I’ve been reading Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah. The first chapter or two was very difficult, I think because the author is coming from the perspective of psychiatric hypnosis, a field about which I know nothing and which obviously has its own technical language and assumptions. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole–at least, not today. This book has made me look back at some other books I’ve got and to make connections I might not otherwise have made. Although the book is not primarily about magic in Kabbalah, it does discuss Kabbalistic magical practices that I have not seen described in the occult world. There’s plenty in this that relates to the practice of witchcraft, especially from the perspective of its connection to shamanism.

The thing I want to talk about right now, given the fact that I started writing this on Samhain–and it has taken me all this time to finish it because this was a thorny, involved issue for me–is soul retrieval in Kabbalah. I know–I didn’t know there was such a thing in Kabbalah either. It’s connected to a particular practice called nefilat appayim (ne-fee-lat ah-pie-yeem), or falling on one’s face (prostration). Nefilat appayim has been part of Judaism since the Temple still stood in Jerusalem. It’s what the priests did before the Ark. It has remained a part of the practice of Judaism for two millenia, but the only time I have personally witnessed it is on Yom Kippur, and then only amongst people who were rather hardcore and old fashioned. They did it as part of asking God’s forgiveness from transgressing against God’s law. During the service, they wore a ritual shroud to indicate their awareness that God does not have to forgive them and therefore allow them to live another year; IOW, they could die right there. There’s nothing magical about this practice. I never really thought about it much; it seemed just a kind of weird holdover from the Middle Ages, during which the liturgy picked up a lot of sort of creepy self debasement.

But there’s another use of nefilat appayim I’d never heard of. This practice definitely seems shamanistic to me. It’s connected with a prayer that is a regular part of ordinary liturgy. It’s called the Standing Prayer/Amidah/Shemoneh Esreh, which dates from around 70CE–which btw I read recently is the basis for the Christian  ”Our Father.” The Standing Prayer is the core of original synagogue practice, which arose while the Temple still existed and which substituted study of sacred books and prayer for the sacrificial cult, and ordinary people for hereditary priesthood. Just generally a much more hands-on type of Judaism, for all that the Evangelists insulted the Pharisees, who created the synagogue.

The Standing Prayer is today read silently while, logically enough, standing, although certain motions like bowing and making as if to approach and to depart are involved in its recitation. Then it’s repeated aloud, chanted by the prayer leader. This has always been my favorite part of the service. I was not aware, though, being a Conservative (has nothing to do with politics), that in Hasidism, it was traditional to do a nefilat appayim after the Standing Prayer. The idea, as far as I can tell, is that one is at one’s spiritual height during the Standing Prayer. In fact, during the repetition there is even a brief prayer called the Kedushah where the congregation joins in with the angels praising God with “Holy, holy, holy!” and literally gets up on tiptoe at each “Holy” to signify our desire to be in those heavenly heights. It is from those heights that one “falls on one’s face” literally, and one’s soul in ths practice flies from the heights near God’s throne to the depths of the klippot, the Other Side, as it is called. There, if a person is spiritually prepared–holy enough or simply has sufficient concentration–one can rescue a soul that has become trapped in the klippot, a divine spark stuck in the evil husks, and bring it back into the upper realms, where it can be pure and free. I had only ever heard of such a practice in my reading about Reb Nachman of the Breslover Hasidim, whom I wrote about clothing the naked souls of the dead. He was a great rabbi, though, and in contrast, this nefilat appayim and soul retrieval has been practiced by ordinary people.

Seals of the Klippot

This practice is considered dangerous, though, and was even subsequently forbidden in most practices, because someone not sufficiently prepared could not only come back from the Other Side without rescuing a soul from the klippot, but worse, could lose their own soul down there and even get an evil soul in return. A person would then come back appearing to be alive but in fact be spiritually dead and evil. This is especially a risk for a “wicked” person but could even happen to someone who just let their attention slip for a moment. Sounds pretty awful. For this reason, this practice has been either banned completely or instead of nefilat appayim, people simply lean their head on their arm. What’s really amazing to me is that this is a not a practice from some dusty corner of Kabbalistic ritual of, say, the Sabbateans, but is from Lurianic practice, Luria being the most popular Kabbalistic thinker both within Judaism and without at this time. Lurianic Kabbalah is today the most prevalent and is what Hermetic Qabalah takes as the whole of Kabbalah. Hermetic Qabalah never gets any farther than maybe cruising around the Lurianic Tree of Life, from what I can see. This use of nefilat appayim is considered a unification of Tiferet and Malkhut on the Tree of Life in Lurianic Kabbalah, but I don’t think I have seen anything like this in Hermetic Qabalistic practice.

Lawrence Fine has got a neat article on yihudim (how the actions of the individual person can unite the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine) in Lurianic Kabbalah that I want to write about in the future. He has this to say about the use of nefilat appayim to retreive a soul from the Other Side: it “is akin to other perilous descents to a dangerous world, strikingly reminiscent of shamanic voyages to the underworld for the purpose of gathering sick souls and bringing them back to the land of the living. One of the most fundamental features of shamanic activity is to descend to the subterranean world so as to journey among the dead. Thus, among the shamans of Siberia and Inner Asia, the purpose of such a journey is to search out and retrieve the soul of a sick individual that is believed to have wandered away from his or her body or to have been carried off by demonic forces.” (p. 247, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos).

Outside of rescuing a soul from the klippot on the Other Side, one can also use this dipping down to attain spiritual enlightment or divine wisdom. It is considered a death from which one is reborn with new spiritual strength–if one makes it out alive. Luria considered nefilat appayim to be equivalent to laying down one’s life. Clearly, spiritual questing can be very dangerous business in Kabbalah.

Weirdly enough, this process of diving down into the Other Side and coming back with an unexpected “gift” is exactly what, according to Crowley, the Black Brotherhood experienced when they entered the Abyss. I stumbled across this thanks to Jack Faust, who was discussing Saturn work on his blog and informed me who the Black Brotherwood were.

Something not addressed in this whole thing as far as I can see is how the souls who are stuck in the klippot got down there in the first place (outside of the ones who were diving down there and were not prepared for it as part of this practice). Were they just people who screwed up royally in their lives, who got stuck in the klippot by doing great evil? What I immediately wondered was whether they were magicians who through their work got stuck in a bear trap by messing around with demons. The other possibility is that they are the souls of Sabbateans, who believed that one had to dive down into the depths in order to rise above them, I guess I would say. It’s been a long time since I have read their stuff.

I noticed in looking around for information on soul retrieval, a concept I cannot say I am all that familiar with, that a New Age approach sees the souls trapped in wherever that are to be rescued by soul retrieval as, logically enough for New Age, aspects of oneself. For them, soul retrieval is psychological–retrieving a piece of one’s own soul that became dislodged by some spiritual or psychological trauma. I can understand that and I can certainly believe that a part of one’s soul can become dislodged in this way, but if one’s soul is damaged like this, is one really qualified to go find the missing piece and wrest it back? Maybe it would be a better idea to ask someone whose soul is not only intact but who is experienced in such things to go get it. We don’t pull out our own teeth, after all.

I also have to think about what soul retrieval implies about the retriever in nefilat appayim. It is an act of charity, and in Judaism, the highest form of charity is a service one performs for the dead, the assumption being that the dead cannot ever pay us back because they are not in the world any longer (and in Judaism, the dead don’t usually have any special in with God, either). The type of soul retrieval associated with nefilat appayim surely does not involve any payback from the dead and can even involve great risk to oneself but there can be a positive outcome for the soul retriever also. It’s not a completely one-way street. It makes me think about Judaism’s emphasis on doing rather than on believing. This is why the Law is so important in Judaism: it is about doing. Here, by doing this act of charity of retrieving this soul stuck in the mire of the klippot, you can in the process of it, in the doing of it, acquire good for yourself (spiritual enlightenment or divine wisdom).

So here’s this Kabbalistic practice that involves working with the dead, cruising around the Other Side, rescuing a soul, possibly dying or losing one’s own soul, but also possibly acquiring spiritual wisdom. I would not have guessed that Lurianic Kabbalah would contain such a practice.

Something interesting that occurred to me: soul retrieval assumes of course that the soul (or an aspect of it) can leave the body. Is this not what some would say happens when witches fly to the Sabbat? Nefilat appayim, during which a part of one’s soul leaves one’s body, implies that there are some pretty serious dangers out there for the flying soul, depending on where one flies. I’m really curious if anyone out there has done any soul retrieval as a part of magic.

For a while I’ve been drawn to a particular tiny sect of Hasidism begun in the eighteenth century by Nachman of Breslov, a group often known as the Dead Hasidim on account of lacking a rabbinical “dynasty” (but more commonly known as the Breslov hasidim). Last weekend in a collection of articles on the sect, I read about Nachman’s work to “adorn the souls of the dead,” which resonated for me with Early Modern European folks’ descriptions of guiding the dead to the afterlife, such as described by Carlo Ginzburg in The Night Battles. I’d like to make some connections between these two apparently very different activities–Reb Nachman’s attempts to aid the souls of the dead in Uman, Ukraine, and those who guided the “furious” dead to the underworld in 13th-17th century Europe and were called witches for it. This project just keeps getting bigger and bigger, though. I might have to turn it into an article down the road, so please bear with me in terms of its length and disorganization at this point. If I don’t start getting this out there, it will either wither and die or turn into a big, tangled mass.

First, some Kabbalah, in particular, its view on the parts of the soul

In one Kabbalistic view, the soul has three parts: nefesh, ruach, and neshamah. The nefesh is basically the life force. It is the source of passions and is focused on the pursuit of pleasures; it’s clothed in blood* and lodged in the heart. The nefesh is connected to the world of Asiyah, the material world, which is permeated with the divine and where creation takes physical form. (I will take the time to say here that one thing that put me off for years re Kabbalah is its endless complication–worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds, etc. Good example here.) The nefesh derives from the klipot; I’m thinking that the parallel is that the nefesh is like a shell for the neshamah just as the klipot are shells for the divine sparks (and as the Zohar says, without a shell, you cannot have a nut). The sephirah on the Lurianic Tree of Life that corresponds to nefesh is Malkhut (aka the Shekhinah), the plane where spirit and matter intersect. The nefesh stays around the body after death, purifying the body, some say for three days, others say until the body decomposes (which explains ghosts, for instance).  From the perspective of alchemy, nefesh would be Salt.

The ruach is concretized in the lungs and breath and is given to people when they reach the age when they can distinguish between good and evil (12-13). The ruach is connected to the world of Yetsirah, the next up from Asiyah and the center of human emotions and of planning and actualizing creation. The sephirah known as Chesed, center of emotion and location of loving kindness, grace, and good will, is the source of the ruach. The ruach is the seat of emotions and personality; in alchemical terms, it’s Sulfur. It can leave the body with the neshamah and acts as the sort of connecting link between nefesh and neshamah, a sort of spiritual hinge.

The neshamah comes with the ability to reason; it’s the source of our desire to practice kindness, do good deeds, to seek knowledge,  and to be humble (I think this is a good example of the enormous contrast between Judaism and Christianity, btw–the highest soul is not one that believes; it is one that is responsible for acts in the material world). The neshamah is directly connected to the divine and is what is normally responsible for healing or rectifying the nefesh, for any precognition or intuition, and for prophetic dreams. It’s manifested in the world of Beriah, which is where the ability to reason and self awareness originate. The neshamah is seated in Binah on the Lurianic Tree of Life. I guess you could say nefesh is alchemical Mercury. It can leave your body and come back.

When we die, our nefesh wanders the world and visits our grave for between 30 days and a year (depending on who you talk to) while our body decays and releases its hold on the nefesh and the higher aspects of our soul are purified. Then those higher aspects “clothe” the nefesh in light and illuminate it, lifting it up to the Garden of Eden (which comes in a higher and lower form). If someone dies before they receive their ruach or nefesh, their nefesh wanders, “naked,” after death. Without having done any good deeds in life, these souls are not “clothed” in light and cannot leave the earth. The best they can hope for is to return to physical life and hope to be incarnated again to get another chance to achieve these higher souls through good works (yeah, I know–reincarnation in Judaism, who’da thunk it). It has always been a tradition in Judaism for the living to perform acts of loving kindness and to study and pray for the sake of elevating the souls of the beloved dead. In fact, the way I remember it, good works one does for the dead are of the greatest value, since the dead can never pay you back in any way for them. Hasidism takes this type of good work for the dead farther. What’s interesting, though, is the idea that the souls of dead that are “naked” wander around the Earth.

Seeing the Souls of the Dead

Reb Nachman, who was in many ways a very strange character, said he saw many souls of the dead in the course of his life, beginning when he was seven, when he was terrified by seeing the soul of an evil person. Subsequently he was not afraid of the dead because, according to him, he never again saw the soul of an evil person. At the end of his life, when he was afflicted with tuberculosis and knew he was dying, he moved to the Ukrainian town of Uman. The usual reason given for this move was that he wanted to interact with a new movement of secular Jews called the maskilim, whom most religious authorities of that time considered bad. People figured Reb Nachman wanted to work on them. But it also happened that this town had been the site of a mass slaughter of Jews and Poles by participants in a cossack rebellion in the 1768. Many of the Jews killed were children. It was precisely the souls of these children whom Nachman perceived at Uman, wandering, lost, naked, because they had never had the chance to acquire ruach or neshamah, never had a chance to do much in the way of good deeds. He said he had moved to Uman not to guide the living but to help the dead–specifically, these lost souls. Does this start sounding like someone who might work with the Furious Horde?

Trance Techniques for Dealing with the Dead

In Lurianic Kabbalah (Lurianic is the just about the only kind of Kabbalah familiar to practitioners of Western magic), yihudim is a magical/trance technique in which various combinations of the letters of the Tetragrammaton are meditated upon and vocalized. The best known purpose for this in Judaism is to unify the masculine and feminine aspects of God. According to Luria, who created this technique, the best place to practice yihudim is either at home or at the grave of a tsadik (a righteous individual but also a person who can perform miracles; tsaddikim are not born but made–anyone can become a tsadik–no Witchblood or caul necessary), and the best time is the eve of the Sabbath.  Hasidism took yihudim farther, saying that a holy person could heal souls (tikkun ha-neshamot) with this technique. What Nachman did that was different was to practice this technique at the burial place not of tszaddikim but of ordinary people. He described the place where souls congregate as a field or garden:

“Know that there is a field.** Extraordinarily beautiful trees and herbs grow there. The beauty of the field and what grows there is so very precious–it is beyond words. Trees and herbs–these are but representations of the holy souls growing there. There are many, many naked souls wandering about outside of the field awaiting their rectification [tikkun] in order to be able to return and take their place [in Paradise]. ” (p. 168, Yakov Travis, “Adorning the Souls of the Dead” In Shaul Magid, ed., God’s Voice from the Void: Old and New Studies in Bratslav Hasidism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002).

What’s all this got to do with magic and witchcraft? Plenty. I’ve wondered how those magic workers who guided the souls of the dead when they went abroad at night did it. I’ve also wondered what they did to release themselves from their body, since we are told that their bodies were left cold and could not (or should not) be woken up while they were gone, lest their souls be unable to re-enter their bodies and they be forced to join the Furious Horde, the souls of those who died before their time who march abroad at night, getting back at the living, raising a little Hell, you should pardon the expression. There are a lot of different connecting threads here. More next time.

*Sidebar about blood in Judaism. Yes, there’s lots of stuff about how menstrual blood is BAD EVIL to be avoided by the non-menstruable. But consider that we are told to avoid eating blood because it is the life. Could it have been that menstrual blood was not in Judaism’s past reviled but revered? Could there be any other kind of blood that was so close to the life? Just sayin’.

**In the Zohar, the field is a symbol of  the Shekhinah.

What inspired me to get into this work was Crossing the Narrow Bridge by Chaim Kramer. This writing in this book constantly offends against the rules of grammar, but it’s nevertheless well organized. It describes in very straightforward language the important points of the Breslover perspective of Hasidism. Reading it is part of my sacred study for Abramelin, and I have been looking forward to that each day. So I figured I might as well go deeper into Breslov teachings, and you don’t get much deeper than the thoughts of their founder, Rebbe Nachman. But there are a few flies in the flying ointment.

One of the aspects of Hasidism, to which movement Breslov belongs, is the whole tzaddik thing, a concept which I personally find troubling, to put it nicely. Although the word just literally means “righteous one,” a tzaddik is more like a guru or master, someone with authority and who has certain powers above and beyond those of others–mystical, spiritual, and/or magical (miracle-working).   While I can certainly believe in a hierarchy of skill levels, I say no to a hierarchy of worth. And the concept of the tzaddik as above the rest of us mortals has led in the past to all sorts of really smarmy behavior, such as grabbing food off the tzaddik’s plate and asserting that he is the reincarnation of a famous holy person. I bring this up because this is the essence of the very first lessson in the book Likutey Moharan–the commentator on the first lesson states that Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, an individual who lived in Eastern Europe in the 18th century, was the reincarnation of Shimon bar Yochai, who lived in Roman-ruled Israel in the 2nd century and who was the alleged author of the Zohar, a 14th century text; the painting depicts him writing the Zohar in the cave he retired to. (Re the Zohar, the only people nowadays who believe that Shimon bar Yochai wrote the Zohar are very fundamentalist Jews. Everyone else has noted that the language of the Zohar has nothing in common with the language of 2nd-century Israel. On a magical note, Shimon bar Yochai appears to be the source of the idea that Moses had a magical sword upon which God’s name was inscribed. I am not sure if this concept is the basis of the grimoire of the same name. I have never much looked at “The Sword of Moses” since I read that Gaster deliberately did not translate the magical names correctly. I keep meaning to see if I can find a copy of this book up at Cornell when I go up to use their library.)

Why is it necessary to believe that Rebbe Nachman was anyone’s reincarnation? Wasn’t he good enough to listen to just on his own? IMO, he was, not only for his mystical stories and his teaching of the centrality of joy in our daily life but because of his very human struggles with depression and self-hate. IOW, one of the things that attracts me to his teachings is his humanity, not his saintliness.  I also appreciate that Breslov is the only Hasidic movement with no “dynasty,” wherein saintliness is supposedly inherited in a direct familial line and where such saints usually go around embarrassing themselves hugely by vicious fighting over who will be top dog or allowing their followers to believe they are the Messiah (yes, for some reason the latter must have their own flag, shown here), etc. Vanity makes fools of us all, and sycophants don’t help. I am not sure how much Rebbe Nachman believed himself to be the reincarnation of Shimon bar Yochai or if that idea was created by his followers, so I don’t want to tar him with that. I am interested in him for what he can teach about one’s relationship to the divine and about Kabbalah.

All that hemming and hawing aside, it is thrilling to be reading a serious religious work that casually references the sefirot, for instance, which come up immediately in Lesson Two. I look forward to delving further into Breslov teachings and into Kabbalah.