Magia Adamica

[New translation of the Greek:] “the manifest part of the law” and “the concealed part”; [Vaughan’s English:] the law’s hidden and manifest parts. The manifest part, he says, was appointed [New translation of the Greek:] “for the many who lie below”; [Vaughan’s English:] for the many whose thoughts were fixed here below. The hidden part was appointed [New translation of the Greek:] “for the few who are borne upwards”; [Vaughan’s English:] for the few whose minds aspired upwards towards heavenly things. So that the given law might benefit people in both its spiritual and literal parts, the lawgiver established the Sanhedrin, a council of seventy elders upon whom he poured his Spirit, enabling them to discern, as Esdras did, the deep things of the night—in plain terms, the hidden things of his law. From these elders, I believe, Kabbalah originated. They imparted their knowledge orally to their successors, and hence the science was called Kabbalah, meaning reception. This continued while Israel held together. But when its structure began to fall apart and its house’s ruin became desperate, Esdras—an incomparable prophet, notwithstanding the stigma of “Apocrypha”—wrote upon tablets of boxwood the law which God himself had once written on stone tablets. As for its more secret, mysterious part, it was written at the same time in seventy secret books, corresponding to the number of elders