Kabbalah and the Mystical Tree of Life

Kabbalah is the principal mystical tradition of Judaism, and over the centuries it has become one of the most influential currents in Western esotericism. Its central symbol, the Tree of Life, with its ten sephirot and twenty-two paths, has been adopted, adapted, and reinterpreted by Christian Kabbalists, Hermetic magicians, occultists, and contemporary spiritual seekers. To understand Kabbalah is to follow a body of texts that begins in late antiquity, matures in medieval Provence and Spain, is reshaped in sixteenth-century Safed, and is carried into the modern Western esoteric tradition by the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Tree of Life, in turn, is a contemplative map, a structural diagram of reality, and a tool of meditation and ritual, and it sits at the heart of every form the tradition has taken.

The historian Gershom Scholem, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Origins of the Kabbalah (1962), gave the tradition its modern scholarly shape; his account has been challenged, extended, and in places corrected by his successors, most importantly by Moshe Idel, whose Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) argued for the older and more continuous development of Kabbalah from the late antique hekhalot and merkabah literature, against Scholem’s dating of the decisive period to the 12th and 13th centuries. The contemporary study of Kabbalah, in the work of Idel, of Elliot Wolfson (in books such as Through a Speculum That Shines, 1994), of Daniel Matt (The Essential Kabbalah, 1995, and the Pritzker Edition of the Zohar), and of Arthur Green (A Guide to the Zohar, 2004), is a richer and more contested field than Scholem’s classic survey suggests.

The meaning of the word

The word “Kabbalah” comes from the Hebrew root k-b-l, meaning “to receive”, and in its narrowest sense it refers to the received tradition: the body of esoteric doctrine that, in the Jewish context, is understood to have been handed down alongside the written Torah. The tradition sometimes distinguishes between Kabbalah, the mainstream mystical teaching, and Kabbalah iyyunit, the “speculative” Kabbalah, which is the more theosophical and systematic side. The spelling “Qabalah”, with a Q, is used in the Western Hermetic tradition to mark its adaptation of the Jewish source material for non-Jewish, often Christian, use; both spellings refer to recognisably the same body of doctrine, but the Q form is usually reserved for the Hermetic version. The two spellings are sometimes deployed polemically: Christian Kabbalists and Hermeticists have used the Q spelling to mark the theological distance of their work from its Jewish sources, and contemporary Jewish Kabbalists have objected.

The major texts of Kabbalah

Three works stand at the head of the Kabbalistic canon, and a fourth, the Sefer ha-Zohar, dominates everything that came after. The reading of these texts is the entry to the tradition.

The Sefer Yetzirah

The Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation, is the earliest of the Kabbalistic texts, in something close to its present form by the sixth or seventh century CE in the short recension, with the long recension perhaps a couple of centuries later. The dating is debated; the Israeli scholar Joseph Dan, in his Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics (1986), has argued for the long recension’s tenth-century Provençal origin. The book is short, dense, and enigmatic; it sets out the creation of the world through the “thirty-two paths of wisdom”: the ten sephirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Sefer Yetzirah is the foundational text of the sephirotic tree, and it is the source of the doctrine of the sephirot as the instruments of creation. The book is among the most commented-upon in the Jewish mystical tradition; the medieval commentaries by Saadia Gaon, Judah Halevi, and Abraham ibn Ezra, and the later Hasidic readings, are themselves substantial works.

The Sefer ha-Bahir

The Sefer ha-Bahir, or Book of Brilliance, emerged in Provence in the late twelfth century, and it is the first major text to develop the symbolism of the sephirot in detail. The Bahir introduces the imagery of the divine potencies as the “limbs of the divine body”, the “right hand” and “left hand” of God, and the mystical significance of the Hebrew letters. The book’s true provenance has been disputed; Scholem treated it as a Provençal reworking of older merkavah material, while Idel has argued for more direct continuity with the late antique mystical tradition.

The Zohar

The Sefer ha-Zohar, the Book of Splendour, is the masterwork of Kabbalah. It is a long, multi-volume mystical commentary on the Torah, written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, and presenting the teachings in the form of a dialogue among the rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his companions in a cave in the Galilee. The Zohar was first published in Spain in the thirteenth century, and it is now universally attributed to Moses de León (c. 1250–1305), although within the text itself it is presented as a much older work. Scholem’s 1941 Major Trends laid out the case for the de León attribution; Idel has been more cautious, and the question of how much of the Zohar goes back to older oral material is still debated. What is not in doubt is the Zohar’s centrality: it is the single most influential text in the entire Kabbalistic tradition, and the doctrine of the sephirot, the symbolism of the divine names, and the contemplative practice of the Kabbalists all draw on it. The standard English translation is Daniel Matt’s The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (2004–2017).

Later classical works

Beyond these three, the classical Kabbalistic literature includes the works of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Spanish school — Joseph Gikatilla (the Sha’arei Orah and the Ginnat Egoz), Moses de León’s other writings, and the Catalan Kabbalists Azriel and Todros Abulafia — and the important ethical treatises such as the Reshit Chokhmah of Elijah de Vidas and the Sha’arei Kedusha of Chaim Vital. The Tikkunei Zohar, a companion to the main Zohar, was also widely studied; the Tikkunei Zohar is now usually dated to the late 14th or early 15th century, and is associated with the circle of the Castilian Kabbalists.

Historical development

Kabbalah in the strict sense emerges in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France and northern Spain, and it develops in dialogue both with earlier Jewish esoteric thought and with the surrounding Christian and Muslim cultures.

The Provençal and Spanish schools

In Provence, in the late twelfth century, the Bahir appeared and the first sephirotic symbolism took shape. The Spanish school of the thirteenth century, centred in Girona and Castile, produced the early Kabbalists, including Isaac the Blind and his circle, the Catalan rabbis Azriel and Todros Abulafia, and, most importantly, the circle around Moses de León, who produced the Zohar. These early Kabbalists were working in close contact with the surrounding Christian, Muslim, and Jewish intellectual cultures. The Jewish philosophers of the period, the mevinim, were integrating Aristotelian thought with biblical commentary, and the Kabbalists, while not aligned with them, were responding to the same currents. Idel, in Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism (2005), has shown how much of the early Kabbalistic vocabulary was already present in the late antique hekhalot literature and in the German Hasidei Ashkenaz of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Zohar’s reception

The Zohar was, in the first century after its publication, a controversial text. Many of the leading Jewish scholars regarded it with suspicion, both because of its unusual claims to antiquity and because of its theosophical content. By the sixteenth century, however, the Zohar had become a central text, particularly in the land of Israel, and the destruction of the Spanish Jewish communities in the 1391 pogroms and the 1492 Alhambra Decree of expulsion dispersed Kabbalistic learning widely across the Mediterranean. The 1492 expulsion in particular — the event the popular histories of Kabbalah sometimes collapse into a single catastrophe — meant that the centres of Kabbalistic learning shifted to Safed, to Damascus, to Jerusalem, and later to the cities of eastern Europe.

The Lurianic revolution

The most decisive single moment in the history of Kabbalah is the development of the system of Isaac Luria (1534–1572) in sixteenth-century Safed. Luria, a mystic who arrived in the Galilee in 1570 and died of plague only two years later, transformed the tradition. His teachings were recorded by his disciple Chaim Vital in works such as the Etz Chaim (Tree of Life) and the Shemonah She’arim (Eight Gates), though scholars including Eliezer Baumgarten and Lawrence Fine have shown that the Lurianic corpus went through significant editorial development by Vital and later copyists; the texts we have are the product of a complex tradition of transmission, not a verbatim record of Luria’s words.

Luria’s central teaching is that of tzimtzum, the divine contraction. God, in order to make room for the world, first withdrew Himself from Himself, contracting the infinite light of the Ein Sof to leave a primordial space into which creation could emerge. Into that space a ray of divine light was then projected, and the vessels intended to receive it shattered in the process of shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels. The sparks of the broken vessels fell into the lower worlds, and the work of the Kabbalist is the tikkun, the gathering and restoration of those sparks.

Lurianism gave the Jewish mystical tradition a powerful theodicy and an active programme of religious practice. The doctrine of evil in Kabbalah predates Luria — Tikkunei Zohar and earlier treatments of the sitra ahra, the “other side”, are already in place — but Luria gave it its sharpest formulation, and he transformed messianism by giving the redemptive work a cosmic as well as a personal dimension. After Luria, almost every form of Kabbalah, including the Hasidic tradition that arose in the eighteenth century, is in some sense Lurianic.

Hasidism and the eighteenth century

In the eighteenth century, the teaching of Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, gave rise to the Hasidic movement, which brought Kabbalistic doctrine into the everyday religious life of Eastern European Jewry. Hasidism emphasised the immanence of God in all things, the necessity of joyful religious practice, and the role of the tzaddik, the righteous teacher, in the mystical work of the community. The Hasidic masters produced a vast body of mystical teaching, much of it in the form of homilies on biblical and rabbinic texts, and the Hasidic world became a major carrier of Kabbalistic thought into the modern period. The contemplative practices of devekut (cleaving) and hitbonenut (contemplative gazing), and the tradition of the mofet (the flash of insight) reported of the Besht, are part of the Hasidic contribution.

Central doctrines

Several doctrines are central to Kabbalah as a whole, and they form the conceptual ground on which the Tree of Life is drawn.

Ein Sof

The Ein Sof, the “infinite” or the “without end”, is the kabbalistic name for God considered in His absolute pre-manifestation. The Ein Sof is not a being among beings; it is the boundless source of all being, beyond all attributes, beyond all comprehension. No positive statement can be made of the Ein Sof, because every statement is a determination, and the Ein Sof is the undetermined. All Kabbalistic language about God, including the language of the sephirot, is a description of how the Ein Sof becomes manifest, not a description of what the Ein Sof is in itself. The term is masculine in form, but the Kabbalistic tradition uses both masculine and feminine imagery for the pre-manifest divine; the Shekhinah is the feminine indwelling, and the supernal triad (Keter, Chokhmah, Binah) is often interpreted through the image of Father, Mother, and the primeval point.

The ten sephirot

The sephirot are the ten divine potencies or emanations through which the Ein Sof becomes manifest and through which the world is created. The word sephirah (singular) means “number” or “emanation”, and the ten sephirot are most commonly enumerated as Keter, Chokhmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malkuth. Each sephirah has a divine name, an attribute, a set of correspondences, and a contemplative character. The sephirot are sometimes described as the “limbs” of the divine body, and they are the principal objects of Kabbalistic meditation. For a deeper treatment, see the ten sephirot and the mystical Tree of Life.

The four worlds

The classical Kabbalistic tradition describes four worlds, or levels of reality, through which the light of the sephirot descends. The four worlds, in descending order, are Atziluth, the world of archetypes or emanation; Beriah, the world of creation; Yetzirah, the world of formation; and Assiah, the world of action or making. The worlds are not places but degrees of reality: every existing thing exists in all four worlds, and the work of the Kabbalist is to discern the sephirotic structure in each. The sephirotic tree is read differently in each world — the sephirot are divine names in Atziluth, archangelic hosts in Beriah, angelic and astrological intelligences in Yetzirah, and the celestial spheres, planets, and elements in Assiah. For a treatment of the four worlds, see the mystical Tree of Life.

The doctrine of emanation

The relationship between the Ein Sof and the sephirot is described as emanation. The sephirot do not issue from the Ein Sof by a single act of creation; they flow from it in a continuous, organic process, in which each sephirah gives rise to the next. The Kabbalistic tradition has several images for the process: light passing through a prism, becoming differentiated as it descends; a tree sending out branches; a fountain pouring into successive vessels. The emanationist model is the basis of the Kabbalistic rejection of both pure transcendence (the Ein Sof is not wholly absent from the world) and pure immanence (the Ein Sof is not wholly present in any particular thing).

Tikkun and the breaking of the vessels

Tikkun, repair or restoration, is the practical work of the Kabbalist. In its Lurianic form, the work is cosmic: the sephirotic world is in a state of exile because of the breaking of the vessels, and the work of gathering the holy sparks is the work of redemption. In its contemplative form, tikkun is the inner work of purification and ascent through the sephirot, by which the practitioner returns to the source. In its ethical form, tikkun is the practice of mending the world through acts of justice, compassion, and holiness. The English phrase tikkun olam, “repair of the world”, has become a watchword of contemporary Jewish social action, although its use in this political sense is a 20th-century re-appropriation; the Lurianic doctrine is older, and the liberal Jewish use of the phrase has its own separate history.

Gilgul and the soul’s journey

Classical Kabbalah developed an account of the soul’s journey through multiple lives, called gilgul, the “rolling” or “transmigration” of the soul. The doctrine is most fully developed in Vital’s Sha’ar ha-Gilgulim. Each soul is sent into the world for tikkun, and at death returns to its source. If the tikkun is incomplete, the soul returns in another life to complete it. The doctrine is morally demanding: every life is a working out of an unfinished task. In the Lurianic system, the task is not only personal but cosmic, and the soul’s work contributes to the gathering of the sparks. The Hasidic tradition, while generally accepting gilgul, has tended to de-emphasise it in favour of the simpler doctrine of the soul’s single journey and its post-mortem refinement.

Kabbalah and the Western esoteric tradition

From the late fifteenth century onward, Christian Kabbalah, the study and adaptation of Jewish Kabbalah by Christian scholars, became a major current of the Western esoteric tradition.

Christian Kabbalah

The Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was the first major figure of Christian Kabbalah. His 900 conclusiones of 1486 included 47 Kabbalistic theses drawn from Jewish sources (the exact number is given variously as 47 or 49 in the secondary literature), and although the project was condemned by Pope Innocent VIII, the interest it sparked continued. Pico’s older German friend and correspondent Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) — the elder of the two and a collaborator, not a student of Pico’s — wrote the first Christian treatise on the Kabbalah, De Arte Cabalistica (1517), which presented the sephirotic tree as a Christian contemplative map and identified the divine names with the persons of the Trinity. Reuchlin’s earlier De Rudimentis Hebraicis (1506) is the foundational text of Christian Hebrew studies.

From the Renaissance onward, Christian Kabbalists — Reuchlin, Guillaume Postel (1510–1581), Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), and Knorr von Rosenroth (1631–1694) — used the Tree of Life as a Christian contemplative diagram, identified the sephirot with the persons of the Trinity and with the angelic hierarchies, and read the Zohar as a witness to Christian truth. The historian François Secret, in Le Zohar chez les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance (1964), has documented the Christian Kabbalistic reading of the Zohar in detail; the more recent work of the religious historian Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann has shown how the Christian Kabbalah fed into the broader Hermetic and theosophical traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684) was the most ambitious of the Christian Kabbalistic syntheses, presenting the Zohar and the Lurianic corpus in Latin translation and commentary, and it became the principal conduit through which the Western esoteric tradition received the Kabbalistic source material. Knorr von Rosenroth himself died in 1694, having seen only the first two parts of the Kabbala Denudata into print. For a fuller treatment, see Hermetic Qabalah and Western esotericism.

Hermetic Qabalah

The Hermetic Qabalah, sometimes called the Western Qabalah, is the form of Kabbalah that developed within the Western esoteric tradition, particularly within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its offshoots. The Hermetic Qabalah retains the sephirotic tree but interprets it through a Hermetic and Christian lens, identifies the sephirot with the Christian Godhead, and adds a vast set of correspondences — astrological, tarot, alchemical — that the classical Jewish tradition does not have.

The Golden Dawn’s Qabalah assigned the ten sephirot to the ten numerals, the ten divine names, the ten archangels, the ten orders of angels, the ten spheres of the medieval cosmos, the ten planets (with Earth added to the seven classical planets), the ten Sephirotic colours, the ten moral virtues, and the ten trumps of the major arcana of the tarot. The result was a comprehensive symbolic map in which every detail of the magician’s practice could be located on the tree. The Golden Dawn’s ritual system, including the pentagram and hexagram rituals, was designed to be performed in a sephirotic context, and the work of the order was, in large part, a work of sephirotic meditation. The standard modern reference is Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn (1937–1940, 6th ed. 2001).

Kabbalah in modern esotericism

The Hermetic Qabalah passed into the twentieth century through several channels. Aleister Crowley, who was an initiate of the Golden Dawn, drew on the sephirotic system in his Thelemic and magical writings, and the tree remained central to the A∴A∴ and the Ordo Templi Orientis. Dion Fortune, a later Golden Dawn initiate, used the tree extensively in her writings on the Qabalah, most accessibly in The Mystical Qabalah (1935). In the post-war period, the sephirotic system was carried into the Wiccan and Neopagan traditions by Gerald Gardner and others, who drew on the Golden Dawn’s ritual vocabulary. The contemporary Western esoteric tradition continues to use the sephirotic tree as its central contemplative diagram.

The Tree of Life in practice

In practice, the Tree of Life is used in several ways. As a contemplative diagram, it provides a structured path of meditation. The practitioner begins with Malkuth, the kingdom, and ascends through Yesod, Tiferet, and the upper sephirot to Keter. Each sephirah is contemplated in turn, with attention to its divine name, its attribute, its colour, and its imagery. The ascent is taken as a journey of purification and reunion with the source. The Hasidic tradition describes the “flash” or “noonday” experience (the mofet of the Baal Shem Tov, drawing on the verse in Psalm 91, “the noonday demon”), in which the sephirotic structure collapses and the practitioner rests in the Ein Sof.

As a ritual diagram, the Tree is used to assign the elements of a rite to the appropriate sephirah, so that the magician’s work is harmonised with the sephirotic structure. A healing rite is worked from Chesed, the mercy, and Tiferet, the beauty; a rite of judgment from Geburah, the severity; a rite of foundation from Yesod. The work of invocation in the Hermetic tradition takes the magician through the sephirotic spheres, calling the archangels and the divine names at each.

As a divinatory diagram, the Tree is used in connection with the tarot. Each sephirah corresponds to one of the major arcana of the tarot, and the twenty-two paths between the sephirot correspond to the remaining twenty-two trumps. A tarot reading can be read directly off the tree, with the cards interpreted in their sephirotic context.

For a full treatment of the structure and practice of the tree, see the mystical Tree of Life. For a beginner’s introduction, see what is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. For the sephirot themselves, see the ten sephirot.

The modern academic debate

The study of Kabbalah in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is dominated by the debate between the Scholem school, which dates the decisive formation of Kabbalah to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the Idel school, which argues for a more continuous development from late antique Jewish mysticism. Scholem’s Major Trends (1941) treated Kabbalah as a medieval innovation responding to the crisis of medieval Jewish existence; Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) and his Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism (2005) pushed the date back and emphasised the older hekhalot and merkabah material. Elliot Wolfson, in Through a Speculum That Shines (1994) and in numerous articles, has developed a still more radical reading: that Kabbalah is best read as a single continuous tradition from late antiquity to the present, with the medieval and early modern developments as variations on a much older theme. The debate matters for the field because it shapes what counts as evidence and what counts as innovation; the practical, ritual Kabbalah of the Jewish communities has continued throughout, but the academic question of origins remains open.

Kabbalah and the wider occult world

Kabbalah has, since the Renaissance, been in dialogue with every major current of Western esotericism. Christian Kabbalah, Hermetic Qabalah, the astrological tradition, Hermeticism and alchemy, ritual and ceremonial magic, and the tarot as a tool of divination all drew on the sephirotic tree at some point in their development. The dialogue continues in the contemporary Western esoteric world, in which the Tree of Life remains the central contemplative and ritual diagram.

The encounter has sometimes been harmonious and sometimes not. The seventeenth-century Christian Kabbalists, in particular, sometimes treated the Jewish sources as cryptic witness to Christian doctrine, a reading that the Jewish tradition itself would not have endorsed. The historical encounter is therefore also a record of cultural translation, appropriation, and resistance, and any serious study of Western Kabbalah has to reckon with the fact that the same symbol was used by Jewish, Christian, and Hermetic practitioners for very different ends.

In the modern period, the sephirotic tree has also passed into general spiritual culture. The figures of the magician and the seer, in twentieth-century fiction, film, and television, are routinely shown consulting the tree, and the vocabulary of the sephirot has become a recognisable register of the esoteric. For a treatment of that wider cultural presence, see the occult in popular culture.

Sources and further reading

The scholarly literature on Kabbalah is vast. The following works are the most useful starting points for a reader who wants to go further.

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1941; 3rd ed. 1954). The classic scholarly survey, still the entry point to the field.
Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (Schocken, 1965; English trans. 1969) and Origins of the Kabbalah (1962; English trans. 1987). Scholem’s most important monographs.
Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton, 1973). The classic study of the most controversial messianic movement in Jewish history.
Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale, 1988). The defining revisionist study.
Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism (Almog, 2005) and Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (Continuum, 2007). Idel’s continuing programme of research.
Daniel C. Matt, The Essential Kabbalah (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) and The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (Stanford, 2004–2017). Matt’s English translation of the Zohar is the modern standard.
Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, 1994). Wolfson’s most accessible book; his Alef, Mem, Tau (2006) is more advanced.
Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Oxford, 2004). A reader-friendly introduction.
Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts (Oxford, 1989). The classic English anthology of Zohar texts.
Joseph Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics (University of Toronto, 1986) and The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences (Oxford, 2002). Dan’s readable and historically minded work.
Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford, 2003). The best modern study of Luria.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2008). For the Western esoteric reception of Kabbalah.
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (SUNY, 1994). The founding modern academic study of Western esotericism.
J. H. Laenen, Jewish Mysticism: An Introduction (Westminster John Knox, 2001).
Hartley Lachter, “Kabbalistic Revolution and Reinvention: Modern Jewish Mysticism” (in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Mysticism, ed. Fishbane, 2017).
Elliot Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah (SUNY, 1989).