Secret Societies and Subversive Movements | Page 9

diviners. In spite of the imprecations against sorcery contained in the
law of Moses, the Jews, disregarding these warnings, caught the
contagion and mingled the sacred tradition they had inherited with
magical ideas partly borrowed from other races and partly of their own
devising. At the same time the speculative side of the Jewish Cabala
borrowed from the philosophy of the Persian Magi, of the
Neo-Platonists,[40] and of the Neo-Pythagoreans. There is, then, some

justification for the anti-Cabalists' contention that what we know to-day
as the Cabala is not of purely Jewish origin.
Gougenot des Mousseaux, who had made a profound study of
occultism, asserts that there were therefore two Cabalas: the ancient
sacred tradition handed down from the first patriarchs of the human
race; and the evil Cabala, wherein this sacred tradition was mingled by
the Rabbis with barbaric superstitions, combined with their own
imaginings and henceforth marked with their seal.[41] This view also
finds expression in the remarkable work of the converted Jew Drach,
who refers to--
The ancient and true Cabala, which ... we distinguish from the modern
Cabala, false, condemnable, and condemned by the Holy See, the work
of the Rabbis, who have also falsified and perverted the Talmudic
tradition. The doctors of the Synagogue trace it back to Moses, whilst
at the same time admitting that the principal truths it contains were
those known by revelation to the first patriarchs of the world.[42]
Further on Drach quotes the statement of Sixtus of Sienna, another
converted Jew and a Dominican, protected by Pius V:
Since by the decree of the Holy Roman Inquisition all books
appertaining to the Cabala have lately been condemned, one must know
that the Cabala is double; that one is true, the other false. The true and
pious one is that which ... elucidates the secret mysteries of the holy
law according to the principle of anagogy (i.e. figurative interpretation).
This Cabala therefore the Church has never condemned. The false and
impious Cabala is a certain mendacious kind of Jewish tradition, full of
innumerable vanities and falsehoods, differing but little from
necromancy. This kind of superstition, therefore, improperly called
Cabala, the Church within the last few years has deservedly
condemned.[43]
The modern Jewish Cabala presents a dual aspect--theoretical and
practical; the former concerned with theosophical speculations, the
latter with magical practices. It would be impossible here to give an
idea of Cabalistic theosophy with its extraordinary imaginings on the

Sephiroths, the attributes and functions of good and bad angels,
dissertations on the nature of demons, and minute details on the
appearance of God under the name of the Ancient of Ancients, from
whose head 400,000 worlds receive the light. "The length of this face
from the top of the head is three hundred and seventy times ten
thousand worlds. It is called the 'Long Face,' for such is the name of the
Ancient of Ancients."[44] The description of the hair and beard alone
belonging to this gigantic countenance occupies a large place in the
Zoharic treatise, Idra Raba.[45]
According to the Cabala, every letter in the Scriptures contains a
mystery only to be solved by the initiated.[46] By means of this system
of interpretation passages of the Old Testament are shown to bear
meanings totally unapparent to the ordinary reader. Thus the Zohar
explains that Noah was lamed for life by the bite of a lion whilst he was
in the ark,[47] the adventures of Jonah inside the whale are related with
an extraordinary wealth of imagination,[48] whilst the beautiful story
of Elisha and the Shunnamite woman is travestied in the most
grotesque manner.[49]
In the practical Cabala this method of "decoding" is reduced to a
theurgic or magical system in which the healing of diseases plays an
important part and is effected by means of the mystical arrangement of
numbers and letters, by the pronunciation of the Ineffable Name, by the
use of amulets and talismans, or by compounds supposed to contain
certain occult properties.
All these ideas derived from very ancient cults; even the art of working
miracles by the use of the Divine Name, which after the appropriation
of the Cabala by the Jews became the particular practice of Jewish
miracle-workers, appears to have originated in Chaldea.[50] Nor can
the insistence on the Chosen People theory, which forms the basis of all
Talmudic and Cabalistic writings, be regarded as of purely Jewish
origin; the ancient Egyptians likewise believed themselves to be "the
peculiar people specially loved by the gods."[51] But in the hands of
the Jews this belief became a pretension to the exclusive enjoyment of
divine favour. According to the Zohar, "all Israelites will have a part in

the future world,"[52] and on arrival there will not be handed over like
the goyim (or non-Jewish races) to the hands of the