Kabbalah Practices / Practical Kabbalah

Abstract

Abstract Kabbalistic trees—ilanot, in Hebrew—are not merely arboreal diagrams illustrating the sefirot and other symbols associated with them. By the fifteenth century, the term ilan (singular) referred to a genre of kabbalistic creativity that fused this schema with a specific medium: an ilan was a diagram of the sefirot inscribed on a parchment sheet or rotulus. Ilanot had a variety of functions, from meditative to mnemonic. The present essay isolates a common element in the various uses of ilanot: they are performative, ritually-used artefacts. The ilan is thus a tool of kabbalistic practice, but is it to be considered part of so-called “Practical Kabbalah”? By the nineteenth century, ilanot were being produced specifically to serve as amulets; these apotropaic rotuli are certainly classifiable as artefacts of Practical Kabbalah. Ilanot not produced as amulets are best regarded as magical—but in the sense that they facilitate opportunities for ritual identification with the divine image that they map, and therefore participation in and manipulation of the divine.