cabalize

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kəˈbɑːlaɪz/, /ˈkæbəlaɪz/

Etymology 1

cabala +‎ -ize. Compare French cabaliser.

Verb

cabalize (third-person singular simple present cabalizes, present participle cabalizing, simple past and past participle cabalized)

1. (intransitive) To study and interpret the Kabballah.
   • 1864, John Wilson, Unitarian Principles Confirmed by Trinitarian Testimonies, page 344:

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

   • 2001, Peter Standish, Understanding Julio Cortázar, page 127:

     One of these last is Lonstein, an Argentine Jew who "rabbinizes" or "cabalizes" his way through the book, playing with language, obsessed by a mushroom he is cultivating at home , and given to digressions on the virtues of masturbation.

   • 2014, Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, page 521:

     He cabalized, so we put the Jews in the Plan. If he had been a scholar of Chinese culture, would we have put the Chinese in the Plan?

2. (transitive, intransitive, by extension) To decode or demystify.
   • 1693, John Edwards, A Discourse concerning the Authority, Stile and Perfection, page 51:

     This way of Cabalizing gave the Name to Judas Maccabaus

   • 1852, M. Edgeworth Lazarus, Love Vs. Marriage - Volume 1, page 174:

     They are not to be cabalized away by any extemporaneous ingenuity, and while they all the more imperiously demand the inauguration of new and superior influences for the formation of character, they put the subject more in the light of a duty we owe to posterity than of a present satisfaction of our own passional demands.

   • 1971, Arlene Adrienne Miller, Jacob Boehme: from Orthodoxy to Enlightenment, page 153:

     But yet if one is allowed to cabalize in this manner, I can more easily fit "Rech" (7.7) to the German word "Reich."

3. (transitive) To make mysterious; to entangle or obscure with the trappings of religion, mysticism, or superstition.
   • 1785, Archaeologia, Or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity, page 311:

     The Druids, says Rowlands, considered nature in her largest extent: in her systems and in her motions; in her magnitudes and powers; in all which they seemed to cabalize.

   • 1909 February 20, “Reviews: Witch-Lore”, in The Saturday Review, volume 197, number 2782, page 244:

     This household knowledge—which every woman knew—would be added to and passed on; in many cases cabalized and transmitted in the shape of charms and mysteries from mother to daughter.

   • 2000, Nesta H. Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, page 29:

     The result of Gnosticism was thus not to christianize the Cabala, but to cabalize Christianity by mingling its pure and simple teaching with theosophy and even magic.

   • 2019, Cloé Drieu, Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan, 1919-1937, page 120:

     This text gives the film a mark of three out of five, saying little about the antireligious message properly speaking, which is dealt with in a short introduction mentioning “the cultural backwardness of the masses in a state of religious captivity,” “the cabalized situation of women who don't have the courage to remove their veil," and the need to "break the shackles of religious prejudice" in order to build a new life.

   • 2006, Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion, page 59:

     The question for Rumphius was where those powers lay, not whether they existed: "It is true that the common people tell of many strange events, that they have seen people, who could not be killed with any kind of weapon, until one or more of those little stones had been cut out of their bodies where the same had been pushed in; our people have confronted such cabalized people in war, and these things have been said by our own officers, so that I do not care to contradict the same."

4. (transitive) To encode using wordplay such as acrostics or ciphers.
   • 1931, Order of the Eastern Star. Grand chapter of Arkansas, Proceedings of the 1931 Annual Session, page 96:

     Since then anything we see cabalized, or a word that was formed from the initials of other words, so we have ours.

   • 1969, Robert Brodie MacLeod, William James: Unfinished Business, page 42:

     The immediate and marked success of these two cabalized volumes of James' clearly suggests unnatural skill and power were at work.

   • 1981, Peter Tompkins, The Magic of Obelisks, page 149:

     Grillot de Givry, who first commented on the discovery in his Musée des Sorciers, just over a hundred years later, interpreted the text as cabalized alchemy, presumably from the pen of Saint-Germain, one of the sole remaining documents attributable to this timeless sage of the eighteenth century.

5. (rare, intransitive) To use cabalistic language or perform cabalistic magic.
   • 1887, Great Britain. Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, page 190:

     I can employ no man's justification herein more properly than yours, to whom I proposed this difficulty before coming out of England, and received your leave to converse freely but not to cabalize with them .

   • 1900, Julian Jasiencyk, Ten Years in Cossack Slavery, Or, Black Russia, page 135:

     Having nothing to do, I took out my besmeared cards, sat under the stove and began to cabalize.

   • 2002, Francoise Waquet, Latin: Or the Empire of the Sign, page 232:

     Hence the anxiety of these "experts" to protect their monopoly by refusing to express themselves in the vernacular. Ambroise Paré, whose Oeuvres (1575) were written in French, complained at the same time about those "who want to cabalize the arts and lock them under the laws of some specific language".

6. (computing, transitive) To encode as a Haskell package with the ".cabal" extension, which can then be installed and interpreted using the cabal command.
   • 2012, Michael Snoyman, Developing Web Applications with Haskell and Yesod, page 154:

     The scaffolded site is built as a fully cabalized Haskell package.

   • 2016, Samuli Thomasson, Haskell High Performance Programming, page 100:

     To use stack to build our toy project we cabalized previously, we need to create a stack.yaml file for it.

   • 2021, Vitaly Bragilevsky, Haskell in Depth, page 277:

     This documentation can be generated for any cabalized project with the following simple command: $ cabal haddock

Etymology 2

cabal +‎ -ize.

Verb

cabalize (third-person singular simple present cabalizes, present participle cabalizing, simple past and past participle cabalized)

1. (intransitive) To engage in politics as part of a cabal.
   • 1840, Edmund Bach, The Poems of Schiller Explained, page 134:

     The heroes who cabalize and lend on pledge , who pocket silver spoons and risk the pillory , are found in Schröder's “Fähndrich,” in ffland's “Hagestolzen," in "Verbrechen aus Ehrsucht, ” by the same dramatic writer, and in Kotzebue's "Kind der Liebe."

   • 1851, M. Edgeworth Lazarus, The Zend-Avesta and Solar Religions, page 14:

     Thus, again, in politics we see the centrifugal principle cabalizing with the most calculating desperation between the shades or factions of the same political party , who vie with each other for the spoils.

   • 2017, M. Andrew Holowchak, Jefferson’s Political Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Utopia, page 171:

     The cabinet became a center of petty bickering and continuous cabalizing, and Congress split into irreconcilable factions and repeated asserted its will against the president.

2. (transitive) To control or manipulate via a cabal or secret political organization.
   • 1995, The Journal of African Policy Studies, page 55:

     Neopatrimonialism describes a political system in which political power is personalized and in some cases cabalized; public offices and resources are prebendalized;

   • 1997, Fidelis U. Okafor ·, New Strategies for Curbing Ethnic and Religious Conflicts in Nigeria, page 227:

     The reason is that political and economic power is primarily personalized and cabalized .

   • 2013, Jideofor Adibe, Politics and Economics of Removing Subsidies on Petroleum, page 157:

     Some have argued that the subsidy is one of the benefits many Nigerians derive from the country's 'cabalized' political regimes.