/lit/ - Literature

I am - please do before the mods get here.

please share your books OP

>>11352439
kek

im gonna steer clear of the new age Cosmic Consciousness trash and post something a bit higher-level

https://nofaithinthehumanrace.com/777/?drawrandom=1&crowley=0&gd=1&show777=0 (beautiful and interactive Tree, not a great introduction to the Tree as such but a lot of fun to play with)

http://www.erwinhessle.com/writings/scottframe.php (single best introduction I've ever read, nice introduction to Thelemic principles as well)

http://www.organelle.org/tree/treeoflights.htm (kinda idiosyncratic but far more evocative than a million new age sites)

And finally, Crowley's Book of Lies

>>11352449
Also: Colin Low's Introduction to Kabbalah, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, this book (http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Qabalah.pdf)), and Frater Achad's Anatomy of God if you're interested in geometry.

As well as the thelemapedia pages on the individual Sephira just for correspondences: http://www.thelemapedia.org/index.php/Malkuth

As well as: http://www.ifdawn.com/

last one has a bit of that new age tinge to it but the symbolism is dense enough to spare you the worst of it

>>11352463
What if i want to learn about the actual (((stuff))) and not crowleys thelemic version?

>>11352480
http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Qabalah.pdf))

mystical qabalah by dion fortune

primary sources

I'm reading through Alan Moore's Promethea.
I don't know. I'm still not convinced that kabbalah and tarot describe the whole universe (or whatever the claim is). there's lots of big concepts but they still haven't clicked in my mind as a set of things that actually add up to a cohesive totality.

>>11352515
oh man I forgot about Promethea. Great stuff.

it's less about reality conforming to Kabbalah and more Kabbalah conforming to reality. it's not a box to put reality in, it's the box out of which reality is assembled

Kether as the point flowers into form according to immanent logical necessity. First the Point (Kether, 1), then Motion or the Line (Chokhmah, the 2 points that form a line), then Structure/Form (Binah, the 3 sides of the triangle, the simplest shape), then Attraction/Consolidation/Unity (Chesed, the stability of 4), to Movement/Dispersion/Distinction (Geburah, the tension implied by the number 5 as that which escapes the rigidity of the square), then the Harmony of Attraction/Repulsion (Tiferet, the 6 as the unity of 3 and 3), then the individual will (Netzach), reflective thought (Hod), the subconscious and bottle-neck through which all these principles are filtered (Yesod), and finally the consummation of the entire process in concrete actuality (Malkuth)

What about the Tarot?

Don't read Crowley and Fortune. Read Agrippa and Levi.

>>11352551
Right.
Do you see how it starts off talking about geometry, or the topology of the universe, and then it goes off into some very anthropocentric concepts? and then, in my opinion, fails to fully explore either area.

I find the systems proposed in the Hindu tradition to form much more cohesive, holistic groups of concepts.

Also, have you looked into law of one, seven densities, all that stuff?

>>11352624
>Law of One, seven densities

New age tripe. Too soft, too doughy. The source is not love and light and rainbows but pure apophatic negativity

Also the descent into anthropocentric concepts is intentional, and in fact attempting to illustrate how aspects of human being are derivable from universal principles.

>>11352585
Read Jodorowski and the Unknown Friend (Tomberg)

>>11352669
>The source is not love and light and rainbows
oh, so you haven't read it. you should.
(the source is the very neutral idea of infinite possibility)
> aspects of human being are derivable from universal principles.
This is probably why I can't get into kabbalah. I see human beings as only a tiny fraction of the possibilities being explored in this universe. There's nothing universal about our experiences. On the contrary, they are very unique (and that's why they are important).

>>11352755
And yet humans are part of the sane reality as everything else, what the Tree is saying is that the more personal/individual aspects of the Tree are only these principles as they're expressed in the human mode.

>>11352766
sure, And perhaps each life-form in the universe would have their version of the tree and at the end of time we would have the grand unified tree.
it sounds great.
And yet, the other traditions I mentioned manage to adequately frame existence AND to avoid anthropocentrism.
Like I said, I'm not done with Promethea yet. Maybe it'll click for me later.

yall motha fuckas need jesus

>>11352815

Jesus is good, but he doesn't answer a lot of philosophical questions

>>11352794
anthropocentrism has just never been a very compelling refutation

there is no tradition on the planet that doesn't begin with human experience. if there is a metalanguage of being, it can only come about as the negation of the ordinary syntax of daily life.

simple as that

>>11352944
if you agree that
1. the universe is unthinkably vast and it doesn't make sense to assume that we're alone, even as a theist,
2. That other life-forms can be fundamentally very different from us, and not just green people with funny-shaped heads
3. all life forms are here for the same "purpose" (a very anthropocentric word)
then we can conclude that what is true about existence in the universe must be true for human existence, while the converse is not true. Any overview of existence must leave ample wiggle-room to account for all the unimaginable possibilities of being.

that's my anthropocentrism refutation.

>>11353086
but it isn't a refutation because Kabbalah never claims this is the only way to understand the universe, any mystical tradition worth its salt is going to accept the irreducibility of being human and build its negations off that knowledge

a species that orbits a binary system would have a very different conception of duality, for example, while ours is modulated by the sun/moon

>>11352434
i don't know anything about it, but i'd be happy to hear you explain what about it you find interesting, anon. if you don't mind explaining it to some mildly lazy brainlets.

>>11353104
the basic idea is that out of the noumenal nothingness that is the source of being, a point/singularity was first concentrated that contained all being within it en potential, and the logical forms that necessitate it

that is the top of the tree, Kether, the first singularity. out of this singularity emerge negative and positive potencies, the right and left pillars of the Tree: attraction and repulsion, singularity and dispersion, otherness and self-identity, activity and passivity, basically the interplay between Inside and Outside that is constitutive of boundaries and hence cellular membranes and hence life


from that point everything else necessarily follows, filtering down into concrete actuality at the bottom, Malkuth, which is the here-and-now, the room which you occupy and the self-given awareness you have of yourself as yourself. the point is to negate particularity and achieve an equilibrium between the need for the otherness that enriches but also threatens being with its alterity, and the need to consolidate oneself which, also, threatens the being with the inflexibility and inertia of a rigid self-concept

each sphere has geometric, gustatory, olfactory, mythological, philosophical, chromatic, etc. correspondences, pretty much everything finds its place either in a sphere or a path.


the tree appears hierarchical only for visual convenience, it would be better to represent it as a series of concentric circle emanating from a central absence: Ain, the primordial void

No Gershom Scholem mentioned yet? Is he too scholarly and not mystical enough?

>>11353237
I'd actually forgotten about his site, go ahead and post it

>>11353129