Daily Theosophy Glossary
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List of abbreviations of book names <
Q
Qa
(More frequently spelled Kabala or Kabbala.) The Hebrew word for what the Jewish theosophical initiates called “the Tradition,” or “the Secret Doctrine” — meaning something which is handed down or passed down from man to man by tradition; from a Hebrew word meaning “to receive” or “to take over.”
Unquestionably the Jewish Qabbalah existed as a traditional system of doctrine long before the present manuscripts of it were written, for these are of comparatively late production and probably date from the European Middle Ages; and one proof of this statement is found in the fact that in the earliest centuries of the Christian era several of the Church Fathers of the new Christian religion used language which could have been taken only from the Hebrew theosophy, that is, the Hebrew Qabbalah. The expressions here are in some cases identic, and the thought is in all cases the same.
The Zohar may be called the original and main book of the Qabbalah.
The basis of the Jewish Qabbalah was the archaic Chaldean secret doctrine which was a system of occult or esoteric philosophy handed down in part by oral, and in part by written, transmission — and mostly by oral reception, wholly so in the case of the deeper mysteries of the Qabbalah. The Jewish Qabbalah, such as it exists today, has been disfigured and distorted by the interpolations and mutilations of many Western occultists, especially by mystics of strong Christian bias. The Qabbalah, therefore, is essentially the theosophy of the Jews, or rather the form which the universal theosophy of the archaic ages took in its transmission through the Jewish mind. See also Sĕfīrāh.
