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Magic in History
Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy
In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.
- GenresHistory
220 pages, Hardcover
Published September 8, 2021
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 30, 2022
Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein
This book offers restatements of several classical works of Kabbalah, notably Shiur Komah, Sefer Refuot, Sefer Yetzirah, Sefer Bahir, Sefer Chakmoni, and Chovot HaLevavot. These works, in part, offer varied cosmological accounts of the world’s creation and/or how creation can be manipulated by man. The overarching theme that the author focuses on in presenting these works is how multiple divine elements fit together to spawn the world as we know it. She chooses to characterize these sorts of interactions as sexual in nature, because they entail different primeval components (like elements of nature, Sephirot, or letters) fitting together to create new “offspring.”
This book considers the aforementioned works on Jewish metaphysics to be examples of remythologization, presumably after the Bible had previously demythologized the Creation narrative with the story of a Single Creator. In doing so, the author infers a sort of henotheistic theology from these Kabbalistic works, in the sense of a multiplicity of independent gods (or, perhaps more accurately, divine entities) that interact sexually with one another.
In this reviewer’s opinion, henotheism is a heresy that runs counter to Classical Monotheistic theology (with which Judaism is typically identified), and is essentially an advanced form of idolatry. Segol a priori rejects the approach of “most scholars” (page 79) who understand works like Sefer Yetzirah as non-literal. Yet, she does not explain why she refuses to accept these mainstream understandings of the described interaction of multiple divinities, including philosophical (giver vs. receiver modes of One Deity) and linguistic approaches.
As opposed to Segol, this reviewer understands that Sefer Yetzirah actually demythologizes the creation narrative by attributing it to letters rather than to multiple gods. Letters are insentient creations that have no will of their own, as opposed to gods that can be appeased. If one compares Sefer Yetzirah to Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation myth), the former seems much closer to classical monotheism than the latter. The author, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach of understanding Sefer Yetzirah as remythologizing the creation by splitting the Godhead into multiple parts. The final chapter of this book examines contemporary “Jewish” views on sexuality as expressed by Yehuda Berg and Shmuely Boteach, but this reviewer had a hard time mapping how that last chapter really connects to the rest of the book.
This book offers restatements of several classical works of Kabbalah, notably Shiur Komah, Sefer Refuot, Sefer Yetzirah, Sefer Bahir, Sefer Chakmoni, and Chovot HaLevavot. These works, in part, offer varied cosmological accounts of the world’s creation and/or how creation can be manipulated by man. The overarching theme that the author focuses on in presenting these works is how multiple divine elements fit together to spawn the world as we know it. She chooses to characterize these sorts of interactions as sexual in nature, because they entail different primeval components (like elements of nature, Sephirot, or letters) fitting together to create new “offspring.”
This book considers the aforementioned works on Jewish metaphysics to be examples of remythologization, presumably after the Bible had previously demythologized the Creation narrative with the story of a Single Creator. In doing so, the author infers a sort of henotheistic theology from these Kabbalistic works, in the sense of a multiplicity of independent gods (or, perhaps more accurately, divine entities) that interact sexually with one another.
In this reviewer’s opinion, henotheism is a heresy that runs counter to Classical Monotheistic theology (with which Judaism is typically identified), and is essentially an advanced form of idolatry. Segol a priori rejects the approach of “most scholars” (page 79) who understand works like Sefer Yetzirah as non-literal. Yet, she does not explain why she refuses to accept these mainstream understandings of the described interaction of multiple divinities, including philosophical (giver vs. receiver modes of One Deity) and linguistic approaches.
As opposed to Segol, this reviewer understands that Sefer Yetzirah actually demythologizes the creation narrative by attributing it to letters rather than to multiple gods. Letters are insentient creations that have no will of their own, as opposed to gods that can be appeased. If one compares Sefer Yetzirah to Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation myth), the former seems much closer to classical monotheism than the latter. The author, on the other hand, takes the opposite approach of understanding Sefer Yetzirah as remythologizing the creation by splitting the Godhead into multiple parts. The final chapter of this book examines contemporary “Jewish” views on sexuality as expressed by Yehuda Berg and Shmuely Boteach, but this reviewer had a hard time mapping how that last chapter really connects to the rest of the book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review