De Zirkoff on the Kabbalist Literature
Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 10 pages
Ten pages, of which five are the essay and the rest the series' suggested reading. It is taken from de Zirkoff's own H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, volume VII, pages 269 to 273, where it appears as a bibliographical note to the article on Kabalah and Kabalists. He states his purpose in the first sentence: many students are unfamiliar with Kabbalistic literature, the subject is a very vast one, and only essential data have been included. That is an accurate description of what follows — this is a reference note rather than an argument, and it is the most useful thing in this section for anyone trying to work out what to read.
Most of it concerns the Zohar, known also as the Midrash ha-Zohar and the Sepher ha-Zohar, meaning Splendour, which he describes as the great storehouse of ancient Hebrew theosophy supplemented by the doctrines of mediaeval Jewish rabbis. He sets out its structure — several interrelated tracts, each in several portions, each holding a kernel of ancient teaching around which comments have clustered from different hands at very different epochs — and its subjects, among them Ain Soph, the emanations, the Sephiroth, Adam Kadmon, the revolution of souls, and the use of numbers and letters. On authorship he is careful and gives both sides: tradition assigns the work to Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, who hid in a cave for thirteen years and was taught there, by tradition, by the prophet Elias; but a very large portion of the compilation is not older than about 1280, when it was edited in manuscript by Moses ben Shem-Tob de Leon of Spain, whose life and other writings he sketches. The rest is a working bibliography, and it is specific: the first printings at Mantua and Cremona in 1558; Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin Kabbalah Denudata of 1677 and 1684; Mathers's The Kabbalah Unveiled of 1887, which translated three of those treatises; the French of Jean de Pauly and the five-volume English of Sperling and Simon; Isaac Myer's Qabbalah of 1888, which Blavatsky herself reviewed at length in Lucifer. The Sepher Yetzirah, reputed the oldest Kabbalistic work and attributed by tradition to Abraham, gets its own paragraph and its own editions. He closes with a list of essays on the subject from the early theosophical periodicals — Buck, Lazarus, Pratt, Chamier, Pancoast, Skinner, Westcott and others — with volume, month, year and page for each, which is exactly the sort of thing that is hard to find anywhere else.
Read the full text (PDF, 0.3 MB, 10 pages)
