"Represents the only updated book on comparative mysticism, written by some of the most influential scholars of mysticism in the world". -- Incognita

Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth addresses a series of topics that have been neglected in scholarship. First and foremost, the book looks at the early Romanian background of some of Eliade’s ideas, especially his magical universe, which took on a more mythical nature with his arrival in the West. Other chapters deal with Eliade’s attitude toward Judaism, which is crucial for his phenomenology of religion, and the influences of Kabbalah on his early work. Later chapters address his association with the Romanian extreme right movement known as the Iron Guard and the reverberation of some of the images in the post-war Eliade as well as with the status of Romanian culture in his eyes after World War II. The volume concludes by assessing the impact of Eliade’s personal experiences on the manner in which he presented religion. The book will be useful in classes in the history of religion and the history of Eastern European intellectuals.

Product Description: In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—one of the world’s foremost scholars considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it...read more

Product Description: There emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings, or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of religious beliefs...read more

Product Description: There emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings, or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of religious beliefs...read more

Product Description: This book explores the phenomenon of Saturnism, namely the belief that the planet Saturn, the seventh known planet in ancient astrology, was appointed upon the Jews, who celebrated the Sabbath, the seventh day of the Jewish week. Moshe Idel details how the anonymous, late 14th century Sefer Ha-Peliyah was to have disturbing consequences in the Jewish world three centuries later, interweaving luminaries with the cultural, historical, religious, and philosophical concepts of their day, and demonstrating how cultural agents were inadvertently instrumental in the mid-17th-century mass-movement Sabbateanism that led to the conviction that Sabbatai Tzevi was the Messiah...read more

Product Description: Until now, few primary texts on the Kabbalah have been available in English. Under the auspices of the Bronfman Library of Jewish Classics, this historic publicatin of Gates of Light allows readers to enter the hidden world of the Kabbalah and its profound and beautiful Biblical interpretation...read more

Product Description: El eros y la sexualidad de los reinos humano y divino jugaron un papel fundamental en la literatura cabalistica. este es un hecho evidente ya desde sus inicios que sera obvio en fases posteriores del misticismo judio. Sin embargo, el fundamento de estas discusiones fueron los desarrollos de algunos temas anteriores que habian sido elaborados durante el siglo XIII en las provincias espanolas: primero en Cataluna y despues en Castilla...read more

Product Description: Este libro contiene el primer tratamiento completo de los materiales textuales referidos a la creacion del Golem desde la Antigüedad hasta la epoca moderna y se presentan las variadas maneras en que fue entendido el Golem en los diferentes sistemas misticos...read more

"Moshe Idel increasingly is seen as having achieved the eminence of Gershom Scholem in the study of Jewish mysticism. Ben, his book on the concept of sonship in Kabbalah, is an extraordinary work of scholarship and imaginative surmise. If an intellectual Judaism is to survive, then Idel becomes essential reading, whatever your own spiritual allegiances."-Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University While many aspects of sonship have been analyzed in books on Judaism, this book, Moshe Idel's magnum opus, constitutes the first attempt to address the category of sonship in Jewish mystical literature as a whole. Idel's aim is to point out the many instances where Jewish thinkers resorted to concepts of sonship and their conceptual backgrounds, and thus to show the existence of a wide variety of understandings of hypostatic sons in Judaism. Through this survey, not only can the mystical forms of sonship in Judaism be better understood, but the concept of sonship in religion in general can also be enriched.

Product Description: Esta obra establece una distinción fundamental entre dos grandes corrientes de la cábala o mística judía: una teosófico-teúrgica y otra extática. Mientras la primera se orientó principalmente en formas ritualísticas de religiosidad y en concepciones teocéntricas, la cábala extática, de tipo antropocéntrico, se centró en la experiencia mística del yo interior...read more

Product Description: In this book, the world’s foremost scholar of Kabbalah explores the understanding of erotic love in Jewish mystical thought. Encompassing Jewish mystical literatures from those of late antiquity to works of Polish Hasidism, Moshe Idel highlights the diversity of Kabbalistic views on eros and distinguishes between the major forms of eroticism...read more

Product Description: Ascensions on high took many forms in Jewish mysticism and they permeated most of its history from its inception until Hasidism. The book surveys the various categories, with an emphasis on the architectural images of the ascent, like the resort to images of pillars, lines, and ladders...read more

In this book, one of the world's leading scholars of Jewish thought examines the long tradition of Jewish messianism and mystical experience. Moshe Idel calls upon his profound knowledge of ancient and medieval texts and of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Eastern sources to uncover new perspectives on the nature and development of Jewish messianism. He shows that, contrary to Gershom Scholem's view that mysticism and messianism are incompatible religious tendencies, they are in fact closely related spiritual phenomena. Messianism regularly emerges from mystical experiences, Idel contends. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Preface Introduction Part I. Models in Kabbalah and Hasidism 1. The Weakening of the Lurianic Kabbalah in the Eighteenth Century 2. Models in Jewish Mysticism 3. The Mystico-Magical Model Part II. Drawing Down 4. Mystical and Magical Prayer in Hasidism 5...read more

Idel’s thesis is that the role of the golem concept in Judaism was to confer an exceptional status to the Jewish elite by bestowing it with the capability of supernatural powers deriving from a profound knowledge of the Hebrew language and its magical and mystical values.

Surveys the nature and range of Jewish mysticism, discusses the relation between mystical and historical experience, and assesses the impact of Jewish mysticism on western civilization