Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah PDF Download

Author: M. Segol
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113704313X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The Sefer Yetsirah (the Book of Creation ) is a core text of the early kabbalah, yet scholars have struggled to establish even the most basic facts about the work. This project attempts to discover the ways in which diagrams accompanying the text and its commentaries show trends in the development of the kabbalistic tradition as a whole.

Author: M. Segol
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403969743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The Sefer Yetsirah (the Book of Creation ) is a core text of the early kabbalah, yet scholars have struggled to establish even the most basic facts about the work. This project attempts to discover the ways in which diagrams accompanying the text and its commentaries show trends in the development of the kabbalistic tradition as a whole.

Author: Marla Segol
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091053
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
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.

Author: Maurizio Mottolese
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004499008
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Through an unusual investigation of kabbalistic commentaries on prayer and ritual from the viewpoint of cultural semiotics, this book attempts to illuminate the features of a lasting Jewish tradition, showing in particular the relevance of ordering structures in Sephardi Kabbalah.

Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520246195
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Alef, Mem, Tau also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time."

Author: P. Salmesvuori
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137398930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Analyzing the renowned Saint Birgitta of Sweden from the perspectives of power, authority, and gender, this probing study investigates how Birgitta went about establishing her influence during the first ten years of her career as a living saint, in 1340–1349.

Author: Tzahi Weiss
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249909
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In "Sefer Yeṣirah" and Its Contexts, Tzahi Weiss explores anew the contested history of Sefer Yeṣirah, in the process extending our knowledge of Jewish intellectual traditions excluded from rabbinic canon.

Author: J. Ganim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137045094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This collection of essays uncovers a wide array of medieval writings on cosmopolitan ethics and politics, writings generally ignored or glossed over in contemporary discourse. Medieval literary fictions and travel accounts provide us with rich contextualizations of the complexities and contradictions of cosmopolitan thought.

Author: Steven Kepnes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415431
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
A comprehensive review of the entire tradition of Jewish Theology from the Bible to the present from leading world scholars.

Author: Jason Kalman
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201955
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
Despite its general absence from the Jewish liturgical cycle and its limited place in Jewish practice, the Book of Job has permeated Jewish culture over the last 2,000 years. Job has not only had to endure the suffering described in the biblical book, but the efforts of countless commentators, interpreters, and creative rewriters whose explanations more often than not challenged the protagonist's righteousness in order to preserve Divine justice. Beginning with five critical essays on the specific efforts of ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish writers to make sense of the biblical book, this volume concludes with a detailed survey of the place of Job in the Talmud and Midrashic corpus, in medieval biblical commentary, in ethical, mystical, and philosophical tracts, as well as in poetry and creative writing in a wide variety of Jewish languages from around the world from the second to sixteenth centuries.