The Basic
Qabalah
An Address
Presented to Felkin College
By V.W. Fra.
Merv Gollan Vº
On Friday 24th
August 2007.
Greetings
Fratres,
Tonight I am going to try to give a short
lecture on the basic Qabalah and the Glyph
called the Tree of Life.
This
is a huge subject and its symbol system is an
attempt to reduce to diagrammatic form every
force and factor in the manifested universe and
the soul of man, to correlate them one to
another and reveal them spread out as on a map,
so that the relative positions of each unit can
be seen and the relations between them traced.
Dion
Fortune states that the tree of life is a
compendium of Science, Psychology, Philosophy,
Theology, Numerology and Astrology.
There
are many types of symbols used as objects for
meditation but the composite symbol of the tree
of life is the best because of the definite
relations between its parts.
Of the
32 paths on the tree of life we are only going
to deal with two, one Sephiroth and one path and
to try and explain what is involved. The paths
1-10 make up the circles or Sephiroth on the
tree of life-the Hebrew alphabet make up the
paths numbered 11-32 and connect the Sephiroth
to make the tree of life complete.
Four
good books that are essential to the
understanding of the Kabbalah are The Zohar or
the “Book Splendour”, the Sepher Yetzirah or
“Book of Formation”, Dion Fortune’s “Mystical
Qabalah” and the Tarot by Paul Foster Case.
The
paths numbered 11-32 are sometimes called Keys
this is because through meditation some wisdom
is unlocked from subconscious and brought out or
reflected in personal consciousness – as an
answer to a question or an action – knowing what
to do.
If we
take the word “Kabalah” itself it is a Hebrew
verb meaning “to receive” the word Kabalah can
be spelt two main ways which are Qabalah and
Kabalah there are others that have two “Bs” or
two “Ls” some others drop the “H” at the end
Now
Kabalah means “to receive” but receive what. The
traditional wisdom of Israel that’s what we are
to receive. It is the central concept of Life –
the outpouring of Spirit into expression – the
inner livingness of forms that the esoteric
Reflects. Now that we know what the word means
and what we are supposed to receive – how do we
receive its wisdom? Through meditation on the
symbols and Hebrew letters concerning the
attributes of the different Paths. Without
meditation you cannot hope to extract or unlock
the deeper meanings hidden within them.
What is the Tree of Life? It is a
glyph of 10 circles or Sephiroth and the 22
Paths that connect them. Now before I start
explaining the Sephiroth it must |