The Besht’s Cave

On Shamanism in the Carpathian Mountains

(An excerpt from Idel’s Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, Chapter 4)

The techniques of the Besht at this time, according to his epistle, were related explicitly to ascents of the soul. In the Yiddish version of the legend that is quoted above, the Besht’s utter concentration of thought is described as beign out of this world. Shuch ecstatic or trance-like experiences were related to a certain way of life: hitbodedut and hanhagah on the one hand, and a certain type of Yihudim on the other. The hanhagah, or the regimen vitae, of the Besht is mentioned in a book by his acquaintance, Rabbi Meir Margoliot, as if it were an articulated issue. I propose that these mystical practices can be traced to earlier Jewish sources, but the Besht’s emphasis on the ascent on high and on mystical states of consciousness deserve further consideration. The first-person account of the ascent of the soul is a relatively rare phenomenon in Jewish mysticism; a confession that contains not only the names of the person but also the precise date is uncharacteristic of the reports on ascensions with which I am familiar before the time of the Besht.

Interestingly enough, ecstatic practices in which the soul is describes as leaving the body for several hours, during which oracular dreams were experienced, were known on the Moldavian side of the Carpathian Mountains. Though this is indubitably a very ancient Eurasian practice (as analyzed by Carlo Ginzburg), it may be relevant for our discussion to highlight evidence concerning the practice in region of Bacau around the year 1648 as related by a Catholic friar, Marcus Bandinus. The author mentions the incantatores, a term reminiscent of the term “incantation” used in the quote from the Besht’s epistle above. Indeed , the Hebrew expression for performing an incantation for the ascent of the soul, hashba’at aliyyat neshamah, is absent from all Jewish literature prior to the Besht. While ancient ecstatic practices generally were not received positively in Christian Europe, in this particular area alone the incantatores and incantatrices were highly regarded and, according to Bandinus’s formulations, were considered to be similar to the doctores subtilissimi et sanctissimi in Italy. Moreover, ecstatic practices were not restricted to the few but were open to everyone. The assumption is that this was not a Rumanian practice but one brought from Asia by a tribe of Magyars, known as Czangos, who stopped in the Moldavian Carpathians.

Thus, less than a century before the revelation of the Besht, in the immediate vicinity of the place where the founder of Hasidism spent his time in solitude, ecstatic practices similar to his ascent to heaven were known and preformed by Gentiles. These practices have nothing to do with Jewish sources but stem from Eurasian religious heritage. However, as I have pointed out in prior discussions, practices similar to those of the Besht are also apparent in earlier types of Jewish mysticism, some of which presumably were formulated in arias remote from the Eurasian zone. 

What therefore is the significance of the coexistence of similar practices in practically the same period and geographical area? There is no simple answer to the question. Detailed descriptions and analyses of Jewish mystical techniques have not yet been undertaken. A preliminary hypothesis is that, though the Besht’s and his contemporaries’ ascents of the soul caused a resurgence of a Jewish mystical practice that had been in existence for centuries according to literary sources, this practice experienced particular impetus precicly in the Carpathian region. In other words, one aspect of nascent Hasidism – the ascent of the soul – can be attributed to the consonance between Jewish mystical traditions found in much earlier sources as well as mystical-magical practices in vogue in the geographical area from which Hasidism emerged.    

 -atgate231