cabbalize

English

Alternative forms

• cabbalise

Etymology

cabbala +‎ -ize

Verb

cabbalize (third-person singular simple present cabbalizes, present participle cabbalizing, simple past and past participle cabbalized)

1. To study or be influenced by the Kabballah.
   • 1824, The Classical Journal - Volume 29, page 88:

     The most direct derivation is from Serap, to burn, whence Seraph; since Serapis was so represented; and since it is evident that Moses cabbalized in translating names, he may have done so here ; and if this, meaning a column of measured time, evince connexion with the pyramid, the name Boore-Muth, a cavern or well of Pluto, is a no less weighty than curious derivation.

   • 1846, The Christian Reformer, Or, Unitarian Magazine and Review:

     All the efforts to prove it have ended in mere appeals to cabbalizing Jews, who lived long after the New Testament was written.

   • 1854, Moses Stuart, A Commentary on the Apocalypse, page 527:

     Could John, as a cabbalizing Jew, have thus confounded superior and inferior Sephiroth , and thus made a mixture revolting to the feelings of all Cabbalists ?

   • 1999, Johannes Van Den Berg, Jan de Bruijin, Pieter Nanne Holtrop, Religious Currents and Cross-Currents, page 75:

     In passing we note that he remarks in his exposition of 1 John 4.2: "Here St. John seems to cabbalize, as in several places of the Apocalypse, that is, to speak in the language of the Learned of the Jews...".

2. (more generally) To interpret in a mystical and esoteric manner.
   • 1983, Eleanor Cook, Northrop Frye, Centre and labyrinth: essays in honour of Northrop Frye, page 345:

     The great value of Bloom's work is its emphasis on a psychoanalytic perspective, however gnostified, mystified, cabbalized that perspective may be.

   • 1988, Harold Bloom, John Hollander, Poetics of influence: new and selected criticism, page 46:

     We are now given a neo-platonized and cabbalized Yeats, whom to understand we must first master an august company that ranges from Cornelius Agrippa to Madame Blavatsky, from the astral wanderings of Swedenborg to the secret speculations of the Rosicrucians.

   • 1988, Ronald Frame, Sandmouth, page 146:

     But how could she have cabbalized out of her imagination the things she'd seen photographed in that book — how could anyone have conceived of it without the proof of the images?