This comprehensive and well-documented guide to the arcane Jewish tradition of mysticism was written by one of Britain's foremost writers on occult subjects. Enthusiastic in tone and grounded in scholarship, it presents and comments upon the mystic tradition's fundamental ideas. Author A. E. Waite's extensive and lucid history embraces the literature of the Kabbalah (including the Sepher Yezirah and Zohar and their central ideas), its foremost interpreters, its impact on Christian scholars, and its reputation as "the secret tradition." Waite's thought-provoking analysis includes a rejection of proposals by earlier occultists that many esoteric practices -- alchemy, astrology, and Freemasonry, for instance -- are founded on or are integral to Kabbalah. Introduction by Kenneth Rexroth.