Abraham Abulafia: Meditations on the Divine Name

Abraham Abulafia: Meditations on the Divine Name

Abulafia creatively combined Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and the ancient Sefer Yesira into an integrated method of concentrating on the Divine Name that opens the path to fulfilling the soul's deepest spiritual longings. Intense practice of Abulafia's meditative techniques propels the attentive soul into a state of awakened receptivity where the active divine influence can reach down to meet and illuminate the human intellect.

Abulafia was unique amongst Jewish mystics in providing precise instructions for personal spiritual practice. This improved second edition translates meditations from three of Abulafia's major mystical handbooks "that reveal the true knowledge of the Divine Name" as Abulafia puts it. These particular texts achieved a wide underground circulation amongst Jewish mystic elites despite a severe rabbinical ban on Abulafia promulgated by Shlomo ben Adret. For example: -Abulafia's "Life of the World to Come" (extant in more manuscript copies that the Zohar!) is quoted in Yehuda Albotini's "Sulam HaAliya". -Selections from Abulafia's "Light of the Intellect" were printed in Moshe Cordovero's "Pardes Rimonim". -Abulafia's "Book of Desire" is quoted in the fourth, censored part of Chaim Vital's "Shaarei Kedushah". Abulafia's meditations have intrinsic moral prerequisites that guard against their misuse. These techniques can provide short, liminal leaps into revelatory states of consciousness and the adept needs a kind of measured boldness to attempt this.

Abulafia repeatedly emphasizes returning back and integrating these threshold experiences into one's daily life. Abulafia was an eclectic thinker who absorbed and adapted Sufi and even Yogic influences into his mystical toolkit. While the affinities between Abulafia's methods and the Hekhalot rituals are obvious, they also have interesting structural similarities to Graeco-Coptic magical invocations like those found in PGM XIII 646-1077. Translating Abulafia is an impossible task. These gleanings hope to prompt deeper study of Abulafia's oeuvre that can provide a rich breviary of numerically equivalent concepts and rigorous linguistic interpretations to ponder and apply in one's spiritual path.

Abraham Abulafia early life.

Very early in life Abraham Abulafia was taken by his parents to Tudela, Navarre, where his aged father Samuel Abulafia instructed him in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. In 1258 when he was eighteen years old his father died, and two years later Abraham began a life of ceaseless wandering. His first journey in 1260 was to the Land of Israel, where he intended to begin a search for the legendary river Sambation and the lost Ten Tribes. He got no further than Akko, however, because of the desolation and lawlessness in the Holy Land stemming from the chaos following the last Crusades; the war that year between the Mongols and Mamluks forced his return to Europe, via Greece. He had determined to go to Rome, but stopped short in Capua, where during the early 1260s he devoted himself with passionate zeal to the study of philosophy and of the Moreh Nebhukhin (Guide for the Perplexed) of Maimonides, under the tutelage of a philosopher and physician named Hillel — probably the well-known Hillel ben Samuel ben Eliezer of Verona.

Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia

Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (Hebrew: אברהם בן שמואל אבולעפיה‎), the founder of the school of "Prophetic Kabbalah", was born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1240, and is assumed to have died sometime after 1291, following a stay on the small and windswept island of Comino, the smallest of the three inhabited islands that make up the Maltese archipelago.