‘Male and Female’ by Moshe Idel

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Equality, Female Theurgy, and Procreation – R. Moshe Cordovero’s Dual Ontology (2 volume set)

The present study engages the centrality of the bifurcations of male-female entities in the vast corpus of the Safedian Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero. It shows the paramount importance, on both human and divine levels, especially for the sake of procreation. The various expressions of equality between the genders and the claims of the impact of human activities, male and female altogether, on the divine world, are addressed here in detail. The rich imaginaire connected to this duality is conceived to be formative also for some earlier and later forms of Kabbalah, especially reverberating in the Lurianic one.