Abraham Abulafia

Abulafia divided Kabbalah in two and put himself firmly on one side of the line. The Kabbalah of the sefirot, which everyone else was doing, he regarded as the lower path: a way of contemplating the structure of the divine world. The higher path was what he called the Kabbalah of names, and its aim was not understanding but prophecy, now, in the person doing it.

The method is technical and physical. The practitioner takes the letters of a divine name and permutes them systematically, in every possible order, chanting them aloud, coordinating each with a controlled breath and a specific movement of the head that traces the vowel. The mind is deliberately emptied of ordinary content by the sheer combinatorial load, and what he describes as the seals on the soul begin to loosen. He compares the effect to untying knots, and warns repeatedly about attempting it without preparation, because he had seen what happened to people who did.

The end state he describes is a union in which the knower, the known and the act of knowing become one, and the practitioner may hear a voice or see a human figure who turns out to be himself. He is candid that this is dangerous and that the tradition would rather it were not written down. He wrote it down anyway, in a very large number of manuals, which is the reason the technique survived.

In 1280 Abulafia went to Rome intending to obtain an audience with Pope Nicholas III and speak to him on behalf of the Jews. What exactly he meant to say is not certain and his own accounts are elliptical. The pope, informed that he was coming, is reported to have given orders that he be seized and burned on arrival. Abulafia went anyway. The pope died suddenly the night before he reached Soriano, and after a short detention he was released.

That is the pattern of his life: enormous confidence, prophetic and increasingly messianic claims about himself, and a talent for provoking authority. He wandered constantly, through Greece, Italy, Spain and Sicily, gathering students in each place, and in Sicily his claims drew the intervention of Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona, the leading legal authority of the Spanish Jewish world, who denounced him in circular letters and put his teaching under ban. Abulafia's reply is one of the more spirited documents in medieval Jewish polemic and did not help him.

He disappears from the record around 1291. The ban kept his name out of respectable citation for centuries, but the manuscripts circulated regardless: the Safed Kabbalists read him, later Hasidic writing carries his techniques without the attribution, and the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance took him up with enthusiasm. Modern scholarship has restored him to the centre of the story, as the representative of a Kabbalah that is about experience rather than about theosophy.