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If you want to know the Tree of Life, maybe my own story of getting to know it will help you. I'm no scholar and no authority on anything!


The well-known basic diagram of the Tree of Life - imagine it as a fountain of light where pure light is slowly dripping down through coloured vessels


The Tree of Life with names for the spheres or sefirot, and with esoteric associations - in this case by Aleister Crawley and Robert Wang

For many years, I was sure that I'd never be able to tell one sephira from the other, and the whole Tree of Life seemed to me like an artifical construct, something that others can understand but I simply can't. It took many years until all of a sudden, some years ago, the penny dropped.

I can tell you from experience: you need patience and time to absorb the wisdom and beauty of the kabbalah. Your brain will only absorb it when it's ready. Until then, don't consider it a waste of time to read what you can about the kabbalah, consider it as steps on the way. I don't know much and what I write now will probably be torn to pieces by others who feel they know so much more and indeed do so. I don't rely in my explanation on any other source but my own understanding - I may add sources later.

The Tree of Life is only a part of the whole kabbalah philosophy which actually wants to understand God and the world and our human lives.... based on the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew language and numbers. The Tree of Life is a model of the workings of God - how the world was made. If you follow the Tree from the top to the root, you see how God created the world (or how the world came into being) - we're living in the root area. But you can also climb upward and try to reach an understanding of creation.

So this Tree connects the divine sphere and the human, material plane. It grows between Heaven and Earth.



I started to understand it once I started to imagine divine energy as light that flows through a fountain, from bowl to bowl. All the bowls are colourful, and the light absorbs these colours on the way down. That makes it beautiful and interesting, but it also dims the light.

Light is such a wonderful metaphor for divine energy; it's such a basic human instinct to turn to the source of our light, the sun, if we want to understand God, and look for our metaphors there.

But what was before light? The kabbalah says, there was nothing, Ein אין . Ein means in Hebrew "not there". If you're looking for something and don't find it, you say "ein" and shrug. Ein kesef - no money. Ein davar - it doesn't matter. Ein ish - nobody there. Ein sabon - soapless.

We can't imagine an Ein. Even in negation, we always say WHAT is not there, money or people or soap. But before the creation, there was nothing. Ein.

A first definition of this Ein came with the next stage, Ein Sof אין סוף - No ending. The moment you say that there are NO borders, separations, limits, you imply their existence. The moment you think infinity, you imply finitiy. (Sof סוף means ending)

And the third step comes with Ein Sof Or אין סוף אור - limitless light. (Or means light אור) Do you see how we came just by abstract words from a place of Nothing through Infinity to Limitless Light?

You can imagine it like watching dawn. The Ein is the darkest darkness. With Ein Sof, you don't see any light yet but you can sense that it's about to break - one part of the sky is still dark but hints to the existence of light. And with Ein Sof Or, you see that there is light. You don't see the sun yet, but you know there is light.

These three stages are also the stages of creation in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

Look at the three upper " veils": Ein, Ein Sof, Ein Sof Or.



(it doesn't matter whether you transcribe אור as or Or or Aur, letters in Hebrew work differently from Latin letters)

All this has happened before creation has crystallized into spheres. But it happens when light, pure divine light, crystallizes into Keter, the first sephira. It's the first manifestation of the divine will to create.

Before we talk about the sephiroth, the "bubbles" on the Tree of Life, I want to explain the word sephira ספירה

All Hebrew words are built from roots, usually three consonants. You add to these three consonants all kind of things to make different words. It's like in English where to fall and to fell are related, and where you can add word parts until you get downfall, fallible etc. Hebrew is only more consequent. Nearly every Hebrew word you meet can be reduced to these three consonants that make up the root.

Sephira's root is SPR, ספר which is one of the most interesting roots of all imo. (P and F are the same letter in Hebrew, P is just an explosive F)

Sefer = book, sofer = writer, sippur= story, sfira = count, mispar = number.

You see already in this root SPR that in Hebrew, letter and number are the same. Alef counts as 1, bet as 2 etc. And accordingly, the words for writing and for counting are derived from the same root.

So a sephira is actually the act of counting.

Do you know that in Hebrew, there are no planet-derived weekday names but the days are counted like in the Old Testament? First day, second day, third day... and you count them by their letter. Yom alef is the first day, Yom bet the second day. You count your way through time.

The Greek word sphere and the English cipher and the German Ziffer, they're all children of this root, SPR.

Sephira is the singular, sephiroth the plural. Whenever you read a text where somebody writes about "a sephiroth", you know that person has no idea ("one children"). It's one sephira, many sephiroth.

Now let's talk about the sephiroth that make up the Tree of Life.

Our first sephira, Keter, is our first countable manifestation. Keter כתר means crown - you see it's three letters in Hebrew, three nice consonants, KTR, the vowels are added when speaking. The Tree of Life is crowned by this sephira of undivided, undiluted divine light.

This light divides into three streams that flow beneath Keter, three pillars. One is negative and harsh - the other positive and merciful - and one perfectly balanced between negative and positive.

The divine light will flow through all three pillars and touch them. If you look at the whole tree, you can see that on the negative and positive side, the sephiroth are symmetrical - the divine light always touches first the positive pillar, then the negative side.

The sephiroth on the middle pillar, the pillar of equilibrium, are not on the same level as the the others. It's as though the light flowing through the tree comes to rest in the middle sephiroth.

It comes from Keter and flows positive, negative - again positive, negative - then comes to rest in the middle.

It continues positive, negative, and then again goes to the middle - and flows down to the last sephira, the one we live in.

Follow this flow with your finger or your eyes. You will see that what the light needs is balance but also variety. It can't simply flow in one big stream from Keter down to the last sephira. To make creation dynamic, alive, full of tension, interest and struggle, we need contrasts, we need positive and negative. Divine energy flows or bounces from one to the other, and so do we.



We see colours, the light around is reflected, it absorbs different wavelengths - if Keter just remaind Keter, we'd have no life and death, no development.

In Keter, the divine light is complete and we can hardly imagine it. It's very far removed from our day to day existence. But it's there, and without it, we wouldn't.

Once the divine light is aware of its own existence, it's thinking. It's reflecting, and it's no longer undivided. The second sephira appears, and it's Chochmah, חוכמה, Intelligence.

Very obvious, isn't it? The moment that the Undivided starts to think about itself, it's no longer Undivided, but divides itself into thinking subject and thought-about object.

The next step is the understanding that now we can create. Keter is Being - Chochmah is thinking about Being, and Bina is the addition of one and one. Once you have A and B, you know they'll start creating C, D and all the rest.

The kabbalah, influenced by the Jewish concept of the Divine as paternal, sees Chochmah as male (the Father) and Bina as female (the Mother) - the Father comes first. These are only metaphors, and if the kabbalah had been developed by a matriarch society, the mother would probably have come first. The old idea of sperm as light, womb as dark etc comes from the same root.

Chochmah is on the positive pillar, Bina on the negative pillar, both influence the sephiroth that are below them.

These three first sephiroth, Keter, Chochmah and Bina, are so far above us that they're called the Supernal Triangle. We know they are there, they have to be there, otherwise nothing could have been created, but we can't really know them.

To be continued. It's too long already!

I hope you ate and drank well and had some good nights of sleep before you continue reading my musings.

If you know better, correct me, I'm no kabbalah scholar.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention astrological assignations to the supernal triangle. The reason is that there are several different ways to assign planets or the zodiac to the first two sephiroth, and that gets confusing very quickly. Maybe somebody else will write about it or I'll do it later; today I want to continue down the Tree.

Actually, Bina בינה is associated with Saturn and an endless, leaden, dark sea. Now you can ask yourself, and so did I: how do the depth of understanding (BNH is the root for understanding), the maternal principle and Saturn together? You can hardly find a less maternal mythological figure than stern child-eater Saturn. The most distant planet visible with the naked eye, moving slowly...



I have thought about this quite a bit, and warning goes out to all kabbalah scholars: I have come up with my own explanation for this riddle.

In the supernal triangle, there is no real difference between male and female. When we call Chochma male and Bina female, we're using weak human analogies to something that is more complex than we can imagine. It's a model, the idea of male + female = creation. A useful and strong model, but a model.

If I look at Saturn, I see the Father of Time and stern child-eater mentioned before. But I also see Rhea, his sister and wife, who tricked him and made him swallow a stone. I see in the first three sephiroth principles that are above our binary ideas of male and female. That's why I like the association of Chochma with the whole zodiac, and for myself, I associate Bina with Saturn and Rhea.

Okay, I have broken now all the rules of proper Kabbalah, but this really helped me get my head around Bina. I see the mythological scene,



I see Kronos/Saturn as the father afraid of bringing new life into the world that might de-throne him, and I see Rhea who is determined to save her children against her husband.

It is the dark side of parenthood, stripped of all its sentimental additions over time.

Rhea is one of Saturn's moons, and for me, Rhea was the key to understand Bina - and once I understood Bina, in another weak analogy, I could also understand Chochma and Keter better. Basically, I accepted that neither my brain nor my tongue are able to find words that contain, describe or explain them.

So, Bina is by no means cozy. Bringing creation, creatures into this world is difficult, harsh, and it is not smooth. It also means that automatically, we become slaves of time - once we have children, we're the parent generation and no longer important except for keeping the offspring alive.

But now let's continue to Chessed, חסד, a sephirah with a beautiful name: mercy. ChSD is the root, and only kind and good words are derived from it. A Chassid is an especially God-loving person who loves others, too. A chassida is the word for stork, a bird that brings fortune and happiness to the house where it lives - and it always returns. Chessed elyon is higher mercy, and if someone is especially gifted, we say "he's a teacher of chessed elyon", i.e., his gift is divine.

So if we saw the creation of life in the supernal triangle, it is greeted with mercy on the pillar of mercy. A wonderful Blue is the colour of this sephira, and it's associated with Jupiter - jovial, benefic, a powerful influence for more mercy in this world.

Chessed is balanced on the other side by Gvura, גבורה, the red sephirah associated with Mars on the pillar of severity. Chessed gives a second and third chance, gvura is tough and everything has consequences. Chessed is serene and generous, Gvura is disruptive and full of aggressive energy. The thing is: life needs both.

After Gvura, we land on the middle pillar again that we haven't seen since Keter. This sephira is called Tif'eret תפארת and that's maybe the most beautiful name of all. It's a girl's name in Israel, rare but I know one Tif'eret. It's a feminine grammatical form - like Chochma, Bina and Malkuth.

We travelled our Tree of Life and have landed on Tif'eret, the glorious, well-balanced sixth sefira. It's associated with the Sun and radiates into all other sefirot. Why do we have to leave it and once more go to the Pillar of Mercy, and then the Pillar of Severity again? That's life, we never stand still, and after resting a bit in equilibrium, we start moving and changing again.

So after Tif'eret, we and the divine light reach Netzach, the green sefira of fertility, ruled by Venus. In the Thoth Tarot, all Sevens are greenish and foul because its creator is deeply suspicious of the corrupting influence Venus can have. The positive values of Venus are celebrated in the Empress but not in the Sevens. It's interesting that the word Netzach נצח means eternity in Hebrew, and nitzachon, victory, is derived from it. Both words are masculine from a grammar point of view - while Mars' red, virile Gvura is a feminine word. I really like the balance of male and female energies on the Tree of Life that subverts the gender stereotypes we may be having.

The number Seven is a wonderful number. The magical numbers Three (development: going up, staying there, going down or cardinal, fix, mutable or initiative, action, aftermath...) and Four (four directions, temperaments, seasons....) add up here. And the seven planets gave their names to our weekdays and thus built the rhythm of our daily life since most ancient times.

So there is a little discrepancy between the very negative way the tarot, especially the Thoth, sees the sefira Netzach and the number Seven, and the way the Seven is seen more generally.

Then we come to Hod הוד , our last station on the Pillar of Severity. The Eight is a complex number, poised between the square and the circle. The planet Mercury with its sense of logic, verbal interaction and rationality rules Hod - but don't forget that this same Hermes/Mercury is also the Psychompompos who brings the dead down to the gates of Hades, the Underworld.

Now we're on our last two stations, and they're both beautifully balanced on the middle Pillar.

Yesod, יסוד the foundation, associated with the Moon - very logical if you look at the way the divine light drips down through the Sun and then illuminates the Moon. It's the realm of inner power, intuition - all the Nines are beautiful cards.

Yesodot are the foundations of a house, yesodi is a very thorough person, and meyasdim are founders. It's a basic card but it didn't totally touch ground.

We touch ground with the last sefira, Malkuth מלכות . The Kingdom of the earth, the world of the senses, the tangible world.

As I said, we can move on the Tree in both directions. We can follow, as I have done now, the journey of the divine light as it drips down - the way of creation from less-than-idea down to the ground - but we can also climb up.

And that's the most exciting mental exercise you can imagine. Just try it. Imagine yourself in Malkuth - get to know the kingdom of your life, of the world around you - and then start lifting yourself up into the realm of your dreams, of your intuition and memory, in the magical light of the Moon.

You can continue to climb up to Hod where abstract thinking and philosophy live, then on to Netzach, the realm of eros, drives and strong emotional energies. The higher you climb, the less words you will have to describe what you see - well at least I don't have them.

It's wonderful to get to know the Tree and lose the ground beneath our feet a bit.

So this was my introduction to the Tree of Life. Of course, there's more, this is not even the beginning...

According to the Kabbalah, there is not only one world but four. The highest is Atziluth, nobility - this would be Plato's world of pure ideals and ideas. Then we have Briah, creation - where the energy becomes denser and able to give birth to concreter ideas. The next is Yetzirah, design - here these ideas take on a shape that might become reality one day. And then there is Assiya, action or making - where things really happen.

There are many sites that explain it more in detail, just write kabbalah four worlds and Google will throw lots of interesting material at you

I like to compare it with the process of rain. In the Atziluth sky, there are little water drops but you don't see them, you see the sun. In the Briah sky, there are clouds - you can see the tiny drops have found each other and can now create conditions for rain. In the Yetzirah sky, the clouds become rain clouds and rain drops form. And in the Assiya sky, they fall down as drops you can feel.

Actually, there are many processes in life that you can compare to these four worlds - they're four stages. A baby is made through the four stages - from the dream via conception and pregnancy to birth. Every creative project goes through these stages, too.

Each World is also connected to the four letters of the tetragrammaton (yod, heh, vav, heh יהוה) and the four elements (Fire, Water, Air, Earth).

If you look at the Tree of Life, you can identify different parts of the Tree as belonging to different worlds:



(Of course, you can, as shown here, discuss until tomorrow morning where to draw the lines.)

But seen in a higher resolution, each of the Worlds actually has its own complete tree, and they're connected.



If we understand the Tree of Life as some kind of fountain with coloured vessels through which the divine light drips down until it reaches us, then it starts totally clear and radiant in Kether of Atziluth - and when it has dripped down to Malkuth, a new Tree begins, and the light moves on... to to third Tree... and the last. When it has arrived at the last sephira, Malkuth, of the Assiyah world, then it's pretty muddy and you can make things from it

Four worlds - four tarot suits.

Atziluth is the World of Fire, Wands and yud

Briah is the World of Water, Cups and the first heh

Yetzirah is the World of Air, Swords and vav

Assiyah is the World of Earth, Pentacles/Disks and the second heh


Each world has its ten sephiroth: Kether, Chochmah, Binah, Chessed, Gvurah, Tif'eret, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malkuth. There's one of these in each Tree.

We'll go into the characteristics of each sephirah some other time, if anyone's interested (and I'm not a huge expert so I'll be very happy if someone else does it! LOL), but just look at the numbers. Kether is 1, and Malktuh is 10. That's the minor cards from our suits.

Each minor is associated with ONE position on these four connected World Trees. The Wands sit in Atziluth etc down to the Pentacles/Disks in Assiya. And each card is associated with the sephirah of the same number.

Aces - Kether

Twos - Chochmah

Threes - Binah

etc until

Tens - Malkuth.

So if we're now in the first decan of Sagittarius, and our minor for the decan is the Eight of Wands, and I want to know where this card sits on the Tree of Life - all I have to know is:

1. Wands = Atziluth, and

2. Eights = Hod

So the Eight of Wands is Hod of Atziluth.

And once you get into Kabbalah some more, these are not just weird Hebrew words but you start to associate something with them.

You know Atziluth is very high up on the stacked Trees, but Hod is low down and not on the serene, balanced middle axis. You know that Hod is associated with Mercury, ratio, and may be overly rational. And then you remember that the 1st decan of Sagittarius is ruled by Mercury, and you have a double Mercury here, and all of a sudden you understand why it's associated with movement and communication.



And why there are TWO Mercurian winged sandals on the Eight of Wands in the Tabula Mundi Tarot.

This was both fun and educational. Thank you so much for sharing, I can't wait for your next post.

Thanks for this, Nemia. It's really clarified a couple of things for me.

In the past I seemed to reach a certain point with the Kabbalah before the thread slipped from my fingers. I thought I'd found the answer to the problem when reading The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford by Lon Milo Duquette (his approach is very relaxed and funny), but although It seemed clear at first, I reached the sea of Hebrew letters and meanings and lost my bearings. I guess I need the will or passion to persevere, but I need most of my will and time for other things. (Apologies for the mixed metaphors ...)

Oh yes, I absolutely understand. It really helps that I read, speak and write Hebrew fluently. Otherwise words like Hod or Atziluth would just stare me in the face. I have huge respect for people who make progress in the kabbalah without a good working knowledge of Hebrew.

In my last posts, we went from the top of the Tree of Life downwards. Now let's climb up.

We will climb up the opposite way of Creation - we use the paths shown here:

We will explore later the many other possible paths, and their association with tarot majors. Right now, we forget tarot and just climb up the tree.

Look around you. What you see is the material plane. You see the Earth, you see things humans have created, you see things that can be grasped by the senses and that are subject to time. That's Malkuth, the kingdom, and we live in it. It is built from the four elements, and that's why the sephirah of Malkuth is a quartered cross. (Such a wonderful symbol, the quartered cross, and we all drew it as children when we came to the stage where we wanted to combine the ability to draw lines and to draw a circle).

Earth means Malkuth. When we look up from Malkuth, we see the skies.

Now imagine we live in a world that still believes the skies revolve around the Earth - the geocentric universe. In the pre-modern age, people believed that Earth is surrounded by crystal clear spheres. Each of these spheres housed a planet, i.e. a wanderer whose position changed.
What is the next sphere above us? It's the Moon, our closest celestial neighbour, whose movement we can perceive with the blank eye. The celestial sphere above us is the lunar sphere, and the sephira above our kingdom is Yesod.

Now Yesod means foundations - how can the foundations be above the kingdom? It's all a matter of perspective - if you look down from Kether, Yesod looks like the foundation. Imagine flying like an Eagle from Kether through Tif'eret down to Yesod - and there is Malkuth beneath it. But no - we're climbing up.

What does the influence of the Moon mean for Yesod? The Moon dominates the night, with ever-changing cycles (related to the cycles of the human body, not only the female). And night is the time of dreams when unconscious material comes up, when fears and impulses awake, and when the wisdom of the night appears: intuition, gut feelings. Yesod is often painted in dark purple, a nightly colour, mixed from blue of the skies and red of blood.

Think for a moment of the number Nine - three times three. It's the number of the months of pregnancy.

We climb up - now we have left the night time behind us, and also the Middle Pillar of Equilibrium. The next celestial sphere is Mercury - the small planet which is not often visible because it's so close to the Sun, and because of its speed is associated with Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, the great communicator. And we enter the sephira Hod, associated with Mercury's values: language, logic, rational thinking. It's often shown as bright orange, a clear colour, but not as brilliant as Tif'eret.

Mercury is Hermes in Greek, and thus connected to Hermes Psychopompos when our rational, cool, fleet-footed Hermes/Mercury accompanies the dead souls to Hades - remaining untouched by Death, detached and unchanged.

Think of the number Eight - the octagon is a popular choice for religious architecture (shrines, mausolea, memoriae, martyriae in the ancient world, baptisteries, mausolea and churches in the Christian world); it holds the middle between the two perfect geometric shapes: the square and the circle. (That's why in Early Christian architecture octagonal drums are used as transition between a square church interior and a spherical dome.

The number Eight can be seen as transmitter, translator, able to talk with everybody. All these abilities are Hod's. Hod simply means Glory.

Hod is on the Pillar of Severity - now we move over to the Pillar of Mercy.

Netzach is our seventh sephira, and if you look at the celestial spheres - it's Venus' turn now. Venus means fertility, eros, attraction... and this sephira is usually shown as green, like growing things.

The word Netzach means Eternity, and it's the root of Nitzachon, meaning Victory. The Hebrew root nun - tzaddik - chet, נצח, netzach, has other associations, too. Lenazeach means both to defeat, to vanquish (remember "Amor vincit omnia"? Amor is of course Venus' son), but it also means to conduct a concert. Hanzacha means commemoration ("keeping for Eternity").

All these show that this is a fierce sephira. If we think of Venus only as gentle, sexy girl-woman or the wimp shown by Homer towards the end of the Trojan War, we're wrong. Venus is a strong power.

The number Seven is a power number, too. It's the addition of the holy number Four (the quartered circle we live in: before me, behind me, to the left and right to me - the wheel of the year - the seasons - the elements - the directions - the temperaments...) and the holy number Three (the three stages of Life: blossom - fruit - wither, birth - life - death) and combined, the Three and Four give us the number of planets and virtues. Actually, the Seven gives us a ladder to climb up with. Robert Place's Sevenfold Mystery explores the significance of this number.

But why do the Sevens get a bad reputation in the tarot? I think there are two reasons for it. (What I write here is totally based on my own thoughts and observations - no quotations here, no influence from any of the books I readI.

First of all, Venus and the Power of the Feminine were connotated historically with negative energy: passive, dark, dangerous, weakening, - effiminate. What a word that is. Crowley's writing leaves little doubt that he was deeply suspicious of Venus and of Netzach. There is an anti-Venus, anti-feminine bias in much of the esoteric literature. Just like in art. (I looked yesterday through a big art book on Symbolism - and I thought, oh my God, all these artists were so ambivalent about women, so conflicted, they saw them as demons and temptresses, never just as human beings...)

The more serious reason is Netzach's position and its strong pull with Gvura. Just look at the Tree. Venus in Netzach and Mars in Gvura belong to the four sephiroth that "hold up" perfect Tif'eret. When I meditated about it, it looked to me like a tent. Tif'eret is the middle tent pole, held by four others. Hod and Chessed, Mercury and Jupiter, get on much better than Netzach and Gvura (interesting enough, Hod and Chessed are painted in contrast colours orange and blue, and Netzach and Gvura in conrasting colours green and red - just something to think about).

Hod and Chessed are even numbers, Eight and Four - rational and simple. Netzach and Gvura are uneven numbers, Seven and Five - complex and more difficult to understand as shape.

And the Seven and Five are closest to the perfect sephira, Six, Tif'eret - they pull Tif'eret up and suffer themselves from distortion and exaggeration.
That makes the Fives and Sevens so difficult.

Do I make any sense here at all? All those kabbalah scholars who write on other forums would probably laugh their heads off.

So Netzach is Venus's sphere, the green sephira of growth and decay, of attraction and repulson - and we climb higher.

We climb back onto the Pillar of Equality. Look down - beneath us, the gentle, mysterious light of Yesod twinkles. Look up - you can't see anything, the light is so brilliant, you're looking right into Kether. And that's actually pretty impossible.

But where are we? Tif'eret is associated with the Sun, the next celestial body, the next crystal sphere hugging our earth. Tif'eret is also, since we left Malkuth, the first name of a sephira that has a feminine gender (in Hebrew, words ending on tav are nearly always feminine). Tif'eret comes from the root peer, peh - aleph - resh, פאר, meaning glory, like Hod - if you put them together, "with hod and pe'er" you get something like "pomp and circumstance". Hod is glory, Tif'eret glorification, splendour.

So we have here in the middle of the Tree Tif'eret and the Sun, balanced perfectly between the realm of the Divine (high above) and the Human kingdom, radiant and in touch with nearly all the other sephiroth. Without Tif'eret, the tent pole, the whole middle area of the Tree would break down. The solar power of truth gives enlightenment to aggressive Gvura and erotic Venus, and the solar power of warmth gives love to cold Hod and proud Chessed.

Again, this is how I see it, don't kill me now with Sefer haYetsira and Eshelman quotes.

So, let's take a break. We have climbed up from our earthly realm through Yesod, Hod, and Netzach. Now we bask a bit in the Sun of Tif'eret and take a break.

I've only ever thought about the Kabbalah if I had to.
I mean, I know all the names and correspondences etc but I tend to just go 'ok' and move on.

I have to say though Nemia, these posts are making me want to re-examine it afresh - your explanations are wonderfully clear and helpful, a true sign of someone being confident with the subject in question!
I've just spent the past couple of hours with a pen and a notebook - thank you!

The Qabalistic Tarot by Wang, The New Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot by the Ciceros, and Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot were helpful to me as a beginner since they showed how the Kabbalah can be applied to the Tarot, which was my main interest. Because of them the Chicken Qabalah by DuQuette was easier to digest. By the way, its sequel Son Of Chicken Qabalah is going to be released at the end of the month.

I can feel the penny starting to drop.

I have looked over these posts from Nemia in the past and enjoyed them, but lately I have been doing some other reading on Kabbala, and now I come back to these wonderfully clear explanations and descriptions and I am starting to feel things come together.

For me, I find that a bit of jumping around between different writers, and presentations is paying off. Also taking time with the diagrams.

You can't hurry this kind of learning. You have to let it become part of you, bit by bit.

Nemia:

כל הכבוד גברתי!

אל תגידי לי שאת לא חוקרת הקבלה
אזה שטויות

קוראים לי מרדכי. היתי מורה בחודש העבר בפורטלנד אורגן
The Northwest Tarot Symposium.
מלמדתי מבוא לטרו וקבלה
Tarot and Kabbalah: An Introduction.

Because of my searching for online responses to my class I was led to the Cult of Tarot and this Forum. I think you have done a wonderful job of sharing some of the meaning of קבלה Kabbalah, but even more important, השימחה וססון, the joy and delight of study of קבלה Kabbalah.
חשב אני אפשר את מבינה לשון הקדש יותר טוב מימני.

תודה רבה

מרדכי יונה בן יוסף ושרה

חג הפסח סמח
Murray Porath מדריך
Readings...And More!

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נאים מאוד

Oh, I didn't see that post before, and now it's more than a year!

נעים מאוד גם לי, תודה, אבל אני לא חוקרת, רק מנסה להבין

I was just thinking a bit more about kabbalah again, especially now that we make the difficult step from Tif'eret (2nd decan of Taurus) to Netzach (3rd decan).

Tif'eret, number six, is always the high point, and the four sephira around it tear it into different directions. Hod wants more aggression, Netzach more passivity, Chessed more feeling and Hod more rational thinking - and Tif'eret has it all. So now we're descending to Netzach, the sephira that I guess has a less-than-stellar repuration because it's associatied with Venus, and Venus is looked upon frowningly by patriarch writers. And most esoteric writers until not-so-long-ago were patriarchy supporters.

Netzach means eternity, nitzachon means victory, the root is נצח. Hantzacha means commemoration.

In today's Modern Hebrew, the word has also been used for leadership. Musical conductors are called menatzeach, a verb form of netzach. Netzach means you take a place above - above time, above others, above an orchestra.

Netzach is green, fertile, Venusian. The planetary associations with the sephiroth are firmly established but there's always more to each, as it should in esoteric symbolism. We go up the tree in the sequence of the planets visible to the eye since Babylonian times.

It's logical to climb up the tree with Malkuth/Earth, and Yesod/Moon also fit well. Hod/Mercury and Netzach/Venus follow, then Tif'eret/Sun radiates in the middle. We climb on to Gvura/Mars and Chessed/Jupiter - and then actually we can't really go any further to the binary triange, the highest three sephiroth that we can only imagine but not experience. Bina/Saturn - I add here Rhea, Saturn's moon, to complete the feminine character of Bina, and Rhea was wise. Then, the classical planets are finished. There are only two places left, so the modern planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) don't fit. Haindl/Pollock assign Uranus to the hidden sephirah Daath, and thus make them fit, but I prefer to align Chochma with the whole zodiac and Kether with the whole universe.

I find Chessed (literally: mercy, piety, agape) a bit difficult to reconcile with the image of Jupiter who actually shows no mercy at all. In Hebrew, planets have different names and Jupiter is called Tzedek - Justice. Now Tzedek and Chessed are not the same. They complement each other.

And as I said, Netzach and Venus are also more difficult to think together.

If I repeated what i wrote before in my ramblings, I'm sorry, I'll have to re-read what I wrote and maybe I'll understand myself better