Quotes on these topics:
Tarot, Carl Jung, Swedenborg, Blake & Freemasons
See also LILITH by George MacDonald and Theosophy
Warnings - How mysticism & the occult are changing the Church
An Introduction to the Kabbalah: "Kabbalah... found its expression and extension in western Mystery Orders, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.... In its most complete form, the Kabbalah can be considered as the 'Yoga of the West', complementing the eastern chakra system and having counterparts to many of the forms of yogic practice. ... the yin, Tao and yang of Taoist philosophy, find direct expression in the Kabbalistic pillars of severity, equilibrium and mercy on the Tree of Life.
"The Kabbalah at its best is a system of esoteric philosophy, psychology and cosmology that allows any aspect of existence to be assimilated and related to any other on many levels, both rational and trans-rational. It may be used profitably by anyone, regardless of creed; and... it is a key to the control of subtle forces and the attainment of true mystical union. ... The pre-eminent form of Jewish mysticism, sometimes referred to as Classical Kabbalah.... contains elements of both Gnosticism and Neo-platonism....
"...freedom of choice is born of the godhead's self-inflicted suffering, and the redemption (tiqqun) of the broken world and the reunification of divinity becomes the overriding goal of humanity.... This move towards a messianic philosophy fostered the Hasidic movement which made the Kabbalah more widely accessible. The most important figure here was Israel ben Eleazar (1698-1760)....
"Western or Christian Kabbalism grew from German and then Lurianic Kabbalism. Mediaeval ceremonial magicians were fond of appropriating Kabbalistic words of power, and in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, western Kabbalists augmented the Kabbalah with aspects of Christian theology and alchemy....
"The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen further development of the Western Kabbalah from occultists such as Eliphas Levi... and members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn such as Aleister Crowley.... Links between the Kabbalah and many other philosophical, mythological and religious systems have been postulated and detailed; the most important being the links between the Kabbalah, astrology and the Tarot."
The Tarot and the Kabbalah: "The work of the 19th century French occultist, Eliphas Levi, was the catalyst for the study of the esoteric link between the Tarot and the Kabbalah, which became the main model for the development and interpretation of the Tarot. The most influential decks of the 20th century were founded on Kabbalistic principles.... There are also 22 cards in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, and each of these corresponds to a Hebrew letter and a path on the Tree of Life. ...
"Aleister Crowley... transposes the Star and the Emperor..... Assiah is the manifest world, corresponding to the element Earth and the Tarot suit Pentacles....The correspondences between the Kabbalistic worlds and the Tarot suits are as follows: Tarot Suit Element Kabbalistic World Pentacles Earth Assiah (Manifest World) Swords Air Yetsirah (Formative World) Cups Water Briah (Creative World) Wands Fire Atziluth (Archetypal World)
Jacob Boehme, 1575-1624: The German mystic and theosophist, Jacob Boehme (or Jakob Böhme), was born in Altseidenburg in 1575. He ... became deeply depressed at a world in which 'the God-fearing fare no better than the Godless' and could find no consolation in his estimable knowledge of Scripture. In 1600, he experienced a mystical breakthrough that he compared to a resurrection from the dead, and now felt a unity with nature that defined the work that eventually followed: In this light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in and by all creatures, even in herbs and grass it knew God, who he is, and how he is, and what his will is: And suddenly in that light my will was set on by a mighty impulse, to describe the being of God....
"In Boehme's philosophy, God is the Ungrund or 'Groundless', the undistinguished unity that creates by negation. ... Translations into English by William Law in the eighteenth century brought them to a wider audience. His ideas would later influence the visionary poet and painter William Blake, and the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
William Blake 1757-1827: "Blake began to have mystical visions from an early age.... Blake's work was influenced, not only by his own mystical experiences, but by the writings of such figures as Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. In turn, his work influenced later writers, such as the poet, William Butler Yeats.
Carl Gustav Jung 1875-1961: "For years, ever since it was published, the... Tibetan Book of the Dead has been my constant companion, and I owe to it not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries but also many fundamental insights.
"The Bardo Thodol [Tibetan Book of the Dead] offers one an intelligible philosophy addressed to human beings.... Its philosophy contains the quintessence of Buddhist psychological criticism.... The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity."
Jung and the Tarot: "Carl Gustav Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875 and died in 1961. He founded analytic psychology in response to the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud.... Jung made the significant step of defining the unconscious of a person as comprised of both a personal unconscious (proceeding from the experiences of the individual) and a collective unconscious.... Jung classified people as introverted and extroverted types, but more importantly from the point of view of the Tarot, further classified them according to four functions of the mind: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.
"In his final work, Man and His Symbols, Jung wrote: 'These four functional types correspond to the obvious means by which consciousness obtains its orientation to experience. Sensation (i.e. sense perception) tells us that something exists; thinking tells you what it is; feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not; and intuition tells you whence it comes and where it is going.'...
"The occultist Dr. Arthur Edward Waite expressed the following, distinctly Jungian, view of the Tarot: "The Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths embedded in the consciousness of all."
Emanuel Swedenborg 1688-1772: "Swedenborg's religious crisis began with the Journal of Dreams (1743-44), and he had his first vision of Christ on 7 April, 1744....
"He expounded a system of allegorical interpretation of the Bible, in which even mundane events communicate higher truths through correspondences between the material and spiritual planes. He declared that he had been present at the Last Judgement, and that this had taken place in 1757, creating a new Christian church, and considered his religious works to herald this new age of Christianity, and that this was actually what was meant by the Second Coming. He believed in the absolute unity of God, rejecting the orthodox view of the Trinity, and that redemption is obtained by accepting and responding to divine truth through love, wisdom and action....
"Though Swedenborg never made any direct attempt to found a Christian sect himself, a society dedicated to his teachings was created in England in 1787, and similar societies established themselves around the world, known as the Church of the New Jerusalem, New Church or Swedenborgians. Swedenborg's religious works have influenced later writers, including the poets William Blake and William Butler Yeats.
From William Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians:
"...towards the end of the eighteenth century, the interest in Swedenborg among intellectuals was immense...
"...the rationalistic ideologies of Voltaire or Thomas Paine were not alone in fuelling radical or revolutionary programmes.... the reception of how Swedenborg’s esoteric teaching was absorbed into the socio-cultural matrix of the late eighteenth century....
"The Church that Blake visited was a development of the non-orthodox Theosophical Society, which was established in 1783 by a printer with a Methodist background, Robert Hindmarsh. We know that a number of Blake’s fellow artists were Swedenborgians and met in the Theosophical Society (in 1785 renamed as The British Society for the Propagation of the Doctrines of the New Church)....
"Even when Blake seems to be making purely theological statements, there are inevitable links to be drawn to Swedenborg’s diatribe against the Christian Churches and the way they have duped man into spiritual inaptitude....
"In Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788), which Blake owned and annotated, Swedenborg elucidates at length how the Divine in the natural universe has been obscured by the churches. He complains how 'all the Things of Religion, which are called Spiritual, have been removed out of the Sight of Man,' by 'Councils and certain Leaders in the Church.' They have mislead Christians to 'blindly' believe that being born to a 'natural' world, they cannot perceive anything 'separate from what is natural.'”
"There are undeniable links between the reading of Swedenborg and radical activity, centered on a branch of radical Freemasons who operated internationally, but gathered in London....
"An occult tradition of seeking spiritual illumination thrived in the seventeenth century but had since gone underground, marginalised by the progress of rationalist and empiricist modes of thinking, and was preserved most fully and systematically in clandestine Freemasonry.
"At the inception of Swedenborgianism into the European network of 'irregular” Masonry, it blended in with the mainstays of Hermeticism, Cabalism, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism, Astrology etc. Many lodges and Masonic societies welcomed Swedenborg’s teaching. His central idea of 'Correspondences,' which linked all things material to a spiritual source was used to back up notions of unusual rapport with other realities.... For many, Swedenborgianism became an umbrella philosophy under which other occult ideas could be given a collective rationale – even if these were only remotely related to Swedenborg’s doctrines.
"Both the Theosophical Society and Duché’s gatherings were 'open' meetings in the sense that the Masons here mixed with tradesmen, artisans and other local Londoners...."With the exclusion of the radical Masons, the New Church was clearly seeking to weed out its earlier... revolutionary associations.... In addition to this, a petition was prepared to Parliament for 'religious toleration'....
"The reception of Swedenborg’s occultist writings was... an active forum for theo-political debate. Blake noted in the annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Wisdom, 'The Whole of the New Church is in the Active Life'."
See also Warnings - How mysticism & the occult are changing the Church
Endnotes:
1. James Wasserman, Art and Symbols of the Occult (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1993)
2. Since the second triangle was nearly invisible when first posted, I superimposed the light blue lines over the black lines to make it more visible.
3. Peter Hirschberg, "Invoking the Spirits," The Jerusalem Report, November 16, 1995.
