Meir ibn Gabbai · מאיר אבן גבאי

Spanish Kabbalist, born 1480, writing in the generation after the expulsion. His Avodat ha-Kodesh is one of the great systematic defences of Kabbalah against philosophy; his Tola'at Ya'akov, finished in 1507 when he was twenty-seven, is a Kabbalistic commentary on the liturgy — what the prayers are actually doing, word by word, in the upper worlds.

He is here because of the title. Asked to name a book about the power of prayer — about the mouth as the instrument that reaches — he reached past every image of light and ladder available to him and picked the worm. The whole chain this room draws was already drawn, and published, five hundred years ago.