She’s involved in a cult. It’s devil worship. It’s witchcraft… you know the kind of thing. It’s an accusation that’s been thrown at most unorthodox spiritual teachings for as long as humanity has been able to think. After 12 years of studying the ancient Judaic mysticism known as Kabbalah, I’d got pretty used to it – but with the rash of articles and TV documentaries about The Kabbalah Centre – the high-tech organisation that expounds the wonders of red string and Kabbalah Water and has Madonna as its star pupil – Kabbalah has turned a very different corner.

The Centre is the very visible, evangelical, end of a very broad spectrum of belief and study by people who want to understand the relationship between God, the Universe and humanity. Whether the London Centre deserves the flak it’s getting, I can’t say; I’ve never been there. But I wouldn’t personally place much faith in a bottle of Kabbalah water or a bracelet of red string.

To wear something red is ancient Jewish folklore rather than Kabbalistic teaching – it’s said to protect you from the evil eye. The Kabbalah Centre’s red string is said to have been wrapped around the Jewish Matriarch Rachel’s tomb in Israel which is understandably regarded as sacred. But Kabbalah teaches you to look beyond the form of things. Read the book of Genesis and you’ll discover that Rachel had a hard enough time looking after herself. She had to share her husband with her sister, stole some idols from her father and died in childbirth. If you want a protective Jewish Biblical female icon, it would seem be more logical to look to Deborah from Judges or Queen Esther from Kings.

Not a Religion

Kabbalah is not a religion; it’s a structure on which you can base any faith or which you can use to learn more about yourself and the Universe. It’s not a New Age fad either – the tradition dates back almost 6000 years although it was much revised in the 16th century. It’s an oral teaching which, legend says, came down to us from the days of Adam and Eve via Abraham and Sarah, Moses, David and Jesus. It has been kept safe within the Jewish religion for centuries because it’s a bit like fire – a good servant but a bad master. It’s totally compatible with astrology, tarot and numerology but teaches us to use our free will above all things.

In Kabbalah, the reason why we’re all here is because God is having a baby. Each human soul is one cell in the body of this ‘baby’ which has the name of Adam Kadmon. We are all unique and special and we will all be perfected in the end – though it may take most of us a few thousand lifetimes...

You can be a Kabbalist and a Christian, a Muslim a Jew, a Hindu, a Shinto, Pagan, - whatever.

Cordoveran and Lurianic Kabbalah

I’m what’s known as a Cordoveran or Toledano Tradition Kabbalist. We’re the ‘old fogies’ of Kabbalah who still believe in the principles as laid down thousands of years ago. We believe that God created the world perfect – as it says in Genesis ‘And God saw that it was very good’ – and that evil is caused by the misuse of human free will. In the 16th century, a charismatic young Rabbi called Isaac Luria invented a ‘new’ Kabbalah believing that God made a mistake when he created the world and that evil exists as an external force. This was an incredibly exciting new belief for a nation that had met with so much cruelty and injustice. This is the Kabbalah of the Hasidic Jewish tradition and the Kabbalah Centre.

The old tradition is closer to what people in the time of Jesus of Nazareth would have learnt and taught – and having been born into a Christian family, that’s what I needed to understand for my own healing. It has a fair amount of Neo-Platonism built in but that’s almost contemporaneous and adds a deep logic that stops the system from getting floaty.

There is a Magical Tradition of Kabbalah too – though ‘magic’ is a tricky term to use nowadays because although much of ‘good magic’ would be called ‘spirituality’ in the Kabbalistic world, we’re told that magic itself should be avoided because messing with the fabric of the Universe for our own wishes can rebound seriously no matter how good our intentions. The story of the ‘white witch’ who cast a spell on a football team because she wanted her own team to win, shows just how easily magic can be abused.

The Hermetical Order of the Golden Dawn – probably best known through the work of Dion Fortune - is often called ‘The Magical Tradition’ and is still very popular. That also contained its shadow side in the work of Aleister Crowley.

Does it Work?

I came across Kabbalah after I was widowed at the age of 33. My husband, Henry, was an atheist and the hospital chaplain told me, at Henry’s deathbed, that if he didn’t believe in Jesus, he couldn’t go to heaven.

That woke me up and threw my comfortable ‘armchair’ Christianity out of the window. Henry was a kind man and I simply couldn’t go on believing in a religion that said he would go to hell for being good but I could go to heaven for being bad just because I had the correct (if unpractised) belief system.

What I looked for was something which would support my wish to believe in God but not carry the exclusivity of ‘I am the Way the Truth and the Life; nobody comes to the Father except me’ (John 14:6). I tried most New Age ideas, flirted with Buddhism, Hinduism, Ascension etc. but those words of Jesus still haunted me. What did they really mean? I even took classes in New Testament Greek. It was finally the idea of studying the Jewish mystical tradition which was around in Jesus’ time which produced the key that opened the door for me.

I wasn’t tempted into Kabbalah by invitations to be saved or helped; I wasn’t swayed by promises of instant prosperity and happiness – my Jewish teacher was very suspicious of this formerly-Christian would-be convert and did everything he could to put me off. Even 12 years on and with a best-selling book on Kabbalah to my name, he doesn’t cut me any slack at all.

Real Kabbalah is hard work – it requires a lot of study and discipline. Old-fashioned Kabbalists like me learn the significance of two important structures – The Tree of Life and Jacob’s Ladder – both of which are as complicated as learning a new alphabet and a new language. They are important because nobody wrote things down all those years ago – and without these two structures the tradition would end up as Chinese Whispers. The Tree is an interpretation of the design of the Menorah (seven branched candlestick) in the book of Exodus – and a diagram of the human psyche. The Ladder is the design of the Tabernacle – a kind of travelling Temple which the Hebrews carried with them after the Exodus from Egypt – and a diagram of the structure of the Universe.

I found it really hard work – and sometimes really tedious. I only kept going because I wanted to know. Kabbalah teaches you why difficult things happen and how to deal with them; how to understand the Bible; how to relate to yourself and others; how to understand the concept and reality of karma; how to observe the patterns within humanity and nations and how to step back from the everyday world when necessary.

A Kabbalist is taught to test things out. It may sound good; it may promise much but, in the final analysis the only criterion is ‘does it work?’

My website about Kabbalah is Tree of Sapphires