From: rjb@milton.u.washington.edu (LeGrand Cinq-Mars)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Re: Liber Reguli and Pentagram directions
Date: 7 Apr 92 04:12:22 GMT
Article-I.D.: u.1992Apr7.041222.5670
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

My thanks to Colin Low for tracking down Scholem on Waite and others
from _Major Trends_.  My passage from 30 years later indicates that
his opinion did not sweeten with time.

I can imagine that he actually read Waite; it's not as easy to imagine
that he'd actually read much Crowley.  Scholem seems to have made his
distinction between "genuine" and "humbug" along the lines of cultural
history:  what fit what one might call the "primary cultural matrix"
of the Kabbalah, the Jewish religious and cultural context that gave
the texts and teachers a common background project, was for him
"genuine;" claims made about the Kabbalah that had no root in that
context were "humbug."  By those standards, Levi was arguably the author 
of humbug:  Levi makes claims about that specific context.  By the time
one gets to Crowley, however, that's really not the case. Crowley's
stance toward, and claims about, that material, are neither "genuine"
nor "humbug," because Crowley's claims have almost nothing to do with
Kabbalah as Scholem understood it, or as Scholem was interested in it.

About Mathers, all I find in _Kabbalah_ (the book I quoted earlier),
is embedded in a paragraph almost worth quoting in full.  (Pp 240-1)

   "Even before the _Zohar_ was printed, the French mystic G. Postel
had peraperd a Latin translation of Gen[e]sis of the the Midrash on
Ruth, which is extant in manuscript in the British Museum and in
Munich.  The preface to it was published by F. Secret.  The Christian
mystic Chr. Knorr von Rosenroth also made a Latin translation of
important parts, particularly the _Idrot_ and the _Sifra de-Tzeniutha_,
in his large work _Kabbala Denudata_ (Sulzbach, 1677; Frankfort, 1684),
and most of the quotations from the Zohar or translations of those pieces
which appeared in otger European languages were taken from here, together
with all the mistakes of the origibal translator, e.g., the works of S.
L. Mthers, _The Kabbalah Unveiled_ (1887); Paul Vulliaud, _Traduction
integral du Siphra de-Tzeniutha_ (1930).  A French translation of the three
volumes of the standard editions of the Zohar was prepared by Jean de 
Pauly (the later name of a baptized Jew from Galicia) but it is full of
distortions and adulterations and accompanied by a great many false textual
references, often to books which do not contain them at all or to books 
which have never existed.  The translation was corrected by a Jewish
scholar who knew Talmud and Midrash but did not correct the mistakes in
the field of Kabbalah, which he did not understand.  This translation,
_Sepher ha-Zohar (Le Livre de la Splendeur) Doctrine esoterique de
Israelites traduit . . . par Jean de Pauly_, was magnificently printed
in six volumes in Paris (1906-1911).  An English version of the main
part of the Zohar, with the omission of those sections which seemed
to the trfanslators to be separate works or additions, was _The Zohar_
by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, published in five volumes in
London (1931-34).  The translation is in good style but suffers from 
incomplete or erroneous understanding of many parts of the kabbalistic 
exposition. ...

-- Ah well.  So far scholarship.

--LeGrand