Snarky comment

[jeregenest]

Unless you are priceoncairo or heron61 you don't get to lecture to me about Kabbalah or magic in gaming on a gaming related mailing list, unless your credentals are as impressive as clehrich. Just a suggestion if you want to remain in the "this guy might have something creditible" column. Respect my publishing credits!

Comments

[chrislehrich.livejournal.com]

[pedantry]
There ain't no Kabbalah two millennia ago
[/pedantry]

Summoning what, the Nephilim powers or something? The elements and stuff? I'm just wondering. And why is Christian Kabbalah relevant? Serious question, not a dismissal; I just don't know.

The current state of the field as I read it suggests that there are really three different strains of Jewish Kabbalah as of about 1500: the theosophical (sefirot, etc.), the ecstatic (Abulafia and rotations of names and so on), and the magical (basically angel- and demon-summoning, mostly the former). Almost nobody wants to write about the third, though E. Wolfson has some good stuff. Personally, my impression is that this is a very artificial and problematic division, but it's where things are now.

On Christian Kabbalah, it seems that most authors weren't all that clear on such divisions, quite possibly because they didn't entirely exist in the Jewish sources, but also of course because they generally had very sketchy familiarity with the sources. So for example Frances Yates used to think that Christian Kabbalists, by making Kabbalah into angel-summoning magic, were distorting it horribly; perhaps they were, but not by this token. She got everything she knew from Scholem, of course, who (as Idel points out) deliberately bends everything to be theosophical or irrelevant. Idel adds ecstatic material, esp. Abulafia, but still shoves aside the rest.

Can you remind me how Kabbalah works in Nephilim?

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

It doesn't really. Its the annoying link of Summoning = Kabbalah that I was pointing out. It had to do with another post. Never you mind.