Quote:
Originally Posted by Barleywine
As I understand it, the Golden Dawn kabbalah was an hermetic adaptation of the original rabbinical version (which was an oral rather than written tradition);
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But the 'original rabbinical version' is nothing of the sort. There's no such thing as "Traditional Kabbalah" that exists as a unified, homogeneous doctrine. To say there's an 'original version' makes it sound like Hermetic Qabalah is just some sort of deviant spin off. But there are many divergent threads within the Rabbinic tradition too. And some of those threads contain stuff which is more modern than the Hermetic tradition.
For example the Hermetic tradition generally uses the older attributions of the Sepher Yetzirah. The Rabbinic tradition uses a version of the Sepher Yetzirah that was 'retrofitted' to the Zohar via committee action over several centuries. And yet just by virtue of being 'Rabbinic' it is considered 'authentic', 'original', 'traditional'.
