Christian Kabbalah

Now, of course, since the Hebrews weren't that popular at that moment, seems to be a consistent, you know, issue, but that's a different conversation, but they weren't that popular at that moment.

So, of course, this new thing emerged called Christian Kabbalah, which was essentially Kabbalah, you know, with a slightly Christological form, but basically, you know, it was a way to bring it into culture.

But Kabbalah really was formative in the mystery schools of the Renaissance, you know, formative for people like Fichte and Schelling.

you know, formative for people later like Max Scheller, you know, formative, you know, and so it's a very, very, very important, you know, it's the most important source of Western interior science.

like the Buddhist monks right there it's like yeah they'll burn their body in protest they're like big deal and supposedly people who were at his trial said that he had this kind of like this look in his eyes you know the complete fearlessness which is pretty pretty inspiring you know it's pretty pretty amazing but of course when you're willing to burn somebody alive who just had different ideas, then something like a hermetic humanist renaissance is over.

You know what I mean? All of this stuff being out in the open and being synergized with Christianity, right? Like in the, in the Giordano Brino and hermetic tradition, she talks about Christian Kabbalah.

She talks about Christian astrology.

You know, all of these people consider themselves Christians, consider themselves Christians, know uh what they're doing to not be in contradiction with christianity um they've thought a lot of magic again it's not like black magic not casting spells they're not trying to cheat or sell natural magic yeah they're not really not invoking things they're trying to understand the correspondences of the natural world and to harmonize themselves and harmonize you know things around them um And then, of course, she talks about Pico.

I'll mention more of as they come along, but it's been, it, it's been interesting to see because when we talk about Hermetic Kabbalah, it's kind of an amorphous term in some ways.

I mean, it, it certainly is something downstream in many ways of what they would call Christian Kabbalah.

The problem is the early Christian Kabbalists, like Reuchlin and Lazarelli especially, were also Hermet- Hermetists or Hermeticists.

They were bringing back the Hermetica in the Renaissance the same way they were bringing back late Platonism as Neoplatonism in the Renaissance, so that you had the Platonism mixing with the Hermetica, albeit poorly translated in 1500, uh, by Ficino, [clears throat] merging together as this sort of Christianized Kabbalah, right? The, the Verbo Mirifico of the Pentagrammaton, Yod He Shin Vav He.

The only thing that it fought and eventually had to resolve was the exoteric Christian religion, and that's another matter altogether.

Yeah, and it's a very interesting issue, actually.

And one of the things I've been looking forward to doing is finally going back to the beginning of, of, uh, this e- the, the Italian era of, uh, Kabbalah and Christian Kabbalah and Renaissance studies with Lazarelli's work, where he was the first to say, "I'm a Christian and a Kabbalist," or, "Christian and a Hermeticist," and then, then propose these, these, uh, proofs and arguments for, in his, uh, for what, for what being a Christian can give you that being a Jew, Jewish Kabbalist can't give you.

And so-

So this naturally raises the question, how did the medieval and Renaissance masters of Kabbalah, well, learn Kabbalah? How did they arrange the text to learn it the way that they did? Just what texts did they study, in what order, with what commentaries? What Jewish and non-Jewish sources did they use to learn Kabbalah? Just what texts did they study, and in what order, with what commentaries? One wonders to what degree did non-Jewish texts feature into their education? How did Kabbalists, well, become Kabbalists? In this episode of Esoterica, I want to explore a Kabbalistic study program from Renaissance Italy.

It was composed by Yohanan Alameno, a rather obscure but very important Kabbalist, especially through his student, Giovanni Pico della Morandola, who basically invented Christian Kabbalah as we know it in the writing of his 900 Theses.

Alemano's study guide is fascinating because of his priority of ecstatic, prophetic Kabbalah over the more typical theosophical schools associated with the Sefer Zohar.

And further, what makes his Kabbalah really interesting is his linking with both magical theory and practice with the Kabbalah.

There have always been multiple schools of Kabbalah.

And here we have the priority on the more ecstatic prophetic Kabbalah rather than the more classical theosophical Kabbalah that most of us now understand as, well, the Kabbalah.

Of course, the shift from theosophical Kabbalah to ecstatic prophetic Kabbalah is going to have huge ramifications in the development of both Christian Kabbalah and, by extension, Hermetic Kabbalah.

As you may know, in the theosophical Kabbalah, and this is a Kabbalah primarily interested in the world of the divine emanations, or the Sefirot, The task of the mystic is to metaphysically repair reality through scrupulous adherence to Jewish law, or halakha.

And it was just astounding to see, you know, Arthur Edward Waits, holy Kabbalah, um, in there with, uh, and I'm looking at the picture you sent me here now, you know, uh, there's, there's pencil markings in the margins.

Um, you know, he was definitely studying this stuff, also studying Christian Kabbalah, uh, the adumbration on Christian Kabbalah.

Um, and, uh, uh fascinatingly he has a treatise um on uh pico de la mirandola's on the imagination so i mean we know that he did a a tremendous amount of work and with active imagination so on and so forth uh so these are what i would consider uh and it's really interesting too because right weight writes on the Kabbalah, and really, if you really read between the lines throughout the bulk of his work, he passes on quite a bit of Golden Dawn philosophy, I'll say.

Now, you've got somebody like Carl Jung, who's consuming this stuff and incorporating it into his work, And then you have Dion Fortune, the next sort of class of Golden Dawn Initiate, learning from Jung.

Today's guest is Jay Dyer.

He's an Orthodox Christian, a well-known YouTuber, an author, and a podcaster.

Today we discuss his recent interview on the Tucker Carlson podcast, his upbringing and how he found Orthodoxy, his work hosting the Alex Jones Show.

We dive into the Bolshevik Revolution and the facts behind the Rothschild banking family, America's ties to Israel, and more.

And I'm just trying to say like the same level of people pushing the coordination during that coup.

The same people that have been pushing coordination to this kind of stuff.

And so do you feel like as, say, America gets further away from Christianity, this is just going to increase? Absolutely.

Because this wasn't happening maybe to this degree in the 50s and the 60s.

The book emerged during a flourishing era for occultism, particularly in Bavaria.

Amid intellectual movements like Hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah, these philosophies emphasized the duality of nature and the cosmos, highlighting the roles of both angelic and demonic spirits.

As grimoires began to proliferate, they provided instructions for rituals and the manipulation of supernatural forces, marking the peak of ceremonial magic and alchemical practices in Bavaria.

Secret societies in Bavaria often operated under the Catholic Church's condemnation of their beliefs, leading to the covert sharing of grimoires and magical knowledge.

Agrippa also reflects the Renaissance conviction that language participates in the structure of creation.

Hebrew receives particular importance in Christian Kabbalah because its letters and divine names were believed to preserve primordial relationship among language, number, scripture, and divine power.

The spoken and written name could therefore serve simultaneously as theology, symbol, number, and ritual instrument.

None of this should be rewritten as accidental neuroscience or modern psychology expressed in archaic vocabulary.