Wednesday, March 11, 2015

The Saadia Tree of Life


Ten Sefirot out of Nothing, according to the number of the ten digits, which are five against five and a single convenant to be determined in the centre.  In word and tongue and mouth, they are ten extending beyond limit: depth of Beginning, depth of End, depth of Good, depth of Evil, depth Above and depth Below, depth of East, and depth of West, depth of North and depth of South, and the Sole Master and Lofty King faithfully governs them all from his Holy Dwelling in Eternity, Forever.

Sefer Yetzirah, Ch.1 v. 2, Saadia Version 



THE SAADIA TREE OF LIFE


The 10 sefirot are occupied by the 10 depths - (good-evil, future-past, north-south*, west-east, up-down**) - these ten depths are the axial endpoints of the 5D hypercontinuum that we exist ''within''.  The diagram is 2D what it represents is 5D.  Remember this always.

The 3 horizontal paths are occupied by the 3 elements.  The elements are arranged in their rational order - Air, Water, Fire - the order of creation of these elements in the Sefer Yetzirah***.

The 7 vertical paths are occupied by the 7 planets.  These planets are arranged in the Chaldean order - Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury and Luna - descending the Vertical paths, with the topmost middle path being ''first'', the topmost right hand pillar path being second, the topmost left hand pillar post being third and so on down the Tree.

The 12 diagonal paths are occupied by the 12 zodiac signs.  These are arranged from Aries to Pisces in the traditional order of the Zodiac from the top to the bottom.

The purpose of this diagram is to *educate* the WMT on the absurdity of the erroneous Kircher Tree which violates this basic rule of construction.  I have taken every step possible to show the rule of 3, 7 and 12 - the paths are colour coded, the depths are colour coded, etc.

I do accept the possibility of manipulating the position of the letters (permuting them) within the rule of 3, 7 and 12.  For example, from the source text (the Sefer Yetzirah) you can make arguments for positioning Fire in the topmost horizontal (as does the Ari) or making ''Keter and Malkuth'' the depths of Good and Evil, and Hokmah and Binah the depths of Future and Past and several other variations.

However, I have not placed the Hebrew letters on this Tree or used the traditional Kabbalistic titles. This is not because I don't believe in the value of traditional Kabbalistic analysis of the letters of the Alefbeit, or letter meditations. Throughout my Blogos you will see reference to Tzeruf, Gematria and various other traditional kabbalistic approaches. I asked my artist to make this diagram to educate people involved in the WMT on how important the rule of 3, 7 and 12 is in maintaining the integrity of the Tree of Life and the severe lack of knowledge of Hebrew and the Sefer Yetzirah (*the* core Kabbalistic text) in our community only impedes this understanding.   So in the spirit of transmitting this rule I have excluded the Alefbeit for the moment as I feel the general understanding of astrology in the community outweighs it.  I will produce a sequence of diagrams as above with all relevant information including both Kabbalah *and* Genetics.

The Saadia Tree does not conflate the Sefirot with planets, etc****.  Conflation of this kind within the Kircher related systems (777) leads to a very messy mangling of the core principles, you end up with things like 32=34, people get confused and the Tree begins to lose its sense.  It is also unnecessary. WMT adherents would argue that ''Yesod'' is associated with the Moon but you will see in the diagram that the ''path of the Moon'' leads to Yesod (which is the Depth of the West, or the passing of the day).

Anyone with a basic grasp of the WMT will see very interesting patterns within this rendering of the Tree of Life.  For example our middle pillar now becomes a ''temporal axis'' with Future and Past as the ''macrocosmic'' ends (Death and Birth) and with East and West (mediated by the ''path of the Sun'') as the ''microcosmic ends''.  Time passes within the limits of our birth (associated with the path of the Moon) and death (associated with the path of Saturn) and with the rising and setting of the Sun in the East and West.

One could also compare and contrast the positions of Mars and Jupiter.  The path of Jupiter mediates between the Depths of Good and South (Warmth/Expansion), the path of Mars between the Depths of Evil and North (Cold/Contraction).  These associations should resonate for anyone with an ounce of astrological knowledge.  The zodiac signs in their proper places now simulate the Zodiac Man***** in our ''aura'' while staying within the rule of 3, 7 and 12.

I will provide more detailed exegesis of this system as time passes (and answer any questions) but I want you to note that I am not saying that this is the ''one way'', I accept the rule of 3, 7 and 12 has some useful variants, but I do think this is the most rational way and that Kircher in its deviation from this is a severe error.  I also agree that whilst we should accept that ours is an individual and private path that selfsame individualism occurs within the space-time-observer continuum which is what our Tree of Life is intended to show.  I am not trying to ''fence you in'', or limit your possibilities just demonstrate the field within which those possibilities can happen. I am trying to show you the basic principles of the Tree of Life which the WMT has misinterpreted for an embarassing length of time.

Remember that when other writers mock such maps they generally have been working with the wrong one for their entire occult career (or at least during that part of their career that they were exploring ''Qabalah'').  Most of them never properly studied the Jewish Kabbalah  but only Golden Dawn, Crowley, et al, ad nauseaum, derived commentaries on the Kircher Tree. They were right to mock and abandon the Kircher Tree but the Kircher Tree never was the Tree of Life and its barely a Tree at all. Its really embarassing because the rule of 3, 7 and 12 is so obvious as to be glaring at us, as I hope the diagram shows, and we, collectively were really very stupid to miss it.  That goes to show what dogma can do.  I understand the colossal implications of accepting this error but the truth will out.  With sources such as we have today maintaining this ignorance is utterly idiotic.

If you don't already own a copy of Sefer Yetzirah in Theory and Practice by Aryeh Kaplan and you are serious about understanding the WMT then purchase one now.  This is definitely not your ''101'' spellbook, this is your access to ''the mystical experience par excellence'' and will teach you, as Kaplan suggests, ''a special form of telekinesis''.




*North-south could also be understood as the axis of cold/warm and contract/expand.
**Up-down are fairly relative on an Earth spinning in space.  I would prefer in/out or rise/fall.
***The order in which they appear in the *storm*, our lightning flash.
****One of the reasons such conflation occured is because people identified ''Sefirot'' with Spheres.  The word Sefirot is not related to Spheres but means counting, text, etc.  It could be related to cypher and sapphire (sappirot).  As such the Sefirot are best represnted by points, and the paths as the lines on the cut stone, Sefirot being the point where those lines meet.  Sefirot in this sense are better understood as confluxes.  I am not saying spheres aren't useful in meditation, they are, but lets remember that they are 3D and we are discussing a system in 5D.
*****

33 comments:

  1. Hello Dear, long time. Saadia tree is such a misnomer! I suppose I am one of your 'pluralists' - excepting recognise all, but pick one. Miss you xxx

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  3. Don't the diagonals in the SY apply to the Lower six sephiroth of construction? In which case the 'diagonals' of the (much) later 2d tree don't apply?

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  4. I agree -- Kaplan / SY -- but read it critically - keeping in mind Kaplan is a (modern Gra/Lurianic) kabbalist -- not objective historian/scholar -- ...

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  5. Does the fact that every letter can be matched with every path mean that you have to use them all? No. Only that any one of them will do...

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  6. Mind if I link to the new board here you linked to in a previous post:

    http://thegreatwork.boards.net/

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  8. Hi I read your post on the directions, great work! I don't think it excludes overlaying the dimensions in the way I have done though, it depends on how you relate to them - and how they relate to time and observation. East could be ''forward'' and West ''backwards'' for instance, just as North could be ''left'' and South ''right''.

    Do you think different arrangements of the letters do different things?

    If you believe in a truly pluralist approach, don't you think that it would be better to promote a ''Tree of Gates'' type model as shown in the top image of the Blogos as opposed to the Kircher Tree - show all potential arrangements instead of just one, imagine a whirling cloud of letters in each Sefira, forming potential gates and paths between the Sefirot, a kind of cosmic safe?

    Why not promote that?

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  9. From pluralist POV I think the 231 gates is the best model -- any 2d ToL model represents a partial POV. I am not promoting any model in particular, but from a dynamic, pluralist POV I am not decrying any as 'erroneous' either. From our SY study days you'll remember I argued for a model similar to your 'Saadia' tree - differing perhaps only in the placement of the mother mother letters. However, within its scope, as an initiatic path of return Tau-Aleph I think the GD version is as valid as any, and as an integrated self-enclosed system better than many. I think the term 'Saadia' tree is a bit of a confusing misnomer, in as much it is something of an anachronism in historical terms. None of the 2d models with path attributions of doubles to diagonals match what is being described in the SY IMO, as the diagonal boundaries descibed therein (the term actually means 'hypotenuse') appear to me to better relate to the lower six spatial sephiroth.

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    1. An interlude: In as much as everything in pathwalking has signifcance, I enjoyed the chicken fajita, the significance of your deletion of ones appreciation of your chicken fajita, I am weighing...;)

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    2. Do different arrangements of letters achieve different things? Well in as much as 'cat' and 'act' are two different different things, of course....;)

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    3. Yet in my prophetic dreams, a sherif may represent a fisher -- verbs 'act on' may allude to nouns 'Acton'. Any arrangement of letters/numbers, maybe a cipher for others...

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    4. I only deleted the chicken fajita thing to try and stay on topic and not deviate into chat. Dude I think you are totally cool so don't take offence.

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  13. If in the bus companies restructuring I find significance between my work with some letter permutation and my new bus route number that is the filtration of magical thinking -- to confuse that with the bus companies intent is madness and paranoia. If I were to seek/find significance in the appearance & disappearance of chicken fajitas (which I don't, 'twas a joke) any relation to your intent would be purely coincidental :D

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  14. 'An interude' - with which I prefixed fajita post, was in reference to Crowley's Book 4 joke 'An Interlude', with its cabbalistic exegesis of nursery rhymes.

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  15. Hi - you have strayed away from the Tree models, ok, with which did you work and what kind of work did you do with them? I mean we need your experience here. If you spent 10 years working Kircher and 10 mins working Saadia we would have a fairly unfair test.

    Remember, o' pluralist, 'tis the Kircher Tree that declares itself to be ''the tree'' in most of the works of the G.D. et al, if not all. Those texts do not say ''this is a variant of a 126000000000000000000000... etc possible variations of the letters and in fact you'd be better off approaching this pluralistically?'' do they?

    Can we get a source on Kircher's rejection of the rule of 3, 7 and 12 when the Jewish authorities generally obey it - and his reasoning behind it? Can we get a source on Mathers consulting various sources and adopting the Kircher system as ''the best'' for his initiatiatory process? Why this one? Why not one of the other countless trillions of possible arrangements?

    I don't know even why I am posting this as you contributed greatly to the reasoning and research but to me the G.D. positions look like a mistake:

    http://www.psyche.com/psyche/yetsira/sy_planetaryattributions.html

    ''In the 10th century Rabbi Nissim writes people write hebrew comments on the book, and other foolish people come later and comment on the commentary. Between them truth is lost.''

    I certainly contend that this is what happened to the Golden Dawn.

    In terms of the Saadia Tree as one conclusion to a great deal of work by ourselves it has fantastic parallels with my own work on Cellular Consciousness. This work has fantastic parallels with the idea of the book of formation, of life and of making life. I certainly find a great deal of value in the Saadia diagrams arrangement of the 22 letters of foundation and the 10 depths. If I had encountered this first in my qblistic studies as opposed to the nonsense that is the Kircher Tree I would have made considerably more rapid progress. I hope others do find it first. I also believe as a pluralist you should be celebrating the addition of another array, indeed one you contributed to, to a list which is terribly incomplete by your logic.

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  16. As a 'pluralist' I rejoice in multivalent dynamics - and of course celebrate and am in deed proud of the work we did in our group -- whether or not I could have progressed 'quicker' with differing Algorithms I don't know -- I pre-suppose algorithms may always be improved upon, and lead to improved/quicker results - I am not not denigrating what we did, but neither am I denigrating (or promoting) that of others, prior or recent, and I do believe in the 'egreror' concept.

    May I qualify the 'straying away from the tree' remark, in as much I meant it only in relation to my continuing study of the SY -- such was always anachronist anyways - in the end confusingly so - for example as much as I may have contributed to this 'Saadia' model - if my recollection is correct I was at the same time exploring geometric models - and anacohronist 16th century tree models just don't fit -- there is no relation between the ~SY diagonals for example and the diagonals of Gra/Luria/Kircher models of the tree. In as much as Saadia never referenced a 'tree' but did conceive and explain it in terms of a 'cube' of space I think my own concepts, whether less or more respectull, is more in tune with Saadia's (albeit I work with octohedron rather than cube) commentary that an anachroniistic 'tree'.

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  17. 'In tune' from a historical perspective that is, as a 'pluralist' as you would have it, I appreciate the multivalent dynamics make it as operable and convincing as any.

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  18. I don't know the source for Kircher's letter attributions. I doubt they are his own. His Hebrew Cabbalah section is a cut and paste job, a compendium of already available, albeit disparate works. The only real original parts are his translations of sections of Cordovero's 'Garden of Pomegranates', his work being the first to make extensive reference to such. As you no doubt know the 'pattern' of Kircher's tree follows one of the two described by Cordovero. The source for his allocation of letters to paths i don't know though. I doubt they are of his own 'invention', there is nothing particularly original in his Hebrew Cabalah section, I don't think his path/letter attributions are an exception to that... I suspect his attribution of the paths to divine names (the letters of the alphabet suffixed by YH) connects to a tradition in which these names, connected to the paths, are related to the sephiroth as representing vowels, which 'descend from the crown, via the secret paths of justice and mercy, to spread downwards to the kingdom.'

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  19. Although I don't know Kircher's source, I do now that from the 13th century at least there exists several Judaic models describing the ooder of septhiroth & paths based upon an analology of the sequential order of vowels (sefiroth) and consonants (22 paths). Even on Cordovero, there is the order startind with Aleph from Kether to Tau to Malkuth. It varies from Kircher;s, but Codovero himself mentions variations amongst Jewish kabbalalists, e.g., Aleph is from Kether to Tifereath and some say Beth is from Kether to Chokman, others from Kether to Binah - but the principle is there, emanation in analogy to the sequence of letters. If you don't agree with Kircher fine, but don't lay the fault in Kircher, but in the pre-Lurianic Judaic traditions he was, in principle at least, following.

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  21. Philippe dÁquin was the source for Kircher apparently.

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  23. By the way - apply the rule of 3, 7 and 12, to the 231 gates, creating three interlocking rings, the 3 mothers being on the central ring, the 7 on the middle ring and the 12 on the outer ring. maintain the order they appear in the alefbeit and see what emerges. i think you'll find it agrees with 6:5 Gra version and also has astrological implications...

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  24. Earlier in this conversation, you said that The Saadia Tree took its name from Saadia because it was dedicated to him. In which commentary, by whom? Did you have to derive the visual depiction from that work?



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  25. Hi Teresa, I dedicated it to Saadia because it follows the Saadia attributions from the Sefer Yetzirah. I derived the visual depiction of the associations on the Tree of Life.

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  26. Thanks. I've been working through the Saadia Sefer Yetzirah trying to follow and map your associations. Nice work!

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  27. Brilliant! So good to hear, please let me know about any insights or agreements? Would be nice to build some momentum!

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  28. I'm very happy to see the "3, 7, & 12" Tree of Life on an Hermetic blog! I've always used this version of the ToL - but with the 3 mothers descending as Fire, Air, & Water (Spirit, Mind, & Body). I have one question; you refer to it as the "Saadia Tree"; what's your source for that attribution (I'm not questioning it's validity; I know it to be true -- but I can't find anything online & I just need it for my own citations).

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    1. Its based on the Saadia Version of the SY.

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