Borges, the Aleph and Tlön: Kabbalah and invented worlds
The Aleph, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and the Library of Babel: how Jorge Luis Borges turned Kabbalah, idealism and gnosis into philosophical tales.
Jorge Luis Borges, born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died in Geneva in 1986, was never an occultist. He was, however, a tireless reader of mystical, Kabbalistic and Gnostic texts, which he treated as great works of speculative imagination. From this curiosity came some of the most celebrated stories of the twentieth century, in which an object, a book or an encyclopaedia is enough to unsettle our idea of reality.
A point that contains the universe
The Aleph, published in 1945 and later collected in the volume of the same name in 1949, tells of a small iridescent sphere hidden under the nineteenth step of a cellar in Calle Garay, Buenos Aires. Whoever looks into it sees all the places of the world at once, from every angle. The narrator, who bears the author's own name, discovers it in the house of Carlos Argentino Daneri, cousin of the late Beatriz Viterbo, a vain and mediocre poet.
The name is no accident. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and in the Kabbalistic tradition it has been linked to divine unity and the origin of all things. In the story's postscript Borges also recalls that in Georg Cantor's set theory the symbol aleph denotes the transfinite numbers, in which the whole is not greater than some of its parts.
Tlön, the world that invades ours
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which appeared in 1940 and was later included in Ficciones, begins with a conversation between the narrator and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares. A mysterious entry on a country called Uqbar, present in only one copy of an encyclopaedia, leads to the discovery of an entire imaginary planet, Tlön, rigorously described over generations by a secret society of scholars.
On Tlön an absolute idealism prevails, inspired by George Berkeley: objects exist only insofar as they are perceived, and some of the planet's languages have no nouns. Anyone searching for a lost object may find a copy of it produced by expectation, called a hrön. At the end of the story objects from Tlön begin to appear in the real world, and humanity lets itself be seduced by that orderly, artificial cosmos.
Libraries, labyrinths and golems
Borges's taste for esoteric systems returns in many other works. The Library of Babel imagines a universe made of hexagonal galleries containing every possible book; The Writing of the God tells of a Maya priest who seeks the divine formula in the spots of a jaguar. In several essays, among them A Vindication of the Kabbalah, Borges discusses the interpretative methods of the Kabbalists, fascinated by the idea of a text in which nothing is accidental.
The Book of Imaginary Beings, written with Margarita Guerrero and first published in 1957, gathers imaginary creatures from many traditions. The golem of Prague also appears in his work, in a poem from the late 1950s. In all these texts the occult tradition is never professed as a faith, but explored as an extraordinary possibility of human thought.
Borges taught readers to approach Kabbalah, gnosis and idealism as forms of literature. His Aleph and his Tlön have become proverbial images, used by philosophers, scientists and artists to speak of infinity, of memory and of the power that ideas, even the most fantastic, have to transform the world we live in.