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Mathers's 1887 English rendering of three books of the Zohar, presenting the hidden Jewish doctrine in which a limitless and unknowable God unfolds through ten emanations into the worlds of creation.
Mind Map
Core Message
Mathers presents the Qabalah as the esoteric tradition of Judaism, named from a root meaning to receive, handed down by oral transmission and only later written. He offers it as a key to the obscure passages of scripture rather than as a new system.
Behind everything stands the Ain Soph, the boundless one that cannot be defined. The text describes three veils of negative existence, the Ain, the Ain Soph, and the Ain Soph Aur, out of which the limitless light concentrates a first point rather than proceeding from one.
From the first point flow the ten Sephiroth, the numerical emanations of the Deity, beginning with Kether the Crown and ending in Malkuth the Kingdom. Together they form the Tree of Life and the figure of the Heavenly Man, repeated through four descending worlds.
The Book of Concealed Mystery opens by calling itself the book of the equilibrium of balance. Throughout, opposites are arranged in trinities whose third term equilibrates the two, and worlds of unbalanced force are said to have been created and destroyed before this one.
Summary
The Kabbalah Unveiled is Mathers's 1887 translation of three short, dense texts from the Zohar: the Siphra Dtzenioutha or Book of Concealed Mystery, the Idra Rabba or Greater Holy Assembly, and the Idra Zuta or Lesser Holy Assembly. Because the originals are cryptic, Mathers places his own long introduction in front of them, and most of the page's plain-English account rests on that introduction and on the bracketed commentary he weaves through the text.
His introduction first defines the subject. The Qabalah, he writes, is the esoteric Jewish doctrine, named from a root meaning to receive, because the knowledge was passed down by oral tradition. He sorts the wider literature into headings, the practical, literal, unwritten, and dogmatic Qabalah, and explains the literal techniques of Gematria, Notarikon, and Temura, by which letters are read as numbers and words are permuted, since in Hebrew every word is also a number.
At the center of the doctrine is the Ain Soph, the limitless and unknowable one. Mathers describes three veils of negative existence and says the boundless ocean of light does not proceed from a center but concentrates a center, the first of the ten Sephiroth. These Sephiroth are the numerical emanations of the Deity, running from Kether the Crown down to Malkuth the Kingdom, grouped into three trinities and pictured as the Tree of Life and as the Heavenly Man.
This single pattern is then repeated in a descending scale through four worlds: Atziluth the archetypal world of emanation, Briah the world of creation, Yetzirah the world of formation and angels, and Asiah the world of action and matter. The same introduction explains the partzufim, the divine countenances, in which Kether appears as Macroprosopus the Vast Countenance and the lower Sephiroth gather into Microprosopus the Lesser Countenance, with the King and Queen, Father and Mother, as further faces of the one.
The three translated books themselves are the oldest and most difficult parts of this material. They trace, in highly figurative language, the gradual unfolding of the Deity from negative into positive existence and the creation that comes with it. Read soberly, the work is a historical document of nineteenth-century occultism: a Christian Hermeticist's earnest attempt to open Jewish mystical theology to English readers, governed throughout by the recurring idea that reality is held together by the equilibrium of balanced opposites.
Key Concepts
The Ain Soph is the limitless, unknowable ground of all being, screened by three veils of negative existence. It is not a thing that can be defined, and the manifest world begins only when its boundless light concentrates a first point.
It sets the book's starting assumption: the highest reality is hidden and unspeakable, so everything that follows is an account of how the unmanifest gives rise to the manifest.
The Sephiroth are the ten numerical emanations of the Deity, from Kether the Crown to Malkuth the Kingdom. Mathers calls a Sephira a numerical emanation and arranges the ten as the Tree of Life and the form of the Heavenly Man.
The Sephiroth are the framework of the whole system. Reading the Deity through abstract numbers lets the text connect God, scripture, and creation in one diagram.
Equilibrium is the harmony that results from the analogy of contraries, the central point where opposing forces rest. Each trinity of Sephiroth resolves two opposite natures in a balancing third.
Balance is the book's organizing law. Worlds of unbalanced force are said to have been destroyed, so stability throughout the system depends on opposites held in equilibrium.
Mental Models
The ten Sephiroth are mapped as a tree of emanation, with the first Sephira at the top and the last at the root, grouped into three trinities. Mathers also reads the whole figure as the Heavenly Man.
It gives a single picture for ordering ideas that descend by degrees, from the most abstract source down to the world of action and matter.
The same ten emanations repeat through four worlds in a descending scale of brightness: Atziluth, Briah, Yetzirah, and Asiah, from pure emanation down to the world of matter and shells.
It models reality as one pattern reflected at several levels, so that higher and lower planes can be compared instead of treated as unrelated.
Because Hebrew letters double as numerals, every word carries a numerical value, and words of equal value are read as related. This is the basis of Gematria, the first division of the literal Qabalah.
It shows how the tradition finds hidden links between scriptural words by counting rather than by meaning alone, a method to study before reading the texts.
Selected Quotes
The Qabalah may be defined as being the esoteric Jewish doctrine.
The Book of Concealed Mystery is the book of the equilibrium of balance.
This doctrine of equilibrium and balance is a fundamental qabalistical idea.
Source
HTML text: https://archive.org/download/b24884443/b24884443_djvu.txt
This English translation by S. L. MacGregor Mathers was published in 1887, long before 1929, so it is in the public domain in the United States.
First English edition published 1887 in London by George Redway; Mathers rendered three books of the Zohar into English from Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin Kabbala Denudata, collated with Chaldee and Hebrew text.