Kabbalah

Jewish Kabbalah is quite rare, and only available to very learned Jewish men, who have all sorts of social problems in Victorian London. There are also several occultist varieties, which spin out of more or less knowledgeable interpretations of Jewish sources.

Kabbalah is essentially a way of encountering and understanding God via Scripture. The few practical effects are so rare and specialized that they would hardly be Fake-able outside a very peculiar campaign. For example, the famous idea of a Golem^? is so complicated, so exceptional, and so limited in its scope that it would be very difficult to make use of in a campaign, except as a Host creation under truly bizarre circumstances.

The difficulties of using Kabbalah in a campaign are many. If you don’t know much about it, it will be difficult to avoid straying into either a New Age pseudo-Kabbalah that has nothing to do with Judaism^?, or alternatively a kind of knock-off Jewish mystique. Both are exceedingly dangerous, we think, as there are real problems of slipping into old antisemitic^? stereotypes. Unlike most other kinds of magic available in the Victorian age, Jewish Kabbalah is genuinely very old and exceedingly complex, and is more difficult to Fake for that reason. The other problem, of mysticism in general, is discussed below in Dangerous Kinds of Magic.

ChristianKabbalah^? had essentially died out as a form by 1700, and the bits that resurfaced were primarily folded into the revival of RitualMagic.

See Kabbalah^?

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 24 Dec 2004