THE
CABALA AND TAROT
Like
the I Ching, the Cabala has come down to us with a aura of mysticism
and magic, and its significance as a tool of rational research
into the nature of reality has almost been lost.
There is a little story that is very helpful in understanding
what the Cabala meant to the ancients. It tells the story of the
birth of the tarots, that, in the form of 22 playing card illustrated
with scenes and personalities, are the Christian iconographic
transcription of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. (The legend
is obviously false because it describes the birth of the Tarots
as an autonomous event when they are descendants of the Cabala,
but it is still very interesting).
This
legend recounts that, when the victorious caliph decided to burn
the library of Alexandria (pronouncing the fatal phrase
"Everything that contradicts the Koran is blasphemy and must
be destroyed, everything that confirms the Koran is useless and
must be destroyed!²)
the wise men of the library met together to discuss the problem
and to try and find some way to save, at least partially, the
enormous store of knowledge contained in the library.
The solution was to hide the cream of all human Knowledge in the
form of a simple game of cards which, passing from hand, would
escape the fury of the caliph. And the story says that, that same
night, a young girl began to use the cards to predict the future
for lovers and merchants in a tavern in the lower part of the
city.
In part, the story of the Cabala had a different evolution than
the story of the I Ching. Even though it had a profound influence
first on Jewish culture and then on Christianity, it did not serve
directly in the development of medical theories, astronomy or
other sciences, or at least developments have not been passed
on to us. Perhaps because the Jewish people did not establish
a great and wealthy empire, perhaps because book burning became
a fad. We have some record of the work of Pitagoras and his symbolic
mathematics probably inspired by the Cabala but even here there
remains very little.
We also know that in the Middle age alchemists tried to work out
a system of codification of substances (chemicals) based on the
numerical scheme of the cabala and the tarots. But, even though
we know that it was from these obscure researches that modern
medicine and chemistry were born, we know very little about the
theories themselves because the Catholic church forced the alchemists
to work clandestinely and so there remain very few written texts,
and even they are written in undecipherable codes.
We
know, finally, that inside their ghettos, the Jews continued to
study and elaborate the theory of the Cabala. But too often the
rabbis were burned together with their books and their codes and
so we are unable to reconstruct an accurate picture of this intellectual
movement.
We have inherited, on the other hand, an enormous amount of material
in which the numerical symbolism of the Cabala is applied to sacred
texts and is used to interpret their deep meanings.
Besides this truly scientific use, the Cabala was also used popularly
as a key to mystic interpretation. The sistematic approach of
cabalistic analysis, the lucidity of the idea of reading every
phenomenon as a mixture of fundamental qualities, was in any case
enormously attractive because of its concreteness and its capacity
for synthesis the whole of western culture.
The only way that we can recount the evolution of the Cabala,
from the point of view of its practical experimentation is to
return to the way it was used by the early Christians. It is well
known that Judaism and Christianity are characterized by a relationship
of opposition because Christianity is the powerful illegitimate
son of Judaism.
In the structure of the Christian religion the central tenet of
the faith is the divine trinity, in clear opposition to the that
the Jews had denied that God had sent his son to earth (they are
waiting for the Messiah, not the son of God.)
