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The Tarot & Kabbalah: Tools For Explaining the Spiritual Mysteries
Although always controversial and never an accepted part of mainstream Judaism, the Kabbalah has been studied and used by Jewish mystics for well over two millineum. Over the years, there have been periods when the system has completely disappeared from human culture for centuries at a time, only to reappear miraculously during times of spiritual turmoil. As an instrument of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah was used to define and explain the secrets of the Torah, the divine revelation to the Jews. The rabbis were the main recipients of this secret knowledge and they framed the Kabbalah within the context of their patriarchal religious beliefs. They believed that, as God's "chosen people," only they had the genetic predisposition to understand the Kabbalah and that it was futile for gentiles to even try. Women, even Jewish women, were also believed to be unable to understand this mystical system.

This belief is still prevalent today among many Jewish Kabbalists. Several years ago, a woman friend of mine with considerable Kabbalistic knowledge was discussing the system with a rabbi who was in our town to conduct a workshop on the Kabbalah, which my friend had been planning to attend. During their discussion, he told her than in her last life she must have been a Jewish man, because it would've been impossible for her to have gathered so much understanding as a gentile and as a woman. Needless to say, she took a pass on his workshop.

As non-Jewish occultists began to work with the Kabbalah, moving it away from it's strictly Judaic origins, they began to differentiate between the Jewish Kabbalah and their new understanding of this spiritual body of knowledge. Eventually, modern occultist began to refer to their understanding of the Kabbalah as the "Esoteric Kabbalah," but even though this approach has expanded upon the Kabbalah's original Jewishness, it still cannot be separated entirely from ancient Hebrew mystical thought. Even if we suppose that this system predates the Jews and has origins in Egypt, we must first learn to understand it from its connections with the Hebrew language. We cannot pretend to begin to understand how the system was utilized by the Egyptians, where most knowledge has been essentially lost, until we understand the meaning behind the Hebrew.

The Kabbalah can be said to be the "unified field theory" of spirituality. One of the main functions of the Tree of Life is that it's sort of a psycho-spiritual file system. Because of this, by placing aspects from other spiritual systems into their proper "file," it becomes possible to unify all forms of spiritual thought. Here, it's possible to see where an aspect of yoga corresponds to an aspect of Judaism, Christianity, Wicca or any other spiritual practice. The labels on these Kabbalistic files are in the ancient form of the Hebrew language, which means we must understand something about that language before we can begin retrieving files.

In fact, the Kabbalah can itself be seen as a study of the Hebrew language and numbers (which are essentially one and the same). In addition to the diagram of the Otz Chiim, or The Tree of Life, there are two other major branches of Kabbalah: Gematria and Notircon. Like the tree, both of these are a study of the interaction between a divinely inspired alphabet and sacred number theory.

Unlike modern languages, ancient Hebrew was a "sacred" or divinely inspired language. In this language, the concept of number and letter (or sound) are intricately tied together. Each of the twenty-two letters in this alphabet has a numerical value, from 1 to 900, and each of the letters can be said to represent the sacred properties of that number. Therefore, the letter Aleph, with the value of one, represents unity, the letter Beth, with the value of two, deals with duality and so on.

Gematria is the study of the sums of words according to their letters. The gematriast adds the letters in a word according to their numerical value to reach a sum and then compares them with other words made of letters with the same total. For example, the Hebrew word for "love," is spelled Aleph-He-Gimel-He and the word for "unity" is spelled Aleph-Cheth-Daleth, both of which add-up to 13. It's easy to see a connection between "love" and "unity," and the Gematriast would say that the two words have a correspondence. The other major branch of Kabbalah, Notaricon, rearranges the letters in a word, sentence or entire text, to create a second subtext.

Kabbalists. believe that the writers of the old testament, undoubtedly the most learned Jews of their day, understood these inner workings of the Hebrew language and used them in the scriptures. It's certainly true that by analyzing the Torah in this way, many spiritual secrets seem to become unveiled. This would mean, of course, that it's impossible to understand the true meaning of the Old Testament by studying an English language translation - no matter how good that translation may be.
The main branch of the Kabbalah, however, is our trusted glyph of the Tree of Life, for here is the key that explains the properties of both the letters and numbers. These two becomes the basic element of a file cabinet, into which we can next add color and astrology. This diagram of ten spheres and twenty-two paths is deceptively simple, for it's claimed to be no less than a map of "the microcosm and the macrocosm," which means that it is a map of each individual person on the planet and of the entire universe within which s/he resides. In this regard, it's like a hologram in which total reality is imbedded within each piece.
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