KABBALAH AND FREEMASONRY
By Rabbi Barry Albin


AN INTRODUCTION HISTORY
There are three great streams of religious thought on Earth today.
There may have been more in the past. There could be more in the
future. Those three streams can be denominated: The Western
Tradition, The Eastern Tradition, and the Pagan Tradition. The three
Traditions have their origins in the immediate prehistorical period
from 3,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE. At that time certain streams of thought
were beginning to coalesce into what might be called religious legal
and dogmatic theory. Kabbalists believe that their tradition began in
those remote days.
The Pagan Tradition can best be described as a system of religion
centered on sympathetic magic performed by a priest to influence a
multitude of powers to look favorably upon the priest's
community. At
its highest level, we find the brilliance of Greek and Roman logic
and philosophy and the insightfulness of Aborigine spirituality. We
see the glory of the Mayan and Aztec societies and the deep
connection to the land of the descendants of the Bear Claw Cult in
the Americas. And we see the beauty of Confucianism and ancestor
worship. That tradition is making a comeback in the resurgence of
Confucian and Native American religious organizations and the return
of the Druids.
The Eastern Tradition was founded upon the Gitas of Hinduism which
over a period of time philosophized itself away from the pagan view
of its deities into an almost trinitarian view of a singular Godhead.
The previous gods and goddesses were now seen as aspects of the
singular G-d in one of the three faces that G-d presented to mankind:
the Creator, the Sustainer, and the Destroyer. From this tradition,
modern Hinduism, Buddhism, Dhaoism, and Lamaism have arisen and have
presented the world with a rich view of the Eastern mindset.
The Western Tradition is much more fragmented. It began in Eridu,
Uruk, and Ur of the Chaldees. Centering upon the principle of Light
as an embodied spiritual entity, it developed first into
Zoroastrianism which was the first non-Pagan religion to be formed.
The Western Tradition can be differentiated from the Eastern
Tradition by reflecting the ultimate source of Enlightment in its
religious dogma. In the East, one is enlightened by God through
meditation and internal introspection. In the West, although in
esoteric circles such as ours introspection and meditation are
important, the ultimate source of Light is the Prophet and his words
which are considered Divine. Thus Light comes from on high. The
dualism of Zoroastrianism directly effected Judaism during the
captivity in Babylon and resulted in the movement to standardize the
texts of Judaism, to raise the Wisdom literature and Prophets to
almost equal authority with the Torah, and to begin the study of an
esoteric tradition centered on Light called the Kabbalah. Whatever we
say about the ancientness and divinely inspired character of Judaism
must be seen in focus; ultimately, Judaism after the Captivity is not
Judaism before the Captivity and the archaeology of Israel has
demonstrated that the pre-Captivity religion was both pluralistic and
varied.
The Kabbalah centers in its most primitive form with the importance
of letters, numbers, and the descent of Light through something
called Sephiroth. We know that by the 2nd Century BCE, the current
tradition of Kabbalah was being studied in a community along the
Jordan Rift Valley by a group of people called the Chassidim, or
faithful ones. From their studies arose two Jewish schools of
thought: the Zadoki or Sadducees, which believed that G-d divinely
appointed Priests to lead and that they were the only necessary
intercessors between G-d and man; and Farsi or Pharisees, meaning
Persian, who believed like their Magian Brothers that one could find
enlightenment from meditation on the Words of the Prophet and that
ritual acts were personal acts not corporate acts. Zadokkianism,
because of its belief in the importance of sympathetic magic in the
form of ritual and because its central ritualistic acts of sacrifice
centered in a single Temple, could not stand after the destruction of
the Temple in 70 CE. Farsism, or the Pharisee branch of Judaism,
centered on ritual acts of sympathetic magic, prayer, and personal
contemplation of the Torah, Writings, and Prophets. It needed no
Temple; it had grown up in Babylon where there was no Temple and had
been nurtured throughout by Magian concepts and a secret tradition
among the Elders of the Community. Farsism could survive in a new
world because it centered upon a spiritual inner kingdom and not a
fleshly outer kingdom. The branches of Zadokkianism that supported
Yochanan the Baptist, Yeshua, and Ya'akov had already been
schooled
in survival without a Temple and recentered on the sacrificial acts
within a Righteous Community and they also could survive in this new
world. The Farsi principle of inner conversion, contemplation, ritual
magic, and study was well-known by Saul of Tarsus, an eminent student
of Gamaliel I, one of the greatest sages of Farsism. Saul or Paul, as
he became known in Christian circles, took the Farsi principles of
inner conversion, contemplation, ritual magic, and study to the next
logical step. He declared that there was a Meshiach, or Christ, a
Christ with no connection whatsoever to the earthly Jesus who was the
leader of the Chassidim, and he mythologized him into the bearer of
light to mankind. Then, he declared that inner conversion, or
metanoia, was the point of baptism and that the water immersion was
merely an outward sign of that inner grace. He pushed for a spiritual
circumcision which would require one to break with the world and put
on Christ. He provided the religion he founded with a new sacrifice,
the Eucharistic Meal, and elevated the study of scripture to a high
level asking the student to look underneath the words for deeper
meanings. Then he started bringing openly Kabbalistic principles into
this religion and transforming it into a mystery cult.
In reaction to Pauline influence, another brilliant religionist,
Muhammad of Medina, rejected the mythologizing of Jesus and tried to
return religion for the Gentiles to a more pristine state. But, the
Sufi masters attempted and did change Islam into a more esoteric
religion. Nonetheless, Muhammad emphasized the need for personal
conversion, contemplation, ritual acts, and study, even if he now
limited that study to the Koran. In Christianity, almost in response
to the harsh mind control and external ritual acts of Catholicism,
the Protestant reformers, following in Muhammad's footsteps,
emphasized a personal conversion, contemplation, and study of
scripture. Within this milieu, this need for personal religion, a new
inner circle arose. Composed of men of good will who sought the right
to find G-d in a way compatible with their own inner struggle, they
sought to establish a religious fraternity that would provide them
with a place in which to express their personal views without fear of
the clerics and a place that would provide them with meaningful
ritual acts that would through sympathetic magic bring the Divine
closer to them. In order to make their goals succeed, they practiced
extreme secrecy and established practical methods, handshakes and
modes of recognition, by which they could find persons of like mind
throughout the known world. The concept of Inquisition, after all,
was not unknown in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic circles and
practiced by all three religions. That organization was the Societas
Rosicruciana and it was founded on the ancient principles of Kabbalah
and the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus or Moses.
PHILOSOPHY
To begin the discussion of Kabbalistic philosophy requires that you
understand the cosmology of Kabbalism. In standard Western Tradition
cosmology, G-d created the Earth in six days. That certainly is not
the Kabbalistic cosmology. In this brief introduction, I can not go
into the theory of creation and how it agrees with Scripture in any
great detail, but I will give you an understanding of that cosmology.
Kabbalists call G-d, Ain Sof, or Endless Light. We believe that
before anything else existed there was the Ain Sof. A better
scientific description of Ain Sof might be Endless Plasma, because
Light is Real. Scientists talk about Photons. This is not the Light
we mean in Kabbalah. The body of G-d or the Ain Sof filled all the
space in the Universes. Within the Ain Sof, there are areas of
increased intellectual and physical activity, sort of like the areas
of the Human Brain that are active. Those areas are at least ten in
number. These ten areas receive a larger amount of the light flow
than do the other areas of Ain Sof. This greater light flow causes
these areas to have Presence. Presence is the theological term that
describes when a being comprehends that is separate from another.
Because the Light of the Ain Sof is pure and perfect, the moral value
of the flow is perfect. The Presences became aware that Ain Sof gave
to them eternal perfection, but they, the Presences, could not give
anything back to the Ain Sof to allow them to balance the scales of
giving and taking, the coin of morality. The Presences built up an
imbalance of taking called the Bread of Shame. They appealed to the
Ain Sof to allow them to give as well as take so that the imbalance
would be corrected. Ain Sof consented.
Ain Sof in a single instance of infinitesmally small time decided to
withdraw from a portion of the space in the Universes. By conceiving
that Ain Sof could withdraw, Ain Sof created the World of Emanations
called Atziloth. Then, Ain Sof withdrew from what we will call our
Universe. This created a vacuum.
Then Ain Sof sent a single, intense ray of Light into the center of
the vacuum and created the Throne of G-d. This act created the World
of Creation called Briyah. Because the laws of nature abhore a
vacuum, the intense Light immediately began to expand to fill the
Universe with Plasma Light. Another term for this event is the Big
Bang. Another term which describes Briyah is the Temple Above or the
Grand Lodge Above.
The Light began to go into the lower dimensions. The first of those
dimensions is called Yetzirah or the World of Angels. It is made of a
more diffused light that the World above it. This is the World of
Angels and corresponds to the dimensions which we call the Holy City
or the New Jerusalem. There is a great river of Plasma which flows
around Yetzirah called the River Jordan. Below that river or on the
other side of the Jordan in the most visible of the dimensions is the
World known as Asiyah and its ten foundations are the Ten Sefiroth.
Each of the four worlds has Ten Sephiroth. They are called Kether
(pronounced Kay ter) meaning the Crown, Chochmah ( pronounced Hok
mah) meaning Wisdom, Binah meaning Intelligence, Chesed (pronounced
Ha sed) meaning Mercy, Gevurah meaning Strength or Greatness,
Tifereth (pronounced Tif er et) meaning Beauty, Netzach (pronounced
Netzak) meaning Eternity, Hod meaning Glory, Yesod meaning
Foundation, and Malkuth (pronounced Mal kut) meaning Kingdom. The Ten
Presences are the Ten Sefiroth in the World of Emanations. The Ten
Seraphim are the Ten Sephiroth in the World of the Throne. The Nine
Choirs and the New Jerusalem are the Ten Sephiroth in the World of
the Angels. The Archangels are the Ten Sephiroth in this World, the
World of Making and are headed by the Archangel Metatron. It is
characteristic to describe the Sephiroth as above and below each
other. This is done because human conceptions of flowing require that
something flow from higher to lower. As Light in the form we are
describing does not conform to the Laws of Gravity, there is no need
to conceive of them as flowing from higher to lower. They simply
flow. Attachment One is an attachment of the flow chart of the
Sephirot. What is important for purposes of discussion is the layout
of the Sephirot. The Sephiroth are divided into Three Pillars called
the Side of the Right, the Side of the Center, and the Side of the
Left. It is a basic concept of Kabbalah based upon Ecclesiastes 7:14
that the side of Holiness is composed of the four worlds with their
forty sephiroth. Likewise, the Side of Evil is composed of four
mirror worlds with their forty sephiroth. This World, the Visible
World, has both the side of holiness and the side of evil. The Three
Pillars uphold this World and are represented on Attachment One by
the three vertical paths. In addition to believing that there is a
mirror concept in each side, there is also the belief that there is a
higher concept in each higher world.
The Sephiroth are the vessels of Light that are in the World. As the
Light flows from the World of Emanations, it flows first into the
Kether of the World of the Throne. The Light then flows until it
reaches the vessel or Sephiroth that it is like in the above world
ie., the Light that flows from the Presence of Chochmah, flows first
through the Seraphim of Kether in the World of the Throne and then
into the Seraphim of Chochmah in the World of the Throne. When that
vessel is filled, the Light continues to flow out and through the
other Sephiroth of the Throne until it gets to the Seraphim of
Malkuth in the World of the Throne, then it flows downward again
until it finds its own in the next lower world.
The ultimate problem is how do we receive light in this World, the
Visible World. The Light flows into this World through the Archangel
Metatron. He is the Kether of this World, the Crown, the Adam Kadmon,
or Primeval Adam, the King and High Priest, the first one. All the
World was created by him, for him, and through him. He gives off his
light to the other Archangels. When the Light flows from him to us,
it flows against the blindness of this World. Kabbalists say that we
see visible light in preference to spiritual light. We trust in what
we can sense with our regular senses rather than what our mind and
reality can tell us. We are blinded by our own knowledge from a
greater Truth. We call this blindness " husk of Malkuth " or klifoth
which is the barrier that separates us from the Light. As we study,
contemplate, and change, we become more attuned to the Light that is
descending which we call the Shekinah K'vod and we are changed
into
conduits of Light. Then the Light can come through the klifoth into
these new conduits and bless the World with Light. Our Sephiroth fill
up with Light until we are transformed into anointed or Christ-like
persons called Tzaddikim and we become lanterns for others around us
to see the Truth. There are twenty-two letters and ten vowels in the
Hebrew language. Each letter and vowel has a corresponding path of
Wisdom that leads to the highest World. The Torah is written with
these letters and spoken with these vowels. Each letter in Hebrew has
a numerical value. In Hebrew, the important parts of a word are its
consonants. As each consonant has value, a world has a numerical
value composed of the sum of the values of its constituent letters.
Some words are composed of the same consonants with different vowels.
An example is kadosh. Kadosh is the word for holy in Hebrew. The
consonants of the word kadosh are k-d-sh. The value of the word is
404. There are other words with those same three consonants that are
related in meaning to the word holy. Examples are kaddish, kadash,
and kiddush. The Kaddish is the prayer for the dead. A kadash is a
homosexual. The Kiddush is the prayer of sanctification with which we
begin the Sabbath. All four words have the value 404. However, there
are nine ways to put together these three consonants and a much
larger number of words is possible. All of these words have the value
of 404. It is the belief of Kabbalists that any word that has a value
of 404 could then be said to have holy connotations. The practical
result of this belief can be seen in that the value of the word for
carrot in Hebrew is the same as the value for the word for plenty in
Hebrew. We therefore believe that you can eat carrots on Rosh
Hashanah, our New Year's Day, and thus G-d will think that we are
praying and declaring the need to have plenty in the coming year.
Kabbalists believe that declarations made on Earth will be accepted
in Heaven when they are made in the correct way so they believe that
by eating carrots on Rosh HaShanah, they will assure themselves a
plentiful income in the coming year. This concept explains why the
letters of Scripture are studied not only for their actual meaning
but also for the numerical correlations and related meanings that may
be attached.
There are just ten numerals. However, ever living being has a number.
Certain numbers are more related to one thing than another. The one
represents unity. The two duality. Each of the numbers has a
spiritual meaning and can be studied for that meaning.
The Sephiroth are represented in Attachment One. In that form, they
are called the Tree of Life. They are called the Tree of Life because
each Sephiroth corresponds to some portion of the Body of Adam or
Mankind. Kether corresponds to the Will in Man. Chochmah corresponds
to the Wisdom of Man. Binah to the intelligence of Man. Chesed is the
Right Arm. Gevurah is the Left Arm. Tifereth corresponds to the Heart
and is the seat of Mercy. Netzach is the Right Side of the Body. Hod
is the Left Side of the Body. Yesod is the sexual organs. Malkuth is
the feet of Man and keeps us firmly attached to the Earth. Thus the
Sephiroth of this World, the World of Making, are Archangels, each of
the Sephiroth of Man has an Archangel attached thereto and that
Archangel can influence and strengthen that portion of the body of
Man. By correct use of prayer, contemplation, meditation, and ritual
magic, one can bless another through their Sephiroth. As a result,
Kabbalists have a strong attachment to the Archangels. Likewise, the
Ten Sephiroth of the Side of Evil in the World of Making can be
influenced to curse a Man.
KABBALISTIC INFLUENCE ON FREEMASONRY
With this brief overview of Kabbalah, it is appropriate to look at
the major influences that can be found in Freemasonry traceable
directly to Kabbalah. Masons believe that every Lodge is a
representation of King Solomon's Temple and should be oriented
toward
the East, the place of the rising sun. As the Temple or Grand Lodge
Above is oriented exactly as our Lodges, it is implied that when we
act on Earth we are doing the acts that are being done in the World
of the Throne. 1 Peter 2:5 suggests that we are living stones, built
as an edifice of spirit, into a holy priesthood, offering spiritual
sacrifices acceptable to God through the High Priest Jesus. Paul
echoes that idea in Ephesians 2:20-22 and he adds that we are the
Holy Temple. Those ideas are directly traceable to Farsi beliefs, but
they are reflected even earlier in the Dead Sea Scrolls documents,
The Rule of the Community and The War Between the Sons of Light and
the Sons of Darkness. As this community in the desert appears to have
been the headquarters of the Chassidim, we see that the doctrines of
Freemasonry originated here with there belief that the Community of
Believers was the spiritual Temple which was in preference to the
physical one in Jerusalem. Kabbalistic belief in the four levels of
existence of ideas is fully represented then in this concept of the
orientation of the Lodge and the nature of the two worlds. We speak
in the ritual of the Three Pillars denoted Wisdom, Strength, and
Beauty. As we have already explained, their are three pillars of
Light flow in the standard flowchart of the Sephirot. The Side of the
Left is represented by Gevurah, Strength. The Side of the Right is
best represented by Chochmah, Wisdom and the Side of the Center is
best represented by Tefereth or Beauty. The sides represent the three
flows of Light and thus when they strike Earth, it is not incorrect
to say that they reside in the Holy Bible, which is the Word of G-d,
the ultimate source of Light. In the Lodge, we believe that there is
a flow of that Light directly to the Master in the East and we forbid
the breaking of the line of Light to him. From him, there are flows
of light to the Senior Warden and Junior Warden. Paul again puts this
concept into Christianity when he says in Galations 2:9 that there
were three pillars in the early Church, James the Meshiach, Brother
of Jesus, Peter the Rabbi and John the Prophet. He clearly saw them
as the source of Light to the N'tzarim and Chassidim. The
Kabbalah
says that these Three Pillars uphold the World of Making.
Kabbalah is thought to be a spiritual journey. Masonry says in its
ritual that it is a spiritual journey. We take the Candidate around
the altar on that journey seven times including a stop in the Middle
Chamber of King Solomon's Temple where we learn the meaning of
the
Fifteen Psalms of Ascent. This idea originated also in the Qumran
Community as one of the earliest ideas of Kabbalah; we read in the
Rule of the Community that we all must make a journey from Jerusalem
to Damascus. That journey will change us – in fact it will ready
us
for that last great change from Time to Eternity. Paul called it the
Damascus experience and likened it to coming out of spiritual
blindness into the Light of Truth.
In the Lodge we represent two Pillars Standing. These two Pillars
correspond to the two Pillars freestanding on the Porch of the
Temple. Again, they correspond to the Sides of Right and Left. The
third Pillar is represented by the line of Light that extended from
the Ark of the Covenant to the Altar of Holocausts. In the Lodge, it
is represented by the Line of Light between the Master and the Senior
Warden.
Masonry is said to be a course of hieroglyphical and moral
instruction, taught agreeably to ancient usage by types, emblems, and
allegorical figures. In Kabbalah, we find continually explanations of
the deeper meanings in Holy Torah. We believed long before scientists
discovered it that there was a code in the Torah which would release
ever increasing understanding of the message of the Deity if we could
only understand it. We understood that the Torah's stories were
types, emblems, and allegorical statements that would lead to even
deeper truths. The Kabbalistic conception of hiding the truth
underneath allegory, type, and emblem predates Jesus and can be found
in the earliest documents at Qumran. Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah are
replete with examples of this concept of teaching. I have not
exhausted the many connections that can be found between Kabbalah and
Freemasonry, but I hope that I will spur you on to greater study. The
Zohar made its appearance in Europe in the 13th century, contemporary
with the final days of the Knights Templar. At a time when the Church
was burning Jewish documents, the early fathers of the Protestant
Reformation were studying Zohar. Some of them even considered
themselves to be Christian Kabbalists. The greatest of all Masonic
and non-Jewish Kabbalists was Arthur Edward Waite, the great Masonic
esoteric scholar. We as the Societas Rosicruciana in Civitabus
Foederatis are dedicated to keeping Kabbalistic Thought alive within
Freemasonry and I hope that I have given you a desire to know more.