Ars Combinatoria (Sefer Yetzirah, Leibnitz Derrida, Culianu, Eco, Idel) – from Kabbalah to European culture

The Romanian-Israeli scholar Moshe Idel (Hebrew University) gave a series of three lectures at Oxford last February on Ars Combinatoria, Gottfried Leibniz’s theory (based on his doctoral dissertation) on combining letters arbitrarily into words, and words arbitrarily together in combinatorially many combinations to achieve an alphabet of human thought to ultimately achieve characteristica universali, the universal pure language of science.

This type of thought was central to Abraham Abfulia’s project (which predated Leibniz) to find hidden names of God, and ultimately achieve ecstatic union with the Divine, through meditation on permutations of the letters.   Recently, Abfulia’s efforts at what we now call Ars Combinatoria has recently achieved wide attention through sources as varied as Umberto Eco’s bemused The Search for the Perfect Language to Myla Goldberg’s mystico-horror novel Bee Season (a book in which I identified with all four of the major characters.)

Alan Brill, whose blog post brought these lectures to my attention, speculates that these lectures are quite revelatory of Idel’s personal thought, and wonders “Can we reread the entire Idel project as disconnected from mysticism and see that it was originally language and magic (as well as esotericism and ecstatic techniques)?”

Idel’s lectures are difficult and somewhat strange (because Idel is, at least to some degree, a true believer in Ars Combinatoria as a method of generating knowledge) but may be of interest to those who are interested in the mainstreaming of magic and prophecy.

• Lecture 1:  Sefer Yetzirah and its Commentaries:  A major source for Ars Combinatoria
  (audio only link)
• Lecture 2:  Ars Combinatoria in Modern Times: Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Ioan P. Culianu
  (audio only link)
• Lecture 3:  The Transition of Ars Combinatoria from Kabbalah to European Culture: Ramon Llull, Pseudo-Llull, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
  (audio only link)

This is the second hat tip in two days that I owe to the remarkable Alan Brill (and this second one is really a double hat tip, since it incorporates a link from Alan’s post on the Museum Rietberg’s exhibit on comparative mysticism.