The Occult

What Is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life

Kabbalah · 6 min read

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a diagram of ten circles, called sephirot, connected by twenty-two lines, called paths. It is the central symbol of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah and of the Western Hermetic Qabalah that derives from it. The diagram looks deceptively simple: ten circles in a particular arrangement, joined in a particular pattern, with a set of names and numbers attached. In practice, it is a complete map of reality, a contemplative diagram for meditation, and a structural key to the Western magical tradition.

The diagram is the entry to a tradition that runs from the late antique Sefer Yetzirah (in something like its present form by the sixth to seventh century CE) to the contemporary Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its successors. The standard modern scholarly introductions are Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Daniel Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah (1995); the introductory Hermetic treatment is Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah (1935). For a fuller treatment of the sephirot themselves, see the ten sephirot: ten emanations of the divine. For the structure of the tree in detail, see the mystical Tree of Life. For the Hermetic version, see Hermetic Qabalah and Western esotericism. For the wider doctrinal context, see Kabbalah and the mystical Tree of Life.

Where the Tree comes from

The Tree of Life, in something close to its present form, emerges in the Jewish mystical tradition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the most important early text is the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, in which the ten sephirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are presented as the “thirty-two paths of wisdom” by which the world was created. The Sefer ha-Bahir, or Book of Brilliance, in the late twelfth century, develops the symbolism of the sephirot in detail, and the Sefer ha-Zohar, the Book of Splendour, in the thirteenth century, gives the mature classical treatment. The diagram was elaborated further by the Kabbalists of sixteenth-century Safed, particularly Isaac Luria, whose teaching gave the sephirotic tree its Lurianic and Hasidic forms. The diagram was carried into the Western esoteric tradition by the Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance and codified in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn at the end of the nineteenth century.

The ten sephirot in a sentence each

Each of the ten sephirot is a divine potency, a level of reality, and a level of the soul. In descending order, they are: Keter, the Crown: the first emanation, the pure will of the divine. Chokhmah, Wisdom: the flash of insight. Binah, Understanding: the womb that receives and gives form to wisdom. Chesed, Mercy: the expansive force of divine love. Geburah, Severity: the restraining force of divine judgment. Tiferet, Beauty: the harmony that unites mercy and severity. Netzach, Victory: the enduring force of nature. Hod, Splendor: the rational and articulate force. Yesod, Foundation: the place of formation. Malkuth, Kingdom: the manifest world. For a longer treatment, see the ten sephirot: ten emanations of the divine.

The shape of the tree

The shape of the tree is not arbitrary. The ten sephirot are arranged in three vertical columns, connected by twenty-two paths.

                 Keter
              Chokhmah  Binah
                Chesed  Geburah
                  Tiferet
                Netzach  Hod
                    Yesod
                   Malkuth

The right-hand column, often called the column of mercy, consists of Chokhmah, Chesed, and Netzach, and represents the masculine, expansive, outgoing force. The left-hand column, often called the column of severity, consists of Binah, Geburah, and Hod, and represents the feminine, receptive, restraining force. The middle column, often called the pillar of equilibrium or mildness, consists of Keter at the top, Tiferet in the centre, Yesod directly below Tiferet, and Malkuth at the bottom. (Yesod sits on the central pillar directly below Tiferet; Netzach and Hod are on the side pillars, not flanking the middle.) The three columns are also sometimes called the pillars of Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty, after Solomon’s Temple.

The ten sephirot are also grouped into three triangles. The upper triangle, Keter-Chokhmah-Binah, is the supernal triad, the most abstract level of the divine. The middle triangle, Chesed-Geburah-Tiferet, is the divine heart. The lower triangle, Netzach-Hod-Yesod, with Malkuth below, is the lower body. The triple-triangle arrangement gives the tree a further symmetry that is central to its use in meditation and ritual.

The twenty-two paths join the sephirot in a specific pattern, and each path is associated with one of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and (in the Hermetic tradition) with a tarot trump.

One further feature of the traditional diagram is worth noting. A small dotted circle is sometimes drawn at the centre of the supernal triad (between Keter, Chokhmah, and Binah) and labelled Da’at, “knowledge”. Da’at is not counted as an eleventh sephirah in the classical enumeration of ten; it represents a state of consciousness in which the three supernal sephirot are unified. The Golden Dawn’s practical Qabalah often treats Da’at as a working principle at the centre of the tree.

How beginners engage with the tree

The Tree of Life is used in several ways, and a beginner can engage with it at any of several levels. The four levels of practice that follow are a useful pedagogical structure developed in the modern Hermetic tradition; they are not, in this form, traditional in Jewish Kabbalah, and a beginner should be aware that they are a 20th-century way of presenting the material.

The first level is the correspondences. The beginner learns the names of the ten sephirot, their order on the tree, and a few of their basic attributions: the divine name, the colour, the archangel, the planet. This is the foundation, and it is best learned slowly, with the diagram in front of you, until the arrangement is familiar. The standard table of correspondences is in Aleister Crowley’s Liber 777 (1909) and in Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn (1937–1940; 6th ed. 2001); Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah (1935) is the most accessible single introduction.

The second level is meditation. The beginner meditates on a single sephirah, sits with its divine name and its attribute, and tries to feel its quality. The simplest practice is to begin at Malkuth, the manifest world, and to ascend, sephirah by sephirah, contemplating each.

The third level is pathworking. The beginner follows one of the twenty-two paths between two sephirot, with the help of a visualisation drawn from the tarot or the Hebrew letter. The path is a journey between two divine potencies, and the visualisation is a way of working the journey inwardly.

The fourth level is the use of the tree in ritual. The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and the Qabalistic Cross are the simplest practical examples.

A few caveats for beginners

A few warnings are worth giving before a beginner goes further. The first is to be careful about skipping levels. The correspondences look like trivia, and a beginner is often tempted to skip straight to meditation or pathworking; but the correspondences are the foundation, and skipping them makes the higher practices unstable. The second is to be careful about treating the tree as a fortune-telling device. The Qabalistic tradition is a contemplative and ritual tradition, not a divinatory one, and the use of the tree for fortune-telling is a modern Western invention that has little to do with the classical Kabbalah. The third is to be respectful of the Jewish origin of the tradition. The Kabbalah is a Jewish tradition, and a non-Jewish practitioner should approach it with respect for its Jewish context.

For the wider treatment of the Kabbalistic tradition and its place in Western esotericism, see Kabbalah and the mystical Tree of Life. For the structure of the tree in detail, see the mystical Tree of Life.