All Virtues & Vices

This section holds the moral vocabulary of the traditions: the virtues they name as worth cultivating and the vices they warn against, paired where a tradition pairs them.

The Western lists are the familiar ones, the four cardinal and three theological virtues, the seven deadly sins, descending from Greek philosophy and Christian teaching. Alongside them the atlas sets the moral categories of other traditions: the paramitas of Buddhism, the kleshas of Buddhist and yogic analysis, and the virtues and vices attached to the sephiroth in Kabbalistic correspondence.

Traditions count and name the virtues and vices differently, and the differences are informative: what one tradition treats as a single fault another divides, and a quality prized in one setting may be muted in another. The entries give each virtue or vice in the terms of the tradition that names it, note the reason offered for cultivating or avoiding it, and pair it with its opposite where the tradition draws that pairing.

Because so many later systems attached a virtue and a vice to each of their divisions, the sephiroth above all, this material connects outward to Kabbalah & the Tree of Life and to the wider correspondence traditions.