Ecstatic / Prophetic Kabbalah

About Ecstatic / Prophetic Kabbalah

The Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah is the name modern scholarship gives to the distinctive mystical school created by Abraham Abulafia in the second half of the thirteenth century, an alternative current to the dominant theosophical Kabbalah of his Catalan and Castilian contemporaries. Where the writers of the Gerona School and the Castilian Zoharic Circle were elaborating the doctrine of the ten sefirot and reading the Torah as a coded reference to the inner life of God, Abulafia was developing a different program: a set of meditation techniques designed to produce direct ecstatic experience, prophetic states, and even messianic consciousness in the practitioner himself. He called his system Kabbalah nevuit, prophetic Kabbalah, and treated it as the higher and truer form of the tradition, in contrast to what he called Kabbalah ma'asit, practical or operative Kabbalah, which he saw as a lower magical pursuit, and Kabbalah sefirotit, sefirotic Kabbalah, which he respected but considered preliminary.

Abulafia was born in Saragossa in 1240 to a learned family that emigrated to Tudela when he was a child. His father taught him Bible and Hebrew grammar, and after his father's death when he was eighteen Abulafia began the wandering life that would mark the rest of his career. He traveled to the land of Israel in 1260 in search of the legendary river Sambatyon and the Ten Lost Tribes, was turned back by the wars between Mamluks and Mongols, and returned to Greece and then to Italy where he settled for a time in Capua. There he studied Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed under the tutelage of the philosopher Hillel of Verona, and the encounter with Maimonidean philosophy proved formative. For the rest of his life Abulafia would describe his own system as the practical fulfillment of the Guide, the experiential complement to Maimonides's intellectual program, and his books quote the Guide on almost every page. This is among the most surprising features of his thought: the most ecstatic of medieval Jewish mystics considered himself a faithful Maimonidean.

In the 1270s Abulafia returned to Spain and began to teach his system in Barcelona, Burgos, and Medinaceli. Joseph Gikatilla studied with him during this period and absorbed the techniques of letter permutation that mark his early treatise the Ginnat Egoz, before moving toward the sefirotic mainstream. Abulafia also gathered other students, but his teaching attracted opposition from the established kabbalists, particularly from Solomon ben Adret, the Rashba, the senior halakhic authority of Barcelona, who eventually issued a herem, a formal ban, against him and against any who studied with him. The conflict was fundamental: Abulafia's claims to prophetic experience, his use of meditation techniques that could produce trance and vision, and his eventual messianic self-identification all looked dangerous to a rabbinic establishment that had spent generations consolidating its authority.

In 1280 Abulafia attempted his most extraordinary act, a journey to Rome with the stated intention of converting Pope Nicholas III to Judaism. He arrived at the papal court at Soriano nel Cimino, was arrested, and sentenced to death by burning. He was saved when the pope himself died suddenly of a heart attack before the execution could be carried out, and Abulafia was released after a brief imprisonment. He spent the rest of his life writing in Sicily and on the small Maltese island of Comino, producing a steady stream of books that elaborated his system in increasingly daring forms. He died around 1291, possibly on Comino, his exact date and burial place unknown.

The distinctive method of the school was a sequence of meditation techniques built around the manipulation of Hebrew letters and divine names. The practitioner would take the four letters of the Tetragrammaton or another sacred name and combine them in every possible permutation, vocalizing each permutation with a specific vowel and a specific bodily movement, breathing in particular rhythms, and gradually entering a state of trance in which letters and sounds would seem to take on independent life. Abulafia describes the experience in vivid first-person passages: the practitioner sees the letters writing themselves in fire, hears them speaking in his ears, feels his body being filled with a flowing energy that he identifies with the divine spirit, and may eventually receive a vision of an angelic figure who is in fact his own higher self, called by Abulafia the Active Intellect after the Maimonidean term. The vision marks the attainment of prophecy in the technical sense Abulafia gave to the word.

Abulafia's books are unlike anything else in medieval Jewish literature. They are autobiographical, polemical, technical, and visionary by turns. The major works include Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba, Life of the World to Come, the most detailed manual of his meditation technique; Or ha-Sekhel, the Light of the Intellect, his philosophical exposition of the relation between his prophetic Kabbalah and Maimonidean philosophy; Sefer ha-Ot, the Book of the Sign, an autobiographical apocalypse describing his own messianic visions; and a series of commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed that read Maimonides as a coded prophet of Abulafia's own system. He also produced commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah and on biblical books, and a long catalog of shorter treatises on specific letter combinations and meditation techniques.

The school did not survive as a continuous local circle after Abulafia's death. His students dispersed, his manuscripts were treated with suspicion by the dominant theosophical kabbalists, and his books were not printed during the period when the printing press was establishing the kabbalistic canon in the sixteenth century. But his influence persisted in subterranean form. Italian and Byzantine kabbalists copied his manuscripts and incorporated his techniques into their own practice, and in the sixteenth century the Safed kabbalists rediscovered him through these manuscripts, with Hayyim Vital himself studying Abulafia's writings carefully and incorporating elements of letter meditation into his own work. In the modern period Abulafia has attracted disproportionate scholarly attention thanks to the pioneering studies of Moshe Idel, whose Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah and other works have made the prophetic school the most thoroughly documented stream of medieval Kabbalah after the Zoharic literature itself.

Teachings

The central teaching of the Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah is that the goal of mystical practice is the attainment of nevuah, prophecy, understood not as a unique gift bestowed on a few biblical figures but as a state of consciousness available to any sufficiently prepared and disciplined practitioner. Abulafia inherited from Maimonides the doctrine that prophecy is the natural perfection of the human intellect when it is fully aligned with the Active Intellect, the lowest of the supernal intelligences in the medieval Aristotelian cosmology, and he transformed Maimonides's theoretical claim into a practical program. Where Maimonides had said that prophecy requires perfection of intellect, perfection of imagination, and perfection of moral character, Abulafia accepted these conditions and added a specific technique for activating the alignment: the meditative manipulation of Hebrew letters and divine names.

A second teaching concerns the nature of the Hebrew language. Abulafia treats Hebrew not as one human language among others but as the metaphysical alphabet of reality, the underlying code from which all forms emerge. Each letter is a unit of cosmic structure, with its own specific shape, sound, numerical value, and spiritual character, and the combination of letters in different sequences produces different effects in the upper worlds and in the consciousness of the practitioner. The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in this view, are the elementary particles of the divine creative process described in the Sefer Yetzirah, and learning to combine them is learning to participate in creation itself.

A third teaching concerns the divine name. The Tetragrammaton is the most concentrated form of the divine self-revelation, and its four letters are the focus of the most intensive meditation. Abulafia developed a series of techniques for permuting the letters yod, heh, vav, heh in every possible order, vocalizing each permutation with a different vowel from the seven vowel signs of medieval Hebrew, and pairing each combination with a specific bodily movement of the head and hands. The full sequence of permutations runs to many hundreds of combinations and takes hours to complete, and the practitioner who works through it correctly experiences a progressive deepening of trance and a progressive opening of the inner senses to the divine reality.

A fourth teaching is the doctrine of the Active Intellect as the medium of prophetic experience. Abulafia identifies the figure who appears in his own visions, sometimes as a youth, sometimes as an old man, sometimes as a flowing letter of fire, with the Active Intellect of Maimonidean philosophy. The Active Intellect is at once external to the practitioner, since it is a higher cosmic principle, and internal, since the goal of practice is to fuse with it and recognize it as one's own deepest self. This paradoxical structure allows Abulafia to describe his prophetic experience as both an encounter with another and a discovery of self, both a communion and a recognition.

A fifth teaching is the messianic potential of the prophetic state. Abulafia argues that the practitioner who attains full prophecy thereby participates in the messianic consciousness, since the Messiah is precisely the one who has perfected the alignment with the Active Intellect that prophecy makes possible. This claim allowed Abulafia to identify himself eventually as the Messiah and to attempt his audacious mission to Pope Nicholas III in 1280. The connection between mystical attainment and messianic identity, controversial in his own day and since, is among the most distinctive features of his system.

Finally, Abulafia teaches a sharp distinction between his own prophetic Kabbalah and what he calls the lower forms of the tradition. He criticizes the practical Kabbalah of magical operations as a debasement of the divine names, and he criticizes the sefirotic Kabbalah of the Geronese and Castilian writers as preliminary and incomplete. The truly perfect form of Kabbalah, in his view, is the prophetic technique of letter meditation, and the rest of the tradition is at best a propaedeutic to it.

Practices

The practical disciplines of the Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah are documented in unusual detail thanks to Abulafia's willingness to describe his own techniques in writing. The core practice is hokhmat ha-tzeruf, the wisdom of letter combination, performed in solitude and according to a strict protocol. The practitioner prepares by ritual immersion, dressing in clean white garments, and entering a quiet room at night with a candle and ink and parchment. He sits facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, and begins by writing out the letters of the divine name on the parchment in various orders, sometimes drawing diagrams that map the permutations as wheels or grids of letters.

The meditation proper involves vocalizing the combinations of letters with specific vowels and specific head movements. Each consonant is pronounced with each of the seven vowels in turn, and each pronunciation is accompanied by a particular tilt of the head: upward for the vowel cholam, downward for hirik, to the right for kamatz, to the left for tzere, and so on. The full vocalization of a four-letter name with seven vowels and the corresponding head movements requires intense concentration and produces a rhythmic alteration of breath, posture, and attention that gradually deepens the practitioner's absorption. Abulafia compares the practice to playing a musical instrument, with the body as the instrument and the divine name as the score.

A second practice is breath control. Abulafia gives detailed instructions for synchronizing the recitation of the letters with patterns of inhalation, retention, and exhalation. The breath is held for the duration of certain letter combinations and released slowly during others, producing a hyperventilation effect at some moments and a deep stillness at others. Modern scholars including Moshe Idel have noted the structural similarity to the breath techniques of Indian and Tibetan yoga, though there is no evidence of direct contact between Abulafia and any non-Jewish meditation tradition.

A third practice is visualization. The practitioner is instructed to visualize the letters of the divine name as flames of fire, as towers of light, as crowns above his head, or as figures with their own postures and gestures. The visualization is held while the vocalization continues, and the two practices reinforce each other in producing the desired state of trance. Abulafia describes the moment when the visualization spontaneously transforms into a vision of an angelic figure, the Active Intellect personified, who speaks to the practitioner and reveals secrets.

A fourth practice is the cultivation of solitude. Abulafia insists that the prophetic technique can only be performed alone, in absolute privacy, and at night when the distractions of the day are absent. He describes the experience of practitioners who attempted the technique in the presence of others and either failed to enter the trance or produced merely superficial effects. The solitude is not just practical but theological, since the encounter with the Active Intellect is understood as the most intimate of meetings, comparable to the union of lover and beloved.

A fifth practice is the careful preparation through Torah study. Abulafia requires that the practitioner have already mastered the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah, and the basics of Maimonides's philosophy before attempting the prophetic technique, since without this background the experiences of the meditation will be uninterpretable and possibly dangerous. The technique is therefore not for beginners but for advanced students who have already done the slow intellectual work of acquiring the framework within which the prophetic vision can be understood.

Finally, the school prescribes a certain ethic of secrecy and selectivity. Abulafia warns repeatedly that his techniques can be misused by the unprepared and that careless transmission can produce madness rather than prophecy. He instructs his students to share the practice only with the morally and intellectually qualified, and to refuse it to anyone whose motivation is curiosity or pride.

Initiation

The Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah had no formal initiatory institution. Entry into the school was governed by the master-disciple relationship characteristic of all medieval Jewish learning, intensified by the difficulty of the meditation technique and the risks Abulafia attributed to its misuse. The pathway typically began with mastery of the standard rabbinic curriculum and a thorough grounding in Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, since Abulafia required that his students approach the prophetic practice from a Maimonidean philosophical foundation. Only after the student had demonstrated his proficiency in the underlying material would Abulafia begin to introduce him to the technique itself.

The transmission proceeded through personal instruction in the meditation method, the careful explanation of the letter combinations, the demonstration of the breath patterns and head movements, and the gradual unfolding of the more advanced techniques. Abulafia preferred to teach his students one-on-one, in private sessions that could last for hours, and he describes in his writings the moment when a student first experienced the effects of the practice and reported them back to him for evaluation. The student's experiences were tested against Abulafia's own knowledge of the prophetic state, and corrections were issued where the student had misinterpreted what he saw or felt.

Joseph Gikatilla's training under Abulafia in the 1270s is the best-documented case. The two met in Catalonia, Gikatilla studied with Abulafia for some years, absorbed the technique of letter permutation, and produced his early treatise the Ginnat Egoz under Abulafia's influence. He then moved away from his master and toward the Castilian sefirotic mainstream, but the marks of the Abulafian training remained visible in his mature work even after he had publicly aligned himself with the theosophical school. Other students included a few figures known only by name from Abulafia's own references, and a small circle in Sicily and Italy who continued to copy and transmit his manuscripts after his death. The school never had more than a handful of active practitioners at any one time, and its survival depended on the manuscript transmission rather than on continuous oral teaching.

Notable Members

The central figure of the Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah is its founder Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (1240-c. 1291), born in Saragossa, raised in Tudela, and active throughout the Mediterranean world. He composed more than thirty kabbalistic treatises during his lifetime, including Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba, Or ha-Sekhel, Sefer ha-Ot, three commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed, and a series of shorter works on letter meditation and divine names. He attempted in 1280 to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism, was arrested and sentenced to death, and was saved when the pope died suddenly. He spent his last years writing on the small Maltese island of Comino and died around 1291.

Joseph Gikatilla (1248-c. 1325) was Abulafia's most famous student. He studied with Abulafia in Catalonia in the 1270s, absorbed the techniques of letter permutation, and produced his early treatise Ginnat Egoz under his master's influence. He later moved toward the Castilian sefirotic mainstream and wrote the great handbook Sha'arei Orah, but the marks of his Abulafian training remained visible in his mature work. Gikatilla represents the unusual case of a kabbalist who absorbed the prophetic technique and then deliberately moved away from it.

Other students of Abulafia included Samuel of Soria, mentioned in Abulafia's own writings as a disciple who experienced visions during meditation practice, and several anonymous figures whose identities are known only from Abulafia's references. A small circle of followers in Sicily and Italy continued to copy and transmit his manuscripts after his death, and through this circle his works reached the Italian kabbalistic tradition.

The later transmission of the school produced occasional figures who can be identified as direct heirs of the Abulafian method. Isaac of Acre, the kabbalist who traveled to Spain after Moses de Leon's death and who left an autobiographical account of his own meditation practice in his Otzar Hayyim, is sometimes counted as an Abulafian heir, though his exact relationship to the school is disputed. In sixteenth century Safed, Hayyim Vital studied Abulafia's manuscripts and integrated elements of letter meditation into his own work, becoming the principal channel through which the prophetic Kabbalah entered the later tradition. In the modern period, Aryeh Kaplan rediscovered Abulafia for English-language readers and presented his techniques as the basis of a workable contemporary Jewish meditation practice.

Symbols

The defining symbolic system of the Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah is the Hebrew alphabet itself, treated as a complete cosmology in twenty-two letters. Each letter has its own shape, sound, numerical value, and spiritual character, and the relations among the letters are mapped in elaborate diagrams that combine geometric and numerical patterns. Abulafia's manuscripts include drawings of the letters arranged in wheels, grids, and concentric circles, with arrows indicating the order of permutation and lines connecting letters of related significance.

A second symbolic cluster centers on the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, the most sacred name of God. The yod, the smallest of the letters, represents the first and most concentrated point of divine emanation. The first heh represents the expansion of that point into form. The vav represents the descent of form into action. The final heh represents the receptive vessel that holds the descended form. The four letters are visualized in different colors, different sizes, different positions relative to the practitioner's body, and the meditation involves moving attention from one letter to another in specific sequences.

A third symbol is the figure of the Active Intellect, sometimes visualized as a youth, sometimes as an old man with a long white beard, sometimes as a column of light, sometimes as an angelic figure with wings. The Active Intellect is at once external to the practitioner, since it is a higher cosmic principle, and internal, since the goal of practice is to recognize it as one's own deepest self. The visualization of the Active Intellect is the climax of the meditation and the moment at which the practitioner attains the prophetic state.

A fourth symbol is the wheel, the galgal, which appears throughout Abulafia's writings as a diagram of the rotating letter combinations. The wheel has the consonants on the rim and the vowels at the center, and the practitioner traces a path through the wheel as he vocalizes the combinations. The image of the wheel echoes the wheels of the merkavah, the throne-chariot of Ezekiel, and Abulafia explicitly connects his letter wheels to the chariot vision, suggesting that his technique is the practical realization of the ancient Merkavah ascent.

A fifth symbol is the circle of the practitioner's own body, with the head as the dome of the upper worlds, the heart as the throne of consciousness, and the limbs as the channels through which the divine flow descends. The bodily movements that accompany the vocalization, the tilts of the head, the gestures of the hands, are understood as physical enactments of the cosmic structure, and the body itself becomes a kind of moving diagram of the meditation.

Influence

The downstream influence of the Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah is paradoxical. The school never became the dominant stream of Kabbalah, its founder was banned by the rabbinic establishment of his own day, and its books were not printed in the great wave of kabbalistic publishing in the sixteenth century. Yet Abulafia's techniques and ideas reappear, sometimes openly and sometimes in disguise, throughout the later history of the tradition.

The most immediate downstream effect was the absorption of letter meditation into the Italian kabbalistic tradition. Italian copyists preserved Abulafia's manuscripts when Spanish and Catalan circles were marginalizing them, and through the Italian transmission the prophetic Kabbalah became known to the Renaissance Christian Hebraists. Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, and the other founders of Christian Kabbalah read Abulafia with intense interest and used his theory of Hebrew letters as a key to their own program of finding mystical meaning in the divine alphabet. Frances Yates documented this transmission in her studies of Renaissance esotericism.

In sixteenth century Safed, Hayyim Vital studied Abulafia's manuscripts carefully and incorporated elements of letter meditation into his own work. Vital is the principal disciple of Isaac Luria, and through Vital the Abulafian techniques entered Lurianic Kabbalah, where they reappear in altered form in the practice of yichudim, meditative unifications based on the manipulation of divine names. The connection is documented by Moshe Idel and Lawrence Fine, both of whom have shown that the Lurianic kavvanot draw on Abulafian as well as Zoharic precedents.

The Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century also bears the marks of Abulafian influence, though usually at second or third hand through the Lurianic mediation. The Hasidic emphasis on devekut, cleaving to God during prayer, and on the alignment of consciousness with the divine through repeated recitation, can be traced back through Lurianic kavvanot to the Abulafian prophetic technique. Some specific Hasidic figures, including Nachman of Breslov, show direct familiarity with Abulafian materials and incorporate elements of letter meditation into their own practice.

In the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem devoted significant attention to Abulafia in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and his student Moshe Idel made the prophetic Kabbalah the central object of his own scholarly career, producing Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah and several monographs that established Abulafia as one of the major figures of medieval Jewish thought. Aryeh Kaplan's Meditation and Kabbalah and Jewish Meditation introduced Abulafia's techniques to a popular Anglophone audience and presented them as the foundation of a contemporary Jewish meditation practice. Through these scholarly and popular channels Abulafia has reached a wider readership in the late twentieth and early twenty first century than at any previous moment in his reception.

Significance

The Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah matters first because it preserved and developed an alternative model of what Kabbalah could be. The dominant theosophical stream from Provence through Gerona to Castile treated Kabbalah as primarily a system of doctrine, a theology of the inner divine life expressed through the symbolic apparatus of the ten sefirot. Abulafia rejected this model in favor of a Kabbalah of experience, a set of techniques designed to produce direct mystical states in the practitioner. Without his school the kabbalistic tradition would have been theologically rich but experientially impoverished, a doctrine without a practice, and the later flowering of meditative and ecstatic Kabbalah in Safed and Hasidism would have lacked an indispensable medieval precedent.

Its second importance lies in the systematic articulation of Hebrew letter meditation. Abulafia inherited fragmentary techniques from Heikhalot literature, from the Sefer Yetzirah commentaries of the German pietists, and from the practice of divine name contemplation that had been transmitted in various medieval circles, but he was the first to organize these materials into a coherent and teachable program. His method of letter permutation, called hokhmat ha-tzeruf, the wisdom of combination, became the standard technical reference for any subsequent Jewish mystic interested in meditation. Aryeh Kaplan in his Meditation and Kabbalah documents how Abulafia's techniques resurface in unexpected places throughout the later tradition, including the prayer books of Lurianic kabbalists, the meditation manuals of eighteenth century Hasidic masters, and even some Hindu yoga manuals of the nineteenth century that show signs of indirect Abulafian influence.

Third, the school established the link between Kabbalah and Maimonidean philosophy. Abulafia treated his prophetic practice as the experiential fulfillment of the Guide of the Perplexed, the practical achievement of the contact with the Active Intellect that Maimonides had described in theoretical terms. This synthesis was paradoxical and controversial, since the theosophical kabbalists generally regarded Maimonides as a rationalist opponent, but it created a permanent alternative tradition in which Kabbalah and philosophy could be reconciled rather than opposed. Moshe Idel has emphasized this Maimonidean dimension as among the most distinctive features of the Abulafian system.

Fourth, the school introduced messianism as a central theme of personal mystical experience. Abulafia's own visions culminated in the conviction that he was himself the Messiah, the redeemer of Israel, and his attempt to convert Pope Nicholas III in 1280 was an enactment of this conviction. The connection between mystical practice and messianic consciousness, which would later become so important in Sabbateanism and in some strands of Hasidism, has its first major articulation in Abulafia.

Fifth, the school established the model of the kabbalistic teacher as a wandering charismatic outsider rather than as a respected local rabbi. Where the Gerona kabbalists were pillars of the Catalan rabbinic establishment and the Castilian Zoharic writers were members of the Castilian Jewish elite, Abulafia was a perpetual itinerant who moved from country to country, attracted students wherever he went, generated controversy in every community he entered, and ended his life on a small Mediterranean island in semi-exile. This model of the charismatic outsider would reappear in many later kabbalistic figures, including Solomon Molcho, Joseph della Reina, Shabbetai Tzvi, and ultimately Nachman of Breslov.

Connections

The Ecstatic Prophetic Kabbalah connects to many streams of the Jewish mystical tradition. It draws its meditation techniques from the older inheritance of Heikhalot literature and Merkavah mysticism, particularly the practice of intoning divine names during ascent, and from the Sefer Yetzirah commentaries developed by the Hasidei Ashkenaz in the Rhineland. Abulafia's letter combinations are recognizable extensions of techniques that the German pietists had practiced for at least a century before him.

The school stood in deliberate contrast to the contemporaneous theosophical Kabbalah of the Gerona School and the Castilian Zoharic Circle. Abulafia respected the doctrine of the sefirot but considered it preliminary to his own prophetic practice, and he denounced what he saw as the excessive symbolic elaboration of the theosophical kabbalists as a distraction from the true goal of direct experience. The Castilians returned the favor with embarrassed silence, refusing to mention Abulafia by name even when they borrowed his techniques. Joseph Gikatilla had studied with Abulafia in his youth and his early treatise Ginnat Egoz bears the marks of that training before he turned toward the sefirotic mainstream.

Abulafia's system also relates to the contemplation of Kabbalah at large through its sustained focus on the divine name and the Hebrew letters. He treated each letter of the Tetragrammaton as a focus of meditation in its own right, and his manipulation of the letters can be understood as an experiential complement to the doctrinal treatment of the same letters in the sefirotic tradition. The four letters of the divine name correspond, in the standard medieval mapping, to chokhmah, binah, tiferet, and malkhut, and Abulafia's permutation exercises engage these dimensions experientially rather than discursively.

The school's downstream influence runs through several later movements. Abraham Abulafia himself was the founder, and Joseph Gikatilla was his most famous student before turning toward the Castilian sefirotic mainstream. In the Italian renaissance, the techniques of Abulafia were preserved in Italian Kabbalah and reached Christian Renaissance kabbalists including Pico della Mirandola. In sixteenth century Safed, Hayyim Vital studied Abulafia's manuscripts carefully and incorporated elements of letter meditation into his own work, and through Vital the prophetic stream entered the Safed Renaissance and from there Lurianic Kabbalah. Aryeh Kaplan in the late twentieth century rediscovered Abulafia for the modern reader and presented his techniques as the foundation of a workable Jewish meditation practice.

Further Reading