Madame Blavatsky on the History and Tribulations of the Zohar

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 44 pages

The longest document in this batch, and the most technical. Its subject is the Zohar — how it reached the modern world, what can be established about its date, and what the European occultists of her own day had made of it. Those occultists are her first target: they see in the Jewish Kabbalah alone the universal well of wisdom, finding in it the secret lore of nearly all the mysteries of nature, and treat the Zohar as an esoteric thesaurus of all the mysteries of the Christian Gospel.

Her own position separates two questions that were usually run together. On the language, she agrees entirely with those who say that the numerical language of the Kabbalistic works teaches universal truths rather than any one religion, and that the Mystery-language of the Zohar was once the universal language of humanity — but holds they become entirely wrong if they add that this language was invented by the Hebrews and borrowed from them by everyone else. On the text, she argues that the writings passing today under the name of the Zohar of Rabbi Shimon are not authentic, and that the lore in Kabbalistic literature was not recorded in writing before the first century. A separate section takes the claim that the Kabbalah is the basis on which Masonry is built, modern Masonry being on her account a dim reflection of a much older original.

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