Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 1

Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult

Double image of William Shakespeare (right) and the ten kabbalistic sefirot with accompanying
dramatis personae from The Merchant of Venice, (left) from The Provocative Merchant of Venice
by Daniel Banes, P. 102, Malcolm House Publications, 1975.

The Zohar, the canonic masterpiece of Kabbalah, written by Moses de Leon (1250-
1305) between 1280 and 1286 in the Castilian region of North-Central Spain, in the wake
of the Golden Age of Spain, will, either syncretically or synthetically, along with the
ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia (1240-1292), inform the Renaissance of its
Cabalism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Egyptian Theurgia, Alchemy, and Occultic and
Orphic ethos. The premise of this course, as well as its speculative exuberance, is that the
literary Kabbalah of Moses de Leon coupled with the theurgical Kabbalah of Abraham
Abulafia, transmogrified over 400 years in Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Germany,
Italy and England, reappeared in the dramaturgy of the Shakespearian ethos and poesis.
We will demonstrate, albeit inductively and by means of some agonic somersaults, that
the Adam Kadmon, or primeval, Edenic and/or cosmological man of Abraham Abulafia,
coupled with Moses de Leon’s zoharic protagonist, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, are
transformed or created anew by William Shakespeare with the magus, Prospero, in The
Tempest. As The Tempest was the last of the “late Shakespearian romances” and, one
may argue, his “greatest” and most “self-descriptive” play, written in 1611, much of the
mytho-poetic Cabalism and Hermeticism which surfaced in the earlier dramatis personae
of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice are brought to a crescendo. The
crescendo of the Shakespearian oeuvre in Prospero is a semaphore for the arrival,
influence and future dissemination of the mystico-magico vernacular of Kabbalah
throughout the European continent.
The word Kabbalah with a “K” today means primarily “all” of Kabbalah, an
amalgam of the exigencies which make up the historiography of the mystico-magico and
literary realms of the inner life of the God, including Jewish, Christian, Sufic, Hermetic
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 2

and Neoplatonic traditions. Secondarily, Kabbalah with a “K” refers to Jewish Kabbalah:
the Merkabah, Bereshit, Zoharic, Theurgic and Hasidic traditions. The word Cabala with
a “C” refers to Christian Cabala which begins in the 13th century with the Catalan mystic,
Ramon Null (1232-1316), reaching its peak with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-
1494) and Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522). The word Qabalah with a “Q” refers to a
cultic movement of Hermetic Qabalah which began in the late 19th century with such
groups as The Golden Dawn, and such figures as Madame Blavasky, Aleister Crowley,
Arthur Edward Waite, Israel Regardie, and the poet W.B. Yeats.
Regions of “pre-zoharic” Jewish Kabbalah, Christian Cabala and Arabic/Sufic and
Christian Neoplatonism, emerged in 12th century France in cities such as Lunel,
Narbonne, Posquieres, Toulouse, Marseilles and Arles where the first personalities of
Kabbalah emerged. Their disciples transplanted the Kabbalah to Spain where it took root
in such localities as Burgos, Gerona and Toledo. In France, Provence and Languedoc
were the seats of a developed courtly culture. Intimate contact was established in
Provence between Islamic culture penetrating from Spain to North Africa and the culture
of chivalry of the Christian Middle Ages. During this same period the poetry of the
troubadours reached its peak as well as Christian heretical cults such as the Cathars, the
Bulgarian Bogomils and gnostic Manichaeans. The Spanish-Jewish Astrologer,
Neoplatonic scholar, polymath and poet, Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1140) is alleged to
have carried a copy of The Book of Creation, (Sefer Yetzirah, written in Hebrew in
Palestine sometime between the 4th and 7th centuries and circulated along the Rhine in
Germany before being adapted by the Medieval Spanish-Jewish courtier poet Solomon
ibn Gabirol in the mid-eleventh century) to Provence. In Provence, the first pre-zoharic
kabbalistic personality, Rabbi Isaac the Blind (1160-1235), published the first kabbalistic
exegetical commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah’s cosmological 22-Hebrew letters and 10
Sefirot, which will deeply influence Abraham Abulafia’s theurgic Kabbalah. It was also
Isaac the Blind who would merge the arcana of Merkabah, The Sefer Yetzirah and The
Bahir into a grand mysterium of kabbalistic speculation that would inform Moses de
Leon’s Zohar as well as the future history of Kabbalah.
The Bahir, whose authorship like The Zohar’s Shimon Bar Yohai, was attributed to
the 1st century CE merkabah mystic Rabbi Nehuniah Ben Hakana, was actually
composed in Provence in the late 12th century. Though its author remains anonymous,
there are some intuitive as well as hermeneutical hints that its author possessed an
intimate sense of The Sefer Yetzirah’s symbology and thus fashioned an evocative
Midrash as an act of devekut, or cleaving to the Shi’ur Komah, the mystical shape of the
Godhead. In The Yetzirah devekut was made manifest through the “32 mystical paths”
which were seen as divine potencies as well as alphabetic and numeric units. In The
Bahir these paths, gates or units are reformatted as the ten Sefirot, or the ten attributes of
the Godhead possessing distinctive personality traits within the Godhead. With The
Bahir, the Godhead is bestowed with a literary illumination that extends and personalizes
the “panoramic mystictheological presentation of creation and of divine providence over
the world,” as Joseph Dan writes in the introduction to The Early Kabbalah (The Classic
of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1986, p. 32.) Isaac the Blind’s symbology heralded
in the era of the Sefirot with such canonic force, that no future kabbalistic speculation
would be spared their influence.
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 3

The 13th century is the age of the Castilian and Catalonian kabbalists in Spain. The
Catalonians kabbalists, Rabbi Azriel and Rabbi Ezra, both disciples of Isaac the Blind,
built influential Kabbalah circles in Gerona, under the support of the leader of Spanish
Jewry at that time, the famed Nachmanides. Influenced by the “emanational” theories of
the Neoplatonic philosopher/poet Abraham ibn Ezra and the sefirotic Kabbalah of Isaac
the Blind, the Catalonians dominated the first half the 13th century until a new group of
kabbalists became active in Castile, to the west of Catalonia. The Neoplatonism of
Plotinus (Athens), Porphyry & Iamblichus (Rome) and Proclus (Constantinople) which
the Catalonians employed heuristically through Abraham ibn Ezra to read The Sefer
Yetzirah and to interpret the Kabbalah of Isaac the Blind, had been circulating around
Medieval Europe in Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy and mysticism. It is within
the circles of the Castilian kabbalists that The Zohar of Moses de Leon would emerge and
from which the canon of kabbalistic literature would stem and would be compared, even
if that mystical literature was precursory to The Zohar. Unlike the Catalonian kabbalists
whose sefirotic ethos was characterized by a highly conservative rabbinic attitude, the
Castilians were stirred by the mythical and mystical imagery of The Bahir, developed by
the brothers Rabbi Isaac and Rabbi Jacob ha-Kohen and their disciple Rabbi Moses of
Burgos. This highly literary Kabbalah exemplified a fascination with the demonic side of
divine emanation (Samael & Lilith, the King & Queen of the Demons) and the daemonic
side of divine emanation (cherubim, seraphim, angels, hybrid animals, etc.) and
developed a full-blown mythos in which the forces of evil were presented as near
autonomous powers emanated in act of purgation from the depth of divinity. These forces
exist, according to the Castilian kabbalists, at the “liminal outskirts of the sefirotic realm
and the phenomenal universe, at the borders of chaos and nonbeing. There they wait in
ambush for the Shekhinah and the worlds which she creates and nurtures.” (A Guide to
The Zohar, Arthur Green, Stanford University Press, 2004, P. 24)
Gershom Scholem, the famed scholar and founder of the academic study of
Kabbalah, dubbed the Castilian kabbalist as “the Gnostic Circle.” By Gnostic, Scholem
was referring to a group of Gnostics whom lived between 1000 BCE and about 350 CE,
Simon Magus (Samaria), Marcion (Pontus in Asia Minor), Hermes Trismegistus (Egypt
or Ancient Israel), Valentinus (Rome) and Mani (Babylonia). The “Gnostic Circle” of
Castilian kabbalist developed a mythopoeic Gnosticism based upon an amalgam of the
Valentinian demiurge living in the Pleroma and the Mandaic literature of Persia which
passed through Spain via Sufism and the Dervishes. Ancient Merkabah or Chariot Jewish
mysticism based on Ezekiel’s vision was influenced by the Gnostic concept of “aeons,”
or powers that fill the divine fullness of the Pleroma. These powers were called “Middot”
by the Merkabah mystics. Later they would be transformed into Sefirot, where the forces
of darkness and the forces of light are in dramaturgical play. It is in this climate that The
Zohar came to be written, as Moses de Leon, also a Castilian kabbalists and most likely a
disciple of the Kohen brothers, developed a mythopoeic literature which reached its
greatest height in depicting the realms of evil.
Moses de Leon lived in Guadalajara from 1280 to 1291. By 1281 Moses de Leon
showed parts of The Zohar as the Midrash ha-Ne’elam to one of his colleagues Isaac ben
Solomon Abi Sahula. From 1286 until his death in 1305, Moses de Leon wrote books in
Hebrew under his own name and copied out portions of The Zohar for sale and
circulation. Only portions of The Zohar were distributed and no complete manuscript of
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 4

The Zohar has been found. The Zohar is replete with nonce words, arcane symbolism,
erotic imagery and reads like a commentary on the Torah in the form of mystical novel.
Biblical prototypes, mythical creatures and dreaded angels, patriarchs, matriarchs and
prophets such as Adam, Eve, Lilith, Samael, Abraham, Sarah Isaac, Jacob, Joseph,
Moses, David, Ezekiel, Michael and Gabriel, etc., become correlatives for the Sefirot and
the dramatis personae of the Zohar. It would be the Palestinian kabbalist Isaac of Acre
(d.1340), author of numerous tracts on “sacred names” and a book on the Kabbalah of
Nachmanides, whom had briefly met Moses de Leon in Valladolid, who would continue
to carry parts of the zoharic manuscript around Castilian Spain after Moses de Leon had
died.
The second major trend in the development of Kabbalah in the 13th century and its
emergence into the European continent as Kabbalah with “K,” and Cabala with a “C,”
and as Qabalah with a “Q,” is the life and work of the ecstatic kabbalists Abraham
Abulafia (1240-1292). Abraham Abulafia was born in Saragossa (the province of
Aragon, north-central Spain) in 1240. He lived with his family in Tuleda until his father’s
death in 1260, when he left Spain for Acre in the Galilee to find the mythical Sambation
River. The Mongolian invasion of Syria and the Land of Israel thwarted Abulafia’s
ability to uncover one of the Lost Tribes of Israel (the ha-genuzim—the hidden ones),
among the Mongolian invaders, whom, legend had it, were harboring the secrets of the
Messiah, or had the actual Messiah among them. Between 1270 and 1280, Abulafia
immersed himself in his own Kabbalistic creation, attaining, as he was later to describe,
Unio Mystica (mystical union with God). Abulafia, employing his own imagination and
Gematria (Jewish numerology) was convinced that the age of the eschaton was 1290 and
that the world would either cease to exist or be transformed to a holy place through his
messianic involvement. Abulafia left for Rome from Greece in 1278, to seek an audience
with Pope Nicholas III. He arrived in the summer of 1280, only to find that the Pope had
just died. Papal Bulls (or death sentences) had been declared against any and all heathens
(especially hallucinating ecstatic Jewish ones) if and when they entered Rome and sought
an audience with the Pope Nicholas III. Since the Pope had died, Abulafia was not killed,
but arrested and held by a sect of Franciscan monks, Minorites, for 2-weeks and released
for no apparent reason. He left Rome and headed for the Italian Peninsula. Between 1280
and his death in 1291, Abulafia lived on the Island of Sicily, in Palermo and in Messina.
It is in this last and auspicious decade that Abulafia produced the bulk of his literary
corpus from which his fame is derived. The combination of Abraham Abulafia’s mystical
wanderings and teachings in Italy and Isaac of Acre’s copy of the Zohar which was
brought back to Italy by a group of Kabbalists descended from the Castilian kabbalist
under threat from the Inquisition shaped what would become the “mysterium” of the
Italian Renaissance.
An additional influence in 13th century Kabbalah, was the medieval Christian Cabala
of Ramon Null (1232-1316), the Catalonian philosopher and mystic who reinterpreted the
Sefirot of The Bahir’s Godhead, Keter (Crown), Hokhmah (Wisdom), Binah
(Understanding), Hesed (Love), Gevurah (Power, rigor), Tiferet (Beauty), Nezah
(Endurance), Hod (Splendor) Yesod (Foundation) and Shekhinah (Presence), as the
dignities of God on which his art and metaphysics are based. They are: Bonitos
(Goodness), Magnitudo (Greatness), Eternitas (Eternity), Potestas (Power), Sapienta
(Wisdom), Volunta (Will), Virtus (Virtue), Veritas (Truth) and Gloria (Glory).
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 5

Historically, according to Scholem, Christian Kabbalah began with the Christological

speculations of a number of Jewish converts. Among them Abner of Burgos (d.1348) and
Paul de Heredia wrote messianic pseudepigrapha in the name of Judah ha-Nasi, a 3rd
century Tanna from Ancient Israel. Christian Cabala, influenced by Castilian and
Catalonian Jewish Kabbalists, would impact the Renaissance Neoplatonism and Christian
Cabala of Pico della Mirandola.
The 14th century is the age of zoharic and kabbalistic dissemination in Spain and
Italy. The school of Solomon Adret (d.1310), the Spanish kabbalist from Gerona who
wrote copiously on The Zohar and Nachmanides, and The Zohar began to spread through
Italy through the writings of Menachem Recanati. Along with the ecstatic Kabbalah of
Abraham Abulafia with his Hebrew letter permutation praxis and the Sefirotic literature
of Recanati’s theurgic Kabbalah, the pre-Renaissance Italian Jewish and Christian
mystics began to practice, write and teach Kabbalah as well as to continue to illustriously
comment upon The Zohar. There is, according to the Kabbalah scholar, Moshe Idel, “a
gentile eagerness to learn from the Jews” during the first half of the 14th century.
Translating Hebrew into Latin, and, on occasion, Aramaic into Hebrew into Latin, along
with early efforts to translate Platonic, Neoplatonic and Hermetic writings into Latin,
became the cause-celebre of the 14th century erudite and priestly classes. In 13th century
Spain Kabbalah was cast in terms of myth. This mythical sensibility emphasized the
theosophical and theurgic meaning of The Hebrew Bible. 14th century Italian Kabbalah,
on the other hand, emphasized the unity of the divine emanation of the Godhead, a
concept based on Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and the Abulafian oeuvre. Scholem
identifies the year 1391 as the beginnings of “Marrano” or “Converso” Judaism, or the
“Jew” as a New Christian by conversionary means. In fine, in the last decade of 14th
century, several canonic kabbalistic ideas had taken root in Spain, Italy, Northern Africa,
The Land of Israel and Persia. They are: (1.) The kabbalist as Adam Kadmon, the
primeval Adam and the cosmological Adam, from Abraham Abulafia as a spiritual
praxis. (2.) The kabbalist as a Zoharic Tzaddik, which refers to the 2nd century Galilean
Tanna, Shimon Bar Yohai, the protagonist of The Zohar, written by Moses de Leon. The
Zoharic Tzaddik is primarily a practitioner of the “high art” of literary Kabbalah, which
begins with The Zohar. (3.) The circulation and vast influence of the anonymously
written Ma’arekhet ha-Elohut, (The Order of God), which sought to weaken the
“mystical” and/or potentially heathen qualities in Kabbalah to reach a larger Jewish
audience being, itself weakened, by an emerging Papal genocide known as the
Inquisition. (4.) The kabbalistic work of the Italian-Jewish Menachem Recanati, who
wrote extensive commentaries on The Zohar, and who would be, along with Abraham
Abulafia, who wrote nearly all his work in Italy, the sources for the Christian Cabala
which would influence William Shakespeare by circuitous route 200 years later.
The 15th century is soiled by ever more stringent Papal Bul’s emanating from the
marriage between the Holy Roman Empire and the Inquisition, who had, for all intents
and purposes usurped the authority of local governing bodies across the European
continent. The nefarious and genocidal consequences of the legal confluence of Pope,
King and Inquisitor, lead to the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Myth
avers that the Joseph Caro (1488-1575), the author of the Shulhan Arukh (The Great
Code, codifying rabbinic commentary and still in use), was, with his parents, who
supposedly possessed a few zoharic fragments, among the last Jews who boarded the last
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 6

ship out of Spain in 1492. Caro and his family would live in Constantinople until Caro
moved to Safed in The Land of Israel founding a Yeshiva and becoming a disciple of one
of the most influential kabbalists of the 16th century, if not of history, Isaac Luria (1534-
1572) at the end of his life.
With that said, the 15th century is also the age of the first internationally known
Christian student of Cabala, the Italian Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494). Pico saw
fragments of Moses de Leon’s Zohar in Aramaic in the early 1480’s by virtue of his
encounters with Menachem Recanati who was known in the emerging “mystic” circles of
Italy as possessing both the manuscripts and the knowledge of the secrets of Medieval
Jewish mysticism. Allegedly, as historians say, Pico became so enraptured with
kabbalistic ideas that he succeeded in persuading Pope Sixtus IV to translate whatever
zoharic and medieval kabbalistic corpus he had access to into Latin. No extant
manuscript of this Latin translation exists, so one must surmise that Pico was not entirely
persuasive. Pico adapted kabbalistic ideas from disparate sources and penned his own
Cabalistic Conclusions in 1488. Part Renaissance Neoplatonism, as understood by the
Italian Neoplatonic “Inspirationalist” Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), and part Zohar a la
Recanati, Pico’s opus is an audacious effort to “re-spiritualize” Christianity by employing
the sefirot and the holy letters of the Yahwic Tetragrammaton Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh to
conflate the devout Christian with his messiah. Entry XIX of Pico’s Cabalistic
Conclusions, states “The letters of the name of the evil demon who is the prince of this
world are the same as those of the name of God—Tetragrammaton—and he who knows
how to effect their transposition can extract one from the other.”
The German, Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), a student and disciple of Pico della
Mirandola, whom he had met while on diplomatic visit to Venice, Italy in 1490, was the
first Christian Hebraist of Cabala. Pico influenced Reuchlin in all things Hebraic, urging
him to master Hebrew. In Germany Reuchlin became known as a “miraculum trilingue,”
or a master of Hebrew, Greek & Latin, celebrated as a saint by the Franciscans while
being criticized as a heretic by the Dominicans who nearly burned his books. In addition
to the highly subjective and poetized Cabala of Pico, a Cabala based upon Abulafia’s
letter permuted ecstatic narrative, Reuchlin advanced a Cabala based more significantly
on primary Hebrew sources. These sources, disseminated through the labors of the Italian
kabbalist Menachem Recanati, include Isaac the Blind’s (1200) doctrines of emanation
and metempsychosis and Eleazar of Worm’s (1230) Hebrew letter symbolism. The
amalgam of disparate Jewish Kabbalah schools in Medieval France, Spain and later in
Renaissance Italy, with Pico’s influence, created, for Reuchlin, a Christian Cabala based
upon the idea of eternity and paradise. This concept of paradise, or Pardes, referring to
Eden with its beastiary, is exemplified in Reuchlin’s opus De Arte Cabalistica (1517),
where the concepts of Gematria (numerology), Notarikon (letter combination) and
Themurah (letter substitution). This kabbalistic lexicon is described by Reuchlin as the
“Bereshit of God’s Arithmetic,” the Bereshit written in calligraphic Hebrew with the
letters “Bet,” “Resh,” “Shin,” “Heh” and “Tav proceeded by the Latin. The combination
of Pico/Reuchlin and Neoplatonism influenced Renaissance poetry and philosophy,
exemplified by Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, (1596) where the first two characters Una
and Duessa represent Reuchlin’s idea of “true Christian” as Cabalist in Una and its
normative distortion in Duessa. The last 8 years of Reuchlin’s life were spent cultivating
the imaginative and innovative interpretations of Hebrew scripture exemplified by what
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 7

normative religiosity dubbed “deviations:” apologia for the demonic and daemonic
sublime, apocalyptic Messianism and sexual theurgy. Albeit, inspirational and
controversial, Reuchlin erred in seeking to create a new Christian ideology based on
Jewish Kabbalah, The Zohar and these deviations. The “error” was the concept of
“ideology” in which the fissures of authority, attribution and indeterminacy are neglected
for the sake of ultimate truth or teleology. De Arte Cabalistica, for all its spiritual
reification, along with Reuchlin’s devoted and declared Hebraica, did much to advance
the language and literature of Kabbalah in the European continent. The kabbalist as the
“magus” as well as the “white magician,” invoking an arithmetic primordiality which
could be theurgically invoked through sacred books, and thus exemplified later in
Shakespeare’s Prospero, begins with Reuchlin for whom, as we’ve intimated, the trinity’s
“Holy Spirit” was meaningful only through Jewish Kabbalah.
The 16th century is the age of Christian Cabala and the age Isaac Luria, the greatest
sage of Kabbalah Jewry produced. Extant writings of Isaac Luria are scant. There is the
Sifra de-Senuita (published in Hayim Vital’s Sha’ar Rashbi) which is a Cordoverian
derivative, a few liturgical poems (Hymn to the Shekhinah), and some invocations for
Sabbath meals. None of Isaac Luria’s original Kabbalistic work was composed by him.
He is famed in saying about writing “It is impossible, because all things are connected
with one another. I can hardly open up my mouth to speak without feeling as though the
sea burst its dams and overflowed.”
Hayim Vital chronicled Isaac Luria’s notions. Among the most important is the idea
that sparks of divine light have, in the process of God’s self-disclosure or emanation,
accidentally and disastrously become embedded in all material things. These sparks of
light yearn to be liberated from their imprisoned state and return to their source within the
Godhead, thus restoring the original divine unity. Through the process of Tikkun
(renewal, restoration, mending, repairing) the human being, with adequate devotional
care, can raise the fallen sparks. This devotional piety must begin with one person and
emanate out to include all people in order to return all divine reality to the original state
of primordial unity that preceded the creation of the world.
Isaac Luria was described as a saintly person who had experienced the Holy Spirit
through the esoteric wisdom and transmission of the prophet Elijah. Isaac Luria was
known to have disclosed to his disciples, while on walks in Safed between 1570 and
1572, the gravestones of departed saints and teachers with whose souls Luria was
supposed to have communicated with and communed with. During these extraordinary
walks, Luria is said to have become a diagnostician of the soul, able to determine an
individual’s spiritual maladies and the sins for which he was responsible. He was also
able to provide specific penitential exercises to his students that could affect atonement
and restitution. He was said to be able to tell each of his students the ancestry of that
person’s soul and the transmigration through which it had gone.
Isaac Luria’s charismatic knowledge has been described by the Kabbalah scholar,
Lawrence Fine, as “The art of Metopscopy,” which amounts to being able to determine
the nature of person’s soul by the Hebrew letters which appear on their forehead.
Metopscopy was one of the wide arrays of divinatory or mantic arts, practiced by in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, along with chiromancy and physiognomy. From
Lawrence Fine’s essay: “He (Isaac Luria) knew how to make a future soul appear before
him, as well as the soul of living or deceased person. He could also recognize the letters
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 8

on the forehead as well as the lights that are upon the skin and body of an individual. He
was also skilled at recognizing the lights in the hair, the chirping of birds, and the
language of trees and plants. He understood the speech of inanimate things, stones crying
out from walls, the beam out of the timber. He knew the language of the burning candle
and the flaming coal. He understood the language of angels.”
By using Metopscopy, Isaac Luria was able to access whether a person’s souls was in
Nefesh, Ruah or Neshamah. By using Metopscopy, Isaac Luria was able to access
whether a person’s soul was in Nefesh (Soul), Ruah (Soul’s Spirit) or Neshamah (Spirit).
In Addition to this tripartite spirit/soul distinction, Luria also created schemata for the
four Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton: Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh. Yod refers to Atziluth
(realm of intuition, emanation, spirit and fire.) The first Heh refers to Beriah (realm of
knowing, creation, mind and air.) Vav refers to Yetzirah (realm of feeling, formation,
heart and water. The final Heh refers to Assiyah (realm of doing, function, body and
earth.) The four letters YHWH descend in order of metaphysical acuity from the highest
level Atziluth (intuition) to the lowest level Assiyah (doing). Isaac Luria was again famed
for being able to detect which of these letters, if any, were metaphysically engraved on
the forehead of an initiate. The third part of Luria’s seeing, soul/spirit levels being first,
the tetragrammaton being second, was detecting the letters Alef, Mem and Tav on the
forehead. If the initiate had on his forehead, in addition to everything else that we have
identified, Alef, Mem and Tav, he was permitted to enter Luria’s highly selective
Minyan, which grew in time a bit larger than a Minyan into a coterie. These letters spell
“Truth.” If only the Mem and the Tav we visible, spelling “death,” entry was denied.
According to Luria, all people possessed either A-M-T, or just M-T. This art of
Metopscopy evolved, over time with the help of folklore, into the grand beastiary of the
Golem myth. Suffice it to say that no other theoretician of Kabbalah has been crowned
with the titular achievement of being able to restore a broken world.
Besides his charismatic knowledge, Isaac Luria was convinced that he was Rabbi
Shimon bar Yohai through metempsychosis (transmigration of souls), and that he
transmitted his knowledge on the grounds where Rabbi Shimon lay buried, invented the
most influential triple process of God’s identity invented to date. This process was known
at Zimzum, Shevirah and Tikkun. Zimzum means holding-in-of-the-breath, which Luria
transformed into the idea of limitation. That Ein Sof limited itself through Zimzum. This
we might describe as God hiding Himself or entering into Himself, since He is too
massive an idea to contain. Luria employed The Zohar to imagine that this “hiding” was
either a tehiru (a fundamental place) or an ayin (a place of nothing). With Zimzum, God
contracted himself into the Sefirot Din, rigor, but part of God’s self-withdrawn light
remained behind. Zimzum went into tehiru and into reshimu (God’s self-withdrawn
light). The single letter Yod activated the tetragrammaton YHWH, and creation was
inaugurated. The Creation was of Kelim (vessels) of which the culminating vessel was
the Adam Kadmon. Adam Kadmon is the primordial man or man the way that he should
be in a kind of war of light-against-light. We might say that this war emanates out of the
Mystical Shape of the Godhead in patterns of writing. This emanation produces Shevirah,
the breaking of the vessels, because the light contained within the Kelim was too strong.
Some of the shattered light returned immediately to God while much of it fell down with
the vessels, so as to form the Kelippot (the evil forces of the universe.) The Kelippot has
remnants of the sparks-of-light imprisoned within them that must be released. This
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 9

release, or saving process of restoration, is known as Tikkun. Tikkun, already mentioned

as acts of devotional care, liberates the fallen sparks of God imprisoned in the shards of
the Kelippot. The process of Zimzum to Tikkun works also in reverse, Tikkun to
Zimzum, and is the first identified Kabbalistic system that offers a way to restore the
human as well as restoring, at least, the parts of God that have fallen into the world. This
model of restoration and imprisoned light became the theology that informed all
subsequent Kabbalah up to today. So influential is this mode of Kabbalah that many
employ it without knowing that it is the cognitive gift of the genius of Isaac Luria.
Francesco Giorgi of Venice, a Franciscan monk and Christian Cabalist, authored the
highly influential De Harmonia Mundi first published in 1525. Giorgi’s Cabala was
influenced by the Florentine Neoplatonic movement and the Cabala of Pico, which had
been enriched by a new current of Hebrew studies in Venice. As a Hebrew Scholar,
Giorgi was able to employ the art of Hebrew letter permutation to invoke the name of
God which he had theurgically transformed into the Christian Messiah. Further still,
Giorgi grafted the connection between the Hebrew and Christian systems of angels,
creating links between these multifarious creatures and the planetary spheres. These links
are described as cosmic or sacred geometry and bear musicological harmonies. Musical
harmonies, or the music of the spheres, play a central role in De Harmonia Mundi Totius
Cantica Tria (The Harmony of the World in Three Cantos). The De Harmonia influenced,
according to Dame Francis A. Yates, Dr. John Dee, Edmund Spencer, Christopher
Marlowe, William Shakespeare and John Donne. First circulated in Latin, De Harmonia
was translated into French in 1578 under the auspicious influence of the French Royal
House of Valois. This was part of the strategy, according to Yates, rooted in the occult, of
religious syncreticism that provided the logic and motivation for the provocative
proselytizing visit of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) to England where he met Shakespeare
and Spenser.
De Harmonia is a long religio-philosophical poem whose purpose is to demonstrate
the unity of all fundamental philosophical systems, with emphasis on Cabala and
Neoplatonism to make manifest the Sefirotic system in the advent of the newly
reinterpreted musicological Messiah. Giorgi speaks of angelic hierarchies, emphasizing
their number, measure and weight governing creation and the Temple of Solomon. He
speaks of the Unity from which all things proceed by four ways, arithmetic, geometric,
harmonic and musical. He refers to Gematria, Notarikon and ends with a mystical
disquisition on the body of Christ. For Giorgi the body of Christ is the Adam Kadmon,
and the three Cantos of his De Harmonia refer far more to Keter, Hokhmah and Binah
than to God, Christ and The Holy Ghost. Giorgi, in fact, employed the Sefirotic system to
revitalize the weakening spiritual force of the trinity. Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was
modeled on Giorgi’s divine architecture.
The Merchant of Venice was written in 1598 and first performed in 1600, the year
Hamlet was written and the year Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake, in Venice, his
books used at kindling. The decade of the 1590’s in England was the era of the Jewish
Converso, Rodrigo Lopez (accused of trying to poison Queen Elizabeth and burnt at the
stake) and Marlowe’s Barabbas, in addition to being the era of wide-spread Christian
Cabala among the literati. The difference between Barabbas and Shylock (and Shylock
does lament that his daughter had not eloped with one from the stock of Barabbas) is that
Barabbas is a Jew-baiting cartoon of agit-prop meant to incite emotive response to
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 10

foment antisemitism. Shylock is a dignified, albeit rapturous human being and the most
powerful dramatic voice that Shakespeare had yet created between 1589 and 1596.
Influenced by Giorgi, Shakespeare produced in The Merchant of Venice a music-of-the-
spheres poetry that would be rivaled only by Hamlet and Sir John Falstaff. According to
Yates who reads Daniel Banes’s book The Provocative Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare
read Giorgi’s De Harmonia in French in 1595. Shakespeare’s absorption of Giorgi leads
Banes to surmise that the Venice of his play is a kabbalistic Eden replete with a Tree of
Life and ten Sefirot. Banes names Antonio Hesed, names Shylock Gevurah and Portia
Tiferet.
Albeit provocative, we may surmise that the entire Merchant of Venice is gevuric
and that Shylock is Shakespeare’s own invention of his emerging poetic autobiography.
Portia is certainly beautiful and bestowed with some of Shakespeare’s most powerful
poetry. Antonio is certainly touched with love, albeit the homoerotic kind. Bassanio is
clever enough to pick the lead casket, which Daniel Banes says is symbolic of Judaism.
Respectively, the three caskets represent the three religions: gold=Christianity;
silver=Islam; lead=Judaism. Banes quotes Proverbs 8:10-11, Choose my discipline, and
not silver/Choose understanding, and not fine gold;/For wisdom is better than rubies.
According to Giorgi, lead represents Saturn which represents the religion of the Jews. It
is by choosing the religion of the Jews, the Torah that Bassanio wins his Christian
princess. We may even surmise that the lovely poetry expounded by Lorenzo before his
beloved Jessica is indeed cherubic, but it seems to pale, as does the verse employed by
Portia, before the Kadmonic Shylock, who resonates with a powerful life-creating force.
In fact, Shylock is the Shakespearian giest which propelled Shakespeare to invent Sir
John Falstaff and Hamlet. Without the rapturous kabbalistic emptying out of core force,
Shakespeare could not have moved on to the very limits of literary art with Hamlet.
Shylock inherits the Generations of Adam and cleaves to adamic invention, thus the
pound of flesh, which reminds one of the weight of adamic clay-flesh employed by
Yahweh at the primal scene of invention. Shylock is Shakespeare’s first Kabbalist and his
first reach through the agonic play of word-creating lifeforms. He employed the gevuric
strength of “the Jew,” which he understood through Giorgi and Bruno as well as “the
Jew” of antisemitism, to create his own Kadmonic poet of the dark soul, who must be
content at the end, as Shakespeare must be content as his creation. In 1596, Shakespeare
realized with Shylock, that he (Shakespeare) possessed a talent which would exceed the
limits of the stage. This Kabbalic exceeding was no less than the Adam Kadmon, the poet
of God-names reaching unknown regions of the psyche and soul all for the sake of
invention, artistry and doing God’s work as the ancient writers did.

Sources

Philip Beitchman, Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance, State University of
New
Press, Albany, 1988
Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966
Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, Routledge Classics,
New York, 1979
 Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult, DYH, 11

Frances A. Yates, Majesty and Magic in Shakespeare’s Last Plays, Shambhala, Boulder,
1978
Daniel Banes, The Provocative Merchant of Venice, Malcolm House Publications,
Chicago, 1975
Daniel Banes, Shakespeare, Shylock and Kabbalah, Malcolm House Publications,
Chicago, 1978
David B. Ruderman, Editor, Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and
Baroque Italy, NY University Press, New York, 1992
Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, Schocken Books, New York,
1991
Gershom Scholom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Schocken, New York, 1967
Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998
Daniel C. Matt, The Zohar, Pritzker Edition Volumes 1-3, Stanford Edition, 2004-2005
Harold Bloom, David Rosenberg, The Book of J, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990
Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn, Shakespeare and Magical Thinking, University
of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1994
Arthur Versluis, Shakespeare the Magus, Grail Publications, St. Paul, 2001
Daniel Y. Harris, “The Night Moses de Leon Died,” In Posse Review, Issue #15, on the
Internet, http://www.webdelsol.com/InPosse/harris15.htm

Addendum

Shakespeare, Kabbalah, and the Occult is part of a reader produced by Lehrhaus Judaica
for “Engagement and Learning for Leaders: Jewish Community Federation Sonoma
Study Group,” 2007