
Magi and Maggidim
The Kabbalah in British Occultism 1840-1930
by Liz Greene
ISBN: 978-1-907767-02-9
£43.34
15 Aug 2012
Paperback; 576 pages
The growth of the occult ‘underground’ is one of the most fascinating features of late 19th and early 20th century British society. After decades of neglect, a growing body of scholarship is now dedicated to various aspects of Victorian and Edwardian magical practices and personalities, in an effort to understand why such a powerful cultural current could emerge simultaneously with the rise of modern science, and why it continues to exercise such a pervasive influence in many contemporary spiritualities. The books, articles, letters, and diaries produced by major figures in the occult revival, such as Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune, reveal the centrality of the Jewish Kabbalah in occultist thought and practice. However, the ways in which these individuals, and the secret societies they founded, sourced and utilised Jewish esoteric lore are largely ignored in current research. Current scholarship generally assumes that ‘occultist’ Kabbalah is a modernreinvention of older traditions,with little relationship to its Jewish roots. This assumption ignores the documented contributions of Jewish scholars and Kabbalists to the occultists’ work, and there is little, if any, in-depth comparison of the ideas expressed by British occultists and the Jewish Kabbalistic literature of the medieval and early modern periods. And why was the Jewish Kabbalah was so compellingly attractive to non-Jewish occultists at a time of turbulent social and scientific change, when religious, political, and racial antisemitism constituted a normative attitude in many circles of British society? This book provides a new, exciting, and penetrating analysis of how and why the Jewish Kabbalah was adopted and integrated, rather than reinvented or recreated, by important figures in the British occult revival, and why it remains a dominant theme in the spiritual currents of the twenty-first century.
Categories
Maggidim, Occultism, History
Tags
Occult, Kabbalah, British Society, Underground
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List of Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Chapter One
Introduction
The case of the missing Kabbalah
Methodologies, monomyths, and metanarratives
Literature review
Definitions of terms
Chapter Two
The ‘Great Secret’: Éliphas Lévi and the Hebrew Roots of the Vistorian Occult Revival
A visit to a magus
’Le petit romantique’
Rescuing the divine sparks:
The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria
Lévi’s Kabbalah and the alchemical opus
the ‘psychologisation of the sacred’
The power of the letters
Lévi and the Jews
How the Kabbalah crossed the Channel
Chapter Three
Masonic Mysteries: William Wynn Westcott and his ‘Rosicrucian’ Kabbalah
The rhizome and the flower
The creation of the SRIA
The Kabbalah and the Craft
The Kabbalah and the ‘Rosie Cross’
Hermes and the Jews
John Dee and his Jewish angels
Westcott and the goddesses:
The Kabbalahs of Anna Kingsford and H.P. Blavatsky
The ‘Magical Mason’ and his Kabbalah
Westcott and the Ashkenazi
Chapter Four
In the name of YHVH: Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and the ritual magic of the Golden Dawn
A meeting at the museum
The name of the rose
Mathers and the grimoires
The astral magic of the Golden Dawn
Close encounters of the elemental kind
The Jewish scholars and the occultists
The Kabbalah according to S.L. MacGregor Mathers
Chapter Five
Arthwait and the Beast: Mysticism and sexual ‘Magick’ in British occultism
The mystic and the magus
Waite’s Kabbalistic ‘mysticism’
Waite’s ‘Mystery of Sex’
The Kabbalah according to A.E. Waite
The Kabbalah according to Aleister Crowley
Sex, ‘magick’, and the Jewish messiahs
The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor
The ‘man with two souls’
Crowley’s maggid and The Book of the Law
The battle of the Tarots
Chapter Six
When she was ‘Jung and easily Freudened’: Dion Fortune’s ‘Psychological’ Kabbalah
Between the wars
The occult psychologist
Freud, the Hasidim, and the Lurianic Kabbalah
Fortune’s Jungian archetypes
The Kabbalah according to Dion Fortune
Fortune’s ‘occult novels’
Fortune’s Kabbalistic legacy
Chapter Seven
Conclusion
’Is Kabbalah Jewish?’
Defining the Kabbalah
The ‘pluralistic hermeneutic’
Glossary of Hebrew Words
Bibliography
Index
‘A fascinating and erudite exploration of the development of modern Kabbalah. Liz Greene’s knowledge of the subject is wide and deep, and this book is masterful in its nuanced unpicking and re-weaving of the history of an occult tradition often marred by poor research and generalisations.’
~ Professor Owen Davies, University of Hertfordshire

About the Author
Liz Greene is held in high esteem by astrologers all over the world, professional and non-professional alike. She is a prolific author of books and various publications and has been instrumental in shaping modern psychological astrology. She holds doctorate degrees in psychology and (as of 2010) in history and is a qualified Jungian analyst. She also holds a diploma in counselling from the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology in London, and a diploma from the Faculty of Astrological Studies, of which she is a lifetime Patron.