So far my retake of Abramelin is going very well (no evil eye). I felt right away a new font of strength both in terms of doing the operation and in terms of my general work. I’ve actually started looking forward to the end, whereas before I felt very ambiguous about the end. I do need to get cracking on making the robes. I have the patterns and the linen for the under robe but not the silk outer robe fabric yet, and I haven’t cut out the pattern, much less begun to actually sew the thing.
I’ve been doing well with the studying. On the one hand, I am reading much more in depth in Kabbalah. The more I learn about it, the more I feel that the Kabbalah of the occult (or of the New Age, for that matter) is a tiny and distorted splinter of the “sea” of Kabbalah, to borrow a metaphor. Right now I am reading Shalom Shar’abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El by Pinhas Giller (I bought it used at a fraction of the $75 price! I highly recommend abebooks.com as a resource for the avid bookmeister). This is a very clearly written study of a fundamentalist Kabbalistic school that is not just founded on Luria’s interpretation of the Zohar but considers itself to be the location of his reincarnation (gilgul). Beit El does some practical Kabbalah (magic), including causing rain and using the manipulation of divine names to protect people from bombardment during the shelling of Jerusalem. But I bought the book because they were pointed to as practitioners of kavannot during prayer. In mainstream Judaism, kavannah is sometimes mentioned as basically having the right attitude or attention or concentration on a prayer or commandment or the fact that it is Shabbat. I had not heard of it being used in the plural, for one, and it means something completely different. The way I understand it, it shifts prayer from being, say, petitional or thanksgiving or praise, to actively affecting the divine and the universe through unifications (yichudim) or repair (tikkun). The basic idea is that when done in a particular way, prayers and liturgy can help unite the separated aspects of the divine, such as YHVH and the Shekhinah, or mend the sefirot, in particular, the bottom seven sefirot of the Tree of Life, and when that happens, there is a pouring down of the divine flow into the individual who is praying. Although the idea of divine grace or other bits flowing down is certainly something I have heard plenty about, the idea that prayer can mend the divine or the divine in the universe puts a lot of power into the hands of the person who prays. This is a very different conception than the usual person as petitioner before the divine. To my mind, it is more like the image of the magician.
One interesting question the book raises only briefly is what is the status of someone who learns about Kabbalah from academic research and resurrects practices no longer engaged in at present? Is that person practicing “authentic” Kabbalah? The author seems to feel that such a person is indeed practicing authentic Kabbalah, but the community in which his example resided did NOT believe that this practice was authentic and in fact literally isolated him, made fun of him, and told people he was crazy–all because he cried during the Amidah, which is a historically Kabbalistic practice. As mentioned, they are fundamentalists, and such folks don’t like anyone doing anything different from what they have done, regardless of what it has to do with history. (I don’t want anyone, btw, to get the idea that I think Beit El is politically praiseworthy. They are reactionaries. ‘Nuff said.)
In Beit El, the liturgy is turned into a device to unify YHVH/Shekhinah or the lower seven sefirot by substituting various rearranged letters of the Tetragrammaton with different vowels applied. Again, to me, this sounds like the practice of magic. Various prayerbooks indicate when and how this should be done. I had no idea such prayerbooks existed. Here’s the one credited to Shar’abi, the founder of Beit El. If you look at the sample page they give, you can see what is meant about the different versions of the Tetragrammaton and the use of the vowels.
There’s much more to it than I have sketched here, and I have more of this book to read, but it has certainly given me something to think about in terms of prayer in Abramelin.
