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Sacred Correspondences
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The Western Occult Version, and How It Differs

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The Western Occult Version, and How It Differs

Most people who encounter the Tree of Life in the English-speaking world encounter a Hermetic adaptation of it, and the differences from Jewish Kabbalah are substantial enough that treating the two as one thing produces confusion in both directions.

The line runs from Renaissance Christian Cabala through Eliphas Levi in the nineteenth century to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, and from there into virtually all modern Western ceremonial magic. What that tradition did was to make the Tree into a filing system for correspondences: each sephirah and each path was assigned a planet, a zodiac sign, an element, a tarot trump, a colour scale, an angel, a god-form from Egyptian and Greek pantheons, a plant, a metal, a perfume and a magical weapon. Crowley's Liber 777 is the tabulated result, and it remains the standard reference of the system.

The uses differ accordingly. Jewish Kabbalah is a contemplative and interpretive discipline pursued within Torah observance, in which the sephiroth illuminate scripture and commandment. The Hermetic version is operative: the Tree is a map to be travelled in ritual and visionary work, the paths are worked in sequence, and the correspondences are the material with which rituals are built.

Practitioners on the Jewish side have often regarded the adaptation as a misappropriation that detaches the structure from the observance that gives it meaning, and some Hermetic writers have used the spelling Qabalah for the Jewish tradition and Cabala or Kabbalah for the Christian and Hermetic ones precisely to keep the three apart. The spellings are not applied consistently by anybody.

Modern popular Kabbalah organisations, which teach to non-Jews and have attracted celebrity attention since the 1990s, are a further and quite recent development that established Kabbalists have largely disowned.

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