I have been muttering about this in side conversations for a while, and feel like this may be a good moment for a long thread to talk more directly about contemporary Pagan & occultist qabalah and cultural appropriation

1/ https://twitter.com/miniver/status/1303459167638708224

I dread resting too much of the legitimacy of this kind of commentary on identity categories, ratification by authority, or scholarship pissing contests. I would rather have this comment read on the merits.

But situating myself informs does inform what I say, so ….

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I am an assimilated American Ashkenazi Jew. I am not practicing, though I have thrown a kickass ritually-correct seder every year for decades.

I am also a practicing, though lazy, Hermeticist with modest formal investments from a lodge in the Golden Dawn current.

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I am a modern Pagan who counts Ha’Shem among the gods of my personal pantheon, as the “god of my people”.

Ha’Shem has a place but not an icon on my personal altar, physically above the places of all of the other gods. I hold this to be consistent with Ha’Shem’s mitzvot.

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I consider myself unqualified to study Jewish kabballah as a practice, though I am an enthusiastic amateur scholar in an academic sense.

I have some Hebrew & Torah scholarship under my belt, but not enough. And I am not living a life of Jewish practice.

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Hermetic qabalah is integral to my spiritual practice and outlook. My practice is modest and I do not want to overstate my scholarship. But neither is trivial, and after decades of engagement they run deep into my bones.

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I also need to do some throat-clearing about my cultural politics, again to situate myself.

I am committed to the pursuit of social justice. Advocacy is not one of my core personal projects, but I believe I have given it at least the attention which every person should.

7/

I have reservations about the particular school of social justice praxis which dominates the culture of SJ advocacy at the moment.

AND I count myself allied with it, because SJ advocacy is more important than my quibbles, and that school is MOSTLY right on the merits.

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I am very uneasy with some common SJ praxis around cultural appropriation.

Sometimes it is plain wrong about how culture works. Ownership language — “that does not belong to you” — serves us poorly.

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And I am mortified by the implications of some discourse about cultural appropriation.

The implication that each ethnic people must hew only to the cultural forms of their ancestors courts the worst possible blut und boden Cultural Purity “traditionalist” bedfellows.

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But critiques of cultural appropriation are vitally important. We must combat countless examples of appropriation.

White people need to stop wearing warbonnets, right?

Modern Pagan culture has a LOT to answer for here.

Western occultists have a LOT to answer for here.

11/

So.

Is Pagan & and occultist qabalah cultural appropriation of a closed Jewish tradition?

It is complicated.

TLDR:

The history IS appropriative. The practice CAN be appropriative.

But there is a LOT of space for thoughtful gentiles to engage with it responsibly.

12/

First, I need to introduce a distinction between kabbalah, cabala, and qabalah.

K is a body of Jewish practices & systems.

C is a Christian esotericists’ thing, drawing on K.

Q is a usually-not-Christian esotericists’ thing, drawing on C & K.

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Kabbalah is a Jewish body of practice & ideas crystallized in the 16th century, grounded in writings from the 13th century, drawing directly on ideas and practices at least a couple of centuries older, with many much earlier antecedents ... with a mythic lineage to Moses.

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I lack the scholarship to judge arguments about stuff like neoplatonism and other gentiles’ thought & practice influencing proto-kabbalist thought & practice, but it would be naïve to imagine that an esoteric school created by a diaspora people is entirely novel and unique.

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Christian cabala is a little out of scope here, and my expertise on it is weak, but I must mention it to round out the picture.

Renaissance era Christian occultists built symbolism for their own use drawing directly on kabbalah.

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Qabalah comes to us through a clearly-identifiable, narrow door.

The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn, a nominally Christian late 19th century English quasi-Masonic organization of occultists invented it.

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The HOGD were like the Velvet Underground of esoteric groups. They were both innovative and strongly informed by past practices. And they were influential.

As Brian Eno said of the VU, “The first album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

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The HOGD had a “magical system” that was a stew of esoteric ideas from all over:

Renaissance magic, alchemy, the classical proto-sciences (most significantly astrology), confused thirdhand accounts of Hinduism and Buddhism, neoplatonist theurgy, cabala, kabbalah ...

19/

Plus the HOGD just made a bunch of stuff up, and claimed legitimacy for it by attributing it to a mix of “secret traditions” and well-known cultural sources.

They held this mess together using symbolism they called “qabalah”, which drew directly on cabala and kabbalah.

20/

I am being a little flippant in the way I describe the HOGD system of symbols, ideas, and practices. It is bonkers. It is a mess. It is full of lies.

But I love it. It is awesome. It has been massively influential for a reason. It works.

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It should also be apparent from this thumbnail history of the HOGD system that it is in many ways as culturally appropriative as anything can be.

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The HOGD deracinated the culture of oppressed people.

It took a lot of symbols with rich cultural context and then ignored that context, using them just because they thought they looked and sounded cool.

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The HOGD engaged in minstrelsy of the culture of oppressed people.

It took cultural materials from sources, changed them to suit their tastes and preferences, and then misrepresented those changed forms as an authentic presentations of the original.

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The HOGD borrowed legitimacy from oppressed people.

They made stuff up, then claimed it had value because it was sourced from the culture of oppressed people.

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The HOGD exercised the culture of oppressed people which those people were themselves punished for exercising.

They were at the seat of a Christian supremacist white supremacist colonialist empire at its apex, playing with the cultures of religious & cultural minorities.

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The qabalah of the HOGD reflects ALL of these culturally appropriative moves at once.

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But the qabalah of the HOGD is NOT the closed tradition of Jewish kabballah.

It is just ... different stuff, precisely because it is such a mix of different sources and misunderstandings and misrepresentations and outright inventions.

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I think than any esotericist who engages with the qabalah which comes to us through the HOGD has to reckon with the appropriativeness and bullshittiness of this history.

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And the influence of the HOGD system is EVERYWHERE in anglophone esotericism.

Bits and bobs of it show up in Wicca and almost all other modern Pagan practices, in New Age culture, in the banal astrology column in your local newspaper.

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And as a Jew who DOES some of the PRACTICES from the HOGD, I have a bunch of very personal unease with elements of those practices.

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There is a core HOGD ritual which involves pronouncing the divine name יהוה, which violates a major Jewish mitzvah, one of the few Jewish practices I am rigorous about!

(I found myself a lodge which substitutes another name.)

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I am not in the same place they are, but it should be evident why I have boundless love & respect for my Jewish cousins who are disgusted by qabalah and gentile esotericists’ use of it.

All esotericists who engage with qabalah need to grapple with that.

33/

All of which is background and throat-clearing for the thing I came here to say.

34/

So.

I personally am a Jew who is okay with qabalah. It does not bother me.

If you are a gentile, it is cool with me if you work with qabalah.

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Now there sure are ways of working with qabalah which ARE offensively appropriative.

If you are not Jewish and pitch your teaching as The True Secrets Of The Jewish Mystics, that is very bad.

(It is also pretty bad if you are Jewish, though the cultural politics differ.)

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And gentiles SHOULD keep your goyish hands off of Jewish kabballah. “The rabbi said it was okay” is not okay.

There is a whole intra-Jewish conversation to be had about who among us is qualified to work with it (ahem, sexism, ahem) but that is a different thing.

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I respectfully disagree with Jews who say that gentiles need to step away from qabalah.

Emphasis on respect. This is an ongoing conversation. I might well be wrong. They might be right.

I am presenting my case to a candid world.

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I DISrespectfully disagree with anyone who claims that qabalah is nothing other than an appropriation of the closed tradition of Jewish kabballah.

That is a crock of shit. Qabalah has a bunch of stuff cribbed from kabballah in there, but it is a different thing.

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Jazz begat blues. Blue begat rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll begat rock. Rock begat heavy metal.

But that does not make Iron Maiden a jazz band.

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Rock is full of cultural appropriation. White artists and listeners need to do a LOT better at recognizing and avoiding engaging in appropriative moves.

But it would be absurd to say we should stop listening to Iron Maiden because of the distant echo of the Bo Diddley beat.

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Qabalah is part synthesis, part novel creation. It is living culture.

Saying it is just repackaged kabballah is like saying ‘Star Wars’ is just repackaged Kurosawa. Yeah, but it is ALSO planetary romance and space opera and a western and a flying ace story and and and …

42/

I cannot see an argument that the cultural appropriation in the history of qabalah makes qabalah itself illegitimate which does not ultimately make practically all of culture illegitimate.

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There are hard questions in this space.

For example, I ask my fraters, sorors, and nonbinary siblings in the body of Golden Dawn practice to face the aforementioned problem that practicing Jews cannot do the core ritual of the GD tradition as written.

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I use the Hebrew names of the sephiroth of qabalah as useful terms of art. Those are the same words used in kabballah to mean things which are similar but not the same.

I am cool with that. A word can mean related things.

But we must at least note the distinction.

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I do not want people to recruit my words to say that the appropriativeness of qabalah is all in the past, nothing to worry about now.

We still need to step carefully in talking about its relationship with Jewish ideas, tradition, and practice.

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I do not want people to shrug and say “ @miniver said qabalah is A-OK”, or to point to anything I say here as the final word.

I am one person with a considered opinion, no more, no less.

47/

A wise acquaintance reminds me to say in so many words that the HOGD constructing their qabalah using the bits and bobs of kabbalah which suited them was both reflective of and exercise of antisemitism, in case that was not apparent from my thumbnail history

48/

Splicing in a related thread about tarot and claims that it is cultural appropriation from Romani practices https://twitter.com/miniver/status/1386794401565872129