SEPHER YETZIRAH: THE BOOK OF FORMATION WITH THE FIFTY GATES OF INTELLIGENCE AND THE THIRTY-TWO PATHS OF WISDOM
Book Details + Condition: Holmes Publishing Group (Edmonds, WA), 2009 (Third revised edition). Stapled softcover. 56 pages. A reprint of the revised edition of William Wynn Westcott's translation of the Kabbalistic treatise "Sepher Yetzirah". The Sepher Yetzirah is one of the most famous of the ancient Qabalistic texts. It was first put into writing around 200 AD. Westcott's Translation of the Sepher Yetzirah was a primary source for the rituals and Knowledge Lectures of the Golden Dawn. The Sepher Yetzirah is a formulation of the Creation through the Tree of the Sephiroth and twenty two Hebrew Hieroglyphs. Please see below for more information on Westcott. An overall very good, clean copy, with tight binding; old price sticker on back cover; interior is clean and free of markings.
William Wynn Westcott (1848-1925) was an English Rosicrucian and Theosophist best known as a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was an offshoot of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. Dr. William Wynn Westcott, S.L. MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman formed the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1881. The three men particularly wanted to expand their studies in Kabbalah, occultism, alchemy, and ceremonial magic. Westcott decoded old documents, Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscripts, which laid out five masonic initiations. MacGregor Mathers rewrote the rituals, and ultimately they decided upon ten levels of initiation corresponding to the ten sephiroth of the Kabbalah.
