Magical images

[Edward Mason]

93,

If you scan a popular work like Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, she gives a list of the primary correspondences for each sephirah. More is available in 777. Most of them, such as the God-Names and Archangels, are clearly traceable to medieval Hebraic sources.

The magical images seem different - naked men and women, crucified kings and so on. These images seem more explicitly pagan than the other correspondences.

Does anyone have any idea whether they are derived from ancient sources, or whether they came out of the Christian or post-Christian Hermetic traditions?


93 93/93,

Edward

[Jim Eshelman]

I'm not aware of them before the Golden Dawn.

I'm curious what anyone else knows about these.

[Draco Magnus]

93

This is a shot in the dark, but could those images be possibly borrowed from or inspired by old Tarot imagery, or as you say, some pagan and European myths?


93, 93/93

[Edward Mason]

Draco, 93,

When you get into Qabalistic territory, especially Hermetic Qabalah, it can be hard to distinguish precisely between the pagan and the non-pagan. Everything fits someplace on the Tree.

I can't really picture Mac 'n Moina opting for such imagery, given the celibate nature of their own marriage. Although I may be making be a simplistic interpretation of their relationship and of the esoteric aspects of what they discovered and incorporated in the G.D.

My hunch is that it's from a post-Renaissance, pre-Victorian time, giving us a target period of a couple of hundred years when people weren't always prudish yet were also fascinated by alchemy and Hermeticism. But that's just a hunch.

For years, I assumed that, once the doors were safely closed, the old Rabbis told their senior students what the real secrets were, and these images are part of that. I could (just) have been right. There's an unquestioned current of sexual mysticism in Hebraic Qabalah, even today.

93 93/93,
Edward