Collection of Treatises on the Occult Sciences

everything that I shall have told you; but do not do according to their words.

Since then, there were seventy principal books of this Kabbalah; in the time of Ezra, nothing had been written of this doctrine, but it had only been taught by tradition, from which the name Kabbalah is derived. But since the Babylonian captivity, they were found again by Cyrus; under Zerubbabel, the Temple was recommenced and finished by the Synagogue; then the Written Law was recovered and corrected in the Old Testament, although the secrets still came from God, which until that time had not been written and were lost through the captivity of the Jews; and they were unable to teach this doctrine in an orderly and successive manner; and when one reflected upon it, one might believe that the secrets had perished in their first divisions, had they not been