The Gra Tree Diagram & Flower of Life
Posted: 01 Jun 2021, 19:33
So today I'm going to get a little mystical about the Tree of Life in a way that can be looked at from any kind of perspective, traditional Kabbalah, the Hermetic Qabalah, anything that involves the 22 paths (3-7-12) and 10 sephiroth. Working with the six-petal rosette (Flower of Life) as the sacred geometry that underlies creation. No tradition "owns" triangles, stars, lines, circles and pattern figures and this one just maps itself out as one of the hundreds, but it is very special and sacred to me.
I'm putting this out for thoughts and opinions.
And it so happened that Elijah ben Shlomo Zalmen aka The Gra saw in it what I saw. He published his commentary on the Sephir Yetzirah in 1884. So he is, by Kabbalistic standards, one of the most recent of the great commentators and I sure didn't know that when I first began to avidly study as much of his ideas as were published in English in the 1990s and accessible to someone with access to a university library and interlibrary loan and the very first generation of the World Wide Web. I didn't understand most of what I read. But I did understand that he saw Sepher Yetrizah and 32 Paths of Wisdom depicting a universe that looked like this, and not what Issac Luria had in mind and definitely not what the Christian Cabalists did when ~they~ made the diagram we call the Kircher Tree of Life (its older than Kircher but he's the one to make it The Tree)
The premise: The universe ~is~ good. That every part of creation is in harmony with every other part of creation. We humans, on our planet, we suffer a lot but in the macrocosm, in creation itself? The universe was, is, and will be ~good~
The universe is numbers and shapes and patterns, over and over again. And when you look at a perfectly balanced mandala of creation, some really fascinating patterns emerge. I'm going to talk about them without relying on either Kabbalah or Qabalah philosophy or spiritualism for a second.
Every sephiroth (and everything between every sephiroth) creates the core patterns within a circle:
A triangle pointing up
A triangle pointing down
.. and the hexagram aka 6-rayed star (or rose) called oh so many things including the Star of David and the Seal of Solomon which is what happens when you put the two triangles together.
Now, I intentionally lined up my diagram so that Tif'eret would contain one of the hexagrams and that, in turn, dictated which of the 3 patterns appeared everywhere else and I'd completely forgotten what that was. I hadn't drawn one of these in 20 years. Gra Tree, yes. But not a Gra Tree laid on top of the pattern of an extended flower of life design. And I was stunned when I did it today, inspired by reading Nemia's archived Making Your Own Tree of Life post late last night.
Areyh Kaplan used the phrase "The Natural Array" for the diagram but the person within Kabbalah to embrace it was use it at the framework for his commentary on the Sepher Yetzirah which is now one of the most common (but hardly the only one) in Kabbalah. He gave very specific attributions for the Hebrew letters as part of his work. And I don't know how they align with the Continental esoteric tarot tradition because I'm about to teach myself the esoteric Continental tarot tradition from practically scratch.
I'm putting this out for thoughts and opinions.
And it so happened that Elijah ben Shlomo Zalmen aka The Gra saw in it what I saw. He published his commentary on the Sephir Yetzirah in 1884. So he is, by Kabbalistic standards, one of the most recent of the great commentators and I sure didn't know that when I first began to avidly study as much of his ideas as were published in English in the 1990s and accessible to someone with access to a university library and interlibrary loan and the very first generation of the World Wide Web. I didn't understand most of what I read. But I did understand that he saw Sepher Yetrizah and 32 Paths of Wisdom depicting a universe that looked like this, and not what Issac Luria had in mind and definitely not what the Christian Cabalists did when ~they~ made the diagram we call the Kircher Tree of Life (its older than Kircher but he's the one to make it The Tree)
The premise: The universe ~is~ good. That every part of creation is in harmony with every other part of creation. We humans, on our planet, we suffer a lot but in the macrocosm, in creation itself? The universe was, is, and will be ~good~
The universe is numbers and shapes and patterns, over and over again. And when you look at a perfectly balanced mandala of creation, some really fascinating patterns emerge. I'm going to talk about them without relying on either Kabbalah or Qabalah philosophy or spiritualism for a second.
Every sephiroth (and everything between every sephiroth) creates the core patterns within a circle:
A triangle pointing up
A triangle pointing down
.. and the hexagram aka 6-rayed star (or rose) called oh so many things including the Star of David and the Seal of Solomon which is what happens when you put the two triangles together.
Now, I intentionally lined up my diagram so that Tif'eret would contain one of the hexagrams and that, in turn, dictated which of the 3 patterns appeared everywhere else and I'd completely forgotten what that was. I hadn't drawn one of these in 20 years. Gra Tree, yes. But not a Gra Tree laid on top of the pattern of an extended flower of life design. And I was stunned when I did it today, inspired by reading Nemia's archived Making Your Own Tree of Life post late last night.
Areyh Kaplan used the phrase "The Natural Array" for the diagram but the person within Kabbalah to embrace it was use it at the framework for his commentary on the Sepher Yetzirah which is now one of the most common (but hardly the only one) in Kabbalah. He gave very specific attributions for the Hebrew letters as part of his work. And I don't know how they align with the Continental esoteric tarot tradition because I'm about to teach myself the esoteric Continental tarot tradition from practically scratch.