The Kabbalah Unveiled · 1 of 74

Dedication

TO THE AUTHORS OF 'THE PERFECT WAY'

Context

The dedication is itself a clue to where this translation came from. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland were leading lights of late-Victorian English esotericism, founders of the Hermetic Society in 1884. Mathers was a co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn four years later. So the book you are about to read is a Jewish mystical text passing through a very specific filter: the late-19th-century English occult revival, which read the Zohar through Knorr von Rosenroth's 1684 Latin Kabbala Denudata, which had in turn read it through Christian Cabala. The actual Jewish Kabbalists of Safed (Cordovero, Luria, Vital) had a very different relationship to this material, and modern academic Kabbalah scholarship begins with Gershom Scholem in the 1930s deliberately stripping the Christian-Hermetic apparatus back off. Keep both layers in mind as you read.Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, ch. 1 on the Christian-Cabala filter.

ANNA KINGSFORD, M.D.

AND EDWARD MAITLAND

THIS TRANSLATION IS DEDICATED