Eleazar of Worms, and night-blooming plants

I used the timer on my digital camera to take this pic of me studying

Studying for an hour a day was part of Abramelin. Even though I have discontinued the operation (more about that in another post), I’ve been trying to continue the studying.  I’ve been reading the second volume in Joseph Dan’s series: Jewish Mysticism: The Middle Ages. I thought it would be covering the Zohar, but instead he is focusing on Ashkenazi Hasidism–not the hasidism most folks are familiar with. Since this movement did not survive to the present day, you never hear much about these folks. It’s been interesting, though, because Eleazar of Worms, whom Georg Dehn believes is connected to the Abramelin book, is mentioned frequently in Dan’s history as an important figure of Ashkenazi Hasidism. I don’t think I’ll be able to put any significant pieces together on this figure and his possible relationship to Abramelin until I finish reading the book and write up my notes. I’m only about 1/2 of the way through it now. I’ve also got a book on Eleazer himself to look at. I don’t expect much from that, though, because it appears to focus on his ethical writings. Outside of those, Rabbi Eleazar of Worms is perhaps most well-known nowadays for Moshe Idel’s translation of the section of the rabbi’s commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, where he describes how to create a golem (although he is not the same medieval rabbi who supposedly created one–that was Rabbi Loew of Prague). I wish Idel’s golem book was in print. The creation of the golem according to Rabbi Eleazar involves a number of permutations of holy names performed on various parts of the golem’s body. Last night I was reading about how these “gates,” as Eleazar calls them, work in the analysis of Biblical texts–various ways of shuffling around of letters, so that a text becomes like a Rubik’s cube churning out variant meanings. Most interesting of all is the gate of considering the letters that AREN’T used in a verse. This reminds me of what I learned was a quintessentially female/feminine way of reading a text–looking for what is NOT there, what has been driven beyond the margins of the page, the absences and silences and banishments, the unmentionables. I wonder if that is not exactly what a witch is always looking for, the foundation of the occult. It also occurs to me that beyond the margins is also in some sense the place of the witch in society–not in the center of a community, at least, not anymore, but beyond the fringes.

I also picked up Janowitz’s Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews and Christians, which I began reading some time ago and left off for some reason. It’s got some interesting bits in it. Today what struck me was the difference she highlighted between The Greek Magical Papyri and Sepher ha-Razim, which are contemporary works.  The rituals in Sefer ha-Razim depend very much on the intercession of angels. They do basically everything for the operator. In contrast, in the Greek magical papyrus, it’s all “I adjure…” She doesn’t really comment on this difference, just points it out. But she also discussed the shift away from animal sacrifice that was going on in late antiquity, especially with regard to working with entities other than the major gods. Daimones often got herbs or stones as sacrifices instead of animals. So much for the widely believed notion that “real” magic, which can only be “ancient,” MUST involve killing or it isn’t authentically ancient and real.

I also appreciated how Janowitz knocked down Frazer’s (of Golden Bough fame) rather imperialist perspective about magic vs. religion and his whole sympathetic/contagion paradigm that is still horked up in the occult world on occasion. She gave the specific example of “voodoo” dolls, which he uses as an example par excellence of magic. She points out that he (and many after him) assume that practitioners of other religions naively take an object for a deity or person; they aren’t subtle enough (or adult enough) to discern the difference between a thing and a being. Focusing on the ritual doll, she says that it’s clear that people maintain a religious perspective with these images–with an image meant for protection, for instance, they believe it is the spiritual entity represented by the figure who protects them rather than the figure itself that has the power; the latter would be a magical perspective, in this definition. I have certainly seen plenty of the lattter in Judaism with for instance the way people relate to Torah scrolls as magical objects. But IMO, one of the problems modern magic has to deal with sooner or later is a misplaced worship of outmoded (and just plain bad) scholarship such as Frazer’s (or Budge’s or Waite’s, etc.). Older is not better in scholarship. It’s not ipso facto better in magic, either, but that seems to be the assumption.

On a completely different note, I also went outside last evening and sampled the different night-centered flowers in my garden. Oddly, the toloache’s scent might be stronger by day. By night it’s lemony coolness gets swamped by the peanut butter of the leaves. The jasmine tobacco flowers continue to morph from soapy to just weird to gardenia and back. But now the wild white petunias are finally flowering, their sticky fragrance a blend of viscous gardenia, strong spice, and licorice. I love the scent of these things. Tonight I wondered if anyone had ever worked magically with Petunia axillaris. Perhaps long ago, in their homeland, they were spirit guides; here, they are reduced to decorating gas station islands.