Kabbalah

Sefer Yetzirah (“Book of Formation”), early but debated. The earliest extant work of Jewish esotericism, describing creation through “32 paths of wisdom” — the 22 Hebrew letters plus the ten sefirot (here meaning something like primal “numbers”).

Scholarly dating ranges widely, from the early centuries CE to the 9th c., with much recent scholarship favoring roughly the 2nd–6th c. CE. Treat its date as genuinely unsettled.

• The Zohar (“Book of Splendor”), appeared late 13th c. Spain. The towering text of Kabbalah surfaced in Castile in the late 1200s. It is written as the teaching of the 2nd-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, and traditional (especially Orthodox) belief holds him its author. Academic consensus, following Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), attributes it instead to the Spanish kabbalist Moses de León (c. 1240–1305), who composed and circulated it — a pseudepigraphic work that wove together older mystical material. (see the note on the evidence.)
• Lurianic Kabbalah, 16th c. Safed. Isaac Luria (1534–1572), “the Ari,” taught for only a brief period in the Galilean town of Safed before his early death, yet reshaped the whole tradition. He wrote almost nothing himself; his disciples recorded his oral teaching. His dramatic creation-myth — tzimtzum (divine self-contraction), shevirah (the shattering of the vessels), and tikkun (cosmic repair) — became the dominant form of Kabbalah.
• Christian and Hermetic adaptation, 15th–20th c. From Pico della Mirandola (Christian Cabala, 1486) onward, Renaissance and then modern occultists adapted the Tree for non-Jewish ends. By the late 19th c. the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (and later Aleister Crowley) had built a full “Qabalah” mapping the 22 paths to the 22 Tarot trumps, astrology, and ceremonial magic.

A note on the evidence (important). Two things are routinely blurred and should be kept distinct. First, authorship of the Zohar: the traditional ascription to bar Yochai is a matter of religious faith; the scholarly attribution to Moses de León is the historical-critical reading. Both deserve naming — this Atlas reports the academic view as the historical claim while acknowledging the living traditional one. Second, and more important for Western readers: traditional Jewish Kabbalah and the Hermetic “Qabalah” are NOT the same thing. Jewish Kabbalah is a Torah-centered theology of the divine emanations, studied within Jewish law and practice. Hermetic Qabalah (note the Q, by convention; Christian Cabala with a C) is a Western, largely Christianized occult adaptation that bolts Tarot, astrology, and ritual onto the Tree — a 15th-to-20th-century construction, not the rabbinic tradition. The Golden Dawn’s Tarot-on-the-Tree system, however influential, is a modern overlay and has no warrant in the classical Jewish sources.

Ein Sof — the Infinite. Beyond all the Sefirot lies Ein Sof (“without end”): the limitless divine essence, utterly unknowable, of which everything is an emanation. There is finally only one reality. (→ All Is One, All Is One.)

• The ten Sefirot and the Tree of Life. The infinite expresses itself through ten emanations (Keter the crown down to Malkhut the kingdom) arranged in a structured diagram. The Tree is the master pattern of how unity becomes multiplicity. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer.)
• Adam Kadmon — the primordial cosmic Human. The first and highest “configuration” of the emanated order is a divine Human-form; creation is shaped on the template of a cosmic Person, and the earthly human reflects it. The macrocosm wears a human face. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer, All Is One.)
• The four worlds. Reality descends through four (sometimes five, counting Adam Kadmon) worlds — Atziluth (emanation), Beriah (creation), Yetzirah (formation), Assiah (action/the physical) — each a denser veiling of the same light. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer.)
• Tzimtzum — divine contraction (Luria). For a finite world to exist, the infinite “withdraws” to make room — God contracts to allow not-God. Creation begins with a self-limiting of the All. (→ Creation Is Finished.)
• Tikkun — repair. The vessels meant to hold the divine light shattered (shevirah), scattering sparks into the world; human spiritual and ethical work gathers and restores them. The cosmos is unfinished, and the human is enlisted in mending it. (→ Creation Is Finished, All Is One.)

Moses de León (c. 1240–1305) — the Castilian kabbalist to whom scholarship attributes the Zohar; named in prose (no node).

• Isaac Luria, “the Ari” (1534–1572) — founder of Lurianic Kabbalah at Safed; tzimtzum / shevirah / tikkun; named in prose (no node).
• Israel Regardie (1907–1985) — the great systematizer of the Golden Dawn’s Hermetic Qabalah, who published its once-secret Tree-of-Life teachings.
• Paul Foster Case (1884–1954) — American occultist who mapped the Tarot to the Tree of Life (B.O.T.A.), the seminal modern statement of Qabalistic Tarot.
• Primary texts: Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar, and the recorded Lurianic corpus.

Kabbalah states The Inner Creates the Outer (as above, so below) more structurally than any other tradition: the Tree of Life is literally one diagram for cosmos and soul, and Adam Kadmon makes the macrocosm human-shaped.

It carries All Is One (all is one) in Ein Sof, the single infinite of which all things are emanations; All Is One (inner gnosis liberates) in the ascent of the soul back up the Tree; All Is One (consciousness is primary) in a reality that is, top to bottom, divine mind veiling itself; and Creation Is Finished (free will / soul choice) in tikkun, where human action genuinely repairs the cosmos. A reader can drop from any of those truths into this root.

Grew from / alongside: Jewish scripture and Merkavah mysticism, in dialogue with the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation (the One overflowing into graded levels of being) — the philosophical air both breathed. → Seeded: the Christian Cabala of the Renaissance and then the Hermetic Qabalah of modern occultism; through the Golden Dawn it became the structural backbone of Western ceremonial magick (Tarot, ritual, pathworking), and it interlocks tightly with Hermeticism and shares the emanationist and gnostic temper of Gnosticism.,