****************************************************************************
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.
maintained by Jeff Morton / Ioldanach@yahoo.com / Ioldanach@yahoo.com
disclaimer