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- Notes on Kabbalah
-
- The author grants the right to copy and distribute these Notes provided
- they remain unmodified and original authorship and copyright is retained.
- The author retains both the right and intention to modify and extend
- these Notes.
-
- Release 2.0
- Copy date: 12th. January 1992
-
- Copyright Colin Low 1992 (cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
-
- ****************************************************************************
-
-
-
- Chapter 4: The Sephiroth (continued)
- ========================
- This chapter provides a detailed look at each of the ten
- sephiroth and draws together material scattered over previous
- chapters.
-
- Yesod
- -----
-
- Yesod means "foundation", and that is what Yesod is: it is
- the hidden infrastructure whereby the emanations from the
- remainder of the Tree are transmitted to the sephira Malkuth.
- Just as a large building has its air-conditioning ducts, service
- tunnels, conduits, electrical wiring, hot and cold water pipes,
- attic spaces, lift shafts, winding rooms, storage tanks, a
- telephone exchange etc, so does the Creation, and the external,
- visible world of phenomenal reality rests (metaphorically
- speaking) upon a hidden foundation of occult machinery.
- Meditations on the nature of Yesod tend to be full of secret
- tunnels and concealed mechanisms, as if the Creation was a Gothic
- mansion with a secret door behind every mirror, a passage in
- every wall, a pair of hidden eyes behind every portrait, and a
- subterranean world of forgotten tunnels leading who knows where.
- For this reason the Spiritual Experience of Yesod is aptly named
- "The Vision of the Machinery of the Universe".
- Many Yesod correspondences reinforce this notion of a
- foundation, of something which lies behind, supports and gives
- shape to phenomenal reality. The magical image of Yesod is of "a
- beautiful naked man, very strong". The image which springs to
- mind is that of a man with the world resting on his shoulders,
- like one of the misrepresentations of the Titan Atlas (who
- actually held up the heavens, not the world). The angel order of
- Yesod is the Cherubim, the Strong Ones, the archangel is Gabriel,
- the Strong or Mighty One of God, and the God-name is Shaddai el
- Chai, the Almighty Living God.
- The idea of a foundation suggests that there is a substance
- which lies behind physical matter and "in-forms it" or "holds it
- together", something less structured, more plastic, more refined
- and rarified, and this "fifth element" is often called aethyr. I
- will not attempt to justify aethyr in terms of current physics
- (the closest concept I have found is the hypothesised Higgs
- field); it is a convenient handle on a concept which has enormous
- intuitive appeal to many magicians, who, when asked how magic
- works, tend to think in terms of a medium which is directly
- receptive to the will, something which is plastic and can be
- shaped through concentration and imagination, and which transmits
- their artificially created forms into reality. Eliphas Levi
- called this medium the "Astral Light". It is also natural to
- imagine that mind, consciousness, and the soul have their
- habitation in this substance, and there are volumes detailing the
- properties of the "Etheric Body", the "Astral Body", the "Causal
- Body" [1,2] and so on. I don't take this stuff too seriously, but
- I do like to work with the kind of natural intuitions which occur
- spontaneously and independently in a large number of people -
- there is power in these intuitions - and it is a mistake to
- invalidate them because they sound cranky. When I talk about
- aethyr or the Astral Light, I mean there is an ideoplastic
- substance which is subjectively real to many magicians, and
- explanations of magic at the level of Yesod revolve around
- manipulating this substance using desire, imagination and will.
- The fundamental nature of Yesod is that of *interface*; it
- interfaces the rest of the Tree of Life to Malkuth. The interface
- is bi-directional; there are impulses coming down from Kether,
- and echoes bouncing back from Malkuth. The idea of interface is
- illustrated in the design of a computer system: a computer with a
- multitude of worlds hidden within it is a source of heat and
- repair bills unless it has peripheral interfaces and device
- drivers to interface the world outside the computer to the world
- "inside" it; add a keyboard and a mouse and a monitor and a
- printer and you have opened the door into another reality. Our
- own senses have the same characteristic of being a bi-directional
- interface through which we experience the world, and for this
- reason the senses correspond to Yesod, and not only the five
- traditional senses - the "sixth sense" and the "second sight" are
- given equal status, and so Yesod is also the sphere of
- instinctive psychism, of clairvoyance, precognition, divination
- and prophecy. It is also clear from accounts of lucid dreaming
- (and personal experience) that we possess the ability to perceive
- an inner world as vividly as the outer, and so to Yesod belongs
- the inner world of dreams, daydreams and vivid imagination, and
- one of the titles of Yesod is "The Treasure House of Images".
- To Yesod is attributed Levanah, the Moon, and the lunar
- associations of tides, flux and change, occult influence, and
- deeply instinctive and sometimes atavistic behaviour -
- possession, mediumship, lycanthropy and the like. Although
- Yesod is the foundation and it has associations with strength, it
- is by no means a rigid scaffold supporting a world in stasis.
- Yesod supports the world just as the sea supports all the life
- which lives in it and sails upon it, and just as the sea has its
- irresistable currents and tides, so does Yesod. Yesod is the most
- "occult" of the sephiroth, and next to Malkuth it is the most
- magical, but compared with Malkuth its magic is of a more subtle,
- seductive, glamorous and ensnaring kind. Magicians are drawn to
- Yesod by the idea that if reality rests on a hidden foundation,
- then by changing the foundation it is possible to change the
- reality. The magic of Yesod is the magic of form and appearance,
- not substance; it is the magic of illusion, glamour,
- transformation, and shape-changing. The most sophisticated
- examples of this are to be found in modern marketing, advertising
- and image consultancies. I do not jest. My tongue is not even
- slightly in my cheek. The following quote was taken from this
- morning's paper [3]:
-
- Although the changes look cosmetic, those responsible for
- creating corporate image argue that a redesign of a
- company's uniform or name is just the visible sign of a much
- larger transformation.
-
- "The majority of people continue to misunderstand and think
- that it is just a logo, rather than understanding that a
- corporate identity programme is actually concerned with the
- very commercial objective of having a strong personality and
- single-minded, focussed direction for the whole
- organisation, " said Fiona Gilmore, managing director of the
- design company Lewis Moberly. "It's like planting an acorn
- and then a tree grows. If you create the right *foundation*
- (my itals) then you are building a whole culture for the
- future of an organisation."
-
- I don't know what Ms. Gilmore studies in her spare time, but the
- idea that it is possible to manipulate reality by manipulating
- symbols and appearances is entirely magical. The same article on
- corporate identity continues as follows:
-
- "The scale of the BT relaunch is colossal. The new logo will
- be painted on more than 72,000 vehicles and trailers, as
- well as 9,000 properties.
- The company's 92,000 public payphones will get new decals,
- and its 90 shops will have to changed, right down to the
- yellow door handles. More than 50,000 employees are likely
- to need new uniforms or "image clothing".
-
- Note the emphasis on *image*. The company in question (British
- Telecom) is an ex-public monopoly with an appalling customer
- relations problem, so it is changing the colour of its
- door handles! This is Yesodic magic on a gigantic scale.
- The image manipulators gain most of their power from the
- mass-media. The mass-media correspond to two sephiroth: as a
- medium of communication they belong in Hod, but as a foundation
- for our perception of reality they belong in Yesod. Nowadays most
- people form their model of what the world (in the large) is like
- via the media. There are a few individuals who travel the world
- sufficiently to have a model based on personal experience, but
- for most people their model of what most of the world is like is
- formed by newspapers, radio and television; that is, the media
- have become an extended (if inaccurate) instrument of perception.
- Like our "normal" means of perception the media are highly
- selective in the variety and content of information provided, and
- they can be used by advertising agencies and other manipulative
- individuals to create foundations for new collective realities.
- While on the subject of changing perception to assemble new
- realities, the following quote by "Don Juan" [4] has a definite
- Kabbalistic flavour:
-
- "The next truth is that perception takes place," he went on,
- "because there is in each of us an agent called the
- assemblage point that selects internal and external
- emanations for alignment. The particular alignment that we
- perceive as the world is the product of a specific spot
- where our assemblage point is located on our cocoon."
-
- One of the titles of Yesod is "The Receptacle of the Emanations",
- and its function is precisely as described above - Yesod is the
- assemblage point which assembles the emanations of the internal
- and the external.
- In addition to the deliberate, magical manipulation of
- foundations, there are other important areas of magic relevant to
- Yesod. Raw, innate psychism is an ability which tends to improve
- as more attention is devoted to creative visualisation, focussed
- meditation (on Tarot cards for example), dreams (e.g. keeping a
- dream diary), and divination. Divination is an important
- technique to practice even if you feel you are terrible at it
- (and especially if you think it is nonsense), because it
- reinforces the idea that it is permissible to "let go" and
- intuite meanings into any pattern. Many people have difficulty
- doing this, feeling perhaps that they will be swamped with
- unreason (recalling Freud's fear, expressed to Jung, of needing a
- bulwark against the "black mud of occultism"), when in reality
- their minds are swamped with reason and could use a holiday. Any
- divination system can be used, but systems which emphasise pure
- intuition are best (e.g. Tarot, runes, tea-leaves, flights of
- birds, patterns on the wallpaper, smoke. I heard of a Kabbalist
- who threw a cushion into the air and carried out divination on
- the basis of the number of pieces of foam stuffing which fell
- out). Because Yesod is a kind of aethyric reflection of the
- physical world, the image of and precursor to reality, mirrors
- are an important tool for Yesod magic. Quartz crystals are also
- used, probably because of the use of crystal balls for
- divination, but also because quartz crystal and amethyst have a
- peculiarly Yesodic quality in their own right. The average New
- Age shop filled with crystals, Tarot cards, silver jewelry (lunar
- association), perfumes, dreamy music, and all the glitz, glamour
- and glitter of a daemonic magpie's nest, is like a temple to
- Yesod. Mirrors and crystals are used passively as focii for
- receptivity, but they can also be used actively for certain kinds
- of aethyric magic - there is an interesting book on making and
- using magic mirrors which builds on the kind of elemental magical
- work carried out in Malkuth [5].
- Yesod has an important correspondence with the sexual
- organs. The correspondence occurs in three ways. The first way is
- that when the Tree of Life is placed over the human body, Yesod
- is positioned over the genitals. The author of the Zohar is quite
- explicit about "the remaining members of the Microprosopus", to
- the extent that the relevant paragraphs in Mather's translation
- of "The Lesser Holy Assembly" remain in Latin to avoid offending
- Victorian sensibilities.
- The second association of Yesod with the genitals arises
- from the union of the Microprosopus and his Bride. This is
- another recurring theme in Kabbalah, and the symbolism is complex
- and refers to several distinct ideas, from the relationship
- between man and wife to an internal process within the body of
- God: e.g [6].
-
- "When the Male is joined with the Female, they both
- constitute one complete body, and all the Universe is in a
- state of happiness, because all things receive blessing from
- their perfect body. And this is an Arcanum."
-
- or, referring to the Bride:
-
- "And she is mitigated, and receiveth blessing in that place
- which is called the Holy of Holies below."
-
- or, referring to the "member":
-
- "And that which floweth down into that place where it is
- congregated, and which is emitted through that most holy
- Yesod, Foundation, is entirely white, and therefore is it
- called Chesed.
- Thence Chesed entereth into the Holy of Holies; as it is
- written Ps. cxxxiii. 3 'For there Tetragrammaton commanded
- the blessing, even life for evermore.'"
-
- It is not difficult to read a great deal into paragraphs like
- this, and there are many more in a similar vein. Suffice to say
- that the Microprosopus is often identified with the sephira
- Tiphereth, the Bride is the sephira Malkuth, and the point of
- union between them is obviously Yesod.
- The third and more abstract association between Yesod and
- the sexual organs arises because the sexual organs are a
- mechanism for perpetuating the *form* of a living organism. In
- order to get close to what is happening in sexual reproduction it
- is worth asking the question "What is a computer program?". Well,
- a computer program indisputably begins as an idea; it is not a
- material thing. It can be written down in various ways; as an
- abstract specification in set theoretic notation akin to pure
- mathematics, or as a set of recursive functions in lambda
- calculus; it could be written in several different high level
- languages - Pascal, C, Prolog, LISP, ADA, ML etc. Are they all
- they same program? Computer scientists wrestle with this problem:
- can we show that two different programs written in two different
- languages are in some sense functionally identical? It isn't
- trivial to do this because it asks fundamental questions about
- language (any language) and meaning, but it is possible in
- limited cases to produce two apparently different programs
- written in different languages and assert that they are
- identical. Whatever the program is, it seems to exist
- independently of any particular language, so what is the program
- and where is it? Let us ignore that chestnut and go on to the
- next level. Suppose we write the program down. We could do it
- with a pencil. We could punch holes in paper. We could plant
- trees in a pattern in a field. We can line up magnetic domains.
- We can burn holes in metal foil. I could have it tattooed on my
- back. We can transform it into radically different forms (that is
- what compilers and assemblers do). It obviously isn't tied to any
- physical representation either. What about the computer it runs
- on? Well, it could be a conventional one made with CMOS chips
- etc.....but aren't there a lot of different kinds and makes of
- computer, and they can all run the same program. It is also quite
- practical to build computers which *don't* use electrons - you
- could use mechanics or fluids or ball bearings - all you need to
- do is produce something with the functionality of a Turing
- machine, and that isn't hard. So not only is the program not tied
- to any particular physical representation, but the same goes for
- the computer itself, and what we are left with is two puffs of
- smoke. On another level this is crazy; computers are real, they
- do real things in the real world, and the programs which make
- them work are obviously real too....aren't they?
- Now apply the same kind of scrutiny to living organisms, and
- the mechanism of reproduction. Take a good look at nucleic acids,
- enzymes, proteins etc., and ask the same kind of questions. I am
- not implying that life is a sort of program, but what I am
- suggesting is that if you try to get close to what constitutes a
- living organism you end up with another puff of smoke and a
- handful of atoms which could just as well be ball-bearings or
- fluids or....The thing that is being perpetuated through sexual
- reproduction is something quite abstract and immaterial; it is an
- abstract form preserved and encoded in a particular pattern of
- chemicals, and if I was asked which was more real, the transient
- collection of chemicals used, or the abstract form itself, I
- would answer "the form". But then, I am a programmer, and I would
- say that.
- I find it astonishing that there are any hard-core
- materialists left in the world. All the important stuff seems to
- exist at the level of puffs of smoke, what Kabbalists call form.
- Roger Penrose, one of the most eminent mathematicians living has
- this to say [7]:
-
- "I have made no secret of the fact that my sympathies lie
- strongly with the Platonic view that mathematical truth is
- absolute, external and eternal, and not based on man-made
- criteria; and that mathematical objects have a timeless
- existence of their own, not dependent on human society nor
- on particular physical objects."
-
- "Ah Ha!" cry the materialists, "At least the atoms are
- real." Well, they are until you start pulling them apart with
- tweezers and end up with a heap of equations which turn out to be
- the linguistic expression of an idea. As Einstein said, "The most
- incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
- comprehensible", that is, capable of being described in some
- linguistic form.
- I am not trying to convince anyone of the "rightness" of the
- Kabbalistic viewpoint. What I am trying to do is show that the
- process whereby form is impressed on matter (the relationship
- between Yesod and Malkuth) is not arcane, theosophical mumbo-
- jumbo; it is an issue which is alive and kicking, and the closer
- we get to "real things" (and that certainly includes living
- organisms), the better the Kabbalistic model (that form precedes
- manifestation, that there is a well-defined process of form-ation
- with the "real world" as an outcome) looks.
-
- The illusion of Yesod is security, the kind of security which
- forms the foundation of our personal existence in the world. On a
- superficial level our security is built out of relationships, a
- source of income, a place to live, a vocation, personal power and
- influence etc, but at a deeper level the foundation of personal
- identity is built on a series of accidents, encounters and
- influences which create the illusion of who we are, what we
- believe in, and what we stand for. There is a warm, secure
- feeling of knowing what is right and wrong, of doing the right
- thing, of living a worthwhile life in the service of worthwhile
- causes, of having a uniquely privileged vantage point from which
- to survey the problems of life (with all the intolerance and
- incomprehension of other people which accompanies this insight),
- and conversely there are feelings of despair, depression, loss of
- identity, and existential terror when a crack forms in the
- illusion, and reality shows through - Castaneda calls it "the
- crack in the world". The smug, self-perpetuating illusion which
- masquerades as personal identity at the level of Yesod is the
- most astoundingly difficult thing to shift or destroy. It fights
- back with all the resources of the personality, it will
- enthusiastically embrace any ally which will help to shore up its
- defenses - religious, political or scientific ideology;
- psychological, sociological, metaphysical and theosophical
- claptrap (e.g. Kabbalah); the law and popular morality; in fact,
- any beliefs which give it the power to retain its identity,
- uniqueness and integrity. Because this parasite of the soul uses
- religion (and its esoteric offshoots) to sustain itself they have
- little or no power over it and become a major part of the
- problem.
- There are various ways of overcoming this personal demon
- (Carroll [8], in an essay on the subject, calls it Choronzon),
- and the two I know best are the cataclysmic and the abrasive. The
- first method involves a shock so extreme that it is impossible to
- be the same person again, and if enough preparation has gone
- before then it is possible to use the shock to rebuild oneself.
- In some cases this doesn't happen; I have noticed that many
- people with very rigid religious beliefs talk readily about
- having suffered traumatic experiences, and the phenomenon of
- hysterical conversion among soldiers suffering from war neuroses
- is well known. The other method, the abrasive, is to wear away
- the demon of self-importance, to grind it into nothing by doing
- (for example) something for someone else for which one receives
- no thanks, praise, reward, or recognition. The task has to be big
- enough and awful enough to become a demon in its own right and
- induce all the correct feelings of compulsion (I have to do
- this), helplessness (I'll never make it), indignation (what's
- the point, it's not my problem anyway), rebellion (I won't, I
- won't, not anymore), more compulsion (I can't give up), self-pity
- (how did I get into this?), exhaustion (Oh No! Not again!),
- despair (I can't go on), and finally a kind of submission when
- one's demon hasn't the energy to put up a struggle any more and
- simply gives up. The woman who taught me Kabbalah used both the
- cataclysmic and the abrasive methods on her students with
- malicious glee - I will discuss this in more detail in the
- section on Tiphereth.
- The virtue of Yesod is independence, the ability to make our
- own foundations, to continually rebuild ourselves, to reject the
- security of comfortable illusions and confront reality without
- blinking.
- The vice of Yesod is idleness. This can be contrasted with
- the inertia of Malkuth. A stone is inert because it lacks the
- capacity to change, but in most circumstances people can change
- and can't be bothered. At least, not today. Yesod has a dreamy,
- illusory, comfortable, *seductive* quality, as in the Isle of the
- Lotus Eaters - how else could we live as if death and personal
- annihilation only happened to other people?
- The Qlippothic aspect of Yesod occurs when foundations are
- rotten and disintegrating and only the superficial appearance
- remains unchanged - Dorian Gray springs to mind, or cases where
- the brain is damaged and the body remains and carries out basic
- instinctive functions, but the person is dead as far as other
- people are concerned. Organisations are just as prone to this as
- people.
-
- [1] A.E. Powell, "The Etheric Double", Theosophical Publishing
- House, 1925
-
- [2] A.E. Powell, "The Astral Body", Theosophical Publishing
- House, 1927
-
- [3] "It's the Image Men We Answer To", The Sunday Times, 6th.
- Jan 1991
-
- [4] Castenada, Carlos, "The Fire from Within", Black Swan, 1985.
-
- [5] N. R. Clough, "How to Make and Use Magic Mirrors", Aquarian
- 1977
-
- [6] S.L. Mathers, "The Kabbalah Unveiled", Routledge & Kegan Paul
- 1981
-
- [7] Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind", Oxford University
- Press 1989
-
- [8] Peter J. Carroll, "Psychonaut", Samuel Weiser 1987.
-