Occultism and Kabbalah Are Only Masks to Hide the Sacred Truth from the Profane

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 24 pages

Twenty-four pages on what the Kabbalah is for, and the answer given is not the one its Western admirers of the 1880s wanted. Both occultism and Kabbalah, on this account, are masks — systems designed to conceal the sacred truth from the profane rather than to disclose it — so that reading them as though they were straightforwardly expository is to misunderstand their purpose entirely.

From that follows a contrast Blavatsky draws sharply and repeatedly: Eastern occultism, she argues, has for ages veiled a profound pantheistic unitarianism beneath the exuberance of an exoteric polytheism, while the Jewish Kabbalah, behind a screen of exoteric monotheism, arrived at something she characterises as a religion of sexual and phallic worship. The remainder treats the Kabbalah as fire philosophy and fire theology. Explanatory notes by Boris de Zirkoff accompany the text and are worth reading, since the historical claims here are contested even within the tradition.

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