Kabbalah in Sweden

Authors

• Thomas Karlsson University of Stockholm

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67329

Keywords:

Mysticism -- Judaism, Symbolism, Christian, Kabbalah and Christianity, Occult sciences, Esotericism, Runes, Sweden -- History, Secret societies

Abstract

This article examines the history of Kabbalah in Sweden. The reader is presented with an overall view to Kabbalah in Sweden: first, the Johannes Bureus and the Nordic Kabbalah, Kabbalah after Bureus, Kabbalistic literature, and last, Kabbalah in Sweden today. When the Kabbalah reached Sweden it was mainly the non-Jewish Kabbalah that gained influence, even if its Jewish roots were acknowledged. Johannes Bureus unites, in a similar fashion as do the Christian Kabbalists in continental Europe, Christian motifs with the symbolic world of the Kabbalah. Bureus, however, adds runes, ancient Norse gods and Gothic ideas in his own unique manner. The Kabbalah invites speculation and the search for correspondences which has caused the Kabbalah in Sweden to be united with a number of other traditions. Bureus combined the Kabbalah with runes and Gothicism; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we can find the Kabbalah in Freemasonry and Esoteric societies, while the Kabbalah in the twentieth century and onwards has been associated with New Age, Parapsychology and Indian Mysticism. Apart from Bureus, most Kabbalists in Sweden have followed the trends that flourished in the rest of the world. Bureus was the first to create a specifically Swedish interpretation of the Kabbalah.