Samizdat

“…when Adam was still in Paradise, Raziel the angel brought him a book filled with divine wisdom from heaven. This Book of Raziel the Angel, or Sefer Raziel (a Chaldean word which means “secret of God”), flew away from him at the moment of the Fall. However, since he cried bitterly about this [loss] and repented, God gave it back to him through Rafael the angel (the name means “salvation of God”). Adam handed it over to Seth, Seth to Enoch….” (Credited to DMS RSL 14, N 992, f. 1v-2, A Short Notion on Kabbalah, early 19th century.)

Therefore the primordial Kabbalah is considered a certain “book” passed by Raziel the angel to the first man.”

[Ah. The Book of Raziel was purported to be the Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh, but it is clear that the Sefer Raziel is not the Adamic Book of Raziel.]

“After a time the “book” was lost again, whereupon “patriarch Abraham extracted it from the dust and restored it with the help of God, and this [restoration] is evidenced by the Book Yetzirah…..”

(In the footnotes, the book “Rosieyl, the Divine Secret of Practical Kabbalah” is mentioned, as a “curious Masonic register of Kabbalistic texts composed in the 1780’s.” See DMS RSL, F. 14, N 1655, 550. Cf. Burmistrov, Endel, “Kabbalah in Russian Masonry,” 28-9.)

–From Konstantin Burmistrov, “The Kabbalah as Primordial Tradition in Russian Secret Societies,” in Andreas Kilcher, Constructing Tradition, Means and Myths of Transmission in Western Esotericism, 2010, pg. 328-9.