[UA] Pop Culture Update

[Michael Dinowitz]

OK, basically this all comes from the Sefer Yetzirah, one of the oldest classics of Kabbalah. Its mentioned in the Talmud which puts it in the first few centuries of the common era. Basically, the SY goes into the structure of reality and what makes it up. The 10 Sefirot that you read about in different RPGs and books is from here (I also hate when RPGs like mage 'mine' Judaism for its mystical thoughts and misuse them). 
One line specifically says "10 and not 11". Another line speaks about the Sefirot in pairs such as a start of time and an end of time. One pair uses the term depth which Wescott translated as abyss. Without any attempt to go and ask a Jew what it meant, he took it and made up a whole mythology about it with an abyss between two of the Sefirot. This is one of the things that I say is stolen from the Jews to help make what is now known as "western/European hermeticism". Other things include a truly bad mapping of the meanings of the Hebrew letters to match what he/they wanted in the tarot. I could write a lot on this but I'll leave it short and sweet, including a write-up by someone else I know (thanks to googles cache).

http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:Kijz0S1JqO8C:www.kheper.auz.com/topics/Kabbalah/SeferYetzirah.htm+dobbs+yetzirah+SeferYetzirah&hl=en

"In 1642, Rittangel published the third Latin translation of the SEFER YETZIRAH, based on the 1562 Mantua edition.  This was the translation used by Westcott who made his English translation in 1887.  Wescott's Hebrew was somewhat less significant than Shakespeare small Latin and less Greek.  He compared the Rittangel translation to a relatively corrupt and late British Museum manuscript, adopted most of the erroneous variants and thereby set the Golden Dawn and its followers on a misdirected adventure.  Two observations:  the validity of mystical and magic[k]al systems derived from the Westcott translation depends on their internal consistency.  That a number of erroneous choices were made during the course of the translation has met that practitioners of the  Hermetic Kabbalah have long recognized difficulties in the interpretation of this work and have generally explained these or tried to explain them away as 'mysteries'.  Although MacGregor Mathers's wife, Moira, the si!
 st!
er of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, has a good command of Hebrew [and was responsible for most of the work for which her husband took credit] neither Mathers himself nor Westcott nor Crowley, for that matter, had anything more than a smattering of Hebrew, at best the equivalent today of four undergraduate semesters of Beginning Biblical Hebrew: adequate for picking one's way through a text word for word but hardly sufficient for producing accurate translations. Once again, the general xenophobia of the time in England, coupled with both anti-Judaism and antisemitism, meant that the last people to be consulted about what their tradition actually meant were the Jews."
> On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 10:21:30AM -0700, Kali Magdalene wrote:
> > 
> > Michael Dinowitz wrote:
> > > 
> > > It really pisses me off how a single word mistranslated from the Sefer
> > > Yetzirah by someone who cared nothing what the Jews knew (Wescott) could
> > > grow into this entire thing. I guess the concept you describe below, that
> > > of the abyss, is just post modern Kabbalah. No truth but what they made of
> > > it. (yes, I'm venting and I have every right to in this case)
> > 
> > That's fine. Promethea is postmodern myth.
> 
> I don't mind the vent, but it'd be nice to get an explanation of the
> accurate translation, unless we're expected to remain in pleasant 
> ignorance or something.
> 
> -- 
>         Bryant Durrell [] http://www.innocence.com/~durrell [] 9/11/2001
>  [----------------------------------------------------------------------------]
>              Never send a monster to do the work of an evil genius.
> 
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