Among Neopagan Witches, the phrase “the Burning Times” commonly refers to the period in European history when “Witches” were actively pursued, prosecuted, and executed. This period is also sometimes referred to as “the In-quisition” or “the Witch hunts.”
The Inquisition (that is, the Holy Office of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church) was established in 1188 by Pope Lucius III, who had been BURNINGTIMES
Ubaldo Allucingoli of Lucca, Italy. The office was established due to a rise in the number of religious movements the Church administration considered heretical—they feared that there had been a new outbreak of Gnosticism:
The last of the Valentinian Gnostic Churches had been suppressed only a few centuries before, and the Cathars of France and Waldensians of Italy had been suppressed only about a century previously.
The Inquisition came to be administered by a new order of mendicant monks called Dominicans. For about the first 300 years of the Inquisition’s ex-istence, its activities were confined to the detection and suppression of heresy;
relatively few people were executed due to its operations during this period. It was not until Pope Innocent VIII issued a Bull in 1486 that equated “Witch-craft” with heresy that the Inquisition began to increase in scope and fury.
Elsewhere in Europe Catholics and Protestants went to war against one another in the religious wars from 1520 to 1648, and Jews were commonly persecuted. Keep in mind that the Witch hunts did not take place during the Middle Ages—they took place in modern times, after the invention of print-ing and mercantile capitalism, after Columbus’s discovery of the New World, and especially after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. How many Witches perished during these turbulent times? Probably only a tiny fraction of the number of Christians and Jews who died.
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Correctly or incorrectly, contemporary Witches view themselves as the spiritual descendants of the “Witches” executed by the Church during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, the so-called Burning Times. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Art Resource)
It is commonly suggested that some nine million men, women, and chil-dren died in the Witch hunts. There is no historical evidence to support this figure and, in examining records of the Witch trials, scholars have deter-mined that about 40,000 demonstrable executions took place. This figure may be too small, as some Catholic scholars who have had access to unpub-lished documents in the Vatican Library have reported that they found evi-dence for several hundred thousand deaths during the Burning Times.
In modern times, it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the strong religious component in the American Revolution. The overthrow of the Anglican Church, as well as of the English government, was the major goal of most Pa-triots. The Patriots remembered the Witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, where some of the very last executions for the practice of “Witchcraft” in the English-speaking world took place. Supporters of the Bill of Rights argued that one of the purposes of the First Amendment was to ensure that nothing like the Salem Witch trials could ever happen again.
Further Reading
Lea, Henry Charles. A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. 3 vols. New York:
Harper and Bros., 1888. On the Cathars, see vol. I, chapters 3 and 4, especially pp. 91–107.
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. “Recent Witch Hunting Research, or Where Do We Go from Here?” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, LXII, 1968, 373–420. Lists 509 publications, almost all published since 1940, some of which are relevant to the Gardnerian Craft.
Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York:
Crown, 1959. Lists virtually everything published about any kind of Witchcraft up to 1958.
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Cabala
The Cabala (also Qabalah, Kabala) is a system of symbols, commonly known as the Tree of Life (in Hebrew, etz chaim), that maps out the relative positions between humankind and divine forces of creation. Like the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, the Cabala is a systems theory that charts the changes and interrelationships between Heaven, Earth, and humans. Cabala is also a way of reinterpreting myths and texts (usually the Old Testament of the Bible) based on these symbols. Finally, Cabala includes mystical techniques that allow the initiate to explore pathways between divine forces. The key-stone of many systems of ceremonial magic, Cabalistic notions can be found in some Neopagan traditions.
God, in the Cabala, is known as ain soph, “without end,” or simply, ayin, meaning “not” or “none”—one cannot know anything of God for he pos-sesses no qualities. According to the Cabala, only through his different as-pects, or emanations (the Ten Sephiroth, or emanations, that form the Tree of Life), can one know of God. In other words, one can ascend through vari-ous layers, spheres, or worlds, through meditations or incantations, to come face-to-face with the Divine.
Although Cabala is often used today to mean any generic mix of oc-cultism, theosophy, and numerology, it is, in fact, a specific body of Jewish doctrine. The word Cabala derives from the Hebrew root qbl, meaning “to re-ceive.” Cabala is the received aspect of Jewish tradition, which for many cen-turies was never written down but was transmitted orally.
According to legend, the Cabala was taught by God to the angels. Cabala was then transmitted from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses, who passed it on to 70 elders and coded it into the first four books of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). Deuteronomy, for some reason, is “Ca-bala-less.” Cabala probably has its origin in the Jewish mystical tradition of Merkabah, called “throne mysticism” because it involved meditation upon images of God on his throne. Merkabah was an esoteric practice of rabbis in Babylon from the fourth to the tenth centuries.
The most famous book of the Cabala is the Zohar, or the Book of Splen-dor. Moses de Leon claims to have discovered this work, which was originally written in the second century A.D. The Zohar contains cryptic verses that
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serve mystical commentaries on the Pentateuch. By the middle of the thir-teenth century, Cabala included practical techniques for reaching ecstasy, such as breathing meditation or recitation of the names of God.
The first center of Cabala was the Spanish region of Castile where de Leon wrote the Zohar (de Leon claimed discovery but scholars assert that he actually authored it). After Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, cities in Pales-tine became Cabalistic centers: first Jerusalem, followed by the Galilean mountain town of Safed (Tzfat). It was in the heady air of sixteenth-century Safed that Isaac Luria, the mystical saint and premier Cabalist of his time, de-veloped a new theosophy.
In the beginning of time, according to Lurianic Cabala, God was every-where. To allow for the existence of the cosmos, God withdrew into himself.
The central act of creation is thus a withdrawal (tsimtsun in Hebrew). God then created the world from a series of ten emanations (sephiroth in Hebrew).
These emanations, or rays, form the Tree of Life (etz chaim)—an upside-down tree whose roots are in the Godhead, descending into the infinite multitude of branches and twigs that is our world.
According to Luria, after God retracted his being, the divine essence was contained in vessels. But these vessels could not contain the Godhead and broke, spilling divine sparks into the universe, which became embedded in matter. All of creation, therefore, contains divinity. The broken vessels repre-sent the fractured, incomplete nature of reality. The central project of the Cabalist, thus, is to repair the broken vessels, or “heal the world” (in Hebrew, tikkun olam), thereby restoring the Godhead. By this philosophy, God needs humankind as much as humankind needs God.
In Renaissance Europe, Cabala became the realm of alchemists and magi-cians. They used combinations of Cabalistic numbers and divine names in es-oteric rituals. The famous Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463–
1494) believed Cabala to be the original divine revelation, once lost and now recovered. In the late fifteenth century, Cabala was harmonized with Chris-tian doctrine, most notably by della Mirandola’s follower, Johannes Reuchlin, and by Wittenberg associates of Martin Luther. They believed the true Ca-bala revealed the nature of Christ.
Cabala powerfully affected modern magic. Most members of the late-nineteenth-century occult Order of the Golden Dawn, including Aleister Crowley, were Cabalists. Dion Fortune (1891–1946), British occult author and another Golden Dawn member, wrote The Mystical Qabalah, one of the most lucid introductions to the subject.
In the meantime, after falling out of favor with the rational Judaism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Cabala has undergone a revival in the twentieth century. Some modern Jewish scholars have historicized the Cabala, emphasizing one strand of the development over another (the practi-cal versus the idealist, for example) or finding Christian, neo-Platonic, and even Sufi (Muslim mysticism) influences in the Cabala. Others have endeav-ored to popularize Cabala for Jewish laypeople, who have found in this an-cient system a way to explore mysticism while staying true to their own reli-CABALA
gious heritage. Today, Cabala has been almost fully integrated with New Age and Pagan spiritualities.
See Also: Abramelin; Binah; Chesed; Chokhmah; Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Hod; Kether; Malkuth; Netzach; Tiferet; Yesod
Further Reading
Fortune, Dion. The Mystical Qabalah. York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1994 [1935].
Matt, Daniel C. The Essential Cabala: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1995.
———, ed. and trans. Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment. New York: Paulist Press, 1983.
Myers, Stuart. Between the Worlds: Witchcraft and the Tree of Life—A Program of Spiritual Development. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1995.