Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation

Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation
ISBN-10
0826428509
ISBN-13
9780826428509
Series
Stairway to Heaven
Category
Religion
Pages
274
Language
English
Published
2008-06-01
Publisher
A&C Black
Author
Peter Levenda

Description

The idea of heavenly ascent, while popularized in Jewish mysticism, is neither a unique nor recent one. Expertly tracing its origins back to the ancient Middle East, Levenda unearths ascent literature in Africa, India, and China, discerns a common connection in the heavens themselves, and determines that this connection has been sorely neglected in contemporary scholarship. Because scholars treat the "heavens" as metaphorical, it is necessary to recreate the physical context of the culture under discussion in order to better understand it. For the benefit of the reader, Levenda offers two useful concepts for his investigative journey: a "map," whereby he means the cosmological system to better understand the mystical technologies of each culture investigated, and a "vehicle," the method by which the individual equipped with special knowledge is able to navigate the culture's particular cosmology. With these two tools, Levenda travels from the worlds of ancient Egypt and Babylon to the Hebrew Bible, to Jewish and Christian kabbalists, to Daoists in ancient China, to Hindu Tantra and Haitian Vodoun, and, finally, to nineteenth and twentieth century European occult societies.

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