Madame Blavatsky Reviews The Qabbalah of Isaac Myer

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 14 pages

A book review, and one of the warmest she wrote. The subject is Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, published by the author in Philadelphia in 1888 in an edition of 350 copies — a study of the philosophical writings of Solomon ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol, or Avicebron, and their connection with the Hebrew Kabbalah and the Zohar, with translations, an essay on the Chinese Kabbalah of the Yih King, part of the mystic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and an account of the Akkadian and Chaldean universe.

Her enthusiasm has a clear cause: Myer had arrived independently at the position she had argued in Isis Unveiled and elaborated in the Secret Doctrine — that the source of the Kabbalistic ideas embodied in the Zohar is to be traced to Aryan rather than Semitic thought, and that these ideas are neither Akkadian nor Chaldean nor Egyptian originals but universal property common to all nations. She adds a remark that reads differently once you know the print run: on learning of the difficulties Myer experienced in getting the work published, she was not in the least surprised. The book was reprinted a century later by Wizards Bookshelf as part of their Secret Doctrine Reference Series.

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