Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (19 page)

The wealthy man who sought the original Zohar copy may have been disillusioned by this story but other, more fanatic followers were not. “If de Leon indeed wrote these words,” they countered, “then he wrote them aided by the magic power of the Holy Name, and it does not matter into whose mouth he meant to place them—they emanated from the mouth of God, and that is all we need.”

The fanatics won out, based in part on de Leon's attractive writing style that convinced many followers only God could have spoken with such eloquence. Soon the Zohar was being quoted with as much veneration as was the Bible, and even Talmudic scholars began to regard it as a sacred book, turning to it as an authority when dealing with various theological questions.

Success begets success, in both publishing and theology. Soon a later addition to the Zohar appeared. Titled the
Raaya Meheimna
, its unknown author added two more parts of the soul
to the Zohar's description: the
chayyah
, which provides mankind with an awareness of the divine life force; and the
yehidah
, the highest plane of the soul, where union with God becomes attainable.

The Zohar, Talmud and Sephiroth may provide both a source of rich inspiration and a fount of endless speculation for its followers, but how could such arcane viewpoints propel Kabbalah into the realm of secret societies and the whirlwinds of threats and conspiracies they share?

Anti-Semitism played its usual role, aided from time to time by infallible self-fulfilling speculation. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, it was acknowledged in Britain with some distress that Jews held secret religious ceremonies, where elements of Kabbalah were discussed. And it was no doubt true. The British alarmists conveniently forgot, or overlooked the fact, that Edward i had expelled Jews from England in 1290. Those who ventured back, along with their descendants, were forced to hold clandestine services while denying their own existence, meeting the classic prerequisites of a secret society.

Kabbalah, with all of its complexities and mysticism, provided conspiracy proponents with everything needed to brand the movement subversive and dangerous. In her well-researched but outrageously racist
Secret Societies and Subversive Movements
, author Nesta H. Webster proposed two Kabbalahs. The ancient version, i.e., before the appearance of the Zohar was the Good Kabbalah, filled with wisdom handed down over generations by Jewish patriarchs. The modern Kabbalah, including the Zohar and its spin-offs, was simply evil. According to Webster, the Zohar's original wise counsel had been “mingled by the Rabbis with barbaric superstitions, combined with their own imaginings and henceforth marked with their seal,” qualifying it in Webster's judgment as “false, condemnable and condemned by the Holy See, the work of Rabbis who have also falsified and perverted the Talmudic tradition.”

Whenever the opportunity arose, the antics of one individual or another served to personify Kabbalah and its subversive
nature for people who chose to see it in that light. None was better suited for the task in the mid-1700s than Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk, a well-known London eccentric. In addition to promoting an association with Kabbalah, Falk claimed to perform miracles, a talent he drew from the wisdom of Kabbalah. Falk could burn a small candle for weeks, fill his cellar with coal by repeating a special incantation, and exchange an expensive dinner plate with a pawnbroker for cash only to have the plate mysteriously appear in his home before he returned. Or so the stories went. When London's Great Synagogue was threatened by fire, Falk reportedly averted disaster by writing four Hebrew letters on the door, causing the fire to by-pass the building even as it consumed other structures.

Falk appears to have reveled in the sense of mystery and occult practices that enveloped him. He also enjoyed living well—asceticism had no place in Falk's lifestyle. A letter written by a contemporary of Falk to a friend described an encounter with the Kabbalah mystic:

His chamber is lighted up by a silver candlestick on the wall, with a central eight-branched lamp made of pure silver of beaten work. And albeit it contained oil to burn a day and a night, it remained enkindled for three weeks. On one occasion he remained secluded in his room for six weeks without meat or drink. When at the conclusion of this period ten persons were summoned to enter, they found him seated on a sort of throne, his head covered with a golden turban, a golden chain round his neck with a pendent silver star on which sacred names were inscribed. Verily this man stands alone in his generation by reason of his knowledge of holy mysteries. I cannot recount to you all the wonders he accomplishes. I am grateful in that I have been found worthy to be received among those who dwell within the shadow of his wisdom.

Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk and the “proof” of a Kabbalah-Freemason connection.

Falk's wealth and the power of his personality attracted the equally rich and famous to his side, including dukes, princes, diplomats and bankers. When he died, Falk was one of the wealthiest men in London, bequeathing enormous sums of money to charities and synagogues; more than a century later, annual payments from his estate were still being paid to the poor.

All of this might have served as the innocent antics of a colorful character except for his Kabbalah connection and a portrait, widely circulated after his death, in which Falk is posed with a compass and Star of David. With an “Aha!” that must have echoed from London to Lisbon, conspiracy theorists claimed the star was
not
a symbol of Judaism, but two inter-locked triangles, emblematic of Freemasons—a proposal made obvious, they insisted, by the presence of a compass.

The claimed linkage with Freemasons was enough to vault the Kabbalah back onto the secret societies horse, which immediately galloped off in all directions. The first stop was the Sephiroth, where the conspiracy buffs beheld a fascinating assortment of concealed messages.
Tiferet
(Beauty) occupies the central position within the Sephiroth. Later interpretations suggested that the
Tiferet
experience required the individual to pass from human form into a “formless” condition, a process Freudians might call “transcending the ego,” leading to rebirth or resurrection, and eventually metamorphosing into a symbol of Christ. From there it was a small step to associate this with the Holy Grail, supposedly possessed by Templars and later Masons, inspiring fresh connections to new galaxies of secret conspiracies. These revised interpretations, limited only by the instigator's imagination, produced a herd of unrestricted, uninhibited and often unfathomable organizations that treated the
various occult philosophies like a smorgasbord of mystiques waiting to be sampled.

One of these groups was the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
, which employed Kabbalah philosophy as the foundation of an exotic stew combining the Sephiroth with various Greek and Egyptian deities. For added flavor, Hindu and Buddhist theories were added, the potage served on dishes borrowed from the Freemasons and Rosicrucians.

Riding a wave of interest in the occult, the Golden Dawn attracted members of the British elite whose lives needed an injection of mystery regardless of origin or validity. Perhaps the most admired and celebrated of the Golden Dawn members was the poet William Butler Yeats who, we have seen, also plumbed Druidic thought for inspiration. The most reviled and infamous member was undoubtedly Aleister Crowley.

Born in 1875 in a family that had inherited substantial wealth from his grandfather, Crowley became fixated on sex in the midst of strict high-Victorian values, a contradiction that may explain his bizarre life. At age fourteen, he impregnated one of the family housemaids and was tossed from various schools for similar behavior; one school expelled him when it was discovered he had contracted gonorrhea from a prostitute. Still, he was intelligent (and wealthy) enough to be enrolled at Cambridge University, where he spent much of his time composing sexually explicit poetry. On the day he turned twenty-one, having claim to his portion of the family inheritance, Crowley left Cambridge with little regret on either side, and launched a life of sexual excess, narcotics addiction, extensive travel and mystical curiosity. He even found time to write several books.

Joining Golden Dawn exposed Crowley to the Sephiroth. Inspired by the idea of a mechanical means for exploring inner mysteries of the soul, he launched his own organization, the
Astrum Argenium
, or Silver Star, and assumed control of the
Ordo Templi Orientis
(Order of Oriental Templars), or oto. Both employed aspects of Kabbalah in their teachings. Thanks to his over-the-top sexuality (“I rave and I rape and I rip and I rend” is from one of his more prosaic works) and his extensive writings, absorbed with relish by late-Edwardian readers even while being condemned for their amorality, Crowley became a figure of note throughout Europe. He resided for many years in Italy and Egypt where, between orgies and opium parties, he managed to complete several manuscripts. Two of his best-known books,
Diary of a Drug Fiend
and
Magick in Theory and Practice
, make sidelong references to his study of Kabbalah and the Sephiroth. Another publication,
Liber 777
, consists of a set of tables connecting ceremonial magic and religious tenets from both eastern and western religions with 32 numbers, representing the 10 sepherots and the 22 paths within the Sephiroth. His notoriety and his association with Kabbalah, as contrived as it was, strengthened the conviction in some quarters that the Jewish mystical philosophy represented a serious danger to Christian values, and was part of some unarticulated global conspiracy.

The notorious Aleister Crowley as a youth. Between orgies and opium parties, he discovered Kabbalah.

Crowley died penniless in 1947. His personal influence may have waned over the years, but he succeeded in establishing Kabbalah in the minds of many people as a secret organization with connections to the Templars and Freemasons, among others.

Remember the fable of the man who ventured to Israel in search of universal truths and ancient wisdom, returning with hidden secrets of the Kabbalah? His name was Feivel Gruberger. He made his trip to Israel in 1968, not in search of understanding but in search of people to buy insurance policies he was peddling, and to avoid paying support to the wife and eight children he left behind in Brooklyn. To soften any loneliness he might experience in his new land, Gruberger was accompanied by his former office secretary, a divorcee named Karen.

Brooklyn insurance agent Feivel Gruberger morphed into Philip Berg, modern Kabbalah guru.

Whatever opportunities may have arisen to sell insurance in Israel were abandoned when Gruberger encountered Rabbi Yehuda Brandwein, an eminent scholar of Kabbalah. According to widely dispensed lore, Gruberger absorbed all of Rabbi Brandwein's deep knowledge of Kabbalah, exceeding his mentor's insight and understanding of the complex religious philosophy, or so he claimed. Calling Gruberger a quick study is something of an understatement because, when the rabbi died within a year of encountering Gruberger, the former insurance salesman assumed directorship of Brandwein's organization.