Magic of Qabalah: Visions of the Tree of Life
As evidenced in Religion Forecasts (this issue), Kabbalah books continue to be all the rage, though their quality often does not match their popularity. In Magic of Qabalah: Visions of the Tree of Life, Kala Trobe argues that Judaism's central mystical text is "no longer the province of a single philosophy or religion" and adapts its teachings for magickal. She says that Qabalah is the "cuckoo child... now an independent fledgling" of Jewish Kabbalah. Unfortunately, it is the case here that the adolescent child has failed to understand its venerable parent; Trobe falls too often into the trap of misinterpreting or even negating the text's Jewish symbolism in the interest of universalizing it. Bringing Kabbalah to the hoi polloi is a nice idea, but it is far too complex a mystical system to be tackled in so glib a fashion. (Llewellyn, $14.95 paper 336p ISBN 0-7387-0002-9; June)Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.