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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)
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Chapter 4: The Sephiroth
========================
This chapter provides a detailed look at each of the ten
sephiroth and draws together material scattered over previous
chapters.
Malkuth
-------
Malkuth is the Cinderella of the sephiroth. It is the
sephira most often ignored by beginners, the sephira most often
glossed over in Kabbalistic texts, and it is not only the most
immediate of the sephira but it is also the most complex, and for
sheer inscrutability it rivals Kether - indeed, there is a
Kabbalistic aphorism that "Kether is Malkuth, and Malkuth is in
Kether, but after another manner".
The word Malkuth means "Kingdom", and the sephira is the
culmination of a process of emanation whereby the creative power
of the Godhead is progressively structured and defined as it
moves down the Tree and arrives in a completed form in Malkuth.
Malkuth is the sphere of matter, substance, the real, physical
world. In the least compromising versions of materialist
philosophy (e.g. Hobbes) there is nothing beyond physical matter,
and from that viewpoint the Tree of Life beyond Malkuth does not
exist: our feelings of identity and self-consciousness are
nothing more than a by-product of chemical reactions in the
brain, and the mind is a complex automata which suffers from the
disease of metaphysical delusions. Kabbalah is *not* a
materialist model of reality, but when we examine Malkuth by
itself we find ourselves immersed in matter, and it is natural to
think in terms of physics, chemistry and molecular biology. The
natural sciences provide the most accurate models of matter and
the physical world that we have, and it would be foolishness of
the first order to imagine that Kabbalah can provide better
explanations of the nature of matter on the basis of a study of
the text of the Old Testament. Not that I under-rate the
intuition which has gone into the making of Kabbalah over the
centuries, but for practical purposes the average university
science graduate knows (much) more about the material stuff of
the world than medieval Kabbalists, and a grounding in modern
physics is as good a way to approach Malkuth as any other.
For those who are not comfortable with physics there are
alternative, more traditional ways of approaching Malkuth. The
magical image of Malkuth is that of a young woman crowned and
throned. The woman is Malkah, the Queen, Kallah, the Bride. She
is the inferior mother, a reflection and realisation of the
superior mother Binah. She is the Queen who inhabits the Kingdom,
and the Bride of the Microprosopus. She is Gaia, Mother Earth,
but of course she is not only the substance of this world; she is
the body of the entire physical universe.
Some care is required when assigning Mother/Earth goddesses
to Malkuth, because some of them correspond more closely to the
superior mother Binah. There is a close and deep connection
between Malkuth and Binah which results in the two sephiroth
sharing similar correspondences, and one of the oldest
Kabbalistic texts [1] has this to say about Malkuth:
"The title of the tenth path [Malkuth] is the Resplendent
Intelligence. It is called this because it is exalted above
every head from where it sits upon the throne of Binah. It
illuminates the numinosity of all lights and causes to
emanate the Power of the archetype of countenances or
forms."
One of the titles of Binah is Khorsia, or Throne, and the image
which this text provides is that Binah provides the framework
upon which Malkuth sits. We will return to this later. Binah
contains the potential of form in the abstract, while Malkuth is
is the fullest realisation of form, and both sephiroth share the
correspondences of heaviness, limitation, finiteness, inertia,
avarice, silence, and death.
The female quality of Malkuth is often identified with the
Shekhinah, the female spirit of God in the creation, and
Kabbalistic literature makes much of the (carnal) relationship of
God and the Shekhinah. Waite [7] mentions that the relationship
between God and Shekhinah is mirrored in the relationship between
man and woman, and provides a great deal of information on both
the Shekhinah and what he quaintly calls "The Mystery of Sex".
After the exile of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Kabbalists
identified their own plight with the fate of the Shekhinah, and
she is pictured as being cast out into matter in much the same
way as the Gnostics pictured Sophia, the outcast divine wisdom.
The doctrine of the Shekhinah within Kabbalah and within Judaism
as a whole is complex and it is something I don't feel competent
to comment further on; more information can be found in [3] &
[7].
Malkuth is the sphere of the physical elements and
Kabbalists still use the four-fold scheme which dates back at
least as far as Empedocles and probably the Ark. The four
elements correspond to four readily-observable states of matter:
solid - earth
liquid - water
gas - air
plasma - fire/electric arc (lightning)
In addition it is not uncommon to include a fifth element so
rarified and arcane that most people (self included) are pushed
to say what it is; the fifth element is aethyr (or ether) and is
sometimes called spirit.
The amount of material written about the elements is
enormous, and rather than reproduce in bulk what is relatively
well-known I will provide a rough outline so that those readers
who aren't familiar with Kabbalah will realise I am talking about
approximately the same thing as they have seen before. A detailed
description of the traditional medieval view of the four elements
can be found in "The Magus" [2]. The hierarchy of elemental
powers can be found in "777" [4] and in Golden Dawn material [5]
- I have summarised a few useful items below:
Element Fire Air Water Earth
God Name Elohim Jehovah Eheieh Agla
Archangel Michael Raphael Gabriel Uriel
King Djin Paralda Nichsa Ghob
Elemental Salamanders Sylphs Undines Gnomes
It amused me to notice that the section on the elemental kingdoms
in Farrar's "What Witches Do" [6] had been taken by Alex Saunders
lock, stock and barrel from traditional Kabbalistic and CM
sources.
The elements in Malkuth are arranged as follows:
South
Fire
East Zenith Aethyr+ West
Air Nadir Aethyr- Water
North
Earth
I have rotated the cardinal points through 180 degrees from their
customary directions so that it is easier to see how the elements
fit on the lower face of the Tree of Life:
Tiphereth
Fire
Hod Yesod Netzach
Air Aethyr Water
Malkuth
Earth
It is important to distinguish between the elements in Malkuth,
where we are talking about real substance (the water in your
body, the breath in your lungs), and the elements on the Tree,
where we are using traditional correspondences *associated* with
the elements, e.g.:
Earth: solid, stable, practical, down-to-earth
Water: sensitive, intuitive, emotional, caring, fertile
Air: vocal, communicative, intellectual
Fire: energetic, daring, impetuous
Positive Aethyr: glue, binding, plastic
Negative Aethyr: unbinding, dissolution, disintegration
Aethyr or Spirit is enigmatic, and I tend to think of it in terms
of the forces which bind matter together. It is almost certainly
a coincidence (but nevertheless interesting) that there are four
fundamental forces - gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear
& strong nuclear - known to date, and current belief is that they
can be unified into one fundamental force. On a slightly more
arcane tack, Barret [2] has this to say about Aethyr:
"Now seeing that the soul is the essential form,
intelligible and uncorruptible, and is the first mover of
the body, and is moved itself; but that the body, or matter,
is of itself unable and unfit for motion, and does very much
degenerate from the soul, it appears that there is a need of
a more excellent medium:- now such a medium is conceived to
be the spirit of the world, or that which some call a
quintessence; because it is not from the four elements, but
a certain first thing, having its being above and beside
them. There is, therefore, such a kind of medium required to
be, by which celestial souls [e.g. forms] may be joined to
gross bodies, and bestow upon them wonderful gifts. This
spirit is in the same manner, in the body of the world, as
our spirit is in our bodies; for as the powers of our soul
are communicated to the members of the body by the medium of
the spirit, so also the virtue of the soul of the world is
diffused, throughout all things, by the medium of the
universal spirit; for there is nothing to be found in the
whole world that hath not a spark of the virtue thereof."
Aethyr underpins the elements like a foundation and its
attribution to Yesod should be obvious, particularly as it forms
the linking role between the ideoplastic world of "the Astral
Light" [8] and the material world. Aethyr is often thought to
come in two flavours - positive Aethyr, which binds, and negative
Aethyr, which unbinds. Negative Aethyr is a bit like the
Universal Solvent, and requires as much care in handling ;-}
Working with the physical elements in Malkuth is one of the
most important areas of applied magic, dealing as it does with
the basic constituents of the real world. The physical elements
are tangible and can be experience in a very direct way through
recreations such as caving, diving, parachuting or firewalking;
they bite back in a suitably humbling way, and they provide CMs
with an opportunity to join the neo-pagans in the great outdoors.
Our bodies themselves are made from physical stuff, and there are
many Raja Yoga-like exercises which can be carried out using the
elements as a basis for work on the body. If you can stand his
manic intensity (Exercise 1: boil an egg by force of will) then
Bardon [9] is full of good ideas.
Malkuth is often associated with various kinds of intrinsic
evil, and to understand this attitude (which I do not share) it
is necessary to confront the same question as thirteenth century
Kabbalists: can God be evil? The answer to this question was
(broadly speaking) "yes", but Kabbalists have gone through many
strange gyrations in an attempt to avoid what was for many an
unacceptable conclusion. It was difficult to accept that famine,
war, disease, prejudice, hate, death could be a part of a perfect
being, and there had to be some way to account for evil which did
not contaminate divine perfection. One approach was to sweep evil
under the carpet, and in this case the carpet was Malkuth.
Malkuth became the habitation for evil spirits.
If one examines the structure of the Tree without prejudice
then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that evil is quite
adequately accounted for, and there is no need to shuffle evil
to the periphery of the Tree like a cleaner without a dustpan.
The emanation of any sephirah from Chokhmah downwards can
manifest as good or evil depending on circumstances and the point
of view of those affected by the energy involved. This appears to
have been understood even at the time of the writing of the
"Zohar", where the mercy of God is constantly contrasted with the
severity of God, and the author makes it clear that one has to
balance the other - you cannot have the mercy without the
severity. On the other hand, the severity of God is persistently
identified with the rigours of existence (form, finiteness,
limitation), and while it is true that many of the things which
have been identified with evil are a consequence of the
finiteness of things, of being finite beings in a world of finite
resources governed by natural laws with inflexible causality, it
not correct to infer (as some have) that form itself is
*intrinsically* evil.
The notion that form and matter are *intrinsically* evil, or
in some way imperfect or not a part of God, may have reached
Kabbalah from a number of sources. Scholem comments:
"The Kabbalah of the early thirteenth century was the
offspring of a union between an older and essentially
Gnostic tradition represented by the book "Bahir", and the
comparatively modern element of Jewish Neo-Platonism."
There is the possibility that the Kabbalists of Provence (who
wrote or edited the "Sepher Bahir") were influenced by the
Cathars, a late form of Manicheanism. Whether the source was
Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Manicheanism or some combination of
all three, Kabbalah has imported a view of matter and form which
distorts the view of things portrayed by the Tree of Life, and so
Malkuth ends up as a kind of cosmic outer darkness, a bin for all
the dirt, detritus, broken sephira and dirty hankies of the
creation. Form is evil, the Mother of Form is female, women are
definitely and indubitably evil, and Malkuth is the most female
of the sephira, therefore Malkuth is most definitely evil...quod
erat demonstrandum. By the time we reach the time of S.L. Mathers
and the Golden Dawn there is a complete Tree of evil demonic
Qlippoth *underneath* Malkuth as a relection of the "good" Tree
above it. I believe this may have something to do with the fact
that meditations on Malkuth can easily become meditations on
Binah, and meditations on Binah have a habit of slipping into the
Abyss, and once in the Abyss it is easy to trawl up enough junk
to "discover" an averse Tree "underneath" Malkuth. This view of
the Qlippoth, or Shells, as active, demonic evil has become
pervasive, and the more energy people put into the demonic Tree,
the less there is for the original. Abolish the Qlippoth as
demonic forces, and the Tree of Life comes alive with its full
power of good *and* evil. The following quotation from Bischoff
[10] (speaking of the Sephiroth) provides a more rational view of
the Qlippoth:
"Since their energy [of the sephiroth] shows three degrees
of strength (highest, middle and lowest degree), their
emanations group accordingly in sequence. We usually imagine
the image of a descending staircase. The Kabbalist
prefers to see this fact as a decreasing alienation of the
central primeval energy. Consequently any less perfect
emanation is to him the cover or shell (Qlippah) of the
preceeding, and so the last (furthest) emanations being the
so-called material things are the shell of the total and are
therefore called (in the actual sense) Qlippoth."
This is my own view; the shell of something is the accretion of
form which it accumulates as energy comes down the Lightning
Flash. If the shell can be considered by itself then it is a dead
husk of something which could be alive - it preserves all the
structure but there is no energy in it to bring it alive. With
this interpretation the Qlippoth are to be found everywhere: in
relationships, at work, at play, in ritual, in society. Whenever
something dies and people refuse to recognise that it is dead,
and cling to the lifeless husk of whatever it was, then you get a
Qlippah. For this reason one of the vices of Malkuth is Avarice,
not only in the sense of trying to acquire material things, but
also in the sense of being unwilling to let go of anything, even
when it has become dead and worthless. The Qlippah of Malkuth is
what you would get if the Sun went out: Stasis, life frozen into
immobility.
The other vice of Malkuth is Inertia, in the sense of
"active resistance to motion; sluggish; disinclined to move or
act". It is visible in most people at one time or another, and
tends to manifest when a task is new, necessary, but not
particularly exciting, there is no excitement or "natural energy"
to keep one fired up, and one has to keep on pushing right to the
finish. For this reason the obligation of Malkuth is (has
to be) self-discipline.
The virtue of Malkuth is Discrimination, the ability to
perceive differences. The ability to perceive differences is a
necessity for any living organism, whether a bacteria able to
sense the gradient of a nutrient or a kid working out how much
money to wheedle out of his parents. As Malkuth is the final
realisation of form, it is the sphere where our ability to
distinguish between differences is most pronounced. The capacity
to discriminate is so fundamental to survival that it works
overtime and finds boundaries and distinctions everywhere - "you"
and "me", "yours" and "mine", distinctions of "property" and
"value" and "territory" which are intellectual abstractions on
one level (i.e. not real) and fiercely defended realities on
another (i.e. very real indeed). I am not going to attempt a
definition of real and unreal, but it is the case that much of
what we think of as real is unreal, and much of what we think of
as unreal is real, and we need the same discrimination which
leads us into the mire to lead us out again. Some people think
skin colour is a real measure of intelligence; some don't. Some
people think gender is a real measure of ability; some don't.
Some people judge on appearances; some don't. There is clearly a
difference between a bottle of beer and a bottle of piss, but is
the colour of the *bottle* important? What *is* important? What
differences are real, what matters? How much energy do we devote
to things which are "not real". Am I able to perceive how much I
am being manipulated by a fixation on unreality? Are my goals in
life "real", or will they look increasingly silly and immature
as I grow older? For that matter, is Kabbalah "real"? Does it
provide a useful model of reality, or is it the remnant of a
world-view which should have been put to rest centuries ago? One
of the primary exercises of an initiate into Malkuth is a
thorough examination of the question "What is real?".
The Spiritual Experience of Malkuth is variously the
Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), or
the Vision of the HGA (depending on who you believe). I vote for
the Vision of the HGA in Malkuth, and the Knowledge and
Conversation in Tiphereth. What is the HGA? According to the
Gnosticism of Valentinus each person has a guardian angel who
accompanies that individual throught their life and reveals the
gnosis; the angel is in a sense the divine Self. This belief is
identical to what I was taught by the person who taught me
Kabbalah, so some part of Gnosticism lives on. The current
tradition concerning the HGA almost certainly entered the Western
Esoteric Tradition as a consequence of S.L. Mather's translation
[11] of "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage",
which contains full details of a lengthy ritual to attain the
Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA. This ritual has had an
important influence on twentieth century magicians and it is
often attempted and occasionally completed.
The powers of Malkuth are invoked by means of the names
Adonai ha Aretz and Adonai Melekh, which mean "Lord of the World"
and "The Lord who is King" respectively. The power is transmitted
through the world of Creation by the archangel Sandalphon, who is
sometimes referred to as "the Long Angel", because his feet are
in Malkuth and his head in Kether, which gives him an opportunity
to chat to Metatron, the Angel of the Presence. The angel order
is the Ashim, or Ishim, sometimes translated as the "souls of
fire", supposedly the souls of righteous men and women.
In concluding this section on Malkuth, it worth emphasising that
I have chosen deliberately not to explore some major topics
because there are sufficient threads for anyone with an interest
to pick up and follow for themselves. The image of Malkuth as
Mother Earth provides a link between Kabbalah and a numinous
archetype with a deep significance for some. The image of Malkuth
as physical substance provides a link into the sciences, and it
is the case that at the limits of theoretical physics one's
intuitions seem to be slipping and sliding on the same reality as
in Kabbalah. The image of Malkuth as the sphere of the elements
is the key to a large body of practical magical technique which
varies from yoga-like concentration on the bodily elements, to
nature-oriented work in the great outdoors. Lastly, just as the
design of a building reveals much about its builders, so Malkuth
can reveal a great deal about Kether - the bottom of the Tree and
the top have much in common.
References:
[1] Westcott, W. Wynn, ed. "Sepher Yetzirah", many editions.
[2] Barrett, Francis, "The Magus", Citadel 1967.
[3] Scholem, Gershom G., "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism",
Schocken 1974
[4] Crowley, A, "777", an obscure reprint.
[5] Regardie, Israel, "The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic",
Falcon, 1984.
[6] Farrar, Stewart, "What Witches Do", Peter Davies 1971.
[7] Waite, A.E, "The Holy Kabbalah", Citadel.
[8] Levi, Eliphas, "Transcendental Magic", Rider, 1969.
[9] Bardon, Franz, "Initiation into Hermetics", Dieter
Ruggeberg 1971
[10] Bischoff, Dr. Erich, "The Kabbala", Weiser 1985.
[11] Mathers, S.L., "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin
the Mage", Dover 1975.
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