Renaissance magic

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth

Compiler of Kabbala Denudata, the Latin anthology through which every later Western occultist met Kabbalah — including, two centuries on, the Golden Dawn.

Dates: 1636 – 1689
Dating: documented dates
Born: Alt-Raudten, Silesia
Died: Sulzbach

The life

A Lutheran official and scholar at Sulzbach who worked with Hebrew manuscripts and with the physician Francis Mercury van Helmont.

Place in the tradition

Mathers translated parts of this book in 1887 and called the result The Kabbalah Unveiled. What the Golden Dawn knew of the Zohar, it knew through here.

a note on the record

History and later legend

It is an anthology in translation, heavily weighted towards the Lurianic material its compiler found Christologically useful, and it is not a neutral window onto the Zohar.

the written record

Principal works

Sulzbach 1677; Frankfurt 1684

Kabbala Denudata

Kabbalah Unveiled: Latin translations of Zoharic and Lurianic material with dictionaries and commentary. The channel through which the nineteenth-century revival, and then the Golden Dawn, received the whole subject.

held in the source catalogue Read at sacred-texts.com ↗