The Qabalistic Tree as a diagram you can touch, in its light and its night, and in the versions the tradition has given it. Trace the Lightning Flash yourself with a finger, Crown to Kingdom, until the lightning strikes along your line — or, on the Night Side, the Turning up through the shells — with your slips counted and your best clean time kept. And the rest: the tarot given to the paths by the Golden Dawn, Crowley or Lévi, the four colour scales, Lurianic partzufim and the parts of the soul; and, on the Tree of Death, the Qliphoth in the Golden Dawn's and Crowley's names, Kenneth Grant's Tunnels of Set, the four kelipot and the seven abodes. Find routes between places and walk them, light the Middle Pillar or take a shadow inventory, test yourself on the bare Tree, keep notes, and save either Tree as a picture. The spheres glow in their colours with light drifting down the paths; rest the pointer on any place for a preview, find every place that carries a planet, angel, card or colour, open a larger Tree, see each path's trump card, and take a guided journey along any path with a light that travels it. Each sphere has a medallion in its four colours round the heaven it rules, with Dion Fortune's magical image, spiritual experience, vice, titles and symbols drawn; each path a picture of what its letter means; all thirty-two have their names as Paths of Wisdom. Fold the Tree into the ten heavens of the old cosmos and watch them turn, build the Tree from memory against the clock, and on the Night Side slide each shell back toward its light. Spell each sphere's divine name and archangel in Hebrew and add up their letters.
mixer7 lessons explain the ideas behind this tool.
The attributions of the Golden Dawn, the base of most Hermetic work. Strength (VIII) stands on Teth and Justice (XI) on Lamed, and the Fool opens the series on Aleph.
Mothers: elementsDoubles: planetsSimples: signs
Tap a sphere or a path.
SPHERE 6 · THE ETHICAL TRIAD
תפארת
Its shadow, on the Tree of Death: .
PATHS FROM HERE
IN THE MYSTICAL QABALAH
A majestic king; a child; a sacrificed god
Its magical image: the figure to build in the imagination when you meditate on the sphere.
TITLES
SYMBOLS
All her symbols: The lamen; The Rosy Cross; The Calvary cross; The truncated pyramid; The cube.
0 of 32 worked with
gold dots on the TreeNext, going up the Tree from Malkuth and then along the paths: .
Learn more in What Is Qabalah?, The Tree of Life and Paths & Tarot; drill the spheres in the Tree of Life study cards.
Westcott's translation, 1887
A short medieval text, printed with the Sefer Yetzirah, calls each of the ten spheres and the twenty-two paths of the letters an “Intelligence”. The spheres are the first ten paths; the letters are paths 11 to 32.
Path 6 (the sphere Tiphareth)The Mediating Intelligence
Each sphere's “mundane chakra”
In the old picture of the world, inherited from Ptolemy, the Earth sat at the centre in the sphere of the elements, and round it turned the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, then the fixed stars of the zodiac, and last the Primum Mobile, the “first moved”, which carried all the rest. Each sphere of the Tree rules one of these heavens. Fold the Tree to see it.
SPHERE 6 · HEAVEN 4 FROM THE EARTH
Tiphareth Beauty
Shemesh: the Sun
Its spiritual experience, in Fortune's table: Vision of the harmony of things; mysteries of the Crucifixion.
The heavens turn here at speeds chosen to be easy to watch, the nearer the faster; they are not the planets' true periods.
ZOHAR AND EARLY KABBALAH
No fixed picture
The sephiroth appear as lists, triads and images of a body or of the heavens, not as one diagram. The Tree as a drawing came later.
1516
Reuchlin's diagram
On the cover of the Latin translation of Gikatilla's Gates of Light: seventeen paths, with Malkuth joined by a single one. The ten spheres and the twenty-two letters were still separate ideas.
1573
Zillettus
Cesare Evoli's book gives seventeen paths again, arranged differently: the spheres in three columns, Malkuth joined to three of them, and planetary signs beside the Hebrew names.
1592 TO 1609
Cordovero's Pardes Rimonim
Editions carry diagrams with twenty-one or twenty-two paths that disagree with one another, and none gives the letters to them. The text itself describes twenty-four paths (two, from Hod and Netzach to Malkuth, not counted); a second work, Or Ne'erav, describes twenty-two.
1652 TO 1654
Kircher
In Oedipus Aegyptiacus the diagram gives each of the twenty-two paths a Hebrew letter and sets planetary signs on the spheres. It is the earliest known appearance of the form the Golden Dawn and Crowley used.
1677 TO 1684
Knorr von Rosenroth
Kabbala denudata prints five trees (ilanot) for the Lurianic account of creation, four of them from earlier Jewish designs.
1880S TO 1900S
The Golden Dawn
Takes Kircher's layout and letters and gives the paths their zodiac signs, planets and elements and their tarot trumps, with its own planetary scheme for the spheres, four colour scales and four worlds.
1900S TO 1940S
Crowley, Lévi and others
Crowley's Thoth system swaps the Emperor and the Star; the French school of Lévi and Papus gives the trumps to the letters in plain order. Rudolf Steiner (1924) groups the spheres by the body: head (Kether, Chokmah, Binah), middle (Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth) and limbs (Netzach, Hod, Yesod), with Malkuth an earthly force.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Tree of life (Kabbalah)”, which cites Chajes's Ilanot: Maps of God and The Kabbalistic Tree; Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim 7:1 and Or Ne'erav 6:2; Crowley, Liber 777.
The old diagrams differ in the number and joining of their paths (seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-two or twenty-four), so only the Golden Dawn layout, which the others lead to, is drawn here.
A few things to do with this tool, from a first try to a habit. Each one you tick counts as practice for the day, towards your streak and milestones.
Kept in this browser. Notes you send to the journal are kept there as well.