Chaim Vital (1542-1620) was the chief disciple of Isaac Luria, and the reason there is anything called Lurianic Kabbalah at all.
Imported citation, not independently checked: L. Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (2003)
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Who Was Chaim Vital?
Who Was Chaim Vital?
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The disciple who owned the teaching: almost everything called "Lurianic" Kabbalah is Isaac Luria as one ambitious, jealous, indispensable student wrote him down.
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What Vital actually produced across those decades was recension upon recension of the teaching, rewritten and reorganized as his understanding developed.
Imported citation, not independently checked: Ronit Meroz, studies of Lurianic textual transmission
Since Sarug traveled and Vital hoarded, it was often Sarug's version that educated Europe: the Lurianism of the seventeenth-century European imagination is substantially Sarugian.
Imported citation, not independently checked: G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)
Alongside the system, Vital kept a diary: Sefer ha-Chezyonot, the "Book of Visions," compiled around 1609-1612 from decades of records and translated into English by Morris Faierstein.
Imported citation, not independently checked: M. M. Faierstein, Jewish Mystical Autobiographies (1999)
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