A note about the term Kabbalistic Tantra or Hebrew Tantra: Marc Gafni
The texts of the tantric system are part of the Hindu Agama texts. Tantra in it’s original meaning is said by some scholars to mean a weaving, web or loom. It encompasses both a dual and non dual tradition with many and varied practices. It is most known in the west for it’s emphasis on the feminine energy of the divine, on sexual energy, and particularly the raising of the sacred sexual energy, through sexual practice of particular forms, as a means of awakening very high kundalini states, states of awareness and blissful integrity.
Hebrew Tantra is a term coined by a cluster of different people in the last thirty years. Myself, Kabbalah scholar Moshe Idel, and Hebrew scholar Raphael Pattai have all used the term independently.
{My course on “Kabbalistic Tantra for Every Day Living” which I recorded at Naropa University is available through Sounds True Audio courses. I think it is a great course:)}
Each person using this term is referring in a different way to the sexual symbolism which lies at the core of the Holy of Hollies – The Secret of the Cherubs.
What I mean by Hebrew tantra is ancient Hebrew wisdom rooted in the esoteric mysteries of Solomon’s Temple. These teachings understood implicitly that the sexual models the erotic. They viewed the sexual act itself as a great sacred mystery which reflects all the deepest truths of the spirit. Most of these teachings are hidden. One of the methods of concealment is the fact that the teachings are scattered across vast amounts of ancient material with no obvious way of tracing the ideas. The second method of concealment is the embedding of the mysteries in the internal symbolism of the Kabbalah, a code which is inaccessible to the unversed.
Yet as in all quests for the mysteries, the first source is never textual; it is rather the soul itself. In the words of Job, which takes on dual meaning in this context, “Through my flesh I vision God”. I was convinced from an early age that religion had lost what I believed must have been its original erotic vitality. I knew that the sexual somehow held the mystery of return to this much larger than sexual eros**. Moreover, I was convinced that *paganism stripped, of its non-ethical practice, had much to offer us in the renewal of the old religion for our post-modern souls.
The first hint at another more profound if esoteric reading of the sources alluding however vaguely to sexuality as an erotic model came when I was 22 studying a text of Tzadok the priest cited in a work by Gedalia Schor -which enigmatically alluded to the secret of the cherubs and cited the key talmudic texts. Eliyahu Dessler in his Michtav MeEliyahu makes scattered veiled references in the same direction. In the academic world Raphael Pattai’s 1947 book on the Temple also contained important hints (name?)*. Also helpful was an excellent short monograph of Saul Liberman’s on the esoteric mystery of the Song of Songs to which I was referred by Daniel Abrams. Similarly helpful was Pattai’s later work Hebrew Goddesses as well as the work that Pattai was greatly influenced by The White Goddess, by Robert Graves.
Two other monographs (Ohad Ezrahi’s “Shnei Keruvim” Heb. 1997, and Moshe Eisen’s “Ye Shall be as Gods, Conceptions of the Yetzer Hara,” 1992) cite and weave together some of the scholarship on the Cherubs, as well as provide some additional insight (Ezrahi) and give extensive primary sources material (Eisen).
The same is true of a number of prior articles by Moshe Idel, most important among them being his article “Sexual Praxis in Kabbalah.”
The limitation of all the important work cited here is that while they note that there is a mystery and that it is connected to sex, eros and the temple, they do not examine the nature of eros and generally do not distinguish between it and sexual vitality. Similarly they do not suggest sex as a model for eros, nor do they unpack specific paths of eros.
To the best of my knowledge this work is the first modern attempt not merely to establish the existence of such an esoteric body of knowledge, but to actually gather and interpret the essence of Hebrew tantra.
The ten paths which I will discuss here are unpacked in a more scholarly manner in a significantly longer more academic work on the subject . In the however I approach the material not in an academic scholarly sense but as part of the chain of tradition, receiving, interpreting and adding to the ancient wisdom.
I have been privileged to teach virtually all of this material, in print and in person to thousands of friends and students over the last decade, all over the world. These blogs are for them in the heart prayer that for all them – their love will be powerful enough to overcome their fear. And may the giver of blessing also be so blessed. Thank You.
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