Knorr von Rosenroth's

    The filming, scans and organization of the images accessible on this page and in the PDF or ZIP versions are © Bill Heidrick. This work should not be placed on other web sites or sold in any form without the explicit permission of both the University of California at Berkeley and Bill Heidrick. Thanks are due to the staff at the Bancroft Library at UCB for allowing use of the book and granting public access on this web site.

    Of the nearly 2,600 pages estimated to comprise the entire work, this set is known to be short by two pages overlooked during filming. On first impression, it seemed that 194 pages were left out during the original binding of Pars Tertia into the longer of the two bound volumes used to make these images from Tom I. Thanks to the (1677?) scanned edition of Tom I on line at the National Library in Jerusalem, it is now evident that only a miscollaton is at fault. Pars Tertia of Tom I was placed wrongly, near the end, instead of in its proper location in the version scanned here. Tom II seems to be complete, but other copies have not been examined. For more information, see the "Technical Details" section, below.

The JNUL online version of Tom I is at http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/books/html/bk1091404.htm. "Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae" is missing in that edition, but the plates are apparently intact. The resolution of the images there is higher than will be found on this web site. The material on this present website may be easier to download and does include Tom II.

    English translations of a few selections from Kabbala Denudata may be found on the internet via Google and other search engines. Beware: The S. L. Macgregor Mathers book, Kabbalah Unveiled, is often represented as a translation of the entire work; but it provides only a portion of the latter part of Tom II: Pars Secunda, Tracts 1 through 3, about 250 pages in all (Zohar sections: Sepher de Zeniutha/Liber Mysterii, Idra Rabba/Synodus Areae Magna and Idra Suta/Synodus Minor). Mathers published a translation of the Latin, but he excluded the Hebrew and Aramaic text which occupies about half of each page. Thus Mathers' Kabbalah Unveiled includes about five percent of the total text of Kabbala Denudata. Eliphas Levi published a French edition of the Idra Suta, which is available in English translation as The Book of Splendours, Aquarian Press and Samuel Weiser, 1973. Some anthologies of translations from the Zohar include one or more of these tracts, while others do not. Moses de Leon's Zohar is itself a much larger work, and these texts are particularly difficult to render into European languages. Perhaps the most valuable part of Mathers' Kabbalah Unveiled is the introduction, an abridgement of Christian D. Ginsburg's The Kabbalah (1862, Longmans, Green & Co.; more recently published in The Essenes, Their History and Doctrines; The Kabbalah, Its Doctrines, Development and Literature, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). The Ginsburg work is particularly helpful to have in hand while reading this present set of page scans, since Ginsburg provides many of the Greek terms that may be difficult to see on these JPG images.

Kabbala Denudata was one of the first books I filmed at home in the early 1970's. At that time, this work was in the loan stacks of the main library at UC Berkeley. On return of the three volumes to the library, I recommended that the set be transferred to the Bancroft rare books library, where I am assured it safely resides to this day. The 35mm negatives were made on Kodak Tri-X Pan film and developed with a commercial product. Contrast is lower than it would be for microfilm. The resulting images are therefore a little dark, but tend to show more faint detail than would be seen on microfilm. These images are also a little better for eliminating offset and ghosting caused by ink on adjacent pages. Lighting was a problem; portions to the upper left and center tend to be lighter than portions to the lower right on each image. This difficulty of lighting is most obvious in the first 60 images from K1. Detail resolution is less than one would expect on commercial microfilm, but all Latin and Hebrew lettering should be easily read. Greek type faces from the period were typically quite small and thin. Many Greek terms found in odd places in these images may be illegible.     To view a sample image, click here. Magnify in your browser and look for two Greek letters in the second line of numbered paragraph 3.

    With a very good broadband internet connection, all that needs to be downloaded would be four pdf files — available both at the heads of the four tables of content and at the bottom of this web page. I've added some advice on downloading with the latter group. With a slower or dial-up internet connection, the pdfs are not practical choices. In that case, individual zips of portions of the text can be downloaded from the content tables, much as a 17th century contemporary might have ordered the individual parts of the book. Those who do take the pdfs might also like to download the zip file containing the end plates from Tom I, since it is convenient to have those available separately while reading the figure descriptions found near the end of Tom I in the second pdf. Page images of these plates can also be exported with Adobe Reader from the pdf itself.