The Break · 1652 and 1677

The organising fact of the whole descendants' bench. Everything downstream reads the Kabbalah through Christian Latin rather than Hebrew and Aramaic, and through a selection made by people who held that these books proved Christian doctrine. Two bottlenecks, twenty-five years apart: Kircher's diagram and Knorr's anthology.

These are derivatives that forked from the essence. They are not the essence. And the fork is not a wound — Hebrew and Aramaic Kabbalah went on being written and lived the whole time, in languages Knorr's readers could not read. What broke was this line of descent, not the tradition.