****************************************************************************
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.
Hod & Netzach
-------------
"Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
The possibility of occurring in states of affairs
is the form of an object.
Form is the possibility of structure."
Wittgenstein
"Since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you."
E.E. Cummings
The title of the sephira Hod is sometimes translated as
Splendour and sometimes as Glory. The title of the sephira
Netzach is usually translated as Victory, sometimes as Endurance,
and occasionally as Eternity. Although there have been many
attempts to explain the titles of this pair of sephiroth, I am
not aware of a convincing explanation.
The two sephiroth correspond to the legs and like the legs
are normally taken as a pair and not individually. They
complement another but are not opposites any more than force and
form are opposites. This pair of sephiroth provide the first
example of the polarity of form and force encountered when
ascending back up the lightning flash from the sephira Malkuth.
Neither quality manifests in a pure state, as form and force are
thoroughly mixed together at the level of Hod and Netzach: the
force aspect represented by Netzach is differentiated (an example
of form) into a multitude of forces, and the form aspect
represented by Hod acts dynamically (an example of force) by
synthesising new forms and structures. Both sephiroth represent
the plurality of consciousness at this level, and in older texts
they are referred to as the "armies" or "hosts". To understand
why they are referred to in this way it is necessary to look at
an archaic aspect of Kabbalistic symbolism whereby the Tree of
Life is a representation of kingship.
One of the titles of Tiphereth is Melekh, or king. This king
is the child of Chokhmah (Abba, the father) and Binah (Aima, the
Mother) and hence a son of God who wears the crown of Kether. The
kingdom is the sephira Malkuth, at the same time queen (Malkah)
and bride (Kallah). In his right hand the king wields the sword
of justice (corresponding to Gevurah), and in his left the
sceptre of authority (corresponding to Chesed), and he rules over
the armies or hosts (Tzaba), which are Hod and Netzach. The use
of kingship as a metaphor to convey what the sephiroth mean
obscures as much as it reveals, but it is an unavoidable piece of
Kabbalistic symbolism, and the attribution of Hod and Netzach to
the "armies" does capture something useful about the nature of
consciousness at this level: consciousness is fragmented into
innumerable warring factions, and if there is no rightful king
ruling over the kingdom of the soul (a common state of affairs),
then the armies elect a succession of leaders from the ranks, who
wear a lopsided crown and occupy the throne only for as long as
it takes to find another claimant - more on this later.
The psychological interpretation of Hod is that it
corresponds to the ability to abstract, to conceptualise, to
reason, to communicate, and this level of consciousness arises
from the fact that in order to survive we have evolved a nervous
system capable of building internal representations of the world.
I can drive around London in a car because I possess an internal
representation of the London street system. I can diagnose faults
in the same car because I have an internal representation of its
mechanical and electrical systems and how they might fail. I can
type this document without looking at the keyboard because I know
where the keys are positioned, and your ability to read what I
have written pre-supposes a shared understanding about the
meaning of words and what they represent. Our nervous systems
possess an absolutely basic ability to create internal
representations out of the information we are capable of
perceiving through our senses.
It is also an absolutely basic characteristic of the world
that it is bigger than my nervous system. I cannot possibly
create *accurate*, internal representations of the world, and one
of the meanings of the verb "to abstract" is "to remove quietly".
This is what the nervous system does: it quietly removes most of
what is going on in the world in order to create an abridged
representation of reality with all the important (important to
me) bits underlined in highlighter pen. This is the world "I"
live in: not in the "real" world, but an internal reality
synthesised by my nervous system. There has been a lot of
philosophising about this, and it is difficult to think about how
our nervous systems *might* be distorting or even manufacturing
reality without a feeling of unease, but I am personally
reassured by the everyday observation that most adults can drive
a car on a busy road at eighty miles per hour in reasonable
safety. This suggests that while our synthetic internal
representation of the world isn't accurate, it isn't at all bad.
Abstraction does not end at the point of building an
internal representation of the external world. My nervous system
is quite content to treat my internal representation of the world
as yet another domain over which it can carry out further
abstraction, and the subsequent new world of abstractions as
another domain, and so on indefinitely, giving rise to the
principal definition of "abstraction": "to separate by the
operation of the mind, as in forming a general concept from
consideration of particular instances". As an example, suppose
someone asks me to watch the screen of a computer and to describe
what I see. I have no idea what to expect.
"Hmmm...lots of dots moving around randomly...different
colour dots...red, blue, green. Ah, the dots seem to be
clustering...they're forming circles...all the dots of each
particular colour are forming circles, lots of little
circles. Now the circles are coming together to form a
number...it's 3. Now they're moving apart and forming
another number...its 15...now 12..9..14. They've
gone..........that was it..3, 15, 12, 9, 14. Is it some sort
of test? Do I have to guess the next number in the series?
What are the numbers supposed to mean? What was the point of
it? Hmmm..the numbers might stand for letters of the
alphabet...let's see. C..O..L..I...N. It's my name!"
The dots on the screen are real - there are real, discrete,
measurable spots of light on the screen. I could verify the
presence of dots of light using an appropriate light meter. The
colours are synthesised by my retinas; different elements in my
eye respond to different frequencies in the light and give rise
to an internal experience we label "red", "blue", "green". The
circles simply do not exist: given the nature of the computer
output on the screen, there are only individual pixels, and it is
my nervous system which constructs circles. The numbers do not
exist either; it is only because of my particular upbringing
(which I share with the person who wrote the computer program)
that I am able to distinguish patterns standing for abstract
numbers in patterns of circles e.g.
oo
o o
o
o
o
o
o
ooooo
And once I begin to reason about the *meaning* of a sequence of
numbers I have left the real world a long way behind: not only is
"number" a complex abstraction, but when I ask a question about
the "meaning" of "a sequence of numbers" I am working with an
even more "abstract abstraction". My ability to happily juggle
numbers and letters and decide that there is an identity between
the abstract number sequence "3, 15, 12, 9, 14" and the character
string "COLIN" is one of those commonplace things which any
person might do and yet it illustrates how easy it is to become
completely detached from the external world and function within
an internal world of abstractions which have been detached from
anything in the world for so long that they are taken as real
without a second thought.
In parallel with our ability to structure perception into an
internal world of abstractions we possess the ability to
communicate facts about this internal world. When I say "The cup
is on the table", another person is able to identify in the real
world, out of all the information reaching their senses, the
abstraction "chair", the abstraction "cup", and confirm the
relationship of "on-ness". Why are the cup and table
abstractions? Because the word "cup" does not uniquely specify
any particular cup in the world, and when I use the word I am
assuming that the listener already possesses an internal
representation of an abstract object "cup", and can use that
abstract specification of a cup to identify a particular object
in the context within which my statement was made.
We are not normally conscious of this process, and don't
need to be when dealing with simple propositions about objects in
the real world. I think I know what a cup is, and I think you do
too. If you don't know, ask someone to show you a few. Life gets
a lot more complicated when dealing with complex internal
abstractions: what is a "contract", a "treaty", a "loan",
"limited liability", a "set", a "function", "marriage", a "tort",
"natural justice", a "sephira", a "religion", "sin", "good",
"evil", and so on (and on). We reach agreement about the
definitions of these things using language. In some cases, for
example, a mathematical object, the thing is completely and
unambiguously defined using language, while in other cases (e.g.
"good", "sin") there is no universally accepted definition. Life
is further complicated by a widespread lack of awareness that
these internal abstractions *are* internal, and it is common to
find people projecting internal abstractions onto the world as if
they were an intrinsic part of the fabric of existence, and as
objectively real as the particular cup and the particular table I
referred to earlier. Marriage is no longer a contract between a
man and a woman; it is an estate made in heaven. What is heaven?
God knows. And what is God? Trot out your definitions and let's
have an argument - that is the way such questions are answered.
Much of the content of electronic bulletin boards consists of
endless arguments and discussions on the definition of complex
internal abstractions (what is ritual, what is magic, what is
karma, what is ki, what is...).
A third element which goes together with abstraction and
language to complete the essense of the sephira Hod is reason,
and reason's formal offspring, logic. Reason is the ability to
articulate and justify our beliefs about the world using a base
of generally agreed facts and a generally agreed technique for
combining facts to infer valid conclusions. If reason is
considered as one out of a number of possible processes for
establishing what is true about the world we live in, for
establishing which models of reality are valid and which are not,
then it has been phenomenally successful: in its heyday there
were those who saw reason as the most divine faculty, the faculty
in humankind most akin to God, and that legacy is still with us -
the words "unreasonable" and "irrational" are often used to
attack and denigrate someone who does not (or cannot) articulate
what they do or why they do it. There is of course no "reason"
why we should have to articulate or justify anything, even to
ourselves, but the reasoning machine within us demands an
"explanation" for every phenomenon, and a "reason" for every
action. This is a characteristic of reason - it is an obsessive
mode of consciousness. A second characteristic of reason is that
it operates on the "garbage-in, garbage-out" principle: if the
base of given facts a person uses to reason about are garbage, so
are the conclusions - witness what two thousand years of
Christian theology has achieved using sound dialectical
principles taken from Aristotle.
If the sephira Hod on the Pillar of Form represents the
active synthesis of abstract forms in consciousness (and
abstraction, language and reason are prime examples) then the
sephira Netzach on the Pillar of Force represents affective
states of consciousness which influence how we act and react:
needs, wants, drives, feelings, moods and emotions. It is
difficult to write about affective states, to be clear on the
distinction between a need and a want on one hand, or a feeling
or a mood on the other, and I find it particularly difficult
because the essence of sadness is *being* sad, the essence of
excitement is the *feeling* of excitement, the essence of desire
is the aching, lusting, overwhelming *feeling* of desire, and
being too precise about defining feelings is in the essence of
Hod, *not* Netzach. These things are incommunicable. They can be
produced in another person, but they cannot be communicated. It
is possible to be clinical and abstract and precise about the
sephira Hod because an abstract clinical precision captures that
aspect of consciousness perfectly, but when attempting to
communicate something about Netzach one feels tempted to try to
communicate feelings themselves, a task more suited to a poet or
a musician, an actor or a dancer. Please accept this unfortunate
limitation in what follows, a limitation not necessarily present
when Kaballah is learned at first hand from someone.
Netzach is on the Pillar of Force, but in reaching Netzach
the Lightning Flash has already passed through Binah and Gevurah
on the Pillar of Form and so it represents a force conditioned
and constrained by form; when we talk about Netzach we are
talking about the different ways force can be shaped and
directed, like toothpaste squeezed out of a tube. The toothpaste
we are talking about is something I will call "life force" or
"life energy", and as a rule, when I have a lot of it I feel well
and full of vitality, and when I don't have much I feel unwell,
tired, and vulnerable. To continue the somewhat phallic
toothpaste metaphor, the magnitude of pressure on the tube
corresponds to vitality, the direction in which the toothpaste
comes out corresponds to a need or a want, and the shape of the
nozzle corresponds to a feeling: all three factors, pressure,
direction and nozzle determine how the toothpaste comes out; that
is, we could say that there are three factors giving a *form* to
the toothpaste (or life-energy). It may seem sloppy and
unnecessarily metaphysical to imply that all needs, wants and
feelings are merely conditions of manifestation of something more
basic, some "unconditioned force", but Kaballah is primarily a
tool for exploring internal states, and there are internal states
(certainly in my experience) where this force is experienced
directly with much less differentiation, hence the clumsy
metaphor.
Textbooks on psychology define a need as an internal state
which results in directed behaviour, and discuss needs such as
thirst, hunger, sex, stimulation, proximity seeking, curiousity
and so on. These things are interesting, but for virtually
everyone such basic and inherent needs are in the nature of
"givens" and don't provide much individual insight into the
questions "why do I behave differently from other people?", or
"should I change my behaviour?", or more interesting still "to
what extent do I (or can I) influence my behaviour?". In addition
to inherent needs it is useful also to look at needs which have
been acquired (i.e. learned), and for convenience I will call
them "wants" because people are usually conscious of "wanting"
something specific. To give some examples, a person might want:
- to buy a bar of chocolate.
- to go to the toilet.
- to own a better car.
- to have a sexual relationship with someone.
- to live forever.
- to be thinner (more musculer, taller, whiter,
browner...).
- to read a book.
- to gain social recognition within a particular group.
- to win in sport.
- to go shopping.
- to go to bed.
Not only are these "wants" the sort of thing many people want
these days, but these "wants" can all occur concurrently in the
same person, and while some may have been simmering away on a
back burner for years, there can be an astonishing variety of
pots and pans waiting for an immediate turn on the stove. The
average person's consciousness zips around the kitchen like a
demented short-order cook stirring this dish, serving that one,
slapping a pot on the stove for a few minutes only to take it off
and put something else on, throwing whole meals in the bin only
to empty them back into pots a few minutes later. The choice of
which pot ends up on the hot plate depends largely on mood and
accident: some people may plan their lives like military
campaigns but most don't. Most people have far more wants than
there are hours in the day to achieve them, and those which are
actually satisfied on a given day is more a function of accident
than design. Careers are thrown away (along with status and
security) in a moment of sexual infatuation; the desire to eat
wars with the desire to be slim; the writer retires to the
country to write the great novel and does everything but write;
the manager desperately tries to finish an urgent report but
finds himself dreaming about a car he saw in the car park; the
student abandons an important essay on impulse to go out with
friends. One activity is quickly replaced by another as the
person attempts to reconcile all his wants and drives, but
unfortunately there is no requirement that wants should be
internally consistent or complementary; like a multi-process
operating system, a single thread of energy is randomly cycled
around an arbitrary list of needs and wants to produce the mixed-
up complexity of the average person. Each want can be treated as
a distinct mode of consciousness - I can eat a slap-up meal one
day and thoroughly enjoy it, while the next day I can look in the
mirror and swear never to touch another pizza again. It is as if
two separate beings inhabited my body, one who loves pizzas and
one who wants to be thin, and each makes plans independently of
the other, and only the magic dust of unbroken memory sustains
the illusion that I am a single person. When I view my own wants
and actions dispassionately I can conclude that there is a host
or army of independent beings jostling inside me, a crowd of
artificial elementals individually ensouled with enough of my
energy to bring one particular desire to fruition. I cope with
the semi-chaotic result of mob rule by using the traditional
remedy: public relations. I put together internal press releases
(various rationalisations and justifications) to convince myself,
and others if need be, that the mess was either due to external
circumstances beyond my control (I didn't have time last night),
the fault of other people (you made me angry), or inevitable (I
had no choice, there was no alternative). In cases where even my
public relations don't work I erect a shrine to the gods of Guilt
and make little offerings of sorrow and regret over the years.
This is normal consciousness for most people. It is a kind
of insanity. Wants rush to and fro on the stage of consciousness
like actors in the closing scenes of Julius Caeser - alarums and
excursions, bodies litter the stage, trumpets and battle shouts
in the wings, Brutus falls on his sword, Anthony claims the field
- perhaps this is why the sephira is called Victory! Every day
new wants are kicked off in response to advertising or peer
pressure, old wants compete with each other in a zero-sum game.
Having said this, I should point out that it is not desire or
wants or drives which create the insanity - Kaballah does not
place the value judgement on desire that Buddhism does (that
desire is the cause of suffering, and by inference, something to
be overcome). The insanity arises from mob-rule, from the bizarre
internal processes of justification, rationalisation and guilt,
and from the identification of Self with the result - I will
return to this when discussing the sephira Tiphereth, as the mis-
identification of Self is a key element in the discussion on
Tiphereth.
Netzach also corresponds to our feelings, emotions and
moods, because this background of "psychological weather"
strongly conditions the way in which we think and behave:
regardless of what I am doing, my energy will manifest
differently when I am happy than when I am not. Sometimes moods
and emotions are triggered by a specific event, and sometimes
they are not: free-floating anxiety and depression are common
enough, and perhaps free-floating happiness is too (I can't speak
from experience there ;-). There are hundreds of words for
different moods, emotions and feelings, but most seem to refer to
different degrees of intensity of the same thing, or the same
feeling in different contexts, and the number of genuinely
distinct internal dimensions of feeling appears to be small.
Depression, misery, sadness, happiness, delight, joy, rapture and
ecstacy seem to lie along the same axis, as do loathing, hate,
dislike, affection, and love. It is an interesting exercise to
identify the genuinely, qualitatively different feelings you
can experience by actually conjuring up each feeling. I have
tried the experiment with a number of people, and you will
probably find there are less than 10 distinct feelings.
The most immediate and personal correspondences for Hod and
Netzach are the psychological correspondences: the rational,
abstract, intellectual and communicative on one hand and the
emotional, motivational, intuitive, aesthetic, and non-rational
on the other. The planetary and elemental correspondences mirror
this: Hod corresponds to Kokab or Mercury, and the element of
Air, while Netzach corresponds to Nogah or Venus, and the element
Water.
The Virtue of Hod is honesty or truthfulness, and its Vice
is dishonesty or untruthfulness. One of the features of being
able to create abstract representations of reality and
communicate some aspect of it to another person is that it is
possible to *misrepresent* reality, or to put it bluntly, lie
through your teeth.
The Illusion of Hod is order, in the sense of attempting to
impose one's sense of order upon the world. This is very
noticeable in some people; whenever something happens they will
immediately pigeonhole it and declare with great authority "it is
just another example of XYZ". A surprising number of people who
claim to be rational will claim "there's no such thing as
(ghosts, telepathy, free lunches, UFO's)" without having examined
the evidence one way or the other. They are probably right, and I
have no personal interest either way, but it is not difficult to
distinguish between someone who carefully weighs the pros and
cons in an argument and readily admits to uncertainty, and
someone with a firm and orderly conviction that "this is the way
the world is". The illusion of order occurs because people
confuse their internal representation of the world with the world
itself, and whenever they are confronted with something they
attempt to fit it into their representation.
The illusion of order (that everything in the world can be
neatly classified) relates closely to the klippoth of Hod, which
is rigidity, or rigid order. As children we start out with an
open view of what the world is like, and by the time we reach our
late teens or early twenties this view has set fairly solid, like
cold porridge - there are few minds more full of certainties than
that of an eighteen year old. A good critical education sometimes
has the effect of stirring the porridge into a lumpy gruel, but
it gradually starts to set again (unless the heavy hand of fate
stirs it up), and it is generally recognised, particularly in the
sciences, that a deeply ingrained sense of "how things are" is
the greatest obstacle to progress. If you hear some kids
listening to music and find yourself thinking "I don't know what
they find in that noise!" then it's happening to you too. If find
yourself looking back to a time when everything was so much
better than it is today and find yourself declaring "nostalgia
isn't what it used to be" then you will know that the porridge
has gone very cold and very stiff.
The Vision of Hod is the Vision of Splendour. There is
regularity and order in the world - it's not all an illusion -
and when someone is able to appreciate natural order in its
abstract sense, via mathematics for example, it can lead to a
genuinely religious, even ecstatic experience. The thirteenth
century Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia developed a rigorous system of
Hebrew letter mysticism based on the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet, their symbolic meanings, and their abstract
relationships when permuted into different "names of God"; many
hours of intense concentration spent combining letters according
to complex rules generated highly abstract symbolic meanings and
insights which led to ecstatic experiences. The same sense of awe
can come from mathematics and science - the realisation that
gravitational dynamics in three dimensions is geometry in four
dimensions, that plants are living fractals, that primes are the
seeds of all other numbers, are just as likely to lead towards an
intense vision of the splendour of the world made visible through
the eye of the rational intellect.
The Virtue of Netzach is unselfishness, and its Vice is
selfishness. Both the Virtue and the Vice are an attitude towards
things-which-are-not-me, specifically, other people and living
creatures. If I was surrounded by a hundred square miles of empty
desert then my attitude to other living things wouldn't matter,
but I don't, and nothing I do is without some consequence; my
needs, wants and feelings invariably have an effect on people,
animals and plants, who all want to live and have some level of
needs and wants and feelings too. Unselfishness is simply a
recognition of others' needs. Selfishness taken to an extreme is
a denial of life, because it denies freedom and life to anything
which gets in the way; my needs must come first. Netzach lies on
the Pillar of Force and is an expression of life-energy, so to
deny life is a perversion of the force symbolised by Netzach,
hence the attribution of selfishness to the Vice.
The Vision of Netzach is the Vision of Beauty Triumphant.
Whereas the Vision of Splendour corresponding to Hod is a vision
of complex abstract relationships, symmetry, and mathematical
elegance, the Vision of Beauty Triumphant is purely aesthetic and
firmly based in the real world of textures, smells, sounds, and
colours, an appropriate correspondence for Venus, the goddess of
sensual beauty.
Suppose two housebuyers go to look at a house. The first is
interested in the number of rooms, the size of the garage, the
house's position relative to local amenities, the price, the
number of square metres in the plot, and whether the windows are
double-glazed. The second person likes the decoration in the
lounge, the colour of the bathroom, the wisteria plant in the
garden, the cherry tree, the curving shape of the stairs, and the
sloping roof in one of the bedrooms. Both people like the house,
but the first likes various abstract properties associated with
the house, whereas the second likes the house itself. Suppose the
same two people buy the house and decide to do ritual magic. The
first person wants white robes because white is the colour of the
powers of light and life. The second wants a green velvet robe
because it feels and looks nice. The first reads lots of books on
how to carry out a ritual, while the second sits under the cherry
tree in the garden with a flute and a blissful expression of
cosmic love. The first person has continued to make choices based
on an abstract notion of what is correct, while the second makes
choices based on what *feels right*. Both are driven by an
internal sense of "rightness", but in the first case it is based
on abstract criteria, while in the second it is based on personal
aesthetic notion of beauty.
The Vision of Beauty Triumphant has a compelling power. It
is pre-articulate and inherently uncritical, and at the same time
it is immensely biased. A person in its grip will pronounce
judgement on another person's taste in art, literature, clothes,
music, decor or whatever, and will do it with such a profound
lack of self-consciousness that it is possible to believe good
taste is ordained in heaven. This person will mock those who
surround themselves with rules, regulations, principles, and
analysis, the "syntax of things" as E. E. Cummings puts it, and
instead exhibit a whimsical spontaneity, a penetrating (so they
believe) intuition, and a free spirit in tune with ebb and flow
of life. There are those who might complain about their
astounding arrogance, fickleness, unreliability, and the never-
ending flow of unshakable and prejudiced opinions delivered with
papal authority, but those who complain are (clearly) anal-
retentive nit-pickers and don't count. For a total immersion in
the aesthetic vision read Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian
Grey".
The Illusion of Netzach is projection. We all tend to
identify feelings and characteristics in other people which we
find in ourselves and when we get it right it is called "empathy"
or "intuition"; when we get it wrong it is called "projection",
because we are incorrectly projecting our feelings, needs,
motives, or desires onto another person and interpreting their
behaviour accordingly. Some level of projection is unavoidable,
and at best it can be balanced with a critical awareness that it
can occur, but projection is insidious, and the strength of
feeling associated with a projection can easily overwhelm any
intellectual awareness. Projection usually "feels right".
One of the most overwhelming forms of projection accompanies
sexual desire. Why do I find one person sexually attractive and
not another? Why do I find some characteristics in a person
sexually attractive but not others? In my own case I discovered
that when I put together all the characteristics I found most
attractive in a person a consistent picture emerged of an "ideal
person", and every person I had ever considered as a possible
sexual partner was instantly compared against this template. In
fact there was more than one template, more than one ideal, but
the number was limited and each template was very clearly
defined, and most importantly, each template was internal. My
sexual (and often many other feelings) about a person were based
on an internal and apparently arbitrary internal template. This
was crazy; I found my sexual feelings about a person would change
depending on how they dressed or behaved, on how well they
"matched the ideal". It became obvious that what I was in love
with did not exist outside of myself, and I was trying to find
this ideal in everyone else. Each one of these "templates" was a
living aspect of myself which I had chosen not to regard as "me",
and in compensation I spent much of my time trying to find people
to bring these parts to life, like a director auditioning actors
and actresses for a part in a new play. If a person previously
identified as ideal failed to live up to my notion of how they
should be ideally behaving then I would project a fault on them:
there was something wrong with *them*! Madness indeed.
The Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung [1] recognised this
phenomenon and gave these idealised and projected components of
our psyche the title "archetype". Jung identified several
archetypes, and it is worth mentioning the major and most
influential.
The Anima is the ideal female archetype. She is part
genetic, part cultural, a figure molded by fashion and
advertising, an unconscious composite of woman in the abstract.
The Anima is common in men, where she can appear with riveting
power in dreams and fantasy, a projection brought to life by the
not inconsiderable power of the male sexual drive. She might be
meek and submissive, seductive and alluring, vampish and
dangerous, a cheap slut or an unattainable goddess - there is no
"standard anima", but there are many recognisable patterns which
can have a powerful hold on particular men. Male sexual fantasy
material is amazingly predictable, cliched, unimaginitive and
crude, and contains a limited number of steroetyped views of
women which are as close to a "lowest common denominator anima"
as one is likely to find.
The Animus is the ideal male archetype, and much of what is
true about the Anima is true of the Animus. There are
differences; the predominant quality in the Anima is her
appearance and behaviour, while the predominant quality in the
Animus is social power and competence. In the interests of sexual
equality it is worth mentioning that female romantic fantasy
material is amazingly predictable, cliched, unimaginitive and
crude, and contains a limited number of stereotype views of men
which are as close to a "lowest common denominator animus" as one
is likely to find.
The Shadow is the projection of "not-me" and contains
forbidden or repressed desires and impulses. In most men the
Anima is repressed and in most women the Animus is repressed, and
so both form a component of the Shadow. The major part of the
Shadow however is composed of forbidden impulses, and the Shadow
forms a personification of evil. Much of what is considered evil
is defined socially and the communal personification of evil as
an external force working against humankind (such as Satan) is
widespread.
The Persona is the mask a person wears as a member of a
community when a large proportion of his or her behaviour is
defined by a role such as doctor, teacher, manager, accountant,
lawyer or whatever. Projection occurs in two ways: firstly,
someone may be expected to conform to a role in a particularly
rigid or stereotyped way, and so suffer a loss of individuality
and probably a degree of misplaced trust or prejudice. Secondly,
many people identify with a role to the extent that they carry
that role into all aspects of their private lives. This
"projection onto self" is a form of identification - see
the section on Tiphereth.
The archetype of Self at the level of Hod and Netzach is
usually projected as an ideal form of person; that is, someone
will believe that he or she is highly imperfect creature and it
is possible to attain an ideal state of being in which the same
person is kind, loving, wise, forgiving, compassionate, in
harmony with the Absolute, or whatever. This projection will
either fasten on a living or dead person, who then becomes a
hero, heroine, guru, or master with grossly inflated abilities,
or it fastens on a vision of "myself made perfect". The projected
vision of "myself made perfect" is common (almost universal)
among those seeking "spiritual development", "esoteric training",
and other forms of self-improvement, and in almost every case it
is based on an abstract ideal. The person will probably insist
that the ideal has existed in certain rare individuals (usually
long dead saints and gurus, or someone who lives a long way off
whom they haven't met), and that is the sort of person they want
to be. It should be comical, but it isn't. There is more to say
about this and it will keep till the section on Tiphereth.
The klippoth or shell of Netzach is habit and routine. When
behaviour, with all its potential for new experiences, new ways
of doing things, new relationships, becomes locked into patterns
which repeat over and over again, then the life energy, the force
aspect of Netzach is withdrawn and all that remains is the dead,
empty shell of behaviour. Just as the klippoth of Hod is rigid
order, the petrification of one's internal representation of
reality, so the klippoth of Netzach is the petrification of
behaviour.
The God Names of Hod and Netzach are Elohim Tzabaoth and
Jehovah Tzabaoth respectively, which mean "God of Armies", but in
each case a different word is used for "God". The name "Elohim"
is associated with all three sephiroth on the Pillar of Form and
represents a feminine (metaphorically speaking) tendency in that
aspect of God. The elucidation of God Names can become
phenomenally complex and obscure, with long excursions into
gematria and textual analysis of the Pentateuch and it is a
quagmire I intend to avoid.
The Archangels are Raphael and Haniel. The Archangel of Hod
is sometimes given as Michael, but I prefer Raphael (Medicine of
God) for no other reason than the association of Mercury with
medicine and healing; besides, Michael has perfectly good reasons
for residing in Tiphereth. This sort of thing can give rise to an
amazing amount of hot air when Kabbalists meet; for those who
wonder how far back the confusion goes, Robert Fludd (1574-1607)
plumped for Raphael, whereas two hundred years later Francis
Barrett prefered Michael. The co-founder of the Golden Dawn, S.L.
Mathers, went for both depending on which text you read. Kabbalah
isn't an orderly subject and those who want to impose too much
order on it are falling into the illusion of...I leave this as an
exercise to the reader.
The Angel Orders are the Beni Elohim and the Elohim.
The triad of sephiroth Yesod, Hod and Netzach comprise the triad
of "normal consciousness" as we normally experience it in
ourselves and most people most of the time. This level of
consciousness is intensely magical; try to move away from it for
any length of time and you will discover the strength of the
force and form sustaining it. It is not an exaggeration to say
that most people are completely unable to leave this state, even
when they want to, even when they desperately try to. The sephira
Tiphereth represents a state of being which unlocks the energy of
"normal consciousness" and is the subject of the next section.
[1] Jung, C.G, "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the
Self", Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974
Copyright Colin Low 1991
maintained by Jeff Morton / Ioldanach@yahoo.com / Ioldanach@yahoo.com
disclaimer