Great Kabbalistic Art — Hartmann Schopper, 1564-1569

Those who lived through many centuries and brought forth sentences like the prophets of the Gods are often confused with this tradition. However, this exotic and absurd Invention of Posterity, that Sibyls were brought into the world from ignorance of the origin of Kabbalah, is mocked by everyone. From Cicero, Varro, Augustine, Eusebius, Jerome, Lactantius, Bede, Ammianus Marcellinus, and innumerable others, we have the Homeland, name, and number of the Sibyls, which can in no way be confused with Kabbalah.

Its various definitions

Alsted defines this in his Encyclopedia, book 15, part 4, section 1, saying that for the Hebrews it is a purely Traditional and accepted Consideration of the Secret Text. Leusden in Hebrew Philology, page 610, dissertation 26, calls it an occult Science for investigating the deepest Mysteries of the senses of the Law, which are contained in Hebrew words, letters, points, and accents. Reuchlin in book 1 of The Kabbalistic Art says: Kabbalah is a powerful Symbolic reception of divine revelation for the saving contemplation of God and separate forms. Those who obtain this by Celestial inspiration are called Kabalici Kabbalics after the name. Their disciples we call Kabaleos Kabaleans, and those who try to imitate them, Kabalistas Kabbalists.

The three types of Kabbalah in scripture

Furthermore, we say that a threefold type of Kabbalah is commonly distinguished by Galatino, Sixtus of Siena, Bonfresius, Jevarius, and others.

The first type belongs to the ancient Jews before Christ, containing a mystical and secret exposition of Holy Scripture. It was not Written but handed down by mouth, not to everyone, but to the Elders and Wiser men. Since nothing had been written about it until the time of the Babylonian captivity, it was reduced into seventy Books by Ezra after the return to Palestine, having called together the Wise men who remained in the countryside so that each might bring into the open what he held by memory concerning the Mysteries of the Law. This was done with the most faithful Notaries, according to the number of the seventy Elders, to be communicated only to the wise in the future, so that the Mysteries of the Kabbalah could never perish due to exile, slaughter, or the Dispersion of the People.

The second type of Kabbalah is called practical, through which, from distorted letters and words of Holy Scripture and certain secret enticements, they attempt the cure of Diseases, the Expulsion of Demons, and the performance of other Miracles. This is what that Sorceress in Virgil, book 4 of the Aeneid, is said to have promised:

She promised by her songs to free the minds

Whom she wished; but to send hard cares to others;

To stop the water in rivers, and turn the Stars backward,

And she calls the nightly Spirits: You will see the Earth

Bellow under your feet, and the Ash trees descend from the Mountains.

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Of this Kabbalah, the Rabbis impiously say that Moses performed those wonders in Egypt and in the Desert. By this, Joshua, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Samuel, and Daniel performed miracles for both sides, as Devedius notes in book 1, chapter 10.

The third type of Kabbalah, to which more recent Hebrews have devoted themselves with great effort, plays with the letters, points, accents, and Words of Holy Scripture, and from various permutations, combinations, abbreviations, or from the shape of the letters. Elias Levita in the Tishbi under the letter Koph calls this the science of the saints. And Rabbi Bechav bar Asher, who progressed much in this study and wrote some things obscurely about it, also enjoins in his Readings that if anyone has learned any of these Mysteries, he should not rashly communicate them to others. See Walton in the Polyglot Library, Prolegomenon 8, number 154.

Species of the third type.

There are three species of this third type of Kabbalah: namely Gematria, which seems to have taken its etymology from the Greek word Geometria Geometry (as Elias says in the Tishbi); Notaricon, or as others call it Notariacon, a Latin word taken from "noting"; and Temurah, a plainly Hebrew word meaning exchange or permutation.

Gematria

Gematria signifies the calculation of letters, through which one Word is taken for another when the same number corresponds to it. For all Letters of the Alphabet, according to the Hebrews' rite of counting, are marked with some number, as we hand down in the following table.

A chart of Hebrew letters and their numerical values arranged in four rows, including standard forms and final letters.

The Jews use these five final letters only at the end of words. An example of this first species is that of Zechariah chapter 3 verse 8: "I will bring my servant the Tsemach Branch the rising one." Here Rabbi Kimchi notes that some understand the Messiah by Tsemach. The Kabbalists prove this because among the Names of the Messiah attributed to him by the Talmudists, one is Menachem, that is, Consoler. The letters of both words, Tsemach and Menachem, make the number 138. From this, they infer that by Tsemach, the Messiah is understood.