Sepher Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, and the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom

William Wynn Westcott was a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and this is his English translation and edition of the Sepher Yetzirah, an ancient Jewish mystical text, published by the Theosophical Publishing Society. As a translation it makes a genuine ancient primary text accessible in English, but Westcott approached and annotated it through his own late Victorian occult and Golden Dawn framework rather than through the lens of traditional rabbinic Kabbalah scholarship, so his notes reflect his own esoteric reading of the text as much as the text's own historical Jewish context. It is best used here for the primary text itself, with any interpretive claim in Westcott's notes understood as one occultist's reading rather than as mainstream Jewish scholarly interpretation of the Sepher Yetzirah.