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Chiah and Yechidah are the two highest levels of the five-part soul scheme of Lurianic Kabbalah, and both are linked in this atlas to the same historical figure, Hayyim Vital, with the identical note attached to each: the five-level scheme of the soul is Isaac Luria's own teaching, known today in the specific form Vital wrote it down.

A Teaching Preserved Rather Than Invented

Luria himself wrote almost nothing down. What survives of his teaching on the soul, including the two highest of its five levels, chiah and yechidah, standing above nefesh, ruach and neshamah, survives because his student Hayyim Vital recorded it, and it is Vital's own written form of the scheme, not a separately reconstructed one, that this atlas and the wider tradition both work from. Two pages, two links, and both point at the identical fact: neither level of the soul is separately attributable to Vital as its author, and neither is available at all except through him as its recorder.

Why the Two Do Not Need Two Different Findings

Chiah and Yechidah differ from each other within the scheme itself, one commonly read as the level of life force proper, the other as the point of essential union closest to the divine, and a fuller treatment of either belongs on its own page. What does not differ between them is the fact this particular bridge exists to state: that the transmission each depends on runs through one man, writing down one teacher's system, and that fact is exactly as true of the fourth level as of the fifth. Recording it once, for both, is the honest shape of what the record actually holds.

Where To Read More

• ChiahKabbalahOne of the two levels; its own relation note is word for word identical to Yechidah's
• YechidahKabbalahThe other of the two levels; its own relation note is word for word identical to Chiah's
• Hayyim VitalRabbis, Kabbalists & Jewish ScholarsRecorded a teaching Luria himself left almost nothing of in writing