Chapter 4:
The SephirothThis chapter provides a detailed look at each of the ten
sephiroth and draws together material scattered over previous
chapters.Malkuth
-------
Malkuth is the Cinderella of the sephiroth. It is the
sephira most often ignored by beginners, the sephira most often
glossed over in Kabbalistic texts, and it is not only the most
immediate of the sephira but it is also the most complex, and for
sheer inscrutability it rivals Kether - indeed, there is a
Kabbalistic aphorism that "Kether is Malkuth, and Malkuth is in
Kether, but after another manner".
The word Malkuth means "Kingdom", and the sephira is the
culmination of a process of emanation whereby the creative power
of the Godhead is progressively structured and defined as it
moves down the Tree and arrives in a completed form in Malkuth.
Malkuth is the sphere of matter, substance, the real, physical
world. In the least compromising versions of materialist
philosophy (e.g. Hobbes) there is nothing beyond physical matter,
and from that viewpoint the Tree of Life beyond Malkuth does not
exist: our feelings of identity and self-consciousness are
nothing more than a by-product of chemical reactions in the
brain, and the mind is a complex automata which suffers from the
disease of metaphysical delusions. Kabbalah is *not* a
materialist model of reality, but when we examine Malkuth by
itself we find ourselves immersed in matter, and it is natural to
think in terms of physics, chemistry and molecular biology. The
natural sciences provide the most accurate models of matter and
the physical world that we have, and it would be foolishness of
the first order to imagine that Kabbalah can provide better
explanations of the nature of matter on the basis of a study of
the text of the Old Testament. Not that I under-rate the
intuition which has gone into the making of Kabbalah over the
centuries, but for practical purposes the average university
science graduate knows (much) more about the material stuff of
the world than medieval Kabbalists, and a grounding in modern
physics is as good a way to approach Malkuth as any other.
For those who are not comfortable with physics there are
alternative, more traditional ways of approaching Malkuth. The
magical image of Malkuth is that of a young woman crowned and
throned. The woman is Malkah, the Queen, Kallah, the Bride. She
is the inferior mother, a reflection and realisation of the
superior mother Binah. She is the Queen who inhabits the Kingdom,
and the Bride of the Microprosopus. She is Gaia, Mother Earth,
but of course she is not only the substance of this world; she is
the body of the entire physical universe.
Some care is required when assigning Mother/Earth goddesses
to Malkuth, because some of them correspond more closely to the
superior mother Binah. There is a close and deep connection
between Malkuth and Binah which results in the two sephiroth
sharing similar correspondences, and one of the oldest
Kabbalistic texts [1] has this to say about Malkuth:"The title of the tenth path [Malkuth] is the Resplendent
Intelligence. It is called this because it is exalted above
every head from where it sits upon the throne of Binah. It
illuminates the numinosity of all lights and causes to
emanate the Power of the archetype of countenances or
forms."One of the titles of Binah is Khorsia, or Throne, and the image
which this text provides is that Binah provides the framework
upon which Malkuth sits. We will return to this later. Binah
contains the potential of form in the abstract, while Malkuth is
is the fullest realisation of form, and both sephiroth share the
correspondences of heaviness, limitation, finiteness, inertia,
avarice, silence, and death.
The female quality of Malkuth is often identified with the
Shekhinah, the female spirit of God in the creation, and
Kabbalistic literature makes much of the (carnal) relationship of
God and the Shekhinah. Waite [7] mentions that the relationship
between God and Shekhinah is mirrored in the relationship between
man and woman, and provides a great deal of information on both
the Shekhinah and what he quaintly calls "The Mystery of Sex".
After the exile of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Kabbalists
identified their own plight with the fate of the Shekhinah, and
she is pictured as being cast out into matter in much the same
way as the Gnostics pictured Sophia, the outcast divine wisdom.
The doctrine of the Shekhinah within Kabbalah and within Judaism
as a whole is complex and it is something I don't feel competent
to comment further on; more information can be found in [3] &
[7].
Malkuth is the sphere of the physical elements and
Kabbalists still use the four-fold scheme which dates back at
least as far as Empedocles and probably the Ark. The four
elements correspond to four readily-observable states of matter:solid - earth
liquid - water
gas - air
plasma - fire/electric arc (lightning)In addition it is not uncommon to include a fifth element so
rarified and arcane that most people (self included) are pushed
to say what it is; the fifth element is aethyr (or ether) and is
sometimes called spirit.
The amount of material written about the elements is
enormous, and rather than reproduce in bulk what is relatively
well-known I will provide a rough outline so that those readers
who aren't familiar with Kabbalah will realise I am talking about
approximately the same thing as they have seen before. A detailed
description of the traditional medieval view of the four elements
can be found in "The Magus" [2]. The hierarchy of elemental
powers can be found in "777" [4] and in Golden Dawn material [5]
- I have summarised a few useful items below:Element Fire Air Water Earth
God Name Elohim Jehovah Eheieh Agla
Archangel Michael Raphael Gabriel Uriel
King Djin Paralda Nichsa Ghob
Elemental Salamanders Sylphs Undines Gnomes
It amused me to notice that the section on the elemental kingdoms
in Farrar's "What Witches Do" [6] had been taken by Alex Saunders
lock, stock and barrel from traditional Kabbalistic and CM
sources.
The elements in Malkuth are arranged as follows:South
Fire
East Zenith Aethyr+ West
Air Nadir Aethyr- Water
North
EarthI have rotated the cardinal points through 180 degrees from their
customary directions so that it is easier to see how the elements
fit on the lower face of the Tree of Life:Tiphereth
Fire
Hod Yesod Netzach
Air Aethyr Water
Malkuth
EarthIt is important to distinguish between the elements in Malkuth,
where we are talking about real substance (the water in your
body, the breath in your lungs), and the elements on the Tree,
where we are using traditional correspondences *associated* with
the elements, e.g.:Earth: solid, stable, practical, down-to-earth
Water: sensitive, intuitive, emotional, caring, fertile
Air: vocal, communicative, intellectual
Fire: energetic, daring, impetuous
Positive Aethyr: glue, binding, plastic
Negative Aethyr: unbinding, dissolution, disintegration
Aethyr or Spirit is enigmatic, and I tend to think of it in terms
of the forces which bind matter together. It is almost certainly
a coincidence (but nevertheless interesting) that there are four
fundamental forces - gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear
& strong nuclear - known to date, and current belief is that they
can be unified into one fundamental force. On a slightly more
arcane tack, Barret [2] has this to say about Aethyr:"Now seeing that the soul is the essential form,
intelligible and uncorruptible, and is the first mover of
the body, and is moved itself; but that the body, or matter,
is of itself unable and unfit for motion, and does very much
degenerate from the soul, it appears that there is a need of
a more excellent medium:- now such a medium is conceived to
be the spirit of the world, or that which some call a
quintessence; because it is not from the four elements, but
a certain first thing, having its being above and beside
them. There is, therefore, such a kind of medium required to
be, by which celestial souls [e.g. forms] may be joined to
gross bodies, and bestow upon them wonderful gifts. This
spirit is in the same manner, in the body of the world, as
our spirit is in our bodies; for as the powers of our soul
are communicated to the members of the body by the medium of
the spirit, so also the virtue of the soul of the world is
diffused, throughout all things, by the medium of the
universal spirit; for there is nothing to be found in the
whole world that hath not a spark of the virtue thereof."Aethyr underpins the elements like a foundation and its
attribution to Yesod should be obvious, particularly as it forms
the linking role between the ideoplastic world of "the Astral
Light" [8] and the material world. Aethyr is often thought to
come in two flavours - positive Aethyr, which binds, and negative
Aethyr, which unbinds. Negative Aethyr is a bit like the
Universal Solvent, and requires as much care in handling ;-}
Working with the physical elements in Malkuth is one of the
most important areas of applied magic, dealing as it does with
the basic constituents of the real world. The physical elements
are tangible and can be experience in a very direct way through
recreations such as caving, diving, parachuting or firewalking;
they bite back in a suitably humbling way, and they provide CMs
with an opportunity to join the neo-pagans in the great outdoors.
Our bodies themselves are made from physical stuff, and there are
many Raja Yoga-like exercises which can be carried out using the
elements as a basis for work on the body. If you can stand his
manic intensity (Exercise 1: boil an egg by force of will) then
Bardon [9] is full of good ideas.
Malkuth is often associated with various kinds of intrinsic
evil, and to understand this attitude (which I do not share) it
is necessary to confront the same question as thirteenth century
Kabbalists: can God be evil? The answer to this question was
(broadly speaking) "yes", but Kabbalists have gone through many
strange gyrations in an attempt to avoid what was for many an
unacceptable conclusion. It was difficult to accept that famine,
war, disease, prejudice, hate, death could be a part of a perfect
being, and there had to be some way to account for evil which did
not contaminate divine perfection. One approach was to sweep evil
under the carpet, and in this case the carpet was Malkuth.
Malkuth became the habitation for evil spirits.
If one examines the structure of the Tree without prejudice
then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that evil is quite
adequately accounted for, and there is no need to shuffle evil
to the periphery of the Tree like a cleaner without a dustpan.
The emanation of any sephirah from Chokhmah downwards can
manifest as good or evil depending on circumstances and the point
of view of those affected by the energy involved. This appears to
have been understood even at the time of the writing of the
"Zohar", where the mercy of God is constantly contrasted with the
severity of God, and the author makes it clear that one has to
balance the other - you cannot have the mercy without the
severity. On the other hand, the severity of God is persistently
identified with the rigours of existence (form, finiteness,
limitation), and while it is true that many of the things which
have been identified with evil are a consequence of the
finiteness of things, of being finite beings in a world of finite
resources governed by natural laws with inflexible causality, it
not correct to infer (as some have) that form itself is
*intrinsically* evil.
The notion that form and matter are *intrinsically* evil, or
in some way imperfect or not a part of God, may have reached
Kabbalah from a number of sources. Scholem comments:"The Kabbalah of the early thirteenth century was the
offspring of a union between an older and essentially
Gnostic tradition represented by the book "Bahir", and the
comparatively modern element of Jewish Neo-Platonism."There is the possibility that the Kabbalists of Provence (who
wrote or edited the "Sepher Bahir") were influenced by the
Cathars, a late form of Manicheanism. Whether the source was
Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Manicheanism or some combination of
all three, Kabbalah has imported a view of matter and form which
distorts the view of things portrayed by the Tree of Life, and so
Malkuth ends up as a kind of cosmic outer darkness, a bin for all
the dirt, detritus, broken sephira and dirty hankies of the
creation. Form is evil, the Mother of Form is female, women are
definitely and indubitably evil, and Malkuth is the most female
of the sephira, therefore Malkuth is most definitely evil...quod
erat demonstrandum. By the time we reach the time of S.L. Mathers
and the Golden Dawn there is a complete Tree of evil demonic
Qlippoth *underneath* Malkuth as a relection of the "good" Tree
above it. I believe this may have something to do with the fact
that meditations on Malkuth can easily become meditations on
Binah, and meditations on Binah have a habit of slipping into the
Abyss, and once in the Abyss it is easy to trawl up enough junk
to "discover" an averse Tree "underneath" Malkuth. This view of
the Qlippoth, or Shells, as active, demonic evil has become
pervasive, and the more energy people put into the demonic Tree,
the less there is for the original. Abolish the Qlippoth as
demonic forces, and the Tree of Life comes alive with its full
power of good *and* evil. The following quotation from Bischoff
[10] (speaking of the Sephiroth) provides a more rational view of
the Qlippoth:"Since their energy [of the sephiroth] shows three degrees
of strength (highest, middle and lowest degree), their
emanations group accordingly in sequence. We usually imagine
the image of a descending staircase. The Kabbalist
prefers to see this fact as a decreasing alienation of the
central primeval energy. Consequently any less perfect
emanation is to him the cover or shell (Qlippah) of the
preceeding, and so the last (furthest) emanations being the
so-called material things are the shell of the total and are
therefore called (in the actual sense) Qlippoth."This is my own view; the shell of something is the accretion of
form which it accumulates as energy comes down the Lightning
Flash. If the shell can be considered by itself then it is a dead
husk of something which could be alive - it preserves all the
structure but there is no energy in it to bring it alive. With
this interpretation the Qlippoth are to be found everywhere: in
relationships, at work, at play, in ritual, in society. Whenever
something dies and people refuse to recognise that it is dead,
and cling to the lifeless husk of whatever it was, then you get a
Qlippah. For this reason one of the vices of Malkuth is Avarice,
not only in the sense of trying to acquire material things, but
also in the sense of being unwilling to let go of anything, even
when it has become dead and worthless. The Qlippah of Malkuth is
what you would get if the Sun went out: Stasis, life frozen into
immobility.
The other vice of Malkuth is Inertia, in the sense of
"active resistance to motion; sluggish; disinclined to move or
act". It is visible in most people at one time or another, and
tends to manifest when a task is new, necessary, but not
particularly exciting, there is no excitement or "natural energy"
to keep one fired up, and one has to keep on pushing right to the
finish. For this reason the obligation of Malkuth is (has
to be) self-discipline.
The virtue of Malkuth is Discrimination, the ability to
perceive differences. The ability to perceive differences is a
necessity for any living organism, whether a bacteria able to
sense the gradient of a nutrient or a kid working out how much
money to wheedle out of his parents. As Malkuth is the final
realisation of form, it is the sphere where our ability to
distinguish between differences is most pronounced. The capacity
to discriminate is so fundamental to survival that it works
overtime and finds boundaries and distinctions everywhere - "you"
and "me", "yours" and "mine", distinctions of "property" and
"value" and "territory" which are intellectual abstractions on
one level (i.e. not real) and fiercely defended realities on
another (i.e. very real indeed). I am not going to attempt a
definition of real and unreal, but it is the case that much of
what we think of as real is unreal, and much of what we think of
as unreal is real, and we need the same discrimination which
leads us into the mire to lead us out again. Some people think
skin colour is a real measure of intelligence; some don't. Some
people think gender is a real measure of ability; some don't.
Some people judge on appearances; some don't. There is clearly a
difference between a bottle of beer and a bottle of piss, but is
the colour of the *bottle* important? What *is* important? What
differences are real, what matters? How much energy do we devote
to things which are "not real". Am I able to perceive how much I
am being manipulated by a fixation on unreality? Are my goals in
life "real", or will they look increasingly silly and immature
as I grow older? For that matter, is Kabbalah "real"? Does it
provide a useful model of reality, or is it the remnant of a
world-view which should have been put to rest centuries ago? One
of the primary exercises of an initiate into Malkuth is a
thorough examination of the question "What is real?".
The Spiritual Experience of Malkuth is variously the
Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), or
the Vision of the HGA (depending on who you believe). I vote for
the Vision of the HGA in Malkuth, and the Knowledge and
Conversation in Tiphereth. What is the HGA? According to the
Gnosticism of Valentinus each person has a guardian angel who
accompanies that individual throught their life and reveals the
gnosis; the angel is in a sense the divine Self. This belief is
identical to what I was taught by the person who taught me
Kabbalah, so some part of Gnosticism lives on. The current
tradition concerning the HGA almost certainly entered the Western
Esoteric Tradition as a consequence of S.L. Mather's translation
[11] of "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage",
which contains full details of a lengthy ritual to attain the
Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA. This ritual has had an
important influence on twentieth century magicians and it is
often attempted and occasionally completed.
The powers of Malkuth are invoked by means of the names
Adonai ha Aretz and Adonai Melekh, which mean "Lord of the World"
and "The Lord who is King" respectively. The power is transmitted
through the world of Creation by the archangel Sandalphon, who is
sometimes referred to as "the Long Angel", because his feet are
in Malkuth and his head in Kether, which gives him an opportunity
to chat to Metatron, the Angel of the Presence. The angel order
is the Ashim, or Ishim, sometimes translated as the "souls of
fire", supposedly the souls of righteous men and women.In concluding this section on Malkuth, it worth emphasising that
I have chosen deliberately not to explore some major topics
because there are sufficient threads for anyone with an interest
to pick up and follow for themselves. The image of Malkuth as
Mother Earth provides a link between Kabbalah and a numinous
archetype with a deep significance for some. The image of Malkuth
as physical substance provides a link into the sciences, and it
is the case that at the limits of theoretical physics one's
intuitions seem to be slipping and sliding on the same reality as
in Kabbalah. The image of Malkuth as the sphere of the elements
is the key to a large body of practical magical technique which
varies from yoga-like concentration on the bodily elements, to
nature-oriented work in the great outdoors. Lastly, just as the
design of a building reveals much about its builders, so Malkuth
can reveal a great deal about Kether - the bottom of the Tree and
the top have much in common.References:
[1] Westcott, W. Wynn, ed. "Sepher Yetzirah", many editions.
[2] Barrett, Francis, "The Magus", Citadel 1967.
[3] Scholem, Gershom G., "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism",
Schocken 1974[4] Crowley, A, "777", an obscure reprint.
[5] Regardie, Israel, "The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic",
Falcon, 1984.[6] Farrar, Stewart, "What Witches Do", Peter Davies 1971.
[7] Waite, A.E, "The Holy Kabbalah", Citadel.
[8] Levi, Eliphas, "Transcendental Magic", Rider, 1969.
[9] Bardon, Franz, "Initiation into Hermetics", Dieter
Ruggeberg 1971[10] Bischoff, Dr. Erich, "The Kabbala", Weiser 1985.
[11] Mathers, S.L., "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin
the Mage", Dover 1975.Yesod
-----Yesod means "foundation", and that is what Yesod is: it is
the hidden infrastructure whereby the emanations from the
remainder of the Tree are transmitted to the sephira Malkuth.
Just as a large building has its air-conditioning ducts, service
tunnels, conduits, electrical wiring, hot and cold water pipes,
attic spaces, lift shafts, winding rooms, storage tanks, a
telephone exchange etc, so does the Creation, and the external,
visible world of phenomenal reality rests (metaphorically
speaking) upon a hidden foundation of occult machinery.
Meditations on the nature of Yesod tend to be full of secret
tunnels and concealed mechanisms, as if the Creation was a Gothic
mansion with a secret door behind every mirror, a passage in
every wall, a pair of hidden eyes behind every portrait, and a
subterranean world of forgotten tunnels leading who knows where.
For this reason the Spiritual Experience of Yesod is aptly named
"The Vision of the Machinery of the Universe".
Many Yesod correspondences reinforce this notion of a
foundation, of something which lies behind, supports and gives
shape to phenomenal reality. The magical image of Yesod is of "a
beautiful naked man, very strong". The image which springs to
mind is that of a man with the world resting on his shoulders,
like one of the misrepresentations of the Titan Atlas (who
actually held up the heavens, not the world). The angel order of
Yesod is the Cherubim, the Strong Ones, the archangel is Gabriel,
the Strong or Mighty One of God, and the God-name is Shaddai el
Chai, the Almighty Living God.
The idea of a foundation suggests that there is a substance
which lies behind physical matter and "in-forms it" or "holds it
together", something less structured, more plastic, more refined
and rarified, and this "fifth element" is often called aethyr. I
will not attempt to justify aethyr in terms of current physics
(the closest concept I have found is the hypothesised Higgs
field); it is a convenient handle on a concept which has enormous
intuitive appeal to many magicians, who, when asked how magic
works, tend to think in terms of a medium which is directly
receptive to the will, something which is plastic and can be
shaped through concentration and imagination, and which transmits
their artificially created forms into reality. Eliphas Levi
called this medium the "Astral Light". It is also natural to
imagine that mind, consciousness, and the soul have their
habitation in this substance, and there are volumes detailing the
properties of the "Etheric Body", the "Astral Body", the "Causal
Body" [1,2] and so on. I don't take this stuff too seriously, but
I do like to work with the kind of natural intuitions which occur
spontaneously and independently in a large number of people -
there is power in these intuitions - and it is a mistake to
invalidate them because they sound cranky. When I talk about
aethyr or the Astral Light, I mean there is an ideoplastic
substance which is subjectively real to many magicians, and
explanations of magic at the level of Yesod revolve around
manipulating this substance using desire, imagination and will.
The fundamental nature of Yesod is that of *interface*; it
interfaces the rest of the Tree of Life to Malkuth. The interface
is bi-directional; there are impulses coming down from Kether,
and echoes bouncing back from Malkuth. The idea of interface is
illustrated in the design of a computer system: a computer with a
multitude of worlds hidden within it is a source of heat and
repair bills unless it has peripheral interfaces and device
drivers to interface the world outside the computer to the world
"inside" it; add a keyboard and a mouse and a monitor and a
printer and you have opened the door into another reality. Our
own senses have the same characteristic of being a bi-directional
interface through which we experience the world, and for this
reason the senses correspond to Yesod, and not only the five
traditional senses - the "sixth sense" and the "second sight" are
given equal status, and so Yesod is also the sphere of
instinctive psychism, of clairvoyance, precognition, divination
and prophecy. It is also clear from accounts of lucid dreaming
(and personal experience) that we possess the ability to perceive
an inner world as vividly as the outer, and so to Yesod belongs
the inner world of dreams, daydreams and vivid imagination, and
one of the titles of Yesod is "The Treasure House of Images".
To Yesod is attributed Levanah, the Moon, and the lunar
associations of tides, flux and change, occult influence, and
deeply instinctive and sometimes atavistic behaviour -
possession, mediumship, lycanthropy and the like. Although
Yesod is the foundation and it has associations with strength, it
is by no means a rigid scaffold supporting a world in stasis.
Yesod supports the world just as the sea supports all the life
which lives in it and sails upon it, and just as the sea has its
irresistable currents and tides, so does Yesod. Yesod is the most
"occult" of the sephiroth, and next to Malkuth it is the most
magical, but compared with Malkuth its magic is of a more subtle,
seductive, glamorous and ensnaring kind. Magicians are drawn to
Yesod by the idea that if reality rests on a hidden foundation,
then by changing the foundation it is possible to change the
reality. The magic of Yesod is the magic of form and appearance,
not substance; it is the magic of illusion, glamour,
transformation, and shape-changing. The most sophisticated
examples of this are to be found in modern marketing, advertising
and image consultancies. I do not jest. My tongue is not even
slightly in my cheek. The following quote was taken from this
morning's paper [3]:Although the changes look cosmetic, those responsible for
creating corporate image argue that a redesign of a
company's uniform or name is just the visible sign of a much
larger transformation."The majority of people continue to misunderstand and think
that it is just a logo, rather than understanding that a
corporate identity programme is actually concerned with the
very commercial objective of having a strong personality and
single-minded, focussed direction for the whole
organisation, " said Fiona Gilmore, managing director of the
design company Lewis Moberly. "It's like planting an acorn
and then a tree grows. If you create the right *foundation*
(my itals) then you are building a whole culture for the
future of an organisation."I don't know what Ms. Gilmore studies in her spare time, but the
idea that it is possible to manipulate reality by manipulating
symbols and appearances is entirely magical. The same article on
corporate identity continues as follows:"The scale of the BT relaunch is colossal. The new logo will
be painted on more than 72,000 vehicles and trailers, as
well as 9,000 properties.
The company's 92,000 public payphones will get new decals,
and its 90 shops will have to changed, right down to the
yellow door handles. More than 50,000 employees are likely
to need new uniforms or "image clothing".Note the emphasis on *image*. The company in question (British
Telecom) is an ex-public monopoly with an appalling customer
relations problem, so it is changing the colour of its
door handles! This is Yesodic magic on a gigantic scale.
The image manipulators gain most of their power from the
mass-media. The mass-media correspond to two sephiroth: as a
medium of communication they belong in Hod, but as a foundation
for our perception of reality they belong in Yesod. Nowadays most
people form their model of what the world (in the large) is like
via the media. There are a few individuals who travel the world
sufficiently to have a model based on personal experience, but
for most people their model of what most of the world is like is
formed by newspapers, radio and television; that is, the media
have become an extended (if inaccurate) instrument of perception.
Like our "normal" means of perception the media are highly
selective in the variety and content of information provided, and
they can be used by advertising agencies and other manipulative
individuals to create foundations for new collective realities.
While on the subject of changing perception to assemble new
realities, the following quote by "Don Juan" [4] has a definite
Kabbalistic flavour:"The next truth is that perception takes place," he went on,
"because there is in each of us an agent called the
assemblage point that selects internal and external
emanations for alignment. The particular alignment that we
perceive as the world is the product of a specific spot
where our assemblage point is located on our cocoon."One of the titles of Yesod is "The Receptacle of the Emanations",
and its function is precisely as described above - Yesod is the
assemblage point which assembles the emanations of the internal
and the external.
In addition to the deliberate, magical manipulation of
foundations, there are other important areas of magic relevant to
Yesod. Raw, innate psychism is an ability which tends to improve
as more attention is devoted to creative visualisation, focussed
meditation (on Tarot cards for example), dreams (e.g. keeping a
dream diary), and divination. Divination is an important
technique to practice even if you feel you are terrible at it
(and especially if you think it is nonsense), because it
reinforces the idea that it is permissible to "let go" and
intuite meanings into any pattern. Many people have difficulty
doing this, feeling perhaps that they will be swamped with
unreason (recalling Freud's fear, expressed to Jung, of needing a
bulwark against the "black mud of occultism"), when in reality
their minds are swamped with reason and could use a holiday. Any
divination system can be used, but systems which emphasise pure
intuition are best (e.g. Tarot, runes, tea-leaves, flights of
birds, patterns on the wallpaper, smoke. I heard of a Kabbalist
who threw a cushion into the air and carried out divination on
the basis of the number of pieces of foam stuffing which fell
out). Because Yesod is a kind of aethyric reflection of the
physical world, the image of and precursor to reality, mirrors
are an important tool for Yesod magic. Quartz crystals are also
used, probably because of the use of crystal balls for
divination, but also because quartz crystal and amethyst have a
peculiarly Yesodic quality in their own right. The average New
Age shop filled with crystals, Tarot cards, silver jewelry (lunar
association), perfumes, dreamy music, and all the glitz, glamour
and glitter of a daemonic magpie's nest, is like a temple to
Yesod. Mirrors and crystals are used passively as focii for
receptivity, but they can also be used actively for certain kinds
of aethyric magic - there is an interesting book on making and
using magic mirrors which builds on the kind of elemental magical
work carried out in Malkuth [5].
Yesod has an important correspondence with the sexual
organs. The correspondence occurs in three ways. The first way is
that when the Tree of Life is placed over the human body, Yesod
is positioned over the genitals. The author of the Zohar is quite
explicit about "the remaining members of the Microprosopus", to
the extent that the relevant paragraphs in Mather's translation
of "The Lesser Holy Assembly" remain in Latin to avoid offending
Victorian sensibilities.
The second association of Yesod with the genitals arises
from the union of the Microprosopus and his Bride. This is
another recurring theme in Kabbalah, and the symbolism is complex
and refers to several distinct ideas, from the relationship
between man and wife to an internal process within the body of
God: e.g [6]."When the Male is joined with the Female, they both
constitute one complete body, and all the Universe is in a
state of happiness, because all things receive blessing from
their perfect body. And this is an Arcanum."or, referring to the Bride:
"And she is mitigated, and receiveth blessing in that place
which is called the Holy of Holies below."or, referring to the "member":
"And that which floweth down into that place where it is
congregated, and which is emitted through that most holy
Yesod, Foundation, is entirely white, and therefore is it
called Chesed.
Thence Chesed entereth into the Holy of Holies; as it is
written Ps. cxxxiii. 3 'For there Tetragrammaton commanded
the blessing, even life for evermore.'"It is not difficult to read a great deal into paragraphs like
this, and there are many more in a similar vein. Suffice to say
that the Microprosopus is often identified with the sephira
Tiphereth, the Bride is the sephira Malkuth, and the point of
union between them is obviously Yesod.
The third and more abstract association between Yesod and
the sexual organs arises because the sexual organs are a
mechanism for perpetuating the *form* of a living organism. In
order to get close to what is happening in sexual reproduction it
is worth asking the question "What is a computer program?". Well,
a computer program indisputably begins as an idea; it is not a
material thing. It can be written down in various ways; as an
abstract specification in set theoretic notation akin to pure
mathematics, or as a set of recursive functions in lambda
calculus; it could be written in several different high level
languages - Pascal, C, Prolog, LISP, ADA, ML etc. Are they all
they same program? Computer scientists wrestle with this problem:
can we show that two different programs written in two different
languages are in some sense functionally identical? It isn't
trivial to do this because it asks fundamental questions about
language (any language) and meaning, but it is possible in
limited cases to produce two apparently different programs
written in different languages and assert that they are
identical. Whatever the program is, it seems to exist
independently of any particular language, so what is the program
and where is it? Let us ignore that chestnut and go on to the
next level. Suppose we write the program down. We could do it
with a pencil. We could punch holes in paper. We could plant
trees in a pattern in a field. We can line up magnetic domains.
We can burn holes in metal foil. I could have it tattooed on my
back. We can transform it into radically different forms (that is
what compilers and assemblers do). It obviously isn't tied to any
physical representation either. What about the computer it runs
on? Well, it could be a conventional one made with CMOS chips
etc.....but aren't there a lot of different kinds and makes of
computer, and they can all run the same program. It is also quite
practical to build computers which *don't* use electrons - you
could use mechanics or fluids or ball bearings - all you need to
do is produce something with the functionality of a Turing
machine, and that isn't hard. So not only is the program not tied
to any particular physical representation, but the same goes for
the computer itself, and what we are left with is two puffs of
smoke. On another level this is crazy; computers are real, they
do real things in the real world, and the programs which make
them work are obviously real too....aren't they?
Now apply the same kind of scrutiny to living organisms, and
the mechanism of reproduction. Take a good look at nucleic acids,
enzymes, proteins etc., and ask the same kind of questions. I am
not implying that life is a sort of program, but what I am
suggesting is that if you try to get close to what constitutes a
living organism you end up with another puff of smoke and a
handful of atoms which could just as well be ball-bearings or
fluids or....The thing that is being perpetuated through sexual
reproduction is something quite abstract and immaterial; it is an
abstract form preserved and encoded in a particular pattern of
chemicals, and if I was asked which was more real, the transient
collection of chemicals used, or the abstract form itself, I
would answer "the form". But then, I am a programmer, and I would
say that.
I find it astonishing that there are any hard-core
materialists left in the world. All the important stuff seems to
exist at the level of puffs of smoke, what Kabbalists call form.
Roger Penrose, one of the most eminent mathematicians living has
this to say [7]:"I have made no secret of the fact that my sympathies lie
strongly with the Platonic view that mathematical truth is
absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made
criteria; and that mathematical objects have a timeless
existence of their own, not dependent on human society nor
on particular physical objects.""Ah Ha!" cry the materialists, "At least the atoms are
real." Well, they are until you start pulling them apart with
tweezers and end up with a heap of equations which turn out to be
the linguistic expression of an idea. As Einstein said, "The most
incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible", that is, capable of being described in some
linguistic form.
I am not trying to convince anyone of the "rightness" of the
Kabbalistic viewpoint. What I am trying to do is show that the
process whereby form is impressed on matter (the relationship
between Yesod and Malkuth) is not arcane, theosophical mumbo-
jumbo; it is an issue which is alive and kicking, and the closer
we get to "real things" (and that certainly includes living
organisms), the better the Kabbalistic model (that form precedes
manifestation, that there is a well-defined process of form-ation
with the "real world" as an outcome) looks.The illusion of Yesod is security, the kind of security which
forms the foundation of our personal existence in the world. On a
superficial level our security is built out of relationships, a
source of income, a place to live, a vocation, personal power and
influence etc, but at a deeper level the foundation of personal
identity is built on a series of accidents, encounters and
influences which create the illusion of who we are, what we
believe in, and what we stand for. There is a warm, secure
feeling of knowing what is right and wrong, of doing the right
thing, of living a worthwhile life in the service of worthwhile
causes, of having a uniquely privileged vantage point from which
to survey the problems of life (with all the intolerance and
incomprehension of other people which accompanies this insight),
and conversely there are feelings of despair, depression, loss of
identity, and existential terror when a crack forms in the
illusion, and reality shows through - Castaneda calls it "the
crack in the world". The smug, self-perpetuating illusion which
masquerades as personal identity at the level of Yesod is the
most astoundingly difficult thing to shift or destroy. It fights
back with all the resources of the personality, it will
enthusiastically embrace any ally which will help to shore up its
defenses - religious, political or scientific ideology;
psychological, sociological, metaphysical and theosophical
claptrap (e.g. Kabbalah); the law and popular morality; in fact,
any beliefs which give it the power to retain its identity,
uniqueness and integrity. Because this parasite of the soul uses
religion (and its esoteric offshoots) to sustain itself they have
little or no power over it and become a major part of the
problem.
There are various ways of overcoming this personal demon
(Carroll [8], in an essay on the subject, calls it Choronzon),
and the two I know best are the cataclysmic and the abrasive. The
first method involves a shock so extreme that it is impossible to
be the same person again, and if enough preparation has gone
before then it is possible to use the shock to rebuild oneself.
In some cases this doesn't happen; I have noticed that many
people with very rigid religious beliefs talk readily about
having suffered traumatic experiences, and the phenomenon of
hysterical conversion among soldiers suffering from war neuroses
is well known. The other method, the abrasive, is to wear away
the demon of self-importance, to grind it into nothing by doing
(for example) something for someone else for which one receives
no thanks, praise, reward, or recognition. The task has to be big
enough and awful enough to become a demon in its own right and
induce all the correct feelings of compulsion (I have to do
this), helplessness (I'll never make it), indignation (what's
the point, it's not my problem anyway), rebellion (I won't, I
won't, not anymore), more compulsion (I can't give up), self-pity
(how did I get into this?), exhaustion (Oh No! Not again!),
despair (I can't go on), and finally a kind of submission when
one's demon hasn't the energy to put up a struggle any more and
simply gives up. The woman who taught me Kabbalah used both the
cataclysmic and the abrasive methods on her students with
malicious glee - I will discuss this in more detail in the
section on Tiphereth.
The virtue of Yesod is independence, the ability to make our
own foundations, to continually rebuild ourselves, to reject the
security of comfortable illusions and confront reality without
blinking.
The vice of Yesod is idleness. This can be contrasted with
the inertia of Malkuth. A stone is inert because it lacks the
capacity to change, but in most circumstances people can change
and can't be bothered. At least, not today. Yesod has a dreamy,
illusory, comfortable, *seductive* quality, as in the Isle of the
Lotus Eaters - how else could we live as if death and personal
annihilation only happened to other people?
The Qlippothic aspect of Yesod occurs when foundations are
rotten and disintegrating and only the superficial appearance
remains unchanged - Dorian Gray springs to mind, or cases where
the brain is damaged and the body remains and carries out basic
instinctive functions, but the person is dead as far as other
people are concerned. Organisations are just as prone to this as
people.[1] A.E. Powell, "The Etheric Double", Theosophical Publishing
House, 1925[2] A.E. Powell, "The Astral Body", Theosophical Publishing
House, 1927[3] "It's the Image Men We Answer To", The Sunday Times, 6th.
Jan 1991[4] Castenada, Carlos, "The Fire from Within", Black Swan, 1985.
[5] N. R. Clough, "How to Make and Use Magic Mirrors", Aquarian
1977[6] S.L. Mathers, "The Kabbalah Unveiled", Routledge & Kegan Paul
1981[7] Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind", Oxford University
Press 1989[8] Peter J. Carroll, "Psychonaut", Samuel Weiser 1987.
Hod & Netzach
-------------"Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
The possibility of occurring in states of affairs
is the form of an object.
Form is the possibility of structure."
Wittgenstein"Since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you."
E.E. CummingsThe title of the sephira Hod is sometimes translated as
Splendour and sometimes as Glory. The title of the sephira
Netzach is usually translated as Victory, sometimes as Endurance,
and occasionally as Eternity. Although there have been many
attempts to explain the titles of this pair of sephiroth, I am
not aware of a convincing explanation.
The two sephiroth correspond to the legs and like the legs
are normally taken as a pair and not individually. They
complement another but are not opposites any more than force and
form are opposites. This pair of sephiroth provide the first
example of the polarity of form and force encountered when
ascending back up the lightning flash from the sephira Malkuth.
Neither quality manifests in a pure state, as form and force are
thoroughly mixed together at the level of Hod and Netzach: the
force aspect represented by Netzach is differentiated (an example
of form) into a multitude of forces, and the form aspect
represented by Hod acts dynamically (an example of force) by
synthesising new forms and structures. Both sephiroth represent
the plurality of consciousness at this level, and in older texts
they are referred to as the "armies" or "hosts". To understand
why they are referred to in this way it is necessary to look at
an archaic aspect of Kabbalistic symbolism whereby the Tree of
Life is a representation of kingship.
One of the titles of Tiphereth is Melekh, or king. This king
is the child of Chokhmah (Abba, the father) and Binah (Aima, the
Mother) and hence a son of God who wears the crown of Kether. The
kingdom is the sephira Malkuth, at the same time queen (Malkah)
and bride (Kallah). In his right hand the king wields the sword
of justice (corresponding to Gevurah), and in his left the
sceptre of authority (corresponding to Chesed), and he rules over
the armies or hosts (Tzaba), which are Hod and Netzach. The use
of kingship as a metaphor to convey what the sephiroth mean
obscures as much as it reveals, but it is an unavoidable piece of
Kabbalistic symbolism, and the attribution of Hod and Netzach to
the "armies" does capture something useful about the nature of
consciousness at this level: consciousness is fragmented into
innumerable warring factions, and if there is no rightful king
ruling over the kingdom of the soul (a common state of affairs),
then the armies elect a succession of leaders from the ranks, who
wear a lopsided crown and occupy the throne only for as long as
it takes to find another claimant - more on this later.
The psychological interpretation of Hod is that it
corresponds to the ability to abstract, to conceptualise, to
reason, to communicate, and this level of consciousness arises
from the fact that in order to survive we have evolved a nervous
system capable of building internal representations of the world.
I can drive around London in a car because I possess an internal
representation of the London street system. I can diagnose faults
in the same car because I have an internal representation of its
mechanical and electrical systems and how they might fail. I can
type this document without looking at the keyboard because I know
where the keys are positioned, and your ability to read what I
have written pre-supposes a shared understanding about the
meaning of words and what they represent. Our nervous systems
possess an absolutely basic ability to create internal
representations out of the information we are capable of
perceiving through our senses.
It is also an absolutely basic characteristic of the world
that it is bigger than my nervous system. I cannot possibly
create *accurate*, internal representations of the world, and one
of the meanings of the verb "to abstract" is "to remove quietly".
This is what the nervous system does: it quietly removes most of
what is going on in the world in order to create an abridged
representation of reality with all the important (important to
me) bits underlined in highlighter pen. This is the world "I"
live in: not in the "real" world, but an internal reality
synthesised by my nervous system. There has been a lot of
philosophising about this, and it is difficult to think about how
our nervous systems *might* be distorting or even manufacturing
reality without a feeling of unease, but I am personally
reassured by the everyday observation that most adults can drive
a car on a busy road at eighty miles per hour in reasonable
safety. This suggests that while our synthetic internal
representation of the world isn't accurate, it isn't at all bad.
Abstraction does not end at the point of building an
internal representation of the external world. My nervous system
is quite content to treat my internal representation of the world
as yet another domain over which it can carry out further
abstraction, and the subsequent new world of abstractions as
another domain, and so on indefinitely, giving rise to the
principal definition of "abstraction": "to separate by the
operation of the mind, as in forming a general concept from
consideration of particular instances". As an example, suppose
someone asks me to watch the screen of a computer and to describe
what I see. I have no idea what to expect."Hmmm...lots of dots moving around randomly...different
colour dots...red, blue, green. Ah, the dots seem to be
clustering...they're forming circles...all the dots of each
particular colour are forming circles, lots of little
circles. Now the circles are coming together to form a
number...it's 3. Now they're moving apart and forming
another number...its 15...now 12..9..14. They've
gone..........that was it..3, 15, 12, 9, 14. Is it some sort
of test? Do I have to guess the next number in the series?
What are the numbers supposed to mean? What was the point of
it? Hmmm..the numbers might stand for letters of the
alphabet...let's see. C..O..L..I...N. It's my name!"The dots on the screen are real - there are real, discrete,
measurable spots of light on the screen. I could verify the
presence of dots of light using an appropriate light meter. The
colours are synthesised by my retinas; different elements in my
eye respond to different frequencies in the light and give rise
to an internal experience we label "red", "blue", "green". The
circles simply do not exist: given the nature of the computer
output on the screen, there are only individual pixels, and it is
my nervous system which constructs circles. The numbers do not
exist either; it is only because of my particular upbringing
(which I share with the person who wrote the computer program)
that I am able to distinguish patterns standing for abstract
numbers in patterns of circles e.g.oo
o o
o
o
o
o
o
oooooAnd once I begin to reason about the *meaning* of a sequence of
numbers I have left the real world a long way behind: not only is
"number" a complex abstraction, but when I ask a question about
the "meaning" of "a sequence of numbers" I am working with an
even more "abstract abstraction". My ability to happily juggle
numbers and letters and decide that there is an identity between
the abstract number sequence "3, 15, 12, 9, 14" and the character
string "COLIN" is one of those commonplace things which any
person might do and yet it illustrates how easy it is to become
completely detached from the external world and function within
an internal world of abstractions which have been detached from
anything in the world for so long that they are taken as real
without a second thought.
In parallel with our ability to structure perception into an
internal world of abstractions we possess the ability to
communicate facts about this internal world. When I say "The cup
is on the table", another person is able to identify in the real
world, out of all the information reaching their senses, the
abstraction "chair", the abstraction "cup", and confirm the
relationship of "on-ness". Why are the cup and table
abstractions? Because the word "cup" does not uniquely specify
any particular cup in the world, and when I use the word I am
assuming that the listener already possesses an internal
representation of an abstract object "cup", and can use that
abstract specification of a cup to identify a particular object
in the context within which my statement was made.
We are not normally conscious of this process, and don't
need to be when dealing with simple propositions about objects in
the real world. I think I know what a cup is, and I think you do
too. If you don't know, ask someone to show you a few. Life gets
a lot more complicated when dealing with complex internal
abstractions: what is a "contract", a "treaty", a "loan",
"limited liability", a "set", a "function", "marriage", a "tort",
"natural justice", a "sephira", a "religion", "sin", "good",
"evil", and so on (and on). We reach agreement about the
definitions of these things using language. In some cases, for
example, a mathematical object, the thing is completely and
unambiguously defined using language, while in other cases (e.g.
"good", "sin") there is no universally accepted definition. Life
is further complicated by a widespread lack of awareness that
these internal abstractions *are* internal, and it is common to
find people projecting internal abstractions onto the world as if
they were an intrinsic part of the fabric of existence, and as
objectively real as the particular cup and the particular table I
referred to earlier. Marriage is no longer a contract between a
man and a woman; it is an estate made in heaven. What is heaven?
God knows. And what is God? Trot out your definitions and let's
have an argument - that is the way such questions are answered.
Much of the content of electronic bulletin boards consists of
endless arguments and discussions on the definition of complex
internal abstractions (what is ritual, what is magic, what is
karma, what is ki, what is...).
A third element which goes together with abstraction and
language to complete the essense of the sephira Hod is reason,
and reason's formal offspring, logic. Reason is the ability to
articulate and justify our beliefs about the world using a base
of generally agreed facts and a generally agreed technique for
combining facts to infer valid conclusions. If reason is
considered as one out of a number of possible processes for
establishing what is true about the world we live in, for
establishing which models of reality are valid and which are not,
then it has been phenomenally successful: in its heyday there
were those who saw reason as the most divine faculty, the faculty
in humankind most akin to God, and that legacy is still with us -
the words "unreasonable" and "irrational" are often used to
attack and denigrate someone who does not (or cannot) articulate
what they do or why they do it. There is of course no "reason"
why we should have to articulate or justify anything, even to
ourselves, but the reasoning machine within us demands an
"explanation" for every phenomenon, and a "reason" for every
action. This is a characteristic of reason - it is an obsessive
mode of consciousness. A second characteristic of reason is that
it operates on the "garbage-in, garbage-out" principle: if the
base of given facts a person uses to reason about are garbage, so
are the conclusions - witness what two thousand years of
Christian theology has achieved using sound dialectical
principles taken from Aristotle.
If the sephira Hod on the Pillar of Form represents the
active synthesis of abstract forms in consciousness (and
abstraction, language and reason are prime examples) then the
sephira Netzach on the Pillar of Force represents affective
states of consciousness which influence how we act and react:
needs, wants, drives, feelings, moods and emotions. It is
difficult to write about affective states, to be clear on the
distinction between a need and a want on one hand, or a feeling
or a mood on the other, and I find it particularly difficult
because the essence of sadness is *being* sad, the essence of
excitement is the *feeling* of excitement, the essence of desire
is the aching, lusting, overwhelming *feeling* of desire, and
being too precise about defining feelings is in the essence of
Hod, *not* Netzach. These things are incommunicable. They can be
produced in another person, but they cannot be communicated. It
is possible to be clinical and abstract and precise about the
sephira Hod because an abstract clinical precision captures that
aspect of consciousness perfectly, but when attempting to
communicate something about Netzach one feels tempted to try to
communicate feelings themselves, a task more suited to a poet or
a musician, an actor or a dancer. Please accept this unfortunate
limitation in what follows, a limitation not necessarily present
when Kaballah is learned at first hand from someone.
Netzach is on the Pillar of Force, but in reaching Netzach
the Lightning Flash has already passed through Binah and Gevurah
on the Pillar of Form and so it represents a force conditioned
and constrained by form; when we talk about Netzach we are
talking about the different ways force can be shaped and
directed, like toothpaste squeezed out of a tube. The toothpaste
we are talking about is something I will call "life force" or
"life energy", and as a rule, when I have a lot of it I feel well
and full of vitality, and when I don't have much I feel unwell,
tired, and vulnerable. To continue the somewhat phallic
toothpaste metaphor, the magnitude of pressure on the tube
corresponds to vitality, the direction in which the toothpaste
comes out corresponds to a need or a want, and the shape of the
nozzle corresponds to a feeling: all three factors, pressure,
direction and nozzle determine how the toothpaste comes out; that
is, we could say that there are three factors giving a *form* to
the toothpaste (or life-energy). It may seem sloppy and
unnecessarily metaphysical to imply that all needs, wants and
feelings are merely conditions of manifestation of something more
basic, some "unconditioned force", but Kaballah is primarily a
tool for exploring internal states, and there are internal states
(certainly in my experience) where this force is experienced
directly with much less differentiation, hence the clumsy
metaphor.
Textbooks on psychology define a need as an internal state
which results in directed behaviour, and discuss needs such as
thirst, hunger, sex, stimulation, proximity seeking, curiousity
and so on. These things are interesting, but for virtually
everyone such basic and inherent needs are in the nature of
"givens" and don't provide much individual insight into the
questions "why do I behave differently from other people?", or
"should I change my behaviour?", or more interesting still "to
what extent do I (or can I) influence my behaviour?". In addition
to inherent needs it is useful also to look at needs which have
been acquired (i.e. learned), and for convenience I will call
them "wants" because people are usually conscious of "wanting"
something specific. To give some examples, a person might want:- to buy a bar of chocolate.
- to go to the toilet.
- to own a better car.
- to have a sexual relationship with someone.
- to live forever.
- to be thinner (more musculer, taller, whiter,
browner...).
- to read a book.
- to gain social recognition within a particular group.
- to win in sport.
- to go shopping.
- to go to bed.Not only are these "wants" the sort of thing many people want
these days, but these "wants" can all occur concurrently in the
same person, and while some may have been simmering away on a
back burner for years, there can be an astonishing variety of
pots and pans waiting for an immediate turn on the stove. The
average person's consciousness zips around the kitchen like a
demented short-order cook stirring this dish, serving that one,
slapping a pot on the stove for a few minutes only to take it off
and put something else on, throwing whole meals in the bin only
to empty them back into pots a few minutes later. The choice of
which pot ends up on the hot plate depends largely on mood and
accident: some people may plan their lives like military
campaigns but most don't. Most people have far more wants than
there are hours in the day to achieve them, and those which are
actually satisfied on a given day is more a function of accident
than design. Careers are thrown away (along with status and
security) in a moment of sexual infatuation; the desire to eat
wars with the desire to be slim; the writer retires to the
country to write the great novel and does everything but write;
the manager desperately tries to finish an urgent report but
finds himself dreaming about a car he saw in the car park; the
student abandons an important essay on impulse to go out with
friends. One activity is quickly replaced by another as the
person attempts to reconcile all his wants and drives, but
unfortunately there is no requirement that wants should be
internally consistent or complementary; like a multi-process
operating system, a single thread of energy is randomly cycled
around an arbitrary list of needs and wants to produce the mixed-
up complexity of the average person. Each want can be treated as
a distinct mode of consciousness - I can eat a slap-up meal one
day and thoroughly enjoy it, while the next day I can look in the
mirror and swear never to touch another pizza again. It is as if
two separate beings inhabited my body, one who loves pizzas and
one who wants to be thin, and each makes plans independently of
the other, and only the magic dust of unbroken memory sustains
the illusion that I am a single person. When I view my own wants
and actions dispassionately I can conclude that there is a host
or army of independent beings jostling inside me, a crowd of
artificial elementals individually ensouled with enough of my
energy to bring one particular desire to fruition. I cope with
the semi-chaotic result of mob rule by using the traditional
remedy: public relations. I put together internal press releases
(various rationalisations and justifications) to convince myself,
and others if need be, that the mess was either due to external
circumstances beyond my control (I didn't have time last night),
the fault of other people (you made me angry), or inevitable (I
had no choice, there was no alternative). In cases where even my
public relations don't work I erect a shrine to the gods of Guilt
and make little offerings of sorrow and regret over the years.
This is normal consciousness for most people. It is a kind
of insanity. Wants rush to and fro on the stage of consciousness
like actors in the closing scenes of Julius Caeser - alarums and
excursions, bodies litter the stage, trumpets and battle shouts
in the wings, Brutus falls on his sword, Anthony claims the field
- perhaps this is why the sephira is called Victory! Every day
new wants are kicked off in response to advertising or peer
pressure, old wants compete with each other in a zero-sum game.
Having said this, I should point out that it is not desire or
wants or drives which create the insanity - Kaballah does not
place the value judgement on desire that Buddhism does (that
desire is the cause of suffering, and by inference, something to
be overcome). The insanity arises from mob-rule, from the bizarre
internal processes of justification, rationalisation and guilt,
and from the identification of Self with the result - I will
return to this when discussing the sephira Tiphereth, as the mis-
identification of Self is a key element in the discussion on
Tiphereth.
Netzach also corresponds to our feelings, emotions and
moods, because this background of "psychological weather"
strongly conditions the way in which we think and behave:
regardless of what I am doing, my energy will manifest
differently when I am happy than when I am not. Sometimes moods
and emotions are triggered by a specific event, and sometimes
they are not: free-floating anxiety and depression are common
enough, and perhaps free-floating happiness is too (I can't speak
from experience there ;-). There are hundreds of words for
different moods, emotions and feelings, but most seem to refer to
different degrees of intensity of the same thing, or the same
feeling in different contexts, and the number of genuinely
distinct internal dimensions of feeling appears to be small.
Depression, misery, sadness, happiness, delight, joy, rapture and
ecstacy seem to lie along the same axis, as do loathing, hate,
dislike, affection, and love. It is an interesting exercise to
identify the genuinely, qualitatively different feelings you
can experience by actually conjuring up each feeling. I have
tried the experiment with a number of people, and you will
probably find there are less than 10 distinct feelings.The most immediate and personal correspondences for Hod and
Netzach are the psychological correspondences: the rational,
abstract, intellectual and communicative on one hand and the
emotional, motivational, intuitive, aesthetic, and non-rational
on the other. The planetary and elemental correspondences mirror
this: Hod corresponds to Kokab or Mercury, and the element of
Air, while Netzach corresponds to Nogah or Venus, and the element
Water.
The Virtue of Hod is honesty or truthfulness, and its Vice
is dishonesty or untruthfulness. One of the features of being
able to create abstract representations of reality and
communicate some aspect of it to another person is that it is
possible to *misrepresent* reality, or to put it bluntly, lie
through your teeth.
The Illusion of Hod is order, in the sense of attempting to
impose one's sense of order upon the world. This is very
noticeable in some people; whenever something happens they will
immediately pigeonhole it and declare with great authority "it is
just another example of XYZ". A surprising number of people who
claim to be rational will claim "there's no such thing as
(ghosts, telepathy, free lunches, UFO's)" without having examined
the evidence one way or the other. They are probably right, and I
have no personal interest either way, but it is not difficult to
distinguish between someone who carefully weighs the pros and
cons in an argument and readily admits to uncertainty, and
someone with a firm and orderly conviction that "this is the way
the world is". The illusion of order occurs because people
confuse their internal representation of the world with the world
itself, and whenever they are confronted with something they
attempt to fit it into their representation.
The illusion of order (that everything in the world can be
neatly classified) relates closely to the klippoth of Hod, which
is rigidity, or rigid order. As children we start out with an
open view of what the world is like, and by the time we reach our
late teens or early twenties this view has set fairly solid, like
cold porridge - there are few minds more full of certainties than
that of an eighteen year old. A good critical education sometimes
has the effect of stirring the porridge into a lumpy gruel, but
it gradually starts to set again (unless the heavy hand of fate
stirs it up), and it is generally recognised, particularly in the
sciences, that a deeply ingrained sense of "how things are" is
the greatest obstacle to progress. If you hear some kids
listening to music and find yourself thinking "I don't know what
they find in that noise!" then it's happening to you too. If find
yourself looking back to a time when everything was so much
better than it is today and find yourself declaring "nostalgia
isn't what it used to be" then you will know that the porridge
has gone very cold and very stiff.
The Vision of Hod is the Vision of Splendour. There is
regularity and order in the world - it's not all an illusion -
and when someone is able to appreciate natural order in its
abstract sense, via mathematics for example, it can lead to a
genuinely religious, even ecstatic experience. The thirteenth
century Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia developed a rigorous system of
Hebrew letter mysticism based on the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet, their symbolic meanings, and their abstract
relationships when permuted into different "names of God"; many
hours of intense concentration spent combining letters according
to complex rules generated highly abstract symbolic meanings and
insights which led to ecstatic experiences. The same sense of awe
can come from mathematics and science - the realisation that
gravitational dynamics in three dimensions is geometry in four
dimensions, that plants are living fractals, that primes are the
seeds of all other numbers, are just as likely to lead towards an
intense vision of the splendour of the world made visible through
the eye of the rational intellect.The Virtue of Netzach is unselfishness, and its Vice is
selfishness. Both the Virtue and the Vice are an attitude towards
things-which-are-not-me, specifically, other people and living
creatures. If I was surrounded by a hundred square miles of empty
desert then my attitude to other living things wouldn't matter,
but I don't, and nothing I do is without some consequence; my
needs, wants and feelings invariably have an effect on people,
animals and plants, who all want to live and have some level of
needs and wants and feelings too. Unselfishness is simply a
recognition of others' needs. Selfishness taken to an extreme is
a denial of life, because it denies freedom and life to anything
which gets in the way; my needs must come first. Netzach lies on
the Pillar of Force and is an expression of life-energy, so to
deny life is a perversion of the force symbolised by Netzach,
hence the attribution of selfishness to the Vice.
The Vision of Netzach is the Vision of Beauty Triumphant.
Whereas the Vision of Splendour corresponding to Hod is a vision
of complex abstract relationships, symmetry, and mathematical
elegance, the Vision of Beauty Triumphant is purely aesthetic and
firmly based in the real world of textures, smells, sounds, and
colours, an appropriate correspondence for Venus, the goddess of
sensual beauty.
Suppose two housebuyers go to look at a house. The first is
interested in the number of rooms, the size of the garage, the
house's position relative to local amenities, the price, the
number of square metres in the plot, and whether the windows are
double-glazed. The second person likes the decoration in the
lounge, the colour of the bathroom, the wisteria plant in the
garden, the cherry tree, the curving shape of the stairs, and the
sloping roof in one of the bedrooms. Both people like the house,
but the first likes various abstract properties associated with
the house, whereas the second likes the house itself. Suppose the
same two people buy the house and decide to do ritual magic. The
first person wants white robes because white is the colour of the
powers of light and life. The second wants a green velvet robe
because it feels and looks nice. The first reads lots of books on
how to carry out a ritual, while the second sits under the cherry
tree in the garden with a flute and a blissful expression of
cosmic love. The first person has continued to make choices based
on an abstract notion of what is correct, while the second makes
choices based on what *feels right*. Both are driven by an
internal sense of "rightness", but in the first case it is based
on abstract criteria, while in the second it is based on personal
aesthetic notion of beauty.
The Vision of Beauty Triumphant has a compelling power. It
is pre-articulate and inherently uncritical, and at the same time
it is immensely biased. A person in its grip will pronounce
judgement on another person's taste in art, literature, clothes,
music, decor or whatever, and will do it with such a profound
lack of self-consciousness that it is possible to believe good
taste is ordained in heaven. This person will mock those who
surround themselves with rules, regulations, principles, and
analysis, the "syntax of things" as E. E. Cummings puts it, and
instead exhibit a whimsical spontaneity, a penetrating (so they
believe) intuition, and a free spirit in tune with ebb and flow
of life. There are those who might complain about their
astounding arrogance, fickleness, unreliability, and the never-
ending flow of unshakable and prejudiced opinions delivered with
papal authority, but those who complain are (clearly) anal-
retentive nit-pickers and don't count. For a total immersion in
the aesthetic vision read Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian
Grey".
The Illusion of Netzach is projection. We all tend to
identify feelings and characteristics in other people which we
find in ourselves and when we get it right it is called "empathy"
or "intuition"; when we get it wrong it is called "projection",
because we are incorrectly projecting our feelings, needs,
motives, or desires onto another person and interpreting their
behaviour accordingly. Some level of projection is unavoidable,
and at best it can be balanced with a critical awareness that it
can occur, but projection is insidious, and the strength of
feeling associated with a projection can easily overwhelm any
intellectual awareness. Projection usually "feels right".
One of the most overwhelming forms of projection accompanies
sexual desire. Why do I find one person sexually attractive and
not another? Why do I find some characteristics in a person
sexually attractive but not others? In my own case I discovered
that when I put together all the characteristics I found most
attractive in a person a consistent picture emerged of an "ideal
person", and every person I had ever considered as a possible
sexual partner was instantly compared against this template. In
fact there was more than one template, more than one ideal, but
the number was limited and each template was very clearly
defined, and most importantly, each template was internal. My
sexual (and often many other feelings) about a person were based
on an internal and apparently arbitrary internal template. This
was crazy; I found my sexual feelings about a person would change
depending on how they dressed or behaved, on how well they
"matched the ideal". It became obvious that what I was in love
with did not exist outside of myself, and I was trying to find
this ideal in everyone else. Each one of these "templates" was a
living aspect of myself which I had chosen not to regard as "me",
and in compensation I spent much of my time trying to find people
to bring these parts to life, like a director auditioning actors
and actresses for a part in a new play. If a person previously
identified as ideal failed to live up to my notion of how they
should be ideally behaving then I would project a fault on them:
there was something wrong with *them*! Madness indeed.
The Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung [1] recognised this
phenomenon and gave these idealised and projected components of
our psyche the title "archetype". Jung identified several
archetypes, and it is worth mentioning the major and most
influential.
The Anima is the ideal female archetype. She is part
genetic, part cultural, a figure molded by fashion and
advertising, an unconscious composite of woman in the abstract.
The Anima is common in men, where she can appear with riveting
power in dreams and fantasy, a projection brought to life by the
not inconsiderable power of the male sexual drive. She might be
meek and submissive, seductive and alluring, vampish and
dangerous, a cheap slut or an unattainable goddess - there is no
"standard anima", but there are many recognisable patterns which
can have a powerful hold on particular men. Male sexual fantasy
material is amazingly predictable, cliched, unimaginitive and
crude, and contains a limited number of steroetyped views of
women which are as close to a "lowest common denominator anima"
as one is likely to find.
The Animus is the ideal male archetype, and much of what is
true about the Anima is true of the Animus. There are
differences; the predominant quality in the Anima is her
appearance and behaviour, while the predominant quality in the
Animus is social power and competence. In the interests of sexual
equality it is worth mentioning that female romantic fantasy
material is amazingly predictable, cliched, unimaginitive and
crude, and contains a limited number of stereotype views of men
which are as close to a "lowest common denominator animus" as one
is likely to find.
The Shadow is the projection of "not-me" and contains
forbidden or repressed desires and impulses. In most men the
Anima is repressed and in most women the Animus is repressed, and
so both form a component of the Shadow. The major part of the
Shadow however is composed of forbidden impulses, and the Shadow
forms a personification of evil. Much of what is considered evil
is defined socially and the communal personification of evil as
an external force working against humankind (such as Satan) is
widespread.
The Persona is the mask a person wears as a member of a
community when a large proportion of his or her behaviour is
defined by a role such as doctor, teacher, manager, accountant,
lawyer or whatever. Projection occurs in two ways: firstly,
someone may be expected to conform to a role in a particularly
rigid or stereotyped way, and so suffer a loss of individuality
and probably a degree of misplaced trust or prejudice. Secondly,
many people identify with a role to the extent that they carry
that role into all aspects of their private lives. This
"projection onto self" is a form of identification - see
the section on Tiphereth.
The archetype of Self at the level of Hod and Netzach is
usually projected as an ideal form of person; that is, someone
will believe that he or she is highly imperfect creature and it
is possible to attain an ideal state of being in which the same
person is kind, loving, wise, forgiving, compassionate, in
harmony with the Absolute, or whatever. This projection will
either fasten on a living or dead person, who then becomes a
hero, heroine, guru, or master with grossly inflated abilities,
or it fastens on a vision of "myself made perfect". The projected
vision of "myself made perfect" is common (almost universal)
among those seeking "spiritual development", "esoteric training",
and other forms of self-improvement, and in almost every case it
is based on an abstract ideal. The person will probably insist
that the ideal has existed in certain rare individuals (usually
long dead saints and gurus, or someone who lives a long way off
whom they haven't met), and that is the sort of person they want
to be. It should be comical, but it isn't. There is more to say
about this and it will keep till the section on Tiphereth.The klippoth or shell of Netzach is habit and routine. When
behaviour, with all its potential for new experiences, new ways
of doing things, new relationships, becomes locked into patterns
which repeat over and over again, then the life energy, the force
aspect of Netzach is withdrawn and all that remains is the dead,
empty shell of behaviour. Just as the klippoth of Hod is rigid
order, the petrification of one's internal representation of
reality, so the klippoth of Netzach is the petrification of
behaviour.The God Names of Hod and Netzach are Elohim Tzabaoth and
Jehovah Tzabaoth respectively, which mean "God of Armies", but in
each case a different word is used for "God". The name "Elohim"
is associated with all three sephiroth on the Pillar of Form and
represents a feminine (metaphorically speaking) tendency in that
aspect of God. The elucidation of God Names can become
phenomenally complex and obscure, with long excursions into
gematria and textual analysis of the Pentateuch and it is a
quagmire I intend to avoid.
The Archangels are Raphael and Haniel. The Archangel of Hod
is sometimes given as Michael, but I prefer Raphael (Medicine of
God) for no other reason than the association of Mercury with
medicine and healing; besides, Michael has perfectly good reasons
for residing in Tiphereth. This sort of thing can give rise to an
amazing amount of hot air when Kabbalists meet; for those who
wonder how far back the confusion goes, Robert Fludd (1574-1607)
plumped for Raphael, whereas two hundred years later Francis
Barrett prefered Michael. The co-founder of the Golden Dawn, S.L.
Mathers, went for both depending on which text you read. Kabbalah
isn't an orderly subject and those who want to impose too much
order on it are falling into the illusion of...I leave this as an
exercise to the reader.
The Angel Orders are the Beni Elohim and the Elohim.The triad of sephiroth Yesod, Hod and Netzach comprise the triad
of "normal consciousness" as we normally experience it in
ourselves and most people most of the time. This level of
consciousness is intensely magical; try to move away from it for
any length of time and you will discover the strength of the
force and form sustaining it. It is not an exaggeration to say
that most people are completely unable to leave this state, even
when they want to, even when they desperately try to. The sephira
Tiphereth represents a state of being which unlocks the energy of
"normal consciousness" and is the subject of the next section.[1] Jung, C.G, "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the
Self", Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974Tiphereth
---------"Nothing is left to you at this moment but to burst out into
a loud laugh"
From "The Spirit of Zen"The sephira Tiphereth lies at the heart of the Tree of Life,
and like Rome all paths lead to it. Well, not all, but Tiphereth
has a path linking it to every sephira with the exception of
Malkuth. If the Tree of Life is a map then the sephira titled
Tiphereth, Beauty, or Rachamin, Compassion, clearly represents
something of central importance. What does it represent? Can you
imagine in your mind's eye what it might be? Do you feel anything
within you when you contemplate Tiphereth? If asked could you
define what it stands for? Well, if you can do any or all of
these things you are almost certainly barking up the wrong Tree.
As Alan Watts comments [1]:"The method of Zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust
the intellect until it is realised that intellection is only
thinking *about*; it will provoke, irritate and again
exhaust the emotions until it is realised that emotion is
only feeling *about*, and then it contrives, when the
disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional
impasse, to bridge the gap between second-hand conceptual
contact with reality, and first-hand experience."The sephira Tiphereth presents the student of Kabbalah with a
conundrum. Whatever you say it is, it isn't; whatever you imagine
it to be it isn't; whatever you feel it might be, it isn't; it is
an empty room. There is nothing there. The modes of consciousness
appropriate to Hod, Yesod and Netzach respectively are not
appropriate to something which is clearly and unambiguously shown
on the Tree as being distinct from all three. So what is it? The
student is told that the Virtue of Tiphereth is Devotion to the
Great Work. What is this "Great Work"? The student is told
solemnly that in order to find the answer he or she should obtain
the Spiritual Experience of Tiphereth, which is the Knowledge and
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. So the student runs off
and duely reports (after some work in the library perhaps) that
the Great Work is the raising of a human being in every aspect to
perfection. Or it is the saving of the planet from industrial
pollution. Or it is the retrieval and perpetuation of knowledge,
or perhaps it is the spiritual redemption of humanity. The
student then burns enough frankincense to pay off the Somalian
national debt, records endless conversations with the Holy
Guardian Angel in the magical record, and impresses all and
sundry with an unbending commitment to the Great Work. This
enthusiasm, commitment, personal sacrifice and sense of moral
purpose leads to the development of a special kind of person:
pious, preaching, judgemental, a humble servant of the highest
powers with a blind spot of intolerance. Those who inhabit the
vicinity of such moral incandescence may have reason to recall
that the Vice of Tiphereth is self-importance and pride.
A student can spend years running around in circles,
bringing to the planet the benefits of advanced spiritual
consciousness, and this seems to be a necessary exercise. People
need to sweat various personal obsessions out of their systems,
and the empty room of Tiphereth is an excellent set on which to
act out a personal drama. If the devotion to the Work is genuine,
and if Tiphereth and the HGA are invoked with passion and
determination, then sooner or later the hand of fate lends a hand
and the student has the shit knocked out in a big way. An attempt
to penetrate the nature of Tiphereth does seem to bring about
that state which the Greeks called "hubris", an overweening
arrogance, self-importance and pride, until eventually the
inevitable happens and one's life comes crashing down around
one's ears. The resulting mess varies from person to person; in
some people every idea about what is important is turned upside
down, while in others an emotional attachment to habits,
lifestyle, possessions or relationships turns to dust. The daemon
of the false self is dealt a massive blow and sent reeling, and
in that moment there is a chance for real change and the dawning
of the golden sun of Tiphereth.
This is how I interpret the word "initiation": there is a
state of being represented by the sephirah Tiphereth which is
absolutely distinct from what most people experience as normal
consciousness. Once attained the change is irreversible and
permanent; it causes a permanent change in the way life is
experienced. When it occurs it is recognised instantly for what
it is...as if every cell in one's body shouted simultaneously "So
*that's* all there is to it!" This state has been widely
documented in many parts of the world, and Alan Watts' book
(referenced below) is as guarded and explicit on the subject as
any worthwhile book is likely to be.The symbolism of Tiphereth is three-fold: a king, a
sacrificed god, and a child. This three-fold symbolism
corresponds to Tiphereth's place on the extended Tree (to be
explained in a later chapter), where it appears as Kether of
Assiah, Tiphereth of Yetzirah, and Malkuth of Briah, and to these
three aspects correspond the king, the sacrificed god, and the
child respectively. One interpretation of this symbolism is as
follows: if the kingdom is to be redeemed then the king (who is
also the son of God - see below) must be sacrificed, and from
this sacrifice comes a