****************************************************************************
Notes on Kabbalah
The author grants the right to copy and distribute
these Notes provided they remain unmodified and original authorship
and copyright is retained. The author retains both the right
and intention to modify and extend these Notes. Release 2.0 Copy
date: 9th. January 1992 Copyright Colin Low 1992 (cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
****************************************************************************
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. ****************************************************************************
Notes on Kabbalah The author grants the right to copy and distribute
these Notes provided they remain unmodified and original authorship
and copyright is retained. The author retains both the right
and intention to modify and extend these Notes. Release 2.0 Copy
date: 9th. January 1992 Copyright Colin Low 1992 (cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
****************************************************************************
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 --MORE--(6%) 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 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 Copyright Colin Low 1991 |