The Star in the West

THE NEW WINE 247 Are hairs upon my body. Rivers roll To make one tear in my superb caresses , When on myself myself begets a child , A system of a thousand planets piled ! I wheel in wingless flight Through lampless space, the starless wildernesses ! Beyond the universal bounds that roll , There is the shrine and image of my soul. ' Many of the believers in the Qabalah , as those in the Vedas , will give an almost endless antiquity to the ideas contained in their books . In one degree at least they are right, for the mysticism as contained in these systems of thought is as old as thought itself . The great system of the Qabalah is one of emana tion -- a type of spiritual monism , an attempted ex planation of the nature of the Deity , within the limitations of mind . Its correspondence with the Talmud is more of method than material . That it was of slow growth is very certain , that it is a conglomer ated mass of a multitude of efforts is also most sure . The Zohar is its corner - stone , and the date of its construction extends probably from the second to the seventh century of the present era . Much of its logic , psychology , metaphysics , philosophy , and theology , is drawn directly from the Midrash . To make it superior to profane literature its simplicity has at various times been cloaked in a truculent obscurantism , many of its students delighting in paraphrases and hermeneutical constructions . Because of their unintelligibility words were transposed , numericalisms added , till at last much if not all its sense was lost in a maze of mental legerdemain , and in such exegetical methods as 1 Orpheus , vol . iii , pp . 156 , 157 .