The Thirty-Two Keys: A Working System of Contemplative Mysticism

by David Chaim Smith

The Thirty-Two Keys is a system of 32 symbolic images printed as a set of separate contemplation cards and a highly detailed explanatory book. The material offers a structural overview of the path of contemplative mysticism based on the non-emanationist interpretation of the Kabbalah. It provides a rare opportunity to put the material to work through a set of daily exercises configured for a 288-day training period. The system is a true amalgam of sources that span eight centuries, unified as a single vision. The depth of its view and methodology make The Thirty-two Keys a truly powerful tool for study and practice that is unique in the Western Esoteric Tradition.

• Includes a deck of thirty-two 5 x 7 in. cards
• Clothbound hardcover book
• Smyth sewn
• Blocked in red metallic
• French fold dust jacket
• Custom endpapers
• 36 images

Genres: Occult

192 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

David Chaim Smith was born in 1964 in Queens, New York. His early career was as a visual artist throughout the 1980s. In 1990 he began an immersion into the root sources of Alchemy and the Hermetic and Hebrew traditions of the Kabbalah. In 1996 he abandoned visual art for a total dedication to spiritual practice, from which came a unique blend of practical mysticism and creative innovation. This blend coalesced while working with an obscure thirteenth-century text called The Fountain of Wisdom, which he mapped out diagrammatically in notebooks during his ten-year hiatus from visual art. The resulting symbol vocabulary served as the basis for his 2006 return to art, generating the content for several books. He currently lives in the suburbs of New York City with his wife, Rachel.

Reviews

[Anderson Male · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, those who read this one probably need no introduction to the author anymore and thus his system and basic thoughts. Smith walks on well-trodden ground here, but not necessarily to the detriment of the opus, since its nature is complex and difficult to penetrate. I would advice and start cross-referential reading with earlier work myself. The novelty, the important difference in comparision to his other work is the presentation of an actual practice, lasting more than 200 days which concists in essence of repeatet, different contemplations on the 32 depictions which form the skeleton of the book. For the artistically inclined: his art here is more reduced and in line with the simpler diagrams and seals in his earlier work, not so much the complex, bio-organic representations of relations for which he is known, too.