Looking Backwards

To look at the messianic value of Luranic Kabbalah, we will come at it retrospectively, for a reason.

We know that the Sabbatean movement hit the stage in the year 1666, and the main theologian of the main movement was Nathan of Gaza, and he was quite the Lurianic thinker, his ideas and messianic interpretations utilized heavily the frames and phrases of the Arizal, Isaac Luria, the holy arii.

But scholars are split on the nature of what happened between the time of Isaac Luria and Nathan of Gaza.

One theory, of Scholem, is that the Lurianic Kabbalah spread like wildfire and made the soil for what came next - the outbreak messianic Sabbateanism. 

An opposing theory effectively UNDERMINES the presence of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Jewish world before Sabbateanism. The Scholem theory doesn't hold...

Without the theory of Scholem, how did it come about then?!

SOMEHOW the people were just so ready, to be triggered, by the messianic zeal, generally because of the expulsion from Spain, and generally because of the Chmelnytzki persecution in Eastern Europe, and what not.

Somehow this doesn't quite explain things. In other words, Scholem came up with a theory, that theory was debunked, but no good new theory was posited.

Remember that he himself did not write. He only allowed his disciple Chaim Vital to write for him, later. And the latter did indeed have messianic ideas in his head, and he himself was somewhat of a messianic minded self-conscious spiritualist.

But Vital died in 1620, and - ONLY THEN did he allow for the writings written by him in the name of the Arizal to be released.

Well, I think the question speaks for itself, but the scholars were looking at it from the wrong direction:

If the ideas didn't somehow spread like crazy between 1620 to 1666 even though there is not ample evidence (Scholem theory), then, rather, the ideas of Lurianic-Sabbatean-messianism of Nathan of Gaza spread intensely and in so doing they spread the Lurianic Kabbalah everywhere, through Sabbateanism, as the agent, of spreading Luranic Kabbalah.

Cosmological Myth

Now that we have solved that mystery that has had historians fighting and arguing over for decades... 

What then are those ideas of Luria that became prominent in the Sabbatean movement, and generally in messianism, for centuries to come? 

Lurianic Kabbalah is known for its picturesque cosmological myth of creation and the emanation or sublimation of the divine spheres. 

The logic and myth is so:

G-d fills all things, there is no space without Him or without the Divine, otherwise He would not be G-d, that would mean He is deficient, lacking, imperfect...

But then there is the problem of Evil in the world, which also intuitively does not fit G-d, it cannot be Him or from Him, period.

So, the Divine Being reduced Himself and created a vacuum in this world without Him. This space is called tahiru. After the break with mankind, with the sins of mankind, there was a breaking of vessels, and some of the sparks of G-d that were released from the broken vessels remained like residue in the vacuum tahiru, they are called rashimu, they are dispersed and the shards of the broken vessels became as husks, in them the rashimu sparks are entrapped. 

The Other Side, the Evil Being, draws its life energy from the rashimu inside the husks. In order to release the divine sparks, one must follow Torah and every deed is a tikkun, especially the extra designated prayers and fasting and songs for tikkun. These deeds release the sparks from the husks. They reverse the breaking of the vessels, bit by bit, cumulatively. And they operate among the divine spheres causing balance and union. 

The sparks in husks and tikkun deeds are central to mainstream Sabbatean messianic theology, and later on in the Hassidic spiritualism.

Soulish Transmigration

Another element worth mentioning is the concept of transmigration of souls (gilgul neshamot), which is significant in the Lurianic mystical worldview, and connects to the Lurianic messianic phenomena to come (in Sabbateanism and in Hasidism and beyond). 

Chaim Vital wrote extensively about this in one of his books, called Sefer ha’Gilgulim (book of transmigrations), there he asserts that over the generations, the souls of persons transmigrate, they roll, or at least those of righteous masters do, such as Moshe and Eliyahu, and of course the Messiah.

Why is this idea very significant?

This notion builds off of that Talmudic line we encountered in Kabbalah sources - “the Son of David will not come until all the souls of a body are completed…” which means, according to the Arizal, the forum of righteous ones in the heavens, and the souls of the righteous ones that are entrapped in husks of evil - the action of raising up the sparks is essentially raising up these souls of the righteous. Cumulatively, the acts of tikkun raising the sparks which are the righteous souls, mean completing the Primordial Man, Adam Kadmon, which is the reversing the original sin in Eden.

These 2 important concepts explained in a nutshell from Lurianic Kabbalah will manifest in Sabbatean and then in Hasidic messianism. They came from Lurananic Kabbalah, which apparently became a thing because of Sabbateanism, and of course no know one wants to credit that with that.