Crown

Kether, the Crown, is the first of the ten sefirot, the emanations through which, in Kabbalah, the infinite and unknowable divine, the Ein Sof, begins to manifest. It stands at the summit of the Tree of Life, above and beyond the reach of ordinary comprehension, the point at which the undifferentiated One first inclines toward creation; the later Kabbalists spoke of it as the ayin, the divine nothingness, so near to the source that it can barely be called a thing at all. Its divine name is Eheieh, "I Am", the name God gives at the burning bush in Exodus 3, "Ehyeh asher Ehyeh", I Am That I Am.

The ten sefirot are named as a group already in the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, a terse cosmological text redacted somewhere between the third and sixth centuries, and elaborated into the full Tree by the medieval Kabbalah of the Zohar in thirteenth-century Spain and the systematisers who followed. Kether is pure being, the crown that is worn above the head rather than on it, the first and highest emanation.

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

The correspondences attached to Kether in modern Western esotericism belong to a later and distinct layer from the Jewish sources. In the system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, and codified in Aleister Crowley's Liber 777, each sephirah was cross-referenced to planets, colours, gods, plants, stones and tarot cards, building a single grand table of correspondences for magical use. Kether, standing above the planetary spheres, is assigned not a planet but the Primum Mobile, the first swirlings or first motion of the heavens; its colour is brilliant white, and it corresponds to the four Aces of the tarot, the roots of the elements.

Some twentieth-century writers extended the scheme by assigning the outer planet Neptune or Pluto to the supernal sefirot, an overlay later still. It is essential to keep these layers apart: the sefirah Kether and its divine name Eheieh come from Jewish Kabbalah, whereas the elaborate correspondence tables are Hermetic Qabalah of 1888 and after, a Western magical adaptation distinct from the living Jewish mystical tradition it drew upon.