Ancient Angel Magic - The Sword of Moses - Harba de‐Moshe - Early Text of Jewish Magic

there's a wonderful section in the babylonian talmud that describes a debate between moses and the angels of the divine court the topic of that debate is whether or not god should give moses and the israelites lowly humans made of but dust and ashes the glorious teaching of god the torah through the course of that debate found at tractate sanhedrin 88 b in following moses systematically answers all of the angelic objections and argues that indeed the torah is meant for the israelites and not the angelic hosts indeed to congratulate moses each angel provides him a special gift to take with him as he descends down the mountain fulfilling the prophecy you ascended on high you took a captive you took gifts on the account of man and even among the rebellious hashem may still dwell there this is a verse to be found in the psalms indeed even the malacha mavet the angel of death is said to have provided moses a gift a kind of special incense that when a plague broke out among the israelites moses and aaron burned and thus stopped the plague but what about the other gifts what else did the angels provide for moses an ancient text of magic claims to be just that one of these special angelic gifts that moses brought down the mountain that day along with the torah this magical text is entitled the kharba damosha which is aramaic for the sword of moses and contains ritual procedures magical words and nearly 150 different magical recipes there's a wide range of spells to be found in the harbor democia everything from healing to cursing to causing hail to fall from the sky to the magical binding of animals even driving one's enemies insane there's in fact a spell for walking on water a bit of magic that i think of at least one jewish guy that made pretty famous so i hope you'll join me as we explore this ancient magical text the kharba de moshe or the sword of moses i'm dr justin sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the arcane side of history philosophy and religion [Music] despite the fact that judaism has several prohibitions on magic this hasn't exactly stopped the flourishing of magical traditions reaching back over a millennium indeed two distinct magical texts have survived from the late classical world one of those two texts in fact the older of the two it seems is a safer harassing the book of secrets this is a form of angel magic very much influenced by the merkava tradition that is to say the mystical tradition in which people attend to descend to the throne of god if you're interested in the safer high rising i've made a separate video and you can click the card above to check that out the other text to survive from roughly the same time period is the kharba damosha or the sword of moses and that's the subject of today's episode and while magical swords are a pretty common motif and a great deal of literature as we'll see the sword of moses described here is anything other than a conventional sword so what exactly is the sword of moses what we have is a manual of magic written primarily in aramaic although there are sections in hebrew and greek as well written sometime before the year 1000 of the common era we have that rough date because a very famous rabbi the high gaon who was the leader of the academy of pompadita actually mentions the sword of moses in one of his responses a response is simply when you write a rabbi to get a solution to a problem in jewish law and with the solution he actually mentions the sword of moses so that gives us a rough sense around which the time at least by then the text would have been written of course the high got on dies around 1038 of the common era so most scholars put the writing of the sword of moses sometime in the latter third of the 10th century now i know that's a little bit vague but the text is allegedly taken from mount sinai by moses and given to him by a bunch of angels so sometimes vague is what you get sorry there's also scholarly disagreement about where exactly the text was composed some indicate that it was composed in palestine others indicate that it was possibly composed in the babylonian context this is really difficult to tease out because it may be that the text was actually written and rewritten over different layers at different times in fact some strata of the text may go all the way back to the late classical period within the middle section of the sword of moses there's in fact a string of characters that is in fact greek language written in hebrew letters and those kinds of greek language text may actually reflect something much more like the greek magical papyri reaching the text far back perhaps into the early common era although it's not clear exactly when this text was written or if it was ever even written down in one continuous episode so basically what we have is an anonymous magical manual that shows up roughly in the 11th century probably written centuries before that maybe even reaching back to the greco-egyptian context although maybe to palestine maybe parts of it are written in babylon and we don't really know what the entire middle section means this should feel pretty normal if you've been hanging around here at esoterica for very long at any rate the text is divided into three distinct sections the first section begins by describing a heavenly hierarchy in which there are various troops of angels headed up by various archangels by which the magic used in the khabar de moshe is operative here we're given a pretty elaborate description of the various angels and archangels that do the magical heavy lifting from the spells described in the third section and we're also told why it is that any of this magic works at all this is sort of a perennial question why would an angel listen to a lowly human being to go find buried treasure or make someone crazy well the idea at least in the harbor to moshe is because god has commanded the angels to follow the will of the person who wields the khaba damosha the sword of moses so here we have it that the sword of moses if used correctly in some sense activates these angels via the will of god and it's via that three-way connection between the operator god and the angels that the magic itself is in fact effectuated so once the actual angelic causal mechanism of the magical power is described were then given a relatively elaborate ritual set of procedures by which the sword of moses becomes operative here the would-be wielder of the sword must undergo a series of ritual purifications including a change in their diet you're basically having to eat for the course of about three days a pretty spartan diet of just pure bread and salt along with removing any possible ritual impurities from your life which is specifically mentioned here is nocturnal emissions that would invalidate the ritual purification process by which one is preparing oneself to wield the sword of moses further we're given very specific and very complicated adjurations to various archangels which are actually inserted into the traditional three standing prayers other ami da practiced to this day by traditional jews specifically there's a very elaborate prayer of aduration for these various princes introduced into the 16th benediction of the shimon esre which literally means 18 but actually there's 19. let's not get too confused here at any rate this angelic adjuration actually binds the power of these various archangels to the wielder of the sword of moses and this prayer is introduced again in the 16th benediction and is reiterated over the course of several days basically to bind the power of those archangels and by extension the various angels beneath them and therefore be able to wield the sword of moses and accomplish the magical spells described in the third section so basically what we have is a kind of angel magic being bootstrapped into the normal cycle of jewish liturgical prayer such that these new prayers actually magically bind the power of the archangels and angels to the wilder of the sword of moses such they can begin the process of wielding the various magical powers they're described later in the text so we can see very clearly that despite the fact that the bible says you can't practice magic you can't practice magic this magic is very clearly jewish it's literally only makes sense if one is able to add the prayers into the prayers that one is already doing as a pious jew by introducing further adorations into the daily cycle of traditional jewish prayer life so when it comes to jewish magic it's always thou shalt not kinda going back to the text itself i have to admit this section is pretty confusing and it may even be that there are actually several sections of magical text that have been edited together here in a way that doesn't quite completely make sense in fact there seems to be an adjuration to these 13 princes or these 13 archangels and then there seems to be another entity referred to as the quote swift messenger that seems to be a further kind of intermediary in all this though it's worth mentioning that this angelic entity the swift messenger while their exact role in the harbor democrat is a little confusing curiously enough that exact entity also shows up in an incantation bowl otherwise found in the babylonian context so again this really problematizes exactly where this text was produced we have a babylonian context here being expressed by the swift messenger angel but there are other indicators that seem to express that this text was being written in palestine it seems to me that we might have a kind of composite text being written and added to over the course of several centuries and the kaaba democrat as we have is the result of that ongoing editorial process but the jury's out and i'll leave that to the real high level experts to make an argument about exactly how the text was formed and when so once one is accomplished the necessary purification and then also introduce the various angelic binding spells it is then that one can begin to will the power of the khaba dimosha and that allows us to turn to the second section of the text perhaps indeed the most mysterious indeed the second section of the text is actually the sword of moses proper the text understands that the center section the second section is what it understands to be the actual harbor demotion and what is it a lot of words a lot of words that we really don't know what most of them mean it's about 1800 different words ranging from what seems to be basically gibberish to permutations of the divine name yoteva sometimes using safa ot as a kind of combinatory adjunct there's even some greek sections in the text in which greek words have actually been transliterated into hebrew letters although it's not even clear that the writer of the kharba damosha even knows that these texts are greek so basically what the khaba dimocia is is in some sense an 800 word string of words and characters that are basically mysterious we can tease out what some of them mean we can tease out parts and chunks of things but many of the words are simply completely obscure and rather mysterious in fact the images that you're seeing on the screen are sections of the harbor democrat taken from this section section so you can begin to see what some of these words look like some of them are rather long some of them have super linear lines over them some of them are rather short just words like yah over and over again what exactly all this means is completely mysterious and indeed it's only by turning to the third section of the harbor democia that we actually see how this long elaborate system of words is meant to be used basically what we have in this section is in a large elaborate or a large collection of magical words that is then employed and referenced in the third section of the various magical spells so how exactly is the harbor demotia wielded how does the magical operator actually use this collection of about 1800 words to accomplish various magical ends by turning to the third section we'll see that strings of these words from the second section are in some sense plucked out and then inserted into magical formulas being used in the third section along with various other magical techniques that are somewhat reminiscent of those found in the greek magical pyri although i think the best way to illustrate this is by looking at a collection of some of the spells to be found in the third section so let's take a look at some of these spells so here's an example of an exorcistic healing spell in which the operator of the khaba damosha is ejecting an entity known as palga paulga is aramaic for splitting and this may have a reference to something like migraines here we're instructed to take a section of the harbor demotia the actual second section of the text from this word to this word and you can see the string actually extracted from the harbor dimension on the screen currently so you would extract that section out of the harbor dimension you would use it as a kind of adjuration along with some water and some sesame oil you would immerse that person in water rub that sesame oil on their body then you would adjure the demon palga or the spirit paga to leave that person and then further you would use that adjuration along with the second section from the carbohydrate as a kind of amulet to ensure that the demon doesn't repossess that person this is pretty typical of ancient near eastern magic in which you expel a demon and then use a further amulet to prevent that demon or spirit from re-entering the body so here again you can see how the harbor demotia is a kind of index in which magical words can be removed from that index and then put into a logical magical practice in this case to expel a spirit called paga probably to heal migraines this next spell seems to be specifically for perhaps a mortal wound it actually says for destruction caused by an iron knife so it seems like if one is struck with a mortal wound in fact several of the spells in the kharba damosha seem to be used that you utter them in a moment of intense distress and it relieves that distress or it kills those enemies or whatever in this case what we have is a section of the khaba democrat lifted out and then said over a wound along with white nafta in order to cure that mortal wound now i don't know exactly what kind of properties white nafta has but one may wonder to the degree to which this might be an antimicrobial or might it be something that would actually carterize the wound it's not clear to me but at any rate again a section of the harbor democracy lifted out and used in this case for preventing perhaps a person from dying from a wound caused by an iron knife by again employing white nafta over what seems to be a perhaps mortal wound here we have a really interesting spell that actually summons an archangel in order to teach you all kinds of divine mysteries this actually harkens back to an older form of jewish mysticism called sartora mysticism or the prince of the torah in which an angel is actually summoned down to earth in order to teach you the various jewish laws and jewish lore now what's interesting about the entity or archangel that one is summoning down is that if you take this name and read it in the hebrew script the name actually is abraxis of course abraxis is a classical gnostic deity so this is a really interesting combination of in some sense a kind of gnostic deity transformed perhaps into a jewish archangel and then summoned via the power of the kharba moshe to teach you secrets of jewish lore so again a fascinating text here that employs the section of the khabar de moshe you extract those sections out again use them to conjure this archangel and interestingly enough this archangel seems to share the exact same name as an entity pretty commonly associated with gnosticism again showing you some degree of the syncretism between a very explicitly jewish magical text but at the same time the more general religious world in which this text is being produced here very likely being influenced by gnosticism here we have a spell that allows one to descend down into a fiery furnace of course anyone who's familiar with the hebrew bible will be pretty familiar with the idea of going into the furnace from the book of daniel now what makes this spell interesting is unlike much of the magic to be found in the harbor de moisture this one requires that you actually write the section from the actual harbor demotia the second section on a silver plate now that use of a silver plate or a lamella is very typical of magic to be found in the greek magical papyri and in the ancient world in general now what's interesting here about this use of the silver plate in the harbor demotia is as this is rather unusual for this text most of the materials to be found in the harbor democia are relatively accessible and not terribly expensive unlike silver plates which for some people indicates the text may have been produced in palestine it may have been produced in a non-elite environment and this may reflect something much more like the folk practices of jewish magic there in the palestinian countryside perhaps but at any rate this spell is interesting because it seems to have a reference to the book of daniel it allows you to go down into a fiery furnace why you would want to do that i don't know please don't try this at home but at any rate this reveals at least that there is some elite magic in the text with the use of a silver plate although the vast majority of the magic to be found in the harbor demotia is much more accessible to a common folk audience again more evidence to the idea that this may represent some degree of ancient jewish folk magic is the idea that in the harbor democrat a great deal of the magic is actually agricultural and we see that emphasis here in this spell where if one's fruit trees aren't producing yield and again this also includes date palms showing you the geographical region in which this text was produced one can use the harbor democrat to help you grow more fruit again this is the kind of thing that will be much more typical of a kind of folk magic tradition in which one is simply trying to get more fruit from trees and like i said a great deal of the magic in the harbor demotia is largely oriented around agriculture so again this may also reveal something of the origin of the prerogative or interest of the writers or writer of this text of course no magical text would be complete without an erotic binding spell and we find several of them in the harbor democia what's interesting about this combination is it allows one to bind either a man or a woman and notice that the binding is accomplished either with a new lamp or with a pot shirt notice that while the strings of the harbor demotion employed in both sections are different the actual material culture of the magical spell is also different depending on whether one wants to bind a man or a woman now again one wonders to the degree to which this also reflects perhaps a same-gendered magical spell that we see in other greek spells as well although they're not terribly common again to what degree is this magic reflecting the interests of men or reflecting the interests of both men and women it's not clear of course literacy and these kinds of magical practices would been largely the purview of men literally was almost exclusive with the purview of men in the jewish world at this time but again one has to wonder exactly to the greed to which that's true in all cases so here we might have a magical spell that binds either a man or a woman perhaps for same-gendered reasons if the text is being written by a man but perhaps this text could be farmed out and also be used by women as well again we're not quite sure how this was used in the material setting but here we have erotic binding spells one after the other both for men and for women using slightly different strings from the harvard moshe also using slightly different magical material cultures as well here we have a spell against rabies of course rabies is a basically deadly condition unless one is cured very early on and there are basically no cures that we know of in the ancient world there's basically no cures now if one doesn't catch it very early on but here we have a relatively elaborate spell using the hide of a donkey along with sections of the harbor democia and more sesame oil that we actually saw being used also in the spell for driving out the migraine spirit now here we have the use of all these in combination to hopefully cure rabies of course rabies is a terrible condition that causes one to deteriorate in a very dreadful way and it's clear that anyone would use basically any technology in order to cure this horrifying condition whether it would be the medicine of the time period or something much more along the lines of magic i can tell you that if i get bit by a rabbit dog at this time i would use damn near anything not to die of rabies so here you go a spell for how to cure rabbit dog bite this is a relatively straightforward spell to actually make someone demented or insane you simply say a section of the harbadamosha over an egg and hand it to them and they go bananas i don't know um i would be tempted to try this spell if there were like a control z spell that is to say an undo spell but the khaba dimocia doesn't do much in the way of undo spells so be careful with this stuff i don't recommend trying it on people here's a spell for causing hailstones to fall from the sky one simply takes an iron ring and put it up somewhere high and say a section of the harbor demotion over it and that will cause hail to fall as you probably know the ability to cause weather magic specifically hail was among some of the most terrifying magic at least in the european context so while we might look at this spell now and think well you cause a hailstorm to fall big whoop this spell would have been genuinely terrifying to an agricultural population in which hail can literally destroy an entire crop in a matter of minutes so while the spell looks somewhat innocuous to us now this may be actually one of the most terrifying spells in many ways for the audience of the people that would have read the khabar democrat in its time so again a spell for causing hail to fall here's a spell to impose terror on people which you shouldn't do because you should be nice and not impose terror on people at any rate you write the section from the carbon to moshe on a piece of lead and then bury it in the western side of the synagogue of course synagogue this is jewish magic although i imagine for many folks who are watching this episode you also know a bit about roman and greek curse tablets are dyfixiones and you would also know that the curse part of those tablets are almost always written on lead so here we have an example in which a perhaps roman or greek magical technology the use of lead scrolls or lead writing tablets to write curses on and bury them is very typical of the kind of magic to be found in those contexts here perhaps being transposed into a specifically jewish context in the harbor demotia so again an interesting kind of syncretism between greco-roman magic and jewish magic being composed in one text here in the habit of motion this spell is interesting for a lot of reasons it's basically for if you're hungry you raise your hands up to the heavens and you say a section from the harbor de moche and none other than an archangel shows up and gives you bread and meat now they say there's no such thing as a free lunch but this is like archangel service with bread and meat not a bad deal now it doesn't say what kind of meat but it's from an archangel so it must be pretty good maybe it's like duck or something i don't know at any rate this is a spell that if you get the munchies you have an archangel there to feed you some food so that sounds pretty good so here we have a very practical spell against thieves in which one takes a jug of water you say a section of the harbor democrat over the water and then you sprinkle that water over the roof of your house and that will allegedly protect it from thieves the text also tells us this is effective for an entire town now i don't know how much of the water you have to sprinkle all over the town maybe just the four corners of the town or i don't know but at any rate very practical advice here against thieves and this kind of magic anti-thief magic is to be found all over magical literature from the greco egyptian period all the way until now in fact finding lost objects or finding stolen objects is a very popular form of spell and it's unsurprising that we would find an anti-thief spell here in the harbor democia so again very practical magic and one i think we can all appreciate here we have two spells side by side that i find interesting one allows you to hold a line by its ears now i really don't recommend this one whether you're joe exotic or whatever but this is where you would actually take and tie various things around your belt you would say a section of the harbor demotion over each one of those knots and then it would allow you to hold a line by its ears again i really think this is a bad idea now the next spell that follows right after the one in which it allows you to hold the line by its ear allows you to become kind of famous in which you write a section of the khaba demosha out and then bury it by the gate of your house now if you're the kind of person it seems to me at least that's able to hold a line by its ear and not get killed you don't really need the being famous spell i think the holding the line by the ear part will make you famous although i would say i would try the burying the amulet in your gate first before you try the holding the lion by the ear part the holding the lion part is much more likely to get you mauled so bury the amulet then get famous leave the lion stuff to the experts finally we have what might be the piece the resistance in jewish magic the ability to walk on water here we have a section of the khabar de moshe that one writes on lead and that allows you to walk around on water now i don't know if anyone ever frisked jesus and they found a lead plate with a section from the harbor de moshe written on it but walking on water it seems to me that the jewish scribe that wrote this text must have known that that miracle was largely ascribed to jesus and of course jesus was accused of sorcery and magic in the years after his death and so here it seems like the writer might be doing a little bit of tongue in cheek by claiming well your guy can walk on water well that's just like kind of part of our magical routine so at any rate a spell here for walking on water now of course the irony of course is you're carrying around a lead plate which seems like it might make it less likely you walk on water at any rate try this in the kiddie pool first and if you do walk on water let me know because that sounds fun of course i've only covered a small section of the spells to be found in the harbour deposia and as you can see they really run the gamut and i would really highly recommend if you're interested in the history of magic to consult the text yourself for folks who've watched esoterica you may notice there's a lot of similarity between the spells to be found here in the harbor damosha and the way that that magic is accomplished with the greek magical papyri there's a lot of similarity between these two systems of spellcraft and so again unsurprisingly we would find a great deal of syncretism between the jewish magic of the medieval and ancient worlds and the greco-roman magic or the greco egyptian magic rather to be found in the late classical world so again a fascinating view into specifically jewish magic which is still nevertheless highly syncretistic in many ways finally i'll say that there's something about the khaba the motion that strikes me or reminds me a bit of old school cheat codes are the game genie in old school video games where if you can't beat mega man or castlevania or whatever you insert some codes and get infinite lives or infinite time or invulnerability it's as if the carbon dimotion is a kind of code book that has a bunch of cheat codes for reality and if you use these various cheat codes for reality the angels and archangels will sneak into the video game of life and correct things by killing your enemies or making you walk on water or healing you of some kind of disease so every time i read the khaba dimoshia i can't help but be reminded that this is something like the contra code but for reality itself well at any rate the kharba namoshi the sword of moses cheat codes for reality fun if you're interested in the history of magic kabbalah or angels and demons make sure to subscribe here to esoterica these are all core content at our channel and if you want to support my work of making free accessible and scholarly access to topics in western esotericism here on youtube please consider supporting my work on patreon or with a one-time donation your support of esoterica makes all of this work possible i really appreciate it and thank you if you want to consult the sword of moses in a contemporary and incredibly reliable translation i've included a link in the description below to the 2000 translation by yuval harari it is an incredibly scholarly translation with copious notes although it does not include the actual sword itself it doesn't include the middle section if you want to consult the middle section of the kharbat de moshe i've also included a link in the description below for an edition in aramaic that does reproduce the entire second section of the harbor de moshe of course it's written in hebrew letters so you'll have to be able to read hebrew letters and even then i got to tell you just because you read hebrew letters doesn't mean you can make heads or tales of most of the words in that text indeed even from manuscript to manuscript the actual second section and really the entire manuscripts themselves range enormously in terms of their content so there's a great deal of textual transmission and corruption that snuck into the text of this been transmitted but at any rate if you want to take a look at the middle section of the sword after you've looked at yuval harari's wonderful translation of the habit of moshe i've included links in the description below for both of those documents also if you want to learn more about jewish magic in general i would also consult both gideon bohawks and yuval harare's editions on the history of jewish magic both of these are substantial tomes and they would take you quite a while to get through each individually they are works of incredible scholarship and i highly recommend that you consult both of them i can't choose between them in the least so if you're interested in jewish magic i would consult both of these texts by bohak and harari both are incredible text on jewish magic so i just want to say thank you to all of our subscribers and especially to the patrons of this channel i am just so humbled and thankful for your support until next time i'm dr justin sledge and you've been watching esoterica where we explore the arcane side of history philosophy and religion you

Channel: ESOTERICA

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Keywords: the sword of moses, jewish magic, harba de-moshe, history of magic, angel magic, moses, angelic magic, jewish spells, sefer harazim, kabbalah, cabala, qabbalah, necromancy, occultism, grimoire, magic, mysticism, magick, hermetic, esotericism, occult, demons, spirits, western esotericism, hermetic philosophy, john dee, aleister crowley, occult lecture, alchemy, real magic, historical magic, Hebrew magic, aramaic, magic sword, walk on water, talmud, moses magician, Israelite magic, witchcraft

Id: xIrRvEHD0Sc

Length: 32min 36sec (1956 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020