This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Joseph Karo was also a practicing kabbalist who kept a mystical diary, the Maggid Mesharim, recording what he described as nightly visitations from a heavenly mentor, a documented devotional practice he sustained across much of his adult life alongside the legal scholarship for which he is far more widely known. The diary's visions are preserved in his own recorded voice rather than reported secondhand by later biographers.
Karo kept that devotional life largely separate from the plain legal voice of his halakhic writing, a documented separation between the systematic, impersonal register of the Shulchan Aruch and the intimate, visionary register of the Maggid Mesharim, produced by the same author across the same span of years without either register appearing inside the other's own text. That the same scholar sustained both without either eclipsing the other is recorded across the surviving corpus of both works.
That the author of Jewish law's most widely accepted code also kept a nightly mystical diary in a wholly different register, sustained across the same years and never merged into the legal text itself, marks Joseph Karo's combined legacy as a documented case where systematic law and personal mysticism were carried side by side rather than resolved into a single voice.