept election. Yet it can accept feelings of imprisonment, narratives of awakening, and the notion of a hidden truth concealed behind appearances. As a result, Gnosticism is stripped down to symbolism while its metaphysics is discarded. What remains is Gnosticism as a narrative rather than as a faith. 

There are, however, deeper reasons for the return of Gnostic themes. We increasingly perceive the technological world as a demiurgic order even without believing in a Demiurge. Systems govern human beings. Algorithms shape reality. Bureaucracy functions as an impersonal power. The Demiurge returns as system, network, matrix, and archontic order. In the information age, knowledge is everywhere, yet meaning steadily evaporates. This is why gnosis continues to appeal to modern people. 

Gnosis is not information. It is the breakthrough beyond illusion. It is privileged insight. Psychologically and culturally, this remains deeply seductive. Modern discourse formally advocates equality, yet implicitly divides humanity into the aware and the unaware; the critically conscious and the sheep. This is Gnostic anthropology without Gnostic theology. Historically speaking, Gnosticism tends to emerge during periods of imperial uniformity, symbolic overload, and crises of meaning. The structural similarities between today's global technosystem and the cosmopolitan order of the Roman Empire are difficult to ignore. We therefore witness a return of Gnostic motifs because modern culture fails to answer a number of persistent questions:

• Why does the world appear unjust even when it is rational?

• Why does knowledge fail to provide meaning?

• Why does progress fail to provide liberation?

Gnosticism offers a radical, if unacceptable, answer: Because the world is not what it claims to be. Yet Gnosticism cannot be fully revived. Such a revival would require:

• rejection of progress;

• negation of the world;

• acceptance of election;

• return to revelation.

Modern culture cannot accept these premises. Consequently, it appropriates the motifs, symbols, and narratives while rejecting the ontology, ethics, and eschatology that originally sustained them. Gnostic themes return within modern culture because they express authentic experiences of alienation, captivity, and distrust toward the order of the world. At the same time, they are stripped of their original ontology because modern consciousness cannot accept the radical dualism and negative theology upon which Gnosticism ultimately rests.

NOTE:

Originally published in Serbian. This English version is an AI-assisted translation of the original text.

Structural Deformation of Kabbalah: From the Ontology of Emanation to Cosmic Psychology

  

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A critical examination of how modern occultism transformed Kabbalah from a theology of divine being into a system of psychology, symbolism, and magical technique.

The Four Worlds as an Ontological Rather than a Psychological Model

In Kabbalah, the four worlds - Atziluth, Beriah, Yetzirah, and Assiah - are not "planes of consciousness," distinct dimensions of existence, or psychic realms, as they are often interpreted today. Rather, they are ontological spheres through which the Divine Light manifests itself. They represent a graded unfolding of Divine Being, from what is nearest to the Source to what is most distant from it:

1. Atziluth - the pure emanation of Divine Light; here there is no separation from God, as created beings do not perceive themselves as distinct entities.
   
   

2. Beriah - the world of Creation; the first appearance of differentiation and awareness of separateness.
   
   

3. Yetzirah - the world of Formation; form and structure emerge as differentiated realities.
   
   

4. Assiah - the physical cosmos; the world of action and material realization.
   
   

These four worlds are not successive "locations" within a cosmic geography but degrees of concealment and revelation of the Divine Light. The lower a world is, the less apparent the Divine Presence becomes, yet it is never absent. It is merely clothed in denser garments, as though the Light had wrapped itself in successive layers of clothing.

The Kabbalistic worlds are therefore modes of Divine manifestation rather than substantively separate planes of existence. None of them is "psychic" or "subjective"; they belong to the structure of reality itself rather than to layers of the human psyche projected onto the cosmos.

One might compare this to wearing a set of glasses composed of several lenses of varying darkness. Looking through all of them at once, our vision becomes dim and obscured. This is Assiah. Once the darkest lens is removed, we begin to see much more clearly and notice forms that were previously hidden by the opacity of the filter. This is Yetzirah. When the next lens is removed, perception becomes considerably clearer, revealing the richness and depth of Beriah. Finally, when the last lens is taken away, one is confronted with the pure light of Divine Being itself. At that point, however, the removed lenses can no longer be placed back upon the visor; one remains immersed within that Light. This is Atziluth.

The Hermeneutic Break: Christian Kabbalah and the Intellectualization of Emanation

The decisive moment in the distortion of Kabbalistic ontology did not occur in the nineteenth century with Theosophy, but much earlier, during the Renaissance, with the first Latin interpretations of Kabbalah. More specifically, it emerged in the way Christian Kabbalists framed the fundamental question: What does Kabbalah mean for us?

In his Conclusiones Cabalisticae (1486), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and later Johannes Reuchlin in De Arte Cabalistica (1517), were not translators who merely made etymological mistakes. Their undertaking was something far more significant: the assimilation of Kabbalah into an already existing Christian-Neoplatonic metaphysical framework. Their interpretive strategy did not arise from a misunderstanding of Kabbalah but from a different hermeneutical horizon. They did not read Kabbalah from within, as an autonomous theological system, but rather as a praeparatio evangelica, a cryptic anticipation of Christian truths.

The consequence of this approach was a fundamental substitution of ontological categories with epistemological ones. In traditional Kabbalah, God does not think the world into existence; He emanates it from Himself. The Sephiroth are not concepts residing within the Divine Mind but the ontological flow of Divine Being itself.

Pico and Reuchlin, however, translated these stages of divine self-disclosure into the language of Platonic Ideas and Scholastic forms. Pico's formulation is particularly revealing:

Decem Sephiroth sunt quasi ideae divinae, per quas Deus se manifestat.

That is:

The ten Sephiroth are like divine ideas through which God manifests Himself.

In Jewish Kabbalah, however, the Sephiroth are not ideas. They are not mental representations but modes of Divine Being in the process of emanation. Pico transforms them into intellectual patterns, thereby replacing emanation with intellectual projection and ontology with epistemology. Reuchlin goes even further. In De Arte Cabalistica, he describes the Sephiroth as:

rationes divinae, quasi formae in mente Dei

or:

divine principles, resembling forms within the mind of God.

This is more than a mere analogy. The entire Kabbalistic cosmology is reconfigured into a Christian-Neoplatonic noetics.

Where Kabbalah speaks of degrees of Divine Substance, Reuchlin perceives degrees of intelligible order (gradus intelligibilis ordinis). The Four Worlds cease to be modalities of divine self-revelation and instead become logical categories: the Divine Mind, the world of Ideas, spiritual forms, and matter. This transformation proved decisive. It did not arise from ignorance, for both Pico and Reuchlin were among the most remarkable intellectual figures of their age. Rather, it emerged from a conscious or unconscious strategic decision to render Kabbalah compatible with Christian Platonism. In doing so, they laid the foundations for nearly all subsequent interpretations of Kabbalah in the Western esoteric tradition.

Astral Medium and the Birth of Occult Kabbalah

If Pico and Reuchlin intellectualized Kabbalah by transforming it into a metaphysics of ideas, the occultists of the nineteenth century carried out its psychological and spiritistic translation. This process was not arbitrary. Rather, it built upon the existing Renaissance interpretation while introducing a new element: the concept of the astral.

Eliphas Lévi, the most influential mediator between Renaissance magic and modern occultism, adopted Kabbalistic terminology but integrated it into a system that was fundamentally gnostic-energetic rather than emanationist in structure. The key concept became the Astral Light (lumière astrale), a universal fluid, a medium through which will and imagination exert influence upon the world. Lévi did not derive this idea from Kabbalah. Instead, he imported it from Stoic pneuma, the Neoplatonic concept of hylē pneumatikē, Mesmerism, and German Naturphilosophie. Kabbalah served primarily as a reservoir of symbols and names that could now function as technical keys for magical practice.

The Sephiroth ceased to be aspects of Divine Being and became energetic centres. Divine Names ceased to be channels of emanation and became formulas of power. The Worlds ceased to be degrees in the concealment of Divine Light and became operational planes.

In this transformation, one Kabbalistic world underwent a particularly radical reinterpretation: Yetzirah. Because its very name is associated with formation, and because it was traditionally connected with angelic realities and formative forces, Yetzirah became the ideal location onto which the occultists projected the concept of the astral plane. In occult literature, especially in the works of Lévi and later of Papus, Leadbeater, and Blavatsky, Yetzirah came to be identified with the astral world, a realm populated by dreams, larvae, spirits of the deceased, and impressional forms.

Lévi frequently employed the term diaphane (“the transparent”), borrowed from Neoplatonic optics, in order to describe the medium of imagination. Within his system, the diaphane becomes substantialized. It is transformed into the fluid of Astral Light, a transparent substance through which the magician perceives and acts.

Kabbalah, however, contains no such substantial medium. Wherever transparency appears within Kabbalistic literature, for example in the Zohar, it refers to analogy and to the manner in which higher light becomes perceptible through symbols rather than to any energetic fluid. A typical example of this transformation can be found in Lévi's use of the Kabbalistic formula:

Tibi sunt Malchut et Geburah et Chessed.

In Kabbalah, the Sephiroth Malkuth, Geburah, and Chesed designate dimensions of Divine manifestation: Kingdom, Strength, and Mercy. For Lévi, however, the same formula becomes a magical symbol of equilibrium associated with the Cross and with a universal key of operation. What had originally been an ontological structure is transformed into an operative instrument.

Theosophy and the Anthropocentric Inversion

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society carried out the final step in this transformation. Their contribution did not consist in introducing new concepts, for the astral dimension was already present, but in integrating Kabbalah into an evolutionary and gnostic narrative. In Blavatsky's system, the Kabbalistic Worlds become stages in the cosmic evolution of consciousness. Atziluth is no longer understood as pure emanation but as “Divine Consciousness”; Beriah becomes the “Mental Plane”; Yetzirah the “Astral Plane”; and Assiah the physical world.

This translation appears intuitively plausible, yet it is fundamentally misleading because it replaces an ontological hierarchy with a psychological one. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the worlds are not levels of consciousness through which the soul evolves from below upward, but degrees of Divine self-withdrawal (tzimtzum). They are not substances but relations.

Theosophy, however, interprets them as actual locations, a supernatural geography through which souls and spiritual teachers travel. Kabbalistic theology is thereby transformed into a form of cosmic psychology. This move carries profound epistemological consequences. Whereas Kabbalah is fundamentally theocentric, everything begins in God and returns to God, occult Kabbalah becomes anthropocentric. Its purpose is no longer the understanding of Divine emanation but the mastery of cosmic planes for the sake of personal development or magical operation. The Sephiroth cease to be expressions of what God is and become instead expressions of what human beings may become or learn to utilize.

Genealogy of the Deformation: Continuity Rather than Accident

What is often presented as a series of independent “influences” or “free interpretations” in fact constitutes a single genealogy. The line of development is continuous:

1. Pico and Reuchlin – the intellectualization of the Sephiroth into divine ideas;

2. Eliphas Lévi – the substantialization of the astral medium and the reduction of Kabbalah to a magical technique;

3. Theosophy – psychological reinterpretation and an evolutionary-spiritist translation of Kabbalah;

4. Jung – archetypization and individualization;

5. Modern New Age thought – Kabbalah as a technique of self-actualization.

Each of these stages builds upon the previous one. Lévi could not have located the astral realm within Yetzirah had Reuchlin not already defined Yetzirah as a mundus formarum, a world of forms. The Theosophists could not have spoken of mental planes had Pico not transformed the Sephiroth into divine ideas. In other words, the deformation was neither accidental nor the product of ignorance. It was the structurally necessary consequence of relocating Kabbalah from one religious-linguistic universe into another.

Whenever Kabbalah is translated into a Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Spiritist, or psychological vocabulary, emanation disappears and is replaced by representation. To grasp the depth of this rupture, it is necessary to return to the original sources and compare them with their occult paraphrases.

Reading the Sources: Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar versus Occult Interpretations

Sefer Yetzirah does not speak of planes of consciousness but of the combinatorial structure of divine principles: numbers, letters, and names. The cosmos comes into being through the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom: ten Sephiroth and twenty-two letters. The three Mother Letters, Aleph, Mem, and Shin, generate the three axes of existence: world (olam), time (shanah), and body/soul (guf/nefesh). These categories are not successive levels of being. They are simultaneous and complementary dimensions of creation. Occultism, however, interprets them as hierarchical levels: physical, astral, and mental. In doing so, their simultaneity is lost and replaced by a spatial and evaluative hierarchy that is absent from the original text.

The same applies to the letters. In Sefer Yetzirah, God “engraved,” “hewed,” “measured,” and “combined” the letters, using them to shape the entirety of created reality. The letters are not symbols that represent reality; they are ontological instruments of creation. Occultism, by contrast, interprets this as a theory of vibrations and frequencies, transforming the language of creation into a technique of sonic emanation.

The Zohar provides an even clearer picture (I, 15a). The worlds are described as degrees in the concealment of light. Prior to creation, the Light of the Ain Sof filled all things. In order for the worlds to appear, God withdrew and clothed the Light in successive garments. The worlds are therefore not locations in space but modalities of revelation.

Zohar III, 11b reinforces this principle: in Atziluth there is no separation; in Beriah, being emerges; in Yetzirah, form takes shape; in Assiah, manifestation becomes actualized. This is not a cosmic geography but the logic of divine manifestation. Occultism, however, reads this language literally. Atziluth becomes the “highest dimension,” Assiah the “lowest,” while various intermediate planes stretch between them through which the soul supposedly travels.

We arrive, finally, at the question of Divine Names and angels. In the Zohar (I, 3b), the letters are described as “garments of light,” while the Names are pathways through which the Light descends. A Name is not an arbitrary designation but an ontological channel. Occultism transforms this into a technique. Divine Names become formulas for manipulating astral energies. Angels cease to be beings who stand before the Throne and instead become serviceable intelligences at the magician's disposal.

This brings us to perhaps the most revealing point of divergence. Consider the example of Metatron. In Jewish Kabbalah, Metatron is not a spirit summoned at will. He is Sar ha-Panim (“Prince of the Presence”), the supreme priest of the heavenly court, the Lesser YHWH. His appearance is not the result of a technical procedure but of divine initiative. The occult practice of invoking Metatron with obsidian stones and candles, under the assumption that he can be “called” from one's room and livestreamed over the internet, testifies not merely to a hermeneutical deformation but to a fundamental transformation of religious attitude. The entity encountered in such sessions may very well exist, but it is not the Metatron of the Merkabah mystics.

Conclusion: Ontology versus Technique

What modern occultism commonly calls "Kabbalah" is, for the most part, not Kabbalah at all. Rather, it is a pseudo-gnostic cosmology clothed in Kabbalistic terminology, produced through a centuries-long process of translation from one system of thought into another. The core of this deformation does not lie in isolated mistranslations but in the replacement of ontology with epistemology.

Kabbalah is not a form of mystical psychology. Nor is it a map of the cosmos or a technique for personal development. It is an ontological description of divine being in the process of self-revelation. Every attempt to translate it into the language of ideas, energies, planes, or archetypes inevitably impoverishes it, for it substitutes what Kabbalah actually is, namely theology, with what it is not: epistemology, psychology, or magical technique.

Recognizing this distinction is not merely a matter of academic precision. It is a matter of fidelity to the subject itself. Kabbalah cannot be assimilated into foreign categories without ceasing to be what it is. It can either be understood on its own terms, from within its own conceptual world, or it can be transformed into something else entirely. Modern occultism chose the latter.

NOTE:

Originally published in Serbian. This English version is an AI-assisted translation of the original text.

From Tarot to the Book of Thoth: A Brief Overview

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A critical examination of how a Renaissance card game rooted in medieval symbolism was transformed into one of the central sacred texts of modern Western occultism.

Somewhere, I once read that Tarot is the I Ching of the West. I must admit that I found the idea very appealing, despite Tarot's relatively recent origins and the lack of reliable evidence for its existence before the fifteenth century. It most likely acquired its standard structure through the fusion of the Mamluk playing deck with Italian picture cards, whose origins can be traced to medieval didactic and mnemonic imagery rooted in classical, esoteric, and theological traditions.

While the I Ching is based on binary opposition (yin and yang) and the mathematical combinatorics of trigrams, Tarot is founded upon narrative progression. Tarot is a book that can be shuffled, suggesting that destiny, or the cosmos itself, is composed of archetypes that are continually rearranged. In this sense, Tarot represents a transition from the cyclical conception of time characteristic of the East to the scenic or dramatic conception of time characteristic of the West.

Prominent examples of these early pictorial decks include:

• Cary-Yale Visconti (Visconti A), c. 1441
• Pierpont Morgan Bergamo, commonly known as Visconti-Sforza (Visconti B), c. 1451
• Brera-Brambilla (Visconti C), c. 1450
• Ercole I d'Este, c. 1473
• Sola Busca, c. 1491

There is also evidence of a deck described by Marziano da Tortona, secretary to the Visconti rulers of Milan, dating from between 1414 and 1418. It is worth noting that this deck was based on Greek gods and heroes, which in some ways supports my view of Tarot as an instrument of didactic and mnemonic practice.

This was not Tarot in the sense of the Major Arcana as we know them today, but rather an attempt to integrate classical mythology into a card game. Its existence demonstrates that the structure of Tarot remained fluid before eventually crystallizing into the form that became established in later centuries.

In his 1978 Encyclopedia of Tarot, Stuart Kaplan mentions the so-called Mamluk deck dating from the late fourteenth century and originating in Egypt. Preserved today in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, the deck consists of fifty-two cards divided into four suits: staves, swords, cups, and coins. Each suit contains ten numeral cards and three court cards: the king, the deputy king, and the second deputy king. Because the deck emerged from the Islamic world, its court cards are not illustrated but instead bear written titles. Fragments of even older examples have also survived, leading Kaplan to suggest that such cards may have circulated throughout the Islamic world as early as the eleventh century.

In Tarot: An Ancient System of Symbols, Julij Berkovski identifies three principal Tarot traditions that emerged during the fifteenth century: the Lombard-Venetian Tarot of seventy-eight cards, the Florentine Minchiate of ninety-seven cards containing the twelve zodiac signs, four elements, and four virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity, and Prudence), and the Bolognese Tarot of sixty-two cards. It was from the Lombard-Venetian tradition that the famous Tarot de Marseille later developed, a deck many regard as the prototype of Tarot as we know it today.

I am inclined to believe that learned church philosophers with interests in esotericism and alchemy, members of monastic orders and building guilds, initiates of the secret sciences, may have contributed significantly to the symbolic framework upon which Renaissance Italy constructed a pictorial system capable of conveying an initiatory narrative. This narrative brought together elements of alchemy, magic, astrology, Hermeticism, and Christian mysticism. It is difficult to know with certainty, yet it is entirely conceivable that some adept genius from the ranks of the master builders of the Gothic cathedrals conceived the sequence, principles, and essential details of the imagery through which the initiatory story of Hermetic Kabbalah was ultimately expressed. That story belonged to a wider system of initiation containing keys to the interpretation of a secret doctrine, one that largely disappeared from the European stage by the sixteenth century.

I am inclined to seek the origins of the Major Arcana not merely in card games but in the didactic and mnemonic methods of the Middle Ages, as well as in the subterranean currents of alchemy and Eastern star-lore. Such a perspective suggests that the architects of Tarot may be found among monks and theologians of the Western Church acting in concert with initiates of the operative Masonic guilds whose works still adorn the cities of Europe.

The master builders themselves could hardly have designed, decorated, and filled the magnificent cathedrals commissioned by the Church with gargoyles and symbolic figures of pagan and alchemical origin merely according to their own whims. Someone must have approved such imagery, or perhaps even demanded its inclusion. The collaboration between ecclesiastical thinkers and the architects of Gothic monuments suggests that the very individuals who conceived these symbolic programs and justified them before those incapable of understanding them may be precisely the people we are seeking.

From our present perspective, it is difficult to determine who fulfilled which role or how deeply each participant was initiated into these matters. One thing, however, seems certain: all of it existed and functioned within the framework of the Church, serving its purposes and operating under its protection. In this sense, the underground currents of occultism did not exist outside the Church, for educated men could circulate, study, and work only within its institutions. Beyond that sphere, there were relatively few initiates of significance.

At the moment when mnemonic images became incorporated into games of leisure, gambling, and divination, many clergymen denounced cards as the work of the Devil, although there were also those who believed that cards could serve a role in moral education. It is well known that experienced card players often possess remarkable memories when it comes to tracking the circulation of cards during play. In this sense, Tarot may be viewed as a portable locus within a memory palace.

During the Middle Ages, images such as the Pope, the Emperor, or the Wheel of Fortune helped preachers and orators remember complex moral sermons. The famous Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo in the sixteenth century represented an attempt to organize the entirety of human knowledge through images and symbols arranged within a wooden amphitheater. Tarot is, in essence, a pocket-sized version of such a theatre.

The introduction of playing cards into Western culture can be traced no earlier than 1375 in Florence, when Nicola della Tuccia, in his Chronicle of Viterbo (1379), described them as being of Eastern origin under the name naibe.* The addition of this linguistic connection contributes further historical depth to the story.

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* The original Arabic term found in the Mamluk deck is Nā'ib, meaning "deputy" or "representative," a title referring to a court card. From this word derive the Italian term naibi and the Spanish naipes.

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This “work of the Devil,” embodied in a system of seventy-eight cards, was later embraced by occultists as one of the pillars of their gnosis and wrapped in layers of mystery whose trail allegedly led all the way back to ancient Egypt. In this manner, the occult schools of the modern era sought to establish their legitimacy by presenting themselves as custodians of the secrets of the Egyptian priests, claiming an unbroken initiatory continuity preserved through the mystical Rosicrucian brotherhood.

Many representatives of speculative Freemasonry, as well as various irregular Masonic and para-Masonic organizations, adopted a similar approach toward the symbolism they inherited and developed. It should also be remembered that many figures associated with occult schools simultaneously belonged to Masonic, para-Masonic, or fringe Masonic bodies. Such overlap allowed the symbolic, initiatory, and mythological narratives of these organizations to reinforce one another and contribute to the emergence of a shared esoteric worldview.

Whether deservedly or not, Tarot gradually became heavily mystified over time because of what Ronald Decker, in The Esoteric Tarot, described as the peculiar combination of its images and their confusing hierarchy.

The motifs associated with each individual Major Arcana were already familiar and, in one form or another, embedded within the collective imagination of medieval Europe. They existed independently and served various purposes, although their esoteric character cannot be dismissed. Decker correctly observes that these images were standard allegories and symbols that Tarot's creators employed either to conceal esoteric systems or, I would add, to emphasize them. He concludes that during the Renaissance conventional symbols were rearranged to generate new allegories. From our present perspective, even these seemingly familiar symbolic and pictorial representations constitute a considerable interpretive challenge. We must first examine and decipher them before arriving at any usable understanding of their role within the Tarot system.

As a consequence, the modern world has witnessed an inflation of Tarots of every imaginable kind. The occult schools of the West took Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, mythology, astrology, alchemy, ancient grimoires, Greek magical texts, and Tarot itself, and transformed them into something they may never originally have been, combining them into a complex symbolic apparatus whose ultimate meaning has become obscured. In doing so, they effectively turned Tarot into the Book of Thoth. We should remember that Antoine Court de Gébelin was the first, in 1781, to popularize the Egyptian hypothesis, claiming that Tarot represented the sole surviving fragment of the lost Library of Alexandria.

The codification of Tarot into twenty-two Major Arcana of Gothic-Renaissance origin, sixteen court cards, and forty Minor Arcana of Arabic, Egyptian, or Persian origin conveniently served the purposes of eighteenth-century, and especially nineteenth-century, European occultism by providing a structure through which Hermetic and Kabbalistic doctrines could be expressed. Sometime in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, someone determined that the Major Arcana should be framed within a sequence of twenty-two pictorial images, thereby creating, intentionally or otherwise, a remarkable correspondence with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, occultists inspired by the Tarot de Marseille associated its Arcana with Egyptian mythology and magic, as well as with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. During the nineteenth century, they went even further, integrating Tarot into astrology and the Kabbalistic diagram of the Tree of Life, a symbolic map of the cosmos composed of ten Sephiroth connected by twenty-two paths and distributed across four Kabbalistic worlds. Eventually, at least two major occult schools of Tarot emerged, each proposing a different correspondence between the Hebrew letters and the Major Arcana.

In this sense, the Tarot de Marseille became the starting point for dressing Tarot in the garments of the emerging pseudo-Egyptian, syncretic, and Kabbalistic occultism of Enlightenment Europe. Having undergone its Rosicrucian incubation during the seventeenth century, this current reached its full expression in the Illuminist and Masonic eighteenth century, flourished further within nineteenth-century Freemasonry and Neo-Rosicrucianism, and ultimately extended into the contemporary New Age movement.

An intriguing question is why the Tarot de Marseille, comparatively austere in both style and expression, became the starting point for the occultization of Tarot.

In The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett observed that if we seek the symbolic intentions of those who designed the earliest Tarot decks, the Tarot de Marseille is a questionable guide, since we cannot be certain that its pattern predates the seventeenth century. The oldest surviving example of the Marseille type is generally attributed to Philippe Vachier of Marseille and dates from 1639. Dummett therefore concludes that if we wish to uncover the hidden meaning of Tarot, we must begin with its original and authentic form. Yet this immediately raises another question: which version, precisely, should be regarded as the authentic one, and do we have sufficient grounds for such an assumption? Dummett himself approaches the problem through the order of the cards, noting that the sequence found in the Tarot de Marseille is not the only one that existed.

It should also be remembered that the Tarot de Marseille was a product of woodcut printing. Its crude lines and primary colours were not merely aesthetic choices but technological limitations. Yet it is precisely this simplicity that transformed it into a kind of Rorschach test of esotericism. The images are sufficiently indeterminate for occultists to perceive within them Hebrew letters, Egyptian gods, or alchemical stages.

The Tarot de Marseille was a popular product of vernacular craftsmanship, created for gaming and amusement in the workshops of Champagne and Provence rather than as an elite esoteric manual. It was precisely this popular ambiguity and simplicity that attracted eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French occultists such as Antoine Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, and Eliphas Lévi. In these simple woodcuts they believed they had discovered an ancient popular cipher whose meaning, allegedly, had been overlooked by intellectuals.

Throughout the process of what might be called the “Marseillization” and subsequent occultization of Tarot, alternative traditions were gradually pushed aside. One such example is the Tarocchi di Mantegna of 1465, which presents a remarkably coherent and fundamentally Hermetic vision of the world intended for didactic and contemplative purposes.

The imagery of this deck, which is actually a series of engravings rather than playing cards, is organized into five thematic groups of ten figures each: the celestial spheres, the cardinal virtues, the liberal arts, Apollo and the nine Muses, and the social estates of the age. Although fascinating, this system proved difficult to integrate into either the Kabbalistic framework later imposed upon Tarot or the card-playing and divinatory traditions that surrounded it. For that reason, it gradually disappeared from view.

The arcana of the Tarocchi di Mantegna tell a broader and more comprehensive story than the twenty-two Major Arcana of Tarot, yet that story resists interpretation through the speculative Kabbalistic and astrological schemes favoured by occultism.

Later Tarot decks created by well-known occultists preserved the general foundation of the Tarot de Marseille and its predecessors while departing from them in numerous details. Many authors were clearly eager to insert their own principles, ideas, and doctrinal emphases into the cards. Their decks therefore provide valuable insight not only into Tarot itself but also into the teachings of the occult schools to which these authors belonged and the philosophies they sought to promote.

Taking all this into consideration, I am inclined to believe that the authors of the occult versions of Tarot were simply unfamiliar with the original doctrinal keys upon which Tarot was structured. If they did possess such knowledge, which seems less likely, they chose to disregard it for one reason or another. In my view, modern occultists attributed meanings to Tarot that it did not originally possess.

The gaps in their understanding of the phenomenon that so fascinated them were compensated for through lucid and intuitive speculation about the obvious symbolism of the Tarot images. They combined this with what they knew of the metaphysics of the Hebrew alphabet and Kabbalah, as well as with their own interpretations of Hermeticism, magic, alchemy, astrology, and the facts and myths of Greek and Egyptian mythology. In this way, there emerged what may properly be called the occult ideology of Tarot, or more precisely, an ideology expressed through Tarot.

Sallie Nichols, writing from a Jungian perspective, observed that modern people, immersed in a culture that privileges language above all else, often find it difficult to understand the nonverbal and imaginal language of Tarot. In her view, the Tarot de Marseille succeeded in preserving the general tone and character of some of the earliest Tarot decks. She also emphasized that there is no evidence that it was the work of a single creator, as is the case with most modern decks. Equally important, the Tarot de Marseille is not accompanied by an explanatory text; it is a story told entirely through images.

Modern occult Tarots, Nichols argues, appear to have been designed primarily as illustrations of ideas already expressed in words, rather than as images that inspired the subsequent development of texts. As a result, the figures and objects depicted in such decks tend to be allegorical rather than symbolic in character. Their images illustrate verbalized concepts rather than evoking experiences, intuitions, and perceptions that lie beyond the reach of language itself.

According to the principles of Renaissance humanism, the early Trionfi were not instruments of divination but rather a Christian-Neoplatonic ladder of virtues and human destiny, tracing a path from the Fool to God, or to the Heavenly City. Once this original didactic and Christian context faded from memory, occultists filled the vacuum with synthetic Kabbalism, pseudo-Egyptian speculation, and astrology.

In doing so, they transformed Tarot into the Book of Thoth. What had once been a popular game and a visual mnemonic system became a text-based allegorical manifesto for their own secret societies and esoteric doctrines.

The culmination of the development of occult Tarot, through the teachings of the French and British occult schools, found its embodiment in the Thoth Tarot created by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris. This deck represents a fully developed occult doctrine founded upon revelation, specifically the message of the messenger of the Aeon of Horus, thereby acquiring an additional mystical dimension.

That mystical dimension arises from the fact that the entire deck serves as a visual expression of magically inspired verses and declarations that Crowley himself recorded without fully understanding their meaning at the time, only gradually deciphering them over the years that followed.

At the heart of his almost entirely new magical religion, Thelema, lies the doctrine of the succession of aeons and, consequently, the succession of magical and religious paradigms. The Aeon of Horus is the epoch of the Divine Child, replacing the age of the Dying and Resurrected God. This doctrine is symbolized in card XX, which in Crowley's Tarot bears the title The Aeon rather than Judgement.

The god Horus has replaced Osiris upon the throne of the spirit of the age, and accordingly a new era requires a new set of rules embodied in The Book of the Law, whose imagery is, in many respects, expressed through the Arcana of the Thoth Tarot. It is a remarkable development, one that transformed artistically illustrated pieces of paper, or even simple woodcuts, into symbols believed to possess genuine magical potency.

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Originally published in Serbian. This English version is an AI-assisted translation of the original text.