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Colin Low: Cabalah
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Introduction
------------
If a chemist from the twentieth century could step into a time-machine
and go back two-hundred years he or she would probably feel a deep
kinship with the chemists of that time, even though there might be
considerable differences in terminology, underlying theory, equipment
and so on. Despite this kinship, chemists have not been trapped in the
past, and the subject as it is studied today bears little resemblance to
the chemistry of two hundred years ago.
Kabbalah has existed for nearly two thousand years, and like any living
discipline it has evolved through time, and it continues to evolve. One
aspect of this evolution is that it is necessary for living Kabbalists
to continually "re-present" what they understand by Kabbalah so that
Kabbalah itself continues to live and continues to retain its usefulness
to each new generation. If Kabbalists do not do this then it becomes a
dead thing, an historical curiousity (as was virtually the case within
Judaism by the nineteenth century). These notes were written with that
intention: to present one view of Kabbalah as it is currently practised
in 1992, so that people who are interested in Kabbalah and want to learn
more about it are not limited purely to texts written hundreds or
thousands of years ago (or for that matter, modern texts written about
texts written hundreds or thousands of years ago). For this reason
these notes acknowledge the past, but they do not defer to it. There
are many adequate texts for those who wish to understand Kabbalah as it
was practised in the past.
These notes have another purpose. The majority of people who are drawn
towards Kabbalah are not historians; they are people who want to know
enough about it to decide whether they should use it as part of their
own personal mystical or magical adventure. There is enough information
not only to make that decision, but also to move from theory into
practice. I should emphasise that this is only one variation of
Kabbalah out of many, and I leave it to others to present their own
variants - I make no apology if the material is biased towards a
particular point of view.
The word "Kabbalah" means "tradition". There are many alternative
spellings, the two most popular being Kabbalah and Qabalah, but Cabala,
Qaballah, Qabala, Kaballa (and so on) are also seen. I made my choice
as a result of a poll of the books on my bookcase, not as a result of
deep linguistic understanding.
If Kabbalah means "tradition", then the core of the tradition was the
attempt to penetrate the inner meaning of the Bible, which was taken to
be the literal (but heavily veiled) word of God. Because the Word was
veiled, special techniques were developed to elucidate the true
meaning....Kabbalistic theosophy has been deeply influenced by these
attempts to find a deep meaning in the Bible.
The earliest documents (~100 - ~1000 A.D.) associated with Kabbalah
describe the attempts of "Merkabah" mystics to penetrate the seven halls
(Hekaloth) of creation and reach the Merkabah (throne-chariot) of God.
These mystics used the familiar methods of shamanism (fasting,
repetitious chanting, prayer, posture) to induce trance states in which
they literally fought their way past terrible seals and guards to reach
an ecstatic state in which they "saw God". An early and highly
influential document (Sepher Yetzirah) appears to have originated during
the earlier part of this period.
By the early middle ages further, more theosophical developments had
taken place, chiefly a description of "processes" within God, and a
highly esoteric view of creation as a process in which God manifests in
a series of emanations. This doctrine of the "sephiroth" can be found
in a rudimentary form in the "Yetzirah", but by the time of the
publication of the book "Bahir" (12th. century) it had reached a form
not too different from the form it takes today. One of most interesting
characters from this period was Abraham Abulafia, who believed that God
cannot be described or conceptualised using everyday symbols, and used
the Hebrew alphabet in intense meditations lasting many hours to reach
ecstatic states. Because his abstract letter combinations were used as
keys or entry points to altered states of consciousness, failure to
carry through the manipulations correctly could have a drastic effect on
the Kabbalist. In "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism" Scholem includes a
long extract of one such experiment made by one of Abulafia's students -
it has a deep ring of truth about it.
Probably the most influential Kabbalistic document, the "Sepher ha
Zohar", was published by Moses de Leon, a Spanish Jew, in the latter
half of the thirteenth century. The "Zohar" is a series of separate
documents covering a wide range of subjects, from a verse-by-verse
esoteric commentary on the Pentateuch, to highly theosophical
descriptions of processes within God. The "Zohar" has been widely read
and was highly influential within mainstream Judaism.
A later development in Kabbalah was the Safed school of mystics headed
by Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria. Luria was a highly charismatic
leader who exercised almost total control over the life of the school,
and has passed into history as something of a saint. Emphasis was
placed on living in the world and bringing the consciousness of God
through *into* the world in a practical way. Practices were largely
devotional.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Judaism as a whole
was heavily influenced by Kabbalah, but by the beginning of this century
a Jewish writer was able to dismiss it as an historical curiousity.
Jewish Kabbalah has vast literature which is almost entirely
untranslated into English.
A development which took place almost synchronously with Jewish Kabbalah
was its adoption by many Christian mystics, magicians and philosphers.
Renaissance philosophers such as Pico della Mirandola were familiar with
Kabbalah and mixed it with gnosticism, pythagoreanism, neo-platonism and
hermeticism to form a snowball which continued to pick up traditions as
it rolled down the centuries. It is probably accurate to say that from
the Renaissance on, virtually all European occult philosophers and
magicians of note had a working knowledge of Kabbalah.
It is not clear how Kabbalah was involved in the propagation of ritual
magical techniques, or whether it *was* involved, or whether the ritual
techniques were preserved in parallel within Judaism, but it is an
undeniable fact that the most influential documents appear to have a
Jewish origin. The most important medieval magical text is the "Key of
Solomon", and it contains the elements of classic ritual magic - names
of power, the magic circle, ritual implements, consecration, evocation
of spirits etc. No-one knows how old it is, but there is a reasonable
suspicion that its contents preserve techniques which might well date
back to Solomon.
The combination of non-Jewish Kabbalah and ritual magic has been kept
alive outside Judaism until the present day, although it has been
heavily adulterated at times by hermeticism, gnosticism, neo-platonism,
pythagoreanism, rosicrucianism, christianity, tantra and so on. The
most important "modern" influences are the French magician Eliphas Levi,
and the English "Order of the Golden Dawn". At least two members of the
G.D. (S.L. Mathers and A.E. Waite) were knowledgable Kabbalists, and
three G. D. members have popularised Kabbalah - Aleister Crowley,
Israel Regardie, and Dion Fortune. Dion Fortune's "Inner Light" has
also produced a number of authors: Gareth Knight, William Butler, and
William Gray.
An unfortunate side effect of the G.D is that while Kabbalah was an
important part of its "Knowledge Lectures", surviving G.D. rituals are
a syncretist hodge-podge of symbolism in which Kabbalah plays a minor or
nominal role, and this has led to Kabbalah being seen by many modern
occultists as more of a theoretical and intellectual discipline, rather
than a potent and self-contained mystical and magical system in its own
right.
Some of the originators of modern witchcraft drew heavily on medieval
ritual and Kabbalah for inspiration, and it is not unusual to find
witches teaching some form of Kabbalah, although it is generally even
less well integrated into practical technique than in the case of the
G.D.
The Kabbalistic tradition described in the notes derives principally
from Dion Fortune, but has been substantially developed over the past 30
years. I would like to thank M.S. and the T.S.H.U. for all the fun.
Chapter 1.: The Tree of Life
At the root of the Kabbalistic view of the world are three
fundamental concepts and they provide a natural place to begin.
The three concepts are force, form and consciousness and these
words are used in an abstract way, as the following examples
illustrate:
- high pressure steam in the cylinder of a steam engine
provides a force. The engine is a form which constrains the
force.
- a river runs downhill under the force of gravity. The
river channel is a form which constrains the water to run in
a well defined path.
- someone wants to get to the centre of a garden maze. The
hedges are a form which constrain that person's ability to
walk as they please.
- a diesel engine provides the force which drives a boat
forwards. A rudder constrains its course to a given
direction.
- a polititian wants to change the law. The legislative
framework of the country is a form which he or she must
follow if the change is to be made legally.
- water sits in a bowl. The force of gravity pulls the water
down. The bowl is a form which gives its shape to the water.
- a stone falls to the ground under the force of gravity.
Its acceleration is constrained to be equal to the force
divided by the mass of the stone.
- I want to win at chess. The force of my desire to win is
constrained within the rules of chess.
- I see something in a shop window and have to have it. I am
constrained by the conditions of sale (do I have enough
money, is it in stock).
- cordite explodes in a gun barrel and provides an explosive
force on a bullet. The gas and the bullet are constrained by
the form of the gun barrel.
- I want to get a passport. The government won't give me one
unless I fill in lots of forms in precisely the right way.
- I want a university degree. The university won't give me
a degree unless I attend certain courses and pass various
assessments.
In all these examples there is something which is causing change
to take place ("a force") and there is something which causes
change to take place in a defined way ("a form"). Without being
too pedantic it is possible to identify two very different types
of example here:
1. examples of natural physical processes (e.g. a falling
stone) where the force is one of the natural forces known to
physics (e.g. gravity) and the form is is some combination
of physical laws which constrain the force to act in a well
defined way.
2. examples of people wanting something, where the force is
some ill-defined concept of "desire", "will", or "drives",
and the form is one of the forms we impose upon ourselves
(the rules of chess, the Law, polite behaviour etc.).
Despite the fact that the two different types of example are
"only metaphorically similar", Kabbalists see no fundamental
distiniction between them. To the Kabbalist there are forces
which cause change in the natural world, and there are
corresponding psychological forces which drive us to change both
the world and ourselves, and whether these forces are natural or
psychological they are rooted in the same place: consciousness.
Similarly, there are forms which the component parts of the
physical world seem to obey (natural laws) and there are
completely arbitrary forms we create as part of the process of
living (the rules of a game, the shape of a mug, the design of an
engine, the syntax of a language) and these forms are also rooted
in the same place: consciousness. It is a Kabbalistic axiom that
there is a prime cause which underpins all the manifestations of
force and form in both the natural and psychological world and
that prime cause I have called consciousness for lack of a better
word.
Consciousness is undefinable. We know that we are conscious
in different ways at different times - sometimes we feel free and
happy, at other times trapped and confused, sometimes angry and
passionate, sometimes cold and restrained - but these words
describe manifestations of consciousness. We can define the
manifestations of consciousness in terms of manifestations of
consciousness, which is about as useful as defining an ocean in
terms of waves and foam. Anyone who attempts to define
consciousness itself tends to come out of the same door as they
went in. We have lots of words for the phenomena of consciousness
- thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires, emotions, motives and so
on - but few words for the states of consciousness which give
rise to these phenomena, just as we have many words to describe
the surface of a sea, but few words to describe its depths.
Kabbalah provides a vocabulary for states of consciousness
underlying the phenomena, and one of the purposes of these notes
is to explain this vocabulary, not by definition, but mostly by
metaphor and analogy. The only genuine method of understanding
what the vocabulary means is by attaining various states of
consciousness in a predictable and reasonably objective way, and
Kabbalah provides practical methods for doing this.
A fundamental premise of the Kabbalistic model of reality is
that there is a pure, primal, and undefinable state of
consciousness which manifests as an interaction between force and
form. This is virtually the entire guts of the Kabbalistic view
of things, and almost everything I have to say from now on is
based on this trinity of consciousness, force, and form.
Consciousness comes first, but hidden within it is an inherent
duality; there is an energy associated with consciousness which
causes change (force), and there is a capacity within
consciousness to constrain that energy and cause it to manifest
in a well-defined way (form).
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ \
/ \
Capacity Raw
to take ________________ Energy
Form
Figure 1.
What do we get out of raw energy and an inbuilt capacity for form
and structure? Is there yet another hidden potential within this
trinity waiting to manifest? There is. If modern physics is to be
believed we get matter and the physical world. The cosmological
Big Bang model of raw energy surging out from an infintesimal
point and condensing into basic forms of matter as it cools, then
into stars and galaxies, then planets, and ultimately living
creatures, has many points of similarity with the Kabbalistic
model. In the Big Bang model a soup of energy condenses according
to some yet-to-be-formulated Grand-Universal-Theory into our
physical world. What Kabbalah does suggest (and modern physics
most certainly does not!) is that matter and consciousness are
the same stuff, and differ only in the degree of structure
imposed - matter is consciousness so heavily structured and
constrained that its behaviour becomes describable using the
regular and simple laws of physics. This is shown in Fig. 2. The
primal, first principle of consciousness is synonymous with the
idea of "God".
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Capacity | Raw
to take _____________ Energy/Force
Form |
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Matter
The World
Figure 2
The glyph in Fig. 2 is the basis for the Tree of Life. The first
principle of consciousness is called Kether, which means Crown.
The raw energy of consciousness is called Chockhmah or Wisdom,
and the capacity to give form to the energy of consciousness is
called Binah, which is sometimes translated as Understanding, and
sometimes as Intelligence. The outcome of the interaction of
force and form, the physical world, called Malkuth or Kingdom.
This quaternery is a Kabbalistic representation of God-the-
Knowable, in the sense that it the most primitive representation
of God we are capable of comprehending; paradoxically, Kabbalah
also contains a notion of God-the-Unknowable which transcends
this glyph, and is called En Soph. There is not much I can say
about En Soph, and what I can say I will postpone for later.
God-the-Knowable has four aspects, two male and two female:
Kether and Chokhmah are both represented as male, and Binah and
Malkuth are represented as female. One of the titles of Chokhmah
is Abba, which means Father, and one of the titles of Binah is
Aima, which means Mother, so you can think of Chokhmah as God-
the-Father, and Binah as God-the-Mother. Malkuth is the
daughter, the female spirit of God-as-Matter, and it would not be
wildly wrong to think of her as Mother Earth. One of the more
pleasant things about Kabbalah is that its symbolism gives equal
place to both male and female.
And what of God-the-Son? Is there also a God-the-Son in
Kabbalah? There is, and this is the point where Kabbalah tackles
the interesting problem of thee and me. The glyph in Fig. 2 is a
model of consciousness, but not of self-consciousness, and self-
consciousness throws an interesting spanner in the works.
The Fall
Self-consciousness is like a mirror in which consciousness
sees itself reflected. Self-consciousness is modelled in Kabbalah
by making a copy of figure 2.
Consciousness
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Consciousness | Consciousness
of ________________ of
Form | Energy/Force
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Consciousness
of the
World
Figure 3
Figure 3. is Figure 2. reflected through self-consciousness. The
overall effect of self-consciousness is to add an additional
layer to Figure 2. as follows:
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Capacity | Raw
to take _____________ Energy/Force
Form |
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Consciousness
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Consciousness | Consciousness
of ________________ of
Form | Energy/Force
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Consciousness
of the
World
|
|
|
Matter
The World
Figure 4
Fig. 2 is sometimes called "the Garden of Eden" because it
represents a primal state of consciousness. The effect of self-
consciousness as shown in Fig. 4 is to drive a wedge between the
First Principle of Consciousness (Kether) and that Consciousness
realised as matter and the physical world (Malkuth). This is
called "the Fall", after the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden. From a Kabbalistic point of view the story of Eden, with
the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the serpent and the
temptation, and the casting out from the Garden has a great deal
of meaning in terms of understanding the evolution of
consciousness.
Self-consciousness introduces four new states of
consciousness: the Consciousness of Consciousness is called
Tipheret, which means Beauty; the Consciousness of Force/Energy
is called Netzach, which means Victory or Firmness; the
Consciousness of Form is called Hod, which means Splendour or
Glory, and the Consciousness of Matter is called Yesod, which
means Foundation. These four states have readily observable
manifestations, as shown below in Fig. 5:
The Self
Self-Importance
Self-Sacrifice
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
Language | Emotions
Abstraction_______________Drives
Reason | Feelings
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
\ Perception /
Imagination
Instinct
Reproduction
Figure 5
Figure 4. is almost the complete Tree of Life, but not quite -
there are still two states missing. The inherent capacity of
consciousness to take on structure and objectify itself (Binah,
God-the-Mother) is reflected through self-consciousness as a
perception of the limitedness and boundedness of things. We are
conscious of space and time, yesterday and today, here and there,
you and me, in and out, life and death, whole and broken,
together and apart. We see things as limited and bounded and we
have a perception of form as something "created" and "destroyed".
My car was built a year ago, but it was smashed yesterday. I
wrote an essay, but I lost it when my computer crashed. My granny
is dead. The river changed its course. A law has been repealed. I
broke my coffee mug. The world changes, and what was here
yesterday is not here today. This perception acts like an
"interface" between the quaternary of consciousness which
represents "God", and the quaternary which represents a living
self-conscious being, and two new states are introduced to
represent this interface. The state which represents the creation
of new forms is called Chesed, which means Mercy, and the state
which represents the destruction of forms is called Gevurah,
which means Strength. This is shown in Fig. 6. The
objectification of forms which takes place in a self-conscious
being, and the consequent tendency to view the world in terms of
limitations and dualities (time and space, here and there, you
and me, in and out, God and Man, good and evil...) produces a
barrier to perception which most people rarely overcome, and for
this reason it has come to be called the Abyss. The Abyss is also
marked on Figure 6.
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Capacity | Raw
to take _____________ Energy/Force
Form | |
|\ | /|
| \ | / |
--------------Abyss---------------
| \ | / |
Destruction | Creation
of_____\_____|_____ /____of
Form \ | / Form
| \ \ | / / |
| \ \ | / / |
| \ Consciousness / |
| of |
| / Consciousness \ |
| / | \ |
|/ | \|
Consciousness | Consciousness
of ________________ of
\ Form | Energy/Force
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ Consciousness /
\ of /
\ the World /
\ /
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Matter
The World
Figure 6
The diagram in Fig. 6 is called the Tree of Life. The
"constructionist" approach I have used to justify its structure
is a little unusual, but the essence of my presentation can be
found in the "Zohar" under the guise of the Macroprosopus and
Microprosopus, although in this form it is not readily accessible
to the average reader. My attempt to show how the Tree of Life
can be derived out of pure consciousness through the interaction
of an abstract notion of force and form was not intended to be a
convincing exercise from an intellectual point of view - the Tree
of Life is primarily a gnostic rather than a rational or
intellectual explanation of consciousness and its interaction
with the physical world.
The Tree is composed of 10 states or sephiroth (sephiroth
plural, sephira singular) and 22 interconnecting paths. The age
of this diagram is unknown: there is enough information in the
13th. century "Sepher ha Zohar" to construct this diagram, and
the doctrine of the sephiroth has been attributed to Isaac the
Blind in the 12th. century, but we have no certain knowledge of
its origin. It probably originated sometime in the interval
between the 6th. and 13th. centuries AD. The origin of the word
"sephira" is unclear - it is almost certainly derived from the
Hebrew word for "number" (SPhR), but it has also been attributed
to the Greek word for "sphere" and even to the Hebrew word for a
sapphire (SPhIR). With a characteristic aptitude for discovering
hidden meanings everywhere, Kabbalists find all three derivations
useful, so take your pick.
In the language of earlier Kabbalistic writers the sephiroth
represented ten primeval emanations of God, ten focii through
which the energy of a hidden, absolute and unknown Godhead (En
Soph) propagated throughout the creation, like white light
passing through a prism. The sephiroth can be interpreted as
aspects of God, as states of consciousness, or as nodes akin to
the Chakras in the occult anatomy of a human being .
I have left out one important detail from the structure of
the Tree. There is an eleventh "something" which is definitely
*not* a sephira, but is often shown on modern representations of
the Tree. The Kabbalistic "explanation" runs as follows: when
Malkuth "fell" out of the Garden of Eden (Fig. 2) it left behind
a "hole" in the fabric of the Tree, and this "hole", located in
the centre of the Abyss, is called Daath, or Knowledge. Daath is
*not* a sephira; it is a hole. This may sound like gobbledy-gook,
and in the sense that it is only a metaphor, it is.
The completed Tree of Life with the Hebrew titles of the
sephiroth is shown below in Fig. 7.
En Soph
/-------------------------\
/ \
( Kether )
/ (Crown) \
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
Binah | Chokhmah
(Understanding)__________ (Wisdom)
(Intelligence) | |
|\ | /|
| \ Daath / |
| \ (Knowledge) / |
| \ | / |
Gevurah \ | / Chesed
(Strength)\_____|_____/__ (Mercy)
| \ | / (Love)
| \ \ | / / |
| \ \ | / / |
| \ Tipheret / |
| / (Beauty) \ |
| / | \ |
| / | \ |
|/ | \|
Hod | Netzach
(Glory) _______________(Victory)
(Splendour) | (Firmness)
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ Yesod / /
\ (Foundation) /
\ /
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Malkuth
(Kingdom)
Figure 7
From an historical point of view the doctrine of emanations and
the Tree of Life are only one small part of a huge body of
Kabbalistic speculation about the nature of divinity and our part
in creation, but it is the part which has survived. The Tree
continues to be used in the Twentieth Century because it has
proved to be a useful and productive symbol for practices of a
magical, mystical and religious nature. Modern Kabbalah in the
Western Mystery Tradition is largely concerned with the
understanding and practical application of the Tree of Life, and
the following set of notes will list some of the characteristics
of each sephira in more detail so that you will have a "snapshot"
of what each sephira represents before going on to examine the
sephiroth and the "deep structure" of the Tree in more detail.
****************************************************************************
Chapter 2.: Sephirothic Correspondences
The correspondences are a set of symbols, associations and
qualities which provide a handle on the elusive something a
sephira represents. Some of the correspondences are hundreds of
years old, many were concocted this century, and some are my own;
some fit very well, and some are obscure - oddly enough it is
often the most obscure and ill-fitting correspondence which is
most productive; like a Zen riddle it perplexes and annoys the
mind until it arrives at the right place more in spite of the
correspondence than because of it.
There are few canonical correspondences; some of the
sephiroth have alternative names, some of the names have
alternative translations, the mapping from Hebrew spellings to
the English alphabet varies from one author to the next, and
inaccuracies and accretions are handed down like the family
silver. I keep my Hebrew dictionary to hand but guarantee none of
the English spellings.
The correspondences I have given are as follows:
1. The Meaning is a translation of the Hebrew name of the
sephira.
2. The Planet in most cases is the planet associated with
the sephira. In some cases it is not a planet at all
(e.g. the fixed stars). The planets are ordered
by decreasing apparent motion - this is one
correspondence which appears to pre-date Copernicus!
3. The Element is the physical element (earth, water, air,
fire, aethyr) which has most in common with the nature
of the Sephira. The Golden Dawn applied an excess of
logic to these attributions and made a mess of them, to
the confusion of many. Only the five Lower Face
sephiroth have been attributed an element.
4. Briatic colour. This is the colour of the sephira as
seen in the world of Creation, Briah. There are colour
scales for the other three worlds but I haven't found
them to be useful in practical work.
5. Magical Image. Useful in meditiations; some are astute.
6. The Briatic Correspondence is an abstract quality
which says something about the essence of the way the
sephira expresses itself.
7. The Illusion characterises the way in which the energy
of the sephira clouds one's judgement; it is something
which is *obviously* true. Most people suffer from one
or more of these according to their temperament.
8. The Obligation is a personal quality which is demanded
of an initiate at this level.
9. The Virtue and Vice are the energy of the sephiroth as
it manifests in a positive and negative sense in the
personality.
10. Qlippoth is a word which means "shell". In medieval
Kabbalah each sephira was "seen" to be adding form to
the sephira which preceded it in the Lightning Flash
(see Chapter 3.). Form was seen to an accretion, a shell
around the pure divine energy of the Godhead, and each
layer or shell hid the divine radiance a little bit
more, until God was buried in form and exiled in matter,
the end-point of the process. At the time attitudes to
matter were tainted with the Manichean notion that
matter was evil, a snare for the spirit, and
consequently the Qlippoth or shells were "demonised" and
actually turned into demons. The correspondence I have
given here restores the original notion of a shell of
form *without* the corresponding force to activate it;
it is the lifeless, empty husk of a sephira devoid of
force, and while it isn't a literal demon, it is hardly
a bundle of laughs when you come across it.
11. The Command refers to the Four Powers of the Sphinx,
with an extra one added for good measure.
12. The Spiritual Experience is just that.
13. The Titles are a collection of alternative names for the
sephira; most are very old.
14. The God Name is a key to invoking the power of the
sephira in the world of emanation, Atziluth.
13. The Archangel mediates the energy of the sephira in the
world of creation, Briah.
14. The Angel Order administers the energy of the sephira in
the world of formation, Yetzirah.
15. The Keywords are a collection of phrases which summarise
key aspects of the sephira.
=================================================================
Sephira: Malkuth Meaning: Kingdom
------- -------
Planet: Cholem Yesodeth Element: earth
--------(the Breaker of -------
the Foundations, sphere of the elements, the Earth)
Briatic Colour: brown Number: 10
------------- (citrine, russet-red,------
olive green, black)
Magical Image: a young woman crowned and throned
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: stability
----------------------
Illusion: materialism Obligation: discipline
-------- ----------
Virtue: discrimination Vice: avarice & inertia
------ ----
Qlippoth: stasis Command: keep silent
-------- -------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel
------
Titles: The Gate; Gate of Death; Gate of Tears; Gate of Justice;
------ The Inferior Mother; Malkah, the Queen; Kallah, the
Bride; the Virgin.
------
God Name: Adonai ha Aretz Archangel: Sandalphon
-------- Adonai Malekh ---------
Angel Order: Ishim
-----------
Keywords:the real world, physical matter, the Earth, Mother
Earth, the physical elements, the natural world, sticks
& stones, possessions, faeces, practicality, solidity,
stability, inertia, heaviness, bodily death, incarnation.
=================================================================
Sephira: Yesod Meaning: Foundation
------- -------
Planet: Levanah (the Moon) Element: Aethyr
-------------- -------
Briatic Colour: purple Number: 9
------------- ------
Magical Image: a beautiful man, very strong (e.g. Atlas)
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: receptivity, perception
----------------------
Illusion: security Obligation: trust
-------- ----------
Virtue: independence Vice: idleness
------ ----
Qlippoth: zombieism, robotism Command: go!
-------- -------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of the Machinery of the Universe
--------------------
Titles: The Treasure House of Images
------
God Name: Shaddai el Chai Archangel: Gabriel
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Cherubim
----------
Keywords: perception, interface, imagination, image, appearance,
glamour, the Moon, the unconscious, instinct, tides,
illusion, hidden infrastructure, dreams, divination,
anything as it seems to be and not as it is, mirrors
and crystals, the "Astral Plane", Aethyr, glue,
tunnels, sex & reproduction, the genitals, cosmetics,
instinctive magic (psychism), secret doors, shamanic
tunnel.
=============================================================
Sephira: Hod Meaning: Glory, Splendour
------- -------
Planet: Kokab (Mercury) Element: air
------ -------
Briatic Colour: orange Number: 8
------------- ------
Magical Image: an hermaphrodite
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: abstraction
----------------------
Illusion: order Obligation: learn
-------- ----------
Virtue: honesty, truthfulness Vice: dishonesty
------ ----
Qlippoth: rigidity Command: will
--------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of Splendour
------
Titles: -
------
God Name: Elohim Tzabaoth Archangel: Raphael
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Beni Elohim
Keywords: reason, abstraction, communication, conceptualisation,
logic, the sciences, language, speech, money (as a
concept), mathematics, medicine & healing, trickery,
writing, media (as communication), pedantry,
philosophy, Kabbalah (as an abstract system), protocol,
the Law, ownership, territory, theft, "Rights", ritual
magic.
===============================================================
Sephira: Netzach Meaning: Victory, Firmness
------- -------
Planet: Nogah (Venus) Element: water
-------------- -------
Briatic Colour: green Number: 7
------------- ------
Magical Image: a beautiful naked woman
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: nurture
----------------------
Illusion: projection Obligation: responsibility
-------- ----------
Virtue: unselfishness Vice: selfishness
------ ----
Qlippoth: habit, routine Command: know
--------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of Beauty Triumphant
------
Titles: -
------
God Name: Jehovah Tzabaoth Archangel: Haniel
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Elohim
----------
Keywords: passion, pleasure, luxury, sensual beauty, feelings,
drives, emotions - love, hate, anger, joy, depression,
misery, excitement, desire, lust; nurture, libido,
empathy, sympathy, ecstatic magic.
================================================================
Sephira: Tipheret Meaning: Beauty
------- -------
Planet: Shemesh (the Sun) Element: fire
-------------- -------
Briatic Colour: yellow Number: 6
------------- ------
Magical Image: a king, a child, a sacrificed god
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: centrality, wholeness
----------------------
Illusion: identification Obligation: integrity
-------- ----------
Virtue: devotion to the Great Work Vice: pride, self-importance
------ ----
Qlippoth: hollowness Command: dare
--------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of Harmony
--------------------
Titles: Melekh, the King; Zoar Anpin, the lesser countenance, the
------ Microprosopus; the Son; Rachamin, charity.
God Name: Aloah va Daath Archangel: Michael
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Malachim
-----------
Keywords: harmony, integrity, balance, wholeness, the Self, self-
importance, self-sacrifice, the Son of God, centrality,
the Philospher's Stone, identity, the solar plexus,
a King, the Great Work.
================================================================
Sephira: Gevurah Meaning: Strength
------- -------
Planet: Madim (Mars)
--------------
Briatic Colour: red Number: 5
------------- ------
Magical Image: a mighty warrior
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: power
----------------------
Illusion: invincibility Obligation: courage & loyalty
-------- ----------
Virtue: courage & energy Vice: cruelty
------ ----
Qlippoth: bureaucracy
--------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of Power
--------------------
Titles: Pachad, fear; Din, justice.
------
God Name: Elohim Gevor Archangel: Kamael
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Seraphim
-----------
Keywords: power, justice, retribution (eaten cold), the Law (in
execution), cruelty, oppression, domination & the Power
Myth, severity, necessary destruction, catabolism,
martial arts.
===============================================================
Sephira: Chesed Meaning: Mercy
------- -------
Planet: Tzadekh (Jupiter)
--------------
Briatic Colour: blue Number: 4
------------- ------
Magical Image: a mighty king
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: authority
----------------------
Illusion: being right Obligation: humility
-------- (self-righteousness) ----------
Virtue: humility & obedience Vice: tyranny, hypocrisy,
------ ---- bigotry, gluttony
Qlippoth: ideology
--------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of Love
--------------------
Titles: Gedulah, magnificence, love, majesty
------
God Name: El Archangel: Tzadkiel
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Chasmalim
-----------
Keywords: authority, creativity, inspiration, vision, leadership,
excess, waste, secular and spiritual power, submission
and the Annihilation Myth, the atom bomb, obliteration,
birth, service.
================================================================
Non-Sephira: Daath Meaning: Knowledge
----------- -------
Daath has no manifest qualities and cannot be invoked directly.
Keywords: hole, tunnel, gateway, doorway, black hole, vortex.
================================================================
Sephira: Binah Meaning: Understanding,
------- -------
Planet: Shabbathai (Saturn)
------
Briatic Colour: black Number: 3
------------- ------
Magical Image: an old woman on a throne
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: comprehension
----------------------
Illusion: death
--------
Virtue: silence Vice: inertia
------ ----
Qlippoth: fatalism
--------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of Sorrow
--------------------
Titles: Aima, the Mother; Ama, the Crone; Marah, the bitter
sea; Khorsia, the Throne; the Fifty Gates of
Understanding; Intelligence; the Mother of Form; the
Superior Mother.
God Name: Elohim Archangel: Cassiel
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Aralim
-----------
Keywords: limitation, form, constraint, heaviness, slowness, old-
age, infertility, incarnation, karma, fate, time,
space, natural law, the womb and gestation, darkness,
boundedness, enclosure, containment, fertility, mother,
weaving and spinning, death (annihilation).
==================================================================
Sephira: Chokhmah Meaning: Wisdom
------- -------
Planet: Mazlot (the Zodiac, the fixed stars)
--------------
Briatic Colour: silver/white Number: 2
------------- grey ------
Magical Image: a bearded man
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: revolution
----------------------
Illusion: independence
--------
Virtue: good Vice: evil
------ ----
Qlippoth: arbitrariness
--------
Spiritual Experience: Vision of God face-to-face
------
Titles: Abba, the Father. The Supernal Father.
------
God Name: Jah Archangel: Ratziel
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Auphanim
-----------
Keywords: pure creative energy, lifeforce, the wellspring.
==================================================================
Sephira: Kether Meaning: Crown
------- -------
Planet: Rashith ha Gilgalim (first swirlings, the Big Bang)
--------------
Briatic Colour: pure white Number: 1
------------- ------
Magical Image: a bearded man seen in profile
-------------
Briatic Correspondence: unity
----------------------
Illusion: attainment
--------
Virtue: attainment Vice: ---
------ ----
Qlippoth: futility
--------
Spiritual Experience: Union with God
--------------------
Titles: Ancient of Days, the Greater Countenance
(Macroprosopus), the White Head, Concealed of the
Concealed, Existence of Existences, the Smooth Point,
Rum Maalah, the Highest Point.
God Name: Eheieh Archangel: Metatron
-------- ---------
Angel Order: Chaioth ha Qadesh
-----------
Keywords: unity, union, all, pure consciousness, God, the
Godhead, manifestation, beginning, source, emanation.
****************************************************************************
Chapter 3: The Pillars & the Lightning Flash
============================================
In Chapter 1. the Tree of Life was derived from three
concepts, or rather one primary concept and two derivative
concepts which are "contained" within it. The primary concept was
called consciousness, and it was said to "contain" within it the
two complementary concepts of force and form. This chapter builds
on the idea by introducing the three Pillars of the Tree, and
uses the Pillars to clarify a process called the Lightning Flash.
The Three Pillars are shown in Figure 8. below.
Pillar Pillar Pillar
of of of
Form Consciousness Force
(Severity) (Mildness) (Mercy)
Kether
/ (Crown) \
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
Binah | Chokhmah
(Understanding)__________ (Wisdom)
(Intelligence) | |
|\ | /|
| \ Daath / |
| \ (Knowledge) / |
| \ | / |
Gevurah \ | / Chesed
(Strength)\_____|_____/__ (Mercy)
| \ | / (Love)
| \ \ | / / |
| \ \ | / / |
| \ Tipheret / |
| / (Beauty) \ |
| / | \ |
| / | \ |
|/ | \|
Hod | Netzach
(Glory) _______________(Victory)
(Splendour) | (Firmness)
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ Yesod / /
\ (Foundation) /
\ /
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Malkuth
(Kingdom)
Figure 8
Not surprisingly the three pillars are referred to as the pillars
of consciousness, force and form. The pillar of consciousness
contains the sephiroth Kether, Tiphereth, Yesod and Malkuth; the
pillar of force contains the sephiroth Chokhmah, Chesed and
Netzach; the pillar of form contains the sephiroth Binah, Gevurah
and Hod. In older Kabbalistic texts the pillars are referred to
as the pillars of mildness, mercy and severity, and it is not
immediately obvious how the older jargon relates to the new. To
the medieval Kabbalist (and this is a recurring metaphor in the
Zohar) the creation as an emanation of God is a delicate
*balance* (metheqela) between two opposing tendencies: the mercy
of God, the outflowing, creative, life-giving and sustaining
tendency in God, and the severity or strict judgement of God, the
limiting, defining, life-taking and ultimately wrathful or
destructive tendency in God. The creation is "energised" by these
two tendencies as if stretched between the poles of a battery.
Modern Kabbalah makes a half-hearted attempt to remove the
more obvious anthropomorphisms in the descriptions of "God";
mercy and severity are misleading terms, apt to remind one of a
man with a white beard, and even in medieval times the terms had
distinctly technical meanings as the following quotation shows
[1]:
"It must be remembered that to the Kabbalist, judgement [Din
- judgement, another title of Gevurah] means the imposition
of limits and the correct determination of things. According
to Cordovero the quality of judgement is inherent in
everything insofar as everything wishes to remain what it
is, to stay within its boundaries."
I understand the word "form" in precisely this sense - it is that
which defines *what* a thing is, the structure whereby a given
thing is distinct from every other thing.
As for "consciousness", I use the word "consciousness" in a
sense so abstract that it is virtually meaningless, and according
to whim I use the word God instead, where it is understood that
both words are placeholders for something which is potentially
knowable in the gnostic sense only - consciousness can be
*defined* according to the *forms* it takes, in which case we are
defining the forms, *not* the consciousness. The same
qualification applies to the word "force". My inability to define
two of the three concepts which underpin the structure of the
Tree is a nuisance which is tackled traditionally by the use of
extravagent metaphors, and by elimination ("not this, not
that").
The classification of sephiroth into three pillars is a way
of saying that each sephira in a pillar partakes of a common
quality which is "inherited" in a progressively more developed
and structured form from of the top of a pillar to the bottom.
Tipheret, Yesod and Malkuth all share with Kether the quality of
"consciousness in balance" or "synthesis of opposing qualities",
or but in each case it is expressed differently according to the
increased degree of structure imposed. Likewise, Chokhmah, Chesed
and Netzach share the quality of force or energy or
expansiveness, and Binah, Gevurah and Hod share the quality of
form, definition and limitation. From Kether down to Malkuth,
force and form are combined; the symbolism of the Tree has
something in common with a production line, with molten metal
coming in one end and finished cars coming out the other, and
with that metaphor we are now ready to describe the Lightning
Flash, the process whereby God takes on flesh, the process which
created and sustains the creation.
In the beginning...was Something. Or Nothing. It doesn't
really matter which term we use, as both are equally meaningless
in this context. Nothing is probably the better of the two terms,
because I can use Something in the next paragraph. Kabbalists
call this Nothing "En Soph" which literally means "no end" or
infinity, and understand by this a hidden, unmanifest God-in-
Itself.
Out of this incomprehensible and indescribable Nothing came
Something. Probably more words have been devoted to this moment
than any other in Kabbalah, and it is all too easy to make fun
the effort which has gone into elaborating the indescribable, so
I won't, but in return do not expect me to provide a
justification for why Something came out of Nothing. It just did.
A point crystallised in the En Soph. In some versions of the
story the En Soph "contracted" to "make room" for the creation
(Isaac Luria's theory of Tsimtsum), and this is probably an
important clarification for those who have rubbed noses with the
hidden face of God, but for the purposes of these notes it is
enough that a point crystallised. This point was the crown of
creation, the sephira Kether, and within Kether was contained all
the unrealised potential of the creation.
An aspect of Kether is the raw creative force of God which
blasts into the creation like the blast of hot gas which keeps a
hot air ballon in the air. Kabbalists are quite clear about this;
the creation didn't just happen a long time ago - it is happening
all the time, and without the force to sustain it the creation
would crumple like a balloon. The force-like aspect within Kether
is the sephira Chokhmah and it can be thought of as the will of
God, because without it the creation would cease to *be*. The
whole of creation is maintained by this ravening, primeval desire
to *be*, to become, to exist, to change, to evolve. The
experiential distinction between Kether, the point of emanation,
and Chokhmah, the creative outpouring, is elusive, but some of
the difference is captured in the phrases "I am" and "I
become".
Force by itself achieves nothing; it needs to be contained,
and the balloon analogy is appropriate again. Chokhmah contains
within it the necessity of Binah, the Mother of Form. The person
who taught me Kabbalah (a woman) told me Chokhmah (Abba, the
Father) was God's prick, and Binah (Aima, the mother) was God's
womb, and left me with the picture of one half of God
continuously ejaculating into the other half. The author of the
Zohar also makes frequent use of sexual polarity as a metaphor
to describe the relationship between force and form, or mercy and
severity (although the most vivid sexual metaphors are used for
the marriage of the Microprosopus and his bride, the Queen and
Inferior Mother, the sephira Malkuth).
The sephira Binah is the Mother of Form; form exists within
Binah as a potentiality, not as an actuality, just as a womb
contains the potential of a baby. Without the possibility of
form, no thing would be distinct from any other thing; it would
be impossible to distinguish between things, impossible to have
individuality or identity or change. The Mother of Form
contains the potential of form within her womb and gives birth to
form when a creative impulse crosses the Abyss to the Pillar of
Force and emanates through the sephira Chesed. Again we have the
idea of "becoming", of outflowing creative energy, but at a lower
level. The sephira Chesed is the point at which form becomes
perciptible to the mind as an inspiration, an idea, a vision,
that "Eureka!" moment immediately prior to rushing around
shouting "I've got it! I've got it!" Chesed is that quality of
genuine inspiration, a sense of being "plugged in" which
characterises the visionary leaders who drive the human race
onwards into every new kind of endeavour. It can be for good or
evil; a leader who can tap the petty malice and vindictiveness in
any person and channel it into a vision of a new order and
genocide is just as much a visionary as any other, but the
positive side of Chesed is the humanitarian leader who brings
about genuine improvements to our common life.
No change comes easy; as Cordova points out "everything
wishes to remain what it is". The creation of form is balanced in
the sephira Gevurah by the preservation and destruction of form.
Any impulse of change is channelled through Gevurah, and if it is
not resisted then something will be destroyed. If you want to
make paper you cut down a tree. If you want to abolish slavery
you have to destroy the culture which perpetuates it. If you want
to change someone's mind you have to destroy that person's
beliefs about the matter in question. The sephira Gevurah is the
quality of strict judgement which opposes change, destroys the
unfamiliar, and corresponds in many ways to an immune system
within the body of God.
There has to be a balance between creation and destruction.
Too much change, too many ideas, too many things happening too
quickly can have the quality of chaos (and can literally become
that), whereas too little change, no new ideas, too much form and
structure and protocol can suffocate and stifle. There has to be
a balance which "makes sense" and this "idea of balance" or
"making sense" is expressed in the sephira Tiphereth. It is an
instinctive morality, and it isn't present by default in the
human species. It isn't based on cultural norms; it doesn't have
its roots in upbringing (although it is easily destroyed by it).
Some people have it in a large measure, and some people are (to
all intents and purposes) completely lacking in it. It doesn't
necessarily respect conventional morality: it may laugh in its
face. I can't say what it is in any detail, because it is
peculiar and individual, but those who have it have a natural
quality of integrity, soundness of judgement, an instinctive
sense of rightness, justice and compassion, and a willingness to
fight or suffer in defense of that sense of justice. Tiphereth is
a paradoxical sephira because in many people it is simply not
there. It can be developed, and that is one of the goals of
initiation, but for many people Tiphereth is a room with nothing
in it.
Having passed through Gevurah on the Pillar of Form, and
found its way through the moral filter of Tiphereth, a creative
impulse picks up energy once more on the Pillar of Force via the
Sephira Netzach, where the energy of "becoming" finds its final
expression in the form of "vital urges". Why do we carry on
living? Why bother? What is it that compels us to do things? An
artist may have a vision of a piece of art, but what actually
compels the artist to paint or sculpt or write? Why do we want to
compete and win? Why do we care what happens to others? The
sephira Netzach expresses the basic vital creative urges in a
form we can recognise as drives, feelings and emotions. Netzach
is pre-verbal; ask a child why he wants a toy and the answer will
be
"I just do".
"But why," you ask, wondering why he doesn't want the much
more "sensible" toy you had in mind. "Why don't you want this
one here."
"I just don't. I want this one."
"But what's so good about that one."
"I don't know what to say...I just like it."
This conversation is not fictitious and is quintessentially
Netzach. The structure of the Tree of Life posits that the basic
driving forces which characterise our behaviour are pre-verbal
and non-rational; anyone who has tried to change another person's
basic nature or beliefs through force of rational argument will
know this.
After Netzach we go to the sephira Hod to pick up our last
cargo of Form. Ask a child why they want something and they say
"I just do". Press an adult and you will get an earful of
"reasons". We live in a culture where it is important (often
essential) to give reasons for the things we do, and Hod is the
sephira of form where it is possible to give shape to our wants
in terms of reasons and explanations. Hod is the sephira of
abstraction, reason, logic, language and communication, and a
reflection of the Mother of Form in the human mind. We have a
innate capacity to abstract, to go immediately from the
particular to the general, and we have an innate capacity to
communicate these abstractions using language, and it should be
clear why the alternative translation of Binah is
"intelligence"; Binah is the "intelligence of God", and Hod
underpins what we generally recognise as intelligence in people -
the ability to grasp complex abstractions, reason about them, and
articulate this understanding using some means of communication.
The synthesis of Hod and Netzach on the Pillar of
Consciousness is the sephira Yesod. Yesod is the sephira of
interface, and the comparison with computer peripheral interfaces
is an excellent one. Yesod is sometimes called "the Receptacle of
the Emanations", and it interfaces the emanations of all three
pillars to the sephira Malkuth, and it is through Yesod that the
final abstract form of something is realised in matter. Form in
Yesod is no longer abstract; it is explicit, but not yet
individual - that last quality is reserved for Malkuth alone.
Yesod is like the mold in a bottle factory - the mold is a
realisation of the abstract idea "bottle" in so far as it
expresses the shape of a particular bottle design in every
detail, but it is not itself an individual bottle.
The final step in the process is the sephira Malkuth, where
God becomes flesh, and every abstract form is realised in
actuality, in the "real world". There is much to say about this,
but I will keep it for later.
The process I have described is called the Lightning Flash.
The Lightning Flash runs as follows: Kether, Chokhmah, Binah,
Chesed, Gevurah, Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkuth, and if
you trace the Lighning Flash on a diagram of the Tree you will
see that it has the zig-zag shape of a lightning flash. The
sephiroth are numbered according to their order on the lightning
flash: Kether is 1, Chokhmah is 2, and so on. The "Sepher
Yetzirah" [2] has this to say about the sephiroth:
"When you think of the ten sephiroth cover your heart and
seal the desire of your lips to announce their divinity.
Yoke your mind. Should it escape your grasp, reach out and
bring it back under your control. As it was said, 'And the
living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a
flash of lightning,' in such a manner was the Covenant
created."
The quotation within the quotation comes from Ezekiel 1.14, a
text which inspired a large amount of early Kabbalistic
speculation, and it is probable that the Lightning Flash as
described is one of the earliest components of the idea of
sephirothic emanation.
The Lightning Flash describes the creative process,
beginning with the unknown, unmanifest hidden God, and follows it
through ten distinct stages to a change in the material world. It
can be used to describe *any* change - lighting a match, picking
your nose, walking the dog - and novices are usually set the
exercise of analysing any arbitrarily chosen event in terms of
the Lightning Flash. Because the Lightning Flash can be used to
understand the inner process whereby the material world of the
senses changes and evolves, it is a key to practical magical
work, and because it is intended to account for *all* change it
follows that all change is equally magical, and the word "magic"
is essentially meaningless (but nevertheless useful for
distinguishing between "normal" and "abnormal" states of
consciousness, and the modes of causality which pertain to each).
It also follows that the key to understanding our "spiritual
nature" does not belong in the spiritual empyrean, where it
remains inaccessible, but in *all* the routine and unexciting
little things in life. Everything is is equally "spiritual",
equally "divine", and there is more to be learned from picking
one's nose than there is in a spiritual discipline which puts you
"here" and God "over there". The Lightning Flash ends in Malkuth,
and it can be followed like a thread through the hidden pathways
of creation until one arrives back at the source. The next
chapter will retrace the Lightning Flash by examining the
qualities of each sephira in more detail.
[1] Scholem, Gershom G. "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism",
Schoken Books 1974
[2] Westcott, W. Wynn, ed. "Sepher Yetzirah". Many reprintings.
****************************************************************************
Chapter 4: The Sephiroth
========================
This chapter provides a detailed look at each of the ten
sephiroth and draws together material scattered over previous
chapters.
Malkuth
-------
Malkuth is the Cinderella of the sephiroth. It is the
sephira most often ignored by beginners, the sephira most often
glossed over in Kabbalistic texts, and it is not only the most
immediate of the sephira but it is also the most complex, and for
sheer inscrutability it rivals Kether - indeed, there is a
Kabbalistic aphorism that "Kether is Malkuth, and Malkuth is in
Kether, but after another manner".
The word Malkuth means "Kingdom", and the sephira is the
culmination of a process of emanation whereby the creative power
of the Godhead is progressively structured and defined as it
moves down the Tree and arrives in a completed form in Malkuth.
Malkuth is the sphere of matter, substance, the real, physical
world. In the least compromising versions of materialist
philosophy (e.g. Hobbes) there is nothing beyond physical matter,
and from that viewpoint the Tree of Life beyond Malkuth does not
exist: our feelings of identity and self-consciousness are
nothing more than a by-product of chemical reactions in the
brain, and the mind is a complex automata which suffers from the
disease of metaphysical delusions. Kabbalah is *not* a
materialist model of reality, but when we examine Malkuth by
itself we find ourselves immersed in matter, and it is natural to
think in terms of physics, chemistry and molecular biology. The
natural sciences provide the most accurate models of matter and
the physical world that we have, and it would be foolishness of
the first order to imagine that Kabbalah can provide better
explanations of the nature of matter on the basis of a study of
the text of the Old Testament. Not that I under-rate the
intuition which has gone into the making of Kabbalah over the
centuries, but for practical purposes the average university
science graduate knows (much) more about the material stuff of
the world than medieval Kabbalists, and a grounding in modern
physics is as good a way to approach Malkuth as any other.
For those who are not comfortable with physics there are
alternative, more traditional ways of approaching Malkuth. The
magical image of Malkuth is that of a young woman crowned and
throned. The woman is Malkah, the Queen, Kallah, the Bride. She
is the inferior mother, a reflection and realisation of the
superior mother Binah. She is the Queen who inhabits the Kingdom,
and the Bride of the Microprosopus. She is Gaia, Mother Earth,
but of course she is not only the substance of this world; she is
the body of the entire physical universe.
Some care is required when assigning Mother/Earth goddesses
to Malkuth, because some of them correspond more closely to the
superior mother Binah. There is a close and deep connection
between Malkuth and Binah which results in the two sephiroth
sharing similar correspondences, and one of the oldest
Kabbalistic texts [1] has this to say about Malkuth:
"The title of the tenth path [Malkuth] is the Resplendent
Intelligence. It is called this because it is exalted above
every head from where it sits upon the throne of Binah. It
illuminates the numinosity of all lights and causes to
emanate the Power of the archetype of countenances or
forms."
One of the titles of Binah is Khorsia, or Throne, and the image
which this text provides is that Binah provides the framework
upon which Malkuth sits. We will return to this later. Binah
contains the potential of form in the abstract, while Malkuth is
is the fullest realisation of form, and both sephiroth share the
correspondences of heaviness, limitation, finiteness, inertia,
avarice, silence, and death.
The female quality of Malkuth is often identified with the
Shekhinah, the female spirit of God in the creation, and
Kabbalistic literature makes much of the (carnal) relationship of
God and the Shekhinah. Waite [7] mentions that the relationship
between God and Shekhinah is mirrored in the relationship between
man and woman, and provides a great deal of information on both
the Shekhinah and what he quaintly calls "The Mystery of Sex".
After the exile of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Kabbalists
identified their own plight with the fate of the Shekhinah, and
she is pictured as being cast out into matter in much the same
way as the Gnostics pictured Sophia, the outcast divine wisdom.
The doctrine of the Shekhinah within Kabbalah and within Judaism
as a whole is complex and it is something I don't feel competent
to comment further on; more information can be found in [3] &
[7].
Malkuth is the sphere of the physical elements and
Kabbalists still use the four-fold scheme which dates back at
least as far as Empedocles and probably the Ark. The four
elements correspond to four readily-observable states of matter:
solid - earth
liquid - water
gas - air
plasma - fire/electric arc (lightning)
In addition it is not uncommon to include a fifth element so
rarified and arcane that most people (self included) are pushed
to say what it is; the fifth element is aethyr (or ether) and is
sometimes called spirit.
The amount of material written about the elements is
enormous, and rather than reproduce in bulk what is relatively
well-known I will provide a rough outline so that those readers
who aren't familiar with Kabbalah will realise I am talking about
approximately the same thing as they have seen before. A detailed
description of the traditional medieval view of the four elements
can be found in "The Magus" [2]. The hierarchy of elemental
powers can be found in "777" [4] and in Golden Dawn material [5]
- I have summarised a few useful items below:
Element Fire Air Water Earth
God Name Elohim Jehovah Eheieh Agla
Archangel Michael Raphael Gabriel Uriel
King Djin Paralda Nichsa Ghob
Elemental Salamanders Sylphs Undines Gnomes
It amused me to notice that the section on the elemental kingdoms
in Farrar's "What Witches Do" [6] had been taken by Alex Saunders
lock, stock and barrel from traditional Kabbalistic and CM
sources.
The elements in Malkuth are arranged as follows:
South
Fire
East Zenith Aethyr+ West
Air Nadir Aethyr- Water
North
Earth
I have rotated the cardinal points through 180 degrees from their
customary directions so that it is easier to see how the elements
fit on the lower face of the Tree of Life:
Tiphereth
Fire
Hod Yesod Netzach
Air Aethyr Water
Malkuth
Earth
It is important to distinguish between the elements in Malkuth,
where we are talking about real substance (the water in your
body, the breath in your lungs), and the elements on the Tree,
where we are using traditional correspondences *associated* with
the elements, e.g.:
Earth: solid, stable, practical, down-to-earth
Water: sensitive, intuitive, emotional, caring, fertile
Air: vocal, communicative, intellectual
Fire: energetic, daring, impetuous
Positive Aethyr: glue, binding, plastic
Negative Aethyr: unbinding, dissolution, disintegration
Aethyr or Spirit is enigmatic, and I tend to think of it in terms
of the forces which bind matter together. It is almost certainly
a coincidence (but nevertheless interesting) that there are four
fundamental forces - gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear
& strong nuclear - known to date, and current belief is that they
can be unified into one fundamental force. On a slightly more
arcane tack, Barret [2] has this to say about Aethyr:
"Now seeing that the soul is the essential form,
intelligible and uncorruptible, and is the first mover of
the body, and is moved itself; but that the body, or matter,
is of itself unable and unfit for motion, and does very much
degenerate from the soul, it appears that there is a need of
a more excellent medium:- now such a medium is conceived to
be the spirit of the world, or that which some call a
quintessence; because it is not from the four elements, but
a certain first thing, having its being above and beside
them. There is, therefore, such a kind of medium required to
be, by which celestial souls [e.g. forms] may be joined to
gross bodies, and bestow upon them wonderful gifts. This
spirit is in the same manner, in the body of the world, as
our spirit is in our bodies; for as the powers of our soul
are communicated to the members of the body by the medium of
the spirit, so also the virtue of the soul of the world is
diffused, throughout all things, by the medium of the
universal spirit; for there is nothing to be found in the
whole world that hath not a spark of the virtue thereof."
Aethyr underpins the elements like a foundation and its
attribution to Yesod should be obvious, particularly as it forms
the linking role between the ideoplastic world of "the Astral
Light" [8] and the material world. Aethyr is often thought to
come in two flavours - positive Aethyr, which binds, and negative
Aethyr, which unbinds. Negative Aethyr is a bit like the
Universal Solvent, and requires as much care in handling ;-}
Working with the physical elements in Malkuth is one of the
most important areas of applied magic, dealing as it does with
the basic constituents of the real world. The physical elements
are tangible and can be experience in a very direct way through
recreations such as caving, diving, parachuting or firewalking;
they bite back in a suitably humbling way, and they provide CMs
with an opportunity to join the neo-pagans in the great outdoors.
Our bodies themselves are made from physical stuff, and there are
many Raja Yoga-like exercises which can be carried out using the
elements as a basis for work on the body. If you can stand his
manic intensity (Exercise 1: boil an egg by force of will) then
Bardon [9] is full of good ideas.
Malkuth is often associated with various kinds of intrinsic
evil, and to understand this attitude (which I do not share) it
is necessary to confront the same question as thirteenth century
Kabbalists: can God be evil? The answer to this question was
(broadly speaking) "yes", but Kabbalists have gone through many
strange gyrations in an attempt to avoid what was for many an
unacceptable conclusion. It was difficult to accept that famine,
war, disease, prejudice, hate, death could be a part of a perfect
being, and there had to be some way to account for evil which did
not contaminate divine perfection. One approach was to sweep evil
under the carpet, and in this case the carpet was Malkuth.
Malkuth became the habitation for evil spirits.
If one examines the structure of the Tree without prejudice
then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that evil is quite
adequately accounted for, and there is no need to shuffle evil
to the periphery of the Tree like a cleaner without a dustpan.
The emanation of any sephirah from Chokhmah downwards can
manifest as good or evil depending on circumstances and the point
of view of those affected by the energy involved. This appears to
have been understood even at the time of the writing of the
"Zohar", where the mercy of God is constantly contrasted with the
severity of God, and the author makes it clear that one has to
balance the other - you cannot have the mercy without the
severity. On the other hand, the severity of God is persistently
identified with the rigours of existence (form, finiteness,
limitation), and while it is true that many of the things which
have been identified with evil are a consequence of the
finiteness of things, of being finite beings in a world of finite
resources governed by natural laws with inflexible causality, it
not correct to infer (as some have) that form itself is
*intrinsically* evil.
The notion that form and matter are *intrinsically* evil, or
in some way imperfect or not a part of God, may have reached
Kabbalah from a number of sources. Scholem comments:
"The Kabbalah of the early thirteenth century was the
offspring of a union between an older and essentially
Gnostic tradition represented by the book "Bahir", and the
comparatively modern element of Jewish Neo-Platonism."
There is the possibility that the Kabbalists of Provence (who
wrote or edited the "Sepher Bahir") were influenced by the
Cathars, a late form of Manicheanism. Whether the source was
Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Manicheanism or some combination of
all three, Kabbalah has imported a view of matter and form which
distorts the view of things portrayed by the Tree of Life, and so
Malkuth ends up as a kind of cosmic outer darkness, a bin for all
the dirt, detritus, broken sephira and dirty hankies of the
creation. Form is evil, the Mother of Form is female, women are
definitely and indubitably evil, and Malkuth is the most female
of the sephira, therefore Malkuth is most definitely evil...quod
erat demonstrandum. By the time we reach the time of S.L. Mathers
and the Golden Dawn there is a complete Tree of evil demonic
Qlippoth *underneath* Malkuth as a relection of the "good" Tree
above it. I believe this may have something to do with the fact
that meditations on Malkuth can easily become meditations on
Binah, and meditations on Binah have a habit of slipping into the
Abyss, and once in the Abyss it is easy to trawl up enough junk
to "discover" an averse Tree "underneath" Malkuth. This view of
the Qlippoth, or Shells, as active, demonic evil has become
pervasive, and the more energy people put into the demonic Tree,
the less there is for the original. Abolish the Qlippoth as
demonic forces, and the Tree of Life comes alive with its full
power of good *and* evil. The following quotation from Bischoff
[10] (speaking of the Sephiroth) provides a more rational view of
the Qlippoth:
"Since their energy [of the sephiroth] shows three degrees
of strength (highest, middle and lowest degree), their
emanations group accordingly in sequence. We usually imagine
the image of a descending staircase. The Kabbalist
prefers to see this fact as a decreasing alienation of the
central primeval energy. Consequently any less perfect
emanation is to him the cover or shell (Qlippah) of the
preceeding, and so the last (furthest) emanations being the
so-called material things are the shell of the total and are
therefore called (in the actual sense) Qlippoth."
This is my own view; the shell of something is the accretion of
form which it accumulates as energy comes down the Lightning
Flash. If the shell can be considered by itself then it is a dead
husk of something which could be alive - it preserves all the
structure but there is no energy in it to bring it alive. With
this interpretation the Qlippoth are to be found everywhere: in
relationships, at work, at play, in ritual, in society. Whenever
something dies and people refuse to recognise that it is dead,
and cling to the lifeless husk of whatever it was, then you get a
Qlippah. For this reason one of the vices of Malkuth is Avarice,
not only in the sense of trying to acquire material things, but
also in the sense of being unwilling to let go of anything, even
when it has become dead and worthless. The Qlippah of Malkuth is
what you would get if the Sun went out: Stasis, life frozen into
immobility.
The other vice of Malkuth is Inertia, in the sense of
"active resistance to motion; sluggish; disinclined to move or
act". It is visible in most people at one time or another, and
tends to manifest when a task is new, necessary, but not
particularly exciting, there is no excitement or "natural energy"
to keep one fired up, and one has to keep on pushing right to the
finish. For this reason the obligation of Malkuth is (has
to be) self-discipline.
The virtue of Malkuth is Discrimination, the ability to
perceive differences. The ability to perceive differences is a
necessity for any living organism, whether a bacteria able to
sense the gradient of a nutrient or a kid working out how much
money to wheedle out of his parents. As Malkuth is the final
realisation of form, it is the sphere where our ability to
distinguish between differences is most pronounced. The capacity
to discriminate is so fundamental to survival that it works
overtime and finds boundaries and distinctions everywhere - "you"
and "me", "yours" and "mine", distinctions of "property" and
"value" and "territory" which are intellectual abstractions on
one level (i.e. not real) and fiercely defended realities on
another (i.e. very real indeed). I am not going to attempt a
definition of real and unreal, but it is the case that much of
what we think of as real is unreal, and much of what we think of
as unreal is real, and we need the same discrimination which
leads us into the mire to lead us out again. Some people think
skin colour is a real measure of intelligence; some don't. Some
people think gender is a real measure of ability; some don't.
Some people judge on appearances; some don't. There is clearly a
difference between a bottle of beer and a bottle of piss, but is
the colour of the *bottle* important? What *is* important? What
differences are real, what matters? How much energy do we devote
to things which are "not real". Am I able to perceive how much I
am being manipulated by a fixation on unreality? Are my goals in
life "real", or will they look increasingly silly and immature
as I grow older? For that matter, is Kabbalah "real"? Does it
provide a useful model of reality, or is it the remnant of a
world-view which should have been put to rest centuries ago? One
of the primary exercises of an initiate into Malkuth is a
thorough examination of the question "What is real?".
The Spiritual Experience of Malkuth is variously the
Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), or
the Vision of the HGA (depending on who you believe). I vote for
the Vision of the HGA in Malkuth, and the Knowledge and
Conversation in Tiphereth. What is the HGA? According to the
Gnosticism of Valentinus each person has a guardian angel who
accompanies that individual throught their life and reveals the
gnosis; the angel is in a sense the divine Self. This belief is
identical to what I was taught by the person who taught me
Kabbalah, so some part of Gnosticism lives on. The current
tradition concerning the HGA almost certainly entered the Western
Esoteric Tradition as a consequence of S.L. Mather's translation
[11] of "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage",
which contains full details of a lengthy ritual to attain the
Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA. This ritual has had an
important influence on twentieth century magicians and it is
often attempted and occasionally completed.
The powers of Malkuth are invoked by means of the names
Adonai ha Aretz and Adonai Melekh, which mean "Lord of the World"
and "The Lord who is King" respectively. The power is transmitted
through the world of Creation by the archangel Sandalphon, who is
sometimes referred to as "the Long Angel", because his feet are
in Malkuth and his head in Kether, which gives him an opportunity
to chat to Metatron, the Angel of the Presence. The angel order
is the Ashim, or Ishim, sometimes translated as the "souls of
fire", supposedly the souls of righteous men and women.
In concluding this section on Malkuth, it worth emphasising that
I have chosen deliberately not to explore some major topics
because there are sufficient threads for anyone with an interest
to pick up and follow for themselves. The image of Malkuth as
Mother Earth provides a link between Kabbalah and a numinous
archetype with a deep significance for some. The image of Malkuth
as physical substance provides a link into the sciences, and it
is the case that at the limits of theoretical physics one's
intuitions seem to be slipping and sliding on the same reality as
in Kabbalah. The image of Malkuth as the sphere of the elements
is the key to a large body of practical magical technique which
varies from yoga-like concentration on the bodily elements, to
nature-oriented work in the great outdoors. Lastly, just as the
design of a building reveals much about its builders, so Malkuth
can reveal a great deal about Kether - the bottom of the Tree and
the top have much in common.
References:
[1] Westcott, W. Wynn, ed. "Sepher Yetzirah", many editions.
[2] Barrett, Francis, "The Magus", Citadel 1967.
[3] Scholem, Gershom G., "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism",
Schocken 1974
[4] Crowley, A, "777", an obscure reprint.
[5] Regardie, Israel, "The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic",
Falcon, 1984.
[6] Farrar, Stewart, "What Witches Do", Peter Davies 1971.
[7] Waite, A.E, "The Holy Kabbalah", Citadel.
[8] Levi, Eliphas, "Transcendental Magic", Rider, 1969.
[9] Bardon, Franz, "Initiation into Hermetics", Dieter
Ruggeberg 1971
[10] Bischoff, Dr. Erich, "The Kabbala", Weiser 1985.
[11] Mathers, S.L., "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin
the Mage", Dover 1975.
Yesod
-----
Yesod means "foundation", and that is what Yesod is: it is
the hidden infrastructure whereby the emanations from the
remainder of the Tree are transmitted to the sephira Malkuth.
Just as a large building has its air-conditioning ducts, service
tunnels, conduits, electrical wiring, hot and cold water pipes,
attic spaces, lift shafts, winding rooms, storage tanks, a
telephone exchange etc, so does the Creation, and the external,
visible world of phenomenal reality rests (metaphorically
speaking) upon a hidden foundation of occult machinery.
Meditations on the nature of Yesod tend to be full of secret
tunnels and concealed mechanisms, as if the Creation was a Gothic
mansion with a secret door behind every mirror, a passage in
every wall, a pair of hidden eyes behind every portrait, and a
subterranean world of forgotten tunnels leading who knows where.
For this reason the Spiritual Experience of Yesod is aptly named
"The Vision of the Machinery of the Universe".
Many Yesod correspondences reinforce this notion of a
foundation, of something which lies behind, supports and gives
shape to phenomenal reality. The magical image of Yesod is of "a
beautiful naked man, very strong". The image which springs to
mind is that of a man with the world resting on his shoulders,
like one of the misrepresentations of the Titan Atlas (who
actually held up the heavens, not the world). The angel order of
Yesod is the Cherubim, the Strong Ones, the archangel is Gabriel,
the Strong or Mighty One of God, and the God-name is Shaddai el
Chai, the Almighty Living God.
The idea of a foundation suggests that there is a substance
which lies behind physical matter and "in-forms it" or "holds it
together", something less structured, more plastic, more refined
and rarified, and this "fifth element" is often called aethyr. I
will not attempt to justify aethyr in terms of current physics
(the closest concept I have found is the hypothesised Higgs
field); it is a convenient handle on a concept which has enormous
intuitive appeal to many magicians, who, when asked how magic
works, tend to think in terms of a medium which is directly
receptive to the will, something which is plastic and can be
shaped through concentration and imagination, and which transmits
their artificially created forms into reality. Eliphas Levi
called this medium the "Astral Light". It is also natural to
imagine that mind, consciousness, and the soul have their
habitation in this substance, and there are volumes detailing the
properties of the "Etheric Body", the "Astral Body", the "Causal
Body" [1,2] and so on. I don't take this stuff too seriously, but
I do like to work with the kind of natural intuitions which occur
spontaneously and independently in a large number of people -
there is power in these intuitions - and it is a mistake to
invalidate them because they sound cranky. When I talk about
aethyr or the Astral Light, I mean there is an ideoplastic
substance which is subjectively real to many magicians, and
explanations of magic at the level of Yesod revolve around
manipulating this substance using desire, imagination and will.
The fundamental nature of Yesod is that of *interface*; it
interfaces the rest of the Tree of Life to Malkuth. The interface
is bi-directional; there are impulses coming down from Kether,
and echoes bouncing back from Malkuth. The idea of interface is
illustrated in the design of a computer system: a computer with a
multitude of worlds hidden within it is a source of heat and
repair bills unless it has peripheral interfaces and device
drivers to interface the world outside the computer to the world
"inside" it; add a keyboard and a mouse and a monitor and a
printer and you have opened the door into another reality. Our
own senses have the same characteristic of being a bi-directional
interface through which we experience the world, and for this
reason the senses correspond to Yesod, and not only the five
traditional senses - the "sixth sense" and the "second sight" are
given equal status, and so Yesod is also the sphere of
instinctive psychism, of clairvoyance, precognition, divination
and prophecy. It is also clear from accounts of lucid dreaming
(and personal experience) that we possess the ability to perceive
an inner world as vividly as the outer, and so to Yesod belongs
the inner world of dreams, daydreams and vivid imagination, and
one of the titles of Yesod is "The Treasure House of Images".
To Yesod is attributed Levanah, the Moon, and the lunar
associations of tides, flux and change, occult influence, and
deeply instinctive and sometimes atavistic behaviour -
possession, mediumship, lycanthropy and the like. Although
Yesod is the foundation and it has associations with strength, it
is by no means a rigid scaffold supporting a world in stasis.
Yesod supports the world just as the sea supports all the life
which lives in it and sails upon it, and just as the sea has its
irresistable currents and tides, so does Yesod. Yesod is the most
"occult" of the sephiroth, and next to Malkuth it is the most
magical, but compared with Malkuth its magic is of a more subtle,
seductive, glamorous and ensnaring kind. Magicians are drawn to
Yesod by the idea that if reality rests on a hidden foundation,
then by changing the foundation it is possible to change the
reality. The magic of Yesod is the magic of form and appearance,
not substance; it is the magic of illusion, glamour,
transformation, and shape-changing. The most sophisticated
examples of this are to be found in modern marketing, advertising
and image consultancies. I do not jest. My tongue is not even
slightly in my cheek. The following quote was taken from this
morning's paper [3]:
Although the changes look cosmetic, those responsible for
creating corporate image argue that a redesign of a
company's uniform or name is just the visible sign of a much
larger transformation.
"The majority of people continue to misunderstand and think
that it is just a logo, rather than understanding that a
corporate identity programme is actually concerned with the
very commercial objective of having a strong personality and
single-minded, focussed direction for the whole
organisation, " said Fiona Gilmore, managing director of the
design company Lewis Moberly. "It's like planting an acorn
and then a tree grows. If you create the right *foundation*
(my itals) then you are building a whole culture for the
future of an organisation."
I don't know what Ms. Gilmore studies in her spare time, but the
idea that it is possible to manipulate reality by manipulating
symbols and appearances is entirely magical. The same article on
corporate identity continues as follows:
"The scale of the BT relaunch is colossal. The new logo will
be painted on more than 72,000 vehicles and trailers, as
well as 9,000 properties.
The company's 92,000 public payphones will get new decals,
and its 90 shops will have to changed, right down to the
yellow door handles. More than 50,000 employees are likely
to need new uniforms or "image clothing".
Note the emphasis on *image*. The company in question (British
Telecom) is an ex-public monopoly with an appalling customer
relations problem, so it is changing the colour of its
door handles! This is Yesodic magic on a gigantic scale.
The image manipulators gain most of their power from the
mass-media. The mass-media correspond to two sephiroth: as a
medium of communication they belong in Hod, but as a foundation
for our perception of reality they belong in Yesod. Nowadays most
people form their model of what the world (in the large) is like
via the media. There are a few individuals who travel the world
sufficiently to have a model based on personal experience, but
for most people their model of what most of the world is like is
formed by newspapers, radio and television; that is, the media
have become an extended (if inaccurate) instrument of perception.
Like our "normal" means of perception the media are highly
selective in the variety and content of information provided, and
they can be used by advertising agencies and other manipulative
individuals to create foundations for new collective realities.
While on the subject of changing perception to assemble new
realities, the following quote by "Don Juan" [4] has a definite
Kabbalistic flavour:
"The next truth is that perception takes place," he went on,
"because there is in each of us an agent called the
assemblage point that selects internal and external
emanations for alignment. The particular alignment that we
perceive as the world is the product of a specific spot
where our assemblage point is located on our cocoon."
One of the titles of Yesod is "The Receptacle of the Emanations",
and its function is precisely as described above - Yesod is the
assemblage point which assembles the emanations of the internal
and the external.
In addition to the deliberate, magical manipulation of
foundations, there are other important areas of magic relevant to
Yesod. Raw, innate psychism is an ability which tends to improve
as more attention is devoted to creative visualisation, focussed
meditation (on Tarot cards for example), dreams (e.g. keeping a
dream diary), and divination. Divination is an important
technique to practice even if you feel you are terrible at it
(and especially if you think it is nonsense), because it
reinforces the idea that it is permissible to "let go" and
intuite meanings into any pattern. Many people have difficulty
doing this, feeling perhaps that they will be swamped with
unreason (recalling Freud's fear, expressed to Jung, of needing a
bulwark against the "black mud of occultism"), when in reality
their minds are swamped with reason and could use a holiday. Any
divination system can be used, but systems which emphasise pure
intuition are best (e.g. Tarot, runes, tea-leaves, flights of
birds, patterns on the wallpaper, smoke. I heard of a Kabbalist
who threw a cushion into the air and carried out divination on
the basis of the number of pieces of foam stuffing which fell
out). Because Yesod is a kind of aethyric reflection of the
physical world, the image of and precursor to reality, mirrors
are an important tool for Yesod magic. Quartz crystals are also
used, probably because of the use of crystal balls for
divination, but also because quartz crystal and amethyst have a
peculiarly Yesodic quality in their own right. The average New
Age shop filled with crystals, Tarot cards, silver jewelry (lunar
association), perfumes, dreamy music, and all the glitz, glamour
and glitter of a daemonic magpie's nest, is like a temple to
Yesod. Mirrors and crystals are used passively as focii for
receptivity, but they can also be used actively for certain kinds
of aethyric magic - there is an interesting book on making and
using magic mirrors which builds on the kind of elemental magical
work carried out in Malkuth [5].
Yesod has an important correspondence with the sexual
organs. The correspondence occurs in three ways. The first way is
that when the Tree of Life is placed over the human body, Yesod
is positioned over the genitals. The author of the Zohar is quite
explicit about "the remaining members of the Microprosopus", to
the extent that the relevant paragraphs in Mather's translation
of "The Lesser Holy Assembly" remain in Latin to avoid offending
Victorian sensibilities.
The second association of Yesod with the genitals arises
from the union of the Microprosopus and his Bride. This is
another recurring theme in Kabbalah, and the symbolism is complex
and refers to several distinct ideas, from the relationship
between man and wife to an internal process within the body of
God: e.g [6].
"When the Male is joined with the Female, they both
constitute one complete body, and all the Universe is in a
state of happiness, because all things receive blessing from
their perfect body. And this is an Arcanum."
or, referring to the Bride:
"And she is mitigated, and receiveth blessing in that place
which is called the Holy of Holies below."
or, referring to the "member":
"And that which floweth down into that place where it is
congregated, and which is emitted through that most holy
Yesod, Foundation, is entirely white, and therefore is it
called Chesed.
Thence Chesed entereth into the Holy of Holies; as it is
written Ps. cxxxiii. 3 'For there Tetragrammaton commanded
the blessing, even life for evermore.'"
It is not difficult to read a great deal into paragraphs like
this, and there are many more in a similar vein. Suffice to say
that the Microprosopus is often identified with the sephira
Tiphereth, the Bride is the sephira Malkuth, and the point of
union between them is obviously Yesod.
The third and more abstract association between Yesod and
the sexual organs arises because the sexual organs are a
mechanism for perpetuating the *form* of a living organism. In
order to get close to what is happening in sexual reproduction it
is worth asking the question "What is a computer program?". Well,
a computer program indisputably begins as an idea; it is not a
material thing. It can be written down in various ways; as an
abstract specification in set theoretic notation akin to pure
mathematics, or as a set of recursive functions in lambda
calculus; it could be written in several different high level
languages - Pascal, C, Prolog, LISP, ADA, ML etc. Are they all
they same program? Computer scientists wrestle with this problem:
can we show that two different programs written in two different
languages are in some sense functionally identical? It isn't
trivial to do this because it asks fundamental questions about
language (any language) and meaning, but it is possible in
limited cases to produce two apparently different programs
written in different languages and assert that they are
identical. Whatever the program is, it seems to exist
independently of any particular language, so what is the program
and where is it? Let us ignore that chestnut and go on to the
next level. Suppose we write the program down. We could do it
with a pencil. We could punch holes in paper. We could plant
trees in a pattern in a field. We can line up magnetic domains.
We can burn holes in metal foil. I could have it tattooed on my
back. We can transform it into radically different forms (that is
what compilers and assemblers do). It obviously isn't tied to any
physical representation either. What about the computer it runs
on? Well, it could be a conventional one made with CMOS chips
etc.....but aren't there a lot of different kinds and makes of
computer, and they can all run the same program. It is also quite
practical to build computers which *don't* use electrons - you
could use mechanics or fluids or ball bearings - all you need to
do is produce something with the functionality of a Turing
machine, and that isn't hard. So not only is the program not tied
to any particular physical representation, but the same goes for
the computer itself, and what we are left with is two puffs of
smoke. On another level this is crazy; computers are real, they
do real things in the real world, and the programs which make
them work are obviously real too....aren't they?
Now apply the same kind of scrutiny to living organisms, and
the mechanism of reproduction. Take a good look at nucleic acids,
enzymes, proteins etc., and ask the same kind of questions. I am
not implying that life is a sort of program, but what I am
suggesting is that if you try to get close to what constitutes a
living organism you end up with another puff of smoke and a
handful of atoms which could just as well be ball-bearings or
fluids or....The thing that is being perpetuated through sexual
reproduction is something quite abstract and immaterial; it is an
abstract form preserved and encoded in a particular pattern of
chemicals, and if I was asked which was more real, the transient
collection of chemicals used, or the abstract form itself, I
would answer "the form". But then, I am a programmer, and I would
say that.
I find it astonishing that there are any hard-core
materialists left in the world. All the important stuff seems to
exist at the level of puffs of smoke, what Kabbalists call form.
Roger Penrose, one of the most eminent mathematicians living has
this to say [7]:
"I have made no secret of the fact that my sympathies lie
strongly with the Platonic view that mathematical truth is
absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made
criteria; and that mathematical objects have a timeless
existence of their own, not dependent on human society nor
on particular physical objects."
"Ah Ha!" cry the materialists, "At least the atoms are
real." Well, they are until you start pulling them apart with
tweezers and end up with a heap of equations which turn out to be
the linguistic expression of an idea. As Einstein said, "The most
incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible", that is, capable of being described in some
linguistic form.
I am not trying to convince anyone of the "rightness" of the
Kabbalistic viewpoint. What I am trying to do is show that the
process whereby form is impressed on matter (the relationship
between Yesod and Malkuth) is not arcane, theosophical mumbo-
jumbo; it is an issue which is alive and kicking, and the closer
we get to "real things" (and that certainly includes living
organisms), the better the Kabbalistic model (that form precedes
manifestation, that there is a well-defined process of form-ation
with the "real world" as an outcome) looks.
The illusion of Yesod is security, the kind of security which
forms the foundation of our personal existence in the world. On a
superficial level our security is built out of relationships, a
source of income, a place to live, a vocation, personal power and
influence etc, but at a deeper level the foundation of personal
identity is built on a series of accidents, encounters and
influences which create the illusion of who we are, what we
believe in, and what we stand for. There is a warm, secure
feeling of knowing what is right and wrong, of doing the right
thing, of living a worthwhile life in the service of worthwhile
causes, of having a uniquely privileged vantage point from which
to survey the problems of life (with all the intolerance and
incomprehension of other people which accompanies this insight),
and conversely there are feelings of despair, depression, loss of
identity, and existential terror when a crack forms in the
illusion, and reality shows through - Castaneda calls it "the
crack in the world". The smug, self-perpetuating illusion which
masquerades as personal identity at the level of Yesod is the
most astoundingly difficult thing to shift or destroy. It fights
back with all the resources of the personality, it will
enthusiastically embrace any ally which will help to shore up its
defenses - religious, political or scientific ideology;
psychological, sociological, metaphysical and theosophical
claptrap (e.g. Kabbalah); the law and popular morality; in fact,
any beliefs which give it the power to retain its identity,
uniqueness and integrity. Because this parasite of the soul uses
religion (and its esoteric offshoots) to sustain itself they have
little or no power over it and become a major part of the
problem.
There are various ways of overcoming this personal demon
(Carroll [8], in an essay on the subject, calls it Choronzon),
and the two I know best are the cataclysmic and the abrasive. The
first method involves a shock so extreme that it is impossible to
be the same person again, and if enough preparation has gone
before then it is possible to use the shock to rebuild oneself.
In some cases this doesn't happen; I have noticed that many
people with very rigid religious beliefs talk readily about
having suffered traumatic experiences, and the phenomenon of
hysterical conversion among soldiers suffering from war neuroses
is well known. The other method, the abrasive, is to wear away
the demon of self-importance, to grind it into nothing by doing
(for example) something for someone else for which one receives
no thanks, praise, reward, or recognition. The task has to be big
enough and awful enough to become a demon in its own right and
induce all the correct feelings of compulsion (I have to do
this), helplessness (I'll never make it), indignation (what's
the point, it's not my problem anyway), rebellion (I won't, I
won't, not anymore), more compulsion (I can't give up), self-pity
(how did I get into this?), exhaustion (Oh No! Not again!),
despair (I can't go on), and finally a kind of submission when
one's demon hasn't the energy to put up a struggle any more and
simply gives up. The woman who taught me Kabbalah used both the
cataclysmic and the abrasive methods on her students with
malicious glee - I will discuss this in more detail in the
section on Tiphereth.
The virtue of Yesod is independence, the ability to make our
own foundations, to continually rebuild ourselves, to reject the
security of comfortable illusions and confront reality without
blinking.
The vice of Yesod is idleness. This can be contrasted with
the inertia of Malkuth. A stone is inert because it lacks the
capacity to change, but in most circumstances people can change
and can't be bothered. At least, not today. Yesod has a dreamy,
illusory, comfortable, *seductive* quality, as in the Isle of the
Lotus Eaters - how else could we live as if death and personal
annihilation only happened to other people?
The Qlippothic aspect of Yesod occurs when foundations are
rotten and disintegrating and only the superficial appearance
remains unchanged - Dorian Gray springs to mind, or cases where
the brain is damaged and the body remains and carries out basic
instinctive functions, but the person is dead as far as other
people are concerned. Organisations are just as prone to this as
people.
[1] A.E. Powell, "The Etheric Double", Theosophical Publishing
House, 1925
[2] A.E. Powell, "The Astral Body", Theosophical Publishing
House, 1927
[3] "It's the Image Men We Answer To", The Sunday Times, 6th.
Jan 1991
[4] Castenada, Carlos, "The Fire from Within", Black Swan, 1985.
[5] N. R. Clough, "How to Make and Use Magic Mirrors", Aquarian
1977
[6] S.L. Mathers, "The Kabbalah Unveiled", Routledge & Kegan Paul
1981
[7] Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind", Oxford University
Press 1989
[8] Peter J. Carroll, "Psychonaut", Samuel Weiser 1987.
Hod & Netzach
-------------
"Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
The possibility of occurring in states of affairs
is the form of an object.
Form is the possibility of structure."
Wittgenstein
"Since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you."
E.E. Cummings
The title of the sephira Hod is sometimes translated as
Splendour and sometimes as Glory. The title of the sephira
Netzach is usually translated as Victory, sometimes as Endurance,
and occasionally as Eternity. Although there have been many
attempts to explain the titles of this pair of sephiroth, I am
not aware of a convincing explanation.
The two sephiroth correspond to the legs and like the legs
are normally taken as a pair and not individually. They
complement another but are not opposites any more than force and
form are opposites. This pair of sephiroth provide the first
example of the polarity of form and force encountered when
ascending back up the lightning flash from the sephira Malkuth.
Neither quality manifests in a pure state, as form and force are
thoroughly mixed together at the level of Hod and Netzach: the
force aspect represented by Netzach is differentiated (an example
of form) into a multitude of forces, and the form aspect
represented by Hod acts dynamically (an example of force) by
synthesising new forms and structures. Both sephiroth represent
the plurality of consciousness at this level, and in older texts
they are referred to as the "armies" or "hosts". To understand
why they are referred to in this way it is necessary to look at
an archaic aspect of Kabbalistic symbolism whereby the Tree of
Life is a representation of kingship.
One of the titles of Tiphereth is Melekh, or king. This king
is the child of Chokhmah (Abba, the father) and Binah (Aima, the
Mother) and hence a son of God who wears the crown of Kether. The
kingdom is the sephira Malkuth, at the same time queen (Malkah)
and bride (Kallah). In his right hand the king wields the sword
of justice (corresponding to Gevurah), and in his left the
sceptre of authority (corresponding to Chesed), and he rules over
the armies or hosts (Tzaba), which are Hod and Netzach. The use
of kingship as a metaphor to convey what the sephiroth mean
obscures as much as it reveals, but it is an unavoidable piece of
Kabbalistic symbolism, and the attribution of Hod and Netzach to
the "armies" does capture something useful about the nature of
consciousness at this level: consciousness is fragmented into
innumerable warring factions, and if there is no rightful king
ruling over the kingdom of the soul (a common state of affairs),
then the armies elect a succession of leaders from the ranks, who
wear a lopsided crown and occupy the throne only for as long as
it takes to find another claimant - more on this later.
The psychological interpretation of Hod is that it
corresponds to the ability to abstract, to conceptualise, to
reason, to communicate, and this level of consciousness arises
from the fact that in order to survive we have evolved a nervous
system capable of building internal representations of the world.
I can drive around London in a car because I possess an internal
representation of the London street system. I can diagnose faults
in the same car because I have an internal representation of its
mechanical and electrical systems and how they might fail. I can
type this document without looking at the keyboard because I know
where the keys are positioned, and your ability to read what I
have written pre-supposes a shared understanding about the
meaning of words and what they represent. Our nervous systems
possess an absolutely basic ability to create internal
representations out of the information we are capable of
perceiving through our senses.
It is also an absolutely basic characteristic of the world
that it is bigger than my nervous system. I cannot possibly
create *accurate*, internal representations of the world, and one
of the meanings of the verb "to abstract" is "to remove quietly".
This is what the nervous system does: it quietly removes most of
what is going on in the world in order to create an abridged
representation of reality with all the important (important to
me) bits underlined in highlighter pen. This is the world "I"
live in: not in the "real" world, but an internal reality
synthesised by my nervous system. There has been a lot of
philosophising about this, and it is difficult to think about how
our nervous systems *might* be distorting or even manufacturing
reality without a feeling of unease, but I am personally
reassured by the everyday observation that most adults can drive
a car on a busy road at eighty miles per hour in reasonable
safety. This suggests that while our synthetic internal
representation of the world isn't accurate, it isn't at all bad.
Abstraction does not end at the point of building an
internal representation of the external world. My nervous system
is quite content to treat my internal representation of the world
as yet another domain over which it can carry out further
abstraction, and the subsequent new world of abstractions as
another domain, and so on indefinitely, giving rise to the
principal definition of "abstraction": "to separate by the
operation of the mind, as in forming a general concept from
consideration of particular instances". As an example, suppose
someone asks me to watch the screen of a computer and to describe
what I see. I have no idea what to expect.
"Hmmm...lots of dots moving around randomly...different
colour dots...red, blue, green. Ah, the dots seem to be
clustering...they're forming circles...all the dots of each
particular colour are forming circles, lots of little
circles. Now the circles are coming together to form a
number...it's 3. Now they're moving apart and forming
another number...its 15...now 12..9..14. They've
gone..........that was it..3, 15, 12, 9, 14. Is it some sort
of test? Do I have to guess the next number in the series?
What are the numbers supposed to mean? What was the point of
it? Hmmm..the numbers might stand for letters of the
alphabet...let's see. C..O..L..I...N. It's my name!"
The dots on the screen are real - there are real, discrete,
measurable spots of light on the screen. I could verify the
presence of dots of light using an appropriate light meter. The
colours are synthesised by my retinas; different elements in my
eye respond to different frequencies in the light and give rise
to an internal experience we label "red", "blue", "green". The
circles simply do not exist: given the nature of the computer
output on the screen, there are only individual pixels, and it is
my nervous system which constructs circles. The numbers do not
exist either; it is only because of my particular upbringing
(which I share with the person who wrote the computer program)
that I am able to distinguish patterns standing for abstract
numbers in patterns of circles e.g.
oo
o o
o
o
o
o
o
ooooo
And once I begin to reason about the *meaning* of a sequence of
numbers I have left the real world a long way behind: not only is
"number" a complex abstraction, but when I ask a question about
the "meaning" of "a sequence of numbers" I am working with an
even more "abstract abstraction". My ability to happily juggle
numbers and letters and decide that there is an identity between
the abstract number sequence "3, 15, 12, 9, 14" and the character
string "COLIN" is one of those commonplace things which any
person might do and yet it illustrates how easy it is to become
completely detached from the external world and function within
an internal world of abstractions which have been detached from
anything in the world for so long that they are taken as real
without a second thought.
In parallel with our ability to structure perception into an
internal world of abstractions we possess the ability to
communicate facts about this internal world. When I say "The cup
is on the table", another person is able to identify in the real
world, out of all the information reaching their senses, the
abstraction "chair", the abstraction "cup", and confirm the
relationship of "on-ness". Why are the cup and table
abstractions? Because the word "cup" does not uniquely specify
any particular cup in the world, and when I use the word I am
assuming that the listener already possesses an internal
representation of an abstract object "cup", and can use that
abstract specification of a cup to identify a particular object
in the context within which my statement was made.
We are not normally conscious of this process, and don't
need to be when dealing with simple propositions about objects in
the real world. I think I know what a cup is, and I think you do
too. If you don't know, ask someone to show you a few. Life gets
a lot more complicated when dealing with complex internal
abstractions: what is a "contract", a "treaty", a "loan",
"limited liability", a "set", a "function", "marriage", a "tort",
"natural justice", a "sephira", a "religion", "sin", "good",
"evil", and so on (and on). We reach agreement about the
definitions of these things using language. In some cases, for
example, a mathematical object, the thing is completely and
unambiguously defined using language, while in other cases (e.g.
"good", "sin") there is no universally accepted definition. Life
is further complicated by a widespread lack of awareness that
these internal abstractions *are* internal, and it is common to
find people projecting internal abstractions onto the world as if
they were an intrinsic part of the fabric of existence, and as
objectively real as the particular cup and the particular table I
referred to earlier. Marriage is no longer a contract between a
man and a woman; it is an estate made in heaven. What is heaven?
God knows. And what is God? Trot out your definitions and let's
have an argument - that is the way such questions are answered.
Much of the content of electronic bulletin boards consists of
endless arguments and discussions on the definition of complex
internal abstractions (what is ritual, what is magic, what is
karma, what is ki, what is...).
A third element which goes together with abstraction and
language to complete the essense of the sephira Hod is reason,
and reason's formal offspring, logic. Reason is the ability to
articulate and justify our beliefs about the world using a base
of generally agreed facts and a generally agreed technique for
combining facts to infer valid conclusions. If reason is
considered as one out of a number of possible processes for
establishing what is true about the world we live in, for
establishing which models of reality are valid and which are not,
then it has been phenomenally successful: in its heyday there
were those who saw reason as the most divine faculty, the faculty
in humankind most akin to God, and that legacy is still with us -
the words "unreasonable" and "irrational" are often used to
attack and denigrate someone who does not (or cannot) articulate
what they do or why they do it. There is of course no "reason"
why we should have to articulate or justify anything, even to
ourselves, but the reasoning machine within us demands an
"explanation" for every phenomenon, and a "reason" for every
action. This is a characteristic of reason - it is an obsessive
mode of consciousness. A second characteristic of reason is that
it operates on the "garbage-in, garbage-out" principle: if the
base of given facts a person uses to reason about are garbage, so
are the conclusions - witness what two thousand years of
Christian theology has achieved using sound dialectical
principles taken from Aristotle.
If the sephira Hod on the Pillar of Form represents the
active synthesis of abstract forms in consciousness (and
abstraction, language and reason are prime examples) then the
sephira Netzach on the Pillar of Force represents affective
states of consciousness which influence how we act and react:
needs, wants, drives, feelings, moods and emotions. It is
difficult to write about affective states, to be clear on the
distinction between a need and a want on one hand, or a feeling
or a mood on the other, and I find it particularly difficult
because the essence of sadness is *being* sad, the essence of
excitement is the *feeling* of excitement, the essence of desire
is the aching, lusting, overwhelming *feeling* of desire, and
being too precise about defining feelings is in the essence of
Hod, *not* Netzach. These things are incommunicable. They can be
produced in another person, but they cannot be communicated. It
is possible to be clinical and abstract and precise about the
sephira Hod because an abstract clinical precision captures that
aspect of consciousness perfectly, but when attempting to
communicate something about Netzach one feels tempted to try to
communicate feelings themselves, a task more suited to a poet or
a musician, an actor or a dancer. Please accept this unfortunate
limitation in what follows, a limitation not necessarily present
when Kaballah is learned at first hand from someone.
Netzach is on the Pillar of Force, but in reaching Netzach
the Lightning Flash has already passed through Binah and Gevurah
on the Pillar of Form and so it represents a force conditioned
and constrained by form; when we talk about Netzach we are
talking about the different ways force can be shaped and
directed, like toothpaste squeezed out of a tube. The toothpaste
we are talking about is something I will call "life force" or
"life energy", and as a rule, when I have a lot of it I feel well
and full of vitality, and when I don't have much I feel unwell,
tired, and vulnerable. To continue the somewhat phallic
toothpaste metaphor, the magnitude of pressure on the tube
corresponds to vitality, the direction in which the toothpaste
comes out corresponds to a need or a want, and the shape of the
nozzle corresponds to a feeling: all three factors, pressure,
direction and nozzle determine how the toothpaste comes out; that
is, we could say that there are three factors giving a *form* to
the toothpaste (or life-energy). It may seem sloppy and
unnecessarily metaphysical to imply that all needs, wants and
feelings are merely conditions of manifestation of something more
basic, some "unconditioned force", but Kaballah is primarily a
tool for exploring internal states, and there are internal states
(certainly in my experience) where this force is experienced
directly with much less differentiation, hence the clumsy
metaphor.
Textbooks on psychology define a need as an internal state
which results in directed behaviour, and discuss needs such as
thirst, hunger, sex, stimulation, proximity seeking, curiousity
and so on. These things are interesting, but for virtually
everyone such basic and inherent needs are in the nature of
"givens" and don't provide much individual insight into the
questions "why do I behave differently from other people?", or
"should I change my behaviour?", or more interesting still "to
what extent do I (or can I) influence my behaviour?". In addition
to inherent needs it is useful also to look at needs which have
been acquired (i.e. learned), and for convenience I will call
them "wants" because people are usually conscious of "wanting"
something specific. To give some examples, a person might want:
- to buy a bar of chocolate.
- to go to the toilet.
- to own a better car.
- to have a sexual relationship with someone.
- to live forever.
- to be thinner (more musculer, taller, whiter,
browner...).
- to read a book.
- to gain social recognition within a particular group.
- to win in sport.
- to go shopping.
- to go to bed.
Not only are these "wants" the sort of thing many people want
these days, but these "wants" can all occur concurrently in the
same person, and while some may have been simmering away on a
back burner for years, there can be an astonishing variety of
pots and pans waiting for an immediate turn on the stove. The
average person's consciousness zips around the kitchen like a
demented short-order cook stirring this dish, serving that one,
slapping a pot on the stove for a few minutes only to take it off
and put something else on, throwing whole meals in the bin only
to empty them back into pots a few minutes later. The choice of
which pot ends up on the hot plate depends largely on mood and
accident: some people may plan their lives like military
campaigns but most don't. Most people have far more wants than
there are hours in the day to achieve them, and those which are
actually satisfied on a given day is more a function of accident
than design. Careers are thrown away (along with status and
security) in a moment of sexual infatuation; the desire to eat
wars with the desire to be slim; the writer retires to the
country to write the great novel and does everything but write;
the manager desperately tries to finish an urgent report but
finds himself dreaming about a car he saw in the car park; the
student abandons an important essay on impulse to go out with
friends. One activity is quickly replaced by another as the
person attempts to reconcile all his wants and drives, but
unfortunately there is no requirement that wants should be
internally consistent or complementary; like a multi-process
operating system, a single thread of energy is randomly cycled
around an arbitrary list of needs and wants to produce the mixed-
up complexity of the average person. Each want can be treated as
a distinct mode of consciousness - I can eat a slap-up meal one
day and thoroughly enjoy it, while the next day I can look in the
mirror and swear never to touch another pizza again. It is as if
two separate beings inhabited my body, one who loves pizzas and
one who wants to be thin, and each makes plans independently of
the other, and only the magic dust of unbroken memory sustains
the illusion that I am a single person. When I view my own wants
and actions dispassionately I can conclude that there is a host
or army of independent beings jostling inside me, a crowd of
artificial elementals individually ensouled with enough of my
energy to bring one particular desire to fruition. I cope with
the semi-chaotic result of mob rule by using the traditional
remedy: public relations. I put together internal press releases
(various rationalisations and justifications) to convince myself,
and others if need be, that the mess was either due to external
circumstances beyond my control (I didn't have time last night),
the fault of other people (you made me angry), or inevitable (I
had no choice, there was no alternative). In cases where even my
public relations don't work I erect a shrine to the gods of Guilt
and make little offerings of sorrow and regret over the years.
This is normal consciousness for most people. It is a kind
of insanity. Wants rush to and fro on the stage of consciousness
like actors in the closing scenes of Julius Caeser - alarums and
excursions, bodies litter the stage, trumpets and battle shouts
in the wings, Brutus falls on his sword, Anthony claims the field
- perhaps this is why the sephira is called Victory! Every day
new wants are kicked off in response to advertising or peer
pressure, old wants compete with each other in a zero-sum game.
Having said this, I should point out that it is not desire or
wants or drives which create the insanity - Kaballah does not
place the value judgement on desire that Buddhism does (that
desire is the cause of suffering, and by inference, something to
be overcome). The insanity arises from mob-rule, from the bizarre
internal processes of justification, rationalisation and guilt,
and from the identification of Self with the result - I will
return to this when discussing the sephira Tiphereth, as the mis-
identification of Self is a key element in the discussion on
Tiphereth.
Netzach also corresponds to our feelings, emotions and
moods, because this background of "psychological weather"
strongly conditions the way in which we think and behave:
regardless of what I am doing, my energy will manifest
differently when I am happy than when I am not. Sometimes moods
and emotions are triggered by a specific event, and sometimes
they are not: free-floating anxiety and depression are common
enough, and perhaps free-floating happiness is too (I can't speak
from experience there ;-). There are hundreds of words for
different moods, emotions and feelings, but most seem to refer to
different degrees of intensity of the same thing, or the same
feeling in different contexts, and the number of genuinely
distinct internal dimensions of feeling appears to be small.
Depression, misery, sadness, happiness, delight, joy, rapture and
ecstacy seem to lie along the same axis, as do loathing, hate,
dislike, affection, and love. It is an interesting exercise to
identify the genuinely, qualitatively different feelings you
can experience by actually conjuring up each feeling. I have
tried the experiment with a number of people, and you will
probably find there are less than 10 distinct feelings.
The most immediate and personal correspondences for Hod and
Netzach are the psychological correspondences: the rational,
abstract, intellectual and communicative on one hand and the
emotional, motivational, intuitive, aesthetic, and non-rational
on the other. The planetary and elemental correspondences mirror
this: Hod corresponds to Kokab or Mercury, and the element of
Air, while Netzach corresponds to Nogah or Venus, and the element
Water.
The Virtue of Hod is honesty or truthfulness, and its Vice
is dishonesty or untruthfulness. One of the features of being
able to create abstract representations of reality and
communicate some aspect of it to another person is that it is
possible to *misrepresent* reality, or to put it bluntly, lie
through your teeth.
The Illusion of Hod is order, in the sense of attempting to
impose one's sense of order upon the world. This is very
noticeable in some people; whenever something happens they will
immediately pigeonhole it and declare with great authority "it is
just another example of XYZ". A surprising number of people who
claim to be rational will claim "there's no such thing as
(ghosts, telepathy, free lunches, UFO's)" without having examined
the evidence one way or the other. They are probably right, and I
have no personal interest either way, but it is not difficult to
distinguish between someone who carefully weighs the pros and
cons in an argument and readily admits to uncertainty, and
someone with a firm and orderly conviction that "this is the way
the world is". The illusion of order occurs because people
confuse their internal representation of the world with the world
itself, and whenever they are confronted with something they
attempt to fit it into their representation.
The illusion of order (that everything in the world can be
neatly classified) relates closely to the klippoth of Hod, which
is rigidity, or rigid order. As children we start out with an
open view of what the world is like, and by the time we reach our
late teens or early twenties this view has set fairly solid, like
cold porridge - there are few minds more full of certainties than
that of an eighteen year old. A good critical education sometimes
has the effect of stirring the porridge into a lumpy gruel, but
it gradually starts to set again (unless the heavy hand of fate
stirs it up), and it is generally recognised, particularly in the
sciences, that a deeply ingrained sense of "how things are" is
the greatest obstacle to progress. If you hear some kids
listening to music and find yourself thinking "I don't know what
they find in that noise!" then it's happening to you too. If find
yourself looking back to a time when everything was so much
better than it is today and find yourself declaring "nostalgia
isn't what it used to be" then you will know that the porridge
has gone very cold and very stiff.
The Vision of Hod is the Vision of Splendour. There is
regularity and order in the world - it's not all an illusion -
and when someone is able to appreciate natural order in its
abstract sense, via mathematics for example, it can lead to a
genuinely religious, even ecstatic experience. The thirteenth
century Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia developed a rigorous system of
Hebrew letter mysticism based on the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet, their symbolic meanings, and their abstract
relationships when permuted into different "names of God"; many
hours of intense concentration spent combining letters according
to complex rules generated highly abstract symbolic meanings and
insights which led to ecstatic experiences. The same sense of awe
can come from mathematics and science - the realisation that
gravitational dynamics in three dimensions is geometry in four
dimensions, that plants are living fractals, that primes are the
seeds of all other numbers, are just as likely to lead towards an
intense vision of the splendour of the world made visible through
the eye of the rational intellect.
The Virtue of Netzach is unselfishness, and its Vice is
selfishness. Both the Virtue and the Vice are an attitude towards
things-which-are-not-me, specifically, other people and living
creatures. If I was surrounded by a hundred square miles of empty
desert then my attitude to other living things wouldn't matter,
but I don't, and nothing I do is without some consequence; my
needs, wants and feelings invariably have an effect on people,
animals and plants, who all want to live and have some level of
needs and wants and feelings too. Unselfishness is simply a
recognition of others' needs. Selfishness taken to an extreme is
a denial of life, because it denies freedom and life to anything
which gets in the way; my needs must come first. Netzach lies on
the Pillar of Force and is an expression of life-energy, so to
deny life is a perversion of the force symbolised by Netzach,
hence the attribution of selfishness to the Vice.
The Vision of Netzach is the Vision of Beauty Triumphant.
Whereas the Vision of Splendour corresponding to Hod is a vision
of complex abstract relationships, symmetry, and mathematical
elegance, the Vision of Beauty Triumphant is purely aesthetic and
firmly based in the real world of textures, smells, sounds, and
colours, an appropriate correspondence for Venus, the goddess of
sensual beauty.
Suppose two housebuyers go to look at a house. The first is
interested in the number of rooms, the size of the garage, the
house's position relative to local amenities, the price, the
number of square metres in the plot, and whether the windows are
double-glazed. The second person likes the decoration in the
lounge, the colour of the bathroom, the wisteria plant in the
garden, the cherry tree, the curving shape of the stairs, and the
sloping roof in one of the bedrooms. Both people like the house,
but the first likes various abstract properties associated with
the house, whereas the second likes the house itself. Suppose the
same two people buy the house and decide to do ritual magic. The
first person wants white robes because white is the colour of the
powers of light and life. The second wants a green velvet robe
because it feels and looks nice. The first reads lots of books on
how to carry out a ritual, while the second sits under the cherry
tree in the garden with a flute and a blissful expression of
cosmic love. The first person has continued to make choices based
on an abstract notion of what is correct, while the second makes
choices based on what *feels right*. Both are driven by an
internal sense of "rightness", but in the first case it is based
on abstract criteria, while in the second it is based on personal
aesthetic notion of beauty.
The Vision of Beauty Triumphant has a compelling power. It
is pre-articulate and inherently uncritical, and at the same time
it is immensely biased. A person in its grip will pronounce
judgement on another person's taste in art, literature, clothes,
music, decor or whatever, and will do it with such a profound
lack of self-consciousness that it is possible to believe good
taste is ordained in heaven. This person will mock those who
surround themselves with rules, regulations, principles, and
analysis, the "syntax of things" as E. E. Cummings puts it, and
instead exhibit a whimsical spontaneity, a penetrating (so they
believe) intuition, and a free spirit in tune with ebb and flow
of life. There are those who might complain about their
astounding arrogance, fickleness, unreliability, and the never-
ending flow of unshakable and prejudiced opinions delivered with
papal authority, but those who complain are (clearly) anal-
retentive nit-pickers and don't count. For a total immersion in
the aesthetic vision read Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian
Grey".
The Illusion of Netzach is projection. We all tend to
identify feelings and characteristics in other people which we
find in ourselves and when we get it right it is called "empathy"
or "intuition"; when we get it wrong it is called "projection",
because we are incorrectly projecting our feelings, needs,
motives, or desires onto another person and interpreting their
behaviour accordingly. Some level of projection is unavoidable,
and at best it can be balanced with a critical awareness that it
can occur, but projection is insidious, and the strength of
feeling associated with a projection can easily overwhelm any
intellectual awareness. Projection usually "feels right".
One of the most overwhelming forms of projection accompanies
sexual desire. Why do I find one person sexually attractive and
not another? Why do I find some characteristics in a person
sexually attractive but not others? In my own case I discovered
that when I put together all the characteristics I found most
attractive in a person a consistent picture emerged of an "ideal
person", and every person I had ever considered as a possible
sexual partner was instantly compared against this template. In
fact there was more than one template, more than one ideal, but
the number was limited and each template was very clearly
defined, and most importantly, each template was internal. My
sexual (and often many other feelings) about a person were based
on an internal and apparently arbitrary internal template. This
was crazy; I found my sexual feelings about a person would change
depending on how they dressed or behaved, on how well they
"matched the ideal". It became obvious that what I was in love
with did not exist outside of myself, and I was trying to find
this ideal in everyone else. Each one of these "templates" was a
living aspect of myself which I had chosen not to regard as "me",
and in compensation I spent much of my time trying to find people
to bring these parts to life, like a director auditioning actors
and actresses for a part in a new play. If a person previously
identified as ideal failed to live up to my notion of how they
should be ideally behaving then I would project a fault on them:
there was something wrong with *them*! Madness indeed.
The Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung [1] recognised this
phenomenon and gave these idealised and projected components of
our psyche the title "archetype". Jung identified several
archetypes, and it is worth mentioning the major and most
influential.
The Anima is the ideal female archetype. She is part
genetic, part cultural, a figure molded by fashion and
advertising, an unconscious composite of woman in the abstract.
The Anima is common in men, where she can appear with riveting
power in dreams and fantasy, a projection brought to life by the
not inconsiderable power of the male sexual drive. She might be
meek and submissive, seductive and alluring, vampish and
dangerous, a cheap slut or an unattainable goddess - there is no
"standard anima", but there are many recognisable patterns which
can have a powerful hold on particular men. Male sexual fantasy
material is amazingly predictable, cliched, unimaginitive and
crude, and contains a limited number of steroetyped views of
women which are as close to a "lowest common denominator anima"
as one is likely to find.
The Animus is the ideal male archetype, and much of what is
true about the Anima is true of the Animus. There are
differences; the predominant quality in the Anima is her
appearance and behaviour, while the predominant quality in the
Animus is social power and competence. In the interests of sexual
equality it is worth mentioning that female romantic fantasy
material is amazingly predictable, cliched, unimaginitive and
crude, and contains a limited number of stereotype views of men
which are as close to a "lowest common denominator animus" as one
is likely to find.
The Shadow is the projection of "not-me" and contains
forbidden or repressed desires and impulses. In most men the
Anima is repressed and in most women the Animus is repressed, and
so both form a component of the Shadow. The major part of the
Shadow however is composed of forbidden impulses, and the Shadow
forms a personification of evil. Much of what is considered evil
is defined socially and the communal personification of evil as
an external force working against humankind (such as Satan) is
widespread.
The Persona is the mask a person wears as a member of a
community when a large proportion of his or her behaviour is
defined by a role such as doctor, teacher, manager, accountant,
lawyer or whatever. Projection occurs in two ways: firstly,
someone may be expected to conform to a role in a particularly
rigid or stereotyped way, and so suffer a loss of individuality
and probably a degree of misplaced trust or prejudice. Secondly,
many people identify with a role to the extent that they carry
that role into all aspects of their private lives. This
"projection onto self" is a form of identification - see
the section on Tiphereth.
The archetype of Self at the level of Hod and Netzach is
usually projected as an ideal form of person; that is, someone
will believe that he or she is highly imperfect creature and it
is possible to attain an ideal state of being in which the same
person is kind, loving, wise, forgiving, compassionate, in
harmony with the Absolute, or whatever. This projection will
either fasten on a living or dead person, who then becomes a
hero, heroine, guru, or master with grossly inflated abilities,
or it fastens on a vision of "myself made perfect". The projected
vision of "myself made perfect" is common (almost universal)
among those seeking "spiritual development", "esoteric training",
and other forms of self-improvement, and in almost every case it
is based on an abstract ideal. The person will probably insist
that the ideal has existed in certain rare individuals (usually
long dead saints and gurus, or someone who lives a long way off
whom they haven't met), and that is the sort of person they want
to be. It should be comical, but it isn't. There is more to say
about this and it will keep till the section on Tiphereth.
The klippoth or shell of Netzach is habit and routine. When
behaviour, with all its potential for new experiences, new ways
of doing things, new relationships, becomes locked into patterns
which repeat over and over again, then the life energy, the force
aspect of Netzach is withdrawn and all that remains is the dead,
empty shell of behaviour. Just as the klippoth of Hod is rigid
order, the petrification of one's internal representation of
reality, so the klippoth of Netzach is the petrification of
behaviour.
The God Names of Hod and Netzach are Elohim Tzabaoth and
Jehovah Tzabaoth respectively, which mean "God of Armies", but in
each case a different word is used for "God". The name "Elohim"
is associated with all three sephiroth on the Pillar of Form and
represents a feminine (metaphorically speaking) tendency in that
aspect of God. The elucidation of God Names can become
phenomenally complex and obscure, with long excursions into
gematria and textual analysis of the Pentateuch and it is a
quagmire I intend to avoid.
The Archangels are Raphael and Haniel. The Archangel of Hod
is sometimes given as Michael, but I prefer Raphael (Medicine of
God) for no other reason than the association of Mercury with
medicine and healing; besides, Michael has perfectly good reasons
for residing in Tiphereth. This sort of thing can give rise to an
amazing amount of hot air when Kabbalists meet; for those who
wonder how far back the confusion goes, Robert Fludd (1574-1607)
plumped for Raphael, whereas two hundred years later Francis
Barrett prefered Michael. The co-founder of the Golden Dawn, S.L.
Mathers, went for both depending on which text you read. Kabbalah
isn't an orderly subject and those who want to impose too much
order on it are falling into the illusion of...I leave this as an
exercise to the reader.
The Angel Orders are the Beni Elohim and the Elohim.
The triad of sephiroth Yesod, Hod and Netzach comprise the triad
of "normal consciousness" as we normally experience it in
ourselves and most people most of the time. This level of
consciousness is intensely magical; try to move away from it for
any length of time and you will discover the strength of the
force and form sustaining it. It is not an exaggeration to say
that most people are completely unable to leave this state, even
when they want to, even when they desperately try to. The sephira
Tiphereth represents a state of being which unlocks the energy of
"normal consciousness" and is the subject of the next section.
[1] Jung, C.G, "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the
Self", Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974
Tiphereth
---------
"Nothing is left to you at this moment but to burst out into
a loud laugh"
From "The Spirit of Zen"
The sephira Tiphereth lies at the heart of the Tree of Life,
and like Rome all paths lead to it. Well, not all, but Tiphereth
has a path linking it to every sephira with the exception of
Malkuth. If the Tree of Life is a map then the sephira titled
Tiphereth, Beauty, or Rachamin, Compassion, clearly represents
something of central importance. What does it represent? Can you
imagine in your mind's eye what it might be? Do you feel anything
within you when you contemplate Tiphereth? If asked could you
define what it stands for? Well, if you can do any or all of
these things you are almost certainly barking up the wrong Tree.
As Alan Watts comments [1]:
"The method of Zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust
the intellect until it is realised that intellection is only
thinking *about*; it will provoke, irritate and again
exhaust the emotions until it is realised that emotion is
only feeling *about*, and then it contrives, when the
disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional
impasse, to bridge the gap between second-hand conceptual
contact with reality, and first-hand experience."
The sephira Tiphereth presents the student of Kabbalah with a
conundrum. Whatever you say it is, it isn't; whatever you imagine
it to be it isn't; whatever you feel it might be, it isn't; it is
an empty room. There is nothing there. The modes of consciousness
appropriate to Hod, Yesod and Netzach respectively are not
appropriate to something which is clearly and unambiguously shown
on the Tree as being distinct from all three. So what is it? The
student is told that the Virtue of Tiphereth is Devotion to the
Great Work. What is this "Great Work"? The student is told
solemnly that in order to find the answer he or she should obtain
the Spiritual Experience of Tiphereth, which is the Knowledge and
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. So the student runs off
and duely reports (after some work in the library perhaps) that
the Great Work is the raising of a human being in every aspect to
perfection. Or it is the saving of the planet from industrial
pollution. Or it is the retrieval and perpetuation of knowledge,
or perhaps it is the spiritual redemption of humanity. The
student then burns enough frankincense to pay off the Somalian
national debt, records endless conversations with the Holy
Guardian Angel in the magical record, and impresses all and
sundry with an unbending commitment to the Great Work. This
enthusiasm, commitment, personal sacrifice and sense of moral
purpose leads to the development of a special kind of person:
pious, preaching, judgemental, a humble servant of the highest
powers with a blind spot of intolerance. Those who inhabit the
vicinity of such moral incandescence may have reason to recall
that the Vice of Tiphereth is self-importance and pride.
A student can spend years running around in circles,
bringing to the planet the benefits of advanced spiritual
consciousness, and this seems to be a necessary exercise. People
need to sweat various personal obsessions out of their systems,
and the empty room of Tiphereth is an excellent set on which to
act out a personal drama. If the devotion to the Work is genuine,
and if Tiphereth and the HGA are invoked with passion and
determination, then sooner or later the hand of fate lends a hand
and the student has the shit knocked out in a big way. An attempt
to penetrate the nature of Tiphereth does seem to bring about
that state which the Greeks called "hubris", an overweening
arrogance, self-importance and pride, until eventually the
inevitable happens and one's life comes crashing down around
one's ears. The resulting mess varies from person to person; in
some people every idea about what is important is turned upside
down, while in others an emotional attachment to habits,
lifestyle, possessions or relationships turns to dust. The daemon
of the false self is dealt a massive blow and sent reeling, and
in that moment there is a chance for real change and the dawning
of the golden sun of Tiphereth.
This is how I interpret the word "initiation": there is a
state of being represented by the sephirah Tiphereth which is
absolutely distinct from what most people experience as normal
consciousness. Once attained the change is irreversible and
permanent; it causes a permanent change in the way life is
experienced. When it occurs it is recognised instantly for what
it is...as if every cell in one's body shouted simultaneously "So
*that's* all there is to it!" This state has been widely
documented in many parts of the world, and Alan Watts' book
(referenced below) is as guarded and explicit on the subject as
any worthwhile book is likely to be.
The symbolism of Tiphereth is three-fold: a king, a
sacrificed god, and a child. This three-fold symbolism
corresponds to Tiphereth's place on the extended Tree (to be
explained in a later chapter), where it appears as Kether of
Assiah, Tiphereth of Yetzirah, and Malkuth of Briah, and to these
three aspects correspond the king, the sacrificed god, and the
child respectively. One interpretation of this symbolism is as
follows: if the kingdom is to be redeemed then the king (who is
also the son of God - see below) must be sacrificed, and from
this sacrifice comes a rebirth as a child. This is a metaphor of
initiation. It is also markedly Christian in symbolism, an aspect
many explicitly Christian Kabbalists have not failed to elaborate
upon, but it would be a mistake to make too much out of the
apparent Christian symbolism. The king, the child and the son are
synonyms for Tiphereth in the earliest Kabbalistic documents
(e.g. the Zohar), and the introduction of divine kingship and the
sacrificed god into modern Kabbalah owes a lot more to the
publication of "The Golden Bough" [2] in 1922 than it does to
Christianity.
The theme of death and rebirth is an important element in
many esoteric traditions, and provides continuity between modern
Kabbalah and the mystery religions and initiations of the
Mediterranean basin. The initiatory rituals of the Golden Dawn
[3], an organisation which did much to reawaken interest in
Kabbalah, were loosely inspired by the Eleusinian mysteries of
Demeter and Persephone - at least to extent that the Temple
officers were named after the principal officers of the
Eleusinian mysteries. The Golden Dawn Tiphereth initiation was,
like most Golden Dawn rituals, a witch's brew of symbolism, but
it was strongly based on the mysteries of the crucifixion and the
resurrection - at one point the aspirant was actually lashed to a
cross - and took place in a symbolic reconstruction of the vault
and tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz. The following extract [3]
gives the flavour of the thing:
"Buried with that Light in a mystical death, rising again in
a mystical resurrection, cleansed and purified through Him
our Master, O Brother of the Cross and the Rose. Like Him, O
Adepts of all ages, have ye toiled. Like Him have ye
suffered tribulation. Poverty, torture and death have ye
passed through. They have been but the purification of the
Gold."
Gold is a Tiphereth symbol, being the metal of Shemesh, the Sun,
which also corresponds to Tiphereth. Gold is incorruptible and
symbolises a state of being which is not "base" or "corrupt";
again, it is a symbol of initiation, of a state of being compared
to which normal consciousness is corruptible dross.
I do not wish to go any further into this kind of symbolism
- there is an awful lot of it. It is possible to write at great
length and succeed in doing nothing more than losing the reader
in a web of symbolism so dense and sticky that the inner state
one is pointing at becomes a sterile thing of words and symbols.
I wanted to provide an idea of how a large amount of exotic
symbolism has accreted around Tiphereth, but that is all. The
state indicated by Tiphereth is real enough, and lashing
comfortably-off middle-class aspirants to a cross in a wooden
vault at the local Masonic Hall and prattling on about poverty,
torture and death is somewhat wide of the mark.
In the traditional Kabbalah the sephira Tiphereth
corresponds to something called Zoar Anpin, the Microprosopus, or
Lesser Countenance. As might be expected, there is also something
called Arik Anpin, the Macroprosopus, or Greater Countenance, and
this is often used as a synonym for the sephira Kether. The
symbology connected with the Greater and Lesser Countenances is
extremely complex: the "Greater Holy Assembly" [4], one of the
books of the Zohar, is largely a detailed description of the
cranium, the eyes, the cheeks, and the hairs in the beard of both
the Greater and Lesser Countenances. In a crude sense the
Macroprosopus is God, and the Microprosopus is man made in God's
image, hence the symbolism, but this is too simple. The
Microprosopus is also the archetypal man Adam Kadmon, a mystical
concept which should not be confused with a real human being.
Adam Kadmon is androgynous, male and female, Adam-and-Eve in a
pre-manifest, pre-Fall state of divine perfection. The symbology
of the Macroprosopus, Microprosopus, and Adam Kadmon appears to
exist independently of the concept of sephirothic emanation, and
it is probably fair to say that the former was more highly
developed during the Zoharic period of Kabbalah, while the latter
is used almost exclusively at the present time - I have yet to
encounter a modern Kabbalist with much insight into the
thirteen parts of the beard of the Macroprosopus.
Another rich set of symbols associated with Tiphereth comes
from the divine name of four letters YHVH, usually written as
Jehovah or Yahweh. The letter Yod is associated with the supernal
father Chokhmah, and the letter He is associated with the
supernal mother Binah. The letter Vov is associated with the son
of the mother and father, and is both the Microprosopus and the
sephira Tiphereth. The final He is associated with the daughter
(and bride of the son), the sephira Malkuth. Tiphereth is thus
the "child" of Chokhmah and Binah, and also "the son of God". In
Hebrew the letter Vov can represent the number 6, and in Kabbalah
this refers to Chesed, Gevurah, Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod and
Yesod, the six sephiroth which correspond to states of human
consciousness and hence also to the Microprosopus. With a typical
Kabbalistic flexibility they can also stand for the six days of
Creation.
The illusion of Tiphereth is Identification. When a person
is asked "what are you", they will usually begin with statements
like "I am a human being", "I am a lorry driver", "I am Fred
Bloggs", "I am five foot eleven". If pressed further a person
might begin to enumerate personal qualities and behaviours: "I am
trustworthy", "I lose my temper a lot", "I am afraid of
heights", "I love chessecake", "I hate dogs". It is extremely
common for people to identify what they are with the totality of
their beliefs and behaviours, and they will defend the sanctity
of these beliefs and behaviours, often to the death - a person
might have behaviours which make their life a misery and still
cling to them with a grip like a python. This inability to stand
back and see behaviour or beliefs in an impersonal way produces a
peculiar ego-centricity: the sense of personal identity is
founded on a set of beliefs and behaviours which are largely
unconscious (that is, a person may be unaware of being
grotesquely selfish, or pompous, or attention-getting) and at the
same time seem to be uniquely special and sacred. When behaviour
and beliefs are unconscious and incorporated into a sense of
identity it becomes impossible to make sense of other people. If
I am unaware that I regularly slip little put-downs into
my conversation, and Joe takes umbrage at my sense of humour,
then rather than change my behaviour (which is unconscious) I
interpret the result as "Joe doesn't have a sense of humour; he
needs to learn to laugh a little". There are many behaviours
which may seem innocuous to the person concerned but which are
irritating or offensive to others, and when the injured party
reacts appropriately it is impossible for me to make sense of
this reaction if my behaviour is unconscious and tightly bound to
my sense of identity. Our sense of identity thus becomes a kind
of "Absolute" against which everything is compared, and
judgements about the world become absolute and almost impossible
to change, even when we realise intellectually the subjectivity
of our position. Referring to this projection of the unconscious
onto the world Jung [5] comments:
"The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his
environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is
now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into
one's unknown face."
In summary, the illusion of Tiphereth is a false identification
with a set of beliefs or behaviours. It can also be an
identification with a social mask or Persona, something
discussed in the section on Netzach. So to return to the orginal
question: "what are you?". Is there an answer? If the answer is
to be something which is not an arbitrary collection of emphemera
then you are not your behaviours - behaviour can be changed; you
are not your beliefs - beliefs can be changed; you are not your
role in society - your role in society can change; you are not
your body - your body is continually changing. Out of this comes
a sense of emptiness, of hollowness. The intellect attempts to
solve the koan of koans but has no anchor to hold on to. Is there
no centre to my being, nothing which is *me*, no axis in the
universe, no morality, no good, no evil? Do I live in a
meaningless, arbitrary universe where any belief is as good as
any other, where any behaviour is acceptable so long as I can get
away with it? This sense of emptiness or hollowness is the
Qlippoth or shell of Tiphereth, Tiphereth as the Empty Room with
Nothing In It. Jung [6] provides a memorable and moving
description of how his father, a country parson, was
progressively consumed by this feeling of hollowness. There can
be few fates worse than to devote a life to the outward forms of
religion without ever feeling one touch of that which gives it
meaning.
The God Name of Tiphereth is Jehovah Aloah va Daath, or
simply Aloah va Daath. It is often translated as "God made
manifest in the sphere of the mind". The Archangel is sometimes
given as Raphael, but I prefer the attribution to Michael, long
associated with solar fire. His name "Who is like God" reinforces
the upper/lower relationship between Kether and Tiphereth. The
angel order is the Malachim, or Kings.
To cover all of the traditional material related to
Tiphereth is to cover most of Kabbalah. Tiphereth is at the
centre of a complex of six sephiroth which represent a human
being. This isn't a modern interpretation, an "initiated"
interpretation of obscure medieval documents. Kabbalah has always
been deeply concerned with the dynamics of the relationship
between God and the Creation, between God and a human being, and
the descriptions of the Macroprosopus and Microprosopus in the
Zohar are a bold attempt to grasp something ineffable using a
language built from the most immediate of metaphors, the human
body. According to the Bible and Kabbalah, a human being is in
some sense a reflection of God, and to the extent that Kabbalah
is an outcome of genuine mystical experience it is a description
of the dynamics of that relationship, and more importantly it is
a description of something *real*. Even if you don't like the
look of the word "God" (I don't) Kabbalah is trying to express
something important about a relatively inaccessible dimension of
human experience. Tiphereth is a reflection of Kether and
represents the "image of God", the "God within", whatever you
take that to mean; it is a symbol of centrality, balance, and
above all, wholeness. It can be an empty room, a gaping
emptiness, or it can be the heart and blazing sun of the Tree. It
is the symbol of a human being who lives in full consciousness of
the outer and the inner, who denies neither the reality of the
world nor the mystery of self-consciousness, and who attempts to
reconcile the needs of both in a harmonious balance.
[1] Watts, Alan W., "The Spirit of Zen", John Murray 1936
[2] Frazer, J.G., "The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and
Religion", Macmillan 1976
[3] Regardie, I., "The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic",
Falcon 1984
[4] Mathers, S.L., "The Kabbalah Unveiled", RKP 1981
[5] Jung, C.G., "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the
Self", RKP 1974
[6] Jung, C.G., "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", RKP 1963
Gevurah and Chesed
------------------
"The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or
mixed, are good laws and good arms; and because there cannot
be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there
are good arms there must needs be good laws, I will omit
speaking of the laws and speak of the arms."
Machiavelli
"God is the great urge that has not yet found a body
but urges towards incarnation with the great creative urge."
D.H. Lawrence
The title of the sephira Gevurah is translated as
"strength", and sometimes as "power". The sephira is also
referred to by its alternative titles of Din, "justice", and
Pachad, "fear". The title of the sephira Chesed is translated as
"mercy" or "love", and it is often called Gedulah, "majesty" or
"magnificence". Gevurah and Chesed lie on the Pillars of Form and
Force respectively, and possess a more definite and generally
agreed symbolism than any other sephiroth: Chesed stands for
expansiveness and the creation and building-up of form, what can
very appropriately be referred to as anabolism, and Gevurah
stands for restraint and both the preservation of form, and the
breaking-down (or catabolism) of form.
Within the symbolism of the Kabbalah the most explicit and
concrete expression of form occurs in Malkuth, the physical
world, and as it takes a conscious being (e.g. thee and me) to
comprehend the world in terms of forms which are built-up and
broken down, so Chesed and Gevurah express something vital about
our conscious relationship with the external, material world.
When I see something beautiful being created I may well think
this is "good", but when I see the same thing being wantonly
destroyed, I would probably think this is "bad", and this type of
thinking pervades early Kabbalistic writing. In his commentary on
"The Bahir", Aryeh Kaplan writes [1]:
"The concept of Chesed-Love is that of freely giving, while
that of Gevurah-Strength is that of restraint. When it is
said that Strength is restraint, it is in the sense of the
teaching "Who is strong, he who restrains his urge". It is
obvious that man can restrain his nature, but if man can do
so, then God certainly can. God's nature, however, is to do
good and therefore, when He restrains His nature, the result
is evil. The sephira of Gevurah-Strength is therefore seen
as the source of evil."
The Zohar also contains many references to the "rigorous
severity" of God (another synonym for Gevurah) and its being the
source of evil in the creation. However, when one considers that
the creation and uncontrolled growth of a cancer would correspond
to Chesed, and the attempts of the immune system to contain and
destroy it would correspond to Gevurah, it should be clear that
it is not useful to consider creation and destruction in terms of
good and evil. It *is* useful to look at a living, organic system
as a *balance* between these two opposed tendencies, and the
manifest Creation in Kabbalah is very definitely pictured as a
living, organic system (i.e. a Tree of Life).
The most vivid metaphors for Chesed and Gevurah come from a
time when European societies were ruled by kings and queens, when
(in principle at least) the ultimate authority and power in
society rested in a single individual. Chesed corresponds to the
creative aspects of leadership, and early texts are one-sided in
characterising this by love, mercy and majesty. Gevurah
corresponds to the conservative aspects of leadership, to the
power to preserve the status-quo, and the power to destroy
anything opposed to it. These two aspects go hand-in-hand - try
to change anything of consequence in society, and someone will
invariably oppose that change. To bring about change it is often
necessary to have the power to over-rule opposition. Consensus is
an impossibility in society - there will always be someone whose
opinions are at best ignored and at worst suppressed - and Chesed
and Gevurah represent respectively the kingly obligation to seek
what is good for the many (enlightened leadership of course!),
and the power to judge and punish those opposed to the will of
the king. The following description of Margaret Thatcher comes
from Nicholas Ridley, a minister in her cabinet [2]:
"She governed with superb style, carrying every war into the
enemy's camp, seeking to destroy rather than contain the
opposition, and determined to blaze a radical trail. But she
never let power corrupt her; nor did she ever fail to be
compassionate and kind as a human being."
Whether this description is accurate or not is irrelevant to
this discussion; what it does do is capture in two sentences
something essential about a leader, the balance between power,
strength and militancy on one hand, and humanitarianism,
compassion and caring on the other. This is very much a model of
divine kingship (or queenship!): a king who loves and cares for
his people and seeks to bring about "heaven on earth", but at the
same time punishes transgression, and fights for and preserves
what is good and worth preserving. Kabbalists thought of God in
this way: God loves us (so the argument goes), and the mercy and
benignity of God is represented by the sephira Chesed, but at the
same time God has made his laws known to humankind and will judge
and punish anyone who opposes these laws. Read the book of
Proverbs in the Bible if you want to enter into this view of
reality.
Many modern Kabbalists have a more jaundiced view of
leadership than medieval Kabbalists, and certainly do not see
Chesed as purely the love or mercy of God. In the twentieth
century we have seen a succession of leaders harness their
vision, creativity and leadership to the four Vices of Chesed,
which are tyranny, bigotry, hypocrisy and gluttony. It takes an
uncommon skill and vision not only to contemplate the
annihilation of entire races, but to create a structure in which
it happens. And how many people would dream of a socialist utopia
where traditional communities are forcibly bulldozed and replaced
by dilapidated concrete slums, and have the power to bring this
about? You may not like this kind of leadership, but it is still
leadership, and in its own way it is inspired. A leader may be
inspired by a vision, and may have the power to bring that vision
into reality, but it is unfortunately also the case that the
result can become a new definition of evil. Good and evil are not
static qualities with fixed meanings; in every generation there
are exemplars who define for the whole of society the meaning of
the words in new contexts. Tamerlane may have built pyramids from
skulls, but what did he know about asset stripping?
Tyranny, bigotry, hypocricy and gluttony, the vices of
Chesed, are the meat and drink of daily newspapers. Tyranny is
leadership without authority, an illegitimate or unconstitutional
leadership usually oiled with large helpings of cruelty, the Vice
of Gevurah. Bigotry is a quick and easy way to drum up a power
base: find a minority group in society, emphasise and magnify to
grotesque proportions the differences between them and the rest
of society, and use the natural fear of the strange or unfamiliar
to do the rest. Hypocrisy can be found in religious leaders who
denounce normal human behaviour as a sin, sin comprehensively in
private, and use genuine religious aspirations as in excuse to
line their pockets. It can be found in those who talk about the
dictatorship of the proletariat in public and buy their luxury
goods from exclusive party shops - the collapse of state
socialism in Europe has revealed to those who didn't already know
it the full extent to which pious utterances about social
equality were a cover for almost limitless privileges for the
few. Gluttony is over-consumption, an appetite well in excess of
need, and one has only to remember Imelda Marcos's wardrobe to
get the idea. It is virtually a fashion among modern tyrants to
siphon billions of dollars into Swiss bank accounts - the scale
on which men like Idi Amin Dada, Ferdinand Marcos, Baby Doc
Duvalier, Mengistu, and Saddam Hussein (to name but a few) were
able to beggar nations for their own personal advantage goes so
far beyond any rational measure of human need it is hard to
comprehend.
When one looks at the worst twentieth century tyrants, men
who were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands or
millions of people, it is hard to find any Einsteins of evil -
one is struck by the sheer ordinariness of these men. Clever,
manipulative, politically adept, lucky, exceptional in their
ability to climb to the top of the heap, successful in grasping
and holding power, but not conscious, plotting allies of a
terrible dark power. Behind the brutality, murder, torture,
imprisonment, and the apparatus of oppression one can see a very
human vulnerability, self-importance, vanity, folly, insecurity,
and greed. The vices of Chesed are the vices of all the other
sephiroth writ large - power magnifies a vice until it becomes a
ravening monster. A man with rigid and unbending views on human
morality will do no harm if he has no audience, but give him
enough power and he will put society in chains which might last a
thousand years. A greedy man with enough power might loot an
entire country. A petty and irrational bigot with enough power
might enslave or annihilate whole races. They say power corrupts,
but this is not so; corruption is already within all of us, and
we lack only the necessary authority and power to unleash our own
personal evil on the world.
The moral is that power needs to be tempered by mercy and
love, and the correspondences for Chesed emphasise this so
strongly it is easy to for a novice to ignore the
appalling negative qualities of Chesed - power without restraint,
indiscriminate destruction, everything in excess. The Virtue of
Chesed is humility, the ideal of leadership without self-
importance and all its accompanying vices. The Spiritual Vision
of Chesed is the Vision of Love, love and caring for all living
things, and the desire to find a way (be it ever so small -
remember humility) to make the world a better place. There is a
strong message in the positive correspondences for Chesed:
without humility and love, leadership and power become the
instruments of self-importance, and the petty vices of human
nature are transformed into the monsters of evil which terrorise
the human race.
The illusion of Chesed is Right, in the sense of "being
right". It is difficult to lead without conviction, when one sits
on every fence and wavers on every question, but no-one is ever
right with a capital "R", and anyone who seeks the reassurance of
Being Right is evading the essence of responsibility.
The qlippoth of Chesed is ideology, not in the philosophical
sense, but in the common-use sense of "political ideology". The
rationale behind this is that it is very easy to take a creed, or
a doctrine, or a dogma, or whatever, and use it as a platform for
leadership. If you see a politian (or a religious leader) being
interviewed on television, and the response to every question is
just the same old empty jargon, the same old formulae, the same
old evasions, the same old arguments and irrefutable assertions,
and you feel you have heard the same thing a dozen times before
out of a dozen different mouths, then this is the dead, empty
shell of leadership.
The sephira Gevurah is as often misunderstood as the sephira
Chesed. The planet associated with Chesed is (appropriately)
Tzedek, Jupiter, leader of the gods; the planet associated with
Gevurah is Madim, Mars, the god of war and destruction. The
magical image of Gevurah is a king in a chariot, or conversely a
mighty warrior. Most novices take this imagery at face value and
envision Gevurah as a very forceful, violent and destructive
sephira, and cannot understand why it is positioned on the pillar
of form. Almost all novices will (wrongly) attribute the emotion
of anger to Gevurah. It is worth recalling from Chapter 3. the
traditional Kabbalistic view [3]:
"It must be remembered that to the Kabbalist, judgement [Din
- judgement, a title of Gevurah] means the imposition of
limits and the correct determination of things. According to
Cordovero the quality of judgement is inherent in everything
insofar as everything wishes to remain what it is, to stay
within its bounderies."
This is a statement about *form*. The form of something
determines what it *is*, in distinction from everything else, and
when it no longer has that form, it no longer *is*. Take a table
tennis ball and squash it; it stops being a table tennis
ball...it stops being a ball. Something still exists in the
world, but its form *as a ball* has been destroyed. Take these
notes and randomly jumble the letters; the letters still exist,
but the notes are gone. These notes are contained in the *form*
of the letters; destroy the form of the letters and the notes are
also destroyed.
Everything in the world *is* its form. We cannot see the
natural substance of the world; we cannot see atoms, and even if
we could, we would see protons, neutrons and electrons arranged
in different *forms* to create the chemical elements. It has
taken physicists most of this century to deduce that the protons,
neutrons and electrons are not the "true" stuff of the world, and
underneath there might be "quarks", "leptons" and "gluons"
arranged in different *forms* to create the fundamental
particles. Is that the end? Are quarks and gluons the "true
stuff", the raw, primal gloop which carries all form? No-one
knows. Sometimes I think, in common with the earliest Kabbalists,
that Malkuth sits upon the throne of Binah, and at no point will
we find the raw gloop of Malkuth. Someone will write down an
equation and show the properties of quarks and gluons are a
natural consequence of the *form* of the equation, and the form
of the equation is one of those things beyond any possibility of
explanation. "Look" we will say, "The form of all things is a
potential outcome of this one equation. The mother of everything
that exists can be written down on a piece of paper. Look, here
it is!"
There is a deep mystery in form. The world is made not of
things, but of patterns. In our minds we accept the reality of
these patterns, and forget that the sweet, white stuff we put in
our tea and coffee is just one of an infinite number of patterns
of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Carbon is just one of a large
number of combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons, and so
on. We forget that "War and Peace" is just one of an infinite
number of combinations of letters of the alphabet. The patterns
are our reality, and I suspect that *only* the patterns are real
- there is nothing more real than patterns waiting to be
discovered. I have read graduate texts on quantum electrodynamics
and quantum chromodynamics, and I find no grey gloop mentioned
anywhere. These texts do not explain the world, but they predict
it, often with astonishing accuracy, and something one does not
find is a prediction that the world is founded on a formless
gloop. As a programmer I have built realities out of pure
mathematical forms - sets, functions, containers - and nowhere
did I need any grey gloop; my worlds were the way they were
because the objects within them behaved the way they did, and
that behaviour was simply the structure or form I created. The
view of reality in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" [4] has a deeply
Kabbalistic (if one-sided) flavour, the Vision of Splendour of
Hod in a distilled form:
"If I know an object I also know all its possible occurences
in states of affairs.
(Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature
of the object).
A new possibility cannot be discovered later.
If I am to know an object, though I need not know its
external properties, I must know all its internal
properties.
If all objects are given, then at the same time all
*possible* states of affairs are also given.
Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of
affairs.
........
Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
The possibility of its occuring in states of affairs is the
*form* of an object." (my italics)
I have digressed this far into the nature of form because I
do not believe it is possible to understand either Chesed or
Gevurah in depth without understanding the importance of form in
Kabbalah, and when talking about form I am not "talking
mystical". Programmers work with form; they shape programs out of
forms with the same inquisitive delight as a glassblower handling
a blob of molten glass. They talk about objects, and behaviours,
and classify objects in hierarchies according to behaviour. They
*create* new objects with a given abstract behaviour; they leave
unwanted objects to be tidied up by the "garbage collector".
There is much more which can be said about this, but as many
people are not programmers and most programmers do not admit to
being Kabbalists, I must leave this as a trail to be followed.
The important point is that when I talk about form I find similar
thinking in chemistry, physics, computer science, and Kabbalah;
the world of human beings is perceived in terms of form, and form
is created and destroyed. That is what Chesed and Gevurah
represent.
The sephira Binah is the mother of form. That is, Binah
contains within her womb the potential of all form, just as woman
in the abstract contains within her womb the potential of all
babies. The birth of form takes place in Chesed, and that is why
Chesed corresponds to the visionary; the preservation and
destruction of form takes place in Gevurah, and that is why
Gevurah corresponds to the warrior.
In most societies even a warrior takes second place to the
Law. The Law comes first, and the warrior swears to defend both
the Law and the country. This may sound a little idealistic, but
if one takes the trouble to listen to a few oaths of allegiance
(e.g. British Police, British Army, Soviet Army) one should find
that the essence is to obey, uphold and defend. Nothing about
violence, destruction, mayem or anger. The essence of Gevurah is
to uphold and defend - as Cordovero says, "the quality of
judgement is inherent in everything insofar as everything wishes
to remain what it is, to stay within its bounderies". If
Cordovero had the jargon he might have talked about "the immune
system of God".
The Virtues of Gevurah are courage and energy. There is a
saying among managers that "any fool can manage when things are
going well". The acid test of management is to have the courage
to tackle, and essentially destroy, organisations (forms) which
no longer work, and to have the energy to keep going against the
inevitable opposition. The Vice of Gevurah is cruelty - power is
seductive, and destruction can be pleasurable.
The spiritual experience of Gevurah is the Vision of Power,
and the Illusion is invincibility. I don't think these need any
explanation.
The qlippoth of Gevurah is bureaucracy, in the common-use
sense of a system of rules and procedures which has become an end
in itself. My most memorable experience was the time I went into
a social security office to ask whether they could issue me with
a social security number.
"You'll have to take a ticket and wait," the woman behind
the counter said.
"But you only have to tell me yes or no," I protested.
"You'll have to take a ticket and wait!" she snapped.
So I took a ticket and waited for twenty minutes. When my turn
came I asked the question again.
"Can you issue me with a social security number here?"
"No! Next please!"
This is probably not the best example of the dead hand of
bureaucracy at work, as it contains a certain amount of
deliberate cruelty, but we have all encountered endless forms
which *have* to be filled in, pointless procedures which *have*
to be observed, interminable delays and so on. The essence of
bureaucracy is that there is real power behind it, otherwise we
wouldn't suffer the indignities, but the power is locked up and
everyone is rendered impotent by the *forms* of bureaucracy.
Gevurah is a hard sephirah to work with, as Kabbalistic
magicians often discover to their cost. There is absolutely no
place for emotion, no place for excess, no place for ego. The
warrior works within the Law, and ignorance of the Law is not an
excuse. If you don't know what the Law is, don't work with
Gevurah. Most people are sloppy in thinking about problems, and
take what appears to be the simplest and superficially most
convenient solution. Gevurah is clinically exact, and if you
invoke Gevurah you are invoking well above the level of emotion,
particularly *your* emotions, and as you judge, so will you be
judged. Invoke on the Pillar of Form, and cause and effect will
follow without the slightest regard for your feelings. All good
programmers who have sweated throughout the night with a
programming error of their own making know this in their bones.
Associated with Chesed and Gevurah are two tendencies which
are so pronounced, readily observed, and deeply rooted that I
have called them the Power myth and the Annihilation myth, where
I use the word myth in the sense that there is pre-existent,
archtypal script in which anyone can play the role of
protagonist.
The Power myth features a protagonist who seeks power
because power means control. Everything is specified and
controlled down to the finest detail to eliminate every
possibility of discomfort, surprise or insecurity. The world
becomes an impersonal mechanism designed to provide for every
demand. The natural world is destroyed to reduce its
unpredictability and untidyness. All knowledge is subverted to
control. Personal relationships are restricted and formalised to
minimise intrusion or any possibility of personal hurt, and are
modelled to increase self-importance. Anyone who won't play can
be removed or suitably punished. The protagonist lives at the
centre of the world.
In the Annihilation myth the protagonist lives for the
Cause. The Cause is the most important thing in life. The
protagonist prays to be released from the thrall of ego and self-
importance that he may better serve the Cause with every atom of
his soul. "Yea, I am nothing", he whispers, "Less than the
smallest worm in the ground compared with the glory of the Cause.
I humble myself before the Cause. I live only to serve the
Cause." Pain, suffering and death are mere adornments for the
ever-lasting glory of the Cause. The Cause might be the Beloved,
the Revolution, the Great Work, the Mistress or Master, or God
(to name only a few).
Examples of both these myths in practice are legion; two
examples are the package-holiday tourist as an example of the
Power myth, and many Christian mystics as an example of the
Annihilation myth. Both myths can be observed in glorious,
infinitely repetitive, and predictable detail in S&M fantasies.
The God name associated with Chesed is "El", or Almighty
God. The archangel is Tzadkiel, the "Righteousness of God". The
angel order is the Chashmalim, or Shining Ones. In Ezekiel,
Chashmal is a substance which forms the splendour of God's
countenance, and as chashmal is the modern Hebrew word for
electricity, I find it useful to think of the Chashmalim in terms
of crackling thunderbolts - it goes well with the Jupiter
correspondence.
The God name associated with Gevurah is Elohim Gevor. All
the sephiroth on the Pillar of Form use Elohim in their God
names, and in this case it is qualified by "gevor", a word which
expresses the qualities of a great hero - strength, might,
and courage. The name is sometimes translated as "God of
Battles". The archangel is is sometimes given as Kamiel, and
sometimes as Samael. Samael, the "Poison of God" is an angel with
a *long* history - see [5], and is essentially the Angel of
Death. Samael is not the first choice of angel to invoke when
working Gevurah - work on Gevurah is tricky at the best of times,
and the Angel of Death does not mess around. Neither does Kamiel
(which I have been told means "sword of God" - I cannot confirm
this), but there is marginally more scope for interpretation! The
angel order is the Seraphim, or Fiery Serpents.
Chesed and Gevurah are the sceptre and sword of a king;
there are many statues of medieval kings in British cathedrals
which show a king seated with the sceptre of legitimate authority
in one hand and the sword of temporal might in the other. In
Kabbalah the King corresponds to the sephira Tiphereth, the union
of Chesed and Gevurah. This is a symbol of a human being in
relationship to the world - at the bottom of all initiations is
the full consciousness that we are kings and queens with the
freedom and power to do anything we please, and total
responsibility for the consequences of everything we do.
Somewhere between the extremes of power and love each one of us
has to find our own balance, and somewhere in a garden a Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil still grows, and still bears fruit.
[1] Kaplan, Aryeh, "The Bahir", Samuel Weiser 1979
[2] Ridley, Nicholas, "My Style of Government: The Thatcher
Years" Hutchinson 1991
[3] Scholem, Gershom G., "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism",
Schocken 1974
[4] Wittgenstein, Ludwig, "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus",
Routledge 1974
[5] Graves, R., and Patai, R., "Hebrew Myths: The Book of
Genesis", Arena, 1989
Daath and the Abyss
-------------------
"When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into
you"
Nietzsche
"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a
worm"
Sartre
In modern Kabbalah there is a well developed notion of an
Abyss between the three supernal sephiroth of Kether, Chokhmah,
and Binah, and the seven lower sephiroth. When one looks at the
progress of the Lightning Flash down the Tree of Life, then one
finds that it follows the path structure connecting sephiroth
*except* when it makes the jump from Binah to Chesed, thus
reinforcing this idea of a "gap" or "gulf" which has to be
crossed. This notion of an Abyss is extremely old and has found
its way into Kabbalah in several different forms, and in the
course of time they have all been mixed together into the notion
of "the Great Abyss"; the Great Abyss is one of those things so
necessary that like God, if it didn't already exist, it would
have to be invented.
One of the earliest sources for the Abyss comes from the
Bible:
"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep."
Kabbalists adopted this view that there was a time before the
creation characterised by Tohu and Bohu, namely Chaos and
Emptiness [1]. Another idea mentioned several times in the Zohar
[2] is that there were several failed attempts at creation
*before* the present one; these attempts failed because mercy and
judgement (e.g. force and form) were not balanced, and the
resulting detritus of these failed attempts, the broken shells of
previous sephiroth, accumulated in the Abyss. Because the shells
(Qlippoth) were the result of unbalanced rigour or judgement they
were considered evil, and the Abyss became a repository of evil
spirits not dissimilar from the pit of Hell into which the
rebellious angels were cast, or the rebellious Titans in Greek
mythology who were buried as far beneath the Earth as the Earth
is beneath the sky.
Another theme which contributed to the notion of the Abyss
was the legend of the Fall. According to the Kabbalistic
interpretation of the Biblical myth, at the conclusion of the act
of Creation there was a pure state, denoted by Eden, where the
primordial Adam-and-Eve-conjoined existed in a state of divine
perfection. There are various esoteric interpretations of what
the Fall represents, but all agree that after the Fall Eden
became inaccessible and Adam and Eve were separated and took on
bodies of flesh here in the material world. This theme of
separation from God and exile in a world of matter (and by
extension, limitation, finiteness, pain, suffering, death -
manifestations of the rigours or evil inherent in God) precedes
Kabbalah and can be found in the Gnostic legend of Sophia exiled
in matter. This idea of separation or exile from divinity mirrors
very closely the use of the Abyss on the modern Tree to divide
the sephiroth representing a human being from the sephiroth
representing God.
Isaac Luria (1534 -1572) introduced a new element into the
notion of the Abyss with his idea of "tzimtzum" or contraction.
Luria wondered how it was possible for the hidden God (En Soph)
to create something out of nothing if there wasn't any nothing to
begin with. If the En Soph (no-end, the infinite) is everywhere
then how can we be distinct from the En-Soph? Luria argued that
creation was possible because a contraction in the En Soph had
created an emptiness where God was not, that En Soph had chosen
to limit itself by a withdrawal, and this showed that the
principle of self-limitation was a necessary precursor to
creation; not only did this explain why the Creation is separate
from the hidden God, but it emphasised that limitation was
inherent in creation from the very beginning. Limitation,
finiteness, the separation of one thing from another, what early
Kabbalists referred to as the severity or "strict judgement" of
God (what modern Kabbalists call "form") was a puzzling quality
to introduce into the Creation given that it is the source of
suffering and evil in the impersonal sense, what Dion Fortune
calls "negative evil" [3]. Luria's notion of tsimtsum suggested
that there was no possibility of creation without it, and
provided a rather abstract explanation to one of the most
persistent questions of all time, namely: "if God made the world
and God is good, how come he made mosquitoes?".
Pull together the various ideas of the Great Abyss and one
ends up with a sort of vast, initially empty arena like a Roman
amphitheatre where the drama of the Creation was enacted. The
mysterious En Soph played a brief role as director from the
imperial box, only to retire behind a veil at the conclusion of
the performance leaving behind a huge power cord snaking in from
the unknown region beyond the arena, and plugged-in to a socket
at the rear of the sephira Kether. The lights of the sephiroth
blaze out and illuminate the centre of this vast arena; this is
Olam Ha-Nekudoth, "The World of Point Lights". At the periphery
of the arena far from the lights of manifestation there is a deep
darkness where all the cast-off detritus and spoil of the
creation was deposited by weary angels and left to rot. A strange
life lives there.
The situation was more-or-less as described above when in
1909 Aleister Crowley decided to "cross the Abyss" and added to
the mythology of the Abyss with the following description [4]:
"The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon, but he
is not really an individual. The Abyss is empty of being; it
is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each
therefore evil in the only true sense of the word - that is,
meaningless but malignant, in so far as it craves to become
real. These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps
like dust devils, and each chance aggregation asserts itself
to be an individual and shrieks `I am I!' though aware all
the time that its elements have no true bond; so that the
slightest disturbance dissipates the delusion just as a
horseman, meeting a dust devil, brings it in showers of sand
to the earth."
I was struck when reading this by the similarity between
Crowley's description above and the section on Hod and Netzach
in which I described the chaos of a personality under the control
of the "hosts" or "armies" of those two sephira, where a host of
forms of behaviour compete for the right to be "me". Crowley's
experience has far more in common with the rending of the Veil of
Paroketh separating Yesod and Tiphereth, and further comments by
Crowley add weight to this:
"As soon as I had destroyed my personality, as soon as I had
expelled my ego, the universe to which it was indeed a
frightful and fatal force, fraught with every form of fear,
was only so in relation to the idea `I'; so long as `I am I'
all else must seem hostile. Now that there was no longer any
`I' to suffer, all these ideas which had inflicted suffering
became innocent. I could praise the perfection of every
part; I could wonder and worship the whole."
This is a very recognisable description of someone who has been
released from the demon of the false self and the imprisoning
triad of Hod, Netzach and Yesod, and moved through the Paroketh
towards Tiphereth. Crowley's experience is valid as it stands,
but what it might mean to "cross the Abyss", and the absurdity of
Crowley's belief that he had achieved this, will be examined in
the following section on Binah and Chokhmah.
A twentieth-century Kabbalist who did succeed in adding
something useful to the ever-expanding notion of the Abyss was
Dion Fortune, in her theosophical work "The Cosmic Doctrine" [3].
The form of this work appears to have been inspired by
Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine", and certainly lives up to
Fortune's claim that it was "designed to train the mind, not to
inform it."
Fortune describes three processes arising out of the
Unmanifest (i.e. En Soph). Ring Cosmos is an anabolic process
underlying the creation of forms of greater and greater
complexity. Ring Chaos is a catabolic process underlying the
destruction and recycling of form. Ring-Pass-Not is a limit where
catabolism turns back into anabolism. She visualised this as
three great rings of movement in the Unmanifest, with the motion
associated with Ring Cosmos spiralling towards the centre, the
movement of Ring Chaos unwinding towards the periphery, and the
dead-zone of Ring-Pass-Not defining the outer limit of Ring Chaos
as an abyss of unbeing, a cosmic compost heap where form is
digested under the dominion of the Angel of Death and turned into
something fertile where new growth can take place.
The similarity between Fortune's description of Ring Chaos
and what in programming is called a "reference-counting garbage
collector" is remarkable, given that she was writing in the 30's.
Many programming languages allow new programming structures to be
created dynamically, thus allowing the creation of more and more
complex structures. At the same time there is a mechanism to
reclaim unused resources so that the system does not run out of
memory or disc space, and the normal scheme is that if a
structure is not referenced by any other structure, recycle it.
In Fortune's language, if you want to destroy something, you
"make a vacuum round it (i.e. remove all references). You prevent
opposition from touching it. Then, being unopposed, it is free to
follow the laws of its own nature, which is to join the motion of
Ring Chaos."
"Cosmic Doctrine" is a valiant attempt to say something
quite profound; at an intellectual level it fails "abysmally",
and I cannot read it without squirming, but it still has more raw
Kabbalistic and magical insight at an intuitive level than just
about anything else I have read. The idea of a cosmic reference-
counting garbage collection process and an abyss of unbeing which
is not so much a state as a process of unbecoming is something
not easily forgotten once touched.
A final example of an abyss is one which differs from the
previous examples in that it brings to the fore the relationship
between us, the created, and the Unmanifest, the En Soph itself.
Kabbalistic writers agree that the Unmanifest is not nothing; on
the contrary, it is the hidden wellspring of being, but as it is
"not manifest being" it combines the words "not" and "being" in a
conjuction which can be apprehended as a kind of abyss. Scholem
[6] discusses this "nothingness" as follows:
"The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God
is externalised and the light that shines inwardly made
visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En Soph,
the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is in this
mystical "nothingness" from which all the other stages of
God's gradual enfolding in the Sefiroth emanate, and which
the kabbalists call the highest Sefira, or the "supreme
crown" of Divinity. To use another metaphor, it is the abyss
which becomes visible in the gaps of existence. Some
Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for instance Rabbi
Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain that in
every transformation of reality, in every change of form, or
every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of
nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment
becomes visible."
It should be clear by now that the Abyss is a metaphor for
a number of intuitions or experiences. I do not know how many
different kinds of abyss there are, but there are some
distinctions which can be made:
- the Abyss of nothingness
- the Abyss of separation
- the Abyss of knowledge
- the Abyss of un-being (or un-becoming)
The perception that being and nothingness go hand-in-hand is
something Sartre studied in great depth [7], and many of his
observations on the nature of consciousness and its
relatationship to negation or nothingness are among the most
perceptive I have found. His arguments are lengthy and complex,
and I do not wish to summarise them here other than to say that
he viewed nothingness as the necessary consequence of a special
kind of being he calls "being-for-itself", the kind of being we
experience as self-conscious human beings.
The Abyss of separation can be experienced as a separation
from the divine, but it can also be experienced quite acutely in
one's relationships with others and with the physical world
itself. Much of what we perceive about the world and other people
is an illusion created by the machinery of perception; strip away
the trick, Yesod becomes Daath, and a yawning abyss opens up
where one is conscious less of what one knows than of what one
does not; it is possible to look at a close friend and see
something more alien, remote and unknown than the surface of
Pluto. This experience is closely related to the Abyss of
knowledge, which is discussed in more detail in the discussion on
Daath below.
The Abyss of un-being is the direct perception that at any
instant it is possible to not-be. This perception goes beyond the
contemplation or awareness of physical death; it is the direct
apprehension of what Dion Fortune calls "Ring Chaos", that un-
being is less a state than a process, that at every instant there
is an impulse, a magnetic attraction towards total self-
annihilation on every level possible. The closer one moves
towards the roots of being, the closer one moves towards the
roots of un-being.
Daath means "Knowledge". In early Kabbalah Daath was a
symbol of the union of Wisdom (Chokhmah) and Understanding
(Binah). The book of Proverbs is rich mine of material on
the nature of these three qualities, material which forms the
basis of many ideas in the Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts;
e.g. Proverbs 3.13:
"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that
getteth understanding....She is a tree of life to them that
lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth
her. The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by
understanding hath he founded the heavens. By his knowledge
the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew"
And Proverbs 24.3:
"Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding is
it established: And by knowledge shall the chambers be
filled with all pleasant and precious riches."
In the "Bahir" [8] and "Zohar" [e.g. 2] Daath represents the
symbolic union of wisdom and understanding, and is their
offspring or child. As the Microprosopus, often symbolised by
Tiphereth, is also the symbolic child of Chokhmah and Binah,
there is some room for confusion. According to the Zohar however,
Daath has a specific location in the Microprosopus, namely in one
of the three chambers of the brain, from where it mediates
between the higher (Chokhmah and Binah) and the lower (the six
sephiroth or "chambers" of the Microprosopus - see the reference
to Proverbs 24.3 above).
I have often puzzled as to why knowledge is the natural
outcome of wisdom and understanding. It was only recently when I
read Proverbs that I realised that wisdom was being used in the
sense of something *external*, something which is received from
someone else. As children we were told "do this" or "don't do
that", and often couldn't question the wisdom of the advice
because we lacked the understanding. I once had a furious row
with my father about building a liquid fuel rocket engine in the
house using petrol and hydrogen peroxide. He flatly refused to
let me do it. I couldn't understand the problem - I was going to
be careful. I now *know*, because I *understand* the stupidity of
what I was trying to do, the *wisdom* of his refusal. Received
wisdom cannot be integrated into oneself unless there is the
capacity to understand it, and having understood, it becomes real
knowledge which can be passed on again as wisdom to someone else.
For early Kabbalists the ultimate wisdom was the wisdom of God as
expressed in the Torah, and by attempting to understand this
wisdom (and that is what Kabbalah was) they could arrive at the
only knowledge truely worth having. Knowledge of God was the
union between the higher and lower, and perhaps this is why Daath
was never a sephiroth, something which manifests positively;
since the Fall that knowledge has been lost. One of the
unattributable pieces of Kabbalah I was taught was that Daath is
the hole left behind when Malkuth fell out of the Garden of Eden.
If you examine my derivation of the Tree of Life in Chapter 1.
closely you will see that I have based some of it on this very
astute observation.
The notion of Daath as a "hole" appears to have originated
this century. Gareth Knight, for example [9], provides a complete
set of correspondences for Daath, many of which happen to be
negative Tiphereth correspondences or misplaced correspondences
borrowed from other sephiroth, but one at least is appropriate:
he gives the magical image of Daath as Janus, god of doorways.
Kenneth Grant [10], with his usual florid imagination, sees Daath
as a gateway through to "outer spaces beyond, or behind, the Tree
itself" dominated by Qlippothic forces.
There is a deep correspondence between sephiroth in the
lower face of the Tree and sephiroth in the upper face: look at
the symmetry of the Tree and you should see why Malkuth,
Tiphereth and Kether are linked, why Hod and Binah are linked,
why Chokhmah and Netzach are linked, and most importantly for the
purposes of this discussion, that there is a correspondence
between Yesod and Daath. These are not just simple geometric
symmetries; they express some important relationships which are
experientially verifiable, and in terms of what makes most sense
in Kabbalah and what does not, these relationships are important.
Daath and Yesod, at different levels, are like two sides of the
same coin. Jam the machinery of perception I said above, and
Yesod can become Daath. The following quotation is taken from an
bona-fide anthropological article [11] attempting to explain some
of the characteristic features of cave art:
"Moving into a yet deeper stage of trance is often
accompanied, according to laboratory reports, by an
experience of a vortex or rotating tunnel that seems to
surround the subject. The external world is progressively
excluded and the inner world grows more florid. Iconic
images may appear on the walls of the vortex, often imposed
on a lattice of squares, like television screens. Frequently
there is a mixture of iconic and geometric forms.
Experienced shamans are able to plunge rapidly into deep
trance, where they manipulate the imagery according to the
needs of the situation. Their experience of it, however, is
of a world they have come briefly to inhabit
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