“We are stardust, we are
golden,
We are caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the
Garden.”
— Joni Mitchell, “
“Where was the Garden of Eden?” is a question one often gets from children
when they’re told the story of their First Parents. Even in our own “adult” minds, no matter how
jaded and cynical they may become, there always persists the echo of that same
question. As we age — crawling toward
that dreadful door which exits this World — the question seems to transform
itself into another, more immediate one:
“Where is the Garden of Eden?”
All of us, in our own way, grope in
the darkness for the way to that one gate, the gate that lets us into the
hidden Garden. Sometimes we can almost
feel the gate’s latch within our grasp, as we sit perhaps in our own garden on
a still, sunny morning. Or as we look
into the innocent eyes of a fawn we have startled in the woods. Fact is we all have this Garden within us,
and we cultivate it, as Voltaire once observed, each after his/her own fashion.
When we talk about the Garden, then,
we must be aware that we are talking about ourselves, that we are peering into
our own collective psyche. And our
ability to do this, to think about our own thoughts, is the one talent that
sets us humans apart from any other intelligent being in the entire
Universe. Except for God, that is. By looking at ourselves, therefore, we become
like God — or at least like that part of God which invests the material
World. As it turns out, this last
qualification is an important one to make.
We must recognize that God in just as much within us as we are within
Him/Her. This presents no problem so
long as we don’t distinguish between what’s inside of us, the so-called
“Subjective” pole of Consciousness, and what’s ostensibly outside of us, which
belongs to “Objective” Consciousness.
But the mere fact that we assign them different names — “Subjective” and
“Objective” — shows that we can and do distinguish between our inner and outer
realms.
Chapter Two of this book was devoted
to the tale of Lucifer’s Fall from Grace.
In it we learned that Angels represent States of Mind created by
God-Elohim before She created the physical Universe. We also learned that these angelic States of
Mind evolved, before the Creation, just as biological Life has evolved
since. The Fall of some of these Angels
divided the universal Soul (Pleroma)
by withdrawing from it their fragments of Consciousness. This division of the World Soul involves the
separation of the two poles of Consciousness, the “Subjective” and “Objective”
poles. We may think of the latter, the
Objective pole, as a Female mode of Consciousness, because it receives the
Mind’s action and brings it to fruition.
Conversely, the Mind’s Subjective side, the side which bestows action,
may be regarded as having a Male character.
The Male and Female modes of Consciousness roughly correspond,
respectively, to the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
God is both Male and Female, as most
enlightened religions acknowledge (if sometimes grudgingly). So when God created Adam in the Divine Image,
She initially created “him” both Male and Female and not-till-later extracted
the Female side, as we’re told in the first two chapters of Genesis. After that, and until their own Fall, Adam
and Eve continued to conform to the Divine Image. From this we may deduce that, when God
divided Adam and Eve, God simultaneously divided the Male and Female sides of
His/Her own nature.
This scenario presents us with a
paradox, however. If the Godhead splits
into Male and Female sides, how can It remain sublimely One? It must be that, on the highest level, God
remains an inscrutable, ineffable Unity, and that His/Her multi-faceted nature
proceeds from thence. That’s precisely
what makes the Tree such a perfect metaphor for the divine “anatomy”, so to
speak: because the Tree, like God, is both singular (in its trunk) and multiple
(in its branches).
But any Tree must have roots, and
those roots must be planted firmly in the Earth. In that respect, the heavenly Tree we’re
envisioning here is no different from its natural counterpart. Before divinity’s Male and Female limbs can
thrust themselves upward, there must be an Earth to receive the reciprocal
downward growth of the “roots”. Before
there can be a Tree, there must be a Garden.
No wonder, then, that our collective Mind keeps bringing us “back to the
Garden”. It’s the proverbial “square
one” of the spiritual, as well as the material, Universe.
So let’s recap. To become manifest, God has to allow for
multiple centers of Consciousness.
He-Who-Is-All has to embrace She-Who-Is-in-All. In that consummated act of Love is conceived
a Son, through whom God becomes, quite literally, “All-in-All”. It’s just as
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death.
But even an
ordinary tree cannot be planted just anyplace.
The location must be right in terms of four principal “elements”: light,
air, water and soil. And even where
these elements are felicitously balanced, we can’t simply dig a hole and put
the tree in the ground. The soil must
first be carefully nourished and specially prepared, a process known as
cultivation. It’s interesting that the
word “cultivation” comes from the Latin culter
for knife, blade or ploughshare. Just as
mundane cultivation involves the ploughshare penetrating the soil, so spiritual
cultivation requires that the Heavens penetrate the Earth. Thus does the Roman poet Ovid speak of cultus deorum, which literally means
“cultivating the gods”. For the Tree of
Life to flourish, it’s needful that Eternity penetrate Time, needful that the
finest threads of Light weave themselves invisibly into the obscure fabric of
Space. We’ll revisit this concept later
in this chapter.
For now,
however, let’s turn our attention back to the special status of the Earth as
the one and only spot in the entire Universe whose “soil” is suitable to grow
the Tree of Life. This notion of Earth’s
uniqueness, its central place in Creation, is inescapable in Genesis. That’s why Genesis is the one book of
Scripture which “scientific” materialists can never accept. Their dogma is that the Earth but one of a
myriad of insignificant rocks spinning meaninglessly in an immense void. Even lower in their esteem is Man himself —
a mere biological organism, and a none-too-impressive one at that. They point back to Copernicus as their
authority for this blind faith in the mediocrity of humankind. But Copernicus said only that the Earth
revolves around the Sun, he did not disprove that the Earth is at the center of
the Universe. Indeed, in an infinite
Universe, the “center” is wherever the observer is located.[2]
The only intelligent observer we’ve encountered
thus far in the Cosmos is our own species.
It’s ironic that the same “scientists” who dismiss Genesis as a fantasy
resort to sheer fantasy themselves when they speculates on the existence of
other worlds inhabited by civilizations more sophisticated than our own. Such speculations thrive solely on the
assumption that Man is an “ordinary” creature on an “ordinary” planet. If that’s the case (so their reasoning
goes), then there are about 100 billion other “ordinary” planets out there in
Space that must accommodate a comparable number of alien intelligences.
As it turns
out, the forgoing beliefs are anything but “scientific”. Just within the last few decades,
cosmologists and physicists alike have come to question certain things that
previous generations of scientists had always taken for granted. They have begun to inquire why the
fundamental physical “constants” which determine the structure of the visible
Universe have the values that we’ve observed them to have. These “constants” set the balance between the
four fundamental physical forces in which the seemingly immutable “laws of
nature” are grounded. We’re talking
about things like
This
long-overdue line of inquiry has produced some interesting conclusions. First off, it’s neither necessary nor
inevitable that the fundamental constants should be what we observe them to be
in our Universe. If we go back as far as
the “Big Bang”, these constants could have assumed substantially different
values if the initial conditions of the nascent Universe had been even minutely
different.[3] Moreover, if we go back before the Bang
“banged”, as modern “inflationary” cosmology has recently done, we find that
even the laws of physics themselves were a matter of random chance. “In the beginning”, as current theorists see
it, our Universe could have, with equal likelihood, followed any one of an
infinite number of paths, each with its own peculiar “fundamental constants”
and “laws of nature”.[4] With equal probability, our Universe could
have been one in which the particles of light (photons), instead of being
weightless and speedy, would be massive and slow. In such a World, light would literally be
darkness, just as
This
recently recognized “non-inevitability” of the basic physical structure of our
Universe has led scientists to explore various “what if” scenarios. For example, what if the relative strengths
of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces were ever-so-slightly different from
what they are? Their answer is that ours
would then be a Universe without planets, without stars, even without atoms. And most certainly without intelligent
creatures, human or otherwise. But we
don’t have to go so far as to fiddle with the fundamental constants of nature
to produce a Universe categorically inhospitable to any form of life. Even a minimal tinkering with the resonance
energies of the elements oxygen, nitrogen and carbon, for example, would render
organic chemistry inoperative and even the crudest biological forms impossible.[5]
All of this
inquiry has led to the inescapable conclusion that intelligent life could not
possibly exist unless the physical Universe were “fine-tuned” to the
infinitesimally precise degree it apparently is. As immense and ancient as the Cosmos is,
it’s actually not a bit larger or older than it needs to be to accommodate the
one very precious and extraordinary place we call Earth. The visible Universe is about 10-15 billion
years old and has a radius of about 10-15 billion light-years. Not coincidentally, it took the stars about
10 billion years to synthesize the heavier elements needed for life from the
hydrogen and helium generated by the Big Bang.
Planetary formation and biological evolution account for another several
billion years. So the Cosmos is exactly
as vast and aged as it must be to support just one planet hospitable to
conscious beings such as ourselves.[6]
For a
solitary Universe to emerge by sheer chance with the entire host of
finely-tuned prerequisites for life, the odds are, in a word,
infinitesimal. We need only consider
one such prerequisite to prove our point.
We’ve just said that it takes about 10-15 billion years for the Cosmos
to become capable of supporting intelligent organisms. During this 10-15 billion years, the Universe
has been expanding at a rate that was determined by the potential energy level
of the vacuum from which it sprang at the dawn of Time. Obviously, there could have been no
physically precedent cause which would have determined the level of that
primordial “vacuum fluctuation”.
Cosmologists consider that the value of this initial vacuum potential
was a purely random occurrence. It turns
out, however, that this initial value of universal energy had to be exactly what it was for the Cosmos to be
in condition to accommodate life after 10-15 billion years of expansion. If this value had been higher, the Universe
would have expanded so rapidly that, by this time, it would have dissipated
into a featureless cloud of frigid, rarified gases, inhospitable to microbes,
much less men. And if its initial energy
potential had been lower, the cosmic expansion would have long since have run
out of steam and the Universe would have collapsed back into a “black hole”.
In other
words, the possibility that I could be here writing these words and you could
be there reading them was encoded into the original data of our Universe to an
inconceivable level of detail. If we
think of this “code” as a single number, the minimal requirements of biological
life dictate all of the digits down to the 102nd decimal place![7] Tacking on the additional requirements for
intelligent life, we’d probably nail down our “cosmological constant” to better
than 1000 decimal places. It begins to
become apparent how true was the famous observation of the ancient Greek
philosopher Protagoras:
Of all things Man is the measure: both of things that
are, and of things that are not.[8]
In reality, there is no boundary
between Subjective and Objective experience, between what is “inside” of human
Consciousness and what appears to be “outside”. That’s because Man is truly the “model” from
which the entire Universe is erected, the “blueprint” for the minutest detail
of its structure. Thus, what is “inside”
of the human Mind is a microcosm of what exists in the Cosmos at large. As the Kabbalah teaches, the physical
Universe is nothing more than an extension of the greater Body of Man. Each “organ” of that Body dictates the type
of physical conditions that are compatible with its growth and
development. For the example, the Eye
demands that the relative strengths of the four fundamental physical forces be
weighted very much in favor of electromagnetic radiation, of which light is one
variety. The Ear and the Nose prefigure
a world with a very specific atmospheric density, while the Tongue specifies
that such a world must feature the extremely narrow temperature range of liquid
water.
But if Man is the model that the
Cosmos is based upon, this necessarily implies that the idea of Man preceded the formation of the physical Universe. Since Space and Time only came into being at
the inception of the physical Universe, therefore, Man’s existence precedes
Space and Time. It’s also a logical
inference that Man will “outlive” Space and Time. Another way of saying this is that Man is
only partly a finite, temporal being; he is also an infinite, eternal Being.
This begs
another question, however: Are we humans infinite and eternal in our individual
personas, or only in a collective sense?
To answer that, let’s consider the implications of the eternal side of
Man’s nature being associated with his individuality. If that were so, then we’d have two sets of “blueprints”
for the Universe at large — a “grand scale” set based on mankind as a whole,
and a more detailed set for each individual.
We’d have to write a few more thousand decimal places into our
“cosmological constant” to insure that the Universe was capable of producing
not only human life in general, but each one of us specifically.
But there’s
a hitch. A single physical Universe can
be finely tuned to accommodate mankind, but it cannot be simultaneously
optimized for each particular man. The
latter scenario implies multiple Universes, with each of us occupying his or
her own “best-of-all-possible-worlds”.
In other words, the proposition that we are eternal Beings in our
individual personas necessarily implies that each of us inhabits our own special
universe that evolved specifically to accommodate us. The latter notion is known as
“solipsism”. Solipsism is generally
regarded as an absurdity because it’s intuitively obvious that we all share the
same Universe. Hence, if we are not to
subscribe to solipsism, we must consign our individual egos to that portion of
our being which is finite and temporal — existing, that is, only within the
confines of Space and Time.
Okay. So we’ve established that the Universe
conforms, in its most intimate details, to proportions of the supernal Body of
Man. The next question we would
naturally want to inquire after is, simply, “Why should this be so?” It’s the same question that Job posed to
God/Elohim:
What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest
set thine heart upon him?[9]
It strikes us as an outrageous human
conceit to look upon the vast Universe as serving no other purpose than to
please one particular species of primate on a small planet. But, in the light of everything we’ve just
said, is there any other alternative to this grossly anthropocentric
perspective? If the suitability of the
physical Universe to human needs is far too improbable to be considered an
accident, then mustn’t we conclude that things were “designed” that way and for
just that reason? Not necessarily. It’s also possible that our Universe is not
the only universe that has ever existed.
It’s conceivable that, before our own World emerged, there was an
infinite series of “still-born” worlds passing into and out of being. In this scenario, the minute fine-tuning of
cosmic constants that we’ve described would have been achieved by
trial-and-error rather than by explicit design.
This is the identical process of evolutionary “probing” that we’ve
ascribed, in Chapter Two, to the pre-Creation development of angelic
Consciousness.
In effect, we’re suggesting that the
Universe evolved out of a prior series of “failed worlds” until it struck upon
the right combination of conditions to generate intelligent life. Since the physical laws of the “other
universes” were incompatible with the development of sentient observers, these
worlds would have passed out of existence “without a trace”. The Kabbalah expresses this same theory by
relating that a number of worlds were created and destroyed while the Tree of
Life was maturing into its “rectified” form.
As we’ll discuss shortly, the Kabbalah also associates these “lost
worlds” with the shattered Consciousness of the Fallen Angels and the related
symbolism of the defunct Kings of Edom.
Ironically, this “evolutionary”
scenario stands Darwinian evolution on its head. The latter proposes that the human species is
what it is because it has adapted itself to the conditions of the physical
Universe. We, on the other hand, propose
that the physical Universe is what it is because it has adapted itself to the
requirements of human intelligence.
But why, one may well ask, should we
prefer this theory to the more straightforward “design” arguments traditionally
advanced by conventional religion? Why
should the Creatrix have tolerated a tortured succession of aborted worlds,
when She could have just conceived a suitable Universe outright? The answer relates to what we discussed
earlier in terms of the separation of God’s Male and Female poles during the
Creation process.
The Paths of Glory
As we’ve said, God’s Male and Female
poles correspond, respectively, to His transcendence and Her immanence. Scripture clearly affirms that God has these
two distinct polarities. On the one hand,
He is separate from Creation and “surrounds” it like a great cloud whose Glory
is concealed from view. Job speaks of
this aspect of God when he says:
And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the
wind passeth and cleaneth them.
Fair weather cometh
out of the north: with God is terrible majesty.
Touching the Almighty,
we cannot find him out… [10]
Once again, we need to restore some
of the nuances of the original Hebrew before we can fully appreciate this
passage. In the first line, the phrase
“bright light” is translated from bahir,
which signifies brilliance. The word in
the following verse that King James’ scholars rendered as “fair weather” is zohar, which has the similar connotation
of brightness. Interestingly, Zohar and Bahir are the titles of the two principal texts of Jewish mysticism
comprising the Kabbalah. It’s also worth
mentioning that zohar comes from the
root zahab, the Hebrew word for
gold. Finally, we should note that God’s
“majesty” corresponds to the Hebrew noun hod,
signifying beauty, splendor, or glory. Hod derives from the same root as hadar, which likewise signifies beauty
and glory. We learned in Chapter Two
that Hadar was the name of the eighth
and last King of Edom, and that it also describes a type of tree involved in
the eight-day feast of Succoth or Tabernacles.
Complementing this transcendent pole
of the Godhead, we have God’s feminine polarity, which we’ve characterized as
immanent. In this aspect, She is
intimately and palpably present everywhere in Her Creation. She “dwells” (HaDar) in the physical Universe, from the spiral arms of its
far-flung galaxies right down to the core of its tiniest particles. Hers is the Glory which literally fills our
World, as the prophet Isaiah hears proclaimed by the Seraphim who attend the
Divine Presence:
Holy, holy, holy, is the
Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full
of his glory.[11]
Isaiah’s choice of words here
suggests to us that the concept of Glory is something that is common to both
God’s transcendent and immanent sides.
Perhaps we might venture further to infer that Glory constitutes a sort
of “bridge” between the two divine natures.
The prophet uses yet another synonym for Glory, the Hebrew word Kavod, whose letters are equivalent to
the number 32. Again recalling our
discussion in the previous chapter, we recognize that 32 has a special
significance. The Tree of Life contains
32 paths, paths that connect the Crown (Keter)
of God’s transcendent nature with the Heart (Malkut) of Her immanent nature.
Accordingly, the Hebrew for Heart Lev
also expresses the number 32.
The three “holies” that Isaiah hears
the Seraphim intoning indicate that the paths of the Tree of Life extend
through three domains: Space, Time, and
Spirit. Let’s consider the spiritual
domain first. The Kabbalah refers to it
as the “Soul dimension”. Since it has to
include both poles of the Godhead, the Soul dimension must encompass the Tree’s
highest level Keter, as well as its lowest level Malkut. While all 32 paths originate in Keter, they
cannot be comprehended on that inscrutable plane. Instead, the Soul dimension enables the paths
to be experienced by replicating all 32 of them within Malkut, which is the
plane of manifestation. The Bahir expresses this scenario in the form
of a parable:
A king
has a palace in which there are 32 chambers.
Leading to each chamber there is a path.
The king’s chamber is the innermost of the 32, and there he keeps his
most precious treasures and most sensitive secrets. His need to keep these things secure presents
a quandary, however. If he makes all 32
paths accessible to everyone in his kingdom, his treasury will be rifled and
his secrets profaned. But if he conceals
the paths, then his beloved subjects can never share his presence. What should be done? He ponders and arrives at a solution: He touches his daughter so that all 32 paths
are woven into her garments.[12]
To interpret this parable, we need
to recognize the figure of the king’s daughter as an allusion to the following
verse from Psalms:
The king’s daughter is all
glorious within: her clothing is of
wrought gold.[13]
Since Glory/Kavod refers to the 32 paths of the Tree of Life, the Psalmist’s
imagery depicts the incorporation of these paths within the “daughter”, who is Malkut. But why is her clothing said to be woven from
gold?
In the passage from Job we quoted a little while ago, the image of gold zahab was used to represent the divine
brilliance that appears “out of the North”.
The North, as we learned in Chapter Two, is the allegorical locale of
the “Holy Mountain” of Elohim, from whence issue human Souls bound for
incarnation. The incarnation of all of
the Souls within this “treasury of Souls” is the process by which God is reconstituting
the World Soul shattered by the Fall of the Angels. These Souls we refer to as the “Souls of the
Righteous”, and they flow into Malkut from the Vessel (Sephirah) of the Tree of Life which lies immediately above
Her. This next-higher Vessel/Sephirah, from which the Souls of the
Righteous descend, is known as the Foundation, or Yesod :
His foundation is in the
holy mountains.
The Lord loveth the gates of
And of
The Psalmist here is telling us that
Previously we’ve discussed the
masculine aspect of Yesod as the source of “seed” and its association with the
Covenant of Circumcision which the Almighty Shaddai
established with Abraham. That Covenant
“rectified” the Male principle of Yesod so that the Souls of the Righteous
could be conceived and born into the progeny of Abraham. These Souls were symbolically represented by
the letter Heh added to the name
Abram as a sign of the Covenant. We should
also recall that the letter Heh was
given to Abraham by his wife Sarah from her own name.[15] Sarah, who also played the role of Abraham’s
sister when they were in
… and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things (BaKol).[17]
From the context of this Scriptural
passage, one gets the sense that Abraham was blessed by the Promise. It was the Promise that what had been lost
by Adam and Eve in
What the Promise is really “all
about”, so to speak, is the conception of this sacred procession of Souls,
destined to culminate in the Soul of the Messiah, Son of David. These Souls carry the Light into the World of
Darkness, in the same way as the River Pishon
flowed out of
The Hebrew word zahab is spelled with the letters Zayin, Heh, and Bet.
In the esoteric sense, the middle letter Heh is the omni-Soul Pleroma
that links the supernal World with the lower Worlds. In terms of the Tree of Life, the supernal
World occupies its three upper limbs.
These upper limbs are the Sephirot of Keter (Divine Will), Chochmah
(Wisdom), and Binah (Understanding),
with which we’re somewhat familiar.
According to the Kabbalist system, these Three together correspond to
the final letter Bet in zahab.
The lower Worlds (of which ours is but one) are represented on the Tree
of Life by Seven Sephirot, corresponding in number to Zayin, the initial letter in the Hebrew word for “gold”. We’ve already become acquainted with three of
these Seven: Malkut (Matter), Yesod (Foundation of All), and Tipheret
(Beauty/Symmetry).
We’ve also touched upon the two
opposing sides of the metaphysical Balance defined by Chesed (Mercy) and Gevurah
(Judgment). Located just below the
supernal realm, this is the plane where the dynamics of the Tree are
generated. When the Male and Female
forces of Chesed and Gevurah are unbalanced, they deflect the Soul from its
goal. When they are in harmony, they
incline the Soul toward its true path.
It’s at this level that the Soul is either “launched” on its flight
toward incarnation, through the Peace between the Male and the Female, or
“grounded” by their discord.
The motion of the Soul, which is
imparted at the level of Chesed and Gevurah, becomes manifest on the next level
down in the Tree of Life. This plane
comprises the dual Sephirot of Netzach
(Victory) and Hod (Glory). These two are pictured as the “legs” of the
Supernal Man, Zer Anpin, whose Body
takes in the Six Sephirot from Chesed down to Yesod. The three “Mentalities” of the supernal World
plus the seven “Attributes” of the lower Worlds yield a total of ten Sephirot
which “network” together on the Tree of Life.
Figure 1 displays the layout of the Tree as
typically represented in the Kabbalist texts.
We said earlier that the Tree of
Life grows in the three “dimensions” of the Soul, Space and Time. We’ve also seen how the central axis of the
Tree from Keter to Malkut defines the Soul dimension. Defining the dimension of Time, on the other
hand, are the Seven Sephirot of the lower Tree.
These Seven line up with the Seven Days of Creation, so that the seventh
of their number, Malkut, is identified with the Sabbath. The Sabbath connects the Soul dimension with
the temporal dimension because it signifies the eternal moment of Time in which
God conceived the Pleroma, or World Soul.
This is the hidden message of the words the Lord spoke to Moses on
… for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
and in the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.[18]
Again, the King James translation
deprives us of the double entendre of the Hebrew word nephesh. It addition to
meaning “refreshed”, nephesh can also
signify the past tense of the verb “to soul”, in the sense of “to conceive a
soul”. So God is actually telling Moses
that, on the first Sabbath, He/She rested and conceived the Pleroma. Hence, the observance of the Sabbath is a
necessary premise for the conception of Souls.
In the Sabbath is reflected the original state of Peace between God’s
Male and Female poles. Only this
“initial condition” of Peace can enable the incarnation of the Souls of the
Righteous. These Souls are the “gold of
Havilah”, the mytical Zahab, which
the
Okay. We’ve said that the Tree of Life grows in the
three dimensions. And we’ve already
talked about two of the those: the Soul
dimension and the Time dimension.
Referring to Figure 1, we can see that the Tree
has 10 Sephirot connected by 22 paths.
Each of the 22 paths corresponds to one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew
alphabet. The Hebrews divided their
letters into three classes: 3 “Mothers”,
7 “doubles”, and 12 “singles”. In the
Introduction to this book, we discussed the three Mother letters, Shin, Aleph and Mem, and how
they symbolize the three Covenants of the Tongue, the Heart, and the Loins,
respectively. If we picture the human
body as a microcosm of the Tree of Life, which it actually is, we can identify
the levels of the Tongue, Heart and Loins with the Tree’s three horizontal paths.
Seven of the Hebrew letters are
called “doubles” because they can express two different sounds. The first two double letters are Bet and Gimel. Because they are the
second and third letters of the alphabet, Bet and Gimel correspond to the
second and third Sephirot of the Tree — Chochmah (Wisdom) and Binah
(Understanding). Since Wisdom is a
product of the Past, while Understanding anticipates the Future, Chochmah and
Binah together define the Tree’s temporal dimension. The seven double letters are thus seen as
designating the seven vertical paths, by which the Tree grows upward, extending
itself into Time.
In addition to the 3 horizontal and
7 vertical paths, the Tree of Life has 12 diagonal paths. The Kabbalah describes these last 12 as the
“Arms of the World”, because they are seen as surrounding the Universe and
enclosing it like a great set of tentacles or “arms”. These 12 “arms” represent the process by
which the Tree extends itself outward into Space. Notice that I say “outward into Space”. It’s
natural to speak of physical Space as something totally outside of ourselves,
that is, as something totally Objective.
That’s because Space dominates the Objective or Female pole of
Consciousness, just as Time rules the Subjective/Male pole. And the Soul is the bridge between the
Objective and Subjective poles, between the Female and the Male. Therefore, when the World Soul split and
divided in the Fall of Lucifer’s Angels, there necessarily came also a breach
between the Objective and Subjective sides of Consciousness.
If we look at the structure of the
Tree in Figure 1, we see that it’s comprised of 3
“Pillars”. Starting on the right, we
find a column of 3 Male Sephirot: Wisdom/Chochmah, Mercy/Chesed, and
Victory/Netzach. Opposite these 3 Males
is the lefthand Pillar of 3 Female Sephirot:
Understanding/Binah, Judgment/Gevurah, and Glory/Hod. And between these opposing Pillars lies the
Middle Pillar, which encompasses the 5 levels of the Soul: the Crown/Keter, Equilibrium/Daat,
Symmetry/Tipheret, the Foundation/Yesod, and the Garden/Malkut. Daat is described in the Kabbalah as a
“quasi-Sephirah” because the balance point of Equilibrium is imaginary — or, as
the Zohar expresses it, “negatively
existent”.[19]
We’ll have more to say about the
concept of “negative existence” later in this chapter. For now, however, let’s get back to the
question of how the Tree of Life extends itself into the Outer World, that is,
into the dimension of Space. The ancient
Hebrews, like their Babylonian cousins, were accomplished astronomers. They observed that the heavens all revolve
around an invisible axis, which is “negatively existent”. They further observed that the motion of a
heavenly body traces a helix as it revolves through Space around its axis. An obvious metaphor for the shape of a helix
is a snake with its coils. So it was
natural for the Jewish mystics to describe the imaginary axis of Space as a
huge Serpent, whom they called Teli.
The Serpent, of course, plays the
villain in the tragedy of
The Serpent in the Garden
If, as we’ve said all along, Malkut
is the Garden, then the Garden is the Womb of Souls. That’s why one of the four Rivers that flow
out of
This latter connection is
intriguing, because Python was the fabled guardian of the omphalos, or “navel” of the Universe — the same as the “axis” over
which the Hebrew serpent Teli presides.
Like the Serpent of the Garden of Eden, Python was seen as an antagonist
of God’s transcendent aspect, which the Greeks personified in their solar deity
Apollo. Apollo, whose name comes from
the Greek word for “apple”, dispatched Python with an arrow, just as his
henchman Hercules did to the serpent Ladon.
Ladon guarded the golden apples of immortality that grew on the Greek
version of the Tree of Life.
Both Teli and Python probably trace
their origins to Apep, the demonic
serpent of
I
am the Lord that maketh all things; that stretchest forth the heavens alone;
that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself …[20]
The actions
of “stretching” and “spreading” that Isaiah expresses in this passage are also
attached to the Hebrew name of Pishon,
the mystical
So now we have two concepts that
we’ve associated with Teli: Equilibrium and Matter. Putting them together, we get the notion that
the material Universe exists as something to balance or equilibrate the
Pleroma. It’s true that the physical Universe, in all its vastness, serves
simply as a meticulously precise “setting”, so to speak, for the “gold” of
human Consciousness. The “gold” of the
World Soul is bound up with the “ore” of Matter. But there’s more to it than that. When bound up with the Soul, Matter becomes
transparent to the Divine Image and extends the proportions of the Supernal
Man, Zer Anpin, throughout the Universe.
This is the process of “stretching forth the heavens” which Isaiah
describes.
How does Teli, the Serpent of
Matter, accomplish this monumental task of imprinting divine Symmetry on an
entire Universe? This question brings us
back to the merits of the “intelligent design” approach to cosmology. “Intelligent design” is the cornerstone of
the theology of Deism, whose God is exclusively transcendent. Deism is implicitly dualistic, because it
must view the intelligence of Matter — symbolized by the Serpent — as purely
demonic. This means that Deism is a
self-contradictory theology, since an all-encompassing transcendent God cannot
co-exist with an autonomous evil Adversary.
The only way to avoid the contradiction of Deism is to consider the manifest
Symmetry of Creation, not as a premeditated “design” imposed from “above” and
“outside” the physical Universe, but as a pattern spontaneously generated from within it. And that’s what makes the spontaneously
generated Serpent Teli such an apt emblem for the material conduit of this
divine pattern.
It follows then that Matter is invested with an intelligence, and
that this intelligence is not
innately demonic. To help us understand
how this intelligence works, let’s find an example of it. We don’t have to look too far — indeed, no
further than the computer I’m using to compose this text. From the moment our species attained
Self-awareness, we simultaneously acquired the ability to manipulate the
intelligence of inanimate things. An axe
is congealed intelligence; it is the actualization in material form of a purely
mental conception of a task. Why does a
being have to be Self-aware to make an axe?
A beaver can formulate the thoughts needed to cut wood. Why can’t a beaver make itself an axe? The answer is that the beaver can think about
cutting wood but can’t think about thinking.
An animal can’t extract itself from its own thoughts and shape those
thoughts the way it can a piece of wood.
And so we see that the ability of
intelligence to act upon itself is a “bonus” that automatically comes along
with Self-Consciousness. This ability
involves a process called “recursion”. A
recursive process is one that involves one or more “loops”. Such a “loop” would consist of a defined set
of operations performed stepwise in a fixed order. When the last step is performed, the loop
reverts back to the first step. We can
think of many mechanical chores, such as knitting or rolling dough, which fit
into this recursive scheme. And it’s
precisely this motif which governs our everyday thought patterns, regardless of
whether we’d like to think of ourselves as a little “loopie”! But the key to all of this loopiness goes
back to the idea of the helix and our serpent friend Teli. Like the mythical Uroboros, the Serpent “swallows his own tail”, in the sense that
the end of the loop feeds back into its beginning. Since each subsequent run through the loop
starts out a “higher” level than the one before, over time the process traces
out a three-dimensional helix rather than a two-dimensional circle.
A recursive process can also involve
“loops within loops”, also known as “nested loops”. In other words, we can have a main loop
consisting of a number of steps, one of which is a “sub-loop”. Let’s say the “sub-loop” is step #8 in the
main loop. Then when the main loop gets
to step #8, it will run through all the steps of the “sub-loop” before going on
to step #9 of the main loop. In theory,
there’s no limit to how far we can go with this “nested” structure. We can have loops within loops within loops ad infinitum. And, in fact, that’s exactly what we find in
the structure of the Tree of Life.
Again, let’s remind ourselves that
the Tree of Life is, first and foremost, a network of Vessels (aka Sephirot)
which connect God’s transcendent pole with His/Her immanent pole. Another way of saying this is that the 32
paths of the Tree define the “anatomy” of a Deity who is both “over-All” and
“in-All”. We are in God and He/She is in
us. Since the Essence of God must be
indivisible, however, this implies that God is within God is within God is
within God, etc. One might think of the Russian porcelain
dolls which fit one inside the other, but that analogy falls short because the
Divine Image is reproduced undiminished right down to the thinnest slice of
Creation. That’s why, as modern
cosmology is only now discovering, it’s possible for an entire Universe to
expand spontaneously out of a dimensionless point in a complete vacuum.
This is what the Kabbalah is talking
about when it says that the 32 paths are gold-embroidered into the garments of
the Daughter. The Daughter, as we know,
represents Malkut, the realm of Matter.
But Malkut herself is one of the 32 paths. Accordingly, the 32 paths comprise a
recursive loop. The loop begins with
Keter and ends with Malkut. But, because
Malkut contains all 32 paths within her “garments”, when we get to her we begin
all over again with Keter — not the same Keter we started out with, but Keter
mirrored on a “lower” level. And the
same thing happens the next time we run through the loop and arrive again at Malkut. We keep descending down through one sub-loop
after another in an infinitely nested array.
This process of infinite nesting
enables the higher intelligence of Matter. During the past century, mankind has improved
on the simple mechanical intelligence of the axe, which rigidly embodies one
unalterable thought process. The
improvement is something we now call “artificial intelligence”. The science of “artificial intelligence” has
resulted from mankind’s discovery that inanimate Matter is capable of the type
of thinking hitherto believed to be only attainable by humans. And the “tricks” that make artificial
intelligence possible are recursive loops, called “do-loops” by computer
programmers, as well as nested sub-loops, the “subroutines” of
cybernetics. In his sometimes comical
vanity, Man credits himself with endowing Matter with this higher intelligence. Actually, however, Matter inherently has the
capacity for what we call “artificial intelligence”, and Man’s only real
discovery has been how to harness that power for his own ends.
Man’s cyber-manipulation of the
higher intelligence of Matter differs from the natural variety of that
intelligence in one important way, however.
Without human intervention, the loops and sub-loops that Matter is
capable of executing on its own would go on forever. To prevent this, the programmer inserts limits
or barriers. These are typically in the form of “if” statements that establish
certain criteria for the program to abandon the loop it’s been executing and go
branching off in another direction. But
the natural tendency of Matter is to find ways of circumventing these barriers
and to go on looping happily ever after.
The computer users among us get to experience this particular
eccentricity of the Serpent Teli every time our screen freezes and our cursor
stops blinking!
Man is able to circumscribe the
higher intelligence of Matter with limits because he has an idea of the information
he’s seeking and can tell his machine:
“Okay, you’ve found that piece, now start looking for this one.” Without this human piloting, the
cyber-intellect would only generate endless patterns within patterns — the
fractals which characterize a chaotic process.
Although human memory is capable of navigating a certain number of
nested levels of thought, at a certain point we become confused and
confounded. As we learned in Chapter
One, that’s the reason the Hebrews characterized Chaos as Tohu, “that which confounds”.
Hence, Man’s ability to control and
direct the Serpent Teli (who represents the higher intelligence of Matter)
depends very much on his capacity for keeping track of the level on which the
Serpent is “nesting” at any given time.
Such tracking is essential if the State of
Before we go any further, we need to
develop a better understanding of the concepts “above” and “below” as they
relate to the different levels of Reality.
What we’re really talking about here are levels of metaphors. To illustrate
this, let’s pick out something very familiar and mundane to serve as our
baseline Reality. If we’re looking for a
“baseline”, there’s no better place to go than a baseball field, right? On the primary level of Reality, we have the
actual baseball game itself. It consists
of a sequence of actions: pitches, hits, fielding plays, base running, crowd
responses, umpiring calls, etc. If we are a player in the game or a fan in
attendance, then we are “inside” this primary level. How about if we are reading about the game
in the next day’s sports page? Maybe
there’s a photograph of the close play at the plate or a slugger’s homerun
swing. There’s usually a box score that
tells us how each of the players performed.
And then there’s some narrative about the key plays of the game. All of this, we would say, is information
“about the game”. But it’s also more
than that. Its real aim is to recreate
the experience of the game on another level, to generate a metaphor for the
game — a “meta-game”, if you will. To
the extent the sports writer is creative and eloquent, he or she succeeds in
lifting the game up to a “higher”, more imaginative level of Reality.
Let’s take this example one step
further. A second sportswriter reads the
newspaper account of the game and sees that the final score was the MetaMets 24
and the MetaGiants 23. He writes a
magazine article and says: “Too many runs are being scored. The games are too long and fatiguing for both
fans and players. The rules should be
changed to allow just two outs per inning instead of three.” In this article, entitled “Take an Out from
the Ball Game”, the second sportswriter urges the baseball commissioner to
change the official rules of the game accordingly. Here we encounter a third level of Reality,
which is not about the game itself, but about the account of the game. We could call it a “meta-meta-game”, that is,
a metaphor for a metaphor. But something
even more interesting happens when the baseball commissioner reads the magazine
article and decides to implement the rule change. Now the primary Reality, the actual game
itself, is changed. What we now have is
a loop in which the “highest” level feeds back into the base level and touches
off a new sequence of metaphors.
It’s apparent from all this that
there are things we can’t possibly know about the game of baseball until we
look at it from the “outside”. Perhaps this accounts for the strangely
galvanizing effect of a home run, something that has no real equivalent in
other sports. In the instant the ball
soars out of the park, the game spills over beyond its own boundaries and
touches a level of Reality beyond itself.
If we think of baseball as having one ultimate Truth attached to it (as
all things must), then we would surely associate that Truth with the home
run. But the point to be made here is
that the game cannot reach its ultimate Truth without going outside its playing
field.
What’s true of baseball is also true
of any “game” based upon a set of rules or axioms. Take, for example, the “numbers game”. Mathematical genius Kurt Gödel proved that
there can exist no complete set of axioms capable of verifying all that is true
about positive integers. Even if the set
of axioms concerning these so-called “natural numbers” is expanded
indefinitely, there will always remain true statements that can only be arrived
at by going outside the system. Similarly,
cybernetics pioneer Alan Turing demonstrated that no conceivable system of
artificial intelligence, however powerful it might be, can determine in advance
whether an unbounded “do-loop” will ever terminate. In other words, without the limiting “if” statements
imposed by the programmer from outside the system, an unguided machine would
inevitably become locked up in a never-ending loop before completing its
computations.
It’s interesting that the “Achilles
heel” of artificial intelligence identified by both Gödel and Turing relates to
its inability to handle self-reference.
This is what makes a machine susceptible to being trapped in an infinite
loop. The classic example is the so-called
liar’s paradox, which goes like this:
“The statement you are now reading is a lie.” Mechanical intelligence must analyze this
statement first as true-if-false, then false-if-true, then again true-if-false,
and so on and on. In contrast, the human
Mind will, after a few futile rounds, step off the merry-go-round and get
outside the paradox. This simple test
proves that human intellect is capable of something that has been
mathematically proven, by Gödel and Turing, to be beyond the power of the
intelligence of Matter. It goes without
saying that if Man were purely a material being, such a capability would be
impossible.
Human Consciousness is not only capable of stepping outside the bounds
of primary Reality, it has an inherent need
to do so in order to create meaning out of experience. That’s why mankind devotes so much its energy
to creating the meta-Reality of theater, cinema and literature. On the level of unsifted experience, Reality
is a hodge-podge of many meanings, which tend to obscure and mask one another
unless extracted and refined to a higher level. We find a good play, book or movie satisfying
because it strips away the “static” of the extraneous things that clog our
lives and exposes the golden vein of concealed meaning. Shakespeare illustrates this principle
brilliantly when he stages the “play-within-a-play” in the third act of Hamlet.
By deftly shifting down one level from the primary drama to a veritable
“meta-drama”, the playwright exposes a deeper layer of meaning — the evil
lurking beneath the urbane façade of the royal family: “The [meta-]play’s the thing wherein I’ll
catch the conscience of the King.”
Consciousness is vital and active to
the extent that it creates meaning out of experience. It is fallen and moribund to the extent that
it passively receives the imprint of experience. While passive perception sinks beneath
experience into an abyss devoid of any meaning (save brute survival), active
perception floats above, distilling the content of experience. This latter
variety of sensory perception is a central theme of William Blake’s visionary
verse. In his mystical symbolism, each
of the Five Senses represents a level of the World Soul, with the two highest
levels corresponding to the Senses of Taste and Touch. In the Eternity before Time, these two Senses
were originally one, Blake tells us, and they will be so again in the Eternity
after Time. The poet uses this supernal
Sense of Taste-Touch to represent the active, creative mode of perception.
Two human bodily functions utilize
Taste and Touch together. One is the
assimilation of food — better known as eating.
Eating makes a perfect metaphor for active perception because, when we
experience something by eating it, we take it inside of our body and make it
part of us. We act upon our nourishment
in a way that makes it part of something more sublime that itself. By comparison, the self-deprecating motto of
passive perception avows: “You are what
you eat.” This conjures Daniel’s image
of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who carried
… thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the
field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee
with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know
that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men …[21]
Like his disciple William Blake,
John Milton also used eating as a metaphor for the higher mode of
perception. In Paradise Lost, he writes of the Archangel Raphael sharing food with
Adam and Eve in
Aside from eating, the other bodily function
that involves simultaneous sensations of Taste and Touch is sex. That’s why feasting and copulating have both
been focal points of sacred rituals throughout the ages. Back in Chapter One, we learned that the
penis and the tongue, along with the heart, demarcate the plane of Symmetry in
the mystical Body of Man. This plane is
associated with the Covenant of Circumcision, which was intended to rectify a
defect or asymmetry in the Body caused by Adam’s Fall. And at the source of that defect is the
notorious “forbidden fruit”, with its double connotation of gastronomical and
sexual enjoyment.
The Forbidden Fruit
In order for a piece of the World
Soul to be conceived, there must be intercourse between the two sexual poles of
the Godhead. In Kabbalist terminology,
this means there must be Peace between the first Male Sephirah, Chochmah, and
the highest Female Sephirah, Binah. One
consequence of this Peace (aka Equilibrium) is that all Ten Sephirot of the Tree
of Life become “Personifications”. Once
personified, the Sephirot are said to be “rectified”, as compared to the
unrectified state of the Tree during the period when worlds were being created
and destroyed. What this means is that
the Tree of Life, like any other tree, must have undergone a process of growth
and maturation. We do not expect a
mundane tree to become ready to bear fruit for perhaps several years after we
plant it. Similarly, the Tree of Life
had to mature before it could bear the fruit of human Souls. And because the Tree of Life embodies the
sexual polarity of its Right/Male and Left/Female Pillars, the progressive
emergence of sexual traits must have been a key part of its reaching maturity.
In order to bear Souls, the growing
Tree had to become conformed to the structure of the Soul, which we’ve
described as having five levels.
Consequently, the Tree had to develop five Personifications. On the highest level is the Personification
of Keter, who is known as the Ancient Holy One.
The second and third levels Personifications are the supernal Father and
Mother, who correspond to Chochmah and Binah.
On the fourth level are the Tree’s six Sephirot that combine in a
collective Person known as the Son or Zer
Anpin. And at the fifth level we
have the Son’s Bride, who personifies Malkut.
The full articulation of each of
these five Personifications is absolutely essential to the ability of the Tree
to convey Souls conceived by the Father and Mother down into the Womb of Malkut
for incarnation. This is because the
Personifications are not mere abstractions, like John Bull or Uncle Sam. Carl Jung would refer to them as Archetypes —
concepts which have the power to impose their Forms on manifest things. Archetypes have the quality that they can’t
be isolated on one level of Reality.
Instead, their intense energy transmits their Forms downward to create
counterparts of themselves at every level beneath them.
We know that the cumulative birth of
individual Souls into the material Universe is the means by which God is
reassembling the World Soul that shattered with the Fall of the Rebel
Angels. For this process to succeed,
therefore, there must be a firm linkage, an unwavering correspondence between
the sexual Union of the Mother and Father on the supernal level and the sexual
But the rectification of the Tree of
Life through Personification does not occur in isolation from the development
of the material Universe. The maturation
of the Tree within the confines of the Garden proceeds in tandem with the
extension of the Body of the greater Man, Zer
Anpin, out into the Macrocosm. This
is the work of the Serpent Teli in constructing the anthropic Universe, the
Cosmos fine-tuned to accommodate human intelligence. In the figurative sense, the Kabbalah
portrays the Tree of Life as growing from the circumference of the Garden
inward to its center, while the Serpent grows from the outside of the Garden
wall and extends into Space. The two
movements — centripetal and centrifugal — are complementary and totally
interdependent. Without the outward
expansion of Teli, the material preconditions for the Tree’s growth cannot be
secured. Without the inward growth of
the Tree, the direction and guidance of the cosmic expansion is lost, and chaos
ensues.
In many respects, the relationship
between the Serpent Teli and the Tree of Life is like the relationship between
a biological organism and its DNA. The
inner processes of the DNA are reflected in the outward development of the
organism. Without the outward
development, the organism can’t become fit to survive and propagate its
DNA. Without the inner working of the
DNA, on the other hand, the growth of the cells goes pathologically haywire and
destroys the organism, as in the disease of cancer. Among the “jobs” which the bodily organism
performs for the DNA is to defend it against outside chemical and biological
agents that would contaminate it.
Contamination of the DNA can disrupt its operation so as to diminish its
control over the development of the organism.
When the normal functioning of the DNA is disrupted, the organism can
become deformed or mutated.
Speaking of mutations, a short while
ago we were discussing defects that afflicted the mystical Body of Man as a
result of the Fall of Adam and Eve. Such
defects are, in fact, the basis of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and
the Jewish Covenant of Circumcision. In
light of our DNA analogy, we’re now in a good position to speculate as to how
these defects arose. Something must have
occurred to allow the entry of a “contaminant” into the Garden, a contaminant
that found its way to the Tree of Life.
And, based on the story we read in Genesis, whatever this contaminant
was, it must have been carried into the Garden by the Serpent.
But to say that the Serpent brought
something into the Garden immediately strikes us as wrong. The Serpent is Teli and its exclusive domain
is, as we’ve said, outside the walls of
There
is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help,
and in his excellency on the sky.
The
eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he
shall thrust out the enemy before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.[23]
If we think of the Tree of Life as a
great magnet, with its Male and Female polarity, then we can picture these Arms
as the magnetic field lines which extend outward from each pole and curve back
to meet the field lines extending from the opposite pole. As we know, the Earth itself is a huge
magnet, and the “arms” of its magnetic field serve to protect our planet from
the harmful radiation of outer Space. In
the same way, the Arms of Teli are meant to enclose the Tree of Life and
“thrust out the enemy” before it. How
strange and ironic it is, therefore, to think of the Serpent Teli as the
vehicle for bringing the Enemy into contact with the Tree!
Bear in mind, however, that, without
guidance from the Tree of Life, Teli can only act in accordance with the
intelligence of Matter. In the absence
of limits imposed from outside its own system, the Serpent will run away with
itself like a computer program without “if” statements, driving relentlessly
downward through endless nested loops instead of branching outward. It will grow pathologically in all directions
at once, like cancer cells with damaged DNA.
So the thing that goes awry with Teli, the thing that makes the Serpent
turn around and drive inward through the Garden wall, must involve some
dysfunction in its guidance from the Tree.
The Tree of Life can only direct the
development of the material Universe by virtue of its fruit. That fruit, we know, consists of the Souls
which “hang” from the Tree. These Souls
are conceived by the Male-Female intercourse at the level of the Father and
Mother, who are the Personifications of Chochmah/Wisdom and
Binah/Understanding. The Kabbalah calls
this level of the Soul Neshamah,
which means “breath”. Below this plane,
the intercourse of the Son and his Bride impart motion to the Soul at the level
of Ruach, the Spirit Wind. We recall that the Son, Zer Anpin, is a
composite Body consisting of Six Sephira: Chesed/Mercy, Gevurah/Judgment,
Tipheret/Beauty, Netzach/Victory, Hod/Splendor, and Yesod/Foundation. Finally, the Bride herself personifies Malkut,
the Womb wherein the Soul comes to rest at the level Nephesh.
Since the Tree grows and matures in
the course of Time, it does not bear all of its fruit at once. As is true of a natural tree, there is a
specific season when the fruit ripens and is ready to be plucked. In the case of the Tree of Life, this occurs
when all of the Souls contained in the Treasury of the mystical
As for the Serpent Teli, the
extension of Matter into Space continues until the Form of the divine Body is
completed. Again we go back to the
concept of Zahab, with the Universe
of Matter being the ore containing the sacred Gold of the universal Soul. In this sense, the extended Universe of Teli
functions as the greater Body of Man and the dwelling place of the Pleroma. The Serpent expands its coils outward into
the erstwhile empty Cosmos so that it may recover the scattered sparks of
Consciousness which were carried away by the wreckage of the failed universe
which immediately preceded our own.
Thus, the Serpent must, of necessity, also extend into the depths of
Hell, the realm of the Fallen Angels that we described in Chapter Two. Even in Hell — amidst the aborted shells and
husks (Qlippot) of negative existence
— there are scintillations of Soul fire,
sparks of ethereal Light that Teli must gather up toward the final day of
Redemption.
So we come back to the questions:
What determines the endpoint of the Serpent’s extension into Space? Where is the limiting “if” statement in
Teli’s programming? Where is the boundary
of the loop, the criterion that tells the Serpent to stop expanding and deliver
up its hoard of gold? The answer is that
the material Universe must go on expanding until the Tree of Life has produced
its ultimate fruit, the Pleroma. And the
signal that Teli is given of this “Omega Point” is the harvest of the fruit that
begins with the appearance of the Messiah.
At that juncture, Space is gathered up in Infinity and Time in Eternity.
True to his Biblical character, the
Messiah is a Fisherman who casts out his net and, in due time, hauls it
in. His net is the matrix of
Matter/Energy represented by the Serpent Teli.
When the Messiah calls for the net to be hauled in, it will restore to
the Pleroma the Soul fragments that were carried off by the Fall of the Angels. This “hauling in of the net” constitutes the
final event of Time. It is foreshadowed
in the rather enigmatic story that appears in the final chapter of John’s
gospel. The incident occurs on the
Jesus then built a charcoal fire and
invited the seven Apostles to join him in a eucharistic meal of bread and
fish. It’s significant that the
Scripture specifies a charcoal fire, since the intense heat of charcoal flame
was often used by the ancients as a “refiner’s fire” to separate gold and
silver from their ore. This detail is an
unmistakable signature of the Messiah depicted by Malachi, the last of the Old
Testament prophets:
But
who may abide the day of his coming? and
who shall stand when he appeareth? for
he is like a refiner’s fire …
And
he shall sit as a refiner purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of
Levi, and purge them as silver and gold.[25]
Both Malachi and
So this is where the proscription
given to Adam and Eve against eating the “forbidden fruit” comes from. Unfortunately, conventional religion has
drained the meaning from this story by rendering the forbidden fruit as simply
a test of obedience to God’s arbitrary commands. But God’s Will is never arbitrarily
imposed. We are not expected to blindly
follow Him/Her without understanding.
Instead, God is present with us always in the form of the Shechinah, who
carries with Her the Understanding of our heavenly Mother, the Personification
of Binah. It’s not that our First
Parents were arbitrarily excluded from tasting the fruit of the Tree that grew
“in the middle of the Garden”. They were
merely enjoined from harvesting the “fruit” — that is, the World Soul — until
it was “ripe”.
There is an ancient Jewish tradition
preserved in the Kabbalah to the effect that the Tree from which Eve plucked
the forbidden fruit was actually the Tree of Life. According to this tradition, her Sin
consisted of not waiting for the proper time to pick the fruit. In other words, the Tree of Life and the
taboo Tree of Good and Evil were not two different trees. Instead, the latter was an immature,
incomplete version of the former. This
explains why Scripture describes both Trees as being “in the middle of the
Garden”. With this background in mind,
let’s now turn our attention from the forbidden fruit to its source.
The Tree of Good and Evil
Up to the point when Eve did her
untimely picking, there was only the Tree of Life, still in the process of
growing and maturing. The fruit of the
Tree was not ready to be harvested insofar as its consummate blossom, the
Messianic Soul, had not yet unfolded.
The Messiah, as
And when ye shall come into the land, and
shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit
thereof as uncircumcised: three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you: it
shall not be eaten of.
But
in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy to praise the Lord
withal.
And
in the fifth year shall ye eat of the fruit thereof …[27]
The period of five years that the
Law stipulates for the eating of the fruit corresponds to the five levels of
the Soul of which we’ve spoken. So the
ritual of first fruits relates to the completion of the World Soul. It signifies that, until the Messiah appears,
the Tree remains “uncircumcised”, such that the Body of Man — and the Cosmos
which reflects that Body’s Form — remains incomplete. By the same token, the Law itself remains
partial and provisional until the coming of the Messiah:
The
sceptre shall not depart from
It’s interesting that the Messianic
epithet
This, of course, is a radically different
take on the Sin of our First Parents from that expounded by conventional
religion. The Serpent does not cause Eve’s Sin, rather he appears in
response to it. Her Sin does, as we
shall shortly see, transform the Serpent and the Tree from benign to malignant
entities. But the flaw that triggers
this malignancy originates in Eve and Adam.
More precisely, it originates in the interaction between the two of
them, in the Balance of the Male and Female principles as they emerge from the
supernal realm of potentiality into the lower domain of actuality. On this score, the Kabbalah teaches that the
mere appearance of the Serpent in the Garden is an accusation of Sin, because
it shows that the Balance is destroyed.[29]
An analogy can be made to the
balance wheel of an old-fashioned wind-up clock: If the clock keeps bad time, it’s a sign the
balance wheel is misaligned. In the same
way, the Serpent’s premature return to the Garden is a sign of an imbalance in
its guiding mechanism, which is in the Tree of Life.
As for the “balance wheel” of the
Tree, we know it’s located at the first level of the Tree’s seven lower
limbs. This is the level of Chesed/Mercy
and Gevurah/Judgment. Chesed and Gevurah
are the reflections, in the lower Worlds, of the Male and Female principles in
the supernal World of the Tree’s upper limbs.
The supernal Father and Mother are Chochmah/Wisdom and
Binah/Understanding, who may be pictured as two faces looking at each other. Again we have the motif of self-reference and
recursion. Without Understanding, Wisdom
has no expression, and without Wisdom, Understanding has no content. This interaction of Chochmah and Binah on the
supernal level should be mirrored by the interaction of Chesed and Gevurah on
the lower plane. Accordingly, the two
countenances, Male and Female, should behold one another. Another way of saying this is that the sexual
polarization of the Tree must be complete.
But we recall that the seven lower
limbs of the Tree extend from Eternity down into Time. It follows that the sexual polarity at the
level of Chesed and Gevurah must develop over Time. At the dawn of Creation, Male and Female were
combined in the one Body of Adam.
According to the second chapter of Genesis, Adam was in the Garden for
some time before the Female pole began to emerge. Indeed, consistent with the “trial-and-error”
pattern of evolution associated with God’s immanent nature, the initial
feminine eruption appears to have been abortive. Thus, Jewish oral tradition compiled in the Haggadah recounts the tale of Lilith, an
earlier prototype of Eve. The legend
relates that Lilith was a sort of quasi-male, too intent on being the
equivalent of Adam to complement him as a companion.[30]
It’s significant that Eve’s
emergence from Adam took place while he was in a “deep sleep”.[31] Just as waking life is dominated by a type of
Consciousness that we call Reason, in sleep the dominant form of Consciousness
is Vision. In Chapter Two we learned
that Vision is the key to escaping the trap of self-reference that snared
Lucifer. Vision is the manifestation of
the Soul in the Mind. It enables the
Mind to rise — as if on a Chariot or Watchtower —above the recursive perception
of Selfhood that leads down the blind alley of narcissism. When detached from Vision, Reason is reduced
to the one-dimensional rationality of the ego, a rationality which denies the
existence of everything that its diminished senses exclude. Totally obscured by the blind spot of the
ego-persona is all that pertains to Man’s eternal Life and immortal Soul.
When Reason is detached from Vision,
then the Male and Female Personifications of the Tree of Life cease to behold
one another “face-to-face”. As a
consequence, the Tree’s sexual polarity is scrambled and indefinite. This, in turn, throws off the Balance of
Chesed and Gevurah, which serves as the “gyroscope” of the Tree’s guidance
system. Finally, the breakdown of the
guidance system cuts the Serpent of Matter loose to expand wildly, chaotically,
and destructively.
Reason detached from Vision is the
characteristic mindset of the ego-persona.
We recognize it as the State of
The Specter is characterized, above
all, by its inability to deal with its opposite sexual pole
“face-to-face”. Being inherently
incapable of accommodating contraries, it reduces them to negations. Since visionary Self-transcendence is not in
its nature, the ego does not perceive forces that contradict itself for what
they truly are — stimuli to higher development.
Regardless of the occasional lip-service it may pay, the ego-persona
does not and cannot subscribe to the precept, “Love your enemies”. To love one’s enemies is to accept that
which runs counter to one’s own personal will.
Without such Love one cannot truly submit to the Will of God. Without it, one cannot honestly say that one
even loves one’s neighbors, friends or family.
All that the ego can truthfully say is that it loves those who satisfy
its desires … but only for so long as they do so.
Contraries — such as
Male-and-Female, Transcendence-and-Immanence, Reason-and-Vision — provide the
tension, the energy that propels Creation upward on the ladder of spiritual
ascension. The opposing pillars of the
Tree of Life are like galvanic rods generating the “electricity” which animates
Matter and endows it with Soul. But to
the ego-Specter, all contraries must be rendered as negations, that is, as
Good-and-Evil. Blake expresses this
thought much better than I can:
There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary
The Negation must be destroyed to redeem the
Contraries
The Negation is the Spectre, the Reasoning Power in
Man
This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my
Immortal
Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off &
annihilated always
To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by
Self-examination.
To bathe in the Waters of Life, to wash off the Not
Human …
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory…
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him
with Imagination.[32]
And again, in Blake’s words:
They take the Two Contraries … with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member …
This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation.[33]
Blake identifies the dominance of
the spectral ego-persona as the eclipsing of Vision and Imagination by Reason
and Moral Virtue. This imbalance has the
effect of deforming both the collective Body of Man and the Tree of Life. With regard to the mystical Body of Man, it
can be best be compared to a
We’ve
discussed how the State of
Once the
Balance between the Male and Female poles of perception has been disturbed,
it’s as if the “immune system” of the collective human Body is compromised and
weakened. There now appears a huge gap
in the “Arms of the World”, the erstwhile impregnable force-field insulating
the Tree of Life from outside contamination.
These “Arms”, corresponding to the twelve diagonal paths of the Tree of
Life, are anchored in the dual Sephirot of Netzach/Victory and
Hod/Splendor. Netzach and Hod actually
embody the human faculties of Prophecy and Vision, respectively. These faculties are of supreme importance to
the success of the human endeavor, because they occupy the transitional area
between Mind and Spirit.
The
relationship between Vision and Prophecy mirrors that between Wisdom and
Understanding. Vision is the direct
contact of the Mind with God’s Female Presence, Shechinah. This is why great poets, such as Dante,
Milton, and Blake, have always invoked Shechinah as their “Muse”, the source of
their poetic Vision. But, like Wisdom,
the actual experience of God’s Glory cannot be directly rendered in images or
speech. Just as Understanding gives
expression to Wisdom, so Prophecy gives expression to Vision. There is a distinction, however. Wisdom and Understanding operate downward
from the upper limbs of the Tree, that is, from the realm of God’s ultimate
transcendence (Keter) to the realm of Her ultimate immanence (Malkut). On the other hand, Vision and Prophecy
operate in exactly the opposite direction, that is, from the bottom up. Both of these two reciprocal directions of
movement are essential if the Tree is to accomplish its function of linking
God’s transcendent and immanent polarities.
To the extent that the movement is interrupted in either direction, the
lines of the divine “magnetic field” are broken and the Tree is vulnerable to
attack.
The
potential vulnerability of the Tree of Life is presented in allegorical form in
the Biblical story of the Israelites’ battle with the tribe of Amelek in the
Sinai desert. Amelek was descended from
Esau, or
Getting
back to
The
metaphysical background of “negative existence” plays a key role in the
mysticism of the Kabbalah, and we’ll be exploring this subject further as this
book goes along. But, since it also
plays directly into the themes of the Fall of Man, we’ll need to understand it
a little better at this juncture as well.
We’ve said that meaning is created from raw experience by taking it to a
higher level and carving away the extraneous material that obscures its pure
Form. We can liken this to
Michelangelo’s well known statement about his chisel merely liberating the
figure of David from the block of marble in which it had been hidden. But it’s crucial to grasp the concept that
the figure always remains dependent on the background for its meaning. By altering the background, Michelangelo
transformed the meaning of his material from a block of stone to the royal
ancestor of the Messiah. By pushing some
keys, I am now carving dark lines out of the white background of this
page. The letters I type contain
meaning, but that meaning can be altered or lost if I change the background of
this page, let us say, to a pattern of black-and-white stripes.
The
interaction of background and foreground is central to the Kabbalah because it
goes to the core of the problem of God’s simultaneous transcendence and
immanence. According to the Kabbalah,
the first step in the Creation of our Universe was the so-called Tzimtzum — the establishment of a
background from which the ethereal Light was withdrawn. Hence, God’s transcendent aspect relates to
this background, to the Light that is withheld, the Light that is reserved for
the World to Come. Another way of saying
this is that the Eternity is the background of Time and Space. Without access to this eternal background,
temporal existence has no meaning and the Consciousness of its sentient
creatures descends to that of the Qlippot.
As we said earlier, the cultivation of the Tree of Life demands that the
plough of Vision cut through the surface of Space/Time and turn over the
underlying soil of Eternity.
Background
and foreground are classic examples of complementary contraries. We know that such contraries fall within the
“blind spot” of reasoning devoid of Vision.
Such one-dimensional reasoning, as Blake observes, can only deal with
contraries as negations of one another.
Consequently, diminished Reason focuses only on the foreground, that is
to say, on that which can be demonstrated or proven. We readily recognize this mindset as the
prevailing scientific-materialistic rationality of our day. Such rationality must, however, always run
behind the pace of ultimate Truth in the same way that the fabled Achilles ran
behind the Tortoise. This is because the
“background” separating the proposition and the Truth cannot be eliminated
without forfeiting the meaning of the proposition, no more than the space separating
the figures of Achilles and the Tortoise can disappear without obliterating the
figures themselves. That’s why, for
example, Kurt Gödel’s effort to prove all of the truths implicit in the system
of natural numbers ultimately produced only a proof that it can’t be done. Interestingly, the final steps of Gödel’s
proof lead to a mathematical statement that contains itself — in other words, a
proposition without any background.
Expressed in words, it would look something like this:
This statement
contains This
statement contains This statement contains …
{ad infinitum} … itself. itself.
itself.
We immediately recognize this as a
variety of our old nemesis, the endlessly convoluted loop. What Gödel actually proved is that any mode
of reasoning which attempts, by brute force, to squeeze the background out of
its system will only succeed in constructing for itself an inescapable
labyrinth of paradox. Ironically, the
endeavor of the ego-persona to negate its background, and thereby deny the
possibility of transcendence, must inevitably cause it to fashion for itself a
hellish background, a metaphysical “black hole” from which there is no
exit. This is the message of the Greek
myth that portrays the cunning craftsman Daedalus being imprisoned in the intricate
Labyrinth of his own design. The myth
goes on to tell of the escape of the hero Theseus from the same Labyrinth by
the unwinding of a magical ball of thread, the gift of the goddess
Ariadne. Ariadne, whose name means
“most holy Mother”, is yet another mythic rendering of Shechinah, the feminine
font of Vision. According to astral
lore, her wedding tiara appears in sky as the circlet of seven stars called the
Corona Borealis, the “Crown of the
North Wind”. Celtic legend refers to the
same constellation as Caer Arianrhod,
the abode of Souls awaiting incarnation.[36] We can see here an obvious correspondence to
the northerly vantage point of the heavenly
In the Kabbalah, the North is the
direction from which the Qlippot penetrate the Tree of Life and cause it to
produce the Tree of Good and Evil as its offshoot. The northern side of the Tree is identified
as its Left or Female pillar. Its areas
of vulnerability, where the protecting Arms remain open to the evil influx, are
the Sephirot of Gevurah/Judgment and Hod/Vision.[37] On the level of Chesed and Gevurah, the
trouble begins when the complementary pairing of Mercy and Judgment degenerates
into the crude dichotomy of Good and Evil.
In place of the energy of the supernal Archetypes that activate and
inform Vision, the Tree of Good and Evil yields only the moribund Stone of
Law. This Stone of Law serves to beat
Souls down to a flat uniformity, to strip them of their aura of godlike Glory,
the unique numenosity of their divine origins.
It is this Law that crucified Jesus of Nazareth and that continues each
day to crucify the Body of Christ in each and every one of us.
Without the contention of
contraries, the Tree of Good and Evil does not lift its branches to the
heavens, but rather shoots them back downward, like a banyan tree. Blake describes this as the Tree of Mystery,
immobilizing and poisoning the Body of his Supernal Man,
Every ornament of perfection, and every labour of love,
In all the Garden of Eden, & in all the golden mountains
Was become an envied horror …
And every Act a Crime, and
And
… All these hills & valleys are accursed witnesses of Sin
I therefore condense them into solid rocks, stedfast!
A foundation and certainty and demonstrative truth:
That Man be separate from Man …
… and
underneath his heel shot up
A deadly Tree, he nam’d it Moral Virtue, and the Law
Of God who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight.
The Tree spread over him its cold shadows, (
They bent down, they felt the earth, and again enrooting
Shot into many a Tree! an endless labyrinth of woe! [38]
On this Tree of Mystery, the
Judgment of Gevurah becomes the severity of harsh punishment. Torn loose from the circumscribing background
of Vision, Judgment is transformed into an unbridled Wrath that extends itself
without limit. The Kabbalah speaks in
terms of the Tree expanding on its Left side, and in the process causing the
inflation of the Qlippot that have attached themselves there. As we have alluded to previously, these
Qlippot are portrayed symbolically as the dynasty of eight Edomite kings listed
in the 36th Chapter of Genesis. When Eve
eats the fruit of the Tree of Mystery, these impure husks are mixed with the
World Soul and must thereafter be “weeded out” over a series of generations.
We’ve come quite a long way in this
discussion, and it would be useful at this juncture to gather together some of
our conclusions before wrapping up this chapter:
1. Ours is not
the first or only Universe that has ever existed. Before our World was created, there was a
series of abortive universes that failed
to produce the conditions required for the development of Self-conscious
biological organisms.
2. Before the
Creation of our World, God created an ethereal substance embodying His/Her
Essence, a “quintessence” called Light.
To form a background (negative existence) for the positive existence of
created worlds, God first “withdrew” the Light.
3. Part of
this Light was reserved for the World to Come (i.e., to come after our
own). It nonetheless has a background
presence (or negative existence) in our Reality.
4. The rest of
the Light was to be restored to the physical Universe in the form of the
Pleroma, or World Soul. Before our own
Universe came into being, a number of the previously failed universes (referred
to in item #1) proved themselves incapable of receiving and holding the Light
of the Pleroma.
5. Finally,
the last such universe (before our own, that is) developed to the point where
it produced Vessels to retain the Light.
These Vessels were States of Consciousness which we know as Angels. It was the function of one particular order
of these Angels, the Cherubim, to receive the Light of the World Soul.
6. Lucifer,
the first of the Cherubim to achieve Self-awareness, fell under the spell of
narcissistic self-love and drew a number of other Cherubim after him. The State of
7. With the
shattering of the Vessels associated with the Fallen Angels came the splitting
up of the World Soul. Fragments of the
Pleroma, in the form of “sparks” or “scintilla” of Light, remained trapped,
however, in the opaque shells (Qlippot) of the broken Vessels.
8. To
reconstitute the Pleroma, God shaped the surviving Vessels (Sephirot) into a
network called the Tree of Life. Our
World was created and proved itself a suitable habitat for the Tree. The Tree became manifest in our World through
the Sephirah Malkut, the Garden.
9. As the Tree
grew and matured, it came to bear its “fruit”.
That is to say, the Souls of the Pleroma began to assemble in the “womb”
of Malkut.. When all of the Souls had
blossomed, the Messiah was to appear to bind them all together as One.
10. The Tree
directed the intelligence of Matter (Serpent Teli) in the expansion of a vast
physical Universe beyond the bounds of the Garden. The object of this expansion was to gather up
the sparks of Light trapped in the Qlippot in order to restore them to the
Pleroma when the Messiah appeared.
11. Before the
Male and Female branches of the Tree had fully extended themselves, its fruit
was prematurely harvested. This
commenced the incarnation of Souls before the Pleroma had the chance to
complete itself. The rash harvest also
gave an untimely signal to the Serpent to return to the Garden with its “catch”
of Qlippot.
12. Afforded
the opportunity to penetrate the Tree’s protective “arms”, the Qlippot attached
themselves to branches on the Left (Female) side of the Tree, which expanded
into a new offshoot — the Tree of Good and Evil (aka the Tree of Mystery).
13. The Qlippot
mixed with the Souls of the Righteous in the Pleroma. In order to separate them from the Righteous
Souls, it became necessary for a number of generations of Adam’s progeny to be
born and to suffer Death.
When the Qlippot mixed with the
World Soul, they generated in it a sort of turbulence that disturbed its Peace
and upset its Equilibrium. But the Qlippot
could not penetrate into the Chashmal, the translucent core of the Soul that
remains in direct contact with the fountainhead of Righteousness. Instead, they formed an opaque covering to
hide the Light of the Chashmal. This is
the “Covering Cherub”. It is a false
selfhood, an alien persona that imprisons the Soul with fear, doubt and
shame. It instills in our Souls the
fear of reaching across the divide that separates us from others, keeping us
from those we desperately need to fill our inner voids. It fills our Souls with doubt of our eternal
pedigree, causing us to degrade ourselves to level of animals. And, most devastatingly, it makes us ashamed
of everything inside us that makes us unique, exciting, free and alive. This is the shame of “nakedness” that
afflicted our First Parents as the very first symptom of eating the forbidden
fruit.
Thus, the Covering Cherub
constitutes the foundation of the collective False Selfhood of mankind. And all of the many layers of humanity’s
collective and individual ego-personas are built on top of this
foundation. This is the meaning of the
composite Statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in the book of Daniel:
This
image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and
his thighs of brass,
His
legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.
Thou
sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon
his feet … and brake them to pieces.[39]
Beneath the layers of the False Selfhood,
which Daniel describes as consisting of clay and metals, lies the
“philosophers’ stone” of our true and eternal identity, the “fruit” of our
collective unity in the Body of the Supernal Man. When the Messiah appears, He will cut through
the strata of Qlippot obscuring His Body, just as Daniel envisions the Stone
smashing the Statue’s feet of clay.
Because he has so many layers of the
psyche to hide himself beneath, the Covering Cherub is elusive, evasive, and
chameleon-like. He is the source of all
that is cowardly and ambiguous in a man.
According to William Blake, the primary mission of Prophecy is to expose
the Covering Cherub, to compel him to assume a definite form. In the following passage, Blake refers to the
Cherub as the “Reactor”:
The Reactor hath hid himself thro envy. I behold him.
But you cannot behold him till he be reveald in his
System
Albions Reactor must have a Place prepard:
The Sleep of Death, till the Man of Sin &
Repentance be reveald.
Hidden in Albions Forests he lurks: he admits of no Reply
From
Of Action, for Obedience to destroy the Contraries
of
He hath compelld
Himself of
As we shall discuss later in this
book, the “Man of Sin and Repentance” — in whose individual persona the
Covering Cherub will finally reveal himself at the end of Time— is the figure
known in Christian prophecies as the “Antichrist”. Before the reign of the Messiah can begin,
the layers of false personas that lie between us and the Covering Cherub must
be stripped away, one by one. Scripture
depicts these false personas symbolically as the line of seven Kings of Edom
whose deaths are chronicled in the 36th Chapter of Genesis. We will encounter each of these Kings in our
next chapter, when we will venture, in the footsteps of Dante, into our own
allegorical descent into the Underworld.
But before we do, we should be reminded of our objective to remove the
“incrustations” obscuring the divine core of our Soul, the Chashmal. For the Chasmal retains the Image of the
Divine Man, represented by the eighth King of Edom who, unlike his
predecessors, is not consigned to Death.
As we’ve noted previously, the
eighth Edomite King is meant to be a prototype of the Messiah. His name, Hadar,
meaning “Beauty”, identifies him with the Sephirah Tipheret, which is the Heart
of the supernal Body of Man, Zer Anpin.
While no queens are mentioned in connection with his seven defunct
predecessors, Hadar is accounted as having a wife named Mehetabel, signifying one “rectified by God”. Rectification, of course, points us back in
the direction of the Covenant of Circumcision, the ritual excision of the false
covering that obscures the Divine Image in
In King Hadar and Queen Mehetabel,
we recognize the symbolic restoration of the Balance between the Male and
Female principles. Thus is reestablished
the “Peace” between the Sephirot Chesed/Mercy and Gevurah/Judgment that was
disrupted by the Qlippot’s infestation of the Tree of Life. This Peace is effected by the Sephira
Tipheret/Beauty, to which Hadar’s name refers.
As we touched upon briefly at the end of Chapter Two, Hadar’s name also
connects him to the visionary Jewish festival of Succoth, or Tabernacles. This eight-day festival involves a ritual
enactment of the rectification of the mystical Body of Man and the
reintegration of the World Soul.
In his/her left hand, the Succoth
celebrant takes the fruit of the “beautiful” (hadar) tree, a citron that is
held over the celebrant’s heart. The
citron represents the Head of the Female (Malkut) aligning with the Heart of
the Male (Zer Anpin) during their intercourse.
In his/her right hand, the celebrant holds something called a Lulav,
representing the Male principle. The
Lulav is a bundle consisting of the frond of a date palm wrapped around three
myrtle branches and two willow twigs.
The date palm represents the Tree of Good and Evil, which must be
rectified so that the flow of the “seed” of Righteous Souls from the Male to
the Female might resume. This theme is
presented as an allegory in the Biblical story of Tamar, whose name means “date
palm”. Deprived of her husbands’ seed by
the wickedness of Er and Onan, Tamar used her feminine wiles to conceive twin
sons by her father-in-law Judah, thereby sustaining the royal line that was to
culminate in David and Jesus.[41]
In the Kabbalah, the date palm of
the Lulav is also linked with the Cherubim who were stationed East of the
Garden of Eden to bar the way to the Tree of Life.[42] Since, as we said earlier, the Left and Right
sides of the Tree are considered to correspond to the compass directions North
and South, respectively, then East would be toward the top of the Tree. We know that the Garden is represented on the
Tree by Malkut, so to the East of the Garden would be Yesod, located just above
Malkut. It’s from Yesod that the seed of
Righteous Souls enter the Womb of Malkut.
Thus, it follows that the sword-wielding Cherubim — and, by association,
the Lulav’s date palm — signify an impediment to the incarnation of Souls, and
hence to the reconstitution of the Pleroma.
Again according to the Kabbalah, the
date palm functions to bar our way to the Tree of Life by setting up a network
of 32 “Watchers”, each of whom keeps an eye on one of the paths of the
Tree. This message is derived from a
rather enigmatic passage in Ecclesiastes, which speaks of the oppression of the
poor and the perversion of judgment in the king’s land due to the corruption of
the high officials who watch over the lower ones.[43] The Kabbalah also suggests that these
“Watchers” were the Fallen Angels whose sexual relations with the “daughters of
man” engendered the race of primeval Giants (Nephilim).[44]
The 32 paths of the Tree of Life are
mirrored by 32 inverted paths of the Tree of Good and Evil, with the date palm
being an emblem for the latter.
Together, therefore, the two Trees comprise 64 paths. Accordingly, when the Tree of Good and Evil
is ultimately rectified, all of these paths will be restored to the 64 Eternal
Forms which we discussed in Chapter Two.
We recall that these 64 Forms comprise the Elohim who created the
Universe over a period of 6 Days. The
Kabbalah teaches that the 64 Eternal Forms applied over the Creation period of
6 Days produced a 70-fold structure of Space/Time. These 70 Structures correspond to the 70
varieties of the date palm, each of which supposedly has its own distinctive
taste.[45]
With this background, we can
decipher the esoteric message of a pair of events that occurred in Exodus
shortly after the crossing of the
Now let’s get back to the ritual of
Succoth. We said the Female left hand of
the celebrant holds the citron fruit covering his/her heart, while the Male
right hand holds a date palm frond wrapped around three myrtle branches and two
willow twigs. We notice that the total
of five branches and twigs suggests the five levels of the Soul. The Kabbalists see the three myrtle branches
as connoting the Sephirot of Chesed, Gevurah and Tipheret — the triad that
establishes the Peace between Male and Female needed to release the flow of
Righteous Souls toward incarnation. The
two willow twigs, on the other hand, represent the paired Sephirot of Netzach
and Hod, which are seen to function in this setting like two kidneys, mixing
the essences of the two streams of fluid flowing into them.[47] It is here, in the “kidneys” or “reins” of
the metaphysical Body, therefore, that the impurities introduced by the Qlippot
may be mixed with the Souls of the Righteous and injected into the World
Soul. This process insures that we
incarnate Beings all receive some proportion of Darkness mixed in with the
Light of our Souls. In other words,
Calvinism notwithstanding, there are no predestined Elect or Damned Souls,
because we all get a share of the filth and the fidelity. It’s totally up to us what we make of it.
The First Jubilee
If the Sin of Adam and Eve involved
not waiting long enough to taste the fruit of the Tree of Life, then we have to
ask ourselves the question: How long
would have been long enough? As we
discussed earlier, the Law set forth in Leviticus stipulates that a tree must
be “circumcised” before its fruit is eaten.
The Law also requires that a male child be circumcised on the eighth day
after his birth. And we’ve just been
through several instances where we’ve seen the special status of the number
eight in connection with the process of “rectification” of Man’s collective
Body, a process for which Circumcision is a metaphor.
The reason for waiting eight days
before circumcising a male child is to insure that at least one Sabbath will be
observed beforehand. This has to do with
the principle that individual Souls are conceived on the Sabbath, when there is
Peace between the supernal Mother and Father.
In the case of the World Soul, we would naturally expect a more glorious
and extraordinary version of the Sabbath to accompany its conception. The Book of Jubilees (said to be written by
Moses based upon the revelation he received on
Again according to the Book of
Jubilees, Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit after the first “week” of the
first Jubilee Cycle. Adam had been
warned that, on the day he ate of that fruit, he would surely die. That “day”, however, would have been one day
by the Lord’s reckoning, which is one thousand of our years. Hence, Adam lived to be 930 years old, dying
70 years short of the end of his first “day”.[49] The “remainder” of Adam’s first day of life,
consisting of 70 years, then became the basis for the generations to follow,
during which the effects of his Sin would have to be purged and rectified. We’ve just seen how the rituals of Succoth
associate the number 70 with this process of rectification, and we’re well
aware of that 70 years is the natural life span of
And
it shall come to pass after the end of seventy years, that the Lord will visit
Once again, we have here the image
of an end-of-Time eucharistic meal, in which the sparks of Light spirited off
by the shattered Vessels of Lucifer’s host are to be “eaten” and assimilated
back into the World Soul.. The prophet
Daniel likewise speaks of a period of 70 “weeks” for the purgation of the Sin
of our First Parents:
Seventy
weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the
transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for
iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, an to seal up the vision
and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.[51]
We should
especially note in this passage the reference to “sealing up” Vision and
Prophecy. There can be no doubt that the
prophet was a student of the Kabbalah, since Vision and Prophecy refer to the
two Sephirot of Hod and Netzach which anchor the protective Arms of the Tree of
Life. Thus, Hod and Netzach would most
certainly need to be “sealed up” so that the Tree might securely bear the soul
of the “most Holy” Anointed One.
Daniel’s 70 “weeks” represent the 70 Jubilee Cycles destined to
transpire between the entry of God’s people into the Promised Land and the
ultimate fulfillment of the Promise by the establishment of the Messiah’s
In the period from the entry of
Continuing to count the Jubilee
cycles, beginning from the first Jubilee celebrated in the Holy Land in 1337
BC, we find that the 70th, and last, 50-year Jubilee Cycle began on Rosh
Hashanah of 1996 AD. It will end in the
final Year of Jubilee that will commence on Rosh Hashanah 2045. In the seven intervening Sabbath years —
2002/2003, 2009/2010, 2016/2017, 2023/2024, 2030/2031, 2037/2038, and 2044/2045
— mankind will have the opportunity to start stripping away its False Selfhood,
to begin uncovering its Covering Cherub, so that it will be prepared meet its
true and eternal Self, face-to-Face.
But before we can rise together to
look into that Face of Glory, we must first descend together through the layers
of Darkness which cover its Image in our collective Soul. How precipitous the descent proves to be will
depend on how soon we embark upon it. So
let’s begin at once!
Notes
[1] 1 Corinthians 15:26-28
[2] Even in a finite Universe, Einstein’s
equations of general relativity yield cosmological models in which only the
universal center is conducive to the development of intelligent observers. See
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The
Anthropic Cosmological Principle,
[3]
[4] Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1997, p.
141-142.
[5] Barrow and Tipler, op. cit., p. 252-253.
[6]
[7]
[8] Quoted by Plato in Theaetetus, 160d.
[9] Job 7:17
[10] Job 37:21-23
[11] Isaiah 6:3
[12] Bahir 63
[13] Psalms 45:13
[14] Psalms 87:1-5
[15] See Chapter 1, fn. 41
[16] Bava
Batra 16b
[17] Genesis 24:1
[18] Exodus 31:17
[19] Zohar,
Book of Concealed Mystery, ch. i., §5
[20] Isaiah 44:24
[21] Daniel 4:25
[22] John Milton,
[23] Deuteronomy 33:26-27
[24] Bahir 184
[25] Malachi 3:2-3
[26] 1 Corinthians 15:20-23
[27] Leviticus 19:23-25
[28] Genesis 49:10
[29] Zohar, op.cit.,
ch. i., §26
[30] The
Other Bible, Jewish Pseudepigrapha, W. Barnstone, ed. (HarperCollins 1984),
p.31.
[31] Genesis 2:21
[32] William Blake,
[33] William Blake,
[34] Exodus 17:8-16
[35] Bahir 135
[36] Robert Graves, The White Goddess (Noonday Press, 1995), p.98.
[37] Bahir 35 & 42
[38]
[39] Daniel 2:32-34
[40]
[41] Genesis 38
[42] Bahir 98; Genesis 3:24
[43] Bahir 95; Ecclesiastes 5:8
[44] Cf.
Genesis 6:1-4 and the Book of Jubilees
4:21
[45] Bahir 166
[46] Exodus 15:23-26
[47] Bahir 176-178
[48] Book of Jubilees 3:34
[49] Book of Jubilees 4:30
[50] Isaiah 23:17-18
[51] Daniel 9:24
