Hermetic Kabbalah is Not Cultural Appropriation
Immanion Press/Megalithica Books is currently compiling essays for an anthology on cultural appropriation in modern Paganism and occultism. While I don’t have enough material to make a submission, this caught my eye and I had to comment.While I have no real problems with cultural appropriation as such (as long as it’s done with respect and honesty rather than attention-seeking hucksterism), I still must make a point that Hermetic (or so-called Western) Kabbalah is not an example of cultural appropriation. Kabbalah is not a strictly Jewish phenomenon, and to claim that it is, is to miss out on a rich and diverse historical development.
Kabbalah as we know it didn’t exist until the late medieval period, or perhaps the very early Renaissance (depending on where you draw the line; there are a number of historical systems). There were other forms of Jewish mysticism prior to the development of Kabbalah, such as Hechaloth (a.k.a. Merkavah). Kabbalah itself is actually a very synchretic system, even if you’re only examining “kosher” Kabbalah: it borrows liberally from Neoplatonism, Pythagorean mysticism, the various Greek mystery schools, and Gnosticism (pre- and post-Christian). That’s just a handful of the major influences upon Jewish mysticism around the time of Christ, and if extended forward to the historical birth of Kabbalah (sometime in the 13th century or so) we find even more influences: early Islamic mysticism, Hermetic and Islamic alchemy, and Christianity itself. Kabbalah is thus a “brain trust” of some of the best and brightest of spiritual traditions throughout Western and Middle Eastern history, and not a purely Jewish or even mostly Jewish intellectual property.
If anything, Hermetic Kabbalah (at least as it has manifested in certain branches of the Hermetic tradition) has simply changed focus back to more classical ideas. In Hermetics, the primary focus of Kabbalah is as a system of letter and number mysticism and magic, while in Judaism, Kabbalah is mostly a method of organizing one’s prayers and meditations in a progressive format. Personally, my Hermetic practice has been vastly improved by a study of Jewish Kabbalah, but I do not consider either one of them to be “the original” considering the non-Jewish source material that originally went into it.
