


In Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), I will be focusing on Elijah de Vidas’s main work, Reshit Hokhmah (The Beginning ofWisdom) written in Safed in the last decades ofthe sixteenth century.

In my paper, the concept of love will form the main emotional pivot of analysis and will engage related phenomena of jealousy, desire, rapture, physical expressions of attachment (kiss), and poetics or language through which affection becomes articulated. Love constitutes a paradigmatic emotion deployed by mystical writers across the three monotheistic traditions as a counterpoint to ratiocinative discourse transporting the reader into a direct and intimate knowledge of the divinity in contrast to indirect knowledge that logic and scholastic argumentation engender. This thesis thus reconsiders earlier restrictive attitudes towards both Kabbalah and Western esotericism and introduces contemporary Kabbalah and kabbalistic renderings as a worthy field of study for the study of religions in general and for Western esotericism in particular. The following examination of four widely different religious groups is focusing on the various degrees to which Kabbalah is used in the construction of tradition in the more or less traditional Kabbalah Centre, The Danish occultist Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff, the doctrine of synthesis of Samael Aun Weor and the New Age eclecticism of the Kamadon Academy. The scope is extended as to include a discussion of the academic study of contemporary Kabbalah, a topic which to a large extent has been neglected. This is exemplified in two medieval kabbalistic texts, the Gates of Light and the Fountain of Wisdom.

In an analysis of the concept of language in medieval Kabbalah it becomes clear that language holds a twofold position in that it contains indefinite layers of both semantic and hyposemantic character and furthermore becomes both the transmitter and the container of higher or absolute knowledge. With this approach to Western esotericism and Western cultural history it is not only possible but naturally to study Kabbalah as a part of this framework. This discourse involves a claim of higher knowledge and is transmitted or achieved through a dialectic of concealment and revelation. However it is also necessary to detach the definition of Western esotericism from exact historical phenomena and instead view the heuristic construction of Western esotericism as a structural element and a certain discourse in Western history of religions. The preliminary alternative to this view is most importantly to perceive Western culture not as culturally monolithic Christian but rather as a complex system marked by cultural and religious pluralism. It challenges the former notion of Western esotericism as being a strictly Christian cultural phenomenon by discussing the prevalent definitions of and approaches to the field an understanding of Western esotericism which would exclude a phenomenon such as Kabbalah from the field of Western esotericism. This study deals with two fields of European history of religions, namely Western esotericism and Kabbalah. A Master’s Thesis presented to the Department of History of Religions, University of Copenhagen May 2008 by Sara Møldrup Thejls.
