The Mystical Qabalah - Dion Fortune 2000
Otz Chiim, The Tree Of Life
1. Before we can understand the significance of any individual Sephirah, we must grasp the broad outlines of the Otz Chiim, the Tree of Life, as a whole.
2. It is a glyph, that is to say a composite symbol, which is intended to represent the cosmos in its entirety and the soul of man as related thereto; and the more we study it, the more we see that it is an amazingly adequate representation; we use it as the engineer or the mathematician uses his sliding-rule, to scan and calculate the intricacies of existence, visible and invisible, in external nature or the hidden depth of the soul.
3. It is represented, as will be seen from Diagram III, as a set of ten circles arranged in a certain pattern, and connected among themselves by lines. The circles are the Ten Holy Sephiroth, and the connecting lines are the Paths, twenty-two in number.
4. Each Sephirah (which is the singular form of the word of which Sephiroth is the plural) is a phase of evolution, and in the language of the Rabbis they are called the Ten Holy Emanations. The Paths between them are phases of subjective consciousness, the Paths or grades (Latin, gradus, step) by which the soul unfolds its realisation of the cosmos. The Sephiroth are objective; the Paths are subjective.
5. Let it be recalled again that I am not expounding the traditional Qabalah of the Rabbis as a historical curio, but the structure that has been raised upon it by generations of students, initiates all of them, adepts some of them, who have made the Tree of Life their instrument of spiritual development and magical work. This is the modern Qabalah, the Alchemical Qabalah as it has sometimes been called, and it contains all manner of things beside traditional Rabbinical lore, as will be seen in due course.
6. Let us now consider the general lay-out and significance of the Tree. It will be seen that the circles which represent the Sephiroth are arranged in three vertical columns (see Diagram I), and that at the head of the centre, higher than any other, forming the apex of the topmost triangle of Sephiroth, is the Sephirah Kether, to which we referred in the previous chapter. To quote again the words of MacGregor Mathers, “The limitless ocean of negative light does not proceed from a centre, for it is centreless, but it concentrates a centre, which is the number one of the manifested Sephiroth, Kether, the Crown, the First Sephirah.”
7. Mme. Blavatsky draws from Eastern sources the term “The point within the circle” to express the First Becoming of manifestation, and the idea is contained in the Rabbinical term, Nequdah Rashunah, the Primal Point, a name applied to Kether.
8. But Kether does not represent a position in space. The Ain Soph Aur has been called a circle whose centre is every-where and whose circumference is nowhere, a statement which, like so many in occultism, is inconceivable, yet nevertheless presents an image to the mind and therefore serves its purpose. Kether, then (and for the matter of that, all the other Sephiroth), is a state or condition of existence. We must always bear in mind that the planes do not tower up one above another into the empyrean like the storeys of a building, but are conditions of being, states of existence of different types, and though they developed successively in time, they occur simultaneously in space; existence of all types being present in a single being, as we realise when we remember that the being of man is made up of a physical body, emotions, mind, and spirit, all occupying the same space at the same time.
9. If anyone has ever watched a heated liquid, at saturation point, crystallise out as it cools, they will have a useful symbol of Kether. Fill a tumbler with boiling water and dissolve in it as much sugar as it will take up, and then, as the mixture cools, watch the sugar crystals appearing. When you have done this in actuality, and not merely read about it, you will have a concept under which you can think of the First Manifest coming into existence out of the Primordial Unmanifest. The liquid is transparent and formless, but a change occurs within it, and crystals, solid, visible, and of a definite form, begin to appear. Equally may we conceive that a change occurs within the Limitless Light, and Kether crystallises out.
10. I do not propose at the present moment to go deeply into the nature of any of the Sephiroth, but merely to indicate the general scheme of the Tree. We shall go over the ground again and again in the course of these pages until a comprehensive concept is built up. This can only be done gradually, and if we spend a great deal of time upon an individual point before the student has a general concept, much of that time will be wasted because the bearing of that concept on the scheme as a whole will not be understood. The Rabbis themselves apply to Kether the titles, Concealed of the Concealed, and the Inscrutable Height, hinting that there is not a great deal that the human mind can hope to know about Kether.
11. It is worthy of note that Exoteric Judaism, to whose liabilities Christianity is the not altogether fortunate heir, does not contain any concept of the Emanations, or overflowing of the Sephiroth one from another. It declares that God made the sea and the hills and the beasts of the field, and we visualise this process, if we visualise it at all, as the work of a celestial craftsman fashioning each new phase of manifestation and putting the finished product in its place in the world. This concept kept science back for hundreds of years in Western Europe, and in the end men of science had to break with religion and endure persecution as heretics in order to arrive at that conception of evolution which was explicitly taught in the Mystic Tradition of Israel, a tradition with which the writers of the Old Testament were unquestionably familiar, for their works are full of Qabalistic references and implications.
12. The Qabalah does not conceive of God as fabricating creation stage by stage, but thinks of the different phases of manifestation as evolving one from another, as if each Sephirah were a pool which, being filled, overflowed into a lower pool. To borrow again from MacGregor Mathers, hidden in an acorn is an oak with its acorns, and hidden in each of these is an oak with its acorns. So each Sephirah contains the Potentiality of all that come after it in the scale of downflowing manifestation. Kether contains the rest of the Sephiroth, nine in number; and Chokmah, the second, contains the potentialities of all its successors, eight in number. But in each Sephirah only one aspect of manifestation is unfolded; the subsequent ones remain latent, and the preceding ones are received by reflection. Each Sephirah, then, is a pure form of existence in its essence; the influence of preceding phases of evolution is external to it, being reflected. These aspects, as it were, having been crystallised out in the previous stages, are no longer in solution in the outflowing stream of manifestation which ever proceeds from the Unmanifest through the channel of Kether. When therefore we want to find the essential nature, the basis of manifestation, of a particular type of existence, we get it in the Sephirah to which it corresponds when we meditate upon that Sephirah in its primal form; for there are four forms, or worlds, under which the Qabalists conceive of the Tree, and these we will consider in due course. They are only referred to now in order that the student may have enough background to see his picture in perspective.
13. The student will find it very helpful to refer to the chapters in The Ancient Wisdom, by Annie Besant, which deal with the phases of evolution. These throw much light upon the subject with which we are dealing, though the system of classification is not the same.
14. Let us conceive of Kether, then, as a fountain which fills its basin, and the overflow therefrom feeds another fountain, which in its turn fills its basin and overflows. The Unmanifest for ever flows under pressure into Kether, and there comes a time when evolution has gone as far as it can in the extreme simplicity of the form of existence of the First Manifest. All possible combinations have been formed, and they have undergone all possible permutations. Action and reaction are stereotyped, there can be no new development save the combining of the combinations among themselves. Force has formed all possible units; the next phase of development is for these units to combine into more complex structures. When this occurs, a new and more highly organised phase of existence begins; all that has already been evolved remains, but that which evolves now is more than the sum of the previously existing parts, for new capacities come into being.
15. This new phase represents a change of mode of existence. Just as Kether crystallized out of the Limitless Light, so the second Sephirah, Chokmah, crystallises out of Kether in this new mode of being, this new system of actions and reactions which have ceased to be simple and direct and become complex and tangential. We now have two modes of existence, the simplicity of Kether and the relative complexity of Chokmah; both these are so simple that no kind of life known to us could be maintained in them; nevertheless, they are the forerunners of organic life. We might say that Kether is the first activity of manifestation, movement; it is a condition of pure becoming, Rashith ha Gilgalim, the First Swirlings, the commencement of Whirling Motions as it is called by the Qabalists—Primum Mobile as it is called by the Alchemists. Chokmah, the Second Sephirah, is called by the Rabbis Mazloth, the Sphere of the Zodiac. Here we have introduced the concept of the circle with its segments. Creation has moved onwards. Out of the primordial Egg has developed the Serpent that holdeth his tail in his mouth, as Mme. Blavatsky chronicles in her invaluable storehouses of archaic symbolism, the Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled.
16. In a similar manner to that in which Kether overflowed into Chokmah does Chokmah overflow into Binah, the Third Sephirah. The Paths pursued by the Emanations in these successive overflowings is represented upon the Tree of Life by a Lightning Flash, or in some diagrams by a Flaming Sword. It will be observed by reference to Diagram I that the Lightning Flash must proceed from Kether outwards and downwards to the right to reach Chokmah, and then turns on a level course to the left and proceeds an equal distance beyond Kether upon that side, and there establishes Binah. The result is a triangular figure upon the glyph, and it is called the Triangle of the Three Supernals, or the First Trinity and is separated from the rest of the Sephiroth by the Abyss, which normal human consciousness cannot cross. Here are the roots of existence, hidden from our eyes.
