ABSTRACT
Cornelius Agrippa, with little sympathy for either, claims that "Ophites, Gnosticks, and Valentinians" came from kabbalistic superstitions. Mid-thirteenth century, a Kabbalistic school emerges in Castile, which pays special attention to the genesis of the forces of evil, the so-called left emanation. The analogy between the system of hypostases in Jewish mysticism and the pleroma of the Gnostics is an essential moment in Gershom Scholem's argument. Though the great theories about Gnostic origins from Iranian sources are passe, there are some new approaches to the Iranian roots of the doctrine of evil that may also explain the parallels between Kabbalah and Gnosticism in this respect. While ontological dualism is a category too broad to serve as the basis for a meaningful comparison of Kabbalah and Gnosticism, the myth that traces the origin of evil to a primordial catastrophe serves as more favorable ground for making comparisons.
