Apologies for any vagueness here, but I studied the Kabbalah, also known as the Qabbala, in some depth, but it was 30 years ago. The Kabbalah is not a book, per se, but is a system of ancient Jewish mysticism that, its devotees say, is the key to revealing the "hidden truth" of the Torah, that is, the Jewish Bible, or what Christians know as the Old Testament. As a system of oral teaching and personal study it does not have a precise date of origin; it clearly had arisen by at least the second century A.D., and at least some of the teachings clearly had their roots in much older Hebrew scholarship and mysticism. There is a book called the Zohar which is regarded by conventional Jewish thought as apocryphal, that is, of dubious origins, and it is not given the canonical status of the Torah or even the Talmud, the book of rabbinical interpretations of the Torah to practical matters. Kabbalistic thought occupies a portion of the Zohar.
Occultists and mystics have been studying the Kabbalah for many centuries, and many of us were there long before Madonna. As I noted above, I delved most deeply into it about 30 years ago. The Kabbalah teaches a complex organization of the "Tree of Life" into a system of Sephiroth, stations of wisdom or intelligence, and a complex system of numerology is also associated with it. Some also posit a Kabbalistic astrology. The basic philosophy of the Kabbalah is somewhat similar to that of Gnosticism, in its emphasis on esoteric knowledge underlying the sacred texts, hidden wisdom lurking beneath the surface of events, and its view of the perfection of the light spirit of God being cloaked in the darkness of ordinary matter.
More information can be found by searching through those sections of the library in which one finds books on the occult and parapsychology, although one must be aware that some of the occultists who wrote expositions on the Kabbalah may have come by their understandings by dubious and/or idiosyncratic means, and may have had other agendas as well.
In Unity,
j.j.salt
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