Kabbalah & the Tree of Life

This section covers Kabbalah as a structured system: the ten sephiroth, the emanations through which the infinite is held to unfold into creation; the twenty-two paths that join them; the Hebrew letters attached to those paths; the four worlds through which emanation descends; the parts of the soul; and the qliphoth, the shells or husks of the inverse tree.

Kabbalah arose in medieval Jewish mysticism, chiefly in Provence and Spain from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar among its foundational texts. From the Renaissance it was taken up by Christian scholars and, later, by the Western esoteric orders, who mapped tarot, astrology and much else onto its diagram.

It is worth distinguishing the layers. The Jewish tradition (Lurianic Kabbalah above all, with its account of the shattering of the vessels and their repair, tikkun), is a living current of religious thought and practice. The Hermetic Kabbalah of the Golden Dawn and its successors is a later, syncretic adaptation that treats the Tree as a filing system for correspondences drawn from many traditions.

The entries note which layer a given detail belongs to. The Tree of Life recurs throughout the atlas because so many later systems were hung upon it, and this section is where its own structure is set out.