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Ḥayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba — Life of the World to Come (c. 1280)
correspondences
nature
Abulafia's most widely copied work, and the one with the diagrams — concentric circles of letters, to be read around and across, permuting a name through its combinations.
They are usually reproduced as though they were symbolic wheels. They are not: they are working scores. The circles exist to be gone around, at a pace, with breath and voice and the head moving, and the diagram is a way of not losing your place in a sequence far too long to hold in mind. The 231 gates in this app's playground are the same idea a thousand years earlier and without the paper.
Sometimes circulated under other titles, and preserved in many manuscripts of varying arrangement. Layer note: the practice described is Abulafian and ecstatic — a different school from the theosophic Kabbalah of the Zohar, with different aims, and the app keeps them distinct.
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