Warren Kenton
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Warren Kenton (Hebrew name Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi) is an author of books on the Kabbalah and a teacher of the discipline with a worldwide following.
[edit] Life and work
Warren Kenton's family is Jewish Sefardi in London. He went to St Martin's School of Art and the Royal Academy to study painting. After college his jobs included working in general and psychiatric hospitals, as well as in a theatre workshop and the Royal Opera House.
He has been a student and tutor of the Kabbalah for 40 years and been a teacher of it since 1971. He has published 16 books, including a Kabbalistic novel and books on astrology, and his work has been translated into over ten languages.
He is a fellow of the Temenos Academy and director of tutors for the Kabbalah Society. He has taught at Interface Boston, the New York Open Centre, Centre for Psychological Astrology, Omega Institute, NY Kabbalah Society, the Jungian Institute of Santa Fe New Mexico and Karen Kabbalah Atlanta, as well as synagogues and rabbinical colleges.
His early books on stagecraft were Introducing stagecraft, The play begins: A documentary-novel upon the mounting of a play and Stage properties and how to make them.
Subsequent books include An Introduction to the Cabala: Tree of Life, Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree, Kabbalah and Exodus, Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge, A Kabbalistic Universe, As Above so Below: A Study in Cosmic Progression, The Way of Kabbalah, and Astrology: The Celestial Mirror.
[edit] Influence
In an introduction to the Sacred Web Conference at the University of Alberta in 2006, the Prince of Wales said, when talking of the tension between Tradition and Modernism:
- This dilemma is captured in ancient notions of balance and harmony; notions that are, for example, expressed in many guises in that wonderful Kabbalistic diagram of the Tree of Life. As the Temenos Fellow, Warren Kenton, so beautifully explains in his lectures to the students of the Academy, the teaching of the Tree of Life is that the “active” and the “passive” aspects of life, which on their own may lead to imbalance and disharmony, must be, can only be, brought together in harmony by the influx into our lives of the Divine and the Sacred. Whether or not we interpret this image as an explanation of an outer or an inner orientation, it is in this way, and only in this way, that the forces, or characteristics, of expansion and constraint can be brought into balance.[1]
Singer Sinéad O'Connor wrote in the inner sleeve notes to the album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, "Special thanks to Selina Marshall + Warren Kenton for showing me that all I'd need was inside me."
Artist Charles Thomson said, "I studied Kabbalah under a teacher called Warren Kenton, who said there was a lot of humour at the spiritual level, and I think that's true."[2]
