Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Kabbalistic Correspondence

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Kabbalistic Correspondence

Not every Western esoteric source agrees on which sephirah Seraphim belongs to. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy assigns Seraphim to Kether, the first and highest sephirah, rather than to Chokmah, and gives the sephirah this collection pairs with Seraphim, Chokmah, to Cherubim instead, under the Hebrew name Ophanim. The Golden Dawn's own table diverges again, assigning Chokmah to a choir called Auphanim and placing Seraphim lower, at Geburah, the sphere of severity and of Mars. Three influential sources, then, give three different answers to a question that sounds as though it should have one settled reply.

The disagreement is not a modern error to be corrected but a feature of how Christian Kabbalah actually developed: multiple, independently reasoned correspondence tables were compiled by different writers over centuries, each internally consistent but not derived from any single authoritative original scheme, so that a reader moving between Agrippa, the Golden Dawn and other systems should expect the sephirah-choir pairings to shift depending on whose table is being consulted rather than treat any one version as the only correct one. Readers who encounter only one of these tables in isolation can easily mistake a single writer's synthesis for a fixed, ancient consensus that the wider historical record simply does not show.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.