Understanding

Binah, Understanding, is the third sefirah, the supernal mother, Aima, who receives the undifferentiated creative force of Chokmah and gives it form, boundary and structure, the womb in which the seed of wisdom becomes something that can be born into the created world. She heads the left-hand Pillar of Severity and completes the three supernal sefirot above the abyss.

Binah is understanding as distinct from wisdom: where Chokmah is the flash, Binah is the comprehension that shapes and contains it, and she is therefore associated with form, limitation, and the sorrow that form imposes on the boundless, the Kabbalists linked her to the great sea and to grief. Her divine name is YHVH Elohim, the fullest of the divine names, joining the ineffable Tetragrammaton with Elohim. The doctrine of the sefirot in which Binah takes this place is the achievement of Jewish Kabbalah, named in the Sefer Yetzirah and unfolded in the Zohar, where the interplay of the supernal father and mother is a central theme of the divine inner life.

Sources The ZoharTraditionally attributed to Moses de Leon with Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and PracticeAryeh Kaplan

The planetary correspondence assigned to Binah is Saturn, and here the Hermetic and the traditional agree, for Saturn, slow, cold, bounding, the planet of time, limit and structure, fits exactly Binah's character as the sefirah of form and constraint. In the Golden Dawn system of 1888 and in Liber 777, Binah's colour is black, and she corresponds to the four Threes of the tarot suits; the pairing of Binah with Saturn, the great restrictor, is one of the more evidently reasoned attributions in the whole table. As always the layers should be distinguished.

Binah as the third sefirah, her name YHVH Elohim, and her role as the supernal mother who imposes form belong to Jewish Kabbalah, worked out from late antiquity through the medieval Spanish Kabbalah and the sixteenth-century school of Isaac Luria. The systematic cross-referencing of that sefirah to Saturn, to a tarot rank and to a scale of magical colours is Hermetic Qabalah, the Western esoteric adaptation formalised by the Golden Dawn, and it should not be read back into the Jewish sources from which the sefirah itself derives.