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Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult
Double image of William Shakespeare (right) and the ten kabbalistic sefirot with accompanying dramatis personae from The Merchant of Venice, (left) from The Provocative Merchant of Venice by Daniel Banes, P. 102, Malcolm House Publications, 1975.
The Zohar, the canonic masterpiece of Kabbalah, written by Moses de Leon (1250-
- between 1280 and 1286 in the Castilian region of North-Central Spain, in the wake of the Golden Age of Spain, will, either syncretically or synthetically, along with the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia (1240-1292), inform the Renaissance of its Cabalism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Egyptian Theurgia, Alchemy, and Occultic and Orphic ethos. The premise of this course, as well as its speculative exuberance, is that the literary Kabbalah of Moses de Leon coupled with the theurgical Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia, transmogrified over 400 years in Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Italy and England, reappeared in the dramaturgy of the Shakespearian ethos and poesis. We will demonstrate, albeit inductively and by means of some agonic somersaults, that the Adam Kadmon, or primeval, Edenic and/or cosmological man of Abraham Abulafia, coupled with Moses de Leon’s zoharic protagonist, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, are transformed or created anew by William Shakespeare with the magus, Prospero, in The Tempest. As The Tempest was the last of the “late Shakespearian romances” and, one may argue, his “greatest” and most “self-descriptive” play, written in 1611, much of the mytho-poetic Cabalism and Hermeticism which surfaced in the earlier dramatis personae of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice are brought to a crescendo. The crescendo of the Shakespearian oeuvre in Prospero is a semaphore for the arrival, influence and future dissemination of the mystico-magico vernacular of Kabbalah throughout the European continent. The word Kabbalah with a “K” today means primarily “all” of Kabbalah, an amalgam of the exigencies which make up the historiography of the mystico-magico and literary realms of the inner life of the God, including Jewish, Christian, Sufic, Hermetic
and Neoplatonic traditions. Secondarily, Kabbalah with a “K” refers to Jewish Kabbalah: the Merkabah, Bereshit, Zoharic, Theurgic and Hasidic traditions. The word Cabala with a “C” refers to Christian Cabala which begins in the 13th^ century with the Catalan mystic, Ramon Null (1232-1316), reaching its peak with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-
- and Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522). The word Qabalah with a “Q” refers to a cultic movement of Hermetic Qabalah which began in the late 19th^ century with such groups as The Golden Dawn, and such figures as Madame Blavasky, Aleister Crowley, Arthur Edward Waite, Israel Regardie, and the poet W.B. Yeats. Regions of “pre-zoharic” Jewish Kabbalah, Christian Cabala and Arabic/Sufic and Christian Neoplatonism, emerged in 12 th^ century France in cities such as Lunel, Narbonne, Posquieres, Toulouse, Marseilles and Arles where the first personalities of Kabbalah emerged. Their disciples transplanted the Kabbalah to Spain where it took root in such localities as Burgos, Gerona and Toledo. In France, Provence and Languedoc were the seats of a developed courtly culture. Intimate contact was established in Provence between Islamic culture penetrating from Spain to North Africa and the culture of chivalry of the Christian Middle Ages. During this same period the poetry of the troubadours reached its peak as well as Christian heretical cults such as the Cathars, the Bulgarian Bogomils and gnostic Manichaeans. The Spanish-Jewish Astrologer, Neoplatonic scholar, polymath and poet, Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1140) is alleged to have carried a copy of The Book of Creation, (Sefer Yetzirah, written in Hebrew in Palestine sometime between the 4th^ and 7th^ centuries and circulated along the Rhine in Germany before being adapted by the Medieval Spanish-Jewish courtier poet Solomon ibn Gabirol in the mid-eleventh century) to Provence. In Provence, the first pre-zoharic kabbalistic personality, Rabbi Isaac the Blind (1160-1235), published the first kabbalistic exegetical commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah’s cosmological 22-Hebrew letters and 10 Sefirot, which will deeply influence Abraham Abulafia’s theurgic Kabbalah. It was also Isaac the Blind who would merge the arcana of Merkabah, The Sefer Yetzirah and The Bahir into a grand mysterium of kabbalistic speculation that would inform Moses de Leon’s Zohar as well as the future history of Kabbalah. The Bahir, whose authorship like The Zohar’ s Shimon Bar Yohai, was attributed to the 1 st^ century CE merkabah mystic Rabbi Nehuniah Ben Hakana, was actually composed in Provence in the late 12th^ century. Though its author remains anonymous, there are some intuitive as well as hermeneutical hints that its author possessed an intimate sense of The Sefer Yetzirah’s symbology and thus fashioned an evocative Midrash as an act of devekut, or cleaving to the Shi’ur Komah, the mystical shape of the Godhead. In The Yetzirah devekut was made manifest through the “32 mystical paths” which were seen as divine potencies as well as alphabetic and numeric units. In The Bahir these paths, gates or units are reformatted as the ten Sefirot, or the ten attributes of the Godhead possessing distinctive personality traits within the Godhead. With The Bahir, the Godhead is bestowed with a literary illumination that extends and personalizes the “panoramic mystictheological presentation of creation and of divine providence over the world,” as Joseph Dan writes in the introduction to The Early Kabbalah (The Classic of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1986, p. 32.) Isaac the Blind’s symbology heralded in the era of the Sefirot with such canonic force, that no future kabbalistic speculation would be spared their influence.
The Zohar has been found. The Zohar is replete with nonce words, arcane symbolism, erotic imagery and reads like a commentary on the Torah in the form of mystical novel. Biblical prototypes, mythical creatures and dreaded angels, patriarchs, matriarchs and prophets such as Adam, Eve, Lilith, Samael, Abraham, Sarah Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Ezekiel, Michael and Gabriel, etc., become correlatives for the Sefirot and the dramatis personae of the Zohar. It would be the Palestinian kabbalist Isaac of Acre (d.1340), author of numerous tracts on “sacred names” and a book on the Kabbalah of Nachmanides, whom had briefly met Moses de Leon in Valladolid, who would continue to carry parts of the zoharic manuscript around Castilian Spain after Moses de Leon had died. The second major trend in the development of Kabbalah in the 13th^ century and its emergence into the European continent as Kabbalah with “K,” and Cabala with a “C,” and as Qabalah with a “Q,” is the life and work of the ecstatic kabbalists Abraham Abulafia (1240-1292). Abraham Abulafia was born in Saragossa (the province of Aragon, north-central Spain) in 1240. He lived with his family in Tuleda until his father’s death in 1260, when he left Spain for Acre in the Galilee to find the mythical Sambation River. The Mongolian invasion of Syria and the Land of Israel thwarted Abulafia’s ability to uncover one of the Lost Tribes of Israel (the ha-genuzim—the hidden ones), among the Mongolian invaders, whom, legend had it, were harboring the secrets of the Messiah, or had the actual Messiah among them. Between 1270 and 1280, Abulafia immersed himself in his own Kabbalistic creation, attaining, as he was later to describe, Unio Mystica (mystical union with God). Abulafia, employing his own imagination and Gematria (Jewish numerology) was convinced that the age of the eschaton was 1290 and that the world would either cease to exist or be transformed to a holy place through his messianic involvement. Abulafia left for Rome from Greece in 1278, to seek an audience with Pope Nicholas III. He arrived in the summer of 1280, only to find that the Pope had just died. Papal Bulls (or death sentences) had been declared against any and all heathens (especially hallucinating ecstatic Jewish ones) if and when they entered Rome and sought an audience with the Pope Nicholas III. Since the Pope had died, Abulafia was not killed, but arrested and held by a sect of Franciscan monks, Minorites, for 2-weeks and released for no apparent reason. He left Rome and headed for the Italian Peninsula. Between 1280 and his death in 1291, Abulafia lived on the Island of Sicily, in Palermo and in Messina. It is in this last and auspicious decade that Abulafia produced the bulk of his literary corpus from which his fame is derived. The combination of Abraham Abulafia’s mystical wanderings and teachings in Italy and Isaac of Acre’s copy of the Zohar which was brought back to Italy by a group of Kabbalists descended from the Castilian kabbalist under threat from the Inquisition shaped what would become the “mysterium” of the Italian Renaissance. An additional influence in 13th^ century Kabbalah, was the medieval Christian Cabala of Ramon Null (1232-1316), the Catalonian philosopher and mystic who reinterpreted the Sefirot of The Bahir’s Godhead, Keter (Crown), Hokhmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Hesed (Love), Gevurah (Power, rigor), Tiferet (Beauty), Nezah (Endurance), Hod (Splendor) Yesod (Foundation) and Shekhinah (Presence), as the dignities of God on which his art and metaphysics are based. They are: Bonitos (Goodness), Magnitudo (Greatness), Eternitas (Eternity), Potestas (Power), Sapienta (Wisdom), Volunta (Will), Virtus (Virtue), Veritas (Truth) and Gloria (Glory).
Historically, according to Scholem, Christian Kabbalah began with the Christological speculations of a number of Jewish converts. Among them Abner of Burgos (d.1348) and Paul de Heredia wrote messianic pseudepigrapha in the name of Judah ha-Nasi, a 3rd century Tanna from Ancient Israel. Christian Cabala, influenced by Castilian and Catalonian Jewish Kabbalists, would impact the Renaissance Neoplatonism and Christian Cabala of Pico della Mirandola. The 14th^ century is the age of zoharic and kabbalistic dissemination in Spain and Italy. The school of Solomon Adret (d.1310), the Spanish kabbalist from Gerona who wrote copiously on The Zohar and Nachmanides, and The Zohar began to spread through Italy through the writings of Menachem Recanati. Along with the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia with his Hebrew letter permutation praxis and the Sefirotic literature of Recanati’s theurgic Kabbalah, the pre-Renaissance Italian Jewish and Christian mystics began to practice, write and teach Kabbalah as well as to continue to illustriously comment upon The Zohar. There is, according to the Kabbalah scholar, Moshe Idel, “a gentile eagerness to learn from the Jews” during the first half of the 14th^ century. Translating Hebrew into Latin, and, on occasion, Aramaic into Hebrew into Latin, along with early efforts to translate Platonic, Neoplatonic and Hermetic writings into Latin, became the cause-celebre of the 14th^ century erudite and priestly classes. In 13th^ century Spain Kabbalah was cast in terms of myth. This mythical sensibility emphasized the theosophical and theurgic meaning of The Hebrew Bible. 14 th^ century Italian Kabbalah, on the other hand, emphasized the unity of the divine emanation of the Godhead, a concept based on Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and the Abulafian oeuvre. Scholem identifies the year 1391 as the beginnings of “Marrano” or “Converso” Judaism, or the “Jew” as a New Christian by conversionary means. In fine, in the last decade of 14th century, several canonic kabbalistic ideas had taken root in Spain, Italy, Northern Africa, The Land of Israel and Persia. They are: (1.) The kabbalist as Adam Kadmon, the primeval Adam and the cosmological Adam, from Abraham Abulafia as a spiritual praxis. (2.) The kabbalist as a Zoharic Tzaddik, which refers to the 2nd^ century Galilean Tanna, Shimon Bar Yohai, the protagonist of The Zohar, written by Moses de Leon. The Zoharic Tzaddik is primarily a practitioner of the “high art” of literary Kabbalah, which begins with The Zohar. (3.) The circulation and vast influence of the anonymously written Ma’arekhet ha-Elohut, (The Order of God), which sought to weaken the “mystical” and/or potentially heathen qualities in Kabbalah to reach a larger Jewish audience being, itself weakened, by an emerging Papal genocide known as the Inquisition. (4.) The kabbalistic work of the Italian-Jewish Menachem Recanati, who wrote extensive commentaries on The Zohar, and who would be, along with Abraham Abulafia, who wrote nearly all his work in Italy, the sources for the Christian Cabala which would influence William Shakespeare by circuitous route 200 years later. The 15th^ century is soiled by ever more stringent Papal Bul’s emanating from the marriage between the Holy Roman Empire and the Inquisition, who had, for all intents and purposes usurped the authority of local governing bodies across the European continent. The nefarious and genocidal consequences of the legal confluence of Pope, King and Inquisitor, lead to the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Myth avers that the Joseph Caro (1488-1575), the author of the Shulhan Arukh (The Great Code, codifying rabbinic commentary and still in use), was, with his parents, who supposedly possessed a few zoharic fragments, among the last Jews who boarded the last
normative religiosity dubbed “deviations:” apologia for the demonic and daemonic sublime, apocalyptic Messianism and sexual theurgy. Albeit, inspirational and controversial, Reuchlin erred in seeking to create a new Christian ideology based on Jewish Kabbalah, The Zohar and these deviations. The “error” was the concept of “ideology” in which the fissures of authority, attribution and indeterminacy are neglected for the sake of ultimate truth or teleology. De Arte Cabalistica, for all its spiritual reification, along with Reuchlin’s devoted and declared Hebraica, did much to advance the language and literature of Kabbalah in the European continent. The kabbalist as the “magus” as well as the “white magician,” invoking an arithmetic primordiality which could be theurgically invoked through sacred books, and thus exemplified later in Shakespeare’s Prospero, begins with Reuchlin for whom, as we’ve intimated, the trinity’s “Holy Spirit” was meaningful only through Jewish Kabbalah. The 16th^ century is the age of Christian Cabala and the age Isaac Luria, the greatest sage of Kabbalah Jewry produced. Extant writings of Isaac Luria are scant. There is the Sifra de-Senuita (published in Hayim Vital’s Sha’ar Rashbi) which is a Cordoverian derivative, a few liturgical poems (Hymn to the Shekhinah), and some invocations for Sabbath meals. None of Isaac Luria’s original Kabbalistic work was composed by him. He is famed in saying about writing “It is impossible, because all things are connected with one another. I can hardly open up my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed.” Hayim Vital chronicled Isaac Luria’s notions. Among the most important is the idea that sparks of divine light have, in the process of God’s self-disclosure or emanation, accidentally and disastrously become embedded in all material things. These sparks of light yearn to be liberated from their imprisoned state and return to their source within the Godhead, thus restoring the original divine unity. Through the process of Tikkun (renewal, restoration, mending, repairing) the human being, with adequate devotional care, can raise the fallen sparks. This devotional piety must begin with one person and emanate out to include all people in order to return all divine reality to the original state of primordial unity that preceded the creation of the world. Isaac Luria was described as a saintly person who had experienced the Holy Spirit through the esoteric wisdom and transmission of the prophet Elijah. Isaac Luria was known to have disclosed to his disciples, while on walks in Safed between 1570 and 1572, the gravestones of departed saints and teachers with whose souls Luria was supposed to have communicated with and communed with. During these extraordinary walks, Luria is said to have become a diagnostician of the soul, able to determine an individual’s spiritual maladies and the sins for which he was responsible. He was also able to provide specific penitential exercises to his students that could affect atonement and restitution. He was said to be able to tell each of his students the ancestry of that person’s soul and the transmigration through which it had gone. Isaac Luria’s charismatic knowledge has been described by the Kabbalah scholar, Lawrence Fine, as “The art of Metopscopy,” which amounts to being able to determine the nature of person’s soul by the Hebrew letters which appear on their forehead. Metopscopy was one of the wide arrays of divinatory or mantic arts, practiced by in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, along with chiromancy and physiognomy. From Lawrence Fine’s essay: “He (Isaac Luria) knew how to make a future soul appear before him, as well as the soul of living or deceased person. He could also recognize the letters
on the forehead as well as the lights that are upon the skin and body of an individual. He was also skilled at recognizing the lights in the hair, the chirping of birds, and the language of trees and plants. He understood the speech of inanimate things, stones crying out from walls, the beam out of the timber. He knew the language of the burning candle and the flaming coal. He understood the language of angels.” By using Metopscopy, Isaac Luria was able to access whether a person’s souls was in Nefesh, Ruah or Neshamah. By using Metopscopy, Isaac Luria was able to access whether a person’s soul was in Nefesh (Soul), Ruah (Soul’s Spirit) or Neshamah (Spirit). In Addition to this tripartite spirit/soul distinction, Luria also created schemata for the four Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton: Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh. Yod refers to Atziluth (realm of intuition, emanation, spirit and fire.) The first Heh refers to Beriah (realm of knowing, creation, mind and air.) Vav refers to Yetzirah (realm of feeling, formation, heart and water. The final Heh refers to Assiyah (realm of doing, function, body and earth.) The four letters YHWH descend in order of metaphysical acuity from the highest level Atziluth (intuition) to the lowest level Assiyah (doing). Isaac Luria was again famed for being able to detect which of these letters, if any, were metaphysically engraved on the forehead of an initiate. The third part of Luria’s seeing, soul/spirit levels being first, the tetragrammaton being second, was detecting the letters Alef, Mem and Tav on the forehead. If the initiate had on his forehead, in addition to everything else that we have identified, Alef, Mem and Tav, he was permitted to enter Luria’s highly selective Minyan, which grew in time a bit larger than a Minyan into a coterie. These letters spell “Truth.” If only the Mem and the Tav we visible, spelling “death,” entry was denied. According to Luria, all people possessed either A-M-T, or just M-T. This art of Metopscopy evolved, over time with the help of folklore, into the grand beastiary of the Golem myth. Suffice it to say that no other theoretician of Kabbalah has been crowned with the titular achievement of being able to restore a broken world. Besides his charismatic knowledge, Isaac Luria was convinced that he was Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai through metempsychosis (transmigration of souls), and that he transmitted his knowledge on the grounds where Rabbi Shimon lay buried, invented the most influential triple process of God’s identity invented to date. This process was known at Zimzum, Shevirah and Tikkun. Zimzum means holding-in-of-the-breath, which Luria transformed into the idea of limitation. That Ein Sof limited itself through Zimzum. This we might describe as God hiding Himself or entering into Himself, since He is too massive an idea to contain. Luria employed The Zohar to imagine that this “hiding” was either a tehiru (a fundamental place) or an ayin (a place of nothing). With Zimzum, God contracted himself into the Sefirot Din, rigor, but part of God’s self-withdrawn light remained behind. Zimzum went into tehiru and into reshimu (God’s self-withdrawn light). The single letter Yod activated the tetragrammaton YHWH, and creation was inaugurated. The Creation was of Kelim (vessels) of which the culminating vessel was the Adam Kadmon. Adam Kadmon is the primordial man or man the way that he should be in a kind of war of light-against-light. We might say that this war emanates out of the Mystical Shape of the Godhead in patterns of writing. This emanation produces Shevirah, the breaking of the vessels, because the light contained within the Kelim was too strong. Some of the shattered light returned immediately to God while much of it fell down with the vessels, so as to form the Kelippot (the evil forces of the universe.) The Kelippot has remnants of the sparks-of-light imprisoned within them that must be released. This
foment antisemitism. Shylock is a dignified, albeit rapturous human being and the most powerful dramatic voice that Shakespeare had yet created between 1589 and 1596. Influenced by Giorgi, Shakespeare produced in The Merchant of Venice a music-of-the- spheres poetry that would be rivaled only by Hamlet and Sir John Falstaff. According to Yates who reads Daniel Banes’s book The Provocative Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare read Giorgi’s De Harmonia in French in 1595. Shakespeare’s absorption of Giorgi leads Banes to surmise that the Venice of his play is a kabbalistic Eden replete with a Tree of Life and ten Sefirot. Banes names Antonio Hesed, names Shylock Gevurah and Portia Tiferet. Albeit provocative, we may surmise that the entire Merchant of Venice is gevuric and that Shylock is Shakespeare’s own invention of his emerging poetic autobiography. Portia is certainly beautiful and bestowed with some of Shakespeare’s most powerful poetry. Antonio is certainly touched with love, albeit the homoerotic kind. Bassanio is clever enough to pick the lead casket, which Daniel Banes says is symbolic of Judaism. Respectively, the three caskets represent the three religions: gold=Christianity; silver=Islam; lead=Judaism. Banes quotes Proverbs 8:10-11, Choose my discipline, and not silver/Choose understanding, and not fine gold;/For wisdom is better than rubies_._ According to Giorgi, lead represents Saturn which represents the religion of the Jews. It is by choosing the religion of the Jews, the Torah that Bassanio wins his Christian princess. We may even surmise that the lovely poetry expounded by Lorenzo before his beloved Jessica is indeed cherubic, but it seems to pale, as does the verse employed by Portia, before the Kadmonic Shylock, who resonates with a powerful life-creating force. In fact, Shylock is the Shakespearian giest which propelled Shakespeare to invent Sir John Falstaff and Hamlet. Without the rapturous kabbalistic emptying out of core force, Shakespeare could not have moved on to the very limits of literary art with Hamlet. Shylock inherits the Generations of Adam and cleaves to adamic invention, thus the pound of flesh, which reminds one of the weight of adamic clay-flesh employed by Yahweh at the primal scene of invention. Shylock is Shakespeare’s first Kabbalist and his first reach through the agonic play of word-creating lifeforms. He employed the gevuric strength of “the Jew,” which he understood through Giorgi and Bruno as well as “the Jew” of antisemitism, to create his own Kadmonic poet of the dark soul, who must be content at the end, as Shakespeare must be content as his creation. In 1596, Shakespeare realized with Shylock, that he (Shakespeare) possessed a talent which would exceed the limits of the stage. This Kabbalic exceeding was no less than the Adam Kadmon, the poet of God-names reaching unknown regions of the psyche and soul all for the sake of invention, artistry and doing God’s work as the ancient writers did.
Sources
Philip Beitchman, Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance, State University of New Press, Albany, 1988 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memor y , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966 Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Routledge Classics, New York, 1979
Frances A. Yates, Majesty and Magic in Shakespeare’s Last Plays, Shambhala, Boulder, 1978 Daniel Banes, The Provocative Merchant of Venice, Malcolm House Publications, Chicago, 1975 Daniel Banes, Shakespeare, Shylock and Kabbalah, Malcolm House Publications, Chicago, 1978 David B. Ruderman, Editor, Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, NY University Press, New York, 1992 Gershom Scholem , On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, Schocken Books, New York, 1991 Gershom Scholom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Schocken, New York, 1967 Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998 Daniel C. Matt, The Zohar , Pritzker Edition Volumes 1-3, Stanford Edition, 2004- Harold Bloom, David Rosenberg, The Book of J, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990 Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn, Shakespeare and Magical Thinking, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1994 Arthur Versluis, Shakespeare the Magus, Grail Publications, St. Paul, 2001 Daniel Y. Harris, “The Night Moses de Leon Died,” In Posse Review, Issue #15, on the Internet, http://www.webdelsol.com/InPosse/harris15.htm
Addendum
Shakespeare, Kabbalah, and the Occult is part of a reader produced by Lehrhaus Judaica for “Engagement and Learning for Leaders: Jewish Community Federation Sonoma Study Group,” 2007
