Hermetic Kabbalah vs Wicca

S

Spencer Smith

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So I have studied a bit of hermetic Kabbalah in my past. Mostly material that derived from the Golden Dawn. However, Wicca and or other forms of 'witchcraft' seem to be so much more popular than Ceremonial Magick. For me, I am just now getting back into Magickal study and practice and I am struggling with which path to take. I was raised a Christian so to me the Kabbalah feels more at home, thus easier to believe in and follow. However, I really identify with the nature based practices of witchcraft. I don't know what path to take. If you ask the Wiccans they say Cerimonial High Magicians are elitist's, and according to a lot of Cerimonial Magicians Wicca is just wishful thinking. I was wondering if anyone had any insight that could help me with this decision, or any additional info underlining main differences in the two paths?

PS I don't know if this is relevant, but i am only really interested in higher self and self mastery type of magick, not money spells, love spells, etc.
 
Wicca, at least Gardnerian Wicca, being a spin-off of ceremonial magick, I don't really see the either-or thing.

Can you find hermetic principles in wicca? Can you sort nature mysteries into the tree of life? What do you feel is incongruent, that makes you want to take sides rather than embrace both?
 
Can't go too wrong with some Hermetic Qabalah, Hermeticism is a very awesome system condensing neo-Platonic, Gnostic and even Dharmic (sic) ideas into what is very much a universal system (and is still relevant), well assuming you're talking about Hermes Tris..not some of the modern stuff......
Jewish Kabbalah is amazing too (and greater), it's better to go to it's origins though than modern adaptions of it (but I'm not gonna force you), study Judaism and Platonism. There! :)

Skip Wicca, read Aradia, not much else to see there. Wicca is just like Satanism: a bland repackaging of older ideas marketed to certain contemporary audiences looking to make the banks off an ideology and aesthetic. The broader category of "Neo-Paganism" is better in this regard.
 
It rather depends on your sources.

Wicca, for example, was largely re-invented in Britain in the mid 19th-century. It was developed Gerald Gardner who published books on the topic.

I am obliged to admit here and now a rather jaundiced view of what sprang out of the tail end of the golden age of upper-middle-class English dabblers. You really have to have a sense of the English class system in the 19th-mid 20th century to get a sense of free-wheeling amateurs who see their vision of England and Empire crumbling away before their eyes, their own heritage declining into banal obscurity, escaping the drab mundane existence in their delight in all things exotic — Egypt and the Far East, witchcraft, the esoteric, spiritism, the occult, folklore, the past – I cannot help but think it's all a bit sad. They were born to empire, raised to think they were the best people on earth, and were obliged to watch it all drift away ... but mostly those who could afford it indulged their whims and fancies ... there were good guys and there were charlatans ... the usual suspects like Crowley (who's reputation is now under review), or the likes of Robert Graves and W.B. Yeats, Egyptologists like T E Lawrence or H St John Philby (father of the notorious Kim).

You have to see the emergence of Wicca, Theosophy and the Esoteric Schools against the backdrop of times of social change, and realise that the ideas were similarly shaped by their times in which their progenitors lived. Same as the 'New Age' enthusiasms of the post-modernist 60s.

Me? I'd look at Kabbalah but not through the lens of such relatively recent movements, rather try and find something founded in traditional Jewish commentary, in that sense I'd say a kabbalist is to Judaism what a sufi is to Islam, in that both mystical traditions sit within their over-arching founding paradigm. But that's me, I look for roots.

If you're more towards wicca, I'd look at 'deep green' thinking (avoiding a lot of gaia nonsense), and a agrarian folklore that's closest to your genetic heritage.
 
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