the form of Jewish mysticism known as cabala is most famous for a speculation on the nature of the Divine immin naations a series of 10 moments of the Divine coming to be which are also essential aspects of all of reality itself those 10 emanations are spot are echoed and mirrored down through all levels of reality a fractal Matrix of being and becoming while the concept of the sephar was more or less settled early on in the development of cabala the doctrine settling into pretty profound cohesion by the compositions of the mammoth safer Zohar or the
book of Radiance in the latter half of the 13th century another theosophical debate raged on for centuries thereafter the nature and origin of evil those debates would take a wide variety of forms before themselves settling into what has become the standard theory of evil and kabalas most of us know it that is the cabala developed by itak luua the Ari in the theory of the breaking of the vessels the Demonic husks or shells known as the kipot and the generation of an impure evil inverse reality of the spote known simply as sitra Akra or the
other side it's the Jewish upside down but how did speculation around the origin and nature of evil developed in cabala in the first place what are the origins of the kipot and the horrible sitra Akra let's survey the wide range of speculations to find that evil in kabala may very well have its origins in the Divine itself in a kind of primordial void or as an ontologically malevolent shell which precedes the fruit of being itself also this video is a collaboration with my dear friend and colleague Dr Angela puka an expert in contemporary occultism you're
going to want to make sure to check out her fantastic video where she'll be describing contemporary occult and left-hand path magic inspired by the concept of the CLE poat absolutely go over to check out Angela's Channel make sure to subscribe to her content and tell her I said hi but stick around here make sure to subscribe also to esoterica for weekly explorations of topics and esoteric history and if You' want to support work like this providing evidence-backed free and accessible content I'd hope you consider checking out my patreon and some of the merch on the
channel if you're new to the study of Western esotericism and you want to kind of get your SE legs esoteric legs make sure to check out my study guide and if you're interested in historical books on topics in the occult and the mystical check out my website esoteric rare books you can find all those links in the description and in the pen comment including a link to Dr Angela puk's Channel but now let's turn to the origins of evil in the cabala I'm Dr Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane in
history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music] the origins of chaos and evil have been the subject of religious and philosophical speculation since such speculation has been put to writing and probably very long before the likely fad fad that is civilization ever rared its head many of those speculations are found in the collection of Israelite literature known as the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament the origins of evil have also fascinated early Judaism and Christianity and a wide range of etiologies or origin stories of evil have been offered by theologians Mystics and philosophers Through the Ages
from a radical monotheism where God Alone is responsible for all things including evil the rapacious desires of angelic beings for the women of Earth a pride inspired great Revolt of angels led by Satan against God or the introduction of Evil by the violation of the first commandment in Adam's tasting of the for bidden fruit a wide varieties for the origins of evil were Lively topics of discussion in the first few centuries of the Common Era however Christianity pretty quickly settled on a very specific set of myths to Anchor its theory of evil those Miss of
course in the service of the soteriological coming of Jesus Judaism on the other hand continue to wrestle with those questions for centuries and with no Central theological Authority there no Jewish Pope bashem a truly wide variety of speculations emerged those speculations perhaps informed with encounters with zor asrian theologies in Persia would reach a truly stunning array in the speculative cabala that took shape in France and Spain in the Early Middle Ages but before turning to that range of cabalistic speculations on the origins of nature of evil it's worth exploring the more fundamental Matrix the scriptural
and historical substructure that actually anchored much of that very speculation this is a tradition existed in which God was responsible for evil God was fundamentally responsible for evil and this is a position born out of the kind of radical monotheism or monotheistic rhetoric of texts like Isaiah 45:7 in which God famously declares I form the light and create Darkness I produce peace and evil or at a text like Lamentations 338 where we read that out of the mouth of the most high did not good and evil did not good and evil proceed it's a rhetorical
question the answer is yes good and evil did proceed further the famous a time for x and a time for y of Ecclesiastes or calet 3 also indicate the Divine is responsible for all those times those of wheel and of Woe those of Good and Evil and other sections of the Hebrew Bible like the scapegoat for a potential demonic being Azazel and the Y poor Temple liturgy also seem to hint at some kind of primordial quasi evil Divine being that needs to be appeased the mysterious but widely accepted sepher a mystical text detailing the formation
of the Olam or the universe out of the Divine speech also seems to indicate that God has forged both good and evil as we read and God made the states of opposition good and evil good from the good and evil from the evil finally a famed midrash a mythopoetic exegesis of the Bible attributed to Rabbi tanuma is an early 4th Century scholar of the Common Era that is hints at a surprising aspect of the history of our Cosmos of this world that this world the one that we're currently inhabiting it wasn't the first in fact
others had come before and were destroyed by the Divine because they displease God for various reasons at least in those early texts we we don't really learn why they displease God but speculations on previous worlds would flourish in cabalistic discussions on the origins of evil thus the Matrix of such speculations on the origins and nature of evil in cabala are centered on a handful of elements biblical and rabinal texts focusing on evil especially impurity and malevolent beings and characters such as well demons like ashmadai or Lilith for that matter or murderous evil people like Cain
secondly there's just the historical reality of Jewish existence an existence well that was all cheery and nothing ever bad happened no it's one of course marked by tragedy oppression and you know the destruction of the temple and things finally there are more specifically metaphysical speculations on the nature of evil which arose from mystical philosophical and religious speculation just more generally outside of biblical concerns all of this given the cradle that much of rabinal Judaism occurred in cenan Persia remember we're talking about the Babylonian T but we should really talk about the Persian talid before spreading
to The Wider Jewish World thus some degree of zarrian influence maybe zervis is likely here but it's often obscure now I'll be coming back to those possible zor asrian or zervis influences in an episode all on its own so hold on to this idea but to quickly come back to this question of philosophical speculations on the nature of evil while much calistic speculation will eventually hypothesize evil was just just a fancy philosophical way of saying they thought evil was metaphysically real and thus it had substantial status ontological status we would say in philosophy most Jewish
philosophers just rejected that position out of hand myON is a pretty radical Arista tilian primarily understood evil a bit like Augustine in the Christian tradition as a lack as a privation a metaphysical lack of inexistence in the same way that cold or Darkness don't really exist others more neop platonically inspired philosophers like iban Latif speculated actually very little on the nature of evil they just didn't seem to care but they also understood it as a kind of pration associated with the imperfection of matter or hulle rather than being evil is a metaphysically substantial thing some
even went so far as to say that evil was just the influence of an astral being like Saturn it was just Saturn emitting astral Rays down here that caused things to go badly it had nothing to do with fundamental philosophical or mystical question and at all it was just astrological weather however it's important to note that cabala was often very self-consciously a rejection of those kinds of speculations it was a kind of anti- philosophy in some ways especially the rather deflationary aerosan metaphysics of someone like myones and thus it isn't that surprising that whereas myones
would go for a metaphysically minimalist position cabala they a big note on minimalism of any kind it would kabala would exal in positively Baro maximalism including evil maximalism that sounds dangerous that said speculations about evil in early kabala generally take three distinct forms a naturalistic mode in which evil is said to emerge prior to goodness either as a kind of primordial ontological void by the emergence of evil as a kind of condition for the possibility of the existence of goodness itself those speculations center around the cabalistic dictum that the shell precedes the fruit come back
to this in a good bit in a minute another line of speculation is the C of Greater Harmony or perfectionist line in which good and evil must exist both at the same time in order for there to be any existence at all this is kind of like a li nitan best of all possible world's business and thus the presence of evil is necessary for the Perfection of The Wider Universe this is an extension of the radical monotheism discussed earlier whereby good and evil are brought into being by God as an essential aspect of the creation
of the cosmos it's like you needing a symphony where everything's there but if you just heard one instrument at a time it sound terrible God hears all the instruments we don't finally there is the evolutionary or kartic model by which the coming to be of evil is simply part of the evolution of the Divine and the creation of the universe as well in this line of speculation evil is a kind of dross or Refuge kind of trash thrown off in the process of the Divine coming to be and or the creation of the cosmos most
early cabalists will follow one several or all of these forms of speculation until they're really systematized by Isaac Lura in the 16th century becoming as you probably know the myth of the breaking of the vessels the coming to be of the Demonic shards of creation that's the cipot and the generation of the evil and impure side of the sephirot the other side the CRA Akra from the SP specifically gura or de Divine wrath unchecked by the cifra of hessed but to appreciate those lanic Concepts indeed Concepts that most simply recognize just as cabala simplic we
need to understand the centuries the centuries of development that led to the cabala as we understand it now you're not going to really appreciate those ideas in lanic cabala fully if you don't understand the fact that they're the product of an evolution of ideas and that evolution is itself fantastically interesting in my opinion an early strata of cabalistic speculations on evil which are actually reflected in Christian speculations about Jewish belief like those reflected in the 9th century Archbishop of Leon aabar who indicates that Jews at that time believed that the Divine good and bad thoughts
the thoughts of the Divine actually gave rise to Angels and Demons respectively it also seems to indicate for Jews at that time that the first evil arose in the Divine mind before flowing out as a kind of ontological substance in the emanation of reality the 13th century Rabbi Joseph hamadan whose name actually may indicate Persian origin and that's another hint at all these possible zarrian zervis connections we'll come back to those seemingly agrees with this line of speculation such that the pure thoughts in the Divine mind become an angel why the Divine mind contemplating Calamity
which is also maybe a translation of raah forg de demons specifically the damager demons the mazak of the talud and of course the famous Lilith the liline demons importantly these angels and demons seem to appear on respectively on the right and the left side of the Divine mind whatever right and left mean inside of a mind but that's an important bit of metaphysical geography as we'll see in a bit the left or the side of divine evil and imperity is also understood by the 13th century Rabbi mosha Deon not a small character and all this
as the origins of The Commandments for the biblical sacrifices thus the killing and burning of animals especially is meant to satisfy the malevolent regions of the Divine mind just as acts of loving kindness satisfy the right hand side of the Divine mind of course as my cabala nerds Know da on would play a pivotal though not the only role that's very important development in scholarship and the composition of the safer Zohar the book of Radiance the most important text in the whole history of kabala and unsurprisingly we find just such an idea very obscurely developed
in the Zohar itself there the Bina deard nuta the lamp of Darkness so the first occulted light which is the initial impulse of the Divine will strikes the Divine thought which throws off a shower of Sparks but also somehow purifies the Divine mind of some kind of primordial Refuge this is the imal pilet the dross or trash even of the mind this initial Clash seems to create a higher thought and a lower one or a right and a left one and thus generates evil in some sense as we know it the shower of Sparks as
a Divine resid or Refuge the pet even more esoteric sections of the Zohar which is a thing especially the idra Zuta link this moment with an even more primordial period of the Divine existence there the Divine underwent some kind of symmetry collapse rotating in upon itself creating and destroying worlds and throwing off Sparkles or ziken also throwing off Divine Sparks or nittin in the tremendous process of becoming until the Divine became oriented face to face throwing off a final fiery residue in generating the spote and our Cosmos along with evil admitt ly these passages with
their profound sexual ontology are among the most and obscure and the most mysterious in an already difficult text and frankly they remain so to this day single lines of the Zohar in these sections get pages and pages and pages of mystical commentary in the literature and 30 seconds of explanation ain't going to do it another line of speculation or perhaps lines of speculation is that evil is an expression of an inverse Realm of the Tim emanations of the Divine an inverse spote these evil spote are sometimes in the earliest texts referred to as a tamura
or a counterpart and thus this Spa as an inverse spote or denoted as the urot this might be a kind of pun on Tuma the Hebrew word for impure impurity exactly where thisam torot or world of the torot is varies a lot sometimes it's all said said to be contained in the SPH of ker other have it generated from the backside of gura and other have it kind of as a inverse upward growth from malut regardless such a concept is the prototype for what would later become the Citra Akra however theat morot is also linked
with an equally obscure cabalistic concept that of the 10 Kings of adom who ruled before a king ruled Israel this otherwise innocuous completely passable vers at Genesis 36:31 was long taken as a hint or a remes of a more profound ontological process far more important than just a list of ancient near East Kings in this interpretation the 10 Kings of Adam are the metaphysical ttin to morote the kipot of later cabala who existed before the emanation of the tin fot not only that but they were previous worlds they were previous universes that were created and
destroyed in became a kind of Refuge or pet that's literally the modern Hebrew word for trash one after the other like a stack of evil pancakes and upon which the world of Purity was just barely able to be constructed so our universe is a bit like a City built a top a landfill composed of the trash of all those worlds that came before yeah we're living in the metaphysical equivalent of Staten Island sorry Staten Island in other lines of speculation the tarot are simply the backsides of the spot just as a person in transition from
a state of tahara Purity to a state of impurity Tuma so the SPO can be said to contain both as logical correlatives on the more philosophical side of the spectrum is a rather strange line of speculation in which Aristotelian concepts are actually hypostasized as if they were platonic forms something that would caus both Aristotle and Plato to roll in their graves specifically the Aristotelian concepts of potentiality actuality and privation or stesis all of these are rendered into ontological elements of the primordial Divinity early variants of this thinking such as the 12th century Rabbi Jacob Benin
Ruan have good and evil track to actuality and potentiality specifically stesis themselves such that both both are required for the generation and Corruption of the entire universe of the entire Olam however in the early cabala of Jona in Catalonia potentiality becomes linked with negativity or pure nothingness Aisa or ion such that the first light of let there be light yahi or is born out of a more primordial Darkness emptiness or void which is ontologically a rich privation as strangely contradict dictory as that might first appear and frankly just might be it's nothingness as a something
this Aisa is an Aristotelian stesis a privation rendered metaphysically real a lack made precisely in its lackness of something this Limitless endless nothingness becomes the toou of Genesis and rabi Azrael Jona from which a bohu or void of somehow less negative nothingness in that it is bounded at least is the structure into which light is drawn forth leaving behind the toou as pit as Refuge you can begin to see how these ideas are being merged together the metaphor employed to describe this process is actually a pun taken from Hebrew where the flower or the solet
is taken from the chaff or waste the peset thus out of the primordial chaff comes the wheat and hence the fame cabalistic dictum that the shell precedes the fruit but an even more esoteric Dimension attends this very speculation not only does the pure stesis approvation of the shell ontologically proceed the fruit metaphysical chaff before the wheat but it's precisely the violent evil of the chaff of that toou that protects the wheat or fruit from the evolution of the system itself remember those 10 worlds that have come before thus the evil primordial period was necessary precisely
to protect the seedling sphere wrote during the birth and death of those prior 10 worlds before the 10 emanations of the Divine could unfold as our world again the pet of darkness and evil becoming the foundations for the pet the life-giving wheat of our reality as cabala began to take shape in Spain especially in Castile focus on the origins and nature of evil took an even more frantic and speculative Dimension from absolutely dizzying texts like the Trea on the emanations of the left hand side which I've covered in a previous episode to more specifically philosophical
treatments the cabalists of Castile did more to contemplate evil than I think any kabalists before or since the focus of these texts is often upon the process that we've hinted at earlier whereby Purity is achieved through impurity Mohamad in Aramaic it means something like to emerge from the filth of gold the rubbish of gold in these cases the process is liken to how Cain and Esau gave rise to Abel and Jacob as dross is purged by the silver smith as garbage is purged from a stately house or as waste is excreted from the human being
these forces of primeval Tuma or impurity are forged as necessary parts of the Divine coming to be in the creation of the spot and the cosmos as such but just as the blow of the blacksmith Hammer throws off Sparks of waste to forge metal so too the does the violence of becoming throw off waste pet draw and out of the impurity of all of that emerges the pure world the spote the shells or husks preceding the fruit there is a sense in these texts however that our world the final world after the 10 worlds of
impurity the so-called Kings of adom is just so barely beyond the world of evil impurity so close is our realm to those that sickness foulness death and the source of ritual impurity or Tuma constantly threaten our world in fact the Torah itself was given in part according to the text of this period to appease to appease those forces of impurity as I mentioned earlier the biblical sacrifices appease such forces that otherwise threaten to overwhelm our tiny little hold out of light and life further the negative Commandments the Thou shalt not are directly commanded in order
that we not empower the forces of tum the will become the sitra when one violates those Commandments it's as if one is taking garbage back from the street and just tossing it all over your house or adding dross back to pure gold the purgation of the pet the detrius of coming to be has simply played its role and only serves to infect our realm with ontological Tuma and thus the Commandments are about separating the worlds from the world of Tuma to the world of tahara the world of Purity in our realm all of these lines
of speculation would eventually converge in the satian center at spat The crucial in which cabala as we know it would come to be forged the existence of primeval privation impurity and purgation as an act of divine Perfection via the formation of the spot in the cosmos would come there to be radically systematized in as early as 1545 such systematizing text would emerge but it would be in the works of schlomo alets Joseph Caro and mosha Cordo my hero that would set the stage for the final synthetic development of the breaking of the vessels the kipot
and the Citra Akra in the writings of these three great Titans of cabala all three lines of speculation on the origins and nature of evil come together though they are often discussed purely speculatively though as strongly received traditions in alabat and Caro in fact the mishna made Angelic teacher the Magid yes the mishna is transformed into a kind of disembodied Angelic teacher in this period this known as the mid this mid expounds to alabat and cararo how the shell proceedes the fruit it is a hinted at in scripture as to why the holy tahara and
the impure the Tuma are mixed in our world but distinct in the superal Divine Realms and in the Demonic reaches of the concrete Darkness because they are mixed in our realm the task of human beings is to fully separate to sift through the world of Tuma impurity that infects our world through the engagement with cabalistic theology hence the development of so many cabalistic rituals at this time including the most famous of all the Friday evening kabot Shabbat service developed precisely by alabat and Caro they develop theor as a kind of sifting tool to separate our
worlds from the world of Tuma and the world of tahara so that we become part of the tahara pulling down the purity of the superal Realms but it would be mosha covo the greatest of the systematizes of cabala in my opinion they will bring together all these strings together but not for whatever reason he wouldn't tie them in his vast literary output C would introduce and develop near every line of speculation for the origins of nature evil that we've discussed so far however always with a more philosophical rather than mythological bent well nearly always the
fact that c of thought of as more philosophical than mythological has been overstated for instance in his discussion of the Primeval nothingness the nothingness he links that void to a kind of pure potentiality of thought which is then EXC via the eternality of divine activity Divine activity being thought thinking itself in the classic Aristotelian sense God's primeval knowledge of the spote as potentialities does constitute a sense of a world before being but that world is purged as mental Refuge through the process of emanation of just those potential cerote as actual spote just as the mental
note is forgotten when the task is actually completed this trend is typical of Cordo previously more my ological elements are reinterpreted within a more specifically philosophical framework I also think this is why Lura ultimately won over Cavo I think people often just like grandio myths in their religion as opposed to critical philosophy it's also why I think my monies didn't win however Cordo does by no means abandon the language of mythopoesis especially in the language of the inner sexual polarity in the generation of the spote there the hidden male and female rise and fall within
the occult light of ker mercy and judgment tossing and turning and violent sexual Delight before bursting out in Ecstasy of the sephirotic reality Cavo also retains the concept of the shell preceding the fruit though he places that process much later in the ontological development of reality down in the SPH of Mal down in our realm to explain the existence of evil prior to goodness the Shadee or demons prior to the souls of the righteous on the Shabbat came before Abel the flawed Kings of Israel before the good ones the rule of Edom prior to that
of the Messiah of course all of this vast and wonderful machinery would be brought to bear on the greatest mythological development in all of je Jewish theological and mystical history that of the system of Isaac Laura the AI the arisol it's just cabala basically and with his myth of the breaking of the vessels the kot and the CRA AA from the SP of gura and the theological process of redemption through tikun ulam Lura would Forge kabala as all of us know it rolling all of this into one vast Baroque and sometimes incoherent system though Laura
did by no means Forge his system from nothing it was a result of a complex and amazing history of philosophical and mystical speculation a history well worth studying on its own for all kinds of profound insights and if you want to dive into those texts as much as one can in English basically nothing of this is translated from Hebrew with a few exceptions nearly all of this material remains in Hebrew unfortunately scholem's essays on evil in cabala the on the Myst mystical shape of the godhead still one of the best places to start frankly and
tish's wonderful the doctrine of evil in the shell and lanic kalala has actually finally gotten an expensive English translation it's like 80 bucks if you can find it but it's a magisterial text and it's just sort of ground floor for this kind of information ell's primeval evil in cabala is also just breathtaking scholarship and this episode is profoundly indebted to the work of mosha Adell that's a great book and well worth checking out but don't forget to check out Dr Angela puk's companion video focusing on how all of this business of the kipot has actually
been reimagined and reinvented in some sense to be used in sort of modern contemporary cult practices of the left-and paath in the form of codic magic so that's fascinating stuff in the Contemporary period well worth checking out again head over to Dr puk's Channel give her a subscribe let her know I sent you and thank you thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music]
